REVIEWS TO ASTONISH!

REVIEW: Fantastic Four (2005)

2006-01-20T08:40:00.000-05:00

I spend a lot of time defending movies that I know other people don't (or won't like). We're talking lots of time, here, quality time, time that I could be spending doing charity work for orphans or trying to take the staples out of Miss September's chest. With great sadness and confusion, it appears that that time is once again at hand, because I really enjoyed Tim Story's movie version of Fantastic Four.

I was never a fan of the FF (that's what the cool kids call them), despite being a life-long comics reader. I bought exactly one issue of their book, because it had a cool embossed cover and it only featured the Human Torch and Spider-Man, so it was more like an issue of Spider-Man featuring a man on fire (and tell me that doesn't sound like good reading). I'm explaining this because I want you all to know that I didn't enjoy the movie for purely geeky reasons. I didn't groan at the casting because I didn't care, I didn't watch and rewatch the trailers, and I never even considered paying out ten bucks to see it in a theater -- and then the reviews seemed to range from mediocre to terrible, and I usually agree with Ebert (who one-starred it). It was pretty much a moment of "well, I have a space in my Netflix queue" that made me rent it.

Here's the digest version of the plot: Reed Richards, Sue and Johnny Storm, Ben Grimm, and Victor von Doom blast off into space in order to study a looming "cosmic storm." Reed is the brainy scientist, Ben is the lovable but gruff co-pilot, Sue looks like Jessica Alba, her brother Johnny is an immature hotshot, and Doom is the asshole scientist and leader of some kind of corporation. Also, Sue looks like Jessica Alba. She and Reed used to date, but now Doom and Sue are dating. (Or not. I couldn't tell if it was just weird innuendo or an actual relationship.) There's a sudden change in the storm, and they get zapped.

Once on earth, each of them starts to manifest strange powers: Reed can stretch and contort his body in ways that are usually reserved for top-shelf porn, and Sue can turn invisible (Good going, movie. Make the hot actress invisible.); Johnny can shoot fire and fly, and Ben finds his skin covered in an ugly, hard, rock-like shell that apparently gives him super-strength. Doom has some kind of vague set of powers that I don't recognize from the comics, where he's part metal and can shoot lightning bolts.

Then, they fight. The end -- OR IS IT???

There are subplots about Reed and Sue's relationship, and of course Ben's adjustments to his new appearance and his later romance with a blind artist. Johnny gets his own little set of sequences where he acts like a jerk. Doom gets plenty of screentime which he uses pretty much none of to explain his motivations, so the audience is apt to think he's just a major asshole that talks a lot about nothing while he stares off into the distance.

It's a really simple flick, and that's kind of what I like about it. For a huge-budget action picture, it was surprisingly small-scale and... well, I'd hate to use the word "intimate," but I don't have my thesaurus handy. Think "intimate" without "depth". It's what most people would consider to be a true "comic book movie," a superficial bit of entertainment that succeeds because it occasionally rises above the material, and doesn't sink too far below to discredit the whole thing. It certainly lacks the heart of the Spider-Man series, and the intensity and scope of some of the Batman flicks, but I'd still call it above-average fluff. I laughed most of the times that I was supposed to laugh, and with a little bit of imagination I could buy into most of the relationships and performances.

I say most, because for the life of me I can't figure out what the actual plot was doing. Doom is an asshole that's jealous of Reed's returning relationship with Sue, and on top of that he gets fired by his corporation because of the bad publicity the space accident caused. Why creating four celebrity superheroes is bad publicity for a corporation is beyond my comprehension, though. Doom is angry at his company, okay. Doom is angry at Reed, fine. Doom wants Sue, perfectly believable. These things make sense individually, but do not sufficiently explain Doom's crazy destructive behavior later, nor why he feels the need to destroy all four of them (Sue included?) and then take out chunks of Manhattan. Maybe he's just a really big asshole. I know other New Yorkers like that.

The acting, too, was about par for the genre. Ioan Gruffudd was decent as the awkward Mr. Fantastic, and despite what I'd heard Jessica Alba didn't embarass herself as the Invisible Girl. Michael Chiklis didn't quite live up to the hype that I'd heard about him in the Thing suit, but Chris Evans certainly did. Johnny's antics were a big part of what made the movie work for me, and even though he got the best lines there was some good comic acting to boot. Julian McMahon was the low point of the ensemble, because there was never anything believable about the character to begin with, and he didn't add anything to make up for the shoddy script. Bad dialogue and one-dimensional acting do not a good villain make.

I'm pretty lenient on the plot side, since watching the movie is more or less about getting from special effects sequence to funny part to special effects sequence. I probably would've enjoyed it just as much if the Fantastic Four stumbled upon Doom robbing a 7-11, and then Johnny said something funny, and then back to Doom breaking the burrito microwave. As I've said, it's a pretty superficial movie, but if the fluff parts are done well enough, the failed deeper bits matter less. It's not high art and it's far from fantastic, but I appreciated the parts that worked and ignored the parts that didn't. I'm not entirely ashamed to say that I'm looking forward to a (hopefully improved) sequel -- there just aren't enough drive-in kinda flicks these days.

I think that the Lady Retropolitan summed it up best during the climax: "I'm enthralled despite myself." I don't think I can make a more clearly-stated review than that one.

And yes, I know that the last photo is from a different movie.

REVIEW: War of the Worlds TV Pilot (1988)

2005-12-05T08:26:00.000-05:00

Like some kind of entertainment world version of puberty, it seems like every movie that's ever released in Hollywood will eventually start the process of turning into a television series. After a few years, if it's marketable, the movie will start to grow producers and slide into development again, and experience countless awkward moments in front of beautiful actresses. Then it'll go deep into debt, get shoved into a weeknight timeslot with some other show, and eventually produce spin-offs. It's a good morning for sloppy metaphors, isn't it?

Following right on the heels of George Pal's 1953 film version of the HG Wells' classic (at least in dog years) 1988 saw the release of television's "War of the Worlds" weekly series, initially produced by the Strangis Brothers. It's been thirty odd years since the Martian fleet attacked with their tripods and nearly decimated the population of the Earth, only to be felled by common earth bacteria contracted during a weekend tryst with the Hilton sisters. According to the television script, the government packed up all those alien bodies and machines and stowed them away in the mysterious Hangar 15, never to be seen again...

...until a group of terrorists take over said hangar in an attempt to commandeer a US broadcasting satellite so they can announce their demands to the world. I'm not exactly certain what their demands really are, other than the immediate resignation of the US President, and maybe to constructively suggest that the military post more than two (2) guards at the "abandoned alien technology" hangar. In the ensuing firefight with the guards, one of the errant bullets hits the alien carcass barrels, which leak a suspicious goo. Then again, isn't all goo suspicious in some way?

The goo starts to melt nearby canisters, and some spindly three-fingered hands emerge. Slowly, perhaps too slowly, each of the terrorists gets their body taken over by an alien being, which (at least as far as my recollection of the 1953 movie is concerned) is a brand-new alien ability. It seems that Hangar 15 is located right around some kind old nuclear test site, and the ambient radiation killed off the bacteria that downed the aliens in the first place. They weren't dead, as the world thought, they were just comatose for thirty years. Luckily, they missed the 1970s.

Cut to: zany academic scientist Harrison Blackwood, played with zany academic spunk by Jared Martin. Blackwood is apparently in charge of all kinds of New Age-y scientific experiments at some non-descript university, and I'll cut through thirty or so minutes of dull exposition by saying that he's "zany" and "unorthodox," he's romantically interested in his new single-mom research assistant Suzanne, and he's got a wheelchair-bound techno whiz buddy named Norton Drake that's analyzing radio signals from outer space. If you've rented the disc, you can just skip to chapter sixteen now. Drake has found some very interesting signals coming from space -- but they appear to be responses to signals coming from Earth.

Meanwhile, the no-nonsense hard-as-nails Lt. Col. Ironhorse is in charge of the investigation of the actual terrorist attack, which of course smashes his plotline against Blackwood's -- but can they work together to prevent the aliens from retrieving their spaceships and early-1950s ray-gun sound effect reels? With a little help from some of the more secret branches of Uncle Sam's family, you can bet that they're gonna try -- for at least two seasons.

I was pretty excited about this hitting DVD, since it's one of those "wish I'd paid more attention" shows from my childhood, just like the entire WPIX lineup. I remember bits and pieces from the original run and syndication, and I figured that I'd give it a try and see exactly how forgiving nostalgia really is -- turns out, nostalgia is really forgiving, because this show really sucks. Actually, to be fair, the pilot really sucks, so I doubt that I'll ever have the heart to sit through too many of the actual episodes.

I've read in articles and reviews about how this show helped jump-start various trends in modern television science fiction, and I can definitely see similar themes: mainly, vast government conspiracies and the paranoia of not really knowing who's on your side. On occasion, it's got that gritty, "X-Files" sort of feeling; other times, it's more of a high school video project. I'm not sure what budgets were like back in 1988, but the pilot episode -- usually the one to get money thrown at it -- looks like a particularly low-budget episode of "MacGyver". It's all close-ups, never more than five people on screen at any time, and even the alien ray-gun blasts at the finale look like they might have been blue-screened directly out of 1953; they're laughably bad effects that might've worked if the show wasn't trying so hard to be dark and gloomy. The "V" series also had pretty ugly bluescreen work, but it was such a goofy show that it didn't really matter.

Most of all, the pilot lacks a decent script. I've given passes to many a show and film that looked shitty, just because the script had something working in it. This time, the script sinks. Plummets, really, down the vast abyss of implausibility and "what the fu--?". Starting with the curiously under-guarded Hangar 15, and culminating with the realization that the show has no idea whether or not anyone remembers the giant alien invasion from 1953. I've seen plot holes before, but this hole has flashing lights and ConEd guys and lava shooting out of it, so it's pretty hard to miss. It would be better if the script didn't remind the audience that it didn't make sense every ten minutes, but it almost always goes out of its way to bring up the invasion, and then have every character act as if they've never heard of it. And then they bring in other characters who reference it. And then deny it. It's frustrating, because it's so, so stupid.

Here's the breakdown of the problem: the invasion happened (which explains the aliens being here). There are flashbacks to the invasion, the main character's family was killed by the aliens, and he was raised by a professor that devoted his life to studying the alien artifacts left behind. When Blackwood brings up his evidence that there are aliens communicating between space and Earth, no one believes him. In fact, most of the cast seems to think that the idea of alien beings is bizarre and implausible, which is why Blackwood is seen as so kooky. Hell, even Blackwood -- the one man who you'd think would be a little bit more realistic about alien life, since his family was melted by them and all -- has a SETI-like academic project where he's trying to imagine what a plausible alien life form would be like. I felt like I spent ninety minutes with those people who walk around with their glasses on looking for their glasses.

Just when you thought that the show couldn't get any better, there's the acting. Jared Martin, the thespian behind Harrison Blackwood, is actually fairly good; he does kooky as the script requires, and he's got one of those voices that almost sounds like it was made for early-40s radio drama. The part as written is more or less unforgivable, but Martin does well enough to make him interesting. That's the good stuff. The bad is everyone else, particularly Richard Chaves as Lt. Col. Ironhorse, and Philip Akin as Norton Drake. Chaves -- who should know how to deal with malevolent aliens after co-starring in Predator -- shouts and growls his lines like a fifteen-year-old pretending to be a drill sergeant. Akin, on the other hand, has perhaps the most distracting non-accent I've ever heard. I was going to say that it was a crummy fake Jamaican accent, but a little research reveals that Akin is actually Jamaican, so I guess it's a crummy American accent. Regardless of which dialect we're talking about, it's distracting and makes him sound like he's either trying to disguise it or bring it out. You'll probably have to listen to it to understand how annoying it gets.

I haven't seen the Spielberg/Cruise version of the story, but I'm a fan of the Orson Welles portrayal and I'd really love to see the story carried on -- even with the same basic premise as this series. I'd just need it to be a little higher quality, and maybe have it arbitrarily make some kind of logical sense. You know, the kind of things that prevent me from trying to shake sense into my TV's cathode tube. Until this hypothetical revival happens, I'm going to have to put this set next to "Werewolf" on the shelf of TV shows that sucked, but could have been great.

Okay, there's one good line. Blackwood is a pacifist, and when he and Ironhorse go to infiltrate Hangar 15, he turns down the opportunity to carry a sidearm. "I don't believe in guns," he says, to which Ironhorse replies: "I'm sure the aliens will respect that."

REVIEW: The Monster Squad (1987)

2005-11-18T07:55:00.000-05:00

One hundred years before this story begins...
It was a time of darkness in Transylvania...

A time when Dr. Abraham Van Helsing...
And a small band of freedom fighters..
Conspired to rid the world of vampires and monsters...
And to save mankind from the forces of eternal evil...

They blew it.

That title scroll kicks off one of the most beloved films of my childhood, Fred Dekker and Shane Black's The Monster Squad. I still remember the day that I saw it in the theater with my parents and my brother -- there wasn't anyone else in the theater, which might be a clue to the kind of box-office this picture did. After getting my hands on a new copy of the film, I found other reasons why this movie under-performed. Before I mislead you any further, let me be up front about it: I love this movie, and watching it again brought back all the warm fuzzies that I had when I saw it for the 99th time as a child.

After the scroll fades away, the first scene opens on a stone statue of the Grim Reaper, sitting on a broken pedestal in the middle of an overgrown cemetery. The camera pans across the headstones as lightning flashes overhead, illuminating the graves, and then we come to a clearing of the trees and stop -- right on a dark, scary CASTLE! We cut inside to a torch-lit crypt, coffins lining the floor; one of the lids moves to the side a few inches, and out comes a parade of giant spiders, followed by the spidery fingers of a stone-white hand. The camera follows the dirt and moss on the ceiling, leading up to a giant, grotesque, writhing bat -- it twists, and screeches, the body transforming slowly into a man, and then with a sudden jump it flops to the floor, a full-grown, fully-dressed Count Dracula!

We jump to Van Helsing and the aforementioned band of freedom fighters charging the castle's gates, blowing them to bits with some dynamite. They run inside, and slay one of Dracula's white-gowned brides with a bolt through the heart. Van Helsing pulls out a glowing amulet, and commands a young woman to read some German mumbo-jumbo off of a scroll, as the castle shudders and skeletal zombies claw their way out from the floor! The girl finishes the spell, the amulet glows, and then a giant whirlwind forms and sucks everyone inside!

I'm not sure if I wrote a review of it or not, but Monster Squad's opening scene is everything that Stephen Sommers' recent Van Helsing failed to be. Squad is a movie about kids, starring a cast of kids, and it has exactly the kind of gung-ho 1980s mentality that appeals to children who more or less need a story with clearly-defined good guys and bad guys. I have the feeling that Sommers and Dekker wanted to make the same kind of movie. The difference ended up being in execution; Sommers' film was a plodding, dull, ugly mess that sucked out the inherent thrills! and chills! out of the characters, but Dekker's film seemed like it was directed with a "Gee whiz!" excitement and exclamation points on all the performances. It's incredibly fun, and that's why it made me so happy to go back to it.

After Van Helsing and his pals screw up the incantation, the story jumps one-hundred years forward to a 1987 middle (?) school, where Shaun and Patrick are getting sent to the principal's office again for drawing pictures of monsters during class. They've got this monster club with a couple of their pals, and their clubhouse (a really nifty treehouse fort) has walls plastered with their drawings and horror movie posters. Also in the club are Fat Kid, little Eugene, and their new recruit Rudy. Rudy seems to be much older than the other kids, but gets invited in on account of his preventing Fat Kid's ass-whooping at the hands of a bully. Rudy's obviously the "cool kid," since he is always -- ALWAYS -- wearing a black motorcycle jacket, and he smokes and wears sunglasses. (And he's got a kickass BMX bike.) As I mentioned, Rudy gets invited because of his heroics, but he stays because the treehouse is right across from Patrick's hot sister's bedroom window. There's also an adorable kid sister, Phoebe, who isn't welcomed into the club on account of the "No Girls Allowed" sign.

As it turns out, the amulet that Van Helsing was playing with is an object of "pure good," capable of destroying all monsters forever, provided that someone reads a certain incantation at midnight exactly during a celestial alignment that only occurs every one-hundred years. On the other hand, the amulet can be destroyed during that time, and so Dracula has come out of hiding to make sure he and his ghouls will live forever.

In the interim century, Van Helsing's disciples have hidden the amulet in the dark, creepy house located at 666 Shadowbrook Road, right on the outskirts of Shaun's town, and the Count brings his pals Wolf-Man, Gill-Man, Mummy, and Frankenstein's Monster to make a grab for it. Actually, he really just brings the Monster, and the other guys seem to have been fortuitously hanging around the town. That's the midwest for you, I guess. With the aid of the Scary German Guy and Shaun's cop father, the kids grab the amulet and save the day. I'm sure they all learned important life lessons somewhere in there too. They were probably in one of the montage scenes.

After seeing it again, I realize exactly why this I saw this in an empty theater with my parents: this is probably one of the last movies I would actually want to show children. The heroes of the movie are kids, to be sure, but they take on all the standard adult roles from the horror genre: they cuss, they smoke, and they save the day at the end by picking up shotguns and bows and violently killing the monsters themselves. It's like a little boy's nihilistic, violent fantasy, where he gets to play-act like the action heroes in the movies. This movie could never, never, never be made today, because the MPAA wouldn't just slap an NC-17 on it, they'd probably burn the negatives. I have absolutely no idea how Dekker got this made AND released.

I said that it was a kids' movie, but in hindsight, it's something different: it's a kids' movie made for adults. It's the kind of movie that you're supposed to view as a kids movie, from the vantage point of adulthood. It's something akin to pre-packaged nostalgia, a reproduction of the feelings and fantasies we had as youngsters. It's much more than just a fond nod to the creature features of Universal Pictures, though; it's a full-on tribute to the feelings and dreams that those movies inspired in little kids, and also a surprisingly honest one. It's not only about the sense of excitement, it's also about the very real and very dark undertones of revenge and violence that kids have when they watch adults in the movies, bravely killing their monsters. I doubt that it's a coincidence that Fat Kid redeems his courage in front of his bullies by picking up a shotgun and blowing a bloody hole in the Gill-Man's chest -- he wanted to show them that he could be as violent and dangerous (or rather, more violent and more dangerous) than they could be, and Gill-Man almost happened to be a scapegoat in the wrong place at the wrong time. Poor Gill-Man, never getting any respect.

I read a recent interview with Fred Dekker, and he mentioned that he and Black didn't consider this movie to be a kids' picture at the time. When I first read that, I figured he was off his rocker, but I think I understand now. This isn't a kids' movie at all, at least not in the sense that we want it to be. Sure, it works as a great pulp adventure (violence and cussing aside), but I think it's much more sophisticated than that. If you're not into, you know, levels of text, then you can certainly have a ball just going along with it, because it's great fun anyway.

The fun part comes largely from Dekker and Black's script, which has a ton of fun with genre conventions without trying to actually rebuke them. It's pretty clear that the two of them understood exactly what was so incredibly thrilling about the old horror films. There's a sense of danger, of course, but it's kept broad enough that it's outweighed -- ever so slightly -- by the idea that the scariness will be entertaining to overcome. Like the old Universal films, Squad's masterstroke is getting the audience to enjoy playing along with the idea of fear, much more than actually inspiring fright of any kind; it's the way that a kid's mind works. For something similar, you can check out Fred Dekker's other great film, Night of the Creeps.

I'm going to make a presumption that Black was responsible for the movie's many great lines of dialogue, since he's becoming known for his especially witty genre-bending scripts (including The Long Kiss Goodnight and the just-released Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). The performances by the kids range from really good to passable, but even the worst of the deliveries is defeated by the dialogue itself; when they nail the lines, they really soar. The adults, too, are all played by actors that seem like they're having a great time, and their performances really shine. I give extra credit to Stan Shaw as Detective Sapir, because he had my favorite line in the movie while he was interrogating the night watchmen about the missing mummy exhibit.

I don't want to sell this movie too hard, but I'm still reeling a little bit from being reminded exactly how much I love it. It's entertaining and satisfying in a way that's becoming more and more rare for me these days, and underneath that I believe it might actually be saying something about the genres it's playing with. It's fast-paced, it's funny, and it's absolutely worth seeing if you missed it on its initial release eighteen years ago. I think it's probably even more worth seeing if you did manage a viewing or two as a child. (Although that makes me wonder what kind of adult supervision you had.) Go dig into your local VHS bins, or hop onto eBay and get yourself a copy.

*quietly singing*Rock until you drop, dance until your feet fall off...

REVIEW: The Night Strangler (1973)

2005-11-01T09:18:00.000-05:00

Only a year after dealing with a vicious vampire in 1972's The Night Stalker, Carl Kolchak has yet another run-in with supernatural evil in the sequel, The Night Strangler. I guess that's a major conceit of all recurring characters in supernatural-related series: they come across incredibly rare unnatural events as though they happened every day. It's a conceit that most audiences are willing to forgive, because overall it's better to have unlikely things happen than to be bored to tears while we wait for something else interesting to occur. I'd hate to think of the realistic version of Kolchak, where he murdered the vampire in part one and then we spent twenty TV seasons watching him languish in jail.

Thankfully, we're treated with a little suspension of reality, and Kolchak -- now trying to peddle his vampire story to papers in Seattle -- runs into his old curmudgeonly boss, Tony Vincenzo. It seems that the vampire debacle also got Vincenzo tossed out of his job as editor, and he's taken up residence in the northwest, again behind the desk of another popular newpaper. Feeling bad for Kolchak's downtrodden state, he gives him a job, and all the old trouble (and fun) begins again.

Another series of murders has begun in Seattle, with each of the lady victims murdered at night, with some blood loss. Kolchak immediately questions whether this might be another vampire on the prowl, but the county coroner confirms that they've only lost about 5ccs of blood, which is a little light for a bloodsucker. Also: small needle marks instead of bite wounds, and the women all actually succumbed to intense strangling and crushed throats. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that this was the inspiration for the title.

No, this is no vampire (although he might still be considered a stalker, technically. He stalks, after all. This is the same manner in which I consider myself a writer.) It seems that similar murders occurred twenty-one years prior in Seattle, all happening with young women in the same neighborhood, all killed in the same manner and in the same number of days. Even more mysteriously, the same circumstances apply twenty-one years prior to that, and twenty-one years before those, as far back as 1868. Sounds fishy!

After much digging and some playing around in a big underground city, Kolchak uses his reporter ways to find the truth: a civil war doctor has almost found the secret of immortality. He's created a potion that will give him youth for twenty-one years, and as it begins to wear off he takes on a corpse-like visage, causing him to come back out into the night to steal blood to make a new batch. Sounds like a good deal to me, although I can't quite figure out why he didn't just steal blood from a blood bank or something; even the Night Stalker thought of that. Since the puncture marks were at the base of the women's necks, maybe it had something to do with spinal fluid or something. I guess it's not really important.

What is important is that Darren McGavin rules the world once again as Carl Kolchak, and this TV-movie is filled out with another talented cast, including the eponymous John Carradine. (Carradine was in two-hundred fifty-one movies in fifty-seven years, and had at least appearances in one-hundred and four TV shows. That's a lot of not taking any vacations.) Simon Oakland also returns as Vincenzo, and Richard Anderson plays the Strangler -- I spent the end of the movie wondering where I'd seen Anderson before, and the IMDB tells me that I'm recognizing him from playing Oscar Goldman on the "Bionic Man" series. And he was in "Knight Rider," so I'm probably having nostalgia fits in my cerebral cortex just from checking his resume.

I'll have to be honest: this movie was fun, but it's not as good as The Night Stalker. Stalker was interesting because I really didn't know if the villain was going to turn out to be an actual vampire -- the show was very procedural, and it had me guessing as to whether they'd find out the vampire was real or just a crazy guy who thought he was undead. Going into the second movie, I now know that the supernatural does exist in Kolchak's world, so that some of the underlying mystery is gone; this time it was replaced with the mystery of simply finding out what kind of ghoul he was, and where to find him. It's slightly less engaging, since the endless fights with the editor and police seem like they're more or less retreads of the first movie. After a while, I was getting bored -- the police are confronted with evidence, they want to cover it up, Kolchak saves the day, story gets covered up, everyone gets fired. I saw forty minutes of the exact same thing two days ago, and I would've liked to have seen a new spin on it this time.

Still, McGavin and Oakland really played their roles to the hilt, and once again the screen crackled with energy. There were several scenes of their arguing that had both me and the Lady Retropolitan laughing out loud. ("Where are you going?") I was really impressed by the smallest nuances of McGavin's performance: the tilt of the hat, the foot stomping, and even the way that he stretched himself out on Vincenzo's couch. I think that it was their contributions to the movie that really stood out and made it worth watching, as well as Wally Cox's turn as Mr. Berry, the awkward police researcher that helps Kolchak find the Strangler.

Overall, The Night Strangler is a fun hour and a half, although I'd be lying if I said it was a really solid piece of entertainment. I got bored at more than one point, despite my high praise for the cast. The plot just wasn't very compelling, and the script unveiled the mystery in spurts; there were some loooong trips between plot points, and the majority of it is revealed close to the end. The performances kept me occupied for most of the in-between parts, but it wasn't really enough to keep me focused. In the end, I still recommend it, but with some reservations -- don't expect to be enthralled by the story. Just sit back and enjoy the bickering.

REVIEW: Sleepaway Camp (1973)

2005-10-28T15:24:00.000-04:00

Sleepaway Camp sitting on my shelf for about a year now, ever since I picked it up during my crusade to form the world's largest collection of the world's shittiest slasher films. While a noble venture, it ended rather abruptly when I realized that a lot of the world's shittiest slasher films are actually shitty, as opposed to the fun kind of shitty. So, my collection went unheralded, unfinished, and unloved, up until last night when I decided to blow the dust off of my DVD booklet and give this classic a try.

In a bizarre departure from the genre (kind of), Sleepaway Camp does not feature gratuitous female nudity from dozens of nubile 19-year-old camp counselors. Sure, there are counselors around, but the focus of the movie is actually on the summer camp attendees this time, which makes the overt themes of sexuality simultaneously off-putting and revolting. Sure, it has a context and a definite thematic value, but after being weened on films that taught me that all camp-based slasher films must have incredibly hot nude women, it's a little troubling when all the women in this one are thirteen.

Welcome to 1974, when a little boy and a little girl are happily sitting on a tiny boat with their father in the middle of a lake. It's summertime, and the beaches are full with teens, and a lifeguard is taking a girl out for a ride with some water skis. The little boy and girl decide to pull off the prank of pushing their dad into the water, which (of course) capsizes the boat, but all is well. Their dad's friend shouts at them from the beach...but they still don't see that the water-skiing boat is headed directly for them! Before anyone can say "1970s fashion sucks!" the boat slides right through the family, and moments later we see the father's corpse doing a really good version of the dead man's float.

"8 Years Later"

The following is either a great scene or a horrible scene, depending on what you think is "good" versus what you think is "funny." A crazy woman is packing up her two youngins, Ricky and Angela, for a summer at Camp Arawak. Angela isn't actually the woman's daughter; she's (presumably) one of the kids from the opening scene, and the woman is her aunt. Her crazy, crazy aunt. She dresses like she's on her way to Oz, and she speaks like a community theater understudy. I'm not entirely sure what kind of actors the director had to work with, but I can't quite tell if she's supposed to be speaking like a bad actress, or she's just a really bad actress. I guess it depends on the circumstances, but this scene is either deplorable or in some manner sophisticated. I love that kind of apologetic ambiguity in my horror films.

So, off the kids go to Camp Annawanna. (Arawak. Whatever.) It starts off well enough, and Ricky is happy since he's spent other summers there, but Angela is a little different. She's not the bustiest or prettiest of the preteens, although that doesn't stop the pedophiliac chef from bringing her back to the storeroom to show her "something." Luckily, the deviant is interrupted, and hours later gets a vat of boiling water tossed on him. Coincidence? Not in this genre!

Angela, being a little quiet, gets picked on by the other kids, especially Judy the camp slut. In fact, pretty much the only people that don't pick on her are Ricky and his friend Paul, who starts a little camp crush "steady" thing with her. Things are going well, until one of the other campers turns up just shy of alive. After what feels like forever, his death is followed by some of the other nastier campers, and for good measure some campers that seemingly had nothing to do with Angela. Up until this point, we're still not really certain who the killer is; signs point to Angela, but Ricky seems to take the insults to his cousin awfully personally, and he's conveniently never around when the murders take place. I give the movie a measure of credit for not explicitly spelling it out until the very end, because most other movies that play the "Was it them or THEM?" game give it up much earlier. Despite our guesses, we don't really know until the last five minutes or so. And what a last five minutes they are.

This movie, despite being one of the films that really kicked the entire slasher genre into high gear, is incredibly slow. Incredibly incredibly slow. The body count is really low, and they space the suckers out, too. My girlfriend had a ten-minute rule that she instituted about forty-five minutes into the movie, where if someone didn't die at least every ten minutes, she got to turn off the movie -- it's slow enough so that my girlfriend was giving me ultimatums. Luckily, her rule came after the interminably dull and useless baseball scene, which thrilled us with the athletic skills of characters we don't know doing things we don't care about for ten or eleven minutes of screen time. (Although it features the fantastic line: "Eat shit and live, Bill.")

The movie is nothing special, except for the very last scene. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the movie isn't worth watching except for the very last scene. I'm not sure if it actually redeems the movie, but it helps. Spoilers will abound in the next paragraphs, so you can just skip them if you want.

I'll just come right out and say it: Angela isn't the little girl from the opening scene; she's the little boy. He was the only survivor of the accident that killed his father and his sister, and he went to live with the crazy aunt. I'm not sure why she was so messed up, but flashbacks tell us that she didn't want to be raising a second boy along with Ricky, so she somehow warped the fragile, accident-shattered mind of the boy into accepting the new fact that he was a girl. Even worse, there are more flashbacks: we learn that Angela and his sister had caught their father in bed with another man -- the guy that was waiting for them on the beach during the accident. I guess the implication was that this messed up his perception of his own sexuality.

This whole story is so messed up that I can't tell if it's offensive or not. Initially, my first reaction was that the movie was saying that having gay parents will turn children into cross-dressing murderers. Then, I figured that it was really more about the aunt's wackiness that screwed up Angela, and being forced to become a woman. I mean, the movie shows the two men in bed together during the late-game flashback, and it's genuinely portrayed as though it's a really loving relationship; it doesn't show it as something that's negative or naughty or anything. I lean towards thinking that it was just a way to show why Angela might have been attracted to men (although she really didn't seem to be all that attracted to men), since just making her a gay character would have been kind of hard to explain in the context of the story -- easier to have a "well, maybe because of her dad" explanation than also explaining that she just happened to be gay. If she was gay at all, anyway. I mean "he." Maybe the movie was saying that you can make someone trans-gendered by putting them in dresses, which might get back to offensive. Maybe they're saying that kids should get summer jobs instead of wasting their summers at camp.

(Although for twenty bucks you can schedule a live phone call with Felissa Rose, the actress behind Angela, at this here website. Maybe we should call her and ask her what her real motivation was.)

I give up on thinking about this movie.

I'll say one last thing for those of you who don't care about my grad thesis on gender roles in horror films: the last shot in the movie is vastly creepy. That should be enough for those viewers that prefer shallow bloody entertainment.

REVIEW: Mad Monster Party (1967)

2005-10-28T13:04:00.000-04:00

Out of all the movies that I knew I was going to be reviewing this holiday season, the one that I was the most excited about was Mad Monster Party. The other Rankin-Bass stop-motion cartoons that everyone knows -- "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," "Frosty the Snowman," "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" -- were absolute staples of my childhood; I can't remember a year when I didn't watch those. If my family happened to be sitting together in the same room during the holidays, it was probably because one of those was on. You can probably imagine my excitement when I found out that not only did the Rankin-Bass team do a HALLOWEEN MONSTER stop-motion cartoon, they did a FEATURE-LENGTH one!

Sweet Jesus Christ on crutches, this was the longest, hardest ninety minutes I've sat through in a long, long time. I can barely describe the suckitude of this picture in words; I might have to do a finger-painting with my own blood. The only way I can accurately portray the agony of sitting through this is to actually make you sit through it, but I think we'd all be better off pretending that this doesn't exist at all.

This odious piece of entertainment takes mostly takes place on Monster Island, a mysterious Caribbean Island that's ruled by Dr. Frankenstein, played by the venerable Boris Karloff. In the opening, the good doctor discovers a potion that causes things to explode, and declares that he can retire now that he's discovered the secrets of the creation and destruction of life. I guess he never heard of TNT, or chainsaws, or guns, or nuclear bombs, or heroin, or falling from great heights, or blood loss, or the bubonic plague, or watching Mad Monster Party more than once. I thought the destruction of life was the easy part, but I guess things work differently in the animation world.

Since Dr. Frankenstein feels like retiring and living the slothful life, he decides to pass on this great secret formula to his only true heir: Felix Flanken, his nebbishy nephew (shades of the elf that wanted to be a dentist in the "Rudolph" special). Being a smart guy, Dr. Frank comes up with the idea to call together a meeting of the world's greatest monsters to announce his departure from running their coalition. Invited are: Count Dracula, the Werewolf, Dr. Jekyll, the Invisible Man, Frankenstein's own Monster, and his Bride; also attending are Frankenstein's assistant Francesca, his lead butler Yetch, and his crew of skeleton and zombie waiters. So far so good! It sounds like a great time!

Unfortunately, almost the entire thing is flat. Dead flat. Unforgivingly flat. Maybe it's because this was one of the first of the animation specials that they made, but the timing is off, and the writing is deader than a corpse. (Believe me, the jokes in MMP are worse than my "deader than a corpse" gag.) The jokes are not funny, and when they happen to have a little spark it's ruined by horrible, horrible pauses and stutters where the animation has to catch up to the punchline. In the beginning, Doc Frankenstein mentions that he's not inviting the "It" monster to his party, because...something about being a "wild bore" which pun-ified into carrying "wild boars." The joke was so shitty that even I didn't understand it, and I have a Master's Degree in bad jokes from Mad Libs University. (Which is a fully accredited four-year NOUN, by the way.)

If nothing else, the character designs were pretty neat. Doc Frankenstein looked a lot like Karloff himself, and the other creatures looked like suitably stylized versions of their movie counterparts. The one exception is the Monster's Bride (called the Mate in this for some bizarre reason), which is designed to look like Phyllis Diller (who lends her voice to the role). Diller, actually, is probably the one high point in the movie. She acts exactly like the Phyllis Diller that we're used to, except that this time her weird post-joke laugh comes off as an act of defiance against the horrible jokes that the writers gave her. Normally, I'm not one of her biggest fans, but she did make me laugh in this. Once. The only other time I laughed is when Dr. Jekyll first turns into Mr. Hyde, and immeeeeediately smashes a window that he happens to be standing next to -- as if he was somehow instinctively drawn to smashing that specific window.

Aside from those two bits in this sea of drivel, every second of the film dragged on like fingernails across my eyeballs. I gave this movie its entire running length to engage me in a manner other than hatred, and it let me down. This is a boring, stupid, sloppy movie, filled with stupid, unconnected musical sequences, poor animation, and jokes that would make the Cryptkeeper ashamed.

You can avoid this one next October.

REVIEW: The Night Stalker (1972)

2005-10-27T13:04:00.000-04:00

It's a shame they brought back "The Night Stalker" as a television series (and not a very good one, I hear) because I really can't imagine Kolchak not being played by Darren McGavin. In preparation of the new release of the old series on DVD, I went into my vast and disorganized video vault and came back out with my copies of the McGavin TV-movies: 1972's The Night Stalker and 1973's The Night Strangler. I've seen both of these movies before, although I was barely paying attention to Strangler -- I think I was busy sending money to charity or adopting homeless kittens or something. Perhaps there was a video game in there. Regardless of my charitable attention-sapping antics, I decided to pop the first of the two back into the ol' DVD spinner and see if it could bring back the Halloween spirit.

The time: 1972. The place: Las Vegas, Nevada. The man: Carl Kolchak, reporter for the Las Vegas Daily News. Kolchak is what one might consider a "loose cannon" type of reporter: always out to get the truth, by any means necessary, and always (or almost always) at odds with the authorities and his very own editor Tony Vincenzo. He's one step above the con men of the world, and you get the feeling that if he weren't working for the Daily News, he'd just be another name in their police blotter column.

Kolchak begins with the perfect "X-Files" hook; he's sitting in a hotel room with a few day's worth of stubble, dictating the story into his always-present tape recorder, and concludes his opening with "Any attempt to verify these events will be unsuccessful." (Or something to that effect.) It might seem old hat nowadays with all the conspiracy types of TV dramas, but it still works; it's a script from Richard Matheson, the man behind I Am Legend and countless other famous stories and scripts.

The story itself begins like any other police procedural: a woman's body was found, in a trash bin, with date and time dictated in Kolchak's narration. Turns out that the body was empty of blood, none of which was found at the scene. Kolchack uses his wits, charms, and favors to get more information out of the police, and more and more bodies begin to turn up with the same problem: no blood. Some of them also have other mysteries around them; one woman's body was found in a sand pit, with no footprints leading to or away from it.

A few more bodies turn up, and as Kolchak's story unfolds he meets with increased resistance from his editor and the police, who want to keep the story of the "vampiric night stalker" under wraps in order to avoid alarming the populace. Kolchak, of course, doesn't believe in vampires; but that starts to end once he and the police actually encounter Janos Skorzeny, the Night Stalker, and realize that he's much more than a man.

Eventually, Kolchak and his FBI friend Bernie (I think he was in the FBI) track the vampire down to his lair, and attempt to do what's necessary. There's a nice semi-twist ending (not in a supernatural way) that surprised me by being, you know, intelligent. I think it's what would have actually happened had the events in the movie occurred, and it was a nice twist that most other movies never even go into.

When I started writing this, I had assumed that there was actually more to the story, but in hindsight it's a pretty simple tale. The vampire kills, and Kolchak and the police try to track him down and stop him, often arguing along the way. Despite its simplicity, the premise really works because of the procedural elements; it's a lot like "Dragnet" was, and to an extent the "Law and Order" franchise. It's very by-the-book and matter-of-fact, and that's incredibly refreshing when compared to the stupidly credulous horror films I normally watch, in which the first reaction to most murders is "OMG WTF it must have been a ghost!!!!!!" I like when characters display a degree of doubt and skepticism that's at least half-realistic.

The other half of the film's success is from Darren McGavin. Most people remember him best as the father from A Christmas Story, but from now on I think he'll be Kolchak in my mind -- horror always trumps comedy in my brain. He's absolutely electric in this movie; every line rolls off his tongue with character and nuance. McGavin portrays Kolchak as a man with different sides -- he can be charming, sneaky, intelligent, smarmy, angry; the character is completely believable, thanks to the fantastic work being done. It almost makes me want to get a cheap hat and a tape recorder.

I also give honorable mentions to the rest of the cast, which is primarily made up of other journeymen actors. Notable (for me) is Ralph Meeker as Kolchak's pal Bernie, since Meeker played Mike Hammer back in the awesome Kiss Me Deadly of 1955. It's almost strange to see a movie like this: slow, methodical, with a cast of middle-aged or older men. These are pretty rare in this world of 20-year-old sexpot victim slasher films, and it's great to see one for a change of pace. Not that I don't like lots of mindless scary slashing and 20-year-old sexpots, but every once in a while it's nice to know that some actors can actually still act with talents other than their breasts.

Just a few more notes: The Night Stalker was apparently the prime inspiration for the "X-Files" series, which featured its own investigative approach to the supernatural. Frank Spotnitz, a producer on "X-Files," just launched the new "Stalker" TV show with the bland, lifeless Stuart Townsend in McGavin's role. The vampire's real name is Janos Skorzeny, which was also the villain's name in "Werewolf"; at one point the vampire uses the alias Bela Blasko (if I'm remembering correctly), which is Bela Lugosi's birth name. Finally, The Night Stalker was produced by Dan Curtis, the man responsible for that vampiric daytime soap, "Dark Shadows." So many connections!

I recommend this movie, once again going against my passionate hatred of the 1970s. It's a great little flick to watch late at night, just to get yourself in a spooky mood. It's a little dated, and not really scary, but I think in the context of investigation and procedure it doesn't really matter that it's not frightening. It's a neat, small, and entertaining story, and it's worth every Netflix penny.

Go rent and enjoy.

REVIEW: Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (1972)

2005-10-20T09:43:00.000-04:00

Remember A Christmas Story? You know, the one with little Ralphie and Red Ryder, "You'll shoot your eye out"?

As it happens, the man behind the camera for that beloved Christmas tale also made a zombie movie early in his career. (He also made Porky's, but that's a review waiting for next Boobtober.) Right now, we'll have to turn our attention to Bob Clark's one and to date only zombie feature, Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things. (In hindsight, he also made one other movie that might be construed as a zombie film. If we really want to define, I'll say no flesh or brains eaten = no zombie film. His movie Dead of Night might be called a ghoul film, instead, because while the guy came back from the dead, he was still pretty normal except for the sucking the life out of people. I know some people that are like that in real life.)

First off, I love the title of this movie. It's not only catchy and easy to remember, but it doubles as practical lifestyle advice: children really should not play with dead things. I remember walking into Movie World's Castle of Horror when I was a kid, and spying this awful, ugly video box. I thought to myself, "You know, they're right. I shouldn't play with dead stuff." Then I went and rented Children Should Be Familiar With The Constitution's Establishment Clause, and my fate was sealed.

What we have here in terms of plot are zombies, which are the titular dead things, and a troupe of actors, none of which are children but they're actors so they all have the mentality of nine-year-olds. Leader Alan (played by writer Alan Ormsby) takes his cast of players on a mysterious trip to an island cemetery (?), in order to prance around like idiots and test out a book of satanic spells on the dead. Their plan is to find a suitable corpse and revive him -- that's that's the entire plan, which, in terms of a zombie movie, is pretty short-sighted. I don't know what they'd planned on doing with their zombie pet afterwards, but I guess Alan and Co. really just want to see if the whole thing worked at all and then they'd figure something out. It's just like actors to come up with retarded and impractical plans like this.

So, off on the fog-enshrouded island, Alan, Val, Anya, Paul, Terry, Roy, Jeff, and Emerson go ahead and dig up the grave of Orville Dunworth. Alan is almost the embodiment of everything I hate about every actor I've ever met, and what mind-crushingly unbearable traits that his character doesn't cover, the rest of the cast makes up for. Alan is completely over-the-top flamboyant, and I'm as surprised as anyone that he doesn't constantly leap gracefully around the set singing "I'm a great artist! I'm a great artist!" There are many subtle allusions to his sexuality (including his marriage to Orville's body), but the horrendous gay jokes are mainly covered by Terry and Emerson, the fabulous duo who argue about cemetery life: "I can't imagine why you'd want to bury yourself in a filthy little hole." Get it?

Eventually, they manage to drag Orville's corpse out of the grave, and invoke the powers of Satan in order to coax him back to life. There's a halfway decent scene after Alan reads his spells and nothing happens, so Val bitches him out for (I guess) not invoking Satan flamboyantly enough; the number of alternative names for "Satan" she comes up with is impressive. Too bad for the running time, this still doesn't make people come back to life. The kids "walk" Orville over to a half-boarded up cabin, where Alan continues his asshole diatribe about how useless everyone else is, how easily he can replace them in his troupe, and how they're all like slabs of meat hanging in the corner to him, and probably some more stuff but I couldn't quite make it out due to the incredibly loud sound of my fist pummeling the TV screen trying to murder everyone in the movie.

Then....fiiiiinally, just before my knuckles crack the screen, the spell kicks in. Either there was a time delay, or the spell didn't actually work at all and Satan just decided to raise the dead because he getting too goddamned annoyed with these people. I thank Satan for this either way.

What follows is the good stuff: the zombies lurching about, hungering for human flesh. It's the one actually effective part in the movie, mostly on account of the creepy music. They use a kind of long, wavering electronic droning noise -- bordering on outright dischordant -- and I think that it really works in context. (I hear it's a Moog device, but that's not confirmed.) I've seen this movie more than once, and it's solely for this music; it elevates the scene -- not quite to "scary," but at least up to "uncomfortable in an vague, unarticulated way."

Once the troupe realizes that the dead are coming back to life, they quickly board up the house and come up with a plan: they need to send someone for help, so they'll try to distract the zombies in front while a few kids run out the back. The plan works flawlessly until the kids in back run directly into a horde of backyard-grazing zombies. Then it all kind of falls apart, as the undead chew excitedly on the actors as if they somehow realize that they're doing the world a great service.

Alan, being the fearless leader of the gang, realizes that if his spellbook can bring the dead back to life, it might be able to put them back down. He flips through the grimoire looking for the antidote spell, and finds that there is one -- but it requires getting the original corpse (Orville) back into his own grave, which is deep in the undead-filled graveyard. I think I heard even the zombies snicker at this plan. Before Alan and Anya (who I think are the only two remaining actors at this point) can figure out plan B, the corpses come crashing in. Anya does her weirdo hippie thing and basically gives herself to the zombies, while Alan does the cowardly actor thing and exits, stage left. Stage upstairs, to be more precise, right to...yep, right to the room where he was canoodling with Orville only forty minutes ago.

Orville is now awake, and he wants revenge. Not so much for the off-screen hinted-at violations, but for Alan just being Alan, I think. I think his personality is more offensive than anything he could do to my body, so I'm right there with Orville on this one. In fact, I'm still punching Alan's flickering TV-image, in case he gets the upper hand on our dead protagonist.

And then...roll credits. I think the movie sets itself up for a sequel, as what appears to be a group of zombies boards a boat, presumably heading towards the mainland USA in search of other theater groups to eat. I wholeheartedly wish them the best on this quest.

You can pretty much avoid this picture, unless you're really keen on Moog synthesizer music. I'd include the chance that you might really enjoy watching bad actors get devoured mouthful by mouthful, but that also entails sitting through the first hour for your Hate-O-Meter to rise enough to make the end worth it. You'll also have to contend with some of the ugliest fashion and hairstyles that 1972 could provide, as well generally shoddy make-up and special effects.

I keep thinking about this movie, trying to figure out what the heck was going on with the acting. Was Alan (playing Alan) trying to do an impersonation of a crappy, pretentious actor, or was that just how he was? The script pretty clearly treats the actors as complete boobs, so does that make the zombies the protagonists, and the actors the villains of the movie since they were the ones defiling the dead? Are they all bad guys? WHY ISN'T THERE ONE LIKABLE CHARACTER IN THE MOVIE?

I hate when movies get all meta.

Stick with Bob Clark's two or three better pictures, despite their lack of zombies.

Oooh, I hate Alan. But I'll forgive him because he also wrote this book, which I had as a kid:

But then I'll un-forgive him because according to this interview with Orville I found over at Badmovies.org, his performance was really him playing himself. Just take a look at him, and you'll understand:

Ugh.

REVIEW: Land of the Dead (2005)

2005-10-19T10:22:00.000-04:00

I can honestly say that I write this review with a great deal of mixed feelings, since my entire perception of the movie has been so warped by my nigh-indecent love of the zombie genre, as well as the insanely high expectations that stemmed from Romero's older zombie films. I saw the movie on its opening weekend in the summer, but I waited to review it until I could watch it again and try to work out what was right and what was wrong.

To preface (for those of you who came in late), I'm a zombie movie fan. I'm a zombie nut. I love zombie movies, far more than any other kind of horror movies, because zombies are the only monsters that will genuinely frighten me. I can watch every Friday the 13th movie in a row, but I still won't feel anything other than the shock of the 'jump' scare. If I put Dawn of the Dead into my DVD player, it's with the understanding that I'm going to be filled with a palpable sense of dread, and it's almost a guaranteed night of bad dreams; I even had horrible zombie nightmares after I watched Return of the Living Dead 4 & 5 -- and those movies sucked.

I credit seeing Night of the Living Dead with one of the direct sources of my zombophobia; it was the first horror movie that I remember affecting me. I doubt that it was the first horror film that I ever saw, but when you throw it on the same platform with mindless schlockfests like 976-Evil or Trick or Treat, it's easy to see that one of these is not like the other. NOTLD works so well because it has a subtext that's actually stronger than the text; the terror didn't really come from the zombies (although they were scary, too), but because the humans just couldn't get their shit together. It was as horrifyingly bleak a film as I'd probably ever seen, and I'm not even counting the ending. After watching so many slasher films, Romero's universe hit me in the gut with a very real fear.

Years later, my brother rented Dawn of the Dead, and I vividly remember trying to watch it by myself in the basement of my house. I had to turn the lights on, just so I could make sure that there weren't any zombies slowly and quietly sneaking up behind me. That movie freaked me out in a huge way, because not only was it much gorier, but because it was slower; the world had begun to slip away and the bleakness of the first movie got mapped onto the entire country. The characters were real to me, and I can still see in my mind the baseball player zombie, sitting in front of Gaylen Ross and staring at her through the glass; even the zombies were real people. The heartbeat synth music still makes me tense up inside.

Eventually, I watched Day of the Dead, and I didn't really think too much of it. Thanks to cable and the adios-to-the-VHS-format sale at my local Blockbuster Video, I've probably seen Day more times than the first two, and it's grown on me more every time I watch it. (Romero himself says that it's the one that's grown on him the most.) It's certainly different than the first two, but it makes sense to me now in a way that it didn't when I first watched it; the way the characters act and the things that they do are all reasonable in their context. I'd be loony, too, if I had to face the fact that the world really was ending, and that my best hope for a future was making it to a remote island so that I could wait for a natural death. Plus, the opening scene in the dead city -- "Hellooo! Is anybody there?" -- is a real doozy. (And that Gorillaz song is unlistenable because of the way the sample makes me feel.)

After two decades of flirting with making the project and then watching it slink back into development hell, George Romero finally made Land of the Dead. I saw it on a Sunday afternoon, and I walked out of the theater feeling...

...unsatisfied.

And confused. I almost had no opinion about the movie at all, other than that it didn't feel quite like a Romero zombie movie. It was too slickly made; it had a larger budget, and it showed. Gone were the bland flourescent lights that made Day and Dawn feel real; gone were the ugly sets that looked like real ugly apartments and malls and stores. There was a full-blown score in place, and not the weird synth heartbeat that made my hair stand on end so many times. There were recognizable actors, so I instinctively knew that they were just playing a part, and that cut some of the scares.

Land of the Dead wasn't a Romero horror film.

At least, that's what I thought the first time through. I watched it again on DVD at night, just after I crawled into bed, and I came away with a different opinion. Now, I think of it as almost a Romero film, in pretty much the same way that I felt about Day of the Dead the first few times that I saw it. I liked it a lot more the second time through, and it worked better, perhaps because my expectations were different.

Land begins in a small town somewhere near Pittsburgh, long after the zombie outbreak began. The dead have taken over the world, and, continuing the evolution from Dawn, the zombies are showing signs of thinking. The townspeople (or their corpses, to be precise) are still showing signs that they're pretending to be alive: a zombie band noisily fiddles with their instruments in the park, and two dead lovers shuffle through the town hand-in-hand. A ringing bell at a gas station introduces us to Big Daddy, who comes out of the booth to service a car that isn't there -- a nice undead Pavlovian reaction. Even worse for the still-living scavengers that are hiding behind the bushes is that Big Daddy seems to be able to communicate with his zombie brethren, alerting them that there's food nearby -- it's very bad news when zombies form unions.

The scavengers, led by Riley and Cholo, are working for Dennis Hopper's Mr. Kaufman over in the human enclave of Fiddler's Green. The Green was a resort apartment complex for the wealthy, and then after the change Kaufman fortified its river-protected location and created one of the last havens of the living. Unfortunately, Kaufman is kind of an evil dictator, keeping the rich people in luxury, and keeping the poor oppressed, mostly ignoring the fact that the rest of the world is going under.

Anyway, it's Riley's last night out scavenging -- he knows that the world is going to hell, and he wants to make his way up north to Canada so he can get away from zombies and humans alike. It's Cholo's last night as well, since he's saved enough money to buy his own luxury place in the Green high-rise, and can live it up like Kaufman and his pals. Unfortunately, he's not white, and there's no place in the world of the affluent for the 'lower-class' people. Cholo barely escapes Kaufman's death sentence, and makes off with Dead Reckoning (a super military scavenging vehicle), threatening to launch its missiles at Fiddler's Green unless Mr. K ponies up many millions of dollars.

Oh, and Big Daddy is still pissed that the living came to his town and fucked shit up, so he gathers up his zombie brethren and starts a march to that bright, tall building that the humans drove towards.

Those are the basic conflicts in the story: Riley is enlisted to stop Cholo, and intends to steal Dead Reckoning himself for his trip north; Kaufman needs to stop Cholo, but is also preparing to abandon the Green and its people to the stenches if things go south; Big Daddy and his many, many friends want some warm snacks.

I think the plot works fine, although the super-political aspects of it might be a little bit overdone. Kaufman could not be more George W. Bush if he wore a nametage that said "Hi, I'm George W. Bush." When dealing with the Cholo situation, one of his board members suggests that they pay the money, but Kaufman "doesn't negotiate with terrorists." In turn, that prompts Cholo to remark that he'll "go jihad on his ass." Those are probably the most blatant connections, but there's a whole subtext to the film that, when applied to the USA's current political situation (or then-current), I don't fully understand. Maybe I'm dense, but since the various factions don't quite relate perfectly to real-world political counterparts, I think that some of the more over-the-top stuff was a mistake. The references are almost too literal, and it doesn't add up. I'm no friend of the Republican party, but some of the subtext feels like it was shoe-horned in; on the other hand, it does make sense in the context of the film's political world, and maybe I'm just trying to read too much into it. There was certainly a similar theme in Day of the Dead, but it was far more broad and general, and it was more interesting because it lent itself to interpretation; it was part of the movie, but it never came across as being the point of the movie. The political aspects of Land seem like they're trying to take precedence over the actual story, and they're really the weaker angle.

Speaking of the story, it's another thing that threw me by the end. Night had an ending that bordered on heart-breaking; Dawn's finale was messed-up, but a little hopeful, and Day's ending was about as close to a happy ending as Romero gets. Land finishes on such an odd note that it makes a little piece of me cringe inside. It's too upbeat, despite the fact that what's possibly the last remaining human outpost has been overrun by the undead, and thousands of people are being eaten in the streets. Riley and his gang giggle at each other and drive off hopefully to the north under a sky of fireworks -- while the few remaining people in the world are ostensibly being trapped and devoured a few blocks away. It's doubtful that they really could have done anything to help, but there was a large contrast with how they'd been painted as characters up until that point and how they acted at the end. Plus, there's the whole "they're just looking for a place to go" line that I've spent hours trying to rationalize.

For those that aren't concerned with plot or story, there's still plenty of gore and carnage this time around, supplied with gusto by Greg Nicotero and Co. There's a lot of very, very gory practical effects, enhanced by some CG blood splatter. Sometime in the third act, Riley and Manolete enter an ammo warehouse, and flit their flashlights over a zombie feast that echoes the very famous basement scene from Dawn. There's one particular effect in this scene that -- even as a desensitized horror buff -- made me do the "uuuuuughh" sound in the theater. Who knew that mouths could be stretched that far? It's disgusting. It's awesome. It's a nice gruesome scene, but it could have been much more effective if it weren't for the bland score; the whole movie could have used tense music, not jump music.

I get the feeling that I'm being too harsh on the movie, but that's what I expected because of my deep love and appreciation for the other movies in the series. This is still a good movie, and stands head and shoulders above all of the other recent genre entries -- I just don't love the movie as I love the others. Not yet, anyway, but I do think that will change with repeated viewings and a little time. It's always tough to look at something that you've been waiting for, especially if you've been waiting twenty years for it to come around. Right now, I think of it as the kid brother of the Dead series. It's a worthwhile movie on its own merits, but it doesn't kill me like Night and Dawn do.

REVIEW: The Unnamable (1988)

2005-10-18T10:44:00.000-04:00

There's nothing quite like taking a dip in the macabre and many-tentacled world of H.P. Lovecraft. Unfortunately for us cinephiles, it's usually not very rewarding. For each of the decent Lovecraft film adaptations out there, there's a million zillion (actual figure) wastes of time and money in the growing abyss of VHS and DVD. I can probably count the number of decent Lovecraft flicks on one hand: there's Re-Animator, which was certainly fun, and probably the most famous. Then we've got Dagon, which I thought was more entertaining than most people did, and From Beyond was a hoot. I've also got hope for the recent Call of Cthulhu, a new silent picture from the twisted minds over at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which looks incredible.

Sadly, The Unnamable does not earn a rank on my good hand. If I'm feeling particularly generous, it might have an honorable mention on my other hand somewhere down by the pinky.

We begin with the tragic tale of Joseph Winthrop, who 100 (or possible 300) years ago made a startling discovery: his pregnant wife was giving birth to something...unnamable. Actually, "giving birth" was probably too polite a term, considering that he later mentions in his journal that the creature "ate its way to the light, and then recoiled just as quickly." Nice imagery, huh? Luckily for the residents of Massachusetts, Winthrop was also an amateur sorcerer and used his mystical manuals to trap the creature forever inside the walls of his home, but as he notes, the rotting wood will not last forever.

Curiously, Old Man Winthrop also bucks the status quo and names his creature "Elyda." So much for the title, eh?

The story jumps forward to the present day (or what was passing for the present day back in 1988), where pretentious grad student Carter is telling the legend of Winthrop and his beastly daughter to his pals Joel and Howard. Science major Joel thinks the story is just the stuff of local superstition, and sets out to prove it by offering to spend some time in the decrepit place that evening. Howard, being weak-willed, follows Carter back to the library, while Joel walks into the house and gets the no-trespassing speech from Elyda's ancient claws.

Meanwhile, Wendy and Tanya are hanging out at the university library discussing the many problems of being hot freshman girls. This was "1988 hot," so when we adjust that for inflation they're both about "2005 pretty okay." Maybe they'd be upgraded to "nice-looking" if their hair weren't so damn frizzy. They're not about to mess with their hair, though, because frat guys Bruce and John walk over and invite them to check out the creepy old house at the edge of town, which they're planning to use for hazing pranks later on. I think that Lovecraft was ahead of his time, because his accounts of freshmen girls being duped turned out to be eerily accurate.

Elsewhere in the library, Howard starts to wonder what the hell happened to Joel -- it's been an entire day since anyone's seen him! After much begging and counter-rationalizing, Carter agrees to join Howard on his search for Joel.

For the sake of brevity, I'll run through the rest:
-Wendy gets naked. Bruce and John die. Wendy dies.
-Howard earnestly tries to save everyone, and gets Tanya's respect.
-Carter treats Howard like he's retarded, but still saves him with magic spells that incite the "tree spirits."
-The end!

I'd recap those parts, but it's really just forty-five minutes of running through hallways and screaming. I won't try to hedge and kinda-recommend the movie, because it's pretty bad. The acting is passable at best, the special effects are terrible (the tree spirits are really shaky tree branches), the make-up is mediocre, and the plot stretches the boundaries of credulity. A one-hundred year old house with dozens of local legends based on it, and there are still centuries-old sorcery books on the dining-room table? Considering that seven characters in the movie walked to the house would seem to indicate that it's not that damn hard to find. The more likely scenario would be that Joel would walk in and trip over homeless people and junkies, and then Carter would have to stop rebellious high school kids from spray-painting fakey Satanic symbols all over the walls. "Satin Lives!!!"

The movie also suffers from what I call "The House Hunt Paradox." This is what happens in horror movies when there are two conditions that logically contradict each other: there's a haunted (or stalked) house that has to be searched, and a cast of characters so large that most of them die in entertaining ways but still leave a couple to defeat the evil. I'm sure that everyone is familiar with this. The problem is that most houses are simply not that big. I've been in a lot of houses, some of them very large, and I've never, ever, ever been in danger of losing track of anyone else inside them. In 99% of non-mansions, everyone is within shouting distance at all times, if not speaking distance. Even in most really big houses, the geography is certainly not maze-like; there's usually a central area and then branching rooms, and the higher floors tend to have even less space. At best, I'd imagine if the house was really big, and there were only two characters, they might lose each other. A cast of six screaming people in this house would NOT lose each other. It would need to be labyrinthine. The house in this movie is large, but the only reasonable way for these kids to get lost is through major head trauma.

And that's all I've got to say about the negative aspects. They're enough to make me assure you that you probably won't enjoy watching this movie, so you can take that as the final line of the review if you like.

On the other hand, for the sake of all drive-in movies everywhere, I'll also talk about the parts of the movie that I enjoyed -- because I didn't walk away completely empty-handed.

The thing that struck me during the final half-hour of the movie is that The Unnamable is really a live-action Scooby Doo episode, with a little bit of gore and some boobs. The monster is ludicrous and laughable, there's tons of running around in a small house searching for clues, and the character of Howard is like a slightly smarter Shaggy. Honestly, if there's one single bit of outright praise I have for this film, it's the relationship between Howard and the rest of the cast (especially Carter). Charles Klausmeyer (or Charles King) plays Howard with such a wide-eyed naivete that he's incredibly likeable, and his interaction with the demanding and terse Carter is actually really funny -- you can tell how much Howard wants to save everyone, but he's completely clueless as to how to do it. Klausmeyer's line readings and facial expressions made me chuckle out loud several times during the movie, and I mean that in the sense that they were all obviously intentional. In most movies of this caliber I couldn't care less what characters survived, but I was actually rooting for Howard to defeat the unnamable and make out with Tanya.

That's about all the praise I've got the movie, but it's really just something to keep in mind if you're somehow forced to suffer through the rest of it. Every movie's got to have some sort of life raft, right?

(MYSTERY UPDATE: The actor who played Carter has both actor AND actress credits on the IMDB, most recently as a woman in Domino. Weeeeeeird.)

REVIEW: After Midnight (1989)

2005-10-17T13:41:00.000-04:00

Just when you think that the minimum running time for a scary story is ninety minutes, you come across the old creepy movie stand-by, the anthology picture. Anthology films seem to be loved and hated with equal ferocity; some people love the variety of having several stories in one movie, while others whine because a lot of anthology films suffer tonal problems from different directors and casts. Personally, I can take 'em or leave 'em. I find that a lot of horror anthology films are anthology films because none of the stories within them are good enough to last for more than twenty minutes; a lot of the newer anthology releases these days are just low-grade amateur shorts that were bought up and packaged together for pocket change.

Then again, we're not talking nowadays, since tonight's film After Midnight was released all the way back in 1989, which was a decent year for drive-in movies. It was pretty much at the top of the video release market, when the Elm Streets and Friday the 13th franchises were still going strong. Most importantly in my version of the history of horror, it was pre-Scream, the film which somehow managed to introduce irony into the genre thereby ruining everything with hipness and self-references.

After Midnight begins in one of the most terrifying locales in the entire genre: a freshman psych class. The new and mysterious professor Edward Derek is teaching "The Psychology of Fear," and he announces quite proudly to the class that they're not going to need their books -- he'll be using other kinds of teaching techniques this semester. For instance, he pulls a gun on the jock in the class, and threatens to blow his brains out until the jock pees himself. Then, he turns the gun on himself and paints the wall behind him with red, gooey blood. Naturally, the class is horrified, until Prof. Derek stands up and giggles that it was all special effects; he was trying to make them afraid. Afraid of having to find a new elective when most class slots will already be filled.

Whereas in reality, where Derek would be arrested and sued more times than I can count on one hand, the movie administration simply tells him not to do that again. Apparently they're pretty light on the administrative action over there at After Midnight University. Anyway, the professor suggests that for those in the class that aren't afraid of a little extra class time, he will continue to hold his own private study sessions at his house.

Once the after-hours session (which most of the class shows up for) begins, they settle down and begin sharing scary stories to inspire fear in each other. So far I've neglected to mention that the framing story's lead girl (a shaky, willowy girl that gets "bad feelings" about things) starts to get "bad feelings" about this class. And the study group. And the teacher. She gets a lot of bad feelings, and she has to mention allll of them. The girl is completely unimportant to about 99% of the film, so we won't get hung up on her.

The first tale is the only one that I would actually classify as a "horror" story. It stars Marc McClure (Jimmy Olsen to most of you) as a timid man whose car gets a flat on the side of a lonely country road, after a scenic drive with his wife following his birthday dinner. It seems that someone has thrown a bagful of tacks on the road not too far away from the creepy old house -- the same creepy house where thatt madman murdered all those people with hedge clippers. There's a light on in one of the upper rooms of the mansion, and before Marc McClure can say "We should get help from Superman!" his wife is off and running to look for a phone to call AAA with. After they enter, she disappears, and it's up to him to find her and perhaps defend himself from the hedge murderer. I won't give away the ending, but it's one that I've remembered since I saw it in about 1990; it's unfortunate that it doesn't really hold up after all these years, but it's still pretty neat in a way.

The second story is the one that I remembered as not being all that scary as a kid, and it turns out I was right. It's the story of four underage girls driving around the seedy parts of town looking for a good club to dance the night away in. Because they're stupid, they end up running out of gas in what appears to be the ninth circle of Los Angeles, a filthy, empty, and altogether abandoned section of town. Actually, it's only mostly abandoned, since they have an encounter with a crazy homeless man and his vicious dogs. He's all set to rape and murder them when the girls get the upper hand and make a car sandwich with him as the meat. You'd think it was all over, then, right? I hope you didn't say yes. There's still three or four nasty dogs left to hunt them down in revenge. This story was actually pretty well done, although it would be a stretch to call it a horror story; at best, it's an action thriller. There's lots of running and jumping and even some explosions at the end, but nothing remotely supernatural (or even creepy) going on. As a plus, three of the four girls are recognizable from other projects, two of them from an installment of A Nightmare on Elm Street, and the other from her role on "Mr. Belvedere."

The final story-within-a-story is the "crazy man keeps calling me and may be getting physically closer and I can't get anyone to help me oh shit I think he's inside the building" story. Having rented When a Stranger Calls not too far in the past, this one just didn't work for me. Marg Helgenberger plays Alex, a receptionist for a late-night telephone answering service. (Didn't they have answering machines in 1989? Heck, I saw one in Kiss Me Deadly, and that came out in 19-fifty-nine.) Alex is just getting back from a skiing vacation, and she's got the broken leg to prove it. Upon her return, her boss informs her that she's had to fire everyone except her, so she's all by her lonesome until tomorrow -- oh, and there's this guy that calls about a dozen times an hour. I have to admit, the rest of the story lost me. The crazy guy is calling some rich woman, and is seen standing outside the woman's apartment. Later, he switches to harassing Alex, and manages to track her down. In the end, there's one accidental death, and the dude is still calling Alex, so it's like the story actually has no ending. You can probably skip this one, unless you've got some kind of receptionist-with-a-broken-leg fetish, in which case I recommend that you get this immediately. That's a tough fetish to appease.

Getting back to the framing story again, the psychic girl Allison starts to get a bad feeling again, and as it happens the bad feeling is correct. That urine-stained jock from the beginning of the film is back to make the professor experience his own kind of fear, and starts a ruckus. The professor -- being an extremely creepy man -- keeps egging on the jock, and before he can change the course to Pass/Fail the professor has been immolated, and turns into an angry walking skeleton with a fire ax. Like any good finale, there's a lot of wind and lights, and Allison gets briefly transported into each of the stories as she's being chased by the skeleton. And then...

...she wakes up. Goddammit I hate when they do that. It's such a cop-out. It's even more of a cop-out when she gets out of bed to go to class, which happens to be the first day of psych 101: the Psychology of Fear. This is likely the scariest moment in the entire film, because it poses the threat of having to watch it alllllll overrrr agaaaaaain. If I were authoring the DVD, I'd make it really scary and have it automatically got right back to chapter one when she got to class. I wonder how long I could make people sit there and think the movie was really going someplace.

Did it live up to my childhood memories? I'm afraid not. It was more of a pleasant trip back down the nostalgia path. Still, the production quality was relatively high (especially for this kind of movie), and the direction wasn't bad. Strangely, I think the acting in the sub-stories was actually pretty good; I do recall thinking for a moment during the "dog" section of the film that the way that the four girls were all given different personalities was actually quite impressive for what was essentially a short film. The worst performances come in during the framing tale, where Allison the psychic deserved a good smacking, and the good professor deserved some non-Shatner thespian tips -- it's a performance that's best described as "off-kilter."

Before I damn the movie with so much faint praise, I'll cut this off and say that if it came on cable on a dark and rainy night, I'd check it out again. Until then, it's going back on the DVD shelf.

REVIEW: Return of the Living Dead, Parts 4 and 5 (2005)

2005-10-17T08:33:00.000-04:00

Since the two movies premiered back-to-back on the Sci-Fi Channel the other night featuring the same characters and directed by the same guy (and I actually watched them both in a row), I'm just going to throw the two together and pretend it's one really long horrible movie, instead of two individual crappy movies. It'll save me time and energy, since I can write things like "These movies are awful" rather than go through the laborious process of typing "ROTLD 4 is an awful movie. ROTLD 5 is also an awful movie."

After a long wait since 1993's Return of the Living Dead Part 3, the zombie-comedy franchise returns with the light-hearted and stupid Return of the Living Dead 4: Necropolis. It begins in the shell of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor (the first film to shoot there since the disaster), with skeevy Peter Coyote as a mysterious scientist who's determined to get his hands on the last remaining canisters of Trioxin, known to us ROTLD fans as the chemical that makes dead people get the munchies. Coyote makes a deal with the Ukrainian (or Russian) Mafia to get the canisters back to the US for research, presumably of the "evil" kind. After a short zombie scare, Coyote takes off with the cans of Trioxin, and then there's a totally inexplicable car accident that has nothing to do with him and probably happens somewhere else in the world.

Actually, let me backtrack for a second: the movie really begins with a short commercial for the fictional company "Hybra Tech," which is the Umbrella Corporation from Resident Evil with a different name. According to the commercial, they do everything from make cheese products to being the number one name in quelling all zombie infestations, which leads us to believe that zombie outbreaks are not all that rare or secret. I'm only mentioning this because it's the only way I can explain everyone's complete lack of surprise that there are walking dead people later on. Now, onward again.

Turns out that Coyote's scheming Dr. Garrison is taking care of his two nephews Julian and "Pyro" (named for his firestarting habits), since their parents died -- in a car accident! Just like the unexplained one we saw a few minutes ago! I'm making this connection apparent for you, because the movie doesn't. Even now, I'm not certain that they ever mention that the parents died in a car accident, but that's the only plausible explanation for having the accident scene in the movie in the first place.

Coyote, of course, is a horrible parental figure, spending all of his days and nights over at Hybra Tech being evil and reanimating arms and stuff. Julian is pretty much left to fend for himself and Pyro, all the while trying to convince his pal Zeke that he's not trying to hook up with Zeke's ex Katie, who -- for plot convenience -- works as a security guard in the Hybra Tech compound. I would talk about how bizarre it is for a high school girl to be a security guard at a giant top-secret lab, but, y'know, not fair to the movie.

Finally, after forever and ever, the plot really begins. Zeke hurts himself slightly in a motorcycle accident, and when Julian tries to visit him at the hospital, they tell him that Zeke has died. Feeling like bearing bad news, he calls Katie at work, only to find out that she just watched the paramedics wheel Zeke's still-breathing body into the Hybra Tech building. Something is amiss! Julian gets his pal Cody to hack into the Hybra Tech computers, where they find a secret weapons research program called "Necropolis." Being idiot kids, they decide to grab their dirtbikes, break into the compound, and rescue their pal.

Turns out to no one's surprise that Hybra Tech is trying to develop the very same zombie weapons program that began in Return of the Living Dead Part 3, then continued into Resident Evil, then Resident Evil: Apocalypse, and probably five or six thousand other unrelated movies. They've got a whole storage facility for angry zombies downstairs, and that's where they've locked up Zeke, so of course the kids make their way down there. You now get one guess as to what happens.

If you guessed that the movie got really gory and entertaining, you're wrong. Go back to line one and try again.

If you guessed that the morons accidentally open all the cages in an edited-for-TV manner, you are correct. Your prize is knowing enough about the rest of the movie so that you won't feel bad turning it off.

So, what's a gang of high-schoolers to do when locked in a building with a hundred zombies and Peter Coyote? You're right: they immediately go down to a lower level because that's where Julian's parents' weaponized zombie bodies are, just to see. I do not even want to imagine what these kids got on their SATs.

And that's pretty much it. Zombies kill everyone in the facility, Zeke turns into a zombie, and a decent amount of the main cast actually dies. Even little Pyro gets his brains chewed on, which won some respect from me since small children tend to live through these things in most movies like this. Coyote lets loose the parent zombies for pretty much no reason other than that he's evil; so evil, in fact, that one of the kids asks him what Hybra Tech really wants and he actually says: "Why, world domination, of course! What else is there?" In the end the army shows up and takes care of the zombies in an incredibly efficient manner, and Coyote makes off with three cans of Trioxin.

Then, we go to Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave.

Julian is now in college with his old survivor buddy Cody, enjoying himself almost as if his entire family wasn't murdered by his zombie-making uncle that's intent on world domination. He's got a hot blonde girlfriend with a dipshit drug-addled DJ brother, and Cody is now a chemistry major with a minor in illicit drug manufacturing. Things are going just fine until Peter Coyote is killed during a Trioxin sale gone horribly wrong, and Julian finds a couple canisters in a hidden compartment in his house. It would seem to me that the smart thing would be to immediately report those things to the police, or the feds, or a haz-mat outfit or something, but I guess if movie-people were smart there would just be a lot of movies about people being successful and happy and in love, and I'd have nothing to do on Saturday nights.

Julian and his girlfriend Jenny wheel the barrel of Trioxin over to Cody's lab on campus to "find out what's inside," apparently not remembering that two of the three of them had seen the same container hooked up to the zombie-making machines in the Hybra-Tech building not ninety minutes ago (in viewer-time, that is). Cody finds out that Trioxin is chemically kind of like a combination of crystal meth and LSD. The stupid DJ samples a bit to see if he can get high; he does for a little while, and it appears to have no adverse effects. Julian demands that they stop experimenting, but after he leaves, Cody, the DJ, and their drug-dealing pal Skeeze decide that they've got a phenomenal money-making opportunity on their hands: safe hallucinogenic meth. They call the little pill "Z," in that it makes you stand still and drool like a zombie. Why the coincidence goes over Cody's head is beyond logic.

Skeeze sells the drug all over campus in preparation for the big "Rave to the Grave" that weekend, and apparently makes a lot of cash off of it before Julian catches on and demands that they stop before it gets out of hand. Before Cody can even say, "Jesus, Julian, I'm a fucking moron, because I was in the prequel and already know that this stuff makes people come back from the dead and eat brains," we've got a whole campus full of zombies looking for dining hall brains.

To mix it up a little bit, the movie throws in a couple of Russian Interpol agents who are looking for the caviar bonuses that come with tracking down the canisters. They're pretty much for comic relief, and their role is to make "funny" jokes by messing up common English phrases. On occasion, they also shoot zombies.

The plot climaxes at the titular Rave to the Grave, where the Z pills start turning everyone into zombies regardless of how much they ingested. The middle of the rave scene has what's probably the only effective part in both movies, where Cody is looking for his girlfriend in the crowd as people around him suddenly start changing into the undead -- there are a few moments of genuine creepiness in there. Almost as good as the last movie (if that's an applicable statement), most of the main cast dies, save Julian, Jenny, and one of the Interpol guys -- sorry about that big spoiler I threw in there, but believe me, by the end of the movies you won't care who lives or dies.

Both Necropolis and Rave to the Grave were directed by Ellory Elkayem, the New Zealand filmmaker that brought us the pretty enjoyable mutant spider flick Eight Legged Freaks. (Oh, how the grammar Nazi in me hates that title. It should have a hyphen between "Eight" and "Legged," otherwise they're not referring to freaks that have eight legs (spiders), but to a group of eight freaks that all have an indeterminate number of legs. ARGH.) Freaks was a fun little homage to all the 1950s mutant animal movies, and watching his two ROTLD films gives the impression that he wants to continue that same vibe: mad scientists, evil goings-on, and youngsters out to save the day. Unfortunately, the tone just doesn't jive with the material and the whole thing falls apart pretty quick.

The main offense of these two flicks is that they're really, really dumb. Back in film school, I was writing my senior thesis script for my epic film noir cartoon, and I got to a point where the hero is locked up in a guarded room while the villains are off on their quest for the mystery device. I got stuck; I knew what had to happen afterward, but I had no idea how to actually get the character there, so I just wrote:

WINTER comes up with an incredibly clever plan for escaping the room, disposing of the HENCHMAN, and catching up with DR. STERLING right before the climax.

That works as a placeholder if it's the first draft and you're only the second week in, with another eight months to actually come up with a clever way for the hero to escape. It doesn't work in a final shooting script, but somehow the ROLTDs ended up with a lot of moments where I thought, 'Did they not finish the real script?' Everything in the two movies happened too conveniently, everyone was too evil, or too good, or too lucky. The zombies were too slow and then too fast, too smart and then too stupid. They make much of the Trioxin canisters, tying in to the first movies, and yet blatantly ignore all the rules that it set up -- zombies can be killed with a bullet to the head in this one. It's almost as if the two screenwriters just mashed out a big outline for the two movies, and then forgot to fill in the rest of the screenplay with cohesive details and logic. It's not hard to imagine the two movies as being relatively decent horror films -- maybe even fun ones -- but the filmmakers weren't really trying.

The two that I hold mostly responsible for the mess(es) are William Butler and Aaron Strongoni, who should really know better: Butler co-starred in the vastly superior zombie flick Night of the Living Dead (the 1990 remake, not the original). As far as remakes go, that one was a decent horror movie. It had scares, it had a heart, and something resembling a point in the end, three things that his ROTLD films did not.

And what in the hell happened to Peter Coyote? Not that I was a big Peter Coyote fan, but I'm passingly familiar with some of the bigger movies that he's been a part of -- and he looks awful in ROTLD. Awful-awful, like his face has been frozen into a bizarre Joker grin, perhaps with Botox; he drawls most of his lines as if he can't really move his lips. Whatever muscles power his cheeks are apparently receding deeper into his throat, making him look like he's always on the verge of swallowing his own tongue. It's not pretty.

Luckily, the rest of the cast looks like they're going to live through the filming. If there's one real compliment that I can pay the film, it's that most of the high school kids in the movies look like they might plausibly be high school students -- none of that 30-year-old girl with a Trapper Keeper stuff for this series. They're all appropriately skinny and doofy-looking, although in Part 5 they manage to squeeze into the college freshman look. Looking back, although I was going to crap on all of the acting, it really wasn't too bad overall. Coyote was slumming (and he knew it), but the rest of the kids did about as well as can be hoped with a script like this. Not every line comes out sounding natural, but there're so many absolutely retarded things being said that I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and accept the 75% of decent readings as being as good as humanly possible. I can't even imagine Pacino being able to pull off some of this stuff.

I'm pretty disappointed with these two, as you can probably tell. I love ROTLD Part 1 with a passion, and although Part 2 was a dumb comedy, Part 3 was actually starting to get the series on an interesting track with its Romeo-and-Juliet theme. I was hoping that these two films -- with the assistance of Elaykim -- would continue to provide some kind of neat-o entertainment, but it turns out that I'm gonna have to wait until Dan O'Bannon comes back to the franchise.

In summation: avoid even on a lonely Saturday night. If you have to watch a video, at least go rent something that has gore and boobs.

REVIEW: Wild Zero (2000)

2005-10-11T12:41:00.000-04:00

I'm on a quest.

It's the same quest that many others have embarked on, a noble and glorious tradition involving all people who are passionately in love with their hobbies: we are all brothers in the quest for the ever-elusive and mysterious hidden gem. We're all looking for that obscure movie or unknown album that will shake us and give us cause to think that we've discovered a new and undiscovered country, like pioneers of cinema and sound.

Okay, fine, that might be too majestic. Really, I'm just a Netflix junkie that watches a lot of shit, so it makes me really happy to find a movie that I've never heard of before that turns out to be more than halfway decent.

Up until about four days ago, I'd never even heard of Wild Zero, which blows my mind because while I may not be 100% up-to-date on all trashy horror films, I'm pretty close. I'd say high- nineties. I read the movie sites, listen to the internet chatter, and scan release dates like they might reveal prophecy. Still, I missed Wild Zero completely, and it was only by the fluke of having Netflix suggest it as a rental that I got it. Zombies and aliens, it said, and I took a chance. This movie is wild, and that's pretty much the only connection the title has to anything going on in the plot.

From the shores of Japan, director Tetsuro Takeuchi and lo-fi rock band Guitar Wolf bring us a silly tale of true love, zombies, and the power of rock and roll. The movie plops itself down in the relatively small genre of "Nonsense Comedies Built Around Bands," and I'll make the argument that it probably has more in common with the Beatles' flick Help! than it does with Dawn of the Dead. The movie is ninety minutes of musical madcap silliness, kept afloat by pure energy and adrenaline. The movie has so much fun with itself that it doesn't really hold to any genre rules; the editing is crappy, the plot doesn't make sense, and even the rules of zombiedom don't hold up internally -- but it doesn't matter, because it's pretty apparent that those qualities are of no importance to the filmmakers. What is important is that everyone has a good time, and that Guitar Wolf gets to rock.

Wild Zero's real lead character is Ace, a doofy teenager that idolizes Guitar Wolf with a zealousness that borders on cult behavior, evidenced by the glazed eyes he uses to stare at them in concert. He has a mile-high pompadour that he's constantly combing, and wears the true rock n' roll black leather biker jacket that Guitar Wolf, Bass Wolf, and Drum Wolf also sport. (Yes, the band Guitar Wolf is made up of Guitar Wolf, Bass Wolf, and Drum Wolf.) I guess one of the biggest joys of the movie is that I really liked the music; think the Ramones with bizarre mistranslated half-Japanese/half-English lyrics, and microphones that spit streams of fire when Guitar Wolf wails into them. Guitar Wolf was once promoted as the loudest band in the world, and are known to prize volume and the rock n' roll attitude as more important than talent; adjust your television volume accordingly.

After their latest gig, Guitar Wolf has a violent run-in with the club manager known as the Captain, a whore-abusing drug addict who wears really little shorts. Ace, of course, happens to be outside the room when the Captain says "Rock and roll is over!" and so bursts in to defend the sacred spirit of rocking, accidentally ending the Mexican stand-off inside. Guitar Wolf, in an act of thanks, makes Ace his blood brother in rock and roll, and gives him a magical whistle so he can call the band whenever he's in trouble. Yeah, it's that kind of movie. Turns out that Ace might need that whistle pretty soon, since an alien attack on Earth (by thousands of tiny spinning saucers straight out of the 1950s) causes the people of Japan to turn into flesh-eating zombies.

Elsewhere in the story, three petty criminals try to rob a gas station, only to be accidentally foiled by Ace's door-opening skills. In the aftermath, our hero meets a girl named Tobio (and we know it's instant love thanks to the red hearts that appear around their heads), but leaves his love unrequited so he can make it to the next Guitar Wolf show. There's also a bunch of arms dealers and Yakuza types that turn into zombie fodder pretty quick, and when Ace comes across that roadside flesh feast, a vision of Guitar Wolf instructs him that if he really loves Tobio, he'll go back for her. A little later on, a dark secret about Tobio is revealed to Ace's screaming disgust, but Guitar Wolf reminds him that true love, like rock n' roll, doesn't recognize boundaries, nationalities, or genders.

There is blood-a-plenty in this flick, and enough gore to keep all the genre fans pleased. Guitar Wolf turns out to be the most badass band in all of Japan, killing zombies by the boatload with magical electric guitar picks and their super-heroic ability to be awesomely cool. Guitar Wolf himself is so hardcore that he takes out the alien mothership with a ninja sword that he keeps inside his guitar; heck, he even blows up Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf for no apparent reason, although they're also so rock that they show up in the next scene with not a scratch on them. We get a bunch of live concert footage, lots of soundtrack, plenty of comedy, and more fun than us jaded horror watchers probably deserve.

I've heard on other websites that Wild Zero is almost beyond reviewing, but I think that I can say that it works, at least in the one way that it seems to want to succeed in: being entertaining. I'd guess that most movies want to be entertaining, but most movies also want to be other things like coherent, heartwarming, scary, and so forth, and when they fail at those things it takes away from the entertainment. Wild Zero has no such pretensions -- it's like a sugar-high circus clown that wants you to smile and will do whatever it takes, be it love stories or zombie attacks, to make you happy. It throws in so many great and silly things that even if you don't like the first thirty jokes, there's just bound to be a good one in the second thirty, and they'll play punk rock as a bridge to get to something that'll make you smile.

The best thing that I can tell you about this movie is that you should just let the rush of it all wash over you, and remember to treat it like it is: a testament to the lo-fi rockers in all of us. If rock n' roll is God, then Guitar Wolf is our savior.

Although I've only seen it once, this is one of my new favorite 'late night' movies, and just might be one of my favorite zombie flicks of all time.

Also included on the DVD is the Wild Zero drinking game, which flashes images of a beer mug on the screen whenever anyone takes a drink, does drugs, says "rock and roll," a zombie's head explodes, or something gets lit on fire. You could get drunk watching the DVD menu screen with these rules.

REVIEW: Christine (1983)

2005-10-11T11:01:00.000-04:00

"She smiled at me. I want to have deep, meaningful sex with her."

With that nugget of wisdom, I present the bastard child of Stephen King, John Carpenter, and Detroit, 1983's opus of vehicular terror, Christine.

Christine's got a bad rap. Admit it, you chuckled the first time you heard about this movie -- a haunted car? A possessed Plymouth? At least that's the reaction that I got when I mentioned that I had rented it. Let me get it out of the way now: a possessed, evil car is silly. But it's no stupider than a haunted house when you really think about it, so as a society we'll have to adjust our standards: all hauntings are equally stupid. I digress.

Christine is, in my mind, first and foremost a John Carpenter picture and a Stephen King adaptation second. I'm not among the biggest King fans of the world -- not that I've got anything against him, but I never took to his writing -- so his participation in the movie is more or less unimportant to me. According to our friends at the IMDB, King was such hot stuff back in '82 that the movie was in pre-production before the book was actually published; also, I hear that the movie takes some unfaithful diversions from the source material, but then again, I don't care. The movie works on its own merits, thanks to one of my all-time genre favorites, John Carpenter.

John Carpenter is primarily known for writing/directing/scoring Halloween, but what people outside the genre don't realize is how unstoppably awesome he was back in the earlier days of his career: Halloween, Starman, Prince of Darkness, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, Escape From New York, The Fog... all of them horror or sci-fi greats, and all of them certifiable cult hits (argue with me and I'll punch you). From there, something happened, and the magic stopped; he starting turning out dreck. As far as I can remember, he went downhill pretty suddenly back in the late eighties, right after They Live came out -- although it might be right before he did They Live. I change my mind about that movie every time I see it. Fortunately for us, Christine was a baby from the good ol' days, and it shows.

Christine opens with the sound of a growling engine over the credits rolling in the standard John Carpenter font. (Speaking of which, how many other directors have their own font? If anyone can find it for download, let me know.) We follow the trip down the factory line for the 1958 Plymouth Fury, which doesn't end well for the worker that accidentally ashes his cigar on Christine's fine leather seats. This is about as much of an origin as we're going for the murderous car, an artistic detail which you can either love or hate. On one hand, maybe the car seems more evil because it really doesn't have motivation; it's just built evil. The nuts and bolts were bad. On the other hand, it's got no backstory whatsoever that we can make sense of, and for some people the idea of an evil semi-sentient automobile might sound stupid unless there's a ghost or something. Personally, this part doesn't bother me, because I believe most things that make it out of Detroit are determined to destroy the world. (Actually, this isn't entirely unlike Carpenter's Michael Myers character from Halloween, who was apparently just born evil, if you ignore the five or six sequels.)

Jumping forward to 1978, teen geek Arnie Cunningham gets bullied during the lunch period by the knife-wielding Buddy Repperton, who does his most menacing Vinnie Barbarino impression before he gets expelled for showcasing his knife skillz. Luckily, Arnie's pal Dennis comes to the rescue in the nick of time, and it's while they're driving home that afternoon that Arnie spots the trashed Christine sitting by her lonesome in someone's backyard. It's love at first sight, and since Arnie isn't troubled by the super-cheap asking price, it's not long before he gets his baby into tip-top shape -- seemingly overnight. There's also a new girl in school, Leigh (Alexandra Paul of "Baywatch" fame), that both Dennis and Arnie have their eyes on.

All would be well, except that Arnie starts to change. He gets a sudden influx of machismo and overconfidence -- even enough to win the heart of Leigh, and to earn the continued ire of Repperton and his gang. In retaliation for the expulsion, Buddy decides to make Christine a little prettier by smashing her to pieces with mallets. One of the guys in the gang (including Bill Murray's test subject from the beginning of Ghostbusters) even shits on her dashboard. What's a possessed car to do? Why, satanically fix itself and kill 'em all, of course!

That's pretty much the entire movie. Arnie goes more and more insane about Christine, Leigh and Dennis get worried, and the car starts killing the gang. There's also a nice small role for Harry Dean Stanton as the cop investigating the murders, and Robert Prosky as the cantankerous owner of Darnell's Garage. It's really a simple plot, overall, but it's bolstered by strong performances from the leads who really sell their characters. I'd say that John Stockwell (who later went on to be a director) makes Dennis one of the most likable horror movie characters that I can remember (don't know if that says much), and Keith Gordon's Arnie is a little over-the-top but still believable as he sinks further into murderous obsession.

Also of note is how confident the direction and camerawork is. Carpenter makes the most out of every inch of the screen, and even goes all-out with lens flare that makes Christine look even more frightening -- the glare stretches so far across the screen that it's almost as if Christine's got her arms stretched out to grab you with. Every movement of the camera is precise and measured, and even the sound effects are top-notch; this movie is tightly edited, and is pretty much the opposite of the sloppy production that mars most horror films, especially the horror films of the early eighties. And I need to throw in a double-especially on account of the track record for Stephen King adaptations. It's probably clear by now that I'm a big admirer, even though it's not the best horror film I've ever seen. Then again, I just sat through Amityville II: The Possession, so my judgment is skewed enough to make me rethink my opinion on Batman & Robin.

I'm no car nut, but I think the movie is a darn good entry into the genre, and I recommend it. Especially for those of you that like to see classic cars get destroyed over and over and over again. You know who you are.

REVIEW: Amityville II: The Possession (1982)

2005-10-09T10:41:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, you rent a movie just based on the title alone, and this was how I came to spend money on Amityville II: The Possession. I saw it sticking out an extra couple inches on the shelf, and thought to myself, 'Hey, I'm in no mood for quality! I should get crap!'

And so I did.

Not having seen the original (or remake) Amityville Horror flicks, I figured that since this was a prequel, it wouldn't really matter. And...it doesn't. It still sucked. It sucked so much that about thirty minutes in, the Lady Retropolitan decided to go look at linen sales online. I cut my toenails, and decided that it would be better if I clipped them more often, and then I tried to figure out a way in which to handle the nail clipper where the clippings wouldn't shoot out in random directions at light speed. I had a martini, which I made with cran-raspberry juice that was 100% juice and no sweeteners; I prefer the sweetened kind. The Lady and I talked about how neither of us liked Juicy Juice when we were growing up.

Oh, yeah, the movie. It sucked. Being the Joe Bob Briggs fan that I am, I staunchly stand by his drive-in movie edict: I can find something good about pretty much any movie, provided that it isn't boring. Amityville II: The Possession is boring, and when you hear from me that a movie isn't worth watching, you know you've pretty much hit the bottom of the video barrel. Sometimes it's actually underneath the barrel.

This movie is apparently a prequel to the regular Amityville series, which were about a haunted house. The tagline for the series is that it was based on a true story, which in a small way, it was. The DeFeo family moved into the nice Long Island home, and the son went a little nutso and murdered his parents and siblings -- that part is true. The rest of the tale, with the Lutz family and the hauntings, has been so thoroughly debunked (including on this site, I think) that it's not really worth mentioning again, other than to say that the whole ghost aspect of it is bullshit. According to this movie, the DeFeo lad (Montelli or something in this movie) was actually possessed when he murdered everyone by something evil that lived in the weird crawlspace in the basement. To his defense, if I were stuck in this movie, I probably would've killed everyone too.

The film begins with the Montelli family moving into the new home, which mysteriously has all the windows nailed shut. It also has poor insulation, and there's a termite problem, but for some reason the movie doesn't touch on those parts. The family is dysfunctional; the father is an abusive bastard played by Burt Young with all the zeal of an actor that knows he's slumming in shitty horror films. Mrs. Montelli is an enabling paranoid Catholic, the eldest son is a teen angsty jerk, and the two youngest kids are so non-existent as characters that the producers could've saved a buck and hired two cardboard stand-ups that had "Young Boy" and "Young Girl" written on them in a Sharpie scrawl. The older daughter actually acts a little, but I was more concerned by the fact that I recognized her as being Monique in "Better Off Dead," which you are better off renting. After some stuff happens, the mother calls in the local priest, Father Adamsky, to help move the plot along.

Just trying to remember what happened in the movie hurts, so I'll make this quick: the older son gets possessed, and has sex with his sister in what's probably the only genuinely creepy part of the movie. I noticed early on that their relationship was somewhat frisky, but by the time that she took off her clothes for her brother I knew something was amiss -- and that was before she even knew he was possessed, which is, like, extra-creepy times a thousand. (For good creepiness measure, she later tells him, "Are you feeling guilty? I'm not." And she doesn't even have the devil problem! Yech!) Some more stuff happens, and the boy's Walkman tells him to kill everyone, which I was kind of rooting for because we've hit the forty-five minute mark and no one has died yet. Arrests are made, the priest comes in, and he's convinced that the Devil is responsible. He tries to get an exorcism underway, but the Scary German Guy from Monster Squad says that he doesn't have church approval.

There's more horrible plot that is unfortunately thrust upon the viewer, and the movie completely devolves into Exorcist mode, including the "Take me! Let his soul go! Take me instead!" bit, but without that little thing that we amateur critics call effectiveness. There's some shitty special effects, a 90% unresolved plot, and then it's thankfully over.

Seriously, now, I don't say this much, but rent something else. The best things that I can say about this movie is that you see Monique from Better Off Dead's nipple (but even that is ruined by the incest subplot), and that watching this movie might encourage you to maybe clean your apartment or something. I know I was pretty much begging to check my bank statements against my ATM receipts by the twenty minute point. I asked the Lady Retropolitan if I could iron her clothes.

Please, do not rent this movie. If you must rent a movie, I will give you an entire list of movies that are better. Just call me. I'm here to help.

REVIEW: Hide and Go Shriek (1988)

2005-10-07T11:57:00.000-04:00

When a late eighties slasher film begins with a creepy man putting on women's make-up products in a dingy bathroom, someone should immediately raise the terror alert scale to the 'Hide All Virgins' level.

Like all good teenage girls, Bonnie, Kim, Judy and Melissa are planning a secretive weekend away from their parents, where they can run off with a group of cute boys and do whatever it is that horny teens do in 1988 slasher flicks -- which, as far as the current state of anthropology is concerned, is mainly having sex. There's also some Chinese fire drills at stop lights, ass-grabbing, and the like -- you know, hijinx! There's also gratuitous discussion of buzzcuts by the guys, one of which played "Crater-Face" Coburn on the episode of "Saved by the Bell" where Zack and Screech invent pimple cream. The star power in the movie is astonishing.

So off they go to that scary staple location of teen horror films, the closed furniture warehouse. I guess they were headed to the abandoned campsite in the cemetery by the haunted lake but got distracted by rock-bottom prices on wholesale cabinetry. Despite being ready for a night of light beer and heavy boobs, they fail to realize that the strange new dock loader ex-con with snake tattoos also happens to secretly live on the premises. Oh, wait -- time to play hide and go seek! Or hide and go sex, as it were. This must have been the first ADHD generation, judging by their inability to focus on the task of hiding without accidentally getting distracted by nekkidness.

Come to think of it, this is actually a fairly realistic portrayal of hide and go seek, according to my experiences playing the game. Half the people playing go have sex, two of them get bored and forget to seek, one just disappears, and the remaining person is adamantly not having sex and so must ruin sex for everyone else by playing the game with the tenacity of a half-starved bloodhound. It really brings back the memories.

And...add on some bloody murder scenes, and you have the essential experience of Hide and Go Shriek, which is about as standard as crappy slasher films come, with the one notable exception of the ending -- and it's a sizable and completely awesome departure. Since this hasn't cursed the world with a DVD version, odds of checking it out are slim, so I'm just going to give up a whole lot of spoilers now. If you hate spoilers or are allergic to people giving away endings to movies that you will never see, turn away now.

The ending to Hide and Go Shriek is one of my favorite endings ever, because it's so "shocking" and "unexpected" that I laughed about it for hours, and rewound and watching it about thirty times. There's a twist in the plot that comes fairly early on that I haven't mentioned for spoiler reasons: the snake tattoo guy is not the killer. He just happens to illegally live on the premises and is made to seem all scary as a red herring. He's a shitty red herring, though, since he has elaborate snake tattoos all over his hands, and somewhere around the very first murder we see that the killer has no snake tattoos on his hands. Good job handling the mystery, guys.

Anyway, Mr. Snake Tattoo doesn't even realize that there's trouble in the store until close to the end, at which point he comes out and tries to help the kids. And the kids beat him up a lot. Maybe they stab him. It's hard to tell, 'cause this isn't the best-lit slasher flick in the world. Regardless of the brightness, the killer is awkwardly revealed to be...Mr. Snake Tattoo's gay lover from prison, who (for some reason) believes that the kids in the store are coming between him and his love, despite the fact that Snake Tattoo has no idea they're even in the store for most of the murders.

So they fight, and Snake Tattoo is mortally wounded, and the killer slips on a puddle of blood and falls down an elevator shaft. This part was funny, but it simply doesn't compare to Snake Tattoo's deathbed (or death-gurney, as it were) explanation dialogue. I wish I had had the foresight to transcribe the genius of it, and the ability to accurately convey the awkward pauses and bad acting in words, but, alas, no.

And the sucker lasts, too. His explanation about how he was just trying to walk the straight and narrow and put the gay part of his criminal history behind him goes on and on, with ocean-wide expanses of silence wherein the burly actor tries to remember his lines. And then...the final silence that befalls even the most straight (and narrow) ex-cons. It's too bad that he didn't live long enough to see that his ex-boyfriend wasn't really dead -- he kills the ambulance driver and puts on his uniform, and then STARES AT THE CAMERA AND LAUGHS MANIACALLY until the credits roll. It's a defining moment in crap cinema history.

Also, speaking of putting on the EMT's uniform, an interesting thing about the movie: the killer dresses up in his victim's clothes after he's done killing them, regardless of whether they're male or female. Wait! I guess that's -- maybe that was some kind of foreshadowing that he's a crazy gay transvestite serial killer. Perhaps....just perhaps this movie is actually more sophisticated than I give it credit for. Maybe it's really trying to make some kind of a statement about...

Nah, just a slasher flick.

REVIEW: Street Trash (1987)

2005-10-04T07:36:00.000-04:00

Imagine if Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" was about runaway brothers, homeless men, serial killers, rape, castration, necrophilia, revenge, Vietnam, the mafia, and a brand of tequila that caused the imbibers to violently melt into primary-colored puddles of goo. There is a game of "Monkey in the Middle" played with a severed penis. There are bloody fistfights. There is stabbing in the back with a knife carved out of human bones. There's lots of urine, and a scene of a cop vomiting on an unconscious hitman's head (which, of course, is in a piss-filled urinal).

Have you got your head around that? Good. Now make it a comedy, and you have James Muro's recently-pressed-to-DVD "Street Trash," the film that I've been wanting to see since I first saw the photo of a man melting into a toilet back in a 1987 issue of Fangoria. It's a film that's so grimy and disgusting that my friend Joe called it "worth seeing." Is it a horror film? Is it a love story? Is it a tearjerker about the homeless plight? Let's find out.

Despite being a low-budget gore film at heart, the filmmakers decided to dream big with "Street Trash," eschewing the standard smallish plots of their drive-in peers and aiming for something that hints at 'epic.' It doesn't quite make it to epic, but it tries, throwing in as many storylines and threads as its running time allowed; I get the feeling that in a perfect world, this movie would be the 'Citizen Kane' of exploitation and trash cinema. It opens with a screwball chase scene with a homeless man who's stolen a bunch of money and some alcohol on the run, which sets the tone for the film -- everything that isn't explicitly slapstick is mere inches away. After the chase, we veer towards the malevolent Vietnam vet that rules the homeless society and occasionally murders pedestrians, the overly-violent brute cop that's trying to take him down, the brother of the first bum who's in love with a garbage dump's owner's secretary, the crazy hobo that tries to abscond with frozen chicken, the mafioso whose doorman allowed his alcoholic wife to stumble away into the night, where she was raped and murdered by an insane gang of the homeless (and then raped post-mortem by the trashyard owner), and about a dozen other lines that are probably worthy of their own films. Oh, yeah, there's the Tenafly Viper tequila, which melts people in horrifyingly gory sequences every now and again.

You'd think that (or at least I assumed that) the Viper would play a huge role in the flick, considering that it makes up about 100% of the advertising for 'Street Trash'; that's how they're selling the movie. If this were a different movie, I'd say that the Viper scenes were too few and far between, but I actually came away from this movie pleasantly surprised that I wasn't bored by the non-gory bits. This film has some of the most repulsive ideas ever burned to film, but it's all handled so lightly and playfully that it's kind of hard to be truly repulsed. Everyone and everything in the movie has such a comic-booky quality, that it's easy to see that it's not meant seriously; it's hard to be truly offended by it, since everything is broad and everyone is almost uniformly despicable (or at least unlikable). Plus, the melting scenes are all pretty neat.

Do I recommend the movie? Hard to say. I'm glad I've seen it, but this is one of the last movies that I'm going to bring to show-and-tell night at the video outpost. I guess Joe is right: if you're a certain kind of person, then the movie is "worth seeing." (If for no other reason, the movie is worth it for the scenes between the mafioso and the doorman.)

I have to go shower again. Just thinking about this movie makes me feel grimy.

REVIEW: Werewolf (TV Series)

2005-06-24T08:27:00.000-04:00

Werewolves are pretty close to the top of the movie monster list in my head, clawing at the ground just a step or two behind zombies. I don't know why, but everyone else I know seems to really like vampires, while I've always thought that werewolves and wolf-men were way cooler. I chalk up my preference to three sources:

1. An episode of "Tales From the Crypt" where a vampire couple adopt a mysterious orphan boy in order to slowly drain his blood. At the end, when the kid finds out their secret, he quietly announces that he has a secret too, and his is better than theirs. Then he turns into a werewolf and mauls them.

2. 'Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein' was a huge favorite of mine when I was little, and I still love it. Seriously, Lon Chaney Jr's Wolf-Man was always way cooler than Bela Lugosi's Dracula.

3. In 'The Monster Squad,' -- which really needs to come out on DVD soon -- the kids in the movie all dismiss the Wolf-Man as being a crummy monster, because they figure that, aside from silver, pretty much anything that can kill a regular wolf (car crash, baseball bat, falling out of a plane) can kill a werewolf. Later on, when they blow the Wolf-Man up with dynamite, they find out just how wrong they are.

Werewolves haven't exactly been causing me nightmares since I was five (when I was certain that the Wolf-Man was just around the corner in my hallway), and they haven't even come close to scaring me in movies like the zombies do, but there's always the underlying metaphor about the kinds of primal instincts that everyone has just below their skin that I find striking about the werewolf mythos. I usually imagine that it would -- at least on some level -- feel really, really good to turn into a werewolf, where we could express all of our violent and uncontrollable urges in an animalistic and guilt-free way.

Now that I've got that out of the way, the 'Werewolf' television series isn't very good.

It debuted on the fledgling Fox Network (whatever happened to them, anyway?) back in 1986, with a two-hour pilot feature which "is not intended for younger viewers," as the voice tells us. In the pilot, young college student/orphan Eric Cord (John J. York) is living the good life with his girlfriend Kelly (the lustworthy Michelle Johnson) and his best friend Ted (some guy I've never seen before), enjoying the sunny summer days in California. As per standard in horror films, there have been mysterious and gruesome slayings in the area, and the show actually opens with one of them outside a nightclub where they play an awesome Mike & the Mechanics song, leading me to believe that the pilot had a decent budget. One night, of course, Ted confesses to Eric that he has a ... problem. Well, more specifically, a curse.

He's only a fiscal Republican, and he feels out of touch with a Reagan America. On top of that, he turns into a monster and kills people.

Eric laughs this off, because that's the kind of reaction you have if your best friend tells you that he's been murdering people as a man-beast. Ted eventually convinces Eric to at least tie him up, and sit with him until morning -- keeping the revolver and silver bullets on hand. Over the course of the next couple hours, Ted tells his story: The previous summer, he got a job on a ship working under a mysterious Captain Janos Skorzeny, a tall one-eyed man with a growl for a voice and questionable after-hours behavior. (And we're talking questionable even for a giant one-eyed pirate.) On a warm, moonlit night in the shipyards, Ted got attacked by some kind of beast, and barely managed to survive; by morning, though, most of his wounds had healed. Soon after, Skorzeny disappears, and Ted's career as a wolf-man began.

You can probably guess where this is headed: Ted turns Eric into a werewolf, Eric shoots the Ted-wolf, and now it's Eric's job to track down the evil Skorzeny so he can end the curse. If you guessed that much, you'd be correct. Of course, Eric gets into a little trouble with the authorities for shooting Ted, but jumps bail and heads out on his own to cut off the bloodline and end the werewolf curse. This means that he's got to dodge the police and other werewolves, as well as super-cool bounty hunter Alamo Joe Rogan (Lance DeGault), who isn't quite sure the world is the same as before he met Eric. That's basically the entire starting point for the entire (one-season) series, and if you're mentally tabbing comparisons to 'The Incredible Hulk,' you'd be right.

In fact, most reviews compare the show to the 'Hulk,' although for my money, this show makes more sense than the 'Hulk.' Maybe it's because I haven't seen it in a long, long time, but I can't remember why, exactly, Bruce Banner was on the run. Did the Hulk kill someone? Even so, I'd feel pretty safe as Banner, since most of the time I would not fit the police's description of a seven-foot-tall green body-builder. (Eric shot Ted as as Eric, not as a giant wolf.) I know he was searching for a cure for his condition, but it seems that the likelihood of finding numerous gamma-radiation research facilities along Route 66 would be pretty slim. At least in 'Werewolf,' Eric had broken the law by killing someone and jumping bail, and he had a legit reason to be followed by the cops, and to wander across the backwoods of the country since he was following Skorzeny. I don't know why I'm nit-picking about shows that feature men turning into either wolves or Lou Ferrignos; I guess I just like a semblance of plausability sometimes.

Anyway, 'Werewolf' was not a great show, and the episodes ranged from interesting to bad. (Although I think the pilot's pretty good, but that could be because of Michelle Johnson.) One of the things that I think really, really, really hurt the program was the half-hour format; I can barely believe that Fox shoved this into sitcom-length time slots. The stories rarely have the time to develop into anything remotely meaningful, which is especially harsh on a show that features new characters each and every week. Despite this, the show tries really hard to pack a lot of story into every 22 minutes, and it does occasionally succeed, but even in the best cases the viewer can't help but wish it were more fleshed out. On the other hand, the efficiency of the scripts lends the show a half-cartoonish element, which sometimes works in its favor.

The acting, too, is hit-or-miss for the most part, even from some of the leads. John J. York played Eric with a lot of innocent, wide-eyed naiveté, which is exactly what the character should be; sometimes, though, the part required a bit more aggression, which kind of faltered. A case could be made, I suppose, for the fumbling of the lines as part of Eric's inherent good nature, but there's something about them that makes me think it was the actor and not the writer. For the most part, though, York acquits himself well, and it becomes clear that Eric's good nature is the thing that's preventing him from killing anyone as a wolf.

The opposite of good nature, Chuck Connors played Skorzeny as a wolf who masquerades as man. Being a veteran of the small screen (as well as a former pro basketball and pro baseball player), Connors breathes 'evil asshole' as the one-eyed seaman. Maybe it's just a smoker's voice, but Connors knows how to growl, and exudes menace even if he's just standing around. It's too bad that he was only in a handful of episodes before he quit the show, replaced as the villain by Brian Thompson, patron saint of small villain parts in horror and sci-fi. I don't think I'm giving away too many spoilers by saying that (and look away now if you don't want to know what happens, although if you can't figure it out on your own anyway you're probably some kind of moron) Eric kills Skorzeny, and realizes that he wasn't really the start of the bloodline. Skorzeny himself was turned by a guy named Nicholas Remy, a 2,000-year-old Frenchman (who was based on a real person involved in the Inquisition.)

While he was only in (I think) two episodes, Thompson is awful. Like, really bad. I've seen him in about fifty other movies, and he's been completely passable, but it's almost as if he and the director had no idea what to do with the character. He's got one of those 'now you hear it, now you don't' accents that rivals Carrie Fisher's 'Star Wars' accent for Most Out of Place Until it Mysteriously Disappears. Plus, the character himself didn't really thrill me. It's another one of those mysteriously super-wise, 'sophisticated' villains that just come off as really, well...comic-booky. I hate to use that analogy, but it's the kind of approach frequently used in comics when a writer wants to make a villain powerful, but doesn't have the brains or the balls to come up with anything interesting, or even halfway specific; everything about the character is made up of lazy allusions to knowledge and power, but there's nothing behind it. Skorzeny had simple motivations, perhaps, but at least he was interesting because we knew what drove him -- at least to an extent -- and we wanted to see it in action. There just wasn't anything behind Remy's facade, and the presentation wasn't interesting enough to make the audience look harder.

The best actor on the show, by far, was Lance DeGault as Alamo Joe, and most of the acting was of the Eastwood style of 'grizzled.' Alamo Joe Rogan was a Brooklynite turned cowboy, although he had a very distinct southern drawl, which is a paradox only acceptable on shows about werewolves. Rogan's character had the advantage of an actual character arc over the course of the show, as he changed from a skeptic into a believer, whereas Eric and Skorzeny had the unenviable positions of staying exactly who they were at the beginning. The basic point of Eric's character was to try and not change from lycanthropy, and Skorzeny was always more of an objective than a real dramatic persona. Plus, DeGault was named "Alamo Joe," which kicks ass in a very manly-man cowboy way.

The episodes themselves were no dramatic works of art, but a lot of them were fun. Getting back to the 'Hulk' comparisons, I was always bored to tears with the Hulk because he was a big superheroic comic book character that did nothing more superheroic than bend metal on the show. Every damn episode, Bill Bixby would turn into the Hulk, and then break some wood and maybe throw some stuff, which is about the most dull manner in which I could imagine the show going about it. There were never any other Hulks on the show, nor supervillains or superheroes (until the TV-movies began), and I think the closest the Hulk got to a challenge was fighting a bear or trying to grunt the alphabet in order or something. 'Werewolf,' on the other hand, shines in this department, because about half the episodes have big climactic battles with other werewolves. One episode has a disfigured man living in a supposedly haunted house, and another has a witch. They may have been short, they may have been flat, but I was rarely outright bored by them. I even put up with the numerous 'was it all a dream?' episodes.

One key component that I've negected to talk about is the make-up. When this debuted, one of the leading bits of the promotional campaign was that the werewolf effects were designed by Rick Baker, who was (I think) the very first man to win an Academy Award for visual effects. What were those Oscar-winning effects for? A werewolf transformation in "An American Werewolf in London." Naturally, of course, Fox got the best, and for the most part the effects are pretty top-notch. The transformations are rarely seen -- because that's way out of TV budget -- but the actual full wolf suits are really nice, and over the course of the show I'm surprised how much they put them through. Honestly, if I were the producer of the show, and the writers wanted to throw the super-expensive werewolf costumes through walls of fire, roll them down muddy hills and into dirty lakes, I'd say 'no.' Luckily for the real show, the producers had no qualms about getting these things messed up and we're all treated to some really nifty stunts. If nothing else, Fox got some nice practical effects for their money.

The verdict, overall?

I really like this show. I know, objectively, that it's not really good; I just happen to really enjoy the characters, or at least what the characters were able to suggest in their 22 minutes a week. I would love to see someone like Chris Carter resurrect Eric, Skorzeny, and Alamo Joe for a weekly hourlong, because I think the idea of it has a lot of potential. It's an interesting story, but for whatever reason -- be it budget, time, resources -- it didn't come together, and that's a shame. Unfortunately, there's about a .000001% chance of seeing a remake unless I do it myself, so I guess I'll have to content myself with watching these bootlegs. It's too bad that the 'Buffy' boom is over, because if it was ever going to get resurrected, that would've been the time.

Oh, well. Until the next full moon, I leave you with:

ooow-WOOOOOOOOOOOOOwoowooWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

REVIEW: Saw

2005-03-16T14:49:00.000-05:00

"Saw" is one of those movies with an irritating title that makes it a pain to talk about, because you'll inevitably end up asking people if they "saw 'Saw'" and "did you see 'Saw'" and feeling like a moron. All you want to do is ask a question about a movie and the stupid title forces you into third-rate sitcom dialogue that fails to trigger canned laughter in real life. I hate when movies make me change the way I have to speak, like when I ask people about "Legend of the Overfiend" and have to come up with less offensive terms for "cartoon tentacle rape." Which is hard, considering that the only way to describe "Legend of the Overfiend" is by mentioning "cartoon tentacle rape."

"Saw" is another film about a fiendish serial killer that, as the film points out, doesn't really kill people. Instead of murdering people outright, he uses improbably elaborate traps to make people either kill themselves or kill other people. Luckily, the bizarre traps that the "Jigsaw Killer" creates are both gruesome and entertaining. Here's a rundown (spoilers abound):
1. He puts a woman in an evil set of braces that will separate her jaw and her head if they're not removed with a special key. Unfortunately, the key is in the stomach of a dead man across the room, so she has to gut the body in order to get it. Unfortunately for the body, the man isn't dead, and has only been heavily drugged so that he cannot move. Even when someone is cutting open his stomach.
2. He puts a naked man in a room with a safe in the middle and broken glass covering the floor. It must not've been the man's lucky day, because he was poisoned, and the antidote was in the safe. The combination was printed on the walls of the room, but it was mixed up with a lot of other digits, and it was awfully dark. Luckily, he had a candle to guide him! A real shame that his body was covered with a highly flammable lotion, though.
3. The subject: fat man. The obstacle: room full of tangled razorwire. The challenge: the door on the other side of the room will shut forever very, very soon. The result: he got thinner.
4. Two men are locked in a dirty bathroom, legs chained to the wall. A dead body lies in the middle of the room in a puddle of his own poisoned blood, which was escaping from the gaping hole he put in his head with a nearby gun. The objective: kill the other in order to live. Or, if they're in a differnt kind of mood, saw off their own feet to escape.

That last scenario is where we meet our main characters, played by Cary Elwes and (writer) Leigh Whannell. Elwes is an arrogant doctor with a wife and child who're being held hostage by the Jigsaw Killer, and Whannell is a photographer who was paid to take surveillance photos of Elwes and remind him that he looks funny whenever he's not playing the Dread Pirate Roberts. Also thrown into the mix is Danny Glover, as a cop obsessed with the serial killer who's kicked off the force after he makes a stupid decision that gets his partner killed. This will be the first of many stupid decisions that his character makes, so get used to it. There're a couple more people in the cast, but they actually matter so little that I'm not sure there'd be a point in listing them. All the characters here are essentially just pieces of a puzzle, or pawns in a game, with about as much real personality.

Like almost every episode of the Twilight Zone, Jigsaw's victims usually wake up in their predicament with no idea of how they got there, or why they were chosen. In the end, we're told who the killer was, but it's so arbitrary and the buildup to it is so ineptly handled that it doesn't really make any difference. As far as the plot of the movie goes, it would've been better handled if the identity of the killer wasn't revealed at all, and it stuck to the strong point: the puzzles. If this movie had a Jigsaw Killer that just went around and took jigsaw-puzzle-shaped pieces from his victims, it would've been a direct-to-video Steven Baldwin film. Instead, the puzzles make this film worth sitting through, and kick it (slightly) above the ranks of its kin. Since the characters aren't really fleshed-out, watching the movie is slightly like watching someone play an adventure-puzzle video game. You think logically along with the characters, but you don't emotionally connect to them. Still, the puzzles are fun, if disgusting, and I spent a long time trying to figure out what I'd do if I were in those situations.

Aside from the puzzle gimmick, the movie is probably deserving of all the hellfire blasts it's been getting from critics. The acting in the movie isn't exactly on the strong side, which may be the result of not having any rehearsals whatsoever (according to the IMDB entry). The characters are all a little crazy and inconsistent, and it's kind of a letdown when you know how good some of the actors can be. (Ever see Danny Glover in "Raisin in the Sun"?) The acting, plus the craptastic 'I'm really making a music video' 'edgy' 'hip' 'fun' 'gritty' style of the movie are the real killers. I suggest that the next time anyone in the world wants to make an 'edgy' 'hip' or 'gritty' film, they be forced to watch "The House on Haunted Hill" and "Thirteen Ghosts" and then flogged if they even attempt to recreate any effect used in either of those movies. And then flogged again just to help them forget that they watched them.

REVIEW: Resident Evil: Apocalypse

2005-02-28T09:22:00.000-05:00

Well, the Oscars were on last night, and since I was punishing them for completely overlooking Sky Captain, I watched "Resident Evil: Apocalypse." Turns out I was really punishing myself.

Essentially picking up where the first one left off, "RE:A" continues on its task of inducing ADHD in viewers and sealing the crypt of bullet-time-oriented action special effects. I think that's actually the plot of the movie, but it's hard to tell, since everytime exposition burst into frame in a slow-motion, CGI-blurred ecstacy, my brain turned off and my girlfriend had to slap me in order to get me back to consciousness. Something about showing 24 unique shots per second makes my brain go all mushy.

Back in the first part, the laughably evil Umbrella Corporation's secret underground complex, the Hive, was the scene of an 'accident' which let loose the horrible T-Virus, which reanimates dead cells. This turned everybody into zombies and monsters and computer graphics, and there were some people being chased around inside the Hive, including Milla Jovavich. She's back for round two, playing the same character (this time genetically mutated by the T-Virus), and now the crap in the Hive has reached the surface of Raccoon City. That's bad for all the residents of the city, considering that the Umbrella Corporation won't let them leave. Umbrella claims it's a measure to stop the contamination, but apparently it's just to be able to test their Evil Nemesis mutants against humans and zombies. (Perhaps "Evil" is not part of the title of the program, but in a movie where they're portrayed as being what one review called "implausibly evil," the lack of inclusion is a surprise. Also: lack of wiry black mustaches to twirl.)

Stuck in the city with Milla are Jill Valentine, a rogue Special Tactics And Rescue Squad cop; Carlos, a regular cop with lots of stubble; Nicholai, a Russian cop that once played Farkus in "A Christmas Story"; the black cop, who has so little characterization that I can't even figure out his name when looking at the IMDB listing; and L.J., the civilian, who was the only part of the movie I liked, because he made me laugh about four times. Their mission: find an Umbrella Corp scientist's daughter, in exchange for getting past the city-wide quarantine. The problem: the city will be nuked at dawn, there are hundreds of thousands of zombies in their way, there's a big Nemesis monster stalking them, and the script is awful. And I mean awful, in italics. At least you can shoot the zombies, but you're stuck with the script, and this script is like resurrected bits of Romero films jumbled together in the least-moving ways possible.

Example: the priest in the church, who was keeping some woman zombie tied to a chair and was feeding her bits of people. Why? Dunno. Who was the woman? Dunno. Was there any relationship implied? Not really. Where'd he get the body parts, considering this was something like 14 hours into the contamination? No clue. I guess this scene was supposed to elicit sympathy for a man whose friend/wife/love died and was reanimated, but since it gave the audience absolutely no reason to give a rat's pitootie about him, it didn't work -- good thing the entire scene lasted a grand total of twenty seconds. For a much better version of the same scene, see the "Dawn of the Dead" remake.

Next, after Jill Valentine ices both priest and zombie, the reporter woman decides for absolutely no apparent reason that she can't stand hiding out in the church, and runs and opens the door. Why? Because it was in the script. Why hadn't they already barricaded the door? Because it wasn't in the script. Why was the guy in the church pissed off that three armed cops came to hole up with him and protect him? In the script. Why would Jill Valentine send a reporter who'd never used a gun before off on her own in a zombie-infested building? In script. See where this is going? No one in the movie acts like a human being. The only people in the movie that act in any plausible manner are the dead people that are shot in the head, and all they have to do is not move.

Coupled with bad screenwriting is bad directing, and this one's got it in spades. I don't mind flashy directing; I don't even mind MTV-style editing, because I think it's got a time and a place, and I understand that sometimes it works. But there's a point where the cuts are so fast, and so inept, that I can't even tell what's happening. There were multiple times in the church during the fights with the Lickers when I had no idea what was going on; all I knew is that things were moving. At the end, when Alice is killing all the Umbrella helicopter guards, I was afraid she'd accidentally killed the cameraman, judging by the erratic 'style' of holding the goddamned camera. It was like trying to watch a movie while two people on either side of you keep slapping your head in opposite directions. I guess it's a bad enough movie experience to watch one where the plot makes no sense (like shortcuts through cemeteries), but to watch one where the nonsense plot is worsened by incomprehensible direction is painful.

Suffice to say, watching "Resident Evil: Apocalypse" was a lot like drinking meth-laced coffee while watching your meth-enhanced friend play 'Simon.' There are lots of pretty colors and loud sounds, and if that's good enough for you, so be it. The DVD comes with two discs, one entirely filled with special features, including 22 deleted scenes. Maybe those were the good ones.

REVIEW: Zombie Death House

2004-12-20T23:28:00.000-05:00

Subscribing to Netflix changed my life. It's one of the best services that I've ever paid money for, and it lets me watch tons and tons of movies, which is great. The downside is that Netflix makes me watch lots of crap.

See, the model that they have is that for a flat fee you can rent movies by mail, the quantity limited essentially by the speed of the Postal Service. I rent a lot of movies, since I have no problem with sitting down and watching two movies a night after work, even if I'm actively doing something else. This means that the turnaround rate is really quick for me, and that renting movies is extremely cheap when looked at on an individual basis -- usually less than a dollar a movie, unless I'm too busy to watch for a couple days. It's these immense savings that justifies my renting films that I would never, ever pay more than 80 cents to watch. So I end up not watching the cinematic greats, but instead renting things like "Zombie Death House."

"Zombie Death House" has an average Netflix rating of 1.9 stars, which surprised the hell out of me because having an average of anything normally requires that more than one person has done it. In this case, I'm surprised that 229 people rated "Zombie Death House," because that probably means that at least ten people have actually watched it. After I saw that I wondered what kind of person rents a movie called "Zombie Death House," but then I realized it was probably the kind of person that would only rent it if it cost 80 cents or less. I don't even want to know what kind of person had the balls to rip it out of a video vault and press it to DVD. At least we do know what kind of person it took to make such a movie.

That man is John Saxon, director and co-star of the film. You may know him from other 80-cent movies, like that one about a girl whose mother is a werewolf, which is only good in that it can be used to help point out to people who John Saxon is. He's the real star-power of the film, and that says something considering he's really only a secondary character, the 'mad doctor' guy that keeps telling people what to do over the phone. I have to give credit, though, because his directorial debut is actually better than "House of the Dead." On the other hand, that's like saying having your eyes put out is better than having all of your limbs cut off.

Hyperbole aside, I've seen worse films than "Zombie Death House." It starts off promisingly enough with a very-1984-TV-style montage of Blonde Hero getting out of prison and starting his new "I don't want any trouble" life working as "just a driver" for a "crime boss." At least I think that's what's happening, since the first twenty minutes of the movie play out in a temporal-spatial warp that mimics the recap parts of the opening credits of a second-season "Dynasty" episode. At some point, Blonde Hero gets a little frisky with the Crime Boss' girl, gets set up for her murder, and gets tossed into prison again. But, continuing with his bad luck, Blonde Hero finds out that the Crime Boss' brother is the inmate who really controls the goings-on in the 'Death House' -- DRAT! And that's not all! Turns out that there's a doctor in the prison that's testing strange serums on the death-row inmates! We're pretty much up to the forty-five minute mark now, making this the most unbearably slow-to-start zombie film of all time. Finally, finally we get Saxon to order the prison doc to try a new serum, and after another twenty minutes we get a full-fledged zombie with skin rot and bad teeth. Of course, these zombies can talk and have super-strength, so it's a little fakey. But it's about an hour into "Zombie Death House," so we'll take what we can get.

Things go to downhill from there, although it's not quite what you'd expect. This movie combines so many different low-budget genres that it's hard to tell what Saxon's actual pitch was like. It's like a crime drama/starting over/prison flick/hostage situation/medical emergency/suspense/horror film, which may actually be a first in the 80-cent category. Unfortunately, it's not really good at being any of those things, but maybe I'm biased because it's called "Zombie Death House" and I was expecting more zombies and death. Or even a house. I think the movie could have been improved significantly, though, if Saxon had cast three blonde actresses that didn't look and dress exactly the same, causing me to assume that the Crime Boss' girl (who was murdered, mind you) had come back from the dead (yay, zombies!) and got a job at a prison med center -- an idea that wasn't helped by the endless montage editing.

Another improvement would have been zombies that consistently acted like zombies. For instance, the first zombie (the Jamaican) escapes from the electric chair, kills a bunch of guards. That sounds about right! Then, the rest of the inmates begin a stand-off with the cops, trying to bargain their way into some medical help -- and our zombie friend takes a hostage, drives a jeep up to the gate, lets the hostage make a short plea for his life, and then tears his head off. That doesn't sound right at all! Zombies aren't supposed to showboat their kills! That's just bragging. Actually, these aren't the flesh-eating type until close to the end of the movie when they start eating flesh for exactly one shot of the film. Oh, well...

I don't know if Saxon ever went on to direct any other films, but I'd beware if I were a casual viewer. Because judging by this example, a movie called "Porn Boobies Waterpark" would only have one boob appear towards the end, and it would be mainly about the stock market or something.

ARE YOU ASTONISHED?

How do you know if you're the kind of person that would rent "Zombie Death House"? Here's a quick self-test: 1. Have you ever seriously debated the cultural implications of fast running-zombies versus shambling zombies? 2. Have you ever watched "House of the Dead" -- by yourself? Or 3. Did you ask for a zombie mug for Christmas? If you answered 'yes' to more than zero of those questions, you are the kind of person that would rent "Zombie Death House."
More evidence that zombies shouldn't talk. Although she has become a member of the super-strong walking dead, the chef has nothing better to say about it than "Doooon't...toooooouch...my...Twinkies...!" I'm not kidding.
There was much joy among my friends and I about how the Crime Boss "loved three things: soft lips...loyalty...and vengeance!" Boy, did he love those soft lips.

REVIEW: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension

2004-12-07T10:52:00.000-05:00

One of the greater relics of my childhood, "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension" came out on DVD a while back, and I finally, finally got around to renting the thing, and it was incredibly worthwhile. It's one of the best cult movies out there, and probably one of the few that lives up to the hype. It's great fun, and it's not afraid of what it is.

I remember reading a capsule review of the film from some old movie-review book I had back in high school, and it was described as (I'm paraphrasing here) "the 26th part of a 27-part serial." I think that's a pretty fair description, since to actually describe the full thematic storyline of the movie would require scholars. I'm no scholar, but I'll give the basics a shot: Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller) is a hotshot neurosurgeon, rock star, race car driver, and inventor who goes on wild world-saving adventures with his band, the Hong Kong Kavaliers, whose members are also scientists, weapons experts, and cowboys. Buckaroo develops this thing called the Oscillation Overthruster, which allows him to drive his rocket car through a mountain's negative atomic space and into the eighth dimension, which is either a home to or a prison for the Evil Lectroids. Dr. Lizardo (John Lithgow) is a man who was also working on getting into the eighth dimension, but whose body was taken over by the Evil Lectroid John Whorfin. All Lectroids have wonderful Earth-names like "John Ya-Ya," John Bigboote," "John Smallberries," -- all of them 'John's. Something happens, the Lectroids try to get the Overthruster, and destroy the planet. Or something like that.

You see? There's a lot of explaining to do, although it doesn't really matter. There's a plot (obviously meant to be a continuing thing) about the dreaded Hanoi Xan, Supreme Commander of Death and Leader of the World Crime League, who mercilessly killed Buckaroo's parents (mother played by Jamie Leigh Curtis), as well as his wife Peggy Priddy. Also, Peggy's long-lost identical twin sister Penny shows up, played by Ellen Barkin, and Buckaroo falls in love again. You'd think that any of these things would be adequately explained in the movie, but they're actually not. The ones closest to the immediate plot (stopping John Whorfin) are kind of explored, but the rest serve as an awesomely in-depth backstory that never actually appears anywhere. It's a shame, really, since all the extra touches give the movie a much greater richness than most sci-fi movies, and if the last bit during the credits doesn't make you cry out for a sequel, I don't want to be your friend.

And check out the cast! Has any other obscure sci-fi cult classic popped out so many future stars (or least mid-to-high-B-listers)? Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellin Barkin, Jeff Goldblum, Clancy Brown, Carl Lumbly, Christopher Lloyd, Dan Hedaya, Vincent Schiavelli, and even the venerated Yakov Smirnoff! Looking back, I think I need to rethink 'stars,' but there's no finer B-talent than these. It also includes some lesser-known B actors, and I give Pepe Serna and Lewis Smith kudos for their roles as Kavaliers Reno Nevada and Perfect Tommy, respectively. The acting suits the movie perfectly, and the entire cast delivers everything with only the slightest wink. Not unlike "Sky Captain," this movie celebrates the sheer entertainment, fun, and invention of the source materials, and offers a hugely entertaining suggestion as to what pulp novels and serials would be like if they were realized with greater means than they originally were.

The reference to "Sky Captain" was more than a nod to one of my favorites; I think it's a valid comparison of a style, although "Buckaroo" predates "Sky Captain" by 20 years. With this being an age of (at least cinematic) irony, I think that movies like this are not only entertaining, but also important. I've had to deal with a good ten years of putting up with self-referential movies, which attempt to be both the material and an observer that holds himself above it -- and that's unfortunate. "Scream" was a very unique and funny film, and it sparked an entire generation of movies that existed primarily to point out how stupid the audience was for liking them. The Ironic Generation didn't ruin cinema, but it certainly helped institute irritating rules for youth-oriented cinema, mainly which stated that if the movie didn't assert a mocking tone over the source, then it was just as dumb as what it was based on. It's a pretty lousy argument, but my generation flocked to these films in droves. What a lot of people hate to acknowledge is that there's not necessarily anything wrong with the source material. Not every 1980's teen-romance flick was a great movie, but there's very few of the big ones that I would really be ashamed to admit liking; but since "Not Another Teen Movie" and its ilk, all of the originals have been relegated to the 'guilty pleasure' section, unwarranted.

I wish that there were more movies like "Buckaroo Banzai" and "Sky Captain," the kind of films that took the material, the genre, the ideas, and elevated them with the very simple concept of 'there's nothing wrong with this.' The movies play the material relatively straight, and show the audience just how much fun these types of things can be -- shame-free. Neither of these movies has anything but respect for the material, and they're infinitely more entertaining for it.

ARE YOU ASTONISHED?

I love the music in this film. As many people know, I'm a huuuuuuge fan of 1980s synth movie scores, especially Tangerine Dream ones, and Michael Boddicker is another great in my book. The music sounds really dated, but it somehow really fits the entire movie, ranging from synth-pop-rock to synth-pop-epic. The marching scene during the credits brings tears of geeky joy to my eyes, and leaves me humming the Buckaroo theme for days.
Out of all the DVDs I have -- and I have a lot -- this is one of the best. Despite it being all on one disc, it's got a lot of extras, including deleted scenes, Pinky Carruther's Unknown Facts trivia subtitles, and a making-of featurette with the director, W.D. Richter. The best part of the disc is that the entire thing, from featurette to commentary, subtitles to radio clip, is played as if Buckaroo Banzai is a real person, and the movie is a dramatization of one of his adventures. Pinky's subtitle track furthers the Buckaroo mythology in a way that left me really, really, really craving a sequel. Plus, it's all done with a deft and clever sense of humor. This is a disc to show your friends.
Pinky Carruthers is played in the movie by musician Billy Vera, whose band Billy Vera and the Beaters did that song "At This Moment" that became a hit when it underscored Courney Cox leaving Michael J. Fox on "Family Ties." According to the character's subtitle track, fans sometimes bring pink boxes of goodies to their shows to celebrate his role.
Why is that watermelon there?

REVIEW: Five Days To Midnight

2004-11-29T00:43:00.000-05:00

Much like stand-off movies, I love watching time-travel movies like I love solving logic puzzles. The real draw is the riddle of the plot, and a clever story will usually trump however bad the rest of the movie turns out to be. Now that I've seen "Five Days to Midnight," I still don't really get how it all worked out, but I enjoyed most of the ride to the ambiguous and paradoxical solution. Plus, it had Timothy Hutton and Kari Matchett, both of whom I'd rather watch than most actors that pop up in these kinds of projects. I love them so much that I'd even rewatch "Demons" if someone told me that they had cameos.

Just to get it off of my chest, I refuse to refer to it as "5ive" instead of "Five." I guess using the number instead of the letter is the hip and cool way to do it, but I'm a big square and I think it's stupid. It became immediately cliched after 'the style' popped up in the "Seven" ad campaign, and it's never ever going to be cool ever again. For the last time, numbers are not pronounced with the same sound as the first letter of the name of said number. Anyone who thinks it does probably spent too much time watching "Fight Club" and getting whacked in the head by their moron friend who they convinced to fight them so they could figure out who they really were. Okay, I'm glad that's settled.

"Five Days to Midnight" starts off with the happy life of Timothy Hutton's J.T. Neumeyer, a physics professor who's celebrating his daughter Jesse's birthday with his new girlfriend Claudia (Matchett). It also happens to be the anniversary of the late Mrs. Neumeyer, and when Hutton and his daughter visit the grave, they happen upon a strange, metallic briefcase with "J.T. Neumeyer" printed on top. Inside, Hutton finds startling information: the police report on his unsolved murder, complete with photographs, suspects, and evidence, dated five days from then. Initially not sure if it's some kind of sick joke, he watches as the events detailed in the report begin to fall into place, and makes a stand to change the (probable) future. In order to make sure that the future is safe for himself, his daughter, and his mob-connected girlfriend, Hutton and Randy Quaid's Detective Sikorski hurriedly try to eliminate (read: avoid) everyone on the suspect list before it's too late.

The whole movie is set up as a relatively straightforward puzzle: there's the murder, the suspects, and the briefcase, and the script sticks to the problem doggedly enough for the audience to think that it's all going to make sense and come together in the end. The first three episodes are quite effective as potboilers, and kept me interested in finding out whodunit; the final episode of the series, though, kind of drops the ball in terms of holding the puzzle together. The rules of time travel aren't really respected, and despite the directness of the other parts, just shoots in and out of plausibility, and it seems like plot twists were tossed in for drama. For instance, just before Hutton finds out who murders him, a helicopter crashes through the ceiling, and Tom Cruise starts firing a machine gun at the National Guard! Alternate universe movies sometimes take odd turns!

I had a great theory about who did it right from the first episode, and I was way off. Of course, my idea was kind of far-fetched (although cool), but at least it made more sense than the actual ending. Since it's a mystery, I don't want to give away any spoilers, but suffice to say you're a better man than I if you can tell me how she got the briefcase full of evidence in the first place. And I don't want to hear anything about alternate timelines and parallel futures! Nothing! Got that? When it comes to time travel, alternate and parallel universes are the cheap and easy solution, because they can explain almost anything away, even if it doesn't make sense in 'our' timeline. Actually, they don't explain; they excuse. Physics-minded friends, forgive me, but when a movie cries parallel universes it's usually the equivalent of the cavalry arriving with photon blasters, or saving the plot via deus ex machina. It's hard to argue against an act of God saving the day, but it's a cheap shot, and it's going to make me groan.

The miniseries also gets a few marks off because of the overbearing style of the filmmaking. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I don't think shooting every fifth shot at six frames per second really amps up the drama so much as makes me want to vomit at whatever strobe light I think is somewhere in my television. Flashy editing and stylistic excess are fine in movies, but they're only fine when the film actually calls for them. I didn't like "Moulin Rouge," but I can at least see that the things happening there were at the service of the rest of the movie. The story in this series was a time-travel puzzle, and it was a straightforward one at that, and every single excess that didn't need to be there only complicated matters. Complicated matters and irritated me. Irritated me and made my girlfriend go check her email instead of watching anything past the opening twenty minutes.

It's still worth a watch, but be prepared to scratch your head at the end -- and rub your eyes.

ARE YOU ASTONISHED?

Timothy Hutton, Timothy Hutton. Kari Matchett, Kari Matchett. Ah, glory. Too bad he didn't bring along any other of his Nero Wolfe players.

So, my idea was that Hutton came back from the future to murder his past self. I don't know how it would work, logically, but I think it's a cool idea. Plus, it makes exactly as much sense as the 'real' ending.

What happened to Randy Quaid? He cycles through existing and not-existing like some kind of Schrodinger's Cat. No parts, many parts, no parts, many parts! I wish he would be more active, since he's my favorite Quaid. Come to think of it, he's lucky to be so different in appearance and style than his brother, because we all know the fate of thespian siblings that are essentially interchangeable. Right, Frank Stallone? You know what I'm talking about, Gary Swayze...

REVIEW: V

2004-11-13T10:19:00.000-05:00

"V" is my absolute favorite sci-fi television series of all time. "V" rules the world so much that it also rules the world that the reptile aliens came from. If you get your hands on the new DVD sets of "V: The Original Series," "V: The Final Battle," and "V: The Series," you will have something in the range of twenty-nine hours of fantastically entertaining sci-fi pulp and soap opera.

"V" began with Kenneth Johnson's idea of telling the story of the French Resistance to the Nazi campaign during World War II. Network execs, still flabbergasted at the continuing success of stuff like "Star Wars," suggested to Johnson that maybe the Nazis...could be aliens instead. At least this is what I read when I troll websites all night long, but the original miniseries has Johnson commentary, so you can listen to him talk about it. At any rate, the French Resistance became the Human Resistance, and the Nazis became Reptilian Aliens that wore outfits that looked like Nazi uniforms and had a big swastika-ish design as their logo. In fact, the first half of the original miniseries is so completely taken with the allegory that it's almost as if the script is reaching through your TV screen and occupying your living room in the name of Der Fuhrer. The fact that just one of the characters (Leonardo Cimino) realizes that the aliens are awfully similar to Hitler's army is a little bit improbable, but since it's the same actor that played the Scary German Guy from "The Monster Squad," I let it slide.

Once the allegory initial thickness wears down, the real "V" comes out. I understand that the original intent was to have the allegory be the grounding of the show, but the budget, the cheap effects, the costumes, and the entire 1983 style relegate the show to the status of an updated Flash Gordon serial. It's really hard to take it seriously, as a viewer in 2004, when aliens wearing pointy-shouldered leotards shoot shoddily-animated laser blasts at the Tight-Blue-Jean Resistance that reacts to things that happen off-screen a lot. The real show is the soap opera, a grand and silly drama that plays out like a cross between Buck Rogers and Guiding Light. The "Final Battle" and "The Series" are wonderful fun, and are completely engrossing if you look past their quite obvious shortcomings.

The Visitors, as the aliens are called, come to earth in giant motherships that hover over major cities; keep in mind that this show pre-dates "Independence Day" by over a decade. They eventually send an envoy to speak with the people of the world: all they want is some of our water resources, in exchange for their superior technology and science. Sure, we say! Before you know it, things are getting out of hand: scientists are disappearing, children are turning into V-Youth, and eventually martial law is declared across the world, with the Visitors holding the reigns. Then, voila, one of them gets their face ripped off. EGADS! A reptile! Turns out, they're just here to harvest humans for munchies, and maybe catch some sun on a nice warm rock if they've got the time. Thus, Mike Donovon, Juliet Parrish, Ham Tyler, and bucketloads of characters -- these suckers have a lot of main characters, nineteen off the top of my head -- decide to take back the earth. Silliness and action ensue! Drama! Romance! Laserguns! Reptiles! Red Dust! Action! Action! Action!

Most of the main cast returned to work in the weekly series, and it was noted as being a pretty terrible show. The scripts are pretty dodgy, the effects range from mediocre to "Man, I could do that on my iMac," and the plot holes are large enough to fly a mothership through. We're talking the kind of show where the Resistance leaders sneak into the V Headquarters in just about every episode simply by donning a V uniform or making a fake delivery of mice to the V kitchen. Mike Donovon is in the V HQ so frequently that he gets mail delivered there. This is not serious science fiction; this is a world where enemies fall down with one punch, and stealing and flying a spaceship requires zero training -- a true pulp fantasy.

I give credit to the actors for playing their parts with what comes across as a true delight. Marc (Beastmaster) Singer is the ostensible star Resistance fighter Mike Donovon, Faye (my 1985 Girlfriend) Grant is Juliet Parrish, the leader of the Resistance, and the cult-TV stalwart plays my very favorite character, Ham Tyler. Ham Tyler is the Vietnam vet badass, the mean, grumbly Batman of the show. When an army of Resistance fighters carefully disables the security system of a Visitor stronghold, sneaks in past laser mines and alien monster dogs, Ham is the character they find sitting on top of fifty dead aliens that he strangled with one of his eyelashes while he smoked a cigar and watched Sportscenter. One time, he ran out of cigarettes, and killed 40,000 aliens with a pair of salad tongs just because he was having a nicotine fit. The actors play it straight, and the character arcs are truly what holds the show together. So much of it is silly, but the characters themselves are pretty well fleshed out despite the fact that there're, like, eight-hundred of them. They grow and change in mostly real ways, and have the same kind of conflicts that one can imagine might occur in these situations. How that works amidst pinging laser guns and poorly blue-screened explosions is beyond me, but I think it does.

I find the series immensely entertaining. I love the way that the series becomes a sci-fi Casablanca, with L.A. becoming that last free city, and Elias' restaurant looks a whole lot like Rick's Cafe. (They even have the scene where the aliens start playing their national anthem in the cafe, and Faye Grant gets everyone to sing the American National Anthem louder in defiance.) I loved the love triangle between Robin, her fast-aging hybrid daughter Elizabeth, and Kyle, the young stud rebel. I love Diana's growing, sparkly hair, and the way that she's such a complete, scenery-chewing bitch. I love the bizarre, pointy-shouldered outfits that get more and more bizarre as the series continues, even throwing in leopard-print-wearing alien dignitaries, and the commanders whose necks are strung with bling gold chains. I loved the absolutely terrible alien baby puppet, and every sequence in the V Conversion Chamber. I haven't even finished watching all of these, but when I do, I know that I'll eventually watch them all again.

If you can put aside that need for serious and really thoughtful science fiction, and can really get into the two-fisted spirit of pulp novels, give these a shot. You'll learn that fisticuffs can save the world, the cavalry always arrives right before your laser gun runs out of ammo, and true love can blossom amidst an alien invasion. And what's more fun than a world like that?

ARE YOU ASTONISHED?

I submit that Faye Grant is the most beautiful actress in the whole world.
Despite the wide availability of easy-to-steal V spaceship/hovercrafts, Mike Donovon always seems to be riding around on a horse for no reason other than the fact that Marc Singer probably likes horses enough to have them written into the scripts.
I guess this show is proof that Robert Englund can act as a character other than Freddy Krueger. I hope he ends up being remembered for a different role than either a child-murderer or a moron alien, despite the fact that he did those well.
This show actually has "Science Fiction Consultants." I bet they're the guys that veto any science that's plausible.

Where are the reviews?

2004-11-12T13:27:00.000-05:00

It's been a long time since I've updated Reviews to Astonish!, and I feel that I should hand over an explanation. The fact is, I haven't even watched a movie in a good five or six days, and to most people that's akin to not eating for five or six days. I've been very busy in the past couple weeks, and after the whole election thing I was drunk for three consecutive days, which makes it very difficult to write a review without passing out on the keyboard.

I fully intend to get back to the reviews, since my movie vault is still overflowing with the best and worst of cinema and I have a lot to say.

Just give me a few more days...

REVIEW: Demons

2004-10-27T14:02:00.000-04:00

Arsenio Hall used to have a talk show. On this show, somewhere during the opening monologue, he'd occasionally do a bit about "Things that make you go hmmm." I think there was a song about it sometime in the early nineties, perhaps MC Hammer, but "Demons" is the closest thing we have to a movie version -- an hour and a half of completely inexplicable behaviors, motivations, and occurences, all designed to leave you scratching your head. On the bright side, it's at least slightly entertaining towards the end, when all of the surreal things really build up and get weirder and weirder.

From the Bava/Argento/Fulci camp of Italian horror, we have this little masterpiece of strangeness in which a bunch of people are invited to a mysterious movie screening by a partially masked man (played by future horror director Michele Soavi), and then trapped in the theater by demon-zombies. I thought I'd have a go at explaining the finer points of the plot, like how the plight of the characters mimics the movie they're watching, and how there's this coked-up gang of car thieves that shows up, but it doesn't really matter. This isn't a good movie, no matter how you look at it, and I can't really understand the many positive reviews it's gotten. It's fun, I suppose, in the same way that sitting on a porch and drinking is fun: even though nothing of substance happens, beer makes it entertaining!

The only appeal that this movie has is that it's got a lot of weird touches and inconsistencies that make it kind of funny and entertaining, although those aren't even enough to merit a second viewing. Unfortunately, that's all I have to work with, so I'll just go over stuff that occurred to me, like the fact that there's a mannequin in gothic clothes carrying a samurai sword sitting on top of a motorcycle in the lobby of the theater -- and the fact that no one ever thought to use the sword against the demons until the last ten minutes of the movie. But I guess that's not really fair, since no one ever fought back against the demons in the first place, choosing the easier path of just not defending themselves whatsoever.

I also noticed that there was the least amount of characterization I have ever seen in a movie -- ever -- so that the only thing we knew about the characters were their names. I was entertained by the bitchy usherette's pilgrim-Santa's-helper outfit, and how steeped in 1980's style this whole movie is. Best of all, I was absolutely overjoyed when, out of nowhere, a helicopter fell through the ceiling of the theater, with no build-up, and virtually no follow-up -- I think it's great when screenwriter get stuck, and say to themselves, "What can we make come crashing through the ceiling?"

I can't say that I recommend this film, because I think it's pretty shoddy even as a low-grade horror movie; but I gotta say, it does have its perks, although I think I probably supplied as much of my own amusement as the film itself did. Unless you're a true believer, or a lover of surrealism, avoid this one.

ARE YOU ASTONISHED?

For all its faults, "Demons" has Billy Idol and Rick Springfield on the soundtrack. And that rules!
It never occurred to me that the people weren't fighting back until one of them seemingly accidentally swung a chair and knocked a demon over. Then, like a lightbulb, I thought: they should have tried that sooner.
The scene where George and Cheryl ride over the seats on a motorcycle while killing zombies is a hoot! Keep an eye out for the leaping zombies, since they're the second-funniest thing in the movie.
When they got in the chopper after it came through the roof, I seriously, seriously thought they were going to get in and fly out of the theater. They didn't, but for about 45 seconds it seemed like it was gonna happen, and I was prepared to piss myself. That would've totally made the rest of the movie worth it!
How long were they in the theater? Five hours? Six? Then how come it's like Mad Max Does Germany when they got out? The city's in ruins, rampant with demons, fires everywhere, cars overturned, and Tina Turner owns Berlin.

REVIEW: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

2004-10-26T18:25:00.000-04:00

I remember watching Kevin McCarthy try to run across a busy highway, dodging the grasp of the emotionless pod people back in the previous version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," which is probably the only version of the material that can laugh off the silly title as being a product of its time. On a related note, Philip Kaufman's updated version is the only treatment that can point to 1978 for justification of starring Donald Sutherland.

For all of those viewers that complain when strange movie phenomena aren't adequately explained (zombie plagues, birds attacking humans en masse, etc.) Kaufman's film throws a dollop of exposition in during the credits: space bubbles. Space bubbles, you ask? Yes, bubbles that form on an alien planet, then float upwards into space, and back down to Earth, leaving soap scum on much of San Francisco's natural landscape. The soapy residue causes Earth plants to mutate and grow strange flowery blossoms, which somehow begin to infect the populace. How do they infect the populace? I have no idea. The whole space bubble thing was kind of throwing bones to the explainists watching, and the movie doesn't really develop it further. Granted, the plot doesn't really necessitate or even allow it, but it's bound to aggravate some people.

After the (nicely done) flower mutation montage, the plot opens up with Brooke Adams and Donald Sutherland as employees of the Health Department. Adams' boyfriend, who's usually something of an ass, overnight becomes very quiet, cold, and awkward...like four years of playing D&D packed into eight hours. It seems, at least according to Leonard Nimoy's psychiatrist character, that the same feeling is striking couples all over the city: their husbands/wives/partners aren't their husbands/wives/partners anymore. I guess that would sound scarier if it didn't occur so regularly due to non-alien-plague causes such as football season, sexual dysfunction, crumbled dreams, and marijuana. Jeff Goldblum shows up, again, in a role where he explores new boundaries of neurotic paranoia in an atmosphere where they're justified for once.

As much as I enjoyed this movie, I have to come clean: it just wasn't very scary. The alien soap was kind of creepy in a biological terror kind of way, and the hopelessness of their situation was somewhat effective, but it was undercut by the fact that becoming a pod person shut up Jeff Goldblum, which only seemed to improve everything. I can give the film high marks in a lot of areas: the acting was good, the music was 1978-effective, the sound design was notably fantastic, and it had a proper ending for the plot; but the low marks go to fright and writing, which are somewhat (although not exclusively) linked. After Adams' boyfriend was 'turned,' she remarked on it with concern bordering on panic to Sutherland; except that we also saw how he was acting, and it wasn't all that bizarre, and certainly not grounds for the degree of concern with which she reacted. Sometimes I'm cranky and cold in the morning, but I don't think my girlfriend should call in the National Guard. She should make me drink coffee.

The last complaint I have is (as I was mentioning before) the weird ambiguity with which the titular invasion is accomplished. See, the pod people are always carrying around and delivering clunky, baby-sized pods -- but to where? Presumably, the pods are what the people are...uh...budding from, although pod-bodies frequently pop up from wherever's the most convenient for the script, pod or not. It starts off with a tiny red flower being the infection carrier, but that's abandoned in favor of the pods, and then that's abandoned for contrived scares. I can stretch my imagination enough to see why these things are in place; being able to get converted anywhere at anytime gives the characters reason to never fall asleep, which is a reliable tension-building device. The flowers and possible poison are good for icky biological paranoia, and the pod-delivery gives the villains something to do other than stand around like a Rick Springfield concert. And what was the whole pod-producing factory at the end for, since it's already been well-established that they don't need pods to convert people? I don't mind being forgiving of a movie when I have to be, but when there are cheap tricks and constant rule-bending, it gets me more aggravated than Jeff Goldblum in a Transport-O-Pod.

This movie's got a lot of good stuff going for it, and it's definitely worth a scare or two. Unfortunately, it's only one or two.

ARE YOU ASTONISHED?

Keifer was not the first Sutherland to pull an all-nighter for the greater good.
The homeless man and his dog: isn't this kind of cross-breeding just open to a lot of logical issues? I mean, it's neat and all, but wouldn't this open the doors to Brooke Adams being a woman/weed hybrid? And Donald Sutherland being a man/moustache creature? It's wrong, all wrong!
Further proof that Leonard Nimoy was born to play an alien.
All right, so we've got space bubbles. And they float up, slowly, from the alien planet -- okay. And then they float gently down into our atmosphere, suffering nary an ill effect? They must be pretty durable after all those milennia space-bubbling through a vacuum, I suppose, although that makes me wonder why they continue to search for new life forms to take over if they're already virtually indestructable and cognizant. Maybe ennui.

REVIEW: Salem's Lot (1979)

2004-10-24T14:03:00.000-04:00

"Salem's Lot" was one of those Sunday afternoon movies that I used to love when I was growing up -- in fact, it was the king of Sunday afternoon movies because it literally took all Sunday afternoon to watch the whole thing. It's a long one even without commercials, but when TBS interrupted the thing every ten minutes to plug the latest rerun of "Matlock," it just stretched and stretched. Actually getting through the whole movie in one sitting was like a marathon to a ten-year-old, and was treated like a rite of passage when I finally accomplished it. I remember trying to plan a day around it when I first discovered the listing in TV Guide -- church, Sunday school, lunch, action figures, cartoons, "Salem's Lot," and when it was finally over I had turned 19 and had a paper to write.

Actually, it's not all that long for a movie. The uncut running time is 183 minutes, which is a dash over three hours for those of you who are bad at math or deviants of the metric system. Three hours isn't a fatally long running time for a movie, but if you're a twelve-year-old who was raised on 84-minute slashfests like "Friday the 13th," it's fooooreeeeever. On top of that, it's really, really slow. It was originally aired as a mini-series, as most of Stephen King adaptations are, and the pace made sense in that respect; unfortunately, by the time it was playing on channels that I was tuning in to, it was usually aired as a big chunk and I wouldn't be surprised if I spent a good portion of my first viewing trying to defend a Lego Gotham City from the Lego Joker.

Seeing the new DVD release a number of weeks ago (in anticipation of seeing the Rob Lowe version of the material), I was happily surprised that the slow and steady pacing of the movie really worked in its favor. You're introduced to each of the many characters in the small town of Salem's Lot, and really get to spend some quality time with them and their nuances before they become undead. You see, something is amiss in the sleepy little town, with the arrival of writer Ben Mears, and the opening of the creepy new antique shop by the mysterious Mr. Straker and the absent Mr. Barlow. Soon enough, townsfolk are coming down with a strange, slow illness; children are missing from their homes, and dead people seem to be rising from the grave and seeking blood. In the most famous (and most parodied) scene, one of the missing Glick boys floats amidst a blanket of fog outside his brother's window, and ghoulishly asks his brother to let him in. It's kind of silly-looking now, especially since it's so recognizable, but it works fine in context.

Mr. Mears, played by "Starsky and Hutch" star David Soul, returns to his boyhood home of Salem's Lot to research the Marsden House -- the creepy old run-down house on top of the hill that every small town and every horror film has. Mears thinks that there's an evil associated with that house, and has some kind of theory that evil can be tied to a physical place. Unfortunately, he's not in grad school anymore, and he has more pressing problems with vampires eating his friends and all. It was nice to give the main character a kind of philosophical lense to look at the villains through, but in the end it didn't make much sense -- I'm not really sure what he was saying. Did he think the house caused vampires to come to Salem's Lot? Or was the house evil because of the vampires tended to like it there? Or was the point that it had no bearing on the evil? I don't know. The idea is more or less discarded, since the vampires chase him waaaay out of the house's zip code by the end of the movie. Hmm...unless...unless all of Guatemala is evil!

Like the slow pace, the other thing that really works well in the movie is that it's not funny. As a horror drama, it sticks with being a horror drama, and there's not a tinge of ironic humor in the script. It plays as a straight horror film, and treats the subject matter seriously even under the silliest circumstances; it's a better film for not asking the audience to laugh, instead asking to play along with the story. It's exactly that kind of mistake that many, many, many modern films make: reminding the audience that what they're watching is stupid. It's one thing for a movie to be playful and fun, but it's another to try to simultaneously be the material and be above the material. At the very least, "Salem's Lot" has the courage to be what it is, even if what it is turns out to be is Hutch beating up James Mason and a bald antique dealer.

"Salem's Lot" does have its shortcomings. For instance, the vampire Barlow and his keeper Straker (James Mason) -- what was their plan, again? Apparently, they move from sleepy little hamlet to sleepy little hamlet, setting up their antique shop, eating the town, and then moving on. Perhaps I'm being a little overly analytical about this, but isn't that a tad inefficient? I mean, do you know just how many forms you have to fill out when you set up a new business? Contrast that with the amount of time that it would take Barlow to suck Salem's Lot dry, and you'll see the flaw. That's not even including the people that get turned into vampires, who also need to feed, which would only suck through the town faster. What does Straker do when his boss is done, and the whole town is either dead or full of vampires? What happens when Barlow Antiques is reported to the Better Business Bureau? Answer me, movie!

Despite the dated look, and the occasionally foot-dragging pace, "Salem's Lot" is a pleasant-enough diversion for those weekend afternoons when you'd rather be sharing scary tales by a campfire, but are instead stuck with a DVD player and microwaveable s'mores.

ARE YOU ASTONISHED?

If you've also seen "Fright Night," you know what happens to the James Mason character on the staircase.
Note the very well done creepy shot towards the end of the film, when Mark is sitting on the floor in front of the coffin room -- and the bodies slowly start to shift over the course of a few seconds. Good background corpse acting.
The theme music has about two hundred times the amount of energy as the rest of the movie. Sometimes, in its slowest moments, you can help the film by humming the music quietly to yourself.
It's so commonplace in horror movies that it's hard to hold it against them: stupid people, and the dark, scary places that they shouldn't go into but they do.
I'd like to talk a moment about Geoffrey Lewis, that beloved character actor that gives me the kind of heebie-jeebies that Christopher Walken gives to other people. This is a man that you'd recognize in some vague way, not in a what-movie-did-I-see-him-in way, but rather a isn't-he-the-janitor-at-my-high-school way. He's been in over 110 movies, seven of them with Clint Eastwood, and still looks like he's having trouble getting the trail-dust off of him. To see him as a vampire chanting "Look at me! Loooooook at meeee!" over and over again helped me fill the void in my subconscious mind that had prevented me from having truly terrifying nightmares.

REVIEW: Modern Vampires

2004-10-14T13:35:00.000-04:00

Sometimes when you watch a film, you have to ask yourself, "Am I being fair to the movie?" As I've said before, I'm usually capable of finding something good about a movie, whether the rest of it stinks or not, and most of the time this involves a temporary lowering of my standards to match the standards of the film. In the case of "Modern Vampires," I had to go pretty low, but in the end admit that I did giggle a little at this horror-comedy. Just a little.

"Modern Vampires" concerns itself with the lives of modern vampires living the Paris Hilton lifestyle in Los Angeles -- sex and drugs, blood and nightclubs. Our "hero," Casper Van Dien's Dallas, is a vamp returning to L.A. to visit his old pals after being exiled by Robert Pastorelli's Count Dracula; in addition to his troubles with the Count, he's also got to deal with the Hollywood slasher Nico, a whoring vampire that he created years ago that's ended up drawing a lot of attention to their vampy lifestyle. On top of that, Professor Van Helsing is still on the trail, this time enlisting the Crips in his quest to avenge the vamping of his paralyzed son. All of this is played in a pretty goofy way, under the direction of Richard ("I'm Danny's Brother!") Elfman, who really seems like he wants the audience to be having a good time. For the record, I would have had a better time if he'd stayed with Oingo Boingo.

You can always tell that there are problems with a movie when reading a paragraph-long description of the events encompasses all the good stuff. Like "Hysterial," the stuff I liked in the movie was what you might call "conceptual humor." There are ideas that seem fun and interesting on the page, but they're just surrounded by dreck and poor execution. I would've really liked a movie about how an aging German man recruits inner-city gang members for his holy war against vampires! That would be funny. Somebody write that one! And I would have enjoyed a movie where a vampire's amnesia is broken by taking her to visit the family that she used to have before she was turned -- grounds for a tragedy, I say! And a revenge picture about a man who's forced to kill his own children after they've been transformed into the enemy! And....well, that's it. That's the good stuff. If you've enjoyed this paragraph, you don't need to watch the movie. I like to be a time-saver for those in need!

The movie's got those ideas, but it traps them in a goofy, stupid comedy that was born without a moral compass. It goes to great lengths to show us the vampire's hedonistic lifestyle: clubs where innocent people are stripped naked and tied up for the vampire's amusement, kidnapping and draining a victim via wrist-straws while the vampires read the newspaper, random murdering of retail saleswomen, and on and on and on. And these are the protagonists! Their behavior makes you feel more sympathy for Van Helsing's cause, which is strange because the script essentially makes him the enemy. Dallas' rationalization of giving Van Helsing's son a choice of dying from disease or becoming a vampire never confronts Van Helsing's more rational point of view that Dallas was turning his son into a serial murderer. Oh, and the vampire community is openly racist, and Van Helsing is a nazi. See what I'm saying?

As for lowering my standards, aside from ignoring the ethics alarm bells in my head, I had to downgrade my views on quality acting to "no one looks directly at the camera." Huzzah! That way I was able to ignore the fact that everyone's fangs prevented them from EVER closing their mouths. Unlike most vampire films where they have fangs that only extend when necessary, these vampires are sadly forced to grin like idiots for all eternity, making the same face as the people who sell things on infomercials. Or people that really want you to think that they're having a great time at your birthday party. Perhaps the actors just really wanted the director to think that they're happy being in this movie!

Another nagging question is: what's up with the casting? Casper Van Dien as Dallas I can understand. I bet he's really cheap since that Tarzan movie. Craig Ferguson (of "Drew Carey Show" fame) was probably on vacation or something, and had a few days to burn -- fine. But Kim Cattrall? I know this was before the whole "Sex in the City" thing heated up, but I thought she was better than the stupid accent and camped-out schtick that she's reduced to here. Robert Pastorelli couldn't be more miscast as Count Dracula, yes, the Count Dracula; perhaps this was the beginning of his drug abuse. Natasha Lyonne once had promise, and Natasha Gregson Wagner -- somehow, I'm not even sure why, but I thought she was a better actress. Maybe it was her breasts or something. The only two people in the whole movie that shouldn't have to cringe when resume-revising time comes are Rod Steiger, who actually acts in this film, and Gabriel Casseus, who is the only black character that's not a stereotype. Not that I'm suggesting that this be included on a resume, unless any of the above are applying for "Modern Vampires II."

I'd started out with the idea of writing a more positive review of the movie, but the more I think about it, the less worth watching it becomes. It did have some good points, and the whole style was 'stupid glee' which generally makes a movie more watchable; but if you're looking for a fun, hip vampire film, you're gonna have to look for something else.

ARE YOU ASTONISHED?

I love the song that Wagner and van Dien were "listening to" when they first met. I loved how they were nodding their heads to completely separate beats. And neither of them matched the song that was playing.
Why do you keep smiling at the end of the movie, Natasha Lyonne? What's so funny and joyful, Casper Van Dien? Why are your lower gums bleeding, Natasha Gregson-Wagner?
Rod Steiger: "On the Waterfront," "Death of a Salesman," "Dr. Zhivago," "Modern Vampires." Which one of these is not like the others?
Udo Kier: Taking movie roles because he can.

REVIEW: Taps

2004-10-13T13:39:00.000-04:00

This being October, month of Halloween, I'd planned on exclusively reviewing horror movies and other films befitting the holiday season. Unfortunately, I forgot about that when I went to pick a movie to watch last night, and somehow managed to choose Harold Becker's "Taps," the 1981 military-academy-gone-awry movie starring George C. Scott with the youngsters Timothy Hutton, Sean Penn, and Tom Cruise in one of his rare 'villainous' roles. While it isn't a horror film, it was a nice change of pace to see something with a more serious bent to it. I guess I really don't have to see flesh-eating each night as I've been thinking I do.

The film takes place at the Bunker Hill Military Academy, where Hutton has been promoted to Cadet Major by his idol General Bache (Scott), thereby placing him in charge of the rest of the school's cadets, including fellow officers Penn and Cruise. It's one of those schools that usually gets in the paper for sexual harassment, or hazing, or not letting in women, or appearing in too many commercials for electric razors. Come to think of it, it's kind of like a high school student council, where the students actually follow Robert's Rules -- under threat of being shot.

(Robert's Rules = "I motion to move on with this review. John seconds that motion. All in favor? All not in favor? Moving on.")

The General gets the bad news that the school is being shut down by the board of trustees, demolished, and will be replaced by condos. This doesn't sit well with the General, who vows to fight the movement in the remaining year's time -- and Hutton, being the little idol-worshipper that he is, takes the General's idealism and romanticism a bit too much to heart. When his mentor is arrested, and the school is about to be shut down, Hutton organizes his cadets into a kiddie-army and, uh, occupies the grounds, issues demands, and does other terroristy things, in a last-ditch attempt to save his school. Of course, the school is surrounded by the police and the National Guard, and things slowly fall apart in ways that are both surprising and inevitable.

I was pretty surprised by this movie, because it's an Oh, That Movie -- the kind of movie that everyone seems to know the title of, but nothing else. I knew there was a movie called "Taps," and I knew that it had a bunch of young stars in a military setting. But I didn't know that it would be as good as it was; it's a tightly-paced suspense film, in the grand tradition of stand-off movies. I'm kind of a sucker for these -- I like trying to think my way through them, like it's a good logic puzzle. Unfortunately, movies rarely bow to logic, and this one's no exception. Trying to use it as a logic puzzle is kind of like playing chess with only half the pieces -- still fun, although you know that everything has been simplified. This becomes part of the movie's strength, relying on the parts that work and outright ignoring anything that would be an obstacle for the good stuff.

The performances are good across the leads, although not quite up to par with what the main actors would mature into. Hutton, who'd won an Oscar the year before for "Ordinary People," carries the film on his shoulders, as an overly-idealistic cadet whose dreams of honor and integrity are shattered by a reality where honor and integrity are only dreams. Penn, as his best friend, really isn't given all that much to do until he has an almost inexplicable tantrum in the middle of the film. Cruise does what Cruise does best: playing a cocky asshole. And what's worse than Tom Cruise playing a cocky asshole? Tom Cruise playing a cocky asshole in a bright red baret.

While it's a very well-executed film, there are those nagging questions. Now, I know (from watching a lot of movies) that cops are not supposed to negotiate with criminals. But in this picture, their demands are almost comical in their simplicity -- they want to meet the board of trustees, and discuss the selling of the school. That's not really much to ask, is it? I make harsher demands when I call Pizza Hut. The cops, being in a movie, will have no part in it, although they will do everything else under the sun to get the kids to surrender their weapons; they bus in parents, the National Guard, and even send veteran character actor Ronny Cox to negotiate -- and you know it's bad when they send in Ronny Cox. In fact, they send everyone to negotiate EXCEPT the damn board of trustees. That's strike one. Actually, that gets two strikes, considering that there are a lot of really young children in danger, which I'm sure would be a factor in negotiation attempts. It's a pretty easy choice to set up a meeting in order to keep numerous children out of danger. Strike three is all about Hutton's own plan; I just can't believe that he thinks it's going to work, even being a seventeen-year-old. I mean, so he talks to the board, and he saves the school -- "Taking over military academy by force in stand-off with National Guard" is the kind of thing you are legally required to include at the end of job applications.

Luckily, once you just accept these things and try not to think about how the entire rear flank of the grounds are unguarded, it's a good thriller. It's tightly edited, and the complete lack of music (other than the diegetic "Taps") gives it an atmosphere of realism that almost makes up for the script's flaws. Plus, you can watch the early efforts of two of our country's finest dramatic actors, and our cockiest asshole.

ARE YOU ASTONISHED?

I kept waiting for Tom Cruise to ask Piggy for the conch shell. Sucks to your asth-mar, Tom Cruise!
The ending scenes: is his going nutso just a little peculiar? Be honest. Couldn't he have waited until the Gulf War?
I had thought Timothy Hutton invented that walk for his role on Nero Wolfe, but apparently that's how he actually walks.

REVIEW: Shivers

2004-10-12T16:17:00.000-04:00

I have a lot of love for David Cronenberg. In a genre full of pointless movies, he at least tries to make films that are actually about something. It doesn't mean that his movies are always good, but at least they all seem to have a message, and that holds them head and shoulders above the majority of the dreck that gets released. Plus, I am constantly entertained by the fact that he looks and speaks with such weird, slow and cold authority, that he reminds me of what a serial killer might be like if he went to grad school for too long.

Last night I watched "Shivers," his first feature film, which is some kind of message about the sexual revolution. On an isolated island, a crazy doctor infects the populace with a parasitic worm that acts as "part aphrodisiac, part venereal disease." The doctor, apparently believing that the human race thought too much and boinked not enough, was launching a test run of his invention when he found out that it also made people angry and violent -- not quite what he wanted. Before you can say "plot device," the small island turns into one part sex-crazed orgy, one part mob of creepy old people, and two parts stupid doctor that doesn't know enough to leave.

For a first feature, the movie holds up pretty well, but again showcases why I don't like movies from the seventies: they're ugly. I just can't take the style of the era, with all the orange shag carpeting, minimalist decorating, and abundance of brown/orange/blue/white color schemes. I won't even get into the hair. Decade aside, there's just something about the performance of the lead doctor St. Luc that hurts the movie; he just kind of coasts through the movie, obviously too dazed on 'far out chill out' pills to think to himself, "Hm. There's a disease spreading in the building which has turned everyone into rapists and murderers. I should leave soon." Granted, he tries to hide with his girlfriend, the nurse, until it turns out that she's also infected. But it's the seventies, man! Everyone's got it!

Cronenberg's script effectively supplies a sense of paranoia, but isn't quite daring enough when it comes to letting the suspense stand. Basically, if you think a character's going to get infected, they will get infected within five minutes of that thought. If it's even slightly ambiguous about whether a character is infected, they are infected. Sometimes, the obviousness of the writing undercuts the power of the idea: anxiety about being part of a dangerous sexual revolution, and having your flesh gain too much control over your mind -- fear and control of flesh seems to be Cronenberg's main fetish. I can only hope he's writing a sequel in which Viagra is introduced into a closed community.

ARE YOU ASTONISHED?

The nurse: is she attractive, or not? I spent several hours thinking about this. Even now that I've seen her naked, I still don't know.
I'm guessing that the parasite is supposed to be phallic, but most of the time it looks vaguely poo-shaped. Then again, that is also a fetish to some people.
Think of it: the whole world becomes a giant Studio 54 on a Friday night. I don't even want to think about what that smells like when Sunday rolls around.

REVIEW: Return of the Living Dead, Part 2

2004-10-10T16:52:00.000-04:00

I always say that you can tell a lot about a movie by the way they title the sequel. Do they use the same title, but slap the digit "2" after it, or do they go for the ever-classier Roman Numeral "II"? Do they keep the original title, then add a hook-subtitle after a colon? Or do they just come up with something new and hope fans of the previous installment figure it out on their own?

Well, to illustrate my point (or not), we have "Return of the Living Dead, Part 2," that late-eighties classic zombie film that most people remember for inexplicably featuring the reanimated corpse of Michael Jackson. Yes, I said that. Pretty much casting aside the first "Return...," and ignoring the fairly huge ramifications of the first movie's ending, this one comes across as a lighter, brighter zombie comedy. Also, it's dumber. In fact, this movie's essentially made for the ten-year-olds in the crowd that weren't allowed to see it until they were too old to be in the target audience anyway. And by the point when they were allowed to see R-rated features, they probably discovered that they were better off playing outside than watching this anyhow.

Taking a page from Part One, the US government has been up to no good with its experiments again: cutting taxes for the rich, soaking the poor, dropping necessary social reforms, taking us into a war without merit, consistently using the presidential seal as a dodge to bleed the impover-- what? Oh, sorry. They reanimated the dead. And, in either A) the usual government style or B) the usual zombie film style, they lose one of the barrels that's filled with a corpse and the toxins that will bring him back as a brain-eating zombie. I don't think I'm going to ruin the film by saying that he gets loose, some living dead things show up, and it's left to an eleven-year-old, a teenage girl, and a TV repairman to save the quarantined town.

Now, the zombie genre is my favorite genre, so I'm a little bit biased when it comes to the hungry dead. I'm exceptionally forgiving when it comes to zombie films, but while this isn't the worst I've seen, it sure isn't among the greats. If "Return of the Living Dead" is a box of Band-Aids, then "Return of the Living Dead, Part 2" is a box of Plastic Health Strips, another inferior knock-off without the intelligence or wit of its predecessor. (METAPHOR!) In other words, it's the kind of movie people point at when they say that sequels are a bad idea. The film is set up as a horror flick, but from the five-minute mark you know that it's just a comedy with the trappings of a horror film. That's fine and all, except that it's a shitty comedy, too. Come to think of it, there's really no reason to see this unless you're a zombie completist like myself. Or a Michael Jackson completist. Or you're not a Michael Jackson completist, but just want to see him die, and Thriller isn't enough anymore.

The new DVD features a commentary track by the director, Ken Wiederhorn, as well as Thor van Lingen, the actor who played Billy the undead bully. I'd be going into more detail about what went wrong with this movie (bad acting, bad makeup, rehashing Part Uno for no reason) but because of DVD technology, the director himself can tell you just how much he didn't want to be making this movie. At least the grown-up Thor, who hasn't had a credit to his name since, provides reasonably interesting comments about how cool it was to be a thirteen-year-old zombie; also refreshingly, he doesn't seem to have any bitterness over not working in Hollywood afterwards unlike Chunk during the "Goonies" commentary. The DVD also mysteriously features a new score for the film (surprising to the director as well), which is conducted at about the same quality level as the movie. The original score can be heard on the French-language track. Actually, if you end up watching this, watch it in French. That way, the score is better, you won't know how bad most of the jokes are, and you'll probably be giggling enough to not notice the special effects.

ARE YOU ASTONISHED?

Doesn't Billy the bully already look dead, before he's dead? It's a little anti-climactic when he actually dies.
The last line in the movie: funny when I was 11, unforgivable at 25.
I don't even need to mention that Michael Jackson's corpse dances across the screen, but I will.
On Billy's nightstand, he's got a George 'The Animal' Steele WWF action figure. I had that one when I was Billy's age! Luckily, I didn't tamper with a cadaver, and have lived to outgrow the WWF.
Aren't brains hard to get at? I know my skull is pretty tough, and it takes some serious force to get through it. More force than teeth. And since zombies that carry big jagged rocks or baseball bats are a lot scarier than ANY of the zombies in this movie, it's a surprising choice they made.

Note: Sometimes 'Bad' Movies Are Not Bad Movies

2004-10-10T13:48:00.000-04:00

It seems like a fella's favorite movies just can't get a fair break these days. It's hard for me to even admit to some of the movies that I like without being jumped on for liking 'bad' movies. Now, to set the record straight about what kind of movies I watch, what kind of movies I like, and how I feel about them:

I'll throw in a question-and-answer format to make things a little easier, akin to many conversations that I've had with loved ones that I try to share with:

"This movie is so bad! Where do you find these? What? Well, yeah, I mean, it's entertaining and all...but...it's so bad! I know, I laughed at the jokes -- and yeah, the part with the head was kinda scary and gross, and I guess the disembodied head scene was supposed to be scary and gross, so...but it's such a terrible movie! What do you mean, do I think the jokes were intentional? Of course! But the movie is just...so bad!"

I hear this argument against movies just about every week. Sure, I know zombie cinema isn't quite held up there with great epics like "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Spartacus," but what makes a movie genuinely bad? Anyone? Class? Okay, I'll even put it in caps and center-align it for you, so you can look it up when you have trouble remembering it:

A BAD MOVIE IS A MOVIE THAT FAILS TO DO WHAT IT SETS OUT TO DO.

That's probably not enough. I'll put it in bold, too.

A BAD MOVIE IS A MOVIE THAT FAILS TO DO WHAT IT SETS OUT TO DO.

Now, there are some arguments that run tangent with this one, such as the argument of The Fallacy of Intention, which states that no matter what we think, we cannot truly know what the filmmaker was intending to do with the film. We only know what comes along with the text itself, what actually occurs in the film itself. That's usually enough to help judge the quality of what's onscreen. If, say, Michael Keaton's "Mr. Mom" had started in the beginning to be a desert epic, and then accidentally settled into domestic role-reversal comedy, we can reasonably say that it was a pretty shitty desert epic. Or at least a movie with serious tonal problems.

If, say, "Return of the Living Dead" had funny parts that were funny, and gross parts that served the story as gross parts, then it's working. Period. Bad movies are movies that don't work. If "Return of the Living Dead" wasn't funny when it presented 'funny' parts, and the gross stuff wasn't really gross, then it would be a bad (or at least medicore) movie. I can say, then, with a great amount of conviction, that "Return of the Living Dead" is a good movie. It just happens to be a good zombie movie, sadly existing in a genre that's not very well-respected.

"This movie sucks! I can't believe you watched it more than once! The special effects are just terrible, and the actors seem like they stumbled in from an even worse movie! Okay, fine, I'll give you that -- it's got nice cinematography. And the colors are pretty."

Sometimes I do watch movies that are bad. It's unfortunate. I seek out obscure films, hoping to find something a little special, and it's inevitable that they will not all hold up under intense scrutiny. Considering that I'm always watching movies, which is a considerable time and money-draining experience, I like to make the best of things. It's a lot like having relationships with actual people; sometimes you have to overlook their flaws, and focus on what's good about them. If I didn't do that, cinema would be my most-hated enemy, and I wouldn't have any friends. I will paraphrase three people to make my point, and all three are respected film critics and historians:

The late Pauline Kael, of the New York Times:
"Movies are so rarely great art, that if you can't appreciate great trash, there's little reason for us to go."
Joel Simon, of the Buffalo News, in his review of a John Carpenter film:
"Unlike Spielberg, Carpenter couldn't cook Coq Au Vin on his best day -- but man, can he make a great greasy burrito!"
Joe Bob Briggs, world's foremost living drive-in movie critic from Grapevine, Texas: "I can find something to like about pretty much any movie, as long as it isn't boring."

I agree. The more that I can find to like about a movie, the less of a waste of time it is. I can still, despite the beliefs of many of my friends, discern between a film that is good and a film that has redeeming bits. For example, "Hysterical" is a really, really bad film -- but it's got three very funny jokes. See? I made a distinction. I can do that! "House of the Dead"? Terrible! But funny because it's terrible. The way that I look at things causes me to get so, so much more enjoyment out of movies than most people, who frequently waste their own time by focusing on the bad stuff.

"This movie is so bad it's good!"

For the last time, some movies are bad! Some movies are good! If a movie works as a film, then it is good, regardless of what it's about, what genre it's in, or who's in it. Bad is bad! Good is good!

Now, after that refresher lesson, I will state: no movie is so bad it is good. It may be enjoyable because it's bad, but that does not make it good. Now, a lot of the time, people will apologize for a film's flaws by saying that 'it's so bad it's good' -- except they don't mean that. They usually mean that they really like it despite its weaknesses, they still enjoy the parts that work. I don't care how many times anyone watches "Moonlight and Valentino," it is not now and never will be enjoyed for the same reasons that people watch "House of the Dead" for.

Finally, in case you're wondering, I do take this pretty seriously. Why, you're asking -- it's only movies, after all!

I take it seriously because it's extremely disrespectful to judge something or someone based on standards that don't actually apply to them. It's disrespectful to degrade someone's work because you generalize, and arbitrarily group it with things that it doesn't belong with, in a way that's wholly unfair. It's disrespectful to confuse personal preferences with actual quality. For instance, I don't like pop music as a whole, but I know that there is pop music out there that is good pop music. And that's all it's trying to do. If pop music isn't pushing back the boundaries of acoustic endeavors, well, it doesn't much matter -- it's just supposed to be entertaining to listen to. I can't ask it to be more than that, but if it does turn out better, then everybody wins!

In conclusion, if anyone ever calls "Return of the Living Dead" a bad movie, then I will absolutely kill them if they even try to defend "The Last Unicorn."

Welcome to Reviews To Astonish !

2004-10-10T11:18:00.000-04:00

People that know me also know that I watch a lot of movies. And saying that I watch a lot of movies is like saying that the Grinch had a little anxiety about Christmas. The fact is that I almost never stop watching movies; at almost any given point in the evening, you can find me in my bedroom with a movie playing in the background, which makes it hard to find time to bathe.

And what happens to all this cinema that I absorb? It just builds up and builds up until I just can't resist explaining the backstory about how "Return of the Living Dead" was almost directed by Tobe Hooper instead of Dan O'Bannon, and how the original producers settled the title lawsuit with George Romero. And then whoever I'm telling the story to reminds me that yes, of course they know who George Romero is, because I wouldn't shut up about the mise en scene of "Day of the Dead." So you see, I have to start a website about movies, because if I didn't the innocents would end up suffering.

Here at Reviews to Astonish you'll eventually find lots and lots of movie reviews, and probably a lot of short essays and articles about movies in general. I have a lot of DVDs to watch, and heaven knows I like to talk about them.

So go get some popcorn, dim the lights, and get comfy in your computer chair...