My friends over at A Butt Of Day are both tattoo freaks, so it’s no surprise that they saw The Tattooist a long time before I got around to it (I myself have zero desire to be “inked”, or to watch any horror movie with Jason Behr). They were both pissed off about a certain scene where a girl sits down and asks him for a tattoo. She doesn’t care what he puts on her, and also he apparently doesn’t wash his needle in between. And I guess that’s bad, but what pissed me off a lot more was that the movie was simply a giant fucking bore.
It’s apparent that screenwriters Matthew Grainger and Jonathan King have an interest in Simoan culture and wanted to write a movie that incorporated their customs and beliefs. And that is fine. But write a documentary or something, not a movie that’s one half baked and one half assed. Like They Wait, it often feels like a remake of a superior Asian film, due to the occasional cheap scare and an American who seemingly has no point to his/her life beyond immersing himself in an Asian culture. The difference is, \ with this one I wouldn’t want to watch the “original”. After about 45 minutes in which I couldn’t even tell if the story had actually kicked in yet, we get a single death scene (a guy’s tattoo ink spills out and... I dunno, envelops him), but the two or three that follow are off-screen. The rest of the time, the movie is simply Behr wandering around and having people explain traditions to him.
But that wouldn’t be a problem if there was even the slightest bit of excitement. Even as a thriller and not straight up horror, the movie is entirely suspense-free. Hell, our hero is almost never really in danger, since it’s only his cursed tattoos that cause harm, and he never tattooed himself. In the final 8 minutes of the film, he tackles the bad guy inside a suburban home, which is about as exciting as the movie gets. He might get a bruise, or knock a photo off the wall!
Also, the movie’s entire concept is just ludicrous. Behr is known for being able to heal people with his tattoos, but it never seems to work, so how did he get this reputation? Also, he just up and goes to New Zealand to give back a tattooing implement (which just looks the little rake from those therapeutic sandbox things that business people have on their desks), which he stole from a fellow tattooist. But he doesn’t use it, so why his tattoos begin killing people, I haven’t the slightest. I t’s kind of sad when a movie is about killer tattoos and yet that is the least baffling part of the narrative.
Back in college, I actually thought Behr was pretty good on Roswell, a show I inexplicably watched all three seasons of, even when it went to the UPN and ceased making any sense. However, in the three movies I’ve seen him in (this, The Grudge, and D-War) he’s been pretty terrible. Granted all of these movies kind of suck anyway, but he almost appears to be asleep in all of them. And he’s not quite up to the level of guys who can afford to be sleepwalking through their roles, so I dunno what his problem is. His co-star on the show, one Brendan Fehr, was pretty engaging, but I’ve only seen that dude in one movie since (The Forsaken). They should have gotten him.
The one thing I liked about the movie was that when the monster/spirit type thing attacks a girl in a hospital, the anonymous doctors and nurses seem to see it. A lot of these ridiculous concept movies always manage to find a way to keep their ridiculous nature hidden from uninvolved characters, so it was nice to see the hero get some witnesses to the strange shit he is seeing, even if for only a moment. But even that had issues, because the monster can only be seen in reflections, which means they are borrowing from Russian Night Watch culture instead of their own.
You got the Achievement for boringest goofy concept movie! 20 GS.
Behr and director Peter Burger contribute a commentary track, and even they admit that the reason for Behr’s character to go to New Zealand is rather weak, which makes me wonder why they didn’t just, you know, come up with a good one. There’s also a few featurettes and a handful of deleted scenes (one that gives a slightly better explanation for Behr’s sudden travel, which Burger cut because it wasn’t better enough), all of which can only be of interest to someone who were actually compelled by the film itself.
So in summary, and before anyone jumps down my throat – it’s not the lack of gore and violence that bored me, it was the serious approach to a goofy concept and the total lack of suspense that did. The pool scene, the only traditional sort of death scene in the entire film, was just as dull as everything else, and my favorite scene was just Behr talking to a doctor that reminded me of Aasif Mandvi (“Someone find Kenchy!”). So there!
What say you?
P.S. Hey Sony – you always start off your standard def DVDs with an advertisement for Blu-ray. Newsflash – you can’t see a true Blu-Ray image on a standard def DVD. So “showing” a comparison doesn’t quite work. Save it for actual Blu-Rays, showing how much better what you are about to see is compared to your old DVD. It's like watching Wizard of Oz on a black and white TV - you're supposed to marvel at something that isn't possible to convey on the equipment being used. Morons.
If one only saw the Pang’s two American films (that would be The Messengers and Bangkok Dangerous), they might think they were the absolute worst Asian filmmakers of all time. Which makes the greatness of movies like Re-Cycle (made in their home country; native title is Gwai Wik) all the more surprising; it’s almost impossible to believe that this wonderful blend of metaphorical and actual worlds can come from the same guys responsible for a movie in which Nic Cage just sort of wanders around Thailand in search of the gun that was Photoshopped out of his movie poster.
The best thing about Re-Cycle is how it manages to blend horror and fantasy so seamlessly. I was reminded of What Dreams May Come, which is a fantasy drama for 99% of the time, but then wastes a perfectly awesome concept of Hell in a should-be-scary scene that feels totally out of place with the rest of the movie. But here, it starts off like a straight up Asian horror movie (complete with an elevator scene), and then suddenly (but not jarringly) shifts into a fantasy world that seems like Terry Gilliam’s live-action version of a Miyazaki film. But even then, the horror aspect is never absent; there are like 3 scenes that can’t be described as anything but zombie attack sequences, and the Pangs manage to out-“gah!” Takeshi Miike’s Imprint with their ideas concerning aborted fetuses.
The fetii are just one of many conceptual designs concerning abandonment. There is also a room full of unread/discarded books (incidentally, today I cleaned my car and found my copy of the Jesse James book I began reading over a year ago and haven’t touched since the new year began), and a wasteland populated with giant versions of discarded toys. Even if some of the plotting/dialogue is a bit hokey at times, on a strictly visual sense this is one of the year’s most original movies.
The movie’s only real blunder is the final minute or so, which seems to be tossed in just so people don’t forget it’s a horror movie at heart. My advice? Shut it off at the conclusion of the “Transit” scene, unless you really love annoying plot twists that undermine the emotional impact of the entire movie.
I’m also amused that despite the movie’s strong themes of not forgetting your past and all that (something I am hugely guilty of), what got me thinking the most was the fact that I never realized how odd it is to type an Asian language using a traditional keyboard. Since they don’t use ABC letters, their Microsoft word type programs just sort of translate the letters into symbols as they type, with a series of confusing-looking number and letter combinations. You know when you’re using Word and you type like “Sept” and then “September” pops up? Imagine that action for EVERY SINGLE KEYSTROKE!
Not sure what the standard def offers, but the Blu has a few extras of interest, if not for the right reasons. For starters, there’s a behind the scenes thing that runs 15 minutes, but appears to be 5 three minute segments strung together. I suspect this because every 3 minutes we see a bunch of film clips flash by (same ones every time) followed by a card reading “Re-Cycle: Behind the Scenes”. Context clues! A lot of the same interview footage is recycled (heh) too, so half of it will interest you, the other half will probably annoy you. Then there are a couple of Q&A sessions from two screenings of the film. These are notable because I learned that in Thailand, they apparently seek out the most shrill and grating people on the planet to moderate post screening discussions. There’s a guy and a girl; the guy is merely over-enthusiastic, but the girl’s questions and approach make Billy Bush look respectable. Having done a few myself, I can safely say that I could have done a better job even without speaking the same language. Christ.
Finally, we get 8 minutes of deleted scenes that are not worth watching, but it’s worth noting that only one of them has any real dialogue, so the sub guys didn’t bother working on them at all. As a result, it’s the only time on the disc that mere sounds (“Groaning” comes up a real lot) aren’t given subtitles. I really wish these folks would learn the difference between close-captioning and subtitling.
If you can watch on Blu-ray, you should, but really, check it out any way you can. It’s one of the best Asian films I’ve seen in a while, and easily one of the year’s most visually exciting films, regardless of country.
Kiefer Sutherland can quit 24 and make nothing but shit movies for the rest of his career, and I would still respect him forever due to his response at the Mirrorspress conference when someone asked what movies scared him and the other cast/crew. Usually, A-listers seemingly grew up in a world where the only horror movies are The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Shining, but Kiefer said that The Car scared him the most as a kid. Not that I doubt that those other movies really are the scariest some folks have ever seen*, but it just seems like such a stock answer since it’s literally ALWAYS one of those whenever a big star is queried. So kudos, herr Bauer, for having the gravitas to be honest, and show a little personality in your response.
(For the record, Amy Smart and Alex Aja both said The Shining).
In one of my first trips to the New Bev, Charles Band himself screened a print of his movie Crash! (not to be confused with Cronenberg’s not that good movie, or the horrendous and godawful piece of shit Paul Haggis film), which was a killer car movie in which the car would kill a cop car every 5-10 minutes, regardless of what else was going on in the movie (which, to be fair, wasn’t much). So as I was watching The Car, I began to wonder if Band’s film was a quickie cashin response to this one, much like a lot of the late 80s/early 90s Full Moon movies (Hollywood has Chucky, Band has Demonic Toys!). But I was wrong! According to the IMDb, Band’s film was released four months before it. I suppose he could have read a trade announcement about the film and got his done sooner, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.
Besides, his movie was missing one crucial ingredient: JAMES BROLIN. Specifically, his moustache. The movie would be a lot of fun even without him, but Brolin elevates it into near-classic territory with his straight delivery. You might expect an actor to ham it out the entire time when dealing with this particular concept, but nope. You almost buy it as a serious storyline thanks to Brolin’s no-nonsense performance (not counting his goofy introduction, in which he tries to convince his girlfriend that eight minutes is more than enough time for lovemaking before work. Smooth.).
That introduction actually kind of fits with the rest of the movie, which is more than just a little “off”. Characters are introduced awkwardly, people say odd things, and bizarrely melodramatic subplots are tossed in, seemingly to make the movie feel less B-movie-ish, but just distract and inadvertently seem as odd as everything else. How else to explain Ronny Cox’s drinking problem, which leads to a honest to goodness “For your consideration” crying scene? But back to the dialogue – it’s worth noting that the car’s antics aren’t even the funniest things in the movie. An old lady yells “Cat poo!” after the car is scared off by a graveyard; Brolin’s daughter responds to his inquiries about him re-marrying with “Do you like it when I cook?” (it comes off like she is offering to take the wife position herself); and best of all, an old jerk sees a guy sitting outside of his house and demands “What the hell ARE you?”, without any respect for proper pronoun usage or traditional verb emphasis.
The old guy also mentions something about his “dynamite truck”, which would have been even funnier if it wasn’t just the most glaringly obvious foreshadowing this side of Cathy’s Curse. I love movie logic – the car can’t be dented with other cars, the tires can’t be shot out with a .357 at close range, etc. So why is dynamite any different? Ah, who the hell cares.
One can’t help but notice the similarities to Jawsin the film. A teen dies first, there’s a big annual town to-do that the monster disrupts (and no one wants to call it off because of the threat), a lot of POV shots, and our finale features a bunch of guys banding together to take it out with a plan that involves human bait. The key difference (well, besides the slight difference in overall quality, but come on) is that for whatever reason, writer Michael Butler can’t bring himself to kill anyone off during the finale. Even the dynamite truck owner, who is a drunken abuser of his wife, is spared. Yet, Brolin’s kindly girlfriend gets utterly annihilated at the end of the 2nd act, which is a great twist but still rather mean-spirited, compared to the rest of the movie.
I really hope this movie gets shown at the Bev someday. It’s too fantastic a film to watch at home with just one or two people. I also hope that the DVD gets double-dipped, since the existing one offers a trailer and absolutely nothing else (not even a chapter menu, which is almost unheard of outside of David Lynch movies). I bet Brolin can do a great commentary.
One final note – one of Brolin’s daughters is played by Kyle Richards, forever known as Lindsay Wallace and/or the vanilla twist loving plot device in Assault on Precinct 13. And according to her IMDb photo, she is incredibly fucking hot now.
What say you?
*If I was going to be honest, the "scariest" movies ever made are Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter and Halloween 5, because those are the only movies I was too scared to watch by myself when I was 10 or so. If I was the star of a big budget studio movie and being told to suppress my personality, I’d go with Halloweenor Blair Witch.
My friend Jib has recently been knocking on me a lot for my seeming obsession with incestuous overtones in the horror movies I see. It's not that I actually enjoy the idea, but look - some of these movies I can't even remember enough to write a review about them a couple hours later, because they are so bland and uninteresting. So if they throw in a line like Wedding Slashers' "That's my mother. She's also my sister", my interest gets piqued a bit. Nothing wrong with that, right?
Especially when it's played for laughs, like it is in this terrible yet sort of awesome movie. See, the heroine is supposed to marry her cousin (who is a bit peeved that her brother got her virginity), but she escapes her redneck family and gets engaged to a nice, normal guy. However, when the family shows up and starts killing everyone at the wedding, she seems pretty blase about the whole thing, as if it was commonplace. And writers John Howard and Robert Paul Medrano clearly play the entire concept for laughs, so kudos to them for making an intentionally funny movie based on such a horrendous and disgusting idea.
Unfortunately, the technical qualities and acting leave much to be desired. Had this been cast with good actors and directed more professionally, it would be the perfect bad movie, but too many great (poor taste) jokes fall flat due to the delivery of the non-actors. Maybe some of them didn't quite get that it was supposed to be funny, but either way it's a bit disheartening. The production value is also pretty atrocious; apparently, all you need to do is hang a cross on a wall and viola, you got a church! Or, what looks suspiciously like a dorm room with a cross thrown up before filming began.
Also, towards the end of the film, some of the rednecks begin what sounds a lot like improvised dialogue concerning the number of toes they have, the merits of Gorillas In The Mist, and other "huh?" topics. It's a bizarre but entertaining concept (imagine the Deliverance guys doing the "Royale With Cheese" scene in Pulp Fiction and you'll get the idea), and I wish it was part of the film throughout, not just in the final 7 or 8 minutes.
Finally, whoever was in charge of the setting titles needs a swift kick to the neck, because they ended up confusing me more than they helped me know where I was. The prologue seems to be set in the 40s, but no title is given. Then the title says "5 years ago", but that's in relation to the real time, not the scene we just saw, something that took me a few minutes to understand. I think there was "yesterday" thrown in there too. Christ.
The only extra is a handful of deleted scenes that go on too long, with the exception of the final one, in which Richard Lynch's character explains a bit more about how they found her (it involves a road trip to a funeral for a distant cousin and a newspaper - why cut this amazing footage?). Skip em.
One final note - the main chick is one Jessica Kinney, who was in Freaky Farley, another low-budget indie that revels in being kind of terrible. She has a niche!
I was interested in They Wait for a couple reasons. One is that it was executive produced by one Uwe Boll, automatically a point of interest (good or bad). Another is that it stars Jaime King, whom I would watch read a phone book (want proof? I watched Bulletproof Monk). And third and finally - it was directed by Ernie Barbarash, who made the above average franchise films Cube Zero and Stir Of Echoes: Homecoming (which I watched almost a year to the day ago, oddly enough). This would be his first original film, so I was curious to see how he fared without having to work alongside any mythology or sequel expectations.
So I suppose it's kind of ironic that the film feels like a remake to an Asian movie that I just haven't seen yet. A lot of the hallmarks of the sub-genre are accounted for: Americans dealing with Asian culture and being the only American around, despite the fact that everyone speaks English (a la The Grudge and Shutter), a child in danger (The Ring, Dark Water), lots of hospital scenes (The Eye, One Missed Call), and, of course, a ghost or ghosts who are mainly pissed about the fact they were improperly buried (see all of the above, plus about a half dozen others). Yet, IMDb's "Movie Connections" page for the film remains empty, so a remake it is not.
Luckily, it's not all that bad anyway. Sure, you can sort of see exactly where it's going right from the first 10 minutes - anyone who doesn't think that Michael Biehn is in the movie just to help provide some exposition doesn't know their DTV movies very well - but it still works as intended; providing the occasional jump scare and even the occasional gore gag (a head split nearly down the middle) that a paying audience expects/deserves. And King, who has never really had a lead before, proves capable of carrying a film nearly on her own (she's in nearly every scene, but other than her son, the other characters just sort of drift in and out).
The movie also has one of the best deaths for a villain ever, not to mention an A+ epilogue. After the movie is more or less done, we go back to one of the conspirators behind the tragedy that set everything in motion. She begins puking up human bones (including a full length arm bone - awesome!), and then all of the ghosts appear and presumably eat her down to her skeleton. SO MUCH MORE AWESOME than a cheeso "everything's OK, the heroine goes home and gets one final scare" bullshit scene you'd expect.
Another thing about the ending (minor spoiler!) that delighted me was a doctor who is watching over King's coma-fied son. She rushes to the hospital, and he turns to her with a stern look and says "I just don't understand it..." or something to that effect, and then finishes "He's completely better all of a sudden!" It reminded me of the terrible doctor on Arrested Development who would tell the family something like "he's gone..." and then 30 seconds later explain that their loved one actually just left the hospital. If a doctor ever did that to me, rest assured his cock would be punched into mush.
The DVD is slim on extras, with only a few deleted scenes, which all curiously take place in the first 20 minutes of the film. No making of or commentaries are included, which is a bummer, as I would have at least liked to have learned how in the hell Boll got involved with this.
In closing, I would like to say that I think it would be awesome if some Asian filmmaker remade this in his home country. Very meta.
NOTE – Timecrimes (Spanish: Los CronocrÃmenes) is not really a horror movie, but it’s sort of set up like one (a guy in a mask is seemingly killing people with a pair of scissors). That, along with its coverage on Bloody-Disgusting and other horror sites, qualifies it as horror per my “rules”.
During my October Extras 2 marathon, I reviewed Primer, which is my favorite time travel movie of all time (or at least tied with Twelve Monkeys). The reason I love these movies as much as I do is because the time travel element is well developed and largely hole-free (ignoring the basic plot hole that time travel cannot exist, obviously). Timecrimes, for the most part, fits in with that template; the time travel is complex but largely consistent, and while not as perfect as those other films, it’s still one of the better TT movies in recent memory, and surely one of the more entertaining.
Unlike Primer, our hero isn’t a genius, or even involved with the time travel experiment. Hector is more like Joe in Idiocracy: an average man in every way. The film’s first 10-15 minutes really sell this concept, as we see that he is absent minded, a bit lazy, and just wants to sit around and look at birds all day. How he gets involved with the time travel machine is one of the movie’s most clever inventions, and writer/director (and co-star) Nacho Vigalondo wisely never bogs the movie down in explanations or special effects, keeping the entire thing from Hector’s point of view. Like Primer, however, this means that we see effects of the time travel before we are aware that time travel is a story element.
Unfortunately, this has a bit of a drawback, as once the first twist is revealed (something I had figured out), the movie has sort of shown its entire hand, and further twists/revelations become more and more predictable. Like Dark Floors, there’s some great bits when you see cause and effect situations being caused by the same person in different timelines, but it gets a bit rote after awhile. I didn’t like feeling so ahead of Hector; at one point he hears a voice on his walkie-talkie, and I knew instantly that it was him from a half hour or so in the future (or past, from the other one’s POV).
Also, the movie never makes clear exactly why Hector goes to such lengths to make things the way he found them earlier. I need to spoil a key twist in order to explain (it’s revealed before the halfway mark, for what it’s worth), so don’t read any further if you want to be completely in the dark.
Once we learn that Hector himself is the killer he is running from (the mask actually a bandage for a wound he encountered after time traveling), we sort of watch the movie again from his time-traveler's point of view. Which is awesome in theory, but I kept getting distracted by killer Hector’s insistence on re-doing everything exactly as hero Hector saw it. At one point during hero Hector’s journey (before the killer’s identity is revealed), he sees the killer turn around and mock his use of binoculars. So later, when we are with killer Hector, we see him keep spinning around and making the mocking action over and over until he gets it “right” (i.e. hero Hector sees it). But why do it at all? Hero Hector wouldn’t know anything was “different” (since it hadn’t happened to him yet), and killer Hector knows that hero Hector’s downfall is the result of his running from the killer. Killer Hector, in short, should have just hid somewhere, letting hero Hector give up and go back home, and thus never time travel in the first place. Killer Hector could then, I dunno, go to Maui and drink umbrella drinks or something, assuming he didn’t alter himself out of existence.
Things get further complicated when a 3rd Hector (let’s call this one “Smart Hector”) shows up and tries to set everything right once again. Again, he does things that ensure things happen the same way, which doesn’t make sense when he is specifically there to change it. He seems to want everything to happen the same way up until a certain point, but why THAT point is the one he chose is entirely unclear (the time travel device is a liquid chamber – just let all the duplicates drown!). Sure, it leads to some funny/cool moments (at this point, smart Hector knows more about what’s going on than the time travel inventor guy), but it seems contradictory to what the character is actually trying to accomplish. Smart Hector should simply kill the other two and be done with it.
I assume that Vigalondo is making the point that once something occurs, it cannot be changed, but it often seems like it COULD, because killer Hector does things over and over to get them right for hero Hector. It would make more sense for him to try to change things and inadvertently cause them to happen anyway, rather than the other way around, no? There is a moment later in the film that should be an example of how the sort of “can’t change fate” mechanism works – killer Hector is seeking a battery for the time machine, which the inventor has discarded in the woods. The inventor convinces Hector not to try to fix things anymore, and Hector tosses his walkie talkie (which he is using to manipulate the other Hector) on the ground, and then asks the inventor to shine his light on it so he could see to smash it. The inventor does, and then they see that the battery is there on the ground next to it. THAT is how the other scenes should work; selling the idea that it was fate that put the battery back in their hands.
In the words of the great Mrs... whatever her name was, “No matter what course of action Collins took, he was destined to his own fate. Fate never changes.”
But if you ignore these issues, you’ll have a lot of fun. Hector (all three versions) is a great protagonist, and I love the relative simplicity of the story (there are only four people in the film). And even though I started mentally calling the twists long before they occurred, it was still fun to watch Hector’s realization to these facts, even smart Hector got surprised a few times by realizing he was the cause of something that effected him in the past. It also has a surprisingly dark ending that felt very right.
So my advice? Go see it and only think about it as much as you would any straightforward movie. It doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a lot of fun and definitely a unique take on the genre. Let’s hope the American remake (reportedly by David Cronenberg) can retain the simplicity while somehow clarifying why Hector does things a certain way once he has become privy to the situation.
One time I tripped and slammed my head right into a big wooden door. But that is nothing compared to the pain I feel when people try to convince me that “digital downloads” replacing physical media is a good thing. Ignoring the complete idiocy of trusting in a bunch of 1s and 0s to offer up your entertainment (“Hey guys, movie night is canceled, my hard drive is dead!”), the simple fact of the matter is that watching a movie via anything with the word “streaming” in the description is one of the absolute worst ways you can view a film or TV show. But unlike 99% of people on the internet, I back up my ranting whenever possible, so I decided to check out a “Netflix on Xbox” version of Graduation Day, one of the slasher heyday movies that had always passed me by. Now, to be fair, this movie could be on the most pristine Blu-ray disc of all time and still mostly suck, but even the worst movie ever made deserves a decent presentation, and this simply isn’t it.
For starters, a lot of Netflix “live” movies are full frame transfers (even when taken from a widescreen source!), which automatically degrades the overall quality. The only good thing about a fullframe transfer on an HDTV is that you can show some ignoramus EXACTLY how much of the film is being cut out for no reason. Plus, they are streaming off of low resolution sources – the Xbox will even allow you to watch the film at the stream’s native resolution, and you may be shocked to see how small it is before being blown up to your TV’s size. This results in hideously “smeared” images, not to mention the “droopy” effect (when the camera moves and still objects in the image sort of stay put for a second before “catching up” with the motion). Detail? Forget about it; you’re lucky if you can tell a person from a tree. Not to mention the fact that if your internet connection becomes slow, the movie pauses to rebuffer. And good luck with rewinding it; not only does it need to rebuffer, but instead of scanning like a normal device, it just shows you a series of frames that represent every 10 seconds, which is pretty much worthless. Yeah, this is the wave of the future! I’m not a fan of any sort of movie downloading, but Christ, at least if you download a full uncompressed rip of a DVD and burn it to a dual layer disc (congrats, you just saved, what, 6 bucks?) you are seeing a proper representation of the image.
Now, to be fair, they do offer “HD” streaming downloads, but as they are larger in original size, they take longer to startup and are more susceptible to re-buffering. Plus, it’s not even true HD – it looked about as good as TBS HD looks (i.e., not very).
In short – use your Xbox to play fucking Xbox games. It’s bad enough folks don’t want to go to the theater to watch a movie, it’s downright sickening that they will accept this type of presentation as a suitable replacement for DVDs as well. Stop being so fucking lazy.
Anyway, the movie itself wasn’t much better than its appearance. A lot of the slashers to come along post Friday the 13th (Halloweenis often credited, but it wasn’t until after 1980, Friday the 13th’s debut, that all of the holiday/occasion based slasher movies began flooding theaters) aren’t exactly cinematic gold, but most have their own sort of charm and can manage a couple of interesting kills and/or killer look. But this one doesn’t even seem to be trying. There’s only one cool kill in the entire movie (the killer puts a bed of spikes under the “safety mat” thing for a guy practicing his pole vault), and the killer just wears a fencing mask for some reason (at least I know where the idea came from for Urban Legend 2’s equally inexplicable costume).
But worse, the killer’s motive is pretty clear right off the bat, and it’s a fucking stupid one to boot. In the opening scene, a girl dies of an aneurysm during a track meet*, and the killer clearly blames the rest of the team for her death and sets about offing them all. Despite the fact that this makes absolutely no sense, it also gives any potential investigation a pretty clear idea of where to start. So to get around that, screenwriters David Baughn and Herb Freed (who also directed) simply have no one notice and/or care that the kids are missing (it takes place over a couple of days, a rarity from this era). Parents call the school for some reason to ask why their son/daughter never came home, and the principal (Michael Pataki, aka Dr Hoffman from Halloween 4) just blows them off and spends screen time giving his secretary a lot of busy work. OK.
Worse still, the movie stubbornly refuses to have a main character! There’s a kind of cool twist early on where they start to set one girl up as the Final Girl (Denise Cheshire, Chrissy from Jawsand way hotter here as a brunette) and then kill her off, but after that the movie is pretty aimless. Our hero is a detective who doesn’t enter the movie until the one hour mark, and the dead girl’s sister, the closest thing the movie has to a center, inexplicably disappears for a solid half hour or so in the middle of the film. This bizarre screenwriting choice DOES pay off though, as the sister approaches the detective near the end and asks for his help. The detective has no idea who she is though (hell, she had been gone so long that even I almost forgot), and just replies “Who are YOU? What’s your stake in all of this?” Hahahaha, holy shit. It’s like Baughn and Freed wrote a shitty movie just so they could use this amazingly funny line.
It just gets dumber as it goes too. At one point the killer walks right by the sister as if she wasn’t a concern, only to chase her throughout the town a few minutes later. He is also killed both times (any movie slasher worth his salt has two “death” scenes) by his own playfully arranged corpses, which is kind of funny in a way - it’s certainly the only movie I can recall in which the “Find The Dead Friends” routine has any sort of dramatic payoff. He props a body up for no reason, and it ends up killing him. Awesome.
There is also a ridiculous amount of padding (more ridiculous when you consider that the movie is 96 min long – it’s not like they needed to get the length to a more acceptable running time). Linnea Quigley shows up to show her tits and use them to bribe a teacher into passing music class, but there was already some other nudity, and the teacher is never killed, so why bother? We know the killer is only going after kids on the track team, so a 5 minute sequence of a music teacher looking around a boiler room is completely unnecessary.
Speaking of the track team, there’s another really stupid moment when the detective sees a photo of the team (the killer has the same photo, and when he kills someone he crosses out their picture. It’s like a murderous version of The Terminal) and says “Who are they?” Well, gee, let’s look at the photo. There’s the track coach with his stopwatch, surrounded by 6 guys/girls in track shirts, standing on a track. Obviously, they’re the art honors society, you fucking twit.
The coach, by the way, is played by Christopher George, apparently on a break from Italian horror movies. He’s possibly the biggest asshole coach in the history of movies (he makes Jon Voight’s character in Varsity Blues look cuddly), and he’s also the woodworking teacher for some reason (it never pays off either – no one is planed or chiseled to death). The movie tries really hard to make the audience think he’s the killer, to the point where nothing he does actually makes any sense once you learn he is in fact innocent. Still, George is always fun to watch, and I almost wish he WAS the killer, since it would give him more to do (it was one of his last roles).
So in short, I would just skip this one. It’s not cheesy enough to be fun (though there is a ridiculous theme song called “Graduation Day Blues”, not a patch on the MBVtheme but still entertaining), the gore is minimal, the killer’s outfit is dull (and barely seen anyway), and his identity reveal is anticlimactic since the character barely registered before that point.
Oh, P.S. – before the “Early Appearance Police” get on my ass, I should mention that Vanna White pops up as one of a pair of girls who always speak over one another and generally just annoy the audience.
What say you?
*This sequence reminded me of a story that scared me when I was younger, about a track star named Karen Ormsby who decided to kill herself during a race that she was losing. She did this by simply continuing to run straight off the track, over a field, and finally onto a bridge, which she jumped from. And she failed at this too, as she didn’t die but instead got paralyzed. Why this story scared me, I have no idea.
Lately, the New Beverly Midnights program has been showing almost a lot more 1980s horror movies (recent HMAD entries The Stepfather, The Gate, and The Keep were all part of the program), which is fine by me. Not only does it sort of open up my Sunday (per my 12:01am to 11:59pm ‘rule’, it counts for Sunday’s movie, not Saturday’s), but it offers me the premium setting to see movies like Waxwork, which I had missed back in the day and would now likely not enjoy as much if I had just watched it at home.
The finale of this movie is one of the more entertaining ones I can recall in my recent movie-watching memory. You get a bunch of old butler guys fighting a bunch of classic monsters, including The Phantom and an Audrey II, Zach Galligan using a sword, vampires, werewolves... I suspect that Die You Zombie Bastards’ Caleb Emerson is a fan of this film, judging from the similar kitchen sink approach to the finale of his film. It’s the type of battle that I could watch all day, and had the film not been so obviously low-budget, I would suspect that there was hours of alternate/unused footage from this fight sequence (as there would be nowadays).
The low budget occasionally hurts the film though. The editing is pretty bad at times (possibly the result of having to cut around a poor effect or something), and it’s kind of inert at times as well. For a while, it’s almost like an anthology movie, where someone gets trapped in a wax display and the movie becomes solely about them for a while. Plus each exhibit is different, so you get a werewolf fight in a log cabin, then a bunch of vampires in an old mansion, and later on a full blown zombie attack (for the sake of simplicity, I have ignored all of these subgenres and just settled for "Monster", as well as "Supernatural" due to the voodoo aspect of it all). And that’s all well and good, but after the first couple (werewolf and vampire) not much happens for a while. Also, the mini-movies aren’t all that exciting in themselves – the Marquis de Sade segment, for example, largely revolves around someone eating what looks like the cherry cobbler that comes in my Healthy Choice meal.
One thing I definitely love about it is that the hero is kind of a jerk, and not a very effective hero either. He’s played by Zach Galligan, and he’s a rich prick who has the butler light his cigarettes for him, and that doesn’t change a hell of a lot by the end (his butler gets killed, otherwise I bet he’d probably have him light his post-fight smoke too). He also doesn’t really DO a hell of a lot; most of his heroics revolve around saving his own ass, and the big battle at the end would probably go down the same way had he been somewhere else entirely.
I also love how ridiculously gory it is at times. Without the gore, the movie would probably be rated PG, as the premise is kind of goofy and the “romantic” elements are kept to a minimum (nice way of saying “no tits’). But Christ, when a vampire is dispatched, the red stuff sprays everywhere! A midget is also tossed into the Audrey II, and that alone makes the movie worth a watch.
And it belongs to the insanely high profile club of movies that feature a "funny" use of a Lesley Gore song (in this case, "Its My Party"). I wonder how Ms. Gore feels about the fact that there are probably hundreds of folks who learned of her existence solely via ironically placed songs in horror movies. She probably doesn’t really care.
I’ve had a bootleg copy of Seed for over a year now, but even though I am a minor fan of Boll’s (more the guy himself than his movies, though to be fair he’s been more or less improving, and I say without a trace of irony that Postalis hilarious and mostly great), I’ve never bothered to watch it. Part of that is due to my distaste of bootlegs (when I make an exception it’s usually for a film that doesn’t seem to be getting any sort of real release in the States, such as [Rec]), but partly because Boll always provides an entertaining commentary, and since the bootleg was obviously sans the alternate track, I knew I’d have to rent/buy it and watch it again anyway, so I figured I might as well wait.
Unfortunatly (sic), his commentary is surprisingly subdued, and he actually bails on it like 15 minutes before the film ends. On Bloodrayne II he got a phone call from his mother about a sale on bicycles or lawnmowers or something, but here, even though he warns us that he might take phone calls, he just sort of narrates the movie and names the actors on screen. He occasionally lapses into old-school Boll style ranting (he calls Saw II “a real piece of shit”), but he’s otherwise kind of mellow (in the same breath he praises Saw I and III). His critics are addressed, of course, but mainly to provide context – he wrote this (and Postal) as a response to all of the shit he takes, as well as what he saw was a severe decline in the human race as a whole. This may be the first commentary to point out that “the theme of the movie is that the earth would be better without humans.”
However, this movie is exceptionally dark, so I am glad I watched this surprisingly strong DVD transfer rather than some 2nd or 3rd generation copy. I seriously thought I was watching a Blu-Ray at times, as the image is incredibly sharp, with color details as vivid as I’ve ever seen on a standard def DVD. If I had to guess, I would say that this is due to the fact that some scenes are filmed in near total darkness, giving the DVD whizzes more disc space to use for the brighter scenes (colorful images take up more space than solid colors). One example is the (overlong) section of the film where a few cops go to arrest Seed in his remote home. At times, I couldn’t even tell what was happening since the image (by design) was showing so little of what was actually happening. Boll even points this out on the commentary, but he doesn’t explain why he went so overboard. Ironically enough, it reminded me of a video game such as Condemned (which also concerned a serial killer who lived at a remote farmhouse) or Dead Space, where you have a flashlight beam illuminating part of the screen and leaving everything else in total black darkness.
I say that’s ironic because this is Boll’s first non-video game movie for the States. He had made several in the early part of the decade, but since House of the Dead onward, all of his films have had some origin in a video game. This is a big part of why he is so vilified by internet critics, because he’s the only filmmaker besides Paul WS Anderson (no fanboy hero himself) to work so heavily in the video game adaptation subgenre. It’s not that his films are any worse (some are actually better, I would argue) than any other game based film such as Doom or Super Mario Bros, but it’s just a lot easier to single him out because he’s made so many.
And that’s a shame, because it led to this film being torn apart as well (even moreso than Bloodrayne, which has escaped the IMDb Bottom 100, where Seed still sits), despite the fact that it’s not bad at all. It’s definitely his most accomplished from a technical sense; it’s well shot and the production value is above average (especially for a period piece). For example, check out this newspaper clipping:
If you notice, the entire article is about the case. A lot of movies (even big budget ones) just write a headline and then the text is gibberish, but someone took the time to write out an entire piece that will be seen only by people with pause buttons.
Speaking of Sanderson, Boll claims that after shooting Seed he retired from the film business in order to raise his family and become a doctor. Which is a bummer, I liked his dedication to Boll (he’s made like 7 or 8 movies with him), and, as Seed proves, he can acquit himself nicely in whatever role Boll has him play He is also the one to tell me how to pronounce Uwe (“Oov-a”), so I am forever in his debt*.
The film also has a strong score, by frequent collaborator Jessica de Rooij. Just thought I’d mention that, and that she is apparently younger than me! I always think of composers as middle-aged (at least) for some reason.
So is this some sort of masterpiece? Well, no. It might be an “original” movie, but it sure seems like Boll watched Shockerand The Horror Show before he wrote it. It might be darker than either of those films (not in the technical sense, but in the more nihilistic, depressing sense – this may be Boll’s most German movie ever!), but the serial killer comes back after being electrocuted thing has obviously been done, and the aforementioned arrest sequence is very similar to the one in Shocker. Plus it’s very jarringly paced... much has been made about the film’s allegedly realistic premise (that if someone survives the electric chair they are pardoned), but Seed doesn’t go to the chair until around the hour mark, and it’s a 90 min movie. And the film’s centerpiece, a 5 minute continuous shot of a woman being beaten to death with a hammer, would probably be a lot more grueling if I had any idea who the hell she was.
Still, Boll set out to make a dark and depressing serial killer movie, and he succeeded. It may not be very good, but for once that is the fault of Boll the writer, not Boll the director/producer, and on that alone, it’s worth a look. Plus, I’ll take it over Heartstopperany day of the week.
One final note – I made Boll yawn. You know how if you hear/see someone yawn, you yawn right after (I bet you just yawned reading that!)? Well I yawned, and then 5 seconds later, Boll yawned on his track. I like that.
What say you?
*I went to the premiere of Bloodrayne (tickets were surprisingly easy to obtain!) and sat in front of Sanderson. Boll had him come up stage to join him for his typically self-deprecating and angry intro, and when he returned to his seat, he muttered “well that was embarrassing.” A similar scenario repeated when I saw Postal and sat in front of Boll’s lawyer. When Boll began to speak, the lawyer guy muttered “Oh please let him be good...” Hahahaha. You gotta love the guy.
A friend tried to get me to watch... fuck, I forget what it was, for today’s movie, but I told him that I absolutely had to watch the 2000 version of Ju-On so that I could write my review of Ju-On 2, which I watched yesterday (see the J2 review for an explanation). Which is funny, because yesterday, before all of this debacle, I was self-admiring myself for my completely lazy approach to what I watch (other than theatrical screenings, I never know what I’m going to watch until about 2 minutes before I watch it). I don’t like setting things in stone. Leave stone alone!
Anyway, now that I’ve watched this movie, and most of the sequel again, I kind of understand what is going on, but it’s still the least coherent version of the three (they got progressively easier to follow in release order; naturally, I saw them entirely backwards). Like most of the others, it’s not so much a typical narrative but instead a series of loosely connected stories revolving around a particular house in Japan. And I want to comment on that, because it’s kind of interesting how much the house truly has become the main character. You always hear filmmakers saying things like “Well, the (boat, house, can of soup, whatever) is just as much a character in this movie as (A list actor who is very much more of a character than any inanimate object).” It’s usually horseshit; the setting may be striking and well designed, but the human characters are always the most important thing. Here, not so much. The characters drift and out of the movie, most of them barely introduced before getting killed off, but at this point, I recognize just about every nook and cranny in this goddamn house. I almost suspect that if someone were to parody the movie (didn’t one of the Scary Movies do a spoof on it?) that I would instantly spot things that weren’t correct. “Hey, that wall should be tan, not light brown!”
It’s interesting to see how many things in this movie were incorporated into the US version of Grudge 2, such as the frying pan to the face and the cool scene where the girl reaches above a desk she is hiding under to get a phone. At least, I THINK that scene was in 2. I remember it happening to a hot girl that wasn’t Gellar, so it must have been, right? I dunno. Who cares. It’s a good scene, but also an annoying one, because she doesn’t answer the phone, and it continues its shrill ringing for the next 4-5 minutes. ANSWER IT!
The most frustrating thing about this movie (besides the fact that I watched half of it yesterday) was that I genuinely love the concept, and I think that if someone were to approach it as a typical narrative, it would be one of the better of its type. The US remake tried, but it still had that awkward Gellar-less middle in the high-rise. I mean, one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen in one of these occurs in this movie (when Toshio’s dad rips the teacher’s baby out of her womb, puts it in a bag, and proceeds to kick it down the street), but I was so disconnected from the characters and storylines that it didn’t even really affect me beyond going “Christ.”, which is my reaction to just about everything. Contrast that with say, Inside, where a similar idea was merely threatened, and I all but covered my eyes like a 10 year old girl.
This movie has one of the strangest plot elements I’ve seen in a while though: the idea that when someone enters the house, they should drink Sake to see if they will be affected by the ghost. I guess if they spit it out, they shouldn’t live there. Well, Sake sucks, and I’d rather spit it out than drink it no matter where I was. It doesn’t really pay off (as always, it just gets mentioned in another vignette), which sucks, because I am curious to see how it works. So what if the world’s biggest Sake lover comes into the house? Will he never die? I suspect some of this may have been mis-translated, but if not, it’s pretty odd, even within the logic of this nonsensical movie.
Well I still have the sequel to the 2003 Ju-On to watch, and of course Grudge 3 (US) is on the way. But that one is directed by Splinter’s Toby Wilkins, so I have hope for it. And apparently Ju-On 2 (2004) ends with the death of all humanity, so there’s something.
As I watched these on Fearnet, there are no extras or commentaries for me to poorly review. I kind of like this, four movies in a row without extras to take up lots of my time! I’ve even been able to watch some of my stories at work this week! 6 weeks’ ago’s episode of Heroes, here I come!
(Note, this review was written on the 21st, after a 2nd viewing)
I’ve always been an advocate for watching movies in order; there’s nothing worse than seeing a lousy remake first and spoiling the original’s effectiveness, or seeing a sequel with revelations that don’t resonate as much as they would had I already seen the first film. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that’s been so utterly incomprehensible as Ju-On 2 was to me, having not seen the first one, even though I thought I did. See, I thought I had seen “the original” Ju-On, but I had forgotten that that movie was itself a remake, of a movie from 2000. Had I paid attention to the year of release, I would have realized that and watched the 2000 one first and saved myself a heap of time, not to mention probably a lot of head-scratching for the readers. So, to sum up, I was watching the sequel to a film I had seen two remakes of, but not the original that all of its storylines was following.
And to top it off, seeing the original today didn’t help much, because even that one didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. But coherency has never been the strong suit of any entry in this convoluted franchise, so that wasn’t really a surprise. However, at least now I have a better grasp on the material, so my review won’t be too ignorant. Hate to make anyone mad.
I think my biggest problem with this subgenre is that I am first and foremost a story/character guy. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy splatter movies or Friday the 13th sequels, but those aren’t really even TRYING to scare me. These movies, however, are designed to scare an audience, and I simply can’t get scared when I don’t know who the people are or even what exactly is going on. I mean, sure, there are some nice visuals and the odd creepy image here and there, but at the end of the day, there is precious little of my time spent feeling any sort of suspense or caring whether or not the characters survive.
And the Ju-On films in particular suffer from this feeling, because they are borderline anthology movies, which by design almost never have really well-rounded characters and deliberately plotted stories. Every 10-15 min, someone dies, and then a new character is introduced. They all have some ties to the house (they lived there, they used to live there, they are the real estate folks trying to sell it, they walked by it... any excuse seems to enrage the ghost(s) that live there), but otherwise the stories have no real connection. Characters are mentioned, but they never interact with the ones from the other stories (usually because they are dead). This presents another problem – a lot of them have very similar names (hey-o, ignorant American excuses coming in!), like Kayako and Kyoko, and the names are often said when those characters aren’t present. People will say “Do you know Kayako?”, but when Kayako is actually in the scene, no one says “Hey, Kayako!” So it becomes hard to match faces to names.
Another language problem – the subtitles are pretty good, even repeating things over and over when it’s no longer necessary (such as when a guy is looking for Toshio, the cat-sounding little boy, and says his name about twenty times in a row), but they often skip translating written things. So we’ll have a scene where a guy is stunned to learn something from a file or a piece of mail, and the subs don’t explain what he is reading.
I also take issue with any film that begins with the final half hour of the previous film. A flashback is one thing, and even helpful when you have something this baffling, but the flashback/recycled footage segment is almost as long as the new footage segment! Silent Night Deadly Night 2 is nothing compared to this. And since they came out in the same year, it’s a wonder why they didn’t just combine the two films into one for Stateside release.
Anyway, since the films (and in turn, my reviews) are so intertwined, head on over to the Ju-On review (the 2000 version) for more thoughts. My final word on this one though? It’s more like Ju-On 1.5 rather than a sequel, but if you dig these movies, I’m sure there’s plenty to enjoy (the ending is actually pretty creepy, even if, again, it makes no sense without context of the other movies).
Well, so far I am 0-2 on Fearnet choices (not counting a viewing of Midnight Meat Train, which is airing “exclusive” prior to its DVD release). Granted, I don’t expect the greatest movies of all time (ones I haven’t seen, at that) to be airing for free, buried in the Time Warner cable menus, but I see some other decent stuff in there, like Friday the 13th Part VI (my favorite of the series, in fact) and The Eye 2, so why the fuck do I keep watching shit like Leprechaun in the Hood and now The Graveyard, which managed to be one of dullest slasher movies I’ve ever seen?
The most brilliant thing about Screamis that they pretty much tell you right off the bat that Billy is the killer, but you spend the entire movie saying “No way, it can’t be that obvious, it has to be so and so”. Apparently, screenwriter Michael Furst didn’t take any cues from that movie, or any other good slashers, since HIS killer is possibly the most obvious in movie history. The whole movie’s a sort of Prom Night ripoff in Friday the 13th’s setting, with a prank going wrong and then everyone going back to the camp (inexplicably located next to a graveyard) 5 years later for a reunion. So who is the killer? The guy who took the blame for the death and just got out of prison? The creepy friend who harbors an unrequited crush on one of the girls? Maybe the jilted girlfriend who decided to join the party at the last minute? Of course not. None of those would be viable choices, because it’s just lazy red herring screenwriting at its “finest” on display. And thus, anyone who has ever seen a single horror movie in his life (you might not even need that much to qualify) would instantly know that the killer is the “cook” who has been hired to “take care” of the group while they are camping.
Allow me to point out a few things here:
1. We have to believe that a bunch of grown men and women in the woods would need to hire a guy to cook for them in the first place. 2. The killer’s plan involves killing the real cook – so not only is the whole idiotic “cook” notion not even made up (they could have just run into the guy there and he could have said he was the owner’s son or some shit), it would only work if no one ever actually saw what he looked like. And, presumably, the killer would have to know how to cook better than any of them to sell his ruse. 3. Even if for some reason the killer’s identity wasn’t glaringly obvious, they actually show the real cook being killed! The LEAST they could have done is just have someone find the body late in the film and discover that their “cook” wasn’t who he said he was.
But of course, if the movie was set up like that, we’d lose on what may be the LEAST plausible thing in the entire movie: the requisite scene where an innocent group member is blamed for a killing by the town sheriff. Sheriff puts the guy in cuffs and calls in his ID. His dispatcher, almost instantly, comes back with the fact that the guy is on parole, and the crime was manslaughter. Yet, dispatcher DOESN’T have the date of parole (which would prove his innocence, since the cook was killed like 3 days ago, even though we saw it happen earlier that day; this particular plot hole is one that I just ignored for the sake of making fun of other stuff), nor the nature of his “crime” (i.e. an accidental death). Why would whatever info the dispatcher got that included his crime and parole status skip over that other stuff? Oh, to provide “tension!” Fuck you, movie.
Another nonsensical blunder of this setup is that the guy kills everyone off in the first hour, and since we know the guy in jail is innocent, this doesn’t even leave any other suspects. Yet there’s about 10-15 min worth of padding until he finally reveals himself as the killer to our Final Girl. If nothing else, a whodunit movie lives and dies on its ability to keep at least two options available up until the actual reveal (best way is to have actual killer kill the other possible suspect).
Let’s see, what else sucked... the direction was terrible, and I later learned that the director was the same soulless asshat responsible for A Dead Calling: one Michael Feifer. Since the movie is filmed entirely at Sable Ranch and it makes absolutely no sense for any of the group to go there again, I am guessing that, like the other movie, he simply had the location and jotted down a story that would fit there on a pizza box. I swear, I have to start remembering these assholes’ names so I know to avoid their other garbage.
And the ways that Feifer/Furst kept the movie “moving” insulted not just my intelligence, but the intelligence of the Hungry Man Meal I was eating at the time; like when one of the girls’ ex girlfriend (hey-o!) shows up to give the “you belong to me!” template speech of crazy girlfriend characters. She literally pops in out of nowhere, gets told to go home, and is then killed. Of course, since I already knew the guy’s identity, this also made zero sense, because he’s with the other girls at the time in the middle of the woods. So in order for him to go kill the lesbian chick, he has to leave our hero girls alone for like 20 minutes to pull it off (this assumes he had his lame costume on him, if not, he’d need probably another 10 to go back to his cabin and get it). These type of plot holes aren’t uncommon in whodunit slashers, but usually you don’t notice them AS THEY ARE OCCURRING. Again, this is what happens when you all but name the killer character “The Killer”.
Also, the movie kills some time (for an 80 minute movie with credits, there’s a shitload of padding) by having the parolee play a prank on the others with the help of one of the other guys. Asshole, you just got out of jail after 5 years because your boring ass pranks got someone killed! Plus, it’s hinted that the guys set it up WHILE HE WAS STILL IN JAIL! Jesus fucking Christ, the more I think about this movie, the fucking stupider it seems.
The gore sucks too. And there’s occasional nudity, but not from co-star Trish Coren, who is the only person in the movie that I recognized (she was in Booand Headless Horseman), so that was a letdown too. The movie even stops cold to have her and her ex start to fool around (more padding that makes no sense at all), but then they get interrupted right as she’s about to disrobe. All this for a character introduced as a slut. Way to piss me off even more.
Anyone want to guess who distributed this horseshit? It rhymes with Brian’s Hate.
I remember it like it was this past Spring. I was at the Fangoria convention, and Tony Timpone announced the next thing up was some behind the scenes footage of something called Twilight. All the girls shrieked. I had to ask what the hell it was. What I saw was just a bunch of goofy looking teens with bad dye jobs running around the woods and being flung around in front of greenscreens. It looked suspiciously similar to the BtS stuff I watched on the DVD for Blood and Chocolate. But none of the females seemed to care; to them this was like, I dunno, me watching Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman perform "For Crying Out Loud" in my living room.
Since then I’ve seemingly been unable to escape the damn thing: my wife and most of her local friends are obsessed, my attempts to see the singer of one of my favorite bands (Blue October) playing acoustic were thwarted because his tour was actually just promoting the newest book, and a good friend of mine is currently making a mini version of it with puppets for some goddamn reason. My only interest, of course: seeing it and posting a review. Since it seems anything Twilight-related is devoured by its fans, a review would drive traffic to my site, and maybe inspire some of those readers to buy a few things from Amazon. Win-win-win!
So, penis firmly tucked between my legs, I actually GOT OUT OF WORK so I could attend an early screening tonight. But my reasons were twofold. One was the greedy “reviews = possible cash” excuse. But the other was that I figured that the press crowd would be far less annoying than an opening night crowd. See, if you didn't know, Twilight fans tend to be... well, disruptive in their excitement (to put it nicely. To put it correctly - they're fucking annoying). I learned this the hard way, when a wonderful new Blue October song was completely ruined by some idiot girl yelling "I LOVE EDWARD!!!!" in the middle of its first performance, followed by like 20 seconds of agreeable shrieking and cheering. So I figured the movie would be no different.
Well, no such luck, it was only about half press. The other half was regular folks; radio station winners, theater giveaways, etc. Unsurprisingly, this section of the theater was made up entirely of the 15-16 year old girls I was there to avoid. Oh well.
(I swear, I’ll get to the movie review eventually – if you’re new to the site, this is sort of the norm with me)
Because, yeah, it actually ain’t all that bad. There was about 20-25 straight minutes where I was actively enjoying the film and giving a shit about the characters (that would be pretty much from the moment Bella visits the Cullen home, up until the post-baseball game) without getting bored, or worse, annoyed by audience members. I could care less about any of the romantic shit (especially when the love story kicks off with a scene in which the male is supposed to be overcome by lust and hunger and LOVE!... but on film it just looks like he’s getting a boner), but put some vampires on screen and I’m happy, even if they’re not doing much. I liked that the family (save one “sister”, can’t recall her name) were accepting of Bella, and how they all rallied to protect her when the bad vampire guys showed up. In fact, if I feel qualified to make any sort of criticism on the plot, it’s that the more interesting/unique aspects (i.e. the vampire family, and especially the murderous villains) took way too much of a backseat to the rather generic romantic stuff.
I mean, I honestly don’t get what has set off so many young ladies on this particular love story. To me it just seemed like Buffy/Angel crossed with Liz/Max (that would be Roswell), without anything unique to add to it. Like Angel, Edward can’t fuck her or else he’ll... I dunno, I missed the explanation for that. He can’t, that’s all I need to know right now. And like Liz and Max, she is torn between her love of the guy and the risk of him being exposed if he starts doing more human type things. You want true romanticism mixed with sci-fi/fantasy? Check out Ludo’s EP “The Broken Bride”. That shit is EPIC. And you know, maybe the book has more stuff that the film dropped, but as far as the film goes, there was nothing unique about their romance, which I thought was a shame since so much of the vampire mythos was pretty original.
For starters, sunlight has no harmful effect on them. Instead, they just... sparkle? It’s kind of goofy, but whatever, it’s unique, I’ll give it that much. And if any of the other traditional weapons have any effect (garlic, crosses, etc) no mention is made of it. Also, they don’t get long teeth (interestingly, the only guy who has pointy teeth is this Jacob dude, who I understand is or at least becomes a werewolf later on, or something?). And I love the scene where they play baseball; using their vampire powers to dive around and what not. It’s a great scene, and it actually has a sense of excitement that was missing from the Quidditch scenes in the first couple Harry Potter movies (I’m actually kind of glad they stopped bothering with them).
Stewart aside, the casting agent apparently went out of his/her away to ensure the guys in the crowd had plenty to look at as well. Nikki Reed, Ashley Greene, and Rachelle Lefevre all instantly earned their place in the Hot Vampire Chick Hall of Fame (run by one Satanico Pandemonium), and Stewart’s best friend (Anna Kendrick) is pretty cute too. Hell even the vampire mom (Elizabeth Reaser) is pretty smashable. None of them get much screentime, since Stewart is the front and center of all but two scenes in the film, but there’s nothing wrong with that either. On that note - Greene, as the mind-reading vampire Alice... I guarantee I’ll watch the sequel if she’s given a bigger role.
I also dug the dad, played by Billy Burke, who was also a (actually, THE) highlight of Untraceable. While the rest of the audience laughed constantly throughout the movie, at things like the sight of Bella wearing a cast or a girl trying on a dress, I only legit laughed twice in the movie. The first was when Bella has Edward come over for the first time, something that occurs as Burke is cleaning a shotgun (he’s the sheriff). She asks if he can come in (oh yeah, vamps don’t need to be invited either I guess, since Edward just watches her sleep sometimes. Guy’s kind of creepy), and he pumps the gun and says “bring him in!”. It’s a generic gag, but Burke totally sells it.
The other laugh I got was when Edward shows her a giant mural made out of all the graduation caps that he and his brothers and sisters had amassed over the years. It’s a hilarious sight gag, but at the same time, it just brought to mind a slight plot hole that I didn’t quite get: the fact that they all go to school. I suppose that they need to “keep up appearances” so that they avoid suspicion, but they don’t talk to anyone else at the school, and even though they are technically stepsiblings, two of them are dating (which the rest of the school knows), so they stick out anyway. Plus, they seemingly live in the middle of nowhere (and not even technically in the school’s town), so if they were just “home-schooled”, wouldn’t that be LESS suspicious than a bunch of pale faced kids who keep to themselves and engage in light incest? They are also ALL absent whenever it’s actually sunny out, another thing that I think would cause more suspicion than it would theoretically prevent.
Another thing I was pleasantly surprised by was the almost total lack of music. Edward plays the piano, and there’s occasional score (actually quite good, courtesy of Coen brothers regular Carter Burwell), but until the final scene at the prom, there isn’t a single pop song on the soundtrack. Since the soundtrack went #1, and Meyer has posted “soundtracks” for all of the books (songs that she was inspired by, or listened to while she wrote), I thought for sure that popular music would be a big part of the film. Not that I’m some music snob by any means (on the contrary, a quick glance at the soundtrack’s tracklist revealed I already had a lot of the albums that the older songs originally came from), but since the crowd was taking me out of the movie enough as it was, I was thankful that Linkin Park and Paramore weren’t doing the same.
I’ve never seen any of Catherine Hardwicke’s other films, and this film didn’t really inspire me to do so anytime soon. It’s technically proficient, but her hand-held, small zoom “indie” style filmmaking felt very much out of place at times, which suggests that she is someone who would rather do her own thing (her other movies were legit indies) than do what is right for the story. It also hurts the romance angle; it’s supposed to be like, the strongest love of all time or whatever, and yet everything about it feels small and minor. I already mentioned the boner, but further scenes feel the same way; it never feels like more than a regular crush. Michael Bay can make a couple of guys taking medical exams seem exciting; why can’t Ms. Hardwicke make taboo love feel the same way?
My only other issue is that the movie had too many things that seemed like it was just setting up a sequel. The werewolf/Indian guys show up just long enough to foreshadow their eventual importance (without ever having any sort of bearing on THIS movie), and the final shot of the film shows the bad vampire chick watching them dance at the prom (something entirely unnecessary, if you ask me – a sequel could easily just flashback to show she was there). The bad guys aren’t even really introduced until the end of the second act, which is also a bit annoying. Maybe it’s like that in the book too, but it’s kind of hard to really fear for Bella’s life when it’s being threatened by someone we don’t know. It would be like if we never saw Darth Vader until he fought Obi Wan in New Hope. Christ, Edward posed more of a threat to her with all his silly “Spider Monkey”/tree jumping stuff. She could fall! I would have liked to have seen the “setup” elements dropped entirely in favor of further developing the threats in THIS movie.
For no reason I’d like to point out that both of Bella’s parents are played by 24 vets. Burke was the psychotic Gary from season 2, and her mom is played by Sarah Clarke (another MILF), aka the villainous Nina Myers. I miss 24.
So I dunno. Same deal as Prom Night (oh yeah, my man Rick, or Kellan Lutz as he’d probably rather be known, is in this movie too!): it’s not that I loved the movie, but I could never actually hate something that is designed for a completely different audience. Would I rather watch a bunch of vampires tear each other apart? Of course. But, I say again, I try to judge a movie based on how well it presents the story it’s trying to tell. It would be easy for me to write “Twilight sucks! Down with effeminate PG-13 vampires!”, but it’s not like the movie is being sold as anything BUT a PG-13 vampire love story, and no one forced me to watch it. I get what I don’t have to pay for.
Besides, I can appreciate that my opinion on it simply doesn’t really matter to the die-hard fans, so might as well just be honest for the folks that read this site regularly, because I’m sure a few of them will end up seeing it for whatever reason. If you think less of me for not slamming it, then fine. But think about it: if a 14 year old kid tells me that Dawn of the Dead sucks, I’m not going to listen to him/her, so why should the reverse be any different? Plus, I defy anyone to convince me that the gory, R-rated Lost Boys 2 is better than this in any way shape or form.
In short: If a 15 year old girl sees this movie and hates it, then the movie has failed. But if a 28 year old man sees it and doesn’t fall asleep, and even becomes a bit Twi-curious in the process (does the blond vampire like, kill everyone at the prom? And does the dad ever find out that the dude’s a vampire but become an ally, a la the Sheriff in Roswell?), then I guess the movie is probably doing its job. And obsessive as they may be, I do think anything that gets teens to read is fine by me. Just shut the fuck up in the movie theater.
The reason I have been skipping over Dark Floors as I made my way through the Ghost House Underground set is, as usual for me, a lame one: it had the most extra features. Since I’m still not completely caught up from the madness of October, I have been avoiding movies that have extensive features, due to my OCD need to watch them all before I write the review (especially for rentals, as I won’t have a chance to catch up on them later on). But had I known about the awesomeness of LORDI, I would have probably watched it first. Hell I may have bought it on principle.
Much like Gwar, Lordi is a metal band that sticks out from their peers by dressing up like monsters on stage and in any sort of promotional capacity. This results in what may be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen on an extra feature, a press conference with the film’s director, two of the stars, and five grown men (oh wait, one’s a girl) in full monster makeup, sitting at a table and answering traditional questions. Even funnier, they don’t TALK like monsters, if anything they sound like meek businessmen. So you see this monkey man/devil whatever thing talking about when their next album will be released. It’s bliss. There are also a couple of music videos that are equally awesome, and a behind the scenes montage which is also inadvertently hilarious. It starts off like the usual boring piece, but then it just becomes a bunch of random BtS footage sans narration or talking head interviews. And then what has to be the band’s awesomest song, “Beast Loose In Paradise” just starts playing over it in its entirety before the movie’s ending is shown in full. That’s it.
Listen to this while you read!
I talk about the extras first because they are fare more entertaining than the movie itself. For something subtitled “The Lordi Motion Picture” (I guess they are a pessimistic group to use “The” instead of “A”), Lordi sure is absent for a lot of it. Each member has like one scene (and none of them are ever seen together), and they don’t even really seem to fit with the film’s general concept. Christ, Mr. Lordi (the band’s singer) didn’t even film his scene in the same building – the commentary reveals all of his shots were done on a studio set later on. And one could argue that the less you see a monster in a studded leather coat running around, the better, but since the movie doesn’t make a lick of sense, I say go all out.
For the record, the only one that truly looks like a goofy guy from a rock band and not an actual monster is Mr. Lordi, and since he has the least amount of screentime of the five, it’s not too much of a problem, but still, I think by keeping their appearances so brief, they actually seem MORE ridiculous. You never get a chance to sort of get used to the idea that these particular monsters are a bit flamboyant. Having never heard of the band until I popped in the DVD, maybe I am the exception to the rule, but when one of them busts through a wall, I wasn’t seeing Ox the bass player, I was seeing a monster bust through a wall. And I wanted to see him more.
(I have no idea if Ox is the bass player, or even the one who came through the wall, but you know what I mean)
So Lordi’s combined screentime is probably less than 10 minutes, what do we get instead? Christ, what DON’T we get? Ghosts, zombies, monsters... and maybe it got edited or I just missed it, but since the end credits point out that no animals were harmed, I guess there were some rabid dogs or whatever in there too. Plus, it all starts when the elevator breaks down, so it’s kind of a Breakdown/Survival movie too. And then there’s all the supernatural stuff. None of it is ever explained, and much like Somebody Help Me, the movie’s biggest blunder is ultimately the fact that the writers seemingly couldn’t decide on a genre.
On top of all that, the movie is ultimately in the vein of Jacob’s Ladder, Silent Hill, and most closely, The Sickhouse. It’s NOT all a dream, as Mr Lordi points out in the commentary (yet refuses to explain what it actually is, which puts him in the same group as douchebag fans of Donnie Darko), but rather some sort of moebius strip narrative, from the POV of a little autistic girl.
From what I can sort of gather, she freaks out at the beginning of the film because she keeps going through this ordeal over and over, and knows that getting on the elevator will start it up again. And she seemingly thinks that the key to escape lies in what color of crayon she uses. So at the beginning, she tries red (and thus says “I want the red crayon!” over and over), and that doesn’t work, so the end of the movie, when it all starts again, she tries blue. Again, this is just what I came up with for an explanation; the movie sure as hell didn’t bother. Feel free to post your own conclusions, as long as it’s not “it was all a dream”, because Mr. Lordi said it wasn’t. And he should know, it’s his storyline.
Back to the girl and her autism, she seemingly took her inspiration from Miko Hughes’ performance in the underwhelming Bruce Willis movie Mercury Rising. I half expected her to yell out “Simon is home!” And her “red crayon” nonsense is excruciating; she must say it more in the first ten minutes than Dustin Hoffman says “definitely” in the entirety of Rain Man.
Still, the movie has an undeniable appeal, and even though it’s slow at times, and offers almost zero gore (or even Lordi songs – the only one is during the end credits; instead we get a score that is mostly stolen from Nightmare on Elm St), I still enjoyed watching it, mainly because it stubbornly refused to make any goddamn sense. But also, the parallel timeline aspect of the story had some really cool payoffs, like when the hero realizes that he is the one who fired the bullet that grazed his buddy earlier in the film. It’s sort of like when you play Portal and you see yourself entering a portal from the other end of the room. It’s also incredibly well shot and looks like it cost a lot more than it did.
I also want to point out that, like Room 205, the back of the DVD explains far more than is necessary to describe the movie. I tried getting my wife to watch it with me and she literally got bored just listening to me read the thing. Think I’m joking?
“Sarah is a diseased little girl whose father is worried about her health. Concerned for her after near-fatal accident with a hospital scanning device, the father decides to immediately remove his daughter from the institution. With his daughter and her freaky monster drawings in hand, he makes way for the nearest elevator, but it breaks down, trapping them with others. Yet, the incident...”
Yeah, there’s more. It eventually gets around to the horror part.
I mean, for the love of Christ, what is so hard about this? “A man and his daughter are trapped in a hospital with four other strangers. At first it seems they have survived a disaster, but they soon discover that they are not alone.” Done. Unless the movie is a documentary about hospital equipment, or about a child prodigy artist, the terms “hospital scanning device” or “freaky monster drawings” should never appear in a plot synopsis. Christ, even a review would have glossed over those details, unless they were being used as examples for the terrible plot synopsis (see what I did there?).
The needless over-explanation doesn’t stop there either. The opening credits (which are all out of traditional order) include what I believe is the first full sentence in opening credit history: “The story is based on an original idea by Mr Lordi and Pete Riski”. Well that’s nice. I wish all of the credits were so polite. “The wonderful costumes you see were designed by JoJo Costumeface.” “Do you like the score? It was composed by Mark Musichead!”
Speaking of Riski and Lordi’s collaboration, their commentary is pretty interesting, because it seems like Riski is about 2 seconds away from telling Mr. Lordi to shut the fuck up throughout the entire thing (probably because he keeps making bad jokes and saying “...or was it?” whenever a plot point is explained). For example, during Mr. Lordi’s one scene, in which his dialogue is just a bunch of growls, he keeps saying the “real” lines, which results in Riski mocking his poor attempt at humor. He’s like “Oh I get it, you’re doing the dialogue.” Hahaha. Passive aggressive commentaries rule.
So I dunno. The movie kind of sucks since it’s not scary, isn’t gory, and doesn’t make a lick of sense, but the sheer ridiculousness of the whole endeavor amused me. And simply putting the DVD in is rewarded with the music videos and performance footage, so do that, and then if there’s time, watch the movie for the hell of it!
I’m about to kick the virtual asses of both Blockbuster and Netflix. I was all set to watch Argento's Cat O’Nine Tails today, but when I put the disc in (from Netflix) I discovered it was some full frame VHS transfer bootleg shit, despite the website’s promise that it was an anamorphic transfer of the 2.35:1 image. So I did what any man would do: took it out of the player and flung it at the nearest wall, and then put in Blockbuster’s copy of Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To. And while it was at least letterboxed (but not anamorphic), it was NOT the special edition version that the site advertised. What the fuck?
But since the movies from the two days before had tracks I had yet to listen to, I guess I could use the break. On the other hand, I would have really liked to have heard Cohen’s thoughts on the film, since it gets so needlessly baffling as it goes on, and seemingly ends because the money ran out, not because the story (such as it is) had reached any sort of narrative endpoint. Oh well.
While certainly no disaster like Special Effects, the movie is still ultimately disappointing in the same way, because Cohen fails to capitalize on his terrific setup: a bunch of folks are killing people at random, and our hero - apparently the only cop in NY - discovers that they are all saying the same thing right before they die (in an amazing coincidence, they say the movie’s title!). Unlike Effects, it as at least interesting for the most part, but still, the final half hour of this film felt like it was missing every other scene, and by the time the movie got around to revealing that our hero is the result of a virgin birth and thus part alien, I actually thought I had fallen asleep and missed something.
Also, unlike the best Cohen films, there’s a complete lack of humor. An easy jab at the Irish is about the closest thing the movie offers to a joke, and even the social commentary seems to be presented without a sarcastic viewpoint.
Still, it’s worth a look, due to the utter batshittedness of it all. Plus, it’s fun to see future stars in bit roles. Sylvia Sidney, aka “the really old woman” in a ton of movies (Beetlejuice, for one) shows up, only somewhat old here. And Andy Kaufman plays a cop who falls under the alien/hippie thing’s spell. And the cult leader (an androgynous alien, obviously) looks exactly like the “White Gold” guy from the Milk ads, so that gave me a laugh.
Plus, while its never out and out horror, there are still a couple of unnerving sequences that stuck out, such as when the hero (I can’t remember his name for the life of me) is attacked on the stairs by a knife wielding woman. There’s also a really disturbing bit where he talks to a dad who just killed his whole family; the guy matter of factly describes how he tricked his daughter into coming out of hiding so he could blow her away. Creepy.
I also like how the movie has such a strong disdain for hippies. The cop begins describing a guy, and says “He had shoulder length hair...”, to which the witness immediately replies “Oh no, he wouldn’t hang around with anyone like that!” Since my hair is approaching said length (you know life is hectic when a trip to Supercuts has become a “rainy day” activity), I found this kind of amusing, and not just because it dated the movie.
Not sure what else the real DVD had for features, but this one has The Ghost on the other side. So I guess which version you seek depends on what you want: insight into the film itself, or a run of the mill Barbara Steele film?
At long last, a film in the Ghost House Underground series (besides Last House in the Woods, which I saw a while ago, pre GHU) that I can wholeheartedly recommend! The Substitute (Danish: Vikaren) is a bit light on the horror stuff (the R is only for language, and I honestly can’t even recall any F bombs), but it’s a super fun movie that delivers a lot of the promise that The Faculty squandered on “hip” self-referential dialogue and WB casting that was all the rage back in 1998.
Essentially a more serious, live action episode of South Park, the movie is about a substitute who is really an alien. And like a lot of SPs, the kids catch on and try to stop her, and their parents are morons who are easily swayed by whatever they are told. This leads to what is possibly the best scene in the movie; the teacher is taking them on a “field trip” and the kids are all crying and trying to run away as their clueless parents drag them onto the bus.
But what’s awesome about the movie as a whole is that there is none of the usual “reveal” shit; nor does the sub even really try to hide her non-human nature. In her first meeting with the kids, she berates them, displays superhuman intelligence, acts bizarrely... I love that writer/director Ole Bornedal just got right to the goddamn point. Which makes the lack of violence/gore even more impressive; the movie feels fast paced despite the fact that there is no action whatsoever until the final 10 minutes (and even that is hardly a big spectacle). I don’t need to “learn” that she is an alien halfway through the movie; that’s a plot point that would have been spoiled by any trailer or plot synopsis anyway.
I also loved the title character, because she reminded me of a character Kristen Wiig might play on SNL. I love Ms. (it IS just Ms, right? Please?) Wiig, because not only is she cute, she is also goddamn hilarious, and has turned passive aggressive behavior into something of an art form (see: Knocked Up). There are a couple of bits in the movie that I could perfectly see Wiig playing the role in the eventual remake (the movie is in Danish, so there MUST be a remake for us stupid Americans, right Hollywood?), such as the end when she is attempting to reason with our hero. First she tries to use his mother issues (his mom is dead) to win him over, and then gives up and admits she came on too strong. It’s fucking hilarious. Oddly enough, whoever did the dubbing for the character on the English track sounds exactly like Wiig’s Suzie Orman impression.
I also liked that the movie was kind of sad. The main kid misses his mom, but his dad gets plenty of choice moments as a grieving and now single father. Bornedal keeps the balance perfect throughout the film, it never gets too funny that you can’t accept the serious parts, and it never gets too serious that the funny bits seem out of place.
And longtime HMAD readers will be happy to know that the image seen on the cover of A Brush With Death (one of my more vicious reviews) reflects a scene in this movie. Since it didn’t correlate to a goddamn thing seen in that piece of shit, I wish Lionsgate would just use the cover again for this, especially since THIS cover makes it look like a zombie children movie. Goddammit Lionsgate, even when I really like a movie you have to go and fuck it up!
Bornedal contributes a commentary, and it’s not the best track ever, but it’s worth a listen if you have the time. He even points out that he’s kind of boring and calls anyone who listens to the whole thing a “hero” (NOW I AM REALLY A RUSSIAN HEROOOOO!), so at least he’s up front about it. It will also allow you to listen to the English dub (please don’t watch the dub version for when you watch the movie itself), which is terrible and thus amusing. And he takes a minute to knock the Silent Hill movie, so that’s cool.
Oh, I almost forgot: the alien transformation scene is fucking awesome too. It sort of builds itself out of a sphere (not too Phantasm-y though). Kickass.
It’s bad enough that Renny Harlin didn’t address the nature of his involvement with Exorcist: The Beginning, but it’s downright sinful that Paul Schrader never addresses all the reshoots and such on the commentary for Dominion: Prequel To The Exorcist, which was the original version that got completely reshot by Harlin and co. Sure, 2 hours of bitching would get annoying, but to completely ignore it is just odd. Then again, the track is about half silence, so maybe he got edited. Who knows?
What matters is the film, and maybe it’s just because I’ve been led to believe that it was terrible, but I thought it was pretty good. The biggest problem with it is that it’s slow. That worked for the first film, but by now, anyone sitting down kind of knows that they are in a horror movie, so there’s no need to kind of spring it as a “surprise” halfway through. Even the original had a couple of odd moments to let you know things were off-kilter (plus the freaky prologue in Iraq), but here it’s almost like they were trying to make you think you weren’t watching an Exorcist movie. In that respect, I can almost side with the producers.
But otherwise, on the whole it works better than Harlin’s (which I also think gets more shit than it deserves). It’s slow, sure, but it’s the good kind of slow that draws you in. Luckily, the danger is kept largely away from Merrin, putting instead Father Francis (played by the Zach Gilford-y Gabriel Mann here, in Harlin’s the role was recast) in harm’s way when shit hits the fan. Since the series has so many characters of equal importance, it’s not a “given” that the character will die simply because he wasn’t around for any of the sequels (as opposed to say, Qui Gon Jinn), and thus his fate is not sealed by our knowledge of what comes “later”.
It’s interesting to see how the films share certain, almost random similarities. The colonel guy’s scenes are all completely different, yet he still has a butterfly collection. And the odd bit of dialogue heard here found its way into Harlin’s version; the lines about the date in which the church was built (and subsequently covered) are almost verbatim in the two films. And they both have shitty CGI hyenas (so stop blaming Harlin for those!).
Despite all the superfluous changes (plotwise, and even structurally, the movies are a lot more alike than I expected, and I suspect if Mann was around for the reshoots, there would have been a lot more of Schrader’s footage in the Harlin version), the biggest is actually Stellan Skarsgard’s performance. Here he is genuinely acting, and doing a good job playing a man without direction or faith. In Harlin’s, whether it was an acting choice, a lack of discipline from Harlin, or simple disgruntled behavior, he just seems like an asshole. There’s a great scene here in which Father Francis admonishes him for trying to spread his lack of faith to others, and also a key moment when someone presents him with the age-old argument against God/Jesus: “Would such a great god allow this to happen?” and he simply mutters “Yes.” It’s good stuff, and while I admit to zoning out at times (on both films) I don’t recall anything that powerful in the Harlin film. And even if it was there, Skarsgard simply didn’t deliver the same way. Basically, the whole “priest has to regain his faith” story, used in a lot of movies (particularly horror) seemed a lot less generic in this version.
And there are still some decent scary moments. I particularly like when Merrin is finally doing the exorcism and the demon just sort of glides behind him, in and out of frame. Also, there are more genuinely horrific moments here; the kid being torn apart by hyenas in the Harlin version was more funny than anything, but I sure as hell didn’t laugh when one of the native guys wipes out a classroom of children in an attempt to keep “Jesus” from spreading in this one.
Now I basically wish I saw the film in production order (I watched Harlin’s cut first for the dumbest excuse ever – it was shorter. By three lousy minutes. Yeah, not too much of a good judgment caller), as the effectiveness of the story (still minor compared to Friedkin’s film) was dulled by watching a subpar version first. If you’ve never seen either, please start with Schrader’s.
Like the other one, extras are understandably slim, since Warner seems to be content with spinning their mishandling of the film (they didn’t like Schrader’s cut because it lacked gore – but they are the ones who initially approved the gore-less script!) rather than just being upfront with a situation everyone knows about anyway. So we get a dull commentary, and instead of a bland EPK, we get a bland collection of deleted scenes (none essential) with no insight as to why they were removed.
So now I’ve gone through the entire box set, and as expected, I needn’t have bothered buying it, since I already owned the original and that is the only one I’ll probably ever bother to watch again (p.s. let’s see a Blu-ray, Warner!). I find the behind the scenes stories far more interesting than the result of any of the sequels, but none of the DVDs address any of this at all. Which I don’t understand; the only people who WATCH extra features anymore (the novelty has long since worn off) are film geeks who all know damn well about the problems with all of the films, so why try to pretend that no problems existed? Even the equally lame Friday the 13th box from Paramount has some occasional juicy dirt on the commentary tracks.
You really can’t go wrong with Vincent Price. Even a rather dull movie like Shock can manage to seem exciting when Price is onscreen. Honestly, whenever the movie shifts to other folks it nearly put me in a coma, but as soon as he was back on, it got my full attention. Shit, Willis can’t even do that sometimes.
And this was rather early in his horror/thriller career, so he’s not even as scene-chewingly delightful as usual. If anything, he’s sort of subdued, playing a shrink who kills his wife and then spends the rest of the movie trying to convince the one witness that she was hallucinating. It’s a grand role for him, and without doing any research whatsoever on the matter, I assume it was part of what led to his signature roles of the 50s.
It’s good that they cast him too, because other actors would not be able to strike the right balance between sinister and charming that Price pulls off, and in turn makes the movie interesting. You practically want to see the guy succeed (I almost put this in the “Hero Killer” category), because he’s just so damn wonderful. And I got a real kick out his nonsensical excuses and fake psychiatric practices that he explains to people. When the girl’s husband tells him that she is convinced she saw Price kill his wife, Price replies “Oh this is a common delusion of amnesiacs...” Hahaha, what? Why would someone who couldn’t remember who they were be able to “remember” specific murders that never occurred? Yet, not only does he convince the husband on this matter, Christ, he almost convinced ME.
Speaking of the murder, for some reason they never show his wife’s face. I expected this to be part of a twist or something, but no. The Code restrictions are obvious during the murder scenes, but why she is never fully shown I do not know. Maybe because he is later seen kissing his mistress (the murder is the result of them arguing about getting a divorce)? Was there some rule about only kissing a woman outside of wedlock if a wife character was never actually shown? Again, someone needs to do a doc about the damn Code.
Oh, and if you’re into conspiracy theories, Price begins a treatment that would kill the woman on Tuesday, September 11th. They even go out of their way to point this out, for some reason. Spoooooky.
As these 40s cheapies go, it’s not too bad, thanks to Price and a kinda cool plot. Plus the ending is a bit of a surprise, though not in a twist way, more in a redemption-y heroic kind of way. It’s very slow and absolutely nothing happens after the murder, but the fact that it’s not about a bunch of assholes in a house discussing an inheritance or whatever (which describes about every 3rd movie on the Horror Classics set) was enough for it to stick out a little.
What say you?
NOTE - Below is not the trailer, but a key (early) scene, provided by Mill Creek itself!
Since the damn title of See Jane Run spoils the end of the movie, I came up with some alternate titles for other horror movies: It’s Jason’s Mother, Michael Disappears, Helen Takes Over For Candyman, The Trees Decide To Kill Europe Instead... suggest your own!
Of course, even if spoiling the ending by simply putting the movie on my rental queue wasn’t the case, it would still be pretty easy to guess how this one would play out almost from the first scene, even if slightly valiant attempts to mix up the standard formula are made. For starters, the heroes’ car works fine; the breakdown aspect is courtesy of a drifter-y red herring. But he’s actually not the killer or even working with them, he’s just some dude. And Ryan Webb wrote a script (he also directed) that doesn’t even bother trying to pretend that the requisite gas station clerk is a good guy; we actually see him call up the killer and tell him that our protagonists are heading his way. He even tells him the right backstory to use! It’s almost like this movie refuses to allow the audience to be kept in any sort of suspense whatsoever.
And that’s one of the two big problems with the film’s script. The other is that it’s painfully generic; even with the aforementioned minor tweaks, it still follows the Last House/Chain Saw mold to a T. Even if the movie was called Jane Dies First you would know that her character would be the survivor right from the start, since there’s only one other girl (a slutty girl at that, so you know she’s dead). I expected the kind-hearted boyfriend to die BEFORE the hitchhiker, not after, but otherwise, the body count rises in the exact order it “should” based on breakdown movie traditions. You know there will be some bizarre behavior from the guy who our characters still think is a good guy, you know some minor thing will be what sets him off, you know there will be some “dark humor” concerning the nature of the meat... Honestly, the most unique thing about the movie is that there is absolutely nothing unique about it.
Luckily, it’s made reasonably well, especially for a low budget digital movie. The actors aren’t the best in the world (Jane is actually played by one of the producers), and the opening kill (Joe Estevez!) features some of the worst CGI I’ve ever seen, but otherwise it’s solid in the technical department, and Webb (curiously absent from the DVD extras) has a good visual sense, a rarity in these things.
Speaking of the extras, they are pretty abysmal. There’s a few useless outtakes of Joe Estevez, an interview with the VFX artist that is entirely unnecessary since the VFX are terrible (though if you want an awkward laugh, watch the last 30 seconds of the piece; it contains a TMI moment that I believe is a first for any DVD extra), and bios of the no-name cast/crew. Finally, there is a commentary track, which is by the producer/co-star team (again, not having the writer/director around is a bit suspect, and he is barely mentioned on the track either) of Jennifer Clary and Kevin Haberer. There’s some interesting info here and there, but it takes a lot of patience to hear it, because these geniuses didn’t bother turning down the film’s audio track. So whenever there is a song or people are talking in the movie, it drowns out the commentary. Nice work, dipshits.
So, I dunno. It’s not a BAD movie, but I fail to see why it was made in the first place. It’s as if they made it under the impression that there weren’t already 50-60 movies that tell the exact same story while bringing something to the table as well. Even Last House In The Woods has that awesome score at least.
You know, I had heard the title The Manster before, and just assumed it was made up, like as a gag in a movie that had a scene making fun of such movies. But nope, it’s an actual movie. And I own it.
(On a budget pack. It’s not like I went out of my way to place a movie called The Manster in my collection on purpose; even my ironic purchasing budget has a limit.)
However, it’s not the worst of its type. Its type, for the record, is a combination of Wolf Man (our guy even sounds and looks a bit like poor Larry Talbot, and his name is indeed Larry as well) and Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But, in the spirit of things, the movie Double Garden seemingly took a lot of inspiration from THIS movie, so I guess it evens out.
Like Garden, the movie takes place in Japan and features a really ridiculous monster. In this one, the “Manster” is just a guy with some half-assed Wolf Man makeup on, and a paper-mache head (or something to that effect) glued to his shoulder. Near the end of the movie, it splits apart and becomes its own thing (and is killed about 19 seconds later), but by then it was too late to really fear the goofy thing; especially since I spent the previous 70 minutes thinking about the (intentionally) goofy 2nd Zaphod head on the HG2G BBC series.
But it does the job. After a slow start it moves along nicely, and there’s even some occasional bloodshed. However, the one thing that particularly delighted me about this movie was the odd obsession with drinking. When some cops show up to the home of the monster-to-be, he angrily greets them with this peculiar phrase: “Come in you know where the drinks are!” He says it in the same manner one might say “Shut the door you’re letting the heat out!” or whatever. Later, he is being questioned, and the cop says “You remember when I saw you in a bar after that old voodoo priest was murdered?” As opposed to when he saw him in a Fuddruckers after an old voodoo priest was murdered? Are old voodoo priests being knocked off with alarming regularity in Japan?
Like Wolf Man, we feel bad for the monster, because he was unwittingly turned into one. But oddly enough, the mad scientist is kind of sympathetic too, because he also inadvertently turned his wife into a monster and is trying to save her. He euthanizes her at the end too, which is a bit of a rare occurrence, especially in 1950s movies. Another minor uniquity is that the cop still plans to arrest Larry at the end. Usually the monster guy dies entirely, or is OK and instantly forgiven for all that he did when under the monster’s hold. But that’s something that bugs me usually, because monster or not, HE is the one who killed a bunch of folks, and if I was a family member of a victim, I’d want the guy to at least pay a fine or do some community service. Kudos.
So, it’s dumb and derivative for the most part, but it’s the rare late-era 50s monster movie that still has some of the charm that made those movies so big in the first place. And for that alone, AND my feeling guilty over assuming its title was fake, I’ll give it a pass.
Apparently, I have Fearnet. I don’t know when this development occurred, but it must have been recent. Part of what I love about HMAD is that I often don’t know what I am going to watch, so having a revolving group of a dozen or so horror movies (free to view) at my disposal is pretty grand.
And that, of course, is the only reason I found myself watching Leprechaun In The Hood today.
No one puts on a Leprechaun movie and expects to be blown away with its story, performances, or even production value, but for the love of God, this is truly wretched in every sense of the word. I never saw the one where he went to space, so maybe this movie has a lot of subtle thematic payoffs to ideas presented in that film, and they were simply lost on me. But even with that benefit of the doubt, this movie is still complete horseshit.
The first movie was kind of fun in a B (ok, C) movie way: it moved along, had a couple of nasty gore effects, and was just so ridiculous that you couldn’t help but be entertained every now and then. I mean, the last line was “Fuck you, Lucky Charms!” – awesome. Plus, how fucking cute was Jennifer Aniston in that movie? THIS, however, I can’t even find the smallest shred of entertainment value. For starters, the fucking Leprechaun is barely in it; he pops up every now and then to say a limerick, but half of his scenes don’t even seem to be related to the rest of the movie. I almost suspect that a really abysmal gangster/rapper movie was made, and then some drunk exec decided to film twenty minutes’ worth of Leprechaun footage and try to work it in somehow.
For example, at one point, we see Leprechaun go into an apartment owned by a blind woman, who tries to feed him. Where the scene came from and where it goes is anyone’s guess; one can assume he was looking for someone else (maybe 2nd billed Ice-T, who also barely appears) and got the wrong place, but one shouldn’t have to be drawing their own conclusions for a Leprechaun movie. Plus, half of his scenes have him sitting down doing nothing except rhyming, and Warwick himself doesn’t even seem to be having as much fun as he used to.
But the real problem is how god awful the main story is, which concerns a trio of rappers looking to make it big (they use Leprechaun’s magic flute – don’t ask – to secure a gig playing in Vegas). That would be fine, but the movie seems to be almost trying to reinforce negative stereotypes about African Americans, which just makes the whole thing even more insulting. For example, their rap music is positive, so Ice-T admonishes them for singing about being positive, when kids only want to hear rap songs about smacking bitches and shooting homeys. This leads to our “positive” heroes robbing the guy and shooting him in cold blood. Oh yeah, pretty much every character in the film is either a gangster, a crackhead, a pimp, or a prostitute (not to mention a lot of cross-dressing), and since there are no Caucasians to be found (except for a wannabe record exec who appears for about 12 seconds near the end of the film), it got to the point where I couldn’t tell if the movie was exceedingly racist or merely trying to parody other Afro-centric movies.
It’s also a waste on the horror angle. Leprechaun kills maybe 3 people in the entire movie, and Ice-T gets shot a couple times, but that’s about it. Lep DOES show off a cool move where he uses “magic” bullets that blows someone’s chest apart, but that’s hardly enough to rescue this thing from crap status. Christ, they don’t even bother using the “he has to clean shoes” trick. The one thing they could play for laughs concerning inner city “gangsta” folks would be the sneaker culture; you know some of these guys have like 100 pairs of sneakers in their closet. That would be amazing! No, we get a fucking Coolio cameo instead.
I never thought I’d see the day where part of what I hate about a movie is that it fails to meet the Leprechaun standard, but there you go. I honestly don’t even think that anyone involved even bothered to watch the others, as this one is both gore and cheesy-charm free. On that note, I also assume that the space one didn’t end with him being sent into a Los Angeles ghetto, but even if so, fuck this movie.
GENRE: BLANK FROM HELL SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REVIVAL SCREENING)
The best thing about The Stepfather is that it first took me forever for me to accept Terry O'Quinn as John Locke on Lost, as he was just so damn iconic in this role. But after almost 5 years of "The Island brought us here!" , and the fact that I haven't seen Stepfather (or it's way better than expected first sequel) in like 20 years, now it's hard for me to picture "Locke" as a guy who would possibly stab a little puppy.
Well, maybe crazy 3rd season Locke, but he's OK now.
But he sells this movie and singlehandedly elevates it out of generic serial killer movie land. Jerry Blake's complete belief in that what he's doing is OK never falters, and O'Quinn is effortlessly perfect in selling that idea. Like near the end of the film, when he uses the wrong name in front of his soon-to-be-"ex"-wife. Other, shittier movies would have the character panic, and/or try to cover his blunder with another lie, but Blake acts as if he merely dialed a wrong number. "Who am I here?" he wonders. It's a great little bit.
The opening of this movie is still one of the best in horror history too. Despite sort of being spoiled by the blood on his face/clothes, we watch Blake shave his beard (a hint I did not take!) and apparently get ready for work. Then he heads downstairs, and nonchalantly heads out the door, past the corpses of his entire step-family. Holy shit! When I saw it as a kid, this freaked me out so much. Now, of course, being a bit buzzed and watching it at 1 am in a theater in which I sometimes spy cockroaches, I just laugh and cheer along with everyone else.
The funniest (in terms of ironic revival viewers) thing in the movie has to be the guy who spends the entire movie seeking Blake, as it was his sister and family that were shown dead in the opening scene. He's super cheesy, and when he finally finds Jerry, he shows up at the house and gets killed instantly. Dick Hallorann launched a more effective rescue. But that's just part of what makes this movie work; it's refreshingly simple. There are no plot twists, no multiple red herrings, nothing beyond what is necessary. They don't even waste time making Jill Schoelen (who has a nude scene, something I DEFINITELY didn't remember. Stupid 8 year old BC!) suspicious of the guy; she's pretty much calling him a psycho from her first scene with him. If anything, it COULD use a bit of that, as it does get a bit slow at times, due to the fact that Jerry doesn't re-snap until the final two reels, which means a lot of scenes of people just sort of watching each other.
Another thing I did not recall from my youth was the cheesy score. It's a bit Nightmare on Elm St-y at times, and while that score is perfect for that movie, the style doesn't really fit this one. Blake's whistling of "Camptown Races" is far more creepy than any of the score by Patrick Moraz.
Still, minor complaints for a minor gem. Region 1 never got a DVD release (I don't think any of them are on DVD, actually), but I'm sure the upcoming remake (from the Prom Nightfolks!) will change that. Hopefully someone will put out Jeff Burr's sequel as well, as it was a very worthy followup (and had a fucking awesome blood-soaked finale at a wedding!).
GENRE: HAUNTED HOUSE SOURCE: THEATRICAL (TEST SCREENING)
Why is it that Paranormal Activity, a fake movie made for a couple thousand bucks, straight up feels more real than The Haunting In Connecticut (the only one ever!), which IS based on a true story and has all the resources a studio movie can provide? When the ending of the film came up I was like “oh man that is so fucking lame!” and then I discovered it was supposedly what actually happened. LOL, whoops?
Also, why is this movie coming out in a few months but Paranormal is still MIA?
Anyway, as “based on a true story” haunted house movies go, it’s better than average, thanks to a genuinely interesting backdrop; the oldest son of the family is dying of cancer, and his experimental drug may cause hallucinations. Is he crazy, or is the place genuinely haunted? Once the answer is clear, the movie gets less interesting, but for a while I was engaged with the sort of “both sides of the story” idea, a la Emily Rose (which the lovely woman who sat next to me was a big fan of, and she made me realize it had been way too long since I have seen it. Good flick!). Also, the human drama was far more engaging than say, Amityville’s “I wish they’d call me dad” nonsense. There’s a really great/sad scene where the kid is getting worse, and we get a montage of the family reacting in their own way (mom cries, dad smashes stuff, etc).
Making the scene sadder was a haunting track from Thin Red Line, one of the all-time greatest film scores (which has now been used in TWO test screenings I’ve attended this year). This one also had bits from Dark Knight/Batman Begins, and I think I heard Unbreakable in there somewhere. One thing that always tickles me about test screenings is that the comment card asks you what you thought of the music, which makes no sense because it’s all from other movies and, except for very rare occasions, will be original score when it’s finished. And I was all prepared to make a note of this on the card, but we didn’t get any. For a test screening, this makes no sense. Why are we there if we can’t tell them the best way to reshoot and ruin the movie?
The movie also scored a few metaphorical points with me by putting both Elias Koteas and Martin Donavan in the cast. Both men are great actors who have recently found themselves being the only good thing about really generic action movies (Koteas - Shooter; Donavan - The Sentinel), so to see them in something that’s actually pretty good is nice. They never really share any scenes together, which is a bummer, but oh well.
One flaw of the movie is that it can’t seem to decide whether its PG-13 or R. There’s some occasional gore, and the backstory is a bit on the disturbing side, but there are also a lot of the same sort of generic fake scares one would expect for a movie aimed squarely at 15 year old girls. Like when someone knocks on a door REALLY LOUD for no reason other than to make 1-2 people jump and have the asshole exec next to me beam to his buddy.
Oh yeah, the execs. Had I gotten a comment card, I would have given it a grade lower than it deserved if only to piss off the two gigantic fucking assholes who sat in between me and the lovely Emily Rose fan (they ran out of “VIP seats”). The movie’s a Lionsgate release, so chances are these two were already on my shitlist for something, but they went above and beyond with their douchebag behavior: sending texts, showing each other said texts (not even bothering to put the shit on vibrate to boot), and literally smiling at each other every time a line or scared got the crowd to react. To be fair, any reaction besides the snoring from the guy behind us is definitely an improvement, but even so: shut the fuck up, put your fucking blackberry away, and watch the movie. Or leave. Especially if you’re sitting with the people whose opinions you are there to collect; my enjoyment of the film was altered because of their behavior. Had someone been with me (this was a solo trip) I would have began pointing out the movie’s flaws and logic lapses loudly to him/her so that the execs could hear, but alas, I would have just looked like a crazy person. Which I AM, but I didn’t want the lovely Emily Rose fan to know that.
I wonder what the world of DTV horror would be like today had Rob Zombie never turned to filmmaking. After Corpses and Rejects, it seems every third horror movie I see on the shelves has Sid Haig, Ken Foree, Bill Moseley, Irwin Keyes, Leslie Easterbrook, William Forsythe, or some combination of two or more. Before Zombie’s films, you’d see those guys in MAYBE 1 movie a year. Brotherhood Of Blood sports Foree and Haig, and surprisingly enough, they are actually in the movie for more than 2 minutes a piece (another tradition is that these guys’ names will be plastered on the DVD cover even if they are only in a scene or two). All hail the Firefly family!
And actually, another rarity among them: the movie isn’t a complete waste. Had it been filmed for any money whatsoever, and maybe undergone another draft or two, it would actually be pretty good. But it’s kind of hard to see the film’s strong points when everything is dulled by the ugly camerawork (consumer DV, from the looks of it) and nearly universal bad acting.
Things start off on an odd note; there are no production company logos or even production company names. The instant you hit play, you are inside a cave or something, and there’s a title saying “3 weeks ago”. Three weeks ago from what? The DVD menu? Then the cast roll begins as we see a guy look at a mural and cut his finger. And then there’s a cut to “present day”. So three weeks ago, a guy was somewhere and got a scrape. Granted, the scene eventually figures into the plot, but its placement is pretty awkward and hilarious.
The entire movie jumps back and forth in time. In fact, it’s ultimately a sort of vampire version of Usual Suspects, right down to the fact that the entire big action event (killing a bunch of vampires, basically) is actually a front for taking out the one guy standing in the ultimate villain’s way. The vampire even has a weird “cool” sounding name that I already forget. And in theory, that’s a pretty sweet concept, but again, I just wish it was applied to a movie with resources to match.
The only other recognizable star in the movie (to me) is Victoria Pratt, who, like Haig, was in House of the Dead 2. It’s not a coincidence; it’s the same writing team behind this movie (they actually work with Boll a lot, so they are OK by me). She’s sexy as hell and not a bad actress, but her role largely requires her to yell at Ken Foree and glare at people. I was hoping to see her kick some major vampire ass, but as it turns out, there’s very little action in the movie (the big vampire “villain” is merely shot to death). I didn’t mind too much, since the story was kind of cool, but it definitely could have used another big setpiece in the first act. At one point we watch Pratt and a few others look around a vampire nest (read: Los Angeles apartment) for what seems like 20 minutes straight.
And for some reason, they are all after a broken stickman from Blair Witch.
Back to the DV/camera though; I don’t see why folks continue to film on this garbage. Why assemble talent, hire makeup crews, the whole nine yards, and use the worst possible format to show their talents? Even 16mm looks better than this stuff; I often felt like I was watching behind the scenes footage instead of the actual movie.
Indeed, there IS an actual behind the scenes look on the DVD, which is incredibly brief and thus not very informative. There is also a trio of interviews with the three stars, but half of each interview is included on the making of, so it’s a bit pointless. A storyboard comparison is also included, something I usually skip but I took a quick look and learned that the storyboards are more visually interesting than the film itself. Seriously, whoever drew them should do a comic or something, the art style was fucking great. Finally, a commentary track with the directors and Haig, and they don’t say much beyond “this was filmed (wherever)” and things of that nature. Haig also points out that he’s been in vampire movies but has never played the vampire, which is a bummer since his vampire character doesn’t get to do any cool vampire shit in this movie. Someday he will get his moment in the sun!
Oh wait, vamps can’t go in the sun. Well, you know what I mean.
Any horror fan worth his salt knows that Exorcist: The Beginning was the result of possibly the largest studio reshoot in history, after Paul Schrader’s Dominion was rejected by the studio heads and Renny Harlin was brought in to “fix” it. His result was an almost entirely new film (apparently only 10% of Schrader’s footage was eligible to be re-used, and not all of it was), which drove the budget for the project as a whole up near 100 million dollars; which meant that in order for it to be worthwhile, the movie would have to outgross the original (not counting inflation). Needless to say, it didn’t.
But the irony is, it really isn’t as bad as you would expect, given its production history. It’s certainly better than The Heretic, and had the CGI not been among the worst ever seen in a movie, I would put it on par with III, with maybe a few extra points for being the only sequel in which an actual exorcism was part of the plot, not something shoehorned in for the hell of it.
That CGI though.... Christ. Stephen Sommers himself would probably be ashamed at some of the work here (incidentally, this film was released the same summer as the epitome of bad CGI: Sommers’ Van Helsing). It seems that nearly half the movie is generated; pretty much every non-human element (insects, hyenas, birds), blood, backgrounds... if it didn’t need to talk, it was made in a computer! This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if the effects were actually GOOD, but they are pretty abysmal throughout, with even things like a shot of Stellan Skarsgard (pretty much the only leftover cast member from the original version) walking around in Rome looking impossibly and laughably fake. If not for A Sound Of Thunder, I would consider this movie the alpha and omega example for why CGI use should be limited to Spielberg and Bay (the only two directors who consistently use it correctly).
But from a storytelling point of view, it’s surprisingly... well, not good, but un-terrible. I expected a lot more inane gore and action from Harlin, so it was nice to see that the film was rather slow paced, like the original, and light on setpiece based filmmaking (at least until the final half hour). The “priest re-discovers his faith” story is hardly a new concept, but compared to yesterday’s abysmal hero priest movie (Shadows Light), it’s Oscar-worthy. I honestly think that it was the idea of Paul “Taxi Driver” Schrader being replaced with Renny “Cutthroat Island” Harlin that drove people insane more than anything. Hopefully I will get to Schrader’s version in the next few days; I would love to see how they compare in a back-to-back setting.
I also like the downer ending. When you have a prequel, you can’t kill the guy you know survives, so Alexi Hawley’s script has just about everyone else in the movie getting killed, including the female heroine. Speaking of her – she turns out to be the one that’s possessed by Pazuzu, an idea that never quite makes sense. There’s a little kid who’s obviously not himself throughout the whole movie, but in order to give the movie a trendy twist, it turns out that he’s OK. Then why was he acting so weird? Why did he let his brother die?
On that note though - you can’t really hate a movie in which a little kid is torn apart by hyenas (even if they are terrible CGI ones).
But otherwise, there’s nothing in the movie as insanely incoherent as the first sequel, nor is it as needlessly overwritten as III. The original is a masterpiece, but it’s also rather simple in terms of storytelling, something that the previous sequels apparently didn’t notice. Also, it FEELS more like an Exorcist followup than II or III did. III was admittedly a sequel to the book, so it doesn’t really follow plot points from the original (hence why Kinderman was suddenly Karras’ best friend), and Christ, I can’t even understand enough of II to know what exactly Pazuzu was trying to accomplish.
One thing it DOES follow is that like the others, it definitely has its own style and feel to it. It’s sort of like the Alien franchise in that way; everyone has their favorites, and the four films are different enough that there’s a film for pretty much every mood. Like, if I was at the New Bev, The Heretic would be the way to go, but when I’m home and feeling lazy, The Beginning would be my top choice. No film should be for everyone anyway, so kudos to everyone in the entire franchise (even Heretic’s crew) for putting their own stamp on things.
Harlin’s commentary is pretty terrible though; he completely ignores Schrader’s version and the reshooting, and just points out how much he likes the actors and such. He also talks about old vs. modern horror, but somehow I don’t think that the director of The Covenant makes for the best authority on the subject. There’s also a dull making of and the trailer, which has about as much footage from the first film as this one.
Hopefully, the Exorcist franchise will get its own tell-all book someday, a la "Crystal Lake Memories". It seems all four films were made under stressful situations, and as long as no one was holding back, it could very well be the most entertaining thing in the entire franchise. I’d even contribute a foreword, if they wish.
I can’t remember who sent me a screener copy of Shadows Light, but can I please send it back? It’s not listed on the Secondspin site, which means I won’t get any tradein for it. And I wouldn’t want to bore any of my friends (or enemies) with it by giving it to them for free. Also, I couldn’t even get through the writer/director commentary track (I got 46 minutes in before self-administering heavy doses of Hinder to resuscitate me), so the ones with the “actors” and producer certainly aren’t enticing.
This is the kind of movie where it’s obvious that the writer had a story he really wanted to tell, but just didn’t have any of the resources (save for some fairly decent monster makeup effects) to tell it properly. Not that the script is a masterpiece by any stretch, but if it had good actors, production value, maybe a better editor, and nudity, it would at least be passable entertainment.
On the nudity note, I should point out that one of the characters is a stripper. This leads to a nudity-free strip scene. What the fuck is the point of that? It’s the O’Douls of movie scenes. Either cut the scene and shed some running time (a far too long 95 minutes) or hire an actress who would be willing to show her cans.
Sadly, No Tits one of the better actors in the movie. She’s still bad, but you can see that she’s at least trying to emote, even if it often sounds like someone trying to dub another language and keep their lips in sync anyway. The hero is OK too; he has zero screen presence but he can at least deliver dialogue in a manner that sounds natural. Everyone else in the movie though; Christ. Worst is the villain, who makes porn actors (actually, guys PRETENDING to be porn actors in regular movies, doing generic “I’m the milkman...” type shtick) look good. I’m sorry, but a movie of this type (bad guy wants to take over the world type crap, at least I think; the actor was so bad I couldn’t even focus on what he was actually saying) rises or falls on the strength of its villain. You know, take End of Days: not a very good movie, but its watchable thanks to having a guy like Gabriel Byrne play the Devil. But this guy? He wouldn’t cut it as Henchman #4 in a DTV Seagal flick.
Then again, why bother trying to act when you have dialogue exchanges like this in your movie?
Someone: “A limo?” Girl: “Yeah, a long black one!”
(As opposed to all those short white limos driving around?)
The dialogue isn’t the only aural insult in the movie. The film seems to have been recorded with the camera’s microphone, or maybe a mic that was simply taped to the camera. Either way, whenever someone is far from the camera, you get two results: obvious ADR or inaudible dialogue. The sound editing made me sick as well; particularly during one of the two lightsaber duels; the audio kept popping and clicking with each cut, because the editor didn’t bother to put some damn crossfade over the audio tracks. Totally amateurish, and insulting when you consider that this movie is commercially available. I put more effort than that into the free videos that I edit for Bloody Disgusting (and I don’t even get paid for those!).
Back to the two lightsaber duels; it almost seems like this movie is actually a pilot and then an episode of a (boring) TV series. The first duel occurs right around the halfway mark, and then all of a sudden, our hero works for a different church, a new character is introduced (and we’re supposed to consider her an important character, so all of a sudden our hero won’t shut up about her, despite never bringing her up once in the first half of the film). Its really jarring, and my suspicions were furthered when the end of the film found our hero and his new buddy going off to walk (well, drive) the Earth after taking part in the obligatory lightsaber duel. I kept waiting for Ben Murphy to show up with some Tripolotine.
The only thing I liked about this movie was the director’s idea of heaven, which is apparently a world where your loved ones appear composited over some blown out shots of the Grand Canyon. Seems nice.
Like I said, the commentary was dreadful, so I shut it off halfway through. Director Stephen Zimmer was either narrating the onscreen action or pointing out how great all the actors are and where he found them (to hear him tell it, it seems as if Lexington, Kentucky is a hotbed of amazing acting talent). There are two other tracks, but I’m not that much of a nihilist (I say that as a man who once watched/reviewed 5 movies in one day). There is also a 15 minute interview montage with the actors, who are all badly composited in front of grade school class photos backgrounds, and an overlong look at the FX which is actually kind of interesting, since the FX were occasionally decent; and since its long enough to have some depth, it may be of some use to budding makeup artists.
When you rent a movie with a title as generic as Ghouls, and the movie itself is pretty generic, is there anyone to blame but yourself for bothering? No one’s forcing me to see these things. In a way, I’d almost rather the movie was terrible, instead of just dull and bland, because then it would at least be fun to write the review. This... man, I dunno.
This movie has two things going for it: competent direction/cinematography, and William Atherton. There is a surprising amount of shotgun action in the film, and despite what couldn’t have even been a 7 figure budget, it’s decent and occasionally exciting to see a guy toss grenades and blast ghost/ghoul things that look like they are the Ringwraiths and the Orcs combined into one thing (at one point, LOTR is even mentioned directly, so they can’t claim they never saw the designs). Also, a lot of it takes place during the day, which is an admirable choice when your CG ghosty things look like ass (if it was dark, the poor compositing wouldn’t be as noticeable). And Atherton seems to be having a good time during the early parts of the movie, as he gets to play a rare good guy (until the predictable “twist” anyway). Good to see him in his third non-bureaucratic asshole role of the year (afterHeadspaceand Girl Next Door).
Everything else pretty much misses the mark. The general idea (girl finds out she is to be sacrificed and take over a cult) isn’t the most original thing in the world, but it’s a perfectly serviceable story. The problem is that the script (by no less than 5 credited writers) never throws anything unique or interesting into the mix. I guess we are supposed to think that the dad is a good guy and that his new age-y girlfriend is working with the cult, but come on, you know it’s the other way around right from the start.
And apparently, it's a Scream prequel.
And why can’t any of these “It’s your birthright!” chicks in movies ever be into their upcoming transformation? They’re always like “no, not ultimate power!” Just once I’d like to see this plot get used on a really laid-back girl who’s like “Yeah, OK, sounds good!” when informed that she is about to become the next cult Queen or whatever the fuck. Also, for a heroine, the Jennifer character is incredibly annoying and dull; not only does she not have any personality to speak of, but the actress delivers nearly all of her lines in a whiny voice that grows tiresome after, oh, 9 seconds. Not that anyone could really pull off a howler like “You have to kill me now or the whole world will descend into darkness!”, but she has trouble with even the more traditional lines.
She’s not the biggest cast problem though. That would be James DeBello (aka the “For the nougat?” guy from Cabin Fever), cast as... wait for it... a Druid badass. Yeah. This is an example of the “Matthew Lillard as a prince” Boll school of casting at its finest. I mean, it’s almost kind of amusing to hear him say “I’m a Druid” and be totally serious about it, but that can only provide so much amusement before you eventually realize that no one in the production cared, so you shouldn’t either.
The DVD’s only extras are a bunch of trailers for other terrible looking DTV nonsense like Cyborg Soldier, which doesn’t even seem to be trying to distinguish itself from Universal Soldier. There’s also one called Sharks In Venice which I assume was greenlit based on the presumed success of Snakes on a Plane. Stephen Baldwin (who co-starred with Atherton in Bio-Dome, a movie they both probably thought would be their low point until these things came along) stars in that one. It looked hilariously bad, so look for a review soon!
Anyone who reads this site often knows that I watch a lot of obscure movies. So occasionally I check the IMDb’s “external reviews” page for proof that anyone else has ever even heard of the damn thing. One site that almost always comes up is slasherpool.com, and while I don’t always agree with them, I’ve come to respect their opinion a bit (I DON’T respect their abysmally small font on their reviews though; it’s easier to read cereal ingredients). So when I saw their praise on Room 205 (Danish: Kollegiet), calling it a “Fast Paced Supernatural Teen Slasher”, I figured it would be, if nothing else, a lot better than the other foreign slasher I’ve seen from the Ghost House Underground set (that would be Trackman). Sadly, that's about all it manages.
Also, slasherpool is a goddamn liar, because this movie is anything but fast-paced. If anything, it’s BIGGEST problem is that it’s deathly slow. Our total body count in the first hour is one. For a “slasher” (and this movie is not really a slasher, unless you think that The Grudge is a slasher), that’s almost a sin. Even Halloween, the patron saint of slashers, and probably the one with the lowest body count of all, racks up three by the hour mark.
Now, that wouldn’t be a problem if the story/characters were interesting, but they are not. Our heroine is “sheltered girl whose mother died” horror female #758934, and the rest of the characters are slasher stereotypes in every sense of the word (a bitch, a jock-y cool guy, a loner...). And the story is right out of any old J-horror film; there’s a ghost haunting mirrors, and as it turns out, it’s the ghost of someone who is seeking revenge for her tragic, accidental death. Zzzzz.
Speaking of mirrors, it’s actually a lot like Mirrors, in that you have this goofy plot, but there’s almost zero levity in the entire film. There’s also a jaw rip (well, an attempt at one), so maybe Aja saw it (it’s been completed for a while, it actually played Screamfest LAST year) before making his disappointing film. So that’s also a problem; at least if they went for a more funhouse, rollercoaster ride version of this story it would liven things up a bit.
But it’s not awful; it’s competently made and the actors are good. And once it finally gets going, it’s kind of exciting, and the deaths are surprisingly cool when they actually occur. To be fair, the slow pace would actually be a benefit if the story was a bit more original or interesting, so it’s nice to see that they are at least TRYING to develop character rather than just present you with wall to wall kills like a latter day F13 movie. Also, I’m pretty sure that this is the first teen horror movie in which our Final Girl snorts cocaine, so at least they aren’t slaves to the “rules”. Finally, there is a pretty rocking song during the end credits that I very much enjoyed, from a band called Marvel Hill. I should note that the new Hinder album nearly gave me a boner though (I highly recommend “Thing For You”), so use that as a gauge for judging my musical taste (you can also just read my Armageddonreview, since I judge this kind of junk music the same way).
Also, it’s the 2nd movie in a row I’ve watched that had a character named Olaf.
The DVD has a commentary (in which director Martin Barnewitz also claims it’s a slasher movie) and a making of, neither are essential but props to devoting a lengthy section of the making of to the sound design, which is one of the movie’s strong points. The commentary also has a film critic along for the ride, and it’s kind of ironic that they spend so much time dissecting (and dismissing) slasher movies that are far superior to this one, and talking about what makes an effective horror movie, when Barnewitz failed to do so. Oh well, at least one of them points out that the backstory is the same as (the superior) Shutter, so I don’t have to.
Also, I want to discuss the back of the case, as it includes the longest and most spoiler-y plot synopsis I have ever seen on a DVD. You ready for the whole thing?
“Wanting to start fresh, Katrine moves from the province into a dormitory in Cophenhagen and enrolls athe University. But when she crosses conniving Sanne by getting to gether with Sanne’s ex, all hell breaks loose.”
Now, that would be enough, but:
“Sanne and her friends try to bully Katrine out of the dormitory. They frighten her with an old myth surrounding the ghost of a former resident. Yet the myth very soon becomes a reality. By accident, Katrine sets the ghost free and it starts a terrifyingly gruesome attack on the dormitory’s residents. Only Katrine knows the fate of the remaining residents if she doesn’t stop the actions of the ghost. However, no one believes Katrine’s story and they accuse her of the series of mysterious murders. She seeks help from the former resident Rolf. While the residents continue to die around them, Katrine and Rod embark on a desperate struggle to stop the ghost before it kills those who are left.”
Jesus Christ. Why not explain HOW they stop it while you’re at it, guy who writes the back of DVD cases? Luckily, I don’t even look at the back of DVDs (unless I’m crunched for time and need to make sure that the movie is short and/or featureless), because that monstrosity would make me NOT want to watch the thing, especially since it makes me feel like I already did.
So to bring this writeup full circle, here’s my submission for a quote: “A dull, generic, J-horror esque faux slasher with a decent ending!”
I forget if I ever explained the term "independent" with regards to my genre tagging, so let me do so here: there is a big difference between “low budget” and “independent”, as far as I’m concerned. Pulp Fiction is NOT an independent film. Tarantino was given 10 million from a movie studio (one owned by Disney no less) and a pretty impressive cast of A-list talent who needed to stick to a shooting schedule. On the other hand, Die You Zombie Bastards! has no stars, was filmed for a few thousand bucks, and was shot over the course of a few years, with filming resuming whenever director Caleb Emerson could scrape together enough dough and find a crew willing to work for free for a few days. THAT is a truly “independent” film. Or to put it in simpler terms: if you ever had to cancel a shoot because your DP couldn’t get the night off from his “real job”, you’re an independent filmmaker!
Anyway, Zombie Bastards is definitely not for everyone. “Worst movie ever made” comments will probably be common on the IMDb messageboard, because morons often don’t understand that terrible effects, bad acting, etc. are sort of the point in movies like this. I never met the man, but I am willing to bet that Emerson knows his actors are so far over the top that they make Christopher Walken look subdued. I mean, Christ, the finale of the movie features a large battle between a sea monster riding a bike, a dozen demons, a serial killer superhero, a giant mosquito, a couple of robots, and a guy with a dogface. Restraint is hardly a factor.
Of course, all of this is even more hilarious when you consider the only restrained thing about the film was its budget. IMDb claims that the budget was about 150k, and yet the movie has more action, gore, and sheer variety than bigger budgeted “independent” films such as Cabin Fever or Jack Brooks do combined. And again, the cost-saving measures add to the fun; it’s a lot more entertaining to see a fake spaceship (it seems they went out of their way to make it look bad) attack a bunch of “Asians” (regular dudes in Raiden hats) than it would be to film all that stuff professionally.
Also: COCONUT HEAD FACE MAN. His scene/story seemingly has no bearing on anything in the movie, and that is a shame, but when the movie otherwise stops cold to tell us his tale, I became completely enamored by the film. It reminded me somewhat of the batshit nonsense stories that I make up when I’m bored (my dream is to make a buddy action/comedy film about bitter enemies: a hitman named Domingo Sally (a man) and a CIA agent/Bichon Frise who unwittingly join forces to take on a demon who has taken control of the Versailles mob), so I felt a kinship with it.
Another thing I loved was the rather random map overlays (think Indiana Jones) that provided occasional scene transitions as our hero made his way around the world. They are all completely wrong (West Virginia is apparently located in Norway), which of course is what makes them so funny. Making fun of cinematic convention is a staple throughout the film; I particularly liked whenever Emerson would obviously use the same cutaway/reaction over and over during a scene, overdoing it to the point that you know that it’s a joke and not just a low budget penny pinching technique.
In a way it reminded me of Repo, in that the movie is so fucking OUT THERE that you need to sort of adjust your senses to get on board. The first fifteen minutes or so made me want to quit doing HMAD forever, but by the time our hero (a serial killer; no one seems to care much though) goes to a police station to try to get them to help him find his kidnapped girlfriend, I knew I made the right choice to stick with it. So for those impatient folks out there; just let it sink in. It’s like, yeah, "Pablo Honey" is a great album, but you gotta sort of forget about it if you ever want to enjoy "OK Computer".
The DVD has a pretty expansive set of extras, though none are as fun as the movie itself. There’s the obligatory commentary, which is exactly the type of track you’ve come to expect from a no-budget film (“that’s my brother, this scene had to be reshot because there was no tape in the audio recorder”, etc). But it’s kind of funny to hear a commentary that namedrops a bunch of towns I know well, like Medford (I lived one town over), and he also mentions going to Spookyworld, a beloved locale for New England horror nerds. Then there’s about 40 minutes’ worth of behind the scenes footage, which isn’t exactly essential, but it’s interesting to see how often the film would start and then shut down again due to budget/cast/whatever issues. Then there are about 8 minutes of ADR sessions that should have been 3-4 tops. Also a couple of poorly shot band performances, an interview with the late (and incoherent) Hasil Adkins, and the only really worthwhile one in the bunch: an interview with Emerson.
This is a movie that sort of defies judging. It’s not love it or hate it; its love it or don’t bother. It’s a shame that Emerson has gone on to work on truly abysmal stuff like Splatter Disco (he was the DP, though to be fair the only thing about that movie that I remember liking was that it was well shot for DV); let’s hope he lines up another feature of his own (in this vein, not some bullshit remake or whatever) sooner rather than later. Also – it was shot in Gloucester, MA, which is about a half hour or so from my hometown. I wish I knew about this movie back during one of its productions; I totally would have been a PA or whatever.
At long last, October is over!* Back to one movie a day, and time to actually watch it without cutting into sleep. Kicking things off is Lost Voyage, which I own because Gamestop was having a ridiculously appealing “Buy 2 get 4 free” sale on used DVDs. I can’t even remember which two I bought because I actually wanted them, but I do know that it took me like an hour to find 4 movies I’d even want for free. And if this is any indication of their overall quality, I needn’t have bothered.
To be fair, it’s fairly competently made, and it’s probably the LEAST incoherent “haunted boat” movie I’ve ever seen. But otherwise, there isn’t a hell of a lot to recommend here. And you can tell right from the start, as Lance Henriksen’s name is spelled incorrectly (HenriCksen) in the credits. And for those keeping score, they get it right on the front of the DVD, but the back has it as “HenricksON”. It’s like they weren’t sure which was right, so they used every variation they could think of to ensure that they got it right at least once. Hey, beats asking the guy, or maybe checking it against one of his GOOD movies.
But Lance is probably the only guy in the movie who gives it any effort (as he always does). He’s the captain of the boat, and despite being listed as “And Lance Henri(whatever)”, he’s actually in it quite a bit, and is the last to die as well. His character wildly swings between being an uptight asshole to being cordial and generous with the reporter who is doing a story on the allegedly lost boat, but hey, any Lance is fine by me.
Especially when our hero is Judd Nelson, who apparently couldn’t be less interested in trying. He is fucking awful here, and worse, his character doesn’t DO anything in the movie. His biggest moment as a hero is watching a guy get crushed to death by chains, waiting until blood is coming from the guy’s mouth before thinking to use the nearby ax to break the glass in order to get to him. The guy tells him to flick a switch (outside of the room, for some reason) which will stop the chain from falling, which Judd does, after the guy has already died. Nice work, Bender. His would-be rival is a guy who looks like Desmond Hume, who had a drinking problem until the “network paid for his rehab”. Yes, because a cameraman on a basic cable ghosthunter show is completely irreplaceable!
Another character problem is the character of Julie, played by uber-sexy Scarlett Chorvat. Her problem, besides never getting nude and improving this movie’s visual excitement (hope you like watching guys fiddle with meters! It makes up about half of the film), is that her character keeps disappearing from the movie. It’s almost like she was added in later, Eddie Murphy in Best Defense style. There will be scenes of the “group” discussing a plan or whatever, and she will be totally MIA. Christ, when they are all heading to the boat, I didn’t even know she was on the helicopter with them until the sequence was nearly over. “Let’s not get coverage of the hot girl. More shots of Jeff Kober please!”
As I was saying before, nothing much happens in the film either. There are only about 4-5 deaths, and most of them occur offscreen. As this was a TV movie, I’m not too surprised, but there is a scene of Lance and Kober screaming FUCK YOU! at each other, so if they could add that back in, why not a gory death or two to keep things slightly more interesting? Then again, since the DVD is as barebones as they come (and full frame to boot), I sort of doubt anyone was putting that much effort into it in order to entice fans of this masterpiece to buy the damn thing.
Also, how can you make a movie about the Bermuda Triangle (with allusions to the creepy Mary Celeste story as well) and make it so damn dull? Damn you, writer/director Christian McIntire (whose entire career is made up of movies with titles that sound created by a computer: Interceptor Force, Dragon Fighter, etc.). Plus, it’s almost like he forgot about half of the movie’s ideas; Judd’s character goes to the ship because his parents were on it when it initially disappeared, but he barely even mentions them once they are on board.
Well, it’s a Sci-Fi movie. I’m sure someone watched it on the air and decided to buy that one brand of soda or maybe went to a Toyota dealership the next day, so it served its purpose.
What say you?
*Oh wait, I have the Halloween convention this weekend. Looks like November 3rd will be the official end of the month. Fuck!
You got the Achievement for boringest goofy concept movie! 20 GS.
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