A few months back, a friend put on a copy of Embodiment Of Evil (Brazilian: Encarnação do Demônio), the long-awaited proper return of Coffin Joe (director/star José Mojica Marins). It was after a open bar party, it was 3 in the morning and it was subtitled, so you can guess how much of the film I actually saw (hint: none). So I jumped at the chance to watch it “again”, at 1230 in the afternoon (and fully sober). And I am glad I did, because this is easily the best Joe film yet, and proves that Marins hasn’t lost his touch or his edge.
Since the plot is the same as always, let’s just run down a list of a few highlights. Joe dips a woman’s face into a bowl full of cockroaches. Joe cuts a woman’s ass cheek off and then feeds it to her (more on her later). Joe has a vision in which an albino takes him on a tour of a woman’s vagina, and then later some sort of desert landscape in which women are feasting on male genitalia. And in the film’s most horrifying (read: applause worthy) moment, Joe shows what you can do with some melted butter, a rat, and a vaginal entrance. Needless to say, this is hardly some sort of politically correct “modernized” Joe - if anything, it makes the other films look downright tame in comparison.
What’s cool is that it actually follows the other films (though how he survived the finale of This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse is a bit of a mystery - he is shown to simply have been in jail for 40 years). Joe (no one calls him Ze in this one, though that might just be a subtitling decision) is haunted by victims from the previous films, and while the film is in full color, their ghostly apparitions are in black and white, which is a terrific visual. He also resurrects Bruno, the loyal hunchback assistant - a nice touch that I wouldn’t have appreciated had I watched the film a few months back, as I hadn’t yet seen the first two.
The only real flaw is that an intriguing plot point is set up early on - Joe meets a woman who is seemingly his equal, rambling about perfection, the ineffectiveness of religion, etc (Joe’s crazy talk is as wonderfully nutty as ever). But after she willingly eats her own ass cheek as part of her “I will prove I am worthy to have your son” test, she disappears from the film entirely until the very end. I was really hoping to see him interact with this seemingly perfect woman, but instead the film follows the same pattern as Corpse, with Joe kidnapping, testing, and then fucking various women, while being pursued by angry townsfolk and yelling about God a lot.
Also there’s no poker game, which bummed me out.
But the movie is so gonzo (and gory!) that you might not even really notice the things that are missing. Joe’s re-introduction to the world is handled well (and hilariously - he is hit by a car the second he walks out of the prison), and he certainly hasn’t lost his ability to cause chaos in his old age. He even gets into an epic sword fight with a monk, and fucks the shit out of a girl on the floor, as the blood from her aunts (whom he had just killed and hung from the ceiling) rains down over them. And the ending sets up a 4th film that could very well be the best movie ever made.
For whatever reason (more than likely, that reason involves the aforementioned “cheese” scene), this film has not been scheduled for distribution in the US. FOX owns international rights, but as of yet have no desire to even send it direct to video here (a theatrical run in its current state would be nigh on impossible - even Mother of Tears’ vertical impalement scene is nothing compared to some of this stuff). I just hope whenever it DOES see a stateside release that it is presented uncut - trying to tame this beast would be counterproductive.
A sentiment that many of the cast and crew on the Friday the 13th films share is that they thought their respective film, or at the very least, their role in it, would be forgotten in a couple of years. But as we all know, that is not the case, and now after two pretty in-depth books about the franchise, we have His Name Was Jason, a 90 minute documentary chronicling the franchise’s legacy from the perspective of both the filmmakers/cast, and some of its supporters within the horror community.
Unlike the books, which tackle each film one at a time, the doc spends about 10 minutes quickly summarizing the 11 films (the remake is discussed near the end of the film, sans footage or even stills) before getting to the real meat of the movie: the impact of the series as a whole. Film personnel and assorted celebrities spend the bulk of the film providing their thoughts on a variety of topics, including the MPAA battles, Jason’s different looks, and even the NES game (Adam Green’s synopsis of that disaster is worth the price of admission alone).
The great thing about the movie is seeing everyone again. Let’s not beat around the bush - it’s not often you watch an F13 film and recognize a bunch of folks. And since the big guns (Kevin Bacon, Corey Feldman, Crispin Glover) don’t appear anyway, it allows us to spend more time with folks like Final Chapter’s Judie Aronson (still SO hot), New Beginning director Danny Steinmann (who hasn’t made a film since), and the cast of New Blood (almost all of whom appear). Some haven’t aged well, others have (hello there, Jensen Daggett). But the omission of a few (such as Steve Miner) just reinforces the fact that those who DO want to talk about it have fond memories of their time at Crystal Lake. This movie’s a celebration, and so if folks didn’t want to be there, chances are we wouldn’t care what they have to say. Fuck em.
One gripe is the “I Love the 80s” feel about the movie. I can understand having someone like Adam Green around (the F13-inspired Hatchetis the only non-Friday film in the movie to make an appearance), and even horror journalists, most of whom grew up as fans and are now reporting on the franchise’s newer developments. But why the hell is James Roday from the non-horror show Psych taking up screentime? Why is Seth Green and some other guy rambling about what Friday characters should and shouldn’t do? There’s even a “screenwriter” without a single produced movie to his credit! Not that their comments are invalid (Seth Green is actually pretty hilarious), but I would have preferred all of their appearances confined to (brief) “How Friday has affected pop culture” section or whatever, and keep it to the personnel the rest of the time. Again - Paramount has really dropped the ball when it comes to providing extras for these movies, so this doc is probably the only time we’ll get to see these people reminisce. I don’t want Victor Miller’s screentime shortened so we can make sure Felissa Rose can speak her mind.
Luckily, there are lots and lots of supplemental material that fill in some of the gaps and make the package better as a whole. The bulk of the extras are on the 2nd disc, but disc 1 also contains longer interviews with all of the Jason actors, running about 45 minutes total. Some great anecdotes are included here (Ted White apparently couldn’t stand Corey Feldman), and it’s interesting to see how different the actors look from one another, and also how differently they recall their time behind the mask (White was originally dismissive of the role, and now embraces it, for example). The remake’s Derek Mears also proves to be the most appreciative of the other actors - whereas most of them point out how they didn’t want to do anything that the other guys had done, Mears took efforts to offer little tips of the hat to his predecessors via specific poses and such.
Be prepared to spend about three hours on disc 2. Over an hour of longer interviews with the film’s directors (all of them save Miner are present) kicks things off, and like with the actors, you’ll get a lot of great little anecdotes while realizing that some have fonder memories than others. Then there’s about 20 minutes’ worth of deleted scenes from the movie, in which certain topics are covered by two or three individuals. A few of the screenwriters also offer longer thoughts, and it’s worth noting how much more direct and honest they are when compared to their film’s respective directors (best line comes from Victor Miller: “Sean may call it an homage, I call it grand theft cinema” - regarding the Carrie-inspired ending).
The rest of the stuff isn’t as exhaustive. A pair of featurettes in which Fox from part 3, and Rob and director Joe Zito from Final Chapter, take you on a tour from a main location from their respective film is a great idea; I wish they had done one for every film. Then we get a collection of “fan films”, which are amusing but hardly essential (Zero Punctuation need not worry about Angry Video Game Nerd) though the “Rupert Takes Manhattan” one is worth viewing for Jason’s letter alone. Adam Green, Joe Lynch and Uncle Creepy then spend four minutes explaining the entire series, which is a pretty damn funny little bit. Then there’s a “Crystal Lake Survival Guide”, in which pretty much everyone interviewed for the film tells you what not to do when visiting the area (“Don’t step around Jason’s body”). Some Comic Con interviews with key folks from the remake are also included, and I’d like to point out that I was actually in the room when they were shot (you won’t see me though, I was too busy on my ultimately fruitless attempt to score one of the posters you’ll see behind the talent). Finally, a bit called “Shelly Lives”, which I will let you discover for yourself.
It’s kind of sad, but also very telling, that the most exhaustive and “complete” special edition for an F13 movie yet isn’t even an actual franchise entry. Paramount and New Line have never really delivered a top notch, overloaded set like this for any of their films (though at least Paramount is currently trying to make amends for their pitiful boxed set), so it’s nice to see them beat at their own game by Dan Farrands, Anthony Masi, and the rest of the folks behind this film. Take Steinmann, for example: he’s nowhere to be found on Paramount’s release of part 5, but Farrands and co. got him to talk for hours about it. It’s nice to know that someone with the power to deliver the things that fans want will actually use their position to get it to them, while Paramount offers us insultingly stupid filler like “Lost Tales From Camp Blood” on their discs. Don’t settle for renting disc 1 from Netflix, because you’ll be missing out on most of the fun. Every F13 fan should own this set, period.
I honestly can’t recall the last time I watched Friday the 13th Part 2. It seems like it was really recent, like at the New Bev or something, but if that is the case I didn’t write a review, which doesn’t make sense. I know for sure I watched it in 2004, but I feel like I watched it within the past 2 years as well. I dunno. My memory sucks.
Anyway, I really dig part 2. It’s basically a remake of the original in terms of structure, though slightly faster paced (the body count is the same, but it’s ten minutes shorter and all but one of the kills are onscreen). I also, again, like these kids. They’re not bitchy or slutty or douchey. Well, technically Scott is the world’s biggest douche, but his target is charmed by his slingshotting/clothes stealing antics, and thus so are we.
I also kind of like/miss the idea that Jason is a human being. He really only had 3 movies as a mortal guy, from then on he was a supernatural force. This one may even make him a bit TOO human: he wears a nice pair of jeans, has a place to live, everything. He even has 2 chairs in his shack in case he needs to entertain company. But he was just plain scarier when he was a real guy.
Paul is also a much better “adult” than Steve Christy. What he lacks in child molester-y appearance he makes up for in snarky attitude (“No seconds on dessert...”) and laid back charm. The scene where he says hello to everyone is great - he mocks some kids, and also waxes nostalgic about previous training sessions with others (these kids are all professional camp counselors, apparently). And the pained look on his face when Ginny beats him at chess is priceless.
Another thing I appreciate was the attention to detail. The lake looks the same as the one in the original (in that it’s pretty giant - the later films made it look like a little pond), and Alice is shown to still be drawing. It’s not much, but again, when compared to the later “ah fuck it” attitude of the sequels, it’s almost Oscar worthy. You go a while with watching only the New Line entries, and it’s almost a shock to the system to realize that back in the day, the filmmakers actually gave a shit about the work of their predecessors. Hell, even the requisite cat scare is better than most, since the cat comes from outside, not a cupboard or whatever.
The only time in the series I didn’t side with Jason.
Of course it’s not without typically “baffling when you think about it” filmmaking issues. At least two of the kills make no sense whatsoever (why doesn’t Mark see Jason in front of him? They’re on a porch, it’s not like there’s a lot of horizontal room), and the kids who all take off to the bar should have come back at some point (I’d argue that their drunken excursions cost the audience too many kills - Ted should have been killed at least). There’s also Terri’s peculiar search for her dog - she keeps saying “Muffin?” but she’s looking straight ahead at eye level. And even though it’s shorter than the original, at times it actually feels longer, particularly during the endless chase at the end (which goes on for so long Miner actually has fade outs during the damn thing).
It is evened out, however, with the lengthy scene of Terri skinny dipping.
The new cash-in DVD release isn’t as extensive as Part 1’s, but it’s a quality over quantity deal. An interview with Peter Bracke (author of "Crystal Lake Memories") is pretty interesting, as is a panel from Fangoria’s 2004 New Jersey con with 4 of the Jasons (a panel I was actually in attendance for!). There’s also a rather silly look at some convention called Scarefest, where the festival organizers go on and on about how wide the aisles are and how much the attendees like the hotel, all the while skirting around the fact that those same fans are asked to dish out 20 bucks a pop to have these folks sign their own property. Another of those worthless “Lost Tales From Camp Blood” is also thrown in for whatever reason, and it's even worse than the first one. Finally, the film’s trailer is included.
I want to talk about the trailer, because it was pretty interesting for a few reasons. One - it uses the roman numeral II instead of “2”, which is what is used on the film itself (it’s notable because if not for the later Friday films, no one would know how to use Roman numerals today). Also, it blatantly lies about the events of the first film, claiming that 12 of Alice’s friends were killed, when in actuality only 9 people died in the entire movie, 3 of which Alice never met. The reason, of course, is to recycle the “13/body count” thing from the 1st movie’s trailer. So they start at 14, and truthfully stop at 23, as 2 has a total of 10 deaths (even though the clips don’t match up with the numbers). But that’s sort of unproductive, because it inadvertently makes it look like the movie has a lower body count than the original! What a wacky spot.
Overall, it’s up there with 1, 4, and 6 as the best of the Fridays. It just plain works, and proves again that a gimmick (3D, telekinesis, Freddy) is never a good idea. The sequels always turned out better when they stuck to the basics.
Ever since I saw the teaser at Comic Con, I have been on board with Platinum Dunes' Friday the 13th remake. I liked the cast, I liked Jason's look, and I liked that they seemingly were trying really hard to make an F13 film that would sit comfortably with parts 1-4 (swap out 3 for 6, and that's the best of the franchise, by far). And while the end product is satisfying and occasionally great, there are some blunders that keep it from being the "ultimate Jason" movie that it could have easily been with another pass or two at the script.
Let's start with what works. The opening scene, which quickly explains the events of the original Friday, is a great idea. You can't ignore the mother, but you don't want to dwell on it either, so they blend it with the opening credits and get it out of the way. Also, Derek Mears is a great Jason - he's got the physicality and presence to match up with the best of them, and Scott Stoddard has done a great job with the makeup, making him look human, but not "just a guy in a mask", like he often appeared in the earlier films. You really feel that he's a guy who's lived in the woods for his whole life. And I really liked that they didn't come up with a bunch of "unique" kils - Jason sticks to the basics (machete, axe, bare hands) for the most part. He even uses an arrow for the first time since the original I believe. Like I said in my review for Part 2 - it's the films without gimmicks, with Jason just being Jason, that turn out the best.
But for every plus, there is a minus. The biggest is the rather awkward setup. After the "Mrs. Voorhees" prologue, we are introduced to a group of kids. But Jared Padalecki and the other top billed actors are not among them, so you know they aren't long for this world - they are ultimately just there to provide some fodder and introduce Amanda Righetti's character, who Padalecki will spend the entire film looking for once he is finally introduced. The odd thing is: this throwaway group is actually more fun and "Friday"-esque than the real group that comes along later. So while you are enjoying their antics and interactions (not to mention the fact that Righetti and America Olivo are among the most beautiful actresses in franchise history), you know they're all goners, and you just kind of want to get on to the actual movie. It's essentially a second prologue, albeit one that lasts about 15-20 minutes. As a result, by the time the REAL group came along, I felt like I was already watching a sequel. And furthermore, this limits the amount of time that THESE kids can spend together before separating and meeting their demise, which is a drag.
There is one bright spot in the main group though: Travis Van Winkle's character. He's a douchebag, but the kind of douchebag that you love. Nearly every one of his lines is laugh out loud worthy, particularly his interactions with Padalecki, and he steals the movie away from everyone that isn't Jason. Padalecki, on the other hand, is almost a non-factor in the movie. He's playing a variant of the Rob character from Final Chapter, but he just doesn't fit into the film at all. Maybe it's because he's a much more familiar face than the others, but whatever the cause, he sticks out like a sore thumb. The other kids are natural and fun and function as they are supposed to, no complaints there.
But I couldn't help but be distracted by one of the guys, who has an unfortunate resemblance to actor Mike Vogel from the Chainsaw remake. I know it's the same director and DP as that film, but I wasn't expecting their Friday to look SO MUCH like it. It technically looks great and beautiful, I never once buy that they are in New Jersey (it was actually shot in the same town as Tobe Hooper's original Massacre), and Marcus Nispel/Daniel Pearl have filtered the hell out of everything (really orange daytime, really blue nighttime) - nothing in the movie looks natural, resulting in a movie that actually looks the complete opposite from a Friday film, which is naturally lit and thus kind of bland. They went from one extreme to another, and thus at times I felt like I was watching a sequel to their Chainsaw film whenever Jason wasn't on screen. At one point, Padelecki and one of the girls discover a wheelchair in the underground tunnel system that Jason uses (he's sort of a Rambo-y survivalist here, with traps and everything), and while it's supposed to be a little reference to Friday 2, the first thing that popped in my mind was finding Franklin in Hooper's Chainsaw 2, because so much of the film felt from that universe instead of Friday's.
One final gripe concerns Jason's mother issues. Righetti looks like her, so he keeps her chained up. How is that "fun"? Between that and the traps he had lying around the area, it started to become dangerously close to Saw/Hostel territory (I actually wrote "Jigson" down in my notes). To its credit, he simply chains her up and her attempts to get free don't involve any self-inclicted pain, but still: the sight of a girl chained up and screaming is not what I think of when I think of "sticking to the tone of Fridays 1-4" (Brad Fuller and Andrew Form's own words). I know it's a "re-imagining" and yadda yadda, but they should have figured a way to come up with their own unique story (which they have) while keeping the light tone intact. Maybe we just have different ideas of what the first few films were like - I think of completely political incorrect teens, fake scares, and keeping the Final Girl out of harm's way for the entire film so she can find all of her dead friends later, but none of those things are present here.
However, silver lining and all - the "search for missing sister" setup allows for the film to have essentially two Final Girls. Righetti is one, the other is Danielle Panabaker as the "nice girl" of the 2nd group. You know the fates of every other character*, so it was nice to have a little bit of suspense whenever one of the two girls were in danger, because you suspect that one of them will buy it, you're just not sure which. It's one of the best ways around an inherent flaw in the slasher formula I've ever seen.
I know the review sounds mostly negative, but that's because I glossed over the great things about it, so you can enjoy it for yourself, while backing up my problems so you know I'm not just bitching. Everyone knows I am in Michael Bay's corner (I was the only one to cheer when his name came onscreen), and I've enjoyed all of PD's other remakes. And I enjoyed this one too; if 1-4 were their goal, then they have come pretty close to making it (it's better than 3, actually). I was hoping for something closer to 1 or 2, and maybe with time I will feel that way (I should note that some of my fellow horror nerds, such as Devin from CHUD and Ryan from Shock, loved it almost unconditionally). It's the best since 6 by far, which in itself is a huge accomplishment, as I was starting to suspect that it was just not possible to make a good Jason film anymore. The Dunes have done that; I just hope next time they make a great one.
What say you?
*At one point the token black guy goes to look for his missing (dead) friend, and says something like "I will surprise you at every turn!". Some guy in the back of the theater yelled "I'm surprised you weren't the first to die!!!" I laughed heartily for a solid 5 minutes.
Horror Movie A Day will be celebrating its 2 year anniversary next week, which means I’ve watched nearly 800 movies (factoring in all of the times I watched two movies for the day). And out of all of those, never did I come as close to just shutting a movie off and watching something else as I did with Animals, a yet-to-be-released atrocity that will hopefully never find a sod stupid enough to put money into distributing it.
(Note - a lot of my problems with the movie, i.e. the editing and camerawork, are really hard to explain in words, so bear with me if the review doesn't quite do justice to this movie's ineptitude.)
I can only pray that the book (by John Skipp and Craig Spector) that the movie is based on is at least interesting on some level. It’s a silly premise (basically, a love triangle between three shapeshifters), but if it has well drawn characters and exciting setpieces it could definitely be enjoyable. The movie offers neither of those things, only wholly incompetent filmmaking. Director Douglas Aarniokoski (who previously helmed the “how did this manage to get a theatrical release?” Highlander: Endgame) clearly has zero understanding how to structure a scene or compose a shot (though DP Matthew Williams - who is ironically the DP of Plan 10 From Outer Space - is just as much to blame in that area). I had no idea what was going on during several of the action scenes, though after a while I didn’t care either.
Aarniokoski also films the entire movie hand-held, which is almost impressive when you consider that the film has zero of the energy or excitement that usually comes along with this filmmaking style. Even the sex scenes, which feature Nicki Aycox topless, aren’t even remotely titillating. And that’s a major problem when the story is supposed to be showing us what it’s like when people give into their carnal urges and all that crap. Shouldn’t I be watching the movie and going “Holy shit! I wish I could turn into an animal and kill my asshole boss and then fuck the shit out of the hot girl from Jeepers Creepers 2 on the hood of my car”? Yes, but instead, I keep finding myself staring at the “time remaining” display.
Worse than the camerawork is the editing. Someone had the genius idea to constantly re-use shots while putting them in slo-mo, an idiotic “style” that wears out its welcome after the 3rd or 4th of its 100 appearances in the 90 minute film. It’s also one of those movies where they cut back and forth between like 5 minutes of time (so instead of an A-B-C-D-E-F sequence of events, it goes A-C-B-E-D-F) and toss in flashbacks to footage we just saw whenever a character is “thinking”. In short - the movie is all over the place. Aarniokoski used a pseudonym, so maybe he's not happy with it either, but assuming its the usual reason (post production tinkering), it doesn't change the fact that it's just terribly shot to begin with.
But the real killer is that it takes itself seriously, so it’s not even enjoyably bad like House of the Dead or whatever. You’d think a bad movie about people who fuck and turn into animals would be a laugh riot, but I was stone cold silent for almost the entire thing. The one exception: at one point a girl walks up to a bathroom and slips on the blood coming from under the door. In theory, that’s fine. But there’s a rug in the hallway, leaving only about 8 inches of hard floor for her to slip on, so she “slips” after just her toe touches the blood. Not only did I laugh, I rewound it to watch it again so I could say I laughed twice.
There is, however, the matter of Naveen Andrews’ performance. I am not familiar enough with his work to know if he’s aware how bad the movie is and is playing his role with a wink in his eye, or if he’s legimately trying to be a badass. I know he CAN be a badass (check out his fight with Keamy on the S4 finale of Lost), but he’s just laughably cheesy here, snarling and growling before the blue CGI ghost thing that’s supposed to be a werewolf (it looks like an evil version of Jack Skellington’s dog) takes over for him. Man, I love Lost more than almost anything, but between this, Speed Racer (Matthew Fox), The Fog (Maggie Grace), Pulse(Ian Somerhalder), and Deck The Halls (Jorge Garcia), I am starting to fully appreciate the fact that the Hawaii shooting location severely limits the number of terrible movies these folks can make.
Back to the CGI ghost wolves - you’d think that they could at LEAST come up with different animals for them to turn into (you know, since the movie is called ANIMALS and not WOLF-TYPE THINGS), but both Andrews’ and Marc Blucas’ “animal forms” look identical, rendering their big battle at the end rather pointless, since you can never tell who has the upper hand. It culminates with Blucas repeating a line Andrews had previously directed at him: “You have no idea what you stuck your dick into.” Now, when Andrews said it earlier in the film, he is referring to Aycox, who Blucas has been fucking (which is how he got his animal power). It’s also the closest thing to a good line in the entire movie. But when Blucas says it back as a one-liner before killing Andrews, it doesn’t make any fucking sense, because Aycox’s character (the only thing the two have in common) had nothing to do with their fight. It makes it sound like Andrews stuck his dick into Blucas.
What else is terrible... well, the music for one thing. It’s all generic techno bullshit, and doesn’t fit the onscreen action or mood at all. Blucas also has an annoying narration (“This is Jane, a friend. Everyone hits on her, but she turns them down. We’ve never been down that road.”), which is especially annoying when they cut from his narration to Andrews’ voice-over (a byproduct of the criss-cross editing). There’s also a subplot about Blucas’ murdered boss that goes absolutely nowhere.
I honestly cannot understand what drew anyone to this movie. Who could read this script and think ‘Yes, I want to be in the Animals business.’ Blucas is always appearing in garbage, but what’s everyone else’s excuse? And who put the money up for this thing in the first place? God, people PLEASE: stop making such atrocious and unappealing shit! Don’t forget: every time someone makes a shitty horror movie, an angel is sodomized.
When is a horror movie not really a horror movie? Answer: when the goddamn monster disappears for a full hour until the final 2 scenes of the movie. Such is the case with The Gorgon, a Hammer entry that gets the cast (Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee), the director (Terrence Fisher) and the setting (colorful castles and villages) correct, but adds in a wholly underwhelming script by John Gilling.
Luckily, the basic plot was interesting enough to maintain just enough interest to keep me awake. There’s a mythological creature turning folks into stone, and a whole bunch of stuffy British guys are fighting over the opportunity to stop it. Cushing is also involved in a jealous rivalry with some other guy over his assistant (the classy Barbara Shelley), who clearly wants to nail the other dude. It’s an interesting role for Cushing, he’s not really the villain, but he’s hardly a Helsing-esque hero either. It’s more of a Vincent Price type kind of sinister/kind of tragic role, and I hope I see other Cushing roles like this (readers: to the recommendation thread!).
Lee also plays sort of against type. He’s a professor or scientist or whatever, but he plays it like Adam Goldberg might, with an air of laid back detachment. Which is just a pretentious way of saying he seems either drunk or high or both throughout the entire movie. He also doesn’t really do much. I was all excited for the idea of another Cushing/Lee face-off or team-up, but the two only interact once in the entire movie. It’s like Hammer’s version of Heat. Bring on Hammer’s Righteous Kill!
I also noticed something interesting - neither Cushing or Lee are given dramatic entrances. Both of them are introduced as casually as every other character in the movie. I started wondering if this was always the case with older films; is giving the big star a really big, impressive first appearance in the movie a relatively new thing? Nowadays, if Christopher Lee shows up in a movie, they’ll probably show his feet first or maybe have the camera spin around from back to front or whatever.
But back to the point - the scares and horror are just not there in this one. After the monster kills two folks, and scares another guy, nothing even remotely horror-related occurs until the final 10 or 15 minutes, leaving a 45-50 min chunk of the 85 film comprised of nothing but folks yammering on and Cushing fiddling with his seemingly unrelated science experiments. And even the horror is pretty weak; most of it is comprised of the wind blowing open a wooden door (an event that occurs I think four times in the film).
The snake head monster is as goofy as they come, with Star Trek-esque levels of cheapness on display. You know those plastic snakes you buy at crappy toy stores, you hold one end and the rest sort of pendulum swings back and forth? It looks like they broke the heads off a few of those and glued it to one of Winona Ryder’s hats from Autumn In New York. Maybe that’s why the damn thing only appears in about 35 seconds of the movie.
The ending saves it though. You find out who the Medusa-thing has been possessing, and it’s a surprise (to me). Plus, it’s a real downer, because you like the person, and it’s worth noting that the monster/person dies rather gruesomely, and instead of ending right there (as any other Hammer film would do), there’s another minute in which someone else you like dies as well. It’s like they broke protocol just to leave you kind of sad, which I appreciate.
Now that Repo: The Genetic Opera is on DVD, I figured I’d review the film’s extras in case you had some hesitation about buying the DVD. Or, more specifically, the Blu-Ray. While the DVD has a pair of commentaries and two featurettes, the Blu-Ray has a lot more content (since the film is only 97 minutes long, I am puzzled why so many of these features were left off of the standard disc), including additional songs. But even on standard def it should still take you about four hours to go through all of the supplemental material.
The bulk of that time will be spent on the two commentaries; one is with Darren Bousman along with Terrance Zdunich and Darren Smith (who wrote the songs/script) and music producer Joe Bishara. As Bousman points out himself, this isn’t a commentary where everyone talks about how much fun they had; the participants spend a great deal of time discussing the various struggles in getting the film made, from songs that producers wanted cut from the film to having a union member turn on an electronic prop. The other track, with Ogre, Bill Moseley, and Alexa Vega (and Bousman again) is more fun – Moseley likes to make wisecracks and Alexa has a penchant to sing lyrics along with the movie (not just hers). It’s more anecdotal than informational, and thankfully Bousman does not repeat himself (unlike Eli Roth, who tells the EXACT SAME STORIES on all three of his Cabin Fever tracks).
Then we get the trailer and a pair of featurettes, one about the transition from stage to screen that is pretty jam-packed with info considering how short it is (10 minutes), and the other about the song “Legal Assassin”. It’s a good piece but it’s taken directly from the website (it’s even presented in a little animated window), and thus the quality (particularly on the audio) is hardly demo quality. I wish LG had taken the time to remaster this properly for a DVD presentation, but considering their dismissal of the film as a whole, I guess we should be lucky the film is on DVD at all.
The Blu-Ray has all the same features, and more. Two additional featurettes (one on Amber, the other on Blind Mag) in the same vein as the Legal Assassin are again, presented in lousy standard def, though unlike on the standard DVD, they are full screen. Then we get “select scene commentary” with Bousman and Paris Hilton. Bousman admirably tries to keep Paris talking, but her comments are pretty short and to the point (“this was fun”, “I like this scene”, etc). Then there are four “sing along” tracks for the more popular songs, which is a nice offering for those who don’t already sing along anyway.
Of most interest to fans will be a collection of deleted scenes, which also have optional commentary by Bousman and Hilton. The first two are full blown songs, the other two are just brief interludes; all of them were cut for pacing reasons. My only gripe is that they are presented without context; “Needle Through A Bug” in particular makes absolutely no sense unless you listen to Bousman’s commentary, which explains at least some of what is going on (why Graverobber is hanging upside down throughout the scene remains a mystery).
The audio/picture is, of course, much better on the Blu-Ray, though tech nerds should remember that the film is intentionally soft focus and thus the image isn’t as “sharp” as they are used to. Still, detail and colors are much better (check out all the detail in Graverobber’s hair during “Zydrate Anatomy”), and the HD master audio track is superb. Since Repo’s theatrical appearances (at least in my experience) were in sub-par screening rooms and/or filled with people singing along, it’s actually the best I’ve heard it yet – a few lyrics I never quite deciphered are now as clear as day.
Repo was unfortunately not a big success in financial terms, and thus the DVD sales will determine any and all future the film has (sequels, director’s cuts, etc). So those of you who might be inclined to wait for the “ultimate DVD” or whatever (especially considering Bousman’s presence, since the Saw films ALWAYS have two editions) – there won’t BE one if folks don’t support the original release. Given the deep love and respect that the filmmakers have for the film and its fans, I am sure that any future release of Repo would be akin to the LOTR releases, with nothing recycled in terms of extras, making it a more enticing doubledip. Plus, the Blu-Ray can be found at a lower than average price, so I urge both fans and newbies alike to pick this one up. And if you are still on the fence regarding whether to upgrade to Blu-Ray: this release, with so much BR exclusive content, is a fine example of the studios’ efforts to steer you in that direction.
The last thing I expected Prom Night III: The Last Kiss to be was INTENTIONALLY funny, but there it is. It’s a lousy horror movie, in that there’s nothing scary or even minorly suspenseful about it (something I could just as easily say about the first two installments), but yet it entertains, coasting along on its laid-back approach and oddball humor.
The key provider of the comedy is the droll PA announcer that pipes up during pretty much every establishing shot of the hallways or immediate grounds of the high school where most of the movie takes place. “The chess club meeting has been canceled, members are to report to the library and play with themselves.” Juvenile to be sure, but damned if it didn’t make me crack up, and that’s probably the weakest quip of the bunch.
Another source of humor is the completely blasé attitude of the hero whenever Mary Lou kills someone. He reacts as in the same way, if not even stronger, as someone might to a dog that piddled on their floor. This, of course, is awesome to someone like me, who misses the old days of horror movies in which human life was never really respected by villains OR heroes.
And it’s a good thing that all this stuff kept me entertained, because the horror aspect was a total bust. Mary Lou starts off by killing anyone who would impede the success of our hero, but after a while she’s just killing anyone (even the guy who is attempting to move in on the hero’s girl; you’d think she’d WANT him around). Then the final 20 minutes inexplicably turns into a zombie movie, and damned if I even understood what the hell was going on in the final scene. I don’t mind the kitchen sink attitude in some movies, but there’s a difference between being random and simply making it up as you go along, so after a while it began to wear a little thin.
One random thing I did enjoy, to whatever extent one enjoys such things: like yesterday’s movie, this had a character doing something completely inappropriate and then using the ill-fitting excuse “I was looking for a contact lens”. I am willing to bet that I am the only person in the world who can claim such a thing.
I also liked that, for the first (and I think last) time in the Prom Night series, the film was actually connected to the one before in a manner that didn’t involve actor Brock Simpson. Mary Lou was, as you all didn’t really care, the villain of the 2nd film, and even though she looks completely different and such, I liked that they seemed to be trying to establish some semblance of a mythology and connective tissue. It made it feel less cheap.
Unfortunately, Artisan didn’t care as much, and the DVD that I spent my hard earned 3 dollars on is actually a TV cut of the film, a fact the DVD (which lists an R rating) never addresses (i.e. with a warning like “This film has been modified...”). I noticed something was up when a guy was clearly dubbed to say “Dork” instead of “Dick” at one point (yet “Fag” was left in for another scene – I guess it’s more acceptable to general audiences to take a shot at a homosexual than at the male anatomy). The uncut version, which has nudity and gore and presumably more harsh language, is not available on region 1 DVD, and that is a shame; I for one wouldn’t mind looking at the knockers of the girl who played Mary Lou. And with Blu-Ray coming along, and the economy in the crapper, I doubt a deluxe DVD edition of a 19 year old DTV movie is high on anyone’s priority list. Oh well.
See? I swore off watching nonsense like BloodWars (aka The Thirst: Blood War), yet I am an optimist at heart. So I watch it, and then remember exactly why I swore off watching this shit in the first place. Granted, this is hardly a Dark Harvest-ian no-name affair – the film features Tony Todd AND C. Thomas Howell, which at least suggests some semblance of a budget. Sadly, one can only assume the entire budget went to their salaries, because it sure as hell ain’t present on the screen.
For starters, it takes place in a college. The cafeteria is a few card tables with folding chairs next to a small buffet line that wouldn’t even cut it in a high school. Even my college, hardly a "Country's 10 Best Schools" candidate, had gourmet food and a separate dining hall. The hero’s dorm room looks suspiciously like the spare bedroom in your grandmother’s house, complete with a nice couch and tasteful art on the wall. The only thing that feels legit is the frat guy’s house, only because it, like all other movie frat guy houses, is a piece of shit rundown thing on a suburban street.
But what really sinks the movie is a complete lack of blood, wars, or any combination of the two*. I found out later that the title was originally just The Thirst, but even that hardly qualifies as appropriate. Most of the movie is about a bunch of folks who stepped in off of a LARP session in order to tell the tale about a bunch of dueling vampire clans and the guys who are after them, and also of the love triangle between a vegetarian, a girl, and a rapist frat guy with supernatural powers.
I’d like to dedicate a paragraph to the latter. He has some sort of telekinesis, but he doesn’t seem to be a vampire or anything. And he goes down pretty easily when him and the hero fight over the girl after he attempts to rape her (this actually is a no win for her – the hero guy becomes a vampire as the result of this fight (don’t ask), and later more or less rapes her as well). So why he has powers, I have no idea - He’s the son of a sentry (the monk-esque vampire hunters), but those are the good guys, so why he acts like a total dick is beyond me. But also, the guy, and all of the other characters, are supposed to be college students, but they act like grade schoolers. I once wrote a short script called The Bully which detailed what would happen if there was a bully in college demanding lunch money and such, and it’s pretty much exactly the same thing I see here. Except mine was played for laughs.
Another big problem is that the entire movie is just people TALKING about cool stuff. It’s like watching others play Dungeons & Dragons. They talk about cool sounding battles and powers and everything, but its just folks sitting at a table talking about doing them. There’s some decent martial arts stuff near the end of the movie, but it’s far too little too late.
And the cast! Tony Todd plays the head vampire guy, and it looks like he borrowed his costume from Dracula 3000. C. Thomas Howell has a cameo as a redneck (there is nothing about that phrase that makes sense), and Sean Connery’s son Jason plays a vampire who seems to be an even bigger bad guy than Todd, or something. Since the movie was all talk and no show, I had trouble following it after awhile, because it was all gobbledy-gook. A few hot women kept my eyes at attention, but my ears tuned out right around the time one sentry says to another “My news is grievous: your son has passed. I believe it was the Maltus Coven.”
Thankfully, there are no extras to wade through. My OCD thanks the DVD company and the entire cast and crew for not putting any more effort into the disc than they already wasted on the film itself.
What say you?
*One of my all time favorite bad lines in an otherwise solid movie is in Exorcism Of Emily Rose, when Laura Linney tells the jury “She was not sick, or crazy, or any combination of the two.” There is only ONE possible combination of two things!
I wouldn’t mind watching more documentaries for HMAD; it would certainly mix things up a bit, and since I like to learn things, a documentary would probably be much more helpful than whatever I watch today for my ‘legit’ daily entry (editor’s note: BC’s prediction was correct). But they would have to be full length films in order to count, and Fantastic Flesh doesn’t quite make the cut at a scant 58 minutes.
I assume Flesh is from the same producers that gave us Bloodsucking Cinema in 2007, which was an entertaining but flawed look at vampires in cinema. This one takes the same approach, albeit focusing on the role of makeup effects. It’s a much more interesting subject to be sure, but unfortunately it shares some of the same problems. For starters, and this is of no fault to anyone but the rights holders to certain films, we get a lot of talking heads, not enough of the actual final product (or better, showing the actual process). When you’re talking about something purely VISUAL, you want to see the work itself, not Greg Nicotero or Mick Garris commenting on it.
Another odd issue is that a lot of the films seem to be from the year 2005 for whatever reason. I don’t doubt the validity of Chronicles of Narnia (it won KNB an Oscar after all), but The Island? Sin City? Neither of those films are something I would immediately think of when considering the legendary advances in makeup (if I was to make a doc concerning greenscreen and compositing, then Sin City would be top of my list). Granted, the film is produced by Nicotero and thus KNB’s work is bound to be shown more than others, but still. They’ve done other films that are more relevant – Jason Goes To Hell, for example, isn’t even mentioned, despite having some pretty great effects (and was one of the last major horror films to come along before CGI became the standard).
One final, more crippling flaw is the total absence of Stan Winston. The film is even dedicated to him, and while the other big timers get their due (Dick Smith, KNB, Savini), Winston’s work is skipped over entirely, and the man himself is only mentioned once or twice in passing. Even if a rights issue prevented his work from being seen, there’s no excuse to skip over him completely, especially with so many celebrity guests on hand to gush about the other makeup gurus. Stills or behind the scenes footage (which belongs to whoever shot it, not the company who put out the movie it was for) would have sufficed. We get 5 minutes about a fucking Transformer and nothing about Terminator???
Otherwise, it’s a great look back at all of the amazing movie monsters and effects that us horror nerds have enjoyed all of our lives. For all its omissions, there ARE a lot of great movies represented properly: The Exorcist, From Dusk Til Dawn, Dawn of the Dead, etc. Since it aired on Starz and not Monsters HD, it could have very easily just focused entirely on non-horror films like Narnia, so to see Rhodes get torn apart in Day of the Dead in the same piece as a shot of Mr Tumnus running around is pretty great, and further proves how wide reaching the work of “horror” guys like KNB has been over the years. My favorite bit in the entire movie comes when Nicotero talks about Dances With Wolves, how Kevin Costner saw the dead bodies that KNB made for (the comedy) Gross Anatomy and assumed they could make dead buffalo as well. To these guys, it doesn’t matter if you’re Costner or Craven, they will deliver top notch work all the same.
As a purchase though, it’s too general a focus to be of much use to die-hard makeup effects fans, especially since much more in-depth looks at each film (even the non horror ones) can be found on their respective DVDs, which fans probably already own anyway. It’s enjoyable enough, but you’d probably never want to watch it again, and the disc contains no extras whatsoever. Because of this, I would think that the best possible audience for this movie would be parents who find their kids’ interest in gore and makeup to be abhorrent. The kid can show this to his parents and watch their shock to discover that the same guys who made a vagina monster eat a guy’s head off in Dusk til Dawn were the same ones who made all the lovable woodland creatures in Narnia. As Nicotero says, their job is to provide the paint and brushes for the director to create their artwork, and even if you dislike the end product, any film fan should have the highest respect for what these guys do (i.e. if you don’t like a Picasso, you don’t blame whoever made the paint itself). Hopefully someday a more in-depth look at the creators themselves will come along (hell, an entire TV series would be ok by me, each week focusing on a different creator or team), but until then, this is better than nothing.
I wonder what it was like for folks to see Friday the 13th during its initial theatrical run, or even a year or two later. Because for me, like many other fans I am sure, Friday the 13th means Jason. The first one I saw was Final Chapter, which had Jason, hockey mask, and the formula down pat. One of the universal memories for a lot of fans in my age group is finding out from a friend, or from an actual viewing, that Jason didn’t appear in the film at all except as a slimy mongoloid child in a lake. “His mom’s the killer? What the-!!"
As such, it’s probably the ONLY horror franchise in which saying that “part ___” is your favorite won’t get you roasted alive. It’s not very often you hear someone claim that Halloween 6 or Nightmare on Elm St 4 represents the best of the series, but with Friday the 13th, it’s equally uncommon to hear “the first one is the best”, at least in my experience. Obviously, the primary reason would be the lack of Jason, but in this most recent viewing, I was hard-pressed to find any other reason for putting it a notch or two below some “traditional” entries.
For starters, it’s the only one besides Jason Lives that has more of a focus on suspense than a body count. Only ten folks are killed in this one (a low for the series, though that’s hardly a surprise), and half of them are off-screen. But rather than have everyone die the second they split away from the others, as they do in the sequels, everyone gets a pretty lengthy stalk/atmosphere scene (and in Brenda and Bill’s case, that’s all they get, since their death is hidden from our eyes).
The characters also have far more personality than the later films (again, except for Jason Lives, which like this one, has a much smaller group to deal with). I love the scene where Officer Dorf comes along, because everyone (except Alice, who must be off dealing with whatever vague problem she has “out west”) gets a little moment to show their personality. They talk to themselves in the bathroom, doing impressions and such, make off the cuff remarks... they’re real people. There’s also a sense of camaraderie that a lot of the other entries lacked – even though these kids just met or barely knew each other, they seem more like a real group than say the kids in New Blood, who are supposed to be close friends and yet don’t gel together at all.
Plus, I liked the idea that the lake is actually part of the real world. We see diners, cops, truckers... it feels easier to identify with, like a place I would go to or actually have gone to in Maine or whatever. Again, some of the later sequels felt less natural because they were always so devoid of life beyond the people that were about to get killed.
And yet it still has that lovably cheap charm that is present for the entire series. The most laughable example is the “thunderstorm” that Kevin Bacon sees, which is clearly just a guy shining an orange light on his face from a few feet away. But you also get the scares that make no real world sense at all (was Crazy Ralph just waiting in the closet all day, hoping someone would need a can of soup?), people without peripheral vision, etc. And I think every single corpse blinks or takes a breath.
I wonder if the campers/counselors at Tomahawk Lake run into as many problems.
One low-budget aspect that’s not as charming is the editing. It downright sucks at times: shots linger on forever (there’s at least two shots of Alice leaving a shot, and then we just look at a tree or whatever for another 10 seconds), and the film as a whole is about 10 minutes too long. There’s a fine line between developing character (having the kids play Strip Monopoly) and padding the runtime (watching all three of them take their turns back to back, with only a boot coming off). If they needed to be 95 minutes for whatever reason, maybe they should have shot an additional scene at the beginning with Mrs. Voorhees (or even someone mentioning that she EXISTED), which would make the reveal much less of a cheat. Though to Sean Cunningham and all 45 writers’ credit – they don’t really make much of an effort to make her look innocent, she pulls up in the jeep we know belongs to the killer, and more or less reveals her intentions about 12 seconds after meeting Alice), rather than waste time thinking she’s an ally only to slowly let her true side out.
Folks have demanded a proper special edition for years, and thanks to Platinum Dunes’ remake, we finally got one (I suspect that 90% of all horror remakes exist solely to make money off the original film again), and on Blu-Ray to boot. The video quality is quite good on the BR, particularly in the daytime scenes (look at the level of detail on the bricks and stones when Annie is walking through the town). It’s a very grainy film, and kudos to Paramount for not de-graining it for its high def release, which is a disastrous process that other films have suffered the indignity of on their ‘remastered’ Blu releases (Dark City, for example, now resembles something shot on DV). And the cut footage, which totals 10 seconds, is well integrated back into the film. The new 5.1 mix SOUNDS good, though the surrounds are mostly ignored. Considering all of the POV shots, I was hoping for a lot of tree branch crackling type noises to be coming out of my rear channels, but I honestly forgot that I was listening to a 5.1 mix once the film began. Still, it’s clear and richer than the original mono track (which is included) for sure.
A wealth of extras are also included, though for the most part they cater only to new fans (presumably those who will come out of the new film and then discover that it was a remake), as it’s just a bunch of stuff die hards already know (Betsy Palmer thought the script was a piece of shit! Tom Savini’s friend played Mrs. Voorhees at the end of the movie! It was cold in the lake!). There’s some reunion footage and a basic retrospective, both run about 15 minutes, with everyone telling the stories you expect. Another new feature is a lame short film focusing on a pair of Jason-esque murders. Without any explanation for its inclusion, this is the worst kind of filler nonsense, and it should have been excised in order to up the bit budget of the film itself. The one sort of interesting (to a well versed nerd like me) piece is an interview with Cunningham, shot in his own home. Again, it’s not like you’ll learn a lot, but it’s a nice and honest self-examination of the guy who is attributed to ‘creating Jason’ (something he more or less takes no credit for). There’s a commentary by Cunningham and a bunch of others, though it seems to be edited together from interviews instead of a screen-specific track. Again – if you’ve already read the books or even a bunch of Fangorias on the subject, you won’t really learn anything new. We also get the awesome original trailer.
Blu-Ray owners get two more extra features, another sort of generic retrospective about the film, and a look at Savini’s creations. Ironically enough, even they are exclusive to the Blu-Ray, they are presented in standard def and are also incredibly dark (which is great when Savini is talking about his legendary work, because you can’t fucking see any of it). They also seem to be re-edited from a full length (or at least, wider-ranging) doc about the series as a whole, as people from all of the films are thanked during the end credits despite the fact that only part 1 is represented either with cast, crew, or clips. In short – if you’re not a Blu-ray owner, I wouldn’t consider this to be the disc you lose your 1080p virginity on, but if you have BL already, by all means enjoy the crisper picture and less shelf-hogging package.
A landmark film that is known as much today for what it DOESN’T have compared to what it does, Friday the 13th is a must see for any horror fan. It holds up fairly well, and is nowhere near as half-assed or reprehensible as some critics would have you believe. And the great thing about it is that it proves a point that I have been trying to make since Horror Movie A Day began: I don’t care if a film exists solely to make some money (Cunningham and the others freely admit that it was made “to keep the lights on”), as long as the people involved put some effort into making something that will actually entertain, rather than use their “independence” as an excuse for its faults. That’s something the Michael Feifers of the world clearly don’t understand and possibly never will.
Some 15 years ago, Fangoria was singing the praises of a film called Mute Witness, comparing the opening 40 minutes to Halloween. That’s not praise I will accept easily, especially without seeing it for myself. But since the review pointed out that the film needed to be seen in widescreen, and I didn’t have a laserdisc, I didn’t bother to watch it. When it finally hit DVD in 2003 I picked it up immediately, and now I finally watch it six years later.
(I would like to submit this story to anyone who claims I need instant gratification.)
To its credit, the opening is pretty exciting, in that it’s well shot, has some nice setpieces (like climbing down a shaft) and an interesting location (a movie studio, where a shitty slasher movie is being shot). Unfortunately, it’s not particularly suspenseful, because it all concerns our heroine, and we know damn well she won’t get killed (also, knowing that it only lasts about 40 minutes kills the momentum a bit, though that’s not the filmmaker’s fault by any means).
After that though, it’s a sort of by-the-numbers “Hitchcockian” thriller, complete with a Macguffin and lightly humorous supporting characters. And again, it’s still well made and all, but the entire time I felt like I was watching a movie I had seen 10 times already; entertained but not involved or surprised at anything. Even the would-be twist ending involving squibs was expected (it didn’t help that director Anthony Waller foolishly shows the woman’s un-shot back in between shots of her “bullet riddled” front).
Waller does do a good job of finding ways to keep the woman’s muteness tied into the story. She gets stuck with one of the killers and can’t explain to her friend why, she can’t call for help, etc. It’s not as gimmick-y as I expected, the movie as a whole wouldn’t really work had she had the ability to communicate (as opposed to the mute girl in Hellraiser II, a disability without any sort of payoff or real narrative function whatsoever). However, I would have liked a scene where she sees a murder about to happen and can’t alert the victim or something – all of the scenes revolving around her communication problems are about endangering HER - but oh well.
Speaking of language quirks – a lot of the dialogue in the movie is Russian, yet these lines are not subtitled. Even with the English sub track on, the Russian words are skipped over. Since our villains more or less exclusively speak Russian, this results in full conversations occurring without the benefit of knowing what is being said. It’s one thing when they make obvious, short statements (like if a guy points at someone and yells a word or two in another language, and then his comrades begin to give chase, you can pretty much guess that he’s saying “after them!” or something), but when it’s a full conversation – one about the object that is causing all of the trouble no less – it’s a bit odd to be left completely in the dark.
One thing that DID surprise was how much nudity was in the film. The murder that sets off the narrative occurs after some hot n heavy lovemaking, and our heroine even disrobes (twice), once in a silly scene in which she tries to get the attention of a guy across the street. Speaking of which, the other surprise was how (intentionally) sitcom-y the movie got at times; her two friends in particular run around like they just stepped in out of Dharma and Greg or something.
It’s also Alec Guinness’ last film. He appears in a few shots (his role was filmed like nine years before the rest of the movie; Bela Lugosi style) as The Reaper, leader of a snuff ring. Even in the nearly wordless role, he shows genuine class.
All in all, I’d say it’s a decent thriller that was lucky to come along during a horror draught. Everything in the film has been done better, but at the time it was released, in the mid 90s (pre-Scream) when no one was making horror movies, it was a breath of fresh air. I wish I hadn’t waited so long, but oh well. Beats the hell out of my idea for a thriller, in which a guy who can’t smell is chased around a flower shop by a giant sewage man. I call it DEATH STINKS.
I was really hoping Boogeyman 3 would at least live up to the surprising quality of Boogeyman 2, which eschewed the supernatural nonsense of the original in favor of a straight up slasher. But the supernatural force is back, and while it still plays out like a slasher film (as opposed to the haunted house-ish original), it still severely underwhelms in any category.
For starters it doesn’t seem to make any damn sense. The opening scene has a girl who looks like she’s 15 getting naked, and then dragged under her bed by the boogeyman. But then she resurfaces a few scenes later, not even injured. Did the boogeyman drag her under there and then just chill out? Plus, the movie steals a page from New Nightmare and introduces the concept that the BELIEF in the boogeyman is what makes him come to life. This results in a potentially great finale, in which our heroine takes credit for the murders in order to kill everyone’s belief in him and spare their lives. But then we get not one but TWO epilogues that prove he’s still around, which renders her sacrifice pointless and the movie even dumber (it doesn’t help that the 2nd epilogue, which concerns the predictable fate of a pair of new students, runs about 5 minutes too long).
Another crippling factor is the over-generic-ness of the entire college. Everyone listens to vague instrumental music that suits their character (i.e. the black pothead listens to some Hendrix-y “trippy” rock), and all of the posters on the wall are equally nondescript. I understand that the film is a low budget production and thus having a Metallica poster or the newest U2 song is out of the question, but come on! I’m sure a band like Saliva would let you throw something up for cheap. The saddest example comes when a kid is shown playing a fake Warhawk type game with a generic PS2 controller. It’s weak enough, but several shots of his room reveals that he doesn’t even have a game console (generic or otherwise)! And when he pauses the game it just freezes the image, there’s no ‘pause menu’ type screen. All of this just keeps an audience from ever believing a single thing that occurs, supernatural or otherwise.
The writer seems pretty excited about the tragedy!
Also, a major plot point requires most of the college to be listening to the campus radio station. I don’t know about yours, but at my school, NO ONE listened to the campus radio. I had a show once, and when I’d have a contest for a free CD, I would just ask for someone to call. No trivia, no “be caller 20” nonsense, just call. And I’d never get a winner.
One department that they DO deliver on is the gore/splatter. Like 2, this is far removed from the PG-13ity of the original; the deaths here are impressively gory, and there are sets literally drenched in blood. Christ, our heroine plays her final scene looking like the broad from The Descent. And since you don’t really care about any of the kids thanks to their generic interests, seeing them die is hardly a problem. I noticed a while back that whenever a character is really likable, they don’t usually make a crowd-pleasing “awesome” death for their demise (Randy in Scream 2, for example, is pretty much killed offscreen).
It also continues one tradition of the series – an incredibly thin link to the previous film provided by a file photo of the actor who they couldn’t afford to bring back. Last time the Tobin Bell character revealed that he treated Barry Watson’s character from the original, this time the girl at the beginning is shown to be Bell’s daughter. We know this because she goes into her house and stops to look longingly at a photo of him, before reading his journal (which is accompanied by a voiceover guy trying really hard to sound like Bell). I really hope that Boogeyman 4, should it come to pass, focuses on the locksmith who inexplicably provided a key lock for her bathroom:
The extra features are slim. No commentary track (thank Christ), just a pair of worthless deleted scenes and a trio of behind the scenes pieces that are more or less exactly what you’d expect (though the 2nd one, concerning the Bulgarian location, is at least kind of interesting due to the fact that it’s Bulgaria and not Canada). Sony also provides a few trailers for most of their other upcoming DTV sequels (Screamers 2 is left out for some reason).
So it’s not terrible, but still pretty weak. The college campus setting is always welcome*, and some really interesting ideas are presented, but screenwriter Brian Sieve lives up to his name and lets them all fall through the cracks. If there was ever a movement to do remakes for DTV sequels, this one would be near the top of my list.
What say you?
*Both the college in the movie and my own college in Massachusetts have a Hammond building and a Sanders building. If their school’s cafeteria was located on a suspended building over a major street (as mine was), then I would have called shenanigans.
Another day, another Kate Beckinsale-less prequel to a Kate Beckinsale movie. But otherwise it's the opposite of Vacancy 2. While that film was a major letdown and a black spot on the original's good (and still underrated) name, Underworld: Rise Of The Lycans is surprisingly an improvement over the convoluted and wayyyyyyyy "style over substance" driven first two.
One must assume that Patrick Tatopoulos is a better director than Len Wiseman, as the writing team is more or less the same and two of the three main stars reprise their roles. How else to explain that this film is coherent, well shot (only once in the film did I find the action incoherent due to the closeups and rapid fire editing that was pretty much nonstop in the others), and just simply more enjoyable than Wiseman's entries?
To be fair, Evolution was an improvement over the original as well, so maybe even with Wiseman at the helm this one would still have turned out pretty good (it's hard to judge the guy as a director when he seemingly never has a decent script to work from). The prequel setting has taken automatic weapons out of the equation, which was always one of my bigger problems with the movies. I want werewolves to claw and tear at folks, not shoot them.
Another big improvement is the storytelling. While some of the subplot narrative is a bit muddled (Viktor wants to use his werewolf slaves as guards to improve their defenses, but it's never quite clear as to what could possibly cause major damage to a castle filled with vampires), the basic plot is more streamlined and coherent than the others. It's sort of a cross between Gladiator and Romeo and Juliet, and that's fine by me. And it's also free of the double-crosses and such that plagued the other films, where I was never quite sure who was on who's side (and could never figure out what the hell they were trying to accomplish either).
The only real issue with this film, besides the obvious prequel "facts" that deflate some of the suspense (Lucian and Viktor might be mortal enemies, but you know that they both survive this battle), is that the vampires never really do any cool vampire shit. This is the werewolf's show most of the time, and since the effects are much improved as well (only the blood looks fake/CG), I wish there was a big vampire transformation like we get for the Lycans. Even in the big climactic battle, Viktor is just plain ol' Viktor.
The nice thing about the movie is that it has inspired me to give the previous ones another look. With a better grasp on the characters, maybe I will enjoy them more. I'll still hate all the fucking guns though.
It seems hard to believe (at least, to me) but I actually missed Jason X during its brief theatrical run in the spring of 2002. There were two reasons: One – I was broke, and two – I was working on my student film (which was why I was broke). And folks told me it kind of sucked, so even though I felt kind of sad about missing this nearly mythical film in theaters, I opted to wait until DVD. Sometimes I wonder if my opinion of the film would be different had I gone with a few friends on opening night, as I did for JGTH and Freddy Vs, both of which I liked in theaters only to get bored to tears when watching them at home.
The problem with this movie is that it’s just so damn lackluster. It was the longest wait ever for a Jason movie (and probably always will be – nine years?!?!), an entirely new setting, new technology to use... and Jason strangles or “breaks” like half of his victims (with another half dozen off screen). By my count, there are really only 3 exciting kills in the entire movie (cyro-face, sucked through the airtube, and guy being cut in half at the waist). The crew is really proud of the fact that this is the least MPAA-mangled film in the entire series, but watching it I had to wonder – what the fuck would the MPAA have a problem with? An explosion? Christ, Prom Night had more splatter. Even the air tube one is limited to a shot of some latex smeared on a metal grate.
And by now I don’t expect any real continuity, but Jason’s appearance is just unforgivable. We can see Kane Hodder’s very human face through the eyeholes, and his outfit doesn’t look right either. The mask is also pretty terrible; even the fake one in part 5 looked better. And while he may have lost his teleportation ability, he has seemingly gained incredible intelligence – he never once seems confused as to why there are virtual reality worlds around him, and he knows exactly how to handle cryogenics the moment he wakes up in the future.
There are also a great number of missed opportunities. The science guys at the beginning claim that they want to study Jason for his unique regenerative abilities, and then the future has this nano-technology that can regenerate damaged tissue almost instantly (one of Todd Farmer’s best ideas is to have this technology get used early on in a funny scene where the frozen Jason manages to cut a guy’s arm off – it foreshadows Jason’s using it later AND it’s pretty funny). Why not work in a line or scene where the future people discover that it was Jason himself that allowed this technology to get created in the first place? That would be awesome!
Also, they apparently didn’t learn from VIII that putting Jason on a ship is a bad idea, but why never give him a chance to do his thing before he is discovered? He wakes up at the 30 minute mark, and everyone is in “Jason is alive!” panic mode at 36 minutes. They go out of their way to introduce a bunch of teenagers for Jason to kill, but they never get to really do anything teenager-y before they are all running for their lives and such. And on that note – I assume we’re supposed to believe that Jason is re-awakened because he senses all of the sex going on, but Jim Isaac is too pedestrian a director to make this idea even clear, let alone as perversely hilarious as it should be. For a movie that’s supposed to be funny, a lot of the humor is totally botched.
I know I knock on Harry Manfredini a lot for recycling his scores, but this movie proves why he should do just that. He did an all new score for this one, and it’s fucking TERRIBLE. It sounds like DVD menu music, or something taken from a 99 cent “Sounds of Halloween” CD from the supermarket. And why he doesn’t reprise the main theme (at least not really, a brief clip of it is used during the “Virtual Crystal Lake” sequence) is beyond me.
But it does have its strong points as well. One is actress Melyssa Ade, for my money the cutest woman in the series since Amy Steel. Another is the body count - what the movie lacks in quality it makes up for in quantity; Jason kills like 25 individual people in this one, plus causes the death of hundreds more when he kills the ship’s pilot, which results in the ship plowing into a space city and blowing it up. Also, the character of Brodski is the badass opponent we’ve always wanted in one of these movies. Creighton Duke was cool, but Jason killed him like 2 seconds after they first squared off. Brodski survives like 3 certain death situations, plus is the one to actually kill him off at the end (as opposed to the Final Girl). I just wish Tony Todd had played him – the actor is fine, but he’s rather unknown, and it would have been cool to have a known badass play him. And it’s rather minor, but I love the guy who plans to buy Jason from the professor. He’s only in one scene, but there’s something slightly off about the guy that made me wish he was in the movie more.
The DVD has respectable extras, about the same as offered on the Hell disc. We get a commentary with Isaac, Farmer, and producer Noel Cunningham, in which Farmer seems to be the only one who was legitimately excited about making a Jason movie (he also alludes that the script was rewritten without him). There’s also a making of that is mostly about the special effects, and another sort of generic retrospective about the series as a whole (Paramount apparently refused to give them any clips though, so we get lame recreations). New Line also provided a handy “Jump to a death” feature, which is exactly what you think it is.
Oh well, for all its shortcomings, at the end of the day it’s at least fun. Once Jason wakes up there’s a kill every 3-4 minutes, and the cast seems more into it than the last few movies. And like 5, it’s one that benefits from a larger crowd (the most fun I ever had watching it was with 3 or 4 friends and some beer on a hot summer night). It just could have been a lot better given the resources (this is the biggest budgeted film in the series, and it sure as hell didn’t all go toward the CGI, which is often terrible), and it’s a bummer that the space setting barely even factors into Jason’s exploits. I was hoping for one of the better Jason movies, but it’s really on the lower end of the 11 entries. I’ve given up trying to put them in an exact order – but I would say 6, 4, and 2 are my favorites, 1, 5, 3, and 8 are the middle rungs, and 7, 9, and Vs are the weakest. X is either the best of that last group, or the worst of the middle one.
" I'd like to see one of these movies where the would-be victim turns out to be Spider-Man or something. Or maybe they could do one where the group is on their first attempt (hey, they had to start somewhere) and both the good and the bad guys are equally incompetent." -BC, Vacancyreview.
Well I guess I have no one but myself to blame for the dullness that is the prequel Vacancy 2: The First Cut, which indeed DOES tell the story of the hotel guys’ first attempt at making a snuff film. The killers aren’t totally incompetent (they manage to kill 2 out of 3) but they apparently haven’t reached the point where they are scary or interesting.
At this point I’m gonna have to go ahead and demand that Joe Lynch teach a class or something on how to make an effective DTV sequel. Wrong Turn 2 isn’t perfect, but it’s far more ambitious and interesting than anyone expected, and Lynch fully embraced the freedom that comes with not having to worry about getting the movie on 3000 screens. On the other hand, Vacancy 2 even has the same writer as the original (the movie even offers an otherwise pointless “based on characters created by” credit to make sure we know that), but not only does it fail to capitalize on the benefits of not having to cater to a multiplex audience (i.e. offer up NC-17 style gore or nudity, give a downer ending, etc), but it actually manages to make the original – a big theatrical release with A-list stars- look hardcore in comparison.
Right off the start we know we’re in trouble. The hotel guys are not killers, but seedy entrepreneurs who use hidden video cameras to make “porn” when guests stop in to fool around - yet the couple they are filming are fully clothed as they fuck. Watching still camera porn is boring enough, but who the hell would want to watch one where you can’t even see skin? But then a serial killer comes along, and they blackmail him into helping them revive their video export business by making snuff films together.
To be fair, it’s not the worst idea for a setup. Seeing the hows/whys of the villains, with the victims being just anonymous filler, would actually be pretty interesting I think, especially once they introduce the idea that one of them is having second thoughts about being associated with murder. But then Agnes Bruckner (of “Katherine Heigl wouldn’t return our calls” fame) and her boyfriend and his best friend show up, and it becomes a lame remake of the original, with them quickly noticing something is wrong and then trying to escape their tormentors. But whereas the original was confined to the hotel, Mark L. Smith’s script blunders badly by having the characters run away. So we get scenes in the woods, scenes with some good Samaritan neighbors, etc. There’s no tension whatsoever in the film, because you feel like they can simply go anywhere.
Worse, Bruckner’s character is revealed to be pregnant early on, and since there’s no nudity and no gore (her boyfriend’s death is so vague I momentarily considered that it was staged), you know the movie doesn’t have the balls to kill her off. So once the other guy is dead the movie is just treading water until it reaches its required 85 minute mark. Thankfully, Bruckner’s method of dispatching the guys is pretty badass, but it’s hardly enough to save the movie at that point.
And so much for seeing things from the killer’s POV – they never really fight amongst themselves or “switch sides” or do anything interesting, nor do they ever really develop into personalities. The irony is, since I couldn’t remember what the guys in the original looked like (besides Frank Whaley) or their names or anything, I wasn’t sure which ones would live or die, so I was actually more interested in their fates than anyone else. As I later learned, the serial killer guy was the only one to reprise his role, though I don’t recall any of the villains in the original film having the severe burn marks his character receives in this one (again – this is a prequel that allegedly leads up to the events of the Kate Beckinsale one).
Speaking of the rather flimsy “prequel” connective tissue – the motel in the film is actually NOT the same one as the one in the original, though the office looks exactly the same and it seems to be in the same remote location. The end of this film shows the killer guy setting up the Pinewood motel from the first one, but it looks nothing like it and seems to be located on the side of a desert road, instead of in heavy forest like it should be. Plus, how does he buy a hotel anyway?
Sony apparently doesn’t think the movie is as big of a waste of time as it is, loading the DVD with features (and audio tracks – they even provide a Thai language track!). There are 3 deleted scenes of no consequence, a pair of featurettes about the making of and the set design (pretension alert – the director is proud of the fact that the main motel building is an inverted V – V for Vacancy!), and a commentary track with even MORE pretension, as director Eric Bross and the others point out how the film resembles Night of the Hunter, Godfather II, Aliens, and other films that don’t belong in the same sentence as this dud of a movie. Interestingly, at one point I began playing Facebook Scrabble to keep myself from falling asleep listening to it, and a few minutes later they reveal that they played Scrabble to kill time on the set. It’s a shame they didn’t just keep playing rather than finish the movie.
In my review for one of the other "6 Films To Keep You Awake", I pointed out how each disc seemed to have a theme. Disc 1 was abortion, Disc 2 was children. Well, Disc 3 is “actual horror movies”. Also great ones. And while Baby’s Room had a few minor issues, the only problem I had with To Let (Spanish: Para Entrar A Vivir) is that it was too damn short (68 minutes!), but like Inside (78 minutes), rather than a 90 minute movie with slow parts, you get a relentlessly paced adrenaline burst without any worthless filler.
See, the movie starts off like a typical haunted house movie. Our working class couple needs a new place, but aren’t exactly rich. So they go look at this “amazing deal” apartment. So I’m thinking, OK, they take the place even though it’s not perfect, and then they hear noises and see things and blah blah”. And even as I was thinking that, all of a sudden, 10 minutes into the movie, the landlord begins beating the husband over the head, blood spraying everywhere. Holy shit!
For the next 55 minutes, we get what is almost a realtime account of our heroine (the wonderfully attractive Macarena Gomez*) trying to escape the landlord, who is sort of Stepfather-y in her desires to achieve perfection, except she doesn’t waste any time beating her subjects into submission. There is another family living there, all chained up and severely shell-shocked, and some other minor developments that mix it up a bit, but for the most part it’s just landlord v. tenant. Things rarely slow down, and even when they do it’s still suspenseful and unnerving.
What I really dug is how it seemed like it was going off into supernatural territory every now and then, only to quickly reveal the very ordinary (and chilling) reasons for these things. Like I said, it starts off like a typical haunted house movie; at one point the couple sees a photo of themselves on the shelf of the apartment they just entered for the first time. You might think it’s a riff on The Shining or whatever, but then the brain-beatings begin and you forget all about it. Then later, Macarena opens a fridge and discovers that it’s filled with the Mexican yoo-hoo drink she loves. Again, you might think it’s some sort of “the house will give you everything you need” thing, but a flashback explains that the landlord has been stalking them for quite some time.
I also like how the landlord gets her ass kicked as much as the hero. The heroine stays relatively unharmed, but both landlord and the husband are covered in blood (more shades of Inside) by the end of the film. It’s actually pretty impressive how gory this movie is when you consider the borderline non-existent body count (I’m actually unsure if ANYONE actually dies in the movie).
I want to quickly mention two soundtrack choices. One is the song during the end credits, which sounds like “A Little Respect” as imagined by Los Lobos. The other is Macarena’s ringtone, which is Hot Butter’s addictive song “Popcorn”. I actually started imagining the state of mind of someone who would take the time to download that as a ringtone. It’s the catchiest song you’ve never heard of (or, you just went on Youtube and looked up the song and went “oh THAT’S what that song is called!”).
Another thing that tickled me was the operator that she calls early on in the film when shit first starts going down. Granted her story probably sounds a bit silly, but the operator just seems borderline retarded; unable to comprehend even basic sentences. I was really hoping for a scene at the end of the film where she tracks the operator down and kills her in cold blood as a means of payback.
The making of is like all the others on this set; filled with blurry faces and everyone talking about how great everyone else was. The post house that edited them all clearly didn’t really care about mixing things up between them, so after 6 movies I was pretty sick of what was almost the exact same piece for each movie (which is a shame since this was my favorite movie of the bunch). Plus this one was needlessly stretched into a full frame image, so it was annoying to watch as well. Blah.
I guess it might be confusing to hear me trash a movie like Hit And Run for being inept and having no likable characters, but also praise something like Cathy’s Curse, which is inept and features no likable characters. The difference is, movies like Cathy’s have that certain je ne sais quoi that makes them special in their own weird little way, a quality something like Hit And Run grossly lacks. It’s worth investigating in greater detail (though not by me – I hate research), I think. Because once that special quality is determined, I might be able to figure out which category Lockjaw: Rise Of The Kalev Serpent (DVD title: Carnivorous) falls in, because I even re-watched parts of it and I am still not sure.
For starters, “star” DMX barely appears in the movie, and when he does, he’s by himself or composited into the shot with the other actors. An obvious standin is used for other shots (how often do you see a movie in which the star’s face is hardly ever lit?), and director Amir Valinia makes laughable attempts to get him into the story more through “creative” editing. At one point they just cut to a random shot of DMX slashing some branches in order to make his way through a field, which would be fine if his character wasn’t still at home at this point of the movie.
Another lovably terrible thing about this movie is that it’s really only 68 minutes long. The disc has a total running time of 83 minutes, but that includes the film’s trailer at the top of the film, 5 minutes of out-of-order opening credits over close-ups of random household objects, and a NINE minute end credit scroll (so long that the music runs out halfway through and you watch the rest in silence), which is also not only out of order, but not even consistently written - at one point they swap the order of “title/name”:
So Supervising Sound Editor was the Michael McDonald? Cool.
Then there’s the dialogue. Most of it seems like it was written by a 15 year old with a hardon, but there are some truly wonderful gems here and there that suggest it was actually written by a wiseass PRETENDING to be a 15 year old with a hardon. There’s a random running gag about lamps that got me chuckling, and a guy in the opening scene suddenly says “You possum bastards!” (or “You AWESOME bastards!” – I couldn’t tell, and both are equally amazing) after dropping his keys. Plot development is just as juvenile; there’s a guy who doesn’t seem to mind his girlfriend giving his buddy a pretty hands-heavy lapdance, and another guy who literally skateboards in and out of his scenes (even interior ones).
The best thing though, is the event that kicks off what passes for a plot. Our heroes (let’s just go with it) are driving around, and the one dude is feeling up the girlfriend of the other guy (who is sitting on the other side of her, apparently blind or not too concerned). The two “nice” folks in the group are in the backseat, sharing an ipod via a splitter that the girl had for some reason. And this is what passes for an explanation as to why none of them notice when they run over a woman standing in the road. I’m not even joking, they hit her dead on and no one really notices. The nice girl wonders what the bump was, and wants to check, but the others are like “what bump?” and the conversation ends. It puts the “accident” scene in Reefer Madness to shame.
The movie then becomes a slasher version of Pumpkinhead, albeit with a snake. The husband, who doesn’t really seem all that upset, draws a picture of a snake with a magic voodoo crayon, and then the snake becomes real and goes about picking off the kids one by one. But then he feels bad and decides to try to stop it. DMX plays the son of the guy who the husband got the voodoo crayon from, and for some reason this convinces him to get a bazooka from the local gang (in Iowa?) and hunt it down.
But see, this is exactly the problem as to why I can’t even decide if this movie is “Bad Awesome” or just plain bad. You read all that and it sounds amazing, but it’s actually really fucking boring. The snake carnage only makes up about 20 minutes’ worth of the 68 minutes. Before the guy even draws the snake, we watch nearly 20 minutes of the husband and wife hanging out in their garden and playfully arguing about digging some holes, and almost as many scenes involving the various relationships between our moronic characters. And, needless to say, the snake footage is hardly impressive (though it’s surprisingly better than anything in Anaconda 3). It’s kind of interesting that they use it almost like a masked killer - it even impales a guy while he’s fucking his girlfriend, a move taken from any number of Friday the 13ths – but it’s never particularly exciting or interesting.
But as the saying goes – it’s impossible to hate a movie in which a guy is eaten by a snake and not only survives that but also the close-range bazooka shot that kills said snake.
Apparently, House played in about 400 theaters this past fall. I knew nothing about it. A "reader" named Lisa who obviously works for Lionsgate recommended I watch it when it hit theaters (she also recommended that obscuro known as Saw V), but I don't recall it ever actually occurring. I can’t say for sure that I would have checked it out (it was in November, when October’s “festivities” left me completely drained of desire to do anything horror-related), but if I had, I’m sure I wouldn’t have minded the excursion. It’s nothing spectacular, but it’s surprisingly watchable; occasionally creepy, and always entertaining.
I got a bit nervous when I spied Bill Moseley, Lew Temple, and Leslie Easterbrook in the credits. Nothing against any of them on their own, but as I’ve pointed out before: multiple cast members from Devil’s Rejects is an instant cause for alarm (see, or not: A Dead Calling, Brotherhood of Blood, etc). Luckily, they’re not only all fine in the movie, but Bill and Leslie actually have real roles, not walk on cameos (Temple’s role is minor, though it’s at least important in the development of one character).
Also, I loved how quickly they got to the goddamn point. You know that any movie character who breaks down and takes shelter at a big old isolated house is bound to run into trouble, but they don’t waste any time getting to that point. Within a minute of the start of the obligatory dinner scene (15 minutes into the film), we get Moseley accusing one of them of being a whore, his freak son telling her he wants to fuck her, and some creepy nonsense involving ice cubes. From there on it’s pretty much nonstop, with a lot of underground tunnels and ghostly children and a guy named Tin Man who keeps shooting at them. It’s a pretty gonzo movie actually.
Unfortunately it begins to derail near the end. I must admit I’m not quite sure what the villain was trying to achieve or why he only needed one of them to die. There’s also a goofy epilogue that first presents a Twilight Zone-y twist, then reverses it with some groan-inducing Christian nonsense (this has been labeled a “Christian horror movie”, though it’s not particularly preachy or anything).
Michael Madsen pops up in it. I didn’t recognize him from his feet this time, but he’s playing the same sort of grunting “badass” he’s been playing nonstop for the past 5-6 years. Remember when he would occasionally act? Yeah, that was cool.
The biggest surprise was to hear Anberlin on the soundtrack. They are one of my favorite bands of that genre (poppy-emo-punky stuff), and I’m pretty sure this is their first in-film soundtrack appearance. The main character even sings along! But then she tries to listen to her own CD (she’s a country singer) which I thought was pretty odd. It’s her “greatest hits” CD – wouldn’t she be sick of the songs by now?
The Gate is releasing this one on DVD soon. It’s hardly essential viewing, but I was expecting a level of quality on the lines of the other DTV Lionsgate pickups I’ve watched, so I was happy to discovered that it was at least competently made and acted. Hope some of you give it a chance.
If there was ever any proof that nostalgia can cloud your judgment on a movie, then my defense of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan* is it. It was the first one I had on tape, and thus have probably seen it more than any of the other films. Yet it’s usually considered among the weakest of the series, if not the absolute worst by some (even Kane Hodder is pretty dismissive of it, which is amusing to me as it’s the only one of his four films I don’t want to punch in the cinematic face). Clearly, my childhood experience with the film is powerful enough to overlook its apparent unforgivable flaws.
I think the biggest issue people had, besides the lack of blood (though much bloodier than the 7th film, it’s still pretty “splatter” free), is that 2/3 of the movie takes place on a boat, and not Manhattan cum Vancouver. But that didn’t bother me as a kid, and it doesn’t even really bother me now. I’d be much more pissed if Jason was at Crystal Lake for the entire first hour only to finally head off to the Big Apple. At least the scenario (courtesy of writer/director Rob Hedden) offered us something new, and in turn, lots of new kills.
One thing the film NEVER gets any credit for is its unique kills. There’s one machete and one axe death in the entire movie. Everything else is pretty unique; a guitar, harpoon gun, toxic waste, a needle, a barrel of sewage, a control panel, a wrench, and a straight up “Jason just punches the dude’s fucking head off” scene, not to mention Jason’s most epic move ever – starting a fire that sinks a boat filled with at least 30 other kids. Fuck yeah.
But also, it made the Manhattan stuff feel more like an event when it occurred. They made you EARN that shit. And it’s not like horror film titles are guaranteed to reflect the bulk of the movie. As I mentioned before, the Bride of Frankenstein doesn’t appear until the final 10 minutes of that movie; I don’t see too many people complaining. Nor does anyone complain (as much anyway) about the “lying” titles of the subsequent entries: Jason doesn’t go to Hell until the final scene (spoiler!) and Freddy doesn’t Vs. him until the 3rd act.
At this point I want to reveal that this movie seriously made me afraid of NY until I was about 18. 10 year old me had no idea that it was really Vancouver and they needed be pretty selective when it came to locations, so I really thought that the whole city was just thieving crackheads, sewers, burnt out warehouses, and wall to wall graffiti. I even really thought that the sewers got flooded out with toxic waste every night (which I think would certainly solve NY’s rat problem, no?). So whatever – it may not have had as much NY as folks would like, but it was enough to scare the shit out of me.
I also like how Jason gained something of a personality in this one. Several times in the movie he cocks his head a bit, as if to say “Try it, you dumb kid.” And even though it doesn’t make much sense that he ignores everyone in NY to keep after two kids, I love when he fucks with the street punks, first breaking their awesome dual tape boombox and then lifting his mask to scare them off.
And uh... AWESOME.
All that said, it IS admittedly weak in a few key areas. The kids are all dull as dirt (worst Final Girl ever for sure), and Jason’s mask is ridiculous – he gets it from a kid who presumably bought it at the store, yet it has the axe mark from 3 on it. Plus it’s way too “designed” for Kane’s head; it looks like a plaster mold more than a store-bought mask. And the plot holes are incredibly large, even for a horror movie. Plus – teleporting Jason. Jason’s travel time has always been a bit questionable when you really start thinking about it, but it’s just blatant here. Especially near the end when he kills Agent For H.A.R.M. – he approaches the guy outside, and then somehow manages to get upstairs before him in order to toss him out the window!
I cannot defend Rob Hedden's commentary though. Not only is it rather dull and filled with "yeah no shit" comments like "This is a real boat", but he also blatantly lies about certain things. There's a rather jarring closeup of a dartboard in the film, and Hedden says that he did that on purpose to mis-direct the audience. But that's bullshit - the darts were originally used to kill Julius' boxing partner, but the scene was MPAA cut and reshot with the guy in the sauna (which he also lies about). Come on man, fess up! And while he admits that there's too much set on the boat, he apparently doesn't feel the need to address the other criticisms of the movie, which is a bit odd considering that it was recorded 15 years later. I've seen commentaries recorded the day that the movie was finished that had more reflection and honesty.
But for my money, it’s a big improvement over New Blood, and it never really gets boring. And it’s the last true “Friday the 13th” movie (after this, New Line took over, leaving the title and most of the entertainment value behind), so it deserves a bit more respect than I think it gets.
What say you?
*Best review I read was simply this: “He also takes forever. D-.”
I hate when something negative chains my movies together. Friday and Saturday’s movies concerned three people tied together over a minor event, and now today’s Red Mist is, like yesterday’s Hit and Run, a movie about really fucking stupid people trying to cover up an accident. But there are two key differences. One – the stupidity here is even MORE ridiculous, since these people are doctors and thus should be smarter, and two – this one ain’t AS bad.
It’s still bad though. The biggest problem with this movie is that it always focuses front and center on the Arielle Kebbel character, without ever really developing any of the other folks in the core group. Thus it’s a bit dull as a slasher film (which it often emulates, though it doesn’t exactly follow the template to a T), because you know she’ll be fine and everyone else will be dead. The scenes in which her friends get killed are often only long enough for you to understand who you are looking at before they are killed, thus killing any chance of suspense. You think of the older slasher movies (particularly the first couple of Friday the 13ths), and in a lot of cases, the Final Girl is on equal footing with the friends until folks start dying.
Another problem is that I don’t like any of them, even Kebbel. I was actually rooting for Kenneth (the “bad guy”), who is the latest in a long line of horror movie characters who are mentally handicapped in some non-descript way, are killed, and then seek revenge on their tormentors. I guess Kebbel’s character is supposed to be sympathetic because she makes a sad face when her friends are mocking him, but since she fails to actually defend the poor sod (plus she’s the one to convince him to stay at the party, knowing her friends are planning to fuck with him), I don’t really like her either. Kill em all dude, I’m with ya!
Also his last name is “Chisum”, which causes much unintentional humor when spoken by an actor with an accent.
It’s also one of those movies in which people would have survived if they bothered to pay the fuck attention. Kebbel designs some superdrug that she hopes will wake Kenneth out of his coma, based on some newsclippings she has seemingly printed out herself about how the drug can restore brain power or whatever. But then after shit starts going wrong (his brain is so advanced he can possess other folks and have them kill one another), she looks a bit further IN HER OWN FOLDER and “discovers” that the drug could cause a side effect: out of body experiences. You’d think if someone was smart enough to actually create a medication, they’d look through their own goddamn notes first.
Plus, I am really getting sick of being treated like an idiot when I watch horror movies. Ever since Saw made it big, suddenly every movie with even the slightest bit of a twist has a flashback sequence that supposedly presents the stuff we saw in a new light. And that’s fine for a movie with a convoluted narrative, but this is not one of those movies. We actually get a flashback to remind us that when Kenneth was being tormented, the kids all called him “Freakdog”, after we see it written with blood at a crime scene later in the movie. The space between the initial scene and the flashback is maybe forty minutes, and I hardly consider that to be a very surprising development, since we know damn well that Kenneth is controlling people with his mind at that point (plus it’s the name of the movie, according to the IMDb). Maybe they were hoping that “Freakdog” would be the “Rosebud” of lousy horror movies, but I am going to guess that they just thought we needed to be reminded.
For like 5 minutes, I actually loved the movie though. Near the end, Kebbel is on the phone with her friend, and explains to her to stay away from anyone with a nosebleed (it’s the sign of being possessed). But the girl is at a club, so there are going to be a ton of disappointed cokeheads tonight. Then it gets even funnier – Kebbel shows up as the friend is dying, and she yells “someone get an ambulance!” and some offscreen guy yells back, apropos of nothing: “Get it yourself you bitch!” Hahahaha.
One last thing – if you’re an epileptic, I would steer clear of this movie. Apparently there was actually a warning about it at Frightfest or something, but it’s not on the DVD. The entire finale is prevented with strobe lights, giving me a headache that still hasn’t gone away.
Actually, you know what? Just steer clear even if you’re not an epileptic. You have better things to do.
Another day, another shitty movie based on a thin premise. But whereas Blackoutat least had good direction and the occasional exciting setpiece, Hit And Run is just abysmal in every way, from start to finish. Worse, it’s almost the same movie as Stuck, which did just about everything this movie does, only much better. Plus I already saw that, so it’s sort of like eating a nice steak and then trying to enjoy a Hungry Man meal, but its still frozen. And about ten years old. And has feces mixed in.
The main problem of the many that Hit and Run suffers is that not a single person in the movie is likable. Our heroine (Laura Breckenridge, whoever that is) is a fucking idiot who manages to do every possible thing wrong that she can (I think she even invents a few ways to dig herself deeper in trouble), and the guy she hits is a muttering bastard who is bipolar, which obviously means that he murders other folks in his attempt to... whatever it is he is attempting to do with the girl. He has several opportunities to kill her, but never does. Yet he kills his own wife for trying to set the girl free? The closest thing the movie gets to sympathetic characters are the parrots.
Yes, the parrots. In one of cinema’s most ridiculous subplots, Breckenridge has to pick up her grandmother’s parrots from the airport. I can’t even begin to point out how little sense this makes (for starters – the grandmother is otherwise never mentioned), but its sole reason for existing is to have the parrots occasionally say incriminating things at inopportune times. But there are no cops or snooping types; the only three people in the movie all know what happened and who was responsible, so what good do the parrots serve? Just screen padding.
And the padding is plentiful. None of the movie would work if anyone behaved like a normal human being, but even factoring that in, there’s still another half hour’s worth of pointless bullshit. We see Breckenridge clean her car out seemingly in real time, drive her car over and over into a tree in order to cover up the smaller dent from when she hit the guy (a scene that has no payoff, since the bumper is removed entirely before she takes the car to be looked at again), etc. And at one point the “bad guy” (the usually dependable Kevin Corrigan) chains her to the car and... just drives around. He even stops for gas.
It doesn’t help that director Enda McCallion apparently prepared for his/her (don’t really care) movie by watching Star Wars and a bunch of Brian DePalma films. So we get goofy wipes and split screens sequences thrown around at random, plus a lot of hyper-edit montage scenes with heavily saturated colors and such. None of it aids the story (such as it is) in any way, which just makes it even more annoying.
The closest thing to a saving grace this movie has is the audio track. We begin with “Float On” from Modest Mouse (a Rock Band favorite!) and for once, the girl is actually singing along to it, not just going “Ba ba baaaa” while whatever song they could clear got tossed in during editing. Then later in the movie she’s watching TV and there’s a movie being advertised that promised “Murder, mayhem, and aliens”. Sounds way better than this one.
At the top of the DVD there is a promo for MGM that celebrates their legacy. We see clips from Rocky, Rain Man, Thelma and Louise, etc. I think it’s a safe bet that a clip from this POS won’t be added to the spot.
Here’s the thing about movies that are more or less exclusively set in one tiny location (Phone Booth, Lifeboat, etc) – there’s only so much of the film you can devote to people yelling at each other, so the writer/director is forced to come up with ways of keeping the movie afloat and driving it to an acceptable running time. So I can’t really fault Blackout for having TWO “someone tries to climb the elevator shaft only to fall back down hard” scenes, or including “gee look at me!” camera shots that are technically impressive but at their core are nothing more than painfully obvious padding (like when we get what seems like a full two minutes of tracking to show us that... yes, the building is empty and help won’t be coming soon). You gotta do what you gotta do.
But I CAN fault it for being so goddamn pedestrian. As it is a horror movie, you know someone is going to go nuts and kill one of the others. The back of the DVD even tells us as much: “...what happens when fear and desperation turn people into vicious, caged animals” So I was hoping to see star Amber Tamblyn use her atrocious teeth to annihilate the bellhop or something. But no – the only one who turns into a “vicious animal” is... the guy who was already a serial killer anyway.
As Lost-style flashbacks explain, the quiet, well dressed man is (shock!) a serial killer, and the tattooed punk looking guy was a heroic guy who was trying to save his girlfriend from an abusive father (or something, I started allowing myself to be distracted during the middle once it became clear that the movie wasn’t going to do anything truly original). Tamblyn has a secret as well, but it’s not particularly exciting and has no bearing on anything.
I just hate a movie with no balls. Why not have all three of them be serial killers? Why not have one of them make lewd advances on Tamblyn, and then she kills him in self defense only to discover that the OTHER guy was the real threat? Why not have the serial killer save Tamblyn from a rapist? Why not have Tamblyn herself be the killer, facing off against two men? There are so many interesting things one can do with a 3 person setup like this, and yet screenwriter Ed Doughtery opts for the most obvious one possible. I kept thinking of the movie Nature of the Beast, with Lance Henriksen and Eric Roberts. It’s not entirely difficult to figure out, but you know one of them is a killer and one’s a robber, and the fun of the movie is trying to guess which one is which. An approach like that could have made this movie a lot more interesting.
Also – the serial killer guy comes from the stock school of “suave” serial killers who spout off cryptic babble and like to get covered in blood during intercourse. And of course he has a daughter (and a teddy bear for the daughter) so that his true side is even more “shocking”. It doesn’t help that actor Aidan Gillen really REALLY wants to be Edward Norton, delivering all of his lines (pre-killer nonsense) with Narrator-esque smugness.
Dr. Michael Bay!
Director Rigoberto Castaneda is certainly talented though. While the script may have been by the numbers, the direction is not. First off he shot the film in widescreen, which is pretty surprising considering that the 1.85 ratio is more common in “claustrophobic” films like this. And the aforementioned “style” shots may be there just to make a 85 minute film (which it actually isn’t, since the end credits go on forever - though IMDb claims there is a 120 min cut floating around), but they are impressive, and he stages the occasional action setpiece with impressive flair (especially the 1st “climb” scene).
One thing he doesn’t quite make clear is how fall the elevator is falling each time it drops down the shaft. It doesn’t seem to be more than a 10 story building, but even if they were at the very top, it seems like it falls a lot more than the length of the building by the time we get to the climax, and you KNOW this type of setup will have a “elevator plummets to the ground floor and kills the bad guy” payoff, meaning that it falls an additional x amount of floors. Plus – the very first thing the characters do is pry open the door, only to discover that they are between floors and can’t get out (why they can’t get out when they climb to the top of the elevator car is never addressed). But even though the car slides down about five times during the movie, they never seem to think “Hey, maybe now we are lined up with a door!”
The DVD contains a trailer and interviews with Tamblyn, Castaneda, the DP, and the producer. Tamblyn’s is manageable; the other three go on forever. Plus they don’t say who is who, so if you use the “play all” function (which includes the trailer in the lineup for some reason) you will have to use context clues to know who is who (well, except Tamblyn. She’s the cute brunette that should seek a new agent, not a Mexican dude).
Oh well, whatever. It’s not horrible, but I’ve seen too many movies to be able to give something so lazy a pass. Put this in the “if you’ve never seen a single other movie in your life then you might enjoy it” pile.
I wonder if the people behind really shitty “special edition” DVDs (like the recent “Anniversary Edition” of Beetlejuice, which contained nothing but 3 episodes of the cartoon that no one important from the film had anything to do with) get DVDs like Cold Prey (Norwegian: Fritt Vilt) and then feel really embarrassed about their work. I really hope so. DVD packages such as this set the standard for what can be considered a quality release, all the more impressive when you consider that it’s a low-budget Norwegian movie.
I’ll get back to the extras in a bit, but first I want to discuss the movie. It’s funny how in the past week I have seen TWO above average slasher movies without any of the post-modern nonsense that Scream ushered in over a decade ago. Stranger, both films involve a killer with a pickaxe and feature an opening credits sequence comprised of news reports and newspaper clippings, which makes me wonder if maybe Todd Farmer and/or Patrick Lussier saw this film before making MBV3D.
The back of the DVD says that this is more than a typical ‘body count’ movie, but I’m really not sure why. It’s greatest strength is that it’s EXACTLY a body count movie, with no supernatural or twisty nonsense to sink it down. There’s a guy in a mask (actually he’s covered head to toe), brandishing a weapon, and one by one he stalks and kills four of our five kids, leaving one girl to fight back. What the hell isn’t slasher about that? I assume they mean because the killer’s identity is sort of a surprise, but then again it really sort of isn’t if you understand the concept of screen omission. I won’t spoil it for those who might be genuinely surprised, but just think about what you actually DON’T see in the opening “attack” and the answer will probably come pretty quickly.
What really worked about this was that all five kids are incredibly likeable. Spotting the Final Girl isn’t exactly a mind-bender (especially with only two girls, itself a rarity), but you’ll still want to see all of them survive. The closest any of them get to a bad trait is the guy who wants to sleep with the non-Final Girl, because he doesn’t settle for a cuddle when she gives the “it’s too soon” speech, and instead goes off to have a drink with the others. Wow, what a complete jerk.
This leads to one of the sadder moments I can recall in a slasher, at least since Scream 2 (calling Randy’s mom). After the girl is killed, we cut back to the bar area, and the Final Girl tells the Blue Balls how much Dead Girl (sorry, I suck at remembering names) really liked him and how he should be more patient, and he’s all like “you’re right, I feel like a jerk” etc. It’s a bummer, cuz she’s, you know, already dead.
Being a snowbound horror movie, I had a lot of reservations. After all, two of the all time worst slasher movies I’ve ever seen take place at ski resorts (that would be Shredder and Iced), and other resort set films are hardly better (Ice Spiders, the Die Hard knockoff Crackerjack). Really, the only one that’s any good is The Shining, and so it’s not too much of a surprise when you see “Room 237” be a focal point for the bad stuff.
I think the lodge might even have the same name (Overlook), but I can’t tell because while the subtitles are good (and every single extra is subbed as well), they don’t bother doing the newspaper clippings which tie into the killer’s backstory (maybe that alleged shocking twist would be more shocking if I had a few more details on the killer’s story). The hotel is named Ogdersnook or something like that, but since I have seemingly misplaced my Norwegian/English dictionary I don’t know what it means in God’s language.
Back to those extras though – there’s a standard making of that isn’t essential, but the look at the “Visual FX” is one of the best extras I’ve seen in years. The title is a bit misleading, as it’s a collection of four featurettes, two on the visuals, one on the sound, and another on the poster designs, but all four should be required viewing for both film buffs and budding filmmakers. The visual effects focus on image enhancement (color and such) and removing unwanted elements (best bit – having to clean some dog poop out of the otherwise pristine snowy landscape), instead of “Look at these cool aliens we made!”, so basically it explains how VFX SHOULD be used. Then we get a similar look at how the audio was enhanced and fixed, which is something you don’t see a lot of these days. But the most original one is the poster design. It’s only 90 seconds long, but you see a series of proposed posters for the film, while director Roar Uthaug explains why they were rejected (“Looks like a snowboarding movie” “This isn’t Saw in the snow.”, etc). A fascinating look at how an oft-overlooked but crucial part of selling a film to an audience can develop.
Then we get a look at how a simple scene (the kids in the car, driving to the mountain0 can change. We see their rehearsal, the scene’s first cut, and then the final cut as seen in the film. Again, this is great stuff for those who might wonder why the bootleg script they bought doesn’t reflect the finished film down to the letter. We also get an old short film from the director, and another odd, unexplained bit of two of the film’s actors walking around the ski lodge together. The other extras are good but a little more basic: trailers, a music video (the soundtrack to this movie, particularly the end credits song, is awesome), and some bloopers. The only actual disappointment is the “Alternate Ending”, which is just the movie’s ending with some storyboards edited in where more complex shots would have gone if they could have afforded it. But otherwise the extras are as entertaining as the film, and all together we’re talking about around an hour’s worth of bonus material, with almost zero worthless filler.
Another thing I want to praise. The opening credits list about 6 production companies, but we only have to watch two animated logos (and one of them, for Fantefilm, is actually a pretty great bumper). Attn: Spain and Ireland, whose films often have like 20 fucking logos - this is how you do it.
Finally! A film in this "horror" set that is legitimately a horror movie, not a drama (or in The Christmas Tale's case, a kid's movie) with some horror flavor. Baby's Room (Spanish: La Habitación Del Niño) is low on body count, but it delivers ghosts and genuine supernatural occurrences, so it evens out. It took 5 films, but Álex de la Iglesia has finally given us the first in the 6 Films To Keep You Awake that seems proud to be a horror movie. Kudos, sir.
A word of advice to folks who haven't watched it yet: Skip the first five minutes. It pretty much gives away what the main character will spend the entire film trying to figure out. I'm pretty sure you can skip to the beginning of Chapter 2 and be OK. Then, watch the opening scene at the end, which will reveal why the old lady is involved. I think it would make for a better viewing experience. Maybe have a nice glass of Thai Iced Tea too, that'll make it even better.
I love movies that have a guy buy a bunch of some random household object to help him solve a problem. In this its baby monitors; he buys like 20 of the damn things and uses them to help him 'catch' the ghost that's been haunting him and tearing apart his marriage. It's a cool idea - much better than having him use a traditional video camera and ending up with half of a 'found footage' movie. Plus it's got one of the best "video can see things we can't" implementations I've seen in ages - when he looks through the video image, he can see doors and then open them (I would have liked a shot of the real world, where he's actually just grasping at air, but it probably would have gotten confusing).
I also enjoyed the better than average character development. Usually these sort of "newborn baby = trouble" movies focus on the mother, but the dad (Javier Gutiérrez) is front and center here. We quickly learn that he's struggling with the 'trappings' of being married and having a newborn child (at one point, he's trying to seduce his wife and she suddenly begins talking about the baby's poop), but he's always sympathetic. At one point he hits on the girl who sells the baby monitors, which could have put him in the "this guy's a douche" category, but the idea is dropped as quickly as its introduced. Plus it helped throw me off - I started suspecting the supernatural stuff was just a manifestation of the guy's cold feet about being a family man or something, but it's something else entirely.
Also - the baby doesn't apparently have a name. Both parents refer to him as "the kid" throughout the entire movie. Then again this might just be a mistranslation on the subtitles - the brief making of has noticeably different text during some of the film clips.
If the movie has one real flaw, it's the length. Not that 75 minutes can be considered overlong, but 15 minutes could have been shaved and we would have the all time best Masters of Horror entry. As it stands, it gets a bit repetitive at times, and there are way too many scenes of him at work, which ultimately has no payoff; though we DO get to hear one of my all-time favorite non-jokes ("Why is a potato like a tomato?"*), so there's something.
I found the movie rather easy to figure out (thanks to the opening), hence the rather vague review - I want you guys to go in blind (and skip the opening!) and enjoy it for what it is: a low-key supernatural entry with enough decent twists and a terrific finale, without me spoiling everything.
On several occasions I have found myself wondering why there weren’t any horror films that centered on a rather bizarre sexual act. Surely, Dirty Sanchez would make for an excellent slasher movie, and I can guarantee cinema’s all time best “car breaks down and they run afoul of redneck mutants” movie would be unleashed in the form of Country Blumpkin. But then again, you watch a dull bore of a film like Donkey Punch, and it starts to make sense why filmmakers tend to stick to the basics.
For those uninitiated, the "donkey punch" is a sexual act in which you take a girl from behind and then just as you’re about to orgasm, you punch her in the back of the head, which will cause her to involuntary clench the appropriate muscles, resulting in a more pleasurable release for the male, and... well, brownie points for her, I guess. In this film, it goes wrong, and she dies. That’s a half hour into the movie. The following hour and change is about the four guys and two other girls yelling at each other, making their situation worse and worse, and occasionally dying as well. It’s like the unfunny version of Very Bad Things, or just the umpteenth version of the “there’s an accident and the idiots make it worse for themselves” ‘horror’ movie.
See here’s the thing about these movies being billed as horror – they’re not scary, they’re not particularly exciting, and they are completely ludicrous despite the attempts to make it feel grounded in reality. Much effort is made to give the audience a sense of “what if this happened to YOU” type thing, but a. I wouldn’t go around punching a girl that was nice enough to let me take her from behind on a boat two hours after I met her, b. whenever I accidentally kill someone my first thought is to blame it on the nearest bicyclist, and c. I am more or less a likable person, unlike any of the people in this movie, and that includes the girls.
Plus, in filmmaker Olly Blackburn’s attempt to keep the characters relatable (by presenting them all as regular every day sorts with general character traits), it also makes his film incredibly predictable. Will the only nice guy in the group meet his own accidental death? Will the meek male end up being the one that is the most callous? Will the Final Girl eschew the activity that causes all the problems? Will she be the one to kill off the final guy in an alleged “crowd-pleasing” act of retribution? If you answered “of course, duh” to any or all of these questions, then congratulations, there is no reason for you to bother with this movie.
There are two things going for it. One is the score by François Eudes, or at least I think it’s his score – the end credits list about 20 licensed songs but I only recall 3 or 4 in the film itself. But even those are good – let’s just say it’s a good musical experience and leave it at that. The other are the kills themselves; even though you know who will die and in what order, Blackburn at least comes up with a few interesting ways to do it. A flare, a lifeboat motor, a Leatherman... and yes, the titular act itself. Maybe he should consider doing a straight up slasher movie next – he’s got the “creative death implements” aspect down pat, not to mention the cardboard characters.
This one is being released as part of Magnolia’s Six Shooter series, which has also given us Let The Right One In and Timecrimes, plus the upcoming Eden Log which has been getting rave reviews from festivals. I love Magnolia (they also distributed Severanceand The Host), so I feel kind of bummed that I didn’t like this one more. But just because a movie is foreign doesn’t automatically make it better than its American counterparts, and this type of plot has just been run into the ground.
It really bums me out when a movie has a great and fairly original concept, and a good cast to boot, and yet just doesn’t quite come together for whatever reason. I’d rather watch the umpteenth generic and terrible “kids break down and run afoul of cannibals” movie than see something like Netherbeast Incorporated, which is essentially a vampire version of Office Space, albeit not particularly funny, stretched far too thin, and ultimately kind of annoying.
Both Dave Foley and Darrell Hammond are dependable performers, especially in ensembles, but neither one of them really got a laugh out of me in this one. In fact, I only laughed out loud twice in the entire movie: once at a sight gag where a doctor (a vampire) tests some blood, then pours it on his pancakes, and another at a rather random line near the end: “I’ve never seen anyone get stabbed to death over a gun.” Then there were a couple of occasional smirks and grins, but for the most part, I was pretty stone cold silent, which is a problem for a horror comedy that leans heavily toward the comedy.
Part of the problem is that everything feels forced. There’s nothing unfunnier than people TRYING to be random, and that’s what the script seems to be going for. Like our female lead yelling at a puppet she has sat with her at the dinner table. You can tell from the camera setup and the pause between her dialogue that a “random” joke is being set up, and thus the effect is entirely muted. You want a funny puppet gag? Watch that one episode of Arrested Development, when they cut to GOB’s puppet for a reaction shot after cutting to two actual human beings. It comes out of nowhere, and thus is funny. Jason Mewes' character fares worst - literally everything he says in the movie is supposed to sound like it was a spur of the moment thing to say, yet it sounds like he rehearsed it 100 times.
But what really kills the movie is the score. It’s not the worst music ever recorded... or so you may think after hearing it once. But I would guess that at LEAST 90% of the film has “whimsical” music playing under it, and you will want to stab your ears with q-tips after awhile. Again – TELLING us something is supposed to be funny is what actually makes it unfunny. We also get a nearly endless voiceover during the film’s first act, as our hero (the guy from Blues Clues, who’s about the best thing about it) endlessly explains what kind of vampires they are and how they survive and what they are allergic to and blah blah blah. You know, maybe SHOWING us these things in this VISUAL MEDIUM would be worth a try.
The DVD comes loaded with extras, for better or worse. There’s the original short film, which is recreated as the feature length version’s first scene (albeit with a slightly different punchline that allows the film to continue), a whole bunch of featurettes in which everyone talks about how much fun they had and how funny the script was, and an interview with the team responsible for it. There’s also a commentary, but I skipped it due to fears that I would hear the score whenever no one was talking.
I have no doubt that the film has its fans, and that these guys are probably the “funny ones” in their circle of friends, but I just wasn’t into it. Then again, even Mel Brooks couldn’t pull off the vampire comedy, so perhaps it’s just an impenetrable genre blend, like the twist ending porno.
Horror Movie A Day now has two VHS reviews, and they are both based on the last two VHS tapes I ever bought. One was I Come In Peace (an October Extra 2), which I bought back in 2004 or 5 because I got sick of waiting for it to come on DVD (which it still has yet to do). The other is this one: Fade to Black, which I bought for 99 cents from Suncoast when it was going out of business. The barebones DVD from Anchor Bay is long out of print, and given AB’s love of re-releasing their titles (they actually invented the term “Quintolodip”, I am actually pretty surprised that a special edition hasn’t been released.
I bought the VHS years and years ago, but even with HMAD I never got around to watching it. It’s really hard to bring yourself to watch VHS when you have nice DVDs (and now Blu-rays) sitting there. It’s almost kind of sad to go back to this once beloved format, because unlike hipsters with their vinyls, I really can’t see there being a “VHS sounds/looks better!” movement. The picture is ugly, rewinding the damn things is an exercist in torture (VCRs would break so often due to rewinding that there was actually a market for “rewinders”), and forget about widescreen transfers – though, ironically, AB was one of the few companies who WOULD provide letterboxed movies in the pre-DVD days. Fade To Black, however, is presented in good ol’ full frame.
What inspired me to finally watch it was finding the novelization at Dark Delicacies. I collect horror movie novelizations, and Dark Del always seems to have a fresh supply of oldies every time I go in. The cover of the book shows the main character in his different disguises, a lot better than the single face on the VHS cover. It was a creepy enough image to get me off my ass and actually watch a movie I spent money to own nearly a decade ago.
Luckily, the movie was entertaining enough to ignore VHS’s shortcomings. It’s a bit long (the Mickey Rourke character could have been dropped entirely without any consequence), but being a movie nerd myself, I couldn’t help but root for poor Eric Binford as he desperately sought out a woman who would love movies as much as he did, and kill those who found him annoying because all he ever talked about was movies. At one point he even says “If you’re so smart then how come you don’t know the name of (some movie character)?”, which I am sure is something I myself have said in the past. I never had any murderous tendencies, so the similarities stop there. But I bet had he not been gunned down by the cops, he would be one of my readers.
I just wish the movie was tighter. Binford just does his thing over and over again; the sequences are fun in and of themselves, but they don’t add up to a hell of a lot. Plus there’s no real evolution to his character, he seems just as crazy after his first kill as he does after the last one. Plus, Tim Thomerson is the sort of Dr. Loomis character, a shrink who has inexplicably set up shop in the police station (and is continually reminded that he is not a cop), but him and Binford never really face off until the end, and Thomerson’s investigation consists of yelling at the chief, fucking some broad, and getting shot.
He also appears in one of the best “not the best location to film the scene as written” sequences this side of Dark Fields. Thomerson and his partner (?) are driving around and she says “Can you believe all this traffic?!?” Since the movie is set in Los Angeles, it’s perfectly believable that there is indeed traffic, which wouldn’t really need to be mentioned anyway (sort of like noticing the snow in Alaska). But we can clearly see that not only is there not any traffic, they appear to be in the least populated section of Los Angeles, as only one other car (behind them) can be seen prior to her taking a shortcut, a brief action bit that bafflingly includes a car driving backwards. Nice work.
Other backgrounds make up for it though; Binford’s boss has Halloweenand Tourist Trap posters up in his office (Irwin Yablans produced all three films), and Halloween is on in the background during another scene. I was hoping this would be the inspiration for one of the kill scenes, but no dice (strangely, most of them aren’t even horror movie related). Speaking of horror references, Binford should be commended for not killing his would-be bride during their meet-cute; he asks her a trivia question about Creature of the Black Lagoon (his hint: “he’s green and slimy”) and she guesses Frankenstein and The Wolf Man. Stupid bitch!
I think I should create a new genre tag for movies that I’d only want to watch again at the New Bev or whatever. I’m sure it would all be a blast there (as many hero killer movies tend to be), but at home by yourself it’s a bit overlong and underwhelming. Binford’s a great character, but he’s stuck in a middling movie. Remake?
Oh, obviously I didn’t read the book yet, but I flipped through it a bit, and it seems better written than many (for comparison – I also picked up a book with novelized versions of both Nightmare on Elm St 4 and 5, and that book, which also includes 8 pages of photos and a much larger font size, isn’t even as long as Fade’s), so maybe I’ll get to it someday. It DOES have a sad little epilogue that the movie excluded, where Binford’s blood on the ground in front of the Mann’s Chinese is cleaned up by a couple of un-caring janitors who comment about how the bloodstain will fade from everyone walking over it. Aw.
I was at a birthday party tonight, so I wasn’t sure if I would make Autopsy in time (hence the unfortunate viewing of Anaconda 3). The clips I had seen at the last Fango con got me excited, and with an above average cast for an AD movie (including Robert Patrick and the great Michael Bowen), I definitely didn’t want to wait until DVD if possible. Luckily my party got out in time, so I get my movie and you get two reviews today!
Thankfully, Autopsy is the polar opposite of the snake movie. Rather than a shitty movie with occasional moments of decency, this is a fun movie with some minor blemishes. It starts off quick (maybe too quick – they wind up at a hospital as the result of a car accident that we don’t actually see), and despite the small cast (only 5 kids), the kills and gore come along at a pretty steady, fast pace.
One thing that definitely worked was having an about equal number of kids and killers. Everyone gets separated (of course), and each kid has a different psycho to deal with. While Patrick is the main villain, all the others (Bowen, Patrick’s T2 co-star Jeanette Goldstein, and Robert LaSardo) get plenty of moments to shine. Also, you know which one is the Final Girl (Jessica Lowndes – who needs to be in every movie ever), but you won’t be able to guess which ones will die first, because they’re all off in their own little mini-movie. Director Adam Geirasch (who also wrote with Jace Anderson and E.L. Katz) sometimes doesn’t make it clear where everyone is in relation to each other (and I never understood why Lowndes never bothered to return to the lobby), but does a damn fine job of keeping the film, which takes place entirely in the hospital after the first 10 minutes, continually interesting in a visual sense. A lot of the hallways and exam rooms may look similar, but you’ll never get sick of looking at em either, and it adds to the disorienting feeling that the characters are experiencing anyway.
One thing that does grow a bit tiresome is the number of times that Lowndes finds herself held down or otherwise trapped, only to reach, grab a scalpel or whatever, get herself free, and run away. It seems like this scene occurs 3-4 times in the film, which is about 2 too many. Granted, with a small cast and small location, some repetition is bound to occur, but it would have been nice to mix it up a tad bit more.
And considering how great the gore/kills are in this movie, you might even wish there were 20 kids, just to get that many more splatter scenes. Even Lowndes gets banged up pretty good, which is rare lately (I think 2005’s House of Wax may be the last time I can recall the Final Girl getting such a major injury), and the deaths of the others are far from standard. Bowen basically annihilates one girl, and the bad guys more than get their just desserts. Key though, is one of the best makeup appliance effects I have seen in I dunno how long. I don’t want to spoil the visual, but let’s just say it looks like a human tree.
I also love the sick sense of humor. It’s not an overly comedic film, but there’s a number of small moments that folks such as myself, who live and die by the mean-spirited hilarity of films like Silent Night Deadly Night, fully enjoy. Bowen and LaSardo’s means of putting a guy in a stretcher alone is worth the price of admission, and there’s a terrific gag involving a “small” shard of glass that had the whole audience rolling. Back to the “tree” too – it actually centers around a rather tender moment between Lowndes and her boyfriend, but Geirasch’s camera lovingly focuses on the prosthetics the whole time, which is just plain awesome. There are also a lot of minor subtle gags I loved; particularly a scene late in the film when one of the good guys just walks right by the villains, completely oblivious.
It was impressive how the film, which could have easily been a torture porn type film (the bad guy even has a morally “OK” motive, a la Turistas) managed to be so much fun. Sure, the heroes aren’t all dispatched quickly, and our heroine gets banged up a bit in an extended sequence, but it’s still all done with an air of goofiness that kept it far from Hostel territory. Occasional pacing issues aside, the short running time and copious amounts of blood along with a game cast (Bowen in particular seems to be having a blast) put this one in the winner category. Which means, along with From Within, After Dark 2009 is 2 for 2 in my book (and I hear good things about The Broken), so it’s a damn shame that they didn’t promote it at all this time around – even people who work for Lionsgate had no idea that the films were hitting theaters until a couple days ago. Previous years had billboards and lots of posters, but this year – nothing. Figures.
You can really track the evolution of the Anaconda franchise just by looking at who plays the badass snake hunter character. The first was a big budget affair, so it had Jon Voight, collecting a nice check and adding a bit of legitimacy and top-notch scenery chewing. The 2nd was the 2000s version of a programmer – it existed only to fill a gap in Sony’s summer schedule, and thus we got Johnny Messner, go-to reliable tough guy who is seemingly caught in the limbo between the big and small screen. Now that the series has gone to the Sci-Fi channel, Anaconda 3: Offspring offers us David Hasselhoff, known cheeseburger enthusiast and star of all things lame.
Hoff actually gets top billing for what should be the “And” role (which is given to John Rhys-Davies, who appears only slightly less), and after a while I found myself being more entertained by how the editors attempted to make it LOOK like he was in the movie a lot more than he actually was. He only appears twice in the first 45 minutes, and neither scene is essential in any way (one doesn’t even make any sense) other than to explain that A. he’s a badass and B. he’s been called in to stop the snake. But even once he joins the team (his re-introduction to the story is hilarious: he pulls up out of nowhere, firing a handgun at the thing) he keeps disappearing; at one point the four surviving folks split into two teams, and wouldn’t you know it – we follow the non-be-Hoff-ed team and settle for a single shot of Hoff and the other guy running through the woods in order to explain how they get back together later.
Hilariously, at one point we cut to a typical victim scene. You know the kind from all the other predator movies: the snake/bear/shark whatever is loose, and after a bunch of exposition, we need a kill, so some isolated guy is introduced, hears a noise, and is killed, usually within 2-3 minutes of his introduction. Yet here, since the film’s star is apparently filming Youtube clips, the eventual victim gets what seems like a full ten minutes as he walks around his farm, looks at his animals, enjoys a few fakes scares, and is finally (yet slowly) eaten by the godawful CGI snake. By the time he’s finally finished, he’s had nearly three times as much screentime as Hasselhoff has had at that point.
Speaking of the snake – good Christ it’s fucking terrible. Like, Lake Placid 2 bad (though there’s at least two shots that look decent). Like all these CG heavy cheapo movies, the damn thing’s size changes from scene to scene, and the animators’ attempts to make it “blend” with the real footage by having (also CGI) grass and branches get moved around a bit are laughable. There is also an unforgivably bad ‘rear projection while driving’ scene, in which our genius FX crew couldn’t even be bothered to rock or bounce the car a bit in the master shot, making it unnaturally (and therefore hilariously) still - despite the fact that they are driving an SUV through the jungle.
Yep.
Another big problem is that the film is about a pair of giant, rampaging snakes, and yet 90% of the movie takes place in the usual science labs, abandoned warehouses, and farmhouses. Since when do anaconda snakes seek out the closest structure with running electricity? And since it’s all CG, you could probably turn the movie into ANY escaped predator movie; nothing about it is snake-centric.
Finally, it really skimps on delivering big moments. The snakes seem more than happy to simply skewer everyone with their pointy tails, with only one squeeze death in the entire thing (again – not a snake-centric movie), and they never do anything really cool. Also, we don’t even get the thrill of seeing their demise; both of them are killed offscreen via explosion. Lame. Plus, our heroine (the cute Krystal Allen) has two of the worst one-liners I’ve ever heard in a movie, and she delivers one to the snake like a full minute before it dies, which is rather awkward. Can you imagine I Come In Peace if Dolph was like “And you go in pieces, asshole!” and then just sort of chilled for a bit before blowing the bad guy to hell?
I have something in my notes that reads “Snake in Micro?” Can’t quite figure that one out, but let’s assume it was another complaint about the movie.
I will give credit where credit is due though: it could have been even more of a cheap knockoff than it is, but they go out of their way to tie it into the previous film’s storyline (the blood orchid nonsense). Also, while Allen comes from the Sci-Fi Channel school of “really hot but also really smart” women, she also carries with her two unique traits for this kind of thing. One – you would expect her character to try to bring the snakes back unharmed so she could continue her research, but instead she’s just as gung ho about blowing them all to hell, which is pretty awesome. Two – she’s fucking ignorant, something you learn when she explains that the snake’s venom (or whatever) can be used as a possible cure for “Alltimer’s disease”. I even rewound the film to make sure that’s what she was actually saying. Because I am an optimist, I will imagine that Allen was subtly mocking the idiotic nature of the entire movie by using a term commonly associated with blatant ignorance. She’s also the only reason I managed to make it to the end (took two sittings), so since she stars in the next one (they were shot back to back) I can guarantee I’ll give it a look.
No extras but the trailer. That isn’t a complaint.
The whole point of After Dark was to give independent genre movies a chance to be exposed to a wide audience, but for the most part, the movies don't even deserve After Dark's idea of "wide exposure" (i.e. playing unadvertised in the shittiest theaters in town). Movies like Dark Ride and Uneartheddon't even deserve to be seen on cable, let alone in a theater for 12 bucks. But it seems like every year, there is at least one movie that deserves the boost in awareness, and it looks like From Within is that movie from this year's lineup (which includes Butterfly Effect 3, making me wonder how truly independent any of this stuff is).
Coincidentally, the film is written by Brad Keene, who also wrote Gravedancers, the alltime best AD film as far as I'm concerned. It's not as successful as that film, but it's an effective tale that combines some hallmarks of both Western and Eastern fare: small town religious hysteria (as American as apple pie!) and jumpy scares/supernatural curses (as Asian as... uh, pandas). It's something we are starting to see more of these days, and I am all for it - beats straight up remakes at any rate.
The secret weapon in the film has to be the beautiful Margo Harshman as Sadie, cousin to Thomas Dekker's character. She's only in the film a little bit, but it pays off because each of her scenes is a winner. Not only does she get the film's best line (in response to someone coming into her home because the door was open: "Does that mean if your pants are open I can just come in?"), she also has a knack for providing unexpected laughs with her constant fiddling with objects. In one scene she sits at a piano and hits a low note every time our heroine finishes an exposition-filled sentence. Hilarious stuff. And according to IMDb, we have the same birthday, so I like her even more now.
Dekker is probably the weak link. He's not the worst actor, but he seemingly only has one note (the same one you see, or probably don't see, every week on Sarah Connor), and it grows tiresome. Also, and this isn't his fault really, he's a pretty boy, and thus he sticks out like a sore thumb. Whoever cast this movie did a great job of picking people who LOOK like small town folks and not actors (even the bigger names, like Adam Goldberg and Steven Culp, fit in nicely), but Dekker, who's supposed to be the town weirdo, looks like he stepped out of a Fall Out Boy music video.
But the movie could star Bruce Willis (incidentally his daughter has a small role) and it wouldn't diminish the film's true power: MEAN SPIRITED DEATH SCENES! The concept is actually pretty unique - the ghost/curse/witch thing makes everyone kill themselves, but they are actually killed by doppelgangers or mirror images. It's sort of like Mirrors, but way better. There's one where our heroine's mom, an alcoholic, reaches for what she thinks is a bottle of vodka (which is what we see in the reflection) but in the real world its some sort of cleaning fluid.
The ending of this movie is balls-out awesome too. I don't want to spoil, but I will say this: you might groan when you see the setup for an obvious final scare, but the little epilogue to it makes it all worthwhile.
I also dug the location: Maryland. I've seen some 544526756 horror movies in the past 2 years, so I am getting pretty goddamn sick of seeing Canadian cities, Los Angeles suburbs, and Texas. Good to see a unique area (the irony being that it's supposed to be Anytown USA). Director Phedon Papamichael does his part well - the movie is not flashy or stylish, which allows us to get more attached to the characters/story than usual.
Another mark in the "con" column is the fact that the movie gets a bit repetitive at times, and thus drags in spots. While the suicide/curse concept is interesting, that doesn't mean we need to see it in action so much. Our heroine has like 3 friends with their own suicide setpiece; one could have been removed easily without any real consequence. I also would have liked more scenes with Culp's preacher character, who is a key figure in the supernatural events and yet only appears in the film for about 5 minutes. Plus, Culp just rules (the scene on Housewives where Bree reacts to his death is probably the most heartbreaking thing I've ever seen on a TV show - partially because at the same time I realized that the show would never be as good again without his defeated yet sarcastic demeanor), so adding to his screentime would help the movie even if he had no connection to the story at all.
So in short - this is the type of movie that After Dark should be releasing as the rule, not the exception. It's not perfect by any means, but it certainly deserves a fate better than the dozens of low grade horror films that Lion's Gate (who handles the DVDs for these movie) releases on a weekly basis. Speaking of which, hopefully the DVD will have some quality extras, which would make a purchase all the more enticing when they come out later this spring.
Yet another Hammer movie sans any of its big name stars. While Phantom of the Opera offered up Michael Gough, I must admit I’ve never heard of any of the folks in The Kiss Of The Vampire. Not that having big stars is essential for a movie (especially a horror movie), but one thing I liked about the other Hammer films I’ve seen is how they all seem to draw from the same talent pool, so when I see one with a bunch of random folks, I get a bit suspicious as to its merit. It’s like watching a Dimension release that doesn’t have Patrick Lussier or Joel Soisson somewhere in the credits.
One actress I DO wish to see more often is Jacquie Wallis. She’s sort of a villain, but doesn’t really do a hell of a lot other than look insanely beautiful whenever she’s onscreen. And since the main vampire guy (Noel Willman) is a bit dull, I really wish Hammer regular screenwriter Anthony Hinds' script had given her more to do. That said, he does get in one pretty great moment late in the film, when he has taken the hero’s wife and brainwashed her with his vampire prowess. The hero is obviously upset, and Willman mocks him, “ ‘If you hurt one hair on her head...’ is what you’re about to say, no?” (something along those lines). Hahaha, awesome.
Speaking of this scene, the wife proves that she doesn’t want to go back to the husband by spitting on him as a way of proving she’d rather just chill with the vampires. This is a rather odd way to do it, if you ask me. Wouldn’t a simple “Leave me alone!” or something be fine? Dude’s not having a good day: he’s being attacked by vampires and now he’s lost his wife. You need to embarrass him on top of it?
Also, as this is technically a breakdown movie (he has a “motor car”!), I had to wonder – why do people never seem to break down near the homes of non-vampires or cannibals? Just once I would like to see a horror movie where someone breaks down, and the nearest home is run by a kind and generous mechanic. Then they go along their merry way and are murdered by killer owls.
The movie does have a couple strong points. One is the Van Helsing-y guy who is after the vampire. He’s not particularly original or interesting, but he looks like Ian Holm dressed up as Coffin Joe, which is pretty awesome. Also he totally ruins a funeral by driving a stake through a casket, which proves the corpse is actually a vampire. I also dug the idea that the vampires were sort of a cult – there’s a whole bunch of folks following Willman around, but if they are actually vampires, they don’t really do any vamp stuff.
The ending is also pretty awesome. Bats are actually the hero for once – a bunch of them swarm (via laughably visible strings) the castle where Willman and his cult are, and wipe everyone out. It looks faker than anything I can recall from the era, but it’s still a sweet idea. Beats the eight millionth “everyone gets distracted with their fighting and forgets about the now rising sun” finale.
Oh well. Good to know even Hammer could make entertaining but ultimately rather forgettable horror movies.
I really don’t like Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood. I didn’t like it as a kid, I didn’t like it as an 18 year old (in college I re-watched the entire series, the last time I did so until the DVD boxed set came along), and I don’t like it now. I know it has some defenders, but I honestly don’t know why. If you are one of those confused folks, please, in detail and preferably in non “Fuck you!” grammar, explain why in the comments.
Nothing about the movie really works. There are a couple of good kills (sleeping bag), and the Jason makeup/actor (Kane Hodder’s first appearance) are among the best ever, but it’s simply a dull film from start to finish. The attempts at a Friday 4 style plot (with the two houses – mom and daughter in one, rowdy kids in the other) are admirable, but at the same time, simply call to attention how far the series had fallen in quality. It doesn’t help that absolutely NONE of the kids are interesting even in the slightest (with possibly the minor exception of Eddie the sci-fi geek); I’ve seen the movie probably 6 times now and I still can’t remember most of their names.
And even though the movie was rushed (filming began 6 months before its theatrical release), there is simply no excuse for the shoddy work here. Half of the kids are killed in the lake (or near it), and no one hears their screams despite the house being roughly 12 feet away (and since when are the cabins right on the lake?). Jason is resurrected, and yet walks about 4-5 miles away to kill 2 folks (how’d he even know they were there?) before returning to where he just was to kill the rest of them. Tina finds a collection of newspaper clippings about Jason – why would someone make a scrapbook? Lengthy flashbacks to 6’s finale are shown, yet the surrounding area (the dock, the cabins) doesn’t look anything alike. Director John Carl Buechler is one of the all time great makeup FX guys, and the various decapitated heads are among the worst I’ve seen in a horror movie post 1970 or so (for the record – Buechler wasn’t responsible for the effects). And so on. I can forgive minor plotholes and inconsistent setting errors (like in 4, when Rob is on this seemingly life-long vendetta to avenge his sister’s murder, which in the Friday timeline only occurred 2-3 days ago), but it doesn’t even seem like anyone involved was even trying.
The most problematic thing though, is the unfortunate introduction of telekinesis in order for the film to compete with the increasingly popular Nightmare on Elm St movies at the time. With Tina’s trauma and powers, she seems like she wandered in from Dream Warriors instead of a Friday the 13th film. Again, yeah, its part 7 and they need to do something different, but come on – this was the best they could come up with? And plus, it’s barely even utilized; Tina uses her powers to throw household objects at him (which pretty much every Final Girl has done with her own two hands) before setting him on fire (which is what Tommy did in the last one). Hell, at the end of the movie, Jason is back in the lake (courtesy of the only unique thing in the movie, when she ‘resurrects’ her dad to have him drag Jason back down), which means you can skip this one entirely and not even break continuity. Her powers are also inconsistent – since when does telekinesis come with bonus visions of the future? Plus – why does she see the death of a guy she never met (Bill Butler’s character) but not any of the other kids?
Some people will claim that the MPAA butchering of the film (which is pretty severe – the only blood you see in THE NEW BLOOD is at the very beginning, during the flashback montage to the previous films) ruined it, but I honestly don’t think it will help much. Yeah, the kills will be more fun, but everything in between those kills will still be dull as dirt. The kills may always be the highlight, but I was never bored when folks were just talking or running around (even the stalk scenes are pretty bland here) in the previous movies.
The DVD is probably the closest any of the films got to a special edition in Paramount’s boxed set, as it is one of the few to get a commentary track (and the ONLY one to get a new 5.1 sound mix). Buechler and Hodder are the participants, though Hodder mainly only talks about his kill scenes. They both discuss the MPAA cuts a lot, but they don’t address any of the film’s other faults, and even praise things that don’t make any sense, like the fact that no one knew about Jason this time (why the fuck not?). What little good info there is can be learned from either of the F13 books, so just read those and spare yourself from sitting thru this one again.
One of horror’s great (well, actually kind of sad) ironies is that My Bloody Valentine is pretty bloodless. While some of the later Friday the 13th sequels may have gotten it worse, MBV is certainly the most MPAA-butchered slasher movie of the early 80s, and even more frustrating – the footage had never been properly restored. So when Lionsgate announced My Bloody Valentine 3D, I was pretty hopeful that even if the movie sucked it would have been worth the effort, because then the original’s missing footage would finally be restored (if there is one thing in the movie business that will never change, it’s the tradition of re-releasing the original on DVD whenever a remake comes along). And it was (buy it HERE), so hurrah! Plus, as a bonus, the remake is pretty good as well, so win-win.
(The review contains MINOR spoilers, but nothing that would give away any deaths or the ending)
One criticism aimed at the original is that the blood would have been the only good thing about it. I vehemently disagree, but those folks should be plenty satisfied with the 2009 version, since it has a fairly similar story (mine, accident, Valentine’s Day, TJ-Sarah-Axel love triangle, Harry Warden) but with the added bonus of the MPAA apparently just giving it an R for the hell of it. Maybe it was even more gruesome to begin with, but the kills here, particularly in the first 20-25 minutes, are among the bloodiest and prosthetic-y I’ve seen in an R rated mainstream movie in a long time. Eyeballs, the upper parts of heads, and lots of seemingly non digital blood fly around (in 3-D!) as Harry carries out his initial murder spree. Plus, we see the aftermath of two separate massacres (the opening scenes almost act as a speedy remake of the entire first film), with walls and floors covered in Valentine red. Yeah!
It’s a bummer though, that the film doesn’t sustain that initial level of old-school slasher fun and top notch kill/gore effects for its entire running time. While the remaining kill scenes are pretty great (if slightly repetitive – the miner uses his pickaxe a bit too much, rarely utilizing the environment or other implements), the movie as a whole isn’t as fun as the original, which is hard to ignore at times, especially during the Axel-Sarah-Tom love triangle type scenes (which echo the original’s, though most of the film plays out differently). While perfectly acceptable in its own right, it seems kind of weird to have this all 3-D set against a far more serious film. There’s no party, no generic fodder (there are only like 10 people in the movie, and the town itself seems unusually deserted), and other than a wonderfully trashy nude scene early on, the non-kill scenes play out like a drama more than the high-spirited fun of the original. Even the Valentine’s Day atmosphere is heavily diminished – it’s essentially limited to a few boxes of candy and a few signs advertising a party we never get to see. By my count, we see more fences and trees in 3D than we do of anything else, because a lot of scenes are just folks talking.
Another reason that the relative seriousness of the film surprised me, though more in a good way, is that it was directed by Patrick Lussier, who worked on the Screamfilms, and written by Todd Farmer, who wrote Jason X. I almost expected (feared) a really jokey, tongue-in-cheek, meta-heavy, “post-modern” slasher movie, which would have been really annoying. Yet it’s played straight up, even more than something like Hatchet. For example, the black guy in the movie never mentions his race - he’s just a guy who happens to be black. That was a relief, and a nice “shut the f- up” to all of those who claimed that it was impossible to do an old-school slasher movie after Scream did such a great job of deconstructing the genre. I just suspect that in their attempts to keep it from being “funny” that they might have inadvertently kept it from being as just plain “fun” as it could have been (really, if you take away the 3-D, everything after the first half hour plays out more like a psychological thriller with a few gory kills).
One other minor blemish is the Sarah character, played by Jamie King (why can’t she always go brunette in her movies?). King is fine in the role, and she goes through the motions with the best of them, but as the obvious Final Girl, the script really paints her as kind of a loser. She knows her husband is cheating on her, yet doesn’t do anything about it (she even calls his mistress “sweetie”, and not in a condescending way). There’s also a scene where Tom and Axel brawl and she completely disappears from the scene, and I spent the entire time wondering where she was and why she wasn’t helping (Lussier doesn’t even cut to her reacting to it all). Part of the fun of a slasher is seeing the heroine overcome both her personal problems AND her masked killer problems (simultaneously, such as in H20, is even more preferred), but Sarah never really gets that moment.
On the plus side, the movie offers two genre vets that more than make up for its shortcomings. One is Kevin Tighe, as the town’s mayor (I think – they never really make his job very clear), adding some class to the film in his 5 or 6 scenes. He also gets to have one of the film’s best “COMIN’ AT YA!” 3-D moments, as he points a shotgun right in our faces. The other is the real draw though: TOM ATKINS! It’s been ages since he appeared in a horror movie, and the moment he first appeared on screen drew a large cheer from myself and the other horror guys in the crowd (whilst the clueless douchebag behind us, likely there out of obligation, told us to shut up). He plays, what else, the sheriff, and lights up every scene he is in; singlehandedly delivering the “old school” feel that the film strives for but sometimes lacks. I can almost imagine that the script called for a “Tom Atkins type”, and then someone smart enough just said “Why don’t we get the actual Tom Atkins?”
Another good thing is how they more or less made their own movie while nicely working in some of the original’s more memorable moments. None of the characters are the same (the central trio’s relationship to one another is the same, but their actual characters, particularly Axel, are different), and the locations, except for the mine, are all new too. But even though there’s no Laundromat, there’s still a laundry based kill. And the Miner does his whole smashing the lights bit, but it’s tied into a sort of silly/sort of awesome editing trick (explaining more would spoil things). I would have liked to have had the theme song used or at least referenced, but can’t win ‘em all I guess.* Other movies get shout-outs too: one kill is stolen almost directly from the original Wrong Turn (itself a straight up throwback to a past-its-prime sub-genre), and another scene mimics the most memorable moment from Exorcist III. The 3-D horror legacy itself is even acknowledged; one character suffers a very Friday The 13th 3D-esque eyeball squeeze.
One less successful call-back to the original is a sneaky way of throwing suspicion off of the actual killer. In the original, Axel is seemingly killed when he disappears as he crosses a bridge, and his friends presume he has drowned. It’s not exactly genius, but it was enough to fool me. Plus, back then, I really thought it was Harry Warden anyway, so I wasn’t really expecting a twist. However, now we all know that it won’t be Harry under the mask, so the audience plays detective the whole time trying to figure it out. But what they do here (again, I can’t really go into details without spoiling) is basically a full blown cheat, which is not only a bit of a dick move, but also a problem more in general because of the film’s curious under-population – you are left with zero suspects after an hour. Plus, the few attempts at red herrings are pretty clumsy (a character shows up with some information that he should have had no way of knowing, and then gets killed moments later). That said, I must admit that even without the cheat, I wouldn’t have guessed who the killer was, and even though it’s a bit goofily executed, it’s certainly the most original whodunit reveal in quite a long time.
So it’s not without fault, but it’s a step in the right direction in terms of bringing back the slasher genre. Let’s be honest, it’s not like many of the original era slashers are perfect, and the sheer amount of them have limited what modern filmmakers can do without being labeled a ripoff of an older film, remake or not. The novelty may never be fully restored, but making a valiant effort is the next best thing, so kudos to all involved for doing just that. The 3D stuff is wonderful (especially, of all things, the opening titles, which take us inside a newspaper clipping montage) and largely gimmick free – this movie won’t be as annoying to watch in 2D as Friday 3D is. It also didn’t give me a headache, like Spy Kids 3D did, so bonus points for that. The acting is solid all around, and it delivers – albeit a bit unevenly – everything the best of the genre should: blood, tits, and Tom Atkins. In my book, that’s a win.
What say you?
P.S. You may have noticed that despite this review’s length, there are no F bombs or profanity of any kind. That is because just before I posted this review, I had an interview with Tom Atkins, and when I reminded him about my hosting the Halloween III panel this past fall, he said “Oh yeah, you’re the guy who was swearing the whole time.” So in honor of Tom, I have made this review family friendly.
*At the premiere after-party, Lussier told me that he tried valiantly to get the song in the film, but Paramount wanted too much money. I’d argue that no price would be too high, but at least he was trying. Also worth noting – at the party I was able to walk right up and talk to Paris Hilton, but Tom Atkins was being mobbed the entire time. Horror fans are awesome.
It’s been a damned long time since I’ve been able to hit up a Grindhouse night at the New Bev, so I was excited to see that not only would I be able to make it tonight, but that one of the films, Return Of The Demon (Cantonese: Mo Gao Yi Zhang), was a horror film, thus sparing me from having to watch some budget pack nonsense at work in order to make my film for the day. Unfortunately, it was also the 2nd film (after the pretty awesome sci-fi action comedy I Love Maria, aka Roboforce), which is traditionally a tough one for me. It’s late, I’ve been guzzling Bud Lights, and it was the SECOND movie I had to read. But I only dozed for like 15 minutes, which I think is way above my average.
Another thing not helping much is that the movie isn’t slow, but it’s very repetitive. Scenes go on for 10-15 minutes sometimes, and often don’t even really have any bearing on anything. At one point, one of our heroes tries to dance his way out of a room that is covered with eggs (he doesn’t want to break any of them). So after like 2-3 minutes of tiptoeing around and ballet movement, the villain (? – her introduction was apparently during my nap) starts telekinesis-ing the guy around, which results in another 5 or 6 minutes of him breaking eggs and getting covered in egg slime (though somewhere in there the ghost chick somehow controls his mind and makes him sing “I have AIDS and corn shit and I’m impotent!”, which momentarily improves matters). It’s one of a few examples of such overlong and repetitive sequences, all of which really hurt the pace and overall enjoyment of the movie At 75-80 minutes, this would have been a classic, but at damn near 100, interest starts to waver.
Also – the movie is seemingly unwilling to kill off any of its heroes until the final reel. It’s hard to really fear the villain, even factoring in the general goofiness of the film, when no one really seems like they are in danger. However, this actually works to the movie’s benefit in that aforementioned finale, as when someone finally DOES die, it’s pretty goddamn shocking.
I also dug the Hammer style ending. Villain dies via explosion, and just as I jokingly muttered “The End!” the credits indeed began to roll. It’s nice to know that by the time they got to the end of the movie, the director and writer finally figured out how to move along. Maybe in The Return Of The Return Of The Demon, we will get kung fu/ghost/supernatural entity/comedy perfection.
The IMDb page for this movie is flimsier than the one for the student film I edited. No external reviews, no message board comments, no trivia, not even a goddamn genre tagging. Safe to say that it’s not really well known, so I am guessing that few of you are reading this entire review. But for those who are, I will leave Tall F-in Joe to fill in some highlights in the comments, he’s good at that.
I would like to briefly talk about I Love Maria though. This one is a bit more well-known, thanks to being co-directed (and starring!) Tsui Hark, and is also far more entertaining. Like Demon, it gets a little repetitive at times, but it’s a far more exciting movie at its core. There’s a robot woman flying around, another robot that looks like the lovechild of ED-209 and one of Bioshock’s Big Daddies, lots of kung fu, a slapstick-y pair of heroes who think a dog is a pig, and lots and lots of mistranslated lines. Damn my drunkenness for not being able to recall any word for word, but trust me, they are a hoot. If you’re a fan of multi-genre fare, I would highly recommend it.
Every budding horror fan remembers hearing about Faces Of Death as a young lad. “It’s got REAL deaths in it!” your cool friend would say. “You saw it?” you’d ask, and he’d lie and say yes and talk about how gory and awesome it was. Well, I am now that cool friend. But I did watch it, and quite frankly, it’s not awesome at all. Actually, it’s pretty fucking boring.
By now everyone knows that half of the footage is staged (dead giveaway – multiple camera angles on certain events when you should be able to see the other camera), which in a way makes the movie even MORE boring. If it was legitimately a bunch of footage of folks or animals really dying, then being slow would be more forgivable, because then the more “action” the movie contained would mean more people/animals really being killed, and that’s not a good thing. So if they are making shit up, why not go for broke! Show a real cattle being killed in the slaughterhouse, then fake a guy getting his head blown off or whatever. Keep it moving!
Instead, we get long stretches where real or not, the footage has no death. And at one point, there aren’t any “faces” either, because the movie stops cold(er) for a good ten minutes to warn us about the dangers of littering and pollution. I bet your schoolyard pal never boasted about the cool scene where you see a bunch of beer and soda cans on a beach. We also get lectured on hunger, World War II, nuclear weapons, and being careful while hiking. Actually, the guy who falls while rock climbing (called a “boy”, dude looks 30) is one of the few times in the movie I wasn’t sure if it was fake or real, so I guess I shouldn’t knock that part.
Another major flaw in the setup is that the narrator, Dr Frances B. Gross, not only has a ludicrous name, but he keeps saying how he’s there in the events we watch. Apparently, he traveled the entire world, took part in rituals, orgies, executions, monkeytorture, the whole shebang. But never ONCE does he appear in any of the footage, nor does anyone seem to actually address him. Where the hell is he?
All that said, it does have its moments. The gator and bear attacks are pretty funny, because everyone is Joe Steady on the camera at first, but then the moment the animal “attacks” it’s suddenly presented in “camera rolling down a hill o vision”, even from the cameras being held by people who aren’t involved with the incident. I also like the random bits that get tossed in, like when they show a French guy being assassinated sans any sort of explanation or context.
Oddly, the film’s soundtrack is more entertaining than anything. We get a creepy piano version of Old McDonald over the “farm animals becoming my sandwich” sequence, and a hauntingly beautiful piece over the electric chair stuff. The new 5.1 mix is also appropriately wacky; basically the only time the surrounds kick in is when an animal is squealing or howling. Nice.
The Blu-Ray (yes, Faces of fucking Death is on Blu-Ray, but LOTR and Armageddonand Star Wars and Jurassic Park are not) has a bunch of extras, but since the 105 minute movie left me pretty close to zzztown, I didn’t look at any of them. If I get a chance I will, but the only one that sounded interesting was an interview with the film’s editor, whom I assume isn’t going to be playing into the film’s validity. Everything else sounded like it was geared towards those among you who think this is either a. real or b. even really worth watching.
It’s a shame that Troma has to make its living distributing garbage like Slaughter Party, because when they make a film on their own, such as Poultrygeist: Night Of The Chicken Dead, it’s a blast almost from start to finish. But all that other crap brings their reputation down, which bums me out. Best way to go about it – if Lloyd Kaufman actually directed it, chances are it’s gonna be pretty awesome, in that special Troma way. If Lloyd simply does an introduction... you probably want to steer clear.
Things get off to a great start: homoerotic dialogue, songs about lesbian sex, a broken finger being used as a butt plug, a reference to a pro vs anti bestiality debate in high school... everything one would want from a Troma film. And surprisingly, it more or less holds up over the course of its rather unnecessary 102 minute run time (90 should really be the max for any movie in which a guy literally shits himself out). It drags a bit in spots, and I really thought that I would get rather sick of it after 40 minutes, but I was still laughing and giggling by the time the credits rolled. Of course, the finale features a little girl running around with her mother’s decapitated head and then guzzling a beer, so even if the previous 90 minutes had been terrible, it would have gone out on a high note either way.
I was genuinely surprised at how legitimately funny the movie was too. The gross out gags and such are one thing, but what got me really rolling were the more random moments, like when a guy suddenly launches into a parody of Quint’s Indianapolis speech from Jaws, albeit about chickens in the city of Indianapolis (best line: “We didn’t have cell phones back then... and I couldn’t afford a pager.”). Also, the main character is prone to clueless meta dialogue, thanking his future self for inexplicably knowing so much about him and things of that nature. One line that didn’t really work though was when he says “this ends now!” and then turns to the camera and says “or in 15 minutes”. It wasn’t funny anyway, but it’s not even accurate, there’s another 25 to go at that point (again – the movie could be shorter).
Another bummer is that it stops being a musical after a half hour or so. The songs are cheesy fun, and a welcome change of pace from what could have been a Terror Firmer rehash. But they are dropped out rather unceremoniously, and replaced with rock songs on the soundtrack (the “Dream Police”esque theme song is a winner though). Also, the audio quality on the whole is rather poor – whenever things get loud, the sound drops down as if to adjust itself. Very annoying.
If you notice, I don’t list zombie as one of the genres. That’s because the zombies are only in it briefly, and don’t really do anything. Most of the carnage is caused by chicken-men and bodily fluids. You might be disappointed in the lack of traditional zombie action, but honestly, I never even really noticed until a brief moment near the end when they are tricked into walking away from the restaurant that the entire movie takes place at.
Final nice surprise – Caleb Emerson, of Die You Zombie Bastards fame (DYZB even gets referenced!), plays one of the characters and also worked as an AD. When I reviewed his film, I noted that he had sadly gone onto Splatter Disco, so I am happy to see him rebound with his work here. Let’s hope Uncle Lloyd keeps him around and gives him his own film. Both this and Zombie Bastards represent the type of no-budget indie films I wish I could see more often, instead of bullshit Saw/Hostel clones.
I didn’t get the 2nd disc with all the extras yet, but disc 1 has a great commentary by Lloyd and Nathan Fillion sound-alike Gabriel Friedman, the film’s writer and editor. It’s a great track, as they talk mainly about all the problems and things they needed to overcome when making the film. It was apparently a very tense shoot, with lots of fighting being discusses (or, more accurately, discussed around). And it’s just as funny as the movie: at one point Lloyd alludes to a crewmember demanding more money and “playing a certain card”, to which Friedman replies “A tarot card?”. Disc one also has a bunch of trailers and a music video for the theme song (which I have placed below in lieu of the trailer). When I get disc 2 I will update with whatever I watched. It’s kind of hard because, being a Troma film, it’s not something I can watch openly at work (I listened to the commentary with the movie minimized to the taskbar – luckily it’s not particularly scene-specific).
Obviously the movie’s not for everyone, but if you’re a fan of Toxie or Terror Firmer, it should be right up your alley. And as Lloyd points out, it’s the only 35mm movie made between 2005-2007 that doesn’t have any CGI, so there’s something.
4-5 years after releasing their pitiful bullshit of a boxed set, Paramount has finally realized that people actually care about the Friday the 13th movies, and are thus putting together special editions of the films. Parts 1-3 are due in the coming weeks, and 4-6 were just announced. I am sure 7-8 are coming along as well (being the ones most requested – they are the weakest of the Paramount lot, but also the most butchered by the MPAA). Even better, they are getting new transfers, which is why HDNET Movies aired almost the entire series over the weekend. So for what I think is the first time since I got my cable box, I watched one as it aired, which also happens to be my favorite: Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives.
Lives was also the first one I watched on upscaled DVD (which actually looks better than HDNet’s compressed version, but that’s neither here nor there), and if memory serves, the first one I bought on VHS back in the day. I think I’ve probably seen VIII the most (first one I had on tape, via HBO), but VI has always been my favorite, and unlike the others, my opinion of it never changes. 2, 3, and 5 have gone from being liked to being hated to being really liked, 1 gets worse every time I see it, but 6 (and 4) are simply the crème of the crop, IMO.
And what’s interesting about that is that those are the two with no gimmick, no “it’s the one with ____”. 1 is “not Jason”. 2 is “paper bag Jason.” 3 is 3D, 5 is fake Jason, 7 is Carrie, 8 is New York... but 6 is just a straight up Friday the 13th movie. Sure, it has some jokey stuff, but that gets phased out of the movie after a half hour, and back then it was pretty unique to have a character in a horror movie actually be aware of the existence of horror movies. It’s nowhere near as campy and banal as Jason X either, and some of the jokes are still pretty funny (the little girl reading Sartre’s “No Exit” is possibly the best sight gag of all time).
Even more impressive is that the film works despite the MPAA butchering. While not as bad as the next two films, a lot of the kills are pretty dry, and few are very inventive; Jason seems pretty content using his bare hands or a machete in this one. But it makes up for it with actual suspense, the only film since the original to really even attempt such a thing. I love the bit where Jason shadows the girl walking along the cabin, and putting actual kids in the summer camp for once brings some genuine fear, since unlike the counselors, it’s not a foregone conclusion that they will get killed.
Actually, this one has a pretty rare role reversal. The Final Girl is a bit wild, makes out with a guy, etc. Then there’s Sissy, who is nice, mousy, and not as hot as the Final Girl (standard rule is that the Final Girl isn’t as hot as her closest fodder friend). By traditional logic, she would be the FG, but she actually (seemingly) gets it worse than anyone else. Her death is offscreen (by design, I think), but the cabin is completely covered in blood afterwards, suggesting Jason literally tore her apart.
And I actually LIKE the people in this one! All of them! There are really only four teens, and they are all pretty decent people. The one dude is the only one with a libido, and none of them do drugs or even drink. But my favorite is Sheriff Garris (I think this was the first horror movie to have everyone named after horror icons), who is the best adult protagonist in the entire series. I love how he instantly hates Tommy and suspects him of murder (my wife thought the film was edited down because he seemingly gets angry before Tommy even opens his mouth), and how he gets to play hero near the end of the film. I only wish that he and Tommy could have shared a final look or something, providing a nice little “I should have listened to you!” moment. But he gets broken in half before that can occur.
Tommy also rebounds after his annoying appearance in part V. It’s a different actor, and the role actually includes dialogue and stuff like that. Being that he is the first male to ever survive Jason, I liked that they kept him around to break up the monotony of having a girl run around for 15 minutes at the end of every movie, though they should have killed him at the end, rather than survive and disappear along with all the other survivors*. Especially since he gets knocked out and then the Final Girl is the one to actually deliver the final blow to Jason (again: tradition).
But I think what really makes this one stick out is that Jason is presented as an iconic monster, not a guy in a mask. I obviously had no appreciation for it as a 7 year old (when I first saw it), but now I realize that the whole revive sequence is a takeoff on the old Universal monster movies (particularly Frankenstein), and there are other moments in the film that suggest that he is indeed one of the classic monsters. When Rob Zombie announced Halloween, he pointed out that Michael was like one of those monsters, and thus his film would not be any more of a “remake” than any version of Dracula is a “remake” of the Lugosi one, but I think Tom McLaughlin (the first time a F13 movie had a writer/director, another possible reason for its above average quality) did a much better job of selling that idea, 21 years prior, with Jason.
Of course, it’s not a perfect movie. They kill everyone off with too much time to spare, so the finale drags a bit, and Jason and Tommy’s showdown should have been more epic. Also, the part with the paintball group is overly jokey (A smiley face on the tree? Really?), and feels shoehorned in to add more kills to the movie. Oddly enough, that definitely wasn’t the case, as it was one of the first things shot (it’s not even CJ Graham playing Jason in those scenes, but rather the original guy that was cast, who was then fired for not being formidable enough). I would rather have had a more traditional scene where some of the kids are hanging out and they think they see Jason in the background (this movie has ZERO POV shots, by my count) even if it meant a lower body count, but oh well.
Two of my fellow horror nerds/journalists (Dread Central’s Uncle Creepy and Shock’s Ryan Rotten) were lucky enough to record a new commentary track for the upcoming double-dip, but I hope McLaughlin’s original commentary is carried over, as it was pretty interesting from what I recall (I didn’t re-listen for this viewing). Also it would be an excuse to finally get rid of that shitty boxed set once and for all, as it was one of the few things on it that is worth a damn.
What say you?
*Seeing my beloved Amy Steel in the new My Name Is Jason documentary (good stuff) got me thinking about how awesome it would be to have a movie in which all of the survivors meet up for whatever reason, only to be decimated by Jason. As I was telling this idea to Rotten, Steel herself brought up the very same idea! Except in hers they don’t all die. It’s something I will be more than willing to discuss with Ms. Steel over dinner.
It doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense that I have never seen Swamp Thing until now. I am a big fan of Wes Craven and own every genre movie he has made EXCEPT this one (yes – I own Vampire in Brooklyn). Plus, I watched the sequel probably 20 times as a kid, as it seemingly aired every other day on Cinemax. How did my 11 or 12 year old self understand the complexities of Jim Wynorski’s meticulously crafted film without the context one would gain from Craven’s subtle and cerebral original?
I am, as usual, joking – both movies are even sillier than the titles would have you expect. And by silly, I mean, the entire first 20-25 minutes of this movie are little more than a strung together collection of puns and one-liners. Adrienne Barbeau even gets to work in that most annoying of movie cliché dialogue: “We’re sure not in Kansas anymore!” You know, maybe if someone would come up with a good line concerning his/her fear of being in a strange new world, future writers will have another one to use when they want to cover their inability to write good dialogue by dragging someone else’s line into their movie.
Once Swamp Thing is finally created, it picks up a bit, albeit only slightly. It’s a strangely all daytime set movie, and the middle of the film is essentially an extended scene of Barbeau trying to retrieve a notebook and escape the mercenary guys that the evil Dr. Arcane has hired to find her. One of them is played by David Hess, and I was hoping that he would turn into a monster that gave Swamp Thing a run for his money, like in the sequel, but no, he gets killed at the 2nd of the 2nd act, and the dude that played Pauly in Darkman takes his place as top henchman. Weak.
The finale sets up something interesting, where the formula turns you not necessarily into a swamp man, but rather something that is a metaphor for your essence. So when the henchman guy has some formula, he turns into a little impish monkey, because he is weak and small or something to that nature. But I can’t quite figure out what Dr. Arcane’s essence is, because he just turns into a kinda-cool looking monster. Way to blow your own concept (which was pretty great and should have been a focal point of the movie, not something added into the final 10 minutes), Wes. Then they have a pretty boring fight and the movie’s over.
One thing the movie does NOT skimp on is nudity. Barbeau takes a bath in the swamp water (sure, why not?) and the climax of the film takes place at what seems to be an evil villain cocktail party, complete with naked Gypsy women. The party bit is hilarious, by the way, because it looks like a regular party, with a nice meal and served drinks and such, but Arcane is openly celebrating the theft of the formula, and none of the guests seem to mind that or the fact that a woman is tied up at the table. I pictured a couple who got invited by mistake and they had to play it cool all night, only to be like “What the FUCK was that?” on the ride home.
There are also a great number of Star Wars-ish wipes throughout the movie, which I’m sure someone thought was a good idea. The usual ones are on display: pushes, clockwipes, etc. But the key one occurs late in the film, after an explosion - the wipe takes on the shape of the explosion! AWESOME! And this was way before Avids and After Effects, so some dude had to hand animate the explosion design.
One thing about the sequel that everyone hated was the two annoying kids that were trying to get a picture of Swamp Thing, and rightfully so. But it had precedent, the original had an annoying kid as well. There’s just the one, and he doesn’t ramble about snack foods, but he’s annoying in his own special way. Mainly, he talks like he’s about to fall asleep. He is seriously the most soft-spoken actor I’ve ever seen in my life, to the extent that I wasn’t even sure if his dialogue was supposed to be intelligible or just some sort of Charlie Brown’s teacher-esque background noise.
Some advice for future Horror Movie A Day-ers – when taking notes because you know that you won’t write the review for a couple days, make sure to write more than just a single word. I have written “vegetable patch” in quotations, and also “Harry” (no quotes), and I have no idea what the fuck either one is supposed to mean.. But after a few minutes I figured out what “2001” was – there’s a line early on, courtesy of a young Ray Wise (who looks nothing like the actor who will play Swamp Thing, but oh well), where he points out that the world’s population in 2001 will b 6.5 billion. He was only a little bit off, so I was pretty impressed with his 19 year old prophecy.
Oh, now I know - “Harry” is Harry Manfredini, who composed the score. I just wanted to point out that, as usual, he wrote his score by changing one note of his Friday the 13th score (which was already pretty much stolen from Bernard Herrmann) and going from there.
If I ever figure out “vegetable patch” I will let you know.
I got a bit suspicious when I saw that Amityville 3-D was rated PG, instead of R like all of the previous (and future) installments. After the trashy sleaze of the 2nd film, how would a PG entry fare? Granted, it’s not impossible to make a good PG haunted house movie (Poltergeist, which this movie occasionally directly emulates, is a pretty good example I would say), but still, I feared the worst. And I was mostly right.
It’s well acted, and the production value is nice, but goddamn is it slow and lazy. Most surprising is how so few scenes/shots seem to be 3D ready”. You know in like Friday 3 when you watch it in 2D, you have to endure a whole bunch of shots that have no reason to exist without some headache-inducing glasses? There are only a half dozen in this movie, split evenly between scares (a 3D fly!) and pointless (a 3D Frisbee!). But it seems like the 3D is more like Monster House, where it’s more about separating things in virtual movie space than having things fly out of the screen. But since you’re watching it in 2D, this means that a lot of the movie looks pretty goddamn blurry, which is pretty distracting.
But more troublesome is the movie’s stern refusal to goddamn DO anything. A fat guy gets flied to death in the first ten minutes, but then nothing much happens until the 3rd act. At one point they even have four teens (including a cute, and already interesting, Meg Ryan, and a cute, but still bland Lori Laughlin) go into the house for séance, which I thought would lead to some good kills or at least scares, but no. A glass flies across the room (and not even at the camera – a perfect opportunity for a good 3D shot, wasted) and that’s about it. With like 10 minutes left of the movie, Robert Joy says he wants to investigate the house, which results in a nice setpiece of furniture being flung around (best death in the series so far – a door flies into a guy, which sends him out a window) and a nonsensical plot point concerning a basement puddle, but it’s too little too late.
Hilariously, even then the movie refuses to kill anyone off. It seems like the whole investigative team is wiped out, but then as our hero does his whole “standing back up after the explosion and dusting himself off” thing, some vague people are seen running out of the house. You don’t see their faces, but unless the place was doubling as a glory hole, you can assume that they all got away (except for Joy, who has a confusing death in which a monster comes from the puddle, grabs his head, and then pulls him in, then they cut and he is in the puddle feet first).
Yet, they DO kill two of the most presumably safe characters in the movie! Our hero’s charming partner, and his teenage daughter bite it (the former’s death is awesome, the latter is so vague I wasn’t even sure she was dead until someone mentioned a funeral a few scenes later). So for those keeping score: random investigators – safe. 15 year old future Uncle Joey squeeze – dead.
The DVD has no extras beyond the trailer. I find it kind of funny that they retain the “3-D” title when the 3D version is not present, especially when A. it would probably be the only thing that makes this one worth a look and B. it has an alternate subtitle (The Demon) that they could have used. Nothing like needlessly calling attention to a missing selling point.
Not sure why it’s taken so long to make an animated Resident Evil movie. The games always had lengthy CGI cut-scenes anyway, and the three movies were more or less junky fun but everyone always complained about the lack of game characters like the Redfields or Leon, so what the fuck took them until now to give us Resident Evil: Degeneration, which brings back the heroes of RE2 and what could have been a pretty awesome game location (an airport)?
Oh, a new game. It’s been years since Resident Evil 5 was announced, but it’s finally coming in March. And it seems that this movie is setting up the plot of that game, in which terrorists are using Umbrella’s bio weapons for their usual terrorist type plots. I haven’t played 4 yet, so maybe this movie is bridging the two games, I dunno. All I know is, there’s no Alice, no little girl ghost, and Paul W.S. Anderson doesn’t have a goddamn thing to do with it.
And it’s not all that bad. The middle act is a bit slow, but the animation is good (there’s a shot of a plane early on that I swear is real), and while the character movement is a little jerky and unnatural, the voice acting, for the most part, is far better than the games usually offer (and no one is referred to as the “master of unlocking”). The only drawback, besides the rather curious lack of zombies in the 2nd half (then again, the games always sort of phased them out after a while too, but there would still be dogs and Hunters, neither of which are present here), is that Claire spends most of the movie like Abbie in Riding With Death: watching shit on a monitor and talking to herself. Leon S. Kennedy (he actually introduces himself with his initial) is the main hero, and he teams up with a new character who eerily resembles Jolene Blalock from Starship Troopers 3. Not sure why they would bring back one of the most enduring characters of the series and not have her really DO anything for the bulk of the film, but oh well. She DOES brandish an umbrella as a weapon (heh) at one point, so I guess it evens out.
I had to laugh too, at a scene late in the film when Leon displays some parkour style skills as he scrambles to avoid a monster. Where the fuck are those moves in the game? I would have liked the animators to just once have a character turn the wrong way, slowly walk a few feet, then run in place against the side of a wall for 30 seconds before getting killed. Or maybe just an ink ribbon lying around. I guess I will settle for a bit early in the film when a background “extra” appears to show disdain for a planter that he was passing by. Keep an eye out for it (it’s before any of the bad shit goes down), it’s hilarious.
Speaking of the character movements – it’s funny how the animators seem to think that keeping a character moving around will make them seem more lifelike. So if someone is delivering a bunch of exposition, the other character will continually nod, shake their head, widen their eyes, blink excessively, etc. Stand still!
One thing the movie definitely takes advantage of is the unlimited range of CGI when it comes to monsters. The final monster has a few stages, and it’s really great to see it bursting new body parts and such, a moment that would be poorly done and look “fake” in a live action movie. Like the games themselves, there’s always a human villain to deal with (actually two, a sleazy senator guy and a corporate tycoon who looks suspiciously like Keith Olbermann), which limits the monster’s screen time, but it’s pretty awesome nonetheless. Director Makoto Kamiya also stages some impressive shots (he’s a big fan of rack focus) and setpieces – I’d love to see him tackle another film of this type, maybe Metal Gear or Silent Hill...
The sound design is also above average for this type of thing. There’s a part where Claire hits a guy with a coffee mug, and even though we don’t see it hit the ground, they took the time to add in a sound effect of it rolling away. Little effort goes a long way. Some of the surrounds are pretty impressive as well; I wish I had gotten this on Blu-ray instead to enjoy an uncompressed track. Like Downfall, it’s nice to see these tie-in movies that display some actual attempts to be worthwhile once the game itself is out.
The DVD comes with a nice collection of extras, including bios for all of the characters for those uninitiated into the RE universe (not sure who exactly would be watching this beyond RE fans, but oh well). Some of the features are jokey, like an “interview with Leon”, and also about 15 minutes worth’ of the movie redubbed with funny dialogue (some of it actually made me laugh, to be fair), but that’s better than fake animated bloopers. Also, the 30 min making of is informative and interesting, albeit not in English (the movie offers like 6 spoken languages – they couldn’t dub the making of into English for a R1 DVD?). There are also a couple trailers for RE5, but sadly none of it is comprised of actual gameplay, just cut scene stuff.
I enjoy playing the games, but I can’t make heads or tails of what is going on in any of them by the end, and the movie follows suit. There’s a lot of nonsense about T-viruses and vaccines and political coups and double-crosses... I’m not going to lie and say I understood all of it. All I care about is zombie action, some cool monsters, and a female character or two that makes me think unnatural things, and in that case the movie delivers as well as any game based on a video game can be expected. I’ll take it over Extinctionat any rate.
What say you?
P.S. I can’t remember, but does time really pass this much in the games? I always assumed they took place within a few weeks of each other, but in this they say it’s been seven years since RE2 (in reality it’s been 11-12, but still, I thought that seemed long).
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