The Pack (2015)

JULY 21, 2016

GENRE: PREDATOR
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

I like home invasion films, but they need to be relatively rare due to the fact that they're even more limited than the slasher film, which is saying something. The location trapping alone boxes in filmmakers, and since the best ones tend to offer stripped down plotting, copycat attempts often follow suit - the focus remains on the intensity and scares, not plot twists and long speeches. Needless to say, you don't have to worry about The Pack being any different, since it's a home invasion film where the attackers aren't masked strangers, but a pack of feral and very hungry dogs. They haven't been "sent" there, there's no voodoo curse or anything at work - they're just hungry, and our hero family of four... well, they're home.

But swap the dogs for the usual guys and there's really not much separating this from any number of others that have cropped up over the years, which is a bummer. It's an Australian horror flick, which are usually more than just serviceable, but that's all this one is, really. It goes through the motions established by Ils, The Strangers, You're Next, etc - just with dogs instead. We get the opening scene kill of the neighbors, the ominous buildup, the "let's run for the shed to get help", the doomed police officer who arrives and is killed before he can help... it's all the same things you've seen before, so once the novelty of the dogs wears off it gets a bit too routine. The only momentum is, grim as it sounds, wondering who, if any, of the family unit will die. You can assume the two kids will be OK, but the Kiefer Sutherland/Sean Pertwee looking dad or the Essie Davis-y mom are fair game for sure. Plus, again, it's an Aussie movie, which means NOT a Hollywood studio one, so even the kids MIGHT get chomped if the filmmakers want to risk angry viewers.

I won't spoil which of them die (again, if any), but I will thank the screenwriter for adding in some obvious dead meat in the form of a suit who comes to their home to tell them that the bank is about to take back their house and farm due to lack of payments. It's a standard horror movie character beat (I swear I've seen "Final Notice" in more horror movies than all other genres combined), but I like that it actually has something to do with the plot - the reason that they're not making money is because their livestock keeps getting killed by the damn dogs. Anyway, you know this asshole is a goner, but I like that they don't keep him in the house when the attacks come, because then it'd just lead to even more cliches. He'd lock the door behind him and leave one of the family members to die, or waste their limited ammo by firing wildly, or whatever - you just know one or all of those things would come into play. Instead, he leaves after giving the bad news and gets killed after stopping on the side of the road to piss, sparing us the antagonistic human character for the bulk of the proceedings.

This decision also cuts down on the film's amount of dialogue. I swear there are like 40 lines in the movie, most of them during that guy's scene with the parents. I watched a lot of it with "subtitles" (actually closed captioning, because no one knows the difference) because of the AC, and nine times out of ten that text appeared on-screen it was of the "[wind rustling]" or "[dog growling]" variety (also a lot of "[sheep bleating]", which I somehow never knew was the word for the sound sheep make. I am learning!). The family gets separated throughout the house fairly shortly after the dogs show up, and the characters go against horror movie tradition and don't even talk to themselves all that much - it's kind of nice to see people go get bullets without saying "OK, I need bullets" like many of their horror movie peers have done in the past. Since the dogs are kind of a known problem they don't even really have to explain things to their children (read: the audience) when they show up. Opening text tells us that feral dogs are a problem in the area, and that's all we ever need to know - there is no need for further explanation once they show up at the family's farm, so our heroes can spring right into action.

And by action I mean they hide for a bit, then run for a shed. Overhead shots show that their place is HUGE, but alas it's underutilized; I wish they could have done more with its hallways and nooks and crannies. There's a nice bit where the mom tricks one into a room and shuts the door (thankfully, they're not as smart as raptors), and a tense scene where another dog (there are four or so, I think?) finds the kids' hiding spot in a closet, but too much of the action is given to the shed or the immediate area around the window that looks out at the two available vehicles (and that damn shed). I can see the logic when picking these locations: bigger the house, the more potential for the scare scenes, but more often than not the budget and actual shooting logistics (lighting, equipment, etc.) keep them from actually getting to use that space to any meaningful degree. That's why the house for Strangers was perfect - it was mid-sized, allowing them to use almost all of it and thus maximize the suspense that could be generated. We in the audience knew our way around their place after 15-20 minutes - we never get that sense of the geography of this house, making the "invasion" of it less terrifying.

The dogs are good though. As I suspected, and later confirmed on the brief making of, they are a mix of the three obvious elements: real dogs, puppet dogs, and CGI dogs, with the filmmakers careful to use the two fake versions sparingly and maintain the illusion, rather than say "Hey we got this CGI dog that can do anything!" and blow it. Amusingly, the CGI dogs were mostly used for shots where it'd be dangerous for the real ones, standing near fire or whatever - I'm not sure if there are any CGI dogs in a shot with a human. And the puppet heads look real good but would probably fall apart if used extensively, so everything works together to create a pretty realistic depiction. Of course, that means we don't see them exactly tearing someone's face off, but there's a tangibility during the encounter scenes that keeps them threatening. There's a great face-off near the end, with both actor and growling dog in the same frame (possibly a split screen effect, to be fair, but a convincing one if so), and it's legitimately scary in that Roar kind of way, because they didn't cheat with a digital animal. Like Burning Bright, an underrated (and HMAD-book certified!) flick that similarly combines the home invasion movie with killer animals, the minimal action involving the animal actually causing harm to the characters is more than offset by wow factor of just seeing them in the same shot, something that you can't replicate with CGI beasties no matter how good they look or how well the direction/editing is for that scene.

I can't help but think the movie needed another threat, however. Like Cujo; the kid is sick and they're trapped in the hot car - there's something else to worry about besides the title character. Not the case here; their financial issues aren't exactly pressing once the dog shows up, and no one needs to get to any medication or anything like that. It might even be told in real time, more or less, now that I think of it - it's almost TOO straightforward, which I think works better when you're less certain about the safety of the cast (a real-time slasher or Descent type, with a group of pals instead of a family unit, could be terrifying if done right). Even the rare injuries they get aren't severe; no one gets incapacitated and in turn gives them a major hurdle in escaping or anything like that. Dammit, movie - complicate matters!

But hey, for "blue collar" horror, it's a winner. There's nothing BAD about the movie, it's well made and checks the boxes, and the characters are likeable (and actually kind of look like a real family, which is worth a letter grade on its own). Weightless and even routine in spots, sure, but again, the home invasion movie is as boxed in as their characters, and within those parameters (plus the limitations of using live animals as much as possible), it should satisfy its intended audience. Plus, it's been a long time since I've seen a modern killer dog flick (the woeful The Breed is the only one coming to mind, but I'm sure there's another), and it's always good for me to be reminded that man's best friends can also be ruthless killing machines, because I can't help but instantly try to pat any dog I see. Movies like this can help me learn!

What say you?

Tweet

PLEASE, GO ON...

Lights Out Review

In the glory (read: daily) days of HMAD, I'd pride myself on offering up a review of every major horror release, and that's a tradition I mostly continue to this day (I know, I never reviewed Conjuring 2 - sorry. It came out while I was on vacation and when I got back I got busy and just never got around to it. I liked it though!). However, on occasion I end up having to review something for my "other" site (the one that IS updated every day, and has millions of readers), and I sure as hell ain't gonna write two reviews. So if you're looking for a Lights Out review here, I'm sorry - you won't find one any time soon (a big special edition Blu-ray, if one exists, might get me to change my mind). However, you CAN head over to BMD for my take on the film from when I saw it last month at the LA Film Festival. Short review: it's not exactly a masterpiece of the genre, but as the fun scare machine it was designed to be, it works like gangbusters, and despite what I say in the review I might actually go see it a second time, if only to give it my 10 bucks (well, Moviepass' 10 bucks, but same thing) and, now that I know it's coming, watch the audience's response to a particular crowd-pleaser moment that I'm still smiling at. So if the trailers left you underwhelmed (or worse, you thought it was just a Darkness Falls remake), I would like to encourage you to take a chance on it this weekend. My review is mostly spoiler-free, if you're worried about that sort of thing.

Tweet

PLEASE, GO ON...

Ghostbusters (2016)

JULY 15, 2016

GENRE: COMEDIC, GHOST
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Any regular reader of the site should know by now that I was exposed to and allowed to watch R rated movies from a young age (6 or 7), so it perhaps shouldn't be a big surprise that the original Ghostbusters is not as sacred to me as several other folks - particularly men - my age. I don't even know if I saw it until I was like 8, which means it would have in between Friday the 13th sequel viewings or R-rated comedies like Vacation and Caddyshack (and no, as a kid I didn't realize the Harold Ramis connection across those examples). As a result, since I had already moved on to more "sophisticated" fare, it didn't inform my childhood as much as it did for all of those folks who have been telling Paul Feig to fuck himself and saying even worse things to the female cast of his remake (subtitled Answer The Call in the end credits, oddly), which has the blessing of every living original Ghostbuster (they all make cameos) and original director Ivan Reitman (who produced this one). Remaking this movie doesn't bother me much, is what I'm saying - and as a fan of Feig's other films (not to mention someone who has harbored a crush on Kristen Wiig for nearly a decade) I was excited to see it - for all I knew I could end up preferring it to the original.

Now, let me stress that it's not that I DISLIKE the first film. Not by any means - it's fairly great, in fact. It's funny even on repeat viewings and the story - unlike many other '80s comedies - is actually satisfying for the most part. Despite the fact that it would have been fairly easy for them to do so, the movie's plot doesn't just exist to string the gags together; the jokes are usually organic to the characters and narrative, so coupled with the FX (many of which hold up) it combines to make a film that is very much deserving of its "beloved" status. I'm just saying it's not really SPECIAL to me the way Halloween or Fletch is - it's important to realize that I recognize several films as being great but they're not of any particular significance to me, same as I realize Kobe Bryant is a great basketball player despite giving less than one shit about basketball. Plus, I'm also too old to give a shit about remakes anymore anyway. They can Van Sant Psycho a new version of Fletch with Zac Efron for all I care.

(Please don't do that.)

Luckily for my comments section, I don't have to worry much about the Ghostbros, because I don't think the new movie reaches the heights of the original. It's better than the sequel for sure (I will never understand that one's appeal beyond the finale - how can GB fans appreciate a movie that spends its entire first act trying to suggest that our heroes have become jokes?), and it might even be funnier in spots, but the villain is very underdeveloped and there are (I know this sounds weird) too many damn ghosts. It's like they had a bunch of concept designs and Feig couldn't decide which to use and thus opted to throw them all in, somewhere - the big finale in Times Square presents dozens of anonymous specters that are disposed of too easily. The movie suffers from an abundance of callbacks to the original, but one of the things they DON'T reprise is one that they perhaps should: the montage of them cleaning up NY over a period of time. That would allow for all of the designs to show up without them being an important part to anything - seeing them all used as essentially the big obstacle before fighting the main villain (who, again, isn't fleshed out enough) isn't particularly engaging. Worse, this sequence is also where the FX start to falter; during Kate McKinnon's big action moment (wiping out a dozen ghosts with her proton-handguns, the ones she licks in the trailer) is laughably bad looking, almost as if they shot the scene with someone else and had to quickly superimpose her over the action. I love practical work, obviously, but for the most part the CGI ghosts here are actually quite well done and even a bit scary (the subway one and the mannequin are on the same level as the librarian), so it's a shame the haters will glom on the few bad FX shots as it's otherwise largely a fine showcase for computer trickery.

As for the villain Rowan, on a conceptual level he's great: a bullied weirdo who uses some homemade devices to amplify paranormal activity in those areas, with the intent on having so many ghosts flying around that the wall that separates their world and ours comes tumbling down entirely, bringing about the apocalypse. Unfortunately, that's pretty much all we know about him; he shows up and plants a device while saying "they'll all pay!" or whatever, and that's about as far as we get inside his head. The meta-parallel between him and the online trolls is apparent, but it's almost like they were afraid to get really lay into these sad bastards, so as a result we're held at arm's length from the villain - in fact if you haven't paid any attention to the online vitriol, you might take away even less about his character and motives. There are a couple of moments where we see that no one wants to deal with him (two waitresses argue over which one of them has to wait on him, for example), but it's all tell and no show - he never interacts meaningfully with anyone else. Let us SEE him being "wronged" by the rest of the world, not just sitting there oblivious to two strangers whispering and saying that the world sucks. And it doesn't help matters that due to the way the plot unfolds he's almost forgotten by the time the climax rolls around, as (SPOILER) he is killed about an hour or so into the movie and becomes a ghost that possesses Chris Hemsworth's idiot receptionist character, letting the actor (using his native accent for a change) kind of take over as the villain. Then, with 15 minutes to go, the ghost leaves Hemsworth and takes on yet another form, that of a giant, growling, personality-free monster. There's nothing about this form that recalls the angry sad sack, which to me feels like a giant missed opportunity. Rowan's takeover of Hemsworth at least allows us to enjoy the actor's otherwise under-utilized comic chops (not to mention his dance moves), but even there it has the same problem: the movie can't quite pin down a primary villain. It'd be like if New Beginning was sped up and grafted on to a shorter version of Final Chapter after Tommy killed Jason off - the transition doesn't work at all for the narrative. Doing it twice is just silly.

But there has to be a big monster for them to blast away at the end of the film, because that's what the original had. As I said, there are too many callbacks to the 1984 movie, following its structure almost beat for beat and overloading it with cameos from FIVE of the original cast members (actually six if you count Harold Ramis, who 'appears' as a bust), plus Slimer and Stay-Puft for good measure. Obviously, you want the new team to show some measure of reverence to their predecessors, and one of the cameos works perfectly (spoiler: it's Ernie Hudson's), but Feig and co-writer Katie Dippold overdo it, as if they figure they can win over naysayers simply by constantly reminding them that they too love the original film. Ironically, the deja vu is the same thing that helped sink Ghostbusters II, so you'd think they would have known better. I don't think anyone would argue that this movie is at its best when it's doing its own thing, so it gets almost frustrating that there isn't more of it.

For example, the dynamic of the group is very different. Kristen Wiig is in the sort of Peter Venkman role as the one who is a bit above the ghost hunting stuff, but unlike Venkman she's not even associated with her "Ray Stantz", the Melissa McCarthy character. The two were best friends and wrote a paranormal book together years ago, but then Wiig left that stuff (and McCarthy) behind when she took a job teaching physics at Columbia, while McCarthy has taken a job at some dump college and made a new best friend (McKinnon's "Egon"). When Wiig finds out the book has been republished on Amazon she confronts McCarthy about taking it down so it doesn't embarrass her, just as a ghost shows up elsewhere. So they're sort of forced together, and she has no existing relationship with McKinnon - a big change from the original's trio of pals (Egon was the new guy, but they clearly didn't MEET in the film). As for "Winston", Leslie Jones plays Patty, a subway worker and history buff who the others meet when investigating the 2nd ghost in the movie, and who joins them shortly thereafter, much earlier in the narrative than Winston joined up (before they've even decided on a name, in fact). This lets the group have some "getting to know you" moments the original obviously didn't require, the occasional reminder of the strained friendship between the two leads (a subplot that's largely phased out as the movie goes on, only to resurface near the end), and also more time of the full group working as a team than the original movie had.

It's this stuff that makes the movie work as well as it does. Obviously everyone's tolerance for this or that type of humor varies, but I personally found almost every scene of the four of them just talking to be hilarious, and all four of them get in plenty of laugh out loud lines (even McCarthy, who seems a bit hampered by the PG-13 rating). Not that the ghost-hunting scenes lack laughs, but again those are the scenes where they seem to be constantly using the original film as a guide - the ones of them just sort of hanging out (usually involving some new tech McKinnon designed) are consistently funny, and cementing the idea that they should be reunited for a sequel. Their chemistry isn't surprising since they've all worked together on SNL (three cast members and one regular host), but despite the fact that they're all subbing in for the original's characters in some form, I was surprised at how quickly they took on their own personalities and played off their relative strengths. Unfortunately, this also means that the movie occasionally suffers from some fairly bad editing, because Feig clearly let these four talented and hilarious women play off each other (read: improv) whenever he could, and used the best gags and jokes even if they didn't always flow as well. McKinnon scores a great laugh with some Pringles in one scene, for example - hopefully you're still laughing and thus don't really notice when they're completely gone (and her expression is totally different) in the next shot.

On occasion, the plot suffers from this "hey, something's missing" feeling as well. Feig said his director's cut was something like three hours long; I don't think it feels like it's been reduced by over a third (I'm sure a lot of what was chucked was just more comedy of no narrative use), but there were at least three instances where I couldn't help but feel something somewhat important just got chucked in order to keep things moving. For example, when all hell breaks loose, McKinnon, McCarthy, and Jones are all running around fighting the ghosts for a bit, and at one point they get trapped... and then Wiig shows up and saves them. It plays like she had quit the team at an earlier point and decided to come back to them (think Han Solo showing up to help save the day at the end of New Hope), but we never saw that if so - far as we knew she was just at home when the other three sprung into action. I've already mentioned Rowan's truncated appearance, but that extends to other antagonists as well: Matt Walsh and Michael K Williams play a pair of Feds who are sort of in the Walter Peck mode, but they never do anything worthy of hiring these actors (particularly Williams, who also gets 6th billing despite maybe 90 seconds of screentime). This is nothing new for a modern comedy; Neighbors 2 (which more of you should have seen - it was pretty great!) was just as bad if not worse in that regard, but since the first film's script by Aykroyd and Ramis was famously gigantic and managed to offer a relatively tight narrative in 100 minutes, it's hard not to notice. It's part of the problem of improv; sure you get comic gold, but then it seems like there's a tendency to let the plot falter because test screenings show this otherwise unnecessary bit gets the best laughs. So when they decide 30 seconds needs to be trimmed somewhere, and the choice is between some exposition/character development, or a tangential bit that people will laugh their asses off (like Hemsworth's terrible ideas for their logo), they opt to keep the latter every time.

Also, maybe I just missed something, but all of a sudden Times Square is transformed into the 1970s (no particular year can be determined; the movie theaters are showing Willard (1971), Fist of Fury (1972), and Taxi Driver (1976), so it's just random), which no one comments on in any meaningful way and seems like a lot of work for the production for a mere sight gag. Anyone have a good explanation for this bit?

Overall, I liked the movie (as did the audience, who applauded when the credits came up - rare for a Friday morning crowd). I'd watch it again, I want to see the cast come together for a sequel (not the one they tease at the end of the credits though - don't Into Darkness this shit, come up with your own villains, please!), and it left me far more satisfied at 36 than the original sequel did when I was 10. But it also kept mucking up the plot and showing its seams, which A) won't help win over any of the idiots who have been hating on this movie since the day it was announced, but an even more painful B) it makes it hard to really champion, either. "GO SEE THIS FLAWED MOVIE!" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement, and that's exactly what I wished I could give it due to all of the unnecessary hate being thrown its way - even a mega-budget studio movie can feel like an underdog, I guess. So they all deserve recognition for making it a lot better than the disaster it might have been, I can't help but feel Feig could have done a little better, either - it almost seemed like he felt he HAD to throw in those shoutouts (Slimer is particularly awful and unnecessary to boot), and did so half-heartedly, using screentime that could have been used on more of his and Dippold's own ideas. Here's hoping that they have the confidence to truly make it their own next time.

What say you?

P.S. Fall Out Boy's awful cover of the theme song appears in the middle of the movie. Brace yourself.

P.S.S. Comments are moderated here for a reason. Don't bother leaving vitriol, because it will never see the light of day. If you have something constructive to say, fine. Otherwise save it for AICN or IMDb, where pointless drivel is tolerated.

Tweet

PLEASE, GO ON...

Cell (2016)

JULY 10, 2016

GENRE: TECHNOLOGY, ZOMBIE
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

As I've said in the past, I am very much a movie before book guy - I know the book will be better, so I can enjoy both rather than go into a movie and get frustrated with everything that they changed or left out. But there are always exceptions (I do like to read after all, and who knows what will be turned into a movie?), and there's also the occasional... er, occasion where I don't like the book much anyway - the movie might actually be an improvement! Such was my hope for Cell, as I thought it was a terrific idea with a killer first 100 pages or so, but ultimately was left underwhelmed by; Stephen King's tendency to botch his endings was in full effect for that one, and the "Raggedy Man" felt like a poor retread of some of his better villains (Randall Flagg in particular). Could a movie fix the book's problems and turn his story into a killer cell phone signal into one of the better King adaptations?

See, I had heard that King changed the ending, and I knew from a few plot descriptions that they weren't following the book to the letter, so I went in hopeful. It didn't hurt that the cast reunited John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson from 1408, which is not only one of the better modern King films, but also a huge hit (the 2nd highest grossing after Green Mile, in fact - though inflation changes that a bit, of course) - as good of a pedigree you could hope for, even if the movie wasn't being distributed by a major studio or given much of as release (I had to drive 30 miles to see it theatrically in a tiny theater). I figured at worst it'd be an OK zombie movie that couldn't manage to overcome its less than stellar source material - certainly nothing new for the horror genre, and even an OK King movie would be better than a lot of them, right?

Alas, saying it was "OK" is almost overselling it. It's not TERRIBLE, but each act is weaker than the one before it, so what started out as a movie I was enjoying and wondering why it got dumped ended up as a movie I wished I had (like one of the four other audience members) walked out early and saved myself some time. Of course, then I would have denied myself the sight of one of the film's primary actors stumbling around as a zombie, which I assure you is even funnier the 2nd time they show it. Again, King's ending wasn't great, but damned if they didn't actually manage to make it WORSE here, and I can't for the life of me imagine why they thought this would be an improvement - they would have been better off copying his ending directly and chalking it up to respect for the text. Granted, King himself is credited with the screenplay, but so is another writer, and the "and" that separates their credits tells us that they weren't working together. So who knows if this is King's ending or not; Cusack tweeted a while back that both he and King had been cut out of the movie's communication process, so we can assume they aren't thrilled with how it turned out, either.

Back to the credits for a minute. Cusack is listed as an executive producer, which means he either sunk some of his own money into it or helped them find the financing to make it (presumably by attaching himself as a star to secure said financing from foreign territories). Alas, there are like twenty other listed executive producers, so when you couple that with the FIVE production logos at the top (none of them you'll recognize), you can quickly ascertain that this was a "film" only in the technical sense. People complain about big studio blockbusters all the time, but personally I find these movies far more insulting - they're thrown together, shot in generic locales (Atlanta here), and designed only to get sold into the overseas markets based on their "star power". It's something I see a lot in the action genre (pretty much every Bruce Willis movie in the past three years falls into this category - one of which also featured Cusack), but rarely for horror films. It's sad to see Sam Jackson joining this little crew (Nicolas Cage, Tom Jane, and Cuba Gooding Jr are other frequent offenders), so hopefully it's just a momentary lapse of judgment for the actor (who has appeared in plenty of bad movies, yes, but they're of the technically more prestigious variety, like Robocop) and not a sign of a dying career. Silver lining, he seems to be aware he signed up for a dud - I can't recall the last time I saw him so disinterested in a performance. He's usually the only source of energy in a lazy film (again, like Robocop), but here he just kind of says his lines and fades into the background more often than not; a brief bar scene where he drunkenly sings some oldie is the only time he seems like he's invested in the proceedings.

Anyway, like all those action movies I mentioned, it quickly becomes clear that one of the main problems is that they're spending too much of their limited budget on securing "names" instead of actually putting it on the screen, so you get a script that probably needed 30-60m to be shot properly, produced for maybe a tenth or (if I'm being generous) a fifth of that amount. And they blow most of the money that they had for actual on-screen production value in the first ten minutes, when the cell-phone outbreak strikes at an airport (not Boston Common as in the book, but it's a solid change) - we get some good carnage, lots of zombified extras, a plane exploding - good stuff. Lloyd Kaufman even shows up, suggesting that perhaps the loss of original director Eli Roth didn't mean that the gonzo splatter spirit he likely would have brought to the table would be gone with him. Cusack (who survives the outbreak because his cell phone died - he's using a payphone at the time) then makes his way down to the subway where he meets Jackson, and they hole up at his place (along with one of his neighbors, played by Orphan's Isabelle Fuhrman) before heading on foot up north to find his family.

This is the good section of the movie, but even here we see signs that perhaps the production wasn't quite up to the task of telling this apocalyptic story. I can forgive the filming location substitutions; as a Bostonian I knew right away that they weren't really there, but I've seen far worse attempts at passing off [name your overused filming location] as my old home. But it was almost oppressively generic - they call it "Boston Airport" instead of Logan, the subway name was wrong (I forget what it was, but it wasn't MBTA), and they didn't even show a Dunkin Donuts - despite the fact that they also exist in Atlanta! I mean, come on - putting a Dunkin Donuts in the shot is an easier method than on-screen text saying "Boston, Massachusetts" to sell the setting; the only distinct landmark I can recall is the Prudential Center as part of a CGI skyline behind them. Everything just felt completely phony, and it just got worse as the movie wore on, as Cusack repeatedly says the name of the NH town he's heading for, but offering no landmarks or geographical info to let us know how close they were. And considering how big the population of Massachusetts is, I also had trouble with its depiction of a zombie outbreak - when they're in the outskirts I guess it's fine that there weren't a lot around, but even in the streets of Boston when they leave Cusack's place to make their way north seem curiously underpopulated - they only have to sneak past one group of like thirty zombies before pretty much being in the clear.

Of course, even if they encountered swarms of zombies every step of the way it wouldn't matter much, as the trio are all expert marksmen, it seems - Jackson's character says he was in Vietnam to explain his shooting skills, but there is no explanation for how Cusack (who doesn't even know how to load the gun) and Fuhrman never seem to miss even when firing while running. As with the book, as things progress with the (goofy) plot it becomes less about the danger of a zombie attacking them and more about the zombies' hive-mind, drone behavior that has them running in circles, so the movie is not only at its best in the first half hour or so, it's also the only time the characters seem to be in any legitimate danger. The movie offers not one but two scenes where Cusack drives a truck through hundreds of the things (they're sleeping in one of them, to be fair) and neither of them carry any tension at all - the second time the shuffling drones just sort of wait until he passes before continuing their endless circling of a big radio tower. At a certain point I almost wished for the introduction of some evil humans, just to give the movie a bit of pep - it'd be better than another scene of our characters walking through zombie-free, depressingly nondescript fields and groves.

It also doesn't embrace its R-rating for the most part, as if they didn't want to put much effort into cutting it down if they had to make it PG-13. There are a couple of isolated gore gags in the airport scene and Sam gets his F-bomb in as always, but otherwise it's shockingly tame - the dozens of zombies they shoot go down without even as much as a CGI bullet hole, and the rare good guy deaths are fairly bloodless as well (one is off-screen entirely, another just gets whacked over the head). My only theory is that they DID want to make it PG-13 (perhaps that would be the "creative differences" cited for when Roth left the project - seven years ago, for the record) and got an R anyway but didn't bother to fight it? At any rate, you can get far more visceral action on Walking Dead every week (easy to compare it to since they're shot in the same state). That said, don't give me any shit about the "zombie" word or tagging - as with 28 Days Later, they are used in the exact same way and have the same anonymity/numbers as they do in any traditional zombie flick. Unless there's proof that the infection can be reversed and the victim will return to normal, it's a zombie movie for all intents and purposes.

Ultimately, the biggest disappointment with the film is that they failed to modernize the source material to any meaningful degree. Sure, we all had cell phones in 2006 when the book was published, but not "smart" phones (even those with cameras were still relatively new, and they didn't even do video yet), an element that barely plays a part in this 2016 (OK, actually 2014) film. Cusack thinks his son might be safe because he never calls anyone, just uses his phone to text and play games, and that's pretty much the extent of modernizing the concept. Hilariously, the timing for the film's late release couldn't have been better, as I and everyone else in the country was spending a chunk of our weekend staring at our phones while playing Pokemon Go - if the (never explained) cell signal originated in real life over the weekend via a stupid game, it would have wiped out the population in half the time. And for what it's worth, I was more creeped out by seeing a dozen people standing motionless in a park (save for their swipes) than I was for anything during this movie. Even the film's attempts at explaining how it works are half-assed and unresolved - they seem to establish that texting someone won't turn you into a zombie, but what about apps? There was a real opportunity here to dive into the fun sociological potential of the concept (that our phones, meant to connect us to our loved ones, are turning us into mindless zombies), but they are content with just more or less sticking to King's decade old novel, poorly and cheaply. Rarely has a professional horror movie squandered so much potential.

What say you?

Tweet

PLEASE, GO ON...

Sleepy Hollow (1999)

JULY 2, 2016

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REVIVAL SCREENING)

My memory has gotten so bad that it wasn't until I was at the theater and experiencing deja vu that I realized I had already gone to the New Beverly to see Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow a few years back. At the time I promised to do an HMAD entry for it (it was in 2013, after I "retired", so I wasn't sworn to review anything!) if I stayed awake, but it was a midnight screening so of course I didn't. But that was nothing new for the movie - I also snoozed during my opening night viewing back in college (despite being with a girl I had a crush on - I guess I wasn't afraid to show her the real me! We never dated, natch) and again when I watched on DVD. In fact, it wasn't until this viewing that I realized there were parts of the movie I had never actually seen (such as the visit to the witch), so it's only now - nearly 17 years after first seeing the film - that I can finally say for sure that I've seen the whole thing. Go me!

The irony is that I actually quite like it; I've said before that I'm more likely to fall asleep during a movie I enjoy than one I am merely bored by, because a good movie is like a comfort to me and when I'm comfortable I nod off. This is also why I doze off almost every morning watching cartoons with my son, because he's snuggled next to me and that's just heaven (also, I've seen these goddamn Mickey Mouse Clubhouse episodes 50x a piece by now). Anyway, Burton's kind of an odd filmmaker to me, in that besides Ed Wood I wouldn't say I LOVE any of his movies, but find a great deal of them to be just enjoyable enough to own (but rarely watch); the only ones I flat out dislike are Apes and everything he's done with Depp since (save Sweeney Todd). But even more amusing to me is that this is really his only full blown, straight up horror movie; he's synonymous with creepy and macabre but his filmography rarely touches on traditional horror movies - his other genre-tinged offerings like Sweeney Todd or Mars Attacks are genre mashups. He's always used his horror influences to inform more mainstream fare (primarily comedies, the best example being Beetlejuice), but this - despite the fact that it's one of his biggest hits - remains the only time he was primarily focused on scares and suspense.

Not that the movie is humorless, at least in spirit - whether you actually laugh at any of Depp's mugging is another story. I can't be sure but this might have been the first movie where he did that exaggerated toothy grimace thing, and he also makes a few other faces when confronted with danger that are likely supposed to make us chuckle. And even if it wasn't the "origin" of this behavior, it's important to remember that at the time we certainly hadn't gotten tired of it, or even him - the actor only had a single hit movie (Donnie Brasco) in the '90s after Edward Scissorhands elevated his presumed star power, and this was also before him being in a Burton film was practically a given. In fact, the studio allegedly didn't even want him for the lead, asking for guys like Liam Neeson and Daniel Day-Lewis (!) instead - THAT'S how much different things were then. His recent career-downswing (not helped by his personal troubles) is due to his shtick growing too stale - when this movie was released he didn't even have any sort of calling card.

Luckily for the film's longevity, that stuff is kept to a minimum, and there isn't much humor to be found in the other performances. Burton stages a few Grand Guignol gags that will appeal to the gorehounds (primarily through the placement of recently disembodied heads), but again his main intent here was to tell a murder mystery that would fit at home in the Hammer canon. When I first saw (or, "saw") the movie in 1999 I had very little knowledge of Hammer; I think I had only seen one or two films and probably got the significance of Christopher Lee's appearance, but that was probably about it. Not that I'm a scholar now, but I certainly see far more of the influence; the gloomy sets, the Brit-heavy cast (including Michael Gough, the only other Hammer vet besides Lee as far as I know), and the other little touches like a stagecoach-set climax cribbed from the opening of Dracula AD 1972 (complete with the villain crashing into a tree and being subdued by the wagon). There are probably other touches I missed (as I said, I'm no scholar - I've seen a few dozen Hammer films but most of them only once), but I see enough to appreciate that Burton was spending nearly 100m of an American studio's money to pay tribute to a bunch of old British (and Italian; there's some Bava in there too) horror movies he liked.

And the plot fits right in with ALL '60s horror, not just Hammer - it's about someone knocking off their "competition" for an inheritance, complete with a recently changed will and lengthy bursts of exposition concerning characters who are already dead. It's almost like a slasher movie (in fact it was originally developed as one by Kevin Yagher and intended to be lower budgeted until Burton was brought on board), with the opening scene kill, the red herrings, and a reveal of who the killer really is. Alas, the identity of the mastermind is not difficult to figure out if you read the credits, as they are given prominent billing but have very little screentime (and even less to do in it) until the last half hour, so if you for some reason haven't seen it yet I encourage you not to read the credits if and when you finally get around to it, for it might help make the culprit a bit harder to peg. Otherwise, it's a fairly satisfying answer, despite the aforementioned exposition dumps, though I suspect fans of the original Washington Irving story were mortified at how little the movie had to do with it - Burton and his writers basically kept the names of the three main characters (and, albeit in a different context, their minor love triangle) and the idea of a headless horseman but changed everything else.

Especially when we learn that the Horseman is kind of a henchman for someone else, which is akin to Halloween 6's "Michael is just working for a cult" explanation. I mean, I guess it's better than the alternative of a personal revenge story that means little to us when the "character" is just a headless guy on a horse who shows up every now and then and kills off a Harry Potter cast member, but I can still see how it might feel like a lame way to use such a legend. To me, it's weirder that Christopher Walken plays the horseman - casting him in a role where he (obviously) doesn't speak is a bit like hiring Kobe Bryant for a basketball team and keeping him on the bench the whole time. It also feels sort of distracting for the two brief moments he appears with his head, especially the first which is a flashback and thus sort of suggests we'll see him more. I don't know if he played the role with a blue or green mask on his head, though I doubt it (according to the trivia he doesn't even know how to ride a horse, and there's a shot of him near the end, head back on, that's clearly a stunt guy), so as far as cameos go it's more of a distraction than a little bonus. Christopher Lee's bit is much more in line with traditional cameo "rules", as he's the judge who sends Depp off to Sleepy Hollow to investigate the murders - it makes sense that we never see him again.

It makes less sense about how minimal Casper Van Dien's role is in the proceedings, however. As Brom Van Brunt, the 3rd point of the love triangle with Depp and Christina Ricci, he's usually a bigger character in the story, but we only see him I think three times, the third being his death. It's funny, I remembered the big fight between him and Depp vs. the Horseman as being far more elaborate than it actually is - in reality it's rather brief and not particularly exciting, though I guess in 1999 when the actor was poised to be a bigger star it was probably a shock that he got killed halfway through. Still, before that point his role is primarily just glaring at Depp; he barely even has a real chunk of dialogue, rendering his part of the story rather insignificant in the long run. Anyway, this would pretty much be his last major theatrical feature - after this he did a bunch of TV movies and some DTV stuff (including one for a pre-video game era Uwe Boll!), and hasn't been in a wide release since, making this a rather depressing end to his big-screen career considering how inconsequential he is to the movie.

Anyway, you can ignore the plot and characters and just soak in the film's gorgeous production design and cinematography. It won an Oscar for its art direction, and DP Emmanuel Lubezki scored his second nomination for it (he didn't win, but as he won the last THREE Oscars for his work on Gravity and the two Iñárritu things*, I'm guessing it's not a big deal). It's a shame that it'd be his only film with Burton; I don't know if they didn't get along or what, but even Burton's weakest films have great production design, so it would have been wonderful if Lubezki had been the one responsible for how nice they looked on screen (of course, he's also Terrence Malick's go-to cinematographer, so it's possible Burton wants him and simply can't get him while he's off on those endless shoots). I popped in the DVD to watch a chunk of the end that I dozed through (I'll never ever see this thing start to finish without dozing off, it seems, but it was only during the big climax which I know I had seen) and almost felt guilty watching that way - the 35mm print was gorgeous of course, but since most folks won't get a chance to see it that way again, if there's one movie of Burton's you need on Blu-ray (if not 4K if such a release is planned), it's this one. The FX mostly hold up too; some of the digital trickery for the kill scenes is a bit of a sore spot, but Burton wasn't afraid to toss around the real stuff, and the occasional imperfect background plates kind of fit in with the Hammer movies anyway.

It's a no-brainer that if you're looking for anything Burton-related for Halloween time, it's probably gonna be Nightmare Before Christmas (which he did not direct, I remind you), but this is really his most holiday-appropriate entry. It's not specifically about Halloween (though there is a Jack o'lantern or two), but the gloomy setting and upstate New York locale (close enough to New England) makes it very much in line with the sort of movies I tend to pull off the shelf come October; it's almost a bummer that it's rather violent and bloody as it'll be a long time before I figure it's OK to show my son (is there a Sleepy Hollow-fied episode of the Clubhouse?). While watching I felt like I was doing a disservice to it in a way, watching with soda and with 90 degree temps outside - this is a movie to watch with a warm cup of apple cider while snuggled under a blanket. If you somehow still haven't seen it, wait until October to do so!

What say you?

*Not a fan, though if anything deserved to be showered with Oscar gold for either of those movies, it's his work.

Tweet

PLEASE, GO ON...

The Purge: Election Year (2016)

JUNE 30, 2016

GENRE: SURVIVAL, THRILLER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

It's amusing that our most interesting (not BEST, before you get angry) ongoing genre franchise is from Platinum "Michael Bay" Dunes and the producers of all those generic supernatural movies you're getting tired of, but what's even more notable is that so far, each Purge film has improved on the one before it, a rarity for ANY franchise but particularly unusual within the horror genre. It's not as big as the leap from the first one to Anarchy, but by not-too-subtly zeroing in on our current Presidential election, The Purge: Election Year gets a few digs in at our current landscape, and never loses sight of this issue. What could have just been window-dressing for another Judgment Night-esque all night chase through the city (as the "Purge" concept itself was to the first film's otherwise routine home invasion flick) remains its primary focus all the way until the end, giving it a leg up on its superficially similar predecessor.

Even if the setting (urban streets, though DC this time instead of LA) was vastly different, it'd be hard to forget about the previous movie since it also retains that one's hero, Leo Barnes (Frank Grillo). Having survived his attack thanks to the guy he was out to kill, he's changed his tune about Purge so much that he's become the head of security for controversial - but very popular - Presidential candidate Senator Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell), who is running on a promise to end Purge if elected. As shown in the trailer, her family was murdered on Purge night when she was a teenager, so there's little chance of her backing down - something that scares the "New Founding Fathers" (read: typical Conservative old white guys, though they throw in a Latino and a lady or two to mix it up) enough to plot to have her killed on Purge night this year. They're very protective of their racist holiday, you see.

It would have been easy for writer/director James DeMonaco (continuing his role from the first two films, another rarity for horror) to use that as the setup and then leave the politics in the background while running through the usual action/horror moments as Mitchell and Grillo try to survive the night (much like Grillo's vengeful quest was often forgotten in the last one as he protected others), but it's never long before there's another discussion of the repercussions this night has on people, and why it should stop. Charlie is a "man of the people" type who never fails to stop to talk to someone about their own life, how they've been affected by Purge, etc., and the action culminates at the NFF's "Purge Mass", where the assholes all meet in a church (led by a priest who seems like he teleported from an Argento or Fulci movie) and ready their sacrifice of Charlie. In an ironic twist, she's actually trying to save their lives from a giant massacre that Dante Bishop is planning to help ensure she wins the candidacy (she wants to stop them so her victory is a clean one, without making the NFF folk into martyrs), a big improvement over my own cynical idea of how the movie would progress (which would have her ultimately forced to engage in Purging to save herself).

The politics even extend to the random acts of violence and "Purge vignettes" (the random little scenes we see that are unrelated to anything else but flavor up the reality of the situation) - rather than the usual scary masks the Purgers wear, this time a lot of them are adorned in costumes that are just scary versions of Uncle Sam, the Statue of Liberty, etc. The news shows a group of tourists who have come to America to join in the Purge for the first time (they show up again later, won't spoil how), and our pursuers are equipped with drones that help track the good guys' every move. To his credit, DeMonaco gets a little more subtle for other things (the bad guys all use assault rifles whereas the heroes never brandish anything heavier than a shotgun, for example), but whereas you could watch the first two for what they were at face value, there's no mistaking the political commentary going on here.

And because of that, I almost wish the movie was angrier about it. Modern horror films rarely have anything to say the way many did in the 60s and 70s, so if Purge movies are the sole source (at least on a mainstream scale) for social minded genre fare, it would have been great if they had just said "fuck it" and actually named names instead of letting the audience draw their own comparisons. The "Minister" (the other main Presidential candidate) won't remind anyone of Trump, really - in fact we don't know too much about him at all beyond the fact that the NFF is really calling the shots and letting him be their mouthpiece (which isn't like Trump, either - key members of the GOP seem to hate him as much as the Democrats). His aforementioned dig at the gun control debate will probably go over the heads of many, and without getting into spoilers, the movie has a more optimistic tone than I was expecting - I kind of wanted the filmmaker to really let it all out, the way Serbian Film's filmmakers did about their own government via their warped movie. Not that optimism is a bad thing (it's actually kind of nice!) but again - with this bound to be the only horror film of the year with something to say, I wouldn't have minded if some of its viewers left the theater a little more riled up about what was going on instead of an affirmation that everything would be OK.

DeMonaco doesn't skimp on the crowd-pleasing moments, however. Along with the optimism is a decidedly less grim story this time around; there are a number of good guys in the film and many of them are left alive at the end, and no one really gets tortured or anything this time around, either (Mitchell gets tied up and a minor wound but is otherwise left unharmed). But when it comes to the villains, he goes all out - one Purger is hit by a car AND shot with a shotgun at close range, and he even lets a bunch of Crips (!) play hero at one point, having them lay waste to some of the NFF's hit squad (who have swastikas on their uniforms to lay it on even thicker). Williamson also has a number of great lines (he's kind of a variant on Sam Jackson's character from Die Hard 3), and with all due respect to Black Widow and Wonder Woman, the year's number one female superhero is Betty Gabriel as Laney, a reformed troublemaker who now spends Purge night driving around in an armored ambulance, assisting the wounded and also firing back on Purgers if necessary.

And that's the other thing I liked about this one - it opens up the reality of Purge night a bit more. In addition to her triage van (one of many in a network overseen by Bishop), we also see a truck driving around collecting the corpses, presumably to make everyone's commute the next morning slightly less unpleasant. The foreigners give us a small taste of how the event is seen in other countries, and part of Joe's subplot involves a massive rate increase on his Purge insurance - something I'm not sure if they have ever addressed in the past (I guess there ARE people who, like I would, just rob stores on the free crime day instead of murdering people. I just want some free games and maybe a new receiver, dammit). But that stuff is brief; murder is still the only crime anyone seems to commit when they can do anything they want, though there are some variations we haven't seen, like a lady who kills her husband and instantly regrets it. There are still a million unanswered questions about how it works, but I like that with each film we get to learn a little more about the nitty gritty of it all, which I found (perhaps too) fascinating and would almost rather watch than see another scene of Frank Grillo ducking his way through a street before killing some random Purger.

One of those unanswered questions is even more frustrating here than it was in the other two, however: the rule that says high ranking government officials are not viable Purge targets. This year, in order to curry favor with the populace (whose interest in the Purge is waning, albeit slightly), they've decided that they are fair game as well - but that means nothing since they all hide out in heavily armed fortresses anyway. It's not like our Senators and cabinet members are out wandering around on Purge night with "Sorry, You Can't Shoot Me" signs, so I never understood why DeMonaco included this exception in the first place. Besides, even if Purgers DID somehow get access to Senator So-and-so - are they simply not going to shoot because it's against the rules? How would the law even know to come after you once Purge was over, anyway? (I also never got the "no demolition weapons" thing, because again - if someone decides to blow up a building when the police/fire aren't out on the streets anyway, how would they be caught? Is it an honor system, the Purge?)

Luckily, the film is set to nearly triple its budget with its opening weekend, so we can expect another Purge film down the road that will hopefully continue the trend of improving while also filling in the blanks a bit on how it all actually works. I'm sure DeMonaco has it all laid out in a notebook somewhere - it might be interesting to see him make photocopies of it and supply them to other filmmakers who might want to use the concept for their own idea. As I said in the other reviews, there is so much potential here, and he's only one guy - even if he made one every year, we might never get a full picture of how Purge works unless he's got some help. If Marvel can do 2-3 movies a year that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, I'm sure Blumhouse and Platinum Dunes can pony up 10-15m more than once a year to fully develop this universe (or they could do a TV show or comic, I suppose). And at that low cost, they can also afford to be a little more biting, too - before someone else beats them to the punch.

What say you?

Tweet

PLEASE, GO ON...

The Shallows (2016)

JUNE 24, 2016

GENRE: PREDATOR, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Considering how much I love Orphan (and really like House of Wax), I was starting to get nervous that Jaume Collet-Serra might have left the horror forever in favor of Liam Neeson(s); a would-be master of horror who didn't seem interested in cementing his status or even adding to the defense for it. Orphan was seven years ago, and since then he's made three action films (and a fourth is on the way) with bigger budgets and (usually) higher box office returns - why would he come back? Well, maybe he just needed a killer idea, which he got with The Shallows, in which a woman is stuck on a rock with a hungry shark endlessly circling her, waiting to make its move. That's pretty much it - it's a home invasion movie where the home is a small (and not stable) bit of the ocean, and instead of a guy in a mask we get a hungry Great White.

Luckily, Collet-Serra knows precisely how to pace the movie, never letting it get boring but also not jumping the gun and straining credibility too early either. The movie is barely over 80 minutes with credits, and he makes them all count, giving us just enough character development time before heroine Blake Lively grabs her surfboard and heads into the water. A quick lunch break offers a little more backstory (and allows for a Facetime cameo from Brett Cullen, playing her dad - a Lost vet safely at home is a cute casting choice, if it was intentional), but then she goes back in and gets in trouble right around the 20 minute mark, giving us nearly an hour of woman vs. shark action. She utilizes three "locations" to stay safe, each with their own major setbacks - the first is a dead whale that the shark doesn't plan on leaving intact for long, the next is a rock that will be submerged once the tide comes in, and the third is a buoy that the shark can easily tip over if he gives it a big enough headbutt.

I don't think I'm spoiling anything to lay all of that out - the trailer does that anyway. At first I was annoyed that the trailer shows her making it to the buoy after setting it up as a sort of main goal (akin to showing Tom Hanks leaving the island on the Cast Away promos), but it's clear that Collet-Serra (I'm going with just Serra from now on, that OK?) knows staying too long in any one spot will kill the movie's pace and also have us start picking apart the logic, so he keeps her moving and thus even if you haven't seen the trailer you'd know she got to here or there. She's the only main human character - we know that if she's going to die at all that it won't be until the runtime has nearly expired, so the trick is to keep giving her new injuries and obstacles to deal with (and that said injuries will keep her from Open Water-like water treading, as she'd be dead instantly with the blood loss). Like, sure, she gets to the rock before being eaten, but NOT before she scrapes her foot up on the coral - the fun doesn't come with seeing whether or not she'll survive, but how she'll managed to get out of her latest predicament. I should note that the trailer does wreck some of the fun by showing a moment that probably should have happened earlier in the movie than it does, because it involves a character who leaves fairly early on and thus we know he'll come back later - it would have worked a bit better for her to be isolated for good earlier on, I think.

But as a whole it still works better than it has any right to, though we can't chalk the success up just to Serra and/or Lively (who I never liked much, but acquits herself nicely here) - they are assisted greatly by Steven Seagull, Lively's closest thing to a major co-star. He's one of the many gulls flying around and pecking at the whale carcass, and gets a broken wing during one hectic scene, grounding him on the rock with her for the bulk of her time there. I can't recall ever seeing a seagull "act" before, but if I have that one wasn't nearly as good as Steven (yes, that's how he's credited), who gets closeups and everything. With Lively's survival not in question anytime soon, he provides the bulk of the movie with its "Will they make it out?" suspense, and damned if I didn't tense up every time it seemed he might be served up as bait or just to give the movie a horror jolt whenever it had been a while since the last one. I wouldn't dare reveal his fate here, but suffice to say his time onscreen, and "chemistry" with Lively, more than made up for the movie's paper-thin narrative and eventually ridiculous spectacle.

On that note, I should stress that for the most part this is more like Jaws than any of its sequels, but near the end - particularly when she's in the buoy, which functions not unlike Hooper's shark cage - I started wondering if the thing had a personal vendetta against her, a la Jaws 4. I know we need a big finale, but when it starts chewing through metal to get at her after it had eaten three people in less than 24 hours (plus whatever it got out of that poor whale), it starts coming off more like Jason Voorhees than a regular ol' shark. For his part, Serra dives headfirst into the silliness, with a money shot I am so happy the trailer didn't spoil (as I was with an earlier one that gave the movie its best jolt), but if you were enjoying the more grounded aspect of the film, you might want to duck out as soon as she leaves the rock and make up your own ending.

(Speaking of ducking out, a guy went to the bathroom and missed the climax, even though it was obviously time for one or both of them to meet their maker - you couldn't hold it for another minute, guy?)

As he did in Non-Stop, Serra spices up his single location imagery with graphic overlays, like a 32 second countdown that times out how long she can jump into the water to retrieve something before the shark can swim back to her, Facetime calls, and pictures of her mother, whose memory she is honoring by traveling to this remote beach (as she went to it when she was pregnant with her). But unlike that film, which was in a sterile, boring environment, he really didn't need the assist - the film is GORGEOUS, and no not because it stars a beautiful woman. He gives us these great (way) overhead shots of the crystal clear water and its various rock/plant formations under the surface, big widescreen vistas showing how far she is from this or that safe spot, etc. - I can't recall the last horror/thriller that looked this lovely. Even the horror stuff has its own sort of beauty, like when she is first attacked and the water turns crimson red around her - Argento will be proud, if he sees it. Such shots more than make up for the film's sometimes lacking CGI - there's a pretty terrible shot of a victim who has been cut in half where the bloodstain on the bottom of his torso seems to be floating around the screen, and the facial replacement for Lively on her surfing shots will have you yearning for the relative perfection of the CGI Myers in H20. With such a minimal cast and lack of location changes, roughly half of the film's credits are for VFX folk, so I'm not sure who is to blame for the bad shots, though at least the ones of the shark all look good to great. Still, its such a technical and aesthetic marvel 98% of the time, it makes those blunders really stand out as laughable.

Ultimately, the singular nature of the film means it won't be one I revisit often, if ever, but that's fine - it's just great to have another Jaume Collet-Serra horror movie again. I think it's a must-see on the big screen to appreciate the scenery and the major shark scenes, however, and certainly a better use of your summer moviegoing dollars than Independence Day 2, which feels like everyone involved is just doing it out of obligation (even Goldblum seems bored more often than not, and Emmerich couldn't even be bothered to destroy anything you didn't already see get blown up/knocked over in the trailer). Those who wanted more alien action in the first one will be satisfied, I think (we see them a LOT this time around) but otherwise if you want big silly fun at the movies this weekend, this is the movie that will provide it - along with some genuinely good editing and craft. And it's been a long time since there was a "serious" (by comparison) shark movie after all the Syfy/Asylum stuff, so it's worth seeing just for the sheer fact that it's daring enough to lend itself to more Jaws comparisons than Sharknado ones. And it pays off - I think Spielberg would have fun watching it without feeling like he should sue someone.

What say you?

Tweet

PLEASE, GO ON...

Clown (2014)

JUNE 19, 2016

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

I knew Clown had been on the shelf for a while, but I hadn't realized how long until the credits were reaching their end, and I noticed a 2013 copyright date (plus the MPAA number was 48,000-something - they're in the 50,000's now). Since then director Jon Watts has made another feature (Cop Car) and landed the plum gig of directing the Spider-Man reboot we are actually excited about this time thanks to the new Marvel deal (and star Tom Holland winning us over in Civil War), and Dimension has probably put another half dozen movies in their vaults for TBA release. Indeed, when the Dimension logo flashed at the beginning I tried to remember the last time I had seen it theatrically, realizing it was probably also 2013 (Dark Skies!). Three years is a long goddamn time, and while I'm sure they're relieved its finally out there in its native US, they can't be thrilled about the weird release it got.

I mean, the number of screens is nothing unusual - it's about the same that Aftershock got a few years back, which was another Dimension/Radius movie that Eli Roth produced. But that one, if memory serves, ran at normal screening times - Clown was bizarrely restricted to a maximum of two shows per day at every one of its Los Angeles screens (about a dozen of them), and all at the same times, more or less 5pm and 10pm (or later). No early matinees for folks like me who prefer to get their movies out of the way around noon (i.e. when the kid is napping), no 7:30-8pm slots that would be the most crowded. Nope, just the weird "too early, I'm not out of work yet" and "It's too late" slots most don't go to, as if the theaters wanted to assure the movie had poor attendance. I don't get it, and if anything I was kind of stunned to see eight other people in the theater for this 9:55 showing - I figured I had a shot of having the place to myself, since it was also available on iTunes and, as always, Dimension didn't do any real advertising.

So does the movie deserve this tossed-off fate? Most certainly not. I wouldn't dub it a classic or anything, but I quite liked how it played its goofy premise - about a man who can't take a clown costume off - totally straight, giving the movie more of a body horror flavor than the Dr. Giggles-esque slasher I was sort of expecting (as usual, I barely knew anything about the movie going in, so I'm sure that information isn't as surprising to most of you). And I loved how it wasted no time on getting going - our tragic hero puts the suit on pretty much in his first scene (after his wife - Laura Allen of Awake non-fame because NBC canceled it too soon because they're jerkheads - calls him to tell him that the clown they've hired for their son's birthday party has canceled on them), and realizes something is wrong not too long after that. Watts and his writers tease out his plight for a bit - he keeps the costume on for the whole party because the kid knows it's him anyway (and thus he doesn't have to take it off to show up as dad), passes out on the couch after the party, then wakes up late and has to rush out the door to get the kid to school... it's like 16-20 hours before he even gets a CHANCE to try to take the damn thing off.

This leads to the movie's first of many gore gags, in which he tries to remove the shirt by slicing at the fabric with a box cutter, only to slash his wrist in the process (Watts then keeps us cringing when he grabs an even stronger weapon to try to cut the neck area of the clown suit). As he learns shortly thereafter, the suit isn't just a regular old thing - it's the actual skin of a demon (and original, pre-kid friendly clown - think Krampus/Rare Exports re: Santa) and it has now fused to his own, with only way to get it off - death, or the sacrifice of five children. Naturally, this being an R-rated movie produced by Eli Roth, the suspense doesn't stem from whether or not he will kill a kid but whether he will that all important fifth kid, giving the movie a rare taboo thrust that a. you don't see anymore and b. usually would upset me too much now that I have a child of my own. Luckily, the supernatural element, along with the fact that our very young murder victims are all but anonymous (meaning we don't meet them much earlier than their deaths, most of which are wholly off-screen), kept me from getting all over-sensitive - I cringed a bit at one of them but was otherwise on board for the deranged ride.

Speaking of deranged, the movie's obligatory "I know what's going on and how to stop it" character is played by Peter Stormare, automatically making the movie worth my and your time (between this, Dark Summer, and Bad Milo, I quite like this period of his career, showing up and having a ball in genre films) in his few scenes as the brother of the man who owned the suit (he died, which is why our real estate hero had access to his belongings). At first you think he's the grand villain, but he's actually quite noble and just driven mad by the responsibility of trying to keep the suit from hurting anyone else. It couldn't be destroyed, they couldn't risk just throwing it out or burying it somewhere, so they kept it under lock and key - unearthed only because a man was frantically trying to keep his son happy. Since today was Father's Day, I couldn't help but feel more than the usual amount of kinship with the man, as I'd probably do the same thing even if I KNEW the consequences if it meant ensuring my son had a good birthday (I'd then kill five random kids at my earliest convenience to get back to him!).

Alas, that's one area that the movie ultimately falls a bit short of greatness, because it's a tragic, Fly-esque story of a man who we didn't get to know much before he got infected and don't really spend a lot of time with afterwards. Big chunks of the movie focus on Laura Allen's character, and then the kill scenes switch to a full blown slasher movie mode where he's kind of in the shadows and the camera stays with our would-be/will-be victim. He's basically a zombie by like the 40 minute mark, so while his final form is quite monstrous, it lacks that tragic element that The Fly and some of these others had, as we didn't get to really experience his gradual disintegration as well as we should, or even get into his head all that much - he's mute during many of these scenes. The strange premise is even kind of played for laughs at first (he has to go to work with his clown suit on; the doctor thinks he's just some weirdo, etc.) so that also keeps us at arm's length - when Allen finds herself in a position that she might have to kill him at the end, I didn't feel the devastation that I felt for Geena Davis' character in Cronenberg's masterpiece.

Ordinarily this is where I'd say "I wish there was more of" this or that, but if anything the movie's other issue is that it needed some tightening. Again, whenever he's about to kill a kid, the movie becomes a slasher (particularly in the Chuck E. Cheese segment late in the film), leaving him in the dark and us wondering where he might pop out as our random kid makes his way through the tunnels of the arcade's giant maze thing - the scenes are fine bits of stalk n' slash on their own, but they don't quite fit in this movie of a man being turned into a monster, and that time coulda/shoulda been spent on his POV, fighting (or not) the urges that he could not control (someone suggested the movie might even be an allegory for pedophiles, which is fascinating and makes me want to watch it again under that impression), instead of just instantly turning him into Jason Voorhees. Shaving a few of the movie's supporting characters might have helped, too - Allen has a friend and her father who both kind of serve the same purpose, so weeding one of them out might have helped as well.

But, you know, it's a full length movie based on a joke trailer. Hobo With A Shotgun is fun but ultimately a bit exhausting, and Machete is damn near unwatchable (I never bothered with the sequel) - this isn't exactly a sub-genre overflowing with masterpieces, and your expectations should be set accordingly. Those with Coulrophobia will find plenty to disturb them (the movie dives into trying to unsettle you with an opening sequence populated by closeups of various clown memorabilia) and the body horror element, while not always successful, is certainly an inspired way to go about a killer clown tale. I wish it was a little better, but not as much as I wish it hadn't been effectively buried - it's a pretty good movie that deserves the audience that would enjoy it if they knew it was (finally!) out there.

What say you?

Tweet

PLEASE, GO ON...

Jeepers Creepers 2 (2003)

JUNE 14, 2016

GENRE: MONSTER
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Usually, when I review a Victor Salva movie, I make a note that I know what he did and that I'm just here to review the movie he made, but he makes that separation pretty difficult with Jeepers Creepers 2, which might take Freddy's Revenge's record for most homoerotic horror sequel in history. Granted, the characters in the film are older than the boy he assaulted (and, as I feel in fairness I must remind people, plead guilty when charged and served time), but they're still kids, and he finds more than one way to get them shirtless (lingering on their bare chests whenever possible). Plus there's a sequence where the Creeper discovers he can easily get to all that young flesh via the backdoor exit of their presumed safety, which is all kinds of icky.

Of course, it's easier to make these connections and shake your head when the movie isn't up to snuff, and that's the issue here. I've seen worse (including from Salva himself), but it's nowhere near as effective as the original film (which itself had some problems), and Salva makes the fatal mistake of over-populating his film, with so many jocks on the bus (plus some cheerleaders, a couple coaches, and the driver) that he doesn't even have time to identify them all. Sure, it gives the film a different flavor than the original, which focused on just two heroes for the most part, and it also helps make it harder to guess who our survivors will be, but it's equally hard to care much, either. By the end, I feel I still barely know anything about the people who survived, let alone the ones that died along the way - an issue that could have been prevented with a few lines of dialogue explaining why there were only, say, ten people tops on the bus (just say they had two buses because of all of the equipment or something - done). It'd still be "bigger" than the original, but not so overstuffed that it starts to resemble a lesser slasher flick more than a cool monster movie.

Because independent of the bus folk, and off-screen for far too long, is a much more interesting character played by Ray Wise, and I don't need to tell you or anyone else that keeping Ray Wise in your movie as MUCH as possible is the correct way to go. Alas, after the opening sequence (which is also one of the best parts of the movie - love the Creeper posing as a scarecrow), Wise pretty much checks out for about an hour or so, only rejoining the action for the 3rd act when the kids, calling for help from the bus, reach him via CB radio. Once he shows up with his homemade harpoon gun things pick up a bit, but by then it's too late for this to be anything but a relatively lackluster followup. Too many interchangeable kids with too much generic drama (including some half-assed attempts at racial tension and even a go-nowhere subplot about one of the players being in the closet) is bad enough, but when we're focused on them instead of Ray Wise (who has a personal vendetta against the Creeper) it's just twisting the knife. To be fair, the kids are involved in some of the best moments - I love the injured Creeper kind of leap frogging his way to a victim (also injured), and the bit where he tries to remove a javelin from his head by sliding it back and forth, finally giving up and just pulling it sideways out of his own head - but OVERALL the movie is more effective when Wise is doing his Ahab/Loomis thing, and much less so when it's just a bunch of kids yelling at each other.

But again, fewer kids might have solved the problem. The concept itself is actually a pretty good one, as it's essentially a "hole up and keep the bad guy out" story in your Precinct 13 or NOTLD vein, albeit on a broken down bus in the middle of nowhere. Salva milks his location dry - you'll know every inch of this bus before the end of the film - but I just never found myself particularly engaged by their dilemma, so whether the Creeper got them one by one or in one fell swoop made little difference to me. Apparently there was a scene of them playing their game before getting on the bus, and I can't help but wonder if that's a big part of the reason I felt so disconnected - it likely would have given them some much needed context that would have improved things greatly. Instead, I actually couldn't tell if they were on their way to a game or coming home from one for a bit after what is now their introductory scene, which means we're starting off on the wrong foot.

Salva also hamstrings himself with a truly terrible "psychic dream" subplot, where one of the cheerleaders inexplicably dreams of Justin Long's character from the first film, who also helpfully explains the "Every 23 years for 23 days..." concept to her so that she can pass this information on to the others. I'm not sure why it's necessary for them to know all of that; a number of the Friday the 13th movies let most of their characters be ignorant of Jason (in Part 3 they never say his name at all), and this "rule" is so goofy that it's probably best not to bring it up any more than absolutely necessary. Wise could have told them about it when he showed up (as a grieving father hunting it down, it'd make sense for him to have picked up this information somewhere) if it was vital for the kids to know what they were dealing with, sparing us the out of nowhere supernatural element. Jesus, why didn't Salva have me rewrite this damn thing before he shot it?

He also could have used my assistance before sitting down for his new interview for the obligatory retrospective piece on the film, because he starts off by blaming 9/11 for the first film's quick death at the box office after a solid (then record-breaking for Labor Day) opening weekend. There's just one problem with that - 9/11 occurred the Tuesday after the film's SECOND weekend, so unless you want to get heavily into conspiracy theories we can be pretty sure that the 2nd weekend drop had nothing to do with what was going to happen a couple days later (and, to further debunk his "theory" - it dropped LESS on the weekend after 9/11 than it did the weekend before it). I mean, Christ, guy - you're already on thin ice with pretty much everyone who watches anything you do, and now you're gonna toss 9/11 into the mix for no reason?

That unfortunate part aside, it's a pretty good recollection, though I'm not sure if it really required it since the existing special edition was already packed and everything has been carried over. The featurettes, the two commentaries, etc - all here, most of them on a second disc (rare for Scream Factory) to save room for the transfer on the main disc. I never saw it on DVD so I can't speak to its improved picture, though I CAN say it looked fine to my eyes and should make fans happy, though as always some shoddy CGI work (the Creeper flying, mainly) is prone to look worse than you remember now that it's been cleaned up for high def. The other new features are an interview with Wise (at 20 minutes, it's possibly longer than his actual amount of screentime) and the three adults on the bus, including the lady bus driver whose role was originally meant for Meat Loaf (dammit!). As for the commentaries, feel free to skip the one with Jonathan Breck and the people who worked on his makeup/design unless he's actually on-screen, and also keep in mind there's a featurette focusing on the character where they highlight all the important info anyway (though Breck tells a pretty horrifying/funny story about mosquitoes biting the inside of his eyelids on the first movie). Salva's is of course more interesting, and he's joined by a large chunk of the cast, but he drops some of that same unearned pretension from time to time that can't possibly help your probably already low opinion of the guy.

There is also a collection of deleted scenes, and if you think the movie laid on the homoeroticism a bit too thick, you might be stunned to learn how much thicker it was - nearly every deleted bit has eyebrow-raising material, including lengthier peeing scenes (one of which includes a guy rubbing one out in front of his friends?), more shirtless closeups, and the oddly written line "You use that mouth on your brother?" (spoken to a young boy, for the record). Again, I try to just ignore Salva's past when I watch his films, but he sure as hell doesn't make it easy, so I guess I can take solace knowing that it could have been even worse if someone didn't think better (the footage is presented sans commentary or introduction, so we have no idea why any of it was cut). But I know some folks feel differently, and they have every right to - and have probably already made up their mind about whether or not they will be supporting this release. However, I ALSO know those folks probably aren't reading this review, and only the film's fans are - to them I say it's probably worth the upgrade for the Wise interview alone, and also to have the film on a stand-alone Blu (it was previously only available on a double feature with the first film, which Scream has also re-released with new features, including a new commentary with the two leads). Just don't wade into any Facebook threads about it.

What say you?

Tweet

PLEASE, GO ON...