Eastern Promises

I’ve long been a fan of David Cronenberg’s work, from his older sci-fi/horror works (I’m eagerly awaiting the day Shivers gets re-released) to his recent crop of vicious, award-winning dramas. Compared to his last effort, A History of Violence, this is a bit more restrained, but even here we see a bunch of men seething with barely controlled anger for most of the film, just waiting for the right opportunity to explode.

The film stars Viggo Mortensen as a fairly high-ranking member of the Russian Mafia operating in London, and Naomi Watts, as the daughter of Russian immigrants who finds a teenage girl with a dark past who soon dies in childbirth. The dead girl leaves her with a diary that connects Mortensen’s boss to drugs, kidnapping, and rape, and soon Watts is barreling into a world that she would have been much wiser to stay well clear of, all for the sake (so she says) of the baby.

What’s interesting about the film is in how nobody really turns out to be who they initially claim to be. Every character is hiding his or her own secrets, some of which are never really uncovered. Mortensen keeps making sure it’s known that he’s “just a driver”, even though all the Mafia higher ups hold him in high regard. The head of the family keeps saying that as long as his minions are honest with him, they’ll be okay, even though he and they know full well that they have no recourse but to constantly plot his doom. Even Watts, who keeps going on about how she just wants the baby cared for, seems to actively be daring them to come at her for reasons that are never explained. The film is slow paced, and yet crackles with hidden tensions at every moment, and these tensions only increase as more and more secrets are exposed. I said earlier that the violence was pretty restrained, and for a Cronenberg film it is, but even here it opens with a throat being slit and has a climax with Mortensen struggling with two assassins in a sauna (note for the ladies: you do indeed get to see his dingaling during the fight, and yes, it was a tad awkward when my mom got home from church halfway through that scene). It’s one of the best films Cronenberg has made so far, and I say this as someone who was already a big fan. You’d be well advised to check it out.

Rating: *** ½

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The Man With the Screaming Brain

What an amazing misfire of a film this is. I’m a pretty big fan of Bruce Campbell, from his Evil Dead days to his successively more show-stealing cameos in the Spider-Man films, but with this, his first time directing (not counting random TV episodes) and writing solo, he makes a total mess. Not only does it not strike the right tone, it completely forgets that it needs to strike a tone at all.

Theoretically a parody of 50s science fiction films, it follows an American business mogul (played by Campbell) who, along with his ex-KGB chauffeur, are murdered in Bulgaria. A local mad scientist, eager to test his theories on reanimation, takes half of each of their brains and restores them in Campbell’s body. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this, but Campbell spends so much time trying to capture the feel of those old movies that he completely forgets that he’s also supposed to be parodying them. Instead, we’re left with a story that’s not even as funny as those old movies were, nor half as interesting.

Comedy is one of the hardest things to direct properly, and this film shows that better than just about any other example I could name. Bruce Campbell is an extremely funny guy. I’ve seen him in tons of movies and TV shows, and he has never failed to make me laugh before. Perhaps it’s just the stress of pulling triple duty on writing, acting, and directing that threw him off, maybe it’s how (according to IMDB) it took him 19 years of trying to get this film made, and the no doubt endless rewrites of the material during that time just sucked all the passion and energy out of the film. It was made on the cheap despite the presences of Campbell, Ted Raimi, and Stacy Keach, and tech-wise it looks just a half step above some straight to DVD horror movie, so perhaps the struggles with overcoming the budget just had a draining effect on everyone. Whatever the actual reason, it wound up being an hour and a half of complete forgettability. I don’t care if Microsoft Word denies that being an actual word, it fits this movie better than any real ones.

Rating: ½ *

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Enchanted

As the first ever film I was requested to review for this blog, I have to say that this is quite a charming little film. There is not a single surprise to be found within, and it never manages to reach the high points its betters (like Stardust, for instance) do, but taken for what it is, it doesn’t disappoint.

Even without the Disney logo at the start of the film, anyone could guess which company is at least stylistically responsible for the movie. Starting off in an animated world not unlike Cinderella’s or Sleeping Beauty’s, it focuses on a beautiful maiden named Giselle who, along with the help of her animal friends, is searching for a prince to call her own. Fortunately for her, there just so happens to be a nearby Prince Edward who is looking for a maiden to marry, but unfortunately for them both, his wicked stepmother wants him to remain unmarried forever so that she can retain the power of the throne. Banishing her to the farthest realm she can think of, she’s dumped out into the real world of Times Square, where she is helped by an attractive New Yorker named Robert, who awkwardly already has a girlfriend. Having told you this much, if you can’t figure out where the film ends up, and which character ends up with whom, you should really stop drinking. It’s clouding your mind too much.

There are quite a few clever moments, most notably on Giselle’s second day in New York, when she enlists the aid of the city’s animal population to help her do some housecleaning, and even the roaches pitch in to help. There’s also some good natural chemistry between Amy Adams and Patrick Dempsey, who play Giselle and Robert, and upon which most of the film rests. Unfortunately, Disney is not known for really taking risks with its films, and this attention to standardness keeps the film from achieving the heights that, say, Stardust (to use it as an example again) does. Still, it’s amusing enough, and you’re not likely to walk away from it feeling like you’ve wasted your time. I just wish it could have given me a bit more than it did.

Rating: ** ½

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The Brothers Solomon

On paper, this movie has a great deal going for it. It co-stars Will Arnett, who was easily the funniest part of Arrested Development, and was directed by Bob Odenkirk, who was one half of the brilliant Mr. Show. Even the trailer looked like it had a good deal of potential to it, so I was rather surprised when it came out and the reviews were pretty heavily negative. Now that it’s out on DVD, though, I can safely say that those critics were fools. Damned fools.

Granted, a comedy about a pair of socially useless brothers trying to knock a girl up so they can grace their father with a grandchild before he dies would tend to appeal to rather select tastes, but surely the film can’t appeal to such a limited audience that it would warrant such a savage beating as it took from critics. To be sure, it isn’t as smooth a comedy as, say, Hot Fuzz or Superbad, and its humor spends most of its time dancing right on the precipice of full-blown creepiness. Damn it, though, I like that in a movie. Good humor requires you to be a little uncomfortable when you’re laughing, otherwise you may as well just be spending your time boring yourself with knock-knock jokes.

The humor is pretty damned uncomfortable at times, I must say. Co-star Will Forte (the other brother Solomon, along with Arnett) kicks that off pretty much at the beginning of the film, meeting a blind date at her house and then trying to show her father respect in about the creepiest way he possibly could. And just in case you forget about it by the end of the film, they helpfully replay different versions of it during the outtakes in the end credits. Even better are their attempts at learning how to safely deal with a baby, once they’ve found a willing surrogate mother. If you clicked the link to the trailer above, then you already saw some of their efforts to catch a baby falling down a stairwell, but that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. The pair also find a use for popcorn and a dead bird, build an ultra safe baby crib that they then demonstrate the impenetrability of by flinging beer bottles at it, and in general just show that maybe it isn’t so bad for someone to go through childhood with a deadbeat dad.

Even as a fan of the film, I freely admit that the humor only works a good two thirds of the time. It is a quite uneven film, but it is one that works great when it’s working. This now brings the number of films Will Arnett has been in that I’ve enjoyed up to four this year (though curiously only the second he appeared onscreen for). If losing AD gives us this, then, well, I’d still rather have AD back, but I suppose this will do.

Rating: ***

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Hatchet

Between this and Wrong Turn 2, I’d say that the slasher film has made an impressive comeback, if not for the fact that they have each set the bar higher than roughly 99% of the slasher films back in the 80s did. The genre really has nowhere to go from here but straight down into Sleepaway Camp and Beware: Children at Play territory.

The film follows a motley crew of people who, largely bored with Mardi Gras, decide to take a nighttime boat tour of the swamps around New Orleans. Naturally their tour – done on the cheap by illegally touring a closed down swamp – happens to pass by the home of a mutated killer that looks suspiciously similar to the mutants from the Wrong Turn series, and soon tragedy befalls everyone. The film has pretty much everything you would want and expect from a film like this. There’s a lot of great violence, a surprising amount of clever humor, and some gratuitous nudity in the form of both the Mardi Gras celebrations at the beginning and in the form of two of the guests on the boat tour, who are making a softcore lesbian film to get back at their parents. One of these girls, God bless her, is Mercedes McNabb, which gets me one step closer to my all-encompassing goal of seeing all the women from Buffy the Vampire Slayer naked.

One thing that’s nice about the film is in how it both elevates and respects the genre. Most horror films only do one or the other, which is why most aren’t very good. It keeps its sights within the boundaries of a slasher movie and, unlike most of the Scream clones of the late 90s, doesn’t spend its time telling us that we’re retarded for wanting to enjoy a movie like this. What it does offer us is a tremendous amount of violence and fairly creative deaths (including one in which our killer – played by Kane Hodder of Friday the 13th fame – grabs a woman by each end of her mouth and just rips off the top half of her head), some great horror cameos (in addition to the aforementioned Hodder and McNabb, we also get Robert Englund hunting alligators in much the manner one would expect Ahab to be hunting whales, and my favorite in Candyman’s Tony Todd as an amazingly flamboyant former swamp guide with a not-overly-sinister past), and an opening credits sequence done to Marilyn Manson’s “This is the New Shit”, as sure a way as any to get on my good side.

It’s not quite up to the level as some of the other horror films released this year, such as Grindhouse, Black Sheep, and Wrong Turn 2, but in fairness to it this has been a pretty competitive year for pretty much every genre of film. Still, it’s a quality slasher movie, so unless you hate horror movies or have a paralyzing fear of seeing breasts that makes you want to cry and then teach all of them a lesson for making you show weakness like that. Yeah, this movie may not be for you then.

Rating: *** ½

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Stardust

Unjust (adj.) 1. Not just; lacking in justness or fairness. 2. Epic Movie and License to Wed doing better box office business than Stardust.

This is the exact kind of fantasy film that we never quite got back in the 80s, no matter how many times various directors tried. Based on the comic book by Neil Gaiman, it follows a young man (Charlie Cox, such an unfortunate unknown that even though he’s the male lead, his name only appears on the back of the DVD case) who vows to catch a falling star to prove his worth to the girl he loves. This is after a series of other less promising gift ideas, such as a vow to go to the North Pole and bring back a polar bear’s head, which does admittedly complement my recent viewing of the Polar Express quite well. His efforts to retrieve the star are complicated by some unforeseen factors, first by the realization that he’ll have to venture over a wall into a magical realm just outside of England, and also by the fact that what he had expected to be a chunk of space rock turns out to be a woman played by Claire Danes, who does get her name on the front cover.

There are further complications, of course, including a set of actually interesting villains, as the film wisely eschews the standard fantasy film procedure of a stock “ultimate evil” in favor of the, well, equally standard scheming witches (led by Michelle Pfeifer, who still manages to look surprisingly attractive at times for a woman that’s about fifty) and villainous princes. Well hell, if it works it works. The film, as could be expected from a story by a legend like Gaiman, so overflows with ideas that you get the feeling that an entire film could be made about the exploits of at least half the characters. There’s also a ton of cameos to be had, with the likes of Ricky Gervais, Rupert Everett, and Robert DeNiro, who delivers the most entertaining performance he’s probably given since Analyze This, as a sky pirate with a penchant for playing dress up.

I’ve been spending a good deal of time this year trying to get into older fantasy films that I’ve either never seen or haven’t seen since childhood, and I have to say, outside of Clash of the Titans I don’t think there was a single legitimately good fantasy story made during the 80s. This film right here is exactly the type of fantasy tale I’ve been looking for. It’s funny, clever, romantic, well acted, well paced, the general threats are on a low enough scale that it’s conceivable the villains could succeed (seriously, when you get a story about the looming destruction of the world, like in Neverending Story and the Dark Crystal, there’s really only one way the story can turn out), it’s everything you could want from a film like this. I can tell by the business it didn’t do that very close to none of the people reading this have seen the film yet, so go and correct that now. Don’t worry, I’ll still be here when you get back.

Rating: *** ½

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The Polar Express

This one came so close to being a fully good movie that at times I could almost see its sweet victory celebration. It doesn’t quite make it, ending up feeling a bit more like a test drive to see how far Robert Zemeckis could push his CG team (in a similar, though superior, manner to Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within), but damn if it doesn’t come close.

As plots go, it aims fairly low, presumably attempting to create the kind of enduring children’s classic that Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph are, light on story and heavy on charm. Basically it can be summed up as “every year on Christmas Eve the children that are starting to disbelieve in Santa are given a ride to the North Pole on the Polar Express so they can retain their fairly pagan belief system. Hijinks ensue.” It’s all pleasant and charming enough, really, feeling at times like a gentler version of Willy Wonka, it’s just that, much like those older Christmas children’s classics, watching it as an adult makes you feel like you’re not really the intended audience. It doesn’t have that extra bit of depth to it that the best children’s movies have, so parents watching with their children can love the movies too.

I mentioned earlier that it felt a bit as though Zemeckis were testing out his new CG technology with this film, and there’s some truth to that. Two years after this, he produced (though didn’t direct) Monster House, which used the same basic technology, and just this past month he released Beowulf, which I haven’t had the chance to see yet, but which he supposedly perfected the CG work for. This may be one of Zemeckis’s weakest films (which, in all honesty, is a testament to him), but it’s good that he was able to build off of it like he has. Just so long as he doesn’t feel the need to use CG for his upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol. I don’t know that it would be a fully natural fit there.

Rating: ** ½

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The Simpsons Movie

Well, a great many years in coming, we finally have the Simpsons movie, freshly out on DVD. I missed this back in the theater, as I do most movies because I’m a reclusive shut-in, but having finally seen it in the comfort of my own cavern, I have to say it’s not bad. That’s not to say that it’s as good as it could have, or frankly should have, been though.

The film’s plot, as is the case with about half the episodes of the series, revolves around Homer doing something stupid and reckless, and the fallout that comes from it. In this particular instance, he causes an ecological catastrophe in Springfield Lake, causing the EPA and President Schwarzenegger to seal the town off from the rest of the country. It thankfully doesn’t devolve into preachiness like it easily could have, instead wisely choosing to focus in on showing a No Man’s Land Springfield falling to pieces, and a Simpsons family on the run from the government.

The problem here isn’t with the plot, really, it’s with the overall quality. Had this film been made in 1997, when they first began discussing making it, it probably would have been a great movie. Back then the show was at the height of its powers, and every other episode was an unqualified classic. However, over the years, it just got watered down to the point where a once-great show has become a pretty good show with occasional flashes of greatness. That’s basically what the movie provides. It’s a pleasant enough way to spend an hour and a half, and there’s several moments of brilliance, enough that at points you almost start to think that the film itself is going to fully turn brilliant, but no. It’s back to Decentville before much longer. It’s almost frustrating, really.

Still, it does function as a perfectly good film upgrade of the show, and you aren’t likely to be disappointed when watching it. It just won’t floor you like you wish it would, like the show itself used to. It is definitely worth watching at least once, though, unlike a lot of the more recent episodes.

Really though, a Titanic reference in 2007? Honestly.

Rating: ***

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The Neverending Story

I really wish I had it in me to be more nostalgic. As it is, I’m generally a little afraid to rewatch anything I enjoyed as a child for fear of the sad revelation that I had crap taste back in the day. This one doesn’t quite count, as I’d only seen it once before in class back in elementary school (yay for public schooling!), but I do vaguely remember having liked it, even if I couldn’t remember anything more than the goofy dog-like dragon and the 80s synth pop theme song. With such a prestigious pedigree there, of course, it was only natural that I had to check this one out again.

To be sure, it starts off fairly promising. We get an opening theme song that is just delightfully awful in that way that we just haven’t seen since the 80s (a check on IMDB tells me that it was done by the lead singer for Kajagoogoo, so there you are), and then we’re treated to a nice and swift beginning that establishes that the main character is a) lonely and isolated, b) without a mother, c) an avid reader, and d) prone to drifting into his own little fantasy world. Not even fifteen minutes into the film, we’ve already delved into the fantasy world in the book he swipes, as director Wolfgang Peterson (whose previous film, Das Boot, was much, much better than this) clearly understands we’re not looking for a lengthy preamble here. Unfortunately, he did not understand the intense difficulty of making a good film with child actors, and the two leads (Barret Oliver as Bastion, the “real world” boy, and Noah Hathaway as Atreyu, the “fantasy world” boy) drag the film down immeasurably with their poor overacting. The worst offenses come when it awkwardly switches back from the fantasy world to Bastion reading the book, as he ridiculously overacts to whatever he’s reading, throwing the book across the room in panic, screaming out advice to the characters, and in general being such an utter spaz that I became essentially required to root for the bullies that had been tormenting him at the start of the film.

Should I be sympathetic, given their ages? Does their youth make it acceptable that they both stunk up the place? I say to you all, nay! It is unacceptable, and we must stamp out bad child acting wherever we may stumble upon it! Let your voices be heard, proud citizens! Together, we can make a difference! I would sooner raze this world to the ground rather than sit through more pesty kids ruining movies had otherwise had potential, and you should feel the same. This actually is a good movie outside of those two horrid kids (One of whom, Atreyu, almost died twice during filming. If only…), but they drag it down so much that you just want to choke the life out of them by the time the end credits roll. In fairness, I’m pretty sure I did like this the one time I saw it as a child, so I suppose it would make a decent movie for your children, it’s just one that they shouldn’t still be liking once they’ve grown up more. You know, unless you raised stupid children.

Rating: * 1/2

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Notting Hill

So yeah, this is a bit closer to my normal reaction to romantic comedies. This one I had been on the fence about pretty much since it first came out, as I normally like Hugh Grant, and normally don’t like Julia Roberts, and this had gotten generally good, but not stellar, reviews, so I was all afluster as to whether to get it or not. The deciding factor for me was the discovery that Irish comic Dylan Moran also appeared in it, so I felt I had to see it just for him.

Of course, Moran is in a grand one scene at the start of the film, and then is never mentioned again, but bless ‘im, he done good. The rest of the film is tragically taken up by Grant, playing a politely befuddled travel book store owner, and Roberts, playing “the most famous actress in the world”, as they meet, fall instantly in love, and then spend the next hour and a half actively looking for excuses not to be together, while the viewer is given the thankless job of waiting an eternity for them both to figure out they were meant for each other. It’s an exercise in tedium, as we’re expected to feel bad for the poor little rich girl, who, despite having made $15 million on her last film, is really just the saddest one of us all. This is a plot thought up by someone born into wealth, I have no doubt. Of course, we’re also expected to feel sympathetic to her even as she’s being a complete bitch to Grant left and right, and then is discovered to already have a boyfriend (played nicely by Alec Baldwin) when he flies out from America to surprise her. If the genders had been reversed here, it would have been a Lifetime original movie about how men are evil. Like this, it’s somehow expected to be a romance.

It’s not a completely terrible movie, of course, in large part due to the efforts of the supporting cast, whose job it is to keep the humor flowing so we’re not overburdened by the plot. In addition to the aforementioned Moran and Baldwin, we also get some great work by Rhys Ifans as Spike, Grant’s incredibly horrid flatmate, who can be relied upon to say the most inappropriate possible thing at any given moment. He’s a great deal of help, unlike the atrocious music in the film. While most movies tend to have music that fits the scenes, the songs chosen here are just ridiculous, basically acting as a Greek chorus explaining the plot to us while we’re watching. At one point, after getting dumped by her for the fiftieth time, he starts walking all sad-like, and a song starts playing that endlessly repeats the line “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone”, which of course means it starts immediately raining so we can feel that much sadder for him. Come on now.

Sorry to all the Julia Roberts fans out there, but films like this, where she acts like an incredible bitch and everyone reacts like she’s completely in the right to do so (see also: Erin Brokovich), are not good movies. Sniping at everyone is not being sassy, it is not being all female empowerment, it is being an asshole. No amount of supporting characters can cover up this nonsense.

Rating: * ½

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Battlestar Galactica: Razor

A word of caution for anyone reading this: the *** review here is assuming you’re already familiar with the show before watching this. I have to assume anyone randomly stumbling across this TV movie without having already watched the first two seasons of Balactica will be hopelessly lost.

Anyway, for those who have watched the show but don’t know what this is, this is basically a TV movie set before and during season 2 dealing with the Battlestar Pegasus and its history, and was seemingly designed to keep fans of the show satisfied during the seemingly endless wait between seasons (seriously, when the hell is season 3 coming out on DVD already?). Dealing with the aftermath of the Pegasus’ harsher, military-gone-wrong crew, and their decision to essentially kill the passengers of over a dozen civilian ships by scuttling their supplies and essential personnel, it functions less as a movie and more as an extended episode, much as the X-Files movie did. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, if you happen to like the show like I do, but again, it will make it a bit hard on anyone unfamiliar with the series.

One thing I really enjoy about the show is how it’s quite possibly the most overtly militaristic sci-fi show I’ve ever seen. Most science fiction since the 60s has tended to follow the Star Trek path of a semi-utopian future where, even when evil is encountered, it’s still dealt with fairly easily before the cast can become all sunny and cheerful again. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but I do like the stark contrast in just how grim and mean this show can get, and how someone can make the command decision to, as said earlier, condemn hundreds of civilians to death at the hands of an enemy race, and still have enough of a gray area left behind that we’re left without being entirely certain it was the wrong decision. The film encapsulates this feeling in the character of Kendra Shaw, a fast-rising officer on the Pegasus who participated in the executions of several of the civilians, and who now serves under a captain from the Galactica. She has a nice meaty role here where she gets to both want to be punished for her crimes, while still not feeling as though there were any other choice, and still being exactly the kind of military hardass that led to such an event.

This is not as good as the show’s main seasons, but it certainly doesn’t let the show down either. For what was essentially filler, there was a good deal more thought and effort put into this than was really necessary, and will be well worth the view for any fans like myself that are desperate for anything new from the show. Now all I ask is for Ronald Moore to rescind his damn fool idea to end the show, so we can have it go on forever. And no, Sci-Fi Channel, spreading out season four so that it takes over a year to show every episode doesn’t really make it into two whole seasons, it just makes you dicks.

Rating: ***

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Drunken Angel

Akira Kurosawa has stated, in somewhat more modest terms, that this was his first great film. I haven’t seen any of his prior films (I’m eagerly awaiting the upcoming box set of his postwar work, due out next month), but I do have to agree this is quality work.

Set shortly after the end of World War 2, this film shows us a Japan that’s been completely broken by its military crimes and failures, and whose slums have been taken over by yakuza men looking to achieve power here that they didn’t get in the army. Out of this world we get a struggle between two men, Takashi Shimura as a beaten down doctor who drinks all of his bitterness and cynicism away, and his new patient, Toshiro Mifune (in his first role of many with Kurosawa, and completely unrecognizable), a young yakuza with tuberculosis. Both men squabble with each other from the instant they first meet, but both also see possible redemption in the other; for Shimura, if he can save the worst possible patient he can, it would validate all his feelings about working in the hellish slum around them. For Mifune, the doctor seems to come from another world entirely, one that promises the chance to turn his entire life around and help him find the peace he has never known. Standing in the way of their joint healing is another man, Okada, Mifune’s former boss who is fresh out of prison and is determined to make life hell for both of them.

The film was intended to be an attack on the Japanese way of life that had led to such a disastrous war, and it mostly succeeds. However, there are two problems that weren’t adequately dealt with. One is that, when you’re trying to show the yakuza as a negative, corrupt influence on society, you shouldn’t make the main yakuza representative in the film so much more charismatic than the doctor that’s supposed to represent the “good” part of society, though since it was his first time working with Mifune I guess Kurosawa may not have known better until it was too late. The other problem comes in the form of the doctor’s young nurse. Before she worked with the doctor, she had fallen under the influence of Okada, who now wants to take her back against her will. One of the themes in the film is that men and women are now supposed to be equal, unlike how they were a scant four years prior when Okada was first thrown in jail. However, she’s never really given her own voice in the film, still relying on Shimura and Mifune to protect her. I have to place the blame for this on Kurosawa himself, as he’s mentioned in several interviews that he has a hard time writing female characters because he doesn’t understand women at all. It weakens what should be one of the main cruxes of the film.

That said, this is still an impressive film, made by someone who, if not yet making the string of masterpieces he was later known for, was still head and shoulders above most all of his peers. If you have not yet seen any of Kurosawa’s films (and frankly, what the hell’s wrong with you?), this may not be the best possible place to start, but it’s certainly not bad either.

Rating: *** ½

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Silent Night, Deadly Night

There are a number of iconic moments from various movies that, no matter how many times I think of them, still make me smile. There’s the zombie with the bone saw in Grindhouse, the kung fu priest in Dead Alive, Johnny Depp’s outro in A Nightmare on Elm Street, and (perhaps best of all) the protagonist of Gozu swinging a dog through the air by its leash. This film may not have anything at quite that level, but I do have to say, a man dressed as Santa Claus screaming out “Naughty!” while wielding an axe against a wheelchair bound nun certainly ain’t bad.

The film takes us through the short, tragic life of Billy Chapman, who as a young boy is scared to death by his mentally ill grandfather on Christmas Eve, who tells him that Santa punishes naughty children so he’d better run and hide, shortly before a man dressed up as Santa Claus murders his parents. If his chances of being stable in adulthood are poor at this time, they are made worse when he is promptly sent to live in a Catholic orphanage presided over by a stereotype of a strict Mother Superior (I admittedly don’t know many Catholics, but I refuse to believe that every Mother Superior on the planet is the kind of cruel bitch that they are always portrayed as in the movies). This portion of the movie, while we’re waiting for him to become an adult and go on his much-needed killing spree, takes too damned long, though it certainly is helped out by both the presence of a sex scene and young Billy punching out a Santa that comes to visit the orphanage. Finally he becomes 18, and goes to work at a department store that specializes in indeterminate goods (its products seem to vary as much as the products at Sears do, but the store is a tad small for that). Of course, come Christmastime he gets tapped to be the store Santa, and after threatening to kill a young girl if she doesn’t stop squirming on his lap, he finally goes on that rampage we’ve all been waiting for.

If the pacing is a failure, the rest of the movie is at least fun. He racks up a pretty impressive body count in the final third of the film, and the police reaction to it (basically going on a mission to shoot all Santas on sight, which is always helpful around that time of year) is just delightful. There’s also two great moments when he breaks into his first house (sadly, he smashes down a door with an axe rather than swooping down the chimney) and deals with the inhabitants. He shows off his mighty antlike strength to the teenage girl by impaling her on the antlers of a deer head mounted on the wall, leaving her boyfriend to show off a remarkable amount of tunnel vision by entering the room via the door immediately next to where his girl is, and somehow doesn’t notice her. I’d show a picture of how ridiculous this is, but she’s topless and this is, after all, a family site. Still, that guy must be completely fucking blind not to spot her when she’s like two goddamned feet away from him. Frankly, he totally deserved to be put on Santa’s naughty list and promptly thrown out the window for that. There’s a little girl in the house too, and in a rather touching moment, she manages to convince him that she’s not doing anything naughty ever, so he rewards her by giving her the gift of a box cutter that’s still dripping blood after he had murdered a co-worker with it. Isn’t that just adorable?

This had three sequels, the second of which is renowned for being just beyond atrocious, and has a remake scheduled for next year, assuming the strikes don’t delay it. While I think that’s a tad excessive for a movie that’s just decent instead of actually good, it’s certainly better than a number of its slasher peers. It got a ton of controversy when it was first released for depicting a killer Santa, because our country was founded by Puritan idiots and deserves to be invaded, but it’s all done with a good bit of fun to it, and didn’t warrant anything close to that reaction. Slasher fans should absolutely check this one out.

Rating: ** 1/2

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The Undertaker and His Pals

The 1960s were a fascinating time for no-budget horror movies. Loosening censorship rules enabled the violence in such films to be ratcheted up tremendously, far beyond what their meager budgets were capable of handling. This mid-60s effort is a perfect example, where the budget for gore effects so compromised the rest of the film that the cover of the DVD actually has to advertise that it’s in color as though that in itself were a major draw, rather than the standard. And then they don’t even properly hold true to this, as the film opens in sepia tone, and only turns into color completely randomly halfway through the first murder. Utter madness.

The film’s basic premise isn’t that bad, as these things go. An undertaker and two restaurant owners go into business together by hitting the town and murdering people (generally moderately attractive women), whereupon the restaurant owners take key pieces of their bodies to sell at their businesses, and the undertaker get the added business of a steady supply of customers in need of extensive restoration and burial. Not a bad racket, all things considered, and it certainly helps that the entire town is deeply afflicted with the stupids and can’t figure this all out for the life of them.

The film’s largely played for laughs, which is a wise decision here, and the guy playing the undertaker spends every moment onscreen mugging shamelessly for the camera. In a nice change of pace, the film’s creators also knew when to end it, leaving the film only an hour long rather than trying to stretch out the flimsy premise much further than it could really take. That said, the movie is just so much light fluff, and not exactly quality fluff either. If you watch it, you won’t find it outright terrible, but you’re hardly going to view it as anything more than a waste of an hour. The acting is fairly atrocious, the directing inept, and the humor the only thing keeping it afloat. You may want to just check out its trailer in the first volume of 42nd Street Forever, it does a damn impressive job of making it look much better than it really is.

Rating: *

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Exiled

Having seen this film, I think I can safely say that I’ll never need to see another one, since this played like nothing more than a pastiche of just about every major action and crime film ever made, from old Sergio Leone westerns to Reservoir Dogs. And if director Johnny To forgot to include characters worth remembering, or an interesting plot, well, who’s keeping track, right?

The story, such as it is, concerns a gangster who’s pissed off his boss and now must die. However, while two men track him down to kill him, another two come to defend his life, and, as they are all old friends, they decide on a compromise. They’ll honor a final request from him and score enough gold to set the man’s wife and newborn child up for life, so he can die knowing that at least his family will be better off. Along the way, there are a number of gunfights and standoffs that pretty blatantly pilfer from a number of other films, despite a great many Asian cinephiles swearing that this is the most innovative film ever.

I think that may be a bigger problem for me than it should be, but let me explain it like this. When Black Sheep did callbacks to some earlier horror movies, it did so organically. The mentions were subtle and inobtrusive, occurring naturally within the story, so they had a proper flow to them. When it nicked a visual from An American Werewolf in London, for instance, it did so at a moment where that visual would fit perfectly. When Exiled rips off the shooting contest in For a Few Dollars more, it doesn’t go organically. It just feels instead like To really likes Leone’s movies and wanted to direct that moment himself, and just changed it slightly to squeeze it into his already shaky framework. Believe me, I get that it sucks Leone’s dead, but you shouldn’t try to appropriate his directing style unless you’re sure you can at least do it close to as well as he did. And don’t get me started on that walking cliché of an ending.

I am a pretty big fan of Asian cinema, but this is not one of its prouder moments, no matter how many fools want to overrate it on IMDB. There’s plenty of much better Asian action films out there like Kill Zone or Ong-Bak. This one’s not worth your time.

Rating: * ½

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Stranger Than Fiction

There are few delights for me greater than a film that is both willing to try something completely different, and is made by people talented enough that they are able to completely pull it off. While I’m not surprised that a movie like this didn’t do incredibly well at the box office, the idea that it didn’t even get a single Academy Award nomination is just baffling to me.

The film stars Will Ferrell as Harold Crick, an IRS agent who seems to have the most tedious life in existence. As the narrator dryly informs us, he’s so full of excitement that every morning he brushes each tooth the same number of times, and spends his life ruled by his wristwatch. This is, of course, until one morning when he suddenly starts being able to hear his narrator, and his life begins to undergo some rather understandable changes. Later, of course, he hears from his fairly oblivious narrator that his death is imminent, and he begins to engage in a mad rush to find out who his narrator is and to try and convince her that his life might actually be worth living after all.

That description makes it sound a bit like a complete nerd film, and, well, it is. But it’s one that is thoroughly absorbing, which populates its film with fully realized characters and doesn’t shy away from taking its concept as far as it can go. In one of the best parts of the film, he enlists the aid of a college professor (Dustin Hoffman) to help figure out who the narrator is, only for Hoffman to eventually decide that Ferrell should be happy that, while most people die senseless deaths, his impending demise will be coming with a strong sense of poetry to it. It can be hard for a number of people to argue against that, let alone an IRS agent. This pales, though, in comparison to the eventual meeting of Harold and the author who’s voice he has been hearing; it would be criminally unfair to reveal what happens, but you would be doing yourself a true disservice not to watch this movie and find out.

This film made my top ten list for 2006 – or at least, you know, it would have had this blog been around back then. I may do a top ten of 2006 at year’s end just so we can all be on the same page with this, we’ll see. Regardless, this is a powerful, thought provoking film, and you owe it to yourself to give it a try. I’m very happy that I got it for my friend Jasmine for Christmas, as it gave me this excuse to watch it again. There simply aren’t nearly enough films made like this, with an eagerness to try to create something that has never been done before, and with a drive to both entertain and enlighten. It really is just an incredible piece of work.

Rating: ****

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Castle Freak

I didn’t like this movie at all when I first saw it back in high school, but a combination of factors, including some surprising praise of it on various message boards by horror junkies, my own atrocious memory forgetting what had happened in it, and a frenzied scramble to get every last Stuart Gordon film available on DVD led me to give this one a second view. I really wish I hadn’t.

The story is basically the same as in Demons 3: The Ogre, as an American family goes to live in an old Italian castle, only to find that there’s a monster living deep within it. And of course, just like in Demons 3, the monster doesn’t actually break loose and attack anyone until way too late into the film. What we get instead is a parade of endless scenes of the family squabbling, occasionally interspersed with scenes of the monster rattling his chains down in the dungeon. It’s 90 minutes long, and doesn’t seem to have enough actual plot to cover an hour.

To be fair, the castle freak himself does look pretty badass, and the climax isn’t bad once it actually breaks free and comes at the family, but by then it’s just too little, too late. I’ve seen almost all of Stuart Gordon’s films, and this is by far his worst effort. To those people who fooled me into thinking this was worth a rewatch, congratulations, you got me. I hope you all get cancer.

Rating: ½ *

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Dolls

I like Stuart Gordon quite a bit, but he does tend to be a very uneven director. Case in point, fresh off of making the two best movies of his entire career in Re-Animator and From Beyond, he breaks his hot streak with this, a pretty big misfire that still comes so close to being good that it actually becomes infuriating that it’s not.

The key flaw in this film is revealed right in its title. After giving us gore-drenched films involving zombies and otherworldly demons, a movie where the monsters are animated dolls is a pretty damn major letdown. I don’t care how many horror movies get made with them, they aren’t scary. They’re DOLLS. Fucking DOLLS. There could be a hundred of them charging at you armed with guns and knives and you’re still going to think they’re just the most adorable little things ever. The only instance I can think of where an evil doll actually worked at all was in Child’s Play, and that was because it was played for laughs as much as for shocks, which isn’t really the case here. Okay, Dead Silence worked too, but those were not normal dolls in that by any means. Not like the normal, everyday walking killer dolls you’ve got here, no sirree.

All that said, the film does generally work fairly well outside of the main premise being critically flawed. The acting is good, aside from the laughably stereotypical gang members that supply the real villains of the film (the dolls are actually working for the elderly owners of this house, see, and they evidently have frequent houseguests that they like to test to see if they can still get in touch with their inner children, and…yeah, well, anyway). Gordon’s directing has a good deal of visual flair to it, which is the film’s main strength. The house nails that feeling of quaint, folksy creepiness that old people’s cluttered homes tend to have. The dolls themselves add to this, at least at first, when you just catch a flash of motion out of the corner of your eye, so little that you’re not quite sure what you saw. Of course, that ends when they just start casually moving about the whole house like it ain’t no thang, but I’ll work with the film on this.

Of course, all that can’t really save a film whose premise is so off, but it makes the movie watchable enough, and sometimes, that’s all you can really hope for. If you’re a Stuart Gordon completist like myself, or if you’re just one of those strange people that finds toys to be terrifying and who probably still wets the bed at the age of 30, then by all means, check this movie out. Everyone else should give this one a pass.

Rating: **

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My Big Fat Greek Wedding

You know, it seems like it was just earlier this week that I was mentioning how I generally dislike romances, and yet here I am giving another one a positive review, and one that also performs the added sin of focusing heavily on ethnic humor. I’m terrified at the thought that I may be turning into a softie in my advanced age. Clearly the only solution is for me to start plowing through some old Julia Roberts movies so I can get my hate on in full.

There’s two main reasons I like this movie. One is that, while it is a funny movie, its humor flows naturally out of the characters, and outside of a few moments here and there (mainly frontloaded into the first few minutes of the film), it doesn’t feel at all forced or awkward. Even all the attention paid to ethnic jokes, which I normally can’t stand, works out fairly well here, though the film still works best when the characters are just allowed to bounce off of each other rather than going out of its way to call attention to how wacky and different Greek people are.

The other reason is how, unlike in most romances, there’s no real major conflict to be had. It’s basically a story of two people meeting, falling in love, and aside from some minor clashes with parents, get married with no troubles. It’s a very refreshing change from most romances, where the characters have to awkwardly turn themselves into crazy people in the third act just to artificially create conflict where none goes naturally. For those of you who only watch horror movies, this is the equivalent of that guy that still refuses to believe anything supernatural is going on even after his girlfriend has started floating and zombies have eaten all the throwaway character. It’s just irritating, and I’m rather grateful this film doesn’t include that nonsense.

If you’re looking for a great film filled with dramatic tension and power, this film is absolutely going to let you down. If, however, you’re just looking for something that’s pleasant and sweet, that’s moderately funny and finishes things off with a happy ending, then by all means, check this out.

Rating: ***

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The Mist

If nothing else this year showed that we are nearing the end of days, the fact that there have now been two quality Stephen King films in one year should clinch it for just about everyone. It’s a bit of a toss-up as to whether this or 1408 was better (I’m leaning more toward 1408 at the moment), but when something approaching 90% of his filmic adaptations have met with failure, the fact that either would be actual good movies, let alone both, is mildly astonishing.

This one shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, though, given its director. Frank Darabont has previously directed two other Stephen King films with The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, which are easily King’s two best films. This is his fourth film (fifth if you count a TV movie he made, but really, who counts them?), and at two hours long it’s both his shortest and his weakest. Without his normal lengthy running time to slowly develop everyone, he instead leaves almost everyone as a stock character, there to behave in their stereotypical manner in service of the plot. This is partially saved by a large enough budget to provide for worthier actors than the screenplay required, but not completely. There’s also the problem of how he removes a good deal of the ambiguity of King’s original short story, making the mistake of actually trying to explain what’s going on. I personally think the uncertainty of the story was better than what we get here.

Fortunately, outside of those two problems the film works well. It’s unsurprisingly well directed and fast paced. The film has more of a premise than a plot, in that it’s basically a group of disparate people (led by Tom Jane and Marcia Gay Harden) trapped in a supermarket by a potentially supernatural mist filled with strange, deadly creatures, but that generally works well in horror. The monsters, if a tad visually uninspired, are still pretty damn scary when they jump suddenly out of the gloom and start terrorizing everyone, and Toby Jones gives us an inspired performance as Ollie, the sweet yet sinister employee who pretty much behaves exactly how you would expect the charming, quiet man down the street with the collection of mangled corpses in his basement would act. The ending is also pretty damned effective; while the original story had a dark, yet ambiguous ending, this one removes the ambiguity in favor of a major gut punch. It’s the grimmest finale to a major Hollywood film I’ve seen in some time.

This is far from a perfect film, but it succeeds in what it sets out to do, which is to be a dark and scary monster movie. It may not quite crack my top five Stephen King films, but it’s certainly close (my top five, in no particular order, for any curious: Shawshank, Green Mile, Carrie, Creepshow, and maybe 1408). Folks wanting to warm themselves up for the holidays with a good horror movie should check this one out.

Rating: ***

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Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

2007 was not a good year to watch the third movie in a series. Shrek the Third, Ocean’s 13, and Spider-Man 3 were all disappointments to one degree or another (I cleverly placed them in order of which I liked from least to most, but you can feel free to have your own varying degrees of displeasure with them). Fortunately Pirates 3, which I may be the only person on the planet to have not seen in theaters, is here to break through that miasma of mediocrity.

To be sure, this film is not without its fair share of problems. What is intriguing to me about them, though, is that each film in this series has different flaws than the others. The first one featured uneven acting and battle scenes that seemed way too long and pointless, considering half the fighters were immortal. The second one had better overall acting, but heavily downplayed Johnny Depp’s role, despite him being the most entertaining person in the film, and gave us fairly dull CG villains rather than entertaining human ones. This one, much like my reviews often tend to be, is just way too damned long. Clocking in at just under three hours, it throws in everything it can to make this feel like a proper ending to a trilogy, including an epilogue that sets up a potential fourth film. As a result, some things get rushed, most notably the band of Chinese pirates led by Chow Yun-Fat, who are given the thankless task of being glorified cannon fodder while the real stars constantly steal each scene.

Despite this clutter and length, the film does indeed manage to feel somewhat epic in scope, giving us a plot that takes the cast to the literal end of the Earth and beyond, and even if Chow Yun-Fat’s cameo is largely wasted, Keith Richards’ as Depp’s father is simply inspired. This movie isn’t particularly amazing, but it does manage one increasingly difficult trick: it manages to conclude a trilogy without a single lame movie in the set. Outside of the Lord of the Rings, I can’t think of a single other trilogy this decade that’s managed that much.

Rating: ***

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Down With Love

I’m not generally a fan of romances. Part of it is the fact that they generally rely on idiotic plot contrivances without any occasional explosions or brutal murders to keep my interest up, and part of it is that I’m just so bad at keeping anything vaguely resembling a relationship going that I’m left incredibly embittered towards anyone that actually has romance in their lives. With that in mind, it’s really to this film’s credit that I wound up liking it quite a bit.

The film hearkens back to Hollywood’s old Doris Day-Rock Hudson battle of the sexes movies, and stars Renee Zellweger as a young woman in 1962 who’s just written a book on empowering women by rejecting love and behaving more like men, and Ewan McGregor as a famous womanizing journalist determined to bring her down. It exists in one of those delightfully elastic universes where someone can write a book and the entire nation is instantly turned on its head, and where everyone is constantly scheming and permanently ready to throw out a clever retort, and where it’s only natural for a magazine writer to be a major celebrity who rides a helicopter to work.

Of course, romances always have to turn up the contrivances and the false conflicts in the final act, and one of the great successes of this film is how it turns that genre convention on its ear. Zellweger’s big reveal is so divinely over the top insane that it would have done Cobra Commander proud. If anything, the film’s final third is stronger than the rest, an impressive feat for a romance. It manages to retain its hard edge right up to the end credits even when it does get to the more romantic moments. This is a worthy addition to the genre, and should not have been largely ignored as it has.

Rating: ***

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Hot Rod

Comedies have, for the most part, really been on fire this year. While Hot Fuzz and Superbad still tower over the rest of the pack (I’m eagerly hoping for a great latecomer to give us a full trifecta), there have been a number of good films in a genre that has recently averaged only one or two worthwhile efforts a year. While Hot Rod isn’t at the top of the list, it is a worthwhile effort and does a good job of evoking the feel of the comedies of the 80s. For a movie that's apparently spun off of SNL (which would make it the best one since at least Wayne's World), this is doubly surprising and good.

Like those older comedies, this is a fairly lighthearted, whimsical effort, that manages to give us a lot of good slapstick humor without devolving into gross-out jokes. It stars Andy Samberg as a 20-something would-be stuntman who’s trying to raise 50 grand to pay for a heart transplant for his stepfather so that he can recover enough for Andy to prove his manhood by beating him in a fight. Along the way, he puts his body through an impressive amount of abuse, smashing into ramps, falling into pools, getting set on fire, and careening through the air with alarming frequency.

There’s a good deal to enjoy about the film, particularly in the form of a supporting role by Will Arnett as a romantic rival for Andy’s childhood crush. He is delightfully assholish throughout the film, and his closing scene makes me laugh a good deal more than it probably should. I still wish Arrested Development were back on the air, but if its absence allows us work like this, then I guess I can make do.

This movie may not be about to win an award, or even be the best comedy you could check out right now, but it’s fun and silly and fairly clever. Considering every last audience poll I’ve seen has said that the vast majority of people go to movies to laugh, this should do the trick for most of you out there. Go check it out.

Rating: ***

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Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan

So at long last, here’s the finale to the box set. While this wasn’t the final film to star Jason, it was the last Friday the 13th film, as in a rather convoluted agreement, Paramount sold the rights to the Jason character to New Line, but did not sell them the rights to the Friday the 13th title, requiring New Line to title them Jason Goes to Hell and Jason X. I’m not entirely certain I want to see Jason Goes to Hell again anyway; if memory serves me right, and it quite possibly doesn’t, it was one of the worst in the entire series, and featured Jason getting shot to little bits at the start by the army, only for the coroner to randomly eat his heart and become possessed by him, and then my brain shut down. This one’s better.

The film opens with some establishing shots of Manhattan at night, while an unseen figure who I guess is a radio deejay or somesuch goes on about how great this town is. As odes to the Big Apple go, it doesn’t exactly match up with, say, Woody Allen, but I guess it’ll serve. From there, we go back to Crystal Lake, as a passing boat occupied by sex-crazed teens accidentally frees Jason once more from his watery prison, and after dispatching them he hitches a ride on a larger cruise ship that somehow passes through Crystal Lake. The new ship is for a graduating class of roughly a dozen high schoolers and their chaperones on their way to doesn’t matter, providing him with a moderate amount of victims to ply his trade on. Obviously, after fleeing him on a lifeboat, the last few survivors make their way to Manhattan, closely followed by him, who evidently swam after them, where they have their final showdown.

Just a man about town, surveying all that he rules.

There’s a lot to like about this film. There’s the wonderful open laughing at continuity, as Jason’s mask is mysteriously repaired after being ripped to bits in the last film, or the big revelation that his entire childhood between his initial drowning and when his mom got killed in the first film was spent living in the lake itself, or how, once in Manhattan, his bloodlust is pretty much totally confined to the people on the boat and those who are in his path to them, rather than just going after everyone. There’s the fact that, for the first time in the entire series, a black guy (ignoring the child in part 5) manages to make it almost to the end of the film, before he makes an ill-advised decision to take the fight to Jason and engage him in a boxing match. There’s even the strange dichotomy between the big lovefest for Manhattan at the film’s start, and the shocking revelation at the end that its sewer system gets flushed with toxic waste every night at midnight.

Further, there are no fewer than three grand series traditions carried on here, in the proper Friday style. One is how the heroine is pretty much completely insane, continuing a tradition that has appeared in every film from part 5 to here (at one point she even causes a car accident because she hallucinates a young Jason in front of her, and in doing so kills one of the chaperones, who barely gets a mention afterwards). There’s the anti-helpful authority figure in the form of the principal, continuing a tradition that goes back to part 6, and who meets a particularly nasty end when he’s dumped in one of those barrels of ooze that New York always has lying around (Strangely, it only killed him rather than turning him into a mutant ninja. Oh well). Finally, and perhaps most importantly of all, Teleporting Jason just goes completely into overdrive here. Someone runs directly away from Jason into a building, only to find Jason already waiting for him on an upper floor. Jason drags a cop off to the side into a shadow, only to instantly be directly in front of the cop car for no reason other than so that he can be run over. Best of all, at one point a girl gets trapped in a room with him, and while looking around for an exit, she looks right, to see him there, quickly turns left, to find him already there, then looks back right to see him there again. The man’s like Jamie Madrox, he’s got doubles everywhere.

This is obviously not great art, but Paramount certainly knew how to end their run on the series with a bang. It’s not the best film in the series, but it is one of the most fun. You should check it, and this box set as a whole, out.

Rating: ***

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Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood

I meant what I said when I yesterday mentioned how the added supernatural element of part 6 was when the series really went flying off the rails, and that is totally born out with this film. Here, we not only get a Zombie Jason, but we have him going face to face with a girl with the Powers of Telekinesis. It’s every bit as good as it sounds.

This one is a bit renowned as being more heavily mangled by censors than any other film in the series, to the point where some of the deaths are rather hard to figure out. Despite this, there’s still a pretty decent amount of blood to be had, with Jason grabbing pretty much every sharp object short of a katana to take everyone out. At one point, in possibly my favorite part of the entire film, he kills one half of a couple with a spear, then leaves the guy alone so he can feel safe, but oh no – Jason actually just left so he could upgrade his weapon like in a video game and kill him more satisfyingly. It’s that level of dedication to his craft that places Jason a notch above your standard 9-to-5er slasher.

Besides Jason, there are two characters that really warrant mention, and that is Telekinesis Girl and her lovable shrink. Telekinesis Girl, also known as Tina, spends the movie being haunted by her memories of using her powers to murder her abusive father at their cabin on Crystal Lake back when she was a child, and after freeing Jason from the lake at the start, thinking he might be her dad, she spends her time doing a terrible job of looking shocked, and screaming a lot. Despite herself, she actually does do a passable job at holding her own against Jason, due I’m going to guess that due to the low budget nature of the film, her powers weren’t able to be used in any really interesting ways. Instead we get her swinging hanging lamps at his head, and dramatically slamming a door shut and shoving a table in front of it. She’s so hardcore.

Dr. Crews is just a delight every time he’s on screen, however. Played by Terry Kiser, he has taken her to her childhood cabin to allegedly attempt some sort of immersion therapy with her so she can get her stress-based powers under control. Of course, as she suspects, he’s not interested in curing her so much as getting her powers to become more active, and has a further agenda that somehow involves Jason, though exactly what that agenda is and how he was planning on freeing Jason and then sticking around in the area without dying is left unsaid. He’s also just one of the greatest creeps in movies; at one point he’s out in the woods arguing with Tina’s mother, who’s finally realized he may not have her daughter’s best interests at heart, and Jason shows up. As anyone with a strong sense of self-preservation would do, he simply grabs her and uses her as a human shield so that Jason can use up his bloodlust on her so he can be spared. Frankly, I admire his ability to think outside the box like that. If only the other characters had been as interesting as him, this movie would have been one of the best in the series.

Rating: * ½

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Friday the 13th Part 6: Jason Lives

While most people though the previous film in the series was where the series jumped the shark, what with its Jason copycat (evidently forgetting that the first film also didn’t have Jason as the killer), I would maintain that this is where the series really flew off the rails. Further, I would argue that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the added goofiness the series gained here certainly gave it an off-kilter boost deep into the series.

The finale of the Tommy Trilogy (who is now played by Thom Mathews, after John Shepherd apparently became a born again), this is the movie that introduces the supernatural to the Friday the 13th universe by having Tommy accidentally resurrect Jason in the opening scene, giving us our first ever Zombie Jason. Apparently it’s not much fun being a decaying corpse, as he just goes on a full-blown rampage here, killing no less than 18 people here and basically wiping out half the damn town. It’s wonderful. He’s all “Rarrrh, you want some of this? Take this broken bottle to the chest, Groundskeeper! Yeah! Oh, you think you’re gonna make it out on your motorcycle? I think not! Take this pole through the chest for your efforts, bitch! Oh, trying to escape in your clumsy RV, eh? Well, why don’t I just shove one of your dumb asses through a goddamned wall and then cut the throat of the other? Yeah, that sounds right! Hey, Mr. Big and Bad Sheriff, you want some a dis? Oh, I don’t think you do! How’s about I just fold you up like an origami crane, how you like that? I’m on a rampage!”

Need a HAND, anyone? Yeah!

While Mathews isn’t as entertaining as Tommy as Shepherd or Feldman were, he still gets the job done, and we’re also treated to a perfectly over the top disbelieving police force headed by a Donald Sutherland lookalike, and – perhaps best of all – we finally get a camp full of children, unlike his previous rampages. They take the presence of an unstoppable killer in better stride than the counselors do, which I guess is understandable since the counselors are the ones that he’s mainly targeting. One of the boys even gets the best line in the movie, while they’re all hiding under their beds listening to their great protective counselor screaming for her daddy to come and save them: “So, what were you going to be when you grew up?”

This one gets my vote for being the single best one in the entire series (discounting, of course, Freddy vs. Jason), both for all of the above, and for the brilliantly stupid plan Tommy develops to stop Jason once and for all. Not the digging up his corpse and burning it part where he accidentally resurrects him, oh no. I won’t reveal how he tries to take Jason down completely, but I will say that the fact that it somehow works is pretty incidental to just how atrocious an idea it was. It’s a wonderfully over-the-top stupid idea that provides a great capper to the film, and to Tommy’s overall legacy in general. If you have any interest in slasher movies, you need to check this one out.

Rating: *** ½

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Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning

This probably ranks as the single most hated film in the entire series, as the killer turns out to not actually be Jason, but just a copycat (this is similar to the mass hatred of Halloween 3 for not having Michael Myers in it, regardless of how it’s still one of the best in the series). The people who have a blind hatred for this film based on that (and there are a great many of them out there) are fools.

This is, of course, the second film in the Tommy Trilogy, and Corey Feldman, aside from an opening scene in a dream sequence, has been replaced by an adult version played by John Shepherd. Surprisingly enough, after a childhood spent chopping a deranged killer to little bits, he’s now a rather emotionally troubled adult, and the film opens (after the dream and credits) with him getting shipped off to a home for disturbed teens. This gives us the sheer joy that is the Mentally Disturbed Hero, as he just goes completely bucknutty on a couple people, giving them some just delightful beatdowns just to keep everyone in line. This film is also notable for having the single most gorgeous women in the entire series, and if there’s only a couple really memorable kills in it, there’s still a lot more nudity than any of the other films, and I must say it’s very appreciated.

I will say, in defense of the haters of this movie, that the film’s big flaw does come in the form of the killer’s poor motivation. Just to spoil it for you here, he turns out to be a paramedic who gets called to the Home for the Criminally Insane Tommy is at after an incredibly annoying fat kid there gets murdered by another resident, only to find that the fat kid that got killed was his own son *Da-DUUN*. Naturally this sends him on a murderous rampage, and naturally he would decide to dress himself like the town’s most famous slasher to deflect suspicion away from himself, but I really must question his choice in victims. I can accept that he would blame the halfway house or whatever the hell it’s supposed to be for killing his boy and would target them, even if the one who actually killed his kid was arrested right there in front of him and is never seen again. What I cannot accept is how he kills like half a dozen other people that have no connection to the place, and for the most part only show up to accomodatingly die (and in one case get obligingly topless before accomodatingly dying). It just seems random, really.

By the way, for those following along to this box set with me, pay attention to the comment by the police chief about how Jason’s body was cremated after his death, and see how well that jibes with his corpse appearing in a grave in the next film. Continuity is for fools, I say.

Rating: ***

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Friday the 13th Part 4: The Final Chapter

Fans tend to be very divided about this film. Obviously part of that has to do with how it’s billed as “The Final Chapter”, and was initially intended to be the last Friday the 13th film, and then the profitability of the series enticed them to make seven more films and counting. Mainly, though, there’s a bit of an argument between those fans who feel that this was the last really good Friday the 13th, and those people like me who believe it’s actually the first really good Friday movie. One thing that is generally accepted by everyone is that it’s one of the best in the series.

I’m not completely sure why this one is so much better than the first three, but I can formulate some guesses. For one, despite the presence of Kevin Bacon in the original, this one really goes for broke on the star power, giving us none other than a young Corey Feldman as Tommy, who would later go on (with two other actors playing him) to be the star character of the next two films. Another key to this one’s success is in how it manages to neatly sidestep the problem of how the victims are invariably annoying idiotic teens by giving us two groups of people, the idiotic teens and a family that’s actually rather pleasant who lives near them that we can actually root for. Continuing with the last movie (just like the third film did, this one starts the same day the last film ended – I’m stunned people didn’t flee this town in droves), this one also ratchets up the violent and the sexual content, which is always appreciated with films like these.

Perhaps most important of all though, is that we finally get ridiculous Teleporting Jason, as he goes and kills someone in the kitchen, then is suddenly on the roof to kill someone from her window, and then its instantly back to the kitchen to grab a blade. There was absolutely no reason for him to go to the roof right then, but I certainly respect his decision to be the hardest working man in shlasherness. It may not quite reach the level of later movies in the series, but Teleporting Jason is aces in my book.

One final note on the ending; this may very well be the greatest ending in the entire series, with Tommy going completely insane and taking the fight right to Jason. I always have a fondness for the hero acting like a complete psychopath when he needs to be, so God bless ‘em for that.

Rating: ***

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Friday the 13th Part 3

This film opens by helpfully reshowing us the campfire recap of the first film from the second film, just to help us all out in case we can’t follow such a difficult plot. I thank them for that, because I find I just can’t get enough explanations of what is going on in a slasher movie. Really, how else are we going to figure out that the guy in the mask wielding the machete is the villain?

Anyway, this film follows the bad luck of the town next to Crystal Lake, as it starts the same evening the second film ended, with Jason on the loose and raring to kill some more people, just as a new group of teens arrives to vacation at an old cabin while cheerfully ignoring all the news reports about the deranged killer roaming the area. Unlike the first two films, there was a serious effort made to make this film stand out, as (to the best of my knowledge) it is to date the only slasher film made in 3-D. Of course, the DVD doesn’t come with the 3-D technology, so we just get a normal film, but with the occasional randomness like the opening credits jumping forward, Jason firing a harpoon at the cameraman, etc. It’s that little added effort to please that pushes this one a little above the first two films.

One thing that’s interesting about the first few movies, despite my previously stating that I didn’t think they were as good as later ones (my favorites, specifically, were the “Tommy Trilogy”, or parts 4-6), is that we’re still dealing with a fully mortal killer. Sure, Jason can take a goddamn machete to the shoulder and get back up, but he gets hurt pretty badly, and can at least be knocked out by the axe to the face he takes here. Also of note, the violence has been ratcheted up considerably from the first two films (though this may be a result of relaxed censorship from the MPAA – the Friday series was notorious for having to heavily cut its violent content, and to date there has yet to be an uncensored DVD set to watch), which helps a lot with a genre like this. ‘Course, that doesn’t quite take it into “good” territory, as it has a slooooow beginning, a retarded ending that’s almost a parody of the ending from the first film, and an incredibly awful nerd character that you just wish could die in his first scene. Still, Jason does get his trademark hockey mask from the guy, so I guess he’s not all bad.

Rating: * ½

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Friday the 13th Part 2

A good many fans of this series point to the original three or four as being the pinnacle of the series. As one may have guessed from yesterday’s review of the first film, I am not one of those people. This one continues in that vein, as it may well be my least favorite film in the entire series (in fairness, I don’t really remember part 3 or Jason Goes to Hell very well, so either of them could easily take the crown). There are a couple good moments to this film, but they’re trapped within an incredibly tedious mess.

I’ll start with the beginning of the film. As much as I loved the grand Friday the 13th tradition of the killer flinging the corpses of past victims at the end survivors, this film indulges in another horror sequel tradition that I hate with an equal amount of passion. To wit, it beings with the lone survivor of the previous film for no reason other than to kill her off ten minutes into the movie. It just raises my “fair play” hackles when someone actually manages to eke out a win against the monster, only to be casually killed off to give us a “shocking” opening scene for the sequel. The most recent example I can think of with this was with Hostel 2, which I also hated. It’s just bad sportsmanship, really.

It’s also incredibly unnecessary, and makes a later, somewhat better done, scene completely redundant and useless. The film opens with her having a nightmare that flashes back to the first film, basically giving us a quick run-through of the entire plot and “shocking” twist, just in case there was someone going to see this who hadn’t seen the first film. Then when the camp counselors all get together in preparation for another grand camp opening, they all gather round the campfire at night as the head counselor repeats the entire story to them. I guess this was for people who missed the first film and who were also stuck at the concession stand for the first ten minutes of the film. I was a little hopeful that someone else would try to recap the first film at the end, just to accommodate people who hadn’t seen the first film and who also have really weak bladders that caused them to miss the first two recaps, but it never happened.

All that said, though, there were two moments that I love in this, and I’m going to spoil them for you here so that you don’t have to waste your time seeing this. The first comes about halfway through the film, as a schmuck in a wheelchair takes a machete to the head and then, because that’s clearly not enough on its own, takes a tumble down a flight of stairs, still in the wheelchair. Brilliant, I say. The other comes near the end, as the last remaining woman runs from Jason (who, prior to his claiming of the hockey mask, hides his hideous face here by tying a sack around his head with some rope) and hides under a bed. She can see his feet as he searches the room for her, but then steps away and she doesn’t see or hear anything from him for a while. Of course she assumes the coast to be clear, and crawls out from under the bed, only to find he had just been standing on a chair waiting for her to come out so he can stab at her with his trusty pitchfork. He’s a good egg like that.

Outside of that, though, this film really is the pits. While they were surprisingly popular, these early efforts in the series really had little to distinguish themselves from literally hundreds of similar slasher efforts being churned out in the early 80s. You probably don’t want to hunt this one down.

Rating: ½ *

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Friday the 13th

One nice thing about horror movies is that they seem to operate by a completely different set of rules than every other genre of film. For instance, while in most genres, a sequel is almost guaranteed to be inferior to the original work, here in the world of horror the reverse is true as often as not. While this isn’t always the case (as series like Pumpkinhead and Critters can show), it is certainly true with a great many of the more famous series, such as this one.

The plot shouldn’t need to really be recapped, but here’s a quick one sentence synopsis: a summer camp with a troubled history plans to re-open under a new management, but an unseen killer stalks all the counselors. There you go. I don’t know whether or not to approach this film as a product of its times, or if I should be judging it based on today’s standards. Either way, though, it’s pretty sub-par. The plot is basically just a body count-style horror movie revolutionized by Mario Bava, without managing to muster up the tension of previous slasher films like Halloween (its direct predecessor) or Black Christmas (Halloween’s direct predecessor). By today’s standards it’s extremely tame; there’s very little blood, and despite a game of strip Monopoly being played by several of the counselors, there’s pretty much zero nudity. As a film, it just doesn’t work. It also rather clumsily tries to emulate the style of Black Christmas or an early Argento giallo by showing most of the murders from the killer’s perspective, so that we can be appropriately shocked when the killer is finally revealed. This also doesn’t work.

Now, what does work? Well, the score by Harry Manfredini is much better than the film deserves, and goes a long way toward making the movie okay to watch. Additionally, you get an early performance by Kevin Bacon, in only (so far as I know) his second speaking role after Animal House, so if you’re like me and have a vested interest in seeing famous actors getting their start in no-budget horror movies, then this ranks right up there with Johnny Depp’s film debut in A Nightmare on Elm Street (though Bacon’s death scene isn’t nearly as impressive). Finally, this film begins one of my favorite horror traditions: after the cast has been whittled down to one or two terrified survivors, the killer then begins heaving the corpses of the earlier victims through the windows at them. It’s a grand Friday the 13th tradition that was sadly not used in Jason X, but given that there weren’t really any proper windows in the spaceship for him to heave corpses in from, I guess it’s understandable. It’s interesting to see how fun several of the sequels were, considering how weak the original is, but that’s how horror movies work, you know.

Rating: *

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