Soul of the Demon

Yeah, I knew it was a bit too much to ask for to hope that more than half the films on this disc would be decent. Still, with the one-two punch of The Cutting Room and Demon Sex, I can comfortably say that disc two of this collection has been roughly twice as good as disc one was, a trend I can only foolishly hope continues through the rest of the set. This one’s not so good though.

The movie’s a bit of a rarity in the set, as it is much older than most films in the set, coming at us from the distant reaches of 1991. Presumably this is to let us all know that production values could be slipshod and horrid back then too. Two dull children cut class to goof off by a river, and stumble across a statue of a gargoyle, whereupon a guy that looks like Freddy Kreuger dressed in black tells them that it’s evil and contains the soul of a demon within it, and so they should just rebury it right then and there. Naturally they don’t, but it doesn’t seem to matter for the plot’s purposes anyway. The kid who takes it’s older brother decides to host a Halloween party in an abandoned building, where he and his friends hold a séance to try to summon the demon of the statue, and even though the statue isn’t there with them, they still summon it, and the rest of the movie is basically it picking them off one by one like in a slasher movie. With some superficial changes, it’s the same plot as Night of the Demons, only with the subtle difference of Night of the Demons actually being kinda fun.

A large part of the problem is that the pacing is just tragically off. The movie’s only 78 minutes long, and yet the little boy doesn’t get possessed by the demon until the 42 minute mark, and the first death doesn’t occur until the 50 minute mark. Over half the movie is spent on boring us with fairly nonexistent buildup. There’s also the issue of the aforementioned production values. While there isn’t a real sound problem like there was with most of these movies, there is a bit of a problem with the lighting, and how they frequently seemed to have used nothing but candles and flashlights rather than actual lights to film the scenes with. What we get then, for most of the big scenes in the haunted house, is a series of dark, fuzzy figures moving about in a dark, fuzzy landscape and occasionally screaming. It really isn’t asking too much to be able to see the movie that I’m paying for, even if I’m only paying about fifty cents for it. Also, I don’t care if it’s writer-director-producer-cameraman Charles Lang’s favorite sport in the world, there was absolutely no need for that damned basketball game near the beginning. When your film is under 80 minutes and still needs that much padding added to it, you may want to consider punching up the plot a wee bit.

Still, this one may be really dull, but at least it’s not as blatantly rubbish as The Traveler and Terror at Baxter U were, so good on it for that. There was at least one really amusing death scene (involving a woman tied spreadeagle on a bed and getting sawed in half starting at her vajayjay) and one that just shamelessly ripped off the eye puncturing in Zombie, so it gets half a star just on the basis of them, and for an ending that just goes over the top silly. Still, it’s definitely not a movie you’d want to watch without lots of booze or likeminded friends among you to goof on it with. And now, lucky me, I'm blessedly free of this set for another week.

Rating: ½ *

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Demon Sex

As if in answer to my criticism yesterday of Death From Beyond openly mocking us by promising tons of nudity and not delivering any, here comes Demon Sex hot on its heels that gives us pretty much nonstop nudity throughout the entire film. Of course, this gift is a bit lessened when the very first person to get naked in it is Brinke Stevens, but I suppose I should make do.

For those who don’t know who Brinke is, she shows up in a lot of these horror porns, and I had previously seen her in Delta Delta Die! She’s popular largely due to her eagerness to completely ham it up, and her willingness to spend half her screen time naked. This would be a good thing if she were a bit younger, but as she’s over fifty years old, this is a bit of a hindrance. Still, most of the other girls in the film are much more attractive, and they pretty much all spend the whole film naked or on their way there.

But onwards and upwards to the film itself. The film opens very boringly, with a woman giving us a voice over about the alien history of the planet, and how a super advanced race evolved from here and eventually spread out over the neighboring star systems, but while still here they evolved early humans to provide some easy slave labor, but since we were too aggressive they gave up on us and created a second race called the Greys, or Demons (complete with picture showing them to be stereotypical X-Files style aliens), who were much more passive and helpful. Unfortunately, after their alien masters left for other worlds, the humans wiped out all the Greys because we’re so aggressive and Man is the true villain!!! Now it’s present day, and a cult of women (led by Brinke) has acquired the skull of a Grey and wants to extract the DNA from it so they can repopulate the world with Greys. If all of that sounded interesting to you, kill yourself.

Of course, even the filmmakers realized that this was a dumb plot, so after the first ten minutes or so, they start throwing naked women at us, and don’t stop until it’s time to give birth to the Grey baby at the very end of the film. So I guess the film really should be judged on how attractive the women are and how hot the sex scenes are. They’re mostly pretty average, verging on grotesque when Brinke strips down, but I do have to admit, seeing a naked girl on top of a guy that’s slapping her in the face so hard that she’s dripping blood down her chest and onto him while she’s choking him until he’s unconscious before she rides his limp form to orgasm is EXACTLY what I want out of my pornography. That and seeing a heavily pregnant chick stripped nude, that was hot. Definitely one of the better entrants in the collection thus far.

Rating: **

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Death From Beyond

Well, I have to admit, one of the main requests I have of movies is that they show me something I’ve never seen before, and this film delivers on that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie in my entire life before now that was so low-budget that they had to place a blue tarp on the ground because they couldn’t afford to film at an actual river.

In the film’s defense, it at least lets you know right off the bat that it’s going to suck. It starts with a girl dressing up in some slutty faux-priestess costume and kinda hanging herself in her apartment a la the priest in City of the Living Dead, and then we get a credits sequence that is nothing more than amazing. It’s the regular opening credits to a film interposed in front of a maze screen saver that a person would have on their computer back in the early 90s. The special effects stay at that general level for the rest of the film, which is fortunately brief. The case claims the film is 57 minutes long, though it’s actually 37, a hit that I was quite willing to take here. The film jumps ahead three years after the credits, as we learn that the girl at the beginning was an archaeologist who disappeared, and now a group of filmmakers is using her still empty apartment to make a porn movie. Naturally, she is still haunting the place, now possessed by a vengeful Egyptian spirit, and begins killing each of them after they have sex to absorb their power. Now, don’t get me wrong here, I do not in any way require nudity to enjoy a movie. However, when you repeatedly state that the characters are all there specifically to make a porno film, and you have almost every character have sex at some point during the pleasingly brief run time, and you have the villain change outfits in the very first scene, and you have the really hot girl take a goddamn shower for no reason, and at no point in all of this do you have any nudity at all, then I find I have no choice but to protest most strongly. I shall not put up with all of this shameless trickery any more. I am drawing a line in the sand on this – who is with me?

By the way, if I mention that the film climaxes with the Survivor Girl and the villain being magically transported into a godly field where they have a swordfight for all of a minute and a half, don’t take that to mean that the movie is now somehow worth seeing.

Rating: ½ *

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The Cutting Room

And we’re back with the second disc of the Tomb of Terrors collection, and once again we get a fairly comedic and mildly fun lead-in film to start the disc off. If the second disc follows the general flight plan of the first, then after this one the other three films on the disc will just be abysmal, but I’m keeping cautiously optimistic on this.

This film, in the proud tradition of roughly a million other no-budget horror movies, is about a cast and crew making a horror movie that are shockingly being simultaneously stalked by a monster themselves. The twist here is that their movie is already finished, and the director is killing her cast and crew off so that there’s no risk of any reshoots that would weaken her dubious level of artistic integrity. One of the biggest bits of humor of the film comes in the clips of their movie that we get to see, where we learn that it is just as dreadful as can be. Indeed, they kind of oversell it a bit; I think the filmmakers could have trusted anyone actively seeking this collection out to understand when a character is doing the Chainsaw Dance without the repeated camera close-ups on a poster of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The humor, though, is probably the biggest part of the film, and we get this from the very first scene, with Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman (if you recognize the name, then you know what kind of movie this is going to be) playing a major film producer passing on their film because it’s too unmarketable, unlike proper recent horror movies like the remake of Psycho. We also get such things as one of the male actors in the film mentioning that he did the movie to get famous enough to break into porno, and another actor that gets attacked and pretends to be dead just to show off his method acting chops.

Of course, there are the standard run of technical problems that are common with a no-budget production like this. There are a number of sound gaps where we just get dead silence for a few seconds, even when someone’s talking. This happens most often during scenes with lots of camera cuts from one angle to another, so it’s possible that whoever was doing their mixing and editing just didn’t have good enough equipment to handle the job, or was somewhat retarded. I won’t list the ridiculously amateurish acting as a negative because, well, in this kind of film that beyond badness tends to be an actual plus, though I do think there should be special mention made of the film critic whose review is spent blatantly reading off of cue cards, and who I don’t think even once manages to actually look at the camera he’s supposedly talking to. A more serious concern is the absolutely terrible gore and blood effects, which are so bad that there are times when you have to kind of guess as to what’s supposed to be going on. Not good. The ending is also an issue, at least so far as this collection goes, as I am now five movies into the set, and all five films have ended in generally the same way. I have a feeling these movies could have been mixed up a bit better than they were.

Despite these problems, the movie is still at least somewhat fun to watch, and is so far my second favorite one from the set. I just hope that I’m going to get at least a few really good films in the mix sometime soon, rather than just a few okay ones and a lot of terrible ones. I do have one final plea to the filmmakers here, and to all other aspiring young movie makers out there reading this: while I do certainly appreciate that the second girl to appear in the film gets naked almost immediately after she shows up, it is deceitful in the highest degree to make that the only nudity we get for the entire film. This is an especially egregious sin when you actually have two girls kissing later on and then neither one of them, even the really hot one, takes anything off. Honestly now.

Rating: **

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Comedian

Probably the main thing a documentary hopes to accomplish is to give its audience a deeper, more appreciative understanding of its topic, and on that level, Comedian mostly succeeds. On a pure entertainment level, well, the results are a bit more mixed.

The film, produced by Jerry Seinfeld, tries to pull back the curtain a bit on the average life, or at least mindset, of stand-up comics, primarily by following the careers of two of them: Seinfeld himself, as he tries to make a comeback two years since he’s even been on stage by writing an entire new hourlong act for himself, and Orny Adams, a comic who’s been around for about a decade now, and hasn’t yet caught his big break. The film shows how much of a neurotic mess pretty much everyone in the business is, as not only Adams, but Seinfeld and his peers, are all a bunch of nervous wrecks before and after their performances. Immediately after a gig where he gets a great response from the crowd, he confides in fellow comic Colin Quinn that he thought his whole set stunk and the crowd knew he was dying up there no matter what their response was. Adams is even worse, as every moment he’s not on stage he’s pretty much collapsing into a heap, just as miserable a person as they come. He openly trashes everyone, and for all of his claims that he wants to succeed above all else, the more he succeeds in his career the more miserable he seems to become.
One of the film’s main problems is in how, while it shows how much of a pack of emotional wrecks comics are, it never really explores why they are all that way, or why such a person would choose such a career. Another is in how, despite being a documentary on stand-up comedy, it doesn’t really show very much actual stand-up. Outside of Seinfeld and Adams practicing their new material at home and backstage, we only get very brief snippets of their actual performances, something that would have helped the film tremendously. As it is, most of the humor just comes in little asides and casual banter between the various comics backstage, and most of the fun comes from hearing their stories about their favorite comics. The highlight in that regard comes from Chris Rock, who comes off here as one of the few people in the industry that’s not a complete mess, who tells about how he went to see Bill Cosby recently, and it was the best show he’d ever seen, so much so that it made all the comics that had gone feel like frauds. The actual arrival of Cosby at the end, and Seinfeld’s rookie-like amazement at being in such a legend’s presence, really work.
The film itself does work well overall, too. Its only flaw is that it doesn’t really excel enough: it doesn’t push quite deep enough to really find out all there is to know about the industry and stand-up comics in general, and it doesn’t contain enough actual stand-up material to work as a full comedy. Still, it did keep me consistently entertained all the way through, and I suppose that’s all I can really hope for from it.
Rating: ***

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Casino

In the interests of full disclosure, I will admit right here and now that I tend to place Martin Scorsese up on a pedestal and view him as being head and shoulders above every other director, nay, every other PERSON, on the planet, be they living or dead. That said, Casino isn’t really one of his best movies, though it is one of the best for sheer entertainment value.

The film follows the rise and fall of the mob in Vegas, centering on Robert DeNiro as “Ace” Rothstein, an expert betmaker who’s placed in charge of the Tangiers with the sole purpose of ensuring it made as much money as possible so that his mob bosses back east can skim off as much money as possible. It seems like a perfect system at first, until our three “heroes” – DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and Sharon Stone – all begin to self-destruct together. Pesci is a childhood friend of DeNiro’s that’s sent out there to help him in his work, but is such a loose cannon that he quickly begins attracting way too much attention from the law. Stone is a money pilfering con artist that DeNiro falls for, but who doesn’t want to let go of her shady past, and eventually turns to drugs as a way of dealing with everything. In the dreamworld Vegas of the film, both of these problems seem handleable. The unpardonable sin, however, comes from DeNiro himself, who becomes so intent on ensuring the perfection of his casino that he fires an incompetent worker who’s related to a gaming commissioner, bringing a kind of hell on himself that seems to be even more important than the cops.

The film is just exhilarating to watch. It doesn’t quite have the depth of such classics as Taxi Driver or The Last Temptation of Christ, but that’s really not the point of the film. What he’s doing here is just trying to have as much fun with the basic material as he can, almost making a parody of gangster films (a genre that, with Mean Streets and Goodfellas, he’s one of the premiere directors of). The film is often extremely funny, particularly with the constant stream of voice-overs from DeNiro, Pesci, and several other characters that get caught up in the act. He’s not even afraid to “cheat” a bit with his narrative – I won’t spoil how for anyone reading this who hasn’t seen it yet, but anyone who’s seen it knows what I mean – and it results in a moment that’s simultaneously surprising, funny, and tragic.

It’s a bit lengthy, as Scorsese’s films always tend to be, but there is not a boring moment to be found in it. He lined up a great cast (Stone in particular gives what is likely the best performance of her career) and let them all go crazy together. As his pure fun movies go, it’s not quite on the same level as The King of Comedy or Cape Fear, but it’s slightly ahead of The Departed, which is not a bad place to be. Go check this out if you haven’t.

Rating: *** ½

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Paper Moon

I’ve always found it rather interesting that Peter Bogdanovich never really became as big a name director as his 70s contemporaries like Coppola, Scorsese, or Spielberg. It’s not really that he isn’t any good, as between this and his other big early 70s hit The Last Picture Show, I have to assume that, even if he may not have been at the same level as the three others I mentioned, he was still certainly good enough to be considered a major talent in his own right. Based on this film, though, I think I have the answer. At a time when every hot young director was making waves by trying to redefine how movies worked, it seems the only unpardonable sin then was to openly embrace the cinema of times gone by and make a movie with the look and feel of a comedy from the silver age.

Filmed in black and white, and set during the Depression, the film follows Ryan O’Neal as a small time con man that goes around selling customized bibles to grieving widows, and who gets unexpectedly saddled with a young girl played by Tatum O’Neal, who may or may not be his daughter. After some initial squabbles, they realize it’s in both of their best interests to team up, so as to better rip everyone else off, and the rest of the film is devoted to their squabbling as they try to stay one step ahead of their marks.

Tatum, at ten years old when this was made, still holds the record for the youngest person to ever win a competitive award (Best Supporting Actress) at the Academy Awards. It’s an award that I think she earned here, even though she was up against Linda Blair’s work in The Exorcist (which I do think is the better film overall of the two). This is especially amazing given how awful most child actors are, giving us a forced cuteness and attempted incorrigability that just makes you want to thrash them about the ears. In contrast, she never seems to smile here, already bitter and world-weary at such a young age, and fully able to get the upper hand against any of the adults she encounters.

The film has that marriage of playful sweetness and black humor that typified a number of the great old black and white comedies, like those involving the Marx Brothers or Nick and Nora. If it doesn’t quite reach truly great comedic heights like those older films did, well, at least it does a fine job of trying. The two have a natural chemistry together, which I guess would go without saying, given that they are real life father and daughter. Had Bogdanovich started his career at any other time, I have to believe that he would have been a much longer lasting success than he was, and while it’s probably too late for him to have any kind of comeback, I do hope that one day he will recapture his brief old success.

Rating: ***

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Cadillac Man

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Robin Williams, in much the same way I imagine most of his fans do. He can be incredibly funny at times, but he unfortunately has a tendency to overdo everything until he just becomes completely obnoxious (I know, stunning that a former cokehead might have this problem). With this film, though, we have a different problem, where he manages to play his role in a nicely understated manner, and yet the film around him is pretty clueless.

Williams stars as a used car salesman with the required wreck of a personal life and a job that’s on the verge of nonexistence, as any film like this seems to require. His dealership is relocating, and the owner has decided to have a contest among the employees to see who can sell the most cars on a big sale day, and thus see who will be allowed to keep their jobs. If this sounds overly similar to Glengarry Glen Ross, a far superior work set in the real estate world, I should mention that the second half of the film is pretty drastically different. See, as the filmmakers don’t really seem to know how to pull off a movie like this, early on in the big sale day everyone is taken hostage by Tim Robbins as the crazed boyfriend of Williams’ big competition for the job, and we’re left with Williams trying to use all his skill as a salesman to talk Robbins down and get everyone out of there alive and safe.

I should say that there’s nothing really done too poorly about any of this, it just all fails to excel. Its schizophrenic nature stops it from being able to build up to anything impressive plotwise (the film would have been much better served if it had kept to one plot or the other), and it’s nowhere near as funny as its kindred used car comedy Used Cars. Instead, it just kind of sits there, pleasantly inoffensive, and never really trying for fear of failure. The only time you really get any sense of how good the movie could have been is at the very beginning, where he happens to drive past a funeral and tries to cheer up the grieving widow by selling her a used car. It’s almost deceptive how good that scene is, when the rest of the film is unable to keep up. Still, this is the ideal level of quality for a movie you’d expect to see on cable on a weekend afternoon: mild fluff, moderately entertaining while it’s there, and utterly unmemorable once it’s done.

Rating: **

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True Lies

This was the last big hit Arnold Schwarzenegger had before his film career started to fall apart, and watching it again, it’s not too hard to figure out why. From the mid-80s to the mid-90s, a time when there were a number of major action movie stars, from Stallone to Van Damme, he was THE action star. When this came out, it seemed to be, and was, another sure-fire winner, with him reuniting with James Cameron, who had previously written and directed the Terminator movies. Somehow, though, it all went wrong immediately afterwards; his next movie Junior, released the same year, was a comedy where he played a scientist that impregnates himself, and was his biggest box office flop up to that point. What followed was a string of commercial and critical duds, with Terminator 3, released nine years after True Lies, being the only hit he’s had since.

As I said before, this film, while still good, shows what was going wrong for his career. It’s an action-comedy-romance that keeps going to the wrong types of excess without giving us enough of the good excess that we crave with these types of films. The film is basically broken up in two halves. The first involves Arnold as a spy who’s so secret that even his family thinks he’s just a boring white collar worker, and who becomes scandalized when he unwittingly stumbles across what he thinks is evidence that his wife (Jamie Lee Curtis) is having an affair with a used car dealer that has told her that he himself is a spy. The second half is a more traditional Arnold piece involving him and Curtis trying to gun down a bunch of terrorists before they can launch a nuke at an American city. Neither of these parts is done badly, though quite frankly, the movie would have been better if one or the other had been shortened or done away with entirely. At just under two and a half hours long, it’s a bit excessive (there’s that term again).

Indeed, it’s the more traditional “Let’s kill the terrorists!” part that would have been best to lessen. There are good chunks of it that simply feel like everyone was just going through the motions, generally playing it more for laughs than for anything else. There’s no real sense of danger anywhere, so you can’t find it truly exhilarating, and it doesn’t reach the heights of complete insanity that recent action films like Live Free or Die Hard or Shoot ‘Em Up do, so you can’t enjoy it on that level either. The 80s style “big muscles, big guns” action film was dying out by this point in general, so I suppose this worked well enough for people as the coda. It was clear that a change was needed to the formula or else stagnation would set in, which is, well, what did end up happening. It’s a shame, because I really like Schwarzenegger’s work, and wish he had been able to make the leap into comedies and dramas, but apparently he just couldn’t do it.

So in conclusion, this is a good movie and if you haven’t seen it, do so. Just be aware that it’s not his best work, nor does its climax work as well as its first hour.

Rating: ***

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Terror at Baxter U

I think I may have to take a week off from watching the Tomb of Terrors collection. I just had the pleasure of being in my first ever car accident last night, and I frankly don’t need the grief of watching a group of non-filmmaker’s shitty attempt at crafting a horror movie just for this site. So yeah, perhaps this one didn’t have as much of a chance with me going in as some other films I’ve watched, but it’s still every bit as bad as any other film I’ve yet seen on this set.

The movie’s about a series of murders at a college, which would initially lead one to assume it’s a slasher movie, if not for how they repeatedly beat into our heads that this is clearly the menace of the deadly chupacabra, which someone has summoned to life there to feed upon the student body. The movie’s fundamental ineptness can be witnessed just from how they keep hammering home that it feeds on the Mexican Day of the Dead, which we Americans celebrate as Halloween. This despite them being on different days, and having nothing to do with each other whatsoever, yes.

The movie pretty much has no redeeming features whatsoever. There is not a single likeable character to be found; the supporting characters are all obnoxious idiots, and the main character, who I guess we’re supposed to get behind, has such an obnoxious, scene killing stutter that you begin praying for his death right from when he first opens his mouth. The attempts at humor are just delightful, as apparently one guy dressing up as a clown for a Halloween party and spending a tedious length of time staggering around on the streets drunk and peeing in a park is just the height of comedy to whatever morons made this. The murder scenes are made so clumsily, with tons of fast-cutting and red filters placed over the lens, that you can’t even see what the hell’s going on. If it’s better than The Traveler, that’s only because it’s twenty minutes shorter.

I’m not asking for all that much from this collection. If there’s just one good movie per disc among the crap, I’ll be quite content. So far I’ve made it through the first disc, and Disk Jockey was the only one that was even halfway decent. The film that I had specifically bought the set for (I won’t say it just now, so it can be a fun surprise for later) doesn’t come up until the ninth disc, and I can only hope that I’ll be able to hold out that long. Confidence is really not high at the moment.

Rating: Zero stars

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The Traveler

Oy. Three movies into this boxed set and I’m already deeply regretting having purchased it. You should all really get your own copies and follow along with me so that you can properly understand the pain I’m going through.

The Traveler gets it wrong on pretty much every level. The story is a mix of Survivor and a torture porn film, with the characters trapped in a house by a demon who makes them keeping voting for one of their own to be tortured to death. Given how well it’s done, though, I have to assume that the filmmakers didn’t really enjoy either, but they saw that Survivor and films like Saw and Hostel were popular, and wanted to ride that wave to success, but didn’t really understand what it was about each that made people like them. The acting is the most wooden and lifeless I’ve yet seen from this set, with the main character particularly never really coming off as caring about anything, instead seeming for all the world like he’s downing Quaaludes before each take. This would actually seem to have some level of continuity, as his wife spends a good chunk of the movie constantly shifting position like she’s going through withdrawal. The demonic figure is equally retarded, as he seems to be spending most of his time trying to ensure he doesn’t screw up his faux posh accent and doesn’t actually get around to being menacing or really much of anything. This is especially problematic when they finally shockingly reveal at the end that – WOW! – he’s actually Lucifer.

The film’s story suffers heavily from decompression, as if Brian Michael Bendis had been writing it. They’ve got barely enough actual story for an hour, and yet by hook and by crook they manage to stretch it out to over a hundred minutes. How do they do this? Well, I won’t reveal all of their secret filmmaking tricks, but they spared no effort in showing us the main couple’s lengthy phone conversation and subsequent car ride to nowhere at the beginning that serves exactly zero purpose beyond getting them to Death House. When they arrive, they’re treated to a number of horror stories about the house by the group that’s already there, and a whole none of these stories has any connection with the actual plot, so I assume they’re just there to kill some time. Now, if the film’s story suffers from some heavy decompression, the film itself suffers from some pretty heavy compression problems. There are a number of points in the film that look really blocky and blurry, which I’d say was a consequence of slapping four films onto one disc, if not for the fact that compression problems weren’t nearly this bad on the first two movies I watched.

I suppose it’s nice that the film is actually terrible across the board, since it means that nobody with any talent actually had their time wasted by working on this. That’s about all the good I can say for it, though. Just one closing comment to whoever did the sound effects for the film: when someone swings a pipe at someone else, it should not be making a sound like they had just swung it at another pipe. The human body is not made of cast iron. Just FYI.

Rating: Zero stars

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Lifeblood

Yeah, this was a little closer to what I was expecting from this set. Here we get a vampire movie that combines all the worst nonsense of the Gothic overelaborate borderline porn that has infested vampire movies for decades with a budget that’s so nonexistent that rather than trying to turn into bats or anything, the vamps will just run away on foot from their enemies. Worst of all, despite the filmmakers knowing that they’re making a piece of shit (and come on, they had to know), they hardly attempted to put the slightest bit of humor into it at all, which would have at least made it somewhat watchable.

To be fair, there is some amusement to be had from both the atrocious dialogue and the atrocious acting, particularly the latter. For instance, at one point a vampire walks in on a group of girls doing lines of cocaine. One girl looks up and in a dull monotone says, “oh shit, you’re one of them,” before snorting another line. Earlier a female vamp is trying to, I guess seduce, a human girl before feeding on her. She asks her “are you nervous,” then the instant the girl is done saying her line she immediately goes on with “you smell nice,” then just sits there waiting for her cue before asking “has anyone ever touched you like this before?” This is why it’s not always the best idea to fill a cast out with your friends and family. In a similar vein, even if you want to support your friend’s band, grinding your movie to a halt when you’re not even twenty minutes into it so that they can play an entire song in a club is not the best possible use of your running time.

The film fails on just about every level. The dialogue is lame, the acting is worse, the editing is curiously choppy (there are a couple instances where people giving speeches are cut off mid-sentence as the film abruptly jumps forward to later in their speech with no reason at all), and a great many of the outdoors scenes are so dark that it’s virtually impossible to see what’s going on. When my favorite part of the film comes from the main character looking like a dead ringer for Louis C.K., the film has some serious problems. Writer-director Steven Niles may want to consider finding another field of employment, or at least consider revising past the rough draft phase of his next script.

Rating: ½ *

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Disk Jockey

As I hinted at a few reviews ago, I have finally gotten the Tomb of Terrors 50 “horror” movie pack. I put horror in quotes there because, as I discovered with the very first movie in the collection, not all of them have anything to do with the horror genre at all.

This collection was a bit of a departure from the two that I had up till now (Horror and Chilling 50 packs) in two potentially important ways. One, it was put together by a different company, and two, rather than collecting a bunch of older out of print films, it instead collects a bunch of modern films that were just too small time to make it onto their own DVDs (this one, for instance, is so obscure that it doesn’t even appear on IMDB). Neither of those feels like a positive change (at least with the other sets you can be guaranteed 4 or 5 actual classic films in the mix), but at least they started out with an okay film.

What’s nice about this film is that the makers of it realized that they were never going to make a legitimately great film, and so just tried to make it as goofy as possible. When the main character, a white gangsta boi trying to hunt down a girl possessing incriminating evidence about him, gets flustered and stops time to talk to the camera like Zack Morris, you know this isn’t going to be the most normal film. When it just goes for broke on the silliness, it generally does work pretty well, the high point for me being a randomly slow motion fist fight between the gangsta and a group of women. Its short length (57 minutes) is also a plus, as it knows when to duck on out (at one point toward the end, he yells at his partner that they have to hurry up and get the girl, because the movie is only an hour long) before it really wears thin.

However, on the technical side, there are some pretty glaring flaws. There are a number of sound errors, such as the complete lack of an actual gunshot noise the first time someone gets shot. The biggest screw up in this vein comes towards the end, as the sound goes off sync with the video, and we spend the last ten minutes or so of the film hearing the characters lines a second or two before their lips move. I get that this was done on the cheap, but come on now. There’s also the pretty glaring problem of the soundtrack, which insists on blaring electronica music throughout the entire film, regardless of the appropriateness of the scene. It may have worked in Run Lola Run, but that doesn’t mean you can just throw it in anywhere, you know?

Overall though, this was not a bad introduction to the collection. At its price, I’m basically paying about fifty cents per movie, and this one was definitely worth at least that much. I’m sure there will be plenty more down the road that will make me regret this purchase, but they can wait for another day.

Rating: **

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No Country For Old Men

So here it is, what may well be the best movie of 2007 (at least the first one I’ve seen that can knock Grindhouse off of the rather lofty position it’s been maintaining in my mind). This comes, mind you, from someone whose expectations of greatness from this film had become so unreasonably high that anything short of perfection was probably going to be a disappointment.

This is the first film from the Coen brothers that I’ve seen since 2001’s The Man Who Wasn’t There. Given the general reaction people had to Intolerable Cruelty and the remake of The Ladykillers, I don’t think I was really missing too much with them, but I have been eager for some time to see this. So much so, in fact, that when my initial efforts to see it were thwarted, I went ahead and bought the book, figuring I’d just wait for the DVD. I’m glad I didn’t actually wait that long.

The film’s plot is pretty basic. A Texas boy named Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) happens to stumble across drug deal done horribly wrong, and decides to reach for the stars by stealing a briefcase with 2 million dollars inside. Chasing after him are Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who wants to protect him from the other men chasing him, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a psychopath that leaves a constant trail of bodies in his wake, and Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), a cocky bounty hunter who’s been hired to deal with the Chigurh problem. The film is visually just amazing; there’s a slow and steady progression to events that leaves you with plenty of time to take in the scenery, and the Coen brothers show a control over their camerawork greater than has been seen in their work since Fargo. In fact, I’d say this might well be their greatest film yet, an impressive achievement for a duo that already have such an impressive filmography.

Josh Brolin is not having a very good day.

The performances are equally powerful. Javier Bardem is one of the scariest movie villains I’ve seen in a long time; he has very little emotion to him, seeming to view all the murders he commits as something he’s required, or perhaps simply fated, to do. Tommy Lee Jones, fresh off of his success directing and starring in another miserable western (The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada), just seems completely overwhelmed here. He views himself as a relic from another time, and has no idea what he’s doing anymore, or how to even try to catch what he openly calls a “ghost” rather than a man. Kelly Macdonald also excels as Moss’s wife, and despite her comparatively brief screen time, she manages to be the only one in the entire film that really stands up to Chigurh and his monstrousness.

There are so many powerful scenes throughout this film, an entire review could be made just of cataloguing them. There’s a scene early on, shown in the trailer, where Anton is in a store, flips a coin, and makes the store owner call whether it’s heads or tails. The tension just continues to build, as despite it never being explicitly stated what the coin toss will decide, both Anton and the owner (and the audience) fully understand what’s riding on that toss. The idea of someone’s life being determined by something as random as the toss of a coin comes up again at the end of the film. Sheriff Bell, knowing that Anton returned to a different crime scene the next night, decides to investigate a new crime scene at a motel. He has two taped off rooms to choose from when he arrives; we see, though he doesn’t, that one of them contains Anton waiting to kill him. Which door he chooses is completely random, yet it’s going to make all the difference between whether he lives or dies. The coin toss comes up differently for another character shortly afterward.

A good deal has been made of the ending. While I personally really enjoyed it, I can see why others would have a problem (SPOILER WARNING, by the way). The film builds itself up to a fairly explosive climax, only to avoid all expectations and give us a mean, ugly anticlimax instead. Two main characters are murdered without us seeing it, one of whom we didn’t even know was in any immediate danger. Leaving the scene of the second killing, Chigurh is struck by a car that runs a red light; he leaves his car with a badly broken arm, and is helpfully told by witnesses not to worry, for police and ambulances are already on their way. We expect this to be where he is finally caught, only for him to buy a shirt and secrecy off one of the young witnesses, and slip away back into the shadows, leaving us with just one broken down character left that is no longer able to deal with life. The Coen brothers made a wise decision to heavily shorten the epilogue, which in the book went on for quite some time and gave us a lot more philosophizing. That worked okay in the book, but it would not have worked here. Here it takes just the time it needs to end on a note of somber despair at the state of things, and then we get the credits.

Rating: ****

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Away From Her

Yes, I know, I have an abundance of positive reviews on this site. I’ve ordered the Tomb of Terrors 50 movie pack to help counter this, but the damnable thing has yet to arrive. When it does, though, I hope you’ll all have the proper amount of appreciation for the pain I’m willing to go through for your entertainment.

Entertainment is perhaps not the proper word to use in a review for this film, though pain certainly is. This is one of the most difficult to watch films I’ve seen in some time, as an elderly couple played by Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie finds it has to come to grips with the wife succumbing to Alzheimer’s. This is no standard Hollywood drama where they overcome difficulties and then rediscover each other and their love by the end, and it all works out well. The very nature of the disease makes sure of that. Instead, after a growing understanding that Christie is deteriorating fast enough that she needs professional care, she decides that she should be placed into a retirement facility so that her husband can be spared the pain of seeing her wither away. He is told when admitting her that they have a policy that the family must wait 30 days before they can first visit, so that the patient can get fully settled in, and when his 30 days are up and he shows up to visit, he discovers that she has largely forgotten him and has fallen in love with a fellow wheelchair bound patient there.

Such a story seems almost ripped from recent headlines. Back in October, the news reported that former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s husband, who is also in a retirement home for Alzheimer’s, has forgotten about her and found love with another patient there. She was happy that he’d been able to find love to help him cope with his condition, and here, while initially jealous, Pinsent eventually comes to the same conclusion, though his love and guilt for her still compel him to visit every day to make sure she is doing well.

To me, Alzheimer’s is possibly the cruelest disease imaginable. To have one’s mind slowly rotting away like that, slowly forgetting everything that made you a person instead of an object, is just an atrocity, and one that’s just as hard on caregivers. How are you supposed to care for a loved one when that loved one is slowly forgetting who you are? Their interactions with each other are just painful to see; she doesn’t quite remember him, but is still cognizant enough to know that she should, and so puts on the brave face of someone pretending to be okay when nothing is, while he spends most of his time in solitude, internalizing all of his pain in the apparent hope that such quiet stoicism will make everything easier on her. It’s a tender, sad, nicely understated work, and one that everyone should see.

Rating: ****

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Charlie Wilson's War

Political thrillers are always a pretty tricky genre to deal with. On the whole, the genre tends to be done fairly poorly, with Hollywood either deciding (with admittedly some measure of justification) that their audience needs the final film dumbed down heavily so that everyone will be able to understand it, or just deciding to make it into a clumsy, blunt weapon to beat their political interests into everyone’s heads. It’s to this film’s great credit that, outside of a couple lines here and there, neither of those problems occurs.

The film stars Tom Hanks as Congressman Charlie Wilson, a low-ranking Representative from Texas who gets caught up in trying to help the Afghanis fight off the Russian invasion of their country in the early 80s. Assisting him in this endeavor are Julia Roberts as a fairly fundamentalist Christian millionaire with a lot of influence among similarly religious Congressmen, and (in a brilliant performance) Philip Seymour Hoffman as an abrasive CIA agent that will try anything in his power to get Hanks to heavily increase black ops funding to arm the Afghanis. What’s wonderful about these people is how they’re a pack of fairly charming creeps. Roberts can’t shut up about her religious beliefs even though it’s running the risk of alienating several key financiers, Hoffman chain smokes his way through the film and seems totally unable to meet someone without infuriating them within half a minute, and Hanks doesn’t seem to make it through a single scene without a young female staffer on one arm and a drink in the other (it’s nice how, back in our more idealistic 80s, nothing is thought about him nicknaming one of his pretty young staffers Jailbait). This is some of each actor’s best work; they fully become these people, leaving no trace of their normal personas around, and they all, particularly Hoffman, get some pretty hilarious lines in here and there.

Given all the present-day drama with Afghanistan and Pakistan, it’s an interesting time to make a film about the United States helping to rescue the Afghanis from the Soviets (though I imagine the Afghanis themselves might have a somewhat different opinion as to who was most responsible for their eventual victory). The film works pretty well, though, particularly in how gradual the victory is. Wilson first becomes inspired to help when seeing Dan Rather doing a piece on the situation in 1980, and they don’t manage to get the weapons out there until close to the end of the decade. Even then, it shows us just how minor the conditions for victory are considered, as we see stock footage of fighting, with captions like “Spring 1987: 47 Russian helicopters shot down”, as if that was a major military coup.

The ending doesn’t quite work, as I guess it was fated not to, as they seem to feel obligated to point out how Afghanistan eventually turned out once we had left and try to claim that it’s all our fault for not helping them rebuild after the end of the war, but the movie does work very well up until then. I’m trying right now to think of another political film that I liked as much as this, and I’m frankly finding it difficult to come up with any from this decade other than The Lives of Others. It’s a dying breed of film, heavily weakened by clumsy, ham-handed efforts from writers, directors, and producers trying to hammer audiences with their political leanings, making a film like this that mostly manages to achieve a measure of subtlety and evenness all the more impressive.

Rating: ***

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The Lives of Others

This film bears a great kinship to the old Francis Coppola classic The Conversation. Both were about men who secretly listened in on private conversations, and who accidentally overheard secrets that would be extremely destructive if made known. The films do part ways when it comes to awards, though; The Conversation, being in English, was nominated for Best Picture, while this film, n German with English subtitles, had to content itself with winning Best Foreign Language Film, a kind of conciliatory prize that’s there to acknowledge that most Academy voters can’t be bothered to watch films that aren’t in proper American.

The film is set during the mid-80s, when the Stasi are keeping tabs on virtually every citizen in Eastern Germany. This is not the most pleasant time for anyone there; fear and paranoia run rampant, though the most crippling emotional state is sheer despair. As one character points out, when the GDR stopped tracking the number of suicides in the nation, back in 1977, it had the second highest suicide rate of any country in Europe, behind only Hungary. Into this world resides Hauptmann Wiesler, an ambitious Stasi agent who is assigned to bug the home of a famous playwright in hopes of uncovering evidence against a corrupt politician that the playwright’s actress girlfriend is possibly having an affair with. Got all that? Good, because the plot only gets more labyrinthine from there, and it wouldn’t be fair to spoil what Wiesler actually uncovers about the playwright, nor what he decides to do about it, nor the moral dilemmas involved, nor how it all ends.

The comparison must be made, once more, to The Conversation. Both films employ protagonists that occupy a murky gray moral zone. Even if they want to generally do the right thing, their careers are based off of spying on people’s most intimate moments. Both also face the same choice, of whether or not to rebel against their employers and try to retain what little bit of their souls they have left. This is somewhat fast paced than its spiritual predecessor was, but I’d say they are both at about the same level of overall quality. This film fully earned its Best Foreign Language Film win, and frankly should have gotten a Best Picture nomination to go along with it; it certainly deserved it more than a few of the actual nominations did.

Rating: ****

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Shoot 'Em Up

This is about the most pure, undiluted “action” film I have seen since…well, possibly ever. I mean that as a compliment, too. There are far too many genre films out there that keep weakening themselves by trying to include elements that aren’t iconic to the genre in an effort to reach a wider audience. I say that this approach is nothing more than shameless pandering, and I shall not tolerate it.

The film stars Clive Owen as a potentially nameless badass that goes around gunning down and beating the shit out of just about everyone he sees in an effort to protect a newborn baby that is being threatened by an outright army of goons (his protection actually begins a bit early, as he starts by trying to protect the mother with a gunfight while she’s in labor). The bad guys are led by Paul Giamatti in the most brilliantly over the top performance he’s yet given, and Monica Bellucci is also in it as a lactating hooker who gets roped into helping Owen, and that’s about all the plot you need or will get.

What makes this film so brilliant is in how the film opens up with over the top nonsense (gotta love that ridiculously blatant CG baby), and just keeps topping itself as the film goes on. This is no minor feat, when one of the first scenes has the kid on a merry-go-round being menaced by Giamatti armed with a sniper rifle (wielded from a parked car for maximum secrecy), and is protected by Clive Owen shooting the handles of the merry-go-round so that it keeps spinning and causing Giamatti to miss. If you can visualize such a scene within your mind, and not want to see this as a result, then I just don’t know what’s wrong with you.

I haven’t seen every action movie of the past year, but I’m gonna go ahead and say that this is the best one of 2007 anyway. Yes, even better than Live Free or Die Hard. Why, then, am I giving it a lower rating? Because I’m a contrary asshole, of course. I don’t need to explain myself to you. Just go give this one a view. The movie bafflingly tanked in theaters (well, given that Alvin & the Chipmunks is one of the highest grossing films of 2007, I guess it’s not THAT baffling), so now it’s on all of you to get it on DVD and show your support for awesomeness. Remember, if you ride without Shoot ‘Em Up, you ride with Hitler!

Rating: *** ½

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Humanoids from the Deep

I’m a little curious as to why this movie is so hard to come by. Yes, it’s out of print, but it really shouldn’t be. While yes, it is pretty incompetently made, and yes, the acting, if anything is even worse than the directing, but…perhaps I should just start from the beginning.

The film was one of the last produced by Roger Corman during his grand late-50s-to-early-80s zero budget exploitation movie run, a run that helped launched the careers of such illustrious directors as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, and which gave us actors like Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda. This film, directed by Barbara Peters (listed as Barbara Peeters in the film, which was her amazingly clever pseudonym), concerns a small fishing town beset by a new species of amphibious mutant fish men that are going around killing the men and impregnating the women. The fish men kind of look like C.H.U.D.s with retardedly long forearms, and they seem to have some measure of difficulty figuring out how they’re supposed to act. For starters, they kill their first victims in the daytime, only to later be classified as nocturnal hunters. Then there’s the problem of how they have such an expanded cranial capacity they look like their brains are actually exposed to the open air, and yet they keep getting caught on fish hooks. They also have the strange habit of hiding underwater that doesn’t even come up to the characters’ waists, despite the creatures all being well over six feet tall. Still, though, they’re quite capable of ripping off a bikini top, and God bless ‘em for it.

There’s a subplot involving a new cannery that will supposedly bring in lots of revenue and jobs to the town, but which is opposed by the local Native Americans because it’s set to be built on their holy lands or something. It wasn’t all that well explained, and never gets resolved, perhaps because the writers realized the whole plotline should be dropped if only they knew how to stretch the film out to feature length without it. Heaven forbid they actually fill up extra time with more violence and nudity or anything (Bonus trivia: Barbara Peters got replaced near the end of filming by uncredited director Jimmy Murakami for reportedly not putting enough nudity into the film. This despite her directing career having begun by making softcore lesbian films a decade prior), that would have just been crazy.

The cast is every bit as laughably bad as the writers and director. Led by Doug McClure (who IMDB tells me was half of the inspiration for the Simpsons character Troy McClure, the other half being actor Troy Donahue), this intrepid crew of actors mumbles and stammers their way through the whole film, pausing only to give an appropriate amount of blank stares. There really isn’t a single person who lands in front of the camera here that did not in some way deserve to be beaten repeatedly with a brick, so the fairly high body count of the film (starting off with an annoying child, always a nice way to get on my good side) was nice.

This film is a confused, jumbled mess. Outside of the really terrific looking women and the wonderfully poor monsters, there is nothing to recommend about it. So why am I rating it so highly, and why do I think it needs to be brought back to DVD? Simply put, it’s one of those movies that’s so bad that it transcends itself and becomes well worth watching. It’s almost like watching an early Troma film, if Troma hadn’t actively been trying to be funny. If this ever gets a proper release (the only DVD ever made for it was full screen and has been out of print for roughly half a decade), I highly recommend anyone with an interest in film trash to check it out. You won’t be disappointed.

Rating: ** ½

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Two-Lane Blacktop

There’s something to be said, really, for the general feel of driving down an open road, being able to just drive completely at your leisure without worrying about traffic like you would on virtually every road within a hundred or so miles of where I live (yay New Jersey!). It’s a feeling I’ve known all too rarely, and it’s a feeling that you’re going to have to be really ridiculously fond of if you’re going to enjoy this movie.

The plot is…well, nonexistent, really. There’s two cars involved in a good-natured cross-country race, and that’s it. The film is really about the act of driving itself, and watching the cars roaring down a long series of highway roads out west. Neither car really seems too eager to win the race, either, as they each continually stop to help the car lagging behind. I am referring to the cars as if they were the people themselves, because the people driving them seem to live as nothing more than maintainers of their vehicles. Nobody in the film even has enough character development to warrant a name, they’re just Driver, Mechanic, and Girl, all in the Chevy, and GTO, in his GTO. As I said, this isn’t a movie about plot or characters, it’s about driving and the road itself.

Quite frankly, I am not the kind of car nut or driving nut that’s going to be able to enjoy a movie like this at the length it is (103 minutes), but I will say that for what it is it’s done well. There’s quite a number of nice-looking shots to be had here (though really, you film vast landscapes long enough you’re going to find any number of nice-looking shots), and there’s nothing really offensively bad about it all. It certainly isn’t mired in pretentiousness like its dreadful spiritual predecessor Easy Rider is, and I’m grateful for that. Unfortunately, that isn’t enough in itself to justify the film, and the film itself doesn’t provide any better reasons.

Rating: * ½

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The Bourne Ultimatum

I may not have been as prepared as I possibly could have been for this. I enjoyed the first movie well enough, but never got around to seeing the second before watching this, the theoretical end to the trilogy. I just assumed (correctly, as it turns out) that since the first movie relied more on appearing to have a plot than on really having one, I’d be pretty safe, since I’m apparently not supposed to know what’s actually going on. It’s as good a plan as any, I guess.

This is the third film in the Jason Bourne series, coming out in a year which was not kind to the third movie of any series (with the lone exception, I would maintain, of Pirates of the Caribbean), and it’s to the film’s credit that it mostly works fairly well. The plot involves a bunch of nonsense about clandestine governmental groups all plotting out various assassinations, and we finally get to discover Bourne’s origins, only to learn that, yes, the man of mystery really isn’t nearly as interesting once we know his backstory. The owners of the Bond franchise would do well to remember this with their next film.

The action scenes are of course the important part of the film, and they’re done pretty well, I guess. There’s a heavy reliance on Shaky Cam, which is probably the single most painfully overused cinematic technique of the decade, but at least when it’s used here director Paul Greengrass (who’s a good deal better at making dramas than action films) makes sure we can actually still see what’s going on. There’s nothing here that reaches the heights of, say, the duel with the sniper from the first film, or any of the actions scenes from Casino Royale (or Die Hards 1, 3, and 4, while we’re at it), but they’re still competent, even if they don’t excel.

That’s really the main problem with the film. It’s competent, but doesn’t reach for more than that. Everyone involved in this film can and has done a good deal better than this, and seems to be here solely for the paycheck. There’s nothing really wrong with that, I suppose, but it’s not exactly doing me any favors here, now is it?

Rating: ** ½

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Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse

Back in the late 70s, director Francis Ford Coppola was on what could mildly be termed a “hot streak”. He had made three movies so far that decade, all three of which were nominated for Best Picture, and two of which won. When it came time to really show everyone what he could do, he decided to tackle a project that had stymied even Orson Welles, by making a film version of the Joseph Conrad novel “Heart of Darkness”, which he renamed Apocalypse Now and set in the Vietnam war. This documentary, originally started by his wife Eleanor as a video companion of her diary during filming, instead became a chronicle of one of the most disastrous productions in film history.

It’s rather amazing watching this and seeing just how much of a mess filming was. Originally slated to film for sixteen weeks (already a rather long film time, though I guess suitable for an intended war epic), it wound up stretching out to over two thirds of a year. Just so you younguns out there have some point of comparison for this, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, all ten or eleven hours of it, was filmed in less time than this one movie. The film had to deal with weather problems (production was shut down temporarily due to a monsoon), governmental problems (the Filipino government, which was providing the helicopters for the film, had to keep recalling them to fight Communist insurgents in the southern islands), casting problems (a few weeks into filming, Coppola decided Harvey Keitel was all wrong for the lead, and replaced him with Martin Sheen, who later also held up production when he had a heart attack), and ending problems (Coppola hated the ending he had in the script, but as he was unable to come up with a better one, he eventually just filmed Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando improving various endings for three weeks out of sheer desperation).

In the end, after an appropriately lengthy editing period, he remarkably wound up making what I personally feel is the single greatest war movie of all time, but there was a pretty hefty price. In the near thirty years since Apocalypse Now’s release, he has yet to make another film that comes close to matching his work from the 70s, making this a very aptly titled doc. This isn’t the best documentary I’ve ever seen, but it more than accomplished its main goal: I really want to see Apocalypse Now again. It’s been way too long since I’ve watched it.

Rating: ***

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The Shining

I’d like to wish you all a happy new year. For my new year’s resolution to myself, I’m no longer doing reviews on weekends. Go me! Anyway, onto the review. If you didn’t notice the decade this is listed under, this is actually the 90s TV miniseries, and not the 80s movie by Stanley Kubrick. I had last seen this when it first aired, and actually found it to be superior to Kubrick’s version, but since then I haven’t watched it a single time (unlike Kubrick’s, which I’ve seen two or three times since), so I was curious to see how it held up.

I have to say, while it’s not great by any means, it does still hold up pretty well. It obviously doesn’t pack the visual punch of the film version, partly because Kubrick’s main strength was in his visual flair (indeed, I’d argue that it was his only strength), and partly because, despite coming out 17 years later, it had about the same budget to cover almost double the length of film, so the ability to just build the most lavish sets possible wasn’t there. Director Mick Garris wisely realized this going in, and made his focus the plot and the characters, who had been sadly neglected in the film.

I guess it’s not fair to spend half my review here discussing another film, but I guess it’s inevitable. Steven Weber may not have the talent of Jack Nicholson, but he’s protected by having an actual character with a good deal of depth to him, rather than starting off as a raving madman and unraveling further from there. (Lightning fast recap, for the two of you out there who have never read the book, seen the movie, or seen the TV mini: recovering alcoholic dad, long-suffering mom, and psychic son all go to be caretakers for a haunted hotel in Colorado for the winter, ghosts drive dad crazy, he tries to kill family, fails, the end) The family also fares better than the one-note characterizations they all got in the original, particularly the mom, played by Rebecca De Mornay, who doesn’t have to spend the film looking wide-eyed and panicked.

It does have some problems to it, mind you. I mentioned earlier that it’s no great shakes visually, though still mostly competent. It’s mostly well-directed (rather surprisingly, considering this is from the same guy that gave us the other King films Sleepwalkers and Desperation, and Psycho 4), but there are patches early on, mostly regarding the flashbacks, where the discussions of the father’s alcoholism veer dangerous close to after school special territory. There’s also the problem of its sheer length. Stephen King has a tendency to write lengthy novels, and at four and a half hours this still doesn’t quite manage to include everything, but it certainly gives it the old college try. This approach does provide it with a depth that no movie version could possibly match, but it also has the side effect of making the film start out tremendously slowly. There really isn’t much that happens during the first hour beyond introducing us to the characters and the hotel, so if you need something a bit more fast-paced, you should probably avoid this (and, it should probably go without saying, King’s other minis). However, if you’re willing to take your time with a story, and have the patience for a lengthy story, you should enjoy this.

Rating: ***

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