Man, am I glad to be ending this week with at least one movie that doesn't completely stink. Anyway, much like with Class Reunion Massacre, I had gotten this film as a result of scouring various message boards searching for a new obscure horror thrill. Really, there’s nothing quite like the rush that comes from discovering a movie that nobody else has ever heard of. If this film, then, was not quite as magnificent as it had been hyped up to be (and really, few horror movies honestly could be as great as this was made out to be), it’s still impressive enough that I’m glad I went through so much effort to hunt it down.
It was described to me as Argento-ish, which certainly didn’t hurt its chances with me, and thankfully it mostly lives up to that lofty praise. The film follows an American archaeologist who flies out to Italy to meet with a colleague about some ancient writings he’s uncovered, only to be repeatedly warned by his friend and others that the town is filled with danger, and he must get out before it’s too late. Naturally, after his friend is brutally killed hours after their conversation, he decides that there’s nothing to do but investigate what he had found there and what’s going on with the town. I feel I must interject at this time with a small editorial. When you fly out to a creepy town where everyone openly stares at you like they want you dead, and multiple people tell you that you need to leave immediately because your life is in danger, and the person you are there to meet with is violently killed in a bizarre and monstrous way, you may want to consider heeding everyone’s advice and getting out of Dodge while you can. Also, when someone warns you that most of the town is in on it, and you need to be careful who you talk to, it may not be the wisest decision to then go and tell all to the very first person you see. Granted, then we wouldn’t have had much of a movie, but still. His ongoing efforts manage to uncover evidence of an ancient sect devoted to spider gods, and a decent-sized body count begins to accumulate as it slowly dawns on him that he may well have wanted to take everyone’s advice earlier in the film.
If this movie wasn’t quite as wild and brilliant as Suspiria, it was still suitably creepy and grim as an Italian horror film from the 80s should be. While the townsfolk are able to go over the top with their scariness when they need to, early on they manage to stay frightening on a perfectly subtle level, which really only makes it much scarier than a movie filled with quick jump scares in lieu of real frights. For instance, the morning after his friend is killed, he goes out to eat with a local, and while she’s flirtatiously grilling him about what kind of research he and his friend are there for, he slowly becomes aware that nobody else in the restaurant is talking, but instead are all staring at him. Then when they see he’s noticed them, they all get up and silently file out, as his dining companion keeps idly chatting with him to try to deflect attention away from everyone else. It’s a brilliant moment, in a film with a few of them.
This is not an easy movie to find (I had to get a bootleg from Midnight Video), but if you’re a devoted horror fan it will be worth your while. It’s one of those films like Suspiria or Inferno (or the upcoming Mother of Tears) that just creates an entire dark world just one wrong turn away from our own, filled with monsters and damnation. I live for movies like that.
Rating: *** ½
Friday, February 29, 2008
Spider Labyrinth
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Abberdine County Conjuror
I’ll be honest here. I didn’t manage to watch all of Abberdine County Conjuror. Due to its unnecessary length of 135 minutes, I had to spend some of its running time getting myself ready for work. As such, in recognition of the fact that it may well have had something really amazing happen that I missed, I’m giving it an extra star for potential awesomeness, even though the bits I saw were roughly ½ * worthy.
The film follows a small band of people as they roam around some wooded campgrounds in the south and run afoul of a 150 year old conjuror and his southern hillbilly witches and zombie brigade. To give some idea of how fine the attention to detail was in the film, the zombies, in the vein of the Italian zombie movies of the 70s and 80s, wear dark cloaks that cover their bodies like ancient monks, and sneakers. The conjuror needs the blood of those that wander into his/her* land, see, in order to stay alive, but he’s run afoul of Australia’s favorite zombie hunter, Sean Steel. It’s possible that Sean Steel may actually have been trying to be British, but his accent keeps on slipping from one cliché to another, so it was hard to be certain.
It’s hard to review a movie when you’re not entirely certain of what happened in it, but I’ll fill you in about what I did see. I saw a great deal of padding in the form of long shots of people driving or walking through a woods, a trick one normally sees in movies struggling to reach the 80 or 90 minute mark, not in movies that are already over two hours. I saw the problem that arises when shooting a river in DV, where it looks almost, but not quite, completely unlike an actual river, even though it is. I’m not a tech guy, so I don’t know why DV has such a hard time showing running water, but I will admit I do like how weird it looks. I also saw one rather curious bit, where a woman dressed only in a blanket and sneakers acts drunk while trying and failing to hide her breasts. Since there’s nobody around her, she can only be trying to hide them from the camera so they won’t show up on film, and so their appearance anyway points to some potential legal difficulties somewhere along the film’s journey to the world of home video. Finally, I saw that there were no less than 6 screenwriters, which seems excessive for a film based around people running around in the woods and getting attacked by zombies and witches.
I think that I’m being very overly optimistic in giving this film an extra star here, as everything I personally witnessed screamed pure garbage. It’s not an outright offensively bad movie, like Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires and Rape is a Circle were, but it’s also nothing that you and your buddies couldn’t slap together in a few weekends’ time either. I’m very happy that I’m done with this damnable collection for another week, as I don’t think I could really take another day of this.
* I wasn’t entirely clear, from the parts I saw, whether the conjuror was male or female. The first time we hear it speak, it does so with a man’s voice, and yet the characters keep referring to it as her, so I clearly missed something.
Rating: * ½
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Rape is a Circle
Each copy of disc 4 of the Tomb of Terrors collection should be set on fire to spare anyone who has yet to watch it. Granted, I have yet to watch the last film on the disc, but given that Abberdine County Conjuror has a listed running time of a ponderously long 133 minutes, and has an IMDB rating of 1.7, I’m thinking it a safe bet to say that that won’t be the one to turn everything around.
The rape-revenge genre is a tricky business. Bad taste is frankly expected to go along with it, but thanks to an appropriate lack of general public interest in these films, bad production values and poor quality tend to go along with it as well. So where does this one rank on the very sliding scale of quality for the genre? Well, it goes somewhere below Night Train Murders, a film whose big claim to fame is being the most well-known open ripoff of Last House on the Left. This is not a good place to be.
The film follows three girls, two of whom are foreigners hitch-hiking in the U.S., and the third is a mad lesbian rapist and serial killer who drugs them and takes them back to her home for several days of torture and sexual deviancy. I guess the general mindset of this was that having a girl be the mad rapist torturer would be considered a shocking twist among people with no familiarity with the genre, but it’s really not that helpful, aside from ensuring that every major character in the film is a reasonably attractive woman (or at least a woman with a reasonably attractive body). In a presumed effort to show some level of artistry, she keeps playing with her naked Barbie dolls, showing what she plans to do to her captives, and re-enacting her seemingly unending list of childhood traumas, from being ostracized due to her gayness to being raped by what appears to have been every man she has ever met. Eventually, of course, the two girls escape, and have a tedious conversation about how they need to go back and stop her permanently, and the movie wraps up swiftly with the revenge part of the rape-revenge.
There’s quite a few problems with the film, which I’m sure stuns everyone reading this. For one, if the two girls are from Canada, why do they inexplicably say they’re from the far south? For that matter, why does the one girl have no accent whatsoever, while the other one seems to be trying for a Russian accent? Why is all the dialogue written and spoken like this was intended to be a dom-sub porno? What self-respecting writer-director would want his or her name listed in the credits as Bill Zebub? Who approved that dreadful music, with a girl trying to sound like a low-rent Kate Bush singing over borderline elevator muzak? How can there be so damn many continuity glitches in a one hour film that has virtually no plot to speak of? Why am I still watching these movies, despite how terrible they are?
That last one, unfortunately, I don’t know that I’ll ever get an answer for.
Rating: Zero stars
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Blood Legend
I may have forgotten to mention it yesterday in my review of Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires, but thanks in part to Troma Films, anytime I see a no-budget horror movie, I always instinctively assume it was made in or near New Jersey. That is sometimes a point of pride, though it certainly was a bit embarrassing when that film announced it had been filmed in Newark. I was glad, then, to see that this film was made in California, in a presumed effort to show the world that the west coast can make plenty of bad movies too.
The film follows a coven of witches, a fact that I appreciate not least because its title had led me to fear that this would be yet another dreary vampire film, as they attempt to sacrifice pretty much 90% of the cast in order to resurrect an ancient witch who’s the ancestor of one of our main characters. The movie’s a bit of an unusual one for this collection, as, while still a bad movie, it seems to have had an actual budget. The film looks clean and sharp, without all the technical problems that follow along with the DV look almost every other film in the set has, and the acting, while not exactly good, is at least on the level of a standard 80s slasher movie. The film’s quality content-wise, unfortunately, is a tad below that none-too-lofty benchmark. We get the standard collection of idiot teens that all speak and behave more like ciphers than actual people. We get an attempt at a university mythology class that’s so ineptly handled that it seems everyone in the school, professor included, is deeply retarded. We get an attempt at an ironic twist ending that is just clumsy and sad. We even get an ancient witch that kills people by transforming into a guy in a rubber monster suit, who might have feasibly done battle with Godzilla is there were but a model of Tokyo nearby.
To be fair, there are some nice moments. When the film flashes back to the ancient witch’s trial and burning at the stake, the shouts of the angry mob were pretty damn funny (Think things along the lines of “Ya, what say ya, wench!” and “Speak, ye bitch!”), and the overacting of the one hunter that randomly arrives near the end was rather amusing, but these are small moments overall in a film that is largely not worth seeing. I’m now halfway through the fourth disc, and unless Rape is a Circle or Abberdine County Conjuror impress me a lot more than their titles would indicate, it seems this will be the one that screws up the slow increase in quality each successive disc has given me thus far. It’s a shame, too. This collection was starting to go places.
Rating: *
Monday, February 25, 2008
Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires
It’s amazing to me how a title with so much promise to it could be at the head of a film so terrible. Just looking at that title, one could feasibly assume that this would instantly have a step up from most of the films in the set, but no. Granted, this is roughly the fifteenth vampire film we’ve gotten so far, but nowhere in that title are they preparing you properly for a cinematic abortion like this, that has what amounts to a local late night horror host named Mr. Creepo introing the film and repeatedly popping up during it trying to call to the spirit of Ed Wood.
The lesbian sex scenes in this are so anti-erotic they make Tara Reid’s sex scene in Alone in the Dark seem hot by comparison. They’re clumsy, awkward, and dull, something that should never need to be said about something like this. I mean, this would be the paragraph where I normally go into my formulaic plot descriptions, but there really isn’t a plot to speak of here. I’ve got nothing to go with here but nitpicks. There’s quite a few truly awful moments in this film. I don’t mean awful in the “so bad it’s good” sense either. I mean it in the sense that whoever made this film needs to be forcibly restrained from making another, a claim that I do not make lightly, despite having said similar things about a few other movies in this collection.
I guess we may as well begin with the awful names that the characters in the film have. Even setting aside Mr. Creepo there’s names like Lilith, Carmilla, and Muffy the Vampire Slayer, for both vampires and human characters, leading us to the inevitable conclusion that the film takes place on some hellish parallel world where not only are there vampires, but also every single human is a goth eking out a tragic existence waiting for a vampire to come along and turn them. Given the names of the actors in the end credits, I think I can reasonably assume this would be because the film was actually made by a bunch of goths (Do they like to be called covens? They probably do, the creeps). There’s also a bit of a problem of people looking directly into the camera repeatedly during the film, sometimes specifically to deliver a poorly-written monologue to the camera, and sometimes just because the film was made by idiots. There’s quite a few truly groan-inducing jokes, such as one of the vampires suggesting to another that they should take a bloodbath together, which apparently means taking a shower together where the water supply has been replaced by actual blood. Leaving the logistics of just how many people would have been needed to supply that much blood, the scene goes on for about as long as an actual shower does, making this into just a maddening experience.
I’m sure the people involved are going to make another lame vampire movie, because frankly, if they’ve already scarred us with one why not go for two, so here’s a few suggestions to help make the film at least more technically competent. For one, as much as you may enjoy using red filters to show off how vampires enjoy blood, when you’re trying to show a vampire spreading blood all over the nude body of a human woman, all the red filters manage to do is make the blood invisible and the effort pointless. For another, if you can’t afford good CG effects it is perfectly okay not to have any at all. Movies were able to get by without them for quite a long time, we don’t need some awful cartoon fire suddenly obscuring most of the screen when a vampire dies. Finally, when you’re trying to dramatically show a person has disappeared by giving us the sound of a phone ringing with nobody answering, don’t show the phone off the hook while you’re still making the ringing sound. Phones don’t work that way.
Rating: ½ *
Friday, February 22, 2008
Carnage
This was part of a double bill with Class Reunion Massacre, and as dubious as it may seem, it’s the worse of the two. In the interests of full disclosure, I do have to admit that I’m not generally a fan of haunted house movies, in large part because they routinely tend to suck like this one does. That said, though, even with the lowered standards of the genre this one is noticeably poor, to such an extent that it almost makes me remember the Amityville movies fondly. That’s not good.
The film opens with a young bride and groom having one of those private romantic ceremonies with lots of lit candles that nobody outside of movies ever engages in because of fire hazards, ending with the groom shooting them both in a murder-suicide pact. We then cut ahead a few years as a new couple moves into the home, now – as one might expect – haunted by the ghosts of the original couple. We get all the normal horrid cliches of the genre – objects moving on their own, machines turning on, strange noises coming from other rooms – all thrown at us as though a character being somewhat disoriented is in itself scary. To be fair, things do eventually escalate, as their houseguests begin getting murdered by the ghosts, the bride even visibly appearing in the basement as she starts flinging axes at people. The, um, attempts at gore are pretty embarrassing, as when one guy’s belly is sliced open and spaghetti representing his guts begin to slide out from under his shirt, or when another person is beheaded, and a blatant mannequin’s head tumbles down the stairs. This is even without the nonsense of the ending, where after spending almost an hour and a half trying to kill the new owners and everyone they know, suddenly the ghosts get upset that they’re leaving and convince them to kill themselves in the same ceremony and join them forever. You know, not to ruin the ending or anything, but come on.
I think I can understand why so many people love Stanley Kubrick’s version of the Shining. It’s not because the movie really is all that great, it’s because that compared to 99% of the haunted house movies in existence it’s a goddamned masterpiece. I noticed on IMDB that people had complained about this DVD double feature because of how no care was taken on cleaning up Class Reunion Massacre for a proper DVD release, but I can’t imagine anyone really being upset about this one looking old and haggard. The film is very fuzzy, with the colors bleeding into each other, though it doesn’t have the problem of terrible lighting that Class Reunion Massacre did (and while we’re at it, what was the deal with the high school being out in a fucking field somewhere with no other buildings around for miles?). Personally, I rather like that about this disc. It lets you know right from the start that these movies were not good enough to justify a proper treatment, and screw anyone hoping for one. It’s just a shame they didn’t go the extra mile and not release this at all, but I guess we can’t have everything.
Rating: ½ *
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Class Reunion Massacre
I found this movie by doing Google searches for obscure horror movies and making a fairly obsessive list of everything that sounded interesting, though now having watched it, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it once already. I have no idea where or when, though I wish I had remembered, because this is really not worth watching a second time.
It’s a pretty standard slasher plot. Six people are lured to their old high school under the pretense of it being their 10 year reunion, only to be trapped there by a madman that kills them off one by one in various ways of varying imagination. Given that my own ten year reunion is coming up this year, the idea does hold some amount of appeal for me, but it’s pretty poorly executed here. I realize that there are any number of DV horror movies being made now that seem to want to redefine the term “low-budget”, but I do like to think that we can still make the term stick to older movies like this one. The lighting is extremely poor, with almost every indoors scene so poorly lit that it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish between characters, or even tell what’s supposed to be going on. This isn’t helped by the film’s own remarkable continuity problems. Shortly after the six guests arrive, one of them discovers that every door leading outside has been locked behind them, leaving them trapped. A few minutes later, though, a character is seen outside, just stopped by a large gate (with the killer on the other side inexplicably dressed like the grim reaper). A few minutes after that, another character (these are all females, so it’s quite likely that at least two of these occasions featured the same actress and I just wasn’t up to the task of distinguishing between them) is somehow outside with no gate to worry about and no explanation given. I like to think that this just adds to the film’s overall charm, but you can feel free to come to your own conclusions.
So yes, the movie is more than a little muddled and perplexing, but does it at least function well as a horror movie? Well, I will acknowledge that there was an interesting death scene or two, but most were pretty generic deaths by gunshot or stabbing. The killer’s motivation is pretty muddled, as he’s a preacher that’s after them for having sinned somehow, but he spends most of the film in disguise as a clown for no reason at all (I have no problem giving away that it’s the preacher, since the back of the DVD case felt free in telling me), and he had no problem with randomly killing the school’s groundskeeper at the beginning, whose sin, I guess, was being handicapped. Still, the movie’s complete lack of sanity did make for some nice moments, as when they decide to get the furnace going to keep warm or burn the place down or something, only to open up the furnace and discover that someone has bricked it up from the inside, a feat that I tip my hat to the preacher for. The DVD is also in fullscreen, which can often hurt a movie, but it did provide an amusing moment here when we first see the big banner reading “ELCOME CLASS ‘6”. We’re also given some tender moments from the preacher’s church at the beginning, where one choirboy tells a dirty joke to his cohorts, and sees that one of the other choirboys didn’t laugh. Naturally, and I’m sure you’ll agree, he really had no choice in this instance but to say, “I told a joke. You didn’t laugh!” before whipping out a knife and holding it to the kid’s throat. The life of a choirboy can be pretty rough.
In the end, though, this film really doesn’t have that much going for it. It’s really slow to start off with, not killing off the first of the six classmates until over halfway through the film, and it has a ponderously long epilogue back at the church that feels like padding more than any real poignant way of ending things. It’s too dark and poorly made to really be able to appreciate most of what’s going on. The entertaining bits of the film are spread out enough that you can keep watching without completely feeling like you’re throwing your life away, but it doesn’t really provide anything more than that.
Rating: *
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Tales from the Hood
This movie was a fond memory from high school, where it played on HBO fairly frequently, but I don’t think I’ve managed to see it once since college started. As such, I was slightly nervous that this would be yet another youthful favorite that I wound up hating when I saw it again years later, but my fears were thankfully completely unfounded. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that, of the nearly nonexistent number of horror anthology films of the 90s, this definitely ranks up at the top of the list.
The film is structured around three gang members that go to a funeral parlor after being lured with promises of drugs by one of the most beautifully creepy morticians ever put on film. I wish I could find a picture of him, but he’s essentially an elderly black version of Amadeus, all wild hair and bug eyes. As he takes them to their rewards, he relates to them stories of four of the people in his parlor. There’s the story of a rookie black cop who fails to stop his white veteran officers from beating a political activist to death, a story of a young boy who can hurt people with his drawings, a story about a racist politician running for governor that runs afoul of some Southern voodoo, and a surprisingly serious story about a gang member that gets experimented on in prison.
Whenever you get an anthology, there’s always one story that’s weaker than the others, and while in most it tends to be buried somewhere in the middle, here, because of how it ties in with the three gang members of the wraparound story, it’s placed squarely at the end. While the first three stories are told more than slightly tongue-in-cheek (the second story even has David Alan Grier playing a dangerous boyfriend, which is somewhat along the lines of us being expected to find Jim Carrey frightening in The Number 23), this one starts to tread dangerously close to preachiness, as the prisoner comes face to face with all of his past victims, and sees just how much pain gang members cause even to strangers. A real laugh riot, that one.
The best is easily the one with the racist politician that was so blatantly modeled on former presidential hopeful David Duke that he’s even named Duke and has the same former KKK affiliations. While running his campaign, he decides to set up shop in a former plantation whose owner massacred all of his slaves after the Civil War to prevent them from leaving him. Unfortunately for the would-be Governor, their souls still remain at the house, bonded to a set of voodoo dolls that begin raising all kinds of hell. It’s all told with a great deal of fun and humor to it, as when he flings a vase at the first reanimated doll and wildly screams out “No reparations!” It’s find political insight like that which you rarely find in movies these days.
I am admittedly a pretty big fan of horror anthologies, due no doubt in large part to how I’ve managed to successfully avoid most of the clunkers out there. Regardless, this still manages to be a superior entrant, ranking up with the likes of Creepshow and Amicus anthologies like Asylum and Tales From the Crypt. That it came out in the mid-90s, when the horror genre was largely on life support, just makes it all the more impressive. This is a movie that definitely needs to get re-released on DVD pronto.
Rating: *** ½
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Sabbath
I have a sick compulsion when it comes to end of the world films. It’s probably why I have so much love for zombie movies, there’s just something about the whole damn planet being torn apart and only tiny, scattered groups of survivors being left to try to fight for their existence. This compulsion has led me down some very tough paths in the past, but at the moment I’m having a hard time thinking of a movie I’ve impulse bought in such a genre that was as bad as this.
It’s not as if I didn’t have any warning about what the movie would be like, either. My efforts to research the film were in vain, as it’s so small time that it doesn’t even have an IMDB listing, which means that it’s actually lesser known than films like The Traveler or Purvos. Scary. And yet the product description’s promises of an end of the world scenario where a small band of survivors has to stand against the likes of zombies, demons, and reapers seemed too good to resist, because I am sometimes very, very stupid.
My first bit of confirmation that the film would give me problems came when I first put the disc in my DVD player and promptly went deaf. The film is set so ridiculously loud that I had to turn my volume down by twelve notches just to get a comfortable level of sound (Incidentally, the film wouldn’t even play in my PS2. It seems my Playstation wanted to save me a great deal of pain, and I am grateful to it for that). Of course, I might as well have turned it down all the way, because the sounds we get in the film aren’t, to put it charitably, any good whatsoever. There’s almost no dialogue for the first several minutes, which I found curious at first until people started talking and I realized that the silence was the film trying to play to its strengths. The music is pretty generic, alternating between a general Halloween store music that doesn’t change at all when anything changes on screen, and generic death metal music that seems to be fairly prevalent in no-budget horror movies. There’s only two main sound effects we get. One is a scream from one special zombie leader, distinguishable by the fact that his face seemed to be covered in pink goo, whereas the other zombies just use general store-bought gray face paint with darker gray paint for around the eyes. The film is so muddled that until the end, I didn’t even realize that that sound was the zombie screaming, but just thought he was supposed to be special enough to warrant his own musical cue. Either way, aside from occasionally summoning other zombies to attack the heroes, he just stands there doing nothing until someone finally shoots him. That brings us to the other main sound effect of gunfire, which seems to have been accomplished by recording a paint ball gun firing and using that sound for every single gun in the film, whether it be a hand gun, rifle, shotgun, what have you.
It should go without saying that the plot and acting are also particularly bad, but I’m here to say it anyway. The acting, particularly that of the male lead (actually, the lead is female, and she also sucks, but I’m talking here about the most prominent male character), is just abominable. These are the most apathetic, blasé people one could populate a film with. Robert Bresson would look at this movie and find the acting too wooden for his tastes as our heroes just casually mill about, slowly ambling through zombie infested woods like they haven’t a care in the world. Sure, there may be monsters all around us trying to eat us, but we can’t let that spoil our nice Sunday stroll, right? Right. The story is just a mess from start to finish, with a grim reaper and a demon running around that none of the characters can see, the reaper killing zombies when nobody’s watching and the demon palling around with the main characters and occasionally putting dark thoughts in their heads, and often hiding under the bed despite nobody being able to see him anyway. The ending gives us one of those horrid “Everyone’s connected” bits of nonsense where we get to see how every character was linked to the others before they even met, all through the tragic suicide of a little girl. Yeah, the film seems to want us to think the girl was just hit by a drunk driver, but it presents the accident so poorly that we see her running as fast as she can, making a beeline for the road, running out right in front of the car, then stopping and staring at it while waiting for death to overtake her. That was as clear a suicide as anything Bill Murray whipped up in Groundhog Day.
This film almost shouldn’t qualify for a review (particularly not one that may well be the longest I’ve yet written), since it’s basically just a bunch of college buddies goofing off in the woods and dressing up in stereotypical costumes, but screw it. They wanted me to pay money for the damn thing, this despite them not even paying for vaguely realistic blood and instead just using really fake looking CG blood, so they can live with the consequences. This is not a movie that you’re going to watch and remember fondly. This is a movie that you’re going to watch and then discuss ten years later with your prison’s psychologist. If a film of this quality came up in a 50 pack of horror movies, I would still be mad despite paying only 50 cents for it. I hope everyone that was involved in this had a good long talk with their parents afterward about where their lives were headed. Do not see this film.
Rating: Zero stars
Monday, February 18, 2008
The Toolbox Murders (2003)
This, is should be noted, is not the original 70s grindhouse movie that I’ve yet to see, but is the 2003 Tobe Hooper remake. I guess if anyone was going to remake an old nasty horror movie, the creator of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre might as well be the one.
The film stars a young couple (Angela Bettis and Brent Roam) as they move into the worst apartment building in the country, complete with a wide array of non-functional utilities and the occasional screaming coming from the neighbors’ apartments. The screaming is generally connected with the film’s title, as the building seems to be haunted by a figure dressed all in black that pops up every ten or twenty minutes to brutally murder somebody with a handyman’s tool like a hammer, electric drill, nail gun, saw, or the like. There’s a great deal of suspicion cast upon the creepy maintenance man, Ned, so much so that we can easily wrote him off as having no chance of being the killer. The young wife quickly twigs to the fact that there’s a serious problem with the building, particularly when her friend Julia (played by Buffy’s Juliet Landau) disappears after making plans with her. Naturally nobody believes her, because why would there be anything suspicious about a series of disappearances in a creepy looking building, so she has to dig up the dark truth about the building all on her own.
If I had to point to one glaring flaw in the movie (and let’s be honest here, I do), it would be the dialogue. It starts out adequately enough, but it slowly spirals downward into complete nonsense. Sometimes it’s as simple as a character ominously informing another that the “lines are dead”, despite this being set in 2003 and every single person in the film probably having a cell phone nearby. Sometimes it’s a bit more than that, though, as when our beloved heroine has what amounts to a complete mental breakdown at the climax and begins babbling to her husband lines like “Steven, it’s a spell! It’s a spell, Steven! The building, it taps into something! It taps into something, Steven!” And on and on and on.
Let me just state that this is a good film, but the first half of it is definitely better than the second, as the silly mysticism that begins to crop up does nothing to help the story out. Isn’t it enough that there’s a killer secretly living in the building, does it have to be a magical killer that lengthens its own lifespan by putting people’s heads in vices? Still, this is a movie that looks really good and creepy, has some nice violent scenes, and some pretty good acting in it. If the story doesn’t perfectly hold up, well, were you really expecting that in a slasher movie?
Rating: ***
Friday, February 15, 2008
Strange Things Happen at Sundown
The title of the film is a tad misleading, as the vampires in this movie are quite capable of moving around in the daylight, a fact that is noticeable over an hour before they feel the need to explicitly state it. The film itself is notable for two additional reasons not directly related to the quality of the film: for one, at 136 minutes, it’s easily the longest movie in the set thus far (possibly the longest in general), and two, watching it means I’m now one fourth of the way through the entire set. It’s a good feeling.
The film’s plot kind of meanders a bit. It opens up by giving us a group of vampire mobsters, which was the essential premise of John Landis’s Innocent Blood, a film that was fairly amusing but didn’t seem to know where to really take the story. I was a bit curious to see if co-writer/director Marc Fratto would be able to succeed where the director of Animal House and An American Werewolf in London failed, but the film fairly quickly moved away from that whole concept.
Instead, we get a big jumble of different plots, as the vamps only wanted to take control of the city’s drug trade because the head vamp wanted to leave trace amounts of his blood in the whole drug supply and turn everyone into his slaves. There’s also a pair of renegade vamps that stole a hundred grand from him and are now fleeing to Canada, a female vamp that hunts down and kills other vamps like an even whinier Vampire Hunter D, and an uber-vamp known as the Reaper who is contracted to kill the thieves. There’s also a number of scenes of exposition where we get a female vamp explaining what vamps are actually like to us, and a few vamps telling the stories of when they were turned. So yeah, this film did not have the firmest structure one could have hoped for.
However, it did manage to at least keep my interest for most of the movie. The actors largely seemed to understand that they were in a retarded film, and weren’t afraid to go over the top and goofy with it, which mostly helped (as with the blatant stereotype mobsters) the film. The scenes of violence also mostly looked better than what I’m used to from these movies, which was a definite plus. That said, there were some significant problems. The main one comes from the vampire slayer, as she is just as whiny and horrid and shrill as one could imagine a person being. Her torturously long monologue describing her pain is one of the worst things I’ve had to sit through in any of these movies. Just dreadful. Another main problem just comes from the recurring problem of low production values. This film clearly could not afford top of the line mics for its actors, and the ones they use tend to be on the loud side. Normally this is fixable just by me turning down the volume on the TV, but when someone, such as the vampire slayer or the Reaper’s wife, starts to scream, I would not have been surprised if every dog in my neighborhood had started howling. There's also a problem toward the end of some curious jump cuts. For whatever reason, there’s a few scenes that will just jump ahead a second, play a normal second, jump ahead another second, play a second, etc. I suppose it’s nice that they tried some way of shortening the damn film for me, but perhaps a better method would have been to outright edit out some scenes entirely rather than just making some of them indecipherable. Just a thought.
This is not a good movie, but it’s a watchable movie, and that does place it squarely in the upper half of the movies I’ve seen thus far in this collection. Between this and Kill Them and Eat Them, I think it’s safe to say that the streak of each disc being better than the last has continued, although just barely here. I hope disc 4 can ramp things up a notch, though with a lead-in title like Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires, how could it not?
Rating: * ½
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Slaughterhouse
Before I describe the film itself, I find I must describe the DVD. Essentially, what happened is that the company releasing this blatantly just burned the movie – fullscreen – onto some DVDRs and slapped labels onto them. The case directly lists it as a DVD-9 and offers up half of its bonus features if you put the movie into your computer. They also didn’t realize it would be a good idea to give people a Play Movie option on the main menu, instead requiring people to go into the Chapter Selections and clicking on Chapter 1. That’s the smell of professionalism right there.
The film itself kind of sucks, though it does get better as time goes on. It’s basically a fairly gentle slasher movie, played more for laughs than for violence. The story has an old farmer and his retarded pig-like son (I say pig-like not just because he’s fat, but because he oinks instead of talking) whose decrepit old slaughterhouse is being foreclosed to make way for a new modernized slaughterhouse that’s going to bring an extra hundred jobs to the community. Naturally this cannot stand, and so the old farmer instructs his son to murder the owner of the new slaughterhouse, his lawyer, and the sheriff for conspiring against him. The son also takes the opportunity to wipe out as many teenagers as he possibly can along the way.
The film is no great shakes, though there are enough nice moments to it to keep you from completely regretting watching it. The death scenes range from good (as when one character has his head crushed by the pig-boy’s hands) to retardedly bad (like when one girl is killed with a hatchet, and all we see is two spurts of red-colored water fly on a window), though we mostly don’t see anything. The humor works a bit better, as whenever the blatant Texas Chainsaw-ripoff family is onscreen they’re generally doing something amusing. The problem mainly comes during the fairly lengthy parts where neither of them is around. The numerous cuts to the police station, or the even more frequent bits with the teenagers as they go around town doing nothing of note and just doing a sad effort of padding it out to the full 90 minutes. The worst of this comes during the first third of the film, as after the opening throwaway deaths, we get nothing that’s not incredibly dull until we’re close to halfway through the movie. Still, I just can’t find it in me to really hate on a movie that has a mutant hillbilly stealing a cop car and hauling ass down some county back roads like he’s one of the Dukes of Hazzard. I just wish the rest of the movie could have been that good.
Rating: * ½
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
The Somnambulists
I had some pretty high hopes for the Somnambulists when it first began. I’m now almost a quarter of the way through this 50 movie collection, and this is easily the best looking of the bunch so far. The opening moments hit me with an impressive one-two punch of both widescreen and actual filmstock, and the discovery soon afterward that the movie was actually 24 minutes long instead of the 73 it said on the case meant that it had a very low chance of outstaying its welcome. Unfortunately, that in itself doesn’t make the movie good.
The film follows a girl of indeterminate age (I’m guessing mid-to-late 20s) who lives with her grandfather, and both suffer from sleep disorders. In an early scene of fairly alarming exposition, her grandfather cheerfully explains to her that the reason he doesn’t sleep is because dreams are where the Somnambulists, or the dead, live. See, there’s no Heaven or Hell, the dead merely go on living in dreams, so if she starts encountering them in her dreams she’d better start praying (this despite there not being a Heaven, of course), because they can get pretty ornery. There’s some further plot twists at the end, as various dark secrets are revealed about our heroine, but I guess it would be unfair to reveal them.
All the incidental things about this film work fairly well. I’ve already mentioned the look of it (the camerawork, if not thrilling, is at least competent, unlike Purvos), and mention should be made of the music as well. It’s generally a nice, understated bit of piano, which provides a very pleasant contrast to this collection’s usual routine of inappropriate techno and generic metal. I dare say it’s the best part of the film. Unfortunately, the main part of the film, the story and the acting, just like of lie there lifelessly. I can readily believe that our heroine was a bad insomniac, since she seemed to be sleepwalking through her role. This doesn’t really seem to be solely her fault, as every actor in the film was the same way, leading me to suspect that the director actively wanted most of the cast to act stiff and emotionless (my favorite moment, after one character is literally scared to death, we see her lying on her bed with a completely slack, unemotional face, and her mouth hanging open to presumably imply she had died screaming, or was perhaps dreaming about a dental exam). The story is also pretty damn generic, with nothing in it to distinguish it from hundreds of other stories about the dead haunting the living. Still, if it’s not good, at least it’s not offensively bad, which is more than can be said for some of the other entries here.
Rating: *
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Purvos
I’m not sure that there exists a level where this movie did not completely fail. The acting is the single worst I’ve yet seen in this set, the filmmaking is below sub-par, the script – what little of it seems to exist – is cliché and lame, and even the website is painful to look at. On the upside, though, it’s only 75 minutes long, so it’s got that going for it.
The film is about a serial killer, and a woman working at a sleep disorder clinic who stumbles across his path. See, all of her insomniacs had begun having visions of the murders committed by the killer, which proved her theories that insomniacs are psychic or something. It’s not easy to really get a strong feel for what was going on, as every single actor in the entire film talks in a slow, halting manner, often repeating the same lines over and over until I began to worry that the film’s plot involved time travel and I hadn’t picked up on it. While I was unable to find actual clips of the film’s dialogue, this video should give you some idea of what it was like watching it. Just add excessive pauses in the middle of sentences and sometimes partway through words, and you’ll understand what a treat it was.
The film’s title comes from how the killer has apparently taken on the identity of Purvos the Clown, though the mask he wears looks a hell of a lot more like the Scarecrow from Batman than it does any kind of clown. He does put on a clown suit at the very end of the film, as if that’s going to make it all better, but don’t be fooled. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at this. After all, when the film can’t even manage to show a single murder scene clearly (thanks to a heavy overuse of filters, goofy camera angles, and quick cutting) despite being a serial killer horror movie, with a plot revolving around how insomniacs are psychic, I suppose a little continuity goof like a clown killer that doesn’t even vaguely resemble a clown isn’t that big of a deal.
There are movies out there that will make you angry at all the injustice in the world. Then there are movies like this, that will make you angry at the filmmakers for dumping this atrocity into your lap. I see that one of the 5 votes for this film on IMDB was a 9. I can only assume that vote came from writer-director Jerry Williams, and I hope he gets punched right in the face for such a blatant lie. Right in it.
Rating: Zero stars
Monday, February 11, 2008
Kill Them and Eat Them
God help me, I think I’m actually starting to become a fan of this set. I just started the third disc (of twelve) and the first movie here is better than any on the first two discs, continuing the process of each disc being better than the last. Indeed, had this one not dragged on a bit too much at the end, I was prepared to fill it a full blown three stars, I was digging it so much. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The film is the standard no-budget “shot-on-handheld-digital” that just about all the other movies in the set are. Curiously enough, the only one so far that actually seemed to have a production budget was the horror porn Demon Sex, which ranks just below Begotten so far as movies people have found this site from Google searches for. Unlike the other films, though, this one actually managed to work its lack of a budget into the film itself, with a pair of mad scientists stuck doing their genetic experiments in hiding, and bemoaning the fact that their work budget is so scant that they had to cobble together all their equipment from junkyards and set up shop in a basement. This being a monster movie, their genetic experiments involve kidnapping people and de-evolving them into hideous monsters, which due to the film’s budgetary concerns basically means they now look like people wearing masks and gloves they got from the local Halloween shop. I won’t lie, I was pretty amused by how writer/director Conall Pendergast couldn’t even bother with making the monsters look similar, but instead had them all wearing different masks.
I’m not sure if the monsters were actually supposed to be scary or not, at least within the contexts of the film’s reality. They’re certainly capable of doing a great deal of damage when they can grab someone, but it doesn’t bode well that the very first time we see one, the person it’s chasing picks up a rock and throws it at the monster, and the rock takes its damn hand right off. Really now, if their bodies are held so thinly together that a thrown rock can make them crumble, then perhaps they shouldn’t be so eager to throw down with everyone they see.
So it’s not going to be winning any awards on scariness. Lucky for it, then, that it’s actually pretty funny. Both the mad scientists (the elderly Dr. Gore and the youthful Dr. Tobias) and the men from the Company that’s hot on the trail of the mutants are very amusing. In particular, the idealistic Company man has some great lines, with his great love for his employers providing such nice moments as when he’s alone in a room and takes the opportunity to hug a Company poster on the wall and start stroking it affectionately with his fingers. Dr. Tobias gets in some nice character moments too, as in a brief montage of him complaining to his mutants about how hard he has it and how Dr. Gore just doesn’t understand him. Of course, the humor doesn’t always work; the bit about how the Company’s guns look like Buck Rogers weapons just kind of lies there sadly, for instance. In general, though, it does succeed much more frequently than it falters.
Were it not for the occasional comedic fumbles, the far too lengthy ending sequence, and the kidnapped girl whose acting ability seems to consist of staring at the other actors while they speak and waiting for her cue, then reciting all her lines as mechanically as possible (fortunately, she’s not in most of the film), I would give this an unqualified positive review. As it stands, I’m actually a little curious to see the rest of Pendergast’s films. He has quite a bit of potential to him.
Rating: ** ½
Friday, February 8, 2008
House of the Dead
There’s a part during this movie where our band of survivors is surrounded on all sides by a swarm of zombies, and they’re left with no recourse but to try to kill every last one of a seemingly endless horde. What we get is a lengthy battle sequence in which lots of guns are fired, people leap through the air in slow motion, people and zombies throw axes and machetes at each other, often in slow motion, and the Asian girl stereotype takes down a bunch of zombies with karate kicks. The overall effect is that of a retarded version of Black Hawk Down.
That shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, since there’s quite a few movies that director Uwe Boll openly steals from in this film. He directly swipes the famous scene of Frodo hiding from the ringwraiths in Fellowship of the Ring, and he makes repeated use of the “freeze the action and move the camera angle while people are in mid-air" technique that was already ridiculously overplayed by countless Matrix parodies by the time this came out in 2003. This is the first of Boll’s films I have seen all the way through (I’ve also seen parts of Alone in the Dark, including the most anti-erotic sex scene I have ever witnessed), and I think there may be some truth to the numerous comparisons he gets to old cult director Ed Wood. The main difference is in how Boll actually has a budget to work with, whereas Wood had to pretty much make his films with budgets that would have been eaten up in one day of shooting on a normal production, so he at least had some measure of excuse.
The film, based on the video game of the same title in that both involve people shooting zombies, involves a large group of people that go to an island for the “rave of the year”, and then a bunch of zombies arrive and kill most of the non-essential people. The last remaining survivors get together, and after brief abortive attempts to get away by boat, they arm themselves to the teeth with guns, grenades, and sharp objects and try to barricade themselves into a small, predominantly underground building they found earlier on the island.
There’s a lot of questions one would have about such a film. For instance, when it’s clear that nobody can last for more than a few hours on the island without being attacked by zombies, how were the rave’s promoters able to set the place up? For that matter, with all the islands they had to choose from, why did they feel the best possible choice for their party was an island known as “Isla de la Muerte”? Even if we can get past all the other abominable editing choices, why did we keep having footage from the video game used both for scene transitions and as cheap filler during the action scenes? Why would anyone make a zombie movie with a climax that has the final two survivors get into a sword fight with the head zombie? Did somebody actually get paid to write dialogue like the exchange of: “You created it all so you could be immortal. Why?” “To live Forever.”? Finally, even if this is a movie based on a video game, isn’t it asking a bit much of us to accept the awful voice overs that open and close the film by the main character where he tries to make his voice sound like he’s a grizzled special agent in a video game?
I’d love to say that this is one of those so-bad-it’s-good type films, but it’s not. The ridiculously awful zombie costumes certainly fit that bill, but the completely insane editing, while providing some mild amount of amusement, mostly serves to make the film completely illegible. There’s tons of fast cutting, awkward camera angles, night battles, and hazy filters thrown over the scenes in a seemingly intentional effort to make sure that we can’t actually see what the hell’s going on. Combine that with an ending that all but promises a sequel – one that we eventually got, though without Boll helming it – and you’ve got a movie that you should all steer well clear of.
Rating: *
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Juno
I mentioned yesterday that There Will Be Blood had a particularly inspired soundtrack, quite possibly the best of 2007. I bring that up again today because, if there’s one glaring, irritating flaw to mar an otherwise classic film, it’s the frankly atrocious songs by Kimya Dawson that are strewn about the film like land mines strewn about Afghanistan, only more cruel. Her songs seemed designed with the sole aim of being kitschy, and I hate her so much for this.
But onto the rest of the film. The film follows a 16 year old high school junior named Juno (Ellen Page), who learns the unfortunate news that she’s gotten pregnant. After briefly considering (and rejecting) an abortion, she instead decides to have the baby and give it up for adoption, and finds a couple played by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner who desperately want a child of their own. There’s a few twists and turns along the way, as there are in any good movie, but after summarizing all of There Will Be Blood yesterday, I think I should stop right here.
There’s been a lot of backlash against this film for having the nerve to be popular, largely centered on two general areas, both foolish. The first, and by far the most abundant, complaint is that Juno is too clever and funny for a girl her age, with the presumption that not only are all teens complete idiots but that the movie would be much better if the characters in it were all dull and tedious. I personally found her quirkiness really charming, and furthermore she is clearly using humor as a defense mechanism throughout the film, constantly joking in every stressful situation she’s in because it’s easier for her to do that than to actually deal with such major problems. This is shown by how much less joking around she does later in the film, when she’s gotten more of a handle on things. The other general complaint is that the film is somehow pro-life or outright anti-choice, which is just retarded. Being pro-choice does not mean you want every last pregnancy to end in abortion, though frankly, when I see a child in a movie theater or restaurant I can easily see how one’s mind could wander to that path. All it means is that abortion is an option, and since her first thought was to get one, it clearly was. Trying to hijack the film into being part of your political statement just makes you look like an ass.
Anyway, outside of those two weak complaints the film just sparkles. The adults in the film are a real treat, as they show a great deal more dimension to them than the parents in most teen movies do (think of the one-note adults in any John Hughes movie or any movie made by one of his successors). Both Juno’s parents and the couple hoping to have her baby come across as fully realized, intelligent people (I particularly loved her father, played by J.K. Simmons). I’m a little disappointed that Jason Bateman and Michael Cera never had any scenes together to give us a small AD reunion, but that’s a small quibble overall. This is a smart, funny, touching film, and while I don’t know about it being Best Picture worthy (of the three nominees I’ve seen, it’s the weakest), it certainly deserves all the attention given to it.
Now if only they could re-release it with those atrocious songs changed.
Rating: ****
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
There Will Be Blood
If there’s one nice thing about being unemployed, it’s that I have a lot of free time to do things like go see two four star films, which I did earlier today. While this was a good thing for me personally, it does kind of go directly against the whole point of me getting that Tomb of Terrors horror pack, which was purchased specifically to drag down my average star ratings and make me look like less of a whore. Still, I am nothing if not honest, and I do so love Paul Thomas Anderson.
The film, based very loosely off of Upton Sinclair’s novel “Oil!”, follows an entrepreneur named Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) as he slowly creates an empire based around oil derricks in the American southwest in the early 20th century. Everything we need to know about this man, we get in the first scene of the film, where he is working by himself digging coal out of a tunnel, breaks his leg in an accident, and drags himself back out of the well by sheer strength of character, making sure to bring the coal with him. Right away, without any words being spoken we know that this is a man for whom profit is his very lifeblood, and who is capable of overcoming any obstacles thrown in his path.
Despite that, he initially seems friendly enough. After a few early successes, we see him going from town to town with his young boy trying to score oil deals with naïve townfolk, eventually setting up shop in Bakersfield, California, where he runs afoul of a young faith healing preacher (Paul Dano) who wants him to convert both himself and his money into the church. He sours quickly, though, both from the preacher and from an accident at the oil derrick that deafens his son, and he just fills himself up with so much hatred that he loses any previous ability to feel anything else. He becomes a good deal more open with his greed, allowing it and his rage to become his only two character traits left.
One sure sign that I really dig a movie? Way too much time spent on plot description. It helps, though, when the story is as strong as that of this film, but there are certainly other great aspects to it as well, chief among them being Daniel Day-Lewis’s typically masterful work. Remember how I just complained about Robert Downey Jr. not being enough of a lynchpin for Restoration? Well, not only is Day-Lewis as good a lynchpin as one could ever hope for, but the movie around him is even better. A lot of critics have complained about the ending of this film, but I found it to be immensely satisfying, and thought it was about the only logical way the story could end after everything that had been building up to it. The directing is typically top-notch, as one would expect from the maker of Boogie Nights and Magnolia, and he even goes the extra mile to capture the feel of the 20s by using an antique camera that curls in on the corners of some scenes like an old silent movie. Special mention must also be made of the score composed by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead. It's an extremely effective bit of creepiness that goes a long way toward drawing us into the madness in the film's world. If this is not quite as good of a movie as No Country For Old Men (though it’s certainly no less grim and violent), well, this was an exceptionally competitive year for movies. Its Best Picture nomination was well earned.
Rating: ****
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Restoration
This one was recommended to me by my friend Jasmine, who wanted me to buy it so she could watch it with me and further indulge one of her bizarre obsessions. Specifically, this film would have indulged her obsession with King Charles cavaliers, her favorite dog breed, which makes two appearances within the film. I can only conclude that she’d have been bored by the remaining 110 or so minutes when there are no dogs to be found anywhere.
This is not to say that the movie is bad by any means, though it really wasn’t quite what I was expecting. Set in England in the Restoration era following Oliver Cromwell’s death, it follows Robert Downey Jr. as a brilliant young doctor who attracts the attention of King Charles II (Sam Neill). I had been expecting a film that largely followed England’s court and various political changes during this time, and so I was kind of expecting the scenes from this early portion of the film, where he’s completely swept up into court life, and falls prey to its many vices. After close to a decade of Puritanical rule under Cromwell, England veered sharply in the other direction, and Charles II’s reign during this time is still known today as a time when everyone was screwing constantly. However, our young doctor falls too far into this lifestyle, and before long is drummed out of court in complete disgrace, and has to find work at a madhouse, where he tries to slowly rebuild his name as a physician by attempting to cure the inmates. One of these inmates is played by Meg Ryan so that we know which one we’re supposed to focus our attentions on, and is just normal enough for him to fall in love with. Some people today might foolishly view that as a conflict of interests, but I fully support him in his efforts to find a port in such a storm.
There are two main problems with the film, both intertwined with each other. The biggest problem is that of Robert Downey Jr.’s performance. While I normally love his work, here he largely seems to sleepwalk through the role; given that this was made in the mid-90s, I can only assume his severe drug problems at the time were keeping him from playing an alcoholic sex fiend very convincingly. The second problem is that the film seems a bit too unfocused at times. This is one of the most revolutionary eras in England’s history, and instead of exploring it, we spend half the film locked up in a mental asylum. One could say that I’m being foolish for complaining that the movie tried to show me something other than what I had expected to see, but screw that. It would have been more interesting to spend all of its time at court, rather than mooning over crazy women. Granted, the film does accomplish what it’s trying to achieve fairly well, but when it’s this free-form of a plot, a strong central acting performance would have helped tremendously, and instead we got one that was adequate at best.
This is indeed a good movie, and yes, I’m probably whining inanely for no reason here, with my demands that it try to be a completely different film. Don’t worry if you saw the star rating and rented this and are just now reading the review itself. It’s still a film worth watching, it just isn’t as good as it could have, or should have, been.
Rating: ***
Monday, February 4, 2008
Breach
Breach pretty much exactly met my expectations going in, in that it delivered a solid if unspectacular drama about the FBI highlighted by some quality acting on the part of Chris Cooper. Three cheers for watered down expectations, I guess.
The film, based on a true story, is about the single biggest breach of our intelligence agencies in the history of the nation. Ryan Philippe stars as a young fed hoping to make agent who is ordered to spy on one of the top agents in the Bureau, played by Cooper, under the guise of being his new page. He eventually learns just how bad Cooper is, and how he’s given up the identities of at least 50 field agents and informants, 3 of which had since been executed by Russia, and finds that it’s no small task spying on one of the greatest intelligence agents in the country. What drives the film is Cooper’s performance, and the work of Laura Linney, who is Philippe’s liaison to the investigation. Both of them do suitably impressive work, as one would expect from them.
The film, however, suffers from simply being too generic. I have no idea how much of the film is actual fact and how much was just glamorized for the film itself (as a general guideline, though, I always assume it’s a lot more of the latter than the former), but the film has an abundance of cliches dragging it down. There’s Philippe’s wife (played by Caroline Dhavernas) who is given the thankless task of disliking his new job and who spends all of her scenes being nonunderstanding and combative (seriously, does the wife ever support her husband in movies like this?). There’s the required scene where he has to swipe vital information from Cooper’s personal effects while he’s out, only for him to return too soon requiring a mad scramble to get everything back together again. There’s the ending, which doesn’t end in a big shootout, but which wouldn’t have been any less familiar territory if it had. Some work was needed on the script level to stamp out these problems.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s certainly a watchable film, and there are indeed parts that are quite entertaining. It’s just not one of the best of its genre, and that’s a little sad given the great potential of its source material. It’s worth a viewing, at least, but don’t be expecting to want to return to it again and again.
Rating: ** ½
Friday, February 1, 2008
Big Bang Love
I first saw this film (also known as Juvenile A or 4.6 Billion Years of Love) with my friend Emily when we went together to the New York Asian Film Festival. Director Takashi Miike describes this film as his masterpiece, but while I do like it overall, I think he’s kind of reaching with that. To be honest, it was both my friend’s and my least favorite of the three films we saw that day (the others being Exte, which was my friend’s favorite, and I’m a Cyborg But That’s OK, which was mine). Still, in its defense it was up against some pretty stiff competition there.
The film is a somewhat murky murder mystery set in a prison. One of the convicts has been seemingly murdered by his lover, who is found leaning over the body with his hands around the corpse’s throat screaming “I killed him!” before we’re sent back to when they both first arrived there, so we can all see both how they arrived at that point and how the murder itself isn’t nearly as cut and dried as it would seem. The film is visually amazing to look at, and I will say is one of Miike’s best in that regard, which to those familiar with his better works is some pretty high praise. The plot itself is left deliberately confused, continually looping back in on itself and repeating scenes to throw us off, and just so that we don’t all forget who is making this film, it opens with a fiery interpretive dance and is set inside of a prison that borders both a giant space rocket and a pyramid.
Despite the great visual feel, the movie doesn’t quite manage to bring everything together, and a good chunk of the film is simply too slow-paced for the material. It’s certainly not one of his weaker efforts, but I have difficulty viewing it as one of his best when his career includes classics like Ichi the Killer, Dead or Alive, and The Happiness of the Katakuris. This is a good effort, and a worthy addition to your collection if you’re a Miike fan or just someone curious about modern Japanese cinema (or, hell, if you just want a men-in-prison film to counterbalance all the women-in-prison movies you’ve got in your collection), but don’t go in thinking it’s the masterpiece its been hyped up to be.
Rating: ***
