Gorginfoogle's Movie Guide

Tron: Legacy

2011-04-09T21:16:00.000-07:00

It’s been a while since I reviewed a nice, big, loud, dumb action movie (I think the last I did was Prince of Persia, and that one was far from nice), so it was kind of fun to try to watch Tron and Tron: Legacy back to back earlier today (I say “try”, as I kind of fell asleep halfway through the original -- I don’t get to sleep much during the week). If they aren’t exactly “good” movies, per se, they’re at least modestly entertaining ones, and sometimes, that’s all you really need.

The film, directed by newbie filmmaker Joseph Kosinski, is every bit as video gamey as movies get. It keeps the plot both minimal and incomprehensible, and the action fast-paced and beautifully gaudy. Basically Jeff Bridges (the star of the original film) has been missing for over a decade, and his now-adult son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) is a sort of directionless youth that indulges in screwing over his dad’s company Encom and parachuting off of skyscrapers. One day, however, he gets a page from his dad back at his abandoned arcade or whatever, and when he goes to investigate he finds a portal that sucks him into the Tron universe. There he quickly discovers the place is ruled by Clu, a program with his father’s face CG’d onto him, who has him fight in the various arena games. Just before he’s killed in one massive group race, however, he’s rescued by a mysterious woman (Olivia Wilde), who takes him to his father’s secret lair, where they can then plan out how to fix everything that’s gone wrong. Or at least on how to escape. Or at least on how one or two of them can escape.

As flimsy action movie plots go, this one is retarded but serviceable, and provides us with several action sequences, the best of which is the group race that I just gave away the ending to. There’s also a big climactic battle with a bunch of planes that starts off rather exciting, but drags on far too long, and has way too many cutaway scenes of Jeff Bridges saying things like “Yeah!” and “All right!”, which reminded me of nothing more than young Anakin during the equally lengthy pod race scene in Phantom Menace. A little goes a long way, people.

I also have to take some issues with the color scheme. It’s become almost a cliché that half the movies now just obsess over showing blue and orange color contrasts since they’re at opposite ends of the color wheel, so did we need an entire movie world that’s solely those two colors? It’s about as lazy a method of visual design as we can get in such a film. Though it is still a great deal better than the “All brown and gold all the time” color scheme used to such fugly effect in Prince of Persia.

I am, of course, being too unkind to the movie. For what it is, and what it tries to be, it succeeds moderately well. There may be no real soul to any of the characters, but you don’t go to a big effects-driven movie like this expecting really memorable characters and stories, do you? No, you go to these expecting some really flashy effects and a few cool action sequences, and that’s exactly what this movie delivers. It goes on a bit too long, and it never really excels at any point, but at least it’s never boring or tedious like so many movies of its kind. It’s a movie that’s just the right amount of idiotic, without making you feel like everyone involved fully believes you are an idiot for watching it, you know?

Rating: **

Jackass 3D

2011-04-02T21:40:00.000-07:00

For those wondering why there was no review last week, it's because I had placed the finishing touches on what is now this week's review, only to watch MS Word crash and delete everything when I tried to post it, and it's taken me this long to muster up the energy to rewrite it. Regardless, I should mention that I had originally intended to write a review of the first season of Walking Dead, only to find that I couldn't muster up the energy for it (for the record, it's a solid show so far, but hasn't really developed enough in the first six episodes for me to say for certain of its quality one way or the other), and wound up deciding to review Jackass 3D instead. I'm glad that I did too, because it was the funniest damn movie of last year, with the Jackass guys getting everything right that Todd Phillips got wrong with Due Date.

For those that are much more cultured than I, Jackass began as a show on MTV based around the likes of Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Steve-O and friends all getting together to perform a bunch of ridiculous stunts that mainly involved them hurting themselves in stupid, stupid ways. After a few seasons, I suppose they realized that it would be better for their health if they were to end the show and just do everything in movie format once every few years.

I admit, I was a tad bit disappointed with Jackass 2. While it was certainly funny, even just a couple months after watching it, the only bit I could remember was the four-way teeter totter in the middle of the rodeo. With this, however, I can absolutely affirm that the series is back on track, with a great many instances of incredibly stupid and dangerous stunts, such as when they test the theory that music can soothe the savage beast by going into a ram's pen armed with a tuba and trumpet, or when Knoxville decides to go rollerskating in the middle of some charging buffalo, or when they decide to see how well they can withstand the winds created by a jet plane. There's a notice in the end credits about how the ASPCA was around for several scenes to ensure no animals were harmed, though I have to assume they weren't there for the beehive tetherball.

Of course, there's also two segments that are a little more memorable than any in the previous two films. In one, they play a prank on Bam for his fear of snakes by letting him fall into a disguised pit and then dropping dozens of live snakes down in there with him, marking what might be the first time Bam has ever cried on camera. In the second, what's meant to be a bit of a goof involving Knoxville messing around with a bull almost leads to a very uncomfortable end to the series when the bull flips him around so that Knoxville lands hard right on his head, making sure to get in a kick to the head right as he's landing for good measure. It's the sort of fall that's designed to paralyze or kill a person, and while Knoxville was able to get up and awkwardly stagger away to safety, it's pretty telling that, while with most of the painful stunts in the film we get all the non-participants off to the sides laughing at their friends' pain, here they're all just immediately terrified that he might be crippled. It's a rather uncomfortable way to underpin the warnings at the beginning and ending of the film that viewers should never try any of these at home.

Now, having said all of this, should you watch this movie? All I can give you are the facts, and quite simply, I laughed more and harder during this film than at any other movie this past year. It's frequently disgusting and about as horribly offensive as any good-natured movie could be (I feel I have to put that in, because there are movies I find much more offensive in a rather mean-spirited, hateful way -- like Expelled, for a recently watched example), but if you can withstand watching several people vomiting one by one, or a man that goes bungee jumping inside a Port-A-Potty (with all that such a premise implies), then by all means, you should absolutely give this a view. Though please, don't try this at home, at least unless you have some solid friends that are ready to post it on Youtube even when you kill yourself.

Rating: *** 1/2

Due Date

2011-03-16T19:26:00.001-07:00

I guess director Todd Phillips was due to make another weak comedy, to get it out of his system before making The Hangover 2. This is a bit of an inconsistent mess, occasionally brilliant, but more frequently boring or just plain irritating, and unfortunately by it’s very nature one is forced to spend the entirety of the film thinking of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, which it’s not even in the same league as.

See if you’ve heard this before. An uptight businessman (Robert Downey Jr.) is trying to fly home to his family for an important event, but is stymied in his efforts, and reduced to getting a ride with an overly sociable chubby fellow (Zach Galifianakis). The two then have a series of wacky misadventures together traveling across the country in a variety of vehicles, as Mr. Uptight grows to truly hate his companion before eventually deciding that he may in fact not be quite so bad after all. Sounds like the most original plot in the world, right?

But of course the overall originality of the plot doesn’t matter so much as how effectively done it was, and it’s really not that effective here. There are some big laughs -- I’m sure I laughed much more than is really healthy when Downey dealt with a misbehaving child by punching him in the gut and threatening to beat him further if he told anyone -- but overall it seems like Phillips was more interested in being mean-spirited and uncomfortable than funny, and the film suffers for it.

Take, for example, the character of Darryl (Jamie Foxx). A friend of Downey’s, he arrives in his car to rescue both of them after yet another ugly mishap, and when they reach his house Galifianakis immediately starts suggesting to Downey that Foxx is sleeping with Downey’s wife. Naturally Downey believes him and fires off a terse voice mail to his wife asking if he’s going to be dealing with a surprise when the baby is delivered, and that’s pretty much it. The next time it’s brought up, it’s when he’s hastily apologizing to his wife for being a headcase. There’s no real drive to it whatsoever, it’s just uncomfortableness for the sheer sake of uncomfortableness. And pretty half-hearted uncomfortableness, at that -- Danny DeVito would have made this material much nastier and funnier.

I think that’s really a large part of the problem. Comedies need to be really tightly wound in order to work: you don’t really need to look any further than the aforementioned Planes, Trains, and Automobiles for a perfect example. Due Date is simply too laid back and aloof, setting up several situations without giving them any proper follow-through. The only ones that are permitted to truly escalate are scenes involving lots of vehicular destruction, as if Phillips had just gotten done watching The Blues Brothers before storyboarding.

Phillips just got done making one of the best comedies in recent years with The Hangover before this, and with The Hangover 2 currently in post-production, I can only hope that he felt that he needed to get all of his bad ideas out of the way before doing his big money film. As for this one, you can definitely give it a pass. I’d say it was past it’s due date, but the very thought of saying such a thing makes my testicles want to shrivel up.

Rating: * ½

Birdemic: Shock and Terror

2011-03-06T21:15:00.000-08:00

I should probably explain, right before I go anywhere with this review, that despite the three star rating I’m giving this film, it’s actually a pretty terrible movie. It is, however, one of those blissfully, transcendentally awful movies that rises deep down below its limitations to give us a piece of truly inspired filmmaking. This should be viewed as part of a double feature with the likes of Battlefield Earth or Plan 9 for those that enjoy such fare.

But I get ahead of myself once again. This is the story of Rod (Alan Bagh) and Nathalie (Whitney Moore), two twentysomethings that run into each other and begin a whirlwind romance. He’s a rising young software salesman with impeccable business sense (at one point he’s on the phone with a client and offer’s them whatever his competitor did plus a 50% discount, and is quite proud of himself for making the sale even though with that kind of business acumen his company will soon be going under) and she’s a lingerie model who sadly never gets naked. After a really uncomfortable date (they enjoy each other’s company just fine, though there’s all the awkward pauses and stilted lines that one would expect from a movie where the cast is reading their lines from cue cards and there’s only one camera which needs to keep being turned off and repositioned instead of splicing footage together), they spend the night together and wake up to find a town in flames. It seems that the seagulls have gone crazy and begun waging war on humanity, and also now when they collide with anything they explode. Oh, and they can also spit acid at people, as birds do. It’s now up to them and a few other scattered survivors to try to fight their way out of town and to safety.

So, where to begin with the review proper? I suppose I almost have to start with the unique CG on display here. You know how in some Hollywood blockbusters, they have these big elaborate bits of CG that just seem slightly off somehow, like they look really impressive on their own but don’t quite seem to actually be sharing space with the non-CG stuff on the screen? Now imagine someone (someone in this case being writer/director/producer James Nguyen) using lots of CG, except the entire film has a budget of $10,000, and so no effort whatsoever is made to try to get the murderous birds to seem like they even exist in the same film. I want to talk about how no effort was made to shade them properly so they don’t look so much brighter than the actors they’re in the frame with, but that seems almost beside the point when half the time they don’t even interact in any way with the actors, instead just flying in place and slowly flapping their wings while the humans wave weapons frantically at the air (you can see this in the trailer below, by the way). It’s a truly inspired decision to make the CG this bad, and I for one cannot wait to see how Nguyen utilizes 3D for the sequel he’s currently filming.

Then there are of course the other problems with the movie, which comprise everything else. I’ve already touched on the general acting, and you can see easy examples of that in the trailer, so I won’t say much more here beyond that, while nobody gives anything close to a good performance in the film, our hero Rod is easily the worst, and I fully respect the decision-making process that led to him becoming the lead despite his obvious handicap. There’s also the curious musical choices, which tend toward the cheerful muzak end, leading me to assume Nguyen just grabbed the first pieces of public domain music he could find and called it a day. Then there’s the reasoning behind the bird attacks, which are the typical “Man is destroying the environment and that must be the reason!” explanation that we frequently get with killer animal movies. However much I may agree we need to combat global warming, I’m not certain the cause is really being helped by such as this, you know? There’s also the tremendous amounts of padding to help get the film up to 90 minutes. There’s the standard horror movie padding, of course, where every so often a new character will be introduced solely for the purposes of being swiftly killed, but we also get ponderously long bits where the camera just shows bits of scenery while the soothing muzak plays. You can see that better in the alternate trailer (not included below, but which is still on Youtube -- No, I‘m not doing all the work for you, you lazy slackers), which is literally just a minute straight of scenery shots with no people at all, and then a minute of crappy CG birds flying in place with no people at all. The opening title credits, in particular, give us five or six minutes of just someone driving around, like we finally got an American version of Solaris….wait…

So with all of that in mind, you should have a pretty solid idea by now as to whether this is the movie for you. After all, a substantial chunk (one might even call it the vast majority) of the general movie going audience has little patience for a film so blatantly inept and amateurish (note that I don’t say bad, as every year we get plenty examples of movies worse than this that become big hits), but I have to assume that there’s a few people out there that read the names Battlefield Earth and Plan 9 and want to check this out, and it is to those people that I give these stars for. It’s one of those rare brilliant terrible movies, and one that everyone should find time to see.

Rating: ***

Megamind

2011-02-27T17:16:00.000-08:00

So I should probably explain what the hell happened to the blog last week. Basically, I got a new job, and while I’m in training, I have to make a three hour round trip drive to my classes, because why wouldn’t they be on the other end of the state, plus a good hour or so of homework each day. Therefore, until the training is finished, this blog’s going to go from being updated five times a week to once a week. It’s only for the next couple weeks, though, so have no fear. Also, thank you to the guys at Red Letter Media, who seem to give me hundreds of new readers each and every time I mention them. Also, thank you to the makers of Megamind, for making a pretty darn good movie to start the week off right.

The film stars Will Ferrell as Megamind, a brilliant alien supervillain who has had a lifelong rivalry with his heroic counterpart Metro Man (Brad Pitt). After one of his fiendish deathtraps turns out to be unexpectedly successful, he finds himself ruler of Metro City, and has no idea what to do with himself. He finds himself falling for plucky reporter Roxanne Ritchie (Tina Fey), but realizing she’d never go for him as Megamind, disguises himself as a Clark Kent-looking reporter and gets himself in tight as her new partner so that he can better woo her. Of course, his continued villainy seems strangely empty without a hero to challenge himself against, and so he decides to take some shlub (Jonah Hill) and give him all of Metro Man’s powers (begging the question, of course, of why he never used that on himself back when he was regularly fighting Metro Man) to have a new hero to pit himself against. Of course, things turn horribly awry when Hill decides to use his new powers to conquer the city rather than save it, and now it’s up to Megamind and Roxanne to stop him.

This film, by director Tom McGrath (whose previous efforts in the Madagascar films were not half as good as this), is much funnier and more clever than the trailers had made it out to be. There’s a lot of great little bits of humor (such as Megamind crash landing on Earth as an infant in a Prison For the Criminally Gifted, and the warden evidently deciding that he should just remain a prisoner there for no discernable reason), and the voice talents are all wonderful (Ferrell is particularly delightful, and shows that maybe he should be allowed to occasionally play a role where he’s not a complete moron). The visual design isn’t quite on par with Tangled or How to Train Your Dragon, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that by this point every animated movie that comes out of Disney or Dreamworks is going to look pretty darn impressive and colorful.

Now, I know it’s been getting compared a lot with Despicable Me, as it’s one of those awkward coincidences where two movies with similar premises (in this case, an animated film where the protagonist is a super villain) come out within a few months of each other, but the two are fairly different beasts. I mean, granted, they’re both animated, they both star supervillains voiced by famous comedic actors (Steve Carrell in Despicable Me), they both have their villainous leads start to imagine changing their villainous ways due to love of another (Roxanne here, and the three little girls in Despicable), they both dramatically show their villainous leads transforming into heroes by way of having them fight it out with other villains (Jonah Hill as Titan here and Russell Brand as Dr. Nefario there), and they both inexplicably end with everyone dancing, but…seriously, is there some secret website that just comes up with like a half dozen basic templates each year that every movie then gets patterned off of here? It’s ponderous, is what it is.

Still, that’s not to say either one is bad, or even that they necessarily had anything to do with each other (in fact, I‘d say it‘s pretty damn unlikely they were in any way connected). Both are pretty great films, though I’d say this one is the superior film. It’s funnier, more emotionally and intellectually satisfying, and it’s filled with some nice rock music from the likes of AC/DC and Ozzy Osbourne. That Megamind’s got some good taste, yo.

Though, ugh, did they have to end the movie by having everyone dance to Michael Jackson?

Rating: *** ½

The Willies

2011-02-20T17:28:00.000-08:00

I’m not really sure what the intended audience for The Willies was, exactly. I would have to assume, from the incredibly juvenile humor and urban legends found within (and by how the film revolves around theoretically elementary school age children) that it’s a horror movie for the young ones. However, they then throw in just enough violence and blood to ensure themselves a PG-13 rating with such things as a woman getting her throat cut and some bloody, dismembered arms, as if they cynically decided that young children would refuse to watch any horror movies that were actually rated as suitable for children. Of course, the point is somewhat academic, as the film is so bad that its actual target audience is idiots that buy tons of cheap movies for review material for their blogs.

Anyway, the film is an anthology that uses the framing device of three kids (Sean Astin and two others that never developed actual careers) out in a tent in the woods telling each other urban legends to try to scare/gross out each other. They start with a few of the more famous ones, like a woman at a fast food place getting a fried rat mixed in with her bucket of chicken, and the haunted house ride that was originally so scary that a man actually died of fright so the operators had to tone it down (a sample of this film’s idea of humor: the ride’s obviously meant to be Disney’s Haunted Mansion, but I guess they couldn’t get the rights to that, so they just made allusions to other rides at the park like “It’s a Wee World” and “The Enchanting Wiki Hut” -- if you just threw up in your mouth a little, that’s only to be expected), before they get to the two main stories.

That’s right, two. While most anthology films go for three to five stories to accompany their wraparounds, this one just gives us two main stories (No, I am not counting the fried rat or the others as separate stories, not when all of them combined are maybe five minutes long), perhaps under the assumption that this would help them dodge the complaint that most anthologies wind up with one story that’s just not as good as all the others. Unfortunately, this just means that the two stories instead go on much longer than is justified, until you can almost feel the padding being added as they panic over having almost blown through the script and still having a lot more time to kill to reach 90 minutes.

Plus, it also still has that very problem I’m casually assuming was the intended reason for the dual stories, in that the second story is much worse than the first (Its also a good deal longer too, which may have something to do with it). The first is lame, but functional, and follows a kid that has to alternate between dealing with bullies and dealing with a horrid teacher (Kathleen Freeman of Gremlins 2 fame). While the school custodian reaches out to him a bit, his fortunes really change when he discovers a monster in the bathroom, which is obviously the custodian there to help the boy out by killing and eating all of his enemies. The second one, about a thoroughly loathsome boy obsessed with flies, rambles on for so long without anything approaching a point to it that our government could have used it to crack prisoners at Guantanamo. The boy, played by Donkeylips from Salute Your Shorts, is fat, has a lisp, constantly insults others, collects flies anywhere he can find them, and at one point even convinces a female classmate that he’s not really that bad, and all he needs is a friend, and when she takes him at his word and tries to befriend him he goes on to give her a cookie he made filled with dead flies. He of course gets his comeuppance at the end by the tragic irony of the very flies he was so obsessed with, but it’s pretty abrupt and unsatisfying.

I can only wish the movie itself had been so abrupt, as watching it I felt like it might have been twice as long as it actually wound up being. The humor was so lame I have a hard time even envisioning six year olds laughing at it (actually, strike that, I can easily see six year olds laughing at it, assuming their parents actually let them watch it), the film is so slow paced as to be coma inducing, there‘s a completely random cameo from Kirk Cameron and Tracey Gold as their Growing Pains characters (odd that Cameron didn‘t make it into Expelled as one of the ID experts) that goes nowhere, and presumably only exists due to writer/director Brian Peck having been a frequent actor on the show; this may be the worst horror anthology I’ve ever watched. If you ever take my advice on anything, let it be this: be very, very careful just which mostly forgotten children’s horror movies you seek out, because not all of them are awesome.

Rating: *

P.S. Also, notice in the trailer below (which is unfathomably in HD) how every last “scare” in the film is fully displayed without ever needing to watch the movie itself. Also, notice how awful all the acting is. Notice it, I say!

Unstoppable

2011-02-17T21:59:00.000-08:00

It figures. Right when I take the time to craft a new word for Tony Scott to describe his over-directing, he goes ahead and tones himself down considerably, leaving me with a perfectly worthwhile runaway train movie that doesn’t have any of the big camera or CG flourishes that we’ve all slowly come to be annoyed by with him.

The film stars Denzel Washington and Chris Pine as two new partners working for the Pennsylvania railroads. Their first day together finds them with some problems, however, when a horrible screw-up far down the line leads to an unmanned train going full speed down their line. As one by one all the rail company’s plans to stop the train fail miserably, it becomes clear that the only way for disaster to be averted is for Captain Kirk and Malcolm X to stop it themselves.

One thing I was rather fond of with this film was just how the train got going through a perfect storm of fairly plausible mechanical errors and one tremendous bit of human error (before the end credits, when the film is giving us a textual account of where the various survivors are today, the guy that screwed up initially gets a particularly amusing outcome). Then, because it is of course an action movie and not a documentary, we have to ratchet up the tension by explaining how the train simply has too many cars -- and thus, far to much weight on it -- to be stopped by any ordinary runaway train means, and then we naturally also discover that eight of its cars are carrying a highly toxic and flammable substance, making sure that if the train derails when it reaches the tight curve in Bellaire, Ohio, the entire city will be destroyed.

The film works both in how it sets up its various crises and in how it solves them (or doesn’t, as the case may be). For instance, early on, before they realize just how fast the train is moving (they originally just think it’s drifting slowly, not realizing it’s plowing ahead at full speed), there’s a brief subplot with a train full of schoolchildren on the same track that winds up being diverted just in time. A less confident film might have spent a half hour or more on them even though everyone watching knows full well a damn train full of kids isn’t going to be wiped out. Here, they’re diverted almost immediately after the runaway train is reported, and though they get off the track just in time for the kids to all ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ as it whizzes past them, the film doesn’t try to insult us by spending any undue time pretending what’s going to happen.

I worry that I may be overhyping it to much here now. The problem arises in that, while it’s nothing particularly fantastic, there really isn’t anything appreciably wrong with it, either. The acting is solid down the line (if it‘s occasionally overdone, this is exactly the kind of movie that requires it), it’s nice and fast-paced, there’s good buddy cop-style banter between Washington and Pine, it doesn’t insult our intelligence, and it’s directed both competently and without any of Tony Scott’s excesses. The only real problem is that it never actually excels at anything; it’s unfortunately probably going to wind up one of those movies that you’ll watch whenever it happens to be on TV, and will simply drift out of your consciousness almost immediately afterward. Still, that hour and a half you’re watching it? Solid.

Rating: ***

P.S. The film is supposedly based on a true story. I have no choice but to assume, however, that it took a few more liberties with the facts than 127 Hours did

127 Hours

2011-02-16T22:54:00.001-08:00

And I now narrow my list of Best Picture nominees I have yet to see down to just Black Swan and True Grit. Hey, it matters to me, alright? Anyway, this wasn’t really one of the better nominees, but it’s still a pretty solid if somewhat over-directed film.

James Franco stars as Aron Ralston, an energetic part time hiker that is spending yet another weekend canyoneering (See, movies can teach new words!) in Utah when, after meeting two cute girls and getting invited to a party they’re throwing that evening, he finds himself in a bit of a pickle. Specifically, he finds his arm trapped underneath a rock that came loose and fell on him during his adventure. We are then stuck with him for the next 127 hours (Hey, like the title!) as he tries every way available to free himself, before finally accepting that he’s going to need to use his knife to chip away at something other than the rock pinning him.

It’s a really interesting story, and is really well acted, but I found it being occasionally overdone pretty heavily. I know director Danny Boyle has a bit of a history of over-directing, but this is a story that screams for something a bit more low key. Instead, he directs chunks of it as though he were trying to make an extreme sports fan’s ultimate fantasy movie, very loud and in-your-face and more than slightly abrasive. Even when the story’s been reduced to just him stuck under a rock, Boyle throws in constant flashbacks and daydreams, complete with split screens, ugly fishbowl lens shots, and anything else Boyle can think of to keep from letting us just focus on the story at hand. It’s all very unnecessary and distracting, and weakens the film considerably.

This is not to say that it’s a bad movie. It’s one of the rather surprising number of films made in recent years about someone stuck in one location fighting nature for survival (putting it with the likes of Frozen and Buried, both of which also came out in 2010), and while it’s not the best in that genre I’ve seen (Frozen is my current favorite), it’s certainly one of the better ones. James Franco works his ass off here, managing an increasing amount of desperation and despair while keeping true to a core level of confidence and optimism. Not an easy task, and he definitely earns his Best Actor nomination, if nothing else.

Of course, that’s obviously not the only good part of the film, and to be fair, Boyle does manage to occasionally reign himself in and give us some scenes of quiet sadness as he stands there (because of his pinned arm, he’s unable to sit) quietly understanding that he’s almost certainly going to die. I wish the entire movie had been this calm and thoughtful, but the film still manages to get us into Ralston’s mind well enough despite Boyle’s Tony Scottization (I’m making that a term now, yes) of the visual scheme.

This is probably the weakest of the Best Picture nominees (though again, I still have two left to see), and that’s due almost entirely to Boyle going so overboard with the visual style as though he wasn’t confident enough in the material. It’s still really well acted and surprisingly fast-paced for a movie with so little action to it. If I wish it were better, it could easily have been so much worse as well.

Rating: ***

The Top Ten Horror Movies of 2010

2011-02-15T14:00:00.000-08:00

So after having finally seen enough decent efforts to stretch out a real top ten list, and to write about something a bit happier than the dreary nonsense I’ve been subjecting myself to earlier this week, I bring you the ten best horror movies of last year. There’s two reasons it’s taken me until mid-February to finally write this up: I missed several of these when they were in the theater, and so had to wait for the DVDs to come out, and quite honestly there were so few good horror movies out last year that it was difficult to even come up with ten worthy efforts. Hopefully 2011 will be better. And in case you’re wondering, The Crazies was number 11.

10. Burning Bright

It’s a film with a fairly ridiculous premise (a woman and her autistic son are trapped in their boarded up house while a deadly Bengal tiger stalks them), and finds a way to make it work, giving us a tight, intelligent cat and mouse game (no pun intended). This didn’t make it into theaters outside of some horror festivals, making it just one more example of why most of the best horror movies nowadays can essentially only be seen in the comfort of your own home.

9. Hatchet 2

I’m not sure whether to say the same about this movie, as it did get a theatrical release, though since it was released uncensored and unrated it got yanked from most theaters after one day. Anyway, the original was possibly my favorite slasher movie of the last decade. This one isn’t as fun or silly (and it doesn’t have nearly as much nudity, sadly), but it does try to make up for it by greatly ratcheting up the violence. Seriously, it’s one of the goriest films I’ve ever seen, right up there with one of Miike’s nastier efforts. Anyone reading this should already know just from that whether they’re going to want to see this or not.

8. Devil

It’s been a surprisingly good year for horror movies set in confined spaces. First there was Burning Bright, now Devil, and later one there’s one more. Anyway, this was one of the rare widely-released horror movies of the year that didn’t suck, with a group of people trapped in an elevator, one of whom is secretly the devil. It’s a pretty smart, suspenseful film that was unfortunately torpedoed in theaters by the prominent inclusion of producer M. Night Shyamalan’s name in the trailers.

7. Splice

Another quality horror movie that got sunk by a bad marketing campaign that basically promised everyone it was going to be a straight ripoff of Species, when it was actually all about a scientist couple creating and raising a mutant baby, and raising rather interesting questions about the morality of what they were doing, and aren’t they being rather horrible parents here. It of course devolves into standard Hollywood horror at the end, but until then it’s actually a very surprising and unique film.

6. The Human Centipede (First Sequence

Probably the most infamous horror movie released last year, this underseen film follows the adventures of a charming German scientist who kidnaps three tourists and surgically attaches them mouth-to-anus to create a human centipede, which he believes to be the ultimate life form. There’s not a ton of action in the film, leaving us plenty of time to watch this surgical monstrosity in action, stamping all over the floor and wanting to curse the scientist out but not having enough free mouths to do so. So twisted, it’s a little surprising it wasn’t done by someone from Asia.

5. Let Me In

While there really wasn’t much of a reason for this remake to exist beyond appeasing people that cry when they see subtitles, it does manage to be probably the best vampire movie since the original (not that it had a ton of competition, admittedly). It’s slow paced and moody, more interested in developing its characters than on scares or gross-out scenes, and in general plays to the exact opposite sentiments of Hatchet 2. But yes, you should still watch both.

4. Piranha

While I missed this when it was in theaters and so didn’t get to enjoy the wonderfully garish 3-D they used, I did finally see it when it was released on DVD, and it is as delightfully trashy as anyone could have hoped for. It’s the rare remake that’s superior to the original (granted, the original wasn’t all that great, despite being helmed by Joe Dante), and continues director Alejandre Aja’s streak of good movies. It’s chock full of nudity, violence, and incredibly obvious and cheesy 3D shots, and is a ton of fun.

3. Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy

Some would call this cheating, since this is actually a documentary about a series of horror movies, but I don’t care. What we get here is an incredibly in-depth collection of interviews with virtually everyone among the cast and crew of every Nightmare on Elm Street film (aside from the remake, whose only mention is one person briefly mentioning that a remake was being made) to talk about every last aspect of each film that you could ask for. It’s incredibly informative, frequently really funny, and more than anything just makes you want to watch all of them all over again, even the bad ones.

2. Feeding Frenzy

Made by the people at Red Letter Media (who have been responsible for at least half of this site’s traffic since I posted my original review -- thanks guys!), this is a loving homage to all the small rubber monster movies of the 80s that came out in the wake of Gremlins. It’s visibly low budget, but works with that in creating one of the most laid back and funny films of the year, horror or otherwise. For those unfamiliar with these guys, they’re the ones that did those brilliant Star Wars reviews, and the narrator of those is in this film.

1. Frozen

Writer/director Adam Green had kind of a big year last year, releasing this and Hatchet 2. This was not only the superior film (and my pick for best of the year, obviously), but it was his greatest film to date. We follow the troubles of three friends on a skiing vacation as, due to a horrible mixup, wind up getting stuck on a ski lift as the place shuts down for the week as a blizzard gets ready to roll in. Now they have to find a way to make it off the lift to the ground a hundred or so feet below them before they all freeze to death. It’s scary, beautifully directed, and features some surprisingly touching character development. It’s everything you could want in a horror movie.

So there you have it. Not the best year for horror movies, but there were still enough to make a good list. You could certainly do a lot worse than making a week out of watching all of them, so get on that.

An American Carol

2011-02-14T17:37:00.000-08:00

Oh, David Zucker, how far you have fallen. One of the three writer-directors involved in arguably my favorite movie of all time (The Naked Gun), you’ve now reduced yourself to making a “spoof” that is so focused on trashing anything liberal (or anything that’s opposed to the Bush administration, I should say) that most of its attempts at humor are half-hearted at best.

The film stars Kevin Farley as Michael Malone, a Michael Moore parody who’s trying to get funding for his next movie, which he intends to be a serious drama showcasing the overwhelming corruption and evil that is America, and which will hopefully get him out of the documentarian hole he’s found himself in. Enter Aziz (Robert Davi), Ahmed (Serdar Kalsin), and Mohammed (Geoffery Arend), two filmmakers and a terrorist who want him to make their big pro-terrorism opus, and give him the funding he needs while not telling him about their true purposes. However, Malone is “saved” from his wicked beliefs by the appearance of three ghosts -- General Patton (Kelsey Grammer), George Washington (Jon Voight), and the Angel of Death (Trace Adkins), who show him what the world would be like if all of his foolish liberal beliefs were actually enacted, in order that he learn that conservativism is the only proper outlook on life in time to stop the terrorists from enacting their dastardly plot.

I suppose I should first get out of the way why I’ve been watching these ridiculous conservative films this week. It just so happens that they finally released the trailer for Atlas Shrugged Part 1 (it was originally intended to be a miniseries before all the TV channels passed on it), and since so few movies get made from a hardline conservative viewpoint (well, aside from action movies), I thought it might be fun to watch a couple of the rare ones that actually did get made. I’ve since learned my lesson, and tomorrow you’ll be getting my list of the Top Ten Horror Movies of 2010.

Anyway, this film, unlike Expelled before it, manages to be slightly superior and harder to hate simply by virtue of the fact that it’s so incompetent that hating it would almost seem mean. The jokes are virtually all ponderously obvious and labored, as though Zucker is now getting his material from Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer of ___ Movie fame (sample joke: a kid asks “What’s a demonstration?”, to which Leslie Nielsen replies “It’s when students show how much they don’t know by repeating it loudly”, before of course cutting to Malone giving a speech while throngs of college students wielding large placards angrily chant everything he says). I’m not sure what magical spark it was when Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker worked together, but it sure isn’t there when they aren’t.

Then there’s the astonishing politics on display in the film. Obviously, given the plot, Muslims take a lot of hits in the film (indeed, there’s not a single Muslim in the entire film that’s not connected with terrorism -- JUST LIKE IN REAL LIFE, RIGHT GUYS?), as well as Michael Moore (the fat jokes come fast and furious), but they’re hardly alone. No, with this film, we learn that all documentary filmmakers are evil (at a documentary awards ceremony, they start off by honoring Leni Reifenstahl for being such a great inspiration with her beautiful portrayals of Hitler and the Nazi party), all professors are evil, pacifists are evil, separation of Church and State is evil, allowing inmates at Guantanamo access to lawyers is evil, obeying the Constitution is apparently evil, or at least it is if you try to apply it to everyone instead of just The Good Guys, the ACLU is evil, Cuba is evil, the Geneva Convention is evil, MoveOn.org is evil, stem cell research is evil, Jimmy Carter is evil, and while I don’t recall the context, I wrote in my notes “ending world hunger”, so I can only assume that’s sick and wrong as well. So what’s good about America? Well, Bill O’Reilly (he’s in the film playing himself), country music (in addition to playing the Angel of Death, Trace Adkins also plays himself and puts on a concert to provide the setting for the climax -- we also get country music over all of the end credits), the Patriot Act, which the terrorists all bemoan as making their jobs harder, and apparently all that added TSA airline security, since Zucker seems to find it ridiculous that anyone would complain about having to take their shoes off, have toothpaste or baby bottles confiscated, or strip searched to use an airplane. Rather surprisingly, he’s also a fan of the Civil War, and argues in the film that it’s the only reason slavery no longer exists in the United States. It’s an interesting statement to make for someone trying to desperately to cozy up to conservatives, many of whom view the Civil War as an unprovoked act of Northern aggression and claim that slavery was on its way out with or without the war. Perhaps this is why the film didn’t do so well in the south. Or perhaps it’s because the movie is terrible, I don’t know.

David Zucker describes himself these days as a 9/11 Republican, which means that he threw away all of his old liberal views when the Twin Towers fell (or possibly when the Pentagon hit, but most people tend to focus more on the former). Now, I know that 9/11 was a traumatic event, but quite honestly, if all of your beliefs and views change when a traumatic world event occurs, then your old beliefs and views were very clearly not all that deeply held, and your new ones must not be either, since clearly all that’s needed is another traumatic event to change them all up again. The film is so rah-rah all things Bush that it almost feels like he’s trying way too hard to show off his new conservative bona fides, as though perhaps if he just trashes liberals that little extra bit more he’ll start getting invited to all the cool conservative parties. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs for someone that was once one of the greatest filmmakers around (Historical note: his very first movie after becoming a 9/11 Republican? My Boss’s Daughter, that awesome Ashton Kutcher/Tara Reid rom-com that swept the nation in 2003).

While one might assume upon reading all this that it’s quite easy to hate such a blatant propaganda piece, but it’s really more sad and embarrassing than anything else. Back in the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker days, they made such films as Airplane!, The Naked Gun, and Ruthless People, and now that he’s been on his own for a while this is the best he can manage? It’s like Michael Phelps missing the gun going off at the next Olympics because he has to finish his beer first. He hasn’t worked on anything since this came out in 2008, but I’m hoping he can turn himself around, as I don’t think anyone would want this to be the film their career ended with.

Rating: ½ *

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

2011-02-13T17:35:00.000-08:00

What an astonishingly hateful and dishonest film this is. Watching Ben Stein traveling around, tossing out quips like he’s still hosting a game show and expressing constant fake astonishment each time an Intelligent Design proponent explains one of their basic talking points, nodding his head sagely as though he had never heard any of the arguments here before. The overt contempt he and his film show for science, scientists (except the ones that agree with him, of course), and simple reasoning skills would be amusing, sort of like watching some demented racist frothing at the mouth on Jerry Springer, if not for how he and his ilk comprise such a large part of the country, and have had such powerful influence over our nation’s scientific policies.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The film, for those who haven’t heard of it before, and haven’t guessed from the above, is a documentary by Stein that starts off by him pretending to champion the cause of college professors that have cruelly had their livelihoods ripped away from them for having dared to challenge the status quo and mentioning intelligent design in the classroom or in scientific papers, before gradually moving onto his real point: that evolution and Darwinism is actually just evil and vile, and in Stein’s mind is somehow directly responsible for the Holocaust. His original title for the film, that he strangely couldn’t find financial backing for, was From Darwin to Hitler, and is frankly much more honest in its hatred. That he finds no dichotomy at all in beginning the film condemning Darwinists for their supposed hatred of Intelligent Design proponents and then ending the film showing such relentless hatred of Darwinists that he outright accuses them of being responsible for the Nazi party is just one of the many games of Logic Twister on display here.

That it’s all so slick and polished is almost worse than if it had been the bottom-barrel church production it so desperately wishes to be. It’s every bit as well crafted as any documentary you can see being nominated for an Academy Award, with a good dose of humor (at one point Stein even quips that they “wouldn‘t win my money“ with their arguments), animation to explain some of the basic structure of cells (though obviously not going into any great detail, since his whole thesis is that the basic foundation of biology is a lie, and the more detail he goes into here the more the facts would turn against him), and dozens of interviews with various people on both sides of the issue (he does mention early in the film that it seems like a bad sign when he has to travel to Texas to meet many of the ID people, though he never actually follows up on such a seemingly crucial thread). I’ve seen documentaries that actually won at the Oscars for Best Documentary Feature that weren’t put together this well, and it’s all gone to waste on a completely poisoned mindset that loudly claims to champion intellectual honesty while actively campaigning against it.

Consider the following exchange. Stein is interviewing one of the ID proponents, David Berlinski* (who starts off rather ominously by rattling off about a dozen different universities he’s taught at, which I think was meant to establish his credentials instead of making us immediately wonder what’s wrong with him that he’s been forced to shuffle from place to place so much), who tries to simply ask, “Suppose we find, simply as a matter of fact, that our scientific inquiries point in one direction?” Stein: “Which is that there is an intelligent creator.” Berlinski: “Why should we eliminate that from discussion?” First, for me to point out that Berlinski uses each hand to point in completely opposite directions while posing the question about science pointing in one direction would be childish and immature, and I’m scandalized that any of you would even consider mentioning it. Second, to pose the idea that all of our scientific inquiries could wind up pointing in that direction would require for there to be a vast change in either the way we view scientific evidence, or the way we view an Intelligent Creator. If you’ll think back to your middle and high school science classes (or your college science classes, if you took any there), one of the key parts of the scientific method is that all of your hypotheses must be both testable and falsifiable. It’s simply physically impossible to test for God (Sorry, sorry, I meant an “Intelligent Designer”) in any way that can prove his/her/its existence or lack thereof. We couldn’t even try a basic series of tests to see if the various miracles in the Bible and other religious texts could have actually happened or not, simply due to how proponents of them would just argue that their respective deities transcend all natural laws of science and nature and so are impossible to test for anyway. For those wondering why ID can’t be taught in a classroom, that alone is reason enough.

By the way, it’s more than slightly suspicious how, for all the many proponents of Intelligent Design we encounter in this film, not a single one of them mentions in the film believing in a god. Indeed, several of them are mock outraged by the very idea that Darwinists would accuse them of trying to smuggle religion into the classroom by way of Intelligent Design, because it’s clearly nowhere near the same thing as Creationism, despite being identical in every way except for being cautious not to specifically name the Judeo-Christian God as the Intelligent Designer they’re proposing. Indeed, at one point Stein laughs at the very notion of life on Earth having been potentially caused by aliens, which is curiously dismissive of someone that’s convinced that someone somewhere must have created us, but doesn’t want to narrow things down to specific names. Later, he then mocks Dawkins for suggesting that life on Earth could have conceivably have been started by alien life, but that that alien life would still have to have at its source a basic natural process and not a god, sneeringly claiming that Dawkins is admitting here that he believes Intelligent Design is possible, just not all types. It should be noted, also, that despite Intelligent Design supposedly not in any way requiring a belief in a god (in fact, in the film's entire running time, we never get a clear definition of what exactly Intelligent Design is arguing, which I suppose is not surprising when it's so hard for its adherents everywhere to define it as anything that would separate it from Creationism), one of Stein's main bits of proof of the evils of Darwinism is in how it seems to turn its adherents into atheists. The amount of sheer unbridled intellectual dishonesty on display by everyone involved on the ID side here is staggering. Also, while above I made sure to include an all-encompassing set of deities in the paragraph above, I can’t offhandedly think of a single ID proponent that’s not a Christian, so I probably shouldn’t have bothered.

The film also goes down the wonderful path of politicizing science, as one of his ID interviewees complains that “liberal Christians have been fighting with conservative Christians for so long that they’ll side with anybody against the fundamentalists”. Now, I know that in the United States right now we’re very big on pretending science is about politics and not facts, but it really isn’t. As Roger Ebert put it (not in this film), “the Theory of Evolution is neither liberal nor conservative. It is simply provable or not.” When dealing with scientific evidence, anyone that claims the available evidence is either real or not real based on their political views is not someone you want to be taking your scientific knowledge from. I wouldn’t really expect anything different from people that believe Intelligent Design is every bit as viable a scientific theory as evolution, but it’s nice for them to briefly let slip part of their real issues with evolution. After all, if those godless liberals believe it’s true, it must be false!

I suppose I shouldn’t express too much hatred for the film, though, even if I did specifically choose to watch because I expected to hate it at least a little. After all, the continued cheery presence of Richard Dawkins as the main proponent of evolution in the film (despite being selectively edited in a desperate effort to make him seem like a buffoon with no real substance behind his Darwinism) did remind me just how much I liked his book The Blind Watchmaker, and got me to order another of his books (though I didn’t order his book The God Delusion, which was prominently displayed in the film as part of the general effort to frighten religious people into hating him and, by extension, evolution). The film itself is utterly without worth outside of Dawkins. It’s overwhelmingly dishonest and hateful, pretending to be something it’s very clearly not, and shows a gross misunderstanding of the scientific method, evolutionary theory, and even mathematics. Stein frequently throws in stock footage of Nazis and Russian soldiers as a visual comparison to Darwinists because they’re all so horrid and evil. Curious that they’d accuse Darwinism of such racism, when part of his decision to publish On the Origin of Species was to prove that humans are all one and the same in an effort to help end the practice of slavery, which was still alive and well in 1859. I would expect someone as well-read as Stein to know that, though whether he did or not I’m not surprised in the least that it didn’t make the film. After all, once you’ve made the commitment to actually include footage of Jews in concentration camps as part of showing how evil Darwinists are, it would hardly work to show any facts that might indicate you’re just using a major human tragedy in a massively inappropriate way, now would it?

Rating: Zero stars

* Berlinski, and a few of the other people (I’m not calling them scientists, sorry) at the Discovery Institute, were the ones that tutored Ann Coulter on science and evolution for her book Godless: The Church of Liberalism, if you want further proof of what the man’s like.

P.S. I’m not providing a link to his movie. If you really want to see it, go download it, don’t let him get any of your money. Instead, there’s a link to some Dawkins to feed your mind.

Tamara Drewe

2011-02-10T23:54:00.000-08:00

At a time when most of 2010’s heavy hitters and Oscar bait are coming out on DVD, it’s rather nice to get a little breather with this rather charming British comedy. It’s airy, fun, and while there’s a good amount of seriousness to the proceedings, it never comes close to being as grim as, say, The Fighter or Buried, and for that I’m grateful.

The film opens at a writers’ retreat in the English countryside hosted by Beth (Tamsin Greig of Black Books fame) and Nicholas (Roger Allam). They are having some difficulties, such as when they get into an argument over his infidelity in front of their fellow writers (By the way, to all of my married readers out there: if you catch your spouse cheating on you, and they claim that they only did it once and will never do it again, they are lying to you and you should leave them). Still, things remain relatively tranquil in Ewedown until the fateful return of fellow writer Tamara Drewe (Gemma Arterton, doing much better here than she did in Prince of Persia). Tamara had been a bit of an ugly duckling when she had previously lived in town, but now that she’s gotten a nose job and looks all sexy suddenly all the men are desperate to sleep with her, all the women hate her, and neither group takes her seriously intellectually anymore.

There’s a bit more to things than that, but it’s a good deal more fun watching how everything unfolds, and seeing all of the various quirky personalities bouncing off of each other. It’s the type of film you rarely get to see in American cinema, where humor is allowed to flow naturally out of the various characters, without any clumsy setups or forced set pieces that are the bread and butter of American comedies, perhaps because it’s surprisingly hard to make interesting characters by way of executive committee.

Indeed, while the choice to keep things simple and charming may be part of what keeps it from really reaching any great heights, it’s pretty much clever and interesting all the way through. The contrasting styles of the various writers are pretty entertaining (and while this may make me a huge nerd, I did love all the discussion of Thomas Hardy and how he’s so inscrutable that the author writing about him is already two years past his book deadline -- apparently the film is based on a graphic novel that was inspired by a Thomas Hardy novel, but I‘m hardly enough of an expert to say which), and the endless mix of hatred and optimism of the two teen girls whose names I never wrote down is a constant delight. Also, this has nothing to do with comedy, but I would be amiss if I didn’t mention how incredibly attractive Gemma Arterton is. I know I didn’t really like her in Prince of Persia, but really, I didn’t like much of anything about that terrible movie. Here she’s much more lively and interesting, and proves to be much more attractive when everything’s not color adjusted to look varying shades of brown and tan.

I should say that it’s not entirely a comedy, despite how casually amusing the film tends to be. The film does delve into some serious issues, such as Nicholas’s infidelity, and a bit of a relationship wrecking crisis caused by the spiteful mass e-mail sent out by someone pretending to be someone else. Still, for the most part, the serious issues aren’t all that massively serious, and where I’ve seen films where a cheating husband drove the entire film’s plot, here it’s dealt with without dragging things out too much, as the film is far too intent on winning us over than on making us sad.

Director Stephen Frears is pretty much batting 1.000 with me, having made such great movies as High Fidelity, The Queen, and Hero (the best Dustin Hoffman movie nobody seems to have ever seen). This isn’t really one of his best efforts, but I suspect he wouldn’t be able to make a bad movie if he tried. This isn’t one of the most vital films of the year to see, but it’s certainly nicer and more fun than a great deal of those that actually acquired an Academy Award nod.

Rating: ***

Monsters

2011-02-10T00:16:00.000-08:00

While this doesn’t really qualify as a horror movie despite the monsters alluded to in the title and so doesn’t qualify for the Top Ten Horror Movies of 2010 list I’m still considering doing for this blog, I’m quite glad I saw this, as it’s one of the more intelligent and subtle films of the year. I’m not sure whether to say the social commentary is blatant or subtle, as it’s rather blatant that they’re making social commentary, but somewhat subtle in what exactly it is they’re talking about.

The film is somewhat minimalist in its cast, mostly just following around two characters, Andrew (Scoot McNairy) and Samantha (Whitney Able). He’s a photographer that’s finally managed to get clearance to photograph the giant aliens that have taken up residence in Mexico (I could be wrong, but the map of the Infected Zone does seem to encompass that entire country), but finds himself stymied by having to first secure passage for his boss’s daughter back to the United States. They miss the ferry after being robbed the night before, and so he has no choice but to escort her all the way through the Infected Zone of Mexico.

The aliens, who came here on a NASA probe that was sent out in a search for extraterrestrial life, are pretty massive, though not quite on a Godzilla or Cloverfield scale. The United States has erected a wall around the Infected Zone (Subtextual Hint: Much like the border fences our government has put along the Mexico border) and frequently sends soldiers out to kill the monsters, though they seem to be fairly docile unless attacked first. The bulk of the movie is just the two of them, wandering through the forests of Mexico, learning about each other and the aliens, who he still hopes to photograph in hopes of defining his career.

There really isn’t much in the way of a story for the film, it’s mostly just a premise that gets the two leads talking and bouncing off of each other. For example, she asks him how it feels to do a job where he doesn’t make any money unless someone’s in pain, to which he replies “you mean like doctors?” Of course it goes a bit further than that, but it was a nice immediate rejoinder to her intentionally antagonistic bullshit. Point is, they have some great chemistry together, and they don’t shy away from uncomfortable topics, which is kind of essential for a film whose main purpose in existing is to quietly explore such issues under the guise of a sci-fi movie.

Of course, there are some problems with the film, if you’re a nitpicking asshole like myself. First, while I appreciate that it’s less a straightforward movie than it is an extended metaphor, it would be nice if there were still a bit more plot to the film. I don’t need action every minute, but when close to half the film is just two people walking through the jungle talking, it can get a bit taxing. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t need a big gun fight every ten minutes or anything to be happy, but I do want something more to happen. Sure, they have to deal with occasional encounters with the aliens, and it does become rather tense when they reach the edge of the Infected Zone and call in the military to get evacuated out, but the majority of the film is just two people talking. It’s mostly interesting conversations, but come on.

Still, it is a mostly fascinating movie, and if there’s not enough going on, at least it’s more intelligent and thoughtful than most films that came out last year. This was writer/director Gareth Edwards’ directorial debut (aside from some TV work that I’m not counting), and it makes me pretty damn eager to see what he’s got up his sleeve next. He did a damn fine job with this film, and should hopefully have a nice long career ahead of him.

Rating: *** ½

My Soul To Take

2011-02-08T23:24:00.000-08:00

I suppose it’s only fitting that, after watching one of last year’s best horror movies yesterday, today I watched one of the worst. For those that blinked and so missed this getting released and swiftly removed from theaters back in October, this was writer/director Wes Craven’s proud return to horror after a lengthy hiatus following 2005’s Cursed (though he’d probably rather you focused on 200’s Scream 3). Going by what a muddle this one is, however, I think it would have been fine if he had just waited until Scream 4.

The film opens in the past, as notorious serial killer the Riverton Ripper finally realizes, after a security camera takes some video of him, that one of his personalities (he’s schizophrenic) is the killer. He calls up his psychiatrist for advice, who quickly calls the police, but the personality that’s been killing everyone is pissed that he told anyone, and decides to take action against his family. The police arrive too late for his wife, but gun him down just before he kills his young daughter. And then they have to gun him down again when he revives, grabs a cop’s gun, and shoots the cop and the psychiatrist. And then he comes to again in the ambulance, killing a paramedic and somehow making the ambulance explode. AND THEY NEVER FOUND THE BODY….

We now cut forward sixteen years. At the same instant the ambulance exploded, seven kids were born prematurely at the hospital, one of which came from the murdered mother (not real sure how that worked), and they now celebrate their birthdays each year at midnight by one of them killing the Ripper in effigy. This year’s celebration goes awry, however, when the police show up before Bug (Max Thieriot, the son of the Ripper) can destroy this year’s effigy, and now the students are all afraid that this means the Ripper will return for real. Of course they’re right, as otherwise there wouldn’t be a movie, and the body count starts rising pretty rapidly.

Let’s start with the obvious good parts. First, the movie is pretty ridiculous at times, and I mean that in a good way. Bug and his best friend Alex (John Magaro) do a presentation on the Californian condor, and it’s not enough that Bug made Alex a creepy full-body costume, he also uses the opportunity to get back at the school bully by giving it an alleged condor defense mechanism of projectile vomiting on anyone that tries to touch one of its feathers, and then he gets back even further at said bully by giving it a secondary defense mechanism of having projectile diarrhea in case the vomiting just wasn’t enough. It’s the best scene in the movie, and it’s a shame it arrives so damn soon in the film because nothing that comes later can really live up to it.

Unfortunately, the film simply isn’t ridiculous enough to make up for its other problems. After the over the top nature of the prologue and the presentation, I was kind of hoping for an almost Argento-ish madness to the film, or at least a Drag Me To Hell-ish madness. Instead it soon devolves into fairly standard slasher fare, something made all the worse by the completely outlandish dialogue. The dialogue alone probably warrants its own paragraph, as listening to this movie, one could get the impression that Craven’s sole understanding of how teenagers speak comes from repeatedly watching Juno. He used to have a pretty good ear for this sort of thing, I have no idea what the hell happened to him here. Unlike many of the film’s detractors, I didn’t hate the dialogue so much as was amused and fascinated by it, as one might be fascinated by an alien culture trying to learn English but without understanding any of the basic syntax or grammar, but it’s certainly something pretty damn far from anything one would normally expect or want in a film.

There’s also the issue with the killer. It would be somewhat dishonest for me to accuse the film of cheating with the killer, when roughly half the slasher films ever made have done the same thing (the other half just made the killer some evil mutant/supernatural monster), but here are the basic facts. Our main character spends so much of the movie having sudden nightmares about each new victim being killed before anyone else knows about it, has a history of mental illness and blackouts, and is the son of the previous killer, and they spend so much time all but shouting from the rooftops that he’s the killer that it’s completely obvious that it’s not him. However, they spend absolutely zero time on trying to establish any other possible suspects (one character jokingly suggests the new principal might be the killer, but that thought is never mentioned again aside from the one line), so when the killer is finally revealed, it’s obviously just someone completely random that you can only identify because they’re just about the only other surviving cast member left. If it’s not outright cheating, it’s still pretty damn lame (My favorite, by the way, is probably in the slasher film Cutting Class, where they spend most of the movie trying desperately to convince you that one of the main characters, who used to be in a mental asylum, is the killer, to the point where you have to dismiss him because he’s too obvious, and then he turns out to be the killer after all).

And that’s how this film is: pretty damn lame. It’s appallingly paced (not only is it too long, at 107 minutes, but we’ll go about half an hour without a single kill, and then three characters die almost at once), fairly light on the blood (outside of the prologue, this probably could have gotten a PG-13 for violence), and an opening that promises sheer craziness but stops delivering anything really wild after the first act. It just might be the weakest film I’ve ever seen from Craven, and I say this as someone that’s a much bigger fan than he should be of all his ridiculous 80s horror movies that nobody in their right mind would watch. You should all definitely avoid this one.

Rating: * ½

Let Me In

2011-02-08T00:23:00.001-08:00

I was a little torn about whether or not to watch this film at first. It had gotten rather mixed reviews, and there frankly didn’t seem to be much need to make a remake of a film that was released a mere two years earlier, particularly one that ranks as one of my favorite vampire movies of all time. Still, I was kind of curious to see the first new release of the revived Hammer Studios, and I’m glad I did. While this isn’t as good as the original, it still manages to be one of the best horror movies of 2010.

The film stars Kodi Smit-McPhee as Owen, a young boy that lives with his mother in an apartment complex in a small town in New Mexico. He’s continuously bullied at school, and only finds some measure of solace when he befriends a girl named Abby (Chloe Moretz) who lives next door to him. She doesn’t really behave like most girls her age, and Owen slowly comes to understand just how different she is (though it’s pointed out to us long before it is him). Yes, she’s a vampire, and one with her own problems, such as how she’s “twelve. But…I’ve been twelve for a very long time.” Indeed, she’s rapidly outliving the old man that’s been posing as her father, as he begins botching things when he kills to supply her with blood, as he’s sick of the mockery of life he’s living. The two children find solace with each other and draw the strength they need from each other to (mostly) help deal with their various problems.

Aside from a small and unfortunate flirtation with CG, co-writer/director Matt Reeves (whose previous film Cloverfield showed none of the skill he shows here) makes a subtle, powerful film, more concerned with exploring its characters and situation than with mindless scares (and thankfully no attempts at sexiness, a problem that plagues far too many vampire films). It’s also nice how the film focuses all its attention on our two young leads, to the point where other cast members have names like Owen’s Mother, The Father, and The Policeman. The pair give fantastic performances, showing all the hurt, confusion, and anger that people on the cusp of puberty go through, and which disturbingly few actors their age can manage. They are, of course, aided in conveying this mood by the gloomy winter coastline. Oh, how I’ve missed the sinister Hammer landscapes.

Of course, I can’t avoid the fact that I can make every last one of those bits of praise (slightly modified so far as the New Mexico landscape goes) for the original Swedish film as well. Indeed, for a film that claimed it was just starting from scratch in adapting the novel instead of being a straight remake of the original movie, it sure does hew pretty damn closely to its predecessor. Seriously, the first film skipped like half the novel, they could have easily made some significant changes here. That they claimed they were going to and then went ahead and just did a straight remake of a film that’s two years old is fairly insulting to everyone involved. It’s not exactly like the original was all that obscure, either, when it appeared on a great many critics’ Top Ten lists for 2008, so I can only assume that this was made specifically to appeal to people that wanted to see the original but suffer from illiteracy and so can’t read subtitles.

Still, while there really doesn’t seem to be a point to this film beyond that it’s in English instead of Swedish, I can’t deny that it’s a really effective effort. In a year filled with so few worthwhile horror movies, this stands out as one of the best. It’s good both as the first vampire movie of the new decade (well, the first released in theaters anyway, I’m sure there were dozens of the damn things that went straight to DVD) and as the debut release by the new Hammer. While it may not prove as iconic an effort as The Curse of Frankenstein (itself a remake) was, anytime we get a quality new British horror movie is just fine with me.

Rating: *** ½

Red

2011-02-06T17:31:00.000-08:00

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I have never read the actual comic this film was based on, despite being a huge comics nerd and a huge Warren Ellis fan. Still, I suppose it’s for the best, as I understand quite a lot was changed around, so it would have likely just led to me spending the whole movie annoyed at how different it was from the source material. However, given how what we wound up with was a piece of pleasant fluff that I’ll likely have difficulty remembering anything about in three months, maybe someone should indeed have been harping on writers Jon and Erich Hoebler or director Robert Schwentke to keep it closer than it wound up being.

Anyway, the film stars Bruce Willis as Frank Moses, a retired CIA operative (the film’s title comes from his designation: Retired, Extremely Dangerous) who has been targeted for assassination for one of his past jobs. He goes on the run, making sure to kidnap Mary-Louise Parker first (they’ve grown very close over the phone, and he doesn’t want his enemies kidnapping her to use against him), and starts to enlist a group of old friends to help figure out who’s got it in for him and how to stop them. Cue the run-ins by Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, and Helen Mirren as his old squad that likely doesn’t have a single original hip between them.

It’s a pretty fun, though curiously relaxed film. For a story where one mistake could easily kill the entire cast, everyone seems more interested in just light-heartedly bantering with each other, and showing off how they’re still cool even if they’re old. Even with everything that happens (and with Morgan Freeman not caring what happens because he has Stage IV cancer anyway), they’re just breezing through it all like nothing actually matters here. It couldn’t get any more whimsical if Gene Kelly started dancing partway through.

It’s a curious decision, and while it does make the movie moderately fun to watch, almost like a throwback to an 80s buddy cop movie, it also leaves us with no real suspense, nor does it allow the actors any kind of range. Malkovich spends the entire movie acting crazy, and Parker spends a little time looking frightened and panicked before joining the rest in casual smugness, but that’s about it. It’s almost a waste to have so many great actors in this film, as they’re all forced to turn in very one-note performances in a one-note film.

Schwentke does give us a very smooth and polished effort here, don’t get me wrong. Schwentke previously gave us Flightplan, which was a terrific thriller as long as you made sure not to even try to think about the plot once it was done. I’ve not seen The Time Traveler’s Wife, but based on the two I have seen it seems that his main area of expertise so far is to create very slick, fairly enjoyable action films that can’t quite go the distance. If you happen to catch this on TV sometime, it’s a perfectly fun way to kill an hour and a half, but I could name a whole lot of other action movies out there that do a better job than this. Hell, just in the range of action movies based on Vertigo comic books in which government gunmen are turned on by said government and have to hunt down the man who’s trying to kill them and which was released in theaters last year, we have The Losers, which had the benefit of being more fun, more exciting, and somewhat more dramatic. You should probably go watch that instead of this.

Rating: ** ½

Hatchet 2

2011-02-04T23:08:00.000-08:00

I may have mentioned here before how the original Hatchet was, in my opinion, one of the best slasher movies to be made since the 1980s. Naturally, I was eager to see the sequel, particularly since it was being released in theaters unrated and uncensored, something fairly unheard of for a horror movie, and a trend that I really hope continues. Sadly, I wound up having to wait for the DVD, as there was so much outrage over the fact that such a gory, unrated movie could ever get a limited release that it was yanked out of theaters after one day. Naturally there was no hope of it living up to the kind of ridiculous build-up that put in my head, but now that I’ve finally seen it, I have to admit that while it’s not as much fun as the original, it’s definitely one of the most gruesome movies in my collection. And people, I own a large chunk of Miike films.

The films starts at the exact moment the first film ended, with our heroine (Danielle Harris of Halloween fame, replacing Tamara Feldman) on a boat getting attacked by the monstrous Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder). She fights him off, and after encountering a nearby woodsman to supply the opening kill, she makes her way through the swamp back to New Orleans, talks to voodoo tour guide Reverend Zombie (Tony Todd, who is by far the most fun character in the film), who gives her some added backstory on Crowley and assembles a team of yokels and idiots (including Harris’ uncle, who Zombie demands she bring along) to hunt Crowley down once and for all. Once that whirlwind bit of plot development and hasty character introductions is over with, it’s back to the swamp for everyone to die horribly.

And wow, do they ever die horribly. People get beheaded, shoved into spinning propellers, rubbed down into nothing with a sander, chainsawed in half, take hits to the crotch with an axe, chopped in half, curb stomped, and even skinned alive. What’s more, he spends several minutes on each victim -- not just chasing them down, but outright mutilating each one -- to the point where it eventually stops being fun and gross and starts being a little uncomfortable. I didn’t think I’d ever say this about a gory horror movie, but I think writer-director Adam Green could have dialed it back a tad here, and maybe give us a few more minutes of character development so we could have a reason to care when most of them die. While Crowley has an appropriately tragic back story (and in proper slasher movie fashion, his back story is made both larger, more ridiculous, and more muddled in this sequel), there’s no real reason given for him to be this ridiculously pissed off at everyone that he can’t just kill them, but has to beat them around, chop bits of them off, slap them around a bit, call their mother names, and then kill them. For instance, take one of the early kills. He springs out of the bushes onto the guy, knocking him on his back. Crowley has his hatchet in hand, but rather than using the blade, he instead decides to slam the blunt top of it into his victim’s mouth over and over and over and over and over again, until the poor guy’s face has been completely caved in and just looks like a pile of goo. What the hell, man?!? Calm down!

Really, the two main stars of the film are Hodder (well, I guess the violence is the real star there, but he’s the one dishing it all out) and Todd, in his best role since his star turn in Candyman. Yes, Candyman was a star turn for him, just ask any horror junkie. He completely hams things up as Reverend Zombie, trying to warm up his crowd of hillbillies with guns by waving his shaman staff around and shaking his hands frantically around their heads, and while we’re supposed to view him as a bit of a villain for his secret plans regarding Crowley, I have to say that I was rooting for him all the way to the end. He was a great deal more fun than Harris was. I don’t know what her deal was, but she was perfectly fine in Rob Zombie’s Halloween, so I have to assume she just made a terrible acting decision to appear miserable and lost the whole way through the movie. She’s such a killjoy, it seems almost necessary for Green to have made it so she shared most of her scenes with Todd so that he could keep the fun going.

I don’t mean to put the movie down like this. It is indeed a good, mostly fun modern slasher. If it’s not as good as the original film, well, sequels often aren’t (I’d say almost never are, but that’s not really the case with horror franchises). All I can really advise is that when Hatchet 3 comes around (and yes, I have to assume it will), Adam Green should spend a little less time on the gore effects and a little more time on character development, and perhaps get a more energetic lead. Also, bring Tony Todd back, he was all kinds of awesome. Also, given the quick reference, a Victor Crowley, Leslie Vernon team-up would be all kinds of sweet.

Rating: ***

RoboGeisha

2011-02-03T20:12:00.001-08:00

I hope I’m not revealing any trade secrets here when I mention that Japan is a pretty weird place. It’s something that permeates pretty much every aspect of their lives, from people paid to forcibly shove as many people as possible onto Tokyo subway trains, to vending machines that sell used panties (and I seem to recall reading about them having talking toilets too, which is just gross). Unfortunately, while the nation’s natural bizarreness is pretty endlessly fascinating, it can sometimes become much less so in their movies when they realize their inherent strangeness and decide to actively ham things up and go “Oh, look at how very strange and wacky we are here!” while jumping up and down and waving their arms around. That’s pretty much what we wind up with here.

I confess that I wasn’t paying the closest possible attention to the plot, what little there was of it, but here’s what I managed to piece together today while trying to recall last night: Yoshie is the largely unloved sister of famous geisha who, after showing off some impressive fighting skills, is recruited into the world of geisha assassins, led by Kageno, a big steel businessman. He’s a man with a plan, you see, a plan for raising up an army of geishas, replacing parts of them with machinery so they can be a deadly force to assassinate politicians, and then turning his castle into a giant robot to menace the city. Just your average Thursday in Japan.

Now, I do normally like when my movies get pretty over-the-top, don’t get me wrong. The thrill of craziness is kind of lost, however, when the film is constantly mugging at us as though writer/director Noboru Iguchi (who previously directed The Machine Girl, which I also thought was overrated) was some kind of Japanese Andy Dick. It isn’t enough, say, for a geisha girl to turn around in battle and start shooting shuriken out of her ass. No, we also have to get an over-the-top reaction shot from her victim screaming “From her ASS????” because we just wouldn’t have known this was crazy otherwise. The whole movie is like that too. It sets up a bunch of big moments that could potentially be fun and wild, and then oversells everything until they all just lie there dead.

There’s also a pretty big problem with the CG here. I don’t have a problem with huge blood sprays, obviously, but I do have a problem with CG blood that just looks like it might have come straight out of some mid-90s video game. There’s also the problem of the poor editing connected with it. You’ll get scenes of someone opening fire with a machine gun or a rifle or some such nonsense, then it’ll cut to whoever is getting shot to death as a massive spray of CG blood comes spurting off of them, and then the camera lingers just barely long enough for the blood to partially finish spurting so that we can see the victim’s shirt isn’t even torn, and then we cut back to the action. It happens several times in the movie, and it’s jarringly incompetent each time. I could almost think that it was done intentionally as a joke, except that it would be the most subtle joke in the film by far.

What we’re left with is something that could have been a fun, energetic film, if only it had been placed in the hands of a better director. Instead, we’ve got an incompetent mess, where all the jokes are oversold, all the action is slapdash, and all the special effects are so cheap they would have barely passed muster in a 50s B movie. Rich, I hope you’re happy with this review, because it absolutely justifies me having been too busy with Minecraft to update the past three days.

Rating: * ½

Tekken 4

2011-01-30T19:22:00.000-08:00

I’m at a bit of an impasse here, as I have made it my mission this year to automatically do a review of every video game I beat, and yet I’m fully aware that it’s largely missing the point to be playing a fighting game on single player mode only, particularly when over half a decade of avoidance (this is literally the first time I’ve played a fighting game since all of my college friends graduated before me in 2003 -- well, outside of Smash Brothers) has led to my fighting game skills very badly atrophying. Still, if nothing else I owe it to my own perverse sense of self-hatred, and so you can all enjoy what is no doubt going to be one of my more awkward reviews of the year.

For those that don’t play many video games, Tekken is a long-running series of semi-3D fighting games that features a fine blend of real martial arts styles and video gamey violence. It also, as tends to be the problem for a series with so many playable characters, has an increasingly convoluted and insane storyline, filled with robots and devil energy and there’s two bears that have their own storylines and several of the endings overlap and I don’t know what else is going on.

I made sure to play the game through once with each character, both to get a feel for everyone and to see all the endings, and Namco seems to have done a good job of making a character for pretty much anyone’s preferred fighting style. There’s the standard mix of strong-but-slow and fast-but-weak fighters, a Bruce Lee clone, a Jackie Chan clone, a robot that keeps switching to a different character’s fighting style with each new fight (one of the more frustrating characters to try to beat the game with), and Yoshimitsu, who has now added to his repertoire of swordplay and teleportation some freaking giant insect wings and a voice that makes him seem like he’s auditioning to be a new Protoss unit. He just wasn’t ponderous enough beforehand, I suppose.

While most of the characters from Tekken 3 have returned, there has been some replacement with different characters. Eddy’s gone, though he’s been replaced by his protégé Christie, who has the same capoeira fighting style while also dressing like a stripper, so it’s really an upgrade there. Gun Jack is also gone, but since Kuma and Panda both have the same moveset he was kind of redundant anyway. Really, the only thing I’m very much upset about so far as vanishing characters goes is the news that Armor King was killed in some lame bar room brawl by new character Marduk, who’s one of the stereotypical strong-and-slow guys (he towers over all the other characters), and isn’t very interesting at all. Somewhat better is Steve, a British boxer who doesn’t have much of a story line, but has a neat fighting style (he doesn’t kick, except when getting up off the ground -- instead, the kick buttons just have him duck his head to the left or right to set up more powerful punches).

The gameplay is largely the same as in the previous games, with a couple minor modifications. It’s still largely 2D with the ability to swerve into the foreground or background, which means that whenever I fought on higher difficulties any time I fought a faster opponent they’d just spin all around me whenever I tried to attack and made me look like a jerk. That stupid girl Xiaoyu was particularly annoying at this, as she’s such a small opponent to begin with that it was sometimes a struggle just to keep her from getting a Perfect on me. The levels now also have some barriers to them, so that you can sometimes deal extra damage to your opponent by smashing him into a statue or pillar or the wall. Of course, the same thing can just as easily happen to you, so you have to constantly watch where you are on the level.

I’m not sure what else there is to really say. It’s a very fun game, and there’s a lot of variety to the different fighting styles (though you can get pretty far on Easy with most characters just by doing basic kicks and grabs), though playing a fighting game by myself didn’t really give me the best possible experience the game could have offered. Still, if you happen to enjoy fighting games, it will make a fine addition to your library, though I suspect if you like fighting games and have a Playstation 2 then you’ve already picked this one up. Still, enjoy the confirmation of your good taste here!

Rating: *** ½

Buried

2011-01-28T20:46:00.001-08:00

I briefly debated giving this a horror tag since quite a lot of other people have been talking about it as if it were a horror movie, but while I can see their argument this one felt more like a thriller to me. Possibly that’s due to the deeply political aspect of it all, but regardless, a thriller this shall be for the purposes of this site. It’s still currently on my list for top ten horror movies of 2010, but that’s just because it was a really weak year and I didn’t want The Wolfman making it on there.

Ryan Reynolds plays Paul Conroy, who wakes up buried in a coffin somewhere. Using a lighter to take stock of his situation, he finds that his wallet’s been emptied out, but he’s got a surprise new cell phone in his pocket that’s (rather ominously) in Arabic instead of English. We learn that he’s a U.S. contractor working in Iraq whose convoy was ambushed by terrorists or insurgents or whoever -- we never learn exactly, beyond that they’re Arabic -- and they now want to ransom him for five million dollars or he will be killed. We never leave the claustrophobic confines of the coffin, so the only actors are Reynolds and various people he talks to on the phone -- a 911 operator, a Pentagon representative, his employers, his wife, his wife’s friend, the head of the hostage rescue taskforce in Iraq, and, of course, the kidnappers -- and all of them seem like an exercise in frustration. For a man that’s stuck in a big box that’s slowly running out of air, everyone sure does seem eager to place him on hold for interminably long periods of time, and are astonishingly unhelpful when they do get around to talking to him.

First there’s the kidnappers, who force him to make a video about his situation (in his pocket they’ve prepared a speech for him) by threatening to kill a female co-worker of his that they’ve also captured, and then after he sends them the video they send him a video of them shooting her anyway, for seemingly no reason other than to be cartoonishly evil. His regional director also calls him up just to let him know that they had started filing dismissal proceedings against him a few hours before he was captured due to allegations that he was having an affair with said co-worker, and as a result his family will not be entitled to any of his insurance benefits. The head of the hostage rescue team isn’t exactly encouraging either. He tells Reynolds that it’s government policy to never negotiate with terrorists, so the ransom is never going to get paid, and they also somehow can’t track exactly where the cell phone is, but they do narrow his location down to a city, which they proceed to bomb, which damages his coffin and causes it to start filling up with sand. Seriously, he makes Jack Bauer look lucky.

The film’s direction, by Rodrigo Cortes, is appropriately dark and cramped, and the choice to have the camera never leave the coffin is the correct one. Ryan Reynolds also shows himself to be a surprisingly decent actor when he’s not appearing in rom-coms (I didn’t see Wolverine, so I can’t comment on his turn as Deadpool that had everyone demanding a spin-off), appearing appropriately frazzled and managing to alternate between screaming at people on the phone and talking semi-calmly while visibly wanting to scream at them (Look, I said that he did a decent job, not that he was Brando). No, most of the problems with the film come in the form of the script by first-time writer Christ Sparling. Everything here, while mostly realistic (let’s face it, anyone that calls up a generic number for a business instead of a direct line to someone is just asking to be put on hold for a tediously long time and left talking to people whose main goal in life is to shuffle them around to someone else), builds up to something ridiculously over the top, and is compounded by the ridiculously evil antics of the kidnappers. Seriously, look at that list of absurdities in the above paragraph, and then consider that I didn’t even cover all of it. I was watching it with three friends, and by the end we all just wanted him to die already, since the entire universe was clearly conspiring against him.

And I’m sorry, but while I could sympathize somewhat with the shitty situation he’s in, I can’t help but think about how anyone that decides to make extra money by working in a country that’s been in a semi-civil war since we blew up the government makes very bad life’s decisions indeed. I get that the economy’s sucked for the past decade, but there are always options that don’t involve putting your life at risk. Hell, just so far this year (a good eight years after our dumb cunt president decided to invade because Saddam Hussein had tried to assassinate his daddy back in the 90s) almost 200 people have been killed in bombings in Iraq. Anyone that decides to go to move out there for work is, quite frankly, an idiot.

You can see my problems, then, with this film. It gets quite a lot of things right -- it’s well directed, the acting’s pretty good, some of the film is pretty believable -- but is brought down by the more over-the-top elements and a main character that I can’t manage to root for. For a man that needs all the help he can get, he sure does spend an awful lot of his time screaming at the people on the other end of the phone, and it’s his own atrocious decision-making that led to him getting stuck in this situation in the first place. He’s also fairly useless within the confines of the coffin as well: it’s somewhat oversized, no doubt to leave extra air in there for him and not at all to help with the camerawork, and yet even after it’s weakened by the bombing, he makes no effort at all to try to break through the side or top to dig his way out. He instead chooses to sit there passively and wait for rescue or death. Not the most compelling lead one could hope for.

Rating: **

P.S. If you watch the trailer, it mentions he only has “90 minutes of oxygen”. I don’t think that’s actually the case, I’m pretty sure that’s just the length of the movie outside of the credits. Also, yes, you are not allowed to just buy it on DVD. It is only available as a combination DVD/Blu Ray, because Lion’s Gate has no respect for its customers whatsoever.

The Fighter

2011-01-26T22:00:00.000-08:00

It’s gotten much easier this week for me to make predictions about which of the Oscar bait movies I’m watching is likely to actually get a nomination, since they announced the nominees yesterday (No nomination for Tangled? Nothing for The Town but a Best Supporting Actor nod?), so I think I can confidently state now that this movie will indeed have gotten nominated for several awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. As to whether it fully deserves to have been one of the most nominated films (with seven nominations, it was fifth behind The King’s Speech, True Grit, Inception, and The Social Network), I don’t know that I fully agree there.

The film follows Massachusetts boxer Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) as he struggles to improve his career. With him is his brother/trainer Dicky Eklund (a fairly unrecognizable Christian Bale), who helps train him whenever he’s not disappearing to score crack. It becomes clear very quickly that a large part of Micky’s career troubles are coming from his family: his brother is completely unreliable and obsessed with his own personal fame from his glory days years ago (we get to hear him talk of how he once knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard a great many times through the film), and his mother Alice, who also manages him, and his five or six sisters, are all as overbearing as a family could possibly be. Wahlberg has surprisingly few lines in the film for a lead, perhaps because his character’s family talks so much that he’s used to never being able to get a word in edgewise.

After a humiliating defeat (his fourth loss in a row) when he’s pressured by his family into accepting a last minute fight against a fighter in a higher weight class, his new girlfriend Charlene (Amy Adams) manages to convince him that maybe his family doesn’t exactly have his best interests at heart, and he starts to look into other avenues for his management and training. As one could expect, with his new manager and trainer, he finally gets back on a winning streak, much to the consternation of his jilted family.

Let’s get one thing out of the way here: this is absolutely Christian Bale’s show. He is so wild and energetic that he steals every last scene he’s in. The film opens with Wahlberg trying to get some road work done for his main paying job, and Bale just keeps trying to box him and mug for him that he just gives up from weariness, and joins Bale in posing for Bale’s camera crew. Bale has been telling everyone that the HBO crew is there to film Bale’s comeback, though of course it’s very soon uncomfortably obvious what the documentary’s really about (Hint: Bale eventually gets to see it while in prison). Now, I’ve never thought Wahlberg was that exciting an actor to begin with, but he’s not being given a chance paired off with Bale like this. He might as well be one of the audience members that gets dragged onstage during live theater and tries to gamely play along, but mostly just stands there awkwardly smiling while everyone else just acts around him. He’s a fairly internalized actor at the best of times (The Departed notwithstanding); here, he might as well be a wooden prop in half of his scenes.

Which is not to say that he’s outright bad here, he’s just largely a nonentity, almost serving more as one of Hitchcock’s MacGuffins rather than being an actual person. Somewhat more clumsy are the fights, which almost look like old Hulk Hogan matches. In most of the fights we get a good look at, we just see Wahlberg getting pounded on mercilessly until it’s time for him to win, and then he suddenly Hulks up and drops his opponent with a few well-placed hits. Granted, the movie as a whole is a bit over the top, but come on.

Still, these are fairly minor complaints, all told. The movie as a whole is just plain exhilarating and fun, filled with people that make you better appreciate your own, calmer family, and a lot of great performances by everyone not named Mark (since I haven’t really said it earlier, some mention must be made of Amy Adams, who once again shows why she’s one of the brightest stars in Hollywood). If I don’t quite agree that it’s a Best Picture worthy film, nor should David O. Russell have gotten a Best Director nomination instead of Christopher Nolan, it’s still a damn fine movie.

Rating: *** ½

Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana

2011-01-25T21:25:00.000-08:00

Yes, I am doing another video game review, Rich. Deal with it. This one’s another RPG, one that’s both on a significantly smaller scale than Rogue Galaxy was (it’s only one planet that’s at stake, not the entire galaxy, and I don’t think the world’s even at risk of ending, just being much less pleasant to live in, and is a lot more “traditional“ than the various innovations Rogue Galaxy tried) while also being a good deal more fun to play. Funny how that one aspect always seems to trump everything else.

In this game you’re an alchemist named Klein (pronounced ‘clean’ for some reason, despite looking like the German name) who leads a group of adventurers that go around ridding the land of monsters and promoting alchemy and mana, before running afoul of villains like the alchemist Mull, who wants to use ancient forbidden arts to twist mana to his own ends, or Beggur, the leader of a local order of knights that keeps trying to bully you into joining him. The plot isn’t incredibly elaborate, and the villains aren’t as menacing as in some games (though some of the bosses are really damn hard if you don’t have your game face on), but after having played so many RPGs where all of existence is at stake, it’s kind of nice to play one that takes a different approach to things.

Much of the game is spent synthesizing various items and mana, to either give you new, more powerful items, or to bond any acquired mana to your equipment to heavily beef up your attack and magic powers. If that sounds tedious, you can always just skip those aspects of the game, though it does mean you’ll be missing out on many of the game’s best items, and the later boss battles will be much harder. There’s also a great deal of optional side quests you get to go on, from collecting special items to help various NPCs out, to an entire bonus dungeon that gets unlocked after beating the final boss (yes, make sure you save your game afterward), to help keep the game from being too linear.

There are some pretty notable flaws, however. First and foremost, while all the main characters and many of the NPCs are pretty fun and colorful, the English voice acting is pretty rough to get through. You can change it in the Options screen to the original Japanese voice actors, who are much better, but due to some wonderful programming quirk every single time you start your game up again it resets back to English. I’d like to say that the game was playtested enough to find such an obvious flaw, and so it was an intentional decision on the part of some malicious programmer, but given that the end credits announce things like how the game was made “In Cooperated With Sony Computer Entertainment of America”, it seems quite likely that many of those involved in translating the game for North America weren’t completely focused on their duties.

There’s also a wee problem with the length of the game. I didn’t really do many side quests on my run through (at least not before beating the end boss the first time), so they may stretch it out a bit more, but I beat the game in under twenty hours, which makes this the shortest RPG I’ve played since…I don’t even know. Breath of Fire 1 or Super Mario RPG, I guess. The bonus dungeon will add another hour or two, not because it’s all that long, but rather because the monsters in it are incredibly difficult (that is of course unless you’re “cheating” and using the Avoid Monsters mana). I got the game for free, so I suppose I can’t complain much, but it would hardly be fair to all of you cherished fans out there if I weren’t to mention it. I also have an issue where my favorite character early on gets injured for the bulk of the game, making it a pain in the ass to use her until she gets fully fixed. If you’re going to make it a chore to use her, why not just remove her as a playable character entirely? She’s not doing anyone any good staying on the roster.

Still, for all that it’s definitely on the slighter side as RPGs go, it’s funny, clever, and just plain fun to play. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, and it’s nothing particularly essential to play, but you will definitely enjoy yourself while you’re playing. Really, isn’t that the most important thing?

Rating: ***

The Social Network

2011-01-24T23:31:00.001-08:00

I don’t know what it says about the general quality of the films that came out this year, but where my review yesterday of The King’s Speech was about a film I expect to be nominated for Best Picture, here is a film I am 80% sure will actually win Best Picture (the other 20% is going towards Inception). It’s kind of a combination of both films being extremely good, and there being a bit of a dearth of films this past year that have any kind of real buzz to them whatsoever. I’d hate to think they were going to go with ten Best Picture nominees again this year, because I have no real clue how they’d fill all those slots up. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The film is the story of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), the founder of Facebook and the world’s youngest billionaire. It opens with him verbally assaulting his girlfriend in a lame effort to prove his intellectual superiority (resulting in their unsurprising breakup), and his subsequent blogging about how awful a person she is for dumping him and the swift drunken creation of a new website where he illegally stole all the images of college girls from various university databases and put them online for people to compare and contrast. After this gets him on academic probation, he’s contacted by the Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer), who decide he’s the perfect candidate to help them create a new social networking site called Harvard Connection, which differs from preexisting ones like Myspace and Friendster because you can only see the pages of people you’re already friends with, creating an air of exclusivity to the site. He agrees to help, then spends the next month and a half blowing them off in e-mail while creating his own site The Facebook with the exact same premise. The rest is history.

The film obviously has quite a few hurdles to overcome, and it succeeds at all of them wonderfully. First, it has the difficulty of showing a bunch of computer programmers doing their jobs without boring the audience or betraying any ignorance about what they’re doing, and director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin manage to find a way to simultaneously show how complicated everything is while explaining it all in clear enough terms for the audience to understand. There’s also the problem with the main character being pretty much a total dick to everyone around him, and that’s solved in part by surrounding him with somewhat more sympathetic characters (and apparently also by toning down Zuckerberg’s overall awful personality somewhat from how he is in real life, though he still seems fairly miserable no matter how successful he gets), giving us some semi-likable characters to root for as they’re alternately screwed over by Zuckerberg and go on to sue him for all they can get. There’s also the issue of just how illegal his operations in getting Facebook into the powerhouse it is today were, and to the film’s credit it keeps things pretty murky here, though it’s pretty obvious that he’s at least partially guilty of the various charges his former associates lay at his feet.

Two of the main things that help the film out are Fincher’s relentlessly fast pacing, taking us through the highs and lows of getting Facebook from a germ of an idea to its first million users at a constant run, aided and abetted by a fantastic soundtrack put together by Trent Reznor. Fincher, of course, isn’t exactly a stranger to making fast paced films, having previously helmed such efforts as Seven, The Game, and Fight Club, and he and Reznor manage to blend their styles together pretty much perfectly here. My favorite moment of their collaboration comes when Zuckerberg has a meeting with his friend and business partner Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the creator of Napster, at a dance club. While dozens of people are out dancing on the floor, they’re at a table while deafening music swells and ebbs around them like a physical addition to their group, keeping us from hearing entire sentences and leaving them in the inconvenient position of having to shout at the top of their lungs at each other for the entire conversation. It gave me some not very fond memories of the few times I’ve been out clubbing, and I don’t miss them at all.

Getting back on track, I meant what I said earlier about how I’m fairly sure this is going to win Best Picture. It’s got all the buzz, it’s got all the talent, and it has the benefit of coming out in a year without that many great films. It’s a film that’s well worth your while, regardless of your feelings on Facebook, and is every bit as smart and ruthless as its protagonist.

Rating: ****

The King's Speech

2011-01-23T23:05:00.000-08:00

It’s been long understood that British history is eternally ripe for great films based on and around it, and one need no greater proof than here, where a story of a man learning to overcome a speech impediment winds up being one of the year’s best films. It’s a funny, touching, intelligent, powerful effort, of the sort that one rarely finds in the movies these days. That it’s stuffed to bursting with great actors is just icing on the cake.

The film follows King George VI (Colin Firth) in the years before and after his ascension to the crown. His father King George V (Michael Gambon) has decided that, due to the rise of radio, Firth’s stammer needs to be corrected if he’s ever going to make a worthwhile king (yes, he has an older brother in Guy Pearce, but even his father thinks Pearce is worthless and will never make it as England’s ruler). To fix his problem, he and his wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) enlist the aid of speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), a man with a rather unorthodox approach to fixing speech problems that may come from having never received any actual training for his profession.

Perhaps the main key to the film comes from how Logue is Australian, and so doesn’t have the same politeness and deference to royalty that most British people did at the time. He quickly realizes that the problem with Firth’s stutter is mental and not physical, and so decides the only real route to curing him is to befriend him, beginning by demanding they call each other by first names and standing as equals at all times. This is, to put it mildly, not the normal method of dealing with a prince, though it does seem to have more of an effect than the more physical exercises Firth demands they also do, such as rolling around on the floor to loosen up muscles and saying ridiculous tongue twisters, which Rush rattles off so quickly I couldn’t even hear them, much less repeat them. Still, it’s a lot of fun watching how he works his way under Firth’s skin to help the healing process, such as when he decides to lounge for a bit in the coronation throne at Westminster Abbey. Firth is outraged that he would do such a thing, while Rush just casually says “It’s just a chair. Look, people carved their names in it!”

I’ve not seen director Tom Hooper’s previous film The Damned United, but it’s clear I was missing out. He directs The King’s Speech with a sure hand, filming most of the movie in cramped interior locations to help subtly reinforce how Firth is imprisoned within his own body. When you watch it (and I know you will, you trust my opinion so very much), note how often Rush decides to help Firth by opening up a window to let fresh air in, symbolically opening up Firth’s voice in the process. It’s nothing that’s overemphasized or clumsy, it’s just a sign of Hooper’s mastery of the form.

We’ll be finding out this week if this movie gets nominated for any Academy Awards, though I will predict here that it gets a Best Picture nod. Hopefully it'll get some acting nods as well, as Firth and Rush do some incredible work together. If nothing else, it’s earned these for being such an utterly fascinating film set in England in the 1930s, as war is rapidly approaching, and managing to not need a single scene of combat to make its point.

Rating: ****

Machete

2011-01-06T18:50:00.000-08:00

While it seems that I’ll have to eventually get a BluRay player just to properly enjoy Grindhouse at home, it’s very nice to see how its legacy is still living. Of the four fake trailers made for the movie (plus a fifth semi-official one that only played in Canada and select cities that were nowhere near me), we now have Robert Rodriguez’s Machete made into a feature length film as well as Jason Eisener’s Hobo with a Shotgun and Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving coming out later this year. I can only hope we also get Edgar Wright’s Don’t before this wonderful madness is over and done with, but I’ll happily take Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the SS instead if it means he stops doing terrible remakes for a while.

As an offshoot of Grindhouse, this is by glorious design overwhelmingly trashy and exploitative, and may well be the most energetically race baiting film since Birth of a Nation. If this all sounds somewhat hyperbolic, then so be it: this is a very hyperbolic film, after all, one where there’s no use in the main character just stabbing a group of villains with all of his knives if he can attach them all to the end of a rope and swing them at everyone instead, and one in which Lindsay Lohan can’t possibly be expected to seek revenge against her father’s killer without randomly putting on a nun outfit first. It’s the exact kind of madness and space logic that you would get in the best exploitation films of the 70s, when you wouldn’t be able to watch the movie without understanding that some serious drugs were involved in the film’s making.

The film, before I get too carried away, stars Machete (Danny Trejo), who lives the life of an illegal day laborer in Texas after a haunting prologue where his career as a Mexican federale ends in his wife’s murder. After showing off his skills a bit in a street fight, he’s hired to assassinate a hardline conservative politician (Robert DeNiro) who’s clamoring to close off the border (with a literal electrified fence) and has been connected with a vigilante group that may have been “disappearing” illegals as they try to cross the border. Of course, it’s all a setup to boost the politician’s voting base by showing how dangerous illegal immigrants are, and soon Machete is on the run from the police while finding allies in the most unlikely places: his priest brother (Cheech Marin), an immigration official (Jessica Alba), and the head of an underground group that helps Mexicans sneak across the border (Michelle Rodriguez).

Of course, all of this is making it sound like there’s a more coherent plot than was ever intentioned: according to IMDB the film was so ridiculous that Chris Cooper refused to be in it, saying it was “the most absurd thing I’ve ever read”, and he was in Adaptation. It’s largely an exercise in connecting as many scenes of graphic violence (and wow is it violent) and hot naked women (you even get to briefly see Lindsay Lohan’s tits, for all of you that have been clamoring to see them, though Jessica Alba is still all about that No Nudity clause) as it can, and that utter disinterest in plot does unfortunately mean that all the scenes in between the action-based ones and the naked ones tend to be somewhat boring, but they’re fortunately mostly brief. Supposedly he had already filmed more than half of the movie when making Grindhouse with Tarantino, and just gathered up some friends and big names to film the rest of it. That helps explain the disjointedness somewhat, even though I wasn’t paying close enough attention to know which scenes were filmed when, beyond the ones that made the original trailer.

Still, the sex and violence in this film is completely ridiculous. Not only is Lohan topless (and while Alba and Rodriguez don’t get naked, they are in skin tight outfits in every scene), but two other women (as well as a body double for Lohan) are completely naked the entire time they’re in the movie, because why shouldn’t they be? There’s also, as one might expect from a film called Machete, nonstop stabbings, slashings, beheadings, shootings, explosions, a guy that gets his guts yanked out of him and used as a rope, a guy that gets burned up in an explosion, a man is crucified, Steven Seagal shows up with a sword a couple times…I’ll be honest, I’m a lifelong horror fan, and I can’t think of more than a handful that were gorier than this was. I noticed Roger Ebert never reviewed it; he probably would have been horrified enough for another hospital stay.

I think what I most enjoy about Rodriguez and his films is that he’s never afraid to go as low as possible to entertain his fans, and he has never before gone so low or so far as he does here. It’s entirely an exercise in being as wild and extreme as exploitation fans all wish the drive in movies of the 70s had actually been, and in that it succeeds perfectly. If it doesn’t have anything else really going for it, well, that’s still more than enough for me.

Rating: *** ½

P.S. I’ll be in Florida next week, so no updates for any of you. Yes, I know how this breaks your hearts.

Help!

2011-01-05T20:36:00.000-08:00

I’m rather more a fan of later period, trippy Beatles than I am of their earlier straight pop efforts, so it’s rather interesting to me that, of the four movies they made, their two best were the ones made during this time. Help! isn’t quite on the level of A Hard Day’s Night, but it’s infused with the same level of silly charm and chaos that their first film had.

The film opens with a beautiful young girl about to be sacrificed to the goddess Kali, when the ritual has to be called off. It seems that for Kali to accept the sacrifice, she needs to be painted red and be wearing a special ruby ring, but being a teenage girl in the mid-60s, when she got it she mailed it off as a gift to her heartthrob Ringo Starr. He’s of course now wearing the ring, and since it appears to be stuck on his finger, he now gets to spend the entire movie getting chased and attacked by the worshippers of Kali, who are now trying to paint him red so they can use him as their sacrifice. It’s just enough of a plot to give them the chance to film anything that came into their heads, and good on them for it.

In an essay that comes with the DVD, director Richard Lester said that, even when he was making A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, he knew he would always be known specifically for them. Indeed, while he’s made some good movies since then, I doubt he’d ever want to be remembered for the only other high profile films he made afterward (he took over Superman 2 after Richard Donner was let go, and also filmed all of Superman 3 -- yes, the one with Richard Pryor). He directed this movie with a wild passion that was nowhere to be found in those later films, giving us a movie that hurls about everywhere it can possibly imagine: we get a mad scientist that accidentally shrinks Paul down to mouse size, a pub with a trap door leading to a wine cellar with a deadly Bengal tiger that can only be soothed by singing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” to it, a brief military battle, etc. One would almost wonder why they didn’t just say “screw it” and throw an actual kitchen sink in, though it might have been repetitive after the Beatles destroy the sinks in a bathroom. And interspersed throughout are lovely music videos (and yes, I believe we can safely call them that, since almost none of them have anything to do with the rest of the movie beyond starring the four main characters) showing off the band’s latest music, ostensibly the entire reason the movie was made.

The band itself was rather disappointed in the movie, mainly in how they’re not in it as much as they should be (Lennon in particular complained that they were made extras in their own movie, though he later revised his opinion and admitted a large part of the problem the band had with the film was in how they spent the whole movie stoned and so didn‘t really understand what was going on), and the lion’s share of their face time is given to Ringo. While the cultists (led by the delightful Leo McKern) do appear on screen quite often, I don’t know that it’s a completely fair criticism to make, particularly when just a few years later they demanded that other people do their voices for the animated Yellow Submarine film. Plus, while Ringo does dominate so far as the Beatles go, the appalling amount of hatred the rest of the band openly expresses for him was one of my favorite ongoing jokes in the movie. Right when the cultists first start coming after him, he complains that something weird’s going on and they all monkey pile on him that he’s making up stories again and shouldn’t be trying to drag everyone else down to his level. Later, after they learn of the cultists, and have their lives threatened, John, Paul, and George all chip in to try to convince Ringo to cut off his finger, since he never really uses that one anyway, and he’s really just being selfish putting them in harm’s way like this. I’m not too proud to admit that I was giggling uncontrollably for a good chunk of the film.

And that’s what I love about the movie. It may not have the depth that A Hard Day’s Night did, but it went out there with the specific aim of being as funny and silly as possible, and it succeeded brilliantly. Released just one year before Vietnam made the entire western world miserable, it’s a film that was designed specifically to make you smile, each and every one of you. You know what else makes me smile, thinking about the movie? Not once in this entire review did I call it pop-art, like every other review I’ve read of it has. Oh, damn.

Rating: *** ½

Night Train to Munich

2011-01-04T21:11:00.000-08:00

With all the site’s recent reviews of films and games from the past ten years, it’s nice to get the chance to go way back to the world of 1940 and see how, even right at the start of World War 2, the Nazis were just perfect movie villains. While this may not have been quite as daring as later films fighting the Nazis might have been, as most Nazi atrocities weren’t common knowledge in England back then, it is quite simply never not fun to watch charming Allied forces (or at least Czech civilians and a British secret agent) outwit and outgun them.

The film is set in 1939. As the Nazis begin sweeping into Czechoslovakia, an old Czech industrialist that’s developed a new method of armor-plating vehicles flees to England for fear of being imprisoned and forced to give his secret to the Nazis. Unfortunately, he doesn’t flee fast enough to pick up his daughter, who is captured and imprisoned in a concentration camp to try to break her spirit enough that she’ll reveal her father’s whereabouts. Fortunately for her, she manages to befriend a Englishman imprisoned at the camp, who manages to break the two of them out and flee to England together. Unfortunately for her, he’s actually a Nazi plant that knows that if he keeps close to her, it’s only a matter of time before he can get her and her father on a boat back to Germany…

It’s kind of interesting watching such an early effort from director Carol Reed, who would later go on to helm one of the greatest noirs of all time in The Third Man. This was somewhat less impressive, but still as fun and droll as a British spy caper would be expected to be. While the opening scenes in Czechoslovakia and the concentration camp aren’t all that airy and light, once all the spy and counterspy maneuverings begin the film just lights up and becomes as clever and silly as many of Hitchcock’s 30s British spy films (though not quite as good as The Lady Vanishes, or as dark as Sabotage, but come on, being as good as mid-range Hitchcock is still pretty damn good). While absent many of his later flourishes (seriously, if you haven’t seen it, go watch The Third Man, it’s one of the most amazing films ever made), he still manages some nice visuals, my favorite occurring back in England, when the daughter (Margaret Lockwood) gets the phone call from her father (James Harcourt) telling her where to meet him. All we see behind her is the shadow of the Nazi that befriended her as he listens in, and we can watch the shadow carefully slip away as she finishes the call. Cinema’s great strength is that it can show instead of telling (go watch Shyamalan’s The Village for an example of how well a film works when everything is told instead of shown), and this is a great early example of how much better that can make things.

It’s good that the writing and directing is so fun, as the acting isn’t all that spectacular, with most of the cast being fairly one note. I can’t complain much, since they all get the job done, but they don’t really go beyond that point. Indeed, the film feels almost like a prototype of how a Nazi spy film should be, not just because it came out almost right after WW2 started, but because everything in it seems like it was developed enough to be good, but not quite legendary. We get a fun gunfight at the end, but it’s still a very basic effort, filled with close-up shots of people on both sides carefully aiming their handguns before firing one-handed because fake guns don’t have recoils. There’s some tension on a train involving the Czech family, Nazi officers, and the British secret agent, but it’s resolved so fast that I barely understood what had happened (admittedly, I was playing Sudoku at the moment, so that may have been my fault).

This isn’t entirely the film’s fault; most great art in any field comes at least partially as a result of trying to outdo everything that had come before it, and there really hadn’t been that many spy thrillers made up to that point. Indeed, I can’t offhandedly name any besides the aforementioned Hitchcock films. Still, as long as you understand what you’re getting into, it’s a perfectly satisfying adventure story, with chases, double crosses, and a teensy dash of romance for the ladies in the audience. Carol Reed would go on to bigger and better things (indeed, he would eventually go on to pick up a Best Director Oscar for Oliver!), but he shows that he already had a sure and steady hand here.

Rating: ***

Note: Apparently the trailer for Night Train to Munich isn’t online anywhere, so here’s an awesome (and tragically brief) scene from The Third Man instead:

Greedy

2011-01-03T22:22:00.000-08:00

The fields of comedy are littered with mistakes where they just throw together a bunch of comedians and assumed that the humor would automatically come, only to find that a good script and talented director were also needed (witness the weak tea that was Transylvania 6-5000 or Who’s Harry Crumb? for some perfect examples). Fortunately, Greedy had the wonderful Jonathan Lynn at the helm, whose previous efforts had included the likes of Clue and My Cousin Vinny, so we wound up getting this wonderful, incredibly hateful and mean-spirited black comedy that’s just filled to the brim with great comedic talent.

The premise of the film is that Uncle Joe (Kirk Douglas) is a rich old man whose nieces and nephews all come to his mansion to suck up to him for his birthday in the hopes that when he dies soon they’ll be the ones favored in his will. It seems that for their entire lives, Uncle Joe has been nothing but mean to them and tried to pit them all against each other, and his relatives (led by Phil Hartman and Ed Begley Jr.) have put up with it so they could get at his fortune, but now they discover that he’s recently hired on a sexy young “nurse” (Olivia d’Abo) that seems to spend most of her time swimming naked in his pool, and are terrified that he’s just going to leave his fortune to her instead. They work out a plan to bring in fellow nephew Daniel (Michael J. Fox), since Daniel’s father was the only family member who was able to walk away from Joe’s money, in the hopes that Daniel will be able to make Joe focus on his family over his hot new houseguest. Unfortunately, soon the money starts to eat away at Daniel’s principles as well, and he winds up being as much of a schemer as anyone else.

While some may disagree, I’m of the opinion that comedy is usually at its best when it’s really dark and mean-spirited, and boy, is this one as mean as one can get short of having Danny DeVito direct it. The dialogue is about as cutting as you can get without just filming divorce proceedings. Right from the start, when the family all sits down for dinner with Joe, they immediately begin revealing each other’s dirty laundry, from alcoholism to a divorce (the pair still showed up together so that nothing would seem awry) to my personal favorite, the blackmail photos Phil Hartman acquired of his cousin with an aerobics instructor:

Glen (Jere Burns, examining the photos): This isn’t me.
Frank (Hartman): No, but it looks like you and that’s all that matters.

And all through this, and after Daniel arrives, Uncle Joe is obviously toying with all of them the entire time, lying to Fox and d’Abo about what the other had told him to see what they’ll try next to prove their greater worth of his fortune. And escalate they do: while Hartman goes the rather unsubtle route of telling d’Abo that “people have accidents”, d’Abo takes to walking around in lingerie and see-through clothes to attract Douglas’s interests, and Fox goes even farther, in a payoff that it would not be fair to reveal here.

The film does unfortunately go on a little too long, and it has a borderline sentimental climax and ending that don’t really fit with the rest of the movie. However, while it is always annoying when a movie doesn’t end as well as it begins, it’s certainly not enough to be a fatal flaw here, and if an overly long runtime also means more of Phil Hartman, then that’s something I am willing to take. There really weren’t enough good movies with him before he was murdered, and I would say that this was the best we got outside of his TV work. Oh, and obviously everyone else was good too, aside from the child actors, who were largely miserable in their brief performances. I suppose it’s an inherent flaw in the material; ask a child for his character to behave like a monster, and he’ll end up acting like the same kind of annoying child that you’re hoping not to get stuck sitting near in the theater. They don’t get much face time, though, as well they shouldn’t.

These are all small problems, though. The film as a whole is a hoot, and I highly recommend it to anyone that likes their comedy nice and dark. Put it this way: if you proudly own a copy of Death to Smoochy in your DVD collection, you should absolutely try this film out.

Rating: *** ½

Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil

2011-01-02T18:52:00.000-08:00

I hope everyone had a lovely time ringing in the new year, and doesn’t mind that I’m still busily reviewing video games on my movie site. Yes, while I spend the year trying to plow through as many of my PS2 games as I can to help justify upgrading to a new system by year’s end, you’re all going to reap the benefits here as I finish each game, and hopefully most will be at least as fun as this one was.

The original Klonoa was on the PS1, and employed a nice method of bring traditional 2D platforming into a partially 3D environment. Your character was still on a set track from left to right, but the graphics were fully three dimensional, and you could grab enemies and fling them at objects in the foreground and background (grabbing and throwing enemies, then as now, was your only real weapon in the game). This continues in that proud tradition, upgrading the graphics somewhat, and making the levels bigger, but retaining the same basic gameplay as before. While some may complain that the gameplay here isn’t very modern (the original was a bit stand-out for its insistence, over a year after Super Mario 64 had come out, on not being a fully 3D world like every other plat former in existence suddenly had to be then), it still works really well, so why not? It’s at its most fun when you start getting shot around the map by cannons, so while you’re flying you can see the whole level, both parts you’ve already played through, and parts still to come. It gives you a nice feeling of immersion, while letting you see just how big the levels are. Unfortunately, they decided to go a little too old school at some points, as several levels involve riding a board down water slides and ski slopes, because clearly our favorite parts of old NES and SNES platformers were the mine cart levels, but it’s not as serious an issue as, say, those damnable mine levels in Donkey Kong Country were.

To some extent that’s due to how smooth the game’s controls are, but it’s mostly just that the game is really, really easy. It’s not quite to the extent of the original, in which I went to the end boss with 99 extra lives in my pocket, but I did discover that near the end that if you start dying too often, the game will start tossing out a bunch of extra lives for you to help your lame ass out. Add to that the fact that you can replay any level you want to acquire all the extra lives you want, and you have a game where actually getting a game over screen means you should be ashamed of yourself.

That’s not to say that there’s no hard parts, but a little patience is all you really need. There’s no time limits to the levels (except for segments where something big’s chasing you or a bomb’s about to go off), so you can take as much time as you need or want to go exploring, or to solve one of the game’s many puzzles. Indeed, the puzzles are some of the most fun parts of the game, often involving trying to find the exact perfect enemy combination to blast through a barrier, or just how exactly to get up to a high platform to get at all the goodies up there. Each level (aside from the boss levels) has six doll parts hidden around them, so if you want to do more than just try to finish as quickly as possible then there is indeed at least something else to do.

Indeed, the main problem with the game is that it’s simply too short, and doesn’t have enough side stuff to extend your gaming options. There’s a place where you can do a time attack against all the bosses, and you can unlock a couple bonus levels if you can fully acquire enough of the dolls, but there’s not much more than that. With a little effort, you can have this game fully completed in one day.

That said, though, it’s still a pretty darn fun game, with some colorful (if largely incomprehensible) characters, great level design (my favorite being the Disney-ish haunted house, obviously), and excellent gameplay. If it’s just not long enough, at least it doesn’t wear out its welcome like some other games I could name. If you can find it on the cheap somewhere, by all means snap it up.

Tangled

2010-12-29T22:55:00.000-08:00

After a good two weeks of trying, I finally managed to get to the theater to see the latest Disney movie (no, we still aren’t done with them, thank you), and it’s a damn good one. As I said in my Princess & the Frog review, Disney’s been doing great since Pixar took control of their animation department, and if this isn’t quite as good as that previous effort, it’s still a damned impressive outing.

This film actually took roughly a decade to be completed, as its main developer and initial director Glen Keane (who sadly didn’t get to see the film through to completion due to other engagements) had a grand vision for the visual scheme of the movie that the best technology Disney had at the time couldn’t achieve. He basically wanted the film to look like a moving, 3D painting (specifically Fragonard’s “The Swing”), and combine that with his firm belief that all Disney needed to do to reclaim their animation throne from Dreamworks was to get back to basics and tell a simple fairy tale. Well, by the time the film was finally finished, under the joint helm of Nathan Greno and Byron Howard, the idea of getting back to basics had already been co-opted by The Princess & the Frog, which also managed to be a slightly better movie, but this may still be the single most visually incredibly film Disney has ever made. It’s tough to say if Disney will feel that it’s been worth it financially: after such a long development time that was mostly spent on creating new technology, the film ended up costing a crazy $260 million (making it the second most expensive film ever made, behind only Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End at $300 million -- what the hell is up with the rampant spending, Disney?) , which is about how much the film has grossed worldwide so far, so it’s going to take some time on DVD before it can even make back its marketing budget, but at least now Disney has a completely incredible new visual capability that it can use for any of its future films. So I guess it’s all a matter of how many uses the company finds for all its new toys.

The film, for those who’ve managed to miss all the commercials, is based on the story of Rapunzel, and features a girl (Mandy Moore) with magical, ridiculously long hair that must never be cut, who is locked away in a tower deep within the woods by an evil witch (Donna Murphy) that has made Rapunzel believe she’s her mother, and is only keeping her there to help protect her from all the menaces of the outside world. Oh, and also to use her hair’s magical powers to keep restoring her youth, since she’s several hundred years old. Of course, as her 18th birthday approaches, she encounters a dashing young thief named Flynn Ryder (Zachary Levi) who invades her tower while trying to hide from some soldiers, and winds up taking her away on a grand adventure, of the kind which her adoptive mother does not approve.

While the film does largely achieve its goal of being a more traditional Disney film (incredible visuals aside), it apparently wasn’t always going to be that way. From what I understand the first draft of the script was very much a product of Disney’s recent obsession with aping Dreamworks, and was filled to the brim with horrid pop culture references and juvenile humor. While these have thankfully mostly been excised from the film, faint traces can still be found, particularly in the opening narration by Flynn which made me more than a little nervous at the film’s start. Another issue I had is that, while there are songs constantly throughout the film (thanks to the musical talents of Alan Menken and the lyrical talents of Glenn Slater), they’re mostly pretty damn bland, with only a couple standouts (namely the two songs by Murphy, where she is just trying to terrify Rapunzel, and the big chorus number in the bar). I don’t really know that any of them will prove as memorable as numbers like “Almost There” or “Friends on the Other Side” from Princess and the Frog, which I don’t mean to keep bringing up, but since it’s the very last Disney film prior to this one, and they both feature brand new Disney princesses (since neither film has really done gangbusters in theaters, I’m going to assume Disney will be backing off from all the princess films for a while after this, though I suspect that in this case it‘s at least somewhat due to the rather ghastly trailer, which can be found below), so it’s kind of hard not to directly compare.

Still, I don’t mean to be so harsh on the film. It’s definitely the best animated film I’ve seen all year (with The Illusionist being the only major effort I haven’t watched yet), and if it loses out on Best Animated Film at the Oscars to something like Toy Story 3 or Shrek Forever After, I will be very surprised. It’s sweet, clever, funny, imaginative, it has an awesome horse, and may very well be the best visual feast you’ll find outside of Avatar. You need to check it out.

Rating: *** ½

Contra: Shattered Soldier

2010-12-29T11:25:00.000-08:00

Every old-school gamer has a bit of a love-hate relationship with the Contra series. We love them because they’re so fast paced and fun (seriously, can you name a better series based entirely around you running around shooting at everything you see, because I sure can’t), and we hate them because they are so ridiculously hard you want to hurl your controller down and scream obscenities at your TV. Contra: Shattered Soldier continues in this proud tradition, while making the crucial upgrade to three dimensions and adding stupid cut scenes (Note: I haven‘t played either PS1 Contra, so it‘s very likely that both of these advancements came in one of them).

Much like in the original games, you play as Bill (or if you’re the second player, you get to be a new character in the cybernetic soldier Lucia), who is released from prison (??? The hell did I miss in this series?) to help the government fight off the menace of the Blood Falcon, a terrorist organization that seems to be siding with the aliens against Earth’s government, and which is being run by an old friend of Bill’s…

Okay, let’s get one thing off the table right away. This game is absurdly difficult, to the point where I died almost immediately and had to give myself Infinite lives to win. When a game is so hard that people in Japan refer to it as Hard Like Cancer, the developers may have gone a little overboard. It’s to the point where apparently I didn’t get a good enough rank on each level to get to watch the last two levels and get the good ending even with infinite lives, so now I’m left to watch someone else doing them on Youtube. To be sure, the controls are just about perfect (after all, they were perfect in the late 80s, and Konami hasn‘t screwed with them), and while the game utilizes a 3D environment, you’re still moving along a 2D path, so there’s never a point where you die because the camera got stuck anywhere and you can’t see what’s going on. I’d say this means that when you die, it’s your own fault, but no, it’s because there’s a ridiculous number of enemies on the screen at any given time, all charging at you or shooting you. I don’t think I’ve played a game this hard since Silver Surfer on the NES. No mercy is to be found here.

The game is thankfully pretty short (yes, even if you manage to get to levels six and seven, which I didn’t), so if you can withstand the insane difficulty you can play the entire game in under an hour. This puts it at just a little longer than Contra 3, which was just a bit longer than the original. I kind of like that, as it makes the game feel a bit more like a throwback to an earlier age of gaming, back when games were often pretty short, but so amazingly frustrating that Nintendo had to make their controllers super durable to survive their customers’ childhoods. There’s no save feature, so you pretty much have to finish it in one sitting, making the brevity of it extra appreciated.

The controls need to be touched on briefly as well, or at least the weapon system. Whereas in previous games you’d upgrade your gun by shooting various power ups that went flying alongside the screen, always hoping for the spread shot and crying if you accidentally picked up that one that would send all your bullets out in big looping circles like you were playing Fester’s Quest, here you get no such power-ups at all. Instead, you just have three different guns that you can switch between at any time: the standard fast firing machine gun, the short range but highly damaging flamethrower, and the slow-firing homing bombs, all three of which can be charged up for a super shot that I never found extremely useful. While I miss my spread shots, having three permanently available is extremely helpful, as you always have one for whatever situation you’re dealing with, and most importantly, they don’t disappear each time you die and leave you with nothing. I also like how the game tries to change up the gameplay a bit while retaining the “run and gun” atmosphere the series is known for, by giving you segments where you’re racing on a motorcycle, riding a snowboard down a mountain, or straight up flying around by holding onto a rocket with one hand and firing with the other a la Contra 3. It keeps things good and fresh for the duration of the game.

Remember what I was just saying yesterday about liking Prince of Persia because it was the right level of difficulty for me? Well, this one is just so ridiculously hard that I wouldn’t have been able to complete a single level if I hadn’t cheated (by the way, you can do the first four levels in any order you choose). If you’re a much better gamer than I am, maybe the challenge will just be more fun for you (though if even Japanese gamers are making jokes about how hard it is -- the same Japanese that gave us Super Mario; the Lost Levels, and who went around the original Resident Evil using nothing but a knife because they didn’t think it was hard enough normally -- then there may be a problem), but it kept me from fully enjoying what is otherwise a really fun game. The controls are great, the graphics are great (particularly for such an early release on the system), and the driving techno music gets you good and pumped to start tearing through some mutant alien baddies. I just kind of wish there had been more of me tearing through them and not the other way around, that’s all.

Rating: ** ½

Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time

2010-12-28T18:57:00.000-08:00

Wait, didn’t I just review this a couple weeks ago? Yes, now that I have watched the terrible new movie, I have finally decided to play the non-terrible game, aided in part by my Persian friend Shana getting it for me for Christmas. I’m rather glad I did, in fact, as despite it having a few of the same problems as Rogue Galaxy (mainly involving the camera), it was a much more fun and exciting game to play.

Just like in the movie, the game follows the exploits of (wait for it) a Persian prince, who, during an invasion of an enemy city, acquires a magical dagger capable of briefly turning back time. Of course, you and your father are soon betrayed by the evil vizier (he’s never named, but I think we can safely assume he’s named Jafar), who manages to unleash the dark time powers in a way that alters the entire palace so that it’s crumbling into ruins and turning all the people into demonic sand figures -- all, that is, but the prince, the vizier, and the Maharajah’s daughter (whose city you attacked), who accompanies you in your quest to stop the vizier and save Persia.

The game is largely a combination of platforming and puzzle solving, as you generally spend your time figuring out how to get from point A to point B by way of leaping off ledges, swinging from poles and ropes, and dangling from just about every last nook and cranny you can get a grip on, while avoiding the perils of spinning swords, saw blades, and the like. You also frequently find yourself fighting enemies made from the sands, so you need to brush up on your sword fighting/button mashing skills as well. This may all sound a bit daunting, but at least you’re aided through the use of your magic dagger, so when you fall into a pit or take too much damage, you can just turn back the clock a little bit so you can save yourself.

This was a pretty revolutionary effort when it first came out in 2003, and unfortunately that frequently showed in the problems with the camera, which will often “helpfully” try to give you the best possible view of the action by way of completely shifting location while you’re in the middle of a jump, or sometimes will simply get caught on something so you can’t see a damn thing. It’s a problem that really makes you like that dagger, since there were quite a few occasions where it was needed to avoid a cheap death at the hands of the magical unhelpful camera.

To the game’s credit, though (unlike with the makers of Rogue Galaxy), the developers understood the camera had problems, and figured out every way they could to help alleviate the problem. There’s the dagger, frequent save points, and the fact that there are only four directions you can jump off a rope, pole, or stalactite, so that you always know if one direction turns out wrong, there’s only a couple other possibilities available. The camera, when it’s working properly, also tries to show you the direction you need to go so there’s a bit less confusion than I may be making things sound. The controls are also pretty fluid, though there are occasional problems with buttons that are being used for multiple tasks getting confused as to which task you are trying to use them for. For instance, the Triangle button is for the dagger, which either finishes off a downed opponent or freezes a standing one, and in more than a few fights I found myself trying to finish off an enemy that was on the ground, only to watch my character repeatedly lunging with the dagger at an enemy that’s too far away to hit, giving the guy on the ground time to get back up. In general, though, it’s a pretty smooth, intuitive effort.

The gameplay mainly sticks to the platforming/fighting angle, though there are a few instances where it tries to change things up, either in the case of the occasional puzzle that needs to be solved (seriously, those mirror puzzles in the library were aggravating as all get out), or trying to protect the Maharajah’s daughter during some of the fights, which gets especially frustrating when you go to take out an enemy that she’s fighting with only to have her accidentally shoot you with an arrow. Typical woman, right guys?

Hardcore gamers may find that the frequent save points and dagger make the game a little too easy (plus the end boss is kind of a chump), but speaking as a fairly rusty gamer, I thought it was pretty well balanced. There were a couple times when I got stumped by a puzzle, which is of course what Gamefaqs is for, and I was not particularly a fan of how you lose the dagger near the end to ratchet up the difficulty some more, but overall it was a pretty fluid increase in overall difficulty.

Put simply, while it has its flaws, this was a pretty fun and fast-paced game. It looks pretty damn nice, even when I was making myself dizzy looking down in first person view while on a high ledge (Seriously, you can see quite a bit farther than you would ever need). While the game is pretty linear, there’s still some exploration available in trying to find all of the upgrades to your health and dagger, and at one point you can even unlock the original 1989 Prince of Persia. After beating the game, I decided to play the original for about five minutes before remembering why I hated it, but I know a lot of people out there have somewhat fonder memories of it. You ask me, if they were going to do a sequel more than a decade after the original, they should have gone with something like Super Mario Bros. I always thought that game had some real potential, don’t know why it never went anywhere.

Rating: ***

Six-String Samurai

2010-12-27T21:56:00.001-08:00

In keeping with the spirit of the holidays (We’re on Kwanzaa now, right?), I figured I’d do my part for all of you by finally getting around to this recommendation by BalladeersBlog, who I hope is still reading despite having suggested this back in September. Don’t worry, BB, the mail may occasionally be late but it is always delivered!

The film is set in a post-apocalyptic world in which the U.S. and Russia launched nukes at each other back in 1957, leaving most of the world a smoking ruin. The last remnants of civilization all managed to band together in the city of Lost Vegas, which was ruled by Elvis for forty years until his tragic recent death. As the new power vacuum has bred an increasing amount of violence across the land, we must turn to a new hero in Buddy (Jeffrey Falcon) a guitarist and samurai who is traveling across the desert, along with a kid (Justin McGuire) that he rescued, to Lost Vegas to play at a gig there. Along the way he must do battle with a colorful variety of adversaries, from a group of cavemen in a pickup truck to a Soviet army to Death (who really hates rockers). It seems a little much just for the chance to play guitar.

This was kind of an odd film to watch, and I’m honestly not sure if I just didn’t “get” it, to put it in a term that I rather hate. The film doesn’t have any real overarching narrative, instead playing out as the pair traveling to one location, getting into a battle, going to another location, getting into a battle, etc. all done in a very laid-back manner with constant surf guitar playing by the Red Elvises. It’s pleasant enough for what it is, but what it is is very slight. The villains are colorful and fun, but they don’t really get much more depth than their appearances (in fact, neither does the hero -- there’s rather a shortage of dialogue in this film, which only increases the feeling of the film being padded), so as cool as it may look to see, say, the cavemen riding around in their pickups, grunting at each other and attacking Buddy with femur bones, it could have been a lot better if we had been given an actual reason to care about any of this.

A great example of the padding this film contains comes towards the end of the film, when Buddy is fighting with Death and his henchmen. There’s three of the henchmen, armed with bows, while Buddy has his sword. One archer fires, and Buddy slaps the arrow away with his sword. Then two of them fire, and he slaps both arrows away. Then all three fire, and he starts rolling around, leaping, doing cartwheels, and so on, as they fire again and again and again, long past the point when all of this has grown tiresome. This, and similar moments in the film, seem like they were being stretched out long past where they should have been just to get the film to a 90 minute running time. I’ve said it before, and it’s something co-writer/director Lance Mungia should take to heart if he ever makes another film (as of yet, the only thing he’s made in the twelve years since this film’s release was 2005’s The Crow: Wicked Prayer): there is no shame in making a film that’s only 70 or 80 minutes long. If you don’t have the material for a legitimate 90 minute feature, any attempts you make at artificially increasing the length are only going to make the movie worse, and leave the audience a good deal less satisfied than they’d have been with a shorter, tighter film.

Like I said, this isn’t a bad film at all, it’s just rather light and fluffy and inconsequential, like a more child-friendly early effort by Robert Rodriguez. You know, with surfer music and lots of slow-motion jumping, and a rather terrible scene where the kid decides to fake cry so that Buddy will do backflips and hand walks to try to cheer him up. Because nothing makes a film better than a child loudly crying, right? Indeed, the very concept of a rocker going around constantly getting in wild battles was soon to be perfected in the Japanese epic Wild Zero, which came out a brief two years later. So if you’re reading this, BalladeersBlog, I’m sorry I didn’t think your recommendation was that great, but by all means recommend another one. Just maybe a better one next time, thanks.

Rating: **

Devil

2010-12-26T20:57:00.000-08:00

While some might find this to be an inappropriate movie to be watching on Christmas, I always find it to be a nice palate cleanser to watch something with a hard R rating to counterbalance the sugary sweetness we get to enjoy the entire month. That’s what I say, at least, and Buddha would totally agree with me if he were here. Probably Santa and Jesus would, too.

Anyway, Devil is probably the best film M. Night Shyamalan has been involved with in years (since Signs, I’d argue, though others might go back even father), and of course is the first one he didn’t actually direct, instead being the first in a series of films in which he was to come up with the basic story and allow another (in this case John Erick Dowdle) to direct. It’s curious, as it may well be the best screenplay Shyamalan’s been connected to in some time (the screenplay was actually written by Brian Nelson, which would indicate that the frequent claims of critics that what Shyamalan needs most is for someone to co-write the scripts with him are correct), and would certainly have been better for him career-wise than his last horror venture, The Happening, turned out.

There’s more of a premise than a plot, which is how quite a lot of quality horror movies are. Five people get stuck on an elevator in a high rise building, and one of them is secretly the devil, who proceeds to torment them and kill them off one by one, all while a Philadelphia detective (Chris Messina) watches and counsels from the security office while trying to figure out what the hell’s going on. I like how they’re listed in the credits, as despite each of them being named in the film they are officially listed as Mechanic (Logan Marshall-Green), Old Woman (Jenny O’Hara), Young Woman (Bojana Novakovic), Guard (Bokeem Woodbine), and Salesman (Geoffrey Arend). It’s discovered that each of them is stuck there because of various terrible things they’ve done in the past (Salesman, for instance, turns out to have swindled a bunch of people out of their fortunes with a Ponzi scheme), and according to an old legend about the Devil, after he’s done torturing them all, he’ll kill the final one in front of the person that loves them most just to twist the knife in further, and so it bodes rather ill when the spouse of one of the longest surviving people in the elevator arrives at the security office.

It’s pretty much impossible to guess what of the trapped occupants is actually the devil, since they all seem equally scummy and none are big enough stars to warrant extra notice. In a way that’s a good thing, since it keeps you wondering the whole time you’re watching, but it can be a bit of a negative as well, since it also means that it doesn’t really matter at all who he or she is, nor can one work up a huge deal of sympathy for them once it starts coming out what each of them did to warrant being there. Despite this, it’s very well acted, and there’s quite a lot of tension from start to finish. I kind of wish so much of it didn’t happen “off camera” (the lights keep going out each time the devil makes his move, so as to keep the victims and audience wondering, which means that there’s quite a lot of instances where the screen is completely dark and we just hear various screams and noisy sound effects), but it’s still pretty darn effective.

This was definitely one of the better horror movies to reach theaters this year. It’s a concept I haven’t seen executed in a movie in some time (indeed, every comparable example I can think of off the top of my head where a demonic figure tempts and torments sinners is from the 60s and 70s), and it’s one that’s done pretty darn well. If the characters had been more likable (okay, I liked Young Woman because she was pretty hot, but that’s admittedly not a proper reason to sympathize with a character) I would have enjoyed it more, but of course that would have conflicted with the overall premise and I’m a foolish man for wanting that. Seriously though, of the five characters trapped there, three of them are pretty much completely unlikable, so when one of them dies, it’s more of a whodunnit than a tragedy. Despite that, though, this is absolutely an entertaining horror, and one you can add to your film collection with no worries. I can only hope the rest of Shyalaman’s story ideas turn out so well.

Rating: ***

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation

2010-12-24T10:43:00.000-08:00

It might surprise my younger readers to learn that, back before he became a slightly uncomfortable joke (and way before he started redeeming himself with Community), Chevy Chase was considered one of the best comedic talents of the 1980s. While he had a nice string of hit films for the decade, like Caddyshack, National Lampoon’s Vacation, and Fletch, I personally feel that this, his final success (you know, unless Not Another Not Another Movie turns out to be big) was his real peak as a comedian. And it certainly doesn’t hurt my purposes that it’s a nice Christmas movie for me to have watched immediately after waking up.

There’s not honestly a huge plot to go into here, as it’s basically just the general template that all “spending the holidays with family is Hell” type movies follow. The Griswolds (formerly seen in National Lampoon’s Vacation and National Lampoon’s European Vacation, though tragically not seen since Vegas Vacation was investigated as a possible war crime) are preparing for Christmas, and Clark (Chase) has decided that all the relatives should fly out to his house this year. That’s essentially the whole story, though the movie is filled to bursting with so many gags and wonderfully mean-spirited jokes (and some really cheesy ones as well, which isn‘t necessarily a bad thing when the movie‘s earned them) that it’s just a delight from start to finish.

Honestly, if you’re my age or older, you should already have seen this multiple times by now, so I’m not sure I should give a proper review. Instead, here are some general fond remembrances to help put you all in a good mood for the holiday:

Long before Randy Quaid had turned into a tragic example of encroaching madness, he managed to make his career with this film by portraying the single most blatantly awful relative in film history. He just shows up with his family, uninvited, in an RV that he parks in Clark’s driveway, before doing delightful things like letting his completely wild Doberman run loose in the house, draining the septic tank in the RV into the sewer system, and just in general being the exact kind of horrid redneck that you’d normally want kept as far from your family and home as possible. That he turns into a crazy person at the end of the film to redeem himself does not change this.

Chase’s freakout over not getting a Christmas bonus may not be the greatest freakout in film history (I think Danny DeVito may have permanently taken that award after Anything Else), but it certainly ranks up there, and really, getting all your employees a one year subscription to the Jell-O of the Month Club is exactly the sort of thing that should make them kidnap you and hold a gun to your head, dick. Though speaking in my official capacity as a 21st century worker, I suppose he should be happy he got that much, given that my Christmas bonus on more than one occasion has been to be laid off.

While I’ve never cared for Juliette Lewis, I’ve always admired her fascinating ability to sneak into so many movies that I love, from this to Cape Fear to Strange Days to Kalifornia to Old School to the no-doubt-amazing Hangover 2. She has some weird voodoo going for her and I for one do not intend to cross her.

Out of all the many great gags in the film, probably my favorite that doesn’t involve sexy women stripping is when Clark decides that he’s going to go sledding by way of a metal garbage can lid type thing, which he sprays up so much to keep it slippery that the instant he starts to move all we see is a trail of fire leading into the distance to mark where he went. Another great bit is when the delightful William Hickey (and his awful toupee) accidentally torches the Christmas tree not long after his cat is vaporized from chewing on wires. What a joyously mean-spirited affair this film is.

I don’t know how else to hype the movie up for you. If you’re anything like me you’ve probably seen it at least once a year since it came out in 1989, and if you’re not like me then this is the perfect opportunity to start becoming more like me. Particularly now, when it‘s on sale for three bucks. Hope to it, and have a Merry Christmas.

Rating: ****

Killer Movie

2010-12-23T00:42:00.000-08:00

It’s always nice to get some contrast in our daily lives, and so after seeing the quite acceptable and entertaining modern slasher Midnight Movie yesterday, today I got to “enjoy” a much worse example of a modern slasher with a similar title. You can almost read this movie as an inversion of that, as this gets wrong nearly everything that Midnight Movie got right, from the characters to a plot that’s somehow even worse to all the awful reality TV references. It does have more variety in its kills, but that’s about it.

The film follows a group of people out to create a reality show or something up in the lonesome town of White Plains, North Dakota. Now, the first problem is that I’m honestly not sure what they were actually trying to film here, whether it was intended to be a reality show or a documentary, or what the premise was. They told all the townsfolk that it was meant to be a show about the local high school hockey team, but they repeatedly say they made that cover story up just to get the cooperation of the townies so they could ask questions about a mysterious death that had happened in the town loosely connected to the hockey team, and the feuding current and former hockey coaches, and while I’m certain they said this was going to be a reality show (and the stupid confessional scenes, terribly generic rock music, and overall structure of the film back me up on this), I have not the slightest idea how this was going to translate into one. Of course, it doesn’t really matter, as it’s all just an excuse to get a bunch of people in an isolated environment where there is no cell phone reception and apparently no working land lines either (one character even complains that each time she tries to get on the Internet at the local library she gets booted off after ten seconds), so that a killer can get at them. Now, everyone had difficulty with their cell phones in Midnight Movie as well, but it’s harder for me to get annoyed by that when the killer has a lot of supernatural powers that he’s repeatedly using to block the cast off from the outside world; here, apparently we’re just expected to believe that everyone in North Dakota casually accepts being completely cut off from the world.

Anyway, the big gimmick here is that the killer is making his own movie, planting cameras everywhere (particularly one on his shoulder) and filming all of his murders for his terrible -- well, terribly retarded, which almost counts -- purpose, and since he doesn’t want to get found out right away he frames the first few kills so that someone could almost look at them as suicides. And by almost, I of course mean that the very first kill in the movie involves a girl on a quad getting beheaded when she drives down a road at night that has barbed wire strung across at neck level, and the local police rule it a suicide, because clearly what else could it be? The cast of the reality show does make a lot of jokes at the expense of the local police for their overall incompetence, but quite frankly, when the bodies start piling up and nobody actually gets nervous enough to try to leave, who’s the idiot then? Of course, unlike Midnight Movie, this continues the cliché tradition of everyone not finding out there’s a killer until more than half the cast is dead, to help further drive home the point that everyone in the cast is completely retarded and we should not care about a single damn one of them.

The killer is a little bit dicey as well. We do get a much better variety of gore from him than in Midnight Movie, which is certainly important in these kinds of films, but his costume just makes him look like the killer from Urban Legend (that the first kill, with the wire across the road to decapitate someone, is a fairly well known urban legend doesn‘t help matters), and his secret identity isn’t exactly hard to figure out (hint: it’s the only major character that kind of disappears for a good half hour without anyone noticing). Also, the reason he gives for why he’s committed all these murders is simultaneously retarded and cliché, and the nonsense in the epilogue made me want to break the DVD in half. Without spoiling too much, he basically pretended to be dead after getting shot with a rifle a couple times, and then the next morning, after being confirmed dead by some EMTs, he managed to slip out of his body bag, out of his bullet proof vest (which he leaves behind, I suppose, for no reason beyond to clue the audience in on how he survived, since I can’t imagine how it otherwise benefited him), runs across a street and across a long field into the woods without any of over a dozen people running around spotting him. And then he films the heroes staring into the woods trying to spot him, because this means he won, I guess.

The only real bright spot in the movie, aside from the blood, is the reality show’s big name star Blanca Champion, which made me keep thinking that she must have become champion through her devastating combination of Capoeira acrobatics and electricity-based attacks. I don’t know that that’s enough to justify the ending, where one of her fellow cast members asks her “Is it worth it? Being so famous?” to try to drive home a clumsily inserted moral about the perils of celebrity, but I take my fun where I can find it, thank you.

If you ever needed to make a double bill of horror movies to showcase how just a few simple changes can make or break a film, this and Midnight Movie would be perfect. They’re both fairly similar (one has people making a movie getting killed off one by one by a mad slasher, one has people watching a movie getting killed off one by one by a mad slasher), both came out around the same time (both were made in 2008, and the DVDs were released a month apart), and yet one by and large works while the other is pretty damn lousy. Sure, you’d have to watch a bad movie to accomplish this, but if I had to, damn it, so can all of you.

Rating: * ½

Midnight Movie

2010-12-21T21:01:00.000-08:00

Today’s movie was originally going to be Tangled, before my plans to see that fell through (maybe later this week, maybe just when it comes out on DVD. I am not optimistic). I was then planning on doing Atlantis: The Lost Empire as an alternate, despite feeling foolish after spending the entire movie wondering why the film was making me think of Hellboy and B.P.R.D. before realizing at the end of the film that Mike Mignola was responsible for the art style of the film. However, after giving it some thought, I realized that what really gives me proper Christmas cheer are bloody horror movies, and so that’s what I bring to you on this joyous season.

The film opens with some old man rocking back and forth in his cell at an asylum, watching some old horror movie he had filmed that a doctor unwisely though might help his rehabilitation to see. One doctor vehemently opposes allowing him to watch it, but as he needs to be out of town on business, he’s been overruled. Of course, something goes horribly awry, and when he returns there’s blood everywhere and no bodies to be found. We then cut ahead five years to the present day, where a movie theater is hosting a midnight screening of the madman’s film for the first time since the massacre at the hospital, and in addition to the regular tiny midnight crowd, the two aging cops assigned to the case have turned up in the hopes that he will turn up and they can close the case. Unfortunately for them all, five years ago he managed to transport himself into the film, and now that it’s being screened again it is once more time for him to kill…

It’s a fairly generic, overused story, which gives us the benefit of examining how well it stacks up to its immediate competitors. I’ll start with what may be my biggest pet peeve in these kinds of movies, and that is how in almost all movies like this, there’s got to be one major horror buff that’s constantly talking about other horror movies and driving everyone else (and the audience) completely crazy. One could theorize that it’s to make the character intentionally annoying so we get excited when they die, but I’d personally rather have a bunch of likable characters so I actually don’t want them dead and off my screen already. That’s why I’m so happy that there’s nobody like that in this movie. The main group of guys sit there laughing and joking through the early parts of the movie and annoying their dates, and while they’re exactly the kind of people you don’t want to get caught at the movies with, at least they stop their nonsense pretty early on once it becomes clear that Something’s Wrong. The rest of the cast is also rather nice: there’s a biker and his girl that you’d expect to be the stereotypical “villainous non-villains”, but all he is is pissed off at the guys for constantly talking during the movie, as anyone else would have been. He’s actually a pretty decent guy, as is his girlfriend. The cops themselves are pretty fun too, as they make sure to let everyone in on the problem pretty quickly, so we can spend most of the film with them trying to escape the killer rather than staying oblivious for most of the movie and just wandering off one by one. Then after serving that vital purpose, they both get killed off because fuck the police, coming straight from the underground.

So now that we know there’s interesting characters and a bland story, what about the killer? Well, he’s got a pretty decent look, kind of a retarded mutant version of Crossbones from Marvel Comics. He’s huge, has a club foot, and his face is half covered by a skull mask, and in every way looks absolutely nothing at all like the old mental patient at the beginning of the film that we’re supposed to believe he is. The only major downside to him -- well, aside from all the mystical crap that’s more distracting than interesting -- is that he only has one weapon, a hand-held drill thing that he plunges into people. It leaves most of the kills looking fairly generic, to the point where even the killer seems to realize this about two thirds of the way through, when he kills one guy by grabbing him and then plunging the drill into an electrical outlet so he can electrocute him instead. I appreciate the effort, guy, but maybe for the sequel you can grab a couple extra weapons? Just a thought?

Don’t get me wrong, this is hardly a bad film at all. It’s a perfectly enjoyable modern slasher, certainly better than the over-directed mess that was Laid to Rest or the turgid efforts that one frequently finds in the After Dark collections (think Dark Ride or Lake Dead). It’s not one of the best recent efforts for the genre (for those you’d be better off trying Hatchet or Wrong Turn 2), but one could certainly do a lot worse with their slasher choices for the holidays.

Rating: ***

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

2010-12-20T20:38:00.000-08:00

After a brief hiatus from the Disney love fest (because as we all know, that’s what this blog does best), we return with the very first Disney movie ever made. Released in 1937, it’s a rather uneven affair, showing Walt Disney’s eagerness to push technological boundaries, how much room for improvement there still was in that regard for his future films, and how wildly disparate his attempts at stretching out a story to feature length could be.

Unlike a lot of Disney’s later efforts (including Pinocchio, his very next one), the film of Snow White managed to remain pretty close to the original fairy tale, with most of the story changes either toning down the violence of the original tale (no making the evil queen dance in red hot shoes in this one) or to add a whole lot of “comic” relief in the case of the dwarfs. We still get the standard tale of an evil queen, a magic mirror, the huntsman with a conscience (though strangely, while we still get a huntsman that lets her escape because he can’t bear to kill her, we don’t get the following scene where he kills a deer and cuts out its heart to present to the queen as Snow White’s), the seven dwarfs, the poisoned apple, and the kiss from Prince Charming. It’s almost like a prototype for what would later become the traditional Disney story rather than a finished effort, kept about as basic as Disney possibly could while maintaining an 80 minute running time. Part of that padding came in the form of the musical numbers sprinkled around the film, which were a carry-over from the animated shorts the company had been making up to this point, and which apparently warranted the creation of the first ever soundtrack available in stores. While yay for being such a pioneer, I’m not really certain the songs from this film were really good enough to justify that, with Heigh-Ho and Whistle While You Work being the only ones that are really memorable in any positive way (Bluddle-uddle-um-dum is also rather memorable, though mainly because it’s such a ghastly affair that I’d almost rather rewatch that South Park episode where they showed live footage of sex change surgery).

Technically, the film is both a wonder and an occasional annoyance. It was the first major feature film to be released in modern Technicolor, as well as being the first feature length animated movie in U.S. history, facts that helped make it the highest grossing film ever made to date (outdone a year later by Gone With the Wind), despite having cost so much money that most insiders had expected it to finish the company entirely. On the other hand, it also tried to save time and money by using a process called Rotoscoping, in which they would film live actors and paint the drawings over them, which is why Snow White and Prince Charming look so much more bland and lifeless than the purely animated dwarfs. Disney continued to use the process in limited form in some of his later films (most notably Cinderella), but it’s a process that I’ve found always makes the animation less imaginative than it should be, and is normally only utilized in really cheap efforts like Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films. Not to harp on it, but it’s really about the quickest and easiest way to drain the fun out of an animated movie, and it does not help here in any way. And the animators of the film agreed with me, so nyah.

There’s also a pretty massive tonal disconnect between the pure comedy relief of the dwarfs and everything else in the film, which tends to alternate between pure joy at how beautiful and wonderful Snow White is to pure terror at how evil the Queen is. It’s not really a matter of the film blending together a number of different feels, because there is no blending to be had. It just shifts entirely from one to the other, roughly enough to give one whiplash. While each more-or-less works (though the dwarfs somewhat less so for me, as six of the seven seem to have been designed entirely for very young children and possibly mothers, with Grumpy being the only one that gets any kind of real personality), the jarring shifts do detract pretty substantially from the film.

While this was a landmark effort for both Disney and the film industry as a whole, it really doesn’t hold up particularly well today. The sheer basicness of it means that it remains a very generic effort, with as many flaws as benefits. If you have a young daughter, she may enjoy watching it with you (though given the choice she’d probably prefer watching the latest Pixar film), but I think this is mainly for the real Disney diehards and film buffs.

Rating: **

The Monster Squad

2010-12-19T22:37:00.000-08:00

If the 1980s had brought us nothing else of worth, the whole decade would have been worth it just for this film. I had considered making this week a continuation of Christmas and Disney movies, to help combat the bad cheer I ended last week with (stupid, stupid Rogue Galaxy), but then I realized that there is quite simply nothing more in keeping with Christmas cheer than the heartwarming delightfulness of the Monster Squad. Really, you should know by now that it’s all about keeping me happy.

The film (and really, you should know this already) follows a group of children who have formed a club that’s all about monsters (something I did myself back in elementary school -- before this movie was made, lest anyone think I was just copying what I saw), and who find that their great knowledge of various monster strengths and weaknesses is about to have some startling real world applications, as Dracula has just returned to the world (by way of an airplane, naturally) and brought his friends with him. See, it turns out that there’s a magical Macguffin that can (depending on who gets a hold of it) either trap all the supernatural baddies in the world in an alternate dimension forever, or let evil rule the world for eternity. Now, it’s up to a small group of children, an old German immigrant, and Frankenstein’s Monster (the traitorous fiend!) to save the world from the menace of Dracula, the Wolf Man, Gill Man (the copyright had yet to expire on the Creature from the Black Lagoon, though I’m told that won’t be a problem for the remake next year), the Mummy, and three hot female vampires.

It’s hard to understand why director Fred Dekker hasn’t made a movie in almost two decades when he made two of the most awesome horror movies of the 80s (the other being Night of the Creeps, which you should also obviously see). This one gets pretty much everything right, managing to blend the charm of the old Universal horrors with the coming of age stories of films like Stand By Me. It’s so much fun I could pretty much do an entire review just based on various scenes and quotes I love, but here‘s a couple prime examples.

Alright, so when the boys first meet Frankenstein’s Monster (who had already befriended the little girl [Ashley Bank]), they all try to take cover, whether it be behind a bush or a bench or whatever’s handy. The fat kid (Brent Chalem), of course, decides that the best spot of cover is to climb into a trash can and put the lid over his head, utilizing the Looney Tunes method of personal safety. Then the little girl calls them a bunch of chickenshits, which is totally hilarious, though I’m pretty certain it was a five year old girl calling everyone chickenshits that got the film slapped with a PG-13 rating it otherwise did not deserve.

Another great scene comes when the squad decides to infiltrate the enemy lair in search of the magic amulet and find themselves face to face with the Wolf Man. Building off of a debate they had had earlier in the film about how one could kill a werewolf besides a silver bullet (guesses included blowing him up and waiting for old age to do the job), they decide here to deal with him in the time-honored tradition of all children in fights everywhere: kicking him in the balls. Later, there’s a great moment where they find themselves trapped at a three way intersection in the dilapidated old house: down corridor one, a steadily approaching Dracula, corridor two has the Wolf Man, and corridor three has the three vampire ladies. It’s a great visual as the camera pans from one life threatening danger to another, and it’s a measure of the film’s assured direction that it can pull such a thing off immediately after one of the main characters excitedly yells the line “Wolf Man’s got nards!”

Some might argue that I’m overhyping the film, either due to the great Christmas spirit within me (unlikely, as I’m currently Zachary Cranky since I’m reading up on the Republican Senators who blocked a vote on the Dream Act) or because I’m nostalgic about my childhood (possible, though childhood nostalgia hasn’t made me willing to watch the Garbage Pail Kids movie all the way through). To you naysayers out there I say to hell with your inability to feel joy at a great film. This is one of the most fun movies out there, and while it’s been criminally underseen up to this point, I can only hope that the remake next year proves to be such a hit that it sparks increased interest in this film (as opposed to, say, the remake of the Avengers, which audiences reacted to so negatively that we had to invade England to get a proportionate revenge). Despite its rating, this is an ideal horror movie for children and adults capable of remembering what it was like to be a kid. You all need to watch it. For Christmas.

Rating: ****

Rogue Galaxy

2010-12-16T20:02:00.000-08:00

I don’t normally review video games on this blog, but it’s been a long time since I’ve played a game so outright infuriating (well, actually it was last year when I played The Thing, but that one was so visibly terrible from the start I didn’t waste much time with it) that I wanted the opportunity to properly vent. Some might argue that I won’t be giving the most accurate possible portrayal of the game when writing so immediately after getting fed up with it, but come on. If you want a more positive portrayal of the game, you can go check out the textual blowjob at IGN. Fortunately for you and me, my income is not based on whether or not the video game manufacturers are happy with what I write about them (quite the contrary, they seem to occasionally be taking my income away from me), so you can enjoy this.

I was somewhat eager to play this one, too, as its very concept -- an RPG in outer space, where you fly from planet to planet while still curiously fighting everything with swords because Japan -- is pretty much exactly the kind of thing that I want to see. And yet developers Level 5 (who according to that IGN review also made Dragon Quest 8, a fact I cannot reconcile with what I’ve just spent the last week and a half playing through) manage to screw this up at almost every single aspect. Actually, that’s not completely true. The graphics are pretty nice, and some of the music is catchy if uninspired. That’s about all the nice things I’m going to say, so I wanted to get that out of the way now.

Now, one of the big make-or-break aspects to any RPG are the storyline and the characters. Think of all the great RPG storylines you’ve played through (you know, assuming you’ve played any), and then toss them all out the door and replace them with a thoroughly stock story about how a corporation is trying to create monsters to help increase their profits, and also there’s a secret ultimate evil type enemy that only gets revealed near the end of the game in what would be a big shocker if there hadn’t been one of those since at least way back in Dragon Warrior 2 back in the 1980s. And that is quite honestly the entire plot of the game, aside from some fairly plotless side trips (Example: the second Chapter in the game has your ship get attacked by monsters in space and crash on a jungle planet, where you need to kill a monster that’s been terrorizing a jungle village so you can get fruit to replicate engine fuel with. That’s not even a plot so much as it is a pretense to kill things but this time in a jungle setting). The characterization is little better, with many of your eight characters getting either the most cursory possible personalities, or in at least one case getting none at all. Here, I’ll run through all eight characters for you real quick, getting every detail you would need, and you can determine for yourselves if they have the proper depth for RPG characters, or if they might be better suited for, say, Contra:

- Jaster is our main character, was adopted as an infant by a priest on the desert world Rosa, and has always dreamed of going to space and having adventures. He’s also a descendent of the ancient Star King, but we don’t find that out until more than halfway through the game. His name also makes him sound like a space hillbilly.
- Kisala is the adopted daughter of the non-playable pirate captain Dorgengoa, but don’t expect her to acknowledge being adopted any time too soon. No, instead she just refers to the captain as Dad for most of the game, until it suddenly becomes a plot factor that she’s adopted and is really a princess from a hidden world. Again, you find out all of this close to the end of the game, even the part about her being adopted, even though she herself knows it.
- Zegram is kind of the Han Solo-ish rogue of the group, and is also secretly working against you with the evil corporation. About halfway through the game (have you started noticing yet that nobody has any characterization to speak of in the first half of the game?), you discover that it’s because the love of his life has died and the Daytron Corporation has promised to use an experimental new procedure to bring her back to life if he betrays you guys at a critical moment. This, of course, despite the fact that the corporate heads had no idea we would have any such critical moment when they first hired him.
- Steve is a robot, so instead of having a storyline of his own, his programmer also imprinted his (the programmer’s) dead son’s mind and memories into him, so every now and then while you’re playing through the game you’ll get to a save point and be treated to a cut scene of the programmer talking to his little artificial boy, who (SPOILER WARNING!) eventually destroys his own programming to protect his father and it’s really not the least bit touching. Also, you find out literally just before you go to fight the end boss that Steve wants to be a real boy, for which I’m grateful I wasn’t trying to drink a glass of water when they tried to toss that horrid old cliché at me.
- Simon has a Scottish accent.
- Lillika is -- oh, you wanted more on Simon, did you? Well, too damn bad. They do shoehorn in a little mini story for him (again, immediately before you go off to fight the end boss so you can spend 99% of the game with him as a total cipher) about him being horribly disfigured in an accident and being too ashamed to face his wife and daughter looking like that and that’s why he works on our pirate ship and always wears his goofy face-mask, but I honestly spent the entire game up to that point just assuming he was some weird badger or weasel person or something.
- Anyway, Lillika is a tribal warrior whose mother was killed by a monster when she was little, and who gets cast out of her tribe when we team up with her and help her kill the evil monster that’s been poisoning all the villagers, and who turns out to not only be the same monster that killer Lillika’s mother, but is also the tribe’s god. Whoops. They also force you to use her on the next world for what appears to be no reason at all aside from making sure that she’s there to flip out on a civil clerk and get us all thrown into prison.
- Junip is -- sigh -- a master hacker, who is unjustly fired from his job and has his wife leave him, and decides the proper response is to seize control of the factory he worked at, and after your team goes in and defeats him he decides the best way to avoid the planetary authorities is to join our crew. He ahs the side benefit of having the single most unpleasant voice acting in the entire game (a pretty impressive feat, considering the voice acting is uniformly terrible), and all of his special moves involve him attacking enemies with an electrified yo-yo or him doing a breakdance while a boom box plays next to him or something else so horrible that I did my best to never use him.
- Deego is a dog man from the mining planet Vedan. He used to be a soldier with his best friend Gale until the two are set up to attack a civilian space ship after being told it was run by rebels. Since then, he’s fallen into drink at the bar of the girl he likes, until finding partial redemption in joining you and helping you fight gale, who has turned to evil to deal with his own shame. So yeah, he actually has the most fleshed out character in the game by far, but despite having an axe that’s almost the size of every other character put together, he does very little damage and dies really easily, so I try to never use him when I can avoid it.

So there you are. Eight characters, and only one of them has anything approaching the depth you’d expect to find in, say, a Final Fantasy, or even a Disgaea. That’s even without really going into the voice acting, which starts at poor and gets to truly horrific. The game even defaults to having the characters you’re not playing as shout at you every few seconds about what you’re supposed to be doing and how much more miserable they want to make your playing experience, but thankfully you can turn that off in the options menu.

Of course, bland characters and plot can still be saved (yes, even in an RPG) if the gameplay is good enough, so how does that stack up? Well, the combat is a lot more real-time and action-based than for a standard RPG, in much the style of Kingdom Hearts, but in an attempt to add more depth (which was admittedly rather lacking in Kingdom Hearts’ combat system) they throw in two main changes. One is that lots of enemies are protected from you just whacking away at them, and depending on the enemy you have to either a) jump up and hack at their head, b) hold down the attack button to charge up your attack and break through their shields with it, or c) change Jaster’s gun to the Barrier Break gun and shoot at them to break their barriers before you can hack away at them. All three are goddamned annoying. The guns all reload absurdly slowly so that you can’t just run across the room from the enemies and just fire away at all of them until they die, but when you outright need to hit them first with your gun before you can do damage to them, you can easily find yourself in situations where you’re stuck getting pounded on by enemies you’re physically unable to damage for half a minute while you wait for your gun to reload, particularly since it doesn’t reload between battles either. The ones you just need to use a charged attack on would be fine, if not for how when you first press the X button to start charging it, it has you swing wildly once before you start charging, so your options are to either get next to the enemy, swing at it once and have your character recoil after bouncing off the shield, and hoping you can charge up and attack again before it hits you, or else start charging up while at a distance and then very very slowly creeping toward the enemy and hoping none of the other enemies attack you while you’re creeping. The ones you have to jump at are the worst of all, though it’s not entirely the fault of the enemies themselves. The problem here mainly comes from how the enemies you need to do this to generally tend to be much bigger than your character, which means I frequently found that, do to the terrible camera I often couldn’t see my character, or in many cases anything at all when an enemy backed me against a wall. By the way, not being able to see a damn thing during a battle because the camera is deeply broken is a common occurrence with this game, so if you decide to play the game, you have that to look forward to.

There’s also the maddening problem of the frequent cut scenes, which tend to drag the game to a complete halt anytime you actually progress in this bland story. You’ll frequently reach a plot advancing point, and have to sit there and be subjected to five or ten minutes of cut scenes that you can’t control at all while the voice actors (seriously, I hope they were paid in box wine for the effort they put into their work) grate heavily on you, and then you’ll go back to controlling your characters, and maybe you’ll be permitted to, say, walk out of the room, or perhaps five feet forward, before being subjected to another several minutes of cut scenes. It’s that kind of lovely start-stop-start-stop-start momentum one normally associates with someone learning how to drive stick. While most RPGs I’ve played have allowed you to skip past a page of text once you’re done reading it to help speed things up, or at least let you substitute the Japanese voice actors for the dreadful American ones, you get neither option here. You have to just sit there and watch both the text on screen and the characters very slowly and torturously speaking all the text -- including all of the drawn out sighs and grunts -- and too damn bad if you don’t like it. You can’t even get up and go make a sandwich or pee or something in the meantime, as a couple times I decided to do exactly that, only to come back and find a Game Over screen staring at me because the cut scene had abruptly devolved into a boss fight while I was away.

The boss fights are mostly fine, as these things go. They usually aren’t very exciting, though since they’re usually pretty decent they manage to become by default one of the best parts of the game, to the point where one of the game’s many bonus features is the ability to rise up in Hunter rankings by tracking down special optional bosses and killing them. Of course, lest we become too eager to go after all the bosses in the game, there are a few that are just completely obnoxious. The first of these hateful bosses comes when you’ve just acquired Deego and are fighting Gale to help redeem them both somehow. Gale’s inside a giant battle robot, because Japan, and after a somewhat lengthy but not too difficult fight, you manage to defeat him. Except not really, you just took out the robot. Gale himself now needs to be defeated, and instead of letting your default three characters fighting him like you’ve done for just about every other fight in the game up to now, Deego decides this is something that needs to be done one-on-one, so the fight is just Deego vs. Gale. Sounds okay, right? Well, not your first time fighting him it isn’t, because the very first thing Gale does when the fight starts is pull out his guns and shoots you half a dozen times and kills you in less than five seconds, sending you to the Game Over screen (By the way, the Game Over instead of an instant continue? Really fucking aggravating). See, what you’re supposed to do is spend the entire fight holding down the guard button so all the shots he fires at you only do one point of damage each, and then you just get in a few hits when Gale pauses to reload his guns. Not that they ever tell you to do that, you can just have the fun of figuring that out on your own. Hope you saved recently!

Of course, that pales in comparison to the aggravation of the end boss, where the developers evidently decided that what this RPG really needs is to throw in some nice precision jumping during the goddamned end boss. And to cap it off, you also get a camera that’s planted in the distance and aimed right at your back, to help ensure that the whole time you’re jumping from platform to platform you have no real way of knowing if you’re going to land on the next one or just fall into lava. Of course, the whole time you’re doing this the boss is hitting you or shaking the room around to make you fall off, to the point where I got so pissed off that I just turned the game off rather than face the prospect of playing any further. According to Gamefaqs, this is actually just the first end boss of -- wait for it -- TEN GODDAMNED END BOSSES, the last eight of which are one on one fights with a different one of your characters in each. And with no chance to save between any of them, so if you lose one you have to do all of them all over again.

So yeah, this game can feel free to fuck itself. It’s impossible to play for any real length of time without wanting to stab the developers, and I honestly feel like I’ve been conned by all the positive reviewers. I cannot think of a way for that IGN critic to have given this such a glowing review, unless due to his deadlines he wrote up the review before getting too far into it (at least the positive review the game got on 1up.com -- yeah, enjoy those ads there -- makes it clear that the main reasons for the positive review are how it starts off like Star Wars and the graphics are really pretty, two things that are certainly true, if somewhat irrelevant in my opinion to the game‘s actual quality). As for myself, I’m stopping at the end bosses, not because I don’t think I can beat them, but because it’s the exact opposite of fun to try. There are so many quality RPGs for the Playstation 2, I can’t fathom how anyone could think this was one of the better ones, or really even an acceptable one. If I were trying to keep in the spirit of the game’s awfulness, here’s where I’d close with a joke about hwo you should travel to a distant planet just to avoid this game, but really, the game’s already sapped enough of my energy without that.

Rating: ½ *

P.S. In the video below of the start of the game, notice how the battles keep stopping every few seconds to give you advice. That should have been my first clue. Also, as I write this I see that it’s currently on sale at Amazon for $7.99. That should have been the price it debuted at.

Fantasia 2000

2010-12-15T22:58:00.000-08:00

As much of a classic as the original Fantasia is now considered to be, I have to confess that I find Fantasia 2000 to be superior in virtually every way. There’s more variety to the musical selections, the animation is nicer, the intros to the various numbers are better, it has a shorter running time, and for those that missed it despite the original film being packaged with the sequel, they even included the Sorcerer’s Apprentice from the original in full. Sadly, no Night on Bald Mountain this time, but we play the cards we’re dealt.

Given that these films are vignettes rather than standard narratives, one could actually view this as a continuation of the first film instead of an actual sequel, particularly when one of the hosts mentions that Walt Disney’s initial vision for the original was that it would never be properly finished, but instead would be perpetually re-released with new material replacing some (though not all) of the previous release. Oddly, while I complained yesterday about the overall inconsistent quality of the original film, the quality of this sequel-or-possibly-continuation manages to be much more uniformly good, despite this one having no less than eight different directors, and despite it being less groundbreaking (apparently, to help improve the audience experience, Walt Disney decided to invent surround sound for the original, because that‘s just how he rolled).

Part of that increased quality, it must be said, comes from the improved music, and I’m pretty sure that can be attributed to the use of conductor James Levins and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra doing this film, instead of Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, which did the original (aside, of course, from the Sorcerer’s Apprentice segment, which reuses the original film’s score). Another improvement is the decision to use different celebrity narrators to introduce each segment, rather than the lone narrator from the original (Deems Taylor) talking to us as though Disney had never even entertained the thought that anyone that wasn’t a child would be watching his film. While all of the narrators here give it their all, the obvious standouts here are Steve Martin, who cheerfully claims all credit for the orchestra’s musical ability, and Penn & Teller, who inject some much-needed dismemberment into this Disney film.

Once more they leave the opening segment fairly free form visually, giving us geometric shapes vaguely resembling butterflies flitting about to the tune of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, but the film quickly rebounds with a deft one-two punch containing Respighi’s Pines of Rome, featuring a family of humpback whales that decide to leave the ocean and go swimming around in the sky with the birds, and (easily the high mark of the film) Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which was a wild, jazzy piano number set in 1930s New York.

The other two big highlights are the all too brief Camille Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals bit, where a flamingo is totally hated on by his brethren for playing around with a yo-yo, and the closer, which gives us part of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite while showing us the trials of a wood sprite as she is attacked by the deadly Firebird as it exits a nearby volcano and lays waste to her forest. The Fantasia series is now batting 1.000 for closing the film out with their darkest number, a trend I am eager to see with Fantasia 2060. Because I plan on still being alive at age 80--err, at age 30 Again. Yes.

I think the 74 minute running time really helped this film, as it ensured that there wouldn’t be any of the padding that riddled the original. While I think that may have hurt the film somewhat at the box office (it made $60 million, not quite making back the $80 million production cost -- I guess these films are still ahead of their time), I doubt the film would have worked nearly as well if it had had the two hour running time its predecessor had. That said though, if they make these more of a regular event (and there is no reason at all to believe that, unfortunately -- I would personally love for this to become one of Disney’s key franchises), I certainly would like to see how they would manage doing a Fantasia based entirely around one long concerto or symphony, or perhaps two mid-length ones. This series, if not quite done perfectly (sorry Disney, but to me the perfect blend of animation and classical music pretty much always involves the likes of Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck), is still a rather noble and brilliant use of the art form, and as much of a latecomer to these films as I am, I would love to see them continue further. Come on Disney, you make enough of a profit off of your other ventures, you can afford to lose money on one of these every decade, right?

Rating: *** ½

Fantasia

2010-12-14T22:48:00.000-08:00

Since I’ve been watching a lot of recent Disney efforts lately, I figured I’d head back in time a bit and watch Fantasia for the first time (also, my mom got it for me for my birthday). I’d been curious to see it for some time, as it’s generally considered the most experimental effort Walt Disney ever made, and seems to have been a very love-or-hate type of movie (though audiences in 1940 largely hated it enough that Disney almost went bankrupt). After all, making a two hour long film (to date, the longest animated Disney film) without any proper narrative, merely a series of vignettes that frequently have no semblance of a plot, but exist only in an attempt to marry Disney animation to famous classical music? Well, that does kind of sound like something I‘d want to see.

Unfortunately, its very nature does lend itself to being a pretty inconsistent effort. It gets off to a fairly rocky start, giving us what (in my opinion) is the greatest musical piece in the entire film, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, with fully free form animation -- mostly just vague splashes of color, though it eventually moves on to things like animated strings and bows playing the music. Really kind of disappointing. I know Disney was aiming at creating an entirely new type of art form here, but unfortunately part of taking risks means that you will occasionally fail.

The rest of the film has less flighty animation, giving us such vignettes as the rather charming Dance of the Sugar Plum Faeries during Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite (alright, perhaps it was a bad time to say these were less flighty immediately before praising a segment that’s about faeries literally flying around, but you know what I meant), a rather epic history of the Earth from its formation to the fall of the dinosaurs done to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (complete with a T. Rex totally taking down a stegosaurus), and of course, the famous Sorcerer’s Apprentice segment done to, errm, Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. My favorite, though (as anyone regular reader would have likely guessed) would be the bit with all the ghosts and demons near the end done to Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain. It’s got a perfect marriage of one of the best songs in the film and easily the coolest visuals. Yes, because it’s filled with monsters.

Of course, I’m obviously listing all my favorite bits there. There’s quite a few, in this ponderous two hour running time, that don’t work as well. Not being the expert on classical music that I’d like to be, I’m not sure if it’s the particular selection of songs on display in the film, or if it’s more how conductor Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra performed them, but far too many of them sound so light and airy that they’re largely indistinguishable, and aren’t helped by animations that are frequently nothing more than cartoon characters dancing. The introductions to each sequence, by narrator Deems Taylor, also fell flat for me, feeling more like Disney was worried he needed the introductions to ease nervous filmgoers into the underlying concept of the film, rather than being anything truly helpful or necessary. Also, I don’t know if this should be mentioned as an actual criticism or not, but I will say that I was rather amused by how the infamous pickaninny centaur had to get excised from the film due to its horrible racism, and yet they retained some ridiculous Asian caricatures with nobody saying a word about it. Mulan does not excuse this double standard, Disney Corporation!

As I said, this is a tough one to give a proper rating, as parts of it are straight up brilliant, and completely live up to Walt Disney’s lofty goals, while other segments….not so much. I don’t think it’s quite the classic that some people have made it out to be, but I still have to say that I rather prefer it to the two more famous films Disney made immediately following (they would be Dumbo and Bambi). It’s definitely worth a viewing, though you may find you’re fast forwarding a few of the segments.

Rating: ** ½

Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time

2010-12-13T22:35:00.000-08:00

The first indicator I had that this movie wasn’t going to be very good came right at the start, when Jerry Bruckheimer’s logo popped up and promised me this film was going to be something along the lines of Transformers. The second indicator came right afterward, when we see Jake Gyllenhaal’s character as a child, running from the law through the Persian marketplace before scrambling up onto the rooftops to continue the chase there. Now, I don’t know if the estimated $200 million budget included paying for any child-sized stuntmen, but it certainly looked to my untrained eye like it actually was two children trying to climb up a wall, every bit as quickly as one would expect children to do so. I have to say, it does kind of take some of the tension away when it appears the guards chasing them could have just casually strolled up to them and caught them, or perhaps even made a game of it and hopped backwards on one foot toward them. The rest of the movie wasn’t much better.

Anyway, the film stars Gyllenhaal as Dastan, adopted prince of the Persian Empire, who early in the film leads an attack on a peaceful city after getting some false information about the city preparing weapons for war against Persia, and is subsequently framed for his adoptive father’s murder before having to go on the run with Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton) from the city they just conquered. Helping them in both their flight and their attempts to discover who set Dastan up (hint: it’s Ben Kingsley, who spends the entire film looking sinister and hateful as though he were afraid anyone might sympathize with him) is a mysterious dagger Gyllenhaal recovered in the attack on the holy city, that has the power to turn time back for a minute, without anyone but the wielder retaining any memory of the future that didn’t happen.

I suppose one could very well argue that this is an ideal video game movie, in that it’s very loud, dumb, and emphasizes constant action over anything approaching coherency. It’s also big on using masses of semi-faceless enemies that mostly all look alike, almost as though they just took the same character and occasionally swapped the palette a bit. If Scott Pilgrim reminded us all why we love video games, this was the film to remind us that a lot of the time they’re really stupid and annoying.

The back of the DVD case promises that this is “in the spirit of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy”, though I think it would be far more accurate to say that this is more like a Pirates movie without Johnny Depp or Geoffrey Rush (I.e. the two main reasons to watch), and with all the colors muted down to dull sandy tones to help ensure that it looks ugly as hell. I’m not sure how the deserts of the Middle East could look so beautiful in films like Lawrence of Arabia, and yet look so ghastly here. I’m also not certain how so much obvious talent could do such a bad job both in front of and behind the camera. Gemma Arterton I’ve only seen in Quantum of Solace before (and honestly don’t even remember which of the two Bond girls she was in that), so I can believe she might just be a bad actress, but Gyllenhaal looks like he just decided to drink the whole time filming was taking place, and Kingsley is pretty much just sleepwalking here. I can’t even just place all the blame on director Mike Newell, as I know he’s capable of much better than this, having previously helmed such films as Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Donie Brasco (then again, he also did Mona Lisa Smile, so clearly there are cracks showing).

I could go on a good bit longer about all the problems with this film, from the tremendously lame sandstorm that lasts exactly long enough for Gyllenhaal and Arterton to have a Serious Discussion, and then ends as soon as they’re done, to the constant flashes of slow motion to try to snag some of that vital 300 audience, to how it clearly labors under the false impression that ancient Persians believed in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. However, since the film seems to have been beaten up enough by audiences already (that estimated $200 million budget translated into making a total domestic gross of $90 million), I will mention the film’s one big saving grace in Alfred Molina. Molina shows up roughly a third of the way in as an outlaw libertarian, ranting about he and his men spread rumors about how evil and villainous they are so that the Persian tax collectors will be too afraid to try to visit them. Then he shows off his ostrich races, which gives us great lines like “Did you know that ostriches have suicidal tendencies?” He feels as though he just wandered in from a far different, far better movie, and I hope he manages to get his own spinoff somehow.

I admit to being a bit of a fan of this kind of desert adventure tale, but as these types of films go this ranks somewhere below Hidalgo and the recent Mummy series. It fails on almost every level it shoots for, giving us a perfect example of why snide assholes like me scorn summer blockbusters. It doesn’t work as an action movie, a comedy, or a romance, even though it tries all three at times in a sad attempt at appealing at all audiences. It’s a movie designed by committee to sell extra video games and Happy Meals, with no more soul to it than that would indicate.

Rating: *

The Princess and the Frog

2010-12-12T22:35:00.000-08:00

The transformation Disney has undergone over the past decade has been nothing short of astonishing. Faced with a combination of lagging creativity in their film department and the first actual animated competition in the form of Dreamworks that the company has ever had, the company spent the bulk of the decade outright panicking, eventually settling on the idea that the key to regaining their old glory was to completely ape Dreamworks. This is the great plan that gave us films like Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons, and worked out so well that when Disney finally purchased Pixar a few years later, it was with the demand that John Lasseter not only retain creative control of Pixar, but that he would also take creative control over all of Disney’s other animated studios. While the lengthy development time of animated films meant that there were still a couple years more of lousy movies, The Princess and the Frog finally arrived last year to show what a traditional Disney animated studio could do with Pixar guiding them along.

And quite a movie it is, too. The company’s first traditionally animated film since 2004’s Home on the Range, this is as visually beautiful as anything Disney has ever made (and looks much better than their ghastly efforts at 3D animation), particularly when the style shifts for the song “Almost There” to a style based off of painter Aaron Douglas (I looked it up, I‘m not that much of an art expert). We also get a great villain in the form of the Shadow Man (Keith David), a voodoo priest visually based off of the voodoo god Baron Samedi. I’m a little disappointed that he only gets one song in the film, though since this is Disney I suppose he’ll have plenty of time for new musical numbers when they start churning out fifty sequels.

But yes, the story: Tiana (Anika Noni Rose) is an expert cook/waitress at a New Orleans restaurant who is determinedly trying to save up enough money to buy her own restaurant, when she runs afoul of Prince Naveen (Bruno Campos), heir to the throne of Maldonia, who himself has recently run afoul of the Shadow Man, and been transformed into a frog as part of an elaborate plot to give the Shadow Man control of all of New Orleans. Naveen convinces her that all he needs is for her to kiss him like the frog prince in the children’s story and he’ll turn back to human form, but of course the kiss backfires and transforms her into a frog as well. Soon the pair is on the run, from partygoers, the Shadow Man, a pair of hunters, and some alligators out in the bayou (though in keeping with the film’s praise of New Orleans music, they do actually befriend one alligator that wants nothing more than the chance to play his trumpet), and find their chances of being turned back run out at midnight. I’d say things do not look good, except of course that things in this movie in fact look so very, very good.

Honestly, there is nothing not to enjoy about this movie. The music by Randy Newman features some of the catchiest songs Disney’s made in over a decade (seriously, The Lion King is the most recent film I can think of that could match it), and there was a great commitment made to crafting actual interesting, likable characters, eschewing the recent Dreamworks-inspired trend of having characters that mainly exist to spout off horrid pop culture references. It feels like a very intentional effort was made to use this film to get the company back to what it has traditionally done best* (which likely explains why this is the first film since 1998’s Mulan to give us a new Disney princess -- and in a surprise twist, it‘s also the first Disney film since 1946‘s Song of the South to have a black main character, so good on them for diversity), and it succeeds beautifully.

If I don’t quite give this film four stars, that’s only because it’s not quite at the level of the films Disney was routinely putting out in my formative years. It’s not really on the level of an Aladdin or a Little Mermaid or a Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but in all honesty, I’d rather watch it again before I watch a few of the four star films I’ve reviewed here. And not just ones like Sick, either.

Also, don’t go by the star ratings, read the actual reviews.

Rating: *** ½

* You can see some of the overtness involved in that in the trailer below, which goes on about the company’s 75 years of excellence (including a brief clip of Aladdin picking up the lamp), and in the new animated Disney logo of Steamboat Willy at the start of the film.

A Christmas Carol

2010-12-09T21:13:00.000-08:00

Alright, so I can’t completely avoid the proper holiday here, particularly not when my mom keeps getting as many family films as she can fit under her coat. Still, in choosing today’s movie I reasoned that if anything could snap me out of the holiday spirit, it would be Disney’s new version of A Christmas Carol, starring Jim Carrey as Scrooge and the various ghosts, and directed by Robert Zemeckis, who has made the curious career decision to stop making any more movies except those that he can film as live action and then cover up with frankly creepy animation (his previous two films, of course, being Beowulf and The Polar Express, and whose next film is another animated effort in the form of a remake of Yellow Submarine, in which the Beatles will no doubt be played by your childhood nightmares).

Of course, that being said, part of what makes Charles Dickens’ novella such a classic is its perfect blend of sentimentality and creeping darkness, so Zemeckis’ new directing style surprisingly works incredibly well with the material. The story, I would hope, is already familiar to everyone: a horrid old miser in 19th century England is visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come, repents of his wicked ways and becomes a wacky, beloved socialist, and Tiny Tim has God bless us, everyone. Zemeckis adds a few flourishes, such as shrinking Scrooge down to rodent-sized and having him ride an icicle across a rooftop, but these flourishes largely seem less like natural outgrowths of the story and more like an attempt to keep any children in the audience from getting bored by throwing in a few mindless action scenes here and there.

Despite that, the film works surprisingly well, though I doubt it’s the sort of movie children raised on Dreamworks cartoons will enjoy. It’s slow-paced, dark and foreboding; in short, it’s the exact opposite of drivel like Madagascar or Chicken Little (yes, I know that was a Disney movie). It’s also a complete feast for the eyes: the benefit of doing this as animation instead of keeping it in live action, aside from providing a more seamless blend between the actors and the effects, is that each ghost brings with it a new visual style. Jacob Marley (Gary Oldman) glows bright blue and green, looking as though he wouldn’t be out of place in the next Ghostbusters movie, while the Ghost of Christmas Present flings about so much multicolored lights that his segment rather resembles a Skittles commercial, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come gives us more of a Sleepy Hollow-ish nightmare scenario. It’s the rare film that actually makes me feel a little disappointed that I didn’t see it in IMAX 3-D.

One thing that was a little surprising, after Polar Express, was in how hidden Carrey was in the film. While with Polar Express Zemeckis made the animated characters all look like Tom Hanks (he did most of the voices, this wasn’t some crazed Being John Malkovich-type scenario), here Scrooge looks nothing at all like Carrey, aside from a possibly over expressive mouth. With Carrey toning himself down (aside from the ending, at least) heavily while affecting a British accent, it doesn’t even sound like him, to the point where if you took his name off the credits I doubt any of his fans would recognize him. Actually, does Carrey still have fans, at least to anywhere near the extent that he did in the 90s? It seems like the last movie he did that has any kind of following is Eternal Sunshine, and that movie’s fan base mostly showed up years after it died in theaters. I‘m digressing here.

While this may not be quite the Christmas film people would want, I daresay it’s the Christmas film they all need. After all, the original story is largely responsible for Christmas becoming a major holiday again when it was first published (Go Wiki it if you don’t believe me), so it’s only right that it keep getting remade to frighten and delight us all (elsewhere on this blog I also reviewed one from the 1950s with Alistair Sim as Scrooge, though I have to say I prefer this version). This one has the makings of becoming a new permanent holiday fixture.

Rating: *** ½

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

2010-12-08T23:46:00.000-08:00

‘Tis the season to be enjoying appropriately seasonal Christmas movies at the Savage household. Unfortunately, I am a sentimental enough person that pretty much every Christmas movie I’ve watched since the beginning of the month (which pretty much constitutes Gremlins and The Nightmare Before Christmas, though expectations are high that I’ll see many more) has warranted a rather glowing four star review. Clearly for this blog’s sake, what was needed was for me to start reviewing movies for other holidays, and what better alternative holiday to celebrate here than that of Halloween and the Great Pumpkin?

Anyway, while this surprisingly wasn’t my favorite Charlie Brown special (that would of course be Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown, which curiously has yet to get a DVD release), it’s a solid entry by director Bill Melendez, who appears to have directed all of the Peanuts specials, or at least all the ones I’m familiar with. The film functions as a series of intercut vignettes, one following Snoopy and his fantasies as a World War I flying ace, one following Linus and Lucy as they wait in the pumpkin patch for the Great Pumpkin to arrive, and one following virtually everyone else as they go trick or treating, mostly dressed as crappy little ghosts. Much like the comic strip it’s based off of, it’s a curious combination of very basic (some would say awful) artwork and surprisingly literate writing, leaving us with a group of children that speak rather like adults, philosophizing about their beliefs and fears in ways that would likely prompt any rational person to kill such children they heard talking like that. It’s a very thin line between the Peanuts gang and Village of the Damned, people.

As it’s not very long (it clocks in at a svelte 25 minutes), it doesn’t go to any great depth, providing a nice, pleasant TV special without requiring us to really ponder, say, what it means to be so devoted as to spend an entire evening in a pumpkin patch for your savior to appear, and deciding to spend the next Halloween in a different patch since he didn’t show up this time. Instead, it‘s much better to focus on things like the trick or treating adventures; I don’t know what it says about me as a person, but I am always happy to watch as Charlie Brown stumbles through his life so poorly, getting rocks at every house instead of candy, that my own screwed up life seems that much better by comparison.

And really, when it comes to it, isn’t that what the holidays are really meant for? Making yourself feel better by hating on others? Just like you can all hate on whoever uploaded the terrible video embedded below. Forrest Gump could have done a better job than that.

Rating: ***

The Cure: Trilogy

2010-12-07T08:44:00.000-08:00

Back in 2002, Robert Smith and the Cure decided to record what was less a proper concert and more a historical document: live performances of three of their biggest and gloomiest albums from start to finish, without any flourishes (aside from an encore of two songs from a fourth album), in front of a sold-out crowd in Berlin. What emerged from this idea is arguably the ultimate Cure concert video, dark, musically brilliant, and with the whole band mostly just standing there sulking the whole time.

The three albums in question, Pornography, Disintegration, and Blood flowers (yes, plus a brief encore from Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me), are considered by most fans to be high notes for the band, and while there are naturally plenty of songs from other albums that I would’ve liked to see them perform as well, what we get here is both pretty damn good, and pretty damn long (really, how many bands out there are willing to perform for three and a half hours?). Of course, your enjoyment is going to be pretty heavily predicated on whether or not you’re a big fan of the band, but fortunately for me they’ve been one of my favorites since high school, and to hell with all of you that don’t like them.

Of course, as mentioned before, there are some issues that I have with the concert, mainly involving the lack of visual variety on display. There’s little to no effort put into anything beyond playing the instruments or singing: the guitarists will occasionally walk around a bit, but always looking at their guitars the whole time like nothing else exists to them, and Smith occasionally does not-quite dances with his hands (such as on the song “Lullaby”, where he briefly imitates a spider crawling), but it stays as thoroughly basic as it can get. The non-band attempts at breaking up the visual monotony are pretty basic, mostly limited to lots of camera changes to capture the whole band and lots of multi-colored lights bathing the band. Having seen the band live before, I can confirm that this is exactly what they’re normally like in concert (the most exciting thing Smith did at that show was sit down on the stage halfway through a song like he was about to have a heart attack), and while their music is good enough to make up for such monotonous visuals, it would be nice to have at least a small amount of variety. I don’t ask you guys to be Marilyn Manson or anything, but give us something here!

While there’s really not much more to say about this, I will mention one thing here: that fairly high rating I gave it? That’s because I’m a huge fan of theirs. If you happen to dislike them, or only like some of their stuff (particularly if you mostly just like their poppier efforts), this is not the DVD for you. However, if you’ve read all the above and still feel intrigued, or you’re in high school and are just starting to learn how much fun it is listening to gloomy music and quietly hating everyone, then you should definitely check this out. You’ll be happy you did.

Rating: *** ½

P.S. The idea of a trailer doesn’t work for something like this, so here’s the first song from the concert:

Best Worst Movie

2010-12-06T22:03:00.000-08:00

Having finally gotten the chance to see (most of) the films of Ed Wood last week, I can confirm that, while delightfully incompetent, he is hardly deserving of his title of Worst Director of All Time. For just one example of a director that’s proven a consistent ability to make movies much worse than anything Wood could imagine, I can turn to the films of Claudio Fragasso, director of such films as Hell of the Living Dead, Rats: Night of Terror, and Troll 2, the latter of which is the subject of this documentary.

As I write this, Troll 2 is ranked at #59 on IMDB’s Bottom 100 (or the 100 worst movies ever made), though the film managed to capture a screenshot from when it was solidly ranked #1, so its stock has clearly risen due to this documentary. Regardless, it’s an utter mess of a horror movie, featuring vegetarian goblins (no, the monsters in it aren’t actually trolls), a beyond incomprehensible plot, and acting bad enough that one has to assume Fragasso had just grabbed his friends and only let them do one take per scene (possibly the best line of the entire documentary, by the way, was this gem from Fragasso: “Troll 2 is a film that examines many serious and important issues like eating, living, and dying…People want to eat this family”).

While I’ve certainly seen worse, it’s a solid enough choice for people to rally around as the worst of all time (the real worst ones of all time, movies like The Expedition or Sabbath, are better off having never been discovered at all), and Best Worst Movie does a good job at both capturing the cult following that sometimes surrounds films like this and examining the lives of people that made a completely rubbish movie back in 1990. The most held together, and therefore fun to watch, is George Hardy, a charming dentist who played the father in the movie, who recounts how his friends started calling him up after Troll 2 started playing occasionally on HBO, and who teases his teenage daughter about how he just signed up for Myspace and already has more friends and comments than she has on her page. Unfortunately, writer/director (as well as Troll 2 child actor) Michael Stephenson seems to have been a little too charmed by him, so we occasionally get to sit through him laughing and retelling the same stories of the film to various people he meets, and if there’s one thing I’m sure we all love, it’s an old guy telling the same three or four favorite stories of his over and over again (though by the end of the film even he‘s sick of telling them).

Being a documentary about an old movie, it obviously doesn’t have the tightest narrative possible. We get all the interviews with the old cast members (like Connie Young, who played the daughter, who described both how embarrassed she felt when the film first appeared on HBO and she got to watch her performance for the first time, and how much more embarrassed she was when she made the mistake of reading the comments on IMDB and read people trashing her performance), and the various midnight screenings at places like the Alamo Drafthouse complete with cast and crew appearing to bond with their fans, as well as the various convention appearances. It’s a combination of touching and sad, the touching from how many of their fans they get to meet and talk with, and the sad from when Hardy goes to a couple conventions where nobody has heard of the film. At the first he rather embarrassingly tries to drum up business by calling out to people that walk by and demanding to know if they’ve ever seen his film; at the second he’s a bit more sanguine about the problem and decides to attach himself to all the tables devoted to the cast members of the Nightmare on Elm Street films (going by how he can’t once say that name without tripping over it, I can only assume he’s had such a sheltered life that he’s never even heard of the films). Don’t worry, though, the awkwardness of that is soon dissolved when the cast appears at another convention to do a Q & A, only to have Fragasso heckle them all for not respecting how great of a movie he made.

As documentaries go, this is a fairly light and breezy one. It goes for moderate laughs, and moderate moments of tenderness, generally playing things much safer than the movie it’s about. Of course, while that approach means that we don’t get anything truly remarkable in this film, it does help keep it from having any real boring or lousy scenes, so you get a nice, enjoyable experience throughout. That’s more than can be said about Troll 2.

Rating: ***

Plan 9 From Outer Space

2010-12-02T21:59:00.000-08:00

I’m happy that I got to end the week with this, Ed Wood’s unquestioned masterpiece of filmmaking. It features all the things that one would want in a film like this: ghouls rising up from the grave and staggering about with their arms upraised, a deliriously insane evil plot, dialogue that begins at hammy and works its way rapidly downward, and a wonderfully appalling misunderstanding of science. Best of all, here Wood managed to correct the problem he’s had with his previous films, diving into the action good and early, and sparing us the dull filler I’ve come to expect from him.

The film follows the heroic exploits of a military pilot and his wife as they face the terrible menace of aliens in flying saucers who have decided to solve the threat humans pose to the universe in the most logical way possible: with Plan 9. Plan 9, for those of you who don’t have access to the Galactic Ruler’s files, involves the resurrection of the dead. Specifically, it involves here resurrecting three people from a graveyard in California and having them roam the graveyard and occasionally menace the nearby home of the pilot.

I’m sure you’ll agree that this is a very solid plan, though I’m uncertain as to what they were hoping to accomplish by this. The aliens alternate between wanting to march their zombies on the various governments of the world, and wanting to hide their actions from the pilot, as though he were going to be a bigger threat than all the world’s armies. Of course, they’re also doing all the talk of hiding their existence after having flown their saucers in broad daylight through Washington and had the army opening fire on them, and shortly before complaining that they tried to be peaceful at first but the world governments refused to acknowledge they existed, so there’s some serious mixed signals going on here. This is all, naturally, to stop us before we can learn the secrets of Solaranite, a type of bomb that would work by detonating sunlight -- all sunlight, everywhere the light from our sun has reached in the entire universe. Because SCIENCE~, that’s why!

The script’s problems, of course, are partially due to Wood having started the movie by filming his friend Bela Lugosi prancing around a graveyard in a cape without any real plan in mind beyond that his friend wanted to make another movie. Then, when Lugosi died with only a couple minutes of footage filmed, he quickly cobbled together a story that could utilize such footage, and cast his wife’s chiropractor to play the rest of Lugosi’s scenes with a cape covering most of his face to compensate (they still look nothing alike, of course, but at least the attempt was there). It also features wonderfully over the top narration by famous prognosticator Criswell, to help further muddle the plot under the pretense of explaining it.

For those of you that have heard of Ed Wood, but were uncertain how to start with his movies, this is the ideal starting point. It contains all the delirious fun madness without any of the more tedious aspects involved in trying to properly develop the plot or pad out the running time (ironically, this was his longest film up to this point, clocking in at a scandalous 79 minutes). This should be required viewing for any fan of cheesy cult movies.

Rating: ***

P.S. Youtube informs me that a remake is currently being filmed, and is quite a bit more graphic and bigger budgeted. We’ll see how that works out.

Bride of the Monster

2010-12-01T21:05:00.000-08:00

Ed Wood Plus Sick: The Life And Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist Week continues chugging along, this time providing me with the mild disappointment that is Bride of the Monster. Ed Wood has long been my favorite Tim Burton movie, so I went in fully prepared for the delightfully goofy sci-fi plot that this movie has going for it. I was just somewhat less prepared for how damn long it takes for that to get going.

To be fair, it does start right off with two men caught in a torrential downpour out in the woods somewhere, both inexplicably armed with rifles, so we’re on pretty good ground here. After a quick attempt at hiding in a supposedly abandoned haunted house that turns out to have Bela Lugosi residing there with his giant henchman Lobo (pro wrestler Tor Johnson). After fleeing the two of them (Lobo in particular has a great intro, casually popping onscreen behind the two armed men with his arms outstretched, ready for bear -- that’s a terrible description, but if you see it you’ll appreciate how awesome it is), the pair runs afoul of the local legendary monster -- stock footage of an octopus that quickly makes short work of them.

So that’s a pretty effective, charmingly silly opener. Unfortunately we then get about a half hour of chitchat at the local police station, where our heroic trio is introduced, discusses the recent disappearances, complain to each other about various levels of secret keeping (two of the heroes are police officers, and the third is the reporter girlfriend of one of said cops), and various other nonsense that grinds the film to a halt. Eventually the reporter manages to drive down to the haunted house (well, she drives near it, at least, before running off the road just like a woman and getting menaced by a snake and fainting, and being carried to the house by Lobo), and the film picks up quite well from there, but when the film is only 68 minutes long, you really can’t spend such a vast length of time setting everything up.

It’s a shame, too, because when the film is working, it works pretty darn well. That’s obviously a fairly subjective statement, as we are describing a movie where the evil monsters tend to be whatever animal stock footage Wood found prior to filming (in addition to the octopus and snake, we also get an alligator attack) for the characters to point offscreen at in horror, but the goofy, low budget charm of it all really is quite effective. After all, who among us can hear a line like “Maybe it’s like the papers say, all those atom bomb explosions distorted the atmosphere”, in response to all the thunderstorms they’ve been having lately, and not have a smile on their face? Who wouldn’t enjoy hearing Lugosi’s grand monologue about how he was going to create a new race of Atomic Supermen to rule the world with, starting with the plucky female reporter for reasons that I never understood? And who could possibly dislike how Lugosi’s secret laboratory contains stone walls, manacles on one wall, tons of stock fifties mad scientist lab equipment, and in the corner a regular kitchen sink, countertop, and refrigerator? Nobody I’d like to continue knowing, that’s for sure.

So yes, the film does have some legitimately fun parts to it. It’s just that the film is deeply schizophrenic, with half the film made into a fun little science fiction movie, and the other half being what I can only assume was an attempt at recreating the magic of His Girl Friday, only without the humor. I suppose you can just skip it all and have a much better viewing experience as a result, just be aware that you may want to have another film to watch with it, because it’ll be over really quickly.

Rating: * ½

Jail Bait

2010-11-30T21:35:00.000-08:00

Well, I now know why Jail Bait isn’t really mentioned when people are discussing Ed Wood’s oeuvre, and as I had guessed yesterday, it’s because it’s terminally boring. If I don’t want to commit to saying it’s the worst film noir I’ve ever watched, that’s mainly because I have a bad enough memory that, while I certainly can’t remember any that were worse, there’s always an outside chance that there was and I just blocked it out of my mind.

The plot concerns an attempted heist that goes wrong, in which the elderly night watchman is killed. Of the two would be robbers, the one that shot the watchman is wracked with guilt, and decides to confess, and is subsequently killed by his partner, who then demands that his partner’s father, a renowned plastic surgeon, give him a new face so that he can evade the police. Of course, the father has his own ideas…

Reading that, one can imagine, if not a great story, at least a serviceable one. That’s not what we get here. Instead, what we get is so dull that I want to go to sleep just thinking back on it. Wood directs this in as generic a manner as possible, planting the camera down Kevin Smith style and just assuming the material is good enough to carry the film, despite his amateur actors (just like in Glen or Glenda?, he cast his girlfriend Dolores Fuller in a prominent role) behaving in such a stiff manner one could almost suspect they were reading off of cue cards (aside from Herbert Rawlinson, who plays the old doctor -- he keeps pausing halfway through each sentence because he‘s trying to remember his lines, so he obviously isn‘t reading off of any cue cards), as they no doubt had absolutely no time to rehearse the material at all. To be fair, there is one future star in Steve Reeves, in his first film role before finding fame in a long series of gladiator movies, but outside of randomly showing off his abs he really doesn’t do much here.

It’s a shame too, because there are honestly some good moments in the story (as there would have to be, to balance out the hideous inappropriateness of the blackface routine early on), such as the idea of the plastic surgery, which to my knowledge had only been done once before in the gimmicky Humphrey Bogart vehicle Dark Passage (and which is done more like Face/Off here, half a century before that movie was made). It’s just executed so poorly at every turn that it’s impossible to enjoy any moment of it, even at such moments when the witness to the attempted robbery points the finger at the murderer and says she saw it happen even when we know full well she didn’t. In a better movie her false claims to have witnessed the whole event would lead somewhere. Here it’s just a continuity error.

There’s not much I can really say about this movie. It isn’t written that badly, surprisingly enough, but the acting and directing just crush any possible entertainment value the film might have otherwise had. I can honestly say that I feel sorry for any young film buff whose first experience to film noir is somehow this movie here, because it’s about as low as the genre goes (to say nothing of the wildly misleading title). Go check out Go check out The Third Man or Kiss Me Deadly or something instead, so that you’ll feel better about yourself after this ordeal. You’ve earned it.

Rating: *

Glen or Glenda?

2010-11-30T00:11:00.000-08:00

I feel like I’ve been living a bit of a lie all these many years, and there’s really no better place than here, in my review of Ed Wood’s infamous ode to transvestites, to finally admit it to all of you. This is a little hard to admit, but despite my love of both terrible movies and cult films, and my love of the Tim Burton movie Ed Wood, before this week I hadn’t actually seen any of Wood’s movies aside from Plan 9. Thankfully, with the help of the Ed Wood Box Set, I am now able to enjoy such completely insane efforts as this one.

As mentioned above, this is at least theoretically Wood’s appeal to the masses to become more accepting of transvestites (one of whom was Wood himself), and in that regard it can be regarded as both fairly noble and very ahead of its time, coming as it did in the early 1950s, when being different was something that could outright get you arrested or beaten to death. Of course, what makes the film truly sublime is how Wood feels he can’t let it just be a straightforward tale of a transvestite terrified at his girlfriend/wife finding out his dark secret (and one told almost documentary style at times, due to Wood’s fairly minimalist directing style), and so has his friend Bela Lugosi play the Puppet Master (damn it, I just can’t get away from that series!), who sits in his chair on some gothic horror set while spouting random madness that has nothing to do with anything in the main story of this film or any other, while we get stock footage of bulls running or whatever. Also, when we hit the forty minute mark, it suddenly derails and gives us like ten minutes of women doing strip teases and a woman lying on a couch while a man cracks a whip above her.

One has to admire the sheer bravado on display here by Edward D. Wood Jr. On this, his debut feature, he wrote, directed, and starred in it, also coming out as a transvestite in the process (in later films he’d also take on producing and editing chores, because he was just that much of a workaholic). That he was woefully incompetent at every one of these jobs is almost beside the point; being able to accomplish even this much is pretty damn impressive, no matter how poorly executed.

Of course, that’s not being entirely honest, as the main audience for this film is people wanting to see just how incompetently made it was. They largely won’t be disappointed, as, in addition to the aforementioned goofy kitchen sink approach to storytelling (though I’m pretty certain he only threw in Lugosi and the way too long strip teases as a means of padding out a story that barely has enough plot for half an hour) we get intensely wooden acting, awkwardly spliced together takes of scenes that leave characters standing there with their mouths abruptly shut while they finish their sentences like ventriloquists, hilariously terrible dialogue that badly misinterprets transvestites, homosexuals, and hermaphrodites (it misunderstands gender relations too, but since virtually all non noir movies did back then I’ll give Wood a pass) while admirably trying to remain understanding of them all, and through it all framing the whole endeavor as a police investigation into a transvestite suicide that seems to serve no purpose beyond having a major authority figure in the form of a cop growing to understand these poor, misunderstood people. In short, it’s everything a fan of campy, culty nonsense would want.

Of course, being his first movie, he had yet to develop his style (or budget) enough to really get his craziness going properly, but it’s a very promising start to a week of Ed Wood movies. You know, aside from the Bob Flanagan movie. Up next is Jail Bait, which isn’t really one of his more famous films. I’m going to go ahead and guess that’s because it’s not as interesting as his other movies, though I can‘t imagine how that could be, if it holds true to that title.

Rating: **

Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist

2010-11-28T06:19:00.000-08:00

One never knows where a classic film will appear into one’s life. I know that I certainly never suspected that a documentary about a man who became famous for pounding nails through his penis would wind up being one of the most touching and painful (okay, I had an idea about the painful part, but not exactly how I imagined) movies I have ever seen in my life, and yet here I am, urging you all to go see it.

Some backstory: Bob Flanagan was born in 1952 with cystic fibrosis, a disease that causes the lungs and throat to continually fill up with mucus, and for which there is no cure. Given a median life expectancy of six months, by the start of the documentary he’s made it into his early 40s, though he is continually in and out of hospitals and has plastic tubes permanently pumping oxygen in through his nose. His survival seems at least partially due to how he chose to deal with the constant pain of his life, by creating even more pain for himself through masochistic acts as a means of showing that he was in control of his body and pain, not some disease. It’s a decision that led him to his girlfriend of 15 years, Sheree Rose, a former dominatrix who fell in love with him and joined him in his masochistic endeavors for the surprisingly long remainder of his life.

As I mentioned, the film is surprisingly painful, both physically and emotionally. The physical part was enough to make me squirm in quite a few places: on multiple occasions, we unfortunately get to see close-ups of him nailing his penis to blocks of wood, hanging himself upside down by hooks, having Rose give him a new scrotal piercing, or appearing in the Nine Inch Nails video “Happiness in Slavery”, where clamps yank and twist on his nipples and testicles. All that, however, pales in comparison to the emotional toll of the film. While I don’t recall it being expressly stated anywhere during the doc, it’s pretty clear that Flanagan and Rose had director Kirby Dick start making this movie when it became clear he only had a few months left to live, so we get moments like when Rose is upset at him because he won’t let her give him a birthday spanking. While he doesn’t come out and say it, he’s clearly upset at her for wanting to do that when he’s visibly in so much pain that it’s taking everything he has just to sit up in a chair and talk. Meanwhile, while she doesn’t come right out and say it, she’s not upset about him rejecting the spanking, she’s upset because she knows she’s losing him to his disease, and is now unable to connect with him on the single most intimate level they’ve developed for each other.

Also, while they don’t quite capture the very moment of his death, they do show his final conversations with Rose and his mother the evening before, where he’s in a hospital bed, barely able to whisper, and openly crying that he doesn’t understand why this is happening to him and how he doesn’t want to die. Later, his mother holds up a large jar completely filled with the fluid that was in his lungs when he died, explaining that he drowned from this. It’s one of the most tragic endings to any film I have ever seen, all the worse because it‘s true.

I can imagine quite a few of you having already decided based on this description that you never want to see such a movie, and I don‘t blame you. A film filled with this much pain would be rather unendurable, if not for all the humor Flanagan infuses into the film. He constantly jokes about his condition, whether to the camera, to the audiences of his stage shows, to the students he occasionally lectures about his condition, in his songs and poems. Even in his final few days, he manages some levity, as when he decides on his final art project: “I want a wealthy collector to finance an installation in which a video camera will be placed in the coffin with my body, connected to a screen on the wall, and whenever he wants to, the patron can see how I'm coming along.” There’s also a surprising undercurrent of hope running through the film, both in his own case of having managed to live so far beyond what his doctors believed to be his life expectancy (particularly when two of his sisters also died of the disease, one at 17 years and one at six months), and in the case of a 17 year old girl with cystic fibrosis who visits him through the Make a Wish Foundation, and informs him how his book completely changed the way she viewed her condition. It’s a camaraderie built on dealing with a terminal illness, true, but when facing a disease that tends to kill you at a very young age (though Wikipedia informs me that the life expectancy for an infant born with the disease in 2008 is 37.4 years, so apparently modern medicine has gotten better at treating it), every extra day you’re around can count as a victory.

As I write this, I finished the movie two hours ago, and I’m still tearing up about it like a child. One that cries at sad things. As I said, this is not an easy movie to sit through by any means, but it is one of the most powerful and affecting I have ever seen. I strongly urge you to at least attempt to watch it, even though you may be spending a good chunk of time looking anywhere but at the screen.

Rating: ****

P.S. In lieu of a trailer, here’s the film’s opening montage:

Puppet Master 5

2010-11-25T14:22:00.000-08:00

So here we are. It’s Thanksgiving and I just wasted a good chunk of my morning by watching a pretty terrible sequel in a pretty silly franchise based around murderous puppets that have largely stopped being all that murderous. Fortunately for me, this was “The Final Chapter”, ending out the series on a low note, so I don’t have to review any more of them after this. That there are four other films in the DVD collection I bought is a fact I am choosing to ignore.

As the film was made back to back with the fourth, it starts shortly after the events of the last one, which we find out about by way of a lengthy montage of the entire fourth film, complete with every bit of puppet fighting or violence, just to make absolutely certain that anyone who watched the fourth film will feel like their time has been wasted (and to help pad this film’s running time, but that just goes without saying for this series). Anyway, our hero Rick (Gordon Currie) has been picked up by police as their lead suspect in the murder of the female scientist at the start of the last film, but he’s freed soon enough to go back to that damnable hotel to lead the puppets once more in their war against evil gremlin lord Sutec, slightly complicated in this by his boss Dr. Jennings, who wants to secret formula for animating the puppets to help make his company Biotech, “a major scientific industrial concern”, fabulously rich.

The film falls prey to the same problems that have plagued the series up to this point, as well as a few new ones. For one, it continues the general problem inherent in being one of the most blood-free horror franchises since the old Universal films of the 30s and 40s. Not that I automatically require that a horror movie be wall to wall gore, mind you, but it helps a lot when a horror movie has so little else to offer. Here again half the kills are off-camera, and the on-camera ones are generally so shadowy that we never get a clear look at what’s going on. Again, these movies all went straight to video, so they didn’t need to worry about MPAA censorship at any point (alright, the first one was originally intended to get a theatrical run, but that’s all). They made the conscious decision to make these films borderline PG for violence for reasons that completely escape me.

The movie also contains pretty much every other problem I’ve complained about in the other films, from the constant padding (once more we have opening titles going on for several minutes while set against a black screen just to try to prod the film along to 80 minutes), acting that starts at laughable and then goes downhill, a great deal of characters wandering around that damn hotel because they can’t afford more interesting locations, and a completely retarded storyline, my favorite part of which was when the girl in the coma at the hospital manages to achieve a psychic bond with the hotel computer (and despite the film coming out in 1994, the computer is one of those lovely green text on a black background deals one would expect more from the 80s) so she can give Rick some great advice like “HELP ME” and “KILL BEAST”. Wow, what a great contribution there. And Rick, while I have to agree that the average audience for these films is probably not the most highly literate one could find, when the computer screen is reading out “LIFE FORCE” in giant capital letters that take up pretty much the whole screen, you don’t automatically have to repeat it out loud to make sure we understand what those crazy letters and word shapes are trying to tell us.

I guess Jeff Burr should be proud, in a way. He took a series that had started out pretty retarded and managed to make the two worst films in the series up to that point. That’s quite an achievement, assuming of course that his idea of an achievement is to destroy whatever series he’s working on. Given that he also made what is easily the worst of the original Texas Chainsaw movies (Leatherface) and made a terrible sequel to a pretty underrated late 80s horror movie with Pumpkinhead 2 (I haven’t seen his Stepfather 2, so I can only guess at how wonderful that must be), I have to think that he’s been doing this sort of thing on purpose, or at least that his idea of good is very, very different from my own.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I’m going to just drink now until I can’t remember the word puppet.

Rating: *

Puppet Master 4

2010-11-24T17:49:00.000-08:00

I wrote in my last review that I hoped the Puppet Master series would manage to continue with its efforts to slightly improve with each successive film, in the hopes that by the end of this massive nine-film set I’ll have reached a film that could rank right up there with The Exorcist or Halloween. Rather unsurprisingly, director Jeff Burr (Leatherface, Pumpkinhead 2) had other ideas, bringing the series instead into a blissful state of deeply retarded madness.

I twigged to this pretty early on in the film, when a miniature gremlin (sent by his evil master Sutec that lives in some small cave filled with human bones) kills a scientist in a lab. That in itself isn’t that mad, but when it starts off with her having her finger ripped off, complete with her clutching her ruined hand to her chest in a camera shot long enough to clearly show her finger is still fully intact, and then rather than showing the kill it quickly flashes red and cuts to the master, who cries out “Yes, take her power. Draw her energy into us,” as ridiculous early 90s CG fog suddenly swirls out of her eyes and into the gremlin, that’s when I knew this film was going to be something special.

The film follows Rick (Gordon Currie), a robotics guy that’s become caretaker to an old hotel while trying to perfect his A.I. programs (which basically amount to creating robots to play laser tag with). He lets his friends visit him there, and soon they’ve all uncovered an old box that (after a tediously long sequence of them hammering away at the lock while one of the girls flips the fuck out and screams about the evil forces in the house) is filled with the puppets, Toulon’s journal explaining them, and the formula that gives them life. This is just in time, too, since the evil gremlins have also found the hotel, and they do not want anyone else having the secret of life.

There are so many things wrong with this movie that I hardly know where to begin. The acting is of course beyond awful, as is normally the case with these films, but when you’re handed gems like “You don’t know the forces we’d be summoning here” then you’d have your work cut out for you even if you were Brando. The kills are also largely nonexistent, as Burr has chosen to keep them all off-camera, frequently having a sudden red flash to mark for the audience when someone is killed. I can only assume this was Burr’s over-reaction to his film Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 being so butchered by the MPAA, but when you’re making a film DTV you really don’t need to worry about that sort of thing.

The pacing is also pretty bad, with lots of padding going on to try to reach that crucial 80 minute mark, from the ponderously long sequence of them hammering on the lock to the opening credits being placed on an otherwise black screen to what feels like ten minutes’ worth of just Rick playing laser tag with Pinhead and Tunneler while a generic rock song plays. It’s strange, really. Laser tag is actually quite fun to play, it really shouldn’t be so damned dull to watch someone playing it with robots and puppets in a movie.

Really worst of all, though, is that after a story that finally helped us escape the damn hotel in Puppet Master 3, we get brought right back to it one movie later. It’s as though all of my earlier enthusiasm was just completely misplaced somehow. While this movie does get some points for just sheer brassy ridiculousness -- really, you’re making a movie in a franchise about killer puppets and you include two lengthy laser tag fights? -- it’s a pretty major step backwards for the franchise, and going by the IMDB ratings, the franchise never really recovered. This was apparently filmed back to back with Puppet Master 5 (also by Burr -- yay), so apparently I’m going to hate tomorrow’s movie too. I can’t wait.

Rating: *

Puppet Master 3

2010-11-23T17:47:00.000-08:00

I have to hand it to the Puppet Master movies: I’m three films in now, and each one has been a visible improvement over the previous movie. Here, we get to see, if not quite the origins of the OG Puppet Master Andre Toulon (Guy Rolfe, the third actor to play the role, though he would go on to repeat the role in another three films), how he spent his time when the Nazis had taken over and decided his living puppets needed to be replicated for the war effort.

As a great many filmmakers already know, there is no concept so great that it can’t be improved by throwing Nazis into the mix, and director David DeCoteau (who IMDB informs me also directed Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, which I may have to crush on him a bit for) clearly understands that. We get an evil Nazi officer (Richard Lynch) who decides to capture Toulon and, just to show he means business about forcing him to make puppets for the Reich, guns down Toulon’s wife in front of him. Somehow this breeds a measure of rebellion in Toulon’s heart, and he manages to escape, leading to a showdown between his puppets and the major’s forces.

First, it has to be said that the period setting enables, in addition to all the cool Nazi imagery (say what you want about the regime, it had a pretty snappy look to it), the introduction of yet another neat new puppet in the form of Six Shooter, a cowboy with six arms (and a revolver in each, of course), presumably to help add to the overall firepower of the puppets now that they’re facing an actual army. We even get to see here the creation of Blade, who has always been probably the most “iconic” of the puppets (I may be wrong on that, but I doubt it -- come on, he was based on Klaus Kinski, people!). Sadly, we don’t get Torch here, despite him being outright dressed like a Nazi storm trooper, but I suppose you can’t have everything.

Unfortunately, while we do get a nice new setting, better screenplay, and better acting than we did in the first two, we do run into one slight snag, and that is that it’s not really much of a horror movie at all. The puppets are now unquestionably in the heroes’ camp for this one, and the kills noticeably suffer as a result. There’s not much available in the way of stalking and killing, and most of the Nazi deaths come at the hands of Six Shooter simply gunning them down instead of Tunneler drilling holes in them, Blade slitting their throats, Leech Woman puking up an army of leeches onto them, or Pinhead punching them right in the damn face. It’s a change that fit’s the story, but I can’t help but feel a little let down all the same.

Still, despite that, it’s easily the best film yet in the series, and I’m eager to find out if they can actually keep this momentum going. At this rate the recently released Puppet Master: Axis of Evil (the ninth or tenth in the series) must no doubt be one of the greatest horror movies ever made. I can only hope that actually winds up being true.

Rating: ** ½

Puppet Master 2

2010-11-22T18:21:00.000-08:00

The first two Puppet Masters work well as a study in how two different directors can make two movies of pretty noticeably different quality despite having nearly identical plots. Not only did the original film follow a bit of a slasher formula, with a group of people going to an isolated location and getting picked off one by one in various elaborate ways, this follows in the tradition of a slasher sequel by basically being the same movie all over again. Also, like the best slasher sequels, it improves upon the original in almost every way (the exception: no William Hickey).

Set a few years after the first one, the hotel, once filled with psychics, is now filling up with paranormal investigators who are trying to figure out what the hell happened with the psychics getting killed by puppets and soon find themselves getting killed by puppets, which somehow takes them by surprise. They also find out that the hotel isn’t quite as uninhabited as they had believed: a man (Steve Welles) who dresses like Claude Rains and talks with a thick German accent is living there, and while he befriends them all, he couldn’t be anymore obvious as the villain if he had a moustache to twirl attached to the outside of his bandages.

The directing, by visual effects artist Dave Allen (who also did the puppet effects for the first five films in the series), shows that it’s not always a bad thing to give a directing gig to someone from a different field. The visual feel of the film is definitely improved, with the hotel looking more gothic and creepy than it did in the original film, when it looked more like…well, like a standard hotel. We also get a nice new puppet in Torch, who wears a Nazi storm trooper outfit, a black metal head (complete with metallic fangs), and a flamethrower, and our head villain, who has chosen to look like the Invisible Man for reasons that seem like they were mostly invented just so he can dress like that. The pacing is also much faster, with the first kill coming shortly after they arrive at the hotel, and the rest of the investigators actually catching the killer puppet in question (Tunneler) and dissecting him to figure out how he works, and both the kills and the nudity come more frequently here.

The only thing that’s really not an improvement, really, is the acting. The original, as I may have mentioned, had one of my childhood icons in Hickey, and Welles is a pretty shabby replacement, even if he once played Lab Tech # 1 in Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers. The only really entertaining actor in the whole thing was the woman who played the farmer’s wife, and I unfortunately didn’t write down either her name or her character’s, but she was pretty entertaining all the same. Still, one hardly watches a DTV horror movie made for under a million dollars because they’re expecting actual good acting, so it’s hardly a major flaw.

While I’m beginning to suspect that the Puppet Master series is never going to actually become good, this was at least a decent effort, and a clear improvement over its predecessor. If this winds up being the peak of the series (IMDB assures me the third one is best, but we’ll see), then it’s at least not the worst horror franchise out there (yes Amityville, I’m looking your way), and had enough fun moments to justify a watch. Can’t ask for much more than that.

Rating: **

Puppet Master

2010-11-21T15:59:00.000-08:00

As a surprise gift to the horror community, Full Moon Entertainment recently released a new boxed set of all nine of the Puppet Master films for under $40, just in time for our post-Halloween horror shopping. The main benefit of this was that I could now casually purchase one of the last semi-major horror franchises that I’d been missing up to now (due in large part to how the last set they released had the slightly less competitive price of about $100). Just as importantly as the pricing, though (well, almost as importantly), is that I’ve never previously seen any of them beyond the occasional clip in a horror documentary, so I’m now getting to go in fresh to see just how good (or more likely bad -- it is Full Moon here) all of them are.

And having said that, I can now affirm that the first film is not very good. It starts off pretty impressively -- we get a POV shot of a tiny figure running across the floor of an Olde Tymey hotel, spying on what looks like gangsters in the lobby, and then running upstairs to warn the Puppet Master, played by William Hickey. I’ve had an undying love for Hickey ever since he fully branded himself into my childhood with his roles in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and My Blue Heaven, so it’s always nice to see him in a movie. Sadly, he doesn’t last past the opening of the film, as we jump from the 40s to the present day of the late 80s, when a group of psychics starts having dreams about the hotel and the old Puppet Master, and decide to head out to the hotel to investigate the matter. I have to say, as a fan of completely stupid movie plots, the setup here is rather impressive.

Unfortunately, the rest of the film isn’t all that impressive. The psychics just wander around the hotel, triggering terribly filmed flashbacks and showing why their combined paychecks for the film were about $100. And occasionally a puppet shows up and kills one of them, though not often enough, or soon enough. The puppet attacks are decent enough for what they are -- visibly low budget, with a minimum of blood since this was made in the late 80s when the MPAA was taking a hatchet to all horror movies -- but while they’re generally different from the standard slasher fare of the time, they still aren’t really exciting enough to make up for the general dullness that makes up the bulk of the film.

Okay, there is one nice, horribly mean-spirited sequence. A woman gets attacked by Pinhead, who breaks her ankle before she can throw him down several flights of stairs. Then Blade comes at her (the other puppets in the movie, as helpfully named in the Wikipedia page, are Jester, Leech Woman, and Tunneler, though apparently there were also Indian and Oriental puppets that I missed), and she’s barely able to crawl into the nearby elevator before he can get her with his hook hand. She manages to take the elevator down to the lobby, where of course Pinhead is waiting, and starts punching her square in the face a few times (with sound effects like she was in the ring with LaMotta) before she can finally fling him off of her. She then makes the key mistake of pausing for a moment to catch her breath, which naturally gives Blade time to jump down the elevator shaft and cut her throat with his knife hand. The poor woman was getting it from all sides, it was like trying to take on Freddy and Jason at the same time here.

This isn’t the worst movie I’ve seen this month by any means, and is certainly able to rise to a general level of mediocrity, but it’s hardly the sort of effort one would expect to be transformed into a franchise beyond how cool the puppets look. Director David Schmoeller does a pretty drab job here, much like he did in his late 70s slasher Tourist Trap (which remains popular among slasher fans for reasons that escape me). If you’re big on evil doll movies, you should probably check this out (though you most likely already have), but everyone else may want to give this one a pass.

Rating: * ½

Dead Space

2010-11-18T14:56:00.000-08:00

It seems like almost every week I sit here and prepare myself to tell you about the latest Alien ripoff I’ve seen, and now…wait, didn’t we just have this conversation? I’m not honestly sure that this makes for the greatest double bill with The Terror Within, as not only are both films bad (though Dead Space is clearly superior), but both are shameless ripoffs of the same damn movie (okay, this one’s a remake of Forbidden World, but Forbidden World itself was a bit of an Alien clone), to the point where they have almost identical plots. At least this one’s set in outer space, though, so points for that.

The film stars Marc Singer, who as everyone knows is the Goddamn Beastmaster, as the captain of a spaceship whose idea of r & r is to lean back in his chair and kick his feet up while wearing only a speedo. “Sadly”, his rest is interrupted by a distress call from a nearby research station that’s under threat from what starts out as a deadly virus, but which quickly turns out to be the birth of an alien monster that quickly grows larger than any of the humans at the research station. Now, Singer has to try to stop the monster, as it stalks the station and kills the researchers one by one, before he becomes its next victim.

There are a great many ways director Fred Gallo was able to make this better than The Terror Within was. The most important, and the one I am most grateful for, is that it’s much shorter, clocking in at a lean, mean 70 minutes. First-time filmmakers, take note: a 70 minute running time is nothing to be ashamed of for your debut film, particularly if you’re making a cheapo genre film. If you’re reading through your script, and you’re uncertain as to whether or not you have enough interesting material for a 90 minute film, that means you don’t, so start trimming the fat. Of course, there’s no real guarantee that cutting it down by twenty minutes is going to make the film good, but it certainly isn’t likely to make it worse, now is it?

There are other aspects of this film that are superior to Terror Within, such as Singer’s presence. While I obviously enjoyed George Kennedy in Terror, he was only a supporting character and died stupidly, leaving us to deal with the guy that was imitating Michael Biehn and the girl whose name I never learned as our non stars. The Beastmaster, on the other hand, is just effortlessly charismatic and action star-y. Just watch him in the trailer below; you could buy a car from that man, you just know he’d treat you right. The film is also somewhat better lit -- while it’s still a fairly dark film, you can at least see what’s going on at all times, and I can’t stress enough how much it benefits a film when you can actually watch it. The monster’s a bit of a wash, though. It’s got a more interesting design than the one in Terror, but was clearly unwieldy, as rather than seeing a guy in a monster suit running around, we’re largely just limited to close-ups of its head moving around, and cuts to frightened reaction shots of the poor humans in its path. This is what happens when function tries to follow form.

I feel rather conflicted here. This is still a very bad movie, but The Terror Within set the bar so low that I want to praise it at the same time, as it takes the same basic story and visibly improves on it. I’ll just say this instead. If you’re a big (and I mean somewhat obsessive here) fan of lousy no budget science fiction from the 80s, then this movie should hold some appeal for you. The rest of you should probably look elsewhere.

Rating: * ½

The Terror Within

2010-11-17T18:08:00.000-08:00

It seems like almost every week I sit here and prepare myself to tell you about the latest Alien ripoff I’ve seen, and now here’s another one for me to share with you all. This is another of Shout! Factory’s recent Roger Corman releases, on a double bill DVD with Dead Space (which I guess I’ll be reviewing tomorrow), and it’s almost eerie how little effort was involved in its creation.

We’re in the future and most of the world has been wiped out by some man-made plague. We center on a small group of survivors led by George Kennedy that live in an underground bunker out in the desert somewhere (ideal for a post-apocalyptic film, as it greatly reduces the chance of a car driving by and wrecking the shot), as they venture out of their lair in search of food, finding both some monsters (called gargoyles) and a pregnant woman that’s somehow survived the plague without the vaccine those in the bunker had taken. Of course, as anyone who’s seen Alien can expect, it’s actually a gargoyle baby, and when it comes time for her to give birth, it tears its way out of her belly (spraying blood all over the medical staff) and skeedaddles into the air vents. After that, it’s just a matter of hunting and being hunted, and preparing various weapons (including, yes, a flamethrower) to take down the abruptly adult gargoyle that’s now in there with them.

So let’s see: we’ve got a monster that impregnates other species with its young (though these monsters admittedly eschew the facehugger-style monsters in favor of just raping the women), a tiny crew of people in a confined, dingy metallic area with poor lighting, a monster that goes from being infant-sized to full adult in about an hour, lots of hiding in air vents, and a black guy trying and failing to stop it with a flamethrower. Does this sound at all familiar to anyone else? I didn’t think so, because this is the most original film I’ve seen since Snakes on a Train.

Of course, a lack of imagination isn’t always enough to kill a movie, so let’s get to the other problems. First, there’s the rubber suit design of the gargoyles themselves, which look like the creature on the cover of the Neon Maniacs DVD but with a crocodile snout (I haven‘t actually seen Neon Maniacs, so I can‘t really say if the monsters in that look like they do on the cover or not -- though given that it came out three years before this film, I have to assume it‘s more than coincidence). We also have the sheer delightfulness of how director Thierry Notz seemingly decided to disguise his inability to make an exciting action scene by shrouding the film in so much darkness that you can barely make out what’s going on half the time (this was a frequent occurrence back in the 80s, particularly among first time filmmakers like Notz who apparently didn’t realize just how much lighting they needed in order for their scenes to actually be visible). The bare bones lighting is kind of like today’s shaky cam action movies in how it renders the film impossible to follow at times. This means a good deal of the money shots of the gargoyle killing people are also buried in shadow, though the ones that we can see easily tend to be pretty lazy and uninspired, so I guess it evens out.

I’d also try to criticize the acting, but I have an unwarranted amount of love for George Kennedy due to a misspent youth involving constantly rewatching all the Naked Gun movies and Police Squad! You’ll never get me to find fault with him, so don’t even try. I can’t even criticize the male lead, played by Andrew Stevens of Night Eyes 3 fame, as he spends the whole movie trying his hardest to look like Michael Biehn did in The Terminator, for no discernable reason, and so I assume it was done specifically to confuse us and make us think the movie couldn’t possibly be ripping off Alien when it’s clearly ripping off Terminator instead.

This is not the kind of movie one watches by themselves unless they either have a very masochistic streak in them, or they are concerned the average ratings on their movie blog are skewed too high. It’s bad in just about every way possible, and is perhaps the worst Alien clone I’ve yet seen. I trust Dead Space will turn out better, but I’ll keep you posted either way.

Rating: *

Toy Story 3

2010-11-16T17:54:00.000-08:00

It’s been eleven years since the last Toy Story, and being Pixar’s flagship title (the original Toy Story was their first feature film back in 1995) I guess it was only natural for them to leave it in the hands of Lee Unkrich, in his first solo directorial effort (after co-directing Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo). I assume John Lasseter, who directed the first two in the series, was too busy making Cars 2 to helm this one. What the lack of Lasseter’s hand means is that this is the weakest of the three films, though it must be said that Unkrich still does a good job making this into what is easily the darkest and gloomiest of all of Pixar’s films to date.

See, not only have eleven years passed in the real world between Toy Story 2 and 3, but in the film world itself Andy, the boy who owns all the toys, is now in his late teens and getting ready to go to college. He plans to store away all his old toys (the ones he still has, that is; poor Bo Peep got sold at a yard sale long ago) up in the attic, but due to a misunderstanding between him and his mom, the toys get put out for the trash. Feeling betrayed, the toys take it upon themselves to relocate to a nursery school, where they’ll have a small army of children to play with them. Unfortunately, the toy end of the nursery school is headed by Lotso the Bear (Ned Beatty), a seemingly nice old man that has his own ideas about how they’re all going to fit in there…

One thing I like about Pixar is that they seem to be outright incapable of making a bad movie. I’ve seen every one of their movies except Cars, and A Bug’s Life was the only weak one in the whole bunch (curiously, that was directed by Lasseter). This one may wobble at times, but it’s still pretty clever and touching, capturing the pain of toys who have outlasted their owner’s interest in them, and what kind of life (or lack thereof) that would create. It’s also nice how they managed to retain all the old voice actors: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Don Rickles, even John Morris (Andy) are all back, and joined by Beatty and Michael Keaton (who plays a downright inspired Ken). One of the most important aspects to movies like this is a collection of interesting, likable characters, and Toy Story 3 is packed with them.

Unfortunately, while the film has a good many highlights (Spanish Buzz being the best, though the opening adventure is a close second), the pacing is also pretty off, leaving the film dragging at times. Further, presumably due to the long gap between the films, it also feels the need to play sort of like a greatest hits at times with its characters, trying to get in all of their catchphrases several times (not only do we hear the lines “There’s a snake in my boot!” and “To infinity and beyond!” far too many times, but we even return to the three aliens and their worship of the claw) to try to garner cheap audience applause. Sorry, but unless said catchphrase is either “Cooooobrrraaaaaa!” or “Cobra-Lalalalalalalalalalalala!”, I remain unmoved.

The movie is still good, if rather emotionally draining (we’re essentially dealing with Toy Hell here, or at least Toy Purgatory), it’s just that the shoes it had to fill may have been a little too big (Full disclosure: when I saw Toy Story 2 in the theater, I literally fell out of my chair at one point because I was laughing so hard. This may not have been a normal reaction). It’s a movie well worth seeing, though I do have to say, newer parents may want to keep in mind that it is a little bit darker than one would expect from a G film. Of course, I went to see Gremlins when I was three and loved it, so as long as you haven’t raised your kid to be a total wuss they should still enjoy it. If you don’t know if they can handle it, that’s just all the more reason to make them see it. Frankly, they sound like they need to toughen up a little.

Rating: ***

Cannibal Girls

2010-11-15T17:23:00.000-08:00

I suppose it shouldn’t be odd to discover that, before helping to make the 80s completely awesome with such films as Stripes, Twins, and Ghostbusters 1 & 2, director Ivan Reitman first got his start with this early 70s horror movie. After all, it’s sort of a rite of passage for directors to get their start by making cheap exploitation fare; everyone from Francis Ford Coppola (Dementia 13) to Peter Jackson (Bad Taste through Dead Alive) to Martin Scorsese (Boxcar Bertha) to…well, I could go on for a while with that. So what better way, then, for a goofy, offbeat director to first make his mark than with a goofy, offbeat horror movie?

The film stars Eugene Levy in his second role (it was both his and Reitman’s second film, after Foxy Lady, which I know nothing about) as a young hippie on vacation with his girlfriend (Andrea Martin). While traveling through Canada, they are told the legend of the cannibal girls, a trio of women that ate their victims and as a result never got sick a day in their lives. As it turns out, the house the girls lived in is now a bed and breakfast, so they decide to spend the night there, meeting their rather outlandish (and touchy feely) host, and his staff of three suspiciously familiar looking women…

Now, the problem with that synopsis is that it makes the film seem like a natural progression from plot point to plot point, when the film is actually, in the grand style of 70s films and films without much of a budget, extremely loose and free form, feeling half improvised for the bulk of the film. You get random bits like a couple characters playing Monopoly (which, combined with the period clothing and woodsy setting, just made me think of Friday the 13th), or the butcher that gets his own closeup so he can assure Martin that “if it was any fresher it would get up and tell you itself!” before winking at her to end the scene. I won’t even get into the last twenty minutes, where the film seems to have ended too early at the one hour mark and so hits the reset button and tries to do a bit of a jazz riff on it.

It’s a completely weird, loopy effort, which I suppose is the sort of thing one should expect from a director that would go on to be primarily associated with Bill Murray. One could almost forget it was a horror movie at various points, were it not for all the gory murders (and the rampant nudity, I guess, but that happened in almost every movie in the 70s). It’s a little incoherent at times, though I guess that’s to be expected when dealing with a movie about immortal cannibalistic women, and the frequent nudity and surprisingly graphic violence help it over the various hurdles it encounters.

The film does fall into the trap that hits most horror comedies, in that by dividing its efforts it manages to not be funny enough or scary enough to justify itself, but it’s still a thoroughly watchable venture, with enough highlights to (mostly) make up for the more draggy sections of the movie. Reitman, Levy, and Martin would all go on to bigger and better movies, but it’s kind of neat seeing such an early, juvenile effort by them. Thanks can go out once again to Shout! Factory for giving this a long-awaited DVD release, they deserve praise for all the old movies they’ve been releasing lately.

Rating: **

Not of This Earth

2010-11-14T18:37:00.000-08:00

While I seem to be disappointed by them as often as not, I’m rather glad that Shout! Factory has been releasing so many of Roger Corman’s productions from the late 70s through early 90s. For one, I’m a bit of an idealist and want every movie ever made to have a DVD release, and for two, I’m always excited to have another early Jim Wynorski film getting a proper showcase.

Of course, being a fan of cheap exploitation directors like Wynorski does mean that one will be frequently let down by them. I had here been hoping for a film on the same level of quality as Sorority House Massacre 2 or Chopping Mall (or at least on the level of Transylvania Twist), and instead wound up with something closer in quality to Komodo vs. Cobra but with much more nudity. Granted, I’m hardly one to turn my nose up at naked women, but outside of Traci Lords, none of the ladies here are really attractive enough to justify themselves.

But I’m getting ahead of myself again. The film stars Arthur Roberts as Mr. Johnson, a vampiric alien who comes to Earth on a mission to see if his species can survive on our blood. Disguising himself as a human, he soon enlists the aid of a nurse (Traci Lords) who moves into his home to give him a series of transfusions to keep him alive, while slowly discovering a little too much about her new employer. Like his ability to drain all the blood out of his victims instantaneously just by removing his sunglasses and looking at them, for instance.

The main problem with the movie, if I had to point one out, is that there’s about enough of a plot for an episode of the Twilight Zone, here stretched out for about 80 minutes. It’s a very slow-paced, draggy film, and aside from Lords’ willingness to get naked frequently and a faint trace of Wynorski’s normal humor (though much more muted here than in his other efforts of the time), there is very little to offer here. There are some entertaining scenes scattered here and there (the highlight easily being when he picks up a trio of the most ridiculous prostitutes in film history, though the opening, featuring a couple getting it on in a car being killed by an alien is pretty nice too), but they account for less than half the film’s running time.

Even though I wasn’t really expecting much out of the film, it’s hard for me to not feel a little bit disappointed in it. After all, when I watch a Jim Wynorski/Roger Corman match-up, I do have a right to expect a bare minimum level of quality that just wasn’t shown here. It’s easily the dullest Wynorski film I’ve yet seen, and all the Traci Lords nudity in the world doesn’t fix that. Though I would not be opposed to her trying it some more.

Rating: * ½

The Howling 2

2010-11-11T16:19:00.000-08:00

I hope I’m not ruining my horror cred here when I admit that I’ve never particularly been a fan of the original Howling. While I do normally think Joe Dante is a fantastic director (I’ve seen most of his other films and liked or loved all of them), the difficulties in making a werewolf movie that isn’t lousy were apparently too much for him to overcome at such an early stage in his career. I do still understand why so many werewolf fans list it as one of the best werewolf movies ever made, of course, as the standards of that genre are so low that it actually is. One might ask why, when I didn’t really care for the original, did I decide to buy the second one, and I don’t really have a feasible answer for you, beyond that it was cheap (on sale for $4 at Amazon for their Halloween sale) and I do a lot of impulse shopping.

At any rate, I am glad I saw this movie. Not because it’s good, mind you, but because it’s so batshit insane that it just can’t bring itself to be boring at any moment. It’s the sort of movie where you’ll get an evil midget taking off his Punch mask (from Punch & Judy, something I’m sure none of you clever readers need explained) and stabbing someone before another character rushes him and throws him out a second story window where he’s impaled on spikes below. It’s the sort of movie where Christopher Lee, going against all sanity and logic, is actually one of the heroes instead of a villain. It’s the sort of movie where (I sweat this actually happens) he takes out a werewolf with a holy hand grenade. Brilliant.

I can’t really do a full paragraph on the plot with this film, because it was all so disjointed and weird that I honestly couldn’t follow it at all. The film’s subtitle is “Your Sister is a Werewolf”, which is something Lee informs a young lady at the beginning, when he tries to recruit her and her boyfriend into his lycanthrope hunting crew. Apparently, there’s a secret cult of werewolves (led by Sybil Danning) plotting to take over the world entire, evidently by wearing skimpy bondage gear (!) and using their magical powers (!!!) like when Danning shoots red lightning from her fingertips, causing a man’s face to abruptly turn into a rubber mask with blood pouring out of the eyes (along with a sound effect that makes me suspect we’re meant to think his eyes actually exploded, even though they’re still there). Anyway, they must all be stopped for the good of the world. Also, much is made of them transforming with the full moon, and yet several times one of them attacks in broad daylight, because consistency is for fools.

But really, consistency and its brother coherency are not what one watches a film like this for (at least I hope not). No, we watch movies like this because they show that an American director like Philippe Mora (IMDB tells me he’s a Frenchman that’s spent most of his life living in Australia and England, but clearly the site has been tampered with by foreign agents) can make a movie just as wild and crazy as a Japanese director might have made. And if it’s one that happens to have a good deal of blood and nudity in it as well, then that’s just all for the better (the scene where Danning rips off her top and shows the goods is so nice, in fact that they replay it about a dozen times over the end credits, which is really how all movies should end).

Of course, those going in hoping for a good werewolf movie are probably going to be rather disappointed. Half of the werewolves are killed with things other than silver, they sometimes show up in the daytime, they have magical powers somehow, and they look more like rejected models from Planet of the Apes than actual werewolves. The constant religious iconography might be a turn off as well, as they’re blatantly stealing a theme from the much more popular vampire genre in the clear assumption that it was the religious element to vampires that made them so much more popular. Still, despite the obvious disregard the filmmakers had for the genre they were working with, it was hard for me to avoid being entertained for the bulk of the film. It’s messy, stupid, and crazy, and you could do much worse than to catch this during your next werewolf movie marathon. Don’t lie to me, I know that you have them.

Rating: **

Night of the Demons

2010-11-10T18:13:00.000-08:00

There’s always a little bit of trepidation involved when preparing to watch a movie that was finished and shelved for a couple years before finally being dumped onto DVD with pretty much no fanfare whatsoever, particularly when it’s a remake of a moderately popular horror movie from the 80s, which should have at least guaranteed it a minor profit in theaters regardless of quality. It’s that lovely vote of no confidence by the studio that just forces you to assume the worst about the film.

Which means that it’s kind of surprising to discover that the film is actually somewhat superior to the original, making it an extremely rare kind of remake. The last instance I can think of where a remake was better than the original was John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing way back in 1982. I’m sure there’s been one or two since, but none that comes readily to mind. To be sure, that’s as much due to the original film not being very good as it is to the relative quality of this effort, but a win’s a win however it comes.

For those that haven’t seen the original, it’s Halloween night, and popular girl Angela (Shannon Elizabeth, long after her American Pie fame has vanished) is hosting a huge party at some abandoned house where some people died in sepia tones in the prologue in goofy, overly gory ways. After the damn cops raid the place, we’re left with just a few stragglers, who discover a walled off room in the basement, where a skeleton with a gold tooth lies on the floor. When Angela tries to get the gold tooth, however, the skeleton snaps down and bites her, infecting her with a demon that needs to spread to seven people (coincidentally the number of stragglers) before dawn so it can free itself from the house and wreak havoc over the world entire. Trapped in the house now, the remaining people now have to find some way to survive until morning.

That’s not exactly the plot of the original, but it’s close enough to be instantly recognizable. It ramps up the violence and nudity from its predecessor, and while the CG is pretty much always noticeable whenever it appears, it at least provides co-writer/director Adam Gierasch with the ability to include things like having someone’s face outright torn off their head, which I could never bring myself to speak against. It also has the benefit of having much better actors on hand -- sure, Amelia Kinkade was a much better Angela than Shannon Elizabeth is here, but you just can’t top Edward Furlong thoroughly hamming it up and visibly having the time of his life as her drug dealing scumbag friend. Also, while I generally prefer when remakes just use the same general premise of the original, and not remake all the actual big scenes (see the recent remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street to see how terribly wrong that path can go), I will say they do a nice job here updating the lipstick scene. And no, for those of you that haven’t seen either version, I won’t spoil what that is.

The Night of the Demons remake isn’t ever going to be mistaken for a classic, but it’s certainly in the upper tier of horror remakes I’ve encountered. Again, while that’s admittedly because most remakes are awful, it’s effortlessly watchable, and comes so close to being an actual good film that one could easily be fooled into thinking that it was (particularly during the lesbian seduction scene, which was incredibly awkward and fake, but which had two girls kissing and brief nudity so I didn‘t care). Fortunately you have me here to set the record straight, but I feel a little sad for all those poor souls out there that are buying this without having me around to give them fair warning.

Rating: ** ½

Don't Go Near the Park

2010-11-09T18:02:00.000-08:00

While the reviews here tend to be somewhat skewed more favorably than the average critic’s, as I have the luxury of reviewing only movies that I was interested in (and therefore would normally hope were good), there come times such as now when I purchased a movie (usually, as is the case here, a horror movie) for the express purpose of trying to see just how bad it is.

Don’t Go Near the Park has quite a pedigree. Fans of 70s grind house fare will be familiar with the “Don’t” horror movies, which were a number of cheaply made horror films warning audiences not to go somewhere or do something. Films like Don’t Look in the Basement, Don’t Go in the House, Don’t Go in the Woods, Don’t Open the Door, etc. Every last one of these was a terrible film, though some were admittedly quite entertaining in their badness (my favorite probably being Don’t Go in the Woods). Don’t Go Near the Park, on the other hand, is pretty widely considered to be by far the worst of the lot, with an Amazon rating of 1.5 stars and an IMDB rating so low that a few more negative reviews might well push it down into Bottom 100 territory.

The problems start right at the opening text crawl which informs us that “while the film you are about to see is fiction, it's based on actual occurrences which happened over the centuries”, before jumping into a plot about two Neanderthals cursed by a witch to stay young forever by cutting people’s bellies open and eating their internal organs, thus stealing their youth. Yeah, I must have missed that part of my world history class too. The one Neanderthal (Robert Gribbin), now in semi-present day, winds up falling for a young woman he’s stalking (scream queen Linnea Quigley -- this, by the way, was her 38th highest ranked movie by IMDB), marrying her, and having a daughter (Tamara Taylor). The daughter quickly grows up to get molested by a bunch of guys in a van (shortly before the van crashes and explodes for reasons unknown, leaving her the sole survivor), get hit on by a seven year old boy, and be used in a dark ritual intended to end her father’s curse in some vague way.

There’s quite a few problems with the film, from the acting to the near complete lack of a plot to the terrible dialogue to the even more terrible gore effects, which generally involve a character’s shirt being ripped open to reveal a giant fake-looking wrinkly pot belly for the Neanderthal to rip into and yank out organs. The acting routinely is along the lines of the cast standing there reciting their lines completely devoid of emotion, as if the only film any of them had previously seen was Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (that film I would absolutely recommend, as the complete indifference every last actor in it has to everything starts to become outright hypnotic after a while). The plot, what little there is of it, is badly disjointed, with scenes ending abruptly (sometimes with just an immediate cut to a different scene without any resolution) and plotlines being dropped and never mentioned again. The dialogue is perhaps the worst part, though: it’s as if co-writer and director Lawrence D. Foldes decided to pass off dialogue duties to someone from France who was then in their second year of English courses in college, or perhaps gave the task to a robot to handle. It’s awkward and stilted to the point where it’s nearly impossible to believe someone that speaks English as their native tongue could have written it, and the actors frequently wind up pausing awkwardly (some would says Shatneresquely) midsentence, as if pondering where their life’s decisions have led them.

While there is plenty of (terrible looking) blood and Linnea Quigley’s breasts in the film, there are a great many films from the 80s that feature both things and are much better than this. Do yourself a favor and go check out Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers or Return of the Living Dead instead, if you’re looking for such a film; you’ll be much happier than you would be watching this drivel.

Rating: *

P.S. Notice how, in the trailer below, they showed almost nothing from the actual film. This is because they were fully aware that anything they showed would only decrease ticket sales.

Predators

2010-11-08T19:10:00.000-08:00

One of my friends saw this in theaters and helpfully informed me that it was the best Predator movie since the second one, which has to rank among the faintest praise a major motion picture can get. Better than Alien vs. Predator and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem??? Why, it must be a classic!

Well, fortunately, it did turn out to be pretty good after all. This is a little surprising, considering how director Nimrod Antal’s previous film Armored was one of the most tedious cop movies I’ve ever seen (he also directed Vacancy, which I thought was decent, but I seem to be a minority opinion there). The plot’s pretty simple: a group of Earth’s toughest badasses wakes up in freefall above a jungle, where they start banding together and realize they’ve been selected as prey for an alien race of big game hunters. Led by Adrien Brody, they now have to try to find a way off this alien world and make their way back home before any of the predators now hunting them can finish them all off.

Since it’s an action movie, we can start our analysis of the film with that. A good deal for the film, too, as the action scenes are the best parts of the movie, though they still aren’t anything that amazing. Too many of these sequences either feel fairly generic and unoriginal, or feel like they were blatantly designed to evoke the memory of the original (most keenly felt when the yakuza character decides to buy the rest of the team time by staying back to go one on one with a predator while armed only with a katana, shades of Billy from the first film). The ones that work best tend to be earlier on, when they’re accidentally triggering traps that have been placed around, or when they fight off a pack of horn-covered beasts that are set upon them.

I can’t give this a firm recommendation, as the film’s various flaws tend to be too numerous and pervasive to comfortably ignore. There’s the problem of the dialogue, which gives us such classic lines as “Your ass is amazing” and “Come on, you alien faggot. Come on, come on, come on, come on!” There’s the completely unsurprising third act revelation that the quiet and seemingly out of place doctor (Topher Grace) is actually the worst one of them all. There’s the troublesome CG, which makes the film look like it was rushed to make it in theaters by its release date before it was really finished (this is particularly noticeable during one high speed pan through the jungle, where -- well, let’s just say it doesn’t look quite as impressive as Avatar, but more like a PS2 game). Antal does try to overcome the screenplay’s various weaknesses by hiring a bunch of actors talented enough to partially compensate for it, from Walt Goggins to Laurence Fishburne to Danny Trejo, but they mostly have a thankless task trying to overcome the dialogue they’re given (Goggins in particular has such terrible lines, including the ass line above, that it was almost depressing to see how far Shane Vendrell has fallen). Louis Changchien, as the yakuza character, somehow manages to fare the best, but that almost certainly has to do with how almost all of his lines are in Japanese.

I would have off-handedly assumed that any of you considering watching this would have managed to already, but IMDB sadly informs me that it only made $52 million in theaters, roughly $30 million less than the first Alien vs. Predator did. This may be a somewhat mediocre effort, but it deserves better than that, at least. Still, while I hesitate to ever call something a rental only (after all, the movie’s either worth seeing or it isn’t), this is definitely one you won’t want to blind buy.

Rating: ** ½

The Toxic Avenger

2010-11-07T13:23:00.000-08:00

It’s appropriate that this early 80s effort by Lloyd Kaufman wound up being the film that largely put Troma Studios on the map and created the company’s signature character, as it’s arguably the best film Troma has ever released. Admittedly, I’ve not seen close to all of their films, as I’m not really a big fan of their style of humor, but of the ones I’ve seen this ranks above even Mother’s Day and Redneck Zombies, two of my other “favorite” Troma films. It’s also much, much, much better than Slaughter Party or Beware: Children at Play, which are not among my favorites.

The film follows Melvin (Mark Torgl), a tremendous nerd who works as a janitor in the Tromaville Health Club, and who runs afoul of the numerous bullies and gang members of the town. After a rather humiliating prank which involves him dressing up in a tutu, he is chased by what appears to be half the town until he smashes through a second story window and falls into a vat of toxic waste. Horribly disfigured and transformed by this waste (and now played by Mitchell Cohen), he has now dedicated his life as the Toxic Avenger (still with the tutu) to romancing a blind woman and viciously killing off all the evildoers of the town, from the gangs to the corrupt mayor.

The idea of a prank gone wrong and the survivor killing his tormentors is hardly a new one, but that’s almost beside the point. Despite its low budget, this seems to have better production values than just about any of Troma’s other movies (perhaps due to Kaufman himself having directed it, or perhaps just because filming on video hadn‘t become widespread yet), and just as importantly, the jokes actually mostly work (uncommon at best for the company) and the violence looks really nice. I think we can all agree that such a thing helps make a horror movie better.

Here’s the problem I normally have with Troma. It’s not that I have a problem with bad horror movies -- if anything, this entire blog stands as proof that that isn’t the case. However, the really fun, entertaining bad horror movies are the ones that actually tried to be something really good and just failed miserably. Most of Troma’s output, however, has them seemingly going out of their way to make bad movies, so that they can presumably then point at it and go “ha ha, look how lousy this is, isn’t that funny?” Well no, not when you’re being all self-conscious and awkward about it it’s not. Just try to make good movies, and if you wind up having made a great many good bad movies, then that’s perfectly all right. This method of trying to make bad movies in the hopes that they turn out as good bad ones is just designed to fail almost every time.

Of course, it’s somewhat out of place for me to post that rant here, at a time when the Troma formula was actually pulled off pretty well (plot and pacing aside), but I watch Troma films so rarely that I figured if it wasn’t said here and now it might never be said at all. Which I’m sure Kaufman and co. would have been fine with, but it sadly just wouldn’t have worked for me. I hope you and they can all forgive me.

Rating: ***

Leaves of Grass

2010-11-04T19:10:00.000-07:00

Perhaps if I watch this movie again, I’ll be able to appreciate it more. It’s certainly a good, funny movie, but as a clash of two worlds (academic vs. hick stoner, both represented here by Edward Norton), the one I much preferred was the send-up of academia, and I feel it was sadly underrepresented here. What we wind up with instead, with an unexpected murder and an astonishingly weird stand-off, is pretty entertaining in its own right. It just seems a bit of a shame that we couldn’t get a full hour and a half of comments about how academia is just people writing papers about papers other people have written.

But anyway, to sidestep my nerdiness for a bit, the film has Edward Norton pulling double duty as twin brothers, one of which is a philosophy professor who, shortly after almost being sexually assaulted by a female student, hears the tragic news that his brother has been killed with a crossbow. Flying back to his home state of Oklahoma, he quickly learns that his brother is quite alive and well, and in fact just had a friend tell him (Academic Norton) he (Stoner Norton) was dead so that he (Academic) would come visit in time for his (Stoner) pending wedding. Oh, and also could he (Academic) go visit their mother while impersonating his brother so that he (Stoner) can go do a major drug deal while appearing to law enforcement officials to be in another part of town?

Let’s get one thing out of the way here: while the story is a bit muddled at times, the film is generally pretty damn funny. In my opinion, it’s at it’s best during such statements as when Stoner Norton mentions that to help read his brother’s published paper on someone else’s paper on Heidegger, he read through the entire Oxford English Dictionary (yes, it was funny to me, and should be to anyone with an English degree), but it still works fairly well when it devolves into drug world humor (the battle between one man armed with a knife and another armed with a brass menorah is a particular highlight). It’s also obviously quite well acted, not just by Norton himself (though let’s face it, he is one of the best actors in Hollywood today) but by such supporting actors as Susan Sarandon and Richard Dreyfuss. No matter where you look, someone new keeps popping up to entertain you.

Indeed, that might almost be a problem with the film. It has so many different ideas that it starts to lose focus on what it’s trying to accomplish. All too frequently we get great scene set-ups that end with gunfights, seemingly as though writer-director Tim Blake Nelson wasn’t sure how to end what he had begun. Even with the large supporting cast, you’ll often get a new character appearing just to get you all excited about how goofy and neat they’re going to be, and then they leave forever just like your father did because you misbehaved too much.

Still, just like your absentee father, at least when they’re around they’re delightful. And if the movie isn’t everything that it could have, or should have been, then at least it’s better than the bulk of comedies that come out of Hollywood. That should certainly count for something, as should the fact that it took the time to linger on a shot of Walt Whitman’s famous poetry book “Leaves of Grass” to try to distract us from how the leaves of grass in the trailer are pot leafs. It’s that touch of class that makes it all better, you know?

Rating: ***

The Final Patient

2010-11-03T18:37:00.000-07:00

As BC over at Horror Movie a Day is always fond of saying, when you’re operating with a low budget, the only aspect of the film that doesn’t cost anything is the script. This is especially the case when you (you in this case being director Jerry Mainardi, naturally) are just writing the script with your brother. That’s why it’s always nice to see a film like The Final Patient, a low-budget effort (IMDB estimates it at $498,000) that actually took the time to come up with an interesting and original story and characters, at least before throwing in a weak, obligatory horror movie ending.

Bill Cobbs plays Dr. Daniel Green, an elderly country doctor who draws attention from his community when he rescues a boy pinned under a tractor by lifting the whole tractor up and pulling the child out. The townsfolk get to talking around the bar, and sharing stories of him displaying extraordinary strength, such as lifting up a twenty foot oak tree, or running one night faster than a dog despite his cane. Two young med students hear all this, and decide to check him out to see what his secret is, and after being invited to his house for supper, he begins to regale them with the story of his life and how he became so strong in the first place. Of course, some secrets are better left unknown…*

There’s quite a bit to like about this movie. As I noted in the tags, for most of the movie it functions more as a drama than a horror movie, filled with a great deal of people talking, slowly building up the mystery of the doctor. Some will undoubtedly find this slow and tedious, but I for one am happy to see a low-budget horror that’s not just yet another slasher movie. Further, and this is eve more unexpected for a low-budget horror, the central character is actually played by a really good actor. Cobbs is worn down with life, and yet still just seems more interested in goofing around and telling long-winded stories to his young companions -- you know, like how old men frequently are in real life and almost never are in the movies (when they appear in movies at all). The two med students aren’t as interesting, but at least they’re not visibly bad either.

Of course, all this goodwill is partially undone by the ending, where the movie devolves into more standard horror fare, in a similar (though briefer and less effects oriented) manner to Splice. I actually kind of wish that, while keeping the supernatural mystery about him, they actually had kept it at a drama instead of a horror movie at all. It would have had the potential to have a much better ending than it wound up with, at least.

If you don’t mind a movie with a nice slow build and casual pace, and don’t require scenes of violence throughout the film, The Final Patient has a lot to offer you. Of course, it’s remained pretty obscure since its release five years ago (to the point where the DVD is a bargain price now) while visibly worse-made but gorier indie horrors have thrived, so I may well be in the minority on this.

Rating: ***

* This is actually not true.

P.S. Since the ending is the only part of the movie that really has any violence, the trailer below naturally takes pretty heavily from there. Fair warning.