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
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Not of This Earth
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Night of the Demons
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
Monday, October 25, 2010
The Crazies
Out of all the “major” horror movies I saw all year (which is just about all of them except Piranha and Saw 7), this was second only to Splice for my favorite. That’s not to mean that this was all that great -- indeed, it straddles the line of “pretty good” quite impressively -- so much as that, like most years in recent memory, all of the best horror movies either got limited theatrical releases, or went straight to DVD and Blu-Ray. Of course, it’s also reminiscent of a great deal of mainstream horror movies from the past decade, in that it’s a remake of an older, better horror movie.
The film follows Sheriff Dutten (Timothy Olyphant) and his wife (Radha Mitchell), a doctor in a small town in Iowa, who find that the citizens of their community are all beginning to turn insane. The sheriff and his deputy (Joe Anderson) soon discover that a military plane crashed into the river that gives the town its water supply, and since the people are going crazy in the order that the water supply reaches them, he immediately rushes to the mayor and demands the water be shut off everywhere (and in a nice moment, when the mayor decides to be a movie stereotype and refuses, claiming it would kill the town to do so with planting season starting up, Olyphant ignores him and shuts off the water anyway). Unfortunately, it’s a bit late, as most of the town is going crazy, and the military has shown up to arrest everyone and enact some confused efforts where they seem to alternate between separating everyone by infected or uninfected, tying people to beds and then abandoning them to being victims of the infected, and just nuking the site from orbit. It’s just a mad dash to the end for sheriff and company to escape the town without being killed by the crazies or the military.
First, let me mention where things went right for this movie. Director Breck Eisner (whose previous film Sahara I also thought was fun fluff) prudently decided that he probably couldn’t match George Romero’s original film when it came to the social commentary, so he stripped most of it out and just filled the film with a shit-ton (yes, this is an industry term) more action scenes, making the remake much faster-paced to boot. This actually seems to be a pattern with remakes of Romero films, as Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead did the same thing (though the less said about Tom Savini’s remake of Night of the Living Dead, the better). In keeping with the increased action, the blood is also ramped up a bit (though the original was plenty bloody as well), and the benefits of having an actual budget meant they could hire actual quality actors for once, which was always a bit of a rarity with Romero’s old films. Indeed, the whole effort is much more polished than the original.
So where does it go wrong? Well, in a way, it becomes a little bit too slick and polished for its own good. For whatever flaws the original had, the cheap roughness of it perfectly matched a story about people getting a virus that turns them into borderline zombies (not the undead kind, the 28 Days Later kind that I’m sure someone is going to tell me don’t count), whereas this remake is so busy showing off how many camera and editing tricks it can do that it frequently dulls the edge of the story. Another big flaw is the screenplay by Scott Kosar and Ray Wright -- while parts of the film work very well, there’s also quite a few plot holes, especially where the military is concerned. With all of the rapidly changing behavior on the part of the soldiers (Are they rounding everyone up? Are they killing everyone? Are they quarantining the town? What?) it seems less like the military is changing its plans to deal with new circumstances than it feels like the plans are being changed depending on what the story needs to be doing right that moment to be most menacing to our heroes. Quite frankly, it’s lazy writing. I won’t spoil what nonsense happens at the end (though the trailer has no such qualms), but I will say that if you loved the film version of The Sum of All Fears, then you may well enjoy the ending more than I did.
Of course, this really isn’t the kind of film that one goes to because they’re hoping it will be really smart and clever, is it? If all you’re looking for is a little of that nice ultraviolence, You won’t be disappointed here. It’s a perfectly agreeable way to sit around and watch people die in various set pieces (my favorites being at the morgue, where a bonesaw comes into play, and at a car wash, where we get one of the most wonderfully ridiculous zombie attacks in film, where we can’t actually see any of them because of all the soap and fabric strips moving over the car). It just unfortunately doesn’t seem to want to try to be anything more than that, when with just a couple more script revisions it could have really been something special.
Rating: ** ½
Sunday, October 24, 2010
The Wolfman
When this long-delayed film finally stumbled into theaters early this year, I had found it to be a really great-looking mess of a film, as would befit a movie that had gone through such a large number of writers and directors. The unrated DVD has a surprising extra sixteen minutes of the film, mostly in the form of additional plot, so I felt an urge to see the film with the extra material and see if it was any better.
In case you were wondering, no, it wasn’t. Almost all of the additions came at the beginning of the film, where a quick, inscrutable montage was expanded to where each of the quick clips was expanded into a full scene (the most notable of which was a scene of Benicio Del Toro sleepwalking his way through a stage portrayal of Hamlet). This has a troubling dual effect: it makes the confused, rushed early scenes of the film more comprehensible, at the price of slowing the movie down so much that it seems to outright crawl at the start. It’s a bit of a wash either way, though I suppose I’d give the slight edge to the theatrical version, just for getting the film over with sooner.
Anyway, for those of you that require a plot description, here goes: Del Toro plays Lawrence Talbot, a famous stage actor who is summoned back to his ancestral home after his brother disappears. He arrives only to find that his brother’s body has been found, torn apart as if some wild animal had savaged him. He soon discovers that the locals live in fear of the werewolf, which they feel is responsible for the recent attacks on people, and they feel his family is also at the root of the curse. He is, of course, promptly bitten in an attack, and his father (Anthony Hopkins) first frees him to attack some more locals trying to hunt the beast down, then helps the law arrest him, for what appears to be no reason other than so we can get scenes of him in a mental hospital, before breaking out and tearing people apart in London, which is admittedly a good reason indeed. This it’s off to the final showdown between father and son (I hope I’m not really spoiling anything by saying the father was the original werewolf, because it’s pretty obvious while watching long before that point).
The problems with the film are numerous. The story, as a result of having been written and re-written so many times, is a complete mess, with incredibly clunky dialogue, frequently nonexistent characterization, and a plot that tends to leap from action sequence to action sequence without any serious attempt at added coherency (the exception being the expanded beginning, which in contrast to the rest of the film just moves appallingly slowly). The acting is appalling: Del Toro, Hopkins, Hugo Weaving, and Emily Blunt are all talented actors, and they all give some of the worst performances of their careers here, alternating between hamming it up and standing there visibly weary at the thought of the mess they signed on for. Del Toro in particular spends the entire film just looking sad and broken, as though he can’t quite figure out how his childhood dream of playing the wolfman could have turned out so wrong. The bulk of these problems can be attributed to director Joe Johnston, who was hired specifically because of his reputation for finishing films quickly and cheaply, without worrying overly much about actual quality. Universal, after watching the film languish in development hell for three years, evidently felt that what was most important was getting any movie into theaters, not necessarily a good one.
Of course, there are a few good parts of the film, the main one being the frankly magnificent set design. The film looks incredible, like the old Universal gothic settings cranked up to 11 (the film looks incredible, that is, with the exception of the CG of the werewolves and fire, which looks like the effects department whipped up a quick first draft and Johnston just figured “Good enough, we need this in theaters next week“). The Talbot mansion is just massive and run down, lit only by candles strategically placed every twenty or so yards to ensure that every scene inside it is bathed in shadow. There is also the section when he is captured and sent to London, which is the single best portion of the film, as he transforms and rips apart a group of psychiatrists and colleagues who are convinced the problem is all in his head, before busting out and ripping through people in a steam-powered trolley. It’s one of the all-too-few entertaining action scenes in the film, but it’s a good one.
Unfortunately, that’s really not enough to give the film anything approaching a recommendation. It’s just sloppily made, visibly rushed, and leaves us with a film where everyone involved just looks like they’d rather be anywhere else. As a bad movie, there’s enough goofy material in it to make a viewing somewhat entertaining, but don’t be expecting anything more than that. According to IMDB, the film wound up costing an estimated 150 million dollars and made back about 62. Sometimes it pays to wait for quality.
Rating: * ½
Friday, April 30, 2010
A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
The Platinum Dunes guide to creating a successful remake is as follows: find a beloved older horror movie (older in this case being anything before the 90s, when the company’s target audience started being born), and strip away any and all intelligence or filmmaking skill. Then they can successfully call it a day. It’s a pattern first devised with their debut offering, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (which may well be the single worst horror remake I have ever seen), and has only been refined further ever since.
*SPOILER WARNING*
This is the worst kind of a remake, really, as in addition to being a much dumber film, it also tries to simultaneously change around the storyline while still shoehorning in all of the major hits of the original film, even though the changes to the story often make the highlights stolen from the first film incomprehensible. Now, instead of being a child murderer, Freddy Krueger is a child molester, completely negating any and all reason for him to have his iconic knife-covered hand. Of course, they couldn’t really do a proper remake without the glove, so he has it here too, for no discernable reason whatsoever. Then there’s the fact that the nightmare world is pretty much just the iconic boiler room where, as we all remember, he was burned alive by the parents of his victims…except he’s murdered in some kind of warehouse/factory looking place in the remake, so the nightmare world being a boiler room only makes sense as a lame bone thrown to fans of the older series. And don’t get me started on how the mechanics of the parents covering up their crime is supposed to work with the closing of the nursery school, because as much as I try to wrap my head around it, there’s nothing involved there that makes anything approaching sense.
To be fair, they do have one interesting potential plot twist, in that they briefly flirt with the idea that he may have been falsely accused and murdered, and is now enraged at the children that betrayed him so. That would have made him from a villain into an outright tragic figure (though it would have made a sequel pretty difficult to pull off). Of course, they very quickly find that, no, he really was guilty after all, and here’s some pictures to prove it. And also, there’s the glove that he apparently made for no reason at all. Lame.
Of course, the plots got pretty convoluted in the original series of films anyway, so how are the main issues, the kills and Jackie Earle Haley’s performance as Freddy? Well, the kills are pretty damn lame and uninspired (there is nothing in the film that can match, say, Johnny Depp’s death in the original), with lots of CG blood flying around looking like CG blood, and every last one is done with the glove, so there’s not a single bit of variety to them (though they do steal Tina’s death from the original, with her flying through the air, it’s not done nearly as well). Haley’s performance is harder to judge. I’m not really sure if he actually turned in a bad performance, or if the script never gave him any chance to give a good one. When he’s under the makeup, he’s pretty much relegated to growling in his Rorschach voice, and looking like nothing more than an X-Files alien that’s been badly burned. The flashback scenes that show him when he was still alive aren’t really any help either, as they’re mostly done in voice-over, so we only get brief glimpses of him. It’s not the way to really build a terrifying villain.
Of course, the rest of the acting in the film is pretty poor, with just about anyone that’s not aggressively annoying to watch getting killed off in the first half of the film, something that is a surprisingly common problem with horror movies. The two teens that last the longest, Nancy and Quentin (played by Rooney Mara and Kyle Gallner) are so goddamned obnoxious that the movie almost has no chance at all with them leading the show.
The film has a good deal of other problems as well. For one, we spend too much time in the nightmare world, as the cast passes out every few minutes even at the start of the film, leading me to assume there’s something in Springwood’s water supply that causes mass narcolepsy. Then there’s the climax, when they pull him out of the dream world and into reality, goes into that delightful editing style where we do lots of quick cuts while throwing the camera around the room, so we frequently have no idea what the hell is actually happening. This is called building tension, I suppose. Then there’s the dialogue, where we have frequent exchanges like the following:
GIRL: Dreams aren’t real.
GUY: This dream is real.
GIRL: This dream isn’t real.
GUY: This dream is real!
It took two people to write dialogue that razor sharp.
There’s very little here to recommend itself. There’s quite a few spots where I laughed, though most of them were at the movie’s expense, not because of any intentional humor. It’s Samuel Bayer’s debut film, and while I hope he improves with his next movie, Fiasco Heights, the fact that it’s a) another Platinum Dunes release, and b) got a plot description on IMDB that goes “the story centers on a notorious hitman who teams with a failed private eye in search of a missing woman and an invaluable briefcase,” I’m not exactly holding my breath.
Rating: *
