Uzumaki

It starts small, a man in a little Japanese village becomes obsessed with snails because of the spiral (uzumaki) pattern on their shells. Slowly, his sickness starts to spread, the whole town becomes obsessed with spirals, as if the spiral is some sort of sinister, omnipotent force. People start drawing spirals everywhere, collect anything with a spiral on it, kill themselves by contorting into spiral shapes, turn into giant snails.

Kind of a neat premise, I know. I read a few issues (or whatever they call them) of the manga that this was based on a few years back. It was not a great comic, I didn't think the execution quite lived up to the concept, but it was memorably bizarre and somewhat creepy.

The film retains the bizarre but loses all the creepy and instead replaces it with absurdism. I don't know who this Higuchinsky fellow is that directed Uzumaki, but as best I could tell, he interpreted the material as almost comedic instead of horrific. If I'm misunderstanding his intentions, it's because the film is all bombast and no atmosphere. The actors have all been instructed to turn it up to 11, constantly shouting and mugging. The film is a never ending series of fast zooms, whip pans, sped up footage, slow mo, fish-eyed lens... you name it, they stuck that obnoxious gimmick right in there for the world to behold.

What I'm saying is that I kind of hated Uzumaki.

100 Feet

A woman fresh out of prison for the murder of her abusive husband, finds herself being haunted by his ghost in their old home. Why doesn't she leave? Because she's still on house arrest, if she leaves, she goes back to jail.

Except for his collaborations with Kathryn Bigelow, I have not been too impressed by the work of Eric Red as a writer or director. Sadly, 100 Feet is no exception. The premise is acceptable, I guess, but it just descends in to the normal bullshit I hate about ghost movies. For example, sometimes the woman physically struggles with the ghost, fighting him off... exactly how much strength does a ghost have? How does one overpower a ghost? Does the ghost get tired? Why are ghosts sometimes solid and sometimes intangible?

I don't hate haunted house or ghost movies as a rule; Sam Raimi's horror movies are every bit as arbitrary as 100 Feet, but his are staged for maxim entertainment. Raimi's filmmaking is exuberant, glossing over any metaphysical concerns. Red's direction is rote, and therefore I'm disengaged from the film and left to ponder the implausibilities.

There are isolated moments in this film that work, it's not a terrible film by any means. For instance, I've seen a lot of movies where someone is hiding a dead body and a small clue threatens to give them away; this is the first time I've seen one where they hid the body in the ceiling, the ceiling slowly gives way, and the corpse falls out and lands on a cop. That was almost worth the price of admission right there.

Eyes of a Stranger

A rapist/killer is on the loose, and a local TV anchor begins to believe that it may be one of her neighbors. She begins to investigate, but by doing so, she may be putting herself and her blind and deaf sister (played by a young Jennifer Jason Leigh) in danger.

I will admit that I probably did not play as close attention to Eyes of a Stranger as I could have, but I caught enough to know that it's an above average slasher movie. It's well shot and entertaining, with effective slashing/stalking sequences and good performances. Way better than these movies usually are.

The best is the finale, where the killer sneaks into Leigh's apartment unbeknownst to her. He doesn't just outright assault her, he fucks with her first, moving shit around to confuse her until it slowly dawns on her what happens. It's tense and clever and that's more than we can usually ask for from this genre.

Zombieland

The world has been overrun by nu-zombies (the kind that run fast, not the classic kind), and a ragtag group of survivors (referred to not by name but by hometown) travel across the American wasteland to the West Coast, where there are rumors that one of the amusement parks is a safe haven. In a clever touch, the main character is some sort of obsessive-compulsive type with a list of rules for surviving the zombie-holocaust that he strictly adheres to. I don't think it's been addressed before in apocalypse movies, but of course it makes sense that obnoxious type-A personalities would be best equipped to survive the end of the world.

Zombieland is not as heavy on the undead as the title implies. Though much humor and action is mined from all the walking (or, as it were, running) corpses, the zombies are often more a background detail, even forgotten for long chunks of running time. Think of it more as a feature-length version of the shopping spree sequences in Dawn of the Dead; yes, there are zombies, but it's more a comedy about what it would be like if America became your own personal playground.

Though mystified at the critical love Zombieland received on its release (you ever notice that critics always hate horror movies, unless it's a horror-comedy and then they love it), I still thought it was a lot of fun. As far as zombie comedies go, it's not a puss-filled boil on Shaun of the Dead's undead taint, but it has laughs, an agreeably cartoonish visual style, a likable cast and a handful of memorable sequences. More entertaining as a comedy and an action film than it is as horror, Zombieland provides solid fun for the casual zombie fan.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

I don't think I need to bother describing this one. If you've never seen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre before, then I don't think you can be considered a fan of horror movies. Plus, the title says it all.

I got a free DVD of this at FYE this weekend because I spent more than $30 or something. Kind of fucked up that I didn't already own a copy, I guess, but it worked out for the best.

It's Alive (remake)

Lenore, pregnant, drops out of grad school to live with her boyfriend in sinful, sinful cohabitation and raise their bastard child together. The baby begins growing too fast and labor has to be induced. Then, during the procedure, all of the doctors are mysteriously butchered, with only Lenore and her baby Daniel left alive. Is some sort of maniacal killer to blame? Of course not. You saw the original or you at least saw the DVD cover of the remake, you know that little Daniel is a cannibalistic mutant freak baby. Daniel proceeds to eat every god damn living thing he comes across, with Lenore desperately trying to cover up for her baby.

I can't blame It's Alive, but it suffered greatly from the fact that I had just watch Grace the week before. Turns out, much like Grace, this remake plays up the angle of the mother trying to protect her child. Unfortunately, compared with Grace's thematically rich treatment of the material, It's Alive's crass provocations ring hollow. Hell, even though it's gorier and, in it's way, slicker in it's production, this remake is less satisfying than the original It's Alive.

Still, if all you're looking for is a few laughs and some gore, this is a decent killer baby movie.

Seventh Moon

Eduardo Sanchez (one of the Blair Witch Project guys) directs this tale about an newlywed American couple honeymooning in China. They end up lost in the countryside during a festival about evil spirits or the gates of hell opening during a particular lunar cycle or... anyways, some sort of Chinese, mythic voodoo shit where creepy white naked demon men want to chase them down to sacrifice them.

I wanted to like Seventh Moon, I really did. It had a lot going for it. It establishes a likable, believable couple (Amy Smart and Tim Chiou, giving much better performances then we usually get in this kind of fare), has a perfectly serviceable premise, a few good ideas for set pieces and chase scenes, and some creepy as fuck villains. It seems so close to working, but I have to be honest, Sanchez's poor filmmaking sinks it.

In my view, there's nothing inherently wrong with the whole handheld, fast-cutting style popular these days. When done right, as in The Bourne Ultimatum, the results can be exciting. But if you're going to go for the whole intensified continuity approach, you have to know what you're doing. You have to be conscious of your framing to make sure that the subject of your shot is clear. And if you're going to cut fast, you have to be very careful in your shot selection, so that each images clearly and logically leads to the next one, helping the audience to understand the action/geography/progression of each scene.

Too much of Seventh Moon is visually incoherent. Sanchez doesn't go nearly as overboard with the shakey cam as some directors do, but it doesn't matter, too often his shots are too tightly framed, or too dimly lit, and it's hard to understand what they are communicating, especially since they are all so brief. I'm not big on fast-cutting in horror movies in general (not as an absolute, but as a general guideline) because I think it's not conducive to creating the right kind of atmosphere. Seventh Moon is especially egregious. The actual cinematography (sans some of the framing) seemed nice, it was colorful, had a crisp looking image, I thought maybe they were trying to do some interesting things framing ominous details in the foreground, but none of that mattered because the shots were too brief to register. And they weren't edited together to create a coherent whole.

This is not nearly as ugly of a movie as Blair Witch, but it suffers from a similar lack of craft.

Intruder

Evil Dead II co-writer (and Sam Raimi BFF) Scott Speigel directs this slasher movie set after hours in a grocery store. The staff is staying over night to do some inventory when one's creepy ex-boyfriend, fresh out of prison, shows up to start some shit. They kick him out, but soon thereafter a mysterious killer shows up, picking off the employees one by one. Could it be the creepy ex-boyfriend? Obviously not, or they wouldn't be keeping his identity a secret. Intruder features a Raimi-tastic cast, in addition to Raimi-regular Dan Hicks, there are small roles for Sam and his brother Ted, as well as a Bruce Campbell cameo.

Intruder has a lot of problems, not the least of which is how much it seems like an early Raimi movie without being nearly as good as an early Raimi movie. It's clear that Spiegel has a similar sensibility to (and has taken much influence from) his buddy Sam, with the goofy sense of humor and overblown, kinetic visuals, but too often the film feels like a failed imitation. There are too many shots that seem like Raimi shots minus the style and wit; a POV shot from a rotary phone isn't clever, it doesn't even make any sense, it's just a meaningless affectation. And not even an amusing one at that. (As I recall, Spiegel also pulled a lot of this kind of bullshit in From Dusk Til Dawn 2.) It's like a kid trying to impress his friends by doing a jump on his bike and he ends up crashing; Spiegel's trying to show-off but he doesn't have the skills to back it up.

That said, I'm giving Intruder a pass. Enough of the film is funny and off-beat, toying with your expectations of the genre, that it can be ranked as a slightly above-average slasher film. I am not recommending it, but if you like this kind of shit then it's not a total waste of your time.

Offspring

Jack Ketchum adapts this nasty little movie from his own novel. A tribe of feral children roam the wilderness, raiding homes in the night to murder and cannibalize the inhabitants, and to find a woman to abduct so she can breast feed their baby.

I'll say this for Offspring, it doesn't fuck around. I definitely wasn't expecting to see this many children get shot in the head in a horror movie. The movie is decidedly a mixed bag. Let's be honest here, the premise is kind of stupid. It would probably lend itself better to a fun horror movie rather than the grim, disturbing, outrageously violent final product.

To varying degrees, I've enjoyed all the other Jack Ketchum movies I've seen (Red, The Lost, The Girl Next Door). The different might have been that Ketchum didn't adapt those works himself, I don't get the sense he's much of a screenwriter. The dialogue is often over-written and clunky, the movie is too brief and builds little momentum, the structure is way fucked up. Too many characters are introduced, cutting between 3 or 4 different groups of people, just to have most of them unceremoniously killed off before they do anything. There is one instance in the film where this is effective, where someone I assumed was the main character ends up biting it relatively early. Mostly it's just unsatisfying, for example we spend 10 or 15 minutes with this one guy, establishing that he is an evil, cruel prick with the potential for violence, but this just turns out to be a red herring, he spends the rest of the movie as a victim and eventually dies.

Some of the violence is effective and disturbing, and the film is never boring, but I have to give it the thumbs down. It's simply too absurd to be so grim.

Screamers

In the distant future, a war is waged on a mining planet over the control of a powerful substance that has eliminated mankind's energy problems. Realizing that he and his men have been left out to dry by their commanders on Earth (turns out the war was already won 2 years ago , but the soldiers haven't been told because the government doesn't want them returning home and telling everyone how awful the war was. And we thought Bush was a shithead), a commander (Peter Weller) leads a group of soldiers over to the enemy base to make peace. The problem? The wasteland between the two bases is overrun with "screamers," vicious little robots that hide underground and kill anything with a pulse, designed by the "good guys" to help win the war. The screamers are crafty little bastards, scavenging corpses for raw materials (harvesting methane from their rotting flesh, using their vitreous jelly as gear lubricant) and worse, they are learning how to upgrade themselves, building new models, becoming smarter.. evolving, if you will.

No surprise this is based on a Philip K. Dick story ("Second Variety," which I haven't read), with its dark humor, deeply cynical point of view, and twisty turny plot that questions the nature of humanity. Screamers is top notch sci-fi/action/horror for about 90% of it's running time; engrossing, exciting, well-written (co-writer credit goes to Dan O'Bannon, who I mentioned in my Lifeforce post) and with an agreeably sardonic performance from Weller. The finale is something of a god-damn shame, even if it contains the film's best line ("you guys are moving up in the world - you're learning to kill each other"), shoehorning in an inappropriate romantic angle and ending on a stunningly anticlimactic "twist." Still, like I said, 90% of this movie is imaginative, exciting stuff, and although I can't say personally how close it follows the original story, it's one of the most faithful PKD adaptations I've seen in terms of tone.

Lady in White

It's 1962 in your typical idyllic American town, and little Frankie gets locked in the coat room at his elementary school as part of a mean prank. That's scary enough for a little kid, but it gets worse. First he is visited by the ghost of a murdered little girl, whose murder is reenacted in front of him. Next, the killer shows up in person, looking to dispose of some crucial evidence. Frankie barely escapes with his life, but continues the be haunted by the little girl, whose murder remains unsolved, so he sets about to play detective and see if he can help find the wandering soul some peace.

The idealized small town setting, the mixture of the supernatural and the everyday, and especially the framing device of a horror novelist recounting his youth all suggest to me that Lady in White writer/director Frank LaLoggia is a big Stephen King fan. Hell, if you had told me this was based on one of King's novels I would have accepted it without question, it's the most Stephen King-y story Stephen King never wrote.

I don't mean that as a put down, Lady in White is very enjoyable, equal parts ghosts story and coming-of-age drama, told well and with humor. Again, like King, LaLoggia has an unfortunate knack for cramming too many subplots and sidetracks into his story, but regardless of that the film is an agreeable mix of old-fashioned ghost story and Americana nostalgia.

The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (a Poem by Shenan Hahn)

The Bird With the Crystal Plumage is Italian horror maestro Dario Argento's first film, and it's also one of his best and, relatively speaking, most normal. Though not as luridly violent as his later giallos, it is a highly entertaining expression of his visual style, already crystallized (if you don't mind the pun) at the beginning of his career: over-the-top and baroque while still maintaining a certain formal elegance. I think Shenan's adopted style perfectly pays homage to this.

Shenan notes that her poem is "in three parts, with each part from the POV of a different character,and written in a different form; first is the shaped verse with an iambic4-3-5-3-4 foot metric pattern and an abcba rhyme scheme; second is pureiambic pentameter; third is a seriers haikus."

Perhaps we'll try to squeeze in a viewing of our Blu-ray copy of The Bird With The Crystal Plumage this month so I can do a blog entry about it.



I. Guilia
This city’s still-born every morning. Rome’s
been baking steadily
for hours beneath the sun, and thirsting all
the while, she readily
accepts the day in kodachrome

but lies immobile, aches and waits
for all its souls to rise
and take to living just like her. We stir,
pour coffee in surprise
that we’ve awoken, fill our plates

with eggs in awe that such a calm
could show its face when it
had fled and left us here for dead last night.
For now the window’s lit
in gold, ensconced by morning’s balm,

but look- that candlestick! Still stuck
there like a stab wound, eye
inside the hurricane of radiating
cracks, the scars of my
attempts to free myself. I struck

the glass as he was hacking at
the door, but fruitlessly:
there was no exit, no redemption, no
kind God to rescue me
in righteousness. Last night I sat

here witnessing my death, the fight
a loss accepted. Now
I’m told to live again? Beneath that candle,
laughing at how
nightmares linger in the light?


II. Sam
That call- there’s something strange about it still
that haunts me. Something in his voice, perhaps?
Some pitch or timber that I recognize,
a certain brogue or telling turn of tongue
to place the man I heard?

That isn’t it,

it wasn’t him that struck me, captivating
though his homicidal chit-chat was.
It’s what came through between his words-
that noise! Like moaning crickets, menacing
and strange, like lullabies that howled outside
your window as you’d lay, the blankets tucked
around your ears, a child too young to know
just who or what composed the tunes that rocked
the streets at night.

That sound was crying

from the background, singing in a language
distant and entrancing, calling me
to rise as if I were a cobra, rapt
within its rhythms, to pursue it, run
it down, caress it hungrily, to speak
its notes and translate fluently, ease meaning
from its otherworldly aria.

III. Monica
Gallery at night.
Geometric harmony
in marble silence.

No sound can be heard
behind this glass. A turning
key locks in your screams.

Two pairs of olive

legs entwined. A milky tide

of cotton rising.

A half carafe of

Montepulciano left.

Radio playing.

A vigilant clock.

Pillows cold and stiff without

your head at rest there.

But all of this is
elsewhere, out among the world
that lives, even now.

No comforts for you
here, no soft loves, no warm wine,
no story telling.

There’s only you: held
by a knife, by a woman
you thought you knew once.

Lifeforce

A team of astronauts finds a giant alien spacecraft hidden inside of Halley's Comet. Within the enormous craft they find the corpses of thousands of weird bat-like creatures, as well as what appears to be three peacefully sleeping naked people (one of them a hot-ass lady). All but one member of the crew dies under mysterious circumstances, and the naked alien people are brought back to Earth for study. What are they? Motherfucking space vampires, that's what, and they intend to conquer Earth by sucking away our lifeforce and turning us into their exploding zombie slaves.

To call Tobe Hooper's output inconsistent would be generous, but I would rank Lifeforce amongst his best films. If nothing else, the man can pump up the visual style, and Lifeforce is a treat for the eyes, trippy and jam-packed with unconvincing but fun 80's special effects. You get a cavernous alien spacecraft, swirling vortexes, emaciated exploding space zombies, vampire blood that erupts out of Patrick Stewart's face and transforms into a naked lady. And so forth.

The insanity of the story (co-scripted by Dan O'Bannon of Alien, Dark Star and Return of the Living Dead fame) adds much to the fun. I was expecting naked space vampires, but I wasn't expecting demonic possession, psychic mind powers, bat monsters or a zombie apocalypse to factor into things. It's overlong and overstuffed but that's all part of its charm.

The Deadly Spawn

A giant alien toothed worm-beast thingy lands on Earth and holes itself up in some family's basement, where it eats the mother and father. The alien gives birth to nasty little baby worm-beasts and uses the corpses to nurse/feed them. Only gradually does the rest of the family realize what's going on, and soon they are fighting for their lives against the deadly spawn, especially the young son, who likes old horror movies and wears a cape around and turns out to be uniquely qualified to fight off an alien invasion.

The makers of Home Sick should take note, this is how you do a low-budget, gore heavy horror movie right. The Deadly Spawn follows a style of 80's horror films that I have a soft spot for; in love with and paying homage to old-fashioned horror and sci-fi movies while updating them with over-the-top gore and a heavy dose of irony. It reminded me somewhat of Night of the Creeps and Reanimator... not quite as funny as those, and with an even lower budget, but still made with a respectable amount of imagination and humor that helps it transcend its shortcomings.

It may look a little cheap (some of this probably more the fault of the shitty DVD transfer than the filmmaking), the acting and dialogue are not always stellar (though good enough), but the writing and directing are dynamic, interesting, playing with your expectations and trying to make the film better than it needs to be. Home Sick, by comparison, wasn't just cheap, it was uninspired; it contained too many scenes where the camera is pointed flatly at characters standing around in empty locations, trading dialogue of little interest. It only comes alive when it brings the gore, it never works to build a memorable sequence, only scattered money shots. The Deadly Spawn gives more of a shit. It too has some surprisingly graphic gore, but the gore is worked into effective, well-crafted sequences and set pieces.

Take for example my favorite part of the movie, an extended sequence where the young hero finds him self trapped in the basement with the monsters. It sets an eerie tone by having the kid walking around in the dark with only a flashlight, catching only brief glimpses of things moving. Then he finds his parents' bodies, being eaten by the spawn. It's a great gross-out payoff, but it doesn't end there. The monster pops out of the dark (it looks fake, but still awesome) and the kid notices that the little spawn are everywhere, squirming around the basement. And slowly he figures out that they can't see him, they have no eyes, they can only hear him. So he's got to figure out a way out of the basement without alerting them to his prescence, using their lack of sight to his advantage.

I mean, this is not exactly a brilliant sequence, but it's light-years beyond what you get in most cheap horror movies.

The Lawnmower Man

A frustrated scientist (Pierce Brosnan) developing a virtual reality program that somehow boosts intelligence begins using his retarded lawnmower man Jobe (Jeff Fahey) as a guinea pig. Things seem to be going great at first, as Jobe becomes somehow non-retarded and normal and attractive to women, but surprise surprise things go horribly wrong as Jobe develops frightening powers, becoming almost god-like, eventually going insane and trying to take over the world.

The Lawnmower Man is an unbelievably terrible movie that bears no resemblance to the not very good Stephen King short story it takes it's name from. Apparently the filmmakers took a pre-existing screenplay they had, and bought the rights to King's story so they could slap his name on their movie. King sued and had his name removed from the film. Awesome.

This film came out in 1992, and I must say, its antiquated misconceptions about the internet and its Sega Genesis quality CGI effects are rather hilarious when viewed today. Were people really falling for this shit a mere 17 years ago? We must have been a bunch of fucking savages back then.

I've never been a big fan of Jeff Fahey as an actor, but he can be perfectly serviceable in the right role with the right filmmaker (White Hunter Black Heart, Planet Terror). In The Lawnmower Man, well, let's just say I bet he wishes this one wasn't on his resume. His performance in the first half of the film as simple Jobe, with his oversized overalls (with one strap always falling off), his messy blonde 5-year-old's hair and his goofy "Aww gee shucks Timmy" line delivery comes dangerously close to Tug Speedman's "Simple Jack" in Tropic Thunder.

I have nothing nice to say about this film. The story is silly. The performances are embarrassing. The special effects are overwhelmingly bad. There is not a single scene, moment or idea that generates any true interest. Not even the violence is fun.

Wait, there is one thing I liked: Jenny Wright (the cutie from Near Dark and I, Madman that I discussed a few posts ago) briefly shows her breasts. That part was worth watching.