Madeline (Jordan Ladd) survives a car crash that leaves her husband and unborn daughter dead. Unable to let her daughter go, and perhaps somewhat delusional, Madeline decides to carry the dead child to term with the help of her naturopathic mentor/midwife. Then something strange happens. Little Grace is born... alive.
Grace is a clever twist on It's Alive, a baby-monster movie not about the baby but about motherhood, and what a mother is willing to do to protect her child. It's crafty in its structure and the way it builds tension. It begins to make you uncomfortable by exploiting commonplace anxiety (there's tension in Madeline's marriage, her mother-in-law thinks she knows better than Madeline what's best for the baby) before slowly working its way to the violence and murder that the genre demands. It also takes its time in getting to know the characters so that we actually care when shit goes down. Ladd's sympathetic performance is key in this.
Grace is noteworthy for being a horror film primarily concerned with women's issues, despite being written and directed by a man. The film not only focuses on pregnancy and motherhood (and the anxiety associated with each) as dominant themes but also lesbianism, and all of the central characters are female. In the film's most disturbing scene, Madeline's mother-in-law, distraught over the death of her son, invites her oblivious husband to suck on her nipple during sex... not as a turn-on, but because it reminds her of nursing. In a genre dominated by running, screaming, crying victim-sluts and virginal final girls, it's nice to see a horror movie that at least attempts to flesh out its female characters and show things from a feminine perspective.
I'm happy to recommend this one, but if I can't say that I loved it as much as I wanted to, it's because the thriller elements of the final act aren't as effective as the slow-burn build up. The story and the characters are sufficiently set-up that the required violence and murder seems logical, but it generates little tension or excitement, the direction seems perfunctory and it becomes more of a matter of waiting for things to play out. It's something of a letdown, but not completely; the film ends with a grossout shot that is highly effective and most definitely earned.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
The Unborn
A Megan Fox look-alike is haunted by a demon searching for a human body to inhabit, who announces his presence with the hilariously unscary mantra "Jumby is ready to be born now." Turns out that the demon had dibs on her twin brother, but he died in utero, so now he's after her. Also some shit about Nazis and curses and Judaism.
I can't say I was expecting this one to be any good, but I did hope that maybe it would turn out to be a pleasant surprise. It didn't take me too long to figure out this wouldn't be the case, but the aforementioned "Jumby" line (seriously, Jumby? That's the scariest name they coud come up with?) and a few other moments had me hoping at least for unintentional comedy.
Sadly, The Unborn doesn't even work as camp, mostly it's just fucking boring. Director David Goyer tries his damnedest to pile on the atmosphere by giving the film a desaturated, color-filtered look. Which is, of course, what one does when one doesn't know how to create atmosphere and wants to trick the audience into thinking the film has some sort of vision.
The occasionally striking images (dog wearing a child's mask) could have been creepy in a better movie; here, they do nothing to save the mediocre material. The plot contains an over baked mythology that you could not possibly care about, unlikable characters (Goyer and Rob Zombie should hang out, they both have a penchant for writing clever dialogue for their young characters that comes off as phony and grating) and suspense sequences that range from stupid to confounding... Why the hell would the heroine peer through what clearly looks to be a glory hole in a public restroom? I'd say she lucked out by getting covered in gross insects. She could have gotten a dick in the eye.
I can't say I was expecting this one to be any good, but I did hope that maybe it would turn out to be a pleasant surprise. It didn't take me too long to figure out this wouldn't be the case, but the aforementioned "Jumby" line (seriously, Jumby? That's the scariest name they coud come up with?) and a few other moments had me hoping at least for unintentional comedy.
Sadly, The Unborn doesn't even work as camp, mostly it's just fucking boring. Director David Goyer tries his damnedest to pile on the atmosphere by giving the film a desaturated, color-filtered look. Which is, of course, what one does when one doesn't know how to create atmosphere and wants to trick the audience into thinking the film has some sort of vision.
The occasionally striking images (dog wearing a child's mask) could have been creepy in a better movie; here, they do nothing to save the mediocre material. The plot contains an over baked mythology that you could not possibly care about, unlikable characters (Goyer and Rob Zombie should hang out, they both have a penchant for writing clever dialogue for their young characters that comes off as phony and grating) and suspense sequences that range from stupid to confounding... Why the hell would the heroine peer through what clearly looks to be a glory hole in a public restroom? I'd say she lucked out by getting covered in gross insects. She could have gotten a dick in the eye.
I, Madman
Jenny Wright (long lost 80's cutie from Near Dark) becomes deeply engrossed in a series of old dime store novels by Malcolm Brand, some sort of H. P. Lovecraft/Stephen King type. She's so engrossed that she begins imagining herself as the lead character in his books, a feat that becomes much easier when people in her life start turning up dead in ways similar to the victims in the books. Is there some sort of copycat killer on the loose? Is the mysterious Mr. Brand somehow to blame? Does life imitate art, etc etc?
I, Madman plays almost at times like an earlier version of John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness (Lovecraftian hack novelist's stories seem to be coming to life), and although Carpenter's film goes much further and has more fun with the material, there's still a lot to like here. Director Tibor Takacs gives the movie a comic book vibe, creating a world of dark shadowy hallways and corridors, highly stylized with bold colors and dramatic angles. The film boasts a few effective stalk/murder sequences (the finale in a used book store is fun, with characters stumbling over stacks of books while trying to flee for their lives), is told with good humor and has a very likable performance by Wright in the lead. The final result is no classic, but it's a little bit John Carpenter, a little bit Sam Raimi and a little bit Nightmare On Elm Street, not the worst places to look for inspiration.
I, Madman plays almost at times like an earlier version of John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness (Lovecraftian hack novelist's stories seem to be coming to life), and although Carpenter's film goes much further and has more fun with the material, there's still a lot to like here. Director Tibor Takacs gives the movie a comic book vibe, creating a world of dark shadowy hallways and corridors, highly stylized with bold colors and dramatic angles. The film boasts a few effective stalk/murder sequences (the finale in a used book store is fun, with characters stumbling over stacks of books while trying to flee for their lives), is told with good humor and has a very likable performance by Wright in the lead. The final result is no classic, but it's a little bit John Carpenter, a little bit Sam Raimi and a little bit Nightmare On Elm Street, not the worst places to look for inspiration.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
The Stuff
So follow me here. Some old dude finds a puddle of weird looking white shit bubbling out of the earth. Naturally, the first thing he does is try to eat it, and as it happens the stuff is delicious. Before you know it, "The Stuff" has become the most popular food on earth, dominating the supermarkets, with a ubiquitous marketing campaign to boot. The few holdouts who don't want to eat "The Stuff" start to sense that something is wrong, that other people are acting weird, and... did they just see that shit move? Turns out it's no ordinary snack treat, "The Stuff" is some sort of sentient The Blob like being that is trying to take over mankind by turning all of the people who eat it into its zombie slaves.
The Stuff, something of an offbeat horror/comedy, was written and directed by Larry Cohen, a fellow whose talent as a writer seems to be to take the worst possible idea for a B-movie he can think up and try to make it as fun as possible. Though not always successful (Maniac Cop, Uncle Sam), when he does come through, the results can be irresistibly silly and very entertaining (this one, the It's Alive movies, and surprisingly the Maniac Cop sequels). The Stuff is a goofy story told with a straight face. It benefits also from a likable performance by Michael Moriarty, some funny dialogue and a lot of enthusiastically ridiculous special effects.
Home Sick
A gathering of obnoxious douchebags is inexplicably interrupted by a weird dude (a cameo-ing Bill Mosely) with a brief case full of razor blades. The weird dude starts slicing up his own arms and makes everyone tell him the name of one person they hate. Soon there after, a masked killer begins murdering the people they named. And oops, wouldn't you guess it, one of the douchebags named everyone in the room. A bona fide gorefest ensues.
I'm not in the business of inherently trashing a movie because it has a very low budget, in fact I might be inclined to give it a little leeway in the visuals and acting departments if makes up for it in creativity. But you have got to go that extra mile, you have to show some vision or ingenuity or unique spirit. I will not tolerate long, awkwardly drawn out shots filled with empty space, a lack of action or unnatural pauses in the dialogue if you aren't serving up any other goodies. Home Sick serves up more than its fair share of entertaining gore, but little else. It is a tediously told story about unlikable characters, directed with little style or wit. I enjoyed some of the crazier scenes of grand guignol, but nothing in between those moments.
Home Sick's biggest problem is that it tries, very hard, to be funny. But it isn't. At all. Especially the final act, which has the surviving protagonists get the gun fever after obtaining weapons from a local gun nut. The director apparently asked everyone in the cast to turn it up to 11, with everyone hooting and hollering and running around like children. It's painful to watch a bunch of grownups embarrassing themselves so fully for something so unfunny.
Still, A + for the gore. Maybe next time the filmmakers can write an actual movie to go along with it.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Of Unknown Origin
When his wife and son take a trip to visit family, a successful businessman (played by Peter Weller; looks like I accidentally had an actors-who-played-Robocop double feature on Friday night.) is left alone in their oversized New York apartment. With pressure building up at work, he slowly starts to crack, becoming obsessed with killing a rat that has taken up residence in his home. First it's just a matter of putting rat traps everywhere and researching rat trivia and regurgitating it to everyone he talks to. Soon enough, however, he's suiting himself up in old sports gear, crafting homemade weapons and waging a full out war against the rodent.
Although Of Unknown Origin never quite descends into full-out horror, and has a weirdly funny/upbeat ending, it was quite awesome and probably my favorite movie I've watched for the marathon so far (I'm writing this on Monday the 5th). Part of the fun is the entertaining, exaggerated yet never quite over-the-top visual style that director George P. Cosmatos brings to the material. In addition to some striking framing and much fun with reflections (something I'm always a sucker for), I very much enjoyed Cosmatos' treatment of the rat. He almost always films it in extreme, fragmented close-up, so that the rat's nasty teeth or giant claws look enormous, dominating the frame and dwarfing Weller. One stupid fucking rat is not a credible threat in a horror movie, but the point is that Weller sees the rat as such and becomes fixated on it. The result is a lot of fun to watch.
Unfortunately, the final act, when Weller finally loses his shit and tries to take the rat on mano-a-mano is a little disappointing, though still very watchable. It's a classic case of the build-up being more interesting than the pay-off; watching Weller slowly lift his veneer of normalcy is more compelling than watching him try to fight one non-evil, non-supernatural rodent.
Still, what's interesting and somewhat strange about the ending of this film is that it finally presents Weller's breakdown as being a positive experience. In the end, though he succeeds in killing the rat, Weller has jeopardized his career and destroyed his fancy looking home. He walks around his apartment, surveying the damage, he sees a vase that remained unharmed... and smashes it on the ground. In the final shot, his family returns from their trip, Weller embraces them and leads them inside. From outside, we hear his wife, understandably shocked, ask what happened. "I had a party." The end.
If I'm reading this right, Weller's war against the rat was less a breakdown of his sanity/stability and instead an event that brought him in touch with his inner savage, and lead him to reject his upper-class lifestlye as well as the white-collar, ahem, rat race that he was a part of. I was expecting Weller to end up hurting or killing someone, and instead I guess he finds self-actualization.
Although Of Unknown Origin never quite descends into full-out horror, and has a weirdly funny/upbeat ending, it was quite awesome and probably my favorite movie I've watched for the marathon so far (I'm writing this on Monday the 5th). Part of the fun is the entertaining, exaggerated yet never quite over-the-top visual style that director George P. Cosmatos brings to the material. In addition to some striking framing and much fun with reflections (something I'm always a sucker for), I very much enjoyed Cosmatos' treatment of the rat. He almost always films it in extreme, fragmented close-up, so that the rat's nasty teeth or giant claws look enormous, dominating the frame and dwarfing Weller. One stupid fucking rat is not a credible threat in a horror movie, but the point is that Weller sees the rat as such and becomes fixated on it. The result is a lot of fun to watch.
Unfortunately, the final act, when Weller finally loses his shit and tries to take the rat on mano-a-mano is a little disappointing, though still very watchable. It's a classic case of the build-up being more interesting than the pay-off; watching Weller slowly lift his veneer of normalcy is more compelling than watching him try to fight one non-evil, non-supernatural rodent.
Still, what's interesting and somewhat strange about the ending of this film is that it finally presents Weller's breakdown as being a positive experience. In the end, though he succeeds in killing the rat, Weller has jeopardized his career and destroyed his fancy looking home. He walks around his apartment, surveying the damage, he sees a vase that remained unharmed... and smashes it on the ground. In the final shot, his family returns from their trip, Weller embraces them and leads them inside. From outside, we hear his wife, understandably shocked, ask what happened. "I had a party." The end.
If I'm reading this right, Weller's war against the rat was less a breakdown of his sanity/stability and instead an event that brought him in touch with his inner savage, and lead him to reject his upper-class lifestlye as well as the white-collar, ahem, rat race that he was a part of. I was expecting Weller to end up hurting or killing someone, and instead I guess he finds self-actualization.
Dust Devil
From Richard Stanley, the director who got fired from The Island of Dr Moreau, comes this strange and atmospheric horror movie set in South Africa. A woman splits from her abusive husband and takes a road trip through the desert. Along the way she picks up a handsome drifter, which of course is a bad idea, but you know how it goes. The guy isn't any ordinary drifter, he's not even an ordinary serial killer, he's some sort of shape-shifting demon completing a series of ritual sacrifices.
I'm impressed that Stanley was only in his mid-20's when he made this film... my age, essentially. He's got an admirably tight control of the tone, evoking the desolation of the wasteland that the characters are passing through. Apparently when this was initially released, the Weinstein brothers cut out a good 20 or 30 minutes of it, including all the supernatural stuff, I guess because it was too slow and too strange. Poor Stanley can't get a break, that's two movies I know for a fact that he got fucked on. But this DVD release is a restored version, the "final cut," and it's pretty sweet.
I could have done with out the portentous voice-over narration, or the subplot about the woman's husband, or the other subplot about the aging black police office searching for the killer that also is trying to make some sort of statement about racism in South Africa that doesn't have anything to do with the rest of the film. That said, Dust Devil is still an effective and entertaining horror movie with style to burn. I might try to catch another of Stanley's movies for YVIAHMMAOIHTNQ:Y2.
Also of note: the Dust Devil is played by Robert John Burke, the actor who played Robocop in Robocop 3. He's a lot better looking when his face isn't covered in metal shit.
Doppelganger
A scientist working to create mind-controlled robotic arms for disabled people becomes increasingly stressed out by his work. One day, with no real explanation, his is confronted by a mysterious double, a more aggressive and conniving version of himself, who offers to help him with the project. Unlike in other films and stories with a similar premise, the doppelganger doesn't seem to want to kill him or take over his life so much as he wants to act out all the scientist's unconscious desires.
I've admired all of the previous Kiyoshi Kurosawa films I have seen. Pulse, Seance and especially Cure are all well-crafted horror films heavy on moody atmosphere and dread. Doppelganger seems to start off that way, but gets lost in endless, uninteresting subplots before eventually abandoning most of the atmosphere for slick style (with split-screen and everything), while often veering towards broad comedy. And I get it, Kurosawa is exploring the idea of the double by having a movie that is similarly split; sometimes it's a horror film sometimes its an oddball comedy. I admire Kurosawa's balls for making a movie like this. I knew he had a penchant for making weird films, but not weird in this way. Ultimately, though, it's slow and not much fun to watch, the horror isn't as effective as in his other films, and the comedy is only fitfully funny. Call it a unique failure.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Hour of the Wolf
From Ingmar Bergman, director of such internationally beloved cinematic classics as The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Fanny and Alexander and Scenes From a Marriage, comes... a horror movie? No way, horror movies are for children and fat, immature nerds who live in their mother's basement and jerk-off to Fangoria. Bergman was a serious artist, he wouldn't taint his name by working in such a disreputable genre.
No? Well guess what, bitches? He did. Sort of.
Hour of the Wolf stars Bergman staple Max Von Sydow as a tortured artist type, living in semi-seclusion on an island with his wife (Liv Ullmann), who is being haunted by... what? Ghosts? Demons? Memories? Are these experiences even real, or is he losing his mind?
The early scenes of Hour of the Wolf are rough going. I've admired and even loved some of Bergman's films, but for a while I thought that Hour of the Wolf was an expression of his worst tendencies; gloomy self-seriousness about a bunch of joyless Swedes posing in the shadows and reciting grim, impenetrable statements to each other. Not that this style of turgid theatricality is inherently ineffective, but I much prefer the warm humanism of Fanny and Alexander to the posed obscureness of, say, Persona. Though I can perhaps admire its posture, it doesn't connect with me emotionally.
It gets better, luckily. I never quite got in sync with whatever Bergman was trying to communicate in terms of narrative or meaning, but Hour of the Wolf becomes increasingly eerie as it goes along, as well as increasingly bizarre, and Bergman treats the audience to some memorably weird visuals. The atmosphere is thick enough in the later portion of the film that I'm glad I watched it, but it's not the brilliant revelation I might have expected from the film's pedigree.
No? Well guess what, bitches? He did. Sort of.
Hour of the Wolf stars Bergman staple Max Von Sydow as a tortured artist type, living in semi-seclusion on an island with his wife (Liv Ullmann), who is being haunted by... what? Ghosts? Demons? Memories? Are these experiences even real, or is he losing his mind?
The early scenes of Hour of the Wolf are rough going. I've admired and even loved some of Bergman's films, but for a while I thought that Hour of the Wolf was an expression of his worst tendencies; gloomy self-seriousness about a bunch of joyless Swedes posing in the shadows and reciting grim, impenetrable statements to each other. Not that this style of turgid theatricality is inherently ineffective, but I much prefer the warm humanism of Fanny and Alexander to the posed obscureness of, say, Persona. Though I can perhaps admire its posture, it doesn't connect with me emotionally.
It gets better, luckily. I never quite got in sync with whatever Bergman was trying to communicate in terms of narrative or meaning, but Hour of the Wolf becomes increasingly eerie as it goes along, as well as increasingly bizarre, and Bergman treats the audience to some memorably weird visuals. The atmosphere is thick enough in the later portion of the film that I'm glad I watched it, but it's not the brilliant revelation I might have expected from the film's pedigree.
Marsupials: The Howling III
From Philippe Mora, director of The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, comes your classic in-name-only sequel. It's not even about werewolves; as the title implies, the monsters in this film are were-marsupials. It turns out that there's a hidden race of them that evolved in Australia, and one of them gets cast in some corny B-horror movie about shape-shifting monsters (meta-ness abound), but her secret is inadvertently exposed to the outside world, the government wants to study them, etc etc.
I like the new direction that Mora went with, but it is something of a shame that we never saw the original story some to closure with The Howling III: Your Father is Also Coincidentally a Werewolf and The Howling IV: Yo Momma So Werewolf, She Put Lon Chaney Out of Business.
Okay, I realize this was a fucked-up way to start off Your Vice is a Horror Movie Marathon and Only I Have the Netflix Queue: Year Two. It's the third movie in a series, I haven't blogged about the previous two, and neither Netflix nor Hollywood Video seem to have all the remaining sequels so I can't do much follow up. I should have at least kicked off the marathon this year with a standalone movie, but that's not how things worked out. I'm sorry. Deal with it.
Howling III is not quite funny enough to be called a good horror comedy, but it is strange and goofy enough that it provides suitable entertainment. There is in irresistible charm to it's silly hodge podge of weirdness: cheap but enthusiastic special effects, B-movie parodies, were-marsupial birth scene, an Alfred Hitchcock impersonator for some reason, a were-marsupial wins an Oscar but then transforms on stage. It doesn't make a lot of sense and the story never really seemed to go anywhere, but it is unique and not a total waste of time.
I like the new direction that Mora went with, but it is something of a shame that we never saw the original story some to closure with The Howling III: Your Father is Also Coincidentally a Werewolf and The Howling IV: Yo Momma So Werewolf, She Put Lon Chaney Out of Business.
Okay, I realize this was a fucked-up way to start off Your Vice is a Horror Movie Marathon and Only I Have the Netflix Queue: Year Two. It's the third movie in a series, I haven't blogged about the previous two, and neither Netflix nor Hollywood Video seem to have all the remaining sequels so I can't do much follow up. I should have at least kicked off the marathon this year with a standalone movie, but that's not how things worked out. I'm sorry. Deal with it.
Howling III is not quite funny enough to be called a good horror comedy, but it is strange and goofy enough that it provides suitable entertainment. There is in irresistible charm to it's silly hodge podge of weirdness: cheap but enthusiastic special effects, B-movie parodies, were-marsupial birth scene, an Alfred Hitchcock impersonator for some reason, a were-marsupial wins an Oscar but then transforms on stage. It doesn't make a lot of sense and the story never really seemed to go anywhere, but it is unique and not a total waste of time.
"Midnight Movie" a poem by Shenan Hahn
(This is a poem that Shenan wrote to kick off YVIAHMMAOIHTNQ:Y2, and I think it rocks. Not that I wasn't already jazzed about this month, but now I'm jazzed AND I have a poem that expresses said jazzing.
I like that, besides the overt references it makes, it also evokes John Goodman's speech about horror movies from Matinee, as well as makes what I believe to be an accidental reference to David Cronenberg's Videodrome.
Shenan also wanted to note that this started off as a sonnet, but then she needed an extra stanza so now it's some original form which we'll call a Shenan-sonnet or a "Shonnet." She also requested suggestions for a better title, but I think this one works fine.)
Imagine that first scream- before Fay Wray,
before the queens of Halloween, The Blob,
the jazzy giallo chases, and the Day-
or many Days- the Dead saw fit to mob-
there’s one guy by a fire who on a whim
says, “Out there is a killer mastodon,
who used to be a man like you, or him…”
and boom, the horror tale is born, its spawn
of bloody hoopla letting people tempt
the dread of what’s beyond that blaze, assured
in sticky popcorn safety as the reels
are flickering, as if we’d somehow dreamt
ourselves new flesh, its monstrousness a lurid
form caressed in grisly circus zeal
until we exit and the casualties
and killers we’d become are shrugged away,
or melt as we remember sunlight, moan
again, more distantly, at memories
of narrow odds we overcame to slay
the mastodon to a filet mignon.
I like that, besides the overt references it makes, it also evokes John Goodman's speech about horror movies from Matinee, as well as makes what I believe to be an accidental reference to David Cronenberg's Videodrome.
Shenan also wanted to note that this started off as a sonnet, but then she needed an extra stanza so now it's some original form which we'll call a Shenan-sonnet or a "Shonnet." She also requested suggestions for a better title, but I think this one works fine.)
Imagine that first scream- before Fay Wray,
before the queens of Halloween, The Blob,
the jazzy giallo chases, and the Day-
or many Days- the Dead saw fit to mob-
there’s one guy by a fire who on a whim
says, “Out there is a killer mastodon,
who used to be a man like you, or him…”
and boom, the horror tale is born, its spawn
of bloody hoopla letting people tempt
the dread of what’s beyond that blaze, assured
in sticky popcorn safety as the reels
are flickering, as if we’d somehow dreamt
ourselves new flesh, its monstrousness a lurid
form caressed in grisly circus zeal
until we exit and the casualties
and killers we’d become are shrugged away,
or melt as we remember sunlight, moan
again, more distantly, at memories
of narrow odds we overcame to slay
the mastodon to a filet mignon.
Your Vice is a Horror Movie Marathon and Only I Have the Netflix Queue: Year Two
Greetings, boils and ghouls. It's nearly Shocktober once again, and much like in the previous fear of 2008, I plan to spend the month having a frightfully good time watching as many horror movies as I can possibly fit in. A murderthon of horror cinema, new and old, about which I will blog for your reading displeasure. A scare-iety of boo-vies upon which I will comment... spookily!. A cornucapitation of flayed-skinemtic masterpieces-in-which-you-are-resting which I will review for your amoozement and blood-er defright...
Okay, enough of that shit. Same deal as last year. I'm going to try to watch a shitload of horror movies before the end of October. For each one I watch, I will make a post on this blog about it. I may try to structure it a little more, perhaps offering a synopsis of the film followed by my thoughts. We'll see. Stay tuned, updates should be following soon.
Okay, enough of that shit. Same deal as last year. I'm going to try to watch a shitload of horror movies before the end of October. For each one I watch, I will make a post on this blog about it. I may try to structure it a little more, perhaps offering a synopsis of the film followed by my thoughts. We'll see. Stay tuned, updates should be following soon.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
The Final Halloween-stination II
I wasn’t particularly thrilled by this summer’s lineup of major releases. Yes, The Hurt Locker and Ponyo were great movies that happened to come out during the summer, that's not what I'm talking about. What I am referring to are the megabudget action/sci-fi/fantasy/superhero blockbustery movies we get every year, or the major-release comedies. I loved Up and Inglourious Basterds, and they sort of fit the profile, but they were a little more off-beat, a little more interested in doing their own thing. Last year we got The Dark Knight, Indiana Jones and Hellboy 2. What did we get this year?
The Hangover was funny, but not something I need ever see again. Funny People was interesting, but turned out to be a dark, somewhat unpleasant drama with a little humor rather than a comedy. I wrote a long rambling post about being a little obsessed with Transformers 2, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t think it was a terrible movie. I liked Star Trek I guess, it was fun and was perfectly cast, but I’m shocked at the outpouring of critical and commercial love it received considering that it had what I consider to be some rather egregious flaws in its direction and storytelling. Likewise District 9, which seems to already have a (mystifying to me) reputation as a minor classic, exciting and thoughtful; not only didn’t I like it, I thought it was downright poorly made at times, with a lot of lazy storytelling. And I didn't even bother seeing G.I. Joe.
(Update 9/16: Further proving my point about the lackluster summer season, I didn't recall that I saw Michael Mann's disappointing Public Enemies and Justin Lin's passably stupid Fast and Furious. And I totally forgot that Tony Scott's remake of The Taking of Pelham 123, which I didn't waste my time on, even existed.)
(Update 9/18: Holy shit! And I forgot to mention Terminator: Salvation in my update. I think I liked it, or at least liked the action scenes, slightly more than the general public and it still completely slipped my mind. Worst summer ever.)
Looking back over the summer a week or so ago, I worried that I was becoming an old fuss-budget. Honestly, except for Funny People, I hadn't even been looking forward to any of those movies. Am I becoming too artsy-fartsy? Have my efforts to watch a more diverse and eclectic selection of films somehow spoiled my ability to enjoy a dumb summer movie? Am I holding my light entertainment to too high of a standard?
Maybe I am becoming a pretentious asshole, but all I had to do to remind myself that I haven't become a total killjoy was look to the weekend of August 28. What may be considered the final weekend of the summer season was easily my most anticipated, as it marked the release of both The Final Destination (aka Final Destination 4 in 3-D!!!) and Rob Zombie's Halloween the Remake II. You can't be too much of an elitist if you're eagerly awaiting the release the fourth film in a franchise whose inspiration dried up two movies ago, and the sequel to the terrible remake of a beloved classic.
I may be an admirer of Rob Zombie's The House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects, moreso it seems than most horror-moviegoers, but I knew that even a talented individual such as Mr. Zombie shouldn't touch Halloween with a ten-foot pole. No horror director, no matter how good, would come off well in comparison to the original, because the original is in a class of its own. (Maybe if they hired a director with a distinct vision who worked mainly outside the genre and didn't feel the need to honor the original, it could have been interesting. Just try imagining, say, Werner Herzog's Halloween). It wasn't surprising that the remake sucked; what was a little surprising was the manner in which it sucked. I'm not going to review it here; suffice it to say that in addition to the film's obnoxious dialogue and seriously flawed structure, I was disheartened to see that Zombie failed to craft a single stalk/slash/suspense sequence that was anything more than tedious.
Yet somehow I found myself looking forward to Halloween II, most likely because Zombie was promising in interviews that he was doing his own thing, not following the original series and trying to stick closer to his own vision. It was clear in the Halloween remake that zombie was trying, unsuccessfully, to use his style to tell someone else's story with someone else's characters. Maybe now that he felt free to tell his own story would his style finally gel with the Halloween series. Instead of remaking the original Halloween II, he'd finally make the real Rob Zombie's Halloween.
So of course the new Halloween II begins where part 1 left off, and then has protagonist Laurie sent to the hospital where she is attacked by Michael Myers, exactly like the original sequel. "Holy shit," you're thinking, "He's actually doing a remake of Halloween II." Turns out it's just Zombie having a little fun fucking with the fanboys' expectations; the hospital sequence is just the opener and then he's on to other things.
I'll say this for the new Halloween II, it's an improvement over the remake. I would go so far as to say I liked it, however that's not an "I really liked it," but rather an "I liked it*". It feels more like a complete film than the remake, not like two half-assed films stitched together.
The element that I thought worked best was that, this time out, Zombie gives us access to Michael's inner thoughts, so he's less of a boogeyman and feels like more of a character. This time we can actually see the wounded little boy inside of Michael, instead of just being told about it. Literally. Turns out that Michael hallucinates about his pre-adolescent self a lot. Along for the ride is his dead mother (nice to see Sheri Moon Zombie back) always dressed in white, a faithful white horse that follows her around, and weird nightmarish creatures that live in the recesses of Michael's mind. These sequences, highly stylized, often backlit with blinding white light and I think in one part shot in black and white, were probably my favorites in the movie, where it felt like Zombie was finally doing his own thing and ignoring the usual generic conventions. The imagery may be a little obvious or even corny at times, but it has a weirdo, surreal, spooky quality that I responded to.
Unlike the remake, this film is fun and even funny at times. Zombie still can't write dialogue for teenage girls that isn't grating and obnoxious, what with them calling each other "dicklickers" and "bitches" ad naseum, but the humor he showed in his earlier films is still present. The best is the subplot about Dr. Loomis, who has become a vain, egocentric publicity hound, trying to capitalize on the murders in the first movie to further his career. He's such an asshole and a whiny bitch that you can't help but laugh, pestering his assistant to bring him a cup of his special tea before he has a hissy fit, or going on a talk show and getting snippy with the host. (The other guest is Weird Al Yankovic). There are other funny bits in the movie too. I liked the kid at the Halloween party with the wolfman costume who promises that the beers in his van are roofie-free.
In the interim between this and the remake, Zombie learned how to construct a chase/suspense sequence. I remember watching the remake in theaters and totally tuning out during the climactic chase. Then I watched it on DVD and tuned out at the exact same point. It was that boring. This time, Zombie starts the movie off with a bang, with the hospital chase, and until he goes overboard with the shakeycam, it's an effective scene.
Poor Laurie, bruised and battered, with a big cast on her leg, wakes up in the hospital and can't seem to find anyone around. She stumbles down the hallway to the nurse's station, where the nurse seems weirdly unresponsive. Always a bad sign. The nurse turns around and, oh shit, her face is split open in she's in some sort of daze. Out comes Michael, and Laurie's got to try to get away, through corridors and down the stairwell, dragging her wounded leg behind her, and the big bastard just keeps coming. The scene also features an effective use of the song "Nights in White Satin" by The Moody Blues, an offbeat musical choice that is Zombie's bread and butter, and a way better choice than his confounding use of "Love Hurts" in the remake. The other set pieces never quite top the opener, but they all still function on an entertaining level.
So, the better screenplay and better set pieces, combined with more of a weird, personal vision from Zombie, adds up to a better movie... but still a problematic one. I mentioned before that Zombie still tries too hard to write clever dialogue for his young female characters and winds up making you hate them all, but it's even a little worse than that. He can't even flesh them into real characters or give them anything interesting to do. Poor Scout Taylor-Compton, she seems like she might be charming and likable in real life, but as Laurie she spends the whole movie either crying, screaming, or running away from Michael Myers while crying and screaming. That is the extent of her character. She is almost always making what my girlfriend referred to as "the super pouty face," and I concur with Shenan that Ms. Taylor-Compton is a pro at it. Zombie tries to go to some different places with her character (is she losing her mind, just like her brother Michael?) but since Laurie spends 95% of her screentime in screamy-crying-pouty-running mode, it doesn't really scan and she comes off as yet another generic final girl.
Halloween II also falls victim to the common slasher movie trope of introducing too many characters for the sole purpose of killing them off to add more violence. Michael Myers is constantly running afoul of characters we've never met before and brutally murdering them after they get their obligatory 2 minutes of screen time. He hides out at a farm, so the owner and his family show up to scare him off and he kills them. He shows up at a strip club after hours for no reason and murders all the staff. Etc. I don't normally like this kind of shit because I have no emotional investment in what's going on and it sidetracks from the main story for no better reason than to satisfy audience bloodlust. It can be fun in a shitty slasher movie if the death is particularly over-the-top, but in a movie such as this one, trying to strike a more serious tone, it's a waste of celluloid and something of a concession.
The worst though, and I really didn't see this coming, is how stylistically bombastic and assaultive the film becomes at times. It's as if instead of trying to scare you, Zombie decided to settle for overwhelming your senses. Bright, blinding, seizure-inducing lights flash on the screen. Loud clanging noises and explosions erupt out of the speakers and drown out your every thought any time there is a mild surprise or bit of action in the film, or sometimes for no reason at all. Completely indistinguishable from the film's overbearing score, I should add. Fuck, even the stabbing noises were louder than gunshots are in most other movies.
Zombie's first two films are excellent enough that he's built up a lot of goodwill with me, so I'm still on board next time he makes an original feature. Unfortunately, that won't be for a while, as the motherfucker signed on to do a remake of The Blob, which already had an excellent remake in the 80's and doesn't need to be revisited. Sigh.
At 82 minutes, The Final Destination (in 3-D!!!!!) is so streamlined that it barely feels like a real movie. No time for character development or new ideas, after rehashing the same plot as the last three films in the series in as little time as possible, it moves efficiently enough, though at a breakneck pace, through a series of deaths, disfigurements, dismemberments, etc. If you saw any of the previous films, then you know the drill: blandly attractive young Dawson's Creek-looking motherfucker has a psychic vision, prevents catastrophic death of self and others, turns out that it was their time to go so the malevolent force of Death kills everyone off (in the order they were originally supposed to die) in elaborate, protracted, Rube Goldberg device-esque ways.
And I swear it takes maybe all of 15 minutes for them to get through the catastrophe and the exposition and get to the murder set pieces. It opens at a Nascar rally, each major character gets about 2 lines of dialogue, then a car crash happens and sets off a spectacular chain of events, etc etc.
The problem here is that, outside of the illusion of an extra spacial dimension, The Final Destination is content to add nothing new to the series. In the original Final Destination, the premise was still fresh and interesting, the complex, ornate death sequences were a surprise instead of an expectation, and it actually made an attempt to flesh out its characters and even get a little philosophical about the nature of life and death (just a little bit, mind you). Final Destination 2 was a step down, but it was at least ambitious and tried to build upon the first movie: it made the plot ludicrously complex and intertwined with the first film, tried to add some new rules and ideas (i.e. if they bring a new life in to the world, maybe Death will spare them). Part 3 was another slight step down, basically resigned to repeating the story from the first two movies and focusing on the death scenes. And now we have the fourth, which strips the formula down even further to a series of showy death sequences barely strung together by a nearly non-existent plot.
David Ellis, the director of Final Destination 2, returns to helm this one (James Wong directed 1 and 3, so I seriously hope if they continue the series that Wong directs part 5 and that he and Ellis tag-team the series for as long as it runs) and along for the ride is one of the two Butterfly Effect guys who both wrote part 2. Apparently the other guy had all the good ideas though, or they need to work as a team, because nothing new is brought to the table. Seriously guys, step it up a bit, throw a twist or two in there. How about next time, the psychic character gets killed halfway through, leaving everyone else totally screwed. Or have it turn out that their lives will be spared if they kill someone else to take their place. Or use my buddy Patrick's idea: have a psychic somehow prevent the destruction of earth, so Death has to go around killing every single person on the planet Mouse Trap style.
That said, I haven't given up on this series yet, and there is still a lot of fun to be had. Maybe the movie boils down to nothing but set pieces, but some of the set pieces are pretty good. There's a kind of slowly building, deliberate, coming together of many different strands style to the set pieces in the Final Destination series that are Hitchcockian in nature. Or, at least, sub-Hitchcockian. Or really more sub-DePalmian, but you get my point. Or if you don't, my point is that this style is rare in modern, mainstream horror movies. I wouldn't dare go so far as to call the construction of these sequences brilliant, but the visual storytelling is often exceedingly clever, and requires a certain amount of craftsmanship sometimes missing in the genre.
The most enjoyable sequence for me was a major one near the end, in which an accident at a construction site in a mall leads to an explosion at a movie theater (showing a 3-D movie, natch) which leads to a series of calamaties that turns the mall's escalator into a conveyor belt of swirly, slashing, bone-crushing doom. Also, The Final Destination re-enacts an urban legend I've been wanting to see in a movie for years: the one where a pool filter pulls out a man's guts through his asshole.
What I'm saying is, if you like this kind of shit like I do, this one is worth seeing even if it isn't anything special. Though I wouldn't say it's a big deal to rush out and see it in 3-D, you can wait for video. Ellis's use of the 3-D gimmick isn't gimmicky enough and pales in comparison to the goofy eyeball-popping madness of this year's My Bloody Valentine 3D. If you're going to use a silly gimmick like 3-D for your silly horror movie, you need to go all out. Except for a few moments, the format is wasted in The Final Destination.
So, wrapping up, maybe this weekend didn't quite live up to my expectations. Certainly I won't be putting either one of these on any "best of" lists. Regardless, both Halloween the Remake II and The Final Desintation are enjoyable endevours for horror fans, and in particular I'd be interested in rewatching Zombie's film some day to see if time irons out some of the flaws.
*but it has a lot of problems.
The Hangover was funny, but not something I need ever see again. Funny People was interesting, but turned out to be a dark, somewhat unpleasant drama with a little humor rather than a comedy. I wrote a long rambling post about being a little obsessed with Transformers 2, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t think it was a terrible movie. I liked Star Trek I guess, it was fun and was perfectly cast, but I’m shocked at the outpouring of critical and commercial love it received considering that it had what I consider to be some rather egregious flaws in its direction and storytelling. Likewise District 9, which seems to already have a (mystifying to me) reputation as a minor classic, exciting and thoughtful; not only didn’t I like it, I thought it was downright poorly made at times, with a lot of lazy storytelling. And I didn't even bother seeing G.I. Joe.
(Update 9/16: Further proving my point about the lackluster summer season, I didn't recall that I saw Michael Mann's disappointing Public Enemies and Justin Lin's passably stupid Fast and Furious. And I totally forgot that Tony Scott's remake of The Taking of Pelham 123, which I didn't waste my time on, even existed.)
(Update 9/18: Holy shit! And I forgot to mention Terminator: Salvation in my update. I think I liked it, or at least liked the action scenes, slightly more than the general public and it still completely slipped my mind. Worst summer ever.)
Looking back over the summer a week or so ago, I worried that I was becoming an old fuss-budget. Honestly, except for Funny People, I hadn't even been looking forward to any of those movies. Am I becoming too artsy-fartsy? Have my efforts to watch a more diverse and eclectic selection of films somehow spoiled my ability to enjoy a dumb summer movie? Am I holding my light entertainment to too high of a standard?
Maybe I am becoming a pretentious asshole, but all I had to do to remind myself that I haven't become a total killjoy was look to the weekend of August 28. What may be considered the final weekend of the summer season was easily my most anticipated, as it marked the release of both The Final Destination (aka Final Destination 4 in 3-D!!!) and Rob Zombie's Halloween the Remake II. You can't be too much of an elitist if you're eagerly awaiting the release the fourth film in a franchise whose inspiration dried up two movies ago, and the sequel to the terrible remake of a beloved classic.
I may be an admirer of Rob Zombie's The House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects, moreso it seems than most horror-moviegoers, but I knew that even a talented individual such as Mr. Zombie shouldn't touch Halloween with a ten-foot pole. No horror director, no matter how good, would come off well in comparison to the original, because the original is in a class of its own. (Maybe if they hired a director with a distinct vision who worked mainly outside the genre and didn't feel the need to honor the original, it could have been interesting. Just try imagining, say, Werner Herzog's Halloween). It wasn't surprising that the remake sucked; what was a little surprising was the manner in which it sucked. I'm not going to review it here; suffice it to say that in addition to the film's obnoxious dialogue and seriously flawed structure, I was disheartened to see that Zombie failed to craft a single stalk/slash/suspense sequence that was anything more than tedious.
Yet somehow I found myself looking forward to Halloween II, most likely because Zombie was promising in interviews that he was doing his own thing, not following the original series and trying to stick closer to his own vision. It was clear in the Halloween remake that zombie was trying, unsuccessfully, to use his style to tell someone else's story with someone else's characters. Maybe now that he felt free to tell his own story would his style finally gel with the Halloween series. Instead of remaking the original Halloween II, he'd finally make the real Rob Zombie's Halloween.
So of course the new Halloween II begins where part 1 left off, and then has protagonist Laurie sent to the hospital where she is attacked by Michael Myers, exactly like the original sequel. "Holy shit," you're thinking, "He's actually doing a remake of Halloween II." Turns out it's just Zombie having a little fun fucking with the fanboys' expectations; the hospital sequence is just the opener and then he's on to other things.
I'll say this for the new Halloween II, it's an improvement over the remake. I would go so far as to say I liked it, however that's not an "I really liked it," but rather an "I liked it*". It feels more like a complete film than the remake, not like two half-assed films stitched together.
The element that I thought worked best was that, this time out, Zombie gives us access to Michael's inner thoughts, so he's less of a boogeyman and feels like more of a character. This time we can actually see the wounded little boy inside of Michael, instead of just being told about it. Literally. Turns out that Michael hallucinates about his pre-adolescent self a lot. Along for the ride is his dead mother (nice to see Sheri Moon Zombie back) always dressed in white, a faithful white horse that follows her around, and weird nightmarish creatures that live in the recesses of Michael's mind. These sequences, highly stylized, often backlit with blinding white light and I think in one part shot in black and white, were probably my favorites in the movie, where it felt like Zombie was finally doing his own thing and ignoring the usual generic conventions. The imagery may be a little obvious or even corny at times, but it has a weirdo, surreal, spooky quality that I responded to.
Unlike the remake, this film is fun and even funny at times. Zombie still can't write dialogue for teenage girls that isn't grating and obnoxious, what with them calling each other "dicklickers" and "bitches" ad naseum, but the humor he showed in his earlier films is still present. The best is the subplot about Dr. Loomis, who has become a vain, egocentric publicity hound, trying to capitalize on the murders in the first movie to further his career. He's such an asshole and a whiny bitch that you can't help but laugh, pestering his assistant to bring him a cup of his special tea before he has a hissy fit, or going on a talk show and getting snippy with the host. (The other guest is Weird Al Yankovic). There are other funny bits in the movie too. I liked the kid at the Halloween party with the wolfman costume who promises that the beers in his van are roofie-free.
In the interim between this and the remake, Zombie learned how to construct a chase/suspense sequence. I remember watching the remake in theaters and totally tuning out during the climactic chase. Then I watched it on DVD and tuned out at the exact same point. It was that boring. This time, Zombie starts the movie off with a bang, with the hospital chase, and until he goes overboard with the shakeycam, it's an effective scene.
Poor Laurie, bruised and battered, with a big cast on her leg, wakes up in the hospital and can't seem to find anyone around. She stumbles down the hallway to the nurse's station, where the nurse seems weirdly unresponsive. Always a bad sign. The nurse turns around and, oh shit, her face is split open in she's in some sort of daze. Out comes Michael, and Laurie's got to try to get away, through corridors and down the stairwell, dragging her wounded leg behind her, and the big bastard just keeps coming. The scene also features an effective use of the song "Nights in White Satin" by The Moody Blues, an offbeat musical choice that is Zombie's bread and butter, and a way better choice than his confounding use of "Love Hurts" in the remake. The other set pieces never quite top the opener, but they all still function on an entertaining level.
So, the better screenplay and better set pieces, combined with more of a weird, personal vision from Zombie, adds up to a better movie... but still a problematic one. I mentioned before that Zombie still tries too hard to write clever dialogue for his young female characters and winds up making you hate them all, but it's even a little worse than that. He can't even flesh them into real characters or give them anything interesting to do. Poor Scout Taylor-Compton, she seems like she might be charming and likable in real life, but as Laurie she spends the whole movie either crying, screaming, or running away from Michael Myers while crying and screaming. That is the extent of her character. She is almost always making what my girlfriend referred to as "the super pouty face," and I concur with Shenan that Ms. Taylor-Compton is a pro at it. Zombie tries to go to some different places with her character (is she losing her mind, just like her brother Michael?) but since Laurie spends 95% of her screentime in screamy-crying-pouty-running mode, it doesn't really scan and she comes off as yet another generic final girl.
Halloween II also falls victim to the common slasher movie trope of introducing too many characters for the sole purpose of killing them off to add more violence. Michael Myers is constantly running afoul of characters we've never met before and brutally murdering them after they get their obligatory 2 minutes of screen time. He hides out at a farm, so the owner and his family show up to scare him off and he kills them. He shows up at a strip club after hours for no reason and murders all the staff. Etc. I don't normally like this kind of shit because I have no emotional investment in what's going on and it sidetracks from the main story for no better reason than to satisfy audience bloodlust. It can be fun in a shitty slasher movie if the death is particularly over-the-top, but in a movie such as this one, trying to strike a more serious tone, it's a waste of celluloid and something of a concession.
The worst though, and I really didn't see this coming, is how stylistically bombastic and assaultive the film becomes at times. It's as if instead of trying to scare you, Zombie decided to settle for overwhelming your senses. Bright, blinding, seizure-inducing lights flash on the screen. Loud clanging noises and explosions erupt out of the speakers and drown out your every thought any time there is a mild surprise or bit of action in the film, or sometimes for no reason at all. Completely indistinguishable from the film's overbearing score, I should add. Fuck, even the stabbing noises were louder than gunshots are in most other movies.
Zombie's first two films are excellent enough that he's built up a lot of goodwill with me, so I'm still on board next time he makes an original feature. Unfortunately, that won't be for a while, as the motherfucker signed on to do a remake of The Blob, which already had an excellent remake in the 80's and doesn't need to be revisited. Sigh.
At 82 minutes, The Final Destination (in 3-D!!!!!) is so streamlined that it barely feels like a real movie. No time for character development or new ideas, after rehashing the same plot as the last three films in the series in as little time as possible, it moves efficiently enough, though at a breakneck pace, through a series of deaths, disfigurements, dismemberments, etc. If you saw any of the previous films, then you know the drill: blandly attractive young Dawson's Creek-looking motherfucker has a psychic vision, prevents catastrophic death of self and others, turns out that it was their time to go so the malevolent force of Death kills everyone off (in the order they were originally supposed to die) in elaborate, protracted, Rube Goldberg device-esque ways.
And I swear it takes maybe all of 15 minutes for them to get through the catastrophe and the exposition and get to the murder set pieces. It opens at a Nascar rally, each major character gets about 2 lines of dialogue, then a car crash happens and sets off a spectacular chain of events, etc etc.
The problem here is that, outside of the illusion of an extra spacial dimension, The Final Destination is content to add nothing new to the series. In the original Final Destination, the premise was still fresh and interesting, the complex, ornate death sequences were a surprise instead of an expectation, and it actually made an attempt to flesh out its characters and even get a little philosophical about the nature of life and death (just a little bit, mind you). Final Destination 2 was a step down, but it was at least ambitious and tried to build upon the first movie: it made the plot ludicrously complex and intertwined with the first film, tried to add some new rules and ideas (i.e. if they bring a new life in to the world, maybe Death will spare them). Part 3 was another slight step down, basically resigned to repeating the story from the first two movies and focusing on the death scenes. And now we have the fourth, which strips the formula down even further to a series of showy death sequences barely strung together by a nearly non-existent plot.
David Ellis, the director of Final Destination 2, returns to helm this one (James Wong directed 1 and 3, so I seriously hope if they continue the series that Wong directs part 5 and that he and Ellis tag-team the series for as long as it runs) and along for the ride is one of the two Butterfly Effect guys who both wrote part 2. Apparently the other guy had all the good ideas though, or they need to work as a team, because nothing new is brought to the table. Seriously guys, step it up a bit, throw a twist or two in there. How about next time, the psychic character gets killed halfway through, leaving everyone else totally screwed. Or have it turn out that their lives will be spared if they kill someone else to take their place. Or use my buddy Patrick's idea: have a psychic somehow prevent the destruction of earth, so Death has to go around killing every single person on the planet Mouse Trap style.
That said, I haven't given up on this series yet, and there is still a lot of fun to be had. Maybe the movie boils down to nothing but set pieces, but some of the set pieces are pretty good. There's a kind of slowly building, deliberate, coming together of many different strands style to the set pieces in the Final Destination series that are Hitchcockian in nature. Or, at least, sub-Hitchcockian. Or really more sub-DePalmian, but you get my point. Or if you don't, my point is that this style is rare in modern, mainstream horror movies. I wouldn't dare go so far as to call the construction of these sequences brilliant, but the visual storytelling is often exceedingly clever, and requires a certain amount of craftsmanship sometimes missing in the genre.
The most enjoyable sequence for me was a major one near the end, in which an accident at a construction site in a mall leads to an explosion at a movie theater (showing a 3-D movie, natch) which leads to a series of calamaties that turns the mall's escalator into a conveyor belt of swirly, slashing, bone-crushing doom. Also, The Final Destination re-enacts an urban legend I've been wanting to see in a movie for years: the one where a pool filter pulls out a man's guts through his asshole.
What I'm saying is, if you like this kind of shit like I do, this one is worth seeing even if it isn't anything special. Though I wouldn't say it's a big deal to rush out and see it in 3-D, you can wait for video. Ellis's use of the 3-D gimmick isn't gimmicky enough and pales in comparison to the goofy eyeball-popping madness of this year's My Bloody Valentine 3D. If you're going to use a silly gimmick like 3-D for your silly horror movie, you need to go all out. Except for a few moments, the format is wasted in The Final Destination.
So, wrapping up, maybe this weekend didn't quite live up to my expectations. Certainly I won't be putting either one of these on any "best of" lists. Regardless, both Halloween the Remake II and The Final Desintation are enjoyable endevours for horror fans, and in particular I'd be interested in rewatching Zombie's film some day to see if time irons out some of the flaws.
*but it has a lot of problems.
Quick Thoughts On Thirst
THIRST came out in DC a few weeks ago and I caught it. It's pretty good but suffers in comparison to Park Chan-wook’s best films (OLDBOY, LADY VENGEANCE, his chapter in THREE… EXTREMES). I think my harshest criticism of THIRST would be that it’s somewhat bifurcated, and the 2nd half doesn’t really make good on the first half. Park is one of my favorite directors and THIRST is a very good movie, but I don’t think it’ll go down as a classic.
The first half is slow and contemplative, about a priest who becomes a vampire. He tries to reconcile his beliefs with his newfound bloodlust, essentially trying to be a human vampire. But is it truly in man’s nature to be good, and once you taste the forbidden fruit, can you go back etc etc?
The second half is more baroque and entertaining, but disappointingly drops a lot of the moral/philosophical questions it raised in the first half, and it becomes more of a standard murder/guilt story (this half is apparently based on a French novel from the 1800’s that had nothing to do with vampires). It’s a lot of fun because Park goes overboard on the visual style, and the movie becomes increasingly more violent and darkly humorous, but my problem is that it doesn’t fulfill the promises made in the first half.
Still, Park is a peerless craftsman, and there are a lot of wonderful sequences. In particular, there’s a scene where the protagonist seduces the heroine by cradling her in his arms while he leaps from rooftop to rooftop, where the camera stays on her face the whole time, that is evocative and romantic in a way that puts supposed romantic-vampire bullshit like TWILIGHT to shame. I just felt that THIRST doesn’t quite dig to the heart of its characters and themes the way Park’s best films do.
The first half is slow and contemplative, about a priest who becomes a vampire. He tries to reconcile his beliefs with his newfound bloodlust, essentially trying to be a human vampire. But is it truly in man’s nature to be good, and once you taste the forbidden fruit, can you go back etc etc?
The second half is more baroque and entertaining, but disappointingly drops a lot of the moral/philosophical questions it raised in the first half, and it becomes more of a standard murder/guilt story (this half is apparently based on a French novel from the 1800’s that had nothing to do with vampires). It’s a lot of fun because Park goes overboard on the visual style, and the movie becomes increasingly more violent and darkly humorous, but my problem is that it doesn’t fulfill the promises made in the first half.
Still, Park is a peerless craftsman, and there are a lot of wonderful sequences. In particular, there’s a scene where the protagonist seduces the heroine by cradling her in his arms while he leaps from rooftop to rooftop, where the camera stays on her face the whole time, that is evocative and romantic in a way that puts supposed romantic-vampire bullshit like TWILIGHT to shame. I just felt that THIRST doesn’t quite dig to the heart of its characters and themes the way Park’s best films do.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Zombies and Helicopters
Now and then we come across combinations in life that achieve a kind of perfection. Two things that come together a form a beautiful poetry greater than the sum of their parts. Yin and yang. Peanut butter and jelly. Hall and Oates. Assault and battery.
Zombies and helicopters.
Exhibit B: Nightmare City. Oh shit! Another last minute escape. Bonus points for escaping off the top of a rollercoaster.
Exhibit D: 28 Weeks Later. Being inside in the helicopter is imperative for a successful escape. Hanging off the landing skids... not so much.
If the zombie holocaust happens (and rest assured, it will), two things will happen.
1.) You Will Escape Zombies In A Helicopter
It's a scientific fact that helicopters are the most efficient vehicle for zombie evasion.
Exhibit A: Dawn of the Dead. Mankind's best guide for surviving zombies. Here, our heroes leave a shopping mall via chopper in the nick of time.
Exhibit B: Nightmare City. Oh shit! Another last minute escape. Bonus points for escaping off the top of a rollercoaster.Exhibit C: Planet Terror. Military helicopters provide extra safety. At the very least, have some sort of soldiers or law enforcement individual in your crew.
Exhibit D: 28 Weeks Later. Being inside in the helicopter is imperative for a successful escape. Hanging off the landing skids... not so much.2.) You Will Kill Zombies With The Helicopter's Blades
In addition to being the best means of escape, helicopters also double as an efficient zombie murdering tool.
I hope this was informative.
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