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Reviews
Solos (2008)
Without the child element, wouldn't have much to recommend it...
We "soft-hearted" Yanks will supposedly be drawn to anything with a kid or kids in it, as Chilean writer/director Jorge Olguin presumably knows. In "Descendents" his characters mostly speak accented English, so I gather he had his eye on the American market. His protagonist, Camille, born after the outbreak of (yet another) mysterious disease turning humans into crazed zombie-like creatures, has the telltale marks on her neck indicating she's immune to the killer bug. Most of the (relatively short) running time is about her wandering around either alone or with similar genetically fortunate kids trying to reach the ocean, where there is supposedly a boat and/or a friendly giant octopus waiting. (The kids keep their necks covered, presumably to hide the marks, although it's pretty clear they're immune since they're not coughing up blood and trying to eat people.) There are also a lot of flashbacks with Camille's now dead mother, which at first tug at the heart strings somewhat, but after a while I started to get the flashbacks confused with the present day scenes; they're all shot with that currently popular bleached out virtual black and white look that I guess is meant to give the proceedings a "documentary" aura. To borrow a term from the late Roger Ebert, we also have the "semi obligatory" cold blooded soldiers blasting away at anything that moves. (Come to think of it, "28 Days Later..." has an awful lot to answer for. Could Danny Boyle have had any idea he was writing the new rules for zombie fare?) Camille Lynch as Camille is stoic and completely believable as a kind of Alice in Horrorland, and the other kids are good too, although it's hard to keep track of who they all are. The adult actors are all competent. The settings and effects are impressive, especially on such a low budget. But I hesitate to give it the Ebertian thumb up, if only because there's really nothing here that hasn't been seen before (see above re Danny Boyle). I did like the opening using Camille's drawings to illustrate the violent demise of humanity, but at the end Mr. Olguin suddenly tries to insert an element of "magic realism," which in the South American context seems to mean "any goofy thing that strikes the writer's or director's fancy." Here it just seems bizarre after the preceding bleak real realism. But it is what it is. Compare this with Guillermo Del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" for a much more holistic vision of a child caught up in a real-life adult nightmare seamlessly intertwined with the fantasy element, ultimately more credible and thus more heartbreaking for all the dark whimsy.
Migrating Forms (1999)
Reminds me more of Robert Bresson than David Lynch...
This movie's entry in IMDb includes a blurb from the DVD cover: "If David Lynch's 'Eraserhead' could spontaneously reproduce..." the result would resemble "Migrating Forms," and other reviews also cite Lynch. I do see certain similarities with Lynch's dreamlike classic, like the action (such as it is) taking place mostly in one surreal-looking room, and minimal dialogue. But Lynch's one room (there were more locations as it went along) contained significant furnishings, such as the radiator that possibly had an alien living in it, and the dialogue offered a path into the characters' tortured souls. Here the one room looks like a prison cell (table, two chairs, couch) and the two characters ("the man" and "the woman") always wear the same clothes, like uniforms; the dialogue (what little I could hear and comprehend) just seems incidental. The "plot" involves the woman arriving at the man's room for a series of sexual encounters; whether they take place in one day or over a period of days (or weeks or months) is unclear. When she disrobes, we see she has some bizarre protuberance on her back (okay, the early Lynch was also keen on physical deformities). Whether or not he ever notices it is unclear. After a while he develops a similar protuberance on his shoulder. After a while dead creatures appear in his room, to which he reacts with his usual blank stare. A strange kind of humming or whining sound comes and goes on the soundtrack. At times writer/director James Fotopoulos breaks away from his "documentary" style to depict (possibly) the man's interior fantasies, which remind one of 1960's "head" flicks about drug use. Eventually the movie just stops (calling it an "ending" seems presumptuous). It begins and ends with three images: a black screen (which went on so long I was about to check my video player), an annoying black and white "blinking" effect, and some water splashing around. Where "Forms" reminded me of Bresson was that that French director (maybe known best here for "Pickpocket" from 1959) apparently liked to keep his backgrounds blank to force us to focus on the action, which he mostly filmed in long unbroken takes. The problem here is that I can't grasp what we're supposed to focus ON. There doesn't seem to be anything of "universal significance" with these two people; they just seem a couple of shallow jerks who like to "hook up." (They also smoke a lot, which I mention only in search of something else to say about them.) The emptiness of modern existence has been handled much better and more incisively (not to mention entertainingly) elsewhere. Maybe it's meant to be a deadpan comedy? I could try to find an interview with Mr Fotopoulos, but I'm not hugely motivated to do so, nor seek out his other works. To sum it up, I guess I'd borrow a line from the 1960's Brit satanic romp "Bedazzled": "You fill me with inertia..." But if others want to read something "brilliant" (more blurb) into it: Hey, whatever floats your boat, y'all....
The Cabin in the Woods (2011)
Y'all want blood? Okay then.,..
Having now seen this twice, I'm more glad than ever that I've always been a devotee of Joss Whedon and his twisted view of the world (or, if one factors in "Firefly"/"Serenity," the universe). Remember that phrase coined by Hannah Arendt, "the banality of evil"? That's what Whedon has always illustrated: evil needs functionaries, usually "regular guys" who show up to work and go about their business pretty much as anyone else would. They can always rationalize what they do for a living. Whether it was the law firm Wolfram and Hart in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"/"Angel," the Alliance, the Rossum Corporation in "Dollhouse," or now this organization simulating horror movies, these people are very recognizable. They're probably good neighbors and show up at PTA meetings...
As everyone must know by now, the set-up is classic scream fest: five college types pile into a recreational vehicle and head for a cabin in the middle of nowhere for some (presumably) frisky business. What they don't know, but we do (in fact they follow the corporate types on-screen) is that they're being led into a high-tech trap. This lets Whedon and his co-writer (and director) Drew Goddard have their cake and eat it too: the five are stock types (albeit as well written as one would expect from these guys) but their constant monitoring by the underground "techies" conveys that that's why they were chosen. (Presumably ALL stereotyped characters were inspired by SOMEONE who really existed. Wisconsin's own local yokel Ed Gein would have been amazed how many stories have him behind their tenuous claim to verisimilitude.) Once they get to the cabin, their predictably suicidal behavior is explained by various chemicals the techies have wafting around. At one point a trap door in the floor snaps open for no reason; "Must have been the wind," someone predictably suggests. "And that makes sense how?" responds the substance-abusing type, whose pot use apparently makes him immune to the various chemicals. It would have been funny if all of them had simply shrugged and walked away from the trap door without bothering to explore the cellar, with the techies screaming profanities in frustration, but by then---another insidious victory by Whedon and Goddard---we're pretty much seeing the characters as the techies see them. The cellar of course is full of props, the manipulation of one of which will trigger the arrival of one of a set of stock horror monsters, thus the victims have unwittingly chosen their own demise. Things play out more or less by the book, although one of them meets a rather novel end apparently borrowed from "The Thirteenth Floor." There's a beautifully wicked sequence where the "good girl" victim barely survives and gets a moving tribute to her spunk from one of the techies (Bradley Whitford from "West Wing") but the tribute stops dead when some colleagues arrive with tequila, then all the employees party hearty while her ongoing victimization is ignored on the monitor screen. But here's where I need to indulge in a paragraph break...
I wanted a new paragraph because the best part of "Cabin in the Woods" happens AFTER all this, and if you haven't seen it yet and may still want to, this part really should come as something of a surprise; on your second viewing you'll enjoy it even more (as I did). So if you're still with me: the "good girl" and the "Fool" escape into the gleaming bowels of the stronghold and discover that all the various monstrosities are readily available for use at the flip of a switch...Whedon and Goddard deserve to go to movie heaven if only for the one shot of a bunch of heavily armed security goons in the hallway; a split second later they're monster-chow. Y'all always wanted a scene with the walls, floor and ceiling frescoed with blood and body parts? Enjoy. Eventually all the employees get theirs with the same ruthlessness that they had visited upon the college types; I haven't been so happy to see so many people die violently since "The Island." Finally only "the Director" (a cameo part that others may enjoy more than I did) is left to explain everything; apparently some huge ancient creatures live way underground & will leave humanity alone if this company simulates horror movies for them. (I guess there are monitor screens down in the earth's core too.) At this point "Cabin" unfortunately gets a little goofy, but credit Whedon and Goddard for following through with their premise right to the end. What better way for the only two characters left to celebrate Armageddon than by sharing a final joint? (I'd prefer a beer, but never mind.) .... Fans of "Dollhouse" (such as myself) will enjoy the return of Fran Kranz and Amy Acker (the latter playing almost the same part) but I guess Harry Lennix was unavailable as the black security-guy-with-a-conscience (he's the only one who doesn't bet on which monster threat the kids will "choose") so they got someone else who's also pretty good. Tim De Zarn may have just guaranteed himself movie work for the rest of his life with his surly-last-chance-gas-station guy to end all such...If there's an Academy Award category for "Best Make Out Scene with a Stuffed Wolf's Head," Anna Hutchison should be a shoo-in for it...Wonder if retractable plastic bongs will now become a sought-after item...There's also a pretty good spoof of the "J-horror" genre with a bunch of little girls defeating the obligatory killer ghost, to be rewarded with a snarling series of "F--- you"s from Bradley Whitford's partner, played by the sinisterly taciturn Richard Jenkins... I'd be thrilled to learn that the scene with the jock character getting the idea for the bad tactical move inserted into his brain was inspired by a similar scene in "Time Bandits," hands down the funniest and most subversive English movie about dwarfs ever made....
In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011)
A beautiful rendition of an ugly little war...
Like most Americans, I hadn't known an awful lot about the former Yugoslavia before it broke up after the dictator died; I hadn't even known there was a big Muslim population there. When the "ethnic cleansing" was going on in the 1990's (that was the origin of that term, if I recall right) I marveled how a supposedly civilized world could still let all this horrible crap happen, but at least there were discussions what to do about it, which was more attention than the slaughter in Africa was getting around the same time. I remember at one point some women in Sarajevo put on a beauty contest to lure TV cameras to their situation, with a big banner reading PLEASE DON'T LET THEM KILL US. I sometimes wonder how many of them did survive.
Actress and humanitarian Angelina Jolie has put specific human faces on this nasty story. For her directorial debut she has reworked the classic "Romeo and Juliet" story with apparently a big influence from Roman Polanski's "The Pianist" (certainly well worth emulating). Before the hostilities commence, we see a Bosnian Muslim painter and a Serb soldier on a date in a nightclub; Jolie lets the scene play out a la Michael Cimino with the wedding sequence in "The Deer Hunter," ending with a bomb blast completely out of the blue a la "Children of Men." There's a jump forward and now the couple are forced into being enemies. To her credit, Jolie depicts the ensuing atrocities mostly from the victims' perspective, most of the victims being female. The painter endures her lot with stark stoicism, knowing a display of weakness would just invite more abuse. Some of the abuse is "just" psychological or even childish, as when a bunch of troops eating at a table keep dropping things on the floor for her to clean up. The panoply of man's inhumanity to woman is all the more compelling for being understated. Eventually the soldier stashes the painter in a house for her protection but finds himself torn by conflicting influences. The outcome was a real jolt for me, but in hindsight it should have seemed inevitable, so hats off to Jolie on both points. Wars pass and we forget body counts but I suspect I'll remember that woman's face for a long time. I'll also remember the moments of tenderness and even humor that Jolie allows us, which seems almost like mirages in the unrelenting desert of cruelty that's depicted.
Those seeking more of a "back story," a geopolitical examination of the situation in the former Yugoslavia, may be disappointed. We're just asked to accept the situation as it's presented to us. I think, though, that Jolie was right to stick to the story she wanted to tell rather than include scenes of UN negotiations or whatever. (The blue-helmeted "peace keepers" only appear briefly and ineffectually at the end, maybe that was Jolie's little editorial dig.) All the cast members are effective; I only recognized the guy who played "Boris the Blade" in "Snatch." The photography is that bleakly elegant kind so popular in modern war movies. I don't usually remember soundtracks afterward, but this one was very effective, maybe I'll try to get the CD. Available currently for $4.99 on Comcast on Demand, definitely worth a look. I understand that Jolie filmed this both in English and the local language at the same time; I saw the English version, would have preferred the local language with subtitles, but I know having to read those is torture for many Yanks. By the way, Hollywood studios used that multi-language technique a lot in the early days of talkies, making their actors do multiple movies for the price of one. Now that a silent flick has won the Oscar, I guess we can expect more such blasts from the past...
Red State (2011)
Kevin Smith saved the best for last...
If Kevin Smith wasn't kidding that this will be his last directorial effort, then like Tony LaRussa in baseball, he's definitely going out on top. Shot digitally for an unbelievable mere $5000 special effects budget, "Red State" is a brilliant bloody savage swipe at two of the most deserving targets in this country: gun happy religious maniacs and gun happy government goons. Smith's earlier comedies about feckless horny teenagers always had a satirical edge (or so I've heard; I haven't seen most of them) which was fully unsheathed in "Dogma," but as a non-Catholic I found that much of the latter was lost on me. ("Um, are there excrement monsters in the Douay Bible?") The scariest aspect of "Red State" is that it barely seems exaggerated. "Waco" really happened (inspiring Timothy McVeigh to blow up a federal building two years later in revenge). Abortionists have been assassinated as recently as 2009. The recently passed National Defense Authorization Act (particularly Subtitle D, Sections 1031-1033) made us Yanks fair game on our own soil for the paramilitary types. Hope you folks out there never gave anybody some money that maybe wound up in "terrorist" hands or even sent a friendly email to the wrong party....
As for the actual movie, Smith starts us off on familiar (from him) turf: three foul-mouthed teens (played as usual by actors in their twenties) plotting to get laid. These guys are so relentlessly unpleasant I actually tried to avoid remembering each character's name. Things pick up when they electronically arrange a tryst with an unrecognizable Melissa Leo (of course my image of her is still from the "Homicide" TV show); sitting with the would-be studs in her crappy little trailer, she somberly proclaims "I won't have sex with any man who hasn't had two beers." We the audience only need about three seconds to grasp that she's insane but of course her dumb as dirt guests are totally unsuspecting until they're knocked out and dragged off to the lair of the God nuts. Remember how you felt when Bruce Willis in "Pulp Fiction" got knocked out and woke up with a ball gag in his mouth, that uneasy exhilaration of "Where the hell is Tarantino going with this?" Something like that galvanizes this whole middle section, although with less suspense since we'd seen the demented old preacher and his minions earlier on. It becomes rather "Hostel"-ish as one wonders if at least one of intended victims can escape their nasty fate. Then the Feds show up armed to the teeth, and all you violence junkies (I admit I'm one) won't be disappointed. The big chill comes at the end when some smarmily sinister suits inform a colleague that the surviving extremists will never see the light of day again: "What do you think this is, Joe, September 10 2001? What do you think we've been doing all this time?"
To his endless credit, Smith never misses an opportunity to put humanity in the worst possible light. At one point when two of the studs have a chance to escape together, one of them heartlessly abandons the other. When one of them seems just about to reach safety, "friendly fire" intervenes. When the daughter of one of the loonies begs another stud to help her younger sisters escape, she does so at gunpoint; his response is to tell her to f--- off. Only two characters seem to adhere to some kind of internal principle: the preacher (but does "being true to your light" count if the light itself strikes us as infernal) and the world-weary leader of the ATF contingent, hoping to reach retirement without another pile of corpses on his resume. Two of my favorite "character actors" give Oscar-level performances: Michael Parks as the preacher and John Goodman as the Fed. Parks, now in his seventies, has been stealing scenes for decades but only for the last decade (thanks again to Tarantino) has been getting the meaty roles he deserves. His soft drawl as he explains why the allegedly loving deity is really to be feared is priceless. Ditto for Goodman in a phone call with an unseen superior (having to scream to be heard over gunshots) that he'd better get something in writing, even an email, to cover his butt if they insist he lead a massacre. Kudos also to the always reliable Stephen Root as an inept sheriff whose terror of being forced out of the closet is almost palpable. My favorite casting "stunt" is using ultra-"nice girl" Betty Aberlin (yeah, THAT Betty Aberlin from "Mr Rodgers' Neighborhood") as one of the loonies. Hats off to you, Mr. Smith. So by all means try to find "Red State," which I don't expect to see in neighborhood theaters any time soon. It's more than worth the $4.99 I paid on Comcast On Demand...
Girl Number 9 (2009)
One more good reason not to have kids....
This is almost becoming a sub-genre unto itself, where some fiendishly clever psycho killer (of course not clever enough to avoid getting caught) taunts the police who have him in custody with information about other victims he has stashed somewhere and "Do such and such or they die," etc. The twist here is that one of the stashed potential victims is the daughter of the cop interrogating the killer. What I guess we're not supposed to wonder is how long in advance the killer needed to kidnap the victim and set up the elaborate torture/murder situation---would he need hours? Days? Then he has to time it right to get caught before the victim starves to death or something, then the victim's family (in this case the cop) has to NOT NOTICE that the victim was missing that long. It's this "out of the blue" crap I hate---"Oh, you've kidnapped my daughter and set her up to be killed? Here I thought she was having this really long sleepover with her friends..." In yet another twist---yeah, I'm giving away the store here, to save you from wasting your precious thirty-some minutes on this--the killer demands that the cop kill himself, and the dumb-ass does it! I guess this cop never watched "24" with all those quick ways to torture information out of suspects, especially after the killer has the cop lock the door to the room and shut off the TV camera. Wait, I'm forgetting--the chair in which the daughter is sitting will know if the killer is being tortured miles away, I guess. Anyway the acting and directing etc. are all competently performed here, but no more so than in an average episode of "Criminal Minds" where the story will be much more credible. I wouldn't mind seeing the actor playing the killer again, he's a kind of young "Sting" as the latter appeared in "Lock, Stock and 2 Smoking Barrels." Also the policewoman was pretty hot, in addition to being the only police character not a complete dunce---"How long has this camera been off?" she barks at one point, to which the male cops respond with shrugs before going back to their tea and scones---okay, I just threw in that last part, they being English and all...
Teenage Gang Debs (1966)
Move over Lady MacBeth, here comes Terry Fiore....
Raven-tressed Diane Conti (who, like most of the cast, has at most only one or two other movie credits in IMDb) comes sashaying into the Brooklyn clubhouse of a clean-cut mostly Italian "gang" whose chief activities seem to be talking and dancing (if you call what Elaine on "Seinfeld" did "dancing"). She announces she's from Manhattan, which may as well be Mars for these local yokels. The "prez" of the club takes a shine to her, promptly dumps his current girlfriend and our Terry's off to the races, manipulating a subordinate clubster Nino into usurping the boss and then using Nino as a front for her own power grab. Eventually she "goes too far" and gets her comeuppance--from the other members' girlfriends, of course. That's pretty much it.
"Well then," you may be wondering, "should anything attract me to this opposed to umpteen others like it?" It depends how one reacts to Ms Conti, who carries it, and I for one liked her a lot. She "inhabits" the part very nicely, never seems to be capital-A Acting. Her line readings are neither zombie-like nor melodramatic. Her emotional displays are convincing, such as when she's lying in bed vowing that nobody's going to carve his initials into her, or at the end shrieking at the latter-day Furies to stay away from her. And yeah, she's pretty hot, especially considering that in the mid-1960's there seemed to be this cinematic conspiracy to make women as unattractive as possible (it took the "Hippie chicks" a few years later to break out of that mold). The other cast members pull their weight, and a few scenes actually aspire towards dramatic resonance, as when Nino (at the urging of Terry, of course) instigates a knife fight with a hapless member who just wants to quit and get married. ("It was never a big deal before Terry came along when somebody wanted to quit," a clubster complains. Really? Members could just stroll away taking all those secrets with them? Some bunch of desperadoes.) Some of the outdoors scenes are unfortunately hard to follow, being poorly lit and jumpily edited. There's a lot of "filler," mostly involving "dancing." White people trying to dance (especially back then) remind one of Samuel Johnson's notorious remark about female preachers: "It is like a dog walking on his hind legs: it is not done well, but one is surprised to see it done at all..." I'm white myself, just for the record. Outside the Philly Mummers parade, we should just leave it alone...
I Drink Your Blood (1971)
So basically, this kid's a mass murderer, right?
Certainly Charles Manson deserves to be in prison the rest of his life, not just because of the murders committed by his "family" but for inspiring a bunch of movies about lethal Hippies, such as this one. (In the book "Fatal Vision," about an army doctor who tried to blame the death of his family on lethal Hippies, there's a line "Four people on acid couldn't even organize a trip to the bathroom, let alone a trip to go kill people.") The leader of this wild bunch is played by a 40-year-old Indian dancer (Indian Indian, not American Indian) who in fact is great, jacking far more enthusiasm into his performance than this flick really deserves. He detects the group ritual being gawked at by an outsider (as per the later and vastly superior "Race with the Devil") who then gets mauled by some of the group. This victim, Sylvia, staggers into the nearby largely abandoned town and collapses; the local baker woman, Mildred (this actress eerily resembles Audrey Campbell from the "Olga" series) assumes that the culprits are some nearby construction workers. Meanwhile the Hippies show up in the same town after their van breaks down, setting off the main revenge plot which is basically a reworking of "The Virgin Spring"/"Last House on the Left" (although the latter appeared a few years later). The "gimmick" here is that the Hippies and the construction workers get rabies, after Sylvia's younger brother Pete injects dead dog blood into some meat pies (Sweeney Todd, anyone?) eaten by the Hippies. According to a medical website, "contact with the blood, urine, or feces (e.g., guano) of a rabid animal, does not constitute an exposure...." But I guess we need to allow for some "artistic license..." As to whether "I Drink Your Blood" is worth your time, there's some nice violence, limited of course by the minimal budget; the mass shooting at the end is unfortunately all off camera. The actors playing the rabies victims have varying degrees of frothing at the mouth---by the way, according to that same medical website, "The rabies incubation period may vary from a few days to several years, but is typically one to three months"---in other words not an hour or less, as per the movie, but again, artistic license... Other than the Indian dude, the best performance is by Rhonda Fultz, who unlike most of the cast has a "real movie" on her credit list ("In Cold Blood"). Since she manages to inject some recognizable humanity into her character Molly, Molly's death (by her own hand) is more affecting than what happens to most of the others, plus her being pregnant and all. Bottom line, "Blood" passes the "free/beer" test---if you can see it for free and have plenty of beer handy, then yeah, go for it. By the way don't bother looking for that scary face on the video cover, it's actually from another movie....
The Woods (2006)
A lot more fun than I'd anticipated.....
The biggest hurdle that "The Woods" had to overcome for me was getting me to watch it in the first place; ordinarily I'd rather catch something on the DIY network about house restoration ("Making a curved stair molding from red oak...") than some yarn about spooky goings on in some girls' boarding school in the middle of nowhere--in this case, the Canadian province of Quebec deftly impersonating New England; "Let me guess, there'll be a satanic cult operating there, and then..." But since it was on the IFC "Grindhouse" slot one night, I figured there should at least be some decent gore in it, and while admittedly at first my attention was divided between it and an Arnold Schwarzenegger flick, after a while it had my full attention; damn, though, IFC runs a lot of ads (mostly for itself)....
Okay, so it's 1965 and young "Heather" (of course her name itself reminds us of the movie with Christian Slater and Shannen Doherty; "The Woods" manages to be evocative without being slavishly derivative) is getting kicked out of her home by her fascistic mother after starting a fire---remember "foreshadowing," folks? She's welcomed to the "academy" by indie favorite Patricia Clarkson, whose trademark icy serenity stands her in good stead here. In short order Heather runs afoul of the equally icy faculty members (one of whom has a facial tic involving her whole head and who nearly has a stroke when Heather starts to tuck her blouse in) and the inevitable nasty clique led by the young-Ilse-Koch type Samantha, who dubs Heather "Firecrotch" due to her red hair, which presumably also hints at sexual repression etc. Anyway Heather notices things getting ever creepier at the school, not the least of which being the surrounding trees apparently talking to her. Eventually we learn the trees can do a lot more than just talk....
What chiefly makes this worth watching is, first, the guarded intensity of Agnes Bruckner as Heather, who combines youthful vulnerability with a "Don't tread on me" coiled snake quality, reminiscent of the early Angelina Jolie; and second, the subtleness with which director Lucky McKee (none of whose other stuff I've seen) builds up the ominous atmosphere; it starts as "innocently" as Heather getting a paper cut while handling an exam, then moves on to nightmares and whatnot. It helps the suspense that, in the classic haunted-house-in-the-storm tradition, Heather has nowhere to go to escape---not only is the school in the middle of a possibly haunted forest, but "Mommie dearest" clearly doesn't want her back. Only at the end does "The Woods" get just a bit corny, with Clarkson and her two sisters (as per "Macbeth," witches always seem to come in trios) invoking lost souls etc., but at least there's no boiling cauldron or suchlike. Also of course the "killer flora" (rather lewd as well as deadly) conjures up "The Evil Dead" (and some other titles)---by the way, Bruce Campbell in a cameo role as Heather's milquetoast dad is the only other cast member I recognized, in a rather restrained performance by his standards (at the end he's more like our beloved horror-flick icon). But all is forgiven when Heather grabs an ax (and later some matches) and "The Woods" finally justifies it's "Grindhouse" slot. So bottom line, if you spot this on your TV schedule some night, I don't think you'll regret having gone along for this arboreal dark ride...
Spiked Heels and Black Nylons (1967)
For all you fans of devil masks....
This movie (or at least the 28-minute version of it that appears on Something Weird On Demand) is "narrated" by a colorful devil mask hanging on the wall of a nightclub. It's not "scary" as such, more "psychedelic" I'd say. The voice-over sounds like a guy in an echo chamber doing an impersonation of Boris Karloff playing the title role in "How the Grinch Stole Christmas." It's moderately amusing, especially if one is consuming many beers while watching. ...Oh, um, as to the human characters.... Nothing special going on. The nightclub is called "Club Lesbo"; unfortunately the promise of that name is left largely unfulfilled. Basically a cop's wife gets hooked on drugs, goes to work for some gangsters, her husband raids the club where she works, the cop and the gangster tussle, she grabs the bad guy's gun and kills him and then herself, the end. Moral of the story: legalize all drugs! ---Oops, that's probably not what the filmmakers were trying to convey. At the end, somebody takes the mask down off the wall.... WHERE WILL IT HANG NEXT????
Machete (2010)
Robert Rodriguez is God, or at the very least, St. Michael the Archangel....
Sorry Jimmy Breslin for paraphrasing that line from "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight," but I wanted it pretty clear out the gate where I stand. This is quite possibly the coolest flick I've ever seen---naw, screw that, it IS the coolest. For those of you who haven't seen "Grindhouse"---and if you haven't, shame on you, and you should probably stop reading this---this is based on one of the "fake trailers" conjuring up those great trashy movies that those of us who were around in the 1970's and 1980's remember so lovingly. Not only does "Machete" feature the gloriously outrageous and stylized violence that's a Rodriguez trademark (wait 'til you see the gruesomely inventive use of some poor sap's intestines in one scene), but he seizes a hot-button topic in the news (i.e. illegal immigration) and makes some telling social points without ever getting remotely preachy with it. Those "Minutemen" types (as embodied by Don Johnson in a beautifully modulated performance; after Kurt Russell, I think Johnson's the most under-rated actor in America) are real, folks. They really are on the border with guns, making their own "law" and risking an international incident every day. There really are self-serving politicians (as embodied by Robert De Niro, who seems to have the most fun with a role in years) who promulgate hysteria about "illegal aliens" ---well hell, look at that law in Arizona. There really are people who want to build a wall between us and Mexico--what are we, East Berlin now? ---and in a brilliant touch, Rodriguez turns this into a scheme by dope dealers to control the price. (The "war on drugs" would be really easy to "win"--just treat every substance the way we do tobacco and alcohol.) Those Mexican immigrants whom we scorn really do grease the wheels of this economy and are brutally exploited by companies who use some of their blood money to buy off the politicians. I don't know if there really is an underground "Network" (as embodied by Michelle Rodriguez, about whom what can I say--well I can say this, I stopped watching "Lost" when she got killed off; she's as hot as ever, even--or especially--with an eye patch) but that would be great. Viva la raza! ---and I'm not even Hispanic, but I'm also descended from immigrants, as are all Americans; even the Indians supposedly came here from somewhere else...
I want to start a new paragraph to focus on the acting; like his "brother" Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez manages to elicit from most of his actors the best performance that person has given (or probably will give). Danny Trejo in the title role is a kind of Latin Robert Mitchum, all he needs to do to own the screen is stand there, he's magnificent. (He stole "The Devil's Rejects," among many other titles.) Jessica Alba sheds her pouty "precious" persona and shows some real steel as the immigration agent who can't quite cut her roots; just the scene alone with her air-boxing to a video game is worth having her. Cheech Marin reminds us he can actually act. Jeff Fahey brings a complex and contradictory character to sleazy life. Lindsay Lohan gives what I would call her first "adult" performance. Tom Savini is always a blast (I just wish he'd get bigger parts). My only slight quibble: Steven Seagal more or less "phones in" his role as the drug kingpin (imagine what Powers Boothe would have done with this); maybe Seagal as a screen persona just doesn't have the "juice" I was craving. If the actor's "too cool for school," then the movie tends not to be. But never mind: by all means treat yourself to this gut-bucket visceral blast of genuine show-don't-tell cinema, and then see it again, as I plan to. One more point about Rodriguez: even his "kid movies" don't completely suck, and ordinarily the presence of kids in a film are about as welcome to me as root-canal surgery (which I've had)....
Fans of Mr. R. will enjoy the references to his earlier work, such as "Desperado," both with the vest with throwing knives (worn by the character that Danny Trejo played in that one) and in the scene where Mr. Trejo has to react to bad guys looming just outside while he's in bed with someone. Also fun are the cultural references such as the Hispanic "Exactamundo" network, a variation on "Telemundo" which even some of us gringos watch. (Talk about "violence"; Telemundo even had the gory sequel to "El Cartel" in the 7 p.m. time slot.) I'll admit that I was a bit puzzled by the scene where Mr. Trejo is in bed with Ms. Rodriguez and she cracks open an egg and puts it on the floor under the bed. Maybe the smell is a kind of aphrodisiac? Or maybe it's meant to invoke scenes like the one in Bunuel's "El Bruto" where the camera lingers on some meat cooking during a sex scene...
Opposing Force (1986)
One nice thing about watching free movies on Comcast On Demand....
It's like playing a video in that one can stop the running of it, or fast forward or reverse it. Since really the only reason to watch this is to see Lisa Eichhorn get abused in various ways, I was able to zip from one such sequence to the next one. If you're interested in the plot, which I guess I can't call a rip off of "GI Jane" since the latter came along about a decade later, but that's what it feels like: Ms Eichhorn (who apparently is best known for not playing the Shelley Long part in "Cheers") is "Casey," an air force officer who has volunteered for some super macho training course, apparently meant to remind us of the real life SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) undergone by various commando types. Naturally she's the only woman taking the course. After the commander of the base (like the Scott Wilson character in "GI Jane") kindly warns her that he can do nothing whatsoever to protect her as the only woman involved, she's off to the races. Eichhorn has a kind of nice sisterly persona to her, but I didn't detect any of the inner steeliness that a woman would need to join the military in the first place and then volunteer for a course like this. Casey pairs off with an avuncular middle-aged major played by the usually reliable Tom Skerritt who unfortunately seems to be "phoning in" his lines here, like most of the rest of the cast. In due course they get "captured" (not much instruction in "evasion" is offered) and then this movie comes to life somewhat with the arrival of the Anthony Zerbe character, who deserves a new paragraph break.
Mr Zerbe is a personal hero of mine, now 74 with over a hundred titles on IMDb to his credit, mostly on TV and almost inevitably as the bad guy (although he did get to be the wise old "councillor" in a couple of the "Matrix" flicks). I've been enjoying his unique brand of smarmy menace since the 1970's. His characters sneer at any kind of "back story" or "motivation," they're just out to do you as much dirt as they can without even letting you have the consolation of thinking you're getting a rise out of them. Here he's "Becker," in charge of the training course (fascistic military types need a German surname, of course) who manages to function with no oversight from the brass whatsoever and (like Colonel Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now," also filmed in the Philippines) has gone off the deep end with his subordinates playing right along; maybe there was something toxic in the water supply? Of course he has it in for Casey from the get go; his scenes with her are pure Grand Guignol and worth the wait, especially with that handy fast forwarding. He has her "waterboarded" at one point (I don't recall even hearing that term until the Bush administration), stripped, de-loused, locked in cages etc. and in the piece de resistance, has her bound and gagged on the floor so he can "have his way" with her; this latter is rather minimally filmed, but sometimes less actually is more. (By the way the male soldiers in the course are also abused in various ways, but let's 'fess up, we're not watching it to see them.) This finally pushes the major over the edge; he leads the others in revolt, lots of people get shot etc. The violence is handled curiously flatly; overall there's a cheap made for TV quality to the whole enterprise; even the Philippine jungle that was such an important component of those Pam Grier prison flicks seems pretty tame here. Beyond the actors already mentioned, Richard Roundtree as Zerbe's chief underling has some fun barking invective at the captives; he has even more acting credits than Zerbe, but who knows him as anybody but Shaft? So bottom line, if you have about half an hour to kill (and don't have to pay separately for it), there's enough watchable material in "Opposing Force" to occupy about that much of your time...
Detour (1945)
Like Mercedes McCambridge on steroids...
Of course I'm referring to the late Ann Savage as "Vera" (it's not clear in the movie that that's the character's real name), that fatale-est of femmes in "Detour." Narrated mostly in flashback by the (anti-) hero, a feckless lounge-piano player who decides to hitchhike across the country to Los Angeles to join his lounge-singer girlfriend, it illustrates in big neon lettering that in "film noir," "Murphy's law" rules: that which can go wrong, will...especially for people not particularly bright to begin with. Al, the musician, seems to have lucked out after thumbing a ride with a seemingly well-to-do gent who even buys him a meal; the affable driver reveals some scratches on his hand, courtesy of an earlier female passenger. (What ever happened to "foreshadowing" in the movies? I used to enjoy that.) Once Al takes the wheel so his new friend can sleep, though, the powers that be start to clamp down: it starts to rain; Al stops the car to put the convertible roof up; his benefactor promptly falls out of the car stone dead. Al makes some very quick and very wrong decisions, setting the stage for the eventual appearance of Vera. Never mind "The Hitcher": THIS is why you should never pick anyone up on the road. She stands there sizing him up like the later Jerry at the beginning of "The Zoo Story," then strides toward his car like a lioness on the hunt, gets in and stares stonily forward, allowing Al a few moments of pleasant anticipation before she snaps "What did you do with the body?" Of course she's the one who scratched up the dead fellow and of course knows Al is not he. Immediately taking over his life by threatening to rat him out to the cops, she directs him to a cheap motel room and emasculates him in every figurative way. Al is such a passive sap that it's hard to work up much sympathy for his ordeal (hard to believe that actor killed somebody several decades later). I won't reveal the outcome of their coerced partnership, but presumably you can guess that as Morgan Freeman memorably put it in "Seven," "This ain't gonna have a happy ending." The other reason to trade an hour and change of your life for watching "Detour" is to enjoy the Expressionist touches of immigrant director Edgar G. Ulmer, best known for "The Black Cat" (1935) which managed to cram necrophilia, devil worship and live flesh removal into a package that wouldn't even get rated "R" today--remember "the power of suggestion" in movies? I used to enjoy that. At one point Al imagines his girlfriend singing with the shadows of three musicians appearing on the wall behind her, then the whole image is reduced to the size of the rear view mirror of the car he's driving---and it doesn't seem "arty," just adds to the overall Lynchian dream-likeness. By the way, here's a "spoiler" but a good one--it DOESN'T all turn out to be a dream at the end! Or if that was the original ending, fortunately it got edited out... By the way, I hadn't known that trying to enter California in 1945 was like trying to get into East Berlin during the Cold War; didn't take long for us Yanks to get used to living in a police state, sorry to say...
Olga's House of Shame (1964)
From the "Something Boring" part of the "Something Weird" vault...
In the realm of "S-M"/"B & D" (i.e. women getting physically restrained and then usually abused in various ways) this can be viewed as a kind of "missing link" between the Irving Klaw/Bettie Page classics of the early to mid 1950's and the gems from House of Milan/TAO in the 1970's and 1980's (the latter still being regarded by yours truly as the exemplar of the genre). Apparently it's part three of a trilogy, but I've just seen the one (which probably won't change). As you probably already know, the alleged story concerns a crime boss named Olga who spends most of her time punishing various female subordinates for various off-screen infractions. It upholds the John Willie/Eneg tradition of the all-female universe, although we do briefly see a couple of quasi-gay male characters, one of whom wears a ship captain's hat and smokes a big cigar---overcompensation? Even by Z-grade budget standards, the faked nature of the abuse performed by Olga is pretty laughable; I especially enjoyed the pulled punches/slaps. (How hard would it have been for the director to have Olga put her hand next to the victim's face, yank it back suddenly, then show that particular footage in reverse?) The "electric chair" also stands out (or sits) in that regard. The reason I give it 2 stars instead of just 1 is due to a few aesthetically pleasing elements; the cinematography is gorgeous old-school black and white (not like today's occasional black and white efforts that look like crap); the outdoor shots of upstate New York are a nice relief from the largely bare-walled interior scenes (it's a nice touch having Olga's hide-out be an abandoned mine, although clearly the rooms seen aren't in a mine); there's a long (and blessedly dialog-free) sequence of one of the victims getting chased through the countryside that almost achieves a kind of pastoral quality, reminiscent of the silent era; most of the women are fairly easy on the eye, especially Olga (who by the way is clearly American despite her foreign-sounding name). Late in the going we see Olga let her hair down and start to undress as she gets ready for bed; unfortunately no auto-eroticism ensues (well it was still 1964 and all that). There's also a scene of some amateurish belly dancing tossed in, for fans of that particular activity. If you're a male who will be watching this for masturbatory purposes (I don't know who else would be watching it, or why else) I would suggest turning the volume all the way down and playing your own "stroke music" on your CD player or whatever you have, unless you're heavily into "Night on Bald Mountain" (and other old library tunes) and lots of self-satirizingly earnest narration a la Walter Winchell on "The Untouchables," e.g. "Olga was now about to achieve a new level of sadism," pronounced "sad-dism." (That line's probably not verbatim, but you get the idea.) Even on just a technical bondage level it's pretty lame (aside from the lady in the strait-jacket with the blindfold and ball gag); soap operas do a more convincing job of binding & gagging. Here's the "spoiler" part: eventually one of the victims becomes Olga's partner ---but do any nice lesbian antics ensue? No way, Jose--bottom line, it's a pretty bare-bones 70 minutes; even describing the "tortures" would make them sound more interesting than they actually play out, one reason I haven't done so...
Paranormal Activity (2007)
For those of you who recall feeling nauseous towards the end of "Blair Witch Project"....
....You'll probably feel the same at this movie; maybe not quite as bad since the camera doesn't jump around quite as much. It's a shame since I probably would have "gotten into" both movies more if I hadn't kept feeling like I might have to bolt for the bathroom at any moment. Well, as you've doubtless heard, like "Blair Witch" this is presented as "found footage" but as former President Bush eloquently put it, "Fool me twice... uh... we can't get fooled again." Also like "Blair Witch," there are moments when I thought "Uh, who's supposedly filming this?" but again, it's less obvious here. (If you really want to see a "film within a film" done exquisitely, see "Cannibal Holocaust" or "Man Bites Dog.") Basically it's yet another haunted house story, with a young couple in San Diego (again like "Blair Witch," the actors use their own names) noticing things going escalatedly bump in the night. Other than calling in a psychic who (in a nice twist on convention) proves completely useless, their response to the spooky things happening is to buy a camera to record everything while waiting for more spooky things to happen. Years ago when Eddie Murphy was a stand up comic he had a bit about "The Amityville Horror" and why it couldn't have been about black people, because if the latter had bought a beautiful home and then heard a voice in the walls growling "Get out," their response would have been "Too bad we can't stay!" Mr. Murphy's humor unfortunately has ruined every haunted house flick for me since then: "Why don't they just get the f--- out?" "Paranormal Activity" tries to get around this by suggesting that the ghost/demon/whatever is after the woman personally, so it wouldn't matter if they went somewhere else. It's hard to believe, though, that they wouldn't at least have tried a change of venue. But as someone else posted on IMDb, if I were 18 maybe that wouldn't have bothered me.
I do want to give Oren Peli credit for remembering classic movie wisdom about the power of suggestion. He also seems cinematically unique in recognizing that a steady unedited image (like in a dream) can be a lot more effective than so many movies nowadays that are so frenetically cut that it's impossible even to tell what's happening, let alone be scared by it. The most unnerving bits are of the couple asleep in their bedroom where every night around three a.m. a door will move by itself, a light will go on and off, then a sheet will move as if someone or something is under it. I wondered how they managed to get to sleep every night with all this happening (presumably they watched each video the next day). After the woman is literally dragged out of the bed one night, I thought "That's it, they're outta there" --but no. Sound effects are used very effectively (the demon's arrival is signified by a loud humming). Also the couple in question seems realistic in terms of getting on each other's nerves etc. There's definitely a lot here to like. But little things kept picking away at my "suspension of disbelief"; the Ouija board, the powder on the floor, the broken picture frame all seemed somewhat corny, maybe based mostly on budget restrictions. Some of the sequences didn't really "pay off" for me, particularly when the guy ventured into his trap-door attic (I have the same kind of attic and hate going up there even with no demons around) where I thought maybe something really juicy would be discovered; instead it's just a partially torn/burned photo from the woman's childhood (when she also saw spooky things, then their house burned down). It's impressive, I guess, that a demon would hang on to a souvenir that long (in his invisible demon lair somewhere?) and then plant it in their attic and wait for it to be found--but what if the guy hadn't ventured up there? I suppose the demon would have needed to retrieve the photo from the attic and put it under their pillow or something. Ultimately I can't get around the lack of more initiative from this young energetic couple in terms of response to the threat; as in umpteen previous movies (and presumably more in the future), they have to stay there so they can be victims. (In the recent "Pandorum," by contrast, the heroes had to face the menace because there was literally nowhere else to go.) But "A Plus" for effort from Mr. Peli, I look forward to his future work. No, I don't think he'll be "corrupted" by having more money available. I think too many film fans make too much of a "virtue" of the "necessity" of new directors working with limited funds. If they have the chops, more funds will only enhance their ability to show their chops off....
Schramm (1993)
If David Lynch had been a German porn director....
It wasn't until after my second viewing of this video that it occurred to me maybe this was meant to be a comedy of sorts, albeit very "black" (I haven't seen Mr. Buttgereit's other work). The title character, Lothar Schramm, falls off a ladder in his apartment while painting his wall and dies; a news article informs us he was the "lipstick murderer." (We never actually see him murder anyone except a couple of hapless missionaries who barge into his place bent on saving his soul; it turns out to be their blood on the wall that he's later painting.) Lothar's only contact with the "real world" is his job as a taxi driver (thanks, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, for establishing permanently that cab drivers are potential homicidal maniacs) and his somewhat strained relationship with a neighboring prostitute. (Instead of having a pimp for protection, she keeps Lothar and his cab standing by while entertaining clients in a mansion.) His is mostly a fantasy life and (as per Lynch's "Eraserhead") it's not always clear what's meant to be hallucination or maybe an "alternate universe." He wears a leg brace after waking up one morning to discover his leg cut off but still in the bed with him; he reacts in his usual comatose manner, poking at the stub of his thigh rather as Graham Chapman did with Eric Idle in Monty Python's "Meaning of Life," so we're inclined to think he's hallucinating, yet later it's the braced leg becoming detached again that seems to make him fall off the ladder. In some of the film's many "insert" shots (that may be his memory and/or fantasy) he's shown manipulating unconscious or dead women in various ways (applying lipstick to one, tying another's hands behind her back, spreading another's legs) but in "real life" he's reduced to masturbating with a plastic inflatable female torso (which, as a "good German," he dutifully rinses afterward). In what amounts to the film's only "dramatic sequence," he and the prostitute go to a restaurant and eat some very unappetizing-looking stuff (it's when Germans started getting away from good ol' bratwurst and beer that their downfall began) (when she holds up some money, it makes him think of her with a "john") then go back to his apartment where he spikes her drink, renders her unconscious, gradually undresses her while snapping pictures and indulges in the kind of "gutter talk" he'd never say to her face--yet she wakes up the next morning not having been murdered. In a kind of ironic epilogue after he dies, she goes without him to another tryst in the mansion and winds up bound and gagged in a chair, suggesting she may die not due to his presence but to his absence. I'm happy to report this is not another cinematic "whore with a heart of gold"; when Lothar tells her about a dream he had that apparently is significant to him, she "blows it off" with some inane remark.
"All right," you may be wondering, "what is it about all this that strikes you as comedic?" Well, the background music for one thing, especially the moody cello solos contrasting with the drab little lumpen-reality of Lothar's life. The best comedy (that I've seen) is about coping with frustrations of various kinds; Lothar's life is one long frustration. (Oddly, there's no sexual activity on screen or anything particularly erotic, which may be frustrating for some viewers.) (One gathers from Lothar's reveries he was once a runner or at least aspired towards it.) His deadpan reaction to everything that happens (or seems to) (even when some kind of toothed vagina-monster appears) conjures up Buster Keaton. There's an ostensibly pointless scene showing Lothar and the prostitute walking home past a guy sitting on the sidewalk, on whom the camera lingers until he produces a revolver and blows his brains out, then a big hand-silhouette appears on the screen several times, as though Mr. Buttgereit (then a young wise-ass under thirty) is daring us to take it "seriously." Finally, in a foggy post-mortem sequence that may be the afterlife or (the now nude) Lothar's fantasy of it, a young blond dude wearing a shawl appears and takes a vicious swipe at the camera--a kind of final celestial "Eff you"? ....I guess it's obligatory to respond to the famous scene of Lothar driving nails through his foreskin. As a non-gay circumcised man, I had never seen one of those, so there was some "novelty value" to it. I doubt it's the most "queaze-inducing" thing you'll ever see in a movie; it's hard to beat the shot of the guy pounding a piece of metal into his leg in "Tetsuo," or more recently the "eyeball scene" in "Hostel" ...
If I could hark back for a moment to the scene of the missionaries getting murdered: not to pick on this movie in particular, but this is about the umpteenth time in cinema where we have one killer and two (or more) victims and while the killer is busy with the first victim, the second victim just sits or stands there screaming or staring or crying, instead of---oh, I don't know---maybe running away, or maybe trying to help the first victim by attacking the killer, or something. We've all heard of the "fight or flight response" in situations of great stress? Well, what's more stressful than seeing someone getting murdered right in front or one? To borrow an example from real life, when Jack Kennedy got shot in Dallas, we all saw on the Zapruder film how Jackie tried to haul ass out of the car.... But then an awful lot of psycho killer flicks would've needed to be rewritten....
Riti, magie nere e segrete orge nel Trecento... (1973)
This director makes Ed Wood Jr look like Orson Welles....
Okay, I admit I may've nodded off a few times while watching this video; maybe that's when the "fun stuff" (i.e. nasty stuff) occurred. What I remember is lots of shots of people talking (faces often changing color at random) and a few shots of women standing around looking unhappy (presumably due to being stuck in this piece of dreck). Apparently it's about witches or Satan or something. The notorious "Manos: Hands of Fate" had more dramatic drive and continuity (and that using a camera that could only film 32 seconds at a time). Only two sequences made much of an impression on me: one with a bunch of angry villagers menacing a couple of suspected witches with sticks; these folks looked like "regular people," but as Fellini pointed out, "All Italians are actors," and these were great. The other sequence had a woman sitting down wearing some kind of headband watching four or five other women, each of whom was tied or chained to a post of some kind. Nothing in particular happened as I recall, just showed the sitting woman glancing from one standing woman to the next, but it was amusing imagining it being worked into some kind of warped game-show context. "Which of these contestants can remain standing the longest?? Will it be number one, number two..." The end of the movie had a woman falling to the ground in what I gathered was meant to be a humorous manner, based on the background music. Final verdict: "Well, there's 93 minutes of my life I'll never get back..." By the way, Jayne Mansfield's husband and Mariska Hargitay's father was also in it, but I also don't remember him doing much but standing around getting dubbed....
Moon (2009)
The best unadvertised movie I've seen since "Below"....
I had never heard of "Moon" before checking the Internet that weekend to see what was playing in my area. When I saw it was rated R and filmed in England, that was a "Go" for me, and boy am I not sorry (although I did have to drive about twenty miles to the nearest cinema that had it). The problem for me here is that I would have to give away major plot points to discuss this at all coherently, and for the viewer the discovery of these plot points for oneself is a big plus. So here's what I'll say just to try to get you to see it in the (probably limited) time it'll be in theaters. Essentially a cross between "Silent Running" and "Outland" with elements from "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Solaris" mixed in, it features Sam Rockwell (last seen by me a decade ago as a death-row inmate in "The Green Mile") and the voice of Kevin Spacey as a robot. Rockwell's character Sam Bell works alone (or does he?) at a lunar outpost producing helium for use on earth. (The company for whom he works has a slick ad proclaiming their dedication to humanity's needs, so we know they're doubtless up to no good.) He has a three-year contract nearing it's end. He has pictures and recorded messages from his family (suspiciously, no live communication from earth is available). He has the robot attending to his every need; in maybe the movie's best touch, the robot has a "face" consisting of those excruciatingly annoying "smiley face" "emoticon" symbols (the voice is Spacey's trademark monotone). As Bell starts winding down his tour preparing for his anticipated replacement, he starts "seeing things," and that's as far as I want to go plot-wise.
"Okay," you may be wondering, "exactly what should draw me to this?" A virtuoso performance by Rockwell, making one wonder why he hasn't been a "big star" already; superb special effects--you won't believe this was shot in a studio in only about a month; a sustained mood that becomes ever more ominous yet poignant as it goes along; plot twists that shouldn't strain your credulity nor insult your intelligence; besides, to repeat, it's rated R (although I'm not sure why except for a few F-words). Come on, folks, we need to let the movie moguls know there's an adult market out here, and not just for horror flicks or sex comedies! One more thing: if you think a robot can't "act," watch for when this one gently puts it's mechanical arm on Bell's shoulder; stunning how effective it is...
Of Darkness (2006)
Okay, so now what?......
Filmed in scenic Cherry Hill, New Jersey (best known as the stomping grounds of an obese criminal named Sylvan Scolnick), this comes off as a somewhat promising opening for a passable if derivative horror flick. A couple of teenagers are carrying a trunk containing the personal effects of their recently deceased grandfather; unsurprisingly it falls to the ground and pops open, revealing among other items a book whose cover rather blatantly resembles the one in "Evil Dead." In this short's best exchange, one brother asks the other "What did Grandpa do, anyway?" "Didn't Mom tell you?" the other replies, "he was a Satan worshiper." Hmmm, wonder if that was a union gig; was there a dental plan? "Well son, Dad used to say Satan worshipping really went downhill once they started hiring all these illegal immigrants..." That night the younger brother is sitting around with a bunch of his friends doing nothing in particular; inevitably one of them opens the book and looks through it, which (also a la "Evil Dead") seems to invite some invisible force to arrive and do them dirt. The only kid who survives takes the book to school the next day for Show and Tell. Just as one is thinking "Hey, a whole classroom full of kids in mortal danger, this could get interesting," it's over.
If you're wondering if it's worth investing about twenty minutes of your life in it: on the plus side, the special effects aren't bad given the presumably minuscule budget, especially a couple of shots of what looks like black smoke wafting into some light bulbs. The teenagers (for a change) are neither too charming nor too obnoxious nor too erudite nor too horny; really not too interesting, come to think of it. (It would have been fun to seem them playing some monster-based video game before they start getting massacred.) Some shots of spattered blood are very convincing. But having all the violence occur off camera seems a "short cut" used in a short film, whereas in a feature-length offering it would have whetted our appetite for what would be to come. The absence of some kind of valid "payoff" leaves one feeling somewhat had. It's unclear why "Fearnet" felt this warranted inclusion on their movie list. But if the director were to work it into something feature-length and get it rated R, I reckon I'd come back for more....
Spider (2007)
Gee whiz, didn't anybody else read "Charlotte's Web" as a kid?
I was just wondering why so many people seem to be afraid of spiders. What I most admire about them is their approach to life: set up shop somewhere and then just wait for something to happen along. As to their dietary regimen: okay, they eat bugs because bugs are available. Not too many pizzas come flying along, I would imagine.
Anyway, it almost takes longer to describe the plot of this short film than it does to watch it. "Jack" and "Jill" (hey, cute) are driving along in Australia (I still can't get used to seeing the steering wheel on the wrong side). She's mad at him for some reason. They stop at a gas station (run by guys from India, of course) where he buys her some presents. Back in the car, he feeds her some chocolates and just as she's starting to like him again, a rubber spider freaks her out. She pulls over, gets out, then hops backwards and is promptly hit by a mini-van. (It seems to be a trend in movies nowadays to depict what's within the screen as a kind of two-dimensional universe, at least in scenes like this, so the oncoming vehicle apparently arrives out of nowhere and can't be seen at a distance by the person about to get hit.) Paramedics then arrive; one of them prepares a hypodermic needle for Jill, sees the fake spider, also freaks out and our Jack winds up with the needle in his eyeball. "Oooh, I HATE when that happens!" "I know what you mean...." Like many people I guess, I'll watch pretty much anything if I know in advance it's only ten minutes long, and I didn't regard this as a waste of my ten minutes. Nice quick dose of sardonic humor from Down Under, what's not to like? As to what it's "for"? Hey, that's easy: it's for... about ten minutes.
Capadocia (2008)
A kind of Mexican female "Oz" ....
If you've seen or heard of the "telenovela" programs that appear on cable channels Telemundo or Univision, you probably know the name Argos, the producer of many of these shows (I'd have to say "Gitanas" remains my favorite). If the term "telenovela" signifies to you a kind of alternate universe where most of the characters are well to do, easy on the eye and spend most of their time talking and drinking--i.e., escapism--don't be put off from having a look at "Capadocia." Produced by Argos for HBO, it retains their trademark "production values" but also features grittiness galore. Like HBO's "Oz," it's visually seductive but may well rattle your sensibilities. If you're an Anglo who hates reading subtitles, though, you should probably pass on it.
It starts with a look at a seemingly tailor-made-for-telenovela Mexican family, with beautiful intelligent wife (Ana de la Reguera from "Gitanas"), handsome but not so intelligent husband and unbearably cute little kids. She's a qualified pharmacist (which enters into the plot around episode seven, the latest I've seen) but chose to be a full-time capital-M mom---can't you just feel your cardiac cockles heating up? But when she catches hubby at home doing the nasty with her best friend (in one of the show's sardonic little touches, it's her kid clamoring for a missing toy that sends her back home unexpectedly), a fracas ensues with her friend promptly falling fatally down the stairs. (Does anyone ever fall down the stairs and not die?) In short order she's in the hoosegow which is de facto run by a psycho inmate called "Bambi" who has colluded with some crooked politicians and guards to start a blood soaked riot, thus prompting a public outcry for a "new kind of prison" where inmates will work (and be economically exploited by the politicians). (There's a "lot going on" in this show, numerous subplots.) A human-rights crusader (Dolores Heredia, also from "Gitanas") runs the new facility (or thinks she does) and like the Terry Kinney character in "Oz," finds that there's a lot more to prison reform than just good intentions.
No TV show will work without characters who make you want to keep seeing what happens to them. "Capadocia" has plenty of these. The female inmates look not just like "real women" but women who have been kicked around a lot by life (often literally). There's no maudlin attempt to depict them as capital-V victims of circumstance; we're invited to draw our own conclusions. (In one scene a nun jailed for selling drugs to help feed sick kids piously intones that a fellow inmate is "doomed," which seems like the writers' sly dig at moral fastidiousness.) I'm very happy with the realistic depiction of women's needs for emotional connections, especially in this kind of situation. I'm not as happy with the depiction of almost all the male characters as jerks, but I guess I can't argue that "guys aren't like that." There are flashbacks and scenes of what I'm tempted to call (since it's Hispanic) "magical realism" with characters confronting specters from their past along the lines of "Solaris." (In one episode an inmate who's been forced to give up her new baby envisions him as a thuggish adult. This episode culminates in one of the most warpedly spectacular set-pieces I've seen on TV. Gives new meaning to "dropping in on" a concert.) It all fits together due to the care taken to concoct the overall hauntingly elegiac atmosphere. Mexicans excel at depicting both sadness and inevitability; since this is no telenovela, one suspects that (to borrow a line from "Seven") "...this ain't gonna have a happy ending..." or even a "real" ending at all, again as per "Oz."
Of courseI have a few quibbles: the subtitles can be hard to read; characters pop in and out such that it's sometimes had to follow "without a scorecard." Since the penal system is depicted as SO thoroughly brutal and corrupt, one wonders how "Bambi" gets her way by threatening to expose the collusion of the politicians or by invoking her "friends outside"; why can't they find a way to "shut her up for good," cover it up & use the myriads of cops/bodyguards we see to protect them from street hoodlums? The character of the "Colombiana" (apparently the actress is actually from Colombia), a former beauty queen coveted by males and females although I personally don't find her "all that," seems borrowed from a telenovela. She escapes from prison and from the kingpin character who's having his way with her, then wanders around town buying jewelry with his stolen money, blunders into a trap and finally implores the kingpin to take her back---yeah, okay, whatever...By the way, "even in the Third World" would a male inmate who's had a sex-change operation be put in a cell (or cell block) with knuckle-dragging macho goons? There's no "protective custody" capacity down there, even after the Heredia character intervenes for him? But bottom line, don't miss this pearl from south of the border---unsavory elements forming into a gem; available On Demand until 12/15/2008 for your convenience.
Re the name Capadocia: in the second episode there's a reference to "the city where the Amazon women lived," but since the episode titles have religious connections ("Genesis," "Exodus" etc.), it also seems likely that name was picked because the "Cappadocians" (a region of what is now Turkey) in the Bible were among the people who heard the Gospel in their own language after the resurrection of Jesus. Or maybe the writers just thought it rolled "trippingly on the tongue," as Shakespeare put it...
Rambo (2008)
The only "PC" here is "plenty convulsing"....
Maybe it's just the mood I've been in lately, being fed up with the human race or at least those to whom I have to talk, but I was absolutely ready for a movie like this. My only qualm was that it wouldn't be gory ENOUGH, too few bodies. I needn't have worried: "Rambo" hits the cinematic nail on the head and then some. And no, Sylvester Stallone does not look "over the hill." He looks about the way you'd expect a grizzled sixty-year-old killing machine to look who hasn't spent the last decade or so drinking beer on the sofa.
What Rambo has been doing lately, it seems, is hiding out in Thailand catching snakes and arrowing fish for a living. Stallone, who also co-wrote and directed, sets the tone early with some choice footage of atrocities committed by the Burmese military. (The real-life Burma--excuse me, Myanmar--is a perfect example of how a dictatorship can go on for years without being bothered by America: they simply have nothing we want. Keep Aung San Suu Kyi in house arrest forever? Shoot and club and tear-gas a few Buddhist monks and nuns in the streets? Never mind, we have other things to focus on, like colonizing oil-rich Iraq.) The world-weary Rambo gets a visit from some just-annoying-enough-without-being-caricatures Christian missionaries who want him to take them into hostile territory for humanitarian purposes. At first Rambo gruffly blows them off but then changes his mind after apparently taking a liking to the blonde female member of the group. Director Stallone wisely wastes no time on Hamlet-like indecision: one moment Rambo is frowning in the rain, the next they're en route up the river. When they encounter some "pirates," what ensues is pretty well predictable, but that's part of the pleasure of this kind of flick: the anticipation and then the fulfillment of it. "Like pornography?" you may say? Uh, yeah....So? If you don't like it, don't watch it. Those of us who like it, leave us alone.
After the plucky do-good-ers inevitably get captured, Rambo joins a motley crew of mercenaries to go rescue them. These "dogs of war" seem just a little too "civilized" except for one scar-faced Brit SAS guy who has some of the best lines. But I guess we need to distinguish the "good guys" from the "bad guys," the Burmese. The rescue raid on the encampment nicely inter-cuts the action with a set-piece involving some female captives forced into giving a dance performance for the troops that quickly devolves into a gang-shag. From here on just sit back and enjoy the carnage. (This is one of the few movies I've seen in a theater that made me regret I couldn't have a beer with me.) I really admire Stallone for going "balls to the walls" with the violence and the language, in a current atmosphere where on any given weekend there may be one R-rated film in my area, if that. It's as though he's saying "I've had a long career, I've made lots of money, now I'm going to do what I want; you don't like it, too bad." The sequence where Rambo cuts loose with a .50-caliber machine gun alone is worth the price of admission; anyone who's had the chance to fire one of those knows what a rush it is. Stallone even has Rambo "pull a Sonny Chiba" in one scene (if you've seen "Street Fighter," you know what I mean). "Rambo" looks great, too; Stallone has learned well what Spielberg pioneered in "Saving Private Ryan." I even forgive him the occasional "arty" touch, like having flames reflected in the villain's sunglasses.
So, do I have any quibbles? Not really--I got what I paid for, and I'll probably see it again next weekend and enjoy it just as much or more. Sure, it would've been fun if Stallone had tossed in a reference to Blackwater USA, and the ending with Rambo walking back to his father's ranch in Arizona seems an anti-climax, but if this does well at the box office, why not leave open the possibility of another one? I admit that when the few remaining "leading men" in cinema who are older than I am show they can still kick some ass, I'll come to see 'm do it so long as it has an R rating---sorry, Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones again (I'll be shocked if that's not rated PG-13)....For those who crave sex with their violence: sorry, it only gets hinted at, which again I'd expected.... Possible favorite moment: when the most egregiously pious of the missionaries (who earlier had chided Rambo for killing the pirates even though it kept the blonde from getting raped) reverts to visceral mode and whacks somebody to death in the heat of battle. "There are no atheists in foxholes," I've heard, but I doubt there are many volunteer martyrs either...
Bug (2006)
Is this the "neo-grindhouse" type of movie?
Roy Orbison late in his life recorded a tune with the lyrics "Anything you want, you got it; anything you need, you got it; anything at all
." This came to mind as I was watching the new one from that veteran of "arty" schlock, William Friedkin. It amounts to a two-character stage play, only slightly "opened up" for cinema. Ashley Judd plays Agnes, a barmaid who's been "self-medicating" since the disappearance of her young son about a decade previously. Michael Shannon plays Peter, a drifter who's introduced to Agnes by the latter's apparently only friend, a gorgeous lesbian called R.C. (Ever notice that lesbians in real life never seem quite as cute as those in the movies?) Most of the rest of the movie is about the two of them going crazy together because Agnes will do literally anything to hang on to him. Warning for horror fans: despite the cleverly edited trailer, there are no actual bugs here (that we can see, anyway) (except in a few hallucinatory inserts) and very little gore (one scene will remind you of Nick Nolte performing some home dentistry in "Affliction"). This is more like Friedkin channeling David Lynch and Harold Pinter.
Judd is the chief reason to see this; she's so keenly on the mark (at least until the script asks her to jump off a cliff; more on this below) that after a while I was wishing I could preserve this character for a better flick. Her Agnes has a convincingly worn-around-the-edges look. She reminds me of some women I've known working in factories and whatnot, maybe not the highest IQ but they have "street smarts" and are used to fending for themselves in life, often with minimal assistance (if not abuse) from the husband/boyfriend/significant other(s). Agnes' own "ball and chain" is an ex-con named Jerry who re-appears in her life out of the blue after possibly making a series of prank phone calls to her (exactly who made the calls and why is one of the items never spelled out for us). Harry Connick Jr. is perfect as Jerry with his laid-back menace and tattooed musculature. The scenes with the two of them ring so true that they make the later histrionics with Peter (whom we can spot as a nut before he even opens his mouth; it's always "the quiet guys") seem all the more outlandish in comparison.
Here's why this ultimately doesn't work for me: Judd from "Ruby in Paradise" onwards has always emanated a kind of inner strength and core of common sense, a residual humanity that is what has always attracted me to her. Even in those potboilers from the 1990's and early 2000's she was able to transcend her often two-dimensional character and make you believe the person has existed beyond the confines of the screen. In "Bug" she is asked to betray this quality; while she's a good actress she's not quite good enough to pull this off. It doesn't help that her transition into shared lunacy is handled so jarringly; one moment she's questioning the existence of bugs that only Peter can see, the next she's sharing his hallucination of helicopters shaking the building. We know Agnes is one of the "walking wounded" but there are many such people; they mostly don't "lose it," which is why it's news when one of them does (e.g. that female astronaut). We would have needed to see right from the get-go that Agnes has a few screws loose; if Judd was showing us that, I for one missed it. (If she's as DESPERATELY LONELY as we're asked to believe, why not just let Jerry back into her life? Or why doesn't she just go find a guy, or gal? Oklahoma's not the surface of the moon, believe it or not.) From the moment we see all the fly paper hanging from the ceiling, "Bug" gets ever less buyable (and more derivative). With Peter and Agnes dissolving into a mish-mash of shrieks, screams and self-mutilation, I kept wondering where were the cops with a couple of strait-jackets. Judd's performance comes to remind one of Julianne Moore in "Freedomland": the more she hysterically emotes, the more conscious we are of watching an actress as opposed to a character; "suspension of disbelief" goes out the window. The movie's early naturalistic tone also makes the later plot holes more gaping: Why do we never see Agnes' neighbors getting alarmed (is she the only one living there?); when Jerry arrives with the alleged doctor, where is he biding his time until knocking on the door again after the murder; who ordered the pizza? If it's all just taking place inside someone's head like "Videodrome" or "Identity," what are we left with? I think Friedkin wants to have his cake and eat it too: have us accept it both as externally viewed drama and inner phantasmagoria, but as the late Dwight Macdonald pointed out, "If all the cards are wild, you can't play poker
.."
To be fair, there are some nice creepy moments and foreboding atmosphere in the best "X-Files" tradition, in fact this probably would have worked better on the small screen; I wouldn't be surprised to see it available on demand on "FEARnet" in the near future. (Sometimes not having had to pay to see a film frees it up to be more likable
.sometimes not.) The handful of actors all rise to the occasion. I liked the suggestion that Peter was acquainted with the late Timothy McVeigh (I won't remind you who that is; it's a shame if I need to) but such references (government conspiracies etc.) would have been more compelling if we'd heard them during Peter's earlier more lucid stage. Still it's nice to see Friedkin this late in the game working so low-budget and "balls to the walls"; I'd rather go see this again than the umpteenth "Spiderman" or "Shrek" or "Pirates" or whatever other pre-fab corporate crap comes down the pike
..
Grindhouse (2007)
Hats off to these two hombres.....
I don't know what more Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Tarantino could have done to recreate the sleazy glory of 1970's urban schlock cinema a.k.a. "grindhouse," except maybe hire some black people to sit in the theater and shout at the screen, e.g. "Don't go in there, y'all!" or "That m-----f----r crazy!" As it is, they tell two original trashy stories and surround these with "prevues of coming attractions" and clips of other (fake) Z-grade movies courtesy of the likes of Rob Zombie and Eli Roth (I for one would rather go see Roth's "Thanksgiving" than the real "Hostel Part 2"). On top of that they season their offering with realistic-looking scratches, jumps, burns, re-takes, "missing frames/reels" etc. It would almost seem greedy to expect that "Planet Terror" and "Deathproof" would be enjoyable to watch just per se. I'm happy to report that they are----for the most part.
Mr. Rodriguez' zombie segment will probably be the more satisfying for the adrenaline junkies who I'm sure were already hooked by the trailer featuring Rose McGowan's machine-gun peg-leg. (Those scenes alone should make this a cult classic.) There's also an interesting reference to the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and the side effects of various chemical weapons used in Iraq; sometimes horror flicks are the easiest way to make political statements about our current wars---see also the recent "The Hills Have Eyes 2." But I hope audiences don't miss some really fine acting by Ms. McGowan and Freddy Rodriguez as the obligatory hero-with-a-checkered-past. They more than meet the big bravura needs of their roles but also inject some nice nuance into it. Naveen Andrews from TV's "Lost" is weirdly fun as the requisite mad scientist with British accent who dresses like a gay Chicano biker. Wait 'til you see what's in his collection jar; that and a scene with Tarantino as a lecherous soldier rival Hong Kong in the "warped use of genitalia" department.
Mr. Tarantino's following road-warrior segment seems almost an anti-climax in comparison, especially during long stretches of that famous "dwelling on trivia" dialog of his, some of which doesn't play out as interestingly as it must have sounded in his head. (Tarantino makes good use of David Mamet's tactic of repetition but unfortunately lacks Mr. Mamet's preciseness and concision.) There's also a little too much overt tribute to genre gems like "Vanishing Point"; that's what interviews are for; the movie itself should "show" rather than "tell." But it builds to two swell pay-offs, one a head-on car collision that's the best I've ever seen in cinema (tell me that image of the severed leg on the road won't stick with you a long time), then an extended double car chase that rivals even "Bullitt" (the granddaddy of them all). Kurt Russell, possibly the most underrated actor in America (like the late Robert Mitchum, he suffers critically from "making it look easy") is terrific as the affable psycho who's found a unique way of "connecting with" women. I'd sure like to see more of that New Zealand stunt chick. Minor quibbles: I didn't really need to see Tarantino again as a bar owner after seeing him as the lecherous soldier---as an actor, he's, um, a great director---also his fondness of the term "nigger" seems a little old by now, especially since he now plays it safe by only having black actors use it. We're a long way down the road from "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction" when dropping the "N-word" was just "too cool for school...."
But overall this was the best three hours I've spent in a cinema lately, and I'll probably head back while it's playing (knowing now when to head for the restroom). Whatever Rodriguez and Tarantino want to do with the rest of their careers, they can always "come home" to this if they want to; good work by people who care about what they do is worth seeing, "genre" be damned. As Little Richard once put it: "It ain't what you do, it's the way how you do it
" PS The radio host Anthony Cumia darkly warned that "If that stupid Ice Cube movie out grosses 'Grindhouse,' I'll go on a shooting spree." Now I certainly don't espouse violence, but
. Personal favorite bit: old special effects wizard Tom Savini trying to slip the ring back onto this severed finger, then settling for the next finger
.
My vote for best cameo appearance goes to Jonathan Loughran, the guy in "Kill Bill" paying to rape the comatose Uma Thurman. Tarantino knows that our memory of that horrific scene provides the juice needed for the sequence with "Jasper" verbally jousting with "the girls" seeking to take his prized white hot rod out for a spin. Maybe the single most effective shot in "Grindhouse" is of Mary Elizabeth Winstead in her cheerleader costume staring up at the lasciviously chuckling Jasper who's been led to believe she's ready to perform certain sexual favors for him. Really, was it nice of her alleged friends to throw her to "the wolf" like that?