Archive for October, 2006

Marie Antoinette and The Prestige

Tuesday, October 24th, 2006

THE PRESTIGE and MARIE ANTOINETTE double feature

This week was one of those ones that start coming up toward the end of the year where there’s just too many movies you want to see all coming out on the same day. And me being an obsessive motherfucker I try to tackle them all at once. We got three reliable directors all hitting the same day here. #1 priority for me was Clint’s FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS, but I already saw that at an early screening. So that left Chris Nolan’s THE PRESTIGE and Sofia Coppola’s MARIE ANTOINETTE. So I watched them both in a row, liked both, also fell asleep during both. (You gotta go to sleep the night before one of these double-headers, it turns out.)

To be honest I wasn’t even gonna review MARIE because, let’s face it, I am not a girl. This is not only a girl movie but a long, arty, low on plot girl movie. I think some of you cinemasters are gonna love the shit out of it but alot of my readers would probaly never be able to sit through it. Still, I’ve read so many reviews that clearly didn’t fucking GET this movie that I decided I had to comment.

Ms. Coppola’s take on Marie Antoinette is not your typical stuffy historical drama costume movie. She tries to emphasize that Marie was a teenager (14) when she became French royalty, so this movie is about giggly teen girls hanging out like they’re having a slumber party or something. If you saw the trailer you know that some (but not all) of the movie is set to ’80s synthesizer pop music that white people used to listen to due to the brain damage caused by the popularity of cocaine at the time. Also, since the movie is in English anyway and nobody’s speaking French, she decided to dump the artificiality of everybody faking French accents, so you got Rip Torn and people in there talking how they normally would. But wearing wigs. Other than that though they’re trying to be fairly accurate to the times and like most of these types of pictures they get some beautiful imagery that seems inspired by old paintings. (more…)

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Running Scared (2006)

Tuesday, October 24th, 2006

I really don’t have a problem with America’s team captain, Paul Walker. Alot of people seem to hate this guy, but I think he’s pretty good at playing these straight laced hunky characters in movies like THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS and EIGHT BELOW. But I gotta admit, when I saw the trailer for RUNNING SCARED I thought it looked like the worst shit ever. Paul Walker doing an accent, playing a mob guy? I wasn’t buying it. It didn’t help that the trailer ended with mobsters trying to hit a glowing hockey puck into Walker’s mouth. Like it’s not enough to hit the guy in the face, they gotta make it visually appealing and EXTREME.

But there are two things that the trailer didn’t get across. One, that Paul Walker actually does a pretty good job playing this type of character. I was hoping that Clint’s FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS would be the movie that shows Walker is a little better than people thought, but his part in that one turned out to be minimal. Instead it was this one that makes you think huh, maybe he could play other types of characters. Hard to say. The second thing the trailer didn’t get across about RUNNING SCARED is that it’s a crazed, ridiculous movie where the day-glo hockey rink fits right in. And I guess the third thing is that Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines are not in this one, it’s Paul Walker.

Walker’s character has the job of disposing of murder weapons for the mob. But instead of actually disposing of them, he keeps them in baggies in a secret compartment in his basement. I don’t think the beginning of the movie actually offers a reason why he would do this, but the narration in the trailer tells you that it’s his insurance in case they try to screw him over some day.

He has a wife and a son, and the son likes to play with the Russian kid who lives next door. The Russian kid is played by Creepy Boy, that kid from every movie that has come out in the last 2 years. For example he was in X-MEN 3 as the kid who takes away X-Man powers, and he was in some movie where he stares eerily at Nicole Kidman and freaks everybody out. (more…)

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Phenomena

Tuesday, October 24th, 2006

If you know your horror you know about Dario Argento, the crazy Italian fuck responsible for SUSPIRIA, DEEP RED and Asia Argento. Even if you don’t dig his movies or daughter you have to give him credit for putting together Goblin, the band who made the distinctive scores for alot of his movies as well as DAWN OF THE DEAD and that movie where Art Carney refuses to leave before Mount St. Helens erupts. I also really like INFERNO, the movie I brought up the most when trying to convince people that SILENT HILL was a surreal nightmare world and not just a moronic video game adaptation with stiff dialogue that made no sense like they thought it was.

I thought I had seen most of the big ones by Argento and I had kind of avoided this one PHENOMENA that didn’t have as good of a reputation. Maybe part of the problem is that it’s better known in the U.S. as CREEPERS, the version where they cut out about a half an hour. But at least in its uncut form I really dug this strange fucking movie about an American girl (Academy Award winner Jennifer Connelly) sent to a Swiss boarding school during a murder spree.

So far it sounds simple and normal, but let me explain the good parts. One of the people investigating the murders is the famous entomologist John McGregor (Donald Pleasance – Dr. Loomis in HALLOWEEN, the president in ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK). When they find, say, a severed head in a river, he is able to tell by the life cycles of maggots how long it has been chopped off. He’s also quadriplegic so he has a chimpanzee for an assistant. And maybe it’s just me, but I think the chimp is a suspect. In the opening murder you never see the killer at all, you just see the point of the scissors he or she uses as a murder weapon. And you see the chains that hold the killer to a basement wall before it breaks loose, and these are some pretty small chains. A monkey might be able to break them. Then the first thing you see in the very next scene is the chimp running outside during a stormy night at the professor’s bug palace. (more…)

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The Marine

Wednesday, October 18th, 2006

The second ever film under the prestigious WWE Films banner is sort of a half-assed COMMANDO rip-off starring John Cena. Yeah, I never heard of him either but apparently he is or was the heavyweight champion, he has a rap album and his championship belt has a rotating thing on it like those asinine spinning rims that rappers use to dispose of some of their disposable income. But he doesn’t do anything that cool/asinine in this movie. Basically, imagine a bland clean cut muscleman with no personality, and the PG-13 action movie that would be built around him.

The movie starts out with promising ridiculousness. First you got the WWE Films logo, which is still misleadingly classy with an orchestra tuning up, and still does not even explode or bleed or anything that you would expect it to do. But it does rotate into the opening titles which involve Mr. Cena in full marine uniform doing a salute while standing on top of a giant flag. So far so good. Then it goes to the prologue where John Cena (as the fictional character John Triton) is in Iraq, sneaking around an “al Quaeda compound, 100 miles outside of Tikrit.” (Bush hasn’t convinced the world that there’s a connection between 9-11 and the Iraq fiasco, but maybe he’s convinced the WWE.)

Of course, John has to save some marines from some terrorists, and they tell him over the walkie talkie to wait but he says “There’s no time!” Alot of movies called THE MARINE would try to have, like, some sort of military advisor or something, but for this one it looks like they tried to make sure nobody working on the movie even knew that the military was a real existing institution, they thought it was some kind of heroic myth like jedis or herculeses. So this Triton guy actually runs through one wall of the barn/compound the way football teams run through those paper banners. He fires off a few hundred bullets, then things start blowing up and catching on fire and he does a bunch of fancy kicks and punches to save the hostages. I think I counted five explosions just in the brief scene of them leaving the compound. (more…)

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Last Night at the Alamo

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

During my recent two-week TEXAS CHAINSAW binge I learned of the existence of this movie I’d never heard before. It was written by Kim Henkel (co-writer of the original TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, writer/director of part 4). It also stars Lou Perryman two years before he played the lovable loogie-spittin’ sidekick L.G. in TCSM part 2. (He was also assistant cameraman on part 1.)

But this is not a horror movie by any stretch of the imagination, in fact if I was gonna compare it to any movie it would have to be CLERKS. Because this is a low budget, 16mm black and white slice of life movie about some regular people hanging out in a bar called The Alamo. It’s the last night before it’s gonna get demolished, and almost the entire movie takes place inside, in the parking lot, or at a house right across the street. (The opening scene is the farthest you get from the Alamo, it shows one of the characters driving to The Alamo in real time.)

But these characters are regular working class Texans circa 1984, so instead of STAR WARS they complain about their wives and their bosses. (more…)

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10/11/06

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

The Chainsaw binge is finally over, so here’s a little known independent drama called LAST NIGHT AT THE ALAMO. It has nothing to do with Texas Chain Saw other than being another independent movie from Texas. And also because TCSM co-writer Kim Henkel wrote it. And also because it stars Chainsaw 2’s Lou Perryman. Ah, shit. Well, try this then. I also got an early review of Clint’s new one FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS. 100% chainsaw free.

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Flags of Our Fathers

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

Well, shit. I feel like an asshole giving a room-temperature review to my man Clint Eastwood’s long awaited WWII drama. Because Clint is the best. If there was some reason why the entire human race had to be destroyed except for one movie star, and I had to choose who it would be, I would choose Clint. I don’t care if he’s old, he’s the number one Badass Laureate of all time. He’d make a damn good last representative of our species, and he could still take on the vampires pretty good I think. But despite (and partly because of) my great respect for the man, I gotta be honest: I don’t consider this a great movie.

I like the idea behind the movie, which is not the usual “war is hell” but instead “war is complicated.” Starting with the dialogue at the very beginning it tells you that nothing is black and white, people aren’t just heroes or villains and that they have to make it seem that way to sell a war. Some of the movie is about the battle of Iwo Jima and some is about three of the guys who hoisted the flag in the famous photo going on a tour to be introduced as “the heroes of Iwo Jima” to promote war bonds. But these guys have a hard time with it not only because putting up the flag wasn’t the heroic part of what they did, but because they actually put up the second flag. The first one was a spontaneous gesture, the second one was a replacement flag so the marines could keep the historic first flag. The second flag happened to be photographed really well though, so they got all the attention. Also their flag was bigger.

There are complications because some of the flag-hoisters have died, and there’s confusion between the two flag-raisings, and some of the wrong parents have been notified that their dead sons are in the famous photo. To me the most effective scene in the movie is when Ryan Phillippe, who actually is in the photo, has to lie to a woman to convince her that her son Paul Walker, I think) is in there too. It’s a hell of a situation they’re in because they think it’s all a bunch of horse shit but then they realize how much it means to these parents to know, or to think, that their son is in the photo. And they also want to sell war bonds because if somebody doesn’t raise a whole hell of alot of money they won’t have the equipment to win the war. (I don’t think Eastwood intends the movie as commentary on the Iraq war, but you can’t help but notice the contrast between this struggle to sell war bonds and the complete lack of direct sacrifice any of us make for the billions that are being poured into Iraq.) (more…)

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10/10/06

Tuesday, October 10th, 2006

Okay, now I reviewed the new DVD of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2, which I’m as obsessed with as the original. But don’t worry, that’s it. That ends my two weeks of Chainsaw writing. In two weeks I’ve written up every Chainsaw movie other than the remake, and I already said my piece on that. So don’t worry, it’s time to move on to something completely different. Starting with SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE, which is about a killer with a power drill. Not a chainsaw. Chainsaws cut in a line, drills do a hole through something. It’s a completely different tool.

(seriously, non-horror reviews coming soon.)

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The Slumber Party Massacre

Tuesday, October 10th, 2006

This is a slasher movie about girls at a slumber party, and a dude with a portable drill. There is no pillow fights or nothing but otherwise it pretty much plays out how you would imagine.

Almost anywhere you read about this movie they say it’s a feminist slasher movie. I can see a touch here or there that supports that theory, but I am positive that pretty much every one of these people would be saying it was misogynistic if it was directed by a man. In most respects it’s exactly like every other slasher movie of the time, including showing lots of gratuitous female (and not male) nudity. When the girl gets up in the morning you see her take her shirt off to change into a dress. When she goes to school you see lots of nudity in the locker room, including a really funny shot (I’m not sure if it’s intentionally funny or not) that pans down and just focuses on a girl’s ass for a while before panning back up to where it started. Then during the slumber party they all take their clothes off to change into their night clothes and for the most part don’t wear pants for the rest of the movie. The other characters, who don’t get naked, wear those tight running shorts that were popular at the time.

Plus, there’s a scene where the girls are in the school gym playing basketball, and they’re fucking terrible. They can barely dribble, let alone shoot. I thought it was okay, they’re just high school kids in gym class. But then they mention that it’s not gym class, it’s the actual varsity team. You call that feminism? I’ve seen the Seattle Storm before, I know girls can play basketball.

The alleged feminism in the movie is pretty minor. There is a shot (also used for the movie poster) that goes from between the killer’s legs with the drill pointing down to look like a dick, but that’s not all that different from Jason’s machete or Leatherface’s chainsaw (especially in part 2 where in one scene it’s almost more of a prosthetic penis than a phallic symbol). At the end one of the girls hacks the drill bit off with a machete and this makes the killer helpless, so the phallic thing is obviously not a coincidence. (more…)

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

Tuesday, October 10th, 2006

Boys, boys, boys–

These last couple weeks have been tough on my mental facilities. I reviewed that great new “ULTIMATE” edition of the original TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, I also revisited parts 3 and 4 in that original series, then on Thursday I reviewed the new prequel to the remake. So by that point I’d studied and written about pretty much every angle to the whole Texas Chainsaw deal. You’d think I’d be done with it by now, but there is one final chapter: the one spinoff of the original movie that achieves its own level of True Greatness. I am talking about Tobe Hooper’s 1986 sequel, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2. It’s been available on DVD for a couple years in a bare bones edition (get it, that is a pun because of all the skeletons they have) but Tuesday it comes out in a much deserved special edition with new commentaries, featurettes and deleted scenes.

THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE is my all time best buds forever horror movie, so it’s lucky for me that part 2 happens to be one of my all time favorite sequels. Mostly hated in its time, it has developed a little bit better of a reputation over the years and if it’s not at bona fide classic status by now I think it will be after this DVD gets around and more people give it serious consideration. Like Mr. Romero’s DEAD pictures Mr. Hooper here made a chainsaw movie to represent the time it was made, an excessive, over-the-top ’80s take on TCSM. While it’s about as unrelenting and in-your-face-crazy as slasher movies come, it’s also way more of a comedy than the original, so I can understand why some people didn’t cotton to it right away. But I think most horror fans who gave it half a chance would fall in love with its deranged brilliance.

A warning: it starts out iffy. The first thing you hear after the credits is the dated 1980s drum machine of a Timbuk3 song. And the first scene is about some obnoxious high school yuppie football fans driving down a Texas highway firing guns and calling the K-OKLA request line, announcing themselves as “Buzz” and “Rick the Prick.” Like in many bad horror movies (especially of that era) these are characters that you will probaly want to see get killed. If so you will get your wish when the two assholes get stalked by an American flag-decked pickup truck that they played chicken with earlier. Leatherface makes his entrance hidden behind “Nubbins,” the new name for the hitchhiker’s rotted corpse, which he uses as a puppet while sawing their Mercedes. (more…)

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