Archive for March, 2008

3/28/08

Friday, March 28th, 2008

Sorry for the delay but now I’m ready to continue with my Krueger vs. Kersey series. So today we have DEATH WISH 4: THE CRACKDOWN and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER (which by the way came out less than a year apart in 1987 and 1988).

By the way I just got my proof copy of the Titan Books edition of SEAGALOGY and it’s looking real good. One thing they did for me that I was too amateurish to know how to do in my version was to put the chapter subject on the bottom of each page, so for example if you want to flip to the part about SONGS FROM THE CRYSTAL CAVE real quick it’s easier to do. Also I expected they would take out some of my goofy touches like in the copyright information where I said you could not reproduce it without written permission from the publisher or from an actor such as Michael Caine or Eric Bogosian who played a major villain in a Seagal film. They left that in! So I am real happy with Titan Books, they are on my cool list.

Not that I necessarily expect you all to re-buy it if you have the super rare lulu version, but I personally was wondering if I had sold out and it turns out that I did not. So I thought I would share that. (they call this blogging now, that’s what I’m doing here I believe.)

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Death Wish 4: The Crackdown

Friday, March 28th, 2008

For part 3 Michael Winner stripped DEATH WISH down to its crudest elements. There was nowhere further to go within. So for THE CRACKDOWN new director J. Lee Thompson (GUNS OF THE NAVARONE, the last two PLANET OF THE APES movies, THE EVIL THAT MEN DO, tons of other shit) dresses it back up again. You know this right away from the opening which contains suspense, mood, atmosphere, build, surprise, and symbolism, all forbidden by part 3’s strict DOGME style rules.

Kersey is an architect again, and has a family again – another reporter girlfriend with a teenage daughter he regards as his own daughter (we know this because he says “I regard her as if she were my own daughter.”) Oh jesus, not more gang rape, right?

Well, we’re in luck. Kersey’s regarded-as-daughter dies not from an attack but from a cocaine overdose. Kersey follows her boyfriend to the video arcade/roller rink, sees him confront and get stabbed by their dealer, ends up shooting him so his body falls and gets shocked by the top of the bumper car rink.

The admirable thing about this sequel is that the only punk or “creep” in the whole movie is the guy who gives the cops a description of Kersey’s car after the arcade/roller rink shooting. Kersey goes after the organized crime figures who get rich off of the drugs that killed that girl. So finally the class conflict of DEATH WISH is reversed. It’s not this well-to-do architect going after poor people who dress funny. It’s Kersey vs. rich guys who wear suits and live in mansions or penthouse condos. And to enter their world he pretends to be the help, sneaking into a party as part of the catering staff, or pretending to be a worker at the drug front fishpacking plant. (more…)

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master

Friday, March 28th, 2008

From the Academy Award winning writer of L.A. CONFIDENTIAL and MYSTIC RIVER, and the director of DEEP BLUE SEA, and with a story by the guy who did the novelization of E.T., comes a new old name in terror…

or, to put it another way, from the writer of PAYBACK and the director of DIE HARD 2 comes a part 4 that’s not as awesome as that sounds. If you are a Freddy devotee like myself you enjoy watching this crap every once in a while, but it’s the first one in the series that doesn’t advance the story at all.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s kind of nice that they continue with some of the characters from part 3, you don’t see that in too many slasher sequels. This one starts out with Kincaid, Joey and Kristen (now played by Tuesday Knight instead of Patricia Arquette and seeming to have a completely different personality) out of the institution and in a regular high school like the kids in parts 1-2. (I wonder if they all go to the same school Nancy did? I’m not sure.)

Eventually these part 3 survivors all get picked off, as does Kristen’s boyfriend, a karate practicioner who battles invisible Freddy in a dojo and loses due to a dishonorable flying glove move. (Also, I’m not sure because he’s invisible but I bet Freddy didn’t even bow after he defeated him.) But Kristen’s boyfriend’s sister Alice happened to be pulled into Kristen’s dream when she died so Kristen’s dream power of pulling people into her dreams is transferred to her. You know how those dream powers work. It seems that Freddy has killed all of the kids of the people who burned him alive so now he needs Alice to pull her friends into dreams in order for him to get them. (more…)

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The Mist

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

THE MIST is called THE MIST because it’s a cool and refreshing vapor of soothing horror quality in a sea of crappy bombast. Also because it’s about a mysterious mist that surrounds a small town and when they go into it there’s monsters. The small town is Castle Rock, Maine and you know what that means: based on a Stephen King story. The weird thing is the hero, Thomas Punisher Jane, is not an alcoholic writer, he is a guy who paints movie posters exactly like Drew Struzan (he even painted the poster for THE THING, just like Drew Struzan did, and came up with the same poster). So this is real new territory for Stephen King.
After a storm wrecks Tom Jane’s painting, his window, his boathouse, and his asshole neighbor’s Mercedes he takes his son and the neighbor (the great Andre Braugher of TV’s HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET) to the Food House grocery store. The place is chaotic with everybody stocking up in case of more storm and you can imagine how much worse it gets when The Mist traps everybody inside. By the way, even though this is Stephen King the grocery store is not possessed, not even the mist is possessed, it’s just mist that happens to surround monsters, which may or may not be possessed. I’m not really sure if monsters can be possessed or not, I have not considered this before.

There’s kind of a microcosm thing going on here. The story shows how people turn on each other due to fear. At first they band together and they trust the authority of the guys in uniform (strangely I’m talking about the guys with the Food House aprons, not the three uniformed soldiers who happen to be there). But as things get crazier tensions rise, they argue, they split into teams. Working class don’t trust college boys. Locals don’t trust out of town vacationers. Out-of-towners think locals are talking shit about them. The biggest split is religious when Marcia Gay Harden believes these are the end times, starts preaching, develops a flock. (more…)

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Doomsday

Monday, March 24th, 2008

and the end of the world of action and horror movies

Well, shit. I been looking forward to this one for a long time. ROAD WARRIOR + ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK from the director of THE DESCENT? Yes please. I thought. And in the week since it came out I’ve gotten alot of emails about it and talked to several people who saw it and only 2 of them said they didn’t like it. Most weren’t willing to call it “good” but they did seem pretty delighted by it.

So hopefully most of you who see it will like it too, but Jee and Zuss. To me DOOMSDAY seems like my own personal doomsday, the end of the line for my two favorite genres.

DOOMSDAY is not a horror movie, but after DOG SOLDIERS and THE DESCENT Neil Marshall is a bigshot in the “Splat Pack” or whatever stupid name you want to call what passes for the best horror directors these days. I’ve had alot of discussions with other horror watchers about this crop and what worries me is that so much of modern horror – including the stuff I like – is looking backwards. You got Rob Zombie with his various ’70s homages, Eli Roth with his “grindhouse” and Italian horror and Takashi Miike references. I think Aja shows some promise, but his best movie is a faithful Wes Craven remake. Everybody complains about the avalanche of remakes but even among the well-reviewed movies you got some stuff that’s 100% tribute and references (HATCHET, BEHIND THE MASK). I get it, I like those old movies these directors like too. Let’s all high five each other and quote a couple lines but then let’s make some new movies, shall we? Where is the George Romero or the John Carpenter of today? It can’t be the fucking SAW guys, can it? (more…)

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3/19/08

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

SOUTHLAND TALES came out on DVD this week and if a motherfucker may be so bold I’d like to fire off some warning flares to keep you away from it. Don’t worry, Bruce Willis isn’t in it, I put his icon up because it’s his birthday.

I also got a review of SEXY BEAST for you.

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Southland Tales

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

Poor The Rock. With his outsized charisma, cartoonish build and air of sincerity I’m still convinced he has the potential to make great movies. The problem is he doesn’t seem to hook up with any good directors. THE RUNDOWN is still his best movie and it’s a fun time but, come on, it’s no PREDATOR, or even COMMANDO. I believe we, as a society, can offer The Rock more than THE RUNDOWN. So I was excited when I found out the Rock would be one of the stars of this weird new movie from the director of DONNIE DARKO. “Should at least be interesting,” I thought, not bothering to knock on wood.
Trouble is I had writer/director Richard Kelly pegged all wrong. I liked DONNIE DARKO well enough, thought it was pretty original and enjoyable. Saw it once on video and once as the director’s cut at the Seattle Internation Film Festival, which is when I learned that some youths worship this guy. They traveled across the country dressed in DARKO-themed costumes to nervously stammer to him that he changed their lives. That’s weird, I thought.

Then he wrote DOMINO, one of my most hated movies of the last several years. But I blamed Tony Scott. I figured there could’ve been a good script in there, Tony Scott just ax murdered it to unrecognizable bits with his Guiness Book of World Records All Time Worst Editing Ever In the History of Cinema. But after seeing SOUTHLAND TALES I’m not so sure Kelly is clean on that one. In fact I bet he specified alot of that shit in the script.

SOUTHLAND TALES takes place in Los Angeles, in the near future, after a nuclear attack on Texas. It involves intrigue between an amnesiac action star, a senator, a porn star/talk show hostess, left wing radicals, a Homeland Security type Big Brother department of the US government, twin brother racist cops, the inventor of an alternative fuel, some dwarves, and a weapons dealer in an ice cream truck played by Christopher Lambert. The plot also hits on time travel, dimensional travel, the human soul, psychedelic drugs, kidnapping, blackmail, staged murders, slam poetry, and a zepellin piloted by Kevin Smith wearing old man makeup but talking exactly like he did in LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD. The cast also includes Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mandy Moore, Justin Timberlake, Nora Dunn, John Larroquette, Bai Ling, Jon Lovitz, Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler, Miranda Richardson, Wallace Shawn, Curtis “Booger” Armstrong, Zelda Rubinstein, Janeane Garafolo in one shot of a crowd scene, and the guy who apparently played Seagal on MAD TV. Also your mom is probaly in there somewhere. (more…)

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Sexy Beast

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

In any earth-shattering journey you’re gonna run into some unanswerable questions, some intractable dilemmas, some jokes without punchlines or words without letters. In my case I have encountered a catch-22 like you would expect to find primarily during time travel. On one hand, I have vowed to myself that if I see a movie with plans to write about it, but then I don’t feel like I have anything very interesting to say about it, then I won’t write a review. On the other hand I’ve vowed to myself to try to review every movie on the BADASS 100. In this case I’ve decided to betray one aspect of Excellence and side with vow #2. Please forgive me if I made the wrong choice.

I know when SEXY BEAST came out everybody said it was good. I didn’t trust it though because I got burnt by SNATCH and nobody else seemed as sick of that type of shit as I was. They were right: except for some computery music this wasn’t much like a Guy Ritchie picture. The story centers not on hipsters but on old guys. Ray Winstone plays a retired gangster who’s not really supposed to be cool, unless it’s in a “this guy doesn’t give a fuck about anything” type of cool. The overly long opening scene is mostly gross-out shots of him oiling his horrible red belly while sunbathing by the pool.

The movie is mainly about an asshole not-retired gangster (Ben Kingsley) coming to Winstone’s house and trying to force him to do another job. He just doesn’t want to take the risk, or to damage the happy legit life he has with his wife. But this is a guy you do not say ‘no’ to. (more…)

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3/17/08

Monday, March 17th, 2008

Nothing new today, but I wanted to mention that yesterday they showed PISTOL WHIPPED on the USA network, and it was letterboxed.

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3/16/08

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

Many fine movies have been released to DVD recently. Instead I am reviewing HITMAN. The much better I AM LEGEND comes out on Tuesday and I sneakily bought the DVD early so I added an update at the end of my original review to address the other ending that’s included.

Also a little business: I got a very convincing email from a guy begging me to see DOOMSDAY. He says it’s the movie PLANET TERROR wishes it was. If you’re not familiar with this movie it’s the director of THE DESCENT doing a riff on ROAD WARRIOR and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (or so it looks to me who hasn’t seen it yet). For some reason it wasn’t screened at all and is only playing at one theater in Seattle so it’s getting kind of buried. I don’t think I’ll get a chance to see until next weekend but I thought I would at least pass on the word that the movie MAY be worth checking out in theaters. I cannot vouch for it yet.

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