Archive for September, 2008

Return to Sleepaway Camp

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

Okay, let’s say it’s the year 2008, you are a horror fan, and the one thing that would really hit the spot for you in the near future would be a low budget FRIDAY THE 13TH (part 1) rip-off with a unique brand of in-your-face FUCK YOU AND YOUR MOTHER New York attitude. But not SLEEPAWAY CAMP, you already saw that one. Well then November 4th is your lucky day, dickwad, because that’s when original SLEEPAWAY CAMP director Robert Hiltzik returns to Sleepaway Camp with his sophomore directorial effort, RETURN TO SLEEPAWAY CAMP.

During the cheesy credits sequence (which I thought was a menu animation at first) your mind may slip away to imagine all the modern ways a new SLEEPAWAY CAMP could suck. You can easily picture the bland twentysomething soap opera actors going through the usual DTV horror motions. But you’ll know this is a better kind of suck as soon as you hear the first few lines of dialogue:

“What are you dicks laughin’ at?”

“Nothin’.”

“You makin’ fun of me?”

“No Alan. We were just lightin’ farts.”

Moments later Alan (Michael Gibney, not eligible for Oscar because this didn’t get a theatrical release) is disappointed with the fart lighting and threatens the other kids with a hairspray torch, but is stopped by a counselor (some guy who was apparently in Pirates of the Caribbean). Instead of punishing him the counselor complains that that Alan kid is a jerk and is gonna get his some day. The kids are played by actual kids, not your usual college grads, and the counselor looks at least late 30s, but his powerlessness over this Alan made me wonder if he was also supposed to be a kid. This whole movie is about camp kids swearing and attacking each other and counselors not knowing what to do except occasionally swear back at them. (more…)

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9/28/08

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

Sorry I’ve been AWOL for a week. Today I got a double-review of the two VHS obscurities I watched this weekend, a real good Australian giant crocodile movie called DARK AGE and a less impressive action movie called TRIPWIRE.

Also I’d like to note that using Google I stumbled across a guy’s Amazon wish list where the top two were Seagalogy: A Study of the Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal by Vern and The Law of the Somalis: A Stable Foundation for Economic Development in the Horn of Africa by Michael van Notten.

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Dark Age and Tripwire

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

DARK AGE

In my ongoing tribute to the land of MAD MAX and CHOPPER I have come across another good giant crocodile movie that pre-dates ROGUE by a good 20 years. But this one actually has John Jarrat – the widower Russell in ROGUE, the fuckin maniac in WOLF CREEK – as the park ranger hero.

This one reminds me of RAZORBACK a little, because it reminds me of JAWS a little. The director, Arch Nicholson, was second unit director on RAZORBACK, but his movie is in a more realistic vein, less stylized and exaggerated. The crocodile never runs through the side of a house and steals a baby like the razorback did. The photography is pretty naturalistic, it’s by Andrew Lesnie whose name seems familiar because he did the LORD OF THE RINGS movies, the BABE movies, and I AM LEGEND.

There’s a scene that has to be a deliberate homage to JAWS where everybody’s playing on the beach and a woman spots the croc and tries to warn the kids to get out of the water, but one kid gets eaten in front of everybody. But it’s an Australian twist because half of the kids on the beach are aborigines. That’s what makes this story unique is the conflict between the “white fellas” who just want to kill the crocodile, and the aborigines who won’t let them. (more…)

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Born to Fight

Saturday, September 20th, 2008

You know how once every 6-12 months you and your buddies will have a brief conversation about what a shame it is SNAKES ON THE PLANE didn’t live up to its potential as entertainment? Yeah, I do that too, and the one thing I always bring up is how they had a character who they told you was a kickboxer and yet they never had him kick a snake… or a person for that matter. No buts about it, that is a dereliction of duty on the part of the filmatists.

Well this time when I said that one of my buddies brought up this movie from Thailand, BORN TO FIGHT, as a movie that lives up to that particular responsibility. The movie has a bunch of athlete characters so when drug lords take an entire village hostage and plan to fire a nuclear missile into Bangkok the athletes rise up and use techniques from each of their sports as combat.

He wasn’t lying. There’s gymkata in this movie. There’s a little bit of pole vaulting. There’s a guy who kicks soccer balls at gunmen and when he runs out of balls he jumps up and kicks fruit off of a tree. In short this is a great action movie. (more…)

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Lords of the Street

Friday, September 19th, 2008

Take a look at that cover there. If you know me then you know I had to watch that movie.

I’m not stupid. I knew it would be, uh… problematic. “Probaly unwatchable” is I believe how I pre-described it to friends. But I figured as long as it stars the team of DMX and Kris Kristofferson I’m gonna get something out of it.

True, DMX has failed to deliver on the promise I thought I saw in him when I first saw BELLY. He seems to have pretty much lost his mind (up in here, up in here) and is not above making cameos in unwatchable DTV garbage in order to pay the legal bills for his poor driving, impersonating of federal officers and lack of dog feeding. So DMX alone is not a selling point.

But teamed with Kris Kristofferson? Blade’s mentor? FIRE DOWN BELOW’s villain? Mohammed Ali’s white cohort in the TV movie FREEDOM ROAD? Guy who should play me in a movie if Nick Nolte is not available? Could the creators of the albums ‘The Silver Tongued Devil and I’ and ‘It’s Dark And Hell Is Hot’ really be standing side by side, weilding their guns in a fortress of flames and sparks?

That is a hell of an odd couple there. Those two names above the title sold me. They didn’t even need to bother with that terrible photoshopping, they already had me. (more…)

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The Jesse Ventura Story

Sunday, September 14th, 2008

In 1999, after the pro-wrestler and PREDATOR badass Jesse “The Body” Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota, they made this quickie TV movie about his life. My main problem with it is that it kind of sucks.

TV movies don’t have to be bad. There is the obvious DUEL precedent, but I’m not gonna hold anything to that standard. A more fair comparison would be the EVIL KNIEVEL movie starring George Hamilton. That one’s pretty cool, and personally I think a wrestler who becomes governor is an even better biographical subject than a dude who jumps motorcycles over canyons.

At the time I thought a wrestler becoming a governor was a poetic gesture. I thought “See that? People have more faith in a professional wrestler than a politician. His job is fake and they believe he is more real than Democrats and Republicans.” But I also had a predisposition to like him because, to be frankly honest, I watched my share of WWF wrestling in the ’80s. I don’t remember Jesse too much as a wrestler, but I always liked him as the bad guy commentator. It was him and Vince McMahon, who was the whitebread goodie-two-shoes commentator who would be outraged by Jesse’s comments. He was like the Alan Colmes of the WWF – the guy who did a poor job of making you root for the good guy point of view. I didn’t know at the time that McMahon owned the WWF, or that he was a huge prick who would later beef up on steroids and become the supervillain of the league. He was just some dork in a tie. (more…)

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2008 Political Conventions

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

Wow, I’m looking back at my column archives, it’s like a logbook of political burnout. For a while there in the early 2000s I couldn’t stop raging about the latest headlines. By last year I only wrote 2 columns including the one on January 1st. I guess that’s the power of Bush and friends, you start looking at what they’re doing you either turn crazy or turn away.

But now it’s election time, the Ewok celebration song is cued up so the needle can drop the second Bush shuts the door behind him, and I’m getting excited enough to follow politics a little more than I was last year. As usual I’m not an expert, I’m just some dude, and I could be wrong. These are just some impressions from the parts I watched and read about the two political conventions.

By the way, I never been to one of these conventions, or to a comic book convention. But I read about them so much I started to wonder if they’re the same. Do people dress up as their favorite politicians? I’m not sure. Did either of the conventions show exclusive footage from Tron 2? Probaly the republican one. Shine up a rehash of the crappy ’80s and call it CHANGE. (more…)

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Stuck

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

I like where Stuart Gordon is coming from. Always thought of as a horror director because of REANIMATOR and FROM BEYOND, now he’s just this low profile indie director, doing his own thing, making little movies with playwrights and obscure writers, usually with gore and dark undertones but not really horror anymore. Not that he has disowned the genre – he’s still trying to do another REANIMATOR sequel.

And this new one, STUCK, is an interesting idea. It’s inspired by that horrible case you may remember reading about a few years ago where a nurse’s aide was driving under the influence, ran over a homeless guy, and parked the car in her garage with him still stuck in the windshield. She left him there to die (it was originally reported as taking two days, which is how it’s portrayed in the movie, but from what I’ve read it was actually 2 hours).

Stephen Rea – who would’ve seemed like a casting coup if he hadn’t recently played the corrupt cop villain in the Van Damme movie UNTIL DEATH – plays the homeless guy, and for his character it’s basically DIE HARD in a garage. There’s a very sympathetic setup of his character, you see how he gets kicked out of his apartment after being laid off, his application gets lost at the employment services office, a cop kicks him out of the park at night, and he happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Then he spends the rest of the movie trying to get off this windshield, trying to honk the horn or grab the cell phone or get out and rig up support for his broken leg. Then he has to fight off the people trying to dispose of him. And somehow a gun appears. I always wanted to see “DIE HARD in the trunk of a car,” this might be as close as I get.

But most of the movie is from the point of view of Mena Suvari’s character and man, I don’t know. I think she’s supposed to be partly likable. The first thing you see her do is clean shit off of an old man and not complain about it, which shows strength of character. Unlike the woman in the real case she almost drops her victim off at the hospital. But she takes off when somebody might see her because she can’t jeopardize the promotion she’s up for. (more…)

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

Part 5 is one of the less popular Freddy pictures, maybe because it made an admirable attempt to get beyond high school. It continues the story of Dream Master Alice and her boyfriend Dan (still played by the same actors, Lisa Wilcox and Danny Hassel) and their new circle of friends who replaced the dead ones. They are just graduating from high school, Alice and Dan are planning a trip to Paris over the summer, and early on Alice finds out that she’s pregnant. So they’re still teens but they’re dealing with some growing up type shit here.

The gimmick this time is that because she has a baby inside her, and because babies (according to the movie) dream all the time, she suddenly starts having Freddy dreams while awake. In the dream world the baby is a kid named Jacob and he does not have a positive male role model in his dream life so unfortunately Freddy comes in and takes advantage of that. You know how a bad uncle lets his little nieces and nephews drink beer, or helps them score pot? Freddy’s like that, he feeds Jacob the souls of Alice’s dead friends. I’m actually not sure what he’s trying to do – will this make the baby grow up into Freddy? Is he just trying to make the baby a killer like him? Or is he just pushing Alice’s buttons by messing with her kid? I don’t really know.

What if the baby doesn’t turn out to be evil, but has dream powers from eating all those souls? Maybe he’ll haunt people’s dreams but instead of giving them gimmicky deaths ironically based on their hobbies he’ll give them nice dreams. Instead of getting slashed and they wake up and have real cuts, he gives them a lollipop and they wake up and it’s right there on the pillow next to them. Or he gives them a bunch of money. And it works as real currency, it doesn’t show Freddy wearing a George Washington wig or anything stupid like that. It’s not printed in red and green ink. (more…)

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