Academy Award winner Adrien Brody and Academy Award nominee Sarah Polley play a married (?) team of scientists working to harvest useful proteins from a new species they’ve genetically engineered. They got two of them named Fred and Ginger (get it? They’re named after Fred Flinstone and Ginger Baker), two dog-sized lumps of CGI flesh shaped kind of like maggots but mostly like dicks.

I like how casually the movie introduces these dick monsters, but I gotta say, enough with the phalluses, fellas. Yeah, Mr. Giger did well with a penis-shaped head on his Alien, the idea I guess being that a subliminal genital look will make you uncomfortable (or make you buy Camel cigarettes). But that was more than 30 years ago. In my opinion the “shaped like a dick” train left the station a long time ago. It’s limp and unimpressive now. I think it’s supposed to be disturbing, but it just seems kind of gay. And this is 2010. Gays are our friends, they’re not scary.

By the way, Brody and Polley’s characters are named Clive Nicoli and Elsa Kast (get it? They’re named after Clive Owen and Ilsa: She-Wolf of the S.S.). After the boss short-sightedly shuts down Clive and Elsa’s project they rebelliously decide to do an off-the-books experiment splicing animal and human DNA, just to prove to themselves that they can do it. They don’t actually do this as part of a deliberate plan – Elsa runs in giggling and locks the door before she fertilizes the embryo. Mad science meets tickle fight.

Then they keep taking things farther than planned. They don’t intend to bring it to term, but it grows so fast it takes them by surprise. So they have the thing there, they think well, it’s not gonna live very long, we might as well keep it around, study its life cycle. Next thing you know it’s their daughter, Elsa’s giving it Barbie dolls and putting makeup on it. She names it “Dren” because that’s “nerd” backwards. I don’t get it either. Sometimes I think it’s supposed to be really quirky, but I can’t quite translate it. Maybe Canadian quirk is different, like how they spell it “colour” instead of “color.”

Anyway, Dren is born looking like (what else?) a penis, but grows into a humanoid girl with a circumcision scar on her bald head. She has big eyes spread out too far on her head, she has legs like a goat and a tail with a stinger and other things most girls don’t come equipped with. The effects are real good – not always looking real, but always looking cool. We see her at many different stages and ages including facehugger, toddler, little girl and grown woman trying to look attractive (Delphine Chaneac). She has some funny flashes of character, like a scene where she runs off and eats a live rabbit, turns around and smiles stupidly with its blood all over her face.

There’s something a little off about the movie, maybe it’s the way it portrays these scientists as sort of irreverent ex-punks who wear cool t-shirts and have military patches on their lab coats. For alot of the movie they don’t really take it seriously, which somehow cuts down on the amount of dread I think. But there are outrageous touches here and there that won me over. I like the scene where they reveal Fred and Ginger to the scientific community at large. It’s not ED-209 disastrous, but pretty fuckin bad. Not only do those penises turn savage and kill each other, but their tank falls over and an explosion of glass shards and monster blood pelts the front couple rows in the face. They weren’t ready for this, they didn’t know it was gonna be a Gallagher show.

And the craziest thing that happens – I’m just gonna come out and say it, so this is a big fuckin SPOILER: Adrien Brody fucks the monster. It makes a pass at him and he pushes it away, does the whole “We can’d do this, this is wrong” routine, then just gives in and goes for it 110%. I mean, there is some passion here. Goin at it like the rabbits she eats.

You know, it’s like that Clive Barker thing, the idea that all guys wanna stick their dicks in a monster. But this is way worse than boning the porcupine lady in NIGHTBREED, this is that combined with Woody Allen and his stepdaughter. Shit, worse than that even. Maybe it’s not his DNA, but he conceived her – he and his lady came up with the idea, they combined the DNA, they made her. He’s playing God and playing dad and now he’s fuckin her? It’s gross because she’s a monster, and because he’s her dad, and because he’s in a long term relationship, and mostly because this girl doesn’t talk, she just makes chipmunk noises. I mean come on, man.

The potential of cloning humans brings up so many ethical quandaries. Is it our place to artificially create human life? How do we know we won’t fuck it up and create some kind of new disease, or create unhealthy beings that live a life of pain? Is a cloned human equal to a born human, or because we created it is it lesser, is it our property? Is it as bad to kill a clone as a human? Since we created it do we have the right to alter it, like when Elsa tries to remove Dren’s stinger?

There are so many questions to consider, but Clive mostly considers “what are the best positions to fuck your monster daughter in?” It’s so damn wrong, so I love that the movie isn’t timid about it. It doesn’t fade out. It’s pretty graphic. She mounts him and sprouts wings! The one thing missing is a couple hundred candles dripping all around, like it’s supposed to be real sexy, that would be good. Maybe dripping some wax on each other, or twisting a wet towel. Or the ice cube thing from DO THE RIGHT THING. Or the pottery from GHOST. They fuck on the floor which I guess is passionate but it would be funny if at the end of the scene they did that movie thing where she’s laying in bed with the blanket tucked under her arms perfectly covering her breasts.

The thing that’s crazier than Academy Award winner Adrien Brody fuckin a monster is the way the movie treats him afterwards. Yeah, there’s some good shame when his girl catches him monsterfucking. He doesn’t know she saved him from being stung to death, but if he knew he’d probly wish she hadn’t. But after a few scenes with his head hung low they stop making a big deal about it. It still treats him as a reasonable, sympathetic protagonist, not an over the edge nutball. It’s like ah, come on. You’d fuck your monster daughter too. Don’t front.

Actually the DVD cover makes it sound like Peter Travers would fuck his monster daughter. It says “A potent and provocative thriller. Sexy and scary in equal doses!” How else can you interpret the “sexy” part? That’s gotta mean he wants to fuck his monster daughter, right? You’re creepin me out, Travers. But it’s rare that a quote whore blurb unintentionally offers a peak into the writer’s dark sexual fantasies. So in a way he’s advancing the artform of film criticism with this breakthrough.

Nah, I’m gonna give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s just saying that it’s not at all scary, and therefore not at all sexy.

SPLICE doesn’t entirely work. It’s just too undisciplined to be the kind of deeply unsettling but darkly hilarious tale that it oughta be. Still, I can’t write off a movie with a monster this cool and with a pretty good sized craziness streak. I thought treating Clive’s behavior like it’s not that out of line was so out of line that I kind of respected the movie and its cinematic balls. But come to think of it I would’ve liked it better if Clive turned all Humbert Humbert at that point. He crazily declares his love for Dren and tries to run off with her and marry her. “You don’t understand! I love her!” he cries, clutching her hand possessively, and she’s hunched over chattering like a squirrel.

And then DEAD RINGERS. I mean, for crying out loud, DEAD RINGERS. So sonofabitch, why am I not surprised when I watch Clive Barker’s NIGHTBREED and there’s Dave Cronenberg as a masked “baby slasher” murdering families around Toronto?

I don't know, it almost seems to me like there could've been a better poster for an epic horror fantasy featuring dozens of cool monsters. But I mean, they're professionals, they must know what they're doing.

His name is Dr. Decker and he’s got a creepy mask with button eyes and a zipper mouth, but he wears a nice overcoat and chain mail gloves, he’s not wearing overalls or a mechanic’s jumpsuit. He wants you to know he’s higher class than Jason or Michael.

Sure enough his day job is as a psychiatrist, and he decides to frame one of his patients (Craig Sheffer) for the murders, basing the crimes on the guy’s bad dreams, recording him talking aobut it, and dosing him with hallucinogens to get him into trouble. I can see why he’d consider this guy an easy mark, too. His name is Aaron Boone but even his girlfriend just calls him “Boone,” like they’re in P.E. class or something. He’s kind of a brooding Kevin Bacon type in a leather jacket, and his answering machine message just says, “This is Boone. You know what to do. Add-i-os.”

But there’s one important piece of information Dr. Decker didn’t know about: Boone is not just some chump in a leather jacket. He’s some chump in a leather jacket who’s destined to be the Chosen One for the people of Midian, a secret town hidden beneath a cemetery where the surviving members of ancient monster tribes take refuge. They got weird lizard people, devilmen, a guy with a moon-shaped head like Mac Tonight, a woman who can turn into smoke, a fat guy who thinks it’s amazing that tentacles come out of his belly and likes to make puns about it. They got a statue-like demon god named Baphomet and a Moses-like dude who keeps telling them what the laws are and a fenced off area for “berserkers – mad bastards who’ll bite off your head and shit down your neck.” This is the rare case where that’s probly meant literally, but unfortunately you never do see the berserkers shitting into any necks. Maybe in the fabled director’s cut.

Boone heard some rumors about Midian being a place where sins are forgiven (what happens outside Midian stays outside Midian) so he tries to check it out and gets bit by some asshole monster who likes to eat “Naturals.” Turns out this is lucky though because then he gets set up and shot by the cops and the monster-infected bite brings him back from the dead sort of like a vampire. And I like how the guy who bit him is happy and claps for him at the ceremony where he’s accepted into the monster club. So that guy’s not as much of an asshole as you expect.

But oh shit, nobody shoulda let Decker find out about monsters. He saw himself as some kind of cleanser, killing off bloodlines of people he considered filth. Now he finds out there’s monsters, he joins a long line of witch hunters in oppressing these poor Nightbreed. I mean, I’m glad if it takes the heat off the working class Canadians, but you hate to see a guy getting off on genocide like this. Basically he lets the cat out of the bag about Midian and the monsters have to take a stand against redneck cops and local loonies. I don’t know what the cops thought Decker meant when he said “something’s breeding there,” but after they see a guy explode in sunlight the shit is on.

It’s a real ambitious horror fantasy, lots of scenes seem like the cantina in STAR WARS, just all different kinds of monsters, all in the pre-digital age, crazy latex makeup, occasional crude stop motion, and when somebody’s eyes or wounds have to glow you see that extra care that goes with painting it directly on the frame. Lots of mythology that they put lots of thought into, plus little moments that would only come out of Clive Barker’s perverted imagination (not even Cronenberg’s).

For example the porcupine lady. There’s this weird gal with no nose and a back covered in 10″ poison quills, but she’s supposed to be real sensual and erotic. When the cops are pulling a Waco on Midian she starts making suggestive tongue gestures to one of the officers, and he follows her. Barker’s point is that we all secretly yearn to explore the dark sides of our sexuality. My point is that nobody’s that hard up for a blow job that they’re gonna stop mid-siege to make it with a

Whaddya think... would you go for it?

porcupine monster. I mean at the very least he would stall for a while and act like he doesn’t want it and then wait ’til his friends are gone to hit it. But I guess that might be in the 50 minutes that I read the studio cut out of the movie.

NIGHTBREED’s biggest weakness is that its hero is the least interesting character. There’s not much to him except a bad boy pose, and he doesn’t have the Steve McQueen type of charisma to make that work. But his girlfriend Lori is more sympathetic, and alot of the movie is through her eyes. The movie also gets a little choppy as it escalates into full on human vs. monster combat, and I’m sure it would benefit from the longer cut.

But to me the uniqe qualities of this one make its weaknesses not all that important. I love this movie. These monsters have a genuine exoticness, they don’t seem like other movie monsters you’ve seen. Barker has one thing in common with Cronenberg and that’s that he seems to have some actual madness in there, and he’s not ashamed of it. So he does things (including the porcupine seduction) that you can truly say nobody else would think of. And the unpredictableness adds a real feeling of danger. You root for the monsters but can’t trust all of them, because you can’t honestly say they don’t bite. Some of them do, we’ve seen it.

Barker’s brain bubbles over with visual imagination like he left the burner on too long. The budget and technology are crude compared to most genre movies today, but he was able to get more imagery out of his head and onto film than in any of his other movies. He seems better at the designing than at moving the camera, but he does pull of a couple good tricks. I like the frenzied glimpses of the monsters in his nightmares, and they fit exactly with the busy Danny Elfman score.

And Cronenberg makes a great villain. I’m sure my knowledge of his movies adds something to it, but I think he really gives a convincing performance as a sicko. You gotta love the shot of him sitting in his office with a bunch of masks on the wall and a table covered in machetes laid out ritualistically. It makes you think – the Canadian health care system seems tempting, because you could actually get therapy and not have to do without it because your health insurance doesn’t cover jack shit. But then what if you get stuck with this nutball as your doctor? Doesn’t seem so great anymore, does it?

Man, what would be the closest modern comparison to NIGHTBREED? Would it be UNDERWORLD or something? They just don’t make ‘em like this anymore, and they didn’t before. I wonder where those guys went, anyway? It was obviously meant as chapter 1, it’s too bad it’s probly too late to do a follow up. I mean, unless they skip forward a bunch of years, and the porcupine lady’s got a bunch of kids, they’re all fat and wrinkly, the moon-faced guy looks like he’s had work done. And then all the fans would complain if they used any CGI, they’d say Clive Barker seduced their childhood and shot poison quills at it.

Oh well. Barker was trying to make “the STAR WARS of horror,” but I guess it wasn’t meant to catch on like that. But it’s an interesting oddity and as long as we know about it that’s enough. We’ll always have it on a shitty no-extras DVD, a freaky outcast living under a cemetery avoiding daylight.

[ratings]

First you acknowledge that the directors you hired won’t have the skills to fill Spielberg’s filmatic shoes. You put director Joe Alves into the shoes and fill the extra toe-space with credit-flying, severed-limb-and-head-floating, dolphin-and-orca-jumping, water-splashing-in-the-camera, slow-motion-water-ski-jumping, harpoon-firing-just-like-FRIDAY-THE-13TH-3D-but-what’re-you-gonna-do-you’re-fighting-a-shark, fake-dragons-and-snakes-popping-out, shark-exploding-and-spraying-goo-all-over-the-audience 3-D. I mean, not on video, but that’s what it was originally, and I would’ve enjoyed that.

Second, you come up with more of a gimmick than “shark shows up at Amity Island for the third time.” This one (with a script co-written by Richard Matheson of I AM LEGEND: THE BOOK fame [note: he wasn't happy with the movie, though]) is about now-adult-and-played-by-Dennis-Quaid Michael Brody on opening day of a new Sea World park he built. (Quaid is another 4 year age jump from JAWS 2, for a grand total of 9 years older than original actor Chris Rebello would’ve been if he was still playing Michael.) Funded by the eccentric millionaire Calvin Bouchard (Louis Gossett Jr.) it’s a fancy “Underwater Kingdom” with a whole exhibit, restaurant and control room complex submerged in and looking out into a man-made lagoon. Pretty cool idea, but I’ll be god damned if a young up-and-comer shark named Jaws 3 doesn’t gate crash into that lagoon for some snacks.

Brody’s girlfriend Katherine (Bess Armstrong) is the dolphin trainer. His little brother Sean (John Putch – 7 year age jump from part 1 actor) comes to visit on a break from college, where he majors in staying the fuck away from water. He’s been afraid of water since shark attack #2, but is lured in by top-of-the-pyramid water-skiier Lea Thompson.

The director of part 3-D was Joe Alves, production designer and storyboard artist for part 1, second unit director for parts 1 and 2. This was his only directorial work that got off the ground, although I have learned from interviews that are online that he almost directed a whole bunch of things including CONAN THE BARBARIAN. He was also production designer for CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and FIRE DOWN BELOW.

Apparently the 3-D was his idea. Scouting Sea World type parks for locations he happened to see a 3-D underwater wildlife documentary. He had been kind of embarrassed about the idea of doing a Part 3 and thought it would be cool to call it “Part 3-D” instead. I don’t know if he knew FRIDAY THE 13TH had already done this, or was working on one anyway.

I don’t know why Sea World let them film there, and even call it Sea World. Maybe they forgot what happened in JAWS 1-2. Or maybe they figured it couldn’t possibly happen a third time, so everything would be peaceful in this one. But it makes for a pretty impressive production, showing all kinds of flying dolphins, orcas and water skiiers that must’ve looked great in the 3-D. Of course the undersea complex is not part of the real park, so that and alot of the underwater shark shots have really fake looking composite deals.

Hats off for the long shots of floating body parts, though. I’m pretty sure those things should have clouds of blood around them, but maybe not. I’m no doctor.

There’s not as much suspense and tension as there could be with the shark attacks. And they flirt with having the dolphins help the humans, but I think it could’ve been funnier and cooler if they went further with it. I think we all would enjoy a couple of dolphins heroically attacking a giant shark, or luring it into a trap or something. I’m not saying they have to have guns attached to their heads, although I wouldn’t be against that. I’m just saying since they set them up they oughta use them.

There’s a scene where they have to make the decision to close the gate even though the dolphins are out there, and say that “they’re on their own.” But then they don’t try to get much tension out of those little guys being in peril. Shit, I would’ve switched to their point-of-view for ten minutes. And there would be a part where one of them first sees the shark and it would zoom in on the dolphin’s face the same way it did Roy Scheider’s in the first JAWS. Or I would have a part where the two dolphins are chirping at each other and if you pay attention you can tell they’re showing their scars to each other, and then the music gets real tense and it slowly closes in on one of them and he’s doing a real low, slow type of dolphin noise and it wouldn’t be subtitled or anything but you would get the sense he was telling his dolphin equivalent of the Indianapolis story.

They didn’t do that. But there are two little twists that help make it more dramatic, and that I’m about to give away:

1. The Sea World peopl decide to capture the shark and put it on display, the first great white in captivity. So there’s some JURASSIC PARK/WESTWORLD type potential there.

B. They figure out the one they have is only a baby, and like Louis Gossett Jr. himself there is presumably a Jaws 3 Sr. out there. Or at least a mama. And that’s the one that was eating their employees so that one’s also in the lagoon somewhere. Oh shit.

The problem with the movie is that it has the setting and the characters and the plot developments of a good monster movie, it has all the machinery there, but then it doesn’t really deliver as well as it could. If there were a couple real good and suspenseful shark attack set pieces in the last third this would be a legitimately good movie, in my opinion. Not JAWS good, but cheesy sequel good at least.

But that’s coming from the point of view of looking at these movies many years later, having lived in a world where there were a bunch of JAWS sequels. I’m not saying it was a good idea to do them and that it’s okay to not aim for the sky like Spielberg did. But having accepted that that’s what happened, that they made it into a series of lowbrow exploitation movies, I thought this was an enjoyable almost. I would go see this if they were showing it somewhere in 3-D. In addition to being no doctor I’m no engineer either so I’m just guessing here but I bet it would be possible to remaster movies like this, FRIDAY THE 13TH 3-D, HOUSE OF WAX, and the 3-D version of DIAL M FOR MURDER for digital projection and show them in modern multiplexes. Some enterprising fan that works at a studio with rights to a few of those ought to get the ball rolling and then show them for special limited engagements like they do with After Dark Horror Fest and shit like that. Put together a little 3-D festival but accessible to anyone in a major city.

And as long as I’m throwing out million dollar ideas, how ’bout some enterprising software billionaire movie buff building a drive-in theater for the future? Retro design but modern technology. Figure out a way to make better sound systems that can plug into modern car stereos, with state of the art digital projection but also equipped with an old 35 mm for revivals and vintage trailers and shit. Come on rich people, you should do this. It would be fun. Sink your money into that, please. I don’t even have a car but I’ll endorse it, especially if you show JAWS 3-D.

It seems like movie fans right now either have to hate 3-D as a cynical ploy to raise ticket prices or they have to think it’s the future of all movies. Personally I love 3-D and don’t necessarily want it to be the future. I mean James Cameron did do a pretty good job of using it to pull you into his artifical world, and I’m sure there will be some really smart uses of it if the trend continues for a while. But personally I love it as a gimmick. I like it for slasher movies and monster movies and movies that have little guys who fly out of the screen and float around in front of your face making eye contact with you like the thing in CAPTAIN EO. I think it should call attention to itself. I want to see harpoons flying. I want to see limbs floating. This is a legitimate use of the medium, especially when saved for special occasions, like part threes.

[ratings]

So I guess man and shark are the same. Sharks swarm when there’s blood in the water, men when there’s money to be made. We’re creatures of pure instinct.

Roy Scheider returns as Chief Brody, still chief of police and with even more pressure to not scare anybody because they’re opening a bunch of condos there. Unfortunately for everybody another shark (Jaws 2) does show up and start eating people. And once again Brody is the only one who believes it’s a shark, and he embarrasses himself with a false alarm on the beach, and everybody thinks he’s crazy. De ja vu. Must be a glitch in the matrix.

Some divers and water skiiers get eaten, and even an orca. This was the year after ORCA, which had an orca headbutting a shark as a “fuck you” to JAWS, and this is their “no, fuck you” to ORCA. I gotta side with ORCA this time though, it’s a way better movie than JAWS 2. Sorry, JAWS 2. Just tellin it like it is. I’m trying to have an open and honest relationship with you.

(And come on man, we’re not stupid. We all read the scientific journals. We all know there’s at least one case where an orca in California killed a shark, ate its liver and scared the other 100 or so sharks in the area so bad they all turned tail and hauled ass to Hawaii like a bunch of tadpoles.)

Brody’s son Michael is a teen now (the new actor jumped ahead 5 years in age), so there’s a whole bit about horny kids trying to go boating together, and sneaking out when they’re grounded, and all that type of teenage shit. More like a summer camp slasher movie.

When the shit hits the fan Brody does try to call Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss’s character) but he’s out to sea where radio can’t afford him. Er, I mean reach him. So it’s a solo act this time. So it’s kind of like a band playing without all the original members.

The filmatism is better than I expected, though. They try to re-create Spielberg’s naturalistic approach, his atmospheric sound design, and they got John Williams back on the music. But it’s not that fun to watch a rehash with the best parts taken out. It has an approximation of the basic monster thriller elements but it leaves out some of the extra things that made JAWS different. I mean what is JAWS without all the tension and the camaraderie between those three men on the boat? That’s the part of the story they don’t retread: the best part. I guess it could be even worse if they tried to do some equivalent to Quint’s classic U.S.S. Indianapolis speech, but still. You notice the difference. Less greatness, more teens in peril. It’s a good way to show why JAWS was so special.

And this one’s not special at all, but as far as sequels that shouldn’t exist go it does have a couple enjoyable parts. My favorite would have to be when Jaws 2 is attacking a woman in a boat. She tries to bash him on the sharkhead with the nearest heavy object, which happens to be a big tank of gas. And you’re not gonna believe the bad luck she has but she ends up spilling the gas all over the place. And then she tries to fire a flare at the shark and, well, you can guess how that backfires. What’s great is the shark catches on fire too. Then the boat explodes into a big fireball, and you see it from the point of view of an old lady watching the whole thing from her porch. That’s the beauty of these houses with ocean views. If a shark catches on fire you’re gonna be there to see it.

So Jaws 2 has burns on his face. This could be why he continues being an asshole for the rest of the movie. Facial mutilation like that can really mess people or sharks up, like the Phantom of the Opera or Two Face for example. The injuries scar their psyches as much as their skin. Jaws 2 might not be hungry, he might be lashing out in anger over his disfigurement. He’s asking God (who looks like an old shark with a long white beard) why me? Why do I have to suffer? How unlucky does an underwater creature such as myself have to be in order to catch on fire? I mean what are the chances? I don’t stick my head out of the water that often. He’s confused and he’s depressed and he’s not getting any answers, so he eats a helicopter.

So I give him credit for the scarring and for taking out a helicopter, even if GRIZZLY beat him to that one. Also I gotta give credit to Ann Dusenberry, the actress who played the young blond girl. Her portrayal of being in shock and barely able to speak was surprisingly credible.

Roy Scheider of course gives it his all, does a good job again and at least gets some tender moments with his wife (Loraine Gary also returning). But he must’ve felt like kind of a chump going through all that again. I bet some of the thrill was gone the second time. But maybe I’m projecting.

The director was Jeannot Szwarc. Like Spielberg he started as mostly a TV director, doing episodes of “Night Gallery” and some TV movies and stuff. Unlike Spielberg he went on to direct SUPERGIRL and SANTA CLAUS: THE MOVIE and now is back to just doing TV episodes.

[ratings]

But wait! There may be an answer contained within the Outlaw Vault. I knew I had written something about it, I just hadn’t posted it before. Back when I was considering a book about summer movies I wrote a rough draft for part of the ‘75 chapter. So even though I’m still alive I’m gonna clean it up a little and package it as new material, like a posthumous B.I.G. guest appearance.

Jaws was the first Big Summer Event Movie. It was the first movie to make over $100 million at the American box office. It drastically changed the way studio movies are marketed and budgeted. It turned Steven Spielberg from promising new director to the very definition of A-list. It won three Oscars – best editing, original score and sound. But personally what I like about Jaws is that Jaws is a great fucking movie.

Spielberg will be showing up in this book a lot [note: no he won't, because there's no book - suckers!], having re-reinvented the blockbuster more times than anyone else over the years, and having directed even more popular and more celebrated movies than Jaws. And personally I think that between his trio of flawed but underrated sci-fi movies (A.I., Minority Report and War of the Worlds) and his brilliant, multi-layered thriller Munich he’s still on his game all these years later. There’s a reason why he’s the most famous American movie director of all time. But if you ever forget what that reason is, all you have to do is go back and watch what 26 year old Spielberg was doing on Jaws.

It’s a pretty simple story: huge fucking shark eats people in island resort community. Mayor won’t shut down beaches because of tourist money. Police chief knows better. Chief, oceanologist and hunter go out on a boat and kill the huge fucking shark. Float off into the sunset. The best-selling book by Peter Benchley was a little more complicated – Murphy (Richard Dreyfuss’s character) was having an affair with Ellen Brody (wife of Roy Scheider’s character), for one thing. More ridiculously, the real reason why the mayor wouldn’t close the beaches is because he owed money to the mafia! It’s funny because why would you need that type of motivation? When the mayor waffles about closing the beach you think of course, it makes perfect sense that they would be more concerned about business than about “bathers,” as they call those who enjoy water activities on Amity Island. Luckily, the producers and Spielberg wanted a more straightforward version, no backstories, no love triangles. There is something to be said for not being completely faithful to the source material. Spielberg figured Jaws was four letters like his evil truck movie Duel. He wanted this to be kind of a sequel. A simple, straight forward man-chased-by-giant-killing-machine tale.

Sometimes just the way a movie is directed makes you feel like all your senses are heightened, and Jaws is one of those cases. Spielberg makes you feel Amity Island all around you. As Chief Brody sits on the beach, watching the water, knowing in his gut that there really is a great white shark out there, you hear the overlapping sounds all around him, the conversations, the playful screams, the splashes, a radio playing somewhere. The threat has been established. We’ve not seen the shark, but we’ve seen his handiwork. We’ve seen what it looks like when a skinnydipper is jerked to and fro by an unseen underwater menace. And now we see the familiar sight of a crowded beach. Elderly sunbathers and energetic children “lining up to be a hot lunch.” And all we can do is what Brody does – sit and wait and hope we’re wrong.

The atmosphere is so authentic, so not-movie-like that at times it looks like a documentary about summer vacations. But the camera slowly, deliberately pans to Brody’s tense face, letting slip that it’s not just a crew haphazardly covering what’s going on, it’s a young director right in that zone who knows exactly what he’s doing, what to make you look at, how long to make you watch kids innocently splashing in the water before giving you the underwater camera and John Williams music that tells you that yes, your greatest fears were true, there is a shark out there somewhere and he’s gonna eat that dog and that kid and there is nothing anybody can do about it. Except blow him up later, but that won’t bring back the kid or the dog. At least not in a physical state that would be very satisfying.

So it’s a movie full of tension and suspense, but it also has momentum. Spielberg and friends cut directly from the death of the little boy on the beach to a crowded town meeting mobbed around a flyer advertising the boy’s mother’s bounty for killing the shark. Most of the important things are developed quickly and visually. We don’t hear Brody talking about all he’s learned about sharks, we see him reading books and being so involved that he jumps when his wife tries to embrace him.

But it also knows how to slow down and smell the roses. One of the most memorable scenes in the movie is not really about the shark or even the hunt for the shark, it’s about the camaraderie between the three men as they sit together on the boat waiting to come across the shark. They drink, they loosen up, they start to share scars. Murphy seems to have proven his manliness to Quint (Robert Shaw), who had previously called him a “city boy” and a “college boy” and a “rich boy” and had cruelly called attention to the softness of his hands. Almost as an afterthought Murphy mentions Quint’s tattoo, which leads him to reveal his military background: he was on the USS Indianapolis, the ship that broke down and left its crew stranded, surrounded by hungry sharks. He tells the tale like an old ghost story, but he gets credit for not ever bringing it up himself. He was content to show off his scars without pulling out the old USS Indianapolis card. Which is good – imagine going out on a boat with a dude who can’t stop bragging about the old war-buddies-eaten-by-sharks incident! It would be a nightmare.

Murphy, of course, gains a new respect for Quint, but now everybody is bummed out and horrified, so Murphy slyly segues into a drunken group singalong. And it’s now, when true drunken friendship has been achieved, that the shark starts munching on the boat like it’s corn on the cob.

While the shark in the movie is scaring people away from summer resorts, in the real world he was luring them into movie theaters. In those days summer was considered a dead season, a dumping ground for movies that weren’t expected to do well. In the twenty-first century we’re used to crowded summer release schedules with expensive studio movies coming out one after the other, making it unlikely for any one of them to dominate. But nothing of note was released in the weeks preceding or following Jaws. The movies opening against it on June 20^th, 1975 were a re-release of Walt Disney’s Bambi, a limited release of the Gene Hackman western Bite the Bullet, Jacqueline Susann’s Once Is Not Enough, a porno called Sex Fantasies, and the spaghetti western The Silent Stranger.

There were certainly other memorable movies made in 1975, but not of a type that would compete with Jaws. The second highest grossing movie that year was The Rocky Horror Picture Show, followed by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Shampoo and Dog Day Afternoon (the last of which made less than a fifth of the $260 million Jaws piled up.)

Some claim that it was the first movie to advertise on television, but Tom Laughlin actually pioneered that with Billy Jack, the top grossing movie of 1971. At any rate, Universal used the then-new technique to turn Jaws into an event, and they released it on an unprecedented 465 screens. It was adapted from a book that was only a year old, and had been on the top of people’s “summer reading” lists. I guess if you’re supposed to read trashy but fun books during the summer then there might as well be a cinematic equivalent. But by today’s standards there’s nothing trashy about Jaws.

None of the handicapping that people give “summer popcorn movies” apply to the grandaddy of the genre. Jaws has great characters, a great story, great acting. It did win Oscars. Every technical aspect of the movie is superb except the special effects, because they couldn’t get the damned thing to work. Now people will say that a movie like 2012 or Transformers is fun to watch only for the special effects, but here is a movie that is made all the stronger because of the total failure of the special effects and the creative ways they had of getting around that. It’s hard to imagine the movie being quite as suspenseful if the shark kept swimming up instead of being represented by the floating barrels.

Okay, I never really finished this review, because I was gonna segue into that year’s best picture winner, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST. (This incarnation of the book was gonna compare each year’s top grossing movie to its best picture winner [which was a problem when they started becoming one and the same]). But I think you get the point I was going for. I hope you do. I was happy to have Yippee Ki-Yay, Moviegoer mentioned in the New York Post’s “required reading” column, but they wrote:

A chapter in which he ruminates on, among others, “The Terminator,” “T2” and “Mission: Impossible 3,” pretty much sums it up with the title “It’s Not Supposed To Be Hamlet.”

And I don’t think they got that I was being sarcastic with that chapter title, I was trying to rebut the people who use that excuse all the time. My point is that those movies do strive to be as good as Hamlet within their own genres.

We all have a capacity to enjoy crappy movies. It is our right and perhaps our sacred duty. But I hate when people say or imply that that’s all you can expect, or all you can even want, from a big summer studio movie.  It’s simply not the case, and never was. JAWS started this shit, and JAWS is not lacking.

To enjoy GI JOE is not a sin (if it is I’m gonna roast in Hell). But to refuse to hope for more is just plain dumb. It’s like when people now try to instill values in the U.S. that are not at all in the spirit of what the founding fathers intended. JAWS never intended for you to settle for any old crap that’s not trying to be War and Peace.

No, JAWS invented the summer movie. And JAWS is a perfect overlap of artistic and commercial. It is a great movie that also happens to be a mainstream crowdpleaser. That’s how the summer movie started and that’s what you gotta aim for. This is not negotiable.

[ratings]

Now, I don’t want to rattle any cages or nothing, but in my opinion – and it’s a free country, so I’m allowed to believe whatever I want to believe – ORCA is not as good as JAWS. To be fair, the makers of ORCA most likely had no idea about JAWS, they hadn’t heard of it, it’s probaly a coincidence. Just two completely unrelated summer movies about men in boats going to battle against deadly aquatic mammals. So it’s probaly not cool to compare them. And that’s good because as its own thing I think ORCA is topnotch.

Richard Harris plays Nolan, lifelong fisherman with his own small crew on a boat called the Bumpo. When we first see him he’s trying to save Bo Derek from a shark attack. But an orca shows up – a good samaritan orca – and fuckin headbutts the shark, sending it flying into the air and bloodied. So it’s not a killer whale, it’s a saver whale, or a protector whale. If these filmatists had known about JAWS this would’ve been their way of saying “fuck sharks, man, an orca could totally ram a shark and make it fly through the air, that is why it is so much more terrifying than a shark, because of its ramming.” But like I said, they didn’t know.

Next we see Charlotte Rampling giving a college lecture about orcas. This is basically the “just how badass is he?” scene where she hypes up the intelligence of the orcas so we know who we’re dealing with. She says they’re good parents, better than most humans. She talks about a recording of their language, how it was analyzed and found to contain 50 million pieces of information, ten million more than the Bible. She talks about their sonar, and how it helps them to know things about each other without words. “A human phrase like ‘how are you’ would be meaningless. What we call language they might call unnecessary, or redundant. Or– retarded.”

She also makes a claim that arguably is more relevant for us, the viewing audience, than for her students: “Like human beings they have a great instinct for vengeance.” Hmm, that’s odd. Probaly won’t ever come up in this movie, because the orcas in this one just go around defending people, they wouldn’t do something like that. But good to know, could be handy some day for a crossword puzzle or Jeopardy answer or something.

Nolan decides he should catch on orca and sell it to a zoo for a quick buck. But the one he catches doesn’t go peacefully. She tries to kill herself on the outboard motor, then when she’s hanging upside down on the deck bleeding she pops out a baby. And her husband/boyfriend/sea life partner watches the whole thing, so he’s  probaly upset. What was that trivia I heard one time about orcas and vengeance? Can’t remember anymore.

Okay, so this is a movie about a killer killer whale. It has plenty of enjoyable absurdity to go around. But I also like its humanity. You can see Nolan start to feel bad about his whole plan as soon as he hears the sound the whale makes when he shoots her with a tranquilizer dart. He quickly sees that he has alot in common with the papa orca. For example, he lost a pregnant wife too. But the orca comes after him, starts smashing everybody else’s boats until the townspeople start demanding he go out there and kill it. Trying to force a showdown. But Nolan knows he’s the bad guy here. He doesn’t want a fight. he even considers a plan of apologizing to the orca.

But this is the Charles Bronson of orcas. He’s not looking for “I’m sorry.” Try to see it from his perspective. Remember what we learned from that lecture? To orcas we seem like retards. They literally believe that we are retarded. They also think we’re bad parents. So he already thinks badly of us, then one day we just show up and attack his pod, murder his pregnant wife. To him we’re the fuckin HILLS HAVE EYES, savage inbred hicks attacking him for no reason. Why do we still have fingers? Why didn’t they grow into fins like an orca’s do? We’re monsters.

So he devises a systematic revenge plan. This is the first (but hopefully not last) movie I’ve seen where an orca commits arson. He knocks over  a lantern that burns down the entire dock and causes a bunch of explosions. And he can’t really run away in slow motion so instead he does a bunch of jumps like he’s at Sea World or doing stunts for FREE WILLY.

Also he takes out a whole house and 1 human leg. I won’t give away the details except to say that the same orca who saves your life may one day bite off your leg. That’s how tenuous the bonds between man and orca are. It’s the tension that’s boiling just beneath the surface. Surprised they didn’t cover that one in CRASH.

By the way, don’t believe this movie poster here. The orca is not giant like in that painting. Also, the orca is not happy like in that logo.
One thing that’s clever is that Nolan is the anti-Ahab. Instead of obsessing over an act of vengeance against an animal, the animal obsesses over vengeance against him. He tries to get out of it but decides their destinies are intertwined. He goes out to face the orca, and wants it to be an honorable fight. We see them staring each other down face-to-face. Nolan reflected in the orca’s eye, the orca reflected in Nolan’s eye. And now that I’m writing this down it sounds pretty goofy, but in the movie I swear it seems kind of deep. I blame Ennio Morricone. They got more than one beautifully photographed scene of orcas swimming around in front of beautiful sunsets, and the Morricone music is as emotional as the peaks of his spaghetti westerns. He makes it seem profound.

The director is Michael Anderson, who it turns out directed alot of movies, including 1984, AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM, DOC SAVAGE: MAN OF BRONZE, LOGAN’S RUN and SWORD OF GIDEON (that one that’s about the same thing as MUNICH). The story is credited to an Italian named Luciano Vincenzoni – can you believe the same dude wrote THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY, ORCA and RAW DEAL? The other guy, Sergio Donati, did DUCK YOU SUCKER, and they both worked on FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE. (IMDb also says Robert Towne did an uncredited rewrite.)

This is just a real good movie of its type. It’s the JAWS of JAWS ripoffs. It’s not Spielberg-level but it is well directed and acted, with a lean and fun story. It delivers with characters and emotions but also with mayhem. On land and on sea. I hope that some day – perhaps in some Big Brother program – man and orca can watch this movie together and laugh.

[ratings]

Oh well, at least it snuck out. The cover art is pretty cool too, and it uses one of those critic quotes that isn’t really a compliment but just a description: “PREDATOR meets BEOWULF.” And that’s accurate. A space ship crash lands in Norway, 709 A.D. A survivor climbs out wearing a space suit that looks alot like a suit of armor (surprisingly that doesn’t come up again later). He’s Jim Caviezel, and I wasn’t sure at first if I was gonna accept aliens that look just like humans, but when he looked up Earth on his computer it said we were an “abandoned seed colony,” so I guess we all come from the same place. Brothers from a different mother.

Anyway, something deadly got off that ship. He goes after it, but it’s already decimated a village ahead of him. He ends up captured by the vikings (who think he’s a foreigner, not a spaceman) and blamed for the attack. The attack is a big deal because it could start a war between John Hurt’s people and Ron Perlman’s.

And then he becomes a viking. The spaceman part is less important than I expected, this is mostly a vikings vs. monster movie. Doesn’t matter that much that the monster is from space, it might as well be a dragon. The outlander has to prove himself as a warrior, convince them of the existence of the monster (called a moorwen) and help them kill it. The sci-fi angle is mostly important for the flashbacks, where we learn where the moorwen came from. That’s my favorite part of the movie. You find out this monster is basically an endangered animal on a rampage. You gotta feel sorry for that thing. I mean it’s like an elephant that gets loose from the circus or something. It’s dangerous, but what did you think would happen when you locked up an elephant and started beating it until it did tricks? This guy Caviezel knows what he did to the moorwens was wrong, but at the same time he feels it’s his responsibility to kill it (like the dragon in BEOWULF). So there’s some moral ambiguity there.

Ron Perlman’s not in it that much, but he’s a cool character with a bushy beard, bald head and face tattoo. The type of dude battle axes were invented for.

The monster is cool if not perfect. There’s parts where you see him running around and he has that weightless look most CGI monsters have. That’s a problem. But otherwise he’s great. He lights up from the inside, a good look in the dark. He’s a vicious fucker too, with one especially good move where he impales a guy on a light-up tentacle and then pulls him through a wall. His face looks a little like the American Godzilla, so I’m sure the other monsters give him alot of shit about that. Maybe that’s why he acts out so much.

If they ever did a sequel to this I’d want them to get some sci-fi weaponry vs. viking action. Maybe some asshole viking finds the laser gun that the outlander dropped in the water at the beginning, and it takes a whole army to stop him from fucking shit up. Or the other spacemen come back and try to colonize but the vikings fight back. You know, I just want to see an underdog viking vs. alien technology battle. It’s not something that comes up every day, so when it does you want to see some vikings swinging axes at flying saucers and shit.

This is one of those small surprise gems like what PITCH BLACK was to some people. I actually think it’s better, or at least the visuals and production value are better and I enjoyed it more than I did PITCH BLACK the first time. The monster is definitely better. There’s not a memorable badass character like Riddick, so that point goes to PITCH BLACK. But anyway, good movie. You wouldn’t guess it from the director’s resume either. He directed some kiddie movie starring Robert Hays and wrote UNDERWORLD: RISE OF THE LYCANS. But now he can hold his head high like a viking.

Since we don’t actually witness the incident (except for where the head lands) it’s hard to really know for sure what Cloverfield’s motive is. It’s easy to jump to conclusions that he’s making a statement about the loss of liberty in America post 9-11, or perhaps he is some sort of rabid anti-American and is threatening our liberty. He should realize that it is very insensitive in the post 9-11 world to not only attack landmarks in Manhattan but to make people think of being beheaded. I don’t care if the fucker’s from space, if you’re visiting some place you gotta do research on the local customs and not just be a big asshole like that. So he’s either very anti-american or just a prick. Or maybe he hates women. My guess though is he thought the statue looked at him funny. Or he saw that torch and thought she was armed and just acted on reflex. After all, it is New York. Okay, I have gone through alot of theories here but I’m sticking with that last one, the Amadou Diallo theory. If anybody finds evidence to back me up on one of those stupid “viral marketing” websights everybody got all caught up in please let me know.

The truth is we don’t really know alot about Cloverfield. He comes from the sea. He is not careful about damaging buildings. I heard he eats people. He has some bad hygiene, because giant poisonous spiders flake off of him. Worst dandruff ever. The movie really isn’t about Cloverfield though as much as it’s about some urban professional youths who are having a party that gets interupted by Cloverfield’s out of control behavior. As you know this is a movie like CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST or MAN BITES DOG or THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT or THE LAST BROADCAST or GUINEA PIG or THE LAST HORROR MOVIE or the first part of BEHIND THE MASK or the last part of SNUFF or various parts of FACES OF DEATH or MY LITTLE EYE or REAL TIME: SIEGE AT LUCAS STREET MARKET or REDACTED or THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES or DIARY OF THE DEAD or WAITING FOR GUFFMAN where it pretends to be actual footage of a real event. There’s a going away party for a guy named Rob, and his brother’s girlfriend wants to make a video for him to remember them by. Then they keep taping during the monster attack “because people will want to know,” and you are watching their tape, which was found in Central Park.

I’m sure this is a premise that a million people thought of before: “what if somebody had a camcorder there when Godzilla attacked?” But these type of movies are usually low budget independents and that’s why they’re doing the fake documentary gimmick. This one is only low by studio standards, so it’s kind of cool that somebody put the money into it to show what it would be like to just capture a glimpse of giant tail or tentacle as you’re running down a rumbling city street. The effects look pretty real and it definitely gives you a different angle on the standard giant monster story. (A low angle.)

I was impressed by the way it sets up the characters. The one you like best is the one you see the least, the guy behind the camera for most of the movie. How many movies have a memorable off screen character? He’s immediately set up as kind of a dumb funny guy, providing comic relief from behind the camera, and they establish his personality so you believe he might keep taping through alot of this. Of course, we’ve seen enough amateur video of disasters we almost don’t need an explanation for that. CNN calls them “iReporters” I think. And there’s a scene where everybody takes out their phones and starts snapping pictures of the Statue of Liberty’s severed head, which rings very true. But they don’t try to force feed you some point about modern technology and voyeurism or the way the camera lens acts as a protective layer to distance these guys from the horror in front of them or that by capturing a soul (taking a photo) we are taking away its power or some shit like that. It’s all there if you want to read it but they feel no need to get out the highlighters.

But wait a minute. This giant monster movie is really about PEOPLE? In most of the Godzilla type movies that’s the last thing you want to see is a bunch of fuckin people. There are way too many scenes of scientists standing around in lab coats discussing things. This goes all the way back to the first GODZILLA. That had a good tragic character at the center but still, you’re always waiting for the monster to eat a train or something. GODZILLA FINAL WARS is the only one I know of that has a memorable human character, because they have some guy from Ultimate Fighting who has a big mustache and tries to fight Godzilla with a sword. Would’ve been cool if that guy was invited to Rob’s party. Things would’ve turned out better.

Anyway, the natural answer would be to have less people and more monsters, but this movie’s answer is to make the people a little more relatable. Alot of people are excited because the movie is produced by J.J. Abrams, who does TV shows that people besides me like to watch and enjoy, etc. And of course everybody knows that director Matt Reeves can be trusted, as he is the co-writer of UNDER SIEGE 2: DARK TERRITORY. But what people don’t mention is that those two were also the creators of the late ’90s TV show FELICITY which was also about young people in New York City who have relationships and somewhat naturalistic acting and like to make home videos and are involved in clever gimmicks and do impulsive things because they think they’re in love and have fancy apartments and wear nice sweaters. From what I understand. I don’t know much about the show, apparently something about a young girl named Felicity Porter (Keri Russel) who upon graduating high school impulsively decides to ditch her plans and move to New York City to go to the same school as a boy she barely knows but has a crush on. Then it expands to be about the developing relationships between a group of her roommates, classmates and co-workers as she learns life lessons and struggles with her affection for two boyfriends who are opposites and decides to study art instead of medicine and then in one episode they’re all tiny and trapped inside a box and it’s shot TWILIGHT ZONE style. I don’t know, you’d have to ask somebody more familiar with it but someone who has seen it might argue that CLOVERFIELD is a natural extension of the type of style those guys did on FELICITY but expanded into the world of giant monster attacks. I think maybe I heard somebody argue that or something, I’m not sure.

But even if you can’t relate to these youths with their crushes and feelings and what not, at least you can relate to their size. Because like I said, they are human-sized, just like you. I can’t emphasize this enough. They are smaller than Cloverfield. This might be a broad generalization but in my experience all humans are small compared to Cloverfield and it’s pretty awe inspiring to be in their shoes looking up at that motherfucker. For the record, I have no idea what Cloverfield looks like, the clearest shot of him is looking up at him from below his neck, like a nipple’s eye view. If I had to guess I’d say he looked like that monster Luke Skywalker killed in RETURN OF THE JEDI fucked some weird albino bat or something.

I went to a midnight show with a huge crowd of nerds. One pissed off guy yelled “BULLSHIT!” at the end, which I thought was funny. All I can figure is he was frustrated that it is exactly what the premise tells you and no more. You don’t ever know where the monster came from or if it for sure got stopped or the usual sort of things you see in the ten thousand regular giant monster movies available for you on home video. You don’t know what the president said or the guys in the war room and there was never a part where an animal just barely escaped death. Yeah, those kind of movies can be fun but the strength of this one is that it’s not that type of movie. You have a limited perspective, a limited knowledge, just like you would if you were at Rob’s party when the shit went down.

So I thought they did a good job and it’s well put together, complete with awkward in-camera edits and what not. The characters are more likable than the ones in BLAIR WITCH PROJECT because they whine less, they show care for each other and they have more of a gallows sense of humor. And you glimpse some pretty harrowing monster destruction, so it works on an amusement park ride level.

I also think it has a heart to it. Everybody knows the original GODZILLA was about the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so it’s not surprising that this movie is clearly coming from a post 9-11 perspective. (sorry, that’s the third time I’ve used that term. But I swear it was relevant.) If somebody used this gimmick before 2001 maybe it would’ve been more about what other awesome things the monster could do besides disrespecting Lady Liberty. Remember INDEPENDENCE DAY, everybody was all excited about blowing up landmarks?

That’s not the mentality of CLOVERFIELD, it’s more interested in showing the emotions we all went through on 9-11. It’s about friends wanting to appreciate the time they have together, wanting to make sure the people they love know that they are loved, wanting to go back for the person who was left behind, wanting to go with their friend to go back for the person who was left behind even though they know it’s a stupid thing to do. But it’s what they need to do. These are all responses to any disaster but to many Americans they are things you thought about more after knowing about 9-11, so they’re things that become more necessary in a movie like this than they were before. Before Will Smith could’ve just went in and started shit talking Cloverfield, calling him ugly. But who knows if he’s ugly or not for his species, we don’t even know what his peers would look like if he had any, or which one would be considered ugly by their standards of beauty. So that would be kind of racist. Come on Will Smith, this is 2008. Not trying to be “PC” or anything but jesus, don’t be such an asshole.

So this is a really intense experience, in fact people were so involved in the movie that they started to throw up! I’ve never seen anything like it. Nah, I’m just fucking with you. I didn’t notice any puking in the theater, but there was quite a bit outside the exit. It may or may not have been caused by the motion sickness from watching a camera shake around for 70 minutes. I noticed they carefully placed little camera-stays-still intermissions every couple scenes. I hate shakycam because it takes the geography out of action scenes, but I didn’t think it would be a problem here since obviously I know going in that it’s the whole reason for the movie. It makes it seem like a real video but in a weird way it kind of made the movie less intense for me, it’s kind of distancing. Because it puts you in the position of watching a video of an event, not experiencing the event. If you were “Hud,” the character with the camera, you would see much more than what’s in the viewfinder. You wouldn’t be as disoriented as you are watching this movie.

So it’s strange because I liked the “realism” of CLOVERFIELD but on a gut level I was much more affected by the more artificial, more Hollywood approach of Spielberg’s WAR OF THE WORLDS. It’s a similar perspective – you only see what Tom Cruise and his family see, so the tripods are usually across a field and you don’t cut away to some big meeting in the war room. And the information you learn is from news reports or people they run into. You might hear some information passed on by a soldier on the ground, but you won’t see the top guy giving the command. So it has that limited perspective but it’s still shot like a movie, you get the benefit of seeing things more clearly and being less nauseous. And without pretending not to be a movie, it subliminally gives you a feeling of reality. It creates reality instead of dressing up like reality. For me it’s still the champion of PG-13 intensity.

Another good comparison might be CHILDREN OF MEN, which created a feeling of realism with those seemingly-continuous handheld shots, but didn’t pretend to be a documentary. For me CLOVERFIELD never got anywhere near the tenseness of those scenes, but it did have some good ones. My favorite is when they’re on a street pretty close to the monster and all the sudden a bunch of soldiers run up and just start firing bullets and missiles at the fucker (because they are racist like Will Smith) and Rob and friends are standing right there, in danger from both sides. Total chaos.

If CLOVERFIELD is a hit it’ll be interesting to see if they try to do a sequel. Obviously you want to see Cloverfield fight one of his fellow monsters, even if it does kind of promote stereotypes about monsters. I don’t know, maybe if they do that then the Will Smiths of the world win, and nobody wants that. But the real dilemma is not how many monsters, but what type of camera. The FELICITY/CLOVERFIELD team faces the same problem as the BLAIR WITCH sequel people. Either they do another camcorder-POV and the novelty has worn thin, or they do it regular style and they’ve ditched what was unique about the original.

I think they did leave a couple little ways they could connect it. There’s some kind of muffled voice at the end of the credits that I couldn’t hear over everybody shushing each other, but it might be some kind of hint. The first scene is in an apartment and they talk about a girl’s dad not being home – so the sequel could be about her dad. My guess is they’ll call it HAMMERDOWN and do like a pro-shot documentary or news crew account of the fight against the monster, which will turn out to survive and then at least one other monster will crawl out of the sea to fight it. And more and more shit will just keep hitting the fan. Still only one fan but just a huge amount of shit hitting it. Then at the end there’s a twist where either Predator or Freddy comes out. Or I guess Jason since it would be hard to get Freddy on camera, unless the whole thing turns out to be a dream, which might be too weird of a twist.

Or maybe it will be a prequel about setting up the decorations for Rob’s party.

[ratings]

Like

Unlike

Aliens, predators, why do you always gotta fight? Why can’t you just resolve your differences? I know they say “whoever wins, we lose” but I’ve seen both the AvP movies and clearly nobody is winning anything. We lose, and you lose our respect.

RESURRECTION and RATATOUILLE were already taken and they needed something that started with an R, so the title of this thing is REQUIEM. That might make you wanna ask who died, but you already know the answer: the remaining dignity of aliens and predators across the universe. Two proud races slandered and humiliated, on the Lord’s birthday no less. And why? For what? What the hell did aliens and predators ever do to us other than entertain and delight us, scare us, fuck up our space colonies and skin some dudes in a jungle? Nothing. And for that we give them a franchise so lazy it can’t even be bothered to spell out its own titles.

Okay, let me say this. The directors of the movie, who are credited as THE BROTHERS STRAUSE (I picture them as the Barbarian brothers, preferably holding battle axes while on set), are not entirely incompetent. I don’t believe they will ever be smokin hot directors like Ridley Scott was when he created his masterpiece ALIEN (sorry BLADE RUNNER, but you know it’s true. Why don’t you go cry in the rain now?) or like James Cameron when he made one of the best sequels ever made (ALIENS or T2, take your pick). But better than Paul Not Thomas Anderson? Yeah, I’ll buy that. On par with Stephen Hopkins? Sure, why not? I could believe that. But this is no PREDATOR 2. That’s all I ask is a PREDATOR 2 or greater level of quality, but I didn’t get it.

The monsters look pretty cool when you get glimpses of them. There is some violence, and we like violence. The look of the movie is pretty decent for the most part. It’s cool and kind of weird that the director of photography is Daniel Pearl of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE fame and TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE infamy. After a nicely shot opening in the Colorado woods that ironically mimics E.T., the power eventually goes out and most of the events end up taking place in dark buildings or tunnels or outside in the rainy night. This was an intentional choice to imitate the dark and wet look of ALIEN, but I’m not sure they thought it through that well. In ALIEN the alien is mysterious, kept off screen most of the time, and Scott is using our imagination against us, all the while knowing that when we do see it the thing is so fuckin weird it’s gonna be scarier even than what we were picturing.

THE BROTHERS STRAUSE don’t have that advantage or that goal. The aliens are not mysterious and there is no time in the movie where they try to create any tension about where the aliens are. More often there is some scene where two ordinary characters are talking about ordinary things in a kitchen and suddenly an alien storms in and kills them. Or some dudes are fighting over a girl at a swimming pool and an alien comes out and kills them. So when we finally get what the letters before the dash in the title promised why the fuck does it have to be in the dark, in the rain, with a handheld camera shaking around? Is there some storytelling reason why we should not clearly see what’s going on in the climactic fight between the only two characters anybody gives a shit about? I don’t think there is. And that kind of sums up the movie. Not thought through that well, and no reason for it.

The thing about this movie, it’s not the kind of bad where it’s funny or awe inspiring in its craziness or anything like that. It’s more frustrating because it’s competently made but it’s so misguided from the very concept that you can’t figure out why the hell they didn’t try to do something more worthwhile. Maybe they could’ve pulled it off.

This might be some kind of arcane wisdom that nobody else is privy to, but I happen to know that both the ALIEN and PREDATOR movies are not just monster movies, they’re about CHARACTERS. Obviously Ripley is one of the all time great characters in sci-fi movies. But there’s also Dallas, Ash, Parker and Harry Dean Stanton (admittedly, I forgot his name was Brett). And in ALIENS who can forget Bishop, Vasquez, Burke (eerily believable sleazy bureaucrat) or of course Private “Game over, man!” Hudson? And that’s only a few of the memorable characters in those movies. PREDATOR’s characters are more iconic action movie types. The monster is cool but the reason for the movie’s longevity is the asskicking ensemble of cigar chomping Dutch, Carl Weathers and Bill Duke at their most badass, crazy fuckin Sonny Landham and Jesse “The Body” Ventura’s greatest role with his greatest lines and his greatest weapon.

So how does credited screenwriter Shane Salerno try to build on the legacies of those beloved characters? WITH A FUCKING PIZZA DELIVERY BOY IN A SMALL TOWN IN COLORADO. That’s the hero of the movie. He is sad because his boss makes him wear a hat and because he has the hots for a blonde model in his class, but she’s dating an asshole bully who looks like Fred from Scooby Doo if he were 30 years old and trying to dress up as a contemporary high school student. (I’m betting they cut out the scene explaining that these characters are undercover narcs like on 21 JUMP STREET.) Fred makes fun of Pizza Boy for being a Pizza Boy so Pizza Boy calls Fred a fag so Fred takes his keys and throws them in the sewer! That will surely be an iconic scene everyone will always remember like Ripley in the powerloader or Dutch jumping from the Predator bomb.

(By the way, can we have a moratorium on sewer tunnels? How many towns in Colorado really have huge sewer tunnels with walkways in them? If you believe movies every street in the world has a sewer tunnel below, crawling with mutant crocodiles, vampires, reapers, aliens, predators, Beauty and the Beast and who knows what else.)

Anyway the blond gets mad and breaks up with Fred and about an hour in she and Pizza Boy are gonna sneak into the school swimming pool to screw. But then Fred shows up and there’s gonna be a fight! And the Predator is there too! Also there’s a part where the Predator comes out of the cement on the street by Dairy Queen. You know, the one across the street from Papa John’s. I know I am making this sound like one of the all time great movies but actually it’s kind of dull.

There are supposed to be safeguards such as “common sense” and “basic decency” put in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening. I’m sure there are many people responsible for it but we need a scapegoat so I’m gonna pin it on Salerno. Unless he comes into the talkback and claims that he was held at gunpoint and the lives of his loved ones were at stake, I don’t think there’s an acceptable excuse for writing a movie like this. He would probaly claim that the studio head used to work in the pizza delivery industry and would not greenlight the movie unless it gave him a forum to share those experiences with ALIEN and PREDATOR fans as he had always dreamed. Sorry bud, that doesn’t get you off the hook. You are still responsible for your actions regardless of who told you to do it or how much money they paid you. Haven’t you seen A SIMPLE PLAN? Or JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG?

Come to think of it I don’t think he has because at the end of the movie (SPOILER) the military has nuked the town RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD style, the dumbass heroes have escaped the blast and are surrounded by soldiers, and the guy called Dallas (who’s no Tom Skerritt, by the way) says “You bastards! You killed every one in the whole town!” A soldier says, “We were just following orders.” And then the heroes put down their guns, accepting that as a reasonable answer, and the movie ends, as if we are also supposed to accept that.
But, sorry bud. You’re wrong on that one. Nuremberg was right.

I don’t like to call people I don’t know idiots, but how do you explain this getting made? Who the fuck thought this was the story to use? If this is the one they give the greenlight to then what the fuck were the rejected ideas? I’m sure there was one where they were in the hood, and one where they were on a reality TV show. Hey, I have an idea, next time you should go the LEPRECHAUN route and put them in space! That would really mix this franchise up if you could put the aliens into an alien environment like that! You can use this idea for free, no need to credit me.

I have enough problems accepting aliens on earth in the present day, because of how stupid and insignificant that makes Ripley’s story. Still, I was willing to accept this as a cheesy PREDATOR sequel. But the story is not a PREDATOR story, it’s a worse than usual NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET sequel. I’m surprised they didn’t throw in a part about how the parents don’t believe the kids that there are aliens and predators.

There are scenes where the kids are struggling with their love lives and you just think, what the fuck THE BROTHERS STRAUSE, why are you showing me this? You could take this same dumb ass story and make it much more tolerable just by not following these walking cliches with blond streaks. Do it only from the point of view of the cops, instead of partly. Or from the POV of the soldiers who are called in to respond. Or best of all, from the POV of the Predator. He’s the only character you really perk up for when he shows up.

By the way, this movie does not contradict my theory that the hunters in PREDATOR 1&2 are the redneck yokels of Predator society. In fact, they briefly show the Predator planet and there are buildings there, it’s not a bunch of trees with skulls nailed to them or anything. They are civilized. The main Predator here is just sitting at his post in Predator City, minding his own business, when he finds out about those stupid Mitchell Report muscleheads from AvP1 and he has to fly to earth to clean up their mess, destroy the evidence before humans find out about aliens and warn Ripley not to go into space or something. I’m not actually clear why exactly he has to destroy the evidence, but he’s probaly just doing his job, like Salerno. And like Salerno he’s not that great at his job, since he first destroys evidence of aliens and then, moments later, skins a man alive and hangs him upside down ten feet in the air.

Still, he’s a pretty good Predator and clearly the most interesting character in the movie. So if they weren’t gonna put any effort toward actual characters they should’ve cut all that shit out and made the movie about the Predator. The directors are special effects guys, by the way, and clearly are better with monster suits than with TV actors. Either that or nobody told them how this brother team thing works, that one of the brothers is supposed to work with the actors while the other one moves the camera around.

I’m not saying there can’t be humans in a movie like this (although I always wanted to see that in an ALIEN movie). But if it’s mainly gonna be about the human characters and their love lives, you better make them resemble humans, or at least characters. If you could take out all of the characters and their storylines, you would have a passable movie. So good effort I guess on the other stuff, fellas. But next time do better.

Originally published at Aint-It-Cool-News: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/35164

[ratings]

I heard some shit about your butts were numb or something like that. Sorry to hear about that I hope you get well soon.

Anyway here’s the deal. I saw KING KONG. Not sure if you know about this one but it is a remake of an older picture from ‘33 or so. This version is by Pete Jackson who won an Oscar, etc. You LORD OF THE RINGS fans will know who I’m talking about. If not there is always the internet. I’m not sure if they have IMDB translated into elfish, but I’m sure you can find the information somewhere or other.

Basically the plot involves a 25 foot tall gorilla, a blonde gal and a prominent New York landmark. (not the statue of liberty.) By the end of the movie the fates of these three may or may not turn out to be intertwined. I don’t want to give too much away.

Okay I’ll be more specific. The movie is basically divided into two movements. First movement is the movie crew heading to this place Skull Island (don’t go there) where they meet the gorilla, who we will call Kong. Also there are dinosaurs, giant worms, giant bats, angry natives, skeletons (dead), things you can fall off of, and that sort of shit. Second movement, the action repeats itself in New York. (there are not giant worms and shit in New York though. sorry.)

I must admit that this is not a 100% perfect movie descended from Heaven in the form of pure celluloid energy never touched by man. The main flaw is that it takes its sweet time getting to the island and our boy Kong. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind that this is a 3 hour movie. I’m thankful for the 3 hours. It would take a no good rat soup eating motherfucker to complain about a movie this good being 3 hours long. Oh boo hoo, they spent extra time and money trying to entertain you. They sacrificed box office by limiting the amount of showings per day, what bastards! I’m sorry if you have to piss real bad and it causes bladder hemhoraging or something horrible like that, but otherwise you shouldn’t complain. I mean Harry and his friends over there just watched this and ten or so other movies IN A ROW. Admittedly, those people are clearly insane, but their journey is only one of the many indiciations that it is technically possible to take 3 hours out of your busy schedule of whining to watch a great movie.

THAT SAID, they coulda got to the island faster. Maybe a little less of the Ann Darrow embarasses herself routines. I would be willing to trade some of the human setup for some bonus Kong. But anyway they set up these human characters and they boat around for a while but when they finally get to the point where Ann Darrow is kidnapped by savages of indistinct race and offered to Kong… HOLY SHIT, this movie takes off like a bunch of actors running from a bunch of dinosaurs.

I liked LORD OF THE RINGS as much as the next guy, assuming the next guy does not speak elfish or carry a sword. But I gotta admit, I was not prepared for how amazing the character of Kong is. I didn’t expect it. I seen ape movies before and I didn’t realize you could have this big a leap ahead of, say, remake Mighty Joe Young or whichever was the last ape movie. This movie is a god damn miracle. It’s not just because they made a great computer program but because they gave this guy personality. Like Gollum, you don’t think of him as a special effect at all, you think of him as a character. In fact, you think of him as a dude you know. And although it’s fun to see your buddy tear a t-rex’s head apart or get mad and wipe out the balcony of a theater with one quick arm swipe, he’s not just a raging monster. He does ape things. He lays around and scratches himself. He makes jokes to amuse himself. After he kills the t-rex, he plays with it a little. I don’t think they ever show him taking a shit or masturbating but otherwise it is very realistic.

Kong is played by Andy Serkis (THE ESCAPIST) who also plays the part of “Lumpy.” Who do you think you are dude, Eddie Murphy? Let’s keep it to one role in the future. Anyway, Serkis is basically wearing the greatest ape costume of all time. Don’t worry, I understand that it’s computers and what not. But you figure he is controlling the ape by his movements, he is basically wearing a costume made out of pixels. I’m sure there’s some animation in there too, I don’t know, but whatever they do they end up with very realistic movements, very strong personality, very convincing giant ape the likes of which you’ve never seen.

By the way, this is how you know Kong is a bad motherfucker. He lives on an island populated by all kinds of dinosaurs, giant bugs, bats, and who knows what other crazy shit that we didn’t even see. They found a six foot wide poisonous jellyfish off the coast of Japan recently, who knows what they could have on the undercharted territory of Skull Island. (Some would call it uncharted but since Jack Black had a map to it I think technically it is undercharted.) What I’m getting at is, when a beautiful blond gal washes up on shore, who do the natives try to sacrifice her to? No, not the t-rex. Not the giant bats. They give this chick to Kong. And beautiful blond chicks are not easy to come by in this part of the world. When they snag one they’re not gonna waste it. So they give it to the official baddest motherfucker on Skull Island, which would be Kong, thank you very much.

Also you know he’s a bad motherfucker because of a particular move he does in a fight that could very well top Tyler Durden’s “spitting blood in face” move from FIGHT CLUB for Outstanding Achievement in Fighting Dirty. I won’t give it away but you’ll see it.

So anyway, with a bad motherfucker like that in the starring role, this ends up being a real thrill ride. There’s a certain type of “big event movie thrill ride” that I hate, I don’t really know if there is a name for them so let’s just call them “Stephen Sommers movies.” These are movies that have no rhythm and just toss BIG LOUD ACTION SCENE after BIG LOUD ACTION SCENE in your face and it’s so monotonously loud and big that it’s just boring, it doesn’t involve me. I don’t know why but KING KONG doesn’t feel that way at all, even though there are long ass sections of the movie that are as non-stop and relentless as a Texas chain saw massacre. It doesn’t let up. Basically the section from the first appearance of Kong to when they’re ready to take him off the island (spoiler) is one of the most exciting and amazing extended action scenes I’ve seen in a long god damn time, full of tension and clever dilemmas. I mean if it isn’t one thing (crushed by dinos rolling down a hill) it’s another (head swallowed by giant prehistoric tube worm). And then when you get to New York you’re so emotionally involved in the big guy that it’s even better than the earlier part.

Of course, there is some amount of suspension of the ol’ disbelief involved. First of all, you gotta accept that when people get chased by various giant prehistoric monsters, they are gonna be able to get away most of the time, or at least make a good run for it with the lizardy fuckers snapping at their ass and not quite connecting. The Jason Voorhees principle. You also gotta accept that when people run under the feet of stampeding dinosaurs, only a bunch of them will get crushed. Not all of them. And you have to accept that cute little Naomi Watts can get tossed around like a hacky sack for days on end without losing consciousness or transforming herself into the purplest Naomi Watts-shaped walking bruise you’ve ever seen in your life. Also there may be one or two other very very minor violations of accepted scientific fact. I’m sure the experts on giant prehistoric insects will chime in in the talkbacks.

So you got all kinds of harrowing adventure and what not, but the real kicker on this movie is obviously the tragedy of the whole thing. I mean, clearly Ann Darrow has a bad day. First her theater gets shut down and she can’t afford food. Then she gets kidnapped by savages and manhandled by a giant gorilla and hangs off the teeth of a falling dinosaur (long story) and all this. But you gotta feel even more for Kong. Because what’s he supposed to do? There’s no winning for Kong. Yeah, so he loves a woman obtained under illicit circumstances. So what. I’m sure worse shit happens on Skull Island every day. Considering where he grew up, he’s a nice guy. And you’d probaly like Naomi Watts too if somebody gave her to you. So for the crime of love and/or gigantism he gets drugged up and taken to New York in chains and put on display. Nobody can blame him for escaping. I’m sure even the guy whose head he bit off in that one awesome part (spoiler) would understand.

So now here he is living in New York just trying to spend some time alone with his girl. This time it’s consensual so get over it, people. Get off his balls. Unfortunately, some people – like the United States Army to name one example – just can’t leave shit alone. They gotta shoot a dude just for being a giant ape. I mean come on people, we need to learn to work shit out without resorting to tommy guns and biplanes all the time. I’m sure if you told him he had to swim back to Skull Island he would give it a shot. Even though it would be bullshit.

What I’m saying is, this poor bastard is doomed. No way anybody’s gonna let him get back to Skull Island. No way anybody’s gonna let him just hang out on tall things and chill like he did at home. And trying to put giant clothes on and pass for human is probaly out of the question too although in my opinion that option is not adequately explored in the movie.

And THANK GOD Kong does not know that the dashing and charismatic Oscar winner Adrien Brody is waiting in the wings to come sweep up Ann Darrow as soon as Kong bites it. That shit would’ve KILLED Kong. If the biplanes didn’t. Which they did. Spoiler.

Anyway, this doomed relationship is very sweet and beautiful. A good giant ape romance. Obviously it’s not gonna work out real well physically and I don’t think Ann Darrow really digs him that way. Maybe it’s not a boyfriend girlfriend deal per se. I’m not sure which one is which one’s pet dog but whatever the deal is you can see why they dig each other. And they do a good job of portraying the whole romance with almost no dialogue at all. Alot of filmatists I think would be tempted to make Ann Darrow talk to Kong non-stop to explain her thoughts to the audience. “Oh no, put me down you big hairball!” and that sort of shit. Peter Jackson though obviously did his research because he knows that apes actually don’t speak English. So she doesn’t waste her time saying things to him that he’s not gonna comprende. The fact that it’s mostly non-verbal makes it all the more sweet and tragic.

I didn’t cry though, come on. Who do you take me for? But it’s a sweet movie.

Ah hell, I’m doin it. I’m goin all caps on this one. THIS IS A GREAT FUCKIN MOVIE. I’m not the world’s all time #1 greatest fan of hyperbole, but I think it’s safe to say this one is a classic, masterpiece, etc. It’s one of those movies that reminds you why you love movies, reminds you that it’s still possible to be amazed. This movie proves the old adage that “If Peter Jackson wants to do something, just let him fucking do it you shitheads.” Especially if that something is a $200 million 3-hour NC-17 sequel to BAD TASTE and that’s why he lost the weight, to reprise his role as Derek.

Seriously Harry, check out this movie, I think you would probaly dig it. Maybe you are not into giant ape movies or Peter Jackson movies as a rule but give it a shot, watch it with an open mind. Also Harry could you burn me a copy of Masters of Horror, I don’t want to pay for Showtime. Don’t tell Moriarty. Nah forget I said anything I’ll deal with this later. Anyway KING KONG motherfucker. KING KONG. That’s all I got to say.

thanks,

Vern

Originally published at Aint-It-Cool-News: http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=22016

[ratings]

Like

Unlike