Archive for the ‘Thriller’ Category

The Old Dark House

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

As you know I like to watch the classics but the only way to tell for sure if it is a classic is based on what channel it is on. This one was on American Movie Classics so that’s how I know. If it was on TBS or especially USA that would be another story. Anyway it is an old one from James Whale the director of Frankenstein.

Boris Karloff from the Frankenstein gets top billing but let’s be honest here, he’s playing a mute butler for christ’s sake. This is not a starring role it is strictly a gimp role in my opinion. I mean I know for a fact the man can talk, and can talk well. But you wouldn’t know it the way he’s typecasted in some of these pictures. Here he’s just a big oafish brute who gets drunk and tries to grab the pretty ladies. He looks like they left the Frankenstein makeup on him and pasted a beard over it the poor bastard.

Charles Laughton the famous hunchback is also in it playing a jolly gay guy (and by gay I do not mean jolly, that would be stupid to say that, it would be like he plays a jolly jolly guy. What I mean is he is gay or homosexual). Gloria Stuart is one of the two pretty young gals in the picture. She strips down to her antique undies at one point so if you liked her in the titanic movie, get ready to hit pause. (more…)

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Halloween: Resurrection

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

A couple years back you’ll remember that I reviewed the whole HALLOWEEN series. And I mean the WHOLE series. The first one, the middle ones, the last one. The very last one. The one where they got the original stars back, they got a halfway decent script, they brought everything full circle, they chopped that fucker’s head off and they cut to the credits. The end, forever. Never again. Against all odds, they came up with a decent wrapup to an endless series of bad sequels.

Well sadly what they went and did, they talked poor Michael Meyers into doing ANOTHER one, one that nobody in the world wanted, one more in the tradition of parts 4, 5 and 6, but even worse. I guess I can’t blame Mike, with a mug like that how you gonna get leading man roles. He’s a character actor at best unless he’s in HALLOWEEN, then he’s the star.

They never really mean it when they say a movie is the last in the series, but I’m telling you, I really mean it when I say this is the worst in the series. The premise is sort of a self consciously modernized HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL. Busta Rhymes (the rapper who I think should play Dolemite instead of LL Cool J) is Vincent Price, because he’s gathered all these kids together to spend the night in Mike Meyer’s childhood home, and straps cameras onto them like some kind of REAL WORLD type show, but it’s broadcast on the internet instead of real tv. This premise makes the following unwise assumptions:

  1. the audience doesn’t know that nobody watches “internet programming”, especially live on a day they could be doing something else (i.e. Halloween)
  2. the audience believes home computers can download 100 live feeds of full screen tv quality digital video at the same time
  3. people still believe computers make blipping and blooping noise whenever you hit a key or a graphic appears on the screen
  4. we’re really gonna buy that this company won’t get paid for their event until after it’s over
  5. we really want to see a HALLOWEEN movie that is almost entirely about a group of kids walking through the shadows of one small house
    5b. and that we don’t mind if all they ever cut away to is a bunch of kids at a party standing in a room watching a computer screen with the kids walking through the shadows of that one small house.

I think I called UNDISPUTED asinine, but I wasted it, I should’ve saved that word for this one.

The one section that doesn’t revolve around the house is the ridiculous opening which explains away the great ending to the last movie. We are told that the Michael Meyers who attacked Laurie at the end and then got his head chopped off was actually a paramedic who Michael had switched clothes with! In this scene Michael tracks Laurie down at an asylum where she has set up a bunch of boobie traps and manages to hang him upside down. But he kills her anyway and frames one of the other inmates for the murder. I guess I wasn’t paying attention in this series – when did Michael and Laurie turn into fuckin MacGyver?

This is one of those embarassingly out of touch movies where they seem to think that being on the cutting edge of technology is enough to make the movie work, even though they’re not really on the cutting edge of technology. They keep cutting to shaky, fuzzy digital video footage from mini-cameras attached to the actors. This was an interesting new gimmick in 1986 when they did it in ALIENS. Now it’s 2002, it’s, what, ten or more years later. You’re gonna have to try a little harder to dazzle us, asshole.

As long as I had to see the fuckin thing, I wish I saw it in the theater so I could’ve heard everybody laugh every time they had a “subliminal” Michael Meyers face appear when the video flipped over. SPOOOOOOKKKY!

Busta Rhymes is the most charismatic individual in the movie, but he doesn’t get shit to do except talk to himself making wacky jokes like he thought the movie was supposed to be more along the lines of HOW HIGH. Supporting my theory that he should play Dolemite, there are scenes where he does fake kung fu on Michael Meyers and is overdubbed with Bruce Lee style squeals. We understand that he knows these kung fu moves because earlier he watched a kung fu movie, which was also overdubbed with Bruce Lee style squeals, even though it wasn’t a Bruce Lee movie. At the end Busta has a sudden change of heart and makes a half assed stick it to the man speech about the media exploiting violence, which I guess you learn after you’ve faced Michael Meyers. It’s like one of those dolphin encounters you can get.

There is one new addition to the Michael Meyers mythology: we now know that rappers are immune to his killing powers. When LL Cool J survived what seemed like certain death, I thought it was a fluke. This time Busta gets stabbed several times in the back, but appears again to save the day. At the end he gets a sling for an apparent arm injury but his rapping powers have healed over the stab wounds.

If Mike shows up again I wouldn’t bother calling the sherriff, just call the Wu-Tang Clan.

The asshole responsible for this poppycock is Rick Rosenthal, the director of HALLOWEEN part 2. That movie was okay but apparently he did a bad job so they had to fire him and have John Carpenter reshoot a bunch of the scenes. In an attempt to recapture that classic not-that-badness, they hired Rosenthal again and fired him again and replaced him with (I heard) Steve Miner, who doesn’t contribute any of the thrill he gave to part 7 or Friday the 13th parts 2 and 3-D. Before they did the reshoots, Dimension wasn’t even planning to release this piece of shit, but Ms. Curtis and Mr. Rhymes talked them into it. I guess you can’t blame Busta, he probaly told everybody he was in a HALLOWEEN movie and nobody believed him, and if they hadn’t released the movie he would’ve looked like a liar. Still, I’d rather be called a liar than be called the guy from HALLOWEEN 8.

One final question for you folks to ponder. How come they always got wires in these type of movies, and they always get cut and then they cause massive electro shock and fire. What kind of electricians do they have in Haddonfield, Illinois? They need to be more careful. Not that I don’t appreciate a livewire laying around here or there in case Busta needs to shock Michael Meyers in the dick. But there are kids in that neighborhood. Anyway, Michael’s house finally gets burned down at the end, so they’ve finally gotten rid of Laurie Strode and the Meyers house.

Or have they? I’m guessing Laurie faked her death, like she did in part 2 according to conversations in part 7. And the house was actually an innocent house that Michael switched with his house at the last minute.

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National Treasure

Friday, November 19th, 2004

Well you gotta find something to be proud of your country for, and right now reality sure as shit ain’t doin’ the trick. As I’m writing this we’re lookin down the barrel of four more years of Bush. There are signs of vote fraud starting to peek their heads out, but since it wouldn’t necessarily change who the president is, everybody seems to figure eh, screw it. They just massacred the shit out of innocent people in Fallujah, only to move the rebels into Mosul and Baghdad, so now there will be more massacres. Meanwhile, Bush continues to stick an electrode up the ass of the concept of accountability, promoting everybody he can think of who has fucked up bad. National security adviser has destroyed our national security? Make her secretary of state! White House lawyer wrote the infamous memo arguing that torture is great and the Geneva Conventions are for pussies? Make him attorney general! As we speak they are trying to track down Joseph Hazelwood to head up the EPA and Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

I mean I love my country. But my country is being a real bitch right now. Don’t worry, I never hit a country in my life. But my country is getting up in my face trying to provoke me right now and I guess I just gotta leave the apartment for a while to cool off.

So I head to the movie theater because if there’s one man who knows how to blow smoke up America’s ass, it’s Jerry Bruckheimer. Now I’m not stupid. I seen Armageddon and a number of these other shitpiles this individual is responsible for. I knew what I was in for and I can take my lumps like a man. But this one sounded so god damn retarded it seemed like it would be worth my time. I guess. Well, it seemed to make sense at the time.

The ads tell us NATIONAL TREASURE is “from director John Turteltaub,” who it turns out is some dude who directed 3 NINJAS and COOL RUNNINGS. But in the tradition of Dick Cheney, the real man in charge here is Bruckheimer, who just Bruckheimers the shit out of this movie. Not in the sense of quick cuts and fetishistic gazing on heat trails and sunsets and crap. More in the sense that he takes the dumbest possible premise and is sure to tell it in the way that is most annoying and insulting to the audience. (more…)

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My Name Is Modesty and Frankenfish

Thursday, September 9th, 2004

VERN’S VHS PILE

Howdy boys. Well I know Moriarty’s got his DVD shelf that he’s real proud of and he has more DVDs than he will actually live to ever watch, which is good. Always wise to have that shit around to pawn, in my experience. I’m not saying he’s gonna get a whole lot for BASIC, GHOST SHIP, ROLLERBALL, MR. DEEDS, and that kind of crap (yeah, I studied that picture too), but hey, if it buys half a bowl of soup on a cold day it might be worth it. Always save for the future. Anyway I’ve got a couple more reviews of straight to video movies for you so I thought it was time I shared with you something very special. Not to brag or anything but this is Vern’s VHS Pile:

Yep, that’s right, that’s a pile of VHS tapes right there. Most of them are screeners, all of them are an obsolete format, and one of them is even a good movie. Two if you count the headcleaner. I know alot of people will not believe I actually have such a pile, so let me just head you newsies off at the pass and tell you that no, that is not fake, that’s a bonafide 100% real photograph, and all are owned by me, not rented like Ja Rule’s mansion on that episode of CRIBS I read about.

MY NAME IS MODESTY

Well the upcoming pictures I am reviewing today are the two at the top of the pile. We’ll start with what I figured was the most promising, MY NAME IS MODESTY. Or as the box says, QUENTIN TARANTINO PRESENTS MY NAME IS MODESTY.

It took me a minute to figure out what this was, but some of you may remember: a while back Mr. Tarantino was thinking about doing a movie of Modesty Blaise, the pulp heroine from comic strips and novels (I believe John Travolta is reading one of the books on the john when he dies in PULP FICTION). Well obviously he never ended up doing it, and Miramax’s option on the character was about to run out, so they hired Scott Spiegel to do a straight to video about the character’s backstory, to set up the “real” Modesty Blaise movie they might do some day (unless they decide instead to just buy up a bunch of Hong Kong movies and let them sit on the shelf for years).

A popular texas based web sight reported on this story about 2 years ago, when they said that the movie had been shot and the creator of Modesty Blaise was going around implying that he was not too happy about it. Then it sat on the shelf and we all forgot about it.

But there is exactly one way that a dusty old movie can escape the Miramax archives: by convincing Tarantino to put his name on it, even though he didn’t make the movie. If it worked for Jet Li it can work for Modesty Blaise. So just like the HERO trailer, this one tries to get visions of KILL BILL dancing in your head. The screener box mentions revenge twice (even though this is not a revenge movie). On the back it calls Tarantino “The Master of Action Storytelling!” and declares that “WOMEN ACTION HEROES ROCK!” Below that it says:

“-Catwoman………Catwoman

-Kill Bill………The Bride

-X-Men………Storm, Mystique, Rogue

-Daredevil………Elektra

-Die Another Day………Jinx

-MY NAME IS MODESTY………Modesty”

Well, that proves it I guess. This thing is gonna be huge!

Actually I really was hoping for the best. When people talk about Scott Spiegel they always go back to “co-writer of EVIL DEAD 2.” That doesn’t seem to mean much at this point, but the thing is, he already did a straight to video Quentin Tarantino Presents movie that I really liked. For whatever it’s worth, I still think FROM DUSK TILL DAWN PART 2 TEXAS BLOOD MONEY is the greatest achievement to date in straight to video sequeling. It’s not a theatrical level of quality but it’s alot of fun. Great premise, good cast (Danny Trejo, Robert Patrick, Bruce Campbell cameo, Woody Harrelson’s brother) and great sense of over the top cinematics. I mean this is a movie with POV shots inside a bat’s mouth, on a dog doing pushups, on an oscillating fan. For a cheap-o straight to video sequel shot in South Africa to jump out of the tv and kick you in the ass is a pretty impressive stunt. So I figured I could trust this dude to get me again.

The opening credits for MY NAME IS MODESTY had me going too, with a catchy theme song and a montage of action shots and spinning roulette wheels printed in candy colors. It’s a big blast of badass old fashioned energy and then the main problem is, well I think where the trouble starts is when after that the movie starts.

I’m not saying it’s terrible. It’s perfectly okay, I think. It’s just not fun to watch. The story is about Modesty Blaise, who runs the roulette table in a small European gambling establishment. A rival gang comes in, kills her boss and takes everybody hostage. She convinces their leader to play roulette with her. Every time she wins 3 games in a row, he has to let a hostage go. But every time she loses, he gets to ask her questions and she has to tell the truth. (no dares, sorry.) So he just asks her about herself and then she narrates her backstory, which involves being a young war refugee who fights with a stick, steals a car, then learns how to read and names herself. Exciting shit.

I don’t know anything about Modesty Blaise, I haven’t even seen the old movie with Monica Vitti. But I always meant to see it and that’s because I figured it would be, you know, entertaining. I checked a web site and it looks like this new movie stays pretty true to the details of the character’s backstory, but unless those book covers are lying, there seems to be a whole lot more action and thrills in there than in this movie.

Those opening credits promise “A MODESTY BLAISE ADVENTURE” but there’s not all that much adventure since the entire movie takes place either in the one room where they’re holed up or in some dismal Balkan wasteland somewhere in the past. There is no globetrotting or sneaking around or jumping off things. No helicopters blowing up, or even landing. No swinging on ropes, setting up traps, solving mysteries or breaking into museums. Nothing.

Well, there’s one short karate fight at the end, but not a memorable one.

But the biggest problem is there’s no humor at all. Not camp or otherwise. Not even much smiling. There’s an overbearing score that always sounds downbeat. The whole thing is so gloomy. It’s like a pilot for some syndicated show you’ve never heard of that you come across on cable one depressing Saturday afternoon.

The best thing about it besides the credits is Alexandra Staden, the actress who plays Modesty, is pretty good. She has an exotic look with ghostly light blue eyes. If you stretched Maggie Gylenhaal out so she was about 6 inches taller, she would look like this. But they don’t let her be very appealing. She’s always so serious.But I give her the benefit of the doubt. I figure this gal might not be a bad choice to play Modesty Blaise if they make another movie, but good this time.

FRANKENFISH

FRANKENFISH is a movie maybe you haven’t heard of but some of you comic strip fans are gonna shit your pants. I think you already know where I’m going with this. You see this movie marks the long anticipated return of Mark Dippe, director of SPAWN. Remember, it was a movie about a devil guy and there was an evil farting midget clown I believe. And that guy who’s famous for being cut out of KILL BILL, but he was also in EXIT WOUNDS – he was the main dude in SPAWN I believe.

Anyway yeah, big surprise but somehow the director of that movie ends up doing a straight to video movie about a giant mutant fish eating people. I was thinking maybe they would mix it up a little, give us something original like a giant mutant fish that falls in love with a jewel thief or discovers a shocking secret from his past or tries to join a spelling bee or something like that. Instead they just go the eating people route. oh well.

What you got here is basically a bad ripoff of a bad JAWS ripoff, this time updated with the amazingly different twist of its a genetically modified fish. Inspired by the snakehead fish or whatever it was that was in that lake somewhere. You heard the story. In this fictionalized account, there are a couple of giant mutant fish in a lake, and some people also in the lake. They get trapped in one small piece of swamp where almost the entire movie takes place. And they fight against the giant mutant fish. Every once in a while it hops out and eats somebody’s head or something. Towards the end you find out that it was not a product of Nature Gone Amuck or Man’s Hubris or Scientists Playing God. Actually it was one of those Evil Hunters who needed The Ultimate Prey so he created the Frankenfish. Because everybody knows that the ultimate prey is, a, uh, a fish. In the water. For hunting.

Anyway, this is kind of a bummer to admit but this movie is actually incredibly boring. For the first half of the movie they don’t even show the Frankenfish. That would be fine if it was a suspenseful movie with characters and plot. But this is fucking FRANKENFISH from the director of SPAWN. I don’t care if it worked in JAWS, when this movie has a buoy moving around to imply the presence of a large fish below, that’s NOT FUCKING SCARY. I don’t know who they are fooling with these type of movies, they must realize that there is not a single human being on this planet who will ever by scared in any way by this movie. Including kids. So quit pretending. Just show the goofy CGI fish and get it over with. I don’t care if Alfred Hitchcock made things scarier by not actually showing them. That doesn’t apply to fucking FRANKENFISH. The goofy CGI fish in our imagination is not any better/worse/different than the goofy CGI fish we’re gonna see later. So quit beating around the god damn bush.

There are no funny/scary/memorable/above average characters in the movie, although Richard Edson is in it (playing a rasta dude, somehow) and also Mark Boone Jr. from VAMPIRES. I remember Muse Watson (the killer fisherman from the I KNOW ABOUT YOUR LAST SUMMER pictures) was in there at one point but the fish must’ve ate him or something, I don’t know. I watched this shit yesterday, how am I supposed to remember it in that type of detail.

Anyway, I wouldn’t recommend anybody waste their time on this horse shit, but I do have to admit a couple things. Number one, the CGI effects are pretty decent for low budget straight to video crap. Not as good as STARSHIP TROOPERS 2 but way better than BOA VS. PYTHON for sure. There was one part where there was an explosion and they added a person flying out of the fire and into the water. That looked cool and I even rewound it to watch again. So good job computer people who did that shot.

Number B, I gotta admit there are a couple of inspired moments in this one. Like, at least 1, maybe 2 minutes worth of good material. I’m just gonna go ahead and ruin the best part for you so you either don’t have to watch it, or know what to look for if you catch it on cable. See, the giant mutant fish eats a guy’s head, right? And it keeps killing these people. Then it’s going after this one guy and actually jumps up on the dock and wiggles around. But the guy shoots it in the head before it can eat him.

So the guy gets up, walks into a little cabin and turns on a grill. He goes back out with a big knife, slits open the side of the fish, reaches in and pulls out its giant mutant fish heart. Then he brings the heart in, puts it on the grill for a minute. Gives it a couple spins but definitely keeps it pretty raw on the inside. Then he takes the heart and yells something like, “YOU KEELED MY BROTHER, NOW I EAT YOUR HEART!” and does just that, starts eating the heart.

I thought the gimmick was gonna be that the fish is still alive even after his heart has been cooked and eaten, but instead they went for the old “another fish jumps out and eats him” routine. It’s pretty deep though if you think about it. This guy was eating the fish’s heart to avenge his brother, but the fish too had a brother. It’s the same endless cycle of violence that Dr. King spoke about with his “eye for an eye leaves everyone blind” line, and that Shakespeare depicted so vividly in Titus Andronicus. I think alot of our presidents and secretaries of defense and terrorists and what not could learn a little something from FRANKENFISH. And more than that, they deserve to have to sit through it.

[A note for our British friends: it's true that most Americans really aren't too concerned about eating GMOs (genetically modified organisms), so it's not that farfetched that this dude would eat a barely cooked mutant fish heart to show off. It's a cultural thing.]

Anyway thanks everybody I gotta go now, I gotta polish the pile or something. thanks everybody

–Vern

Originally published at Aint-It-Cool-News: http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=18307

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Out of Reach

Thursday, June 3rd, 2004

Hey boys, it’s Vern again, sitting out the film festival for a few days or weeks because something much more important came up. Today I managed to get my hands on the video screener I wanted more than any other. You guessed it: Steven Seagal’s new picture, OUT OF REACH.

So obviously, you know, FUCK the Seattle International Film Festival. As one of North America’s leading Seagalogists, I will be watching this many more times as part of my research. But I thought it would be good to share some of my initial thoughts with you and your readers.

Seagal may be at a crossroads in his career right now. As you have no doubt read, he is planning to do a comedy, parodying himself with the help of one of those Zucker brothers. I shoulda known that Mountain Dew commercial was a harbinger of doom. I’m sure this comedy will be one of the least funny pictures of his career, but still, the fact that he is trying to make fun of himself is probaly some kind of a landmark. Once he has acknowledged the ridiculousness of his persona, will that mean he can no longer make serious movies anymore? Because I don’t see Leslie Nielsen doing any movies where he doesn’t dress up like characters from other movies and then that’s supposed to be funny, I guess.

Well luckily Seagal has an assload of serious movies already in production that he’s gonna dump on us before the comedy. This could be the last stretch of true Seagalogy and I intend to enjoy it. This new one OUT OF REACH, you might think from the title that it could be a return to form, going back to his roots. After all, it is his first three word title since, well, since HALF PAST DEAD two years ago, but that was his first 3-worder since FIRE DOWN BELOW in 1997. And unlike either of those pictures, this one has the word ‘OUT’ in the title, like one of his best pictures, OUT FOR JUSTICE. This is his first picture with ‘OUT’ in the title since 2003’s OUT FOR A KILL. But that one’s four words I believe. (more…)

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Never Die Alone

Friday, March 26th, 2004

Well for a while now I have been saying that this young man DMX is gonna do some good movies. He started out in a flawed but very artful crime picture called BELLY, before buddying up with Jet Li and my man Seagal and then riding around on those go-carts and doing wheelies and shit. (I guess I better rent that one.) He is still not a very convincing actor but he just has such a presence and charisma that I have faith in the dude for some reason. Too bad it’s not panning out so far.

See, I really thought this was gonna be his breakthrough. It’s the first movie where he does not have a co-star of equal or greater “star power.” He is the main attraction. And at the same time it is not some Hollywood action vehicle that the Rock or somebody turned down, it is an independent crime movie based on a novel by the legendary black crime writer Donald Goines. Also it’s directed by the sometimes decent director Ernest Dickerson, who has some credibility because he used to be Spike Lee’s cinematographer. Also because I kind of liked BONES.

But my friends I am sorry to report that NEVER DIE ALONE does not work. And I will try to explain why. Because that’s what I do.

DMX plays King David, a drug dealer with what you might call a pretty poor attitude towards other human beings, especially the ladies. In the opening scene, he is dead in a coffin and narrating about his life. “The Hindus have a word for it… ‘karma.’” Oh, thanks for introducing that exotic new concept to us there bud. Then it goes back to two days earlier and I was ready to see a thrilling story about the last two days before this guy got killed. (more…)

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Wild Things 2

Monday, March 8th, 2004

Howdy boys

Not sure if you got this review that I sent you boys last week. Maybe you didn’t feel it was up to my meticulous standards. But I feel the people have a right to know. A right to know that there is a WILD THINGS 2.

So yep, I saw WILD THINGS 2. Unneccessary direct to video sequel to underrecognized 1998 John McNaughton masterpiece. And believe it or not I’ve been waiting for this one anxiously. Not expecting it would be anything other than garbage, but just hoping on the off chance that maybe it would be fun. Yeah, I’ll give you two guesses which one it was. The first one. The one about the garbage, and the not being anything other than, or whatever it was I just said.

There are a couple of ways you could do a sequel to WILD THINGS. All of them would be bad.

  1. The continuing adventures of Neve Campbell’s character, now rich and living on a tropical island somewhere under a new, blonder identity. She likes to sail boats and shit. Neve probaly wouldn’t do it (especially if it’s straight to video) so they’d have to throw some ballet into the plot somewheres to try to convince her. If she didn’t bite, they’d get some girl from Roswell, maybe. And she’d have to be teamed up with Bill Murray’s sleazy lawyer character, but Bill probaly wouldn’t do it (because he’s coming off one of the best movies of his career, and he might be about to finally get an Oscar, and he might be a liability anyway because he’s the star of fucking GARFIELD). So I’m guessing they’d cast Jim Belushi.
  2. A sort of straight to video spin-off franchise centered completely around the Bill Murray character. Maybe it takes place before WILD THINGS, and it shows all the fucked up cases he gets involved in over there in the swamplands. Belushi is not available but they managed to get Patrick Warburton. Fred Willard cameos. Coolio maybe works at the law office. If not, Ice-T is the villain. Mario Van Peebles plays the district attorney.
  3. A new tale of crime in the Everglades, involving knowingly over-the-top sleaze, cold-hearted young girls, unexpected plot twists. Not connected to any of the characters from the original, but connected in setting and spirit.

Well, when I heard they were making WILD THINGS 2 (working title: THE GLADES) I assumed they were going for #3. A new tale of crime in the etc. etc. (you can read it again, I’m not gonna retype the whole fucking thing). But instead they invented approach #4: a new set of characters in the same place re-enacts the same story with minor variations and a different ending. (more…)

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Out for a Kill

Friday, July 4th, 2003

Boys -

Well I think it’s been a real good movie summer so far with RETURN TO THE MATRIX and THE AMAZING HULK and CHARLIE’S ANGELS GO FULL THROTTLE and JOHN ASHCROFT VS. THE X-MEN and etc. But now we’re at that crossroads of summer where it could go either way. Now it’s the more iffy movies and the sequels you’re not sure you want or you know for sure you don’t want. Okay, sure, people always wanted TERMINATOR 3 but did they want it if it had to be directed by the guy who made that submarine movie that they never bothered to see, even though they heard Bon Jovi got his head chopped off? A more extreme case is BAD BOYS PART 2. Oh yeah, I always wanted to revisit those great characters, officer (insert will smith’s character name) and officer (guy from big momma’s house). It will be great to find out what has happened to them since that bank robbery, murder, drug deal, kidnapping or whatever the fuck it was that they stopped back in that other movie. I wonder if they still like to sing the theme song from “COPS”, which was already a dated reference when the first movie was made like TEN FUCKING YEARS AGO. Maybe this one will be more up to date and they’ll get some Judge Ito jokes in there. Maybe throw in a “Is that your final answer?”

So fuck that shit, we need something that will bring us all together in unity and togetherness and what not. So what I have for you today is a review of something we all can agree on, and that is a new Steven Seagal straight to video movie. With the release of this movie, everybody wins: Seagalogists like me can study his new works in the privacy of their own homes, everyone else can pretend Seagal does not exist since they do not see his name on a marquee.

With that in mind… what do you call it when you’re not really OUT FOR JUSTICE, and you’ve already said you were HARD TO KILL, and you want to come up with something else to call yourself? Well, how about OUT FOR A KILL? That is in fact the name of the new picture. (more…)

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On Deadly Ground

Monday, October 14th, 2002

Boys–

I know how you feel about film festivals. You’re for them, right? I think one of you said you were. I’ve seen a couple good pictures at the Seattle International Film Festival but that’s about it for me. Until today, when I decided to venture south to the Olympia Film Festival. And I’m real glad I did.

Usually I avoid Olympia. I know it’s our state capital, it once had a fine brewery and they got lots of college kids who brag because the rock band Sleater-Kinney was named after a street they still have near there. But I mean come on. The street isn’t even that good. In the downtown area the buildings are too far apart, and everything is closed. At least on Sunday. Anyway today they finally got a reason for me to go there: ON DEADLY GROUND.

Now if you know me, you know I wasn’t gonna miss ON DEADLY GROUND showing in a film festival, even if it was on the other side of the god damn planet. ON DEADLY GROUND is a unique specimen among ’90s action movies, with an admirable spirit of cornball politics you don’t usually see anymore, if you ever did. I think of it as a loose remake of BILLY JACK, transported to an oil rig in Alaska, and without all the hippie girls strumming guitars. The protagonist, Forrest Taft, is an ex-CIA badass who puts out fires for an oil company. Like Billy Jack, he is a white guy who has appointed himself as the defender of Native American culture and dignity, and he preaches non-violence but always finds himself having to throw guys through windows and shit. The movie also has BILLY JACK-like unruly town meeting scenes where natives angrily yell about various outrages, but to quote Senator Robert Byrd, they “might as well be talking to the ocean.” And like Billy Jack, Forrest Taft is injured and taken in by Native American healers who perform a ritual with him and tell him what his spirit animal is. But in this case they are eskimos and – here’s the twist – instead of a snake, he’s a bear.

See, that makes it totally different. Also there’s a scene where he gets bit in the balls by a dog. (more…)

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The Ring (2002)

Friday, October 4th, 2002

Boys -

First of all, you gotta start talking to each other again. I don’t like it when mommy and daddy fight.

Second of all, I know you already have an assload of THE RING (american remake) reviews. But I think you need to use mine also, as a sign of gratitude toward me, the man who first told you about the japanese RINGU series and the impending remake back in July of 2000. So look at this as the highly anticipated sequel to the article “Vern Steals A Look At THE RING Part I and II!!” CLICK HERE

Of course, I got one thing wrong back then. I said it was New Line Cinema doing the remake, turned out to be Dreamworks. I think the rights might’ve been passed around though, I remember Moriarty told me at the time that he talked to somebody at New Line and they swore they were gonna re-release it and not remake it.

Anyway I was real skeptical about the remake and I wrote an open letter to New Line that started like this:

“Now listen up you sons of bitches. I hope you have sat down and thought this through, and not just at a meeting with a bunch of marketing freakos who know alot less about what people want than they think they do. If you’re gonna remake this picture DO NOT FUCK IT UP. You BETTER know what you’re doing. These movies don’t work only because they are about this curse where you watch a video and the phone rings and a week later you die. They work because of the whole creepy tone — the way the actors talk, the sound of the waves crashing against the shore, the quiet pauses and subtle but eerie cine-mato-graphicry. This is some SOLID fucking direction so you can’t just go hire some music video fuckwad and tell him to run with it. ”

Well I don’t want to take too much credit, but. Well, obviously, CLEARLY, the director Mr. Gore Verbinski read my letter. If not literally sat down and read it, then he must’ve soaked it up subconsciously, through his interactions with people who interacted with people who read the letter. (people at New Line, I guess.) Or better yet, maybe he’s just a good guy, and he knew that maybe he should, like, not fuck this one up. So what’s really so great about this movie, again, is the restraint and subtlety and what not. The tone. They didn’t american it up any more than changing the setting. The feel is all RINGU and no SCREAM or BLAIR WITCH or ATTACK OF CHUCKY or any other trendy american horror.

It makes you want to have faith in hollywood when you see something like this. Sure, it’s still the old american imperialism, buying up the movie and remaking it instead of releasing it. I don’t understand why they want to do that type of shit. But for that type of shit, THE RING (american remake) is pretty great, very faithful to the spirit of the original (which to me means the movie by Hideo Nakata, even though it was based on a book and came after a mini-series).

Like the original, this is a serious horror movie. Only one or two small jokes. No wackiness. No references to horror movies, not even Bride of Frankenstein. No modern cultural references or songs to date the movie. No rock music at all! They even gave the girls in the opening private school uniforms, like the japanese girls in the original. They didn’t turn them into “goths” or anything.

It’s a little more gruesome than the japanese version, but not in a way that ruins anything. It’s very quiet and atmospheric and the photographicry is beautiful. The cursed video itself is more show offy, with some real music video images. But there are also some creepy additions to it (a pile of maggots that becomes something else), and some of the old classics straight off the Nakata shelf.

They even avoided two of my biggest movie peeves. Somehow, Verbinski kept Hans Zimmer on a leash! Most american filmatists these days, hell, most filmatists period, they think they gotta hammer you in the balls with the music. Like in that movie WINDTALKERS, poor old John Woo let Jerry Goldsmith take a huge shit all over the war scenes.

Oh that’s right, talkbackers love grammar. what I mean to say is WINDTALKERS, that movie in which John Woo allowed the shatting upon by Jerry Goldsmith…. no, that’s not right. On which a huge crap was taken upon by Jerry Goldsmith aided by John Woo, or I mean with John Woo acting as bathroom attendant, and he didn’t even tip. He meaning Jerry, not John… Oh, fuck you guys anyway. I’m writing for the other fellas.

The point is that in WINDTALKERS you have no chance to get involved in the realism of the scene because DAH DAHDAH DUUUUUHHHHHHMMMMMM… that fucker keeps telling you how triumphant everything is. I see this all the time now, they gotta tell you which parts are scary and which parts are sad and especially which parts are funny or delightful. This is real dangerous in horror movies, because they substitute loud violins for scary scenes. In THE RING (american remake) Mr. Zimmer knows how to wait his god damn turn. He throws in some music here and there but he’s mostly doing the ol’ ambient sounds, and even keeps his fuckin mouth shut long enough for there to be long scenes with no music at all, just rain pouring on the roof. ‘Cause it takes place in Seattle.

Oh yeah, and my second pet peeve which this movie triumphantly avoids. This is the only movie I can think of off the top of my head where the characters use computers realistically. Somehow, every movie director in hollywood thinks that the viewing audience has never used a computer before. They expect us not to be distracted to see a character type “cursed videotape” into the computer, and it fills up the screen with giant letters, and then it goes BLIP BLIP BLOOP and a fancy 3-D animation hurtles us through a literal information superhighway as a voice says “searching internet for cursed videotape information” and then it gives us another animation of a videotape spinning around and gives a perfect scan of a newspaper article explaining the whole history of the tape. (extreme examples: THE NET, HACKERS, COPYCAT.) In THE RING (american remake) Naomi Watts uses a search engine, and a mouse, and she clicks on underlined text, and she has to click more than once, and there are no beeps. It’s beautiful! It’s like seeing a toilet in a movie for the first time in PSYCHO.

The story is fairly close to the original. But there are plenty of changes here and there – the tape gets an origin, the backstory to the curse is a little different. It’s kind of like somebody saw the movie a while back and tried to re-write it from memory. There are some real good bits that they added. One takes place on a ferry, another involves choking. Usually I like to give things away, like the guy from Felicity is the killer in SCREAM PART 3. But these are too good to ruin. When you see it, you’ll know what I’m talking about. These are very inspired, surreal bits good enough to have been in the original.

I still like the whole Nancy Drew mystery angle. Our heroine, this time a reporter for the Seattle PI (a real newspaper!) hears about the tape, watches it, and then spends the whole movie researching everything she can about it, following leads until she either dies or finds out What Exactly The Deal Is Here. (Note: Most modern reporters would just accept the police press release version of what happened, and wouldn’t ever find out about the tape. If she was a shitty reporter, she wouldn’t've had all this trouble.)

The structure is a little different and I think this throws the pacing off a little. I didn’t get the same death march feeling as it counted down the days until she’s supposed to die. It seemed to me like the first days passed by a little too fast, so you didn’t get the same drawn out sense of dread. On the other hand, the last day is handled real nice, and managed to surprise me even though I knew pretty much everything that was coming.

I liked it better in the japanese version that you heard just scratching over the phone. It made it more ambiguous whether it was really a curse, and made it more satisfying what she found later in that, you know, in that one place. But oh well.

Note to Seattle natives. This movie takes place in the area and you might get a few mild chuckles out of it. There is one scene where two monorails pass her, one after another. Not possible – yet! There are references to a Kirkland University. And it seems that the residents of some non-existent San Juanish island have that generic rural accent that all the country folk have in movies. Otherwise, nothing is too distracting, and they show a monorail, a bus, and a ferry – hooray for public transportation!

Anyway boys, I was real impressed with this movie, and glad that my gut feelings two years ago were wrong. If I had a scariness measuring machine, I think I would find that it was a little less scary than the original, but only by about two or three scariness measuring units. I can’t really be sure, because scariness measuring machines haven’t been invented yet, and even when they are I bet it will take a while for the prices to go down to a consumer level. Point is it’s a good picture. Now if the fuckers would just let somebody release the original on an NTSC dvd region code 1 (or better yet, 0) we can all be happy.

thanks dreamworks,

Vern

Originally published at Aint-It-Cool-News: http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=13472

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