EL CONDE is a pretty simple idea: what if Augusto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile from 1974 through 1990, was in fact a vampire? Sort of the opposite of our “what if Abraham Lincoln was a vampire hunter?” It’s kind of a horror movie in that it shows us graphic bloodlettings, beheadings of both humans and animals, eating a cat, crushing a skull, and it puts even more revolting imagery into our heads through verbal descriptions. It also gets a classic horror atmosphere going with its gorgeous Academy Award nominated black and white cinematography by Edward Lachman (LIGHT SLEEPER, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, THE LIMEY, CAROL). But mostly it’s a satire hitting on a very old, very obvious, but still very relevant point: the rich and powerful are monsters. You could say we’re all human, we’re all petty, but that doesn’t make us all the same. These people are fucking weirdos, the bad kind. I don’t have the statistics in front of me, but it seems like more often than not the type of people who seek power, and the families who inherit it, and feel it is their right, there’s something very wrong with them. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, but also it attracts a bunch of freakos in the first place. I mean, part of the joke of this movie is that the fucking guy wears a cape. Like Dracula. (read the rest of this shit…)
El Conde
Saint Maud
When I first saw the trailer for LOVE LIES BLEEDING I thought “I need to see SAINT MAUD, don’t I?” It’s the first movie from writer/director Rose Glass, which was heavily hyped after playing TIFF and Fantastic Fest, and was picked up by A24, who of course gave it an intriguing trailer that was playing on all the horror movies. But that was in 2020, so the pandemic happened, it got delayed for a while, and ultimately only received a limited release in January of 2021, which was a no-go for me because it was well before vaccines were available.
So the hype train grinded to a halt, and personally I needed it to push me over the small hill of it looking like religious horror. You know, you put “Saint” in the title, you show her in some kind of robe on the poster, you show her levitating, I’m gonna assume it has something to do with possession or some shit. I can watch a movie like that if it’s a really good one, but I need some encouragement. Glass’s follow-up looking amazing gave me that. (read the rest of this shit…)
Love Lies Bleeding
LOVE LIES BLEEDING is an unusually cool lesbian neo-noir from director Rose Glass (SAINT MAUD), who co-wrote it with Weronika Tofilska. It’s vaguely in the tradition of all my favorite dusty desert town crime movies, and the ones about passionate young couples on the run from bad choices or circumstances, but it has its own secret recipe of transgression, poetry and lovestruck naivete.
It comes at you with a wave of atmosphere, opening deep inside a chasm, rising up to look at the bright stars in the sky above New Mexico, then craning down to the Crater Gym, a big rectangular warehouse of sweat and dirt that might as well be a barn. It’s surprisingly active at night. High concentration of muscle heads in this barren town, I guess. Kristen Stewart (CRIMES OF THE FUTURE) stars as the manager of the gym, Lou, who’s introduced reaching deep into a plugged toilet. I had to do that working at a grocery store as a teenager, ‘cause I didn’t have a manager like Lou. Mine wouldn’t do it herself, she called the new kid and said, “Sorry to say, sug, the only thing to do is reach in there and pull it out.” (read the rest of this shit…)
The Mountain Between Us
THE MOUNTAIN BETWEEN US (2017) is to date the biggest Hollywoood production from Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad (RANA’S WEDDING, OMAR). Some reported it as his English language debut, but of course we know that was actually the Jeffrey Dean Morgan DTV action movie THE COURIER. This one is a little more respectable and was given a decent release, opening against BLADE RUNNER 2049 and doing okay-ish, despite pretty negative reviews.
Based on a 2011 novel by Charles Martin, it’s a survival movie with most of its runtime spent with just two actors. Daredevil conflict zone photojournalist Alex Martin (Kate Winslet, TRIPLE 9) and Baltimore-by-way-of-London brain surgeon Dr. Ben Bass (Idris Elba, PROM NIGHT) don’t know each other until their flight is cancelled by a storm, stranding them both at an airport in Salt Lake City. Alex is intent on getting home in time for her wedding, and she overhears Ben saying he needs to get home for a surgery, so she convinces him to go in with her to charter a small plane to another airport to catch a different flight. (read the rest of this shit…)
Rana’s Wedding
A few weeks ago I watched the very good, Oscar nominated Palestinian film OMAR (2013), followed by the same director, Hany Abu-Assad’s English-language DTV action movie THE COURIER (2012) starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Because that’s how I roll. I enjoyed those and want to watch some more from Abu-Assad, so the obvious choice is his earlier Oscar nominee PARADISE NOW (2005). But for now I wanted to watch one that’s not about terrorism, so I went with his 2002 film RANA’S WEDDING, aka JERUSALEM, ANOTHER DAY. This isn’t as much of a thriller as the others I’ve seen, closer to a romance, a story about a woman trying to marry her boyfriend on very short notice. It’s just about this character and this situation, but because of where she lives that can’t help but be political. (read the rest of this shit…)
Breaking News
Johnnie To’s BREAKING NEWS (2004) opens with a crane shot of a cool guy in a leather jacket (Haitao Li, VENGEANCE, GALLANTS, MOTORWAY) walking down a block into a building, and the camera floats up and looks into the window of the room where he tells his fellow armed robbers, led by Yuen (Richie Jen, EXILED), that it’s time to bring the money out to the car. Then the camera lowers back down to the street where hotshot inspector Cheung (Nick Cheung, AH KAM) and his loyal subordinate Sergeant Hoi (Hui Shiu-hung, ROYAL WARRIORS, NAKED KILLER, LEGENDARY ASSASSIN) are in a car staking them out. They’re concerned about two unwitting patrol officers stopping the thieves’ car for a traffic violation – could mess everything up. The shot will continue uninterrupted as one of the officers asks about a bag in the back seat and then the guns come out. The camera turns every which way to see the different sides firing at each other, the civilians fleeing, the backup police cars arriving. It cranes up to get a look at the guy hanging out a window firing a rifle down, then hopping onto a ledge and dropping to the street to run. It doesn’t cut until the thieves flee the scene in a stolen police van.
The only thing I knew about BREAKING NEWS was that people made a big deal about this long take at the time (it’s about 7 minutes). But since then we’ve had TOM YUM GOONG, CHILDREN OF MEN, HANNA, BIRDMAN, 1917, ATHENA, etc., so it not only is it a more common technique now, but this is a relatively subtle use of it . It certainly doesn’t seem like the point of the movie. It’s just a cool way to open it and show how these characters are tied together. (read the rest of this shit…)
Gamera vs. Barugon
GAMERA VS. BARUGON (1966) – or GREAT MONSTER DUEL: GAMERA VS. BARUGON according to the subtitles on the Arrow blu-ray – is the second Gamera movie, and the first one in color. That makes it extra cool when they recap part 1 at the beginning, because the flashbacks are in black and white. They remind us that mankind’s “Z Plan” sealed the giant turtle Gamera into a rocket and shot him to Mars.
Or so we thought last time! What we didn’t know then was that a meteorite would hit the rocket (in full color), Gamera would escape and fly right back in that cool way he does, spinning like a flying saucer, blue flames spewing from his shell holes. It reminds me of FRIDAY THE 13TH 3D, how they show the ending of part 2 in 2D but suddenly Jason comes back to life and gets back up in three dimensions. (read the rest of this shit…)
Vern’s Oscar Round-Up and 2023 Recap Thing
For some years now, some of you may remember, I’ve made it a point to watch all of the best picture nominees. This year, for the first time ever, I’d already seen all of them when the nominations were announced. Achievement unlocked, as they say in whatever they say that in.
Since I was ahead of the game there I thought maybe I could also review them all for the first time ever. I always don’t get around to a couple of them, and that’s what happened this year too. I did review AMERICAN FICTION and ANATOMY OF A FALL together, as well as BARBIE, MAESTRO, OPPENHEIMER, POOR THINGS and THE ZONE OF INTEREST. The ones I missed were THE HOLDOVERS, KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON and PAST LIVES, so I’ll say a little about them now. (read the rest of this shit…)
After Blue (Dirty Paradise)
There’s this weird French filmmaker, Bertrand Mandico. He has a new movie I’ve seen people raving about called SHE IS CONANN. When I read about it, I realized that over the last few years I’ve read about two other movies of his that also sounded really intriguing. So I decided to finally try one.
AFTER BLUE (DIRTY PARADISE) is his second movie, it’s on Shudder in addition to DVD and blu-ray, but it’s not horror. The reductive way I thought of to describe it is “Jodorowsky’s BARBARELLA,” then I noticed that the promo materials from distributor Altered Innocence call it “a lesbian EL TOPO (in space!),” so I guess I’m not the only one to think of it that way. But I think mine is a little more precise.
It’s set on a planet called After Blue, where people moved to when “the Earth was sick, rotten,” and made new rules banning electronics and screens “to avoid the same mistakes.” Everything works differently there. For example, something about the atmosphere makes hair grow on your neck, and for men it grows inward, so they all died off. Luckily, women can be inseminated “with good Earth sperm.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Elektra (second review)
Revisiting DAREDEVIL obviously made me want to watch ELEKTRA again – this time in a director’s cut, but the differences are minimal compared to DAREDEVIL’s. It’s a different situation anyway because I actually did enjoy ELEKTRA when I saw it on video back in the day, and even wrote a review of it. So instead of “maybe I’ll like it better now” it was a “will I still like it?” situation. The answer is yes, I did.
That’s not a popular opinion. It was a big flop, and scoffed at from all quarters. Roger Ebert called it “a collision between leftover bits and pieces of Marvel superhero stories.” Manohla Dargis called it “The latest Hollywood movie to give comic books a bad name.” Mick LaSalle wrote, “It’s garbage” and complained that it was “twisted” to open with this contract killer character assassinating someone when “we don’t know what he did to deserve this.” At least David Edelstein said it was “only maybe two-fifths” bad because “these Marvel pictures are starting to blur together” (which now seems like a funny thing for someone to have said then), and he was wise enough to say it paled in comparison to A CHINESE GHOST STORY, THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR and THE HEROIC TRIO rather than X-MEN or SPIDER-MAN. Because that’s what it is: one of the American movies that’s not nearly as good as Hong Kong movies. But I still like them. (read the rest of this shit…)
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