But this is the story of this particular Priest finding out his daughter got kidnapped by vampires. He tries to get the Vatican (Christopher Plummer) to put together a team or call James Woods or somebody, but they refuse to authorize it because their official stance is that there are no vampires left to worry about. Priest goes by himself, even though he’s told “To go against the church is to go against God.”

“Then I go against God,” he says.

On his rescue mission he takes the young sheriff who told him about the kidnapping (Cam Gigandet, bad guy from NEVER BACK DOWN 1) and is later joined by Maggie Q (LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD) as another Priest who gets sent to stop him, but chooses not to. I like how they have what would be a love type relationship in most movies, but they’re priests so there’s no scene of them surrounded by candles making gentle no-boobs-showing love. Instead they consummate their love with motorcycle action.

There’s alot of cool shots of these long, futuristic motorcycles hauling ass through the desert, that’s probly my favorite imagery in this one. And the best action involves Maggie Q on her motorcycle chasing a train or off her motorcycle fighting some guys who are still on theirs. There’s a little part I dug where Gigandet jumps from his motorcycle onto a train, and before he continues with his mission he takes a second to look over his shoulder and watch his motorcycle crash and flip around.

At its best it’s a western, a story about a quiet killer in a lawless land trying to do the right thing. And it’s got all the western trappings besides horses. Little gas-powered towns with sheriffs trying to stop outlaws. I wonder how long it has to be after a nuclear apocalypse or vampire plague before everybody agrees hey guys, let’s live old west style again. We’ll wear cowboy hats and other old timey clothes, we’ll have a train, we’ll have Brad Dourif as a snake oil salesman. It’ll be awesome.

Most of the vampires are naked digital bugaboos, but the main villain gets to be live action and wear a black hat. Karl Urban plays a Daywalker responsible for the kidnapping, a new step in the evolution of vampires (like they always have in these things). The vampires also have Marilyn Mansony “familiars” to do their work. (It’s illegal to be a familiar, but the law goes unenforced. Probly unconstitutional anyway.) Having these humans around is useful to the movie, but whenever they’re fighting the vampires proper it has that old CGI problem – they look pretty good, but they don’t feel right. They constantly jump and flip, they do everything fast, agile and light, while roaring into the camera. Eventually CGI characters gotta be about what’s best for them to do, not what’s possible. Listen to Jeff Goldblum, whatever that was he said about you shouldn’t make dinosaurs.

I don’t know, maybe that extra weight and grit of fighting actual on screen humans is what this movie is missing. I feel like it’s almost there. We’ve seen similar ideas in other movies, but I like this configuration. It’s simple enough in plot and dialogue, it has pretty good iconic characters, a very dramatic score by Christopher HELLRAISER Young, a serious tone, a short and sweet running time. And yet it mostly doesn’t work. It feels too dull and lifeless at the center.

The director is named Scott Stewart, an effects guy (not surprising) who previously directed LEGION. Here’s everything I remember about that movie: creepy crawly CGI demons, Lucas Black, a diner, Paul Bettany was a heavily armed angel, I think God might’ve been the bad guy. My overall impression was a muddled and stupid movie with occasional bits of “that was kinda cool.” If I had to guess I would say this one is probly closer to working because it’s more focused and streamlined. And Bettany’s character looks cooler, maybe. But that one might’ve been a little more original, I don’t know.

I’ll say this for PRIEST: the last time I tried to watch a movie because Maggie Q was in it it was just a couple weeks ago and it was called KING OF FIGHTERS. It had Ray Park as the bad guy and it was about some kind of fighting tournament where they put in ear pieces that bring them to another dimension to compete in battle. And somebody’s trying to steal a magic sword or something. As soon as it started I realized it must’ve been based on a video game, and soon after I realized it was the exact same premise as MORTAL KOMBAT except with every single entertaining or somewhat entertaining aspect removed entirely. It was just too boring. I didn’t even make it halfway through.

In PRIEST Maggie Q has a smaller role, but I watched the whole thing. Congratulations to PRIEST and Maggie Q. You earned it.

What exactly is THE BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS? It’s not a sequel, not exactly a remake to BAD LIEUTENANT. Werner Herzog, who directed this new one, claims he hasn’t seen BAD LIEUTENANT. Ferrara claimed he was gonna stop this one from being made. (In my opinion he failed.) This isn’t about the same character and I didn’t notice any mention of the original screenplay in the credits. But it does have a little bit of a BAD LIEUTENANT vibe, and that’s all I can ask.

Actually I hope you guys haven’t seen any of these, but there are some DTV sequels to WILD THINGS and CRUEL INTENTIONS and THE SKULLS that aren’t exactly sequels, they basically just do a similar plot to the original, rehash some of the famous scenes, but with different characters. At first TBL:POCNO seems like they only took the idea of a corrupt, crack smoking cop trying to solve a case and used the title. But then he also starts getting into debt from betting on sports, same as in the original, and there’s even a scene that’s the (tamer) equivalent to the infamous scene where Harvey Keitel pulls over the two teenage girls and has them make faces and show him their asses while he jerks off and talks dirty to them. People are talking this BAD LIEUTENANT up for being weird, but that’s just for a movie starring Nicolas Cage, it’s really not as extreme as the original. It’s a funnier and more mainstream-palatable take on the crack smoking, gambling, cheating, murdering, lovable bastard cop genre.

Before we move on I want to say a few things about the title. I believe PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS can and will be the new funny subtitle to add to everything, finally replacing the tired “ELECTRIC BOOGALOO.” I had been trying to get people to switch to “FAREWELL TO THE FLESH” as an all-purpose fake sequel subtitle, but that’s never gonna catch on. So look how well POCNO works for any movie title:

COMMANDO: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS
AVATAR: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS
KING OF NEW YORK: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS
BAD SANTA: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS
A CHRISTMAS CAROL: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS
GARFIELD: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS

I also think it’s interesting to note that the title screen calls it THE BAD LIEUTENANT. There’s a THE in it. I think we finally found the missing THE from THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS. Part 4 of that series was just FAST AND FURIOUS, because the first THE went to THE FINAL DESTINATION and the second one to THE BAD LIEUTENANT.

Herzog’s THE BAD LIEUTENANT PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS dumps the Catholic themes of Ferrara’s, so unfortunately Nic Cage never hallucinates Jesus and calls him a rat fucker. Instead of a nun getting raped it’s a Senagalese family getting massacred. He gets high about the same amount as Keitel, but never waddles around naked or does that weird Chewbacca cry. Instead he summons his super power, which I usually consider an enjoyable type of overacting, but I read that Nic Cage didn’t like being called “over-the-top” in this movie. So instead I will call it mega-acting. He’s not just firing off on all cylinders all the way through though, he’s like a mess of a guy barely holding it together and then a few times when he smokes crack he goes into the Castor Troy/howditgetburned mega-acting mode. It’s like Popeye eating spinach or Pac-Man eating one of those bigger dots that means for a short period of time he has the power to digest the souls of the dead, except for their eyes.

One thing that’s great about Cage playing this role is that you kind of feel like you’re supposed to root for him. There’s one scene, not a real important one or anything, where he flips out on a pharmacist because she’s taking a personal call and he’s been waiting forever for his prescription. It’s kind of a FALLING DOWN type situation, everybody hates poor service and phone etiquette, so you get a satisfied laugh from this nut getting so fed up that he pulls out his gun and jumps behind the counter to get his Vicodin, leaves his co-pay plus tip and tells the security guard “Get the fuck out of my way!” before leaving triumphantly. Ha ha, wish fulfillment, right? We can all relate to wanting to do something like that, or some of these other things he does, like when he takes crack hits out of a teenage girl’s mouth and forces her boyfriend to watch at gunpoint while he fucks her in the parking lot.

(After that scene a guy in my audience said matter of factly, “He’s out of control.”)

That’s just the beginning of the joyfully unhinged mayhem that happen in this movie. I would have fun listing all of them, but I’m not gonna because I think most of you should just take my word for it and see for yourself. That guy in the theater who might’ve expected a normal Nic Cage movie like NATIONAL TREASURE was right, things are out of control and it’s fun to not know where the line will be drawn. But I want to be clear that it’s not just a bunch of random weirdness. It has a definite plot and structure to it. I like the original BAD LIEUTENANT but I gotta admit it’s a chore to get through, and it took me two times to enjoy it. This is different. This one’s a fun time at the movies.

To me it works brilliantly as a subversion of cop movies. Since DIRTY HARRY and WALKING TALL we’ve seen approximately three hundred and six thousand four hundred and thirty two movies where a cop goes over the line and breaks the rules in order to bust the bad guys. Here is a guy who does that while also stealing drugs from his hooker girlfriend’s clients, threatening old ladies and babies, etc. In fact, he’s so functional while high that he comes up with a master plan to play everybody against each other, and at one point it works so well that even he seems shocked.

Cage himself seems to be enacting some master plan to fuck with our minds, because this is not the first time he’s tried this crazy formula. It’s Nic Cage and Millennium Films (whose movies are mostly DTV, including many with Seagal, Van Damme and Snipes) taking the title of an arty cult movie and giving it to a somewhat respected auteur who you wouldn’t expect to do a movie like this to do a supposed remake that has very little to do with the original. And the funny thing is everybody made fun of him about THE WICKER MAN but he didn’t give a good god damn, he felt confident in using the formula again. What if he was getting at something there that nobody picked up on? I did feel like there were some things going on in that script that people didn’t give it credit for, but it wasn’t as good as this. I’m gonna have to revisit that one. Anyway if he wants to make it a trilogy maybe he could let Abel Ferrara get revenge and remake AGUIRRE or something.

I read in a recent Entertainment Weekly article that Nicolas Cage outbid Leonardo Dicaprio for a dinosaur skull. I wonder what you do with a dinosaur skull? Just mount it on the wall? Anyway, just wanted to throw that out there.

There are many good character actors showing up for little parts, including a sleazy Val Kilmer, a  really memorable Shea Whigham, Xzibit in a really nice suit, Jennifer Coolidge (who I didn’t recognize playing a serious role), and a tight-bodied Fairuza Balk in her underwear making sexual advances at the lieutenant and he has a big bulge in his pants but he’s too high to be interested. The biggest surprise for me was Eva Mendes is actually pretty good as his junkie hooker girlfriend. I always wonder how she even gets in movies, but here she’s not bad. And I thought it was really funny to have the same couple from the inexcusably terrible GHOST RIDER reteaming for something like this.

I love THE BAD LIEUTENANT PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS, and it gives me a new respect for Nicolas Cage. It takes alot to make up for GHOST RIDER, NATIONAL TREASURE and all that shit, but this and KNOWING might do it. I know there are some gossipy stories now about Cage being in debt, but I hope that won’t stop him from aiming his mega-acting powers in the direction of more enjoyably one-of-a-kind movies like this. And I hope he doesn’t have to sell the dinosaur skull to DiCaprio, because he’s earned it.

* * *

If you haven’t seen the movie yet consider that the end of the review, because I want to discuss THE ENDING: PORT OF CALL SPOILERS

This is for my buddy code name Mr. Armageddon who didn’t hate the movie but said it didn’t have a point or meaning. I disagree. For the most part it’s just a cracking crime tale, full of dark humor, inappropriate behavior and occasional spots of violence. Somehow you want this asshole to stumble out the other side alive, but he keeps getting himself in deeper trouble with a wide variety of enemies.

That would be enough for me to enjoy it, but the way it’s bookended with the flooded jail cell opening and the aquarium ending turns it into something of a zen koan. It’s hard to believe all of his addiction happened after the opening, but I think that’s what you’re supposed to assume – he started using Vicodin because of the back injury and it just got out of control from there.

Well, he’s in this sea of corruption, he’s encouraged and tempted to let the prisoner die. But he saves his life instead. A selfless act that ruins his expensive underwear (and pants and shirt I’m assuming, although this is not mentioned). Because of that act he gets the injury, and the addiction, and turns into a bad lieutenant. In the end he somehow manages to pass himself off as a hero and becomes a bad captain and a family man, but he can’t stop being a junkie.

But in the end we learn that what he did really made a difference, because the man he saved did turn his life around. And he wants to return the favor. He sees that the captain is at rock bottom and he seems to basically become his sponsor, be there for him and talk to him. And this should be a redemptive moment for the captain. He was rewarded greatly for all the horrible things he did, and I think that weighs heavily on him. Now finally the one good thing he did a long time ago has come back to him. He actually deserves this help. He really can be a force for good, for positive change in the world.

And he sits there and thinks about it but he comes to the conclusion that he regrets doing it, because it ruined his underwear.

(or that’s what he says anyway. It’s up to you whether he’s serious or not. And I don’t think his new friend knows what to make of it either)

[ratings]

MTV: And you won’t be coming up with ideas for “Halloween” sequels on the tour bus?

Zombie: No. I have no plans on watching them or making them. [He laughs.] My movie has a beginning, a middle and an end — and then I am done. Anything that comes after that? It will not involve me.

Writer/director Robert Zombie returns with the sequel to his remake of HALLOWEEN from two years ago. Mr. Zombie showed some promise with his HOUSE OF THE ONE THOUSAND CORPSES/DEVIL’S REJECTS movies. Then they hired him to remake HALLOWEEN, which seemed to me like a better idea than hiring whoever else they were gonna hire. I liked some of what he was trying to do, but the movie was a mess and made me question whether he really knows what he’s doing.

But he had done his remake, time to go back to what he was good at, so he was working on some kind of biker or wrestler movie or something and then… dropped that because they gave him some money to do this. I know he previously said he wouldn’t even watch a sequel, but this is different, he figured out a way to make it work: he gave Michael Meyers a beard.

Okay, I was trying to make it sound like I hated this movie to set up the “Laurie is Michael’s sister” style plot twist: I actually kind of liked it. It works much better than the remake and it’s Zombie’s least flawed movie besides DEVIL’S REJECTS.

I’m not gonna pretend it’s something completely new for him. All of his fetishes are in here, but he keeps them in check more than usual. Okay, so he has teenage girls saying shit like “Whut up, dicklickers?” to each other, but not too often. He has dumb rednecks, but more of the standard horror movie variety played by Mark Boone Jr., and not some hipster rednecks calling each other skullfuckers. He does give Laurie a bunch of cheesy rock shirts and absurdly puts a Charles Manson poster on her wall. (Sure, Zombie, because YOU think killers are awesome the girl whose parents and friends were horribly murdered one year ago also must think they’re awesome. And her sheriff guardian has no problem with her hanging that in his house.) And I have to say that I’m not a fan of the shitty graffiti she has in her room.

But all the “Rob Zombie” shit is a small percentage of the movie and worked in more organically than in part 1. The rock/horror thing almost seems like a motif: Kiss and Alice Cooper posters on the wall, some retro horror rock band playing at the Halloween party, Laurie and her friends dressing up as Rocky Horror characters. Most of it actually works.

And that’s all I ask. Some people seem to hate directors having recognizable styles, which is stupid. But Zombie is no Tarantino, and can be more clumsy about his trademarks getting in the way of the story. For example in the HALLOWEEN remake it started to get distracting that old horror and TV icons kept popping up for cameos every 5 minutes: Tom Towles, Bill Moseley, Clint Howard, Udo Kier, Ken Foree, Sybil Danning, Micky Dolenz, Sid Haig, not to mention Brad Dourif and Dee Wallace in major roles. I like those guys but it felt like a gimmick in this movie. How are you supposed to be scared when you keep thinking “Oh yes, I remember HENRY PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER. Ah, TEXAS CHAINSAW 2. Oooh, DAWN OF THE DEAD. A ha, THE HOWLING.”

The biggest problem this sequel solves is that the remake crammed Laurie Strode’s story into only the second half of the movie, so you didn’t get to know her or her friends very well and it seemed like a crappy slasher sequel instead of pretty-much-the-best-ever which is what the original HALLOWEEN was. This one is Laurie’s movie so you get to know her and her friends much better. Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton) lives with Annie (Danielle Harris, in her fourth HALLOWEEN movie) and her dad Sheriff Brackett (Dourif). All three are good in the movie and have a survivor’s bond and look out for each other. And have scars on their faces from part 1.

Early in the movie there’s a great sequence that shows the aftermath of part 1 in gruesome detail: the cops at the crime scene, the survivors being operated on, the dead being examined, Michael Meyers’s body being photographed and packed up.  The look of the movie is much more raw and real than the first one, and more than any other sequel that comes immediately to mind this makes it seem like the violence we’ve seen has serious consequences and repercussions. (Only a dumb scene where the guys in the morgue truck talk about necrophilia breaks the CSI feel.)

Like the DAWSON’S CREEK guy did in HALLOWEEN H20, Zombie wants to show that running from Michael Meyers has seriously fucked Laurie up. She’s always tired and headachey, she does alot of crying and yelling, she has murderous thoughts, she sees a therapist (Caroline Williams from TEXAS CHAINSAW 2, but I didn’t recognize her [UPDATE: That's because it was Margot Kidder, you dumbass. But Stretch was in there somewhere]), later she gets real drunk. She’s less sympathetic than Jamie Lee Curtis, but Taylor-Compton is pretty believable and you feel bad for her. Annie has dealt with it much better (she still has a dad, at least) and her motherly/sisterly support of Laurie is kind of sweet.

Zombie also wants to get inside Michael’s head, but not in the way he did the first time. This time it’s much more efficient and ambiguous: he shows us Michael’s delusions, seeing himself as still a kid in a Halloween costume walking around with a ghostly vision of his mom. You see all three of them walking around like this ghostly procession. Adult Michael looks more like the help than the mastermind, which I guess is how he sees himself. (They got a different kid playing the young Michael. That’s how crazy Michael Meyers is, he thinks he’s still a little boy but not even the same one he used to be.)

As you may have heard, Zombie also partly ditched the usual Meyers iconography. For six of the original HALLOWEEN movies he was a guy in a jumpsuit and a mask, the same one although of varying quality. Here he still has the mask but he doesn’t always wear it, it’s torn in half by the end and he likes to wear a hood over it. Zombie of course wants all of his characters to look like him, so in part 1 he gave Meyers long rock star hair, in this one he gave him a silly hobo beard and in part 3 he’ll give him tattoos, a wallet chain and a Munsters t-shirt.

It’s definitely a weird approach to a HALLOWEEN sequel (some of the Sherri Moon Zombie stuff got laughs in my theater), but I’ll tell you why that’s allowed. The original HALLOWEEN II is okay, it has parts I like and parts that are typical of shitty slasher sequels. The third one doesn’t have Michael in it. 4, 5 and 6 are terrible. 7 I like, but most people don’t seem to, and they didn’t even get his mask right in that one. 8 is fucking inexcusable. So we know what a HALLOWEEN sequel was supposed to be like, and most of us agree that wasn’t working out. Zombie’s approach may have been deliberately trying to piss people off, but it worked out better than almost all of the previous tries. I mean, this is way better than that thorn cult bullshit.

It uses the original characters in different ways: Loomis is a scumbag celebrity now instead of the one guy who knows the danger. He mostly has a separate storyline about his book tour. I kept thinking fine, I don’t mind if you change it, but how is this more interesting than the original approach to Dr. Loomis? But I forgave it when he rejoined the main storyline at the end. This Annie Brackett survived to part 2, which she didn’t do before, and becomes a much stronger character. Sheriff Brackett becomes an important person in Laurie’s life instead of just the sheriff and her friend’s dad. And Laurie doesn’t have to babysit and gets to go out and be a teenager – I believe this is the first time she’s gotten to wear a Halloween costume.

It still keeps some HALLOWEEN elements: the that-same-night hospital terror of the original part 2, the countdown to October 31st of original part 1, the Michael Meyers slow travel to Haddonfield (although this time he looks like a hobo and you just keep seeing him walking across fields), a great onscreen reference to the offscreen dog-eating from the original, even a possible reference to the Silver Shamrock pumpkin mask from part 3.

Also, the original part 2 had the retroactive twist that Laurie is Michael’s sister – Zombie made that a huge part of his part 1 remake, but she finds out in this one. To avoid you having the same confusion I had you should know that in this movie Laurie does not realize that she’s Michael’s sister. I thought it became clear to her at the end of part 1 so when she is shocked to find out late in this movie it threw me for a loop.

After he tried to definitively kill Meyers in part 1 (so naive), Zombie wisely doesn’t bother to explain why our boy’s alive again. Anything he could make up would be stupid, so let’s just all agree to look the other way. I was a little confused about Dr. Loomis though, because not only did he seem to be possibly dead, but I could swear his fucking eyeballs were poked out. Looks like they grew back.

HALLOWEEN II has great cinematography. There are some gorgeous shots of Michael in the distance making his journey, his face covered in shadows. The hallucinatory scenes (especially a black and white one) look beautiful and more often remind me of some weird art film than a music video. More than most modern horror movies this one remembers the importance of atmosphere, and really reminds you what it feels like to be in different places at night: a dark field lit only by headlights, a suburban street, a security guard’s shack in the pouring rain, a hospital when everyone’s asleep (well, in this case, dead).

The violence is absolutely brutal, the one major misjudgment that I think holds the movie back. Zombie has said he hates it when people cheer for violence, he wants it to be horrible and ugly, and he succeeds at that. When Michael stomps somebody’s face in or stabs somebody two or three dozen times it feels more like the “I’m gonna puke” violence of HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER than the “good kills” of FRIDAY THE 13TH movies. But come on, he’s not making an anti-violence movie here. He’s making a movie about a guy who walks across a state killing most of the people he sees along the way. He wants us to be sickened by the violence but he also wants us to watch a whole fucking lot of it. Thanks for looking out for us, pal.

I think it’s an interesting movie, and mostly well executed, but toward the end I started to feel like maybe a little something was missing. And I think that may be Zombie’s willingness to follow part of the slasher movie formula (he even uses “I’ll be right back” two or three times) while purposely not wanting to give you the pleasure of watching a slasher movie. Or maybe his sequences just aren’t tense enough. In Carpenter’s version the scariest shit was Michael standing around watching people. It was the anticipation. There’s some of that here because you usually know when Michael is nearby, but then he just appears right there and starts quickly stabbing them. As a suspense thriller it could be better. On the other hand, some sequences got my heart rate up a little, like the one where poor Laurie tries to run down a hospital stairway with one leg in a cast.

I enjoyed most of it, but as it wrapped up I felt that it could lose me. It all depended on where this was leading to. Zombie doesn’t quite have a great punchline like I think he did in the director’s cut of part 1 (Laurie screaming after she shot Michael’s head off cuts to a home movie of young Michael calming crying baby Laurie, like in his death big brother is somehow looking out for baby sister), but it all comes together pretty good.

This is not a criticism of HALLOWEEN II, but an observation: I think Zombie is selfish about the way he ends it. He fucking knows they’re gonna make sequels with or without him, but he tries to make it as hard as possible by (THE PART WHERE I SAID “THE WAY HE ENDS IT” WOULD BE YOUR CUE THAT THIS IS HUGE SPOILERS COMING UP) killing the shit out of both Meyers and Loomis and putting Laurie in an asylum. I mean obviously they’ll bring Michael back to life but you gotta go extra silly to bring back Loomis, who has not yet had much of a chance to be the Van Helsing in this version of the story. And if Laurie goes around killing people that would just be a dumb movie. But as an ending it’s pretty good. (As long as we’re in the spoiler zone I might as well mention that I wish they would’ve cut to the credits as soon as she walked out with the mask on.)

By the way, there’s a cover of “Love Hurts” on the end credits. It actually works really well, unlike the laugh-out-loud use of the original song in part 1. I guess this means he stands by that choice and wants to rub it in our faces.

I’ve found myself defending Robert Zombie alot, but after HALLOWEEN REMAKE  and his weak GRINDHOUSE trailer and some of the stupid shit he says in interviews I was kind of losing faith. I joked with a buddy of mine that this movie would decide if I was on Zombie’s side or not. The remake had no chance to get a rhythm going, because it shot off in so many directions and so many of the ideas didn’t work that if it had you for a minute it would lose you for the next. This one didn’t have that problem. It pulled me into its trance, the big psycho lumbering single-mindedly toward his target, me on the other end waiting with Laurie, hoping she doesn’t get killed.

Yeah, it’s good enough, I’m back on the Zombie train. If he gives The Blob long hair and a beard though I’m fucking out of here.

[ratings]

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As some of you know, over there in Japan they are making cartoons for adults, and what they’re doing with Bride of Chucky is doing the same thing for puppets. I think many adults have always wanted to watch a puppet movie but they were too embarrassed unless it had alot of blood and a respectable brand name like Bride of Chucky.

This is actually not as much a horror movie though as it is a campy comedy with occasional sadistic murder scenes. It is all very tongue in cheek. I don’t know if the filmatists here realize that Chucky isn’t scary anymore, but they definitely do know that there are some things that are just funny to see puppets do. Like shooting two guns at a time, or getting in a shovel fight, or making out in front of a fireplace. The best scene of the movie is when the girl doll Tiffany spectacularly mutilates and electrocutes a newlywed couple with the simple toss of a champagne bottle, and it impresses Chucky so much that he marries her and then there is a romantic love scene in silhouette. That is why the trailer (which is on the DVD) says “This October, Chucky gets lucky.” I guess it came out in October.

I don’t know what it is about the little bastard. His character is not as scary here and he’s not really likable but he’s still funny to watch. Tiffany has a little more dimension to her as far as killer doll characterization goes, because she is a homicidal maniac but also a true romantic. She offs a couple of swingers for tarnishing the sanctity of the marital institution, and she is genuinely moved by The Bride of Frankenstein which she realizes has strong parallels with her own monstrous type relationship. At the end she gets burnt up and she looks so cool, and you really start to feel sorry for her. I hope she stays burnt in the next one but you know how Hollywood is, stupid fuckers.

If you get the DVD, there are two different commentary tracks. One is Ronny Yu who is the Hong Kong director who did such a good job of making this crazy movie look real pretty. And that is really what is good about this movie, because the story isn’t all that hot and the characters besides Tiffany definitely aren’t very interesting. But there are some nice images like the burnt black Tiffany hobbling through the cemetery or Chucky looking into a gas tank or Jennifer Tilly with an eyeball in her mouth as she sews dead Chucky doll back together, and it’s all very carefully lit and framed to look all beautiful and what not. And you don’t usually get to see this type of poetic type visuals applied to some trashy slasher sequel about killer dolls, so my hat is off to Mr. Ronny Yu for making this all possible. But his track is kind of boring he just keeps talking about how hard it was to use the puppets. Sorry bud, that’s how we do it in america, with puppets. Get used to it.

The other track is Brad Dourif (Oscar nominee, voice of Chucky) and Jennifer Tilly (Oscar nominee, voice of Tiffany) and Don Mancini (producer, writer, creator of Chucky an American institution). These motherfuckers really make it interesting, partly because they get to talk back and forth so maybe it’s not being fair to Ronny. Anyway Jennifer Tilly is much more intelligent than I assumed from her acting and she seems to really like Chucky although she admits she’s only seen part of Child’s Play once on USA. And that in my opinion is what’s wrong with America but that’s another story.

Anyway I highly recommend Bride of Chucky if you like that sort of crap.

[ratings]

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Now if you’re like me you remember the very end of BRIDE OF CHUCKY, suddenly a little sharp-toothed baby chucky pops out. It’s like the traditional sudden-jolt-ending used in every horror movie since CARRIE, but at the same time it’s a funny joke because you just KNOW it means we’re gonna get a SON OF CHUCKY some day. Or SEED OF CHUCKY it turns out due to the ambiguous gender of the baby.

SEED OF CHUCKY is the first movie in history to open inside Chucky’s penis, in a computer generated sequence about the actual Seed of Chucky having a go at the Egg of Tiffany, then growing into a baby. Then we skip forward and find the baby at the World Ventriloquism Championships in London. It turns out some random British punk rock fake-ventriloquist found the seed of chucky in the cemetery after BRIDE OF CHUCKY ended. The poor little doll is now living a Charles Dickens style childhood in a cage in London. His name is Shitface and he has the voice of LORD OF THE RINGS hobbit Billy Boyd as he tells us about his sorry existence in a hilarious voiceover.

It turns out the Chucky and Tiffany dolls have been somehow repaired (no explanation needed or offered) and are being used as puppets to star in a movie about their lives. The baby Chucky finds out and journeys to Hollywood where he accidentally does a voodoo spell to resurrect them, and also speaks Japanese to them (long story).

If you didn’t figure it out during the ventriloquism championships, it is at this point that you will notice that this is even more of a comedy than BRIDE OF CHUCKY. Clearly nobody involved in this movie has any illusion that Chucky is scary anymore. So instead writer/direct Don Mancini (who wrote all the chucky pictures, but never directed before now) gives us a weird ass comedy about killer dolls trying to raise a sexually confused child. Also trying to impregnate Oscar nominee Jennifer Tilly with a turkey baster full of Seed of Chucky (long story). Also rapper/deodorant expert Redman, playing himself, is trying to have sex with Jennifer Tilly while pretending he might cast her in his directorial debut, a movie about the Virgin Mary. Method Man was unavailable for comment.

Jennifer Tilly has a dual role as the voice of Tiffany and as herself. She seems to have a good sense of humor about herself, her career, and the movie BOUND. John Waters also has a small role, and the actual effects guy for the movie plays the effects guy for the movie within the movie, and he gets his head chopped off in a pretty spectacular manner. Good job effects guy.

To be frankly honest – and believe me, it hurts to say this my friends – oscar nominee Brad Dourif starts to get a little grating as CHucky, impersonating Jack Nicholson all the time. It does set up a pretty good joke though, where Chucky recreates the “Here’s Johnny!” scene from THE SHINING but manages to NOT say “Here’s Chucky!” For that single act I think the oscar people should retroactively give this kid that supporting actor nomination for ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST. After all these years he’s finally earned it.

There are actually a whole bunch of references to famous horror movies, and they did a pretty good job of them, making them identifiable but not usually TOO obvious. They got a good HALLOWEEN scene in there, they got a couple PSYCHOs (one is the shower scene, sure, but they also do the falling down the stairs shot) and I think they even got DRESSED TO KILL in there.

This isn’t a horror movie, it’s a horror comedy, with an accent on the comedy. Nobody could be scared by this movie. But there’s some good chopping and cutting, so don’t whine. Still, what’s really good is when they get away from that and actually get interested in the characterization of these dolls. Chucky and Tiffany debate about whether to raise their child as a killer doll or not. Tiffany sees their killing as an addiction and tries to get the monkey off her back. She tries her best to raise her kid as a regular non-killer type doll. Meanwhile, after 16 years and 5 different attempts to move his serial killer soul out of his killer doll body and into a human, Chucky finally has an epiphany, and accepts his status as “Chucky, the killer doll.”

And I’m proud of both of them.

There are a few reasons why this is not as good as BRIDE. Of course, it doesn’t look nearly as beautiful as Mr. Yu and Mr. Pau made their movie. It’s got a good look to it, sure, but none of that gothic poetry.

More importantly it doesn’t have that surprise factor. CHILD’S PLAY was a genuinely good killer doll movie, parts 2 and 3 were formulaic slasher sequel retreads. But suddenly BRIDE comes along, it’s a total reinvention. You’ve never seen a movie like this before. All the sudden it’s completely absurd and it’s more about the puppets and the crazy things you can do with them. I believe this movie set the stage for JASON X and FREDDY VS. JASON which are maybe not as good as BRIDE but all three are more entertaining slasher sequels than anybody had made in many years.

But there is one major way that SEED is kind of better than BRIDE: it’s even more about the puppets. In BRIDE you gotta go along with these hollow teenager characters who Chucky and Tiffany hitch a ride with. You don’t have the same problem here. The only human characters you have to know are Jennifer Tilly and Redman, and it’s almost like you already know them anyway. I mean, I remember just the other day, Redman and his friend Method Man jumped out from behind some bushes and told me about a particular brand of deodorant. They seem like a couple of helpful guys, I really appreciated it. And let me be the first to say this about Redman, that any celebrity who is willing to play themselves and then be horribly disemboweled is a cool guy. (spoiler.) If they ever get to make another one (yeah, right) I hope somewhere they have a “REDMAN R.I.P.” graffiti mural like you might see of Tupac or somebody.

Plus you got this new puppet, the Seed of the title, who is either called Glen or Glenda depending on which parent you ask. Billy Boyd does a great job, seeming totally sincere.

I don’t want to give everything away. This is just a funny god damn movie. I’m sure alot of people can’t get into this, but I don’t know what to tell you. If you liked BRIDE I think you will like this one.

One last thing, I want to commend these filmatists on some wonderful end credits. I’m sure somebody’s thought of this before, but I don’t remember ever seeing it. They credit each of the actors next to a freeze frame of their character’s horrible beheadings, guttings, etc. It brings a real sense of class to your night out at the movies, one that is much needed today. Good job everybody.

[ratings]