Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother
YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER is one of those titles that makes sense when you see the movie, but maybe it’s not the best one for getting people to come see it. That’s okay. It’s not really for everybody anyway. But it’s definitely my shit.
How’s this for a selling point: when Mahershala Ali (ROXANNE ROXANNE) finally gave up on ever making the BLADE movie he’d been developing for six years, he reunited with the first director who had been attached, Bassam Tariq (MOGUL MOWGLI), to make an indie movie that would take advantage of all the sword training Marvel had provided for him. You want to see that, right? I sure wanted to see that.
I do think his performance in this might be influenced by how he would’ve played Blade, but it’s really not a BLADE-like movie at all. It’s a totally different thing I also love: what I like to call arthouse badass, though “arthouse” might be overstating it. I’m just trying to describe movies about badasses that are channeling more LE SAMOURAI, POINT BLANK and GET CARTER than, say, THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS; crime movies with elements of action, done with a dry, indie drama approach, but cool. Movies like THE AMERICAN, THE LIMEY, DRIVE, RUST AND BONE, REDBELT, DESTROYER, THE KILLER (2023), A VIGILANTE, YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE, I’LL SLEEP WHEN I’M DEAD, HAYWIRE, ONLY GOD FORGIVES, EASTERN PROMISES, THE BOUNCER, SPARTAN, HELL OR HIGH WATER, and the king of them is GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI, which is an obvious influence on this one.
But Ali’s character Latif is less extreme than Ghost Dog. He says he has a code, but it’s just to not use guns, despite a military past. Being a sword-wielding hitman is his sordid secret life, not his identity. His primary concern during the movie is to be a father.
The Bride!
“THE BRIDE!” (quotation marks co-sign the exclamation point’s insistence that this is not the same as THE BRIDE starring Sting) is a wild and incoherent movie, both for good and bad, and not really in the ways I expected. The trailers suggested a stylized rock musical sort of approach, but they did that by emphasizing the occasional stylistic diversions (a dance fantasy, a James Whale homage). For the most part the world of the movie is more normal and literal than that, grounding the absurd premise “What if the monster and bride of Frankenstein were alive in the thirties and sort of turned into Bonnie and Clyde?” So you got these two heightened monster characters interacting with mobsters and getting chased by cops and regular stuff like that.
In the opening seconds we learn that it’s way more convoluted than the trailer conveyed, with a concept I’m not sure even the full movie gets across with clarity. You see, Academy Award winner Jessie Buckley (MEN) plays Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, famed author of Kenneth Branagh’s version of Frankenstein. Her soul is trapped in some sort of purgatory where she says she’s been for centuries (though the movie is set in 1936, which is 85 years after Shelley’s death). She says that Frankenstein “wasn’t the half of it. What I wanted to write…what I needed to say, I couldn’t.” Whatever great story she had in mind she never got to put on paper because of a brain tumor, so she possesses a lady in Chicago named Ida (Jessie Buckley, JUDY), sometimes but not most of the time speaks through her, and… somehow causes her to live out her life as that unwritten story? Pretty ballsy of writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal (THE LOST DAUGHTER) to write a story and have Mary Shelley declare it better than Frankenstein. (read the rest of this shit…)
A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (39th anniversary revisit)
To quote Bushwick Bill, this year Halloween fell on a weekend. I’m sorry that I’m a few days late on my annual essay, but it’s like I always say: the veil should logically be just as thin a couple days after Halloween as it was a couple days before. So if we’re celebrating all October there should be no problem doing it in November.
This year I decided to write about not only one of my favorite horror movies, but the one I credit with making me fall in love with the genre in the first place. I can’t pinpoint when the fascination started; I remember watching THE SHINING at a friend’s house in elementary school without thinking of it as “my first horror movie” or anything like that. But I have this memory of hearing ads for A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS on K-Plus FM when I was in sixth grade. Around this time I was also fascinated with Gumby, who had been revived as a surfer in the medium of puff-paint t-shirt, and I remember drawing a picture of “Gumby Krueger.” I think I got it wrong and gave him blades on both hands.
I didn’t see DREAM WARRIORS until video, but those ads must’ve been what inspired me to rent A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. I know I had seen and loved the first three by the next year when A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER came out, because that one was a theatrical event and a formative experience. (read the rest of this shit…)
Silent Hill (20 years later)
For two decades, as a non-gamer, I have believed that Christophe Gans’s SILENT HILL is the best video game movie. I have a friend who likes the games and thinks it’s a good adaptation, but that was never a factor for me. I just thought that whatever they were doing as far as translation really worked to create a unique horror movie with a strong atmosphere, bizarre creature designs, excellent FX work and an admirable preference for dream logic over boring reality. Even the characters’ numerous illogical choices and what I deemed to be “terrible” dialogue according to my Ain’t It Cool News review at the time added to the surreal feeling, and reminded me of the dubbed Italian horror movies I enjoyed.
It really felt different from the mainstream horror movies of the time, which made me like it, but also helped make it unpopular. I remember seeing it at a preview screening with most of the crowd in open, loud revolt from early on. I went with my now wife and another couple, who were talking about how terrible it was as we left. When I admitted I liked it they all looked at me like I was insane. (read the rest of this shit…)
Wildwood
I’m sorry to interrupt the Halloween week horror programming, but it would be negligent not to write about a unique theatrical experience that may pass you by soon: the extravagant stop motion fantasy WILDWOOD. Director Travis Knight (KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS), writer Chris Butler (director of PARANORMAN) and the studio Laika (CORALINE) live up to their usual high standard of entertainment while aggressively pushing the envelope of what can be done in this medium.
I’m referring more to its scale than its subject matter. It’s a PG-13 movie, it has some stuff that might be too much for most little kids, but it’s basically a young people movie, based on a book by Colin Meloy of the band The Decemberists, illustrated by his wife Carson Ellis. I don’t know anything about any of that, but I can appreciate a LABYRINTH type going-into-a-fantasy-world-to-rescue-the-kidnapped-baby adventure as much as the next dork. This is a good version of that for a couple of reasons, the biggest and most obvious being that it’s maybe the most technically ambitious stop motion movie ever made, just staggering to look at if you appreciate the art form. (read the rest of this shit…)
Clayface
CLAYFACE is the latest motion picture from the Detective Comics movie universe. It’s set mostly in Gotham City, retelling the origin of one of the great Batman villains, but it’s R-rated horror, and not much like a comic book movie, for good and bad. The good – it stands completely on its own, with none of the little movie universe connections, cameos or credit sequences that people used to demand but now get so mad about. The bad – I’d say it could use more of that heightened feeling of the best movies based on drawings. It doesn’t stand out that much from all the other horror movies that are not based on comic books. But I liked it. It has some clunkiness that will probly draw fire under the heightened scrutiny of comic book shit, but that I can forgive.
Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries, DRAGONHEART: BATTLE FOR THE HEARTFIRE) is an actor on the rise. He famously had a hard childhood on the rough side of Gotham City, but now he’s a popular heartthrob who just got nominated for an Oscar (or unnamed Oscar-type award) for best actor.
(If you know comic books you can forgive that the famous actor Clayface was Basil Karlo and Matt Hagen was a different character, because they combined them so well in the classic Batman: The Animated Series episodes. But if you know Oscars you don’t like that this shows the nominations announced in the middle of the afternoon and not in alphabetical order. Come on guys, that’s not canon.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Blood Frenzy
BLOOD FRENZY (1987) was a perfect Slasher Search suggestion from Mr. Majestyk. It’s exactly the type of movie I was digging through for years and I don’t know how I missed it, since it’s one of the remaining VHS tapes in the “Stalkers and Slashers” section at Scarecrow Video. My only guess is maybe I was scared off by the story credit for Ray Dennis Steckler. But also I really don’t know that guy’s movies so I maybe would’ve had to be mixing him up with Jim Wynorski or somebody.
Anyway I would classify it as a bad movie, but the type of bad movie that brings me comfort. It’s shot without any grace or sense of style, in a bland location, and most of the cast either read the lines like they’re not clear which word to emphasize in any given sentence, or like they’re a hungry community theater actor throwing their entire being into every squint or turn of the head. Each of their characters is introduced with one psychological condition that determines most of what they do in the movie. There’s not much thought of doing anything else with them. (read the rest of this shit…)
Street Fighter (2026)
STREET FIGHTER (2026) is the new film based on the Street Fighter video game franchise. I have less of an affinity for Street Fighter than Mortal Kombat since it’s not one of the few games I’ve played, but come on. Larger-than-life characters who live to engage in martial arts competitions, sometimes with cartoonish powers? Obviously it piques my interest. Maybe I’m even the prime audience for this movie since I’m Interested In This Sort of Shit (IiTSoS) but with no preconceived notions of how these characters or concepts need to be adapted. And I have evidence to support this theory.
1. I thought STREET FIGHTER: THE LEGEND OF CHUN-LI was kind of fun. It has a 3% on Rotten Tomatoes.
2. I went to see this with a friend who’s a games journalist and he had all kinds of complaints afterwards that I didn’t relate to.
3. When the first trailer came out that showed this version’s cartoonish approach, the buzz on the internet seemed to be “that looks like the absolute worst shit ever shat from a butt,” but when I saw it I thought, “Oh wow, I gotta see that!”
I was also intrigued to read that director/co-writer Kitao Sakurai was one of the main people behind The Eric André Show and also directed André’s very funny movie BAD TRIP. That’s just not who you would expect to do a video game movie, suggesting it could be something interesting. Had I known that Sakurai had, as a child actor, made his debut in BEST OF THE BEST 3: NO TURNING BACK, that would’ve also been a selling point too. (read the rest of this shit…)
Hallowarrior / Bloody Tennis
As usual October is passing me by and I feel like I’ve barely started with the horror movies. But also as usual I’m gonna watch them year ‘round anyway so what am I worried about? Stay tuned for many more, but today I’m dipping into two new releases on Shudder.
I wanted to watch HALLOWARRIOR since, as the title implies, it is season. It’s about a young woman who calls herself Pumpkin (Milly Shapiro, Tony winner from Matilda who had a memorable fate in HEREDITARY). She lives in the house she grew up in, all alone now because four years ago a virus killed much of the population and all of the crops.
But somehow she’s still hanging in there, it’s October 31st, she loves Halloween, and she’s damn sure gonna celebrate. She explains this over a radio, begging for someone to come trick or treat, or see the haunted house she made. She found a candy store to loot so she has more than enough to fill a bowl, and she carved jack o’lanterns out of a basketball and a gas can and some other stuff. (read the rest of this shit…)
Pulse (2001)
I finally watched Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 film PULSE (Kairo). I don’t think I’ve seen any of this acclaimed director’s 30+ films, but this is the one people seem to mention most. And I get it now. There’s something very distinct about the potency of its forlorn, foreboding mood and the unusual way it combines a ghost story with an early internet thriller that then dissolves into a surreal apocalypse. The overcast skies, small, impersonal apartments and emphasis on staring at chunky turn-of-the-millennium computer monitors is already depressing before it starts to feel like depression may be its primary subject.
Michi Kudo (Kumiko Asō, CASSHERN) works with a couple other people at a small nursery in Tokyo. She’s waiting for her co-worker Taguchi (Kenji Mizuhashi, TOMIE, GODZILLA MINUS ZERO) to get her a computer disk he was supposed to prepare for her, and he hasn’t shown up for a few days, so she goes to check on him at his apartment. He’s there, but acting kind of weird, and then out of the blue he goes into the other room and hangs himself. (read the rest of this shit…)
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