Robot Dreams
ROBOT DREAMS is a lovely and lyrical 2023 animated film from Spain. It has no dialogue, but English signage because it’s set in New York City. It’s some time in the ‘80s and there are no humans, only animals living like humans (in apartments, wearing clothes, having jobs). Nothing too deep, just a cartooning conceit we can easily accept, with the occasional joke like when the main character Dog is reading Pet Sematary and we have to wonder what the hell that book is in this world. The animals seem to have achieved all the same things as human civilization: the Twin Towers, pizza delivery, ALF, “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire, you name it.
Dog lives alone in an apartment in the East Village. He’s lonely and bored of playing Pong by himself and sees an ad on late night TV about ordering a robot friend. It arrives in the mail and he builds it and they walk around holding hands and having a great time together all summer. Robot is very friendly and open to learning – he waves back at a baby, flips off back at some punk rockers, does his best to join in. (read the rest of this shit…)
Death Machine
If Stephen Norrington had only ever been a special effects guy he still would’ve made a mark. He worked under Dick Smith, Rick Baker, Stan Winston and Jim Henson. He did the Grand High Witch makeup in THE WITCHES, and designed creatures for Jim Henson’s The Storyteller. He played the Gump in RETURN TO OZ. He helped make the aliens in ALIENS and ALIEN 3, the robot in HARDWARE, the creature in SPLIT SECOND. I only know about him, though, because he later directed four movies, one of which was motherfuckin BLADE.
But the first one was DEATH MACHINE (1994), a low budget killer robot movie I watched once about a quarter of a century ago when I found out it was by the guy who did BLADE. I think I thought it was okay, but I retained no details in my memory, so now I have returned to it via the fancy-ass special edition blu-ray from Kino Lorber. I watched the director’s cut (which is 106 minutes, as opposed to the 100 minute U.S. version or 122 minute foreign version), which may or may not have been why it went over a little better this time. I don’t think it’s a great movie, but it’s an interesting one with a cool robot puppet, a cyberpunk world and a hell of a look for a ‘90s b-movie that went straight to video. Cinematographer John de Borman is the guy who did THE PASSION OF DARKLY NOON and THE FULL MONTY, but from the look of it I’d have assumed he was a music video guy, somebody that would’ve worked with the Scott Brothers or Russell Mulcahy or even David Fincher.
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The Wild Robot
THE WILD ROBOT is this year’s feature from DreamWorks Animation, and I’m not sure I would’ve guessed that without the logo. It’s a funny movie but not a smart alecky one, not a child of SHREK. Based on a 2016 young readers book by Peter Brown (first in a trilogy), it’s a simple, sweet tale with an elegant premise: a shipment of mass-manufactured helper robots crashes in the wilderness, one of them survives, accidentally imprints on an orphaned gosling runt and, since her programming requires her to complete all tasks, she becomes convinced that she must teach the goose to swim and fly before migration time in the winter. So there’s a goal to work toward and an inevitable sadness if it’s ever achieved. Good drama. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Eiger Sanction
Unless I’m forgetting something, Clint Eastwood only has two movies that could be classified as spy movies, and both involve a mission to a mountain in the Alps. One is WHERE EAGLES DARE (1968) and the other is this one, THE EIGER SANCTION (1975). I’d say it’s about 65% suspenseful mountain climbing thriller, 25% assassin intrigue, and 10% colorful James Bond type shit. That last portion includes all the sexy stuff and the sinister boss, an albino war criminal named Dragon (Thayer David, ROCKY).
Clint plays Dr. Jonathan Hemlock, a great pulp hero because he’s an ex-Green Beret, secretly a retired assassin, but famously a retired mountain climber (there are fawning magazine profiles of him), now working as a college art history professor, and has a side gig as a book critic. I wondered if this might’ve been an influence on RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK when I saw one of his students (Candice Rialson, CANDY STRIPE NURSES) making eyes and spreading legs at him in class. He turns her down because he doesn’t take advantage of students or drunks, he says. Good to know he has some limits. (read the rest of this shit…)
Nosferatu (2024)
102 years after F.W. Murnau’s illegal copyright violation classic, here’s writer/director Robert Eggers following up THE WITCH, THE LIGHTHOUSE and THE NORTHMAN with THE NOSFERATU.
Nosferatu? Yesferatu. Absolutelyferatu.
In many ways NOSFERATU is pure Eggers: the meticulous attention to old timey visual, linguistic, and folkloric detail; the dreary natural lighting like you were sent hurtling to the past and forced to deal with a lack of electricity; the emphasis on mood, atmosphere and performance over modern horror tropes. The biggest way it’s different comes from being an adaptation (of an adaptation): while he maintains his trademark of presenting deeply researched superstitions of the past as reality, he has to do it with the more conventional horror set up that only the protagonists believe in the supernatural, and the others around them don’t buy it until it’s too late. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Brother From Another Planet
I’m not fully acquainted with the filmography of John Sayles, but I’m pretty sure THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET is an outlier. It was 1984, so Sayles had already had his Roger Corman/exploitation beginnings (writing PIRANHA, BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, ALLIGATOR, THE HOWLING and THE CHALLENGE) and moved into directing his indie dramas (RETURN OF THE SECAUCUS 7, LIANNA, BABY IT’S YOU). Here he makes his only ever sci-fi movie as a director, but it’s not all that commercial. Supposedly the story came to him in a dream.
The most sci-fi part is the opening cockpit lights and bleeping sounds as the mysterious extra-terrestrial played by Joe Morton (CURSE OF THE PINK PANTHER) crash lands on earth. He loses a leg in the process and hops around in an abandoned church until he somehow grows it back. Since he’s missing one shoe we see that his feet have three big clawed toes, like a dragon, but otherwise he looks human. In the city he finds a replacement shoe in a garbage can and I wondered if he understood that was garbage or if he just assumed Earth has public shoe dispensers. (read the rest of this shit…)
Red One
RED ONE is not a prequel to THE BIG RED ONE or READY PLAYER ONE, but in fact a Christmas fantasy action movie produced by Amazon Product Corporation and starring Dwayne The Rock Johnson and Chris Formerly Captain America Evans. It has made around $180 million in theaters but is considered a flop because it cost something like $250 million before marketing. I have seen many holding it up as an example of the worst fucking crap imaginable. “Slop,” if you will.
I don’t have a high opinion of most of the recent artistic choices of the named parties, so I didn’t rush out to see it. But now I have seen it on Amazon’s streaming/package delivery service (it’s already on there) and it is my duty to report that I liked it. This is a genuinely funny movie! That is not something I expect out of Dwayne T.R. Johnson in the year 2024. (read the rest of this shit…)
Christmas horror triple feature: Carnage For Christmas (2024) / A Creature Was Stirring (2023) / The Apology (2022)
Like all modern horror movies, CARNAGE FOR CHRISTMAS – a 2024 indie that came to Shudder on the 15th – is about a true crime podcaster who experienced trauma. But it does not feel like it’s trying to be “about trauma,” and the true crime aspect works because the protagonist, Lola Darling (Jeremy Moineau) is treated as a straight up detective character like Nancy Drew, Jessica Fletcher or somebody there’d be a BBC mystery series about. She’s very self-possessed, observant and knowledgeable, has an interest in the morbid, sneaks around crime scenes with a flash light, brings her own latex gloves.
She’s nervous about returning to the small town she left when she was 16. Yes, it’s the site of the aforementioned trauma (discovering the skeletal remains of someone murdered by a killer called “The Toymaker”), but also she hasn’t been back since she transitioned into a woman. I like that this overlaps a horror trope with a common coming out experience, but again, other than many of the characters/actors being trans I don’t think this is primarily “about” trans issues, but maybe it’s just over my head like I SAW THE TV GLOW was. The credits do label it as “A Transgender Holiday Film by Alice Maio Mackay.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Hellboy: The Crooked Man
If you knew there was a new Hellboy movie this year – the fourth live action one – chances are you weren’t thrilled about that fact. For most people, it seems, HELLBOY was two movies directed by Guillermo Del Toro and starring Ron Perlman and since those guys aren’t making a third one that’s it, end of story, no further questions your honor.
That was the response in 2019 when there was a third one made on not much more than half the budget of HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY, with a different tone, directed by Neil Marshall and starring David Harbour as Hellboy. The makeup just isn’t as good, it’s jokier than I wanted, but hell, it won me over. It’s less reverent than the Del Toros, more in the style of 2000s CG-driven studio b-movies, and even has Milla Jovovich as the villain. In some ways I thought it was more in the spirit of the comics by Mike Mignola than the Del Toro movies were, though with a whole bunch of different stories crammed into one movie, so it feels pretty hectic.
Before greenlighting HELLBOY: THE CROOKED MAN they must’ve checked around and found out I was the only person who liked the 2019 one. So they started over with a new Hellboy (Jack Kesy, DARK WEB: CICADA 3301), a new director (Brian Taylor, MOM AND DAD), and less than half the budget of the previous lower budgeted one. In the U.S. it went straight to V.O.D. with an ugly poster and publicity stills that made it look like a fan film.