Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Tuesday, October 5th, 2021
“I don’t want to scare anyone, but I’m gonna give it to you straight about Jason.”
Sean Cunningham kinda messed up. He hadn’t been trying to become a horror guy, he was just trying to cash in on the popularity of HALLOWEEN real quick. But FRIDAY THE 13TH had been so successful for Paramount that they wanted a sequel immediately. By distributing the film, they’d invented the “negative pickup” – basically, they would let indie producers go through the trouble of making the damn thing, and the studio just had to market it, so they made lots of money. Though not everything had sequels in those days, this seemed like a good chance for one. But Cunningham wasn’t about to dedicate his life to this shit.
So they promoted from within. Steve Miner (previously credited as Stephen Miner) had worked as a p.a., assistant editor, second unit director and other roles on Cunningham productions including THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, HERE COME THE TIGERS and MANNY’S ORPHANS, and he’d been associate producer of FRIDAY THE 13TH. Part I screenwriter Victor Miller didn’t return, so Ron Kurz, who’d done some uncredited rewrites on that one, took over. He’d also pseudonymously written two Ken Wiederhorn movies: the notorious fart comedy KING FRAT (1979) and the in-my-opinion-underrated slasher/suspense movie EYES OF A STRANGER (1981). Fortunately his work here is more like the latter.
Frank Mancuso Jr., the 23-year-old son of the president of Paramount, became the associate producer for Part II, by most accounts staying quiet but very handy. They found there were problems the kid could solve with a phone call.
I called FRIDAY THE 13TH “in many ways the Platonic ideal of a slasher movie,” but I think Plato would agree with me that FRIDAY THE 13TH PART II is actually better. It’s mostly the same formula, but the simple act of telling us it’s Jason allows for more significant onscreen struggles with the killer, whose identity doesn’t need to be hidden. I also think the very fact of being a sequel adds a little more fun, wrapping up the events of part 1 and coming up with a crazy way to continue the story despite the decapitation of the original antagonist. I kinda dig how in the first one everyone in the area was haunted by these past events going back to ’57, and now the events of part I have been added to the list. Also, we hear a new (true!) legend about Jason being alive that apparently the “old timers” believe, even though they didn’t think to mention it last time. Or maybe it just started to proliferate in the 5 years between these two movies that were released less than a year apart. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adrienne King, Amy Steel, Bill Randolph, Carl Fullerton, Frank Mancuso Jr., John Furey, Lauren-Marie Taylor, Marta Kober, Ron Kurz, slashers, Steve Daskewisz, Steve Miner, Stu Charno, Tom McBride, Walt Gorney, Warrington Gillette
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 16 Comments »
Monday, October 4th, 2021
“Ma’am – we didn’t find any boy.”
THE TIME HAS COME. I’m finally going to write about all the FRIDAY THE 13TH movies. I did one big review of the whole saga almost 13 years ago, so it’s time for a reboot. At long last I will review them separately, giving each one the focus it deserves – the type of one-on-one, individualized attention that the counselors failed to give poor Jason Voorhees while he was swimming on that fateful day, on account of they were having s-e-x. As far as I am aware no one else has shared opinions on these films before, especially on the internet, so I’m very proud to be breaking this ground, for the good of the community. At last, Jason’s story can be told.
Maybe part of the hangup in starting a series like this is that this first one is the hardest to write about. As a result of the weird choice to make Jason the killer in part 2, the smash hit cultural phenomenon original retroactively became somewhat disconnected from the rest of the series and much of what we associate with it. Like, when they said they were remaking FRIDAY THE 13TH, we knew that meant they were remaking the sequels to FRIDAY THE 13TH. In that favorite horror fan pastime of ranking the installments of a horror series, you gotta be a little hot-takey or at least personal-favoritey to not choose #1 as the best for the TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, HALLOWEEN or A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET franchises, yet very few would do that for FRIDAY THE 13TH. By definition, if you’re a fan of the series you’re a fan of Jason, right? (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adrienne King, Betsy Palmer, Harry Manfredini, Sean S. Cunningham, slashers, Tom Savini, Victor Miller, Walt Gorney
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 41 Comments »
Friday, October 1st, 2021
RAW is a 2016 French-Belgian movie I’ve been planning to see for years. All I knew is that it was something about cannibalism, directed by a woman (Julia Ducournau), supposedly made people faint at film festivals (haven’t we all?), and is beloved by many horror loving friends and critics, especially women. With Ducournau’s new one TITANE looking very promising even before it won the Palme d’Or (the trailer makes it look like Cronenberg meets Tarantino meets THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS) I figured I better catch up.
This is a great movie. The directorial confidence is immediately striking, but you have to flow with it a while to realize just how original it is, how much it doesn’t follow any existing template. Ducournau told The Guardian “It’s not even a horror movie, even though I love horror movies.” It’s a coming of age story about a young woman starting college, with very relatable emotions painted in extreme, horrific strokes. It definitely doesn’t follow any traditional genre structure. But Justine’s school troubles include some repulsive body horror, some gore, and yes, some munching on flesh. We’re not talking Leatherface style – more like impulsive biting. Snacking, really. The simplicity of it, and the time it takes leading up to it, investing us in the people who do it, is what makes it harder to take than in so many other movies. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ella Rumpf, French horror, Garrance Marillier, Joana Preiss, Julie Ducournau, Laurent Lucas, Palme d'Or winner, Rabah Nait Oufella
Posted in Drama, Horror | 5 Comments »
Thursday, September 30th, 2021
CASH TRUCK (Le Convoyeur) is a 2004 French crime movie I never heard of until Guy Ritchie remade it as WRATH OF MAN. I’m glad he did because I liked that movie and also I liked this movie, which is very different.
Alexandre Demarre (Albert Dupontel, IRREVERSIBLE, writer/director of BYE BYE MORONS) is the new guy at a shitty money delivery service called Vigilante. They’re the bottom of the barrel company in the city, so they mostly deal with smaller amounts of money, but in more dangerous neighborhoods. (Or at least that’s what they tell him. One of the dangers he faces is a bunch of kids on a soccer field taunting him and throwing things at him.)
If you’ve seen WRATH OF MAN, this is an entirely different dynamic. Nobody is named “Boy Sweat” and there’s none of the macho weightlifter bro-manship that’s required when relocating the story to L.A., since it’s endemic to American policing, soldiering and security guarding. Although charismatic Jacques (Jean Dujardin, before he was OSS 117, LUCKY LUKE and THE ARTIST) is one of the main people showing Alexandre the ropes, most of these characters are regular people who would fit just as well if it was an office comedy. And though the story is ultimately full of tragedy and violence, that’s partly what it is. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Albert Dupontel, Claude Perron, Eric Besnard, French, Jean Dujardin, Nicolas Boukhrief
Posted in Crime, Reviews | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, September 29th, 2021
Like many citizens of the world, I love most of Steven Soderbergh’s movies. Still, the nature of streaming services and the lack of urgency their releases seem to inspire in my brain have left me behind in his return-from-retirement period. I haven’t seen the basketball one, the app one, the laundromat one, surely others.
But my favorite Soderberghs are the crime ones: #1 OUT OF SIGHT, #2 THE LIMEY, #3 the OCEAN’S series. And there was another one about a lady beating people up that I raved about for ten years, but that’s on hiatus for a while. These are all very different from each other in most respects other than quality. But his most recent one was released straight to Home Box Office Maximum and although this review is very late I actually managed to watch that one right away. And I loved it.
NO SUDDEN MOVE is another new mode of Soderbergh crime picture. Maybe it’s closest to THE LIMEY in tone: serious, with a high level of tension, but plenty of dry, dark, odd humor coming out of the characters and situations. Set in Detroit in 1956, it’s the story of small time criminal Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle, THE METEOR MAN), recently out due to overcrowding, still disgraced in the underworld after whatever the fiasco was that got him busted. So it’s either real lucky or awfully damn suspicious that someone he doesn’t know – white middle man Doug Jones (Brendan Fraser, MONKEYBONE) – is offering him five grand for what’s described as “a simple babysitting job” that will take three hours of his time. He doesn’t have to know he’s in a movie to have a pretty good hunch it’ll end up being more complicated than that. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Amy Seimetz, Benicio Del Toro, Brendan Fraser, David Harbour, Don Cheadle, Ed Solomon, Frankie Shaw, Jon Hamm, Kieran Culkin, Noah Jupe, Steven Soderbergh
Posted in Crime, Reviews | 21 Comments »
Tuesday, September 28th, 2021
KATE is the straight-to-Netflix Mary Elizabeth Winstead action movie produced by David Leitch and Chad Stahelski’s company 87North (formerly 87Eleven). As you’d expect from that pedigree, it has excellent action scenes, with JOHN WICK fight coordinator Jonathan Eusebio acting as second unit director and stunt coordinator. He did BIRDS OF PREY too, so I gotta wonder if Winstead asked, “You got any more of those JOHN WICKs laying around?”
The screenplay is credited to Umair Aleem (whose only previous credit is EXTRACTION – no, not that one – the Bruce Willis/Kellan Lutz/Gina Carano one), and the story is admittedly more standard than a JOHN WICK or a NOBODY. Elite assassin wanting to retire, yes, but none of the fanciful stuff. Working with her handler Varrick (Woody Harrelson, DOC HOLLYWOOD), who trained her since she was orphaned, Winstead’s titular character adeptly infiltrates, beats up, parkours and rooftop snipes whoever they send her after (which seems to mean Yakuza bosses, since she seems to live and work out of Japan). The first hit we see is successful, but she has to kill the guy in front of his daughter, which upsets her so much she decides she’s retiring after wrapping up the job. The second one we see she misses, making it much more exciting because we get to see her leap and somersault across buildings to get a second shot and then improvise an escape, stealing some dude’s ridiculously pimped out pink and yellow ride for a SPEED RACER/2 FAST 2 FURIOUS neon-blur car chase. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: 87North, Athena Perample, Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, Jonathan Eusebio, Jun Kunimura, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Michiel Huisman, Miku Patricia Martineau, Miyavi, Seng Kawee, Tadanobu Asano, Umair Aleem
Posted in Action, Reviews | 52 Comments »
Monday, September 27th, 2021
THE GREEN KNIGHT was one of my adventures in mostly-empty Covid-era theater-going, but I’m always working on a million things at once and I didn’t finish the review until after it’s left most theaters and most people’s minds. And yet I continue, undaunted. (It’s on VOD now and comes to disc October 12th.)
It’s the latest from director David Lowery (PETE’S DRAGON, A GHOST STORY, THE OLD MAN & THE GUN), and it’s his weird arty take on a fantasy knight movie, released, as you would imagine, by A24. I enjoyed this at a mostly empty matinee, just as I did with pre-pandemic movies like 300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE, HERCULES and KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD. But I don’t consider this to be in that same genre I call “fantasy sword guy movies,” and not just because he uses an ax. It’s different because the whole appeal of it is different. It’s more about deconstructing the things we expect from that genre, or at least finding a different angle on them, than reveling in them.
It’s based on an anonymous 14th-century poem called Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And I tend to like movies based on anonymous poems, judging by the only two I can think of, BEOWULF and BEOWULF. I never heard of this one, but it has been adapted before, including as SWORD OF THE VALIANT, which I went ahead and watched afterward. And I certainly didn’t get this from the movie, but Sir Gawain (Dev Patel, CHAPPIE) is one of the members of King Arthur (Sean Harris, PROMETHEUS)’s Round Table. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: A24, Alicia Vikander, anonymous poems, Barry Keoghan, Cannon Films, Christmas, Cyrielle Clair, David Lowery, Dev Patel, Erin Kellyman, Joel Edgerton, John Rhys-Davies, King Arthur, Miles O'Keefe, Peter Cushing, Ralph Ineson, Sarita Choudhury, Sean Connery, Sean Harris, Sir Gawain, Trevor Howard
Posted in Fantasy/Swords, Reviews | 12 Comments »
Thursday, September 23rd, 2021
I don’t know if Maggie Q thinks of herself as an action star. She’s a good actress, and in recent years she’s been in horror movies and thrillers and on Designated Survivor, and she has a new sitcom coming soon. Maybe one of her best known roles was the title character in Nikita, where I assume she kicked a multitude of asses every week, but it’s not like anybody puts the original TV Nikita Peta Wilson or the original movie Nikita Anne Parillaud or the second movie version Bridget Fonda in a category with Jean-Claude Van Damme and those guys. They’re just actors without much association to the genre.
But I respect that Q specifically came out of Hong Kong martial arts films. She’s American, but as a young woman she worked as a model in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong, where she was discovered and trained by Jackie Chan. Some of her Hong Kong films were Benny Chan’s GEN-X COPS 2, Ching Siu Tung’s NAKED WEAPON and Daniel Lee’s Seagal-produced DRAGON SQUAD, before coming to Hollywood for cool supporting parts in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III and LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD. She’s been in a bunch of stuff since then, including the DIVERGENT series. A lesser known one I thought she was cool in was PRIEST. But I kinda thought she’d moved on from that, so as an action fan I was so thrilled when I first saw the trailer for THE PROTÉGÉ and realized she not only had a legit starring role action vehicle, but one that was made to be released in theaters! And it really happened! I saw it in one!
This was a few weeks ago, many of the reviews I saw were negative, and it’s probly pretty much gone already, but it’s on VOD now and on disc soon. So I want to put in a good word for it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Maggie Q, Martin Campbell, Michael Keaton, Richard Wenk, Robert Patrick, Samuel L. Jackson
Posted in Action, Reviews | 12 Comments »
Wednesday, September 22nd, 2021
CRY MACHO is the new one starring and directed by Mr. Clint Eastwood. In a way it seems like a movie he would’ve made when he was younger, and in fact he almost did make it in the late ‘80s, but decided to do THE DEAD POOL instead. I think making it now it ended up much gentler than it would’ve back then, for better or worse. Although it has some things in common with THE MULE (goofy old widower driving over the border into Mexico, going to a scary villa of criminals, driving around in a truck, getting chased by gunmen and cops) it’s a simpler story and production. As a result it might have fewer things people can pick out to laugh at, but also less that’s really original or interesting about it.
That’s okay. It’s an actor in his ‘90s directing himself during a pandemic. As far as those go it’s a fuckin masterpiece. I enjoyed it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ben Davis, Clint Eastwood, Dwight Yoakam, Eduardo Minett, Fernanda Urrejola, Horacio Garcia Rojas, Mark Mancina, N. Richard Nash, Natalia Traven, Nick Schenk
Posted in Drama, Reviews, Western | 13 Comments »
Tuesday, September 21st, 2021
ZOLA tells a wild road trip story that, I feel, doesn’t amount to much, but it’s worth it for the ride, and for the telling. The big hook is that it’s based on the 2015 “now iconic series of viral, uproarious tweets” (source: A24films.com), something that’s not only emphasized in the marketing, but noted on screen at the beginning. The official onscreen title is @zola (which is actually the Twitter handle of some wedding company, not author/protagonist A’Ziah “Zola” King), the main characters are often looking at their phones and monotonously speaking aloud their texts to each other, and there’s a notification sound heard frequently throughout the movie – I was never really sure if it was meant to be diegetic or not. Admittedly all that sounds stupid, but when it comes down to it this is really just “based on a true story.” Not even entirely based on a true story told in an unusual medium, because a Rolling Stone article about the whole affair…
https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/zola-tells-all-the-real-story-behind-the-greatest-stripper-saga-ever-tweeted-73048/
…is also credited as source material.
The story is about Zola (Taylour Paige, MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM, soon to be in the TOXIC AVENGER remake), a Hooters waitress and sometimes stripper, agreeing to take a road trip to Florida to get some money dancing with a crazy white girl she just met named, in the movie version, Stefani (Riley Keough, MAGIC MIKE, MAD MAX: FURY ROAD). Turns out this bitch (get used to it, that’s what they call each other, both lovingly and not so much) is also planning for them both to turn tricks when they get there, and things get out of hand. It’s a true crime story, but not of a crime normally considered significant enough to get a movie, even including the two most harrowing parts, which were fictional. But that kind of makes it cooler. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: A'Ziah King, Ari Wegner, based on a magazine article, based on a Twitter thread, Colman Domingo, David Kushner, Janicza Bravo, Jeremy O. Harris, Mica Levi, Nicholas Braun, Riley Keough, strippers, Tampa-core, Taylour Paige, Ts Madison
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Crime, Reviews | 39 Comments »
