American movies of the ’80s were so fascinated with fraternities and sororities. Was that just an offshoot of the popularity of ANIMAL HOUSE? They saw that and realized the Greek system was a good way for a movie to have a bunch of young people drinking beer and having sex?
Maybe that’s all they wanted, but this world also has alot of built-in conflict in the rivalries between fraternities, or (as in this case) the new people going through hazing to try to get accepted. It’s a pretty good microcosm of the way alot of us remember the age of yuppies and Ronald Reagan: you got these good looking assholes in charge, coming from rich families, re-enacting weird fetishistic rituals of cruelty while excluding people different from themselves from their superficial, hedonistic lifestyle. Usually we’re supposed to identify with an underdog or outsider who’s trying to be accepted into this world, not opposing it. Here it’s two good looking girls (Joanna Johnson and Elaine Wilkes as Jennifer and Phoebe) and their quirky bespectacled friend Vivia (Sherry Willis-Burch, whose only other movie was FINAL EXAM) who the sorority sisters clearly don’t like. So there’s that tension that they might turn against her to get in, or after they get in. (read the rest of this shit…)
This Chucky series is one-of-a-kind. Of course it all started in ’88 with CHILD’S PLAY, a genuinely effective creepfest that put a drop of contemporary into a classic horror premise. It’s been a while since I’ve watched parts 2 (1989) and 3 (1991), but I remember the second is a pretty solid (if unnecessary) continuation and the 3rd one is, you know, terrible. But in ’98 the series was ingeniously reborn as absurdist horror-comedy with BRIDE OF CHUCKY, directed by Ronny Yu, and in 2004 we got the severely more ridiculous SEED OF CHUCKY, which was a great time at the movies for me and 25 other people around the world.
GRAVITY is the new one from Alfonso Cuaron, genius director who hasn’t done one since CHILDREN OF MEN seven years ago. You remember for that he and his criminally award-snubbed cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (THE TREE OF LIFE, THE CAT IN THE HAT [!?]) devised several completely jaw-dropping long take shots where the protagonists run through these crazy battles and go through all kinds of shit without any visible edits. Remember that scene where the car is rolling down the hill and they get attacked by a band of marauders, or the one where he has to fight his way up the stairs looking for his elephant? Or actually I think one of those was TOM YUM-GOONG. But even so there were some great ones in CHILDREN OF MEN, and for GRAVITY they took that to the next level, doing most of the movie in long unbroken takes. You just stop thinking about it, but apparently the first shot lasts 17 minutes. And this is in an era when 17 seconds without a cut would seem like a long time.
The clock just struck midnight here on the west coast, and thus begins the annual outlawvern.com Watching Of More Horror Movies Than Usual season. Try as they might the GOP were not able to shut down this hallowed tradition.
Dito Montiel is a director I’ve kept an eye on since I saw his underground fighting movie 
“Well, I didn’t think it was terrible or anything.”
Our NINJA: SHADOW OF A TEAR early coverage concludes with david’s interview with the ninja himself, the world’s most complete fighter, El Gringo, a man who has had bit parts in both the remake of THE PINK PANTHER and ZERO DARK THIRTY, an icon of modern action, Mr. Scott Adkins.
