"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Violent Night

When I first heard that the trusted manufacturers of sturdy action cinema at 87North Productions were making a Santa Claus movie, I misunderstood. I pictured sort of a BAD SANTA meets DIE HARD – a serious action movie where it’s some deadbeat mall Santa who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time and has to save the day, hopefully using a velvet sack’s worth of seasonally themed methods.

So when I realized that the Santa Claus played by David Harbour (BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN) in VIOLENT NIGHT is the actual Santa Claus, having his Christmas Eve deliveries interrupted by hostage takers and using “Christmas magic” to fight back, I was disappointed at first. Sounded corny, I thought.

I was wrong. I want to apologize to Santa. VIOLENT NIGHT is an admirable and solid take on a type of movie I treasure: the genre mash-up that knows it’s ludicrous to combine these particular types of movies but moves forward trying to deliver on both genres as well as the unique opportunities offered by their combination. So it has the trappings of a DIE HARD/UNDER SIEGE scenario (ruthless mastermind, elite mercenary force, carefully planned heist, hero mixed up in it by mistake, shocking deaths of innocent people, bad guys picked off one-by-one with stolen or improvised weapons) but also a heartwarming holiday tale (little girl wavering in her belief in Santa, family having trouble getting along, lessons about selflessness). It’s a comedy, but not a spoof. It tries to deliver faithfully on the mission of each genre. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 12th, 2022 | 44 Comments »

The Fabelmans

THE FABELMANS is the new Steven Spielberg joint that we can safely call the most personal of his career. At first glance it may seem like just another fictional story about a Jewish kid who makes 8mm movies in Phoenix, Arizona in the ‘50s and moves to Saratoga, California and his mom buys a monkey and his parents split up and he moves to L.A. with his dad and goes to USC and tries to break into the film business, but in my opinion it is not a coincidence that this character “Sammy Fabelman” was born at the same time as Spielberg to a similar family and lived in the same towns and did the same things and had the same experiences. From what I’ve read this is not even a loosely autobiographical story, but a pretty direct one about his childhood and specifically about what he got from each of his parents and why their marriage didn’t work out.

It’s also about him becoming a filmmaker, but those things are related. Just like Batman’s origin story, Spielberg’s starts with a kid being taken to the movies. (Had it not been for that mugger, maybe Bruce Wayne would’ve directed READY PLAYER ONE.) Five-year-old Sammy (Mateo Zoryon Francis-Deford) is in line to see THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH at a theater in New Jersey. He’s never seen a movie before and doesn’t really understand what it is, but he’s scared because he heard something about the people being giant. We get a handy encapsulation of his parents Burt (Paul Dano, TAKING LIVES) and Mitzi (Michelle Williams, SPECIES) in the differing ways they try to comfort him. Burt, a computer engineer, tells him about the projector and the projectionist, the still photos moving really fast, the concept of persistence of vision. Mom, a talented pianist, says it’s like a dream that you don’t wake up from. As Sammy grows up he’ll apply Dad’s scientific brain to his obsessions with cameras, editing and effects technology, and his mom’s artistic soul to everything else. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 8th, 2022 | 11 Comments »

Light of Day

Some time around the mid-‘90s I took a weekly screenwriting class for a while, and the teacher loved Paul Schrader. He seemed to bring him up in every class. The guy who wrote TAXI DRIVER. The guy with the strict Calvinist upbringing. Eventually he had us watch a Paul Schrader movie, and he chose LIGHT OF DAY – the one where Michael J. Fox plays in a rock band with Joan Jett. I had seen it before and I didn’t dislike it but I thought it was a weird choice to represent Schrader. I think maybe the teacher hadn’t seen it yet.

But, you know, after THE CARD COUNTER last year and finally watching LIGHT SLEEPER this year I was kinda high on Schrader and thought it might be worth going back to this one to see if there was something I was missing. Well, no, not really, but that’s okay. It’s not in the vein of those ones I just mentioned and it’s not as powerful or as distinctly Paul Schrader, but I don’t think anybody else would’ve made exactly this rock ’n roll movie.

I used to think of it as corny because it’s a rock star acting and a sitcom star rocking, but what’s cool about it is that it’s thoroughly working class. It’s about a band, but it’s never about the record label guy is coming to the showcase and it’s their big chance and they write a hit and they get the cover of Rolling Stone but then it’s the pressures of fame or whatever. No, they’re just a small band that plays at a little tavern in Cleveland called the Euclid (“the Euc” for short) and they try to keep that gig or set up a small tour or play in a different band that will pay better. They do pull a pretty good crowd for the size of the place, but they’re not famous. Nobody knows who they are. And they gotta have jobs. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 7th, 2022 | 13 Comments »

Monday Morning

MONDAY MORNING (1990) is the only movie written and directed by the producer Don Murphy (NATURAL BORN KILLERS, DOUBLE DRAGON, BULLY, THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, TRANSFORMERS). I’ve been kind of fascinated by him since his furious all caps attacks on people for saying the wrong things about his productions on AOL message boards back in the Hyborian Age, so when I saw that a movie he actually directed came out on disc from MVD Rewind I got curious.

It was actually his USC thesis film, but he managed to sell it for release on VHS under the title CLASS OF FEAR. They promoted it like an exploitation movie, but it’s more of a corny drama, almost an After School Special. It does not show many signs of directorial vision that I could pick up on, but maybe Murphy deserves credit for recognizing that and going into producing instead. I’m not gonna hold it against him. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 6th, 2022 | 1 Comment »

Bones and All

note: This is a great fuckin movie and this review has spoilers, so if you’re planning on seeing it anyway, I suggest doing that first and coming back.

I’m not fully up on the films of director Luca Guadagnino. He’s done several I haven’t seen, including A BIGGER SPLASH, which I know some people love. I did see CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, which I didn’t officially review but did write a little about in a 2018 Oscar preview. I concluded that, “My main feeling about CALL ME BY YOUR NAME was that it was pretty good but just not for me. But I did continue thinking about different aspects of it for days afterward, making me think I liked it more than I realized at first.”

Since that was my only impression of Guadagnino it seemed kind of crazy that he was the one to finally do a remake of SUSPIRIA! Or as I called it in my review, “SUSPIRI… uh…”

Actually I liked that one, and will watch it again, though I didn’t understand what it was trying to say about German politics of the ‘70s. As I wrote in my review, “It is possible that this Italian director and American writer have something very important to say about the post-WWII generational shift that was happening in Germany when they were 6 and 8 years old, respectively, and that it adds greatly to the story of these dancing witches. If so it’s way over my head, so for me it dilutes what could be a far more intense experience if the horrific parts weren’t so spread out.”

With those mixed feelings in mind, I’m thrilled to say that Guadagnino’s new one BONES AND ALL is the first one I’ve seen by him that I unreservedly loved. This is another horror one that will get some of the more finicky genre purists in their feelings about it being pretentious or whatever, but I think it’s a real fuckin knockout. It’s a cannibal road movie romance. You’re gonna love it. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 5th, 2022 | 12 Comments »

Monkeybone

Here’s a story I may or may not have told before. It takes place on February 28, 2001. A few minutes before 11 am there was a 6.8 earthquake epicentered in the southern Puget Sound. I was at work and I saw some shelves wobble and a few things fall down, but nothing serious. Downtown there was some damage – some vehicles got crushed by falling bricks, and I remember a couple clubs where bands used to play in Pioneer Square (OK Hotel and Fenix Underground) were wrecked enough they went out of business. I called my roommate at home to make sure none of my stuff broke, and he made fun of me.

After work I went to Pacific Place to see this movie MONKEYBONE. All the advertising looked cheesy, but I was hoping it might be interesting because it was from Henry Selick, the director of THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS. Unfortunately the advertising was pretty accurate. I remember a couple times during the movie something playing on a bordering screen made a loud rumble that vibrated the whole row I was sitting in. I thought about the three escalators I took up through the mall to get to the theater, and the fourth escalator inside the theater that goes up to the floor where this one was showing, and I thought, “That’s an aftershock, and the building is gonna collapse, and I’m gonna die watching fucking MONKEYBONE.” (read the rest of this shit…)

December 1st, 2022 | 21 Comments »

Wendell & Wild

Henry Selick, the director of THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, just made his first movie in thirteen years. Stop motion animation takes a long time, of course, but not usually that long. (With the exception of MAD GOD.)

It’s not like he took a vacation. Only a year after CORALINE Selick moved from Laika to Pixar to start a new stop motion division called Cinderbiter. They actually animated much of a movie called THE SHADOW KING – $50 million worth – and then cancelled it. And then he developed a bunch of other movies with a bunch of other people that didn’t even get that far.

But now, finally, he has a new, completed and released one called WENDELL & WILD. He wrote it with Academy Award winning screenwriter Jordan Peele, it stars the voices of Key and Peele, it’s about demons and zombie skeletons and shit, and it has Selick’s eye for design and increasingly sophisticated stop motion, so it’s the kind of thing some people ought to be interested in, in my opinion. Only trouble is it was produced by Netflix, so they just squirted it out in a little glob exactly like Wendell & Wild squirt the cream that grows their father’s nose hairs (more on that later), so most of the people I’ve mentioned it to never heard of the fuckin thing. I read that it didn’t even make it into Netflix’s top ten when it came out, but the computer animated movie THE BAD GUYS did a couple days later when they picked it up after it had already been on DVD, blu-ray and Peacock for five months.

That doesn’t seem fair. I figured I should write a review just so it’s on record somewhere that WENDELL & WILD is a real, existent movie that was made and released and can be viewed with your eyes and everything. (read the rest of this shit…)

November 30th, 2022 | 20 Comments »

Rhymes For Young Ghouls

RHYMES FOR YOUNG GHOULS (2013) was the first of two features by writer/director Jeff Barnaby. I didn’t know about him until I saw his really good 2019 zombie movie BLOOD QUANTUM, at which point I was excited to follow this new director who was around my age and seemed real interesting in interviews. Tragically that was his last film – he died of cancer last month. That’s a real damn shame, but I encourage you to check out his small body of work. He’s got a real interesting perspective as a guy whose politics grew from seeing some shit growing up in the Mi’kmaq reserve in Quebec, but his genre influences taught him to make movies from that point-of-view that are entertaining, not strident.

While BLOOD QUANTUM is straight forwardly Barnaby’s take on the zombie post-apocalypse genre, this one is something more distinct. It’s kind of a small time crime tale, set (like BLOOD QUANTUM) in a fictional reservation called Red Crow, but in 1976 (the year Barnaby was born). Reservation Dogs star Devery Jacobs (credited here as Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs) plays Aila, a teenager who has been running the family weed business since a drunk driving accident killed her brother and mother and put her father in prison. (read the rest of this shit…)

November 29th, 2022 | No Comments »

Eggshells

Holy shit you guys, I never really thought I’d see EGGSHELLS! It’s the weird psychedelic movie Tobe Hooper made in 1969 – five years before THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. According to Hooper it only really played about fifty times, and only in Texas. It had never been on video until 2013, when it was included as a bonus disc for Arrow’s Region B limited edition of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2. I didn’t know about it in time to get it.

But recently a copy of that disc was donated to the collection of Scarecrow Video, so I checked it out. It’s a beautiful restoration and the disc includes a Hooper commentary track, which I’m glad I listened to, because it sure gave me a better idea what was supposed to be going on. You wouldn’t necessarily know this was the work of a future Master of Horror, because it hadn’t yet occurred to him that the horror genre was a good hook to get your movie played in drive-ins. There’s possibly a supernatural force in it, but it’s not used for scares – just trippiness, I’d say. (read the rest of this shit…)

November 28th, 2022 | 5 Comments »

Lucky McKee/Angela Bettis Dangerous Dating trilogy: May / Roman / Sick Girl

I always keep an eye out for new films from Lucky McKee, because he’s the director of my official Favorite Horror Movie of the 2010s, THE WOMAN. Even your average individual who knows who Lucky McKee is may not have heard of his young-people-find-some-stolen-cash thriller BLOOD MONEY or his Lifetime Channel domestic thriller KINDRED SPIRITS, but you bet I’ve seen and reviewed them. He has a new one that came out on VOD recently called OLD MAN, and I didn’t review that one because it’s so simple I didn’t really know how to write about it. It’s pretty much like a two person play with two actors I like – Stephen Lang (BAND OF THE HAND) and Marc Senter (BRAWLER) – having a long, increasingly strange conversation/confrontation in a remote cabin. I didn’t feel like I totally understood where it ended up, but I enjoyed the experience.

Before Halloween I rewatched Tobe Hooper’s THE TOOLBOX MURDERS, which stars long time McKee collaborator Angela Bettis, and I read in an old Fangoria that McKee himself almost played the toolbox murderer in it, and that he hooked up Hooper with cinematographer Steve Yedlin, who’d shot his first film. That inspired me to revisit MAY and also reminded me that despite all my bragging in the first paragraph there were two other McKee/Bettis joints from the aughts that I hadn’t actually seen. What the fuck dude. So I did a triple feature.

(read the rest of this shit…)

November 23rd, 2022 | 7 Comments »

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