(warning: to the extent you can spoil a movie like CRIMES OF THE FUTURE, this review contains spoilers)
CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is your typical undercover story – a guy is working for The Man and thinks he’s doing the right thing, but through his investigation he starts to see a different perspective, rethinks his loyalties, and questions whether or not to narc these people out. In this case the guy is a performance artist famous for growing inexplicable new internal organs and having them removed in front of an audience by laying in a machine that looks like a chrysalis, with robotic bone arms cutting him open under the control of a partner sensually poking her fingers into a gooey bladder. And the people he may or may not bust are (spoiler) an underground movement of people surgically altering their digestive systems so that they can eat plastic. But you’ve seen that before too. Just a good old fashioned organ opera like the ones we all grew up on.
Okay, yeah, on second thought maybe it’s fair to say that this is a weird fuckin movie that could only be made by writer/director David Cronenberg (TOP GUN [offered but turned down]). When he did that trilogy of more reality-based Viggo Mortensen joints (A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, EASTERN PROMISES and A DANGEROUS METHOD) people thought he’d moved beyond slimy mugwumps and uncharted glands and shit, and that this is a throwback. But he wrote and tried to make this before all those, so maybe he’s just getting back on track.
Either way, this has a scene where Mortensen (AMERICAN YAKUZA) has had a zipper installed on his belly and can open it up, and Léa Seydoux (MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL) pleasures him by spreading it open and licking his innards. So it was cool to see at a multiplex on a giant screen with Minions ads and shit playing before it. The summer movie season has finally begun. (read the rest of this shit…)
“Guys! It’s okay! He just wanted his machete back!”
JASON X came out almost 20 years ago, and I reviewed it here (well, on Geocities) at the time, which means I too am a frozen relic of the distant past awakened by somebody having sex and destined to be upgraded with a cool metal mask and robot body parts. Or at least I hope so. That would be cool.
I was in a minority at the time who loved the movie (“Definitely my favorite in the series although I also enjoyed the 3-D one,” I wrote). I also correctly predicted that HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION (which apparently had its trailer playing on JASON X) would not be as good.
It opens with SE7EN-inspired credits over what looks like the Hell from fellow New Line Cinema movie SPAWN (fire and chains and ancient ruins) that transitions into veins and fluids in a bloodshot eye on which is reflected a doctor with a syringe that plunges into the rubbery rotten flesh of Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder, STEEL FRONTIER), before the camera passes into the interior of his brain as the drug enters his bloodstream. I much prefer the title sequences of the earlier films, but this is an elaborate digital age one, and a fun way to set up the premise that Jason has been sedated, strapped and chained in an underground facility. (“Crystal Lake Research”!) We later learn they gave up after electrocution, gas, hanging and other execution methods proved inadequate for ending Jason’s life. (read the rest of this shit…)
David Cronenberg’s THE FLY is about a best case scenario for a remake. It takes the premise of a fun but very dated old sci-fi joint and gives it context, tone and emotional substance more fit for its time of 1986. At the same time it’s a great stealth-Cronenberg movie that was normal enough to be a big hit at the time but artful and weird enough to be different from anything we’d seen before. This was his brief Hollywood period with DEAD ZONE, which was sandwiched between THE BROOD/SCANNERS/VIDEODROME and DEAD RINGERS/NAKED LUNCH/M. BUTTERFLY/CRASH/EXISTENZ/etc.
It starts cute with undiscovered genius Seth Brundle (DEATH WISH‘s Jeff Goldblum) awkwardly hitting on magazine reporter Veronica Quaife (THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT‘s Geena Davis) and somehow getting her back to his lab, which she’s not happy to learn is also his bachelor’s pad. She’s skeptical and probly a little creeped out until he demonstrates what he’s secretly been working on: “telepods,” a set of chambers that can disintegrate matter on one end and reintegrate it on the other. Teleportation. Star Trek shit! He points out that it will revolutionize transportation. In one of the few corny bits in the screenplay by Charles Edward Pogue (PSYCHO III, KULL THE CONQUEROR) we find out Brundle gets car sickness as extra motivation for inventing such a thing. (read the rest of this shit…)
I’m sorry to have just read that James Isaac, director of one of our favorites around here, JASON X, has passed away at only 51. Isaac was an effects guy who got his start working on creatures on RETURN OF THE JEDI and GREMLINS. After working on THE FLY and NAKED LUNCH for David Cronenberg he wound up running shit special effects-wise for eXistenZ, which is something to brag about. That’s how he got Cronenberg to cameo in JASON X.
Isaac also directed THE HORROR SHOW, SKINWALKERS and PIG HUNT.
I knew it. I fuckin knew Dave Cronenberg was up to something. All due respect to him as a consistently great and unique filmatist across three decades, but you gotta admit the guy is suspicious. I mean, CRASH had me wondering. And eXistenZ raised my eyebrows. Possessing in-depth knowledge of tooth-firing gristle guns isn’t a crime in and of itself, but you gotta wonder why he knows so much about the topic, right?
And then DEAD RINGERS. I mean, for crying out loud, DEAD RINGERS. So sonofabitch, why am I not surprised when I watch Clive Barker’s NIGHTBREED and there’s Dave Cronenberg as a masked “baby slasher” murdering families around Toronto? (read the rest of this shit…)
One type of humor I’m a sucker for is the ol’ pathetic lie joke. For example in that movie KINGPIN Woody Harrelson and Randy Quaid are trying to hustle some guys at a bowling alley and Quaid says he’s gonna lose all his money because he’s “so bombed.” But the bartender knows he hasn’t been drinking and says, “You get that way from ginger ale?”
They’re caught, they’re dead, there’s nowhere to go from there, they should hang up the towel, but they don’t. Woody goes for the pathetic lie.
You guys’ll have to forgive me. I’m not a “gamer” or “gamey” or whatever, so I don’t know how much of Dave Cronenberg’s video game exposee eXistenZ is 100% factual and how much is very, very slightly, almost imperceptibly exaggerated for dramatic purposes.
Maybe you can help me out: the “gamepod” controllers are little lumps of flesh, like mutated breasts. They plug a tentacle into a “bioport” on your spine, but if yours is installed wrong (which it turns out can happen if you let Willem Dafoe install yours at the gas station) it can overload your game pod and it will have to be repaired, which is a surgical procedure. The pods are actually genetically modified amphibians. (read the rest of this shit…)
It’s probly hard to imagine for people who grew up post-internet, but there was a time when you couldn’t just turn on your computer and find the weirdest, most fucked up shit imaginable just as quick as you can type www.theweirdestmostfuckedupshitimaginable.org. Back then people who had strange fetishes or possessed disturbing footage tried to hide that shit, they didn’t think they could proudly put it out there and try to make new friends with it. Finding that stuff took time, effort and connections. These days kids email each other real footage of hostages being beheaded. Back then the FACES OF DEATH guys had to fake a beheading, and even their fake version was more of a legend people heard about then something they’d actually seen. That’s when Dave Cronenberg’s VIDEODROME takes place. And it involves material way more unsettling than FACES OF DEATH. (read the rest of this shit…)
SCANNERS is a story about mutants with psychic powers, a generation of babies messed up by a medicine their mothers took, now grown and finding their brains too powerful, causing them to hear other people’s thoughts, and giving them dangerous powers like they can drop you to the ground with a nose bleed just by thinking about you too hard. If you get a greeting card from a scanner that says “Thinking of you,” take that as a threat. (read the rest of this shit…)
Revisiting THE DEAD ZONE for the first time since the ’80s is kind of a trip. I didn’t know who David Cronenberg was back then so I didn’t know it was one of the most commercial movies he’d ever make. No weird phallic lumps, all vaginas presumably in the right spots. It’s an eery thriller with a cold, wintery atmosphere and a good idea from Stephen King. If you don’t remember, Chris Walken is a guy who gets into a car accident, wakes up from a coma and soon starts having premonitions. Sometimes when he touches somebody he finds himself in some traumatic future event. So he uses this to save children, catch a killer, etc., and becomes a local hero.
Walken of course is real good. He’s such a weirdo, but he gets to joke around, be kind of a charmer, and also be pissed off at this turn of events that people tell him is a “gift” even though it’s ruined his life. Cronenberg plays up the tragic love story. Walken and his old girlfriend still love each other, but while he was in the coma she got married and had a kid. So it’s tough. Not much you can do there that’s gonna make you happy in the long run. (read the rest of this shit…)
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Recent commentary and jibber-jabber
VERN on Nutcrackers: “Fred – I initially said 4 controversial horror movies but it really seemed like his first HALLOWEEN was well received…” Dec 3, 06:56
CJ Holden on Happy Sweet Potato Day: “Germany used to have Thanksgiving in October, but it wasn’t really anything relevant. More like “another day off”, if I…” Dec 3, 06:19
daniel on Happy Sweet Potato Day: “There are sections in ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES that explain the history of Thanksgiving :) As far as religion is concerned,…” Dec 3, 05:33
pegsman on Happy Sweet Potato Day: “That is sort of what I was angling for, the religious aspect of it. But people here a too classy…” Dec 3, 04:37
Borg9 on Happy Sweet Potato Day: “We can blame the Celts, rather than the Vikings, for Halloween, although it’s still just a harvest festival. I miss…” Dec 3, 04:23
pegsman on Happy Sweet Potato Day: “You’re partly right. All the big ones comes from the Vikings – Yule Tide, a variant of Easter and Midsummer…” Dec 3, 04:06
Borg9 on Happy Sweet Potato Day: “C’mon, pegsman, as an ignorant Briton and, yes, European, I’ve not been in Norway at this time of year, but…” Dec 3, 03:24
clubside on Nutcrackers: “The sad part, Vern? You realize the sad part, right? The sad part? You see it, right there, so near…” Dec 2, 23:07
pegsman on Happy Sweet Potato Day: “Maybe this isn’t the time, but can anyone tell us ignorant Europeans just what Thanksgiving is? Judging from movies and…” Dec 2, 22:19
Franchise Fred on Nutcrackers: “Trying to figure out which DGG horror movie WASN’T controversial. Maybe Halloween ‘18 was mostly well liked…” Dec 2, 21:52
VERN on Nutcrackers: “Hambone – It definitely has a sad aspect to the story, but the overall feeling is positive and uplifting and…” Dec 2, 16:32
Skani on Nutcrackers: “I HAD heard of this one, but it seemed like a fairly unceremonious dump-onto-Hulu type deal[1]. Good to hear this…” Dec 2, 15:56
Hambone Wilkins on Nutcrackers: “Thanks for the write-up! Hadn’t heard of this and now it is making the list. So my gf asked if…” Dec 2, 15:08
Mark on Knights: “This is my fave of his then nemesis 2. I was also disappointed in the ending but yes he was…” Dec 2, 11:14