Posts Tagged ‘Eric Red’
Monday, June 20th, 2022
“We tolerate everybody. Even the intolerable.”
May 22, 1992
Let’s get this out of the way first: many things went wrong with ALIEN 3 (or ALIEN3 if you prefer). After Ridley Scott’s sci-fi-horror masterpiece in ’79 and James Cameron’s ass-kicking miracle sequel in ’86, producer/writers Walter Hill and David Giler struggled to develop a worthy followup. After numerous reworkings with a series of writers and a late-in-the-game switch of directors from New Zealand’s Vincent Ward (THE NAVIGATOR: A MEDIEVAL ODYSSEY) to MTV’s David Fincher (Madonna’s “Vogue” video, the “Would you give a cigarette to an unborn child?” American Cancer Society PSA), they finally got the ball rolling. With an unfinished script. The 27-year-old first time feature director fought for (and lost) creative control, eventually quitting during post-production, at which point the studio recut the movie without his input. Never great when that happens.
Based on what we learned from THE PLAYER, studio interference should mean they gave it an unearned happy ending that changed the whole spirit of the thing. Like when they reshot the ending of FATAL ATTRACTION, or later when they tried to make Fincher get rid of the head in the box in SEVEN. This is a different situation. What came out of that battle was a mean, dark, anti-crowdpleaser that disappointed, outraged or depressed many fans. Artistically I never thought it was the outright disaster it was initially received as – in fact, I always liked it – but I could never pretend it matched its predecessors.
30 years later – after it’s been in my life so long I can’t remember anything else – it requires no effort to drop all the baggage and admire ALIEN 3 as a singular-ish vision or, at the very least, an act of sheer audacity. Another ’92 blockbuster sequel I’ll be reviewing caused a commotion for allegedly being “too dark,” but I think this baby is still the undisputed bleakness champion of big studio sequels to mainstream hits. To illustrate how unusual the approach is, let’s imagine if the summer’s earlier part 3, LETHAL WEAPON 3, had made some of the same decisions. What if rather than bring back the whole gang, including Leo, they only brought back Riggs? Murtaugh and Leo are said to have died in between 2 and 3. We see brief glimpses of Murtaugh’s mutilated corpse. Riggs goes to the morgue to see Leo’s body, then demands to watch the autopsy. He spends the movie working with murderers and rapists, almost all of whom die, and then the triumphant ending is that he commits suicide. How about that? Do you think that would go over well?
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alec Gillis, Alex Thomson, Brian Glover, Charles Dance, Charles S. Dutton, Christopher Fairbank, David Fincher, David Twohy, Elliot Goldenthal, Eric Red, John Fasano, Jon Landau, Jordan Cronenweth, Lance Henriksen, Larry Ferguson, Paul McGann, Pete Postlethwaite, Rex Pickett, Sigourney Weaver, Terry Rawlings, Tom Woodruff Jr., Vincent Ward, William Gibson
Posted in Horror, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 77 Comments »
Thursday, August 5th, 2021
“Fuck you and all your bullshit! I WANT THIS FUCKING ARM OFF!”
August 2, 1991
BODY PARTS is an Eric Red horror joint that is much better than I thought I remembered, though it has become more macabre in retrospect due to things that have happened in real life.
Red is the guy who came to fame by writing THE HITCHER. By ’91 he and Kathryn Bigelow had written NEAR DARK, BLUE STEEL and UNDERTOW together (though the latter wasn’t produced until 1996) and on his own he had written and directed the not-well-received COHEN & TATE. While Bigelow was basking in the California sun for POINT BREAK, Red still had some affairs to attend to in the gloomy underside of humanity.
But it doesn’t go as dark as it could, and it has an enjoyably chaotic spirit to it, a world that pretends to be pretty down to earth and then leaps into absurd sci-fi concepts. I like these movies where there’s absolute insanity lurking around in your peripheral vision that you just don’t notice until it comes for you. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brad Dourif, Eric Red, James Kidnie, Jeff Fahey, John Walsh, Kim Delaney, Lindsay Duncan, Norman Snider, Paul Ben-Victor, Peter Murnik, Pierre Boileau, Summer of 1991, Thomas Narcejac
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, October 15th, 2019
Right after Kathryn Bigelow and Eric Red wrote NEAR DARK for her to direct, they wrote UNDERTOW for him. Her vampire movie got off the ground first, and it was almost a decade later when his weird thriller about three weirdos out in the woods during a hurricane became a Showtime movie.
It’s not supernatural, and maybe not even horror, but the mood somehow does remind me of NEAR DARK. Lou Diamond Phillips (RENEGADES) plays Jack (last name Ketchum, apparently!), who’s introduced in his car, drifting to the next town after – as he explains in voiceover narration – falling for a sheriff’s daughter. Too dangerous. But before he can find a new place to stay he drives his truck off the road into a forest and wakes up the captive of a paranoid old redneck named Lyle (Charles Dance, LAST ACTION HERO) and his timid wife Willie (Mia Sara, TIMECOP), who I assumed at first was his daughter. They live in an isolated home in some North Carolina woods that’s somewhere between a hermit’s shack and a luxury resort lodge. It looks cold and some of it is built out of rusty car doors, but it’s huge, with various buildings and facilities. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Charles Dance, crossbow, Eric Red, hurricane, Kathryn Bigelow, Lou Diamond Phillips, made-for-cable-movies, Mia Sara
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 3 Comments »
Monday, October 14th, 2019
NEAR DARK is what happens when young, hungry Kathryn Bigelow comes off of co-directing the arty biker movie THE LOVELESS and teams up with the writer of THE HITCHER to do horror movies. She and Eric Red sat down and wrote two scripts together, one for each to direct. A producer says on the making-of featurette that he trusted her to direct, then admits he told her up front that she had three days to convince him not to fire her.
Man, firing her would’ve been a huge fuck up! It’s definitely a cool scenario they came up with, but the primary appeal of the movie is Bigelow’s style, mood, attitude. I suppose the alternate timeline scab that took over would’ve at least had the great cast she put together. Yes, three of them (Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton and Jenette Goldstein) had already been together in ALIENS (a movie that exists in some form within the NEAR DARK universe, unless the “ALIEN5” we see on a marquee meant PROMETHEUS). Bigelow correctly guessed that they’d not only be perfect for the characters, but would carry over a chemistry and familiarity that would work well as this outlaw family. Reportedly she hired them all separately and all were worried about the perception of following ALIENS with a low budget vampire movie. But they knew what they were doing. They chose right. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adrian Pasdar, Bill Paxton, contemporary western, Eric Red, Jeanette Goldstein, Jenny Wright, Joshua Miller, Kathryn Bigelow, Lance Henriksen, Tangerine Dream, Tim Thomerson, vampires
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 25 Comments »
Saturday, November 19th, 2011
Holy shit! There’s another good werewolf movie! And it’s from the ’90s. This is not really one of my favorite subgenres, but there’s definitely a couple good ones of this type. Obviously AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON is one of the greatest horror movies of all time and still the most perfect specimen of the scary/funny balance. Then I like THE HOWLING 1&3 and GINGER SNAPS is pretty good with decent sequels by DTV standards (even if they were theatrical in Canada). And DOG SOLDIERS I remember enjoying. The end. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Eric Red, Mariel Hemingway, Michael Pare, werewolves
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 49 Comments »
Friday, July 16th, 2010
I meant to do this back when I reviewed POINT BLANK (Mickey Rourke vs. mall terrorists version), but I forgot, so here’s another Mickey Rourke picture to kick things off on a new thing I’ll try called COUNTDOWN TO THE EXPENDABLES. Not sure if I got enough time before the movie comes out next month, but I’m gonna try to go down the list of all the main EXPENDABLES cast members and review one of their movies that I haven’t seen before. (See, it’s a good thing Seagal turned the movie down, because there’s not anything by him that I haven’t seen. Maybe I’d have to review the cameo on the episode of Roseanne that I didn’t find out about until after Seagalogy went to print.)
Whether or not Stallone’s movie ends up being any good I think we can all agree that he did a good job of casting a wide range of tough guys from different movements, generations and disciplines. So through this journey I think we will all learn a few things and expand our knowledge of the Badass Arts in its many forms. I know I’ve already seen one unexpected gem in preparation for this series, so this could be a great time.
THE LAST OUTLAW is not that unexpected gem. Sorry. It’s not too bad, though. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Countdown to The Expendables, Dermot Mulroney, Eric Red, Geoff Murphy, Keith David, made-for-cable-movies, Mickey Rourke, Steve Buscemi, Ted Levine
Posted in Reviews, Western | 78 Comments »
Monday, August 31st, 2009
Cohen & Tate. Sounds like a buddy movie, huh? Cohen. Tate. Just a couple guys goin around together, their last names eventually linked together with and to form a team. Ol’ C & T. Co and Ta. Some mismatched dudes maybe, sounds like one’s Jewish, maybe the other guy’s real Catholic and they always bicker about it. Ha ha, what a great time for everybody.
Well, no. Cohen and Tate are the two mob hitmen who massacre a couple and all the cops protecting them and kidnap their 9 year-old-son so they can bring him to their bosses to be questioned about a shooting he witnessed. Then somebody’ll probaly kill him and throw him in a lake somewhere. It’s not that funny of a movie, is what I’m getting at. Cohen and Tate hate each other, they hate the kid, the kid hates them, they’re all pretty much plotting how and when to kill each other for the whole movie. No jokes except when Tate tells that old one about “what’s the last thing that goes through a bug’s brain when he hits your windshield?” So there are no laughs. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam Baldwin, Eric Red, Roy Scheider
Posted in Action, Crime, Reviews | 23 Comments »
Sunday, August 16th, 2009
After FLESH + BLOOD, audiences were thirsty for more of that Rutger Hauer/Jennifer Jason Leigh team. They wanted to see more romantic chemistry from the Hepburn and Tracy of the ’80s. So they got to see him tie her to a truck and… well, it’s even worse than what he did to her in FLESH + BLOOD. And she didn’t fall for him afterwards.
THE HITCHER starts off as a really good horror movie. Atmospheric shots of C. Thomas Howell driving out on the highway, drinking coffee out of a Thermos, trying to stay awake. Looks like he’s been up all night driving. It starts to rain. Maybe out of desperation to stay awake, maybe out of spontaneity, he picks up a hitchhiker, Rutger Hauer. He jokes about how his mom told him never to pick up hitchhikers. But when he tries to ask Hauer where he’s going the weirdo keeps not answering, changing the subject. Every time he does it it gets more uncomfortable. Then he starts talking about murder and dismemberment, making threats, pulls out a switchblade. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Eric Red, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Rutger Hauer
Posted in Action, Horror, Reviews, Thriller | 76 Comments »
