Some grindhouse for your weekend

If you ever wished for a non-campy, non-over the top, classic 70s/80s style horror movie made in our time, then House of the Devil is for you. It's a classic tale of a young college girl who finds herself agreeing to something silly because she needs the money. In this case, she agrees to house sit while a creepy couple goes out. The title gives you a hint of what might be afoot, as does the text which prefaces the film. Just how it will play out is what gives the suspense.

Not only does it take an 80s theme, but it is set in the 80s, before the dawn of connectivity. The high jeans, feathered hair and giant, to our eyes, Walkmen give it the right feel. Nothing much happens during the film, but the director does a good job playing on expectations. The climatic scenes hold a few surprises and get the balance of tone right.

All in all, a good way to scratch the horror itch.

Stray thoughts about Inglorious Basterds

Finally saw the movie. Loved it, of course. Everybody wins with this movie. You get lots of dead Nazis, which everyone enjoys. You get that wild ending. You get the dialogue and pop culture references. 1940s references but still.

I do wonder if Tarantino is trying to wave his magic wand of star creation again. Will Mike Myers be the next Travolta? Reading this old EW profile makes me think he is screwed. Still I would love to see all those awesome German and French actors in movies over here.

I think I need to go back and watch all the others again.

That new Mel Gibson movie

So Mel Gibson has a new movie coming out called the Edge of Darkness. It's based on a British TV miniseries and normally this would mean I would be running around with my hair on fire telling you to watch the TV series first. This is not because the Gibson version is totally badass, but because the highly praised miniseries is not that great. The TV show is about six hours long, but didn't need all that time. Unlike the BBC miniseries State of Play, in which every scene felt essential, this one has long passages devoted to nothing much, both from the initial viewing and from the end of the viewing reflection. Much of the downtime is given to Bob Peck's character. Peck is a cop whose daughter is gunned down by a Irish thug who ambushed them at his house. He thinks it is revenge for his time in Ireland, but discovers it may be related to her own activities in the Green movement.

This is not to say that Peck (best known by me for his role as the guy who says "Clever girl" in Jurassic Park) isn't great when the story is moving. He does an excellent job overall, but the grief scenes go on too long. The other great character is Joe Don Baker who plays a Texan CIA officer (who is also somehow a Colonel in the Army.) The relationship and conversations between these two are the highlight of the movie.

The movie is a cri de couer against the horrors of nuclear power. Coming at the second peak of the nuclear Cold War, it is understandable, but now it feels dated. Great exaggerations (one explosion is said to threaten the whole of Eastern Scotland..um....no...that isn't possible.) about the dangers of nuclear material (read Atomic Obsession to calm your nuclear fears) and a plot that twists itself into nonsense threaten to completely bury the excellent work of Peck and Baker.

I had read reviews about the mini series for years, praising it as one of the great miniseries of all time. It isn't. Part of this is because the Golden Age of Television is right now. The best TV shows and miniseries come from the past ten years, not the years beforehand.

For quite awhile it was only available on VHS in the US. Now, no doubt thanks to the publicity of the Gibson movie, it is on DVD. You may as well watch the Gibson one and see if the story is interesting to watch for six hours.

Last Winter

Despite initial interest, I read some bad reviews about The Last Winter which gave me pause. My reaction to director Larry Fessenden's The Wendigo, which I thought was OK, reduced my interest further. Then I saw this list of top ten wintry horror movies and decided to give it a try. It's actually pretty good!

It's a horror/science fiction hybrid. The pacing, acting and narrative are low key and subdued, but there is an undercurrent of disquiet and tension that kept me watching. It is set in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge at a potential site for drilling. The oil company who has the lease has hired some environmental experts to review the site and give it the OK. Strange warming in the area makes it difficult or impossible to bring in the gear and the experts advise against proceeding. This sets up a conflict with the roughnecks.

The movie sets has a pair of conflicts that slowly escalate. One is between the red and blue staters (much more subtle than in the Wendigo) and the other is the conflict between the environment and the humans. The Arctic Circle is a dangerous place and it might be even more dangerous than we suspect. Fessenden keeps both conflicts going and it is hard to tell which is going to be the bigger problem.

The end will be a problem for some. I loved it, but it may come as a disappointing surprise to some. This is the first bit of science fiction about global warming that I have really enjoyed.

Searching for a distant star, heading off to Iskandar

Are you ready for some live action Star Blazers? I'm not I am either. Still, the video below (via Techland) gives us hope with the BSG looking space battles. This made me think of Battle of the Planets, the show I watched when I couldn't get any Star Blazers, which was most of the time. Wow, does it have a terrible intro.

Two movies

So I watched two movie in the past few days, one pretty good and one disappointing. Let's start with the let down.

Fanboys is a movie that could have been much better than it was. It concerns a group of 20 something friends who plan to break into the Skywalker Ranch so that their friend can see Episode 1 before he dies. The problems are manifold. The main characters aren't interesting, seeming like shadows of characters that might appear in a Kevin Smith or Judd Apatow film. Perhaps recognizing this, the plot relies on a series of cameos. Hey look it's Billie Dee! and there's Ray Park goofing on Darth Maul.

This would be forgiveable if the writing were smart and funny, which it generally isn't. The Star Wars jokes are weak and the movie doesn't really capture why people are fans in the first place, or how far fans will go. Most of the talk of the movies is in opposition to Star Trek, but all of those jokes pale in comparison to the Clerks 2 LOTR vs. Star Wars scene. A movie ABOUT Star Wars fandom should be able to top that, but it can't.

Then the movie has to contend with the reality that Episode 1 is a shitty, shitty movie that crushed the dreams of millions. It acknowledges this at the end, but it could have been better incorporated. The last scene shows tons of cheering fans at opening night. I remember well hearing the opening blasts of the theme and a thrill that I have never experienced in a theater, only to shortly feel the air let out of my balloon. That has been best done in Spaced in this wonderful scene.

The Star Wars machine has grown so large that the original trilogy is lost in the clutter. Anyone who has shopped for kids toys knows that the Clone Wars dominate the merch now. What a bummer.

The King of Marvin Gardens is a bummer too, but of the good kind. The slow, moody early 70s picture is set in off-season Atlantic City. The nearly empty town is the setting for brothers Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern to reconnect and attempt to reconcile after years apart. The bombastic and oily Dern has a real estate scheme in which he hopes to partner with Nicholson. The two brothers clearly love each other and want to work it out, but their differences keep getting in the way. The acting is great, the tone is great and it is well worth watching.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

If you have seen a Kevin Smith movie, you know what to expect from this Zack and Miri Make A Porno. It will have tons of sex jokes and unbelievably bad language. Jason Mewes will be crazy (in this case, crazy and naked.) The plot will revolve around a working class guy (and possibly gal) who takes for granted the great relationship staring them in the face. The only question is whether they will screw it up or not.

This one is a comedy so you can guess how it will turn out. Seth Rogen is sad sack Zack and Elizabeth Banks is Miri Linky (formerly called Stinky Linky). Best friends and roomates, they are always a step away from eviction. When things get really bad, they decide to film a porno. With a group of similar outcasts, including a character played by Traci Lords, they decide to film a porn film. Will Zack and Miri realize what they have in each other? Again, fairly obvious, but still cute.

Best parts of course are the over the top jokes, like Justin Long as a gay porn star who likes to talk about his work. If sex jokes make you uncomfortable, stay far away from this one. If you do watch, enjoy the Pixies on the soundtrack and wait for the bonus scene after the credits.

Paranormal Activity

Well, I saw it last night. Great movie, you can kinda sorta believe the hype. If you go in with the belief that it will Change Everything and be The Scariest Movie of All Time, you will be disappointed. If you want to experience slow burn dread and good scares, you will be happy.

If somehow you don't know about the movie, it get its buzz from the fact that it was made for less money than most new cars (and has already grossed $16M ) and that it was a huge hit at Sundance. Like Blair Witch, it has few actors and they are all unknowns. Most of the acting is acceptable but Katie Featherston does a great job of portraying an escalation of fear.

Katie, her character is also named Katie, was haunted as a child by a spirit. Her techie boyfriend decides to film the house so they can catch sight of the spirit. The exposition just starts to wear thin when the haunting picks up. The initial actions of the ghost are creepy, but in a way that gets the boyfriend cackling, rather than concerned. As you might guess the haunting get worse, much worse.

The last five or ten minutes are great, in particular a disturbing little bit that went by too fast. I will have to watch it again.

It's a long way back from hell

I guess I went into Drag Me to Hell with expectations set too high. It's the sort of movie you expected Sam Raimi to make 20 (or even 30 years) ago. You get the gonzo funny gore, like a demon puking up a kitten, and the unstoppable evil, as in Evil Dead. It just doesn't add up to much. Justin Long is in it and I have a hard time watching him without expecting John Hodgman to show up. And he doesn't.

For some real horror, here is Shakira and pretend Danzig singing Hips Don't Lie:

Empire of the Passion

There can't be a lot of movie plots that hinge on the shaving of pubes. OK, maybe a adult movie with twins and a wacky Three's Company-like misunderstanding plot, but not mainstream movies.

Empire of the Passion, submitted for Japan's shot at the 1978 Academy Awards no less, does have a plot where a few thoughtless moments with a razor lead to madness and death. The movie was made by Nagisa Oshima, director of the 1976 In The Realm of the Senses. Like that movie the plot centers on an illicit liaison, but lacks the In the Realm's pervasive nudity and explicit sex. So no, you do not get to see the shaving.

In the movie, a layabout soldier seduces a rickshaw driver's wife and then declares they must kill the husband. If he saw that she was shaved, there would be no end of it. Turns out killing him leads to more trouble.

To be honest the movie is slow moving and may not appeal to everyone. The ghost of the movie is disturbing, but not really scary. The rising madness of the adulterous, murderous couple is the drama of the second act. There are some good scenes and I like how the village slowly turns on the couple as rumors and suspicions grow.

Overall, I would say that Asian horror fans looking for the roots of the modern movies would like this one. Otherwise, it is just too slow.

Adventureland returns me to the rock of the 80s

I watched Adventureland last night. The director's previous work, Superbad, was a bawdy comedy. This one is a much more low key story of awkward young love at a theme park, peppered with comedic sets by the likes of Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig. It is certainly worth your time.

The movie is set in 1987. The most notable nod to the 80s is the heavy use of 80s tunes. The theme park workers are tormented by Rock Me Amadeus, but find solace in the Replacements, and for some reason Lou Reed. I guess liking Lou Reed = arty outsider status. They could have used something more contemporaneous like Big Black, although that would connote vaguely dangerous outsider status. My vote would be for the use of the Dead Milkmen, specifically Punk Rock Girl. That one has young rebel couple all over it.

Mostly though, I just don't get Lou Reed. Not even Black Francis proclaiming his love can convince me to like Reed or his over-rated band the Velvet Underground. I do like the chorus to Satellite of Love, a little, but for the most part I could never listen to another song.

Fortunately all this Lou Reed cluttering my head is easily dispatched. A visit to the 120 Minutes Archive can clear away the most unforgettable of bad songs. 120 minutes (one of college roomates inexplicably pronounced it one twenty minutes) was a late night MTV show about "altnerative music." Back in late 80s high school days, I drank lots of coke to stay up late and watch. The best/worst part was hoping they would finally play the band you liked.

You might not get the exact song, but you could got plenty of good ones. Here is a Ramones hosted show with Interesting Drug, Dominion (one of my earliest band lady crushes was on the woman in this vid - wow I forgot they shot the video at Petra), and Never Say Never. Of course you had to suffer through Concrete Blonde. There is always a price.

There is always the middle path. The bands that aren't great, but also aren't gratingly terrible. The rock wizards at Clear Channel have apparently decided to revive Billy Squier, who is now nearly unavoidable on the classic rock station. He reminds a bit of what Foreigner might sound like, if they had ever decided to stop being shitty. The one song that I think is not so bad is My Kind of Lover. The lyrics, though, give me pause. He sings to his love "you give me something way beyond revenue." Is he a pimp?

A remembrance of things past

I've been going back to my local video store Movie Madness lately. Partly it is because I want to support local business, but also because I end up finding things I don't think to put in my Netflix queue. The latest trip led to a terrible mistake.

I had recalled a list of horror movies with great endings from Ten Bad Dates with De Niro. One was the excellent Sleepaway Camp, which does in fact have a jaw dropping finale. For some reason I had it in my head that The House on Sorority Row was on the list. I later realized the movie I was thinking of was April Fool's Day, which probably sucks as bad as the movie I watched.

The movie I saw lacked any reason watching. The acting was piss poor. The story is ridiculous and obvious. Sorority house mother has bad birth experience and when sorority sisters think they have killed her, someone starts killing them. Whatever, why am I bothering? It is shitty like all the other movies of its ilk, the terrible stalker film of the 80s. I watched til the end, which was an uninteresting rip-off of Black Christmas. Bad, bad, bad. I should have watched another episode of the Prisoner.

What is more interesting is why these movies were popular. It is as inexplicable of as the popularity of hair metal. Why did such utter tripe make so much money? Later the same night I watched a little of The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film. It made me dislike these movies all the more. It reminded that one or two (Halloween and Black Christmas) are worth a damn, but I took from it that people just wanted to see people die in different ways. Lovely.

There really isn't much else to the movies, but many of those interviewed tried to dress them up as art or expressions of the time, blah, blah, blah. They are just friendlier versions of Salo.

Transsiberian

I watched Transsiberian last night. This one came out last year, but didn't get a lot of buzz. Too bad because the direction is awesome, the movie is crammed with great actors and performances and it looks great. The movie is centered around Roy and Jessie, an American couple in Beijing for a church volunteer mission who decide to go home via the Siberian railroad to Moscow. Roy, played by Woody Harrelson, is a earnest fan of trains but wife Jessie, played by an absolutely fantastic Emily Mortimer, is a former wild child. She is tempted by a roguish Spanish traveller, although she also befriends his young American companion.

The movie is slow moving, but you can feel the walls closing in around Roy and Jessie even when they don't see it. Ben Kingsley's shadowy Russian policeman complicates their lives and they find themselves way over their heads in backwater Russia.

The director, Brad Anderson, also made Session 9, a horror movie I also adore. Both movies share a wonderfully tense build up of suspense. This one is happier in many ways that the bleak Session 9, but both are better than most films out there.

Violence

I was completely taken by the trailer to the movie Surveillance. It made it look like a twisty crazy murder mystery. It's not. It's a fairly obvious strange movie about, I guess, the idea that we live in a world filled with predators and we are mostly screwed. It's not very good, aside for some truly left field perfomances by Julia Ormond and Bill Pullman.

The treatment of violence is peculiar. At first I thought that Lynch (the daughter, not the father) was going for a serious Haneke-esque lecture to comfortable middle class people about the dangers that await them. Later I thought it was going for a goofy Tarantino-esque use of violence to shock and titilate. Still later I think it was going for a horror film scarefest. None of these really fit the film and the slipping back and forth didn't help. Also, most of the characters are reprehensible without being terribly interesting.

The movie does have a few stand out moments. You will be shown an outre sex act you have probably never seen (nor considered.) If you are so inclined you can get a sense of what a crazy Bill Pullman O-face looks like. That could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your point of view.

Another good movie to be remade

I saw the Spanish horror film The Orphanage the other night. It is totally awesome. The suspense is slow-building and rewards patience. This one isn't about the fake shock every ten minutes. It is about anguish, pain and possible madness. Belen Rueda is fantastic and more or less makes the movie.

Which is why, I think the American re-make will probably be a disaster. Although director Larry Fessenden is also known for understated horror movies, I suspect we will have more scares, more gore and less acting in the new one.

Descent part 2

I loved, loved, loved the Descent. Scary, claustrophobic and ambiguous, it is hard to think of a better horror movie from the past decade. The trailer to the sequel is now available. You can watch it here. The movie is working from the US ending, not the UK version. This means that the heroine escaped and is now taking a group back down to investigate. It feels a bit like Aliens with the sole survivor returning with a bunch of people who don't believe her. To be honest, it doesn't look that exciting.

Fun with lists

Oh how I loved the Book of Lists, when I was young. Filled with strange lists, like people who might have been Jack the Ripper or the ever popular preserved sexual organs of famous men, the book was made to titillate and entertain. There is much less titilation, but plenty of entertainment in 10 Bad Dates with De Niro, a book of movie related lists.

I of course went straight the sex and violence section, where movies like In the Realm of the Senses play a major role. Once you get past all the real live actors having sex lists, you can move on to less prurient fare. There is plenty of it. I thought I would give it a quick flip through and put it aside, but I thought that many of the lists were funny and informative. In a list of movies that were never made, but should have been, we learn that John Waters of all people was planning to make A Confederacy of Dunces. I hated that book, but I think a Waters version of it would be worth watching, especially if done in the bizarre fashion of his early movies. There's tons more of this sort of goodness, including a list of one by Stephen Soderberg. He talks about Chinatown really is as awesome as you remember, and in fact is probably better.

This is a book that movie geeks will devour. The book's editor, Richard Kelly, has a blog about the book and movies in general.

More fun with Harryhausen

A few months back I rented Jason and the Argonauts for the kids. They had been reading some Greek myths and I thought they might like the monsters. They liked even more than I expected/hoped, so I decided to follow up with a less seen film with Ray Harryhausen's effects. Yet again, the kids loved it.

The Valley of Gwangi is probably the world's only cowboys vs. dinosaurs movie. The plot is simple. A group of people try to revive a struggling rodeo show by bringing in creatures from the Valley of Gwangi. The Valley somehow has various beasties from pre-history including the eohippus and the allosaurus. It takes awhile to get to the creatures,but once it does, it is quite fun. The effects are impressive and there is more human interaction with the models than in some of the other Harryhausen films.

The Night They Drove Old Glory Down

So I watched CSA, the faux documentary/expose about a modern Confederate States of America that occupies all of the continental territory of the United States today. I am of two minds on this movie. The commentary on race relations and the unfinished business of the Civil War and Reconstruction is great and quite well done. The alternate history, which drives the narrative and can't be avoided, is terribly flawed and drove me to frustration.

First the good parts. The framing device is that a British documentary is being shown on Confederate TV in San Francisco. When the show goes to commercial break, a number of cutting ads are shown. This one starts out normal, but wait for the finish. Far better are the ones that show the celebration of the CSA or the racism that lingers or was once more prominent. This ad for Sambo X-15 is a good example. There is also an excellent spoof on Cops, which often has cops beating on black men, called Runaways, where cops beat on runaway slaves. The movie definately puts stereotypes and our easy acceptance of them in culture right in our faces. So well done there.

The alternate history on the other hand is really quite bad. The film-maker wanted to have the whole country be the CSA, the better to compare our society with a more explicitly racist one. Fair enough, but it is simply not credible to have the CSA occupy the entire US, even with the help of the British and French. What's more, world history follows along more or less the same even though the CSA is building a giant empire, except in Canada. Canada, which cannot be defended against an aggressive continental power to the south, has to exist so they can make it the nicey-nice country to which to compare to the CSA. There is yet more that goes wrong (it is hard to see Hitler arising in the world he portrays, yet he does) but the point is, if you care about counterfactuals, this will drive you crazy.

I recommend you rent it, but fast forward to all the commercial segments.

It's the same old thing

I love the Ramones. No matter what happens, the Ramones will always be greater gods of my rock pantheon. The first four records are astounding, the next four solid and the follow on albums are, to be kind, so so. I feel the same way about the films of George Romero. His early works are excellent and worthy of horror film canonization.) His recent effort, the Diary of the Dead, is crap.

Diary of the Dead combines two moribund approaches to film making, zombie social commentary and Point of View film making. Zombie movies are mostly played at this point(although I hold out hopes that World War Z will be good,) but this movie is killed by the use of the point of view style.

The movie's characters are a group of film students making a horror movie in the PA forests when they hear about the zombie attacks. While they pack up the film crew RV and head to their families, one of them decides to film for posterity. There is some pushback from his friends, but they mostly go along with it. The device becomes more and more unbeliveable as the film continues. They film while people are being killed or while they are in huge peril. This is a comment on media, I know, but I doubt college kids would act the way they do in this movie.

I suppose everyday conversation can be as stilted and ridiculous as the dialogue in this movie, but I doubt it. The acting doesn't help. Most annoying of all is the film school teacher who takes breaks from his booze drinking only to deliver horrendously cheesy pronouncements of world weariness.

There is a sequel to this film being made now. If I hadn't seen this film and wanted to take a guess at its likely quality, I could take note that one of the characters is named "Nicotine" Crockett. I hope Don Johnson gets the role.