Apr
15
“Scre4m” Review
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This review will be spoiler-free. Part of the fun of the “Scream” movies is not knowing where they’re headed and that all their purported rule-breaking will result in something truly original in a genre not known for its freshness.
In the eleven years since “Scream 3″ signaled that the franchise had tapped itself out (at least for the time being), we’ve seen the rise and fall of J-horror remakes, torture porn and moribund franchise reboots. It was a grim period in our nation’s history, the aughts. That most horror films were released with PG-13 ratings was an indicator that the genre had become toothless and practically family-friendly. When I was a young ‘un, the allure of horror movies was that they were hard-R affairs, and I couldn’t even get into the theater without some “Mission: Impossible”-style wirework. But I’m digressing. Fact is, for over a decade, the horror genre didn’t seem to know what to do with itself, post-”Scream.”
So, how does “Scre4m” send-up ten years’ worth of bad horror cinema? Well, it largely ignores our cultural fixation on zombie movies, save for showing a lengthy clip from “Shaun of the Dead,” and it doesn’t even bother mentioning the “Twilight” saga; are those considered horror by anyone but me? The “Scream” movies aren’t interested in the supernatural. “Scre4m” is a straightforward slasher, which is kind of refreshing. Yes, it splits the difference between being a sequel and a reboot, but doesn’t suffer for it as much as I’d feared it might.
In the film, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) returns to her hometown of Woodsboro to close out her book tour. She’s written a self-help tome called “Out of Darkness,” presumably for Final Girls from horror movies to draw strength from. At any rate, she’s arrived just in time for a series of Ghostface-style killings that have Sheriff Dewey (David Arquette) and his wife Gale Weathers-Riley (Courtney Cox) at their wit’s end trying to solve. A new batch of dumb teenagers, including Sidney’s niece Jill (Emma Roberts, who looks uncannily like her Aunt Julia), all do double-duty as potential victims and red herrings.
I’d argue that the opening sequence of the film is actually the best in the series. Giving away anything about its particulars would ruin its impact. Suffice it to say, the movie gets off to a great start. Does it sustain that momentum and cleverness? Eh, not really.
The middle section at times feels draggy and unfocused. Too many new characters are introduced, taking the attention away from the Sidney, Dewey and Gale. Lots of bodies are stacked up along the way, but the kills are unspectacular for the most part. The movie’s not terribly scary, either. Perhaps the most frightening thing about it is all the work Courtney Cox has had done. Gale looks like she was exposed to the Joker’s Smilex gas.
All that being said, the final third of the movie redeems its blah middle section. I won’t reveal the details, but I wish that director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson had gone even further the ending. They start down a path that’s really bold, but hold back. As it is, it’s a solid (and more commercial) conclusion. I just think that the new direction they suggest the series could go is something I’d desperately like to see.
-Brad Lohan
Apr
13
An analysis of the “Scream” series would be incomplete if I left out its first imitator, the Jim Gillespie-directed, Kevin Williamson-scripted “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” Released less than a year after “Scream,” it capitalized on the renewed audience interest in dead teenager movies and was successful enough to warrant a theatrically-released (and clumsily-titled sequel), “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer,” in 1998 as well as a long-delayed DTV installment, “I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer” in 2006.
“I Know What You Did Last Summer,” which I will henceforth refer to as IKWYDLS because the title is so bloody unwieldy, feels like a step back from “Scream.” Neither as witty as “Scream” nor as thrilling, it’s not another game-changing send-up but rather a straightforward slasher. I remember feeling a little let down by the film the first time I saw it in college. I honestly expected “Scream 1.5,” something to tide me over until the official “Scream” sequel opened two months later.
Revisiting the film after having not seen it in at least ten years, I found it to be pleasantly diverting. It’s a darker movie than “Scream,” the characters less sympathetic and for the most part deserving of their gruesome fates. I’ll do a deeper analysis in a moment. First, an overview…
Body Count: Five (confirmed). If you count deaths that are faked, then seven.
Best Kill: Max (Johnny Galecki) gets a hook through the chin by our rain-slickered slasher.
Best Exchange: Trying to play it cool after having (almost) committed vehicular manslaughter, Ray (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) asks Max, who just so happens to be motoring by, “What can I do for you, Max?” to which Max spits back, “You can wipe that my-shit-don’t-stink grin off your face.”
Most WTF Line: Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) attempts to convince a sheriff’s deputy that her ex-boyfriend’s been killed with this bon mot: “Listen, you little shit-stick-Mayberry-ass reject. There’s been a murder, and you are going to fry in hell if you ignore it!”
Most Surprising Extended Cameo: One-time omnipresent ’90s character actress Anne Heche plays Missy Egan, the creepy, grieving sister of the guy the heroes think they killed accidentally-on-purpose.
Best Scare: The mirror gag at the very end.
Hilarious Anachronism: Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) aspires to star on the soap opera “Guiding Light,” a show that every homemaker knows went off the air in 2009; I had to Google that to confirm.
Does a black character comment on a white character’s whiteness, apropos of nothing? Why, yes. Twice.
Is Jennifer Love Hewitt the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen? A-yup.
IKWYDLS is about four dumb teenagers — Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt), her boyfriend Ray, her BFF Helen and her BFF’s insufferable toolbag of a sex partner, Barry (Ryan Phillippe) — who party it up at Dawson’s Beach on the 4th of July. They seemingly have their whole lives ahead of them. Helen’s just been crowned the Croaker Queen (talk about damning someone with faint praise); Julie and Ray hook up for the very first time; and Barry gets tanked because of course he does. Teetotaler Ray insists on driving them back home along a windy ribbon of road. Barry’s reluctant to give up the keys to his prized BMW, but Ray persists. And as Ray navigates the hairpin turns, Barry opens the sunroof and howls at the moon like a drunken werewolf. Then he dumps a bottle of booze in Ray’s lap, distracting him, and Ray immediately plows right into some guy who’s inexplicably in the middle of the road. Derp!
Very quickly, the kids determine that the four of them will get the gas chamber for committing vehicular manslaughter (I’m paraphrasing), and the only way they can erase this unfortunate little incident is to dump the body in the ocean. The criminal justice system is far more lenient on individuals who go to great lengths to dispose of people they accidentally kill rather than simply owning up to it, amirite? At any rate, as they try to chuck the guy off a pier, he turns out to be not so dead after all and grabs Helen’s precious Croaker Queen crown before disappearing into the briny depths. Barry dives in after him, retrieves Helen’s tiara and leaves the guy at the bottom of the ocean. Satisfied with how neatly they’ve covered up their crime, the heroes go their separate ways.
One year later, Julie returns home after her rough freshman year at college. She looks like death warmed over. But, since she’s Jennifer Love Hewitt, death warmed over never looked so good. Her mother is concerned, but Julie made a pact with her friends not to tell anyone about the guy they killed and tossed in the ocean, not even parents. Most people’s folks would freak out about something like that. And so, she remains evasive. Then she gets an anonymous letter, a letter that reads, “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”
Talk about a slasher who’s a bit of a procrastinator. It took this guy a whole friggin’ year to hatch a revenge plot!
Now, Julie must, with the help of her former friends, try to uncover the identity of the the person is tormenting them. Is it Max, who rolled by shortly after the accident and has always had his eye on Julie? Or maybe it’s Elsa (Bridgette Wilson), Helen’s embittered older sister? But what if…what if it’s actually Ray, Julie’s lovesick ex-boyfriend? Whoever it is, the killer trudges around in a fisherman’s slicker and wields a nasty-looking hook.
Unfortunately, the central mystery of the film is resolved in a way that’s kind of a cop-out. (*Spoiler*) I typically hate when the killer isn’t any of the red herrings but someone whose unmasking is only surprising by virtue of the fact that it’s a payoff that has virtually no setup. That being said, Muse Watson’s killer fisherman character, Ben Willis, sort of looks like Ernest P. Worrell’s evil twin. So he’s got that going for him. (*End Spoiler*)
How does IKWYDLS hold up? Though it’s not a worthy successor to “Scream,” it’s an effective slasher movie in its own right. One thing that’s interesting about it is that the heroes aren’t entirely sympathetic. They make a really stupid mistake that causes their lives to unravel. But the script shifts gears and becomes a detective story without spending much time on the characters’ remorse over what they’ve done. It’s just not that kind of a movie. I like how they at least dealt with Julie’s guilty conscience for a couple of scenes. At the end of the day, it’s a dead teenager movie, not a redemption story. And as a dead teenager movie, it works well enough.
-Brad Lohan
Apr
12
“Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair” Review
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The New Bev screened the 247-minute cut of Quentin Tarantino’s revenge epic, “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair,” at the end of March. The film proved so popular, it was held over for another week at the beginning of April. Things have been kind of hectic for me lately, so this review’s being published a little later than I’d originally intended
This version of the film is what screened at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, complete with distracting subtitles. Why it was never released in full is puzzling, but there you go. I refuse to buy the two volumes on DVD because they’re barebones discs, and whenever I end up buying a barebones disc, a double-dip is announced within a month.
And so, I was excited to see “The Whole Bloody Affair.” It’d been seven years since I’d seen either film, and the New Bev is a great venue that I don’t make it out to often enough.
How does “Kill Bill” hold up? Well, it was never my favorite of QT’s films. As two volumes, released six months apart in late-2003 and early-2004, the original releases had a sense of incompleteness to them, despite being so overstuffed. Put back together, the experience now feels dreadfully overlong. It clocks in at over four hours. It’s nine minutes shorter than “Lawrence of Arabia” if that gives you some idea of how gargantuan* this thing is.
Worse, the movie doesn’t begin with my favorite title card in history: “‘Revenge is a dish best served cold.’ -Old Klingon Proverb.” How could they leave that out? I was also expecting this cut to have the street fight between Bill (David Carradine) and Michael Jai White. Carradine talks about it in his book, “The Kill Bill Diary,” which I bought from the man himself a few years ago at a comic book convention. Disappointingly, the scene isn’t in either of the two volumes of the film that I saw during their theatrical run, and it ain’t in “The Whole Bloody Affair.” What gives?
“Kill Bill” is a revenge flick about The Bride (aka Black Mamba, aka Beatrix Kiddo), played by Uma Thurman. After being shot in the head during her wedding rehearsal by her mentor and former lover Bill, The Bride awakens from a coma four years later; she was in a delicate condition when she was gunned down and believes her unborn baby to have died along with her would-be husband and their wedding guests. What follows is an exploitation epic like no other, blending dozens of genres and styles, eschewing traditional linear storytelling and ultimately stopping dead before its talky and anti-climactic finale. The film, I’d argue, is simply too much of a good thing.
Tarantino’s gift for excess is what makes him an exciting filmmaker, but there isn’t enough story in “Kill Bill” to justify its running time. As the narrative leapfrogs from one stylistically different chapter to the next, the film feels like it’s starting over rather than building towards a conclusion. Yes, the Anime segment about O-Ren Ishii is an interesting addition, but ultimately becomes exhausting and unnecessary. Why is so much attention devoted to one of Bill’s henchmen? It takes the focus away from The Bride, who ultimately feels underdeveloped despite the film’s considerable length.
One thing that also struck me while watching the film again is that we never see a scene where the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad acts as a cohesive unit. We never get a sense of how the team functioned before The Bride walked away from the life of a contract killer. It’s kind of amazing how that was left out, considering how much attention is paid to other minutiae. I think establishing The Bride’s relationships and/or rivalries with her team members would’ve lent some real gravity to her revenge mission. Instead, each body she stacks up carries with it the dramatic heft of defeating a video game end boss before advancing to the next level.
“Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair” might not top-tier Tarantino in my estimation, but it’s still quite a theatrical experience. Stacked against some of his stronger efforts, the film feels like a minor work. Even so, it’s at times a thrilling piece of martial arts cinema. It might not be everything one would want out of a filmmaker as promising as Tarantino, and yet even when he falls short, he’s still firing on more cylinders than his contemporaries.
-Brad Lohan
*”You know, I’ve always liked that word…’gargantuan’… so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence.” -Elle Driver (aka California Mountain Snake)
Apr
1
Do You Like Scary Movies? | “Scream 2″
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That “Scream” was an unexpected monster hit meant a meta-textual follow-up was inevitable. And so, “Scream 2″ opened less than a year after the first film. The production hit a major snag when the shooting script was leaked on the Internet — which was then in its infancy — and spoiled the ending to the movie. Kevin Williamson had to do a major rewrite during filming. Studios nowadays avoid this sort of hassle by going into production without completed scripts. There’s still the occasional leak, like when a near-completed cut of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” wound up on Bit Torrent sites back in ‘09 a month before its scheduled release. But with “Scream 2,” this was the first time a major motion picture had its creative direction drastically altered because of some doofus with a dial-up connection.
I was very excited to see “Scream 2.” Being a child of the ’80s, I grew up on film sequels, and with horror movies in particular, kind of get a kick out of how long some of those sagas can keep separating gorehounds from their discretionary income. “Scream 2″ didn’t seem like a cynical cash-in to me as much as a logical extension of the first film. To properly deconstruct the horror genre, director Wes Craven would simply have to do a deep-dive into sequels.
I think “Scream 2″ is unfairly maligned as many sequels are. It unfairly gets lumped in with the generally poor imitators that began trickling out at the time rather than being regarded as a worthy extension of the first film. More on that in a moment. First, the high-level analysis:
Body Count: Eight, unless you count Casey Becker’s on-screen death in the “Stab” movie-within-a-movie that plays during the opening sequence. Then it’s nine.
Does Sarah Michelle Gellar Die in It? Yes
Distracting “Dawson’s Creek” Actor Cameo: Joshua Jackson as Ripley-misquoting “Film Class Guy #1″
Best Cameo: Then-unknown Luke Wilson as Billy Loomis in a clip from “Stab.”
Best Exchange: Ghostface asks Randy, “What’s your favorite scary movie?” and Randy deadpans, “Showgirls. Absolutely frightening.”
Hilarious Anachronism: Film student Micky (Timothy Olyphant) carries around a Hi-8 camcorder.
Best Kill: Ghostface crashes a car at a road construction site and inadvertently plunges a length of rebar through the head of a cop who’s clinging to the hood.
“Scream 2″ picks up two years after the first film. Sidney Prescott has started college and tried to move on from the events of her ex-boyfriend’s killing spree in Woodsboro. Unfortunately for her, a copycat Ghostface killer has started bumping people off on campus in attempt at staging a real life sequel to the Woodsboro murders. And Sidney has a whole new host of potential suspects. Is it camera whore Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber), the man she wrongly accused of killing her mother? Or could it be nice guy Derek (Jerry O’Connell), her new and seemingly perfect boyfriend? But what about “freaky Tarantino film student” Micky with his fetish for strong female heroes? Then again, what if one of her fellow “Scream” survivors — Gale Weathers, or Randy or even Dewey — have cracked? As with the first film, I think the mystery is more enticing than the “killer” reveal(s) at the end. All the monologuing that goes on during the climax again grinds the action to a halt. It’s not as dire as the final reel of “Scream 3,” but I still prefer the “motives are incidental” concept that the first movie flirted with.
“Scream 2″ delivers on the promise that “the death scenes are always much more elaborate” convention of a horror movie sequel. The opening sequence where Maureen (Jada Pinkett Smith) is killed in a theater that’s running “Stab” — an adaptation of the events of the first film — strikes a fascinating parallel between how cinema violence and real-life violence affect people differently. It’s a real carnival atmosphere with people parading around as Ghostface and wielding glow-in-dark knives. But when Maureen is killed by someone in the crowd and shambles up on the dais in front of the screen during Casey Becker’s fetishized death scene, suddenly the party atmosphere turns into one of shock and revulsion. It’s a pretty amazing, self-reflexive moment that tries to re-sensitize the viewer. It’s an interesting commentary on slasher movies, particularly in one that ultimately proceeds to become a roller coaster ride rather than “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.” To the filmmaker’s credit, at least Craven takes a stab at being bold.
-Brad Lohan
Mar
21
“Paul” Review
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I would like to call upon all filmmakers to begin a moratorium on putting “Star Wars” references in movies. Almost 35 years removed from the original film, and we’re still being inundated with lines of dialogue, iconography and subtle nods to the saga. It’s become like some sort of nervous tic that filmmakers have today. I appreciate the fact that they’ve been inspired by “Star Wars.” I get it. Can we move on now? Can we make a movie that stands on its own?
With “Paul,” the answer is no. “Paul” isn’t so much as movie as it is a collection of film references built around the conceit of two English sci-fi geeks encountering a slacker spaceman while on a road trip in the U.S. What sounds like a cute concept — and in the right hands (Edgar Wright’s), it probably could’ve been — is a movie that feels worn out about ten minutes in.
Let’s make no mistake. I consider myself a movie nerd, and I collected comic books for 17 years. I became a serious Trekkie in 2009. I’ve also very recently gotten into “The X-Files.” So, it’s not like I consider myself some sort of elitist who looks down his nose at grown men who wear shirts with obscure comic book characters on them; during the film, I actually spent more time wondering where I could get Nick Frost’s Ming the Merciless t-shirt than I did caring about whether or not they’ll get the epinonimous alien home.
All that being said, I still found “Paul” to be a movie that feels like they shot the first draft of the script. I wouldn’t have minded being inundated with tired tips-of-the-hat to practically every large-scale science fiction movie made over the past three decades if I’d been guffawing the whole time. But the jokes simply aren’t there. I chuckled a few times, but I expected much, much more from one of the co-writers of “Shaun of the Dead” and the director of “Superbad.”
In “Paul,” two life-long friends — graphic novelists Clive (Nick Frost) and Graeme (Simon Pegg) — attend the San Diego Comic-Con for the first time, then they rent an RV to go on a tour of all the famous alien sightings in the Southwest. It’s during this tour that they meet Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen), an actual alien from outer space. Paul crash-landed on Earth decades ago and has now outlived his usefulness in the eyes of the government. Paul has to get to a rendezvous point where his fellow spacemen can pick him up and take him home. If he’s captured by the government, his stem cells will be harvested and they’ll cut out his brain.
Paul is a bit of a prankster. He comes across as sort of an affable roommate rather than a snarling Xenomorph. If anything, he’s a much more interesting character than the two aggressively boring dweebs he stumbles upon in the desert. I liked Paul all right. He’s no E.T., but the character deserved to be the comedic foil for a much better duo of straight men than Clive and Graeme.
See, the problem with having two movie geeks as heroes is that they’re basically ciphers. They have no idea how to drive the action of the story because they’re simply characterizations rather than full-on characters. One is the fat nerd, and he’s a frustrated sci-fi writer; and the other one, well, he’s also fat but not as much, and he’s the sci-fi artist. Oh, and they speak Klingon. There’s nothing that really defines them or dictates their actions. They just spend most of the film reacting to things and going along amiably with whatever Paul needs them to do.
The passivity of the heroes makes for a rather listless plot. They’re being doggedly pursued by Agent Zoil (Jason Bateman) and his two lackeys (Bill Hader and Joe Lo Truglio), but they still seem to have plenty of time to sit out by a campfire and shoot the bull.
I had high hopes for “Paul.” But I’m just exhausted by material now that gets lost up its own ass with the endless pop cultural namechecking. We need to start making new classics, not obsessing over old ones.
-Brad Lohan
Mar
18
Do You Like Scary Movies? | “Scream”
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With “Scream 4″ opening in less than a month, I felt it was time to revisit the first three films in the series and see how they hold up. The original 1996 film, directed by Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson, came out of nowhere, redefining dead teenager movies for post-Tarantino, pop-culture savvy audiences in the latter half of the 1990s. It was a period of self-reflection as the century wound down and we all braced for a technological apocalypse that never came about. During this time, horror films had to become smarter to keep pace with a more cynical audience. The cheap thrills of ’80s slashers like “Friday the 13th” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” were no longer enough to satiate the appetites of self-important viewers who’ve seen everything.
And so, “Scream” became the first dead teenager movie that ’s about self-important viewers who’ve seen everything trying to survive a dead teenager movie. This heightened awareness was, up until that point, largely absent from the genre. Typically, dead teenager movies are about a group of interchangeable nitwits being eviscerated in no particular order; the only cleverness on display is in how they meet with their gruesome ends. There’s an amusement park value to such films, but rarely do they stick with you after the experience is over.
I think “Scream” has since become a victim of its own overwhelming success. The imitators it spawned with rapidly diminishing returns ultimately cheapened the genre once again. A subsequent backlash would see a rise in Americanized J-horror remakes, torture porn and endless reboots of dead teenager movies that collectively stunk up the aughts.
15 years on, “Scream” has a charming simplicity to it. The viewing experience is like revisiting an old friend you haven’t seen in far too long. So, let’s break down “Scream” and see what new light can be shed on the film. First, let’s do a high-level overview.
Body Count: 7
Best Kill: Tatum (Rose McGowan) becomes trapped while trying to escape through a doggie door built into a garage door. Trapped how? Well, her ginorous breasts get in the way. Then, Ghostface raises the garage door, and Tatum’s fake rubber head is crushed.
Most WTF Line: Billy (Skeet Ulrich) tells Randy (Jamie Kennedy), “Maybe your movie freaked mind has lost its reality button.” I have no idea what that means. Do minds have reality buttons? Is it like the “Esc” key?
Most Hilarious Exchange: Intrepid reporter Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) and her cameraman Kenny (W. Earn Boen) show up at the scene of a Ghostface attack and Gale says, “Jesus, get the camera!” to which Kenny responds dryly, “My name isn’t Jesus.”
Best Quip: After miraculously surviving a gunshot wound, Randy remarks, “I never thought I’d be so glad to be a virgin.”
Best Scare: Immediately after Randy reveals himself to be a virgin, the believed-to-be-dead Billy springs up and lays out Randy with one punch.
Most Obscure Pop-Culture Reference: “The Town That Dreaded Sundown.” Even I haven’t seen that movie.
Most Anachronistic Line: “What’s a kid like you doing with a cell phone anyway?”
I remember the first time I saw “Scream.” At the time, I was working my first job at a crappy fast food joint. They let me off early one night, and after hastily changing out of my uniform and into my street clothes, I boogied across town to the now-defunct Cineplex Odeon in Alderwood. I liked that venue for horror movie watching because it seemed like a theater where you could actually be killed by some lunatic in a mask.
I didn’ t have high hopes for “Scream.” I figured it was another forgettable dead teenager moviet. But when I arrived at the theater, it was packed. And this was a week or so before Christmas. All these people were here to see a slasher film, not whatever holiday flotsam was playing at the time. There was a buzz in the lobby, like we were really in for something special. Turns out, we were.
“Scream” is about Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), a teenager still reeling from the murder of her mother a year ago. Sidney’s being stalked by a velvety-voiced psycho in a ghostly mask when she’s not rebuffing the sexual advances of her boyfriend, Billy. (Remember when Skeet Ulrich was hailed as the next Johnny Depp? Then Johnny Depp turned out to be the next Johnny Depp.) Meanwhile, opportunistic reporter Gale Weathers is trying to unmask the killer who she believes is the actual culprit behind the murder of Sidney’s mother; Sidney, however, fingered Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber in a brief cameo) for the crime, landing him on death row. As the bodies of Sidney’s classmates and close friends pile up, Sidney tries to stay alive while skirting some of the rules to survive a scary movie. Can Sidney confront her fears and overcome the unstoppable Ghostface? Well, she’s in “Scream 2″ and “Scream 3,” so signs point to yes.
“Scream” starts with an oft-discussed opening scene that bumps off the biggest star of the film (Drew Barrymore) ten minutes in. It’s been compared to “Psycho,” and I guess that’s fair if “Psycho” were geared towards a more ADD audience; Janet Leigh doesn’t buy it until we’re well into Act II. The opening scene is a bold bit of business and expertly sets up the shocks and the smarts that make the film such a success. I still marvel at how Craven balances a sense of humor and menace throughout. There isn’t a false note to be found.
On a whole, “Scream” holds up quite well. Though some of the hairstyles and clothing choices are true relics of the Clinton era, the movie doesn’t feel particularly dated. Well, people still went to big box video stores and watched movies on VHS tape. “Scream” is also probably one of the last horror movies in which cell phone ownership was anomalous rather than omnipresent. How I long for those days.
So far, we’re off to a good start. “Scream” still owns. But what about its first sequel? Stay tuned.
-Brad Lohan
Mar
7
“Cool World” Review
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I must’ve seen the trailer for “Cool World” about a hundred times. It was one of those previews that seemed to be on every VHS tape in my collection, and I’d blow through it on fast forward practically every time. Still, the imagery seemed striking. The film looked like some sort of sleazy take on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” a dark fantasy about a cartoonist who gets to make it with one of his sexy drawings in a parallel universe from his own imagination. And who wouldn’t want to see a movie about that?
Well, a lot of people.
Despite starring a freakishly young Brad Pitt, “Cool World” was a turkey during its initial release in 1992. The amount of walkouts must’ve been staggering. Oh, how I’d've loved to have gone to a Saturday matinee of this and seen the smattering of families gradually filing out of the auditorium after they came to the realization the film’s definitely not “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” This movie must’ve scored more free passes for pissed-off parents than “Batman Returns” that summer.
So what’s “Cool World” all about? That’s what I’ve been asking myself since the closing credits started to roll. Here’s what I was able to come up with.
The film opens (for no particular reason whatsoever) in 1945 with Pitt’s character, Frank Harris, returning from WWII. His mother greets him at the airport, and they go back to her modest home on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Frank changes into a zoot suit as mom prepares dinner. (Hey, where are the cartoon characters? Hang on, there’s tons more useless backstory.) Then Frank shows his mother a motorcycle that he says he won in a card game in Italy. How it suddenly materialized in front of her house is left unexplained. They go for a ride on the bike and get into the least convincing car accident I’ve seen outside of student-produced short films. Lying in the dirt, Frank has some sort of weird WWII flashback, finds his mother dead near the scene of the crash and gets pulled into Cool World by a cartoon mad scientist named Dr. Whiskers.
Oh, yeah, there are cartoon characters in the movie. I’d forgotten, since this thing seemed like a weird, unofficial sequel to “Inglourious Basterds” for like the first ten minutes there.
We flash-forward to 1992 and meet Gabriel Byrne’s character, Jack Deebs, a cartoonist in the hoosegow. It must be some sort of minimum security facility, since he has a drawing table and all of his art supplies. Deebs is drawing a picture of Holli Would, a busty blond bombshell, who comes to life on the page and yanks him into Cool World. There, Holli (voiced by Kim Basinger) dances her little stripper dance in some kind of nightclub populated by the least appealing cartoon characters I’ve ever seen. Holli teases Jack, who seems to be a little bewildered by what’s going on, not unlike the audience. Jack’s then dumped back into the real world and promptly released from prison.
Jack goes back home, visits a comic book store, and readjusts life on the outside, a process that takes, oh, five or six minutes. We do learn that he was put away for killing his wife and her lover. Character sympathy? Eh, who needs it? At any rate, Jack’s then drawn back into Cool World, where we learn from Frank Harris, now a detective working the Cool World beat, that “noids” are not allowed to copulate with “doodles.” But Holli wants to hook up with Jack anyway because, well, she’s essentially sex personified. So, she and Frank do it, and it turns her into Kim Basinger. This is problematic for reasons beyond my understanding. Actually, Kim Basinger’s pretty terrible in this movie, so maybe that’s what it is.
There’s a lot of chasing around between our world and Cool World, none of it particularly interesting. Holli needs to get some MacGuffin called the Spike of Power that’s at the top of a casino in order to make her change into a “noid” permanent. See, she briefly changes back and forth from a noid into a doodle, and so does Jack for whatever reason. I guess it’s like a cartoon character STD flare up or something.
Problems? This movie’s got ‘em. The story is an absolute bugnuts mess. I have no idea who the hero of this movie is or why I should care about any of these people. Is Frank the hero? He’s a cop, trying to keep order. No, he can’t be the hero. He doesn’t really drive the action. Is Jack the hero? He created this kooky place sort of; it’s never made clear why it was around back in ‘45 but is also from Jack’s imagination in ‘92. Still, Jack doesn’t really do much but act like he has no idea what’s going on most of the time; I guess that makes him the audience surrogate. Is Holli the hero? She actually wants something, but beyond the superficial (boobs), we’re really not given much of any reason to root for her.
Okay, so out of three central characters, none of them emerges as the protagonist. This makes the movie seem aimless, since we just watch people we’re not really interested in doing things we’re indifferent about. Who cares if Holli becomes a noid? Who cares if her becoming a noid might destroy our world and Cool World. Both places suck anyway. Sincerely, this movie is so bad, it made me give up on humanity.
How’s the animation? Craptacular. Holli Would is the only cartoon character in the movie that isn’t a grotesquery. I guess that was done intentionally, but sheesh, “Cool World” on a whole is an eyesore. And damn if it isn’t the clunkiest blending of human actors with cartoon characters. Everyone’s eyelines are off; the physical interactions between noids and doodles are awkward; and the sets look like something out of bad dinner theater.
“Cool World” is a cinematic failure of the first order. It’s an interesting footnote in Brad Pitt’s career, but apart from that, this film doesn’t even merit the “so bad it’s good” backhanded compliment. It’s got a cool trailer, though.
-Brad Lohan
Feb
28
“Blood for Dracula” Review
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Before Udo Kier began slumming in Uwe Boll and Rob Zombie junk heaps, he played Dr. Frankenstein and Count Dracula in two Andy Warhol-produced(!) 3D horror films. “Flesh for Frankenstein,” my favorite of the pair, is one of the best movies of its kind. Director Paul Morrissey’s “Flesh” brings the mad doctor to the ’70s in style. Kier’s turn as Frankenstein is hilariously preening and neurotic, playing the character as though he were a deeply insecure college student.
His take on the vampire count in “Blood for Dracula” fully embraces the camp aspects as well. Kier plays him as a pale and sickly aristocrat. Mostly confined to a wheelchair, Dracula has drained every last drop of virgin blood from his countless victims in Romania. Now, he’s dying of thirst. His familiar, Anton, suggests they travel to Italy, which is apparently crawling with chaste, Catholic women. So they pack up his coffin and pay a visit to the home of bankrupt landowner Marchese di Fiori (Vittorio De Sica, director of “The Bicycle Thief!”) and his four young, available daughters. Unfortunately for Drac, two of them have already been devirginized by the rapey Marxist landscaper, Mario (Joe Dallesandro).
What happens when Dracula drinks the blood of an impure woman? Well, he becomes violently ill and pukes his guts out for what seems like half the movie.The first vomiting scene must rival “Team America: World Police” for the most celluloid devoted to reverse paristalsis. It just goes on, and on, and on. You’d think Dracula would just take a little sip of blood and see how it goes down before drinking his victim dry. Nope, he practically does a kegstand on the poor, impure Italian girl before realizing the hard way she wasn’t a virgin after all. Dracula’s not a quick learner, either. He makes the same mistake on another free-spirited sister later in the movie.
Morrissey fuses the gothic elements of the Hammer horror pictures, which I love, with the seismic changes going on in our culture, women’s lib and so forth. The collision is a thing a beauty. No longer is Dracula seductive and supernatural, but a fey cripple, who’s completely out of touch with modern society. Uncharismatic, he utterly fails in his attempts at casting his spell over any of the sisters, unlike the Alpha male Mario. And it’s Mario who vanquishes Dracula in a brutal dismemberment scene at film’s end. Funnily enough, Carlo Rambaldi did the makeup effects work; he’s the same joker who designed E.T.
“Blood for Dracula” eats “Twilight”’s lunch. And barfs it back up again.
-Brad Lohan
Feb
25
“Drive Angry: Shot in 3D” Review
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Shouldn’t it be called “Drive Angrily?” Oh well, even if the title were grammatically correct, the movie would still blow. Nicolas Cage doesn’t save it, the fact it was shot in 3D doesn’t save it, Amber Heard’s nice gams don’t save it — it’s a film that’s beyond salvation. I guess I should’ve known better. Only Brian Collins from Horror Movie a Day and I attended the midnight screening at the ArcLight Sherman Oaks last night. I couldn’t drag any of my friends to this thing. I thought it’d be the perfect exploitation flick, blending elements of horror with high-octane car chases. Turns out, the movie is just aggressively not very good.
Nicolas Cage, apparently basing his entire performance on Nick Nolte’s infamous mugshot, plays fugitive from hell John Milton Get it? Milton? Hell? Yep, this is what we’re dealing with here, hacks who are vaguely familiar with Paradise Lost. At any rate, Milton’s returned to the land of the living — how is never really explained — to rescue his granddaughter from a Satanic cult led by Jonah King (Billy Burke). King has to be perhaps one of cinema’s least intimidating antagonists, ranking right up there with Mark Strong’s barely-there performance in “Sherlock Holmes.”
And so, William Fichtner is the only member of the cast who actually showed up to the set with things called “choices” that I hear actors talking about when they want to sound actorly. He walks away with the movie as The Accountant, a well-dressed lapdog of the Devil, sent to bring Milton back to the inferno. I’d've much rather seen a movie about The Accountant chasing around the Midwest after folks who’ve slipped out of Hell almost unnoticed.
Instead, we get the world’s most slow-moving car chase flick crossed with the world’s least magical supernatural thriller. My drive to the theater was more thrilling than any of the high-speed chases in the film; they’d closed two lanes on the 405. Shouldn’t a movie called “Drive Angry” have some amazing driving stunts in it and some spectacular crashes? This film’s car action pales in comparison even to the anemic “Gone in 60 Seconds” remake, also starring Cage.
The guilty parties here are director Patrick Lussier and writer Todd Farmer. I really dug their collaboration on “My Bloody Valentine,” perhaps the only horror remake within the last 10 years that justifies its existence. With “Drive Angry,” I expected nothing less than B-movie greatness. Sadly, I got significantly less than B-movie greatness. I got a bunch of hungover actors giving uninspired line readings while trying to keep their lunch down.
How’s the 3D? Well, it’s becoming perfectly clear that movies shot in the format still don’t really take full advantage of it, unless CGI bullets fired in super-slow motion are your thing. The 3D in “Drive Angry” is about as negligible as the character development. The effects in this movie are so fakey, they look like animatics. Having them all up in your business doesn’t make the viewing experience more visceral. Crap effects shots are crap effects shots in any dimension.
And so, whatever goodwill I had extended to Nicolas Cage after “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” and “Kick-Ass” has been lost. I was willing to look the other way when “Season of the Witch” dropped last month, since it had been on the shelf for awhile. But with “Drive Angry,” it seems like he just is back to not caring about the quality of the material again.
-Brad Lohan
Feb
17
Surprisingly, I’d never seen a Russ Meyer flick before. “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” had been on my radar since I was an undergrad in film school; one of my professors had the poster hanging in his office. When star Tura Satana passed away recently, I decided it was finally time to catch the movie.
And what a weird movie it is. “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” is about three go-go dancers — Varla (Tura Satana), Billie (Lori Williams) and Rosie (Haji) — who go tooling around So Cal in their roadsters; the close-ups of the driving shots are clearly done by filming the actresses at a low angle in a stationary car as they bounce up and down. Billie, the blonde and my favorite of the trio, pulls over and, apropos of nothing, goes for a swim in a lake with all of her clothes on; this is the most chaste T&A picture I’ve seen to date. Varla sends Rosie (whose Italian accent and wild gesticulations must’ve been Danny Nucci’s inspiration for his performance in “Titanic”) to retrieve Billie, and they wrestle around in the water for awhile. They then go play chicken at the Salt Flats until a bohunk named Tommy (Ray Barlow) and his bikini-clad girlfriend Linda (Sandra Bernard) show up. They challenge Tommy to a race, and apropos of nothing, Varla kills him when it’s over.
The girls kidnap Linda to a gas station, where they learn from the toothless attendant that a crippled Old Man (Stuart Lancaster) who lives nearby received a huge settlement after being hit by a train(!). They cook up some bogus story and pay the old lech a visit at his dilapidated ranch. But he’s not alone. The Old Man lives there with his two sons, the musclebound and not-very-bright Vegetable (Dennis Busch) and the gangly but somewhat brighter Kirk (Paul Trinka). From there, more things happen apropos of nothing.
“Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” isn’t something I would classify as a *good* movie. Describing it as loosely plotted is charitable. The “acting” is amateur hour. And yet, I was never tempted to turn the film off because it’s made endlessly watchable by the staggering amount of cleavage on display. Holy cats, Tura Satana is the queen of the plunging neckline. I’m not really a fan of the penciled-on eyebrows, but who’s looking at her eyebrows? And now I will return to the slightly less misogynistic portion of the review.
They certainly don’t really make bad movies like they used to. And they’ve tried. Last year, I saw the Russ Meyer homage “Bitch Slap,” which should be an argument for the criminalization of homage pictures. Any movie that makes T&A actively boring (“Showgirls” also qualifies for this dishonor) cannot be classified as “so bad, it’s good.” And now I will return to the only slightly less misogynistic portion of the review.
Let’s talk about Billie. I’m not even really into blondes, but Billie, oh my god, Billie. Okay, I think I’m doing talking about Billie.
I need to see some more Russ Meyer flicks, like immediately, before I can get a sense of where “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” fits within the scope of his output. It’s definitely worth a look if you’re into that sort of thing. And if you’re not into that sort of thing, well, it must be a helluva thing, having taste.
-Brad Lohan