At the movies: Jimmy and Stiggs.

 

Jimmy and Stiggs kicked my ass, emotionally. There are times when you have to reckon with the friendships that come apart for all manner of reasons, and the ache gets so loud you can't hear anything else. This movie is like that.

At the movies: Cocaine Bear.

 

There is a bear. There is cocaine. There is more than you might expect.

At the movies: You're Next.

Biding its time since its premiere two years ago, this vicious little gem has been waiting for exactly the right time to kick the collective ass of the viewing public. Smart, gross, funny, vicious, and so very pointed in the way it examines the messed-up ties of family and love, I can't recommend this film highly enough.

At the movies: Evil Dead '13.

I got to talk with Jim Ridley about the new Evil Dead. You can read it here. There is some trenchant observation with just a tad of leavening bitchery. I hope you enjoy it.

At the movies: Silent Hill: Revelation 3D.

The PROs:

1) There's a creature in this film that I'm calling the spidermannequin. It is featured in the trailer, though it skitters quickly (and with such overstated CG speed) that you can't appreciate what an exquisite slice of nightmare fodder it is. This is up there with the Trilobite in Prometheus, or any of the reanimated pets in Frankenweenie. I've always said that a good monster can make up for a multitude of sins in any movie- this is a very good monster.

2) Deborah Kara Unger realness. She only has one scene, but she gets third billing. Damn right. She'll always be Catherine Ballard to me, and she brings all the good will she brought into the first SH to this one.

3) The nurses. Like a fusion of the Stygian Witches from the original Clash of the Titans and The Weeping Angels from Doctor Who (even though, yes, I know the Silent Hill nurses predate the Weeping Angels), these stop/start contortionist slice-and-dice artistes are remarkably effective. Unfortunately, their sequence is edited a bit too haphazardly for one to really appreciate the tension that the 3D adds to this particular sequence.

4) A carousel kept in motion by jagged pectoral hooks.

5) Some masterfully composed deep-focus shots that use stereoscopic images in an effective and unsettling way.

6) a child's birthday party turns into what looks like a meeting of the Kiss Army.

7) I hope Clive Barker got some money from this production, because this movie has a Cenobite axe battle as its climax. It's not staged particularly well, but its set-up is good, and there's a nice transformation that precedes it.

8) the female lead (playing the grown-up version of diva Jodelle Ferland from the first film) is good. She's got presence and gravitas, and she's got a Michelle Williams vibe going on that is a nice touch. The script gives her nothing, and she turns it into something.


The CONs:

1) This is a terrible script. No dialogue that isn't cliched. No motivation that doesn't feel like a cutscene (rightfully) excised from a game. No effort spent on establishing 'the real world.' No strong characters whatsoever- say whatever you want about Roger Avary, his script for the original Silent Hill had superb characterization, including five great roles for actresses. There are entire studios that haven't released five great roles for women in their entire 2012 lineup. And there's just nothing here that doesn't depend on an awareness of either the first film or the series of games. I bet dubbed into another language, this film plays like gangbusters, though.

2) It looks like they had about a tenth of the budget of the first film to work with. That's not the filmmakers' fault, but it is something you need to keep in mind.

3) There's none of the Italian horror dream logic that proved so refreshing in the first film.

4) There's no telekinetic razorwire massacre, or anything that comes even close to the transgressive, gleeful savagery of that sequence.

5) The male lead is just not very good. Part of it is that the script gives him nothing to work with, but he's also never really convincing.

6) Everybody from the first film who returns in this one... one scene each. Sean Bean, he gets a couple, and (surprise) he doesn't die (literally), so that's something. But there's a decent amount of stars involved in this film, and they all get the traditional scream queen treatment of one scene and out. When Malcolm McDowell shows up, you just have to accept that.

7) The 3D is really inconsistent. Some scenes and sequences are absolutely gorgeous, with amazing uses of depth separation and perspective shifts. Others look flat and post-converted.

8) What happened to Carrie-Anne Moss' career? She was the ass-kicking diva of the new millennium thanks to The Matrix. And she's worked continuously since the late '80s. But she deserves more- she gets to be the evil queen in this film, with pale skin and no eyebrows, but she only shines when the CG and stuntperson take over when she grows sawblades and becomes a Barkerian warrioress. She does get a great 'take him to the Asylum and cure him!' moment that resonates, but like everyone else in the cast who speaks, she is left adrift by the script. She doesn't get anything on par with what Alice Krige does in the first one, and that's sad.

9) I'm sure the studios involved were ecstatic that this entry runs just over an hour and a half, but there's never a chance to absorb any of the environments the film presents. Everything looks kind of cheap. The cinematographer, Maxime Alexander, shot Haute Tension and the remakes of The Hills Have Eyes and The Crazies- this is a man who knows how to light things beautifully. And this film looks haloed and overprocessed.

So I can't recommend Silent Hill: Revelation to you. If anything, it's the most disappointed I've been by a sequel to a film I loved since Basic Instinct. Though, in all honesty, Basic Instinct: Risk Addiction had Sharon Stone going full-tilt crazy, and there's nothing so lively or refreshing to be found here. Oh well...

At the movies: Savages.

Ah. Welcome back, insane Oliver...

I love Oliver Stone's more bonkers films, and this is certainly that. A feast of sex, violence, drugs, double-crossing, thrills, gore, mayhem, incisive performative critique, and Travoltarama! Check it out...

At the movies: Breaking Dawn - Part I.

So, this movie you might have heard of opened this weekend.

As you can see above, it's nonstop hot Brazilian honeymoon action. But there are certainly some enjoyably campy facets. Read all about it within...

At the movies: Tucker and Dale versus Evil.

Have a beer and give this a read. Then see the film. I would be there if I could...

At the movies: Drive.

So, this film opened on Friday and it's got a few people talking about it. I think it's particularly awesome. You should check it out. Here's some more of my thoughts on the subject.

At the movies: Final Destination 5.

They just keep dying...

At the movies: Super.

The latest film from James Gunn. You might remember him as the sick individual who wrote Tromeo and Juliet. He brings it.

A Trip down Elm Street (after).

So, in addition to all the other horrifying foolishness that happened last weekend, I saw the Elm Street remake. You can read my thoughts on it in the Nashville Scene. It's a staggering disappointment.

At the movies: The Wolf Man.

Visually stunning and completely overwrought, Joe Johnston's take on the classic tale of lycanthropy and the animal nature of man gets slightly more right than it does wrong, and that makes for a mildly entertaining film. Watching it, though, you can't help but think how much better it could have been.

Benicio del Toro, as the troubled Larry Talbot, keeps things internal and close to his chest, which is an odd choice for a movie where swarthy guys turn into wolves. More successful is Anthony Hopkins, who positively cackles his way through the proceedings with an appropriately jaded and bloodthirsty brio. But I must confess my annoyance with a film that would cast Geraldine Chaplin as a Gypsy fortuneteller and then give her two minutes of screentime.

The effects are exceptional for the most part, though the computer generated imagery works much better in crafting foggy atmosphere and murky Britishry than it does for the big transformation scenes. A little humor and some more for the delightfully moody Hugo Weaving to do would have improved things exponentially, but as it is, The Wolf Man is a bloody buffet for those who enjoy their bloodlettings in as classy a fashion as possible.

It's an ephemeral experience, and what endures is a testament to exceptional production design and mood.

At the movies: Saw VI.

So let’s talk for a second about the Saw films. You know the drill, every Halloween there’s another one, consisting of a bunch of people put in horrible mechanisms that mutilate them unless they make difficult life choices. They’re a reactionary bunch of insidious expressions of how desperately people want to feel morally superior to anyone, and like some obligatory family member who only comes to visit once a year, I cannot avoid them.

Part of it goes with seeing all R-Rated Horror Films on general principle. But there is something more powerful than that at the root of these films that keeps me coming back every year (5 of the 6, on opening day even), and that’s tradition. I was too young (and also not a fan of scary movies) to have been in on the Friday the 13th tradition in the 80s of putting a new film out as often as could be done on an actual Friday the 13th, so this is the first tradition I’ve been able to be in on on the ground level.

That, in a nutshell, is why I keep going back to see these films. It’s not because of the characters, or the gore, or the traps, or whatever heinous moral logic is being spewed forth from within- it’s just the tradition of going every October with good friends.

Ideally, the Saw films would be better.

Even more ideally would be if the Final Destination series had that annual stranglehold. But obviously something appeals to audiences in seeing mutilation doled out to those who ‘don’t appreciate’ their lives. And this time, the filmmakers have decided to become- political. Our opening scene has two crooked loan officers from a bank forced to hack away at themselves in order not to have their skulls drilled into. The main plot for the film is about William (Peter Outerbridge, whom you may remember from Land of the Dead or the forgotten masterpiece Paris, France), an executive at an insurance agency who makes all the final calls about policies- including, at some point in the past, the policy of John Kramer (Tobin Bell, doing quite well for a character who died in Saw III). Which will end up being a bad mistake, as in as pandering a moment as I’ve seen in a film all year, Jigsaw indicts insurance companies onscreen for their actions.

Anyone can empathize with frustration over the organized racket that is the modern insurance industry. Anyone can derive some cheap kicks from watching an incarnation of a corrupt institution get shot, brain-bolted, hung with barbed wire, or having a nonconsensual run-in with hydrofluoric acid. But there's no revolutionary spirit to these films, no call to any sort of action. These are films built around the idea of submission to authority.

At this point in the series’ history, everyone who ever had lunch with Bell’s character in his life has somehow popped up in one of the sequels, strapped into something or shot in the face with a crossbow firing croquet mallets, and it feels like the Pirandellian structure that the writers have been trying to build has become a hermetic prison.

Costas Mandylor’s character from the past few sequels (Hoffman) is back, and he’s become the main villain of the piece because he enjoys brutality rather than earnestly trying to help people by pulverizing some extremities or by sticking a key or two inside their occipital lobe. He’s trying to take over the trap game from John’s widow Jill (Betsy “Angel” Russell, whom I’m happy to see working and who also embodies the closest thing to an actual moral principle in the entire series), and he’s putting our guy William against pretty much the entire staff of his insurance agency, having him cut the payroll in increasingly baroque and explicit ways.

But there’s a lot of blood to be shed this time around, and everyone has their own angle and some form of ulterior motive that was set up in a cutaway to what happened during a previous sequel.

A quick note, a lot of idiots like to bandy about the phrase ‘torture porn,’ which they’ll then use as a subgenre in which to link the Saw films with films like the Hostel diptych and I Know Who Killed Me. Firstly, anyone who uses the term ‘torture porn’ seriously is unworthy of your respect. Secondly, neither of the Hostel films nor I Know Who Killed Me deserve to be tarred with the Saw brush. While all three of those films do in fact depict violent acts of torture and murder, they (Hostel, its sequel, and I Know Who Killed Me) view the act of violence as something to be avoided, escaped from, triumphed over, or to be intervened in.

The Saw films have a torture fetish, and what they love is serving up big, Dr. Phil-sized servings of gore-spattered self-righteousness. The unspoken text of all the Saw films is “if you follow the rules and don’t ask questions and commit horrible acts against people who’ve probably got it coming, then not only are you better than your fellow man, but that you appreciate your life enough to carry about judgments against those around you.”

You are meant to support the killer Jigsaw, and you are never meant to give any thought to the countless victims of these films except as to whether or not they gave good splat. Even the situations that these films present in which some form of education takes place involves the suffering of someone innocent, and for these films to claim any form of moral respectability, which its producers have done, is both disingenuous and shameful.

So what we get here, after several detours into flashbacks and increasingly more ornate murderscapes, is a splattery lesson in how to turn the next generation of kids into fast-acting agents of death who mutilate without hesitation. Forgiveness is never an option in these films. We are animals built on avenging our losses, but never from learning from them. And that's just sad.

Supposedly Saw VII is being made in 3D. I suppose that’ll be enough of a factor to get me in the theatre on opening day 2010.

That, and tradition. But I sincerely hope I’m wrong.

At the movies: Halloween II.

I’m amazed at how much hate is pouring out on this film, from all sorts of places. I had an ambivalent response to Robert Zombie’s take on the John Carpenter masterpiece Halloween last year, but that had more to do with having to take on established classic. With this film- that’s nowhere near the case.

Rick Rosenthal’s Halloween II: nearly thirty years on and it’s still crap. It’s got Jamie Lee Curtis in one of the worst wigs in cinema history, sure, and it sticks in the back of the mind of anyone who has to go to the hospital, yes. But it’s a terrible movie.

So I guess I’m not saying much when I call Robert Zombie’s Halloween II much better than the original Halloween II. It doesn’t really hold together on a narrative plane, nor does it haunt the shadows of the daylight world the way Carpenter’s original did. But this is a film that has some interesting ideas and a nice visual sensibility (firstly, I’m glad Zombie went back to the 1.85 aspect ratio, because he was not at his best working in cinemascope on last year’s Halloween). It’s got several incredibly brutal kills (including a face stomping that makes you forget about American History X and actually manages to rival Irreversible in terms of ‘did I just see snuff footage in the theatre?’ provocation) and a fairly game cast (with Brad Dourif, Danielle Harris, and one-scene wonder Margot Kidder doing most of the heavy lifting). But more than that, it’s got a real sense of free-form ‘anything can happen’ madness afoot.

The pretentious ghostly visions don’t bother me at all (and truthfully, I’d like to see a little more pretension in all movies. Nobody has ever blundered into transcendence by keeping the bar low), and I’m always happy to see Sheri Moon Zombie in any film (does no one else remember that hers was the best performance in the previous film?). Malcolm McDowell’s scenes feel tacked on (and they were), though his interaction with Weird Al Yankovic is kind of priceless.

My one main criticism of this film is that it never really explains why both Michael and Laurie are having these ghostly visions at the same time. The character of Deborah Myers was horrified by Michael’s actions (so much so that she killed herself), but now she is the embodiment of the death urge? In the meantime, she’s gone shakti on us? Perhaps a clearer DVD cut can fix some of this, but I’ll still gladly take this over Rosenthal’s Halloween II any day of the week.

At the movies: Poultrygeist.

When it says Troma, you know what you’re getting: gore, breasts, monsters, mutants, a representation of national diversity that makes Hollywood product look insular and unadventurous, and at least one (but often more) moment where the only response you can have is to say “well, I’ve never seen that before.” The typical Troma film, if you can even define such a thing, is like a madcap collusion between Frank Tashlin and the Marquis de Sade that works on whichever level you want it to. No setpiece too gross, not pun too outrageous, and no patience for subtlety; but still the Troma brand remains absolutely true to itself, and its take-no-prisoners style of social splat-ire doubtless will offend a significant portion of the population.

What else could we expect from a film positively enraged by the course of human life at this point in the aughts, explicitly attacking the legacy of Native American disenfranchisement, the way that food has become a corporatized industry, the Abu Gharaib photographs, and the way that entropy brings down countless social movements from the inside. Which is a remarkable agenda for a film about chicken monsters and dismemberment. There is no bodily mutilation, desecration, or violation that one could conceive of that remains unexplored during the course of Poultrygeist, and its gleeful willingness to gore up the place a little bit is a welcome breath of fresh air when you look at the disturbing ideologies splatter fans are made to implicitly support, through efforts like the Saw series or something like Quarantine, just to get a little grue.

The former frustrates because of its cruel and faux-moralistic undertones (perfectly served up for the Dr. Phil/Sarah Palin side of America), the later disgusts because of its dumbing-down and eviscerating of a quality foreign film/classic that didn’t need to be remade in the first place. And that’s where most modern horror is stuck. So even if Poultrygeist’s tone never strays far from slapstick farce rather than exploring more serious responses to horror, it still slings righteous social anger like the finest of documentary offerings and splatters the walls in ways that make this year’s Inside and Mother of Tears look restrained and dainty. Director/cowriter Lloyd Kaufman once again manages to find the gorgeous within the gruesome, and there’s no other splatter musical willing to talk about issues and sever limbs with such wit. ***

At the movies: Mirrors

This one was a catastrophic disappointment. I've been on the Alexandre Aja train ever since Haute Tension, and I maintain that it's a work of damned near genius. His The Hills Have Eyes remake was a bloodthirsty and brilliant rethinking, and I'm eagerly anticipating his 3-D take on Piranha. But this effort, a julienning of the Korean film Geoul sokeuro and Poltergeist III, is just not up to snuff.

Kiefer Sutherland, sidelined as Jack Bauer due to the writer's strike, is an alcoholic cop recovering from accidentally killing another cop. His family life is in turmoil, and he's crashing on his sister's couch and working as a night watchman in a creepy burnt-out edifice of a department store that was once a hospital.

Anyway, there's something evil in the mirrors. The explanations are ridiculous, the dialogue is just awful, and even Kiefer is in over his head. Some of the effects are great, but the gore is often too CG-based and the final confrontation is just stupid. The only part of the film that actually feels like an Aja movie is the opening pre-credits sequence, which uses the cinemascope frame and incidental reflections in a way which remains stylistically of a piece with his amazing work on Haute and Hills. The rest feels like something some studio execs stepped on (20th Century Fox, I call you out), and the main musical theme seems to be ripping off the same bolero that The Doors' "Spanish Caravan," Jam & Spoon featuring Plavka Lonich's "Right in the Night," Fantastic Planet's "Carry on Columbus," and the main theme to Don Coscarelli's Phantasm films all rip off.

The film is thirty minutes too long by far, and surprisingly boring, especially for an R-rated horror film. What really strikes me as odd is that for a film that rips off so much of Poltergeist III, it doesn't angle for any of the really creepy mirror stuff in that film.

I will give full credit for the remarkable set work that Romania's artisans helped craft- in particular, the edifice of the Mayflower department store is a marvel. But that doesn't make up for just under two hours of shock stabs and creepy light phenomena. There's some good moments and two really gory deaths. That's about it. I still have hope for Piranha 3-D, though.