RMWC Reviews

“They say the devil blows in their sails.”

2012-01-07T20:21:00.000-05:00

So yes, that was a “break” that lasted about two months longer than I planned on. I won’t bore you with the details, but the real world took top priority on everything for a while there.

Where were we?

An Errol Flynn pirate movie? Sure, that sounds fantastic. But I’ve already seen Captain Blood! Not to fear, because 1940 heralded yet another Michael Curtiz’ helmed Flynn swashbuckling ADVENTURE! The Sea Hawk.

The Story
Wait, wait, wait. Play this while you're reading. Trust me.

It is 1585 and Geoffrey Thorpe (Errol Flynn) is the dashing captain of the Albatross, an English privateer and his life is pretty awesome. He’s got a ferociously loyal crew, headed up Mr. Pitt (played by his old sidekick Alan Hale Sr.), a fast ship with which he can raid Spanish vessels with bravado, and an almost-first-name relationship with Queen Elizabeth. He’s unfailingly polite, charming, merciful, yet a stern disciplinarian to those who disobey his direct orders.

We open with a Spanish galley delivering a diplomat to England. The Spanish are quite furious with English piracy against their ships and for the Brits funding their enemies. The two nations are not at war, but things are starting to move in that direction, and the surprisingly British-accented Spanish already have a secret plan for invading/conquering England. So really, considering the time this was made, you should really cross out “Spanish” wherever you encounter it in this movie and replace it with “German” since this is fundamentally a WWII propaganda film. C’est la guerre.

Anyway, the diplomat is Don Alvarez (Claude Raines), and he’s bringing along his neice, Doña Maria Alvarez de Cordoba (Brenda Marshall), and she’s got her own servant in tow, Martha (Una O’Connor, and not nearly as annoying as in Bride of Frankenstein). Suddenly, a ship attacks. It’s the Albatross, and the galley being Spanish is all the pretext Thorpe needs to attack. After a rousing battle where ships shoot each other and men swing across riggings, fall in the water, and insult-swordfight, Thorpe’s sea hawks (DUN DUN DUN!) are victorious and capture the crew and diplomats who…were already…headed to…England. Well, uh, Thorpe also frees the English galley slaves the Spanish were using as labor. The Albatross doesn’t HAVE galley slaves, so there. Either that or its not a galley. Thorpe also takes a liking to Doña Maria (who had an English mother, apparently), and is about the only character he ever feels nervous around. Awww, somebody’s twitterpated.

In England, the Spanish raise a big stink about Thorpe’s actions, and they’re aided by Lord Wolfingham, who’s basically Elizabethan Neville Chamberlain with a dose of actual seditious treason thrown in. Elizabeth (Flora Robson) chides Thorpe about his antics, but shares a lot of sentiment about being wary of the Spanish. Thorpe wants to raise a fleet to counter Phillip II’s armada and he proposes to lead a daring raid on Spanish New World territory to “divert” funds to England. She gives him the go-ahead but with the understanding that “if you get caught, its not my problem.”

Well, Thorpe DOES get caught. The raid is a disaster and most of his men are killed. He’s is caught and sentenced to the galley by the Inquisition. This causes all kinds of headaches back in England, as Elizabeth cracks down on her privateers to appease the Spanish, Wolfingham schemes behind her back, and Doña Maria pines for Captain Thorpe.

The Sights
Like Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk is black & white. However, the movie (at least the DVD I watched) did something different. When the action shifts to the New World, it takes on a sepia tone. Then when they get back to Europe, B&W again. Its an interesting little touch. Apparently the film reused most of the sets of another Elizabethan movie that was shot before it (Essex and Elizabeth, also starring Errol Flynn). The sets are quite lavish, particularly the queen’s palace, as are the costumes.

Interestingly, the movie leads off with its big set piece. The naval battle between two ships is taken care of in the first twenty minutes and then there’s a lot of politics and dialogue for most of the movie. Still, that opening fight is really impressive, compounded by the fact that they really shot it in a giant tank on the Warner back lot with two life-sized ships operated by hydraulics. That is friggin’ awesome! Its also great because you can have guys splashing into the water and continuing to swim as they fight. There’s even a sailor who gets “killed” by a grappling hook tossed at him. That doesn’t really add anything thematically or symbolically. I just thought it looked cool and different enough from other pirate movies to make a note of it.

Now there are more action sequences in the film, of course. Thorpe’s escape and capture of the Spanish galley he’s on is the penultimate one that shows him being a clever leader. Then he high-tails it back to England to warn the Queen that the Armada will attack. Of course that would be too easy, so Thorpe needs to sneak back into the palace, where he has a final showdown with the film’s real villain, Wolfingham (Henry Daniell). Wolfingham’s actor was not a fencer (like Rathbone was in Robin Hood) so most of his work was done by a double. Its still a very satisfying duel, and gets some lovely backlighting by candles at moments (Did I just say lovely backlighting in reference to a fight to the death? I need to get out more.)

The Cast
As in Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood, Flynn is at his Flynniest as a dashing swashbuckler. Its no different here. He’s great fun to watch and has a lot of energy. Brenda Marshall’s love interest does an acceptable job, but she doesn’t do a whole lot except fall in love with Thorpe, question the virtue/goodness of her native Spain, and look pretty. Claude Raines’ Don Alvarez is diminished a bit after Wolfingham rises in villainy, but he gains assorted character touches. He’s very tender and loving of his niece, polite, well-educated, reasonable, and open to discussion. He doesn’t seem to be too privy to Spain’s big war plans and by the end of the movie, he’s goes from evil to neutral on the morality scale. Considering that was mostly through Raines’ body language and dialogue, I’d say its pretty impressive.

Most impressive though is Flora Robson’s turn as Elizabeth. She steals every scene she’s in with a mixture of fiery imperiousness and coy playfulness. It really is great fun to watch, and she gives the character a lot of layers. Her final speech at the end of the movie, rousing the British to muster for war and defend freedom is a really good one, and probably sold a lot of War Bonds.

Perhaps the only real weak link in the cast is Wolfingham. I don’t think that Daniell is particularly bad, its just that Wolfingham is a fairly uninteresting character. He wants the crown of England for himself and is willing to sell out to the Spanish for it. Okay, that’s a pretty vile thing to do, but he does it without being pompously evil like Basil Rathbone was in Robin Hood or greedily evil like Lionel Atwill in Captain Blood (and neither of those characters was particularly deep either). Here its like “Hi, I’m Wolfingham. I’ll be your villain tonight. If you’ll just have a seat I’ll bring out a fight scene for you shortly.”

The Script
Screenplay by Howard Koch and Seton I. Miller. Technically this is a remake of a 1924 film that was based on a Rafael Sabatini novel (like most golden age swasbuckler films). Except the only thing it keeps from the previous version is the name and that its about pirates.

I suppose where points would be negated is from how history is (as usual) cherry-picked and sidelined for various reasons. Here, its for war propaganda. Early on, its clearly obvious that the aggressive, expansionist Spanish are meant to represent Nazi Germany. Obvious historical differences aside, it does have some curious results. History is, of course, much more complicated than casual observers would like it to be, and the historical Armada campaign was not exactly “England=Benevolent, Spain=Bigot,” let alone “England=Good, Spain=Bad.” There really isn’t enough room to go into examples here, so one will have to suffice: Spain wasn’t the only kingdom to have galley slaves. Everybody had them. If you had a galley, you needed galley slaves (though professionally hired rowers also existed, I believe). Spain had them, England had them, the Ottoman Empire had them, the Knights of Malta had them.

So why am I deducting points for the standard drubbing that history gets through adaptation? Its because of how blatant it is. 1940 and all that, and the movie is very entertaining, but it is positively shameless in its propaganda. Which I suppose adds some charm to it and roots it firmly in that time before America entered WWII, but still, the Medieval/Renaissance historian in me just sighs sadly.

The Sounds
Erich! Wolfgang! Korngold!

I should elaborate, I suppose. The opening fanfare for The Sea Hawk blew my hair back and when I saw Korngold’s name during the credits, the note I immediately made was “This is gonna be good.” And oh how right I was. The score is absolutely incredible for this movie. The bombastic cues are epic in scope, but the calmer parts are just as wonderfully rendered, bringing a rich variety of melodies and themes to play. The main theme stuck with me for a while after the end, which is as fine a compliment I can give a film score as any. I think that perhaps his score for this is better than the one he wrote for Robin Hood, and I LOVE the music in Robin Hood.

The Verdict
Watch The Sea Hawk if you get a chance. Come for the opening ship battle, stay for the soundtrack! Good performances, great action and an absolutely incredible score make for one rousing bit of piratey fun, even if its Queen Elizabeth is more like Winston Churchill (symbolically!) than, uh, hmm…

I really wish I hadn’t just pictured Churchill in a frilly collar and red wig.

Trailer over here:
http://youtu.be/6_XIJm0_Wgc

“Quickly! Into the air, zombie bird man!”

2011-10-31T18:08:00.000-05:00

And at last its time to close out October the same way it was begun. With Boris Karloff. In 1967, the good folks at Rankin/Bass released into theaters a feature-length monster movie done in the same animation style as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Except instead of annually overplayed Christmas joy, it was a swingin’ celebration of misanthropic movie monster madness. Its Mad Monster Party?

Story
Its simple really. Dr. Baron von Frankenstein is getting on in years and wants to retire from the whole “Mad Science” business. So he decides to throw a party for all of his friends/relatives at which he will name his successor. Among the invitees is an unassuming pharmacy clerk who’s a long-lost nephew, and the intended heir. The monsters involved then try to scheme and backstab their way into getting this guy out of the way.

Characters
Baron Boris von Frankenstein: Boris Karloff! Dr. Frankenstein lives on a Bond Villain’s island and has developed what is essentially anti-matter that can blow up ANY matter it touches. So yeah, that whole “law of conservation of mass” thing? Irrelevant now. And he’s actually one of the nicer characters. The model he voices looks a little like his Frankenstein’s Monster around the forehead.

Felix Flankin: Allen Swift voices Frankenstein’s nebbish nephew who works in a pharmacy and has a catastrophic case of allergies. Nearsighted and generally oblivious to the nature of the monsters.

Francesca: Gale Garnett voices the Doctor’s mind-bogglingly proportioned (essentially Christina Hendricks) assistant with a sultry voice. She wants to inherit Frankenstein’s fortune, and can scheme with the best of them.

The Monster/“Fang”: He’s mute and strong, and a henpecked husband.

The Monster’s Mate: Phyllis Diller voices the Monster’s bride if instead of a bird-like, screaming woman, it was Phyllis Diller and the two settled down.

Dracula: Allen Swift (Allen Swift pretty much voices everybody else in the movie, so I’ll leave it off to save time) voices Dracula…oddly. I can’t quite place the accent, but its not Bela Lugosi-like. The design kind of makes me think of Sid Caesar, which…is random.

The Invisible Man: The Invisible Man walks around in a smoking jacket and fez and speaks like Sydney Greenstreet.

Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde: Pretty much your standard Jekyll/Hyde thing, except he sure loves drinking his transformative serum out of the flask hidden in his cane.

The Mummy: Mummy’s got some sweet dance moves.

The Werewolf: He howls a lot and likes stowing aboard ships to not have to pay.

The Creature: The Gill-Man, basically. He garbles and gurgles a lot.

Quasimodo: Also mute, he and the Mummy become roomies for a while. I’d pay to see more of that. One’s a mummy, the other’s a hunchback. They fight crime.

Yetch: He’s basically a zombie version of Peter Lorre, which…is a bit odd, since he’s not playing a Lorre character. Anyway, Yetch is Frankenstein’s butler/steward/whipping boy who’s madly in love with Francesca and his limbs tend to fall off a lot.

“It”: Not referred to by his real name because of copyright reasons, “It” is the one guest Frankenstein didn’t want to invite because he always made a mess of things. A giant, hairy, ape-like mess who likes girls and tall buildings.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Jules Bass, it’s the same “Animagic” style that marks other Rankin/Bass productions. However, it’s a refreshing difference from the Christmas ones, and the art department gets to go wild with crazy designs. A lot of the designs were based on the Mad Magazine artist Jack Davis. There’s a lot of physical comedy and there’s a hell of a lot of intricate and detailed work for the sets, and the movie delivers a few things I’ve never seen before, like a squadron of zombies flying biplanes.

Writing
Written by Arthur Rankin Jr., Len Korobkin, Harvey Kurtzman, and maybe Forrest J Ackerman, though there’s varying stuff I’ve read about Forry actually being involved or not. The script really, really, really feels a lot like an issue of Mad Magazine, which makes sense because Kurtzman founded it. Be ready for a lot of puns, a lot of physical comedy, and a lot of saucy that slips in under the radar.

What, me worry?

Sound
Original music by Maury Laws. The extremely James Bond-esque title song is by Ethel Ennis, with a few songs by Phyllis Diller and Gale Garnett dashed in for good measure. The soundtrack is actually quite amazing, with the swingin’ jazz combo sound working surprisingly well for a group of monsters that date back to the turn of the century. The songs aren’t quite as memorable as the Christmas special ones, but they’re not bad by any means.

Conclusion
Mad Monster Party? is actually quite awesome and I was pleasantly surprised by it. Yes a lot of the jokes fall flat and Felix’s character is not a particularly bright or likable protagonist, but the movie oozes style, features good-natured camp, throws in pretty much every major monster, and has ZOMBIES FLYING BIPLANES. If you don’t think that’s awesome, then you have murdered your inner child and there’s no hope for you. Totally recommended.

Mummy's got a theme song, yo.

“My mission, to which I am fully dedicated, is to fight against evil.”

2011-10-28T19:16:00.000-05:00

Its my understanding that they filmed the Aztec Mummy trilogy back to back, sort of like Lord of the Rings, only…not. La maldición de la momia azteca AKA Curse of the Aztec Mummy, also from 1957, was the middle film and…it is every bit as crazy as The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy.

Story
So Dr. Krupp is being interrogated by the police after being caught and outed as the criminal mastermind The Bat. Except Krupp denies everything and his henchmen develop the clever plan of sending a note to Krupp and the police with a bat picture on it, which raises doubt that the scientist actually is the Bat. That doubt doesn’t last long because Krupp’s goons continue to take the initiative and bust him out of the bus taking him to jail, despite the interventions of a masked Luchador named the Angel.

Wait, what?

Yes, the movie throws in a mysterious caped Luchador who seems to drive a Morgan convertible. Right, so, Krupp and his gang get away and after a lengthy flashback of what Krupp knows of the previous movie’s plot, Krupp decides that the lost Aztec treasure the heroes found would perfectly pay for his mad science experiments. So he kidnaps Flor and hypnotizes her, then we get a cycle of Dr. Almada & the Angel getting caught and escaping and caught again. Then they finally DO find the Aztec treasure again and at the very end of the movie, the Aztec Mummy shows up to claim what’s his.

Characters
Dr. Eduardo Almada: Ramón Gay is still our hero and despite everything that happened in the last movie, he thinks the Curse of Popoca will no longer have anything to do with his family. Boy is he wrong. Most of the movie has him working in opposition to Dr. Krupp, who’s kidnapped his woman.

Flor Sepúlveda/Xochitl: Rosita Arenas spends most of the movie kidnapped by Dr. Krupp and kept in a drugged-up state to make her mind susceptive to hypnosis, so she can tell him where the Aztec treasure was buried…even though he himself has been to the same Aztec pyramid as everybody else and…never mind, Mad Science. She’s the only one who really suspects that Popoca isn’t done yet.

Pinacate: Crox Alvarado continues to be the comic relief guy, gets beat up a few more times, and then is largely absent from the movie. Hmm…

Pepe Almada: Jaime Quiñones actually has a larger part in this movie, as he becomes an unofficial sidekick for the Angel, calling him on his wrist phone to alert the hero of danger and eventually rescuing the luchador from a deathtrap.

Dr. Krupp/The Bat: Luis Aceves Castañeda really starts to ham things up. No longer required to pretend to be a sane scientist, he goes into full Mad Science mode, devising bizarre schemes, trying to throw luchadors into snakepits, and determined to get that Aztec treasure. Not because he wants it for himself, oh no. In true Mad Scientist fashion, he only sees the priceless relics as a means to an end: the financing of his experiments so that he may (somehow) achieve immortality! He’s actually great in this.

Tierno: Arturo Martínez continues to be Krupp’s go-to henchman (and will stick around for the third movie). He’s the one who basically organizes his boss’ prison break. Good henchmen like that are hard to find.

Popoca: Ángel Di Stefani is barely in this movie (unless you count flashbacks). For most of the movie, nobody has the Aztec treasure, so Popoca doesn’t have anything to do. He’s guarding it and there’s no problems for him. The only reason he gets involved at all in this movie is because the breastplate and bracelet were stolen, so he busts some heads at the end of the movie, throws Krupp into the snakepit, and leaves with the treasure to go guard it again. Popoca is very dedicated to his job.

El Ángel: While you would think the addition of a masked wrestler would lead to a climactic showdown between a Luchador and Mummy, you’d be wrong. The Angel is a friend of justice, and has a mutual enemy in Dr. Krupp. The Angel is also not particularly good at his job of actually stopping crime. He’s persistent, I’ll give him that, and certainly hard to kill, but he doesn’t really succeed at stopping our villain at anything. He’s more like a big-talking speed bump of justice than an actual deterrent to crime. He’s also secretly one of the characters above. And its not Popoca (though that would be sweet).

Visuals/Effects
Rafael Portillo still directing, and the movie is probably the one with the most action and movement of the trilogy, even if it is mostly backtracking. There’s plenty of action sequences featuring the Angel, which is a plus. The Aztec ceremony from the first movie is flashed back to in pretty much its entirety.

Ah, and I should mention that when Krupp’s goons spring him from the police, Krupp picks up a Tommy Gun and shakes it around like he’s firing it and you hear stock audio of machine gun fire with absolutely no muzzle flash or actual recoil. Cheese at its finest!

Writing
Story still by Guillermo Calderon & Alfredo Salazar, and, well, it’s a mummy movie with a luchador. It is much less serious than the first movie yet still more coherent than the third movie. Basically its cheese with pulp-novel sensibilities.

Sound
Antonio Díaz Conde still did the music and its pretty much the same story. A lot of standard B-movie cues with a lot of shrill sounds thrown in. That Aztec ceremony is a real pain for the ears to sit through.

Conclusion
Curse of the Aztec Mummy might actually be the best of the trilogy because of the good ratio of on-screen craziness to recycled footage from previous installments. I wouldn’t call it a good movie (nor would that apply to the series as a whole) but for Mexican cheese (I guess queso would be more accurate) its very entertaining. The only real complaint is that Popoca has maybe less than five minutes of actual screen time, which is a shame.

No trailer for this one, so here's the overly-long flashback to Aztec times, complete with human sacrifice accompanied by ear-piercing music! If I had to hear it, you should to!

“How far can the human mind fathom the mysteries of the hereafter?”

2011-10-27T16:49:00.000-05:00

Now this is something I’m disproportionately excited about. Way back here, I watched The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy, which turned out to be part three in a Mexican Mummy Trilogy. Well, a few months back at Half-Price Books, I found “The Aztec Mummy Collection” which collects the entire trilogy in one surprisingly respectful boxed set. No way in hell I would pass that up for five bucks.

So off we go, where the magic began, with 1957’s La momia azteca AKA The Aztec Mummy AKA Attack of the Aztec Mummy. I should not nearly be this excited.

Story
So we have a scientist who’s got a lot of weird ideas about how hypnotic suggestion can get people to regress and remember past lives. He gives a lecture on this before an august congress of scientists in Mexico City and when he says this is all theoretical right now because nobody wants to volunteer to try it, he is essentially laughed out of the conference. I should note that the congress was perfectly fine with therapeutic hypnosis to help patients, just not this kooky brand our hero suggests.

Where a villain would “get a volunteer” our hero bucks the trend by actually getting a willing volunteer: his loving fiancée. She gets hypnotized and the scientist learns that she was once an Aztec princess who was slated to be a sacrifice to the gods, but fell in love with a mighty warrior, got caught, and both of the them were punished by being sacrificed, so…that was kind of the plan from the start, right? Anyway, the memories of her death are traumatic and almost kill her, but the heroes do learn the location of the sacred Aztec treasure that was buried with the Aztec princess. So they do what any science-minded heroes would do: Grave Robbing!

Well, tomb raiding turns out to have negative consequences, because it awakens the mummy of the Aztec warrior cursed to protect the artifacts for all time. Then the mummy realizes the woman is his lost love reincarnated.

And there’s a subplot of a criminal mastermind organizing a crime spree and then he gets interested in all this stuff, but oddly enough, its actually pretty unimportant to the main plot.

Characters
Dr. Eduardo Almada: Ramón Gay is our scientist hero. He’s got a crazy idea, experiments on his loved ones, robs graves of sacred artifacts, and somehow, someway, he’s actually not a villain. He also doesn’t believe in curses, which bites him in the ass.

Flor Sepúlveda/Xochitl: Rosita Arenas is our female lead. A supportive fiancée for her Eduardo, after her ordeal with hypnosis she gets very worried about the curse of the mummy coming down on them for stealing ancient Aztec treasure.

Pinacate: Crox Alvarado plays the comic relief. A friend/assistant/sidekick to Dr. Almada, he’s a big ol’ fussy coward with Clark Kent glasses. That’s pretty much it.

Dr. Sepúlveda: Jorge Mondragón plays Flor’s father, another scientist and a close friend of Dr. Almada’s.

Pepe Almada: Jaime Quiñones plays Eduardo’s adolescent brother. He likes tagging along for adventures, though doesn’t really bring much to the table.

Dr. Krupp/The Bat: Luis Aceves Castañeda is our villain. At first he seems to be just another respected scientist skeptical of Dr. Almada’s theories, but it turns out he’s the mysterious Bat who is terrorizing the city. He doesn’t really do much in this movie though.

Tierno: Arturo Martínez plays the Bat’s right hand henchman. While the goons might not be particularly smart at much, they are fiercely loyal to their boss, and he seems to treat them well in return.

Popoca: Ángel Di Stefani is our mummy, though Popoca in his full splendor is only at the end of the movie. In life, he had a giant hat, in death, an adequate but not great costume. Popoca doesn’t like lights shining in his eyes (though to be fair, who does?) and doesn’t like dynamite much either.

The Bat knows the value of wearing a fedora at a rakish angle

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Rafael Portillo, the movie is…well, a low budget Mexican 50’s monster movie. The mummy isn’t around very much, there’s a lot of talking, and a fair amount of stock footage. So like a lot of stuff from contemporary America, just in Spanish. Unlike the sequels this doesn’t have any long flashback sequences, so that’s a plus. Unfortunately, the Aztec ceremony that gets flashed back to in the sequels is much longer and more annoying in this one. Seriously, that’s a long, annoying stretch of film to sit through.

Writing
Story by Guillermo Calderon & Alfredo Salazar, adaptation by Alfredo Salazar. First thing to notice is that the Popoca storyline borrows HEAVILY from the Universal Mummy movies. Mummy cursed with undeath because he messed with private stock? Then when he gets reanimated, he learns that his lost love is reincarnated? Yep, seen that before. The subplot with the Bat is new, though reminiscent of movie serials.

Still, the movie does take the novel step of using an Aztec mummy instead of an Egyptian-style one.

Sound
Original music by Antonio Díaz Conde. Most of the time its standard 50’s monster movie fare, but when they do the Aztec ceremony flashback, man it gets annoyingly shrill. Actually, it tends to get shrill more often than is required.

Conclusion
So I’ve finally seen La momia azteca and it is everything I expected it to be: a low budget monster movie. There’s lots of cheese, lots of bizarre conversations that try to sound pseudo-scientific, and there’s an Aztec Mummy. It definitely has an Aztec Mummy.

“A superior intelligence has come from Venus in MY satellite, established residency, turned off the world’s power, and is about to take over the world’s population.”

2011-10-26T14:47:00.000-05:00

Roger Corman. Oh dear. Well, this 1956 alien invasion movie features two very well-known actors contending with a monster from another world, only on Corman’s infamous shoestring budget. It Conquered The World in only 71 minutes. 71 very long minutes.

Story
In the rural hill town of Beechwood, there’s a space research station that is preparing to launch the first man-made satellite into orbit. The lead scientist’s best friend, another scientist, tries to stop the launch with dire warnings of the potential of alien intervention keeping mankind from entering space. They go ahead with the launch anyway, and some time later, the satellite disappears mysteriously (having been transported to Venus) and returns to Earth orbit much, much quicker than a round trip like that would take. The rocket then crashes to Earth and the Venusian passenger within starts deploying bat-things to take over the minds of assorted important people to begin conquering the world. He’s aided in this (over the radio) by the hero’s best friend, leading to an ideological, as well as physical confrontation.

Characters
Dr. Paul Nelson: Peter Graves is our standard-issue science hero. A man of ambition and exploration, he also values human independence and free will, and really hates the idea of something that would or could limit human freedom. Despite the movie’s massive downer ending, he gets a surprisingly good speech about the need for mankind to feel emotions.

Dr. Tom Anderson: Lee Van Cleef is Dr. Nelson’s best friend and someone who’s been laughed out of most scientific circles for his crazy ideas. Well he’s had it with your primitive Earth bullying! He’s got a friend that he talks to on the radio who lives on Venus and who’s coming to Earth to solve all the problems that human emotions cause. Figures that would be when the crackpot is actually right. Regardless, he gives a pretty good performance, all things considered.

Joan Nelson: Sally Fraser plays our hero’s wife, a supportive and kind woman who eventually gets her mind taken over by the alien. Paul doesn’t like that one bit.

Claire Anderson: Beverly Garland plays Tom’s wife and is the real female lead since she gets probably the meatiest performance out of the film. She’s torn between love for her husband and hatred for his part in the invasion when she finds out about it. She ultimately decides to go and confront the alien herself, even giving it a fiery little speech about it.

Brigadier General James Pattick: Russ Bender (a Corman film regular) plays a general who gets taken over by aliens fairly early. He then sends a unit of soldiers out on a patrol to keep them away from the lab.

The Venusian: One of only 9 living Venusians, he comes to Earth hoping to conquer it for his people. I think a picture would best describe the creature, so here you go:

That is the "It" what "conquered the world." There’s stories circulating that the effects guys made him squat because he came from a high-gravity planet, but when Beverly Garland laughed at it and kicked it over, Corman told them to make it bigger.

Visuals/Effects
Roger Corman, the B-Movie King, directed this, and there’s a certain “style” to Corman’s films. The films were all shot really fast on low budgets and used a lot of padding. What kind of padding? Well, there’s a fair amount of stock footage and then even more shots of people (usually Peter Graves) going from one place to another; either walking, driving, or even bicycling. Naturally, that kind of stuff bogs the pacing down something fierce, and the movie really slouched along until we get to a pretty big climax (by Corman standards) that ends with a rather hefty body count.

As for the effects, well, you’ve seen the Venusian. The alien also shoots out probes that attach to the back of the neck and take over the mind. They look like rubber bats on string.

Writing
Lou Rusoff & an uncredited Charles B. Griffith, the story is actually kind of interesting. A crafty alien lands on earth, shuts down pretty much all power supplies (even wristwatches and water hoses somehow), and starts picking off authority figures so he can use them to keep the rest of the people in line. Add to it a fairly thorough anti-Communist subtext (invaders make everyone equal by brainwashing them sort of thing) and you have some interesting Cold War era sci-fi ruminations. Just not quite interesting enough to pad out 71 minutes, so we get lots of walking scenes.

Sound
Original music by Ronald Stein, the score is your standard issue 50’s B movie soundtrack with “spacey” sounds and punctuations of fanfares.

Conclusion
Shabby alien aside, It Conquered The World is actually a pretty dark film for 1956. By the end of it, Dr. Paul Nelson is pretty much the only named character still standing. That’s dark. There’s apparently no way to undo the mind control. That’s dark. I don’t want to give the impression that the movie is good, because its not. It is a cheesy, low-budget 50’s sci-fi flick that’s really boring except for the scenes with Graves, Van Cleef, and Garland, and the finale brings everything together for a brutal and grim ending. It’s an interesting film, and pretty good for a Corman film.

“Do the dead leave the living in peace?”

2011-10-25T15:44:00.000-05:00

Thought I was done with mummies, did you? Well you’re wrong! Vampires and Zombies are horribly overplayed and Werewolves are kind of close, so you know what monster I’ve decided to champion? The humble Mummy. So get ready world, as I force feed you mummies until you think you’re Ramesses the Great.

But why stop at mere mummies? How about GHOST Mummies! And with an added dose of FRENCH GHOST MUMMIES! Which is kind of the premise of 2001’s Belphégor - Le fantôme du Louvre (AKA Belphegor: The Phantom of the Louvre). Sadly, I don't think there's any way the movie can live up to the mental image of French Ghost Mummies I have in my mind now.

Plot
In 1935, a French archeologist found a strange mummy in Egypt that zaps him with some kind of energy. He seems unharmed by it, except for the nightmares and sleepwalking and ships the mummy back to Paris, but on the voyage, something drives him and the ship’s crew to madness and suicide.

Cut to the modern day as the mummy’s sarcophagus is found in a back room at the Louvre. This raises a lot of questions. Why was he lost in storage for so long? Why was his name scratched off of everything? Who is he? Why is he extra ugly? Who poisoned him and bashed him over the head to make sure he was good and dead?

After an MRI scan lets his ghost loose, the mummy starts shorting out the museum’s electrical grid, which is inconvenient as they’re doing some remodeling, which borders an apartment building where our protagonist lives. She gets possessed by the mummy’s ghost and starts blacking out at night and a mysterious robed figure stalks the Louvre, which leads to the deaths of several security guards on the night shift. Hmmm…

Characters
Lisa: Sophie Marceau is our main character. She runs a perfume shop (that gets seen once to establish that she runs a perfume shop and the lease is going up) and has a grandmother who raised her after her parents died. After the power in the city block starts fluctuating, she meets a young electrician and her grandma tries to hook the two up, then gran dies and Lisa goes a little “manic pixie dream girl” and sneaks into the Louvre at night (because the construction knocked a convenient hole in the wall of her apartment) and gets possessed by the ghost mummy and starts acting all neurotic and switching between normal and possessed modes.

Martin: Frédéric Diefenthal plays the amiable electrician who gets called in a couple times to fix the power in Lisa’s building. There’s attraction there, and he tries to cheer her up after grandma’s death, but after getting a little closer to her, she starts acting all weird and crazy and tossing him through the relationship wringer. He ends up being steadfast enough to see the movie through, but he sure falls for a girl with a lot of baggage. He also plays guitar in a band because of course he does.

Inspector Verlac: Michel Serrault plays a veteran security guard who used to work in the Louvre during the 60’s and encountered the being haunting the place back then. Now he returns, though the museum director is reluctant to bring him back in.

Glenda Spencer: Julie Christie plays an English archeologist called in to examine the mummy and is trying to figure out the corpse’s identity. Eventually she and Inspector Verlac get a nice flirty dynamic going.

Belphégor: Our mummy du jour is both a desiccated, dried out corpse incapable of locomotion (just like a real mummy) and a CGI glowing orange ghost without a lower body that can fly around and bare his skull for the audience. Its worth noting that for most of the movie, only the viewer can see the ghost and the characters cannot. “Belphégor” is not his real name (Belphegor is a name in demonology that also inspired an Austrian metal band of the same name) and the spirit is very upset that his name has been forgotten and wiped away. So upset that he’s possessed a woman, gotten her into a fancy robed costume and has her going around the Louvre at night grabbing artifacts for a ritual and terrifying the guards. There’s also a scene where Lisa and Martin are getting it on before Belphégor intervenes and starts choking Martin. That mummy is into some kinky stuff.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Jean-Paul Salomé, the movie has two memorable visual things going for it. The first is the CGI ghost of the mummy which spends most of the movie invisible to anyone except the audience. There are times when Belphégor fights those who would stop it, and these induce hallucinations in the victim of whatever it is they fear the most (usually ending in a violent suicide). The effects during these scenes are kind of hit or miss, but they’re brief enough that it doesn’t matter much.

The second is the very, very nice cinematography that makes the Louvre look absolutely gorgeous. If nothing else, this movie serves as a fine bit of cinematographic publicity for one of the most famous museums in the world.

Writing
Based on the 1927 horror novel “Belphégor” by Arthur Bernède (which was quite a popular book in France; spawning a movie serial, a 60s TV show, comic strip and other stuff). From what I gather, the adaptation by Jean-Paul Salomé, Danièle Thompson, and Jérôme Tonnerre took liberties with the original in order to make it more supernatural. As it stands, the characters are somewhat archetypal, especially Lisa and Martin. The side characters fare a little better, with Verlac & Spencer as well as some of the security guards getting some nice moments here and there.

Sound
Original music by Bruno Coulais. Its quite good and a bit similar to his score for Coraline, in that it throws in a lot of exotic sounds and cues mixed with electronic beats for an otherworldly atmosphere. In this case, said atmosphere is Egyptian infused. I dig it.

Conclusion
In the end Belphégor - Le fantôme du Louvre is more of a straight-up urban fantasy tale than a horror movie, and its more of a ghost story than a mummy movie, but it is an interesting little curio all the same. I wouldn’t call it particularly great or enthralling, but the cinematography is actually very well done and tells its story competently enough. Not sure I’d watch it again, but the experience itself was painless.

Yes, its a German trailer for a French film.

“Greetings my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.”

2011-10-24T13:25:00.000-05:00

Two years ago I reviewed Ed Wood, a well-made, heartwarming movie about a bad filmmaker and his dreams of movie glory. Well, its time to let Edward D. Wood Jr.’s magnum opus speak for itself. In 1959 he gifted Plan 9 From Outer Space to the world, and the world hasn’t stopped laughing.

Plot
We open with CRISWELL PREDICTS, where Criswell, the Nostradamus of the 20th Century, babbles some vague and redundant sentences before mentioning grave robbers from outer space. Then we get into the credits and the real plot. After burying his wife, a grieving old man is killed off-screen by a car. An pilot landing at Burbank Airport sees a flying saucer out of his window. The aliens land and proceed to raise the old man and his wife from their graves with SPACE SCIENCE and the undead start killing people in a cemetery, including a cop investigating it (and then reanimating him). The military fires ineffectually on some flying saucers. Things begin to escalate between the humans and aliens and the aliens decide to destroy humanity before its destructive potential can start blowing up a sun and causing universal catastrophe. If you think that plot sounds somewhat reasonable, then congratulations, you haven’t seen Plan 9 before.

Characters
Jeff Trent: Gregory Walcott as our square-jawed pilot. He’s the closest thing to a protagonist everyman, I suppose. He lives right next to the cemetery where the aliens have set up base, which must’ve been some cheap real estate.

Paula Trent: Mona McKinnon is Jeff’s wife and loyal and supporting of him. She gets chased around by some of the monsters. She’s also got one hell of a sentence featuring the word “there.”

Ghoul Man: Bela Lugosi, and yes, that’s his credit in this, his last film. Infamously, Wood shot some footage of Lugosi early in the production (as a grieving old man and then in his Dracula costume) and then Lugosi (an old man who developed a heroin addiction later in life) passed away. More infamously, Wood used his chiropractor as a replacement body double who covered his face with a cape but couldn’t cover the fact that his hair was different and he was several inches taller.

The sad demise of Bela Lugosi notwithstanding, the “Ghoul Man” breaks into Paula’s house in the dead of day-for-night and chases her out of her house but then is used as the “expendable” undead. The aliens have him confront the humans and then cut off the ray powering him, reducing him to a skeleton. I’m assuming because even Ed Wood knew he couldn’t keep that up for a whole movie. On the plus side, you can’t really knock Bela’s performance because what little there is of him isn’t bad. Its just badly cut into the movie.

Inspector Daniel Clay: Wrestler Tor Johnson, a staple of several terrible movies from the time period (including several of Wood’s). This movie displays why he normally played silent brutes, because Inspector Clay has a near-impenetrable accent while alive. He does, however, come across as an affable guy, just not one cut out for acting.

Vampire Girl: TV hostess Vampira (Maila Nurmi) plays the deceased wife of the Ghoul Man. She also looks a good thirty years younger than her “husband” so go, Bela, go! Anyway, she just wanders around with her wasp waist and her arms outstretched. Her claim to fame was being a California TV personality that played a vampire-type and showed old movies. A Proto-Elvira, if you will. (So much so that she eventually sued Elvira for cribbing her act).

Lieutenant Harper: Duke Moore plays the cop in charge of the investigation after Clay’s death. He’s got famously bad trigger discipline, using his gun to point at everything, which he apparently did to see if Wood noticed or cared. Wood did not and those shots stayed in the film.

Colonel Edwards: Tom Keene plays a military man who gets sent by the Pentagon to investigate things at the cemetery because he’s had experience in shooting at the aliens earlier in the movie.

Eros: Dudley Manlove is the leader of the alien expedition to Earth. Plan 9, which deals with the resurrection of the dead, is his idea of conquering Earth. He manages to raise three corpses from the grave. Corpses that can’t really tell friend from foe without direct control via electro guns. Plan 9 is not a good plan. Worse, when the humans finally confront him about what’s been going on, he explains that since humanity, even as backward and stupid as it is, is close to discovering Solarnite, a means through which they can explode sunlight itself and destroy the galaxy. Or something. He explains this in the most condescending way possible, so its hard to actually feel bad for him when he gets socked in the jaw.

Tanna: Joanna Lee plays Eros’ much more level-headed (and cuter) sidekick. She’s also less into the plan to wipe out humanity with an army of zombies.

Ruler: John “Bunny” Breckinridge plays the ruler of the aliens. Eros shows off Tor to him as a proof-of-concept for Plan 9 and then Tor almost strangles Eros when the control mechanism malfunctions. Despite this, the Ruler approves of Plan 9. These are really dumb aliens.

Criswell: Criswell himself provides narration for the film, and, well, has the best delivery actually. He spouts nothing but nonsense, but he says it with such conviction that even when he reads “Future events such as these will affect you in the future” from a cue card, you kind of accept the purple prose and his weird haircut.

Visuals/Effects
Edward D. Wood Jr. directed it, and it shows. Wood famously didn’t like re-shooting scenes, so the movie is rife with continuity gaffs and things that would be considered bloopers in other movies (like Tor struggling to get out of his grave). Day-for-night is not just used, but abused, as is stock footage. The flying saucers not only wobble but the strings are clearly visible. Wood also edited the movie, so that’s bad too, the worst examples being soudstage shots set at night intercut with “night” shots shot on location. It would be an unsafe idea to take a drink every time there’s an editing error, which means I’m sure there are already several out there on the internet.

Writing
Edward D. Wood Jr. on script duty as well, and it shows. The bare plot (aliens come to Earth and raise zombies to preemptively conquer Earth before it becomes a cosmic problem) is not horrible in itself. But then the plot gets mangled anyway. The sequence of events that actually takes place is more than a bit incomprehensible. For example, the aliens enact Plan 9 in retaliation for being shot at by the army, but before THAT happens, they’ve already reanimated two corpses. Eros is possibly the worst diplomat ever. The dialog itself is also worth noting, because it is sublimely awful. From Criswell’s ramblings to Paula’s repetitious use of “there” in one sentence to Eros’ speeches, the dialog is both tremendously awful and bloody hilarious to the point of quotability.

Sound
There is no actual credit I was able to find for a single composer, so I’m going to go ahead and assume that Wood used a library of stock music, which sounds like something he’d do. The music is actually kind of nice and full of energy and verve and completely fails to match whatever scene it is accompanying on the screen.

Conclusion
There’s a reason why Ed Wood’s name has lived on as the king of the worst movie makers. There are actual movies that are quite a bit worse, but Plan 9 from Outer Space is different in that everything is awful. Bad shooting, bad editing, bad dialog, bad writing, bad props, bad sets, bad soundstages, bad (use of) music, bad effects. There’s just a uniform layer of enthusiastic awfulness that permeates the entire movie. And that right there is the Ed Wood Mark of Quality.

This is a very, very, very, very bad movie, but required viewing for fans of bad movies because it has everything you could want in a failure of a movie.

“This is the stupidest damn thing I’ve heard of yet! Eight guys are dead from balling and you don’t even know what’s caused it!”

2011-10-21T14:17:00.000-05:00

How does one follow up the Nightmare On Elm Street series? Well, if you’re like me, you jump to a completely random and irrelevant time period. Like the 70s. I am now convinced the 1970s were a time of tremendous amounts of drugs and insanity, because that’s the only explanation for some of the crazy stuff I’ve seen come from that decade. Today’s case in point is 1973’s Invasion Of The Bee Girls, which is essentially softcore science fiction.

And there goes my integrity.

Story
Oh boy, let’s try and figure this out. In a town in California, a noted scientist working for the State Department dies under mysterious circumstances, the government sends agent Neil Agar (William Smith, who played Conan’s ill-fated dad in the ‘82 Conan the Barbarian, not the Fresh Prince) to investigate.

Big surprise, there’s Mad SCIENCE afoot, this time in the shapely guise of Dr. Susan Harris (played by former Price is Right model Anitra Ford). She’s an entomologist (studies bugs, not word origins) who through some process (which involves nudity, bees and goo) has been able to splice insect genetic...whatever with human females. The process doesn’t change them physically except for turning their eyes black and supposedly compound (except when they’re not), leading to the transformed women to wear sunglassses at almost all times.

These “bee girls” are driven by an insatiable desire to mate with doughy, middle-aged, unattractive scientists (and random other men) and they start dying of an “epidemic” of fatal heart attacks brought about through “sexual exhaustion.”

So Agar has to find a way to stop this murderous bout of nymphomania before the whole town is destroyed. Or something. Anyway, he also teams up with the laboratory’s head librarian Julie Zorn (Victoria Vetri, who as “Angela Dorian” was Playmate of the Year in 1968).

Yeah. Not a lick of it makes sense, but, hey, boobs!

Visuals/Effects
It was directed by Denis Sanders, and it seems like the movie’s budget was spent on boobs. It sure as hell wasn’t spent on lighting or audio equipment (though both might be the fault of the bad print I watched). There is one laboratory set that is interesting, and there’s this gloop that gets poured over the initiates into the Bee Girls. Which I’m pretty sure is an actual fetish with its own proper name but I really don’t want to open that Pandora’s Box.

Writing
There’s a script? Difficult to believe, but yes, there is. Its written by Nicholas Meyer, who wrote the screenplays for Star Treks II, IV, and VI (aka, “the Good Ones” of the original crew, so hey, he got a lot better). This movie’s got a lot of bad puns, leaps of logic and excuses to get actresses naked. That’s really all the substance here. The rest of the plot is just window dressing. Tension? Nope. Sympathy for the characters killed? Maybe one of them, but otherwise, Nope.

Sound
Audio’s not good, at least not on the version I saw. Original music by Charles Bernstein, who’s actually got quite a body of work to his name, including A Nightmare on Elm Street. Huh. This is one of his early scores and the “main theme” is infectiously catchy in its cheesiness. There’s even a lot of the ol’ “wacka-chicka-wacka” sound so crucial to 70s movies.

Conclusion
Well. It has boobs. Lots and lots of boobs. That’s about the only thing the movie does well. That and the poster. It’s a groovy poster. The rest of Invasion of the Bee Girls is just plain old bad sci-fi mixed with softcore porn, which kind of has an entertainment value all of its own. Its not good by ANY means. But a bizarre, cheesy slice of 70s drive-in cinema.

Be warned: the trailer sort of, kind of, almost skirts the line of NSFW.

“The only way to stop him is to make another movie.”

2011-10-20T18:36:00.000-05:00

And here we are, the end of our little odyssey into Elm Street. There’s been good, there’s been bad, but all of its been surreal. 1994 brought about another final sendoff for Freddy Krueger, this time with Wes Craven returning to the help of the Good Ship Elm Street. The result was Wes Craven's New Nightmare, the real finale of original ideas for the character (since after that, the series only begat crossovers and reboots).

Plot
We open, as always, with a nightmare sequence. This time its of an updated version of Freddy’s glove being made by special effects guys on the set of a new Nightmare on Elm Street movie, then the glove goes on a rampage and Heather Langenkamp wakes up during an earthquake (since this is LA) and sees her son has got some scratches that are suspiciously similar to those he got in the dream. She’s also been getting harassing phone calls from someone who sounds like Freddy.

Anyway, the 10th Anniversary of the Nightmare on Elm Street series is coming up and Heather & Robert Englund are both really popular on the interview circuit and she also learns that Wes Craven is in the middle of pre-production for a new Nightmare movie. And then her husband dies in a car wreck falling asleep at the wheel. She goes to Craven to hear more about the project, and Wes gives her an explanation that the entity now known as Freddy Krueger is a spirit of pure evil that has been (temporarily) trapped within works of art (namely the Nightmare movies) and sees Heather’s character Nancy as his greatest obstacle to getting free. So Freddy is attacking Heather’s emotional weak spots, i.e. her family, and has his sights set on her young son. Ok, now this is getting a touch complicated.

Long story short, Heather has to save her son (and the world) from Freddy while the line between Heather and Nancy blurs.

Characters
Heather Langenkamp/Nancy Thompson: Heather Langenkamp playing herself playing Nancy for one last go around. The southern accent is gone again.

Chase Porter: David Newsom plays Heather’s husband, an effects tech working on pre-production for the new film. He doesn’t get much characterization before he gets offed in a manner that reminded me of The Dream Child, and I don’t know if I want to be reminded of The Dream Child.

Dylan Porter: Miko Hughes plays Heather’s son, an innocent little kid who starts to hear Freddy in his head and starts getting a bit Freddy-like in some of the things he says. He’s not happy about it either, and connects to his stuffed dinosaur as a shield against the evil. It sort of works.

Wes Craven: Wes Craven plays himself (and lives in a nice house). He’s having fresh nightmares about Freddy and using them to work on the script for the new film, though of late he’s been having writer’s block. Its as though Freddy doesn’t want the movie to be made.

Robert Englund: Robert Englund as himself (and also lives in a nice house), and he’s a close family friend of Heather’s. Nice guy and not at all murderous like his screen counterpart.

Freddy Krueger: Robert Englund plays his own screen counterpart, only this time (aside from one early scene in the real world) Freddy is his own separate entity and lacks most of the charm that made him such an interesting antagonist for most of the series. In terms of malevolence, he’s up there with Freddy’s Dead, but he’s also considerably less funny this time around. It seems like they tried to make him a completely serious threat, which…kind of takes away the characteristic that made him such a standout movie monster in the first place, doesn’t it? He still makes lame jokes, but there’s a twinkle in his eyes missing.

John Saxon/Lt. Donald Thompson: John Saxon in a smaller role as both himself and Nancy’s father, showing that reality is starting to blur around the edges for Heather.

Julie: Tracy Middendorf plays Dylan’s babysitter. She’s somewhat competent (for a horror movie character) and tries her hardest to work with Heather to keep Dylan from falling asleep at critical moments. She gets a death pretty much identical to Tina’s, bookending the series.

Visuals/Effects
Wes Craven directed, and the film definitely has more in common with Nightmare 1 and 3 than the others. The dream sequences area as always a high point, but a few of them seem more like mundane life. Likely to blur the line between dream and reality, but the dream sequences that go back to the boiler room and so on are much more memorable. There are a surprisingly few kills in this movie, and the ones that there are either direct callbacks or reminiscent of previous movies.

Now, here’s the thing that actually kind of did bug me about the movie. Freddy’s look goes through a serious overhaul. Yes he still wears the sweater and fedora and yes his body is still burnt. HOWEVER, the sweater isn’t as ratty and the fedora looks like a new felt hat they pulled from the costume department. Worse, the makeup effects for Freddy’s face seem more…plastic this time around. Before his face looked like hamburger and had a wet quality to it, now it looks like a latex mask with more clearly defined bits of flesh and muscle. The claws being part of his hand I can understand as a different type of character, and I actually quite liked the trench coat they added, but man, visually Freddy took a step down.

Writing
Written by Wes Craven, I certainly have to give the movie points for doing something new and different. But here’s the thing, it seems like its more interested in exploring themes and concepts and being…meta than it is in presenting interesting characters. Heather Langenkamp and Robert Englund are both interesting to watch since they’re playing themselves, but all the other characters, like Chase and Julie (and…uh, I’m sure there’s other wholly fictional characters with speaking parts) aren’t particularly interesting or memorable. The concepts are interesting, as is the meta-commentary, but the execution feels a little flat. Child characters in horror movies generally annoy me as well, and this is no different (but that’s just me).

Sound
J. Peter Robinson on score duties. The music is certainly a product of the mid-90s, eschewing the series’ previous use of heavy use of electronic effects. It works.

Conclusion
New Nightmare is problematic for me, because its not bad, its just a gigantic lateral move from the series in general. I get that its intentional and not a part of the "continuity" of the series. It’s not as cheesy as the previous movies, not as funny, and not quite as interesting as 1 and 3. It’s an adequate movie, sure, and plays with interesting ideas, but I didn’t enjoy it enough to really recommend it.

Scorecard time! Here’s the rundown from best to worst, in my own arrogant opinion:
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare ( I Make No Apologies)
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
Nightmare on Elm Street 4; The Dream Master
Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child
Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge

“Every town has an Elm Street!”

2011-10-19T16:34:00.000-05:00

By 1991, the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise decided to put out a final movie in the series, and why not? The last couple were adequate at best. So the series decided to go out big, with lots more effects and lots more of Freddy on screen before killing the horror icon off, presumably for good. The result was Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare and it is CRAZY.

Plot
So ten years have passed since The Dream Child, making it 1999. After Alice and her boy Jacob moved away, Freddy came back and went on a massacre in Springwood, Calif--, oh right, “Ohio.” The movie starts with the last surviving kid in the entire city confronted by Freddy in a dream but he gets knocked past the Springwood city limits, which acts as a barrier that Freddy can’t cross. But what about when he?…never mind. The kid gets amnesia from the close call and ends up at a shelter for troubled youth. There, we meet a few said troubled youths and their counselor, who decides it would help jog John Doe’s memory with a road trip back to Springwood. A trip to the orphanage reveals that Freddy had a child of his own, so the race is on to find out who that kid is and if they’re still alive and somehow try to find a way to stop Freddy for real this time.

Oh, and all of the Springwood adults have gone completely insane from the previous massacre of Freddy.

Characters
John Doe: Shon Greenblatt is our first protagonist who gets amnesia and is essentially sent out into the rest of the world to find whatever it is Freddy wants. He becomes convinced that he’s Krueger’s long lost scion, so its kind of funny when that backfires on him.

Spencer: Breckin Meyer plays a kid who’s a stoner who doesn’t want to be like his father. He gets the most surreal death scene in which he gets transported into a television and, well…just watch.

And yes, that's Johnny Depp at the beginning of the clip

Carlos: Ricky Dean Logan plays a kid with a hearing aid because his parents physically abused him as a kid. He gets a very ironic death.

Tracy: Lezlie Deane plays an angry, violent girl who was sexually abused by her father as a kid.

Dr. Maggie Burroughs: Lisa Zane plays a psychiatrist in her late 20s who is trying to help these kids but doesn’t really understand the whole dream stuff. Though she starts to, which is good, because the movie telegraphs her as Freddy’s lost child. She’s also pretty hot, so, uh, good job, Freddy?

Doc: Yaphet Kotto (who was the Bond Villain in Live And Let Die and one of the supporting characters in The Running Man) plays a dream therapist working with the kids. He’s a source of information and facts that ends up helping the protagonists quite a lot actually. Sympathetic and competent, he gives one of the better performances of the film.

Freddy Krueger: Robert Englund goes into full-blown camp territory here, hamming and cheesing his way from movie references all the way to pop culture gags to, I shit you not, a joke about Nintendo’s infamous Power Glove. Freddy’s played for laughs more than horror in this installment, but he still manages to get a few choice bits of true devilry out of the movie as well.

With a bunch of odd cameos, like Tom & Rosanne Arnold (as Springwood parents driven over the edge) Johnny Depp (in the above dream sequence), and Alice Cooper as Freddy’s abusive dad (in a flashback).

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Rachel Talalay, the movie doesn’t lack for spectacle. Digital effects were starting to be more prominent so those get used quite a bit. The dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream concept gets used for some nice surprises and as always, Freddy’s dream attacks are a true visual highlight. Pacing is another strength of the movie; despite a lot happening, the flick really does breeze by hitting all the classic Elm Street beats. Some of the effects for the video game based attack on Spencer though are very obviously not game graphics, which I can understand, because in 1991 most graphics were only 8-bit anyway. Still, they go through all the trouble of blue screening Breckin Meyer onto what is essentially a cartoon and they don’t even pixilate it. Bit of a shame that.

It should also be mentioned that the movie also features a climax IN 3-D!!! You can tell that’s the part where the 3-D glasses should be put on because Maggie puts them on. Yeah. It’s pure cheese, and since the video release wasn’t in 3-D, pretty obviously nothing more than a gimmick. I have no idea if the 3-D was well done or not.

Writing
Characters by Wes Craven, Story by Rachel Talalay, Screenplay by Michael De Luca. Aside from a few “wha-huh?” elements like telegraphing the “twist” insanely early in the movie (and reducing its impact), the script seems to be self-aware that this is an incredibly cheesy horror-comedy and capitalizes on it. After the last two movies, that’s a refreshing thing.

The flick also adds a bunch of backstory flashbacks to Freddy’s origin, showing him as a messed up kid who murdered small animals and Alice Cooper, and I don’t think any of that stuff was necessary at all to bring any kind of “deeper understanding” of Freddy Krueger’s character. Freddy works because he’s a bogeyman, and bogeymen tend to be simply motivated, which, amusingly, is what the flashbacks show. Freddy is a devilish figure because he was always a devilish figure, even before undeath.

Sound
Original music by Brian May (not the guy from Queen). More of an orchestral feel to things this time while still retaining the synthesized elements of the series. There’s also Iron Butterfly, Iggy Pop and…the Goo Goo Dolls? Wow. Did not expect them.

Conclusion
You know what? I really liked Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. It’s not as creepy as the original Nightmare on Elm Street and not as thoughtful and polished as Dream Warriors, but it IS a lot of fun. In a lot of ways, it’s a mirror of Dream Warriors. A new entrant to a group of troubled teens is mentored by a sympathetic adult with a past history with Freddy. And much like Dream Warriors was a culmination of the first 3 movies’ heady concepts and extended metaphors, Final Nightmare is a distillation of the latter 3 movies in the series, with the ridiculously over-the-top violence and evil jokester persona of Freddy (lame jokes and all). Dream Warriors made me go “that’s really interesting.” Final Nightmare made me laugh my ass off with childish enjoyment. It’s the funniest in the series, and really shows the flexibility of the Freddy character and I think that’s part of what makes him an iconic film monster; the ability to be serious and clownish at the same time and provide a knowing wink to the audience that there is something inherently weird and goofy about all this bizarre dream imagery.

So yeah. I liked it and recommend Final Nightmare as a cheesy horror-comedy. Haters gonna hate. But this movie was anything but genuinely “final.”

“Faster than a bastard maniac! More powerful than a loco-madman! It's... Super Freddy!”

2011-10-18T15:29:00.000-05:00

The Dream Master wasn’t a very good movie, but it was enjoyable enough and made crazy amounts of money for a horror film, so that pretty much guaranteed a sequel. A sequel that builds on what the previous movie did, good and bad. It’s 1989’s A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child.

Plot
A year after the last movie, Alice and Dan are a couple and seemingly free of Freddy. Alice starts dreaming of a nun, Freddy’s mom Amanda Krueger. Alice and Dan graduate high school and party with their new friends. Alice also starts having dreams about a baby turning into Freddy. After Freddy causes her boyfriend to fall asleep at the wheel and die in a collision, Alice finds out she’s pregnant with Dan’s baby and starts seeing a kid named Jacob. There’s a bunch of stuff about trying to find Amanda Krueger’s body and something about how Freddy is using the dreams of Alice’s unborn baby to enter the dreams of other people and…yeah, this movie actually makes no sense whatsoever and a lot of time is spent on characters trying to explain the incomprehensible plot.

Characters
Alice Johnson: Lisa Wilcox, only now much more blonde. And pregnant. While not nearly as irksome this time around, there’s also not a lot of character development going on. Her boyfriend dies a horrible death and that doesn’t really seem to bother her as much later on as it should. She gets a lot of weird scenes with Freddy and Jacob (her unborn son) and there’s a whole motherhood angle touched upon and how it’s a scary thing. She’s oddly not as competent or heroic as she was at the end of the last movie. And Jacob’s kind of goofy by the end.

Dan Jordan: Danny Hassel is not in this movie much. He’s still a jock and still with Alice, and manages to fall asleep at the wheel. That’s about it.

Greta Gibson: Erika Anderson plays a would-be model. The series has a weird undercurrent of mothers who are either complete bitches or negligent in some other way. Kind of weird. Anyway, she gets force-fed to death because of Freddy’s blunt sense of irony.

Yvonne: Kelly Jo Minter wants to be an Olympic level diver and she’s the resident skeptic. She thinks Alice’s dream thing is crazy.

Mark Gray: Joe Seely is a comic book nerd who’s actually surprisingly helpful at researching information on how to fight Freddy. Sadly, he gets offed in a really weird dream sequence where he confronts Freddy as his dream-powered alter-ego the Phantom Prowler (kind of evocative of the Wizard Master in 3)

Freddy Krueger: Robert Englund is seriously the really only good thing throughout the movie. He continues to be great in this, with some moments of awesome dickery that hammers home the one constant thread throughout these movies: Freddy Krueger is a complete and total asshole with no redeeming qualities other than mugging for the audience watching at home. That’s the simple truth of the character. There is absolutely no subtlety to the character at all. He is evil for the fun of it, unrepentant, and unstoppable and he loves every minute of it. Being a hideously scarred undead creature that can only prowl inside people’s dreams has the tradeoff of giving him nigh-limitless reality warping powers within dreams. He’s essentially a god within his area of expertise. That right there’s the core dichotomy of Freddy Krueger. He’s a destructive, vengeful being with godlike power and a childish sense of humor that can be defeated (temporarily) by waking up. No wonder he’s associated with kids so much, because he’s like the ultimate personification of childish mischief without any limits or controls.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Stephen Hopkins, the movie continues to be extremely 80s in its style and seems to know that what the audience is here for is the bizarre dream scenes. The movie delivers these in great detail. The effects are nice, and the major Freddy kills are actually pretty damn memorable. Set design for the dreams continues to be pretty cool, including one M.C. Escher-like area where the geometry is all kinds of improbable.

And then Freddy skateboards because skateboards were cool in 1989.

Writing
Characters by Wes Craven, Story by John Skipp, Craig Spector, & Leslie Bohem with Screenplay by Leslie Bohem. Here, the script is definitely a mess when it doesn’t involve Freddy murdering people in their dreams. The teens are fairly uninteresting, the dialogue is boring and a lot of scenes are spent on exposition. The plot itself is a horribly convoluted thing that just doesn’t make sense. Freddy wants to be a father so he can give birth to himself so he can do what…? He’s using Jacob’s dreams to attack other people. I get that. But from there it just gets confusing. And kind of goes in a weird Freudian direction.

Sound
Original music by Jay Ferguson, which continues the fine tradition of a very 80s style horror score. Other music includes tracks from MAMMOTH, WASP (their capitalization, not mine), Schoolly D and Kool Moe Dee, because rap/hip-hop was just newly discovered by white people in 1989 (see Ghostbusters II) The soundtrack works and there’s nothing bad or wrong about it.

Conclusion
The Dream Child is probably the lowest point for the Nightmare On Elm Street series by virtue of being really, really boring when Freddy’s not around. Freddy’s Revenge might be harder to sit through because it goes completely off the reservation, but The Dream Child is just plain forgettable. If you’re going through the series like I did, then yeah, its worth a watch, but for a standalone experience, avoid it.

“Tell ‘em Freddy sent ya.”

2011-10-17T12:53:00.000-05:00

1988, A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. Direct sequel of the story of the previous movie. Made a lot of money. Let’s just get into it.

Plot
So the three kids who survived the last movie have been released from Westin Hills and move out of Elm Street to a new high school where they live normal lives and develop a new circle of friends one year later. Naturally, this idyllic life comes to a crashing end as Freddy returns to haunt teens in their dreams. He wants to tie up loose ends, so he goes after the Elm Street survivors, finally finishing off Kristen, but not before she passes some of her dream power off onto new protagonist Alice, who tries to find a way to stop Freddy as he starts killing off all of HER friends.

Characters
The Three Survivors of the last movie:

Kristen Parker: Tuesday Knight instead of a pregnant Patricia Arquette this time. Kristen starts off as our main character and a gateway to the next set of characters. She still has the power to suck her friends into her dreams and I have to admit, I didn’t see the switch coming with Kristen’s death. It kind of works, but on the other hand, I don’t think Alice is a better protagonist than Kristen. Oh, and I guess she smokes now too.

Roland Kincaid: Ken Sagoes again, and he’s still got super strength in his dreams. Remember how he’s a black character who survived the previous horror movie? This time he’s the first to die, but at least he goes down swinging.

Joey Crusel: Rodney Eastman again, and since the events of the last movie, he can speak again. His dream power is a powerful voice/sonic thingy. He’s kind of a perv now, being a horny teenage boy, and gets drowned in a waterbed.

Alice Johnson: Lisa Wilcox plays our new protagonist. Her dad’s a drunk and she’s a meek girl who is a compulsive daydreamer. Alice tries to advise Kristen that when she dreams, to make happy dreams. Naturally this doesn’t work. After she gets Kristen’s powers, this turns out to be a bad thing, since someone who involuntarily daydreams is able to pull friends into said dreams (yeah, they lump daydreams in with regular dreams here). This isn’t so bad by itself, but its compounded by the fact that A) Alice isn’t exactly guilt-ridden or even realizes that her being able to bring people into her dreams is exactly what Freddy wants, and B) she continuously gains new powers from her friends that die, so that in essence, she gets more powerful and less useless the more people around her die. I find that…problematic in a hero.

Sheila Kopecky: Toy Newkirk plays a glasses nerd with asthma. Could they have made a more vulnerable character? Anyway, she gets dragged into one of Alice’s daydreams and Alice uselessly watches Sheila get asphixiated.

Debbie Stevens: Brooke Theiss plays a somewhat bitchy girl who’s into fitness, big hair and a fear of bugs. She dies the most Kafkaesque death in the series.

Rick Johnson: Andras Jones plays Kristen’s boyfriend & Alice’s sister. He likes martial arts. Alice ends up pulling him into a dream and again, Freddy slaughters him too. But Alice ends up getting his leet kung-fu, so its okay!

Dan Jordan: Danny Hassel plays the tall jock that Alice has the hots for. He’s loosely connected to the circle of friends at first, but progressively gets more involved as Alice starts to absorb the positive traits of her friends.

Freddy Krueger: Robert Englund is the best part of this movie. The puns are ramped up a bit further in this film, but I think that works here because the stereotypes and cheesiness of everything else is also broadened. Here’s also the point in the series where Freddy’s personality completely outshines the heroes, who become broadly realized archetypes who only serve as symbolic humans and are therefore much more difficult to feel bad for. Freddy’s plot, that of using Alice as a fishing lure to draw fresh souls for him to feed on and torment is kind of neat, but nothing spectacular. And its just funny seeing Freddy burst out of a sand castle on a sunny beach and put on shades.

Visuals/Effects
Renny Harlin? The man who would go on to direct Die Hard 2: Die Harder, Cliffhanger, and Cutthroat Island? Yes, he directed The Dream Master early in his career. Sure, it would be easy to make jokes, but honestly, the cinematography is fine in this and the pacing works reasonably well. The movie does swap protagonists, essentially splitting it in two parts, which is a bit odd, but nothing horrid. Moreover, the effects remain impressive and the dreamscapes continue to be highly imaginative. Despite its flaws, several of the sequences are really iconic, like the roach motel and the waterbed. My favorite scene has to be the part where Alice and Dan try to rush to Debbie’s rescue but are caught up in a dream that loops over and over until if slowly dawns on them. That's actually really inventive. And I will admit, the final showdown between Alice and Freddy is actually kind of kickass in a music video sort of way. Oh, and Freddy gets resurrected in a dream when Kincaid’s dog Jason pisses fire on his grave. Don’t see that every day.

Writing
Characters by Wes Craven, Story by William Kotzwinkle & Brian Helgeland, and Screenplay by Brian Helgeland, and Scott Pierce. I think its here that the movie really suffers. From inconsistencies with the previous movie to ill-defined characters and really vague plot elements like some kind of a spell to stop Freddy and turning him and Alice into guardians of the gates of bad and good dreams respectively. It makes The Dream Warriors’ super powered institutionalized teens seem restrained and plausible in comparison.

Sound
Original music by Craig Safan, which continues the whole “it’s the 80’s” thing quite well. There’s also a significant licensed soundtrack, featuring the Divinyls, Dramarama, the Fat Boys, Blondie, Sinead O’Connor and a bunch of bands I hadn’t heard of. The theme song “Nightmare” is actually kind of nice, and its sung by Tuesday Knight.

Conclusion
If there’s a slippery slope for the Nightmare series, its definitely The Dream Master. Freddy remains as entertaining as always, but you can tell that various ideas were thrown around to see what stuck. Despite the marked downturn in quality from Dream Warriors, this one’s still fairly entertaining and really maintains the quality of the dream sequences, which are the bread and butter of the series at this point. It’s just that anything outside of Freddy and the dreams doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny.

“In my dreams I am the Wizard Master.”

2011-10-14T13:32:00.000-05:00

So despite the horrid mess of a movie that Freddy‘s Revenge was, the Nightmare series survived and even brought Wes Craven back. The results are a marked improvement in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.

Plot
So now it’s 6 years after the first film (the events of the second being quietly swept under the rug) and a teen girl is so haunted by a strange house in her dreams that she makes a replica house of it. It’s the Thompson house on Elm Street and after a dream attack that leaves her wrists slashed, she gets institutionalized at Westin Hills Hospital. In said institution, she meets a bunch of other kids similarly plagued by nightmares. These are the “last of the Elm Street children” and Freddy wants to finish cleaning house, so to speak. Despite opposition from the chief of the hospital, Nancy and Neil start working with the kids to be able to control their actions in their dreams (essentially lucid dreaming), and they all kind of develop specific “dream powers” that will hopefully help them combat Freddy and stop him from coming back to the real world.

Characters
Nancy Thompson: Heather Langenkamp returns a bit later in the movie. She’s an adult now and after her previous experiences, she’s gone into psychiatry to help other kids tortured by bad dreams and whatever. She’s the shock of white hair she‘s got has somehow migrated to the other side of her face and for some reason has picked up a southern accent OUT OF NOWHERE.

Kristen Parker: Patricia Arquette plays our protagonist. She’s an average teen who’s misunderstood, but she’s also got moxie and initiative. Her dream power is the ability to pull other people into her own dreams.

Jennifer Caulfield: Penelope Sudrow plays one of the kids at the institute who’s offed fairly early on. She’s a wannabe TV actress and a couch potato and probably gets one of the most memorable deaths in the movie. Welcome to prime time, indeed.

Taryn White: Jennifer Rubin is a former junkie who’s feisty and sarcastic nature hides a very damaged girl. Her dream power is two switchblades. …Yeah.

Will Stanton: Ira Heiden plays kid who was paralyzed in a previous suicide attempt to escape his nightmares. He’s a fan of a generic equivalent to D&D and his dream power is that he’s got wizard powers. Yeah, sure, okay.

Roland Kincaid: Ken Sagoes is actually quite likable as the aggressive, mouthy black kid who picks super strength as his dream power, which is an entirely sensible choice.

Joey Crusel: Rodney Eastman plays a kid so traumatized by nightmares that he can’t even speak. He kind of becomes a Macguffin, getting captured by Freddy and used as bait for the other kids to try and rescue him.

Philip: Bradley Gregg plays Freddy’s first victim in the movie and as such he’s a bit vague of character. He’s got a penchant for sleepwalking though, and that ends…badly.

Dr. Neil Gordon: Craig Wasson plays the lead psychiatrist in charge of the kids’ cases. He’s a well-meaning chap and does his best to try and figure things out. He gets a subplot where he starts seeing the ghost of a nun providing him with clues to Freddy’s backstory and origins.

Lt. Donald Thompson: John Saxon! He’s back, though somewhat estranged from his daughter Nancy. He’s needed because to stop Freddy, they need to bury his bones

Max: Laurence Fishburne. Yes! Really! He plays a kindly orderly who follows orders but stays charitable to the kids.

Freddy Krueger: Robert Englund really starts getting into the swing of things. Freddy’s personality solidifies as a wicked punster with a dark sense of poetic villainy, and things really take off whenever he’s on screen. We also get backstory. Apparently, his mother, a nun working at the hospital, was somehow locked up in the psych ward and all the inmates got out and assaulted and raped her, making him, in effect, the bastard son of 100 maniacs.

I think everyone's obligated to post this pic when discussing Dream Warriors.

Visuals/Effects
Chuck Russell directed the film. Keeping most of it in a psych ward in a hospital helps to lend a claustrophobic atmosphere to it. However, that’s not where the movie shines. The movie’s absolute strength is found in the truly imaginative special effects. There are a lot of dream sequences in this movie. Some obviously so, other not so much. It allows for a wide range of special effects going from several stop motion puppets (a skeletal Freddy with his glove is a highlight), a bit of early CGI in some places, and a cornucopia of practical effects which are fantastically done. The dream sequences are a real highlight and the Freddy kills start to get really imaginative. You can tell this movie had a budget and it made effective use of it.

Writing
Story by Wes Craven & Bruce Wagner, Screenplay by Wes Craven, Bruce Wagner, Frank Darabont, & Chuck Russell. The story is actually quite complicated. It has to juggle a lot of characters, at least two major plotlines, the introduction of major backstory elements, and has an underlying theme that touches upon mental illness and a little bit of teen suicide. This movie has a lot going on, plot-wise, and manages to pull it off very well. There’s also a high degree of camp in the movie, what with Freddy’s numerous one-liners, several goofy (but imaginative) dream sequences, and the fact that the teens all have highly specialized “dream powers” by the end of the movie. There’s no two ways around it: a group of misfit teens use their super powers to fight Freddy Krueger. That’s GOOFY. And I like it that way.

Sound
Original score by Angelo Badalmenti, which is again, fully atmospheric and fully enmeshed in 1987.

Oh yes, and the theme song was written by Dokken. Dokken! Not only does “Dream Warriors” rock out as only 80’s hair metal can, the music video for it is amazing.

So much hair, GLORIOUS HAIR!

Conclusion
Dream Warriors is a great entry in the Nightmare series. It’s got outstanding effects, a capable cast and I think Englund’s straddling the line between menacing and cheesiness is at its height in the series. Entertaining and thoroughly satisfying.

Probably the best trailer for the Nightmare series.

“Hello, dirtballs.”

2011-10-13T15:28:00.000-05:00

1985 ushered in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge, and brother, let me tell you, it goes off the rails in a hurry.

Plot
Five years after the first movie, a new family moves into the Thompson residence in Springwood. They’re the Walshes, and their oldest son, Jesse, is in high school; he gets Nancy’s old room (and finds her diary). Jesse starts to experience nightmares of a similar nature and starts getting both freaked out and sleep deprived. Slightly a social outsider, he’s got a hot girlfriend and an athletic buddy, so he’s not THAT much of an outcast. About the only real problem he’s got is the gym coach doesn’t like him. Anyway, Jesse starts getting possessed by Freddy and Freddy starts murdering people in the real world. This is a problem. It culminates in an abandoned factory that bears a resemblance to the traditional Freddy Boiler Room (there's always a boiler room).

Characters
Jesse Walsh: Mark Patton is our rather whiny protagonist. Compared to the very proactive Nancy, he’s just kind of blah. He’s sympathetic enough and you get that he’s tortured by all this, but he is also pretty much a puppet for Freddy to screw around with. Oh, and he screams like a girl.

Lisa Webber: Kim Myers is our hero’s girlfriend, and she’s watching him with those eyes, and she’d LIKE to love him with that body, but lately something’s changed that ain’t hard to define. Her boyfriend is somehow possessed by an undead murderer. Lisa is actually the proactive character, digging for information on how to stop Freddy and so on.

Ron Grady: Robert Rusler is first Jesse’s rival, then closest friend. Jesse’s also more interested in hanging out with him than the cute girl that wants to get up on him. For his part, Ron doesn’t seem as invested in the friendship between him and Jesse as Jesse is. Draw your own conclusions.

Coach Schneider: Marshall Bell is the school gym coach. He’s a jerk and fond of using “Dirtballs” as an insult. He’s also into dressing as a leather boy and going to gay bars. For some weird reason Jesse finds him in one on a night when he wanders into one such place. It’s a bit bizarre and leads to Freddy killing a very much awake adult in the gym’s shower room.

Freddy Krueger: Robert Englund is easily the best part of the movie. Possibly a bit more vicious than the last time around, he’s definitely more manipulative and also more random in his attacks. The whole possession thing and killing people in the real world really doesn’t jive with anything Freddy’s ever done in anything else before or since.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Jack Sholder, the movie looks fine and shows a little more polish than the first one. The effects are actually quite good and when Freddy does his thing people die in reasonably imaginative ways.

The acting is rather blah and Jesse’s rather annoying. The characters aren’t very interesting and as such, the pacing suffers a lot, since Freddy’s not on screen for most of the time. Jesse, Lisa and Ron are all rather boring people with little in the way of personality. There is a nice little detail of a message board in the Walsh’s kitchen that changes from day to day, helping to emphasize the passage of time. But it makes me want to follow that storyline as opposed to the one we got. Also, Ohio apparently has not only palm trees but a desert too. As a resident of the state, this is news to me.

On the other hand, a budgie goes berserk and then explodes. I can honestly say I’ve never seen that before.

Writing
Based on characters created by Wes Craven and written by David Chaskin, the script is kind of a mess. Sequentially, yes it is a direct sequel to the first movie. Functionally, Freddy is completely different in his entire modus operandi. Possessing a teen and killing people who are wide awake? That’s just not Freddy. Now, considering that this was only the 2nd movie of the series, I guess you could argue that if it was just these two movies it might be “valid” but even that’s a stretch for Freddy’s nature. Freddy being defeated by the power of love? Weird.

Also, the homoerotic subtext is more than just present, it’s pretty obvious. The basic metaphor of it makes sense. A teen is tortured by feelings that are frowned upon in his suburban, middle-class culture. It explains why he doesn’t take advantage of a girl that totally wants him and he would rather spend time with a male friend who doesn’t reciprocate the same way. The sympathetic metaphor falls apart rather quickly when said tortured teen becomes “possessed” by the thing inside him and he starts killing innocent people, including the same friend who’s friendship he values a lot. And then he’s redeemed by reconciling with the girlfriend he’s kind of discarded earlier in the movie. So if that IS the metaphor the filmmakers were going for, what’s the actual message here...?

Sound
Original music by Christopher Young, and the story repeats itself for the music: Atmospherically appropriate and extremely 80’s.

Conclusion
Yeah. I can see why Freddy’s Revenge is considered the black sheep of the family. It really doesn’t have much in common at all with its predecessor. Its also not a very good movie with dull characters and extremely muddled symbolism. Englund as Freddy is really the only true virtue for the film, as he still does a great job as the villain. But yeah, its not a very good movie. At all.

“Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep.”

2011-10-12T11:18:00.000-05:00

So I’ve written a lot of words about various classic monster franchises, but haven’t really gone into more recent categories. THAT CHANGES NOW with one of the biggest names in 80s horror, as we begin a long, nightmarish journey to Springwood, Ohio. That’s right, its 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Plot
Nancy Thompson is a normal teenager with normal (if archetypal) teenage friends, who are all having similar dreams of a horrifically burned man stalking them in a boiler room and attacking them. When they awake they have actual wounds like those they got in their dreams. At first, this is just weird, but when one friend is horrifically killed by the guy in her sleep during a sleepover, Nancy starts to freak out and wants answers, and it becomes clear that the parents of Elm Street are hiding something.

Characters
Nancy Thompson: Heather Langenkamp is our hero, an everygirl type of character who just wants the nightmares to end. She’s bright though, and starts working out some ideas on how to confront the murderer who stalks her dreams. She picks up a white shock of hair after one close call.

Glen Lantz: Introducing Johnny Depp! He’s Nancy’s boyfriend. Questionable taste in midriff exposing t-shirts aside, he’s a decent fellow but a fairly bland character.

Tina Gray: Amanda Wyss is Freddy’s very first victim. Like most 80s horror victims, she’s a promiscuous teen. The results are messy.

Rod Lane: Jsu Garcia as Nick Corri as Tina’s greaser boyfriend. He’s a crude, rebellious youth and the prime suspect for Tina’s death. Freddy makes short work of him.

Marge Thompson: Ronee Blakley is Nancy’s mom and denies up and down that anything could possibly be wrong and that Nancy is just imagining things and should really get some sleep. Marge is in deep denial. Marge also likes booze. A lot.

Lt. Donald Thompson: John Saxon! He’s Nancy’s father and a police lieutenant. Like all movie cop dad’s he’s a good man but busy and overworked and doesn’t have much time for his daughter.

Fred Krueger: Robert Englund is one hell of a creepy monster in this. I should point out that Freddy’s look is extremely effective. Trousers, a tattered red and green sweater, horribly scarred face, a weird clawed glove and a dapper fedora. Freddy’s backstory is that he was a child murderer back in the day and the parents of Elm Street banded together to take him down in a fit of vigilante justice, locking him in a basement/boiler room and burning him up. But he’s apparently too evil and too pissed off to let that stop him, so he’s bided his time and now starts taking revenge on the children of those who killed him.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Wes Craven, the movie certainly shows its modest beginnings with a modest budget. Elm Street itself certainly looks generic-suburban enough but other locations for Springwood look nothing like any Ohio location I’ve ever seen. In fact, they look suspiciously like Southern California. The Ohio setting makes sense, since Craven himself is a native Ohioan, but yeah…palm trees. In Ohio.

Now, obviously the dream sequences get the lion’s share of effects work, and the practical effects are actually pretty good. Tina’s death near the beginning is a particularly effective scene, along with some of Freddy’s menacing approaches (backlit in an alley and pushing through a wall over a sleeping Nancy, for example).

Writing
Written by Wes Craven, the storyline is fairly interesting and nicely self-contained. The pacing works very well and by the end of the movie, the line between awake and asleep is blurred as the tone gets increasingly desperate for a solution. As far as “flaws,” Nancy’s plan to confront Freddy in the real world with assorted homemade traps is a little hard to take seriously in a post-Home Alone world, though it does work to show Nancy showing initiative. The other nit to pick is that its interesting to see Freddy being deadly serious in this one. He really only cracks a few jokes (like the infamous ‘I’m your boyfriend now” line) and most of the rest of the time he’s just a sadistic monster with no redeeming qualities. Which, considering that’s what he is, works just fine. It just stands in contrast with the heavy merchandising of the brand that occurred later when Freddy’s personality solidified (or perhaps congealed).

Sound
Original music by Charles Bernstein and, well…it’s the early 1980s. Yes it is atmospheric and suitably creepy at times, but there’s a lot of electronic effects. A LOT. What’s aged better is the children’s nursery rhyme that herald’s Freddy’s approach.

Conclusion
A Nightmare on Elm Street is actually a rather intelligent movie that gives the viewer a sympathetic heroine and a mysterious and effective villain. There’s also subtext you can look into, like a critique of suburban culture and the theme of teen sexuality and the loss of innocence of growing up, and so on. There’s stuff open to interpretation. Obviously the movie’s got stuff for the blood seekers out there, and that stuff’s imaginatively done. Its just nice to have some brains hiding behind the slaughter as well. Recommended.

“We journey to Hell, but God travels with us.”

2011-10-11T17:29:00.000-05:00

Conceptually, 2010’s Black Death is something that should appeal to me. It’s set in the Medieval period and stars Sean Bean. And when it very quickly disappeared to video, I was curious why it didn’t do better than it did. I am no longer curious.

Plot
It’s 1348 and the narrator informs us that the Black Plague is EVERYWHERE. Some see it as a punishment from God, while others see the plague as the work of witchcraft and seek to hunt it down. Our protagonist is a monk who volunteers to accompany a heavily armed Bishop’s envoy to a village untouched by the plague and where the people are said to be led by a witch. They head out there and things go badly, with most of the characters dying, ironically not from the plague.

Characters
Osmund: Eddie Redmayne is our protagonist. He’s released from quarantine after not showing any symptoms of disease. He’s not a very good monk, since he’s got a girlfriend on the outside with whom he’s broken his vows of chastity, and he urges her to seek shelter away from the village and will meet her in the woods. This is precisely the reason why he volunteers to go with the warriors. Osmund is both something of an idealist and a giant weenie. Being a monk, he’s not a good adventurer, but he’s not good at being a monk either. He gets into some difficult moral quandaries.

Ulrich: Sean Bean is our badass and pretty much the only likable character. He’s a cynical realist with an unshakable faith. Along the way he interferes in a peasant witch trial by shanking the woman suspected of witchcraft to give her a quicker, more merciful death than the peasants would have. He gets real pissed at Osmund when the monk wanders off to look for his girlfriend and ends up drawing back a bunch of bandits/goons and in the ensuing fight one of Ulrich’s men is killed. Ulrich tears him a new one for going off on his own and for being a little bitch.

Ulrich’s crew: The fighters in his little band are all rough-and-tumble guys who aren’t nice people. That’s pretty much the extent of their characterization, as I don’t even remember any of their names. The one that stands out from the rest is Bearded Veteran (because that’s what he is) because he shows some personality.

The Abbot: Hey, its David Warner! David Warner is always a good thing, even if he’s only at the beginning and end of the movie.

Langiva: Carice van Houten is our villain (OR IS SHE?!) She’s pretty much in charge of the little village our protagonists travel to. She’s pretty obviously the witch they’re looking for (OR IS SHE?!) and is very keen on spilling Christian blood to keep that Christian disease out of her village. The thing is, she’s a colossal liar and a smug bitch and starts needling the weak link of the group, Osmund by bringing back to life his dead girlfriend (OR IS SHE?!)

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Christopher Smith, the movie is clearly working with a lower budget judging from the small cast and with most of the action taking place in fields and forests. What few fights exist are nicely done, as are the few special effects. However, the movie is plagued by the vile demon that is Shaky Cam. If there is any devil’s work truly at play, it is whoever decided to use Shaky Cam for a Medieval movie. God I hate that.

Writing
The screenplay by Dario Poloni is…problematic. On the one hand it sets an appropriately grim and dark mood for the proceedings. So grim and dark that it would almost work better in the Warhammer 40K universe. On the other hand, by the end of the movie, its clear that while the villagers may be pagan, the reason the plague hasn’t touched them is because it hasn’t actually touched them. As in, it was just isolated from it. That’s one thing, but compounding it is the fact that Langiva and her henchman Hobb come out as atheists turns the movie into yet another question of "Christianity vs. Atheism and isn’t religion so very brutal, superstitious, and unenlightened?"

Yes, I get it, it asks the viewer to challenge and examine dogma under the lens of what it does in extreme conditions, but you know what? Its been done to fucking death. Just about every major medieval movie of the last twenty years has asked or implied that question (Ridley Scott did it twice), while other time periods like Ancient Rome (again, Ridley Scott) get a pass. What is it about the Middle Ages that brings this out? Was it Gibbon’s history? Is it a general anticlerical sentiment? Is it the Crusades? Because if religious atrocity is the subject of scrutiny, I can assure the Middle Ages had no monopoly on that. Hell, the age of the Reformation and the 30 Years’ War is full of inhuman behavior (and witch hunting was far more popular then than in the Middle Ages), why aren’t there more movies about that? Or rather, why are all of those elements squashed into a single time period? As a medievalist I am genuinely curious about this as much as I’m disappointed by this pigeonholing.

Sound
Original music by Christian Henson, and the music is largely forgettable. It’s been a few weeks and I can’t remember any of it.

Conclusion
I was hopeful for Black Death. I liked the premise. Did I want to see a group of warriors hunting down an evil cult while a witch tried to ensorcel them with evil magic? HELL YES I DID. If the movie would have stuck with that premise instead of backpedaling on the witchcraft, I probably would have been able to forgive even the sin of Shaky Cam. But NO. The twist flings the movie into the pile of generic postmodern medieval stereotyping AND features Shaky Cam.

But Sean Bean and David Warner were good, so there’s that at least.

“I couldn’t have an ordinary ghost on my hands, I got a rummy! A big, ugly, booze-soaked rummy!”

2011-10-10T14:51:00.000-05:00

After last week, I’d say we’re done with mummies. OR ARE WE?? This next film carries a lot of nostalgia for me, since it was on a VHS that encompassed most of what I loved as a kid. Disney, ghosts, pirates, the 60’s aesthetic (before I knew how to spell “aesthetic”), and comedy. It’s time for 1968’s Blackbeard’s Ghost.

Plot
After an opening title crawl boasting about how badass a villain Blackbeard the pirate was, we head to the coastal town of Godolphin. The new track coach drives into town one night and will be staying at the Blackbeard Inn, a suitably piratey establishment run by a group of kindly old spinsters called the Daughters of the Buccaneers who claim to be the descendants of Blackbeard's crew. A local nightclub owner has bought their mortgage and is trying to run them out so he can build an off-shore casino.

Our hero arrives during a fundraiser, buys an old warming pan to impress a female professor at the college, gets assigned to Blackbeard’s old bedroom and accidentally sits on the warming pan, breaking it. Inside the handle, he finds an old fragment of parchment containing part of the spell book of Aldetha Teach, one of Blackbeard’s wives who was burned at the stake for witchcraft and cursed him to spend eternity in limbo until he displayed a shred of human kindness. Naturally he ends up summoning Blackbeard from said limbo and has a raging alcoholic ghost that only he can see tagging along as he tries to get his track team in shape for the Broxton Relay, steal the football coach’s girlfriend, and find a way to keep the Daughters of the Buccaneers from being kicked out of their home.

Characters
Steve Walker: Dean Jones (star of most of the Herbie the Love Bug related projects and other Disney films) is our hero. A straight-laced, teetotaler of a track coach, he’s a decent, charitable fellow but also a fish out of water in Godolphin. He inherits the worst track team in the state (his shot putter, Gudger Larkin, looks like he weighs 90 pounds soaking wet) and only has a few weeks before the big relay. Blackbeard is a huge annoyance for him (and causes people to think he’s gone crazy like the previous track coach) and he tries to get the old salt to do a selfless act.

Edward Teach/Captain Blackbeard: You can tell Peter Ustinov was having an absolute blast as Blackbeard. More of a poltergeist than a regular ghost, since he can affect the mortal world (like stealing bottles of hooch, stealing a motorcycle, stealing fat wads of cash, and steali--, er, punching goons in the face), Blackbeard is gleefully reprobate and tries to teach Steve to loosen up and have some fun. He lies, he cheats, and he has mood swings like a spoiled child, Ustinov’s Blackbeard is a hoot in this and reason enough to watch the film.

Jo Anne Baker: Suzanne Pleshette is a psychology professor at Godolphin College. Steve meets her when he mistakenly thinks she runs the kissing booth at the Buccaneer fundraiser. She’s spunky and dedicated to saving the Blackbeard Inn. After Steve picks up Blackbeard, she kind of volunteers to keep an eye on him and see if he’s really crazy. Initially she’s dating the football coach, Purvis, but he’s a smug jerk with no personality.

Emily Stowecroft: Hey, its Elsa Lanchester! A good few decades removed from Bride of Frankenstein, she plays the leader of the Daughters of the Buccaneers and when Steve meets her, she’s reading fortunes in a tent in full-blown crazy lady mode. She also provides incredibly hammy exposition (which is difficult to do) and is great fun to watch.

Silky Seymour: Joby Baker plays our villain. Black suit, goons, and a pencil-thin moustache, he’s stereotypically evil and plays the part with oily smugness. He encourages gambling but naturally cheats when it goes against him.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Robert Stevenson (who was behind the camera for numerous Disney pictures, like Mary Poppins), the film’s strengths are set design (for the Blackbeard Inn) and special effects, which are pretty good for 60s live-action. Doesn’t hurt that most of the scenes are set at night to better cover the wires. There’s quite a few fun scenes where Blackbeard takes an active role in the shenanigans, such as stealing a police motorcycle, interfering in the track meet, and being a trump card in the final brawl between Steve and Silky’s goons (there’s even a nice finger-gun shootout).

Writing
Based on the book by Ben Stahl. Screenplay by Bill Walsh & Don DaGradi. The screenplay mixes a whole lot of plot elements in but keeps things well connected, but right after the track meet the movie slows down quite a lot before rallying for the ending. The real draw is Blackbeard misbehaving and trying to show a spark of human goodness so he can move on from limbo.

Sound
Original music by Disney regular Robert F. Brunner. The score is actually quite good, throwing in a lot of nice piratey touches like concertinas and harpsichords. The few songs in the film (because this is Disney, after all) are also quite catchy.

Conclusion
Pacing issue aside, I’m glad that it wasn’t mere rose-tinted glasses that led to fond memories of Blackbeard’s Ghost. Its actually a very solid family film that is 100% carried by Ustinov’s gleeful scenery chewing. If for no other reason, the movie’s worth watching for that.

Can't find a trailer, but you get the idea.

“The mummy’s on the loose and he’s dancin’ with the devil!”

2011-10-07T15:59:00.000-05:00

Closing the week out while also closes out the Universal Mummy series. Curiously, this sequel is also from 1944. That means Universal released two mummy movies in one year. That’s a lot of mummy. Anyway, here’s The Mummy’s Curse, the last of the Universal mummy franchise and its got the biggest continuity headscratcher of them all.

Plot
We start with a musical number in Louisiana. Huh. 25 years after The Mummy’s Ghost, a government-sponsored work crew is draining some swamplands in Louisiana when the workers start getting real suspicious since a generation ago a mummy disappeared into the swamp. Yes, the movie blatantly moves the entire setting from Mapleton, New England, to the bayou. Why? I don’t know. Maybe they wanted to put a mummy in Cajun country.

Anyway, an academic from the Scripps Museum comes down and asks the foreman for cooperation in letting them dig around after they’ve drained some swampland when the work crews find a dead laborer and a mummy-shaped hole in the ground. Kharis is out there, somewhere. Later, some earth gets loosened and the Princess Anaka digs herself out of the dirt as well. She ends up washing the dirt and crud off and returning to normal human form and the workers and archeologist try to help her out, but her memory’s foggy and she knows an awful lot about Egyptian history. There’s a new High Priest of Arkan in town looking to get both mummies back home and Kharis really wants his woman back.

Characters
Pat Walsh: Addison Richards plays the skeptical and flustered foreman trying to get part of the swamp drained. Mostly around to provide a voice of grumpy cynicism about the possibility of a mummy being in the area.

Betty Walsh: Kay Harding is Pat’s daughter and secretary. She’s there to provide a love interest for…

Dr. James Halsey: Dennis Moore is the archeologist sent by the Scripps Museum to try and recover the mummies if he can. He develops a thing for Betty.

Princess Ananka: Virginia Christie is our real protagonist. Ananka is actually Amina who was killed at the end of the last movie, now revived and psychologically messed up because she’s got the memories of two people in her head and she still swoons into trace-like states when Kharis is near. The most sympathetic character who gets the most character work, she’s actually rather interesting.

Ilzor: Peter Coe is our resident fez-wearing Priest of Arkan, and unlike every one of his predecessors, is actually focused on the mission and not subject to temptation. He’s also kind of a jerk to Halsey after Ananka is revived, constantly decrying the search efforts for her (she tends to wander off a few times) as futile and hopeless.

Ragheb: Martin Kosleck is Ilzor’s henchman and embedded in the work crew. He ends up desiring Betty and ultimately betrays his vows. He’s a stab-happy goon and probably the most outright villainous character in the whole series.

Cajun Joe: Kurt Katch plays a veteran of the swamps who’s a kind of unofficial leader among the work crew. He’s the first person to find the revived Ananka and tries to take care of her. He learns that shotguns don’t impress Kharis at all. He, like most of the crewmen, is painted in broad, stereotypical strokes.

Goobie: The awesomely named Napoleon Simpson is another member of the work crew and also happens to be a black guy who survives a horror movie. Goobie’s quite likable actually, being funny and observant when he’s around, though he too is fairly stereotypical.

Kharis: Lon Chaney Jr. one last time as the mummy. Kharis is quite a bit darker in this movie, strangling a surprising number of innocent people who just wanted to help Ananka. He also seems to have greater strength in this movie, being able to topple some ruins at the end of the film as a kind of avenging agent hell-bent on punishing Ragheb.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Leslie Goodwins, the film actually does pull off some neat techniques. Kharis appears several times as a backlit silhouette against a tent, which hasn’t really been done since the 2nd movie. The mummy effects by Jack Pierce continue to be good, but Kharis' face isn't quite as good.

However, the most impressive scene for me was Ananka’s resurrection. First she kind of digs her way out of the dirt, her skin completely covered in dirt and looking mummified. She stumbles out of the ground and her eyes are pretty much closed as she shambles through the swamp, but she’s not slow like Kharis. They played with the film speed too because her movements are just jerky enough to be inhuman without being grossly exaggerated (and you can tell from the way the leaves on the trees move). That coupled with the music yielded a surprisingly melancholy and creepy scene that worked really well, I thought.

Oh yes, and they recycle footage like crazy during flashbacks, so that tradition continues.

Writing
So Original Story credits to Leon Abrams and Dwight V. Babcock (and uncredited Ted Richmond), adaptation by Leon Abrams and Dwight V. Babcock (and uncredited Oliver Drake), and Screenplay by Bernard Schubert. So, the elephant in the room is the drastic shift in location. Going from New England to Louisiana is really difficult to swallow and really breaks the suspension of disbelief.

But once you get past that, it IS interesting setting a mummy movie in the bayou just because that never happens. The movie also really highlights for me a major feature of the Universal Mummy series. While there’s a definite pulpy feel to the stories, Kharis also straight up kills good/innocent people. Sure Kharis usually kills off a bad guy or two, but most of his victims are nice people who either get in the way accidentally, are searching for knowledge, or, in the case of this movie, just trying to help an amnesiac woman out of sheer human kindness. Rather interesting when you compare it to, say, 90s horror movies where just about all of the victims of the monster are unlikable jerks. Another notable element is that the movie ends on a downer again.

Sound
Original music by (uncredited) William Lava and Paul Sawtell. The music continues to work well with appropriate cues for action, suspense, and melancholy.

Conclusion
So The Mummy’s Curse actually takes the series out on a high note in my opinion. Despite taking the biggest liberty with continuity yet, they do some really cool stuff with Ananka and the setting eventually works.

Now, as for the series of films, the Karloff one stands alone, both as its own story and the best made. The Kharis films are about 50/50 for me in terms of quality, with the middle two being the weak ones. However, as a whole they provide an interesting experience, with a slower, more deliberate pacing than other Universal horrors from the 40s. The Kharis films are also a bit more coherent than the “House Of…” monster mashes with Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolf Man, but at the cost of being way less batty.

Contradictorily I am going to recommend the Mummy series as a whole but not the individual films as stand alones. Because the story generally makes more sense if you follow Kharis along from the start despite the heavy retcons they make with each subsequent film. They're just more fun as a whole.

“Looks like somebody else was messing around with tana leaves.”

2011-10-06T14:12:00.000-05:00

Universal returned to Mapleton in 1944 and resurrected Kharis for another go around, burning mansion be damned. Leaving the Banning family behind, the franchise takes it to new territory: A college campus. So will we be seeing a mummy undergoing fraternity hazings and doing keg stands? Of course not, but the results are still rather interesting anyway. Its The Mummy's Ghost, which doesn't actually feature any ghosts.

Plot
Mapleton is recovering from its last Mummy problem when the priests of Arkan (not Karnak anymore) send a new representative to America to recover the mummies of Kharis and Ananka, the latter being on display in the Scripps Museum. We then turn to Mapleton College, where a professor dabbles in translating hieroglyphics and brews up some tana leaves. Right as rain, he gets choked out by the mummy Kharis and the town goes into a fit over the new killings. One of the deceased professor’s students is dating an Egyptian student who starts to feel weird. She also tends to go into trances and wander around the campus and faints when she sees the mummy. Things progress along familiar territory when the priest sent to exact revenge falls for the girl, and then the movie ends on a real downer.

Characters
Tom Hervey: Robert Lowery is our “college aged” hero. He looks to be in his thirties at least. Anyway, he’s skeptical about mummies and the supernatural. He’s also got a cute little dog as a kind of sidekick, but a pet is not a substitute for a personality. Probably our blandest Mummy hero yet.

Amina Mansouri: Ramsay Ames plays our actual protagonist. Beautiful, but not really “Egyptian-looking,” she is actually the reincarnation of the Princess Ananka. Which explains why she goes into trance states when Kharis is near. Sort of. Anyway, she’s actually an interesting, sympathetic character since she’s mystified by all that’s going on and trying to do something about it.

Andoheb, High Priest of Arkan: George Zucco again, and again under the weathered, old-man makeup. Why is he a Priest of Arkan instead of Karnak? Who knows. Maybe their lease was up and they got a better deal. Anyway, he’s only in the beginning of the movie, but it is kind of amusing that he seems frustrated in the failure of his previous successor when appointing another.

Yousef Bey: John Carradine! Looking a little tanned! He’s the new priest sent to America to get Kharis and Ananka back. Interestingly, reclamation is the sole mission as opposed to the revenge angle. Needless to say, he too falls victim to the whims of lust and falls for Amina and would like to make both her and himself immortal, just like the last two guys tried. Still, the fact that its John Carradine means that he chews the scenery with exceptional relish. It also ends about the same too, with Kharis defenestrating him near the end of the film.

Kharis: Lon Chaney Jr. again and he seems more comfortable in the role. This time around Kharis is a bit more proactive, hiding out in some guy’s barn before Yousef arrives and being very, very adamant about taking Ananka, regardless of whatever body her spirit is in, home to her proper resting place.

Prof. Matthew Norman: Frank Reicher, who was in the last movie as a minor character doing forensic work for the police (maybe a live mummy limping around got him interested in Egyptology), returns in this one as somebody who can be the first victim of the mummy. His death is quite accidental, in that he dabbled too eagerly with the tana leaves and got a throttling.

This kind of shot has been in Every mummy movie so far.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Reginald Le Borg, makeup by Jack Pierce. Again, visually there’s not a whole lot of interesting flourishes, but the camera work is dependable and the makeup effects are great. The movie also makes liberal use of stock footage of Egypt and recycled footage from the Karloff film.

There is one standout scene in the Scripps Museum where Yousef sneaks around after hours and summons Kharis and a security guard gets in the way. It’s quite well done and Carradine’s smile as he sees Kharis sneaking up is nice and creepy, as is Kharis’ temper tantrum when he realizes that Ananka’s spirit is not with her mummy anymore. The last scene is also rather impressive, with Kharis carrying the body of Amina/Ananka into a swamp as he’s being chased by (you guessed it) an angry mob.

Writing
The screenplay is by Griffin Jay, Henry Sucher, & Brenda Weisberg, and here things are actually quite a bit more interesting than the last film. Sure, Tom’s as boring as a rock, but the merging of Amina with Ananka is genuinely an interesting development cribbed from the Karloff film. I also really liked the fact that after the professor’s death, the local police don’t waste any time in suspecting it could be anything other than a returned Kharis. That’s a nice bit of continuity there. What’s also fun is that the cops try to recreate the situation that got Professor Norman killed, only they plan to trap Kharis in a pit trap, since that’s the best idea they’ve got because they know bullets don’t work on him. Sadly they never get to use it, but the fact that they showed the cops being savvy enough to try is a nice touch. Sadly, the random continuity breaks persist, with the priesthood suddenly becoming that of Akran. Maybe they weren’t comfortable with Karnak anymore, since the actual Karnak was a real city and a seat of theological importance? I dunno.

Sound
Frank Skinner (uncredited) on musical duty, and the score continues to be good. This time the themes are changed up a bit and its more sweeping and a bit less melancholy.

Conclusion
The Mummy’s Ghost is better than the previous entry. Some interesting writing touches are done and Kharis displays more personality and then we get a genuinely unhappy ending. Definitely a step up, but it kind of requires seeing The Mummy’s Tomb to appreciate it more, continuity issues notwithstanding.

Wooden fences are no match for the might of KHARIS!

“Three tana leaves to keep him alive, nine to give him movement.”

2011-10-05T13:02:00.000-05:00

The first Kharis movie was successful and it took only 2 years for the next sequel, The Mummy’s Tomb, to come out. This time around, it’s a direct continuation of the story, only set 30 years after it. But despite this, things start to get a little…wonky.

Plot
Its 30 years later and an old Steve Banning is now a retired archeologist with a grown up son who’s got a girlfriend/fiancee of his own now. He tells a tale of his adventures as a young man, told through recycled footage of the last two films, and his son doesn’t really believe it. Meanwhile, Priest Andoheb is still alive and appoints a new priest to act as his successor and caretaker of the mummy, Kharis. Princess Ananka was taken to a display in America and the new guy is sent with Kharis to get her mummy back and exact revenge on those who defiled the tomb 30 years ago. The priest arrives in the town of Mapleton (which is somewhere in New England) and immediately starts sending out Kharis to do his strangling thing.

Characters
Steve Banning: Dick Foran continues to be likable, this time as a mustachioed professor-type who pretty much does a bunch expository narration over some flashbacks before becoming the first victim of the “Mapleton Monster.” Which I’ll admit, is kind of interesting. You bring the hero back from the last movie, then kill him off ten minutes in. Didn’t exactly expect that in a 40’s movie. Its also kind of a shame, since Foran’s performance is more nuanced in this one.

Dr. John Banning: John Hubbard is our actual hero. The skeptical son of Steve Banning, John’s a pretty boring character who doesn’t do anything except be the useless voice of scientific skepticism in a house where his dad straight-up fought a mummy in his youth. He’s kind of a useless character until he finally believes in Kharis, and then he finally does something about it (like helping organize an angry mob). It just takes several deaths to get him there.

Isobel Evans: Elyse Knox plays John’s girlfriend. She’s a bit more intrigued by Steve’s stories, but other than that she’s another standard character without much personality. Pleasant, virtuous, and eventually the object of Mehemet Bey’s affections, she’s more of a plot device than a real character.

Babe Hanson: Wallace Ford returns. I have no idea why his last name’s “Hanson” instead of “Jenson” this time around but whatever. He arrives in Mapleton, also wearing a dapper moustache (and spectacles) after Steve’s murder and he knows exactly what’s going on: Kharis followed them to America and wants revenge. Except nobody believes him. Though the newshawks that descend on Mapleton for the story are eager to hear his tale. He too becomes a victim of Kharis’ wrath.

Andoheb: George Zucco returns. He survived the gunshot that took him out of the last movie and here is shown under a lot of old-people makeup. Humbled from his attempt to use a mummy to steal a girl for himself, he tasks his successor to finish his job, but not before warning him to stay true to his vows and avoid temptation. Guess how well that works out?

Mehemet Bey: Turhan Bey (who’s half-Turkish; which is as close as the series gets to an actual Egyptian High Priest), is our villain this time. He’s a young High Priest of Karnak following his mission. He’s an interesting character since he’s quite polite, kind of nice and not really intimidating in the way you’d expect the handler of a thousand year old mummy to be. He’s fairly level-headed and treats his mission like the job it is. He’s got nothing personal against Banning and company. That all changes when he spots Isobel. His heart goes aflutter and the plan starts to go off the rails.

Kharis: Lon Chaney Jr. takes up the mummy mantle (and continues to do so from here on out). His Kharis is a little bit singed and one eye has swollen shut, but he’s still mute and shambling. Sadly, they didn’t bring back the rotoscoped effect for his eyes this time. It doesn’t feel like Chaney found his footing with Kharis this time around, though the mummy is surprisingly spry and capable of climbing a trellis to the second floor of a house.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Harold Young, the movie has a workmanlike quality to it that isn’t bad, but lacking in any real identity. It is kind of novel bringing Kharis to an American setting, and the Jack Pierce makeup effects are still top-notch, but it lacks the wit of the previous film and the artistry of Freund’s film.

Writing
Story by Neil P. Varnick and Screenplay by Griffin Jay and Henry Sucher. The story is…okay. It recycles a few beats from the last one (and a lot of footage) in that the mummy’s handler falls for a woman and succumbs to temptation and then suffers for it. Like I said above, the real interesting element at play here is bringing in the heroes from the last movie and murdering them, which kind of displays the mummy’s patience and persistence at getting his revenge (though in a lot of ways Kharis is just a tool of the Priests of Karnak). What’s also interesting is that the internal continuity of the series is beginning to, ah, unravel, with Babe’s sudden change in last name. Oh, and big surprise, but there’s an angry mob in the movie.

This happens a lot in the series

Sound
Musical Director Hans J. Salter, and the score is really nice and appropriate. Pretty much the stuff I said for the last movie applies here as well. A good, solid score.

Conclusion
The Mummy’s Tomb is a pretty weak entry into the series. Its watchable, certainly, but it lacks real vitality to make it stand out. It’s got a strong start and then only picks up again at the end when a house is lit on fire with the mummy in it. Also, the movie wants you to buy War Bonds.

“Hey Steve, can a woman go nuts from getting sawed in half too many times?”

2011-10-04T13:24:00.000-05:00

It was almost 10 years before Universal revisited the Mummy franchise, but revisit they did in 1940, producing The Mummy’s Hand, which was more of a reboot since it completely did away with the Imhotep plotline. Sort of. Actually, quite a lot of the movie has changed, going for a more pulpy feel to the proceedings than the eldritch tone of the original. Is that a good thing? We shall see.

Story
Once more we begin in Egypt, only this time our protagonists are Steve Banning, a down-on-his-luck archeologist trying to make a big discovery, and his best buddy, Babe Jenson. In a bazaar they find a piece of pottery clueing them in to the location of the Tomb of Princess Ananka, which is somewhere in the Hill of the Seven Jackals. Unfortunately, the ancient line of the Priests of Karnak are the caretakers of said tomb, and their sacred duty is to ensure the tomb is undisturbed. Banning and Jenson finally get funding, in the form of an eccentric American magician and his beautiful daughter, and they set out for the Hill with another archeologist in tow. To defend the Tomb of Ananka, the Priest of Karnak awakens the ancient mummy Kharis to seek out and destroy the would-be defilers.

Characters
Steve Banning: Dick Foran is our hero, and is a fairly standard one, albeit more proactive than usual. A disgraced archeologist trying to make enough scratch to go home to New York, its his idea to go digging in the desert when he learns of the Valley of the Seven Jackals, its his idea to get funding, and so on. He’s all about going off on an ADVENTURE! Which makes him reasonably likable.

Babe Jenson: Wallace Ford is Banning’s sarcastic, very-much-a-New-Yorker sidekick. He provides a lot of the comic relief and a hefty dose of skepticism towards the supernatural. He’s also reasonably competent in a lot of things, like marksmanship, when it counts.

Dr. Petrie: Charles Trowbridge plays the academic who believes in Banning’s mission. He goes along to provide added academic support, and someone for the mummy to kill.

The Great Solvani: Cecil Kelloway plays the traveling magician who instead of using his money to get back home, invests in the expedition because he thinks it’ll be fun. He provides the rest of the comic relief as he’s able to out con Babe in a few bar tricks when they meet.

Marta Solvani: Peggy Moran is Solvani’s much more level-headed daughter and at first tries to get the money her father invested back by confronting Babe with a (trick) revolver. Naturally, she becomes Banning’s love interest.

Professor/High Priest Andoheb: George Zucco! In a fez! He’s “Egyptian” in this and while a respected scientist, he is also the new High Priest of Karnak, tasked with protecting the tomb from defilers. Eventually sees Marta and decides that he’ll make her and himself immortal through some kind of ritual.

Kharis: Tom Tyler plays the title character, and through a backstory that heavily recycles footage from the last mummy movie, is changed around that Ananka was the princess who died prematurely and whom he tried to revive by stealing, not the Scroll of Thoth, but the forbidden tana leaves. He was caught and mummified alive, but with the added feature of having his tongue cut out, so he’ll never speak any lines. Anyway, a tea brewed from the tana leaves has kept him sort of alive/undead all these centuries. 3 leaves will keep him alive, and 9 leaves will give him mobility. Any more than 9 leaves and that’s going to be a problem. Still, Kharis is a pretty good monster, despite being a mute, undead errand boy who’s whole shtick involves strangling his victims to death.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Christy Cabanne, the movie lacks the artistic touches that Karl Freund brought to the table. Instead, this film is competently shot with some nice set design, which isn’t a bad thing. What is kind of a bad thing is the rather blatant recycling of footage from the first mummy movie, only with Tom Tyler inserted into scenes where Boris Karloff’s face was visible. On the one hand, yes it makes sense, since its not Imhotep this time, but on the other it is a pretty blatant way to recycle footage and plot details whole cloth. Oh well, it works well enough, I suppose.

Not pictured: Zucco's fez

Oh yes, and Jack Pierce returned as the makeup effects artist. And this movie marks the biggest difference between Imhotep and Kharis. Remember how Imhotep was only in the wrappings for a few seconds of screen time? Here, Kharis is all wrappings all the time, so you really get your money’s worth of on-screen shambling mummy action. One more thing of note is the (I guess) rotoscoped effect on Kharis’ eyes that covered Tyler’s human eyes with dark circles. It’s a neat effect, and not visible in the trailer, but adds to the otherworldly quality to the character. Shame its only used in this movie.

Writing
Screenplay by Griffin Jay and Maxwell Shane, who divided this movie into what is effectively two parts. The first is a straight up comedy with Banning & Jenson bumming around Cairo, trying to get funding, and meeting Solvani by Babe trying to hustle him into buying a round of drinks on a bet. There’s a lot of banter and a fair bit of comedy with the horror placed on the back burner. Once they get to the dig site, the horror plot really kicks in as characters start dying off and Kharis makes off with Marta, while still holding onto the more lighthearted characterization of the heroes. Its an odd thing, but kind of works in its weird way. Banning’s cut from a very familiar cloth of bland horror heroes, but through his proactive and good-natured, er, nature, he kind of rises above his more generic ilk. That and Babe is not only a likable goofball but also really handy in the clutch.

And the tana leaves thing is actually kind of a neat idea that allows Kharis to get stronger or weaker as the plot demands. As a writer, I can appreciate that kind of built-in flexibility to the rules of animating a mummy.

Sound
Original music by Hans J. Salter & Frank Skinner (both uncredited), the music is definitely 40s era Universal horror music (sweeping cues, flexibility between melodrama, tension, and bombast, that sort of thing).

Conclusion
You know, I liked The Mummy’s Curse. While The Mummy was a product of Universal’s "Classy Horror" period in the 30s, The Mummy’s Curse has the pulpy feel of 40’s Universal horror. I was not originally ready for the comedy elements to be so strong, but they weren’t badly done and the flick’s able to balance between Babe cracking one-liners and Kharis strangling people quite well. Quite fun, actually.

“Your pardon, I dislike to be touched! An…Eastern prejudice.”

2011-10-03T13:35:00.000-05:00

Once more its that time of year again. Dead leaves flying through the air, pumpkin ale flowing through taps, and nothing but horror-related stuff here at Castle RMWC. That’s right, its back for a third go, and hopefully it’ll be more like the first year and not like last year. So, where do we begin? Universal’s always a good place to start.

Capitalizing on the popularity of the discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922 (and the mystique about the curse which supposedly claimed the lives of several members of the discovering expedition), Universal cast Boris Karloff for a 1932 movie featuring, what else? The Mummy.

Story
So we’re in Egypt in 1921 and an expedition discovers the mummy of Imhotep, a pretty big deal back in the day who apparently did something bad to get himself mummified alive and buried with a curse over his head. A foolish young archeologist deciphers the Scroll of Thoth and reads it out loud, awakening Imhotep, who grabs the scroll and shuffles off. The archeologist goes mad from the experience and we flash forward to “now.” That took all of six minutes.

Ten years later, Imhotep (as “Ardeth Bey”), cleaned up and now fluent in English, arranges for the discovery of the tomb of Princess Ancksenamen, his long lost love. He finds that she has been reincarnated as a modern woman, Helen Grosvenor, and he sets his eyes on her. Trying to oppose him are archeologist Frank Whemple (who’s taken with Helen himself) and Dr. Muller, an expert on Egyptian occultism.

Characters
Imhotep/"Ardeth Bey": The real draw here is Boris Karloff. He just dominates the screen whenever he’s on. His performance as “Ardeth Bey” is incredibly restrained and subdued, as befit’s a man who’s body is shriveled, dried, and fragile. It also helps that Imhotep is an incredibly tragic figure. Sure he’s the villain of the piece, but everything he does he does for love. In life, it was a sad, desperate love to revive his beloved which led to his condemnation to his fate. After his revival, all he wants to do is be reunited with her, first with her mummy and then with her reincarnation. Naturally, he goes about it in a horribly creepy way that involves hypnosis and murder (and the wearing of a dapper fez). He’s fantastically sympathetic.

See? Dapper

Helen Grosvenor: Zita Johann is suitably exotic looking and kind of pulls off the half-Egyptian thing to her character. She’s likable and rather active in trying to figure out just what’s going on with her. Definitely one of the better Universal Horror heroines.
Frank Whemple: David Manners is the male hero and about as generic as other contemporary male heroes in horror films. Frank is the son of the leader of the previous expedition, Dr. Joseph Whemple, and his dad knows that the Scroll of Thoth is a mysterious and potentially dangerous artifact. Frank doesn’t do much except fall in love with Helen.

Dr. Muller: Edward Van Sloan, once again playing a professor type. He does it well, so I’m not complaining. This time he’s also Helen’s doctor, which enables him to keep an eye on the plot after the intro sequence.

Visuals/Effects
Interestingly enough, the famous “mummy” look by Jack Pierce is only used in the beginning, where Imhotep is found in the 1920s and inadvertently reanimated by the Scroll of Thoth. The scene itself is quite effective where little is actually shown of the mummy. The rest of the time he wears makeup that gives his skin a dried, drawn look without being too obviously undead.

The other real thing to note is the direction and cinematography of Karl Freund, who was a successful director of photography before becoming a rather unsuccessful director. Freund worked on a hell of a lot of projects, including Metropolis and the 1931 Dracula, but he was only a film director for a few years during the 30s. Shame, really. Set design, lighting, and so on are all very well done AND the film makes extensive use of a steadi-cam, which wasn’t all that common in 1932.

Writing
Screenplay by John L. Balderston from a story by Nina Wilcox Putnam & Richard Schayer. The storyline borrows more than a few elements from Universal’s Dracula (professor-type character, ancient, foreign villain, hypnotism, etc), but there is significantly more tragedy involved. Imhotep was cursed because his great crime (necromancy) was committed in the name of love, which instantly adds sympathy to the character.

Also of interest is that the other male characters are actually rather ineffective. Dr. Miller provides a lot of exposition and Frank is really rather useless aside from falling in love with Helen. The real protagonist and hero is Helen, and aside from frequently falling under Imhotep’s mental influence, the resolution ultimately comes down to her actions. That’s actually pretty interesting, considering the times.

Sound
Original music by an unaccredited James Dietrich, and the soundtrack is really quite good. Full of intrigue and romantic cues, it fits the proceedings excellently. They also use Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake music for the intro (as did Dracula).

Conclusion
The Mummy truly is a fantastic work of cinema. Moody and atmospheric, it has an interesting etherealness to the proceedings and follows a methodical, measured pace that actually works quite well. Karloff in particular shines as the main character, and while the mummy wrappings disappear after a few seconds of screen time, Karloff himself remains magnetic on the screen. Which is a shame, since he’s got nothing to do with any of the sequels. Totally recommended.

“I am your pallbearer.”

2011-09-15T17:30:00.000-05:00

Well, the previous Sartana movie got me hungry for more, so I tracked down the first in the series, If You Meet Sartana, Pray For Your Death AKA Se incontri Sartana prega per la tua morte from 1968. Starring the original Sartana, Gianni Garko.

Story
It all starts with a stagecoach getting ambushed by a gang of bandits. A mysterious, impeccably dressed drifter deals with most of them and examines the wreckage before traveling to the small town of Goldspring where the plot begins in earnest and swiftly spirals into a game who’s going to double cross whom. There’s a Mexican general who entrusts his money to two crooked bankers, who are in league with a gang that’s raiding stage coaches. It all comes down to a large stack of gold and who’s going to walk away with it.

Characters
Sartana: Gianni/“Johnny” Garko plays our protagonist; a soft-spoken, well-dressed anti-hero with a dark sense of humor. He’s well armed, great at poker, and constantly prepared for any situation. My earlier assessment of him as a Western Batman stands. The four-barreled palm gun also gets a lot of spotlight, and even that thing’s got some surprising tricks up its sleeve. There’s also a hint that Sartana is more than a mere mortal. A smooth, cool badass in every way.

Dusty: Franco Pesce plays the short, elderly undertaker of the town. He latches onto Sartana as soon as the gunslinger rides into town. Dusty was once an artist in Boston but its hinted he threw that away in favor of booze. Provides comic relief, but the voice dubbed for him is gratingly annoying.

General Tampico: Fernando Sancho plays the Mexican general with a comically overlong name (shorted to General Tampico). He’s somewhat comical, but little more than a thug with a bunch of goons that sure don’t act like soldiers. He invests his gold with the bank and gets understandably upset when it vanishes.

Lasky: William Berger hams it up royally as the real villain of the movie. Lasky is a great counterpoint to Sartana since he’s an emotional psychopath who thinks on the fly. Berger’s great in this, whether he’s swaggering into town, smugly cheating at cards, mowing down his own gang with a Gatling gun, or freaking out when Sartana plays a musical watch from some hiding place just to mess with him. Carrying forward the Batman analogy, there’s a fair amount of the modern Joker in his performance as an untamed psychopath. A great villain.

Morgan: Hey, its Klaus Kinsky! He’s Lasky’s right hand man and fond of knife throwing and wears bells on his spurs, which in fact DO go jingle-jangle-jingle. Not a major character, but a fun one.

Jeff Stewal and Al Alman: Sydney Chaplin and Gianni Rizzo are the pair of bankers who are scheming to get away with the gold through an insurance fraud scheme. Alman’s a fat fellow with a fondness for candy and Stewal is juggling two affairs: one with the widow of the mayor, and the other with Alman’s wife Evelyn (Heidi Fischer). Pillars of the community, they are.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Gianfranco Parolini (as “Frank Kramer”) and with Cinematography by Sandro Mancori, the movie has some nice shots here and there, but is otherwise fairly standard as a Spaghetti Western, with a few spots that are rough around the edges. The pacing is nice and we never forget that its all about the gold. The action sequences are a definite positive for the film, since they show off Sartana’s resourcefulness and cleverness. Probably the most amusing is where Sartana has set up a trap in his hotel room where he can snare anyone coming in through the window.

Writing
Adolfo Cagnacci, Luigi De Santis, and Fabio Piccioni on story and Werner Hauff, Renato Izzo, and Gianfranco Parolini as writers. That’s a lot of people working on one script, but things seem to work out okay. The plot is horribly convoluted, but that’s not the real draw here. Solid character work, reprehensible villains and Sartana being awesome are the draw.

Sound
The score by Piero Picconi is serviceable but sparse. The musical watch gets a lot of screen time and those scenes work, but that kind of thing gets done better in For A Few Dollars More (I’ll get to that review when I can). The music’s not bad and has a few high points that dips into that whole “swingin’ sixties” vibe, but not one of the film’s strong points.

Conclusion
If You Meet Sartana Pray For Your Death is a solid foundation for a “franchise” of nearly 20 movies with the gunslinger’s name attached. The action’s good, the plot is confusing (par for the course with a lot of Spaghetti Westerns, I‘m noticing), and the characters are well realized, even if they are caricatures. What it may lack in budget it more than makes up for in attitude and charm. Sartana is, frankly, an Awesome character and thoroughly entertaining.

Boy that trailer sure asks a lot of questions. Don't expect most of them to get answered.

“What was I supposed to do? Call him for cheating better than me, in front of the others?”

2011-09-06T13:34:00.000-05:00

Right, so, Real Life has been kind of getting in the way of working on a side project such as this for a while now, which explains the big gaps in updates. Fear not! I have something big planned to get back in the swing of things come next month! In the meantime, September will likely continue to have spotty updates.

Such as this one!

Regarded as one of the greatest con man movies ever made, The Sting boasts an impressive roster of talent and the awards to match, winning Best Picture and 6 other awards for 1973. And it totally deserves those accolades.

Story
Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford) is a talented but small time con man in Joliet, Illinois during the 1930s. He’s partnered up with Luther Coleman (Robert Earl Jones) who’s looking to retire soon since he’s getting on in years. The two of them con a delivery boy for a mob and end up with way more money than they expected. Johnny pisses the money away gambling and he gets shaken down by crooked cop Lieutenant William Snyder (Charles Durning) who informs him that the money belongs to New York big shot Doyle “The Big Mick” Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) who’s none too pleased that a chunk of his money has gone missing. Luther is killed by Lonnegan’s thugs and Hooker escapes to Chicago, looking for a near-mythic friend of Luther’s named Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman). Hooker wants revenge on Lonnegan and Gondorff agrees to help him pull the Big Con on the crime lord.

What follows is a steady buildup to the Con that involves gathering a big team that includes Gondorff’s gal Billie (Eileen Brennan), the fast talking J.J. Singleton (Ray Walston), and the dapper Kid Twist (Harold Gould) among others. Lonnegan has a fondness for gambling, so the plan is to scam him out of a lot of money without him knowing he was even played. But things are tricky. Lonnegan’s no fool and while he doesn’t know what Hooker looks like, his men know he’s in Chicago. Lt. Snyder and a mysterious assassin named Salino are on Hooker’s trail, and the FBI are very interested in nabbing Gondorff at any cost. You better believe things are going to get interesting.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by the very talented George Roy Hill with Director of Photography Robert Surtees. Its quite a testament to the filmmakers’ skill that while the movie was made in the early 70s, it looks like it was shot back in the 1930s. I don’t mean the period clothing and props (though that’s an obvious requirement), but rather the whole visual feel of the film. It feels like it was made right before the Hays Code (and in color).

Pacing is also marvelously quick and the audience doesn’t get a moment to breathe from the moment Hooker gets to Chicago. It adds a feeling of underlying tension and urgency to even the more relaxed scenes.

Writing
Written by David S. Ward, the movie fires on all possible story cylinders. The character work is fantastic. Redford and Newman work exceptionally well together and their characters have a mentor and student relationship with some interesting twists that play on the inherent paranoia of men who make their livings by lying for big stakes. Shaw’s Lonnegan is also very well realized: Tough, craggy, ruthless, but oddly vulnerable when the con begins. The rest of the cast are well realized as well and given plenty of moments to shine.

The plot also deserves mentioning, because its incredibly well thought out. Unfortunately, I can’t say anything more about it without going into spoiler territory, and that would be a huge disservice to anyone who hasn’t experienced this movie yet. Suffice it to say that its one hell of a ride and rewards multiple viewings.

Sound
The soundtrack doesn’t have an original score. Instead a number of Scott Joplin tunes were conducted and adapted by Marvin Hamlisch. It took a while for me to warm up to the soundtrack because ragtime was old hat by the 30s, but after a while it grew on me. The innocence and above all, playfulness of the music really cuts the tension in some places and in others reminds you that this is a movie and you’re watching it to have fun, so relax.

Conclusion
The Sting is rightly regarded as a classic. Everything works exceptionally and the movie demands that you keep on your toes while you’re watching it. Absolutely recommended, to the point where it should be required viewing.

“One half isn’t any good without the other.”

2011-08-18T17:59:00.000-05:00

In looking for info on the next entry, 1966’s Johnny Yuma, I came across a whole lot of stuff pertaining to the TV series “The Rebel” and a Johnny Cash theme song. This spaghetti western doesn’t have anything to do with that series, which ended about a decade before the movie was released. What does that ultimately mean for this review? Nothing! So off we go.

Story
Johnny Yuma (Mark Damon) is a happy-go-lucky gunslinger and gambler who’s picked up the nickname of “Yuma” from a shootout he was involved in there. Johnny likes womanizing, shoots well left-handed, wears a vest as his signature costume piece, favors really bright shirts (that, impressively enough, he changes several times through the course of the movie instead of wearing the same thing over and over), and in some scenes seems to be wearing eyeliner. Huh.

Anyway, Johnny’s uncle, Thomas Felton (Leslie Daniels) owns a profitable ranch in Santa Marco and makes Johnny his heir. This doesn’t please his wife Samantha (Rosalba Neri) one bit since she was hoping he’d make her brother Pedro (Luigi Vannucchi as Louis Vanner) the heir. The two don’t waste any time in murdering Thomas and pinning it on a servant. These two have an interesting relationship. Pedro is a sadistic bully, little better than a simpleton. Samantha is much more subtle in her manipulations and the brains of the duo, mixing cunning with evil. Sexy evil.

Felton invited Yuma to the ranch before dying, so Samantha & Pedro figure they have to take care of him. Samantha sends a letter to an old flame, a gunslinger named Lawrence Jerome Carradine (Lawrence Dobkin). Carradine’s a classy, well dressed gent who like chess, fair play, and has an interesting holster where the gun basically hooks onto the belt with a quick release. He agrees to come because she’s offering a lot of money, but he’s quite bitter about how their relationship ended in the past. Despite the fact that she’s crazy hot.

Carradine and Yuma happen to meet up by chance in a bar brawl and develop a mutual respect for each other, even going so far as to trade guns and holsters without knowing who the other is. Johnny’s also (largely against his will) picked up a sidekick in Sorito; a cowardly, sniveling fellow who Yuma tends to browbeat on occasion because of his big talk.

The stage gets set for some confrontation and a lot of goons are going to end up dead by the end of the movie.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Romolo Guerrieri and cinematography by Mario Capriotto. The film is very well shot. Scenes are well lit and framed, and there’s a fair amount of nice camera movement. The fight scenes in particular are nice, especially the bar brawl which mixes nice stunts and camera work.

Writing
Written by Fernando Di Leo, Romolo Guerrieri, Sauro Scavolini, Giovanni Simonelli, the movie covers fairly standard ground for a western. Family member is murdered for his money, hero seeks to avenge him. People cheat at poker, bar brawls break out, there’s showdowns and shootouts, and the villains are villainous. People expect that in a western, and this movie does those elements very well. The interesting stuff comes about with character interactions. Johnny Yuma’s a lovable rogue but there’s not a whole lot to his character other than being fun to watch and root for. Samantha Felton is a stone cold bitch, sending her lover and accomplice to deliver a letter to Carradine implicating him in Felton’s murder with half of a reward just to get him out of the picture.

The real interesting character arc goes to Lawrence Jerome Carradine. He’s got sad eyes and his past with Samantha is hinted at being painful. Apparently she left him because they were poor. He claims to not have any feelings left for her but its obvious he’s got something still there. On the one hand, he’s willing to work for her, but on the other its pretty clear that he’s all kinds of angry at her for breaking his heart. He’s the wild card of the film, and its quite fascinating to watch how his arc plays out.

One other thing the movie does is not pull punches with some character deaths. Not so much in showing gore and gruesomeness, but in the way that when it happens you go “well damn.” It adds a little more weight to the consequences of character actions, but if I say more, we’re getting into spoiler territory.

Sound
Music by Nora Orlandi, and the soundtrack is fairly standard Spaghetti Western fare. Trumpets, guitars, and lots of whistling. The score also has a few comical tags for lighter scenes without getting obnoxious, which is appreciated. I have to add that the theme song that plays at the beginning and end titles is also quite catchy.

Conclusion
There is nothing revolutionary about Johnny Yuma, but that’s not a bad thing. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel all the time. Its quite well shot, has a good sense of humor, brings a lot of intrigue to the table and tells a good, if straightforward, cowboy revenge tale. It does its job solidly with some great atmosphere, acting, and good action scenes. And seriously, Rosalba Neri is gorgeous in this. Totally recommended.

See? Catchy.

“You’re lucky today. I never kill on Thursdays. I promised.”

2011-08-01T15:46:00.000-05:00

Ah Spaghetti Westerns. Movies Italians made about the American Southwest in the Italian countryside with mostly-Italian casts and crews and a few American lead actors. The very concept is a bit on the surreal side and I’ll admit before recently, I’ve not seen any of them. Inherent goofiness aside, I suppose its time to change that. Now where to start?
I’ll just be an ass and not pick The Man With No Name Trilogy and instead take one of the Sartana films. Who’s Sartana? From what I’ve gathered he’s another mysterious bounty hunting drifter who’s been the focus of a great many awesomely titled films with several actors playing the lead over time (and several knockoff films of much lesser quality). Guy’s got a cult following. Today’s entry is I Am Sartana, Trade Your Guns For A Coffin, AKA C’e Sartana…vendi la pistola e comprati la bara AKA Fistful of Lead from 1970. It’s not one of the “Big 4” of the Sartana movies, but it definitely leaves an impression.

Story
We start out with an impeccably dressed rider sitting down for a lunchtime picnic on his travels and witnessing a stagecoach get ambushed, slaughtered, robbed and a stick of dynamite thrown into the wagon to destroy it. Deciding to investigate, since a bounty he was looking to claim just got shot dead, he throws his canteen up into the air and shoots it, the water from it landing squarely on the dynamite, diffusing it. This told me two things: That Sartana is one hell of a shot, and that it’s going to be THAT kind of movie.

Sartana (George Hilton here as opposed to Gianni/“Johnny” Garko who was the original and definitive Sartana) discovers that the bags of gold the coach was carrying were full of sand. He follows the trail of a bandit leader named Mantas (Nello Pazzafini) clearing out one of his hideouts of henchmen and heading to the crooked town of Appaloosa where the head of the local mining company, Samuel Spencer (Piero Lulli as Peter Carter) and his henchman Baxter (Carlo Gaddi) are looking for hired guns to protect the gold shipments to Dodge City. Sartana quickly finds himself surrounded by intrigue and backstabbing and catches the eye of local hotel owner Trixie (Erika Blanc).

Sartana proceeds to outfox his enemies with Batman-like resourcefulness and planning. Things take another turn when another gunman rides into town; the poetry reading English dandy Sabbath (Charles Southwood) who’s no slouch himself when it comes to elaborately planned badassery.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Giuliano Carnimeo (as “Anthony Ascot”), there are some interesting camera angles used (mostly spins and whip-pans) that add some different touches. Otherwise, visually the film’s not what I’d call innovative, though still well shot.

Writing
Tito Carpi on writing duty and the film mixes equal parts badassery and cheesiness. There’s a lot of entertainment to be found between the occasional cheesy one-liners, Sartana’s crazy preparedness for any given situation, and interesting little touches, like the four-barreled Derringer he carries around and a friendly game of checkers…using shot glasses. That’s badass. Horribly, horribly bad for your, but still pretty awesome.

Sound
Music by Francesco De Masi, and you know, its pretty good. Nice and catchy with a fair amount of swagger that fits the character nicely.

Conclusion
Fistful of Lead was a fantastic surprise. Sartana is one hell of an interesting gunslinger and I’m going to make it my mission to track down the rest of these films. Totally recommended both as a Spaghetti Western and as a part of “Cinema of the Awesome.”

BONUS REVIEW!

Oh, and the disc also contained Trinity and Sartana Are Coming AKA Trinità e Sartana figli di... from 1972. You would think it was connected in some way, but no. It’s not. It’s a long, dull, Buddy Comedy Western about two thieves/bank robbers who get into all sorts of not-actually-hilarious hijinks as they score loot and can’t seem to keep any of it. They pretty much used the names of popular gunslinger characters (Trinity’s another Spaghetti Western badass). The fights are childish (and I presume targeted at a younger audience), the music annoying, and everybody seems to have graduated from the A-Team School of Marksmanship. The one interesting thing it does is make “Trinity” a native of Trinidad, but its really not worth putting up with the rest of the movie. This film really isn’t worth your time, nor is it worth a full review write-up.

“It's a pity we can't send Jet Jaguar to go and get Godzilla!”

2011-07-25T13:49:00.000-05:00

Ah Godzilla. Haven’t really discussed any of his films here yet, which is a shame, since I’m a fan of giant monster movies. 1973 Gojira tai Megaro (Godzilla vs. Megalon), is considered one of the lesser Gojira films, though.

Story
So, we’re obviously in Japan and the boring human characters we have to follow are an annoying kid, his inventor older brother and another guy who… I don’t really know what he does. Anyway, the inventor has created a robot, Jet Jaguar (he has nothing to do with jaguars), that can fly and do other robot stuff. Unfortunately, the subterranean civilization of Seatopia is pretty angry about nuclear experimentation below the surface of the earth, and they decide they’ve had enough of our nonsense, so they send a giant beetle monster named Megalon up to teach us a lesson by destroying model tanks and buildings. Jet Jaguar is useful to the Seatopians because if controlled, he can help guide Megalon. Naturally, Jet Jaguar breaks free of that control and gets a message to Godzilla on Monster Island. And then suddenly he becomes sentient, taking control of his own programming, decides he has to take things into his own hands, and then grows to kaiju size because he subscribes to the Megatron school of Physics (where the laws of conservation of mass are optional), and he fights Megalon. It goes well too, until another Godzilla foe, Gigan, shows up and he & Megalon double team our hero. Can Jet Jaguar hold out long enough for Godzilla to show up and even the odds?

So its really a Jet Jaguar movie and Godzilla only shows up near the end.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Jun Fukuda, it provides about what you’d expect from a Godzilla movie, though production values seem a little lower than some others. Regardless, we do get four monsters in a tag team match by the end of the movie, so you can’t say they didn’t deliver on the kaiju. The designs themselves are also fairly interesting. Megalon and his drill hands and Gigan with his hook hands and buzz saw belly are both really damn weird, but that’s why they’re likable. Godzilla doesn’t get much screen time at all, but when he shows up he wrecks some faces and does a really goofy tailslide kick that is so insane that they show it to the audience twice to prove to you that it just happened. And as for Jet Jaguar, I dunno. I just really like the guy, with his Ultraman-like body and giant hammy grin. That grin really adds a lot.

Writing
Written by Jun Fukuda, and story credits to Takeshi Kimura (for "Gojira tai Uchu Kaiju") and Shinichi Sekizawa. The plot is ridiculous, but then again, who watches a kaiju film for the plot? The human stuff is boring, the military tries to stop the giant monster of the week, fails and then Godzilla shows up (in this case with an ally). Its not complicated, just thoroughly formulaic.
Sound
The score by Riichiro Manabe is totally suitable for the movie. The sound effects work is fine, but I just wish Jet Jaguar had more than just futuristic clanks for when he talks to the monsters. I know R2-D2 was still four years in the future, but something that sounded like robot speech would’ve been preferable.

Conclusion
I know its considered one of the lesser Godzilla movies, but I have an incredible level of fondness for Gojira tai Megaro that I don’t really have an excuse for. No, Godzilla’s not really in it all that much, but Jet Jaguar is a perfect blend of goofy and badass and the two vs. two battle at the climax is really damn entertaining.

I make no excuses for myself.

And then there's this:

How can you hate that??

“I have the sky as a roof and I sleep wherever I may.”

2011-07-16T22:52:00.000-05:00

A year and some change ago I reviewed Legend of Drunken Master. Which, while an awesome movie in its own right, was also a sequel. Well, I finally saw the original film, Jui Kuen (aka Drunken Master in English), which, while still starring Jackie Chan, was made in 1978. So yeah, young Jackie Chan. So young he was credited as Jacky Chan.

Story
Wong Fei-Hung (Jackie Chan) is an extremely talented but precocious youth who’s father wants to drill some sense into. Dad calls in a relative, the wandering drunk Su Hua Chi (Siu Tien/Simon Yuen) to pound some humility into Fei-Hung. Fei-Hung naturally resists, butting heads constantly with his teacher. Meanwhile, the assassin Thunderleg (Jang Lee Hwang) is hired to take a contract out on Fe-Hung’s father, and naturally its up to our hero to save his father from getting kicked into the grave, but only after a grueling training period where he learns the intricacies of drunken-style kung-fu. That’s pretty much the plot right there. Refreshingly simple.

Visuals/Effects
Woo-ping Yuen (who’s kind of a big deal in the fight choreography world and the director of RMWC favorite Iron Monkey) directed this movie, and make no mistake, the entire movie revolves around martial arts (and fight scenes). It is important to note that it’s a fairly low-budget film, so many of the action sequences lack the flair of a lot of the sequel’s set-pieces. This movie gets by with the sheer athleticism of the cast, which is a different level of impressive. This was Jackie Chan’s breakout movie for a good reason, after all.

Writing
Written by Lung Hsiao, See-Yuen Ng, and Woo-ping Yuen, the story is quite straightforward in terms of plotting. It serves to follow Fei-Hung’s development from immature, selfish boy to more mature, less selfish young man. Simple, really. There’s also a fair amount of slapstick and most of the comedy is physical and broad.

Sound
Original music by Fu Liang Chou, which works great for the film. There’s also the issue of dubbing (which listening to the commentary enlightened me about). Apparently not all of the original Chinese audio track survives and so parts of the film use the English dub track, even when you go for the Chinese with English subtitles option on the DVD. Such is life.

Conclusion
Jui Kuen is a different experience than the more commonly seen sequel. This isn’t bad, just different. For instance, its much more self-contained, less concerned with geo-political situations and is much more…permissive of a hero who’s abilities are essentially “Popeye with booze instead of spinach.” It also has a smaller budget and lacks the polish of the sequel. However, both feature excellent martial arts and showcase Jackie Chan doing what he does best, and when you get right down to it, isn’t that what’s really important here?

“What we have just heard are the first words of the inhabitants of a new planet; a cosmic document!”

2011-07-11T19:20:00.001-05:00

This next dip into old sci-fi is an interesting case, not because it’s good, but because of its origins. It’s a joint East German/Polish production from behind the Iron Curtain made in 1960 as Der schweigende Stern in German and Milcząca Gwiazda in Polish. It was edited, dubbed, and released in the US as First Spaceship On Venus (the version I saw) in 1962. Let’s find out if it’s an early victory for glasnost, or a bowl of bad borscht.

Story
Remember the Tunguska explosion? Of course you don’t, it was in 1908, well before you were born. But you’ve heard of it, yes? Well, according to this movie, it wasn’t a meteor that exploded, but a Venusian spaceship and some equipment will be recovered in the far future of 1985 and get scientists all in a tizzy. Fast forward a few years after that and SCIENCE is getting around to checking out Venus to see what’s going on. An international crew is assembled (naturally bringing a robot with them) and off they go in the rocketship Cosmokrator. There’s too many characters to really go into them (and they don’t really have too much in the way of personality). On the way to Venus, they pick up a signal and the linguist is able to eventually decipher it, and the astronauts learn that the Venusians planned to attack Earth, but its an old signal.

Instead of going back to warn Earth, they press on, reach Venus and discover that the planet is pretty much uninhabited. They do some exploring, some accidents happen, some scientists die and they learn that the Venusians blew themselves up with atomic weaponry a long time ago. So its basically an anti-nuke message, but coming from the other side of the Iron Curtain.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Kurt Maetzig, the special effects aren’t actually that bad for Soviet Bloc Sci-Fi. Its standard rockets on strings stuff for the space ships, but I’m okay with that. The robot is a bit less interesting, being a squat little thing that looks like it gets underfoot.

Writing
Based on the novel “Astronauci” by Stanislaus Lem (a well respected Polish novelist who’s had works adapted into other films, such as George Clooney’s Solaris). Adaptation by Jan Fethke, Wolfgang Kohlhaase, Günter Reisch, Günther Rücker, and Alexander Stenbock-Fermor and Screenplay Collaboration by the director Kurt Maetzig. Aside from giving short shrift to most of the character development, I don’t have much to complain about in terms of writing. It gets the job done and some of the ideas (a hostile and belligerent Venus that screwed itself over with nukes before man gets there serving as an anti-nuclear weapon message) are kind of novel. Still, the adaptation doesn’t really bring anything new to the table aside from a few suspect scientist deaths. They flat out leave the black scientist on the planet when they leave with the fairly flimsy excuse of “being hurled off the planet.” Hmmm…

Sound
Original Music by Andrzej Markowski is your typical orchestral spacy stuff from the rocket age. Nothing fancy or unexpected.

Conclusion
Its not bad, actually. Its not great, but you can tell they actually tried to make a legitimate, somewhat accurate (for the period it was made in) science fiction film. Given the constraints of the time and the fact that it was made in the Soviet Union, they did a pretty good job of it. Still, its value exists more as a curiosity and a look at filmmaking from behind the Iron Curtain than it is a movie that can stand up on its own merits. You’re better off tracking down the MST3K Version to enliven this otherwise dull movie.

“They're eating her... and then they're going to eat me... OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!!”

2011-05-02T18:20:00.000-05:00

What is this I don’t even?

Well, it was bound to happen. 1990’s Troll 2. The so-called “worst movie ever made.” Let’s get this over with. To paraphrase, it has nothing to do with trolls, it has nothing to do with 2’s. It has everything to do with hurting.

Story
Oh where do I begin?

Joshua Waits (Michael Stephenson), Michael Waits (George Hardy), Diana Waits (Margo Prey), and Holly Waits (Connie McFarland). Elliot Cooper (Jason Wright) is Holly’s boyfriend, though she spends most of the early part of the movie ball busting him. For some reason, she also invites him on the family road trip, but he wants to bring his friends along, misses the car ride and they follow along in an RV for no good reason other than to provide a bunch of bland friends to kill off.

Now, Joshua’s been having visions of his dearly departed Grandpa Seth (Robert Ormsby), except Joshua isn’t two jokers short of a full deck and Seth is a ghost trying to warn him about the threat of goblins. Vegetarian goblins that want to feed humans some green goo that will transform them into plant matter so that they can eat them. Sounds like an overly complicated plan, but I guess goblins are just assholes that way. Anyway, the goblins are all capable of disguising themselves as humans and the town is effectively led by the druid-like sorceress (I mean “druid” in the D&D sense, not in the ancient Celtic sense) Creedence Leonore Gielgud (Deborah Reed) who’s actually kind of hot in a crazy-eyed, overacting-community-theater sort of way.

…

So, uh, where were we? Oh, yeah. So it boils down to “can Joshua save his family from being turned into goo and eaten by goblins and escape from the small town in Utah where they live?”

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Italian director Claudio Fragasso (as Drake Floyd) who actually made a fair amount of movies before filming this one, so I’m not entirely sure what the excuse is. Lack of budget is certainly a valid one, as the goblins look silly, the makeup is unconvincing and the less said about Grandpa Seth’s “lightning bolt attack” the better. As for the cinematography, budget constraints doesn’t really excuse it.

As a completely unnecessary tangent to justify a bit of useless trivia, the costume designer of the film was Laura Gemser, who in the 70s and 80s, starred in a very large number of, shall we say “naughty” exploitation films. The writer of one of these films? Claudio Fragasso. She’s actually quite important as she would act as translator between the English-speaking actors and the Italian-speaking crew (according to the trivia page on IMDB).

Writing
Speaking of writing! Screenplay by Rossella Drudi and “Drake Floyd” and let’s not mince words. The script is by far the absolute worst part of this movie. The dialogue is painfully unconvincing and, coupled with the fact that the writers were not native English speakers and expressly told the native English speaking cast to say their lines word-for-word. If you’ve seen this movie, you can see just how well that worked out.

Now, I do have to admit that the idea of making the villainous goblins militantly vegetarian is a reasonably novel idea. It’s something you legitimately don’t see frequently. The execution here probably never helped that trope catch on.

Sound
Original music by Carlo Maria Cordio and its full of synthesized badness. Let’s just move on to the end.

Conclusion
So yeah. Troll 2. Troll 2, man. Troll 2. Its status as infamous trainwreck is well documented by now and there’s little I can add to the discussion other than “Yep. It’s a bad movie.” Certainly not the objectively “worst” movie ever made. Nor is it even the worst movie I’ve ever seen (it didn’t even make me mad or anything). What elevates it to Ed Wood levels of bad moviedom is the sheer ineptitude of the execution that makes it absolutely hilarious when watched with friends because this movie needs to be seen by several people who can stare at each other in slack-jawed shock when the credits roll.

“I brought the atom bomb; I think it's a good time to use it!”

2011-04-27T17:32:00.000-05:00

There’s just something about 50’s-60’s Atomic Age Sci-Fi that I can’t help but love. Maybe it’s the sleek tech designs, maybe the goofy costumes and robots, maybe it’s the ham-fisted social commentary that gets (mostly) ineptly jammed down the audience’s throat about the benefits or dangers of SCIENCE! It was a time where not a whole lot was known about space exploration, so “anything goes” was a general theme. 1955’s King Dinosaur kind of misses the boat on that wide open promise.

Story
Astronomers discover a new planet that has moved into our solar system. Dubbing the planet Nova, a team of four astronauts, Dr. Ralph Martin (Bill Bryant), Dr. Patricia Bennett (Wanda Curtis), Dr. Richard Gordon (Douglas Henderson) and Nora Pierce (Patti Gallagher) travel to the planet and discover it’s pretty much just like Earth, only with GIANT MONSTERS! Most of the movie is padding as the two couples flirt around with each other and then two of them decide to explore the scary looking island in the middle of a lake that contains “dinosaurs” like an iguana and a caiman fighting each other with frills taped onto them.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Bert I. Gordon, a man famous for his quick shooting in B movie circles. This was actually the first movie he directed and, well, there’s not a whole lot to it. Four actors in fairly simple costumes in Southern California occasionally interacting with animals. The set piece of the movie is the “dinosaur” attack, and, well, they’re lizards. Regular reptiles with the actors chromakeyed in front of them. The reptiles themselves look like they’ve been goaded into attacking each other for real, so I guess animals WERE harmed in the making of this picture. Now, I’m not huge on animal rights or anything, but seeing a caiman/small crocodile biting down on an iguana in the name of a bad movie is a little uncomfortable to watch. Simpler times, I suppose.

Writing
Story by Bert I. Gordon and Al Zimbalist, written by Tom Gries. The story is pretty damn light in terms of anything at all of consequence. Some of the humans get pretty injured but nothing really comes of it and Planet Nova is conveniently Earth-like, so the astronauts get out of their spacesuits as quickly as possible. Simply put, the story feels like a rush job. And there’s some of the standard “nukes=bad” elements common to the genre.

Sound
Original music by Louis Palange & (Uncredited) Gene Garf. It’s your standard B movie soundtrack.

Conclusion
It’s a movie called King Dinosaur for crying out loud. You should know whether it’s something you’d want to watch or not. For my part, that answer is yes, because I like bad movies and this fits the criteria: It’s a movie. It’s bad.

“How about making me vice president in charge of cheering you up?”

2011-04-22T12:59:00.000-05:00

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve got a fondness for movies from past decades. Over the course of viewing and contemplating films for this here project, I’ve come to realize that I’ve got a particular fondness for the 1980s, 1930s, and (with relevance to today’s entry) the 1960s. While I am far from anything close to a hippy, I’ve got to admit there’s a definite appeal to the cocksure swagger of a good 60’s movie. 1963’s Charade, which I’ve seen quite a few times in my life, certainly qualifies.
Story
Regina "Reggie" Lampert (Audrey Hepburn) is a wealthy young woman who’s on holiday in the Alps and plans on divorcing her husband when she returns home to Paris. He beats her to the punch by getting himself thrown from a train to his death in the pre-credits sequence. At his funeral, a colorful band of shady looking types (Tex Panthollow (James Coburn), Herman Scobie (George Kennedy), and Leopold W. Gideon (Ned Glass)) make sure he’s dead and Regina starts wondering just what’s going on. She gets called in to the American Embassy by a CIA Agent named Hamilton Bartholomew (Walter Matthau) who explains that during WWII, her husband was part of a group of people who stole a hefty sum of money that technically belongs to the US government. Her husband stole the money from them, but being as he was the only one who knew where it was, a treasure hunt with deadly consequences commences. Oh yes, and along the way Reggie meets the charismatic and mysterious “Peter Joshua” (among other names) (Cary Grant), who’s reason for wanting to find the money changes as often as he changes names.

That’s really about all that I can say about the plot without stumbling into spoiler territory. Just trust me when I say that the plot twists fly fast and thick in this film, but they all make sense by the end of the movie. Basically, if Alfred Hitchcock had ever decided to make a romantic thriller in the 60s, this is the movie he would have made.

Visuals/Effects
But it’s not Hitchcock who directed this. It was Stanley Donen (who’s done all sorts of big films like Singin’ in the Rain, Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, Damn Yankees and some films that aren’t musicals). The visuals and pacing of the film are both outstanding. Paris looks great (as it usually does) and the pacing is lightning quick as we move from scene to scene with a near-manic urgency (which works perfectly for the mystery). Characters seldom get a chance to catch their breath, and when they do, well, its basically for Hepburn and Grant to have fantastic chemistry together as their characters struggle to trust each other as they fall in love. Also, the final chase scene and showdown is exceptionally tense and well-edited, so bonus points for that.

Writing
Screenplay by Peter Stone and based on the story “The Unsuspecting Wife” by Peter Stone and Marc Behm. Funny thing is, the writers shopped the story around first, got no bites from Hollywood, so they published it as a novel under a different title and lo and behold, the studios went for it. Say what you will about the film industry’s lack of originality, but it has always been like that.

The story works great. Yes, its based on the old plot of “we need to find the money before its too late!” but it handles that plot with a deft touch that throws in romance and some legitimately nice twists. Dialogue is great in this too, as character verbally spar with aplomb.

About the only complaint I have with the movie lies with one character, Jean-Louis, the little son of Reggie’s best friend. He shows up at a few intervals with an important part to play, but I don’t know if it’s the writing or the fairly bad dubbing on his voice, but he is annoying as all hell.

However, the character work on Regina herself is outstanding and worth noting. She’s vulnerable and in way over her head, but she is anything but helpless. She doesn’t run around with a gun in her hand, but she’s incredibly smart and resourceful, often figuring things out for herself just as often as she finds herself in trouble. Just a fantastically well-realized and believable female lead character.

Sound
Original music by Henry Mancini. You can’t go wrong with Mancini and this is very much a truism for this movie. Action sequences have a lot of percussive beats that drive things forward quite nicely as well.

Conclusion
Charade is one of those movies that I love deeply and can watch frequently. It works equally well as a Romantic Comedy as it does a crime thriller and it’s great seeing Coburn and Matthau on screen, but the real heart and soul of the movie belongs to the interaction between Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, and they’re both fantastic in this. Hepburn in particular is radiant and I dare any heterosexual male out there to not fall in love with her even a little bit after watching this. Wholeheartedly recommended.

“Roses are green... violets are red…”

2011-04-12T18:20:00.000-05:00

Great, another biker movie from the 1960s. This can’t possibly be a good thing for my health. Well, let’s try and get this over fast. Here’s 1967’s The Hellcats, AKA Biker Babes. A movie that was originally supposed to be about lesbian bikers that was apparently rewritten.

Goddamnit.

Story
Well, there’s a crime boss named Mr. Adrian (director Robert F. Slatzer as “Bob Slatzer”) who uses a biker gang that hates him to run drugs for him (usually in broad daylight). An undercover cop investigating the crime ring is killed by a sniper and his brother, Army sergeant Monte (The Sidehackers’ Ross Hagen, who was also the voice of the retired badass gunslinger Landon Ricketts in Red Dead Redemption, which is a neat fact) and the dead cop’s girlfriend Linda (Dee Duffy) join forces and infiltrate the biker gang to get to the bottom of the killing. That’s pretty much the plot and most of the movie involves Monte trying to get in good with the gang and/or bang their women, and there’s some motorcycle driving and a whole lot of padding before the cartoonish ending. Hagen’s not terrible, but the movie sure is. Aside from Hagen, a few other actors/crew were also involved in Sidehackers.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Robert F. Slatzer the movie doesn’t do a whole lot during the duration. We get some biker partying shenanigans, some motorcycle stuff and eventually some stuff in Mr. Adrian’s very low budget offices. There’s really nothing going for it here aside from a really trippy opening credits background that is inappropriately cosmic.

There is however one scene that bears mentioning. A few bikers menace a painter and his model who are out in a park at one point. It comes out of nowhere, has no bearing on anything and is just a nonsensical temporary diversion that never gets mentioned or explained.

Writing
Based on the original story by James Gordon White and screenplay by Tony Houston/Huston (who worked on Sidehackers) & Robert F. Slatzer. Again, there’s not much here. Dialogue is boring, the characters stiff, underdeveloped, unlikable and usually have one character trait that is about all the characterization they get. There’s an eye patch chick, a bad poet, a guy who carries a trumpet around all the time, etc.

Sound
No original score, but we get some songs by Davy Jones and the Dolphins and Somebody’s Chyldren. Yeah, there’s a reason you’ve never heard of them.

Conclusion
Another sentence I never thought I’d write: Sidehackers was a better movie than this. The Hellcats suffers most from simply being really boring without enough action scenes to get you through. At least Sidehackers, with all of its nihilism and stupidity at least tried to mix things up a bit here and there with action scenes.

Not recommended.

Somehow the trailer manages to be both better AND skeezier than the movie itself.

“Why couldn't you put the bunny back in the box?”

2011-04-05T17:16:00.000-05:00

Right, so I was a bit harsh on Face/Off for being too dumb to take seriously and too serious to take dumbly. Clearly this calls for something extra ridiculous to fix things while still being a Nicolas Cage movie. Something like 1997’s Con Air.

Story
Cameron Poe (Nicolas Cage) is a former Army Ranger who went to prison for killing a drunken redneck outside of a bar. But that’s the backstory. Flash forward a few years and he’s done his time and just needs to get to a parole hearing for good behavior so he can get back to his wife (Monica Potter) and the seven year old daughter he hasn’t met yet. As such, he’s a passenger on a prisoner transport plane that also happens to be transporting some of the nastiest, meanest, most vicious criminals around. Let’s have U.S. Marshal Vince Larkin (John Cusak) and DEA Agent Duncan Malloy (Colm Meany) introduce them: (WARNING: Potty Words)

Cyrus “The Virus” Grissom (John Malkovich), Nathan “Diamond Dog” Jones (Ving Rhames), William “Billy Bedlam” Bedford (Nick Chinlund), Joe “Pinball” Parker (Dave Chappelle), Johnny “Johnny-23” Baca (Danny Trejo) are the major players and this being an action movie, OF COURSE Grissom organizes a takeover of the plane. Also on the flight is Garland “The Marietta Mangler” Greene (Steve Buscemi) who’s an extra creepy child killer who just kind of keeps to himself except for when he says something disturbing in that way that only Buscemi can say. He creeps out the other convicts.

So when things go bad, it falls to Poe (and his mane of prison hair) and Larkin to figure out what’s going on and how to stop these violent criminals from escaping and causing even more chaos and destruction.

Somewhere along the way a Corvette gets towed through the air by a cargo plane and the finale involves Las Vegas and a fire truck. It’s THAT kind of movie.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Simon West, the movie doesn’t really do anything particularly outside-the-box when it comes to 90’s action movies. Still, it knows it’s a goofy action movie and aside from the action set pieces that litter it, there’s a fair number of self-aware goofy touches, like the famous “bunny scene” and the part where one of the convicts’ corpses falls out of a wheel well and lands on small-town America. It’s these kinds of absurd, black comedy touches that give the movie it’s identity.

Writing
Written by Scott Rosenberg, the script takes a premise which is essentially “Die Hard on a Plane” and runs with it. Dialogue is snappy and frequently witty and while there’s not a whole lot innovative here, it does its job of entertaining the audience quite well.

Sound
Original music by Mark Mancina and Trevor Rabin. Orchestral touches married to electric guitars mean that the soundtrack is anything but subtle. Fairly standard for 90’s action films. There’s also “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd (and Garland Greene readily points out the irony of it) and “How Do I Live” by Trisha Yearwood which is kind of the ending/love theme.

Conclusion
I’m not going to defend Con Air as high art. It’s not. It’s a goofy 90’s Nic Cage action vehicle and for what it is, it’s good cheesy fun, and that is something I CAN defend.

“I want to take his face... off. Eyes, nose, skin, teeth. It's coming off.”

2011-04-01T12:34:00.000-05:00

So, uh, 90s action movies. As a whole, they kind of are taken more seriously than 80s action movies, which oddly enough makes them goofier. Maybe it’s all the slow motion walking away from explosions shots. Anyway, 1997 gave rise to Face/Off, in which, well, let’s get to that in the next section.

Story
Sean Archer (John Travolta) is an obsessed FBI agent on the trail of the “terrorist for hire” and gleeful psycopath Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage). A while back, Troy accidentally killed Archer’s young son with a bullet that was meant for the agent, and when Archer captures Troy in a dramatic airport sequence, an experimental medical procedure is performed that physically swaps the faces of the two so that Archer can approach Pollux Troy (Alessandro Nivola), Castor’s brother who has information on a deadly bomb plot.

Naturally, Castor Troy (with Archer’s face) breaks out and assumes the FBI agent’s life because fair’s fair, and it gives him an opportunity to make all kinds of trouble for Archer. Obsession, gunfights, and realizations of a “we’re not so different, you and I” nature about.

Visuals/Effects
This was actually John Woo’s second foray into western cinema, and it has all of his signature “heroic bloodshed” touches. Jumping through the air firing two pistols at the same time, big explosions, and doves juxtaposed with violence. To be fair, the action sequences are all incredibly expensive looking and incredibly good. The rest of the movie is kind of eh. Visually its fine, but in terms of pacing, I think it goes on too long.

Writing
Written by Mike Werb and Michael Colleary, the script is, well, mostly just “eh.” There’s touches of mythological humor (Castor & Pollux Troy) and there are the occasional bits of very entertaining dialogue, but overall, there’s really little that draws me to the movie. Castor Troy, when played by Cage is easily the best character in the movie, but Sean Archer (as Travolta or Cage) never really strays past the whole “Good but obsessed FBI agent.”

The movie also walks a weird line between “ridiculous amusing” a “ridiculous annoying.” The whole face transplant thing was a pretty far-out concept back in 97, but since it’s the premise of the movie, its both essential and it works for all the crazy pseudoscience they came up to make it work in-movie. (Of course face transplants are a thing that is real now). Honestly, the part where the movie really, I mean really lost me, was the remote prison where Pollox Troy is kept after his capture at the beginning of the movie. So, it’s on an oil rig somewhere in the ocean, and it houses only the MOST dangerous prisoners imaginable, AND the method to keep the prisoners in check is to clap them all in giant metal, MAGNETIC boots that, in the need for a lockdown, literally lock the prisoners down in place. For a sci-fi film I could probably buy that conceit, but for something set in the 90s where the big narrative conceit you have to accept is Nicholas Cage & John Travolta swapping faces (and hair, and height, and voice, and… well, see that’s why it’s a narrative conceit you just have to accept), I just can’t accept MagnetBoot Penitentiary. I mean, what budget committee signed off on that project? The logistics of the undertaking had to be absurd, not to mention the cost of flying food and fresh guards in to relieve the garrison.

Sound
The original music by John Powell gets the job done with a mix of orchestral and electronic cues, which works for 90s spy-related movies.

Conclusion
I didn’t dig Face/Off. While the action sequences are impressive, John Woo has a great flair for visual style and Cage & Travolta do admirable jobs imitating each other, there’s just something about the movie that bugged me. Sure, the magnetic boots thing didn’t help and John Travolta just doesn’t do anything for me cinematically, but I think its that, in the quieter moments, the movie tends to bog down and drag itself out. Its as if the movie wants to be viewed as a goofy 90’s action movie AND a serious psychological thriller and it didn’t impress me very much.

Turns out there's a lot of face touching in this movie. SYMBOLISM!

“Why not just kill them? I'll do it! I'll run up to Paris - bam, bam, bam, bam. I'm back before week's end. We spend the treasure. How is this a bad plan?”

2011-03-28T18:44:00.000-05:00

Right, so its been a while since I’ve complained about a film, and it looks like the 2002 adaptation of Alexandre Dumas pére’s classic, The Count of Monte Cristo might get my English Major hackles up. Let’s explore.

Story
For those of you who didn’t pay attention in 9th Grade English, we follow the story of one Edmond Dantés (James Caviezel), an idealistic and naïve French sailor living in the early 19th Century. He’s got a good job, a fiancée that loves him and solid friends, or so he thinks. After a fateful landing at Elba and meeting the exiled Napoleon Bonaparte, a small conspiracy begins brewing against Dantés. After the return to Marseilles, Fernand Mondego, the Count de Morcerf (Guy Pearce) (who in the movie is a close friend of Dantés and fellow crewman and not just a romantic rival) and Danglars (Albie Woodington) (who is jealous of Dante’s quick rise past him in the ship’s hierarchy) bring the illiterate Dantés before J.F. (oddly enough not Gerard as in the book) Villefort (James Frain). Dantés was given a letter by Napoleon to deliver to someone on the mainland. That someone is Villefort’s father. Villefort confiscates the letter, burns it and has Dantés imprisoned for life in the sinister Château d’If because Villefort’s career would be in danger if his father were to be outed as a Bonapartist.

While in prison, Dantés meets the eccentric, but brilliant Abbé Faria (played with great humor by Richard Harris), an Italian priest who was imprisoned long ago and forgotten. Faria teaches him to read, to speak several languages, to fence and other skills. He also tells him of the location of a buried treasure that, if found, would make him wealthy beyond imagination. Faria dies and Dantés escapes the prison, runs afoul of bandits, recruits one named Jacopo (played with homicidal glee by Luis Guzman), finds the gold and returns to France intent on finding out what happened to his former love Mercedes (for some reason called Iguanada and not Herrera) (Dagmara Dominczyk) and enacting a carefully constructed revenge against the three men who wronged him so.

And that’s the short version of the plot. What? It's a thick book.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Kevin Reynolds (who also did Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and the legendarily maligned Waterworld), the movie hits all the right visual notes for a modern period costume drama. Lots of fancy costumes and dresses, interesting locations and the occasional impressive swordfight. There’s even a nice bit of spectacle as Dantés makes his first official appearance as the Count of Monte Cristo via hot-air balloon.

Writing
Based on the novel “Le Comte de Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas pére. Screenplay by Jay Wolpert. As you can see from the plot description above, the book is densely layered and translating all 1,312 pages to a single movie would be a horrible task for any writer. So cuts were made, some characters folded into others, some characters, like Danglars, were diminished and others, like Fernand, elevated. Understandable, and for the most part, the changes are acceptable. Cavizel does a very nice job of transforming our hero from a young idealist to a bitter manipulator. It’s really the end of the movie where things kind of lose it. Without spoiling it too much, instead of patiently exacting his revenge on all of his enemies and realizing that his thirst for revenge is spilling over and destroying the lives of innocent people, the realization of which forces the Count to quietly re-learn mercy and move on with his life, instead we get a knock-down, slam-bang swordfight between Dantés and Fernand over Mercedes and a surprise revelation as to the identity of somebody’s father.

While yes, it’s a nice swordfight, it kind of wraps things up too nice and tidy and removes the deliciously cold revenge that Edmond takes out on Fernand in the book. I suppose it was also done to keep Edmond from going into some pretty unlikable actions (which is arguably the point of the book: Edmond goes to some pretty nasty lengths in his quest for revenge and only really repents for them after he’s seen what he’s become). Still, I appreciate a nice swordfight, so that makes the ending doubly irritating.

Sound
Original music by Edward Shearmur (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), the soundtrack is quite good, filled with sweeping orchestral flourishes and lots of moody movements.

Conclusion
Maybe it’s the weather, maybe I’m just not in the mood for vitriol, but I can’t call the 2002 The Count of Monte Cristo a bastardization of all that is good and holy in literature. The music is good, the visuals are good, the cast are all very good. The ending is very, very dumb, and that rankles me a bit. Still, I can take comfort in knowing that somewhere, somewhen, a lazy high schooler got his information about this story from the movie instead of the book and did horribly on a test or essay.

Some days, it’s the little things like that that matter.

“To be with another woman, that is French. To be caught, that is American.”

2011-03-20T16:51:00.000-05:00

1988 brought forth a most curious combination of Michael Caine, Steve Martin and Frank Oz. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is the tale of two conmen, an American and an Englishman, who get into what can only be called a turf war over a small town in the French Riviera where they are working their cons.

Story
Well, the plot is fairly simple. Lawrence Jamieson (Michael Caine) is a classy, urbane con man operating out of the Beaumont sur Mer who runs into the crass, blunt Freddy Benson (Steve Martin) an American con man working his way across Europe. Some time later, Benson arrives in Jamieson’s territory and the two social parasites end up bumping into each other constantly. At first Jamieson tries to drive Benson away by “training” him, but the American is too persistent to let a little lost dignity drive him off. A contest is agreed to. The first one to con $50,000 dollars out of a rich young woman wins and the loser has to leave town. The contest heats up when the wealthy Janet Colgate (Glenne Headly) arrives in town and both conmen begin working on her. Notable side characters include the very clued-in Inspector Andre (Anton Rodgers) and Jamieson’s servant Arthur (played by Ian “Emperor Palpatine” McDiarmid)

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Frank Oz, the film has a steady hand behind it. The scenery is pleasant, bright and sunny, which goes a long way to making the conmen much more likable than professional liars and social predators normally are.

Writing
Written by Dale Launer and Stanley Shapiro & Paul Henning (and basically a loose remake of 1964’s Bedtime Story), the story ambles around at an amiable clip, though the first half (before the bet is made) kind of wanders a bit too far afield. Things pick up quickly when the conmen officially square off against each other. The film has its fair share of great comedic scenes (one of the real standouts being the “Ruprecht” bit), but be aware that this isn’t a knee-slapper. The comedy is more subtle, steadily building and building towards absurdity. The real charm of the movie is watching Caine & Martin play off of each other.

Sound
Original music by Miles Goodman, the soundtrack is entirely suitable to the task of a light, breezy comedy about conmen. Its somewhat reminiscent of Elmer Bernstein’s comedy scores.

Conclusion
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is a good time. Steve Martin was unstoppable in the 1980s and its always a joy watching Michael Caine chew the scenery. Definitely recommended.

Odd sound effects not actually in the movie, thankfully.

“Do I get the job, or should we move right onto the shark infested waters test?”

2011-03-14T16:07:00.000-05:00

So, digging into the category of “movies I know for certain almost nobody but me has ever heard of” I present to you one of the formative film experiences of my youth: 1983’s Twice Upon A Time, a fractured kind of fairy tale featuring a rare (or at least uncommon) animation style called “Lumage.”

Story
Well, dreams come from two places. Good dreams come from Frivoli and nightmares come from The Murkworks. The residents of both places refer to the real world as Din and us humans as “rushers,” on account of how we’re always concerned about this thing called “time.” The ruler of the Murkworks, unrepentant jerk Synonamess Botch (Marshall Efron), hatches a plan to freeze this “time” and explode a bomb in Din that would effectively cause permanent nightmares. Its up to several Frivolians to put a stop to his mad scheme. Recruited by a particularly cynical Fairy Godmother (Judith Kahan) they are: Ralph, the All-Purpose Animal (Lorenzo Music), Mumford (who doesn’t speak so much as make sound effects), Flora Fauna (Julie Payne) who’s looking for her uncle Greensleeves (Hamilton Camp) who works in Din making sure dreams get distributed, and eventually Rod Rescueman, a superhero still on his learner’s permit (James Cranna). Oh yeah, and there’s also Scuzzbopper, Botch’s head writer at the Murkworks. (also James Cranna).

Visuals/Effects
Directed by John Korty & Charles Swenson, the real draw here is the Lumage style animation. What that means is they used cut out pieces of paper (or plastic in this case) and animated them over a light table. The result is a very unique “illuminated” feel to the film that also looks like moving watercolors, if that makes sense. Also of special note are the credits of Special Photographic Effects by David Fincher (yes, THAT David Fincher) and Sequence Director Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline)

Writing
Screenplay & Story credits to Bill Couturié, Suella Kennedy, and John Korty. Written by Charles Swenson. The story takes a standard heroic plot, mixes in a bunch of fairy tale tropes and then turns a lot of stuff upside down. There’s also two versions of the film, one marked by saltier dialogue that mixes in occasional mid-level potty words.

Sound
Original music by Dawn Atkinson and Ken Melville. There are also several songs by Maureen McDonald and one by Bruce Hornsby. The soundtrack is very "early 1980s," but not in a bad way.

Conclusion
Twice Upon A Time is another one of those “movies I love deeply but you’ve probably never heard of.” Which is a shame, because I can guarantee you’ve not seen an animated film that looks quite like this AND has a surprisingly sophisticated sense of humor. Its also unfortunate that its kind of caught up in a legal snarl between the director and producer, since this really deserves to be on DVD. I don’t normally recommend finding movies through less than legal sources, but since it would take a miracle to get this thing re-released, do so (and if it actually DOES happen I vow to pick up a copy on day one). VHS copies exist and the internet has copies of both versions circulating around.

Not a trailer, but it shows plenty of scenes, so good enough.

“Get your ass to Mars.”

2011-03-02T17:10:00.000-05:00

Rounding out the impromptu Arnold trifecta (yes I'm counting Commando from last month), we turn to 1990’s Total Recall, which is a thoughtful meditation on self-identity, memory, free will and destroying mining equipment with oversized power drills.

Story
Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is an otherwise happy construction worker who’s haunted by strange dreams of being on Mars with a woman, Melina (Rachel Ticotin) who’s not his wife Lori (Sharon Stone). He turns to Rekall Inc. which sells “mental vacations” by implanting memories into clients. Something goes wrong and Douglas Quaid remembers being a secret agent/freedom fighter named Hauser affiliated with the Martian resistance. Chased by agents of Martian dicator/CEO Vilos Cohaagen (Ronny Cox) and his right hand man Richter (Michael Ironside), Quaid/Hauser tries to track down his missing past, surviva Cohaagen’s men, find resistance leader Kuato (Marshall Bell), find Melina and along the way he teams up with a cab driver named Benny (Mel Johnson Jr.). And of course, there’s the three-breasted prostitute, because you can’t discuss Total Recall without mentioning her.

Or Quaid is stuck in Rekall’s memory machine and only thinks that he’s a former secret agent trying to liberate Mars. It’s deliberately left vague.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Paul Verhoeven, the movie looks great and the movie jumps from action scene to action scene at a high clip. The effects are also solid, with a lot of practical prosthetics for the Martian mutants and so on. Some of the vehicles though, are a little goofy looking.

Writing
“Inspired” by the Philip K. Dick short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.” Screen story by Ronald Shusett, Dan O’Bannon, & Jon Povill. Screenplay by Ronald Shusett, Dan O’Bannon and Gary Goldman. The story is actually surprisingly thoughtful for a big action movie, what with the refusal to be clear on whether Quaid really IS Hauser or merely imagining all of these things as part of his “mental vacation.”

Sound
Original music by Jerry Goldsmith, and appropriately, its quite good.

Conclusion
Compared to the previous two Arnold films, Total Recall is easily the classiest, most sophisticated of the three. If you feel like thinking, it actually has a lot for you to find, such as the “is it real or just in his head?” question. If you don’t feel like thinking, its got plenty of “Get your ass to Mars” and “Screw YOU!!” moments to satisfy your barbarian urges.

“I’ll live to see you eat that contract, but I hope you leave enough room for my fist because I'm going to ram it into your stomach and break your god-damn spine!”

2011-03-01T16:48:00.000-05:00

More Arnoldy goodness. This time its 1987’s The Running Man.

Story
Ben Richards (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a former cop who was wrongfully convicted of firing on unarmed civilians during a riot. He gets sent to prison, breaks out with some fellow inmates, but when he makes it back to the city, he runs into Amber Mendez (Maria Conchita Alonso), a woman who eventually turns him back over to the authorities because of his reputation. Richards is given over to Damon Killian (the gloriously hammy Richard Dawson), our villain and host of the hit show THE RUNNING MAN (DUN DUN DUN) where convicted felons are given the opportunity to fight their way to freedom through strange levels while being chased by the Stalkers, a bunch of gimmick oriented goons that include: Captain Freedom (Jesse Ventura), Fireball (Jim Brown), Buzzsaw (Bernard Gus Rethwisch), Subzero (Professor Toru Tanaka-- he was a wrestler, I checked) and Dynamo (Erland Van Lidth).

There’s also cameos by Mick Fleetwood & Dweezil Zappa. For some reason.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Paul Michael Glaser, the movie follows standard 80s action movie principles in visuals. The sci-fi elements lead to a lot of glowing lights and computer screens. As for the costumes…well, that’s where things get really goofy. The jumpsuits for The Running Man contestants are a bit silly, but they pale in comparison to the outfits of the Stalkers. Of particular mention is Dynamo, who is a fat guy who sings opera in a costume made out of LED lights and drives around a go-kart also covered in LED lights.

Writing
Based on the Steven King (under the pen name Richard Bachman) book and screenplay by Steven E. de Souza. I haven’t read the book, but I’m fairly certain that a LOT of liberties were taken. Still, the movie’s fun, we get plenty of Arnold one-liners and its fun waiting for what new craziness awaits around the next corner.

Sound
Original music by Harold Faltermeyer, the score is INCREDIBLY 80s with a lot of electronic cues.

Conclusion
The Running Man is another goofy slice of Arnold-y goodness. Its got a dystopian future setting where convicts fight in an arena that’s like Super Smash TV against a group of bosses that look like rejected He-Man toys. Its great!

“You're a funny man, Sully, I like you. That's why I'm going to kill you last.”

2011-02-14T15:24:00.000-05:00

Ah Valentine’s Day. A day for love, romance, chocolates and gettin’ some. A day like today needs something just as sweet and romantic as the spirit of the holiday. Something like 1985’s Commando.

Story
A former special forces agent would like nothing better than to live in his mountain cottage with his daughter and cut lumber, eat ice cream and feed wild deer. Sadly, a deposed foreign dictator wants him to assassinate a political rival and kidnaps the daughter. This does not go according to plan.

Characters
John Matrix: Arnold Schwarzenegger is our one-man killing machine who will shoot the population of a small country to get his daughter back.

Jenny Matrix: A REALLY young Alyssa Milano plays Matrix’s spunky, resourceful daughter who gets kidnapped by the bad guys. So yeah, she’s kind of just a plot device here.

Cindy: Rae Dawn Chong plays a flight attendant/stewardess who gets caught up in all of this madness when Matrix boosts her car (with her in it)

General Arius: Dan Hedaya is the deported dictator of a small island nation who wants Matrix to assassinate his replacement. This really doesn’t go according to plan. He’s got an army of mercenary goons, including Sully (David Patrick Kelly) and Cooke (Bill Duke) that provide little more than speed bumps for Matrix’s bloody revenge.

Bennett: Vernon Wells plays a former member of Matrix’s squad now working as Arius’ second in command. Bennet has…questionable taste in mercenary clothes (he wears a vest with what looks like a hammock sewed on) and a very…passionate desire to kill Matrix.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Mark L. Lester, the movie is a giant vehicle for action sequences. Ridiculous, over-the-top and thoroughly insane action sequences. It does them well.

Writing
Screenplay by Steven E. de Souza with story by Jeph Loeb, Matthew Weisman and Steven E. de Souza. The plot is goofy as all hell and the dialogue is chock full of Arnold one-liners, and for a movie like this, that is EXACTLY what is needed.

Sound
The original score by James Horner is full of 80’s era driving beats, but also a lot of steel drums. This is both weird and awesome at the same time (which can be said of the movie as a whole, actually).

Conclusion
Pleasures really don’t get much guiltier than Commando. If you want Arnold spouting one liners and single-handedly killing off the equivalent of a small island’s population, this is exactly the movie for you. Its not good cinema. It’s awesome cinema and should be watched alongside Swayze’s Road House.

“They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way!”

2011-02-10T22:12:00.000-05:00

I got tired of people giving me funny looks when I told them I hadn’t seen 1987’s The Untouchables. Well, now there’s one less reason for them to give me funny looks.

Story
Prohibition Chicago, a city effectively ruled by crime boss and bootlegger Al Capone (Robert De Niro). A young Federal Agent named Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) arrives in town intent on enforcing the law and bringing Capone to justice. He has a rough time of it until he assembles a hand-picked team of not-dirty cops to help him out: Jim Malone (Sean Connery), Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith) and George Stone (Andy Garcia). Together, they become known as The Untouchables (Dun dun dun) for their incorruptibility.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Brian De Palma, the movie is really well shot with excellent pacing and some really impressive action set pieces. About the only thing I really, really didn’t like was the shootout near the end, the famous “Odessa Steps” remake in the station. I know, I know, its an homage to one of the great scenes of the silent era and I can respect that, but here its such a gigantic shift from the rest of the movie that it felt a little, I hate to say it, out of place.

And if you feel like seeing just how many times said Odessa Steps sequence gets homaged/referenced: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH1tO2D3LCI

Writing
Screenplay by David Mamet and “suggested by” the book “The Untouchables” by (the real) Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley. Naturally the screenplay takes a lot of liberties with history (there were more than just four Untouchables, Capone’s lieutenant didn’t die like that, etc) but that doesn’t really bother me since 20th century history isn’t my area. The dialogue is sharp, the characters well defined, and the story keeps moving at a good pace.

Sound
Original music by Ennio Morricone, and the music is very, very good.

Conclusion
The Untouchables really surprised me. In the best possible way. The cast all do a solid to excellent job with their characters, the writing and plot are incredibly solid despite the liberties they take with history, and the visual feel of the movie is incredibly stylish and well done (with one exception that I mentioned above). Awesome movie though, and heartily recommended.

“It’s like living with a six year old.”

2011-02-08T15:29:00.000-05:00

I don’t know how to preface 1986’s Three Amigos! so I won’t.

Story
The Three Amigos are Lucky Day (Steve Martin), Dusty Bottoms (Chevy Chase) and Ned Nederlander (Martin Short), three big time actors in Hollywood who get a little too big for their pay scale and get fired for demanding too much from their cranky boss (Joe Mantegna and Jon Lovitz & Phil Hartman as his henchmen). Unknown to them, a lovely woman from Santa Poco, Mexico named Carmen (Patrice Martinez) has seen one of their films and thinks they’re real gunfighters. She writes them and invites them to drive off a bandit that’s been terrorizing Santa Poco, and they comply, thinking it’s a paying gig. That soon changes when they run into the murderous El Guapo (Alfonso Arau), his sidekick Jefe (Tony Plana) and their gang.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by John Landis, the movie is both solidly shot and brings a lot of sight gags to the table, both of which are very important to comedy. Of note is the fake Three Amigos movie shown at the beginning, which is shot just like an old silent short.

Writing
Written by Steve Martin, Lorne Michaels & Randy Newman. The beginning is a little slow and a few early jokes miss the mark, but when the movie gets up and running, its great. Martin, Chase and Short are all funny (as expected), but some of the funniest scenes in the movie come from El Guapo’s exchanges with Jefe.

Sound
Original music by Elmer Bernstein and “The Ballad of the Three Amigos” written by Randy Newman (who was also the voice of the Singing Bush). With that kind of pedigree, you better believe the music is excellent.

Conclusion
Yet another movie in the pile of films that Kes loves unabashedly. Three Amigos! makes up for what it lacks in originality (let’s face it, it owes everything to The Magnificent Seven) with bizarre, tongue-in-cheek hilarity.

"Greetings, Starfighter! You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada."

2011-01-30T00:47:00.000-05:00

CGI is a given for modern movies, but in 1984 it was a new and largely untapped medium. The Last Starfighter was a modestly budgeted science fiction flick that took the bold step of using computer effects instead of models.

Story
Alex Rogan (Lance Guest) is a teen with ambition. Unfortunately for him, he lives in a fairly run down trailer park. Alex has two things going for him: his girl Maggie Gordon (Catherine Mary Stewart) and he’s something of a whiz with the Starfighter arcade box in the park. One night, Alex breaks the high score record of the game and some time later a strange man in a strange car arrives looking for Alex. His name is Centauri (Robert Preston in his last film) and he invented the game.

Centauri takes Alex up to Rylos where he gets recruited (with a lot of reluctance) into the Star League, which is fortunate, because Rylos is under attack by the renegade Xur (Norman Snow) & Lord Kril (Dan Mason) of the Ko-Dan Armada. Alex tries to quit and goes home, but after an alien assassination attempt, goes back to space to fight for the galaxy (a Beta Alex robot (also Lance Guest) is left behind to cover for him). Alex and his alien co-pilot Grig (Dan O’Herlihy) find that their entire squadron has been effectively destroyed, leaving their remaining Gunstar fighter the last starfighter (Dun Dun Dun!) capable of defeating the Ko-Dan Armada.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Nick Castle, the movie is for the most part a typical 80s kind of ADVENTURE! movie. On the other hand, it was also the first major movie to go for computer generated, photorealistic visual effects. Photorealistic is the key here, since Tron already had been out for two years, but the effects there were more abstract and surreal. Nowadays, the spaceships are quite obviously digital, but the designs are still solid and some of the digital shots are still quite nice, especially considering that they were pretty much figuring this stuff out as they went. And the Gunstar is still a really badass design.

Writing
Written by Jonathan Betuel, the plot follows a pretty standard Hero’s Journey storyline, but the writing is competent, the lines generally witty and the delivery is excellent, so hey, nothing wrong with that.

Sound
Original music by Craig Safan, and it is full of epic ADVENTURE! fanfares, but also some sweet down-to-earth themes too. Its fun when the two merge together.

Conclusion
Yeah. I love The Last Starfighter. I always have. There’s something about the goofy premise of a trailer park teen who’s good at an arcade game (and one specific one) being selected to join an elite fighting force to SAVE THE UNIVERSE! that appeals to me on a primal level. Star Wars knock off? Sure. But it’s a good Star Wars knock off.

“I was partial to tragedy in my youth. That was before experience taught me that life was tragical enough without my having to write about it.”

2011-01-21T14:21:00.000-05:00

Ray Harryhausen. If you know anything about special effects, you know about this man. He was THE stop-motion special effects guy of the mid-twentieth century, and made a lasting contribution to cinema. He’s also still alive as of this writing, though he retired from films after his last movie in 1981. That movie? Clash of the Titans.

Plot
We are in Ancient Greece during the time of heroes and gods. Our particular hero of the day is Perseus (Harry Hamlin), son of Zeus (Sir Laurence Olivier) and as far as Greek heroes go, a pretty decent guy too. If you happen to lack a liberal arts education, Perseus’ mother was locked up by her husband and Zeus came to her as a golden ray of light or a shower (depending on your fetish, I suppose) and after the kid was born, he and his mother were put out to sea to punish her infidelity. They survive, the husband (and king of Argos) is killed by Zeus and Perseus grows up. Other gods are also present on Olympus, and its fun to note that the original Bond Girl, Ursula Andress, plays Aphrodite (and has all of two lines in this movie).

Zeus shows favoritism to his son, but punishes Calibos (played by Neil McCarthy when not a stop-motion puppet), the son of Thetis, a sea goddess (and played by Maggie Smith) for his wickedness by transforming him into a cloven-hoofed, horned and fugly monster. This is a problem, since before this, Calibos was to be married to the princess of Joppa, Andromeda (Judi Bowker). Put off by his ugliness, she calls the wedding off, and in punishment, Calibos makes her challenge any would-be suitor with an unanswerable riddle. In a fit of godly jealousy, Thetis plucks Perseus off of his own island and drops him in Joppa to see if he’ll get involved. In retaliation, Zeus grants Perseus a Helmet of Invisibility, a Mirrored Shield and a Vorpal Sword +3 against Gorgons. Naturally, Perseus falls in love with Andromeda. Perseus also gets guidance from the old poet Ammon (Burgess Meredith, who completely out-acts everybody else in the film and infuses everything he says with the right blend of gravitas and ham. Its incredible to watch him in this), and Thallo (Tim Pigott-Smith) a Joppan officer who turns out to be a real solid buddy.

The rest of the movie turns into one elaborate quest to get Perseus laid, as he has to find a way to slay the Kraken, a giant fish monster/Titan who will destroy Joppa if Andromeda is not sacrificed to Thetis. To do so, he has to tame Pegasus to fight Calibos and solve the riddle. Visit the Stygian Witches to find out how to kill the Kraken. Find Medusa, fight off her two-headed guard dog Dioskilos, then kill HER without turning to stone. Go for round two against Calibos (and three giant scorpions). Get back to Joppa with the help of Bubo, a clockwork owl crafted by Hephaestus, and THEN use Medusa’s head to kill the Kraken (oh like THAT’S a spoiler).

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Desmond Davis, but really, this is Ray Harryhausen’s baby. Officially credited as Visual Effects (and co-produced), this is a special effects spectacular that is loaded to the brim with lovingly crafted monsters: Pegasus, Bubo, the Kraken, Medusa, Dioskilos the two-headed dog, Calibos, Giant Scorpions and a Giant Vulture. And they really are lovingly crafted. They move with incredible energy and life, with the Kraken being one of the most impressive, but in my opinion, the best one was Medusa. She’s really creepy, imposing and monstrous, but with a definite touch of sadness to her. Its subtle, but even more impressive since this is done frame by frame in a torch-lit dungeon.

Also worth mentioning is the punishment of Calibos, since we don’t see it directly. Zeus takes a clay figure and puts it in his Action Amphitheater Playset (figures sold separately) and the camera zooms in on the shadow cast of the figure as it writhes and warps into its monstrous form. Not exactly the most complicated effect, but easily the creepiest and most evocative of the movie.

Writing
Written by Beverly Cross, the film is an interesting mix of faithfulness to Greek mythology and a blatant disregard for it. Pegasus was the mount of Bellerophon, not Perseus (and yes, I was able to spell Bellerophon off the top of my head). Dioskilos is something of a poor man’s Cerberus, and the Kraken here is neither Scandinavian nor a giant squid. Perseus’ origin and Medusa herself though are pretty much spot on.

What the movie lacks in faithfulness to the letter of Greek Myth, it makes up for in faithfulness to the spirit of it. The gods are petty, vain and quarrelsome, and they use mortals like playthings for their own purposes. Mortals are, for their part, extremely flawed and weak, but with spirit, determination and the favor of the gods, they can achieve great things.

Sound
The original score by Laurence Rosenthal is a grand, sweeping ADVENTURE! filled soundtrack that perfectly fits the feel of the movie. No complaints there whatsoever.

Conclusion
Clash of the Titans was Ray Harryhausen’s paen and damn did he retire swinging. It doesn’t really hew close to actual mythology (krakens are traditionally giant squids, not Titans and Perseus had nothing to do with Pegasus, among other things) but its such an energetic love letter to mythology that deeply understands the draw of ancient myths (unlike the recent remake, from what I hear) and what they say about the human condition and presented in such a wide eyed, “gee whiz” manner that the camp elements are completely drowned out by the sheer fun of it all. If you hate this movie, clearly you have murdered your inner child and there is no hope for you.

“He had even lost his chair at Königsberg University, where for a long time his colleagues used to refer to him as "The Nut".”

2011-01-14T15:22:00.000-05:00

Sometimes you see a movie that has all the ingredients of a quality time and it just leaves you scratching your head at to why you didn’t like it. Which is exactly how I feel about 1967’s The Fearless Vampire Killers Or: Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck AKA Dance of the Vampires.

Story
Well, we have a disgraced academician, Professor Abronsius (Jack MacGowran) and his meek assistant Alfred (Roman Polanski) arriving in Transylvania in December in their quest to find genuine vampires. The village they stop in has a castle nearby and its pretty clear that there are vampires in the area. The innkeeper, Shagal (Alfie Bass), even hangs garlic all over his place to try to fend them off. Alfred falls for Shagal’s beautiful daughter Sarah (Sharon Tate) who is naturally taken away by the count one fateful night. With a vampire confirmed and Sarah’s life in danger, the two would-be heroes set out to the castle to rescue her from Count von Krolock (Ferdy Mayne).

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Roman Polanski with cinematography by Douglas Slocombe (who had a long and storied career), the movie certainly looks impressive. The exterior locations are nicely done and the set design of the castle is fantastic. The movie looks great and there are some really great shots and great visual atmosphere.

Writing
Story and Screenplay by Gérard Brach and Roman Polanski. On paper, the plot sounds fine. In practice, things are tremendously uneven. The main characters are simply unlikable and worse for a comedy, not very funny. I understand that this is a farce and characters rarely develop past the second dimension, but honestly, Abronsius and Alfred are simply too incredibly stupid to be sympathetic. Alfred in particular is an egregious example of obliviousness and an inability to perform even simple tasks. Easily the best things in the movie are Shagal (who is actually very funny as a lecherous Jewish peasant who becomes a vampire) and Count von Krolock (who is actually very charming and threatening in that classic movie vampire way). Sarah Shagal is quite radiant, but a distant character who just kind of floats through the movie. Its not a good sign when the side characters would make much more interesting story fodder than the main ones.

Sound
The original music by Krzysztof Komeda is adequate, but not particularly memorable. There are some choral flourishes that add to the general creepiness, which is a nice touch. Overall though, its neither here nor there.

Conclusion
I, uh, didn’t like The Fearless Vampire Killers OR: Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck. Yes there are touches of great atmosphere and visual impressiveness. Yes there are some funny performances, but as a whole…its just not funny and just not scary. On the DVD, there’s a special short from 1967 promoting the movie that I got more laughs out of than the entirety of the movie itself. Maybe I wasn’t in the right mood at the time of viewing, but there is no way I am going to recommend this movie.

And if you're wondering, the cheesy sound effects from the trailer are not in the final film. Thankfully.

The Obligatory Lazy End Of Year Lists

2010-12-31T12:44:00.000-05:00

Another year has gone by and its time for some more end-of-the-year filler-- I mean, a retrospective of what’s gone past. Yeah. That’s it.

Soooo, with that in mind (and the fact that updates were interrupted at a few points in time this year) here’s the 10 Best Surprises of the Year (because I‘m too lazy to dig up 20 this time). Like last year, it excludes all the stuff that I’ve watched multiple times in the past, like the Star Wars Trilogy and Ghostbusters. So, keep in mind, this is all stuff that I saw for the first time for this project this year and covered in reviews.

10) Legend of Drunken Master
Jackie Chan and booze. It’s a recipe for comedy. Definitely light on content, its heavy on slapstick and fight scenes and is a perfect kung fu ADVENTURE!

9) Flash Gordon
Thoroughly insane, campy as all hell and so British it shits the queen (pun not entirely intended), it manages to be an epic example of “so-bad-its-awesome.”

8) Stripes
Incredibly subversive yet warm and fuzzy at the same time. That’s impressive.

7) Lethal Weapon
Great characters, great chemistry between the leads, great action and some pretty despicable villains gives you a really well-made buddy cop actioner. And its a Christmas movie.

6) Road House
It ranks up there with the guiltiest of pleasures. A story about the two-fisted adventures of a philosophical bouncer is about as dumb as it sounds, but its also way more awesome than it has any right to be.

Top 5
5) Reservoir Dogs
Simple and made on the cheap, Tarantino’s debut is witty, disturbing and gritty as hell and totally worth watching. Liked it more than Pulp Fiction.

4) Layer Cake
Its like Snatch., only not astronomically overrated.

3) Black Dynamite
Oh yes. Oh. Hell. Yes. And its getting an animated series on [Adult Swim]

2) Murder, My Sweet
Quite possibly my new favorite film noir movie because of the engrossing characters, killer dialogue, and some clever hallucinatory effects. Nothing but love for this.

1) Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Take 1 part Robert Downey Jr., 1 part Val Kilmer, 2 parts Shane Black, add film noir to taste and you get one of the funniest movies ever made.

And now once again, its time for the Bottom Ten Biggest Disappointments of the year, because who doesn’t want to end the year on a list of downers?

Honorable Mention since I haven’t officially reviewed it yet.
Troll 2
One of the true claimants to “Worst Movie Ever Made,” it rightly deserves its place in the pantheon of schlock. However, actually watching it creates a kind of narcotic effect where your mind gets numbed to the pain and all you can do is laugh at the madness on the screen lest you go insane yourself. Come to think of it, that’s probably how Elder Gods make movies.

10) Horrors of Spider Island
Terrible. Truly awful in that wonderfully bad sort of way. Watched this and riffed on it before I was even aware that MST3K had done the same already.

9) Robot Monster
Same reason as above. It’s dreadfully bad and ineptly made, but still manages to have a grim, bleak and weirdly absurdist quality movie. And there’s a gorilla costume with a diving helmet. And a bubble machine.

8) The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy
Badly made (and consisting mostly of flashbacks to the previous movies in the trilogy), the Aztec Mummy Popoca is oddly likable and the villainous The Bat is a gleefully hammy mad scientist. Terrible but oddly fun, and what’s more: A boxed set of the Aztec Mummy Trilogy exists, I have it, and I am waaayyy more enthused than I should be about it.

7) Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines
While Arnold is still fun to watch as the future-sent kill robot and the effects are overall very impressive, this movie in an egregiously unnecessary sequel and considering its subject matter (the activation of SkyNet and the triggering of Judgment Day) completely fails to deliver any kind of dread at the inevitable devastation of the human race. Judgment Day happened, and I wasn’t invested in it.

6) Beowulf & Grendel
Beautiful landscape cinematography and some good performances are not enough to elevate the ponderously boring script that manages to completely misunderstand the reason why the Beowulf story is so popular in the first place. Hint: Its because Beowulf is supposed to be awesome and great at killing monsters, not a navel-gazing existentialist wondering if he’s wrong for wanting to kill a monster.

5) The Brothers Grimm
Talk about wasted potential. What could’ve been a great way to reconstruct the horrific elements of classic fairy tales falls flat due to some face-palmingly bad script/story decisions and sketchy CGI. I didn’t expect it to be great, but I definitely hoped more of Gilliam’s crazy-man genius would shine through.

4) Zardoz
While not the worst movie ever made, it is certainly one of the most incomprehensible science fiction films ever. The core of the story is simple enough, but so much drug-fueled insanity is tacked on that it completely buries whatever it is that the filmmakers were trying to say. Stuff like this should be used by D.A.R.E. to keep kids in line. “Don’t do drugs kids, or else someday you might make Zardoz”

3) Jungle Goddess
Now this one’s just an offensive and bland product of its time. I’m not really one to judge the past for being the past, but a bad movie that’s both blindly racist AND boring has no redeeming features.

2) Robot Holocaust
So bad I keep forgetting that I sat through this piece of dreck. That’s how much my mind wants to erase this from my memory. It’s a bad Star Wars AND Conan rip off.

1) Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women
No movie since Napoleon Dynamite has filled me with such seething vitriol as this waste of time. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Fuck. This. Movie.

“Integrity is something you sell to the public.”

2010-12-27T14:55:00.000-05:00

1968, a year before Michael Caine and 3 Cooper Minis went on a merry chase through Torino in The Italian Job, Steve McQueen took his Ford Mustang through the streets of San Francisco in Bullitt. You bet your ass its time for the greatest car chase in cinema history.

Story
Lieutenant Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen) is a tough detective, a man who’s known to get results, even if he is a bit of a loose cannon at times. That reputation for results at any cost is what brings him to the attention of ambitious District At tourney Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughan), a man looking for dependable cops to protect a key witness against the mob, a key witness who also happened to run off with a large chunk of said mob’s money. Bullitt and his team are put on babysitting duty, and then it all goes to hell. The witness ends up dead and one of Bullitt’s men is in the hospital. Frank…doesn’t take it well, and he makes it his personal mission to find the guys who killed the witness and along the way uncovers a few interesting twists and turns. Bullitt is clearly a cowboy cop, but this isn’t an action movie. There’s a lot of investigation, a lot of angry scowling, and a lot of really thick tension as we watch Bullitt blur the line between doing his job and going rogue.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Peter Yates, the obvious thing to talk about is the almost ten minute long car chase ¾ of the way through. In it, McQueen (who did his own driving in the scene) chases after a Dodge with two shotgun toting hitmen in it. It lacks the flash and busy editing of modern car chases, but more than makes up for it in narrative punch and character moments. Yes, a car chase with no dialogue and not much music is able to tell a self-contained story of cat & mouse between two cars while still being exciting. It starts off slow, builds and ultimately explodes onto the freeway. It sounds kind of silly to always look to Bullitt as the best car chase ever, but after having seen it (and in the context of the movie), I’m inclined to agree. Yes, its an impressive set piece, but its also building tension and moving the plot forward without words. There should be a “Car Chases 101” class for this kind of storytelling.

And that’s really something the movie does well. It escalates tension in a methodical and deliberate way. This isn’t a “blink and you’ll miss it” action movie. Some scenes, like a chase through a hospital, seem to go on for a very long time, but its all tightly calculated to keep you guessing and wondering.

Writing
Screenplay by Alan R. Trustman and Harry Kleiner. Based on the novel “Mute Witness” by Robert L. Pike. The story is full of interesting details, and much like real police work, the majority of it involves investigation and a lot of boring legwork occasionally peppered by violence. The medical scenes (a lot of the movie takes place in a hospital) are also quite interesting to watch, since you get a decent look at medical practice in the late 60s. And yeah, there’s a really interesting twist along the way.

Sound
Original music by Lalo Schifrin, and my only complaint is that there wasn’t enough of it. Seriously, Schifrin was an awesome composer, but there really wasn’t a lot of music in the movie. It is surprisingly quiet and restrained.

Conclusion
Bullitt has a well deserved reputation for having one of, if not THE best car chases in movie history, but that same reputation works against it, since it makes you think its an action movie. It is not. In a lot of ways it’s an early Neo Noir where you have a deeply flawed protagonist finding himself falling deeper and deeper into an ugly situation where there’s no easy way out of. Taken with that mindset, the movie is an incredibly taut thriller and totally recommended.

“What I do not give, you must never take by force.”

2010-12-15T17:20:00.000-05:00

Remember Hero and House of Flying Daggers? (Oh, crap, haven’t reviewed House of Flying Daggers yet. IGNORE ME!!) Well, that same director, Yimou Zhang made yet another period martial arts movie, this time with Chow Yun-Fat and a grandiose sense of scale that would make Cecil B. DeMille jealous. Here’s 2006’s Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia aka Curse of the Golden Flower.

Story
Take a whole bunch of plot elements from Shakespeare’s Tragedies, throw them into ancient China and wait for the body count. Explaining it further will simply complicate things, but here goes. Emperor Ping (Yun-Fat Chow -- using the names as they appear on IMDB here) is a bearded badass warlord who rules with an iron fist. He’s got a beautiful wife, Empress Phoenix (Li Gong), whom he is poisoning daily in order to drive her insane (he can’t kill her outright because her father is a powerful lord). Thing is, she knows he’s poisoning her and she’s planning a coup to get her revenge. Between the two of them, they start manipulating the three Princes: Prince Jai (Jay Chou), Crown Prince Wan (Ye Liu) and Prince Yu (Junjie Quin) like pawns on a chessboard. The plot gets heavy.

And then ninjas show up. Yes, this is China, but damn it, the Emperor has a small army of guys who dress in black, strike from the shadows and generally behave exactly like typical movie ninjas.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Yimou Zhang and cinematography by Xiaoding Zhao, the first thing that strikes you (and continues to strike you throughout) is the sheer volume of color that explodes onto your eyeballs. Gold figures prominently, but next to that, there’s a dazzling rainbow that is constantly assailing your brain. I imagine if you this movie was combined with LSD, heads would physically explode.

Color saturation overdose aside, the movie, like Yimou’s other films, is strikingly beautiful. The fights are breathtaking and brutal and have a punctuate the narrative nicely.

Writing
Written by Yimou Zhang and based on the play “Lei yu” by Yu Cao, the plot really does feel like Shakespeare’s Tragedies were stitched together into a Byzantine framework of subterfuge, betrayal, rebellion, tyranny, lust, incest, poisoning, shocking revelations and so on. All that’s missing is cannibalism. I’m saying this is a bad thing, since the end result is a complex but coherent creature with its own personality. Just don’t go into it expecting a happy ending.

Sound
Original music by Shigeru Umebayashi. The score is quite appropriate for a movie of this grandeur, with the action sequences being accompanied by a thunderous score.

Conclusion
Curse of the Golden Flower is one hell of a visual trip, and its helped by a significantly deep storyline that is full of crazy twists and turns. It begins as a slow boil, but by the time shit hits the fan, it REALLY hits the fan. Very recommended.

Also: THE COLORS!! THE COLORS!!!

“I refuse to be embarrassed by a car that looks like a Trapper Keeper.”

2010-12-08T13:18:00.000-05:00

2008’s Sex Drive gets judged a lot by its title. After all, it kind of indicates that its going to be a raunchy teen sex comedy along the lines of Superbad, full of awkward teens trying to get laid. Having seen Sex Drive, that’s really not what its about. I mean, it is, but its not, but it is, but its not. Its a kind of Shroedinger's Cat situation.

Story
Ian (Josh Zuckerman) is a senior in High School, a nice, fairly shy guy and still a virgin. He’s not happy about this, but there is a spot of hope in his self-conscious life: He’s been chatting up a hot blonde online who goes by the handle “Ms. Tasty” (Katrina Bowden). He’s been lying about being on the football team and owning a badass car to her and she (if it is a she) invites him to Tennessee to “give her the D,” as it were. Ian ultimately decides to go through with it, and steals his older brother Rex’s (James Marsden in an epic show of scene stealing hamminess) Pontiac GTO “The Judge” and drive down from Illinois to Tennessee with his best friend Lance (Clark Duke). Along the way, his hot female (Friendzone) friend Felecia (Amanda Crew) joins them and they set off on the road for ADVENTURE!

Along the way they run into Ezekiel (Seth Green) an incredibly sarcastic Amish man who knows a great deal about car repair and cameos by Brian Posehn and David Koechner (trust me, you’ve seen/heard them before)

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Sean Anders, the movie certainly looks fine but doesn’t have a whole lot of “gee that’s awesome/new” visual elements. It is however, a solidly told road movie with a lot episodic moments that all kind of come together. Also, that donut costume you see on the poster? Yeah, that gets used in a really hilarious way.

Writing
Screenplay by Sean Anders and John Morris, based on the book “All The Way” by Andy Behrens. The story certainly IS about sex, but its also, interestingly, about exploring teen angst, sexual frustration, shyness and lots of other not-exactly-raunchy concepts. There’s a lot going on under the surface of this movie, and I appreciate that. Also, it makes the Amish cool and Rumpspringa really funny.

Sound
Original music by Stephen Trask. We’ve also got Fall Out Boy appearing as themselves at the Amish party. And The Judge appropriately enough gets AC/DC associated with it.

Conclusion
I really enjoyed Sex Drive. A lot. It’s a surprisingly heartfelt examination of teen angst about virginity and a look at relationships and the lengths people will go to for some really stupid reasons. That’s high school in a nutshell right there. It doesn’t hurt that the movie is wickedly funny as well. Sadly, the movie didn’t find an audience in theaters, and I’m noticing a curious trend about modern comedies that the ones I enjoy the hell out of are the ones that don’t find an audience in theaters, while the ones that DO prove to be commercial giants (like The Hangover, which I thought was just okay), I’m significantly lukewarm about. Okay, I realize that I sound like a major snob right now and I’ll stop.

“You weren't listening. We never give anything away. What we do is bargain, trade.”

2010-12-06T15:44:00.000-05:00

In case you haven’t noticed before, I’m a little bit… off-center in a lot of matters regarding taste. Case in point: while many who’ve read fantasy turn to the big named series as their preferred series (I’m talking about The Lord Of The Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Dragonlance Chronicles (yes, I’ve read it, I have no excuse), Harry Potter or even The Inheritance ~~Trilogy~~ Cycle (no, I haven’t read it and need no excuse)) the series I look to with the most fondness are The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander. Long story short, it’s a high fantasy series of five books that are based (somewhat loosely) on Welsh Mythology. It’s a tremendously underrated series that manages to cram in a lot of heavy themes and is just as deserving of the cinematic adaptation treatment as the others.

In fact, the series has already received the movie treatment back in the 1980s from no less than Disney itself with The Black Cauldron in 1985. Unfortunately, its got a reputation as the black sheep of the Disney animated canon. Let’s explore!

Story
Well, uh, considering it’s a movie based on the 2nd book of the series, its really radically different from the books aside from some of the core characters and themes. There is a legendary evil cauldron that can create invincible undead soldiers and a powerful evil lord is trying to find/use it to take over the world. Our hero, Taran (voiced by Grant Bardsley), is an orphan who grew up in a wizard’s remote cottage/estate and serves as Assistant Pig Keeper to an oracular pig. Taran is a headstrong youth who dreams of great heroic deeds and mostly by chance he gets caught up in ADVENTURE! Along the way, he encounters the Horned King (voiced by the ever-awesome John Hurt) (an amalgamation of the books’ villains Arawn Death-Lord and a warlord named the Horned King), the Princess Eilonwy (voiced by Susan Sheridan) (who sadly doesn’t have her signature red-gold hair, here its just blonde), Gurgi (voiced by John Byner) a short, furry, cowardly…thing, and Fflewdur Fflam (voiced by Nigel Hawthorne) a old bard (probably the saddest change from the books where he’s a young king of a distant land who prefers to go wandering around as a bard because ruling his kingdom is boring).

Right, so the storyline of the movie really diverges from the books, but I really don’t think they could’ve done otherwise back in the 80s, since animated movies didn’t really get sequels or series. For what it is, the changes from the book are a bit disappointing, but nothing actually deal breaking.

Visuals/Effects
Here’s where things get really interesting. Directed by Ted Berman and Richard Rich, the movie’s art direction and animation are right up there with the rest of the accepted Disney canon. The Black Cauldron looks gorgeous. Not just gorgeous, but there’s a lot of creepiness involved too, with the Horned King being one of the most malevolent looking villains I’ve ever seen in a Disney movie aside from maybe that guy from Night On Bald Mountain in Fantasia. And the guy gets one hell of a villain death scene (like that‘s a spoiler. It‘s a Disney movie for crying out loud). It’s not a fully unified artistic direction however, what with the Fair Folk looking and behaving like your standard Disney fairies (Doli is supposed to be a Dwarf, not a Pixie), but overall, the art department really brought their A Game to the movie, and it really made me nostalgic for traditional cell painted animation.

Writing
Okay, this is going to be long. Based on “The Chronicles of Prydain” by Lloyd Alexander, story by David Jonas, Vance Gerry, Ted Berman, Richard Rich, Al Wilson, Roy Morita, Peter Young, Art Stevens and Joe Hale; additional dialogue by Rosemary Anne Sisson and Roy Edward Disney; and additional story contributions by Tony Marino, Steve Hulett, Melvin Shaw, Burny Mattinson, John Musker, Ron Clements and Doug Lefler. Whew. The writing is not bad but struggles with trying to cram in and adjust two books worth of material into one movie. That’s really the biggest flaw of the film. Characters behave like they should, but the whole thing feels very rushed, which is unfortunate. Still, the general theme of Glory and ADVENTURE! carrying a much heavier price than those who would seek it out understand are right there from the start, and there are a couple of misty-eyed moments to be found by the end. Its quite dark for a Disney animated movie.

Sound
The soundtrack is by the legendary Elmer Bernstein and it works brilliantly with the movie. Can’t complain about it. Also, in a departure from essentially every other Disney movie, there are no songs. Yep. Not. One. Song. That should tell you this movie means serious business.

Conclusion
The Black Cauldron has a large number of flaws. It also bombed in theaters and kind of drove Disney’s animation arm into the ground until The Little Mermaid, which is a damn shame really. The movie has some of the most impressively fluid animation work I’ve seen in a while and a story that, while divergent from its source material, isn’t afraid to get its hands dirty with some pretty dark themes. It’s definitely worth checking out if you get a chance, and it really makes me wonder what a big budget, live action, book faithful take on the series would be like. Hmm. Guess I’ll just have to become a famous writer and some time in the future adapt the screenplay. Obviously.

Curiously enough, its not easy to find the actual trailer for it.
http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi93716761/

“My god! Do we really suck, or is this guy really that good?”

2010-12-03T17:21:00.000-05:00

Guns, guns, guns, guns. That’s the be-all and end-all of Shoot ‘Em Up, a hyper-stylistic, hyper violent action flick that carries around a hefty dose of black comedy. Its kind of a one trick pony in that regard, lets see if it’s a good enough trick to last the whole movie.

Story
We have a pregnant woman being chased by gunmen who passes a homeless looking “Mr. Smith” (Clive Owen) who has a mysterious past, a surprising competence with firearms and a fondness for carrots. He intervenes in the struggle (by jamming a carrot through one thug’s head, which right there should tell you exactly what kind of movie this is). The woman gives birth but is killed and Mr. Smith ends up an erstwhile nanny for the baby. Turns out, it’s the baby the bad guys, led by Hertz (Paul Giamatti) want and we get one giant gunfight of a movie. Oh, and we also get an ally/mother figure in the shapely form of a prostitute named D.Q. (short for Donna Quintano/“Dairy Queen” and played by Monica Bellucci).

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Michael Davis (who also directed personal guilty pleasure favorite 100 Girls), the movie certainly moves at a quick pace. The gunfights are pretty fun and provide a hefty dose of visual comedy. Physics does tend to get broken over one knee in this movie FREQUENTLY, so if that’s something you feel very strongly about, you’ll probably hate this movie. A lot. Still, the fights just go on into increasingly bigger and more audacious scenes, and the fight choreography is really solid too.

Writing
Written by the above mentioned Michael Davis. The writing has some funny lines and moments here and there, but its really a weak point of the film. The plot, if it can be called such, is insanely convoluted AND contrived and by the end of the movie. I called bullshit a few times. As far as a “message,” I don’t think there really is one. There’s kind of a half-assed anti-gun bit, but the movie’s answer to everything is to add more guns, so really, I think its just intended as a big, loud, stupid action movie with a nihilistic tone its violence.

Sound
Original music by Paul Haslinger, but the licensed songs that go along with the action scenes are a huge part of the awesomeness of those scenes, particularly Wolfmother.

Conclusion
Shoot ‘Em Up isn’t a particularly great movie. The writing is crude and juvenile at a LOT of points, but the three leads give it enough weight to make getting from Point A to Point B a reasonably fun ride. The movie is at its strongest during the plentiful (if not the actual bulk of the movie) and inventive action scenes. The schtick was enough to keep me entertained, but I know of several people who absolutely hated it. Approach with caution, I suppose.

“Negative, I am a meat popsicle.”

2010-12-01T14:05:00.000-05:00

Its kind of hard to preface a movie like The Fifth Element. After all, it’s a brightly colored, shiny, largely optimistic space opera/Adventure! that was released in 1997. And its got Bruce Willis in it.

Story
Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) is a former military pilot who’s now a down on his luck cabbie (in THE FUTURE!). His mom nags him, his wife divorced him, and he can barely afford to keep up with his traffic violations. He’s about to have bigger problems. See, there’s this ancient EVIL which manifests physically every couple of thousand years in an attempt to kill all life in the universe. So it falls to Commander Shepherd and his crew to--wait, sorry.

The only way to stop the EVIL is the lost “Fifth Element” (as opposed to fire, earth, air & water, oh, and DUN DUN DUN!). There is a faith based around this Elemental power, and its current priest, Father Vito Cornelius (Ian Holm) is desperate to convince the Earth government that the only thing that can stop the EVIL is this element. Some friendly aliens try to deliver said Maguffin, but get shot down by mercenaries. The Element is recovered and reconstructed by SCIENCE into Leeloo Minai Lekariba-Laminai-Tchai-Ekbat De Sebat (Milla Jovovich), a smokin’ hot little mama jamma fully capable of kicking anyone’s ass. She escapes from a hospital and falls (literally) into Korben’s cab, and a course is plotted for ADVENTURE!

I should add that along the way, we run into a DJ named Ruby Rhod (Chris Tucker) and the villainous Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg (Gary Oldman), and it seems to me that the two spend their screen time trying to out-ham each other. I’m okay with this.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Luc Besson, the film is, again, very, very bright and colorful. It really jars against the more cynical and darker visuals of its contemporary sci-fi movies (like Dark City and The Matrix). There’s a lot of makeup, model work and wacky outfits, and all of it (aside from some of the weirder costumes) is really well done. And the fight scenes are really badass, which is a plus.

Writing
Screenplay by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen and based off a story Besson wrote back in the 70s. It’s got action, its got a LOT of comic moments and funny dialogue, and its got some reeaaalllly memorable characters. About the only complaint I have is that the ending is a little bit anti-climactic.

Sound
The original music by Eric Serra is an interesting blend of electronica, opera and a blend of international touches. It’s a bit hard to describe, but the one fight scene juxtaposed with the opera scene is easily one of the best in the movie.

Conclusion
Yeah, so I will admit to being late to The Fifth Element party. I’d seen clips here and there and thought it was cool and all, but never sat through it all the way before. I concede the awesomeness of the movie and feel a little ashamed that I haven’t experienced it until now. It’s good. Real good. One of the better surprises this year. Hell, if I had seen this back in the 90's like God intended, it might've become one of my favorite movies ever.

“You fight like a baby. A DEAD baby!”

2010-11-27T19:52:00.000-05:00

Not a whole lot I have to say in prologue about this one other than I’ve got a fondness for ninja movies and a fondness for Flight of the Conchords. 2002’s Tongan Ninja happens to combine elements from both, considering it’s a ninja action-comedy-musical set in New Zealand.

Story
So we have two martial arts students on the island of Tonga, one a heroic, honorable and naïve student named Sione Finau (Sam Manu) and his childhood rival, the arrogant, cheating Action Fighter (formerly Marvin) (Jemaine Clement). Sione gets sent by his master to help out a restaurant owning friend who’s been beat up by the goons of the So-Called Syndicate. He gets to Wellington, New Zealand and finds the onwer’s daughter, Miss Lee (Linda Tseng), being shaken down by the So-Called Syndicate and of course, has to fight his way through a bunch of Mr. Big’s (Victor Rodger) goons, including Asian Side-Kick (Raybon Kan), Herman the Henchman (David Fane), Knife Man, Gun Man and a final showdown with Action Fighter. Its fairly standard martial arts plot stuff, but that’s the point of the whole thing.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Jason Stutter, “low budget” perfectly describes this movie. This is not a bad thing, since it helps the lowbrow comedy of the movie since a lot of otherwise “big budget” encounters are explicitly pointed out and denied to the audience. There is also a healthy dose of CGI which is comically obvious as well. Fight scenes are decent but also intentionally not very good.

Writing
The writing team of Jemain Clement and Jason Stutter are perfectly aware of the kind of low budget movie they are making and they’re also very aware of the genre they’re making fun of. There’s also a healthy dose of deadpan, self-deprecating Kiwi humor.

Sound
The original music by David Donaldson, Plan 9 and Steve Roche isn’t fancy but it gets the job done. The original songs on the other hand, especially the title song sung by an Elvis-dressed Jemaine Clement, are quite catchy.

Conclusion
It is easy to dismiss Tongan Ninja as a silly little fluff parody, and, well, it is. But its also a surprisingly clever little movie and a testament to the “can-do” spirit of independent filmmaking. I actually like it quite a lot, and it has a feel very similar to Black Dynamite (though lacking the production values) but I’ll admit its probably not for everyone.

“Why, my Uncle Thumper had a problem with HIS probate, and he had to take these big pills, and drink lots of water.”

2010-11-23T12:30:00.000-05:00

Been a while since we’ve dipped into the inky black pool of Film Noir, but 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a good solid twisting of the genre into a curious balloon animal shape.

Uhh, that was a weird metaphor. Let’s just get right into it.

Story
Take bitter, drunken hard-boiled private eye Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins doing an incredible job hiding his British accent) and have him working in 1940’s Hollywood. Pretty noir-ish so far, right? Now add Toons, living, breathing cartoon characters that are a staple part of the entertainment business. Eddie, who very clearly does not like toons (for the simple fact that one murdered his brother by dropping a piano on his head) is hired by studio mogul R.K. Maroon (Alan Tilvern) to do a little snooping on the wife of Maroon Studio’s star player, Roger Rabbit (voiced by Charles Fleischer). When Valiant shows Roger pictures of his wife Jessica (voiced by Kathleen Turner) playing literal patty cake with the recently murdered Marvin Acme (Stubby Kaye) owner of Toontown, the plot starts adding up and all signs point to the sinister Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd hamming it up BIG TIME) having something to do with the murder. And then hilarity ensues.

The live action cast is very solid and really gets it done, but since this is a hybrid live action/animation film, the real scene stealers are all the toons that populate Hollywood. And the movie does the near impossible feat of getting all the various companies to grant permission to include their characters in this one film. So you get Betty Boop, Woody the Woodpecker, Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse and so on. What this also means is that the movie features quite possibly the most impressive collection of voice actors ever assembled on screen. In addition to voice work god Mel Blanc (in one of his last performances), you get guys like Frank Welker, Nancy Cartwright, Jack Angel, Tony Pope, Jim Cummings, Wayne Allwine, Russi Taylor, June Foray, Joe Alaskey, Mae Questel (in one of her last performances) and more. You probably don’t recognize any of those names, but I guarantee that you’ve heard them plenty of times. Look them up and you’ll realize just how much respect is due to these incredibly talented people.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Robert Zemeckis with cinematography by Dean Cundey (who worked with Zemeckis on the Back To The Future Trilogy). The movie has two objectives: Look like the 1930s and blend live action with animation. It works brilliantly. Yes, its in color, but they had color back then (Adventures of Robin Hood, Snow White) and it fit’s the, well, cartoonish nature of the population.

Writing
Based on the novel “Who Censored Roger Rabbit? By Gary K. Wolf (bet you didn’t know that) and screenplay by Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman. The snappy dialogue is really what cements the movie together, since it effectively blends the madcap cartoon wordplay with the double-entendre of noir. The plot itself is pretty tight and includes the obligatory third act twist.

Sound
Original music by the always solid Alan Silvestri. Also, the movie gets major props for including a dueling pianos act between Daffy and Donald Duck that is entirely in character for those two hotheads.

Conclusion
A love letter to film noir, the Golden Age of Hollywood and old school animation all rolled into one. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is just about perfect.

“Your knowledge of scientific biological transmogrification is only outmatched by your zest for kung-fu treachery!”

2010-11-15T17:58:00.000-05:00

Arguably the most (in)famous exploitation subgenre is Blaxploitation. It arose in the 1970s and essentially comprised gritty crime plots, shootouts, sex and frequently martial arts starring a predominantly black cast. The soundtracks were funky and/or groovy, production values were generally low and the acting was spotty. In short, perfect fodder for cult films (and believe me, brother, we’re gonna get to some of them in due time). Today’s subject is actually 2009’s homage/parody of the films, Black Dynamite.

Story
This is gonna get complicated. It starts with the mob killing a police mole. That mole turns out to be the younger brother of Black Dynamite (Michael Jai White), a kung-fu master who’s a veteran of the Army AND CIA who sets out on an investigative rampage of revenge to get the bastards who killed his brother. Along the way, he recruits a team to help him: Cream Corn (Tommy Davidson), the rhyme-spouting Bullhorn (Byron Minns) and a group of Black Power militants led by Saheed (Phil Morris). He also starts up a relationship with community activist Gloria (Salli Richardson-Whitfield). Black Dynamite and his crew proceed to wage a ruthless war on drugs and uncover a conspiracy that connects to the mad science of the Fiendish Dr. Wu (Roger Yuan).

If I say anything else, it’d be spoilers of the worst kind, and that would be a real shame. Suffice it to say that there is no shortage of gunfights, car chases, kung fu, boobies and dirty words.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Scott Sanders with Cinematography by Shawn Maurer, the film is shot in the old Blaxploitation style and set in the 70s, so it really plays up the color saturation and so on. Some of the greatest gags the movie offers are visual, where all manner of “errors” (like bad editing, continuity, and crew goofs) abound intentionally. It is outstanding how they’re integrated, like when Black Dynamite is giving a serious speech and occasionally looks up at the boom mike dangling into frame but keeps talking. Stuff like that.

Writing
Screenplay by Michael Jai White, Byron Minns & Scott Sanders. The screenplay is just as solid of a parody as the visual style and acting are. The plot starts out simple but spirals into something sublimely ludicrous. The dialogue is fantastic, even when it’s not spinning new and exciting variants on established profanity.

Sound
Original music by Adrian Younge and it is FUNKY in the best possible way. Some of the songs provide hilariously unnecessary exposition as they narrate what’s going on. Black Dynamite himself has an audio sting that hits whenever he does something incredibly badass. It’s good stuff.

Conclusion
Black Dynamite is a work of genius because it works as a comedy and a straightforward Blaxploitation film. I can’t sing my praises for it enough, and the many people I’ve forced to watch it can attest to it. And every one of them has walked away satisfied. Watch this movie ASAP.

“Hey, its wet-willy time”

2010-11-12T12:03:00.000-05:00

1993 brought about one more Turtles movie. Only this time, the Jim Henson Creature Shop was not involved. And… Well… nobody really likes it. Like, at all. Sounds like a good enough reason to take a look at Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III.

Story
April O’Neil (Paige Turco) visit’s the Turtles spacious underground digs and tells them she’s going on vacation. She also brings some gifts for the gang and an antique scepter that for some reason, starts glowing and April gets thrown through time to Feudal Japan and replaced with Kenshin (Henry Hayashi), the son of a powerful daimyo with daddy issues. Why? Through the age-old storytelling crutch of an ancient prophecy, of course!

Anyway, our heroes Leonardo (Mark Caso & voiced by Brian Tochi), Raphael (Matt Hill & voiced by Tim Kelleher), Donatello (Jim Raposa & voiced once more by Corey Feldman) and Michaelangelo (David Fraser & voiced by Robbie Rist) resolve to use the scepter to go after April and bringing four samurai warriors to New York in the process. Can Splinter (voiced by James Murray) and Casey Jones (Elias Koteas) keep these five samurai out of trouble? Hilarity of course is supposed to ensue (and well, kind of does, since Koteas’ Jones is a welcome return to the series)

Moving on, the Turtles end up in Japan circa 1603 and find out that April’s been captured by the daimyo’s men because of the whole magic thing. The Daimyo, Lord Norinaga (Sab Shimono) is apparently a bad dude, since his army is putting down a rebellious village for…being rebellious I guess. It’s really vague, but it’s the kind of movie where “rebels = good because that’s what Star Wars did.” Anyway, Norinaga forms an uneasy partnership with a much more clearly bad guy: the Englishman Walker (Stuart Wilson, who was the bad guy in Lethal Weapon 3) and his thugs. Walker’s a bit of a dandy and a gun for hire that is really in it to make a profit. He’s got a crew of thugs, led by Niles (John Aylward as one of the funnier characters) and there’s Whit, a dissenting member of the crew that kind of latches on to April that reminds her of Casey Jones (and happens to be played by Koteas as well). The Turtles (who are regarded by the Japanese as fearsome kappa demons, which actually makes a fair bit of sense) rescue April, escape to the village and team up with the rebels and their leader Mitsu (Vivian Wu) who is also Kenshin’s lover. And you can see where the plot goes from here.

There aren’t any really terrible performances, but there aren't any really good performances either. You can kind of tell that there’s not much heart being poured into it. There aren’t even that many fight scenes compared to the first two films. Still, Michaelangelo & Raphael get some character development spotlight, which is not a bad thing.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Stuart Gillard, you can tell the budget was much lower than the previous outings. The animatronics and Turtle costumes are a definite step down from the Henson creations. There’s also the infamous falling scene from the end of the movie where a character drops off the fortress into the water below and simply vanishes through the miracle of bad editing (though there is a splash sound).

Writing
Characters created by Eastman & Laird and screenplay written by Stuart Gillard. The story runs along on rails rather predictably and the Turtles’ schtick is wearing kind of thin at this point. Some of the comedic bits hit, but more often than not they don’t. Such as all of Donatello's increasingly grating catchphrases and one-liners.

Sound
Original music by John Du Prez yet again, which amps up the Japanese musical cues and the soundtrack also includes ZZ Top’s “Can’t Stop Rockin.”

Conclusion
There’s no way I can ever call Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III a good movie. HOWEVER, it isn’t really as bad as people say it is. It’s bad, but compared to dreck like Robot Holocaust, it’s totally watchable. I will admit that part of it might be nostalgia goggles (I did watch this one quite a few times as a kid), but honestly, I don’t hate it at all, but it does get quite annoying at times.

“First, we must observe the ancient ritual of the, uh, uh... traditional pre-fight donut!”

2010-11-08T19:33:00.000-05:00

Turtle Power was still in really high gear in 1991 and a year after the first movie, there was a second: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret Of The Ooze.

Story
Now that the characters are established, we can get into the meat of the plot. The Turtles are regarded as urban legends in New York City, still doing random delivery work and eating pizza, rescuing a delivery boy/martial arts enthusiast Keno (Ernie Reyes Jr.). After their home got trashed in the last movie, they’re staying with April O’Neil (Paige Turco) and the apartment is a little crowded for six people/mutants. April covers the story of a company, TGRI, and its efforts to clean up some of their old radioactive messes, led by Professor Jordan Perry (David Warner in a surprisingly non-villainous, non-sinister role) Splinter (voiced by Kevin Clash again) informs Leonardo (Mark Caso & voiced by Brian Tochi), Michelangelo (Michelan Sisti & voiced by Robbie Rist), Donatello (Leif Tilden & voiced by Adam Carl) and Raphael (Kenn Troum & voiced by Laurie Faso) that TGRI was the company that created the Ooze that made them. They set out to discover the secret of the Ooze (DUN DUN DUN!) but so does a revitalized Foot Clan, led by a returned and decidedly un-squished Shredder (François Chau & voiced by David McCharen) who gets some Ooze for himself and uses it to make some new mutants, Tokka & Razhar (both voiced by voice over legend Frank Welker).

Like the first movie, this one throws a LOT of plot at the audience and manages to keep things moving. Since its Science oriented, Donatello gets a lot more character development as he & Dr. Perry swap techno babble.

Oh yeah, and wrestler Kevin Nash is in it as the Super Shredder, for all of 30 seconds.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Michael Pressman, the movie lacks some of the visual “edge” of the first one. This one’s cleaner, more polished, less gritty. A bit goofier than the previous one, though the fight scenes remain one of the high points, though its more fist fighting than using weapons.

Writing
Eastman & Laird get creator credits and screenplay by Todd W. Langen. The script really amps up the more cartoony aspects of the series than the comics to be more in line with the target audience. But here’s the rub, we seven & eight year olds at the time liked the first movie because it was gritty. Because it was, by our standards, “hardcore.” Sure, we still liked the sequel because it was the Turtles, but we all noticed the toned down violence and wondered “what the hell?”

Sound
Original music by John Du Prez again, but really, what’s going to stick out in your head is the on-screen “impromptu” rap performance of “Ninja Rap” by Vanilla Ice & Earthquake. And it will Never. Ever. Leave you.

Conclusion
Eh, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret Of The Ooze is, ultimately okay. It’s not great. Not even as good as the first one. But it’s kind of charming in its harmless stupidity.

And because YOU DIDN'T ASK FOR IT, NINJA RAP:

“Wise man say forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza.”

2010-11-05T15:19:00.000-05:00

1990 was Twenty Years Ago. Which just makes me feel old and arthritic just thinking about that tidbit. But there’s a bright side to this trip down memory lane, since it gives us a chance to look back at the live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a film that was essentially tailored to my seven year old movie going self. That’s right kids, I saw this beeyotch in theaters. Let’s see if it’s aged well.

Story
To those of you not clued in to just how big of a phenomenon the Turtles were in the late 80s-early 90s, the premise revolves around this radioactive stuff called “Ooze” presumably a byproduct of nuclear…scientific…sciencey…things. Anyway, this Ooze is capable of rapidly (and nonlethally) mutating anything that comes in direct physical contact with it into some kind of anthropomorphic creature/monster. Because comic books, that’s why.

Anyway, it also involves the backstory of a guy named Hamato Yoshi getting killed by Oroko Saki and Yoshi’s pet rat getting covered in ooze. The rat mutates into a human-sized puppet named Splinter that’s voiced by Muppeteer Kevin Clash (the voice of Elmo) who takes up residence in the New York City sewer system. Some time later four baby turtles were abandoned and exposed to the Ooze and Splinter adopted them, taught them, trained them in ninjutsu and named them after famous Renaissance artists: Leonardo (David Foreman and voiced by Brian Tochi), Donatello (Leif Tilden and voiced by Corey Feldman), Raphael (Josh Pais and voiced by Josh Pais) and Michaelangelo (Michelan Sisti and voiced by Robbie Rist). Because comic books, that’s why.

Anyway, this all leads up to 1990, where a crime wave of theft & burglary has the city paralyzed and the police stymied. The thieves strike and vanish without a trace, and there’s only one reporter in town willing to ask the hard questions and get to the bottom of this: April O’Neil (Judith Hoag).

Yadda yadda yadda, turns out the thieves are a legion of maladjusted teens that are taken in by the Foot Clan, a criminal group of ninjas led by the Shredder (James Saito). April runs afoul of them, is rescued by the Turtles, they eventually get joined by a sports themed vigilante named Casey Jones (played by a gloriously hammy Elias Koteas) and ADVENTURE! ensues.

So the plot is complicated and out of the Turtles, it’s really Raphael that gets the most development. He’s angry. A lot. Which causes him to go off on his own and get his ass kicked by the Foot (ba-dum-tsh). After clashing with Leonardo (who’s the Responsible One), Raph ends up learning more self control and how to play better with others. It’s actually fairly well done. The cast all handle their roles pretty well and despite the really cluttered plot, it stays coherent.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Steve Barron, the film is competently shot, but the art direction does end up straddling that line between “realistic” and “cheesy” with some of the sets (like the Foot Clan’s ludicrous-but-awesome-if-you’re-seven indoor arcade & skate park). However, the movie moves along very quickly and the fight scenes are generally pretty good. The most pleasant surprise is that the special effects have largely aged well, and I credit this entirely to the Jim Henson Company for their work on Splinter & the Turtles. Again, it’s all fairly well done.

Writing
Characters created by Kevin Eastman & Peter Laird, story by Bobby Herbeck and Screenplay by Todd W. Langen & Bobby Herbeck. It manages to juggle the origin and a surprising amount of plot quite well. The characters are all recognizably so and (having never read the comic so I’m not 100% sure) but it seems to blend the catchphrase spouting style of the cartoon with the darker visual look of the comics. Which sounds like it shouldn’t work, but kind of does. The movie is not starved for one-liners and a surprising number of them are pretty good though there are also quite a few stinkers that are heavily dated to the period. And Raph screams out “DAMN!!!” at one point, which, when you’re seven, leaves an impact.

Sound
Original music by John Du Prez (UHF), and the score, while heavily influenced by digital touches, does work well and there are some eastern influenced “ninja” style cues. There’s also a licensed soundtrack that includes “This Is What We Do” by M.C. Hammer and “T-U-R-T-L-E Power!” by Partners In Kryme as the end credits song. It’s cheesy, but catchy.

Conclusion
While the nostalgia goggles probably helped in watching this, I have to admit I was a little afraid to revisit Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I’m glad that it still holds up pretty well on its own merits. Yes, it’s extremely cheesy. Extremely cheesy. But that’s kind of the charm of it too. It’s not great, but its definitely way better than it could’ve been.

And yeah, the dubbing on the trailer doesn't match up the finished movie. It's likely the trailer was cut before all the voice over work was done.