After a lackluster second entry the gang that brought us “Feast” is back in top form with the third chapter of the trilogy-- a relatively brief entry that hits the ground running and made me realize “Feast II” was the breather and connective tissue we needed for an admittedly bizarre and kick ass sequel/possible finale. A few of the things set up in part two pay dividends in this entry—such as alien hybrids and pipes through the head—but a lot of the unexpected rears it’s head.
Doing their level best to survive the onslaught that started at the end of the last film our motley gang nails a few beasts then hole up in the town jail they tried unsuccessfully to occupy in the previous film. Therein they meet a survivalist named Shitkicker (John Allen Nelson, sublime) before things turn ugly and they vow to take the fight to the creatures. The gang befriends and escape to the sewers with a prophet named Short Bus Gus, who may or may not be able to control and communicate with the aliens.
In order to avoid spoiling a few truly great surprises I’ll tell you that a bizarre subculture exists down there in addition to the monsters and leave it at that, but I will tell you that the humor while keeping with the grand tradition of being “so not right” is actually funny again. My least favorite joke from the second film where a guy named Greg Swank sacrifices a baby to save himself has a long, irony laden and pretty damn funny pay-off where Greg lives through most of this film with a pipe sticking through his head and he’s disoriented, all his dialogue is unintelligible and subtitled and he thinks the surviving midget luchador from the last film is the baby he killed and this is his shot at redemption.
When I saw “Feast” in 2005 I admired the scene where a soldier was allowed to drink for free at the bar because the bartender was a World War II vet and respected what he did, it was a nice touch that felt pretty wholesome and American. The movie also had a kid getting eaten, old people getting interrogated and blown up and it was just good gruesome fun that embraced being an old fashioned bloody ass, bloody entertaining piece of joy. It also had some pathos to it, as one woman fights to survive to care for another’s child, two brothers band together to live, people had their reasons for wanting to survive and some did. It’s not easy to see that current going through the films but it is there.
Writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan like to keep you on your toes with some truly bizarre and unpredictable shit, but one of the surprising things they do is offer up a sense of fairness and balance. Things don’t always end happily for everyone as wars don’t always let heroes choose to die in a manner that befits them, but they see to it that those who deserve it and act selfishly find a way to meet their doom with unusually healthy doses of irony and agony.
About the only real negative I can say about the film is there is an extended strobe-lit sequence that stands in for the jarring shaky cam work of the first as far as bad directorial choices go and it’s frankly pretty damn irritating. That being said, I can pretty much eat the rest of this shit up.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist [***1/2]
We’ve all been there before: admonishing never again until the next time. Nick (Michael Cera) is making an ill advised phone call to his ex-girlfriend Triss explaing why he isn’t at school, his reasons are multiple, flimsy and he’s making one last mix CD for her. It’s desperate but standard until you see him against the wall as he makes his afternoon phone call, his cheek nestled against a picture of his ex on a collage that adorns his wall. The viewer won’t know it at the time, but the journey of “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” will be better than its trailer lets on. I like Michael Cera and Kat Dennings, I think this movie is miles better than “Charlie Bartlett” and I think this film like “Superbad” deftly handles teenage insecurity, so the question is: why the fuck didn’t I see this thing until tonight? Sadly, I don’t have an answer.
A movie about two strangers who kiss, fight, search for one’s drunken friend who has run off under the mistaken impression that she has been kidnapped amidst an all night quest to find a band’s secret show seems like it would be some light fluffy fun (and it can be), but it never is just any of those things. Cera and Dennings as the titular Nick and Norah are warm and endearing characters, loveable and always at the ready with a quip but fully capable of revealing more depth. They aren’t over written and precious, they don’t have to keep up with the script it fits them.
The comedy of “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” is a mask and there are numerous telling moments in the film: such as the one where Nick has his cheek pressed against a picture of his girlfriend or the moments when after parting ways with Nick, Norah calls a friend named Tal (Jay Baruchel),who is a prick, but makes her feel good because he appreciates her sometimes or the moment when Norah asks how two people who can’t stand each other stay together for so long and Nick offers to call his parents to find out. This isn’t a romantic comedy about two people finding out they are perfect for each other, regardless of the fact that that happens to be true, it’s a story about how often our heart fails us and how we settle for being okay sometimes. The drunken escapades of Norah’s friend Caroline (Ari Graynor) suggest that obliviousness is a preferable alternative to throwing yourself out there for someone to trample on and Nick’s homosexual bandmates, who have brought a fellow named Lethario along for the ride, suggest as “Superbad” did before that there’s no love more uncomplex than man love.
“Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” is a film that understands how big a role heartbreak, the folly of youth and settling for not being alone plays in our romantic lives, better than that I think it also understands what courage is. It takes lots of balls to put yourself out there and that fear that may send you into a retreat never goes away (the film’s final moments are a perfect example of this). The lucky ones among us just make an effort not to shit on or get shat upon.
We’ve all been there before: admonishing never again until the next time. Nick (Michael Cera) is making an ill advised phone call to his ex-girlfriend Triss explaing why he isn’t at school, his reasons are multiple, flimsy and he’s making one last mix CD for her. It’s desperate but standard until you see him against the wall as he makes his afternoon phone call, his cheek nestled against a picture of his ex on a collage that adorns his wall. The viewer won’t know it at the time, but the journey of “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” will be better than its trailer lets on. I like Michael Cera and Kat Dennings, I think this movie is miles better than “Charlie Bartlett” and I think this film like “Superbad” deftly handles teenage insecurity, so the question is: why the fuck didn’t I see this thing until tonight? Sadly, I don’t have an answer.
A movie about two strangers who kiss, fight, search for one’s drunken friend who has run off under the mistaken impression that she has been kidnapped amidst an all night quest to find a band’s secret show seems like it would be some light fluffy fun (and it can be), but it never is just any of those things. Cera and Dennings as the titular Nick and Norah are warm and endearing characters, loveable and always at the ready with a quip but fully capable of revealing more depth. They aren’t over written and precious, they don’t have to keep up with the script it fits them.
The comedy of “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” is a mask and there are numerous telling moments in the film: such as the one where Nick has his cheek pressed against a picture of his girlfriend or the moments when after parting ways with Nick, Norah calls a friend named Tal (Jay Baruchel),who is a prick, but makes her feel good because he appreciates her sometimes or the moment when Norah asks how two people who can’t stand each other stay together for so long and Nick offers to call his parents to find out. This isn’t a romantic comedy about two people finding out they are perfect for each other, regardless of the fact that that happens to be true, it’s a story about how often our heart fails us and how we settle for being okay sometimes. The drunken escapades of Norah’s friend Caroline (Ari Graynor) suggest that obliviousness is a preferable alternative to throwing yourself out there for someone to trample on and Nick’s homosexual bandmates, who have brought a fellow named Lethario along for the ride, suggest as “Superbad” did before that there’s no love more uncomplex than man love.
“Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” is a film that understands how big a role heartbreak, the folly of youth and settling for not being alone plays in our romantic lives, better than that I think it also understands what courage is. It takes lots of balls to put yourself out there and that fear that may send you into a retreat never goes away (the film’s final moments are a perfect example of this). The lucky ones among us just make an effort not to shit on or get shat upon.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
The New Year...in style
Ip Man ***1/2
I remember watching “Iron Monkey” for the first time about six years ago and there was a kid in the movie named Wong Fei Hung who would be portrayed in countless films as China’s greatest patriot and champion, but in that particular film he was only a peripheral character and also a child but the eventualities of what he would do and become loomed large; I get a similar feeling from Ip Man, a martial arts biopic about the man who taught Bruce Lee Wing Chun, this film takes place in the years before Man taught Lee or even had his own martial arts studio. It ends with a climactic battle with a Japanese general some thirteen years before Lee was a student of Ip Man, but the shadow of Lee looms large especially if it’s all you know about Man going into the film and makes one yearn for the second half of Man’s life to be committed to film because “Ip Man” leaves off in exactly the right place. And I also want to know if they can find someone so perfectly suited to play Bruce Lee as Yen is to play Ip Man.
For all intents and purposes Ip Man’s story plays like the Chinese “Cinderella Man” or “Rocky IV” as a man fights for national and personal pride, to feed his family and goes up against a villain who seems monstrous but in his heart of hearts is fighting for at least one of the same reasons as the hero but is only portrayed as monstrous to amp up the tension. To be fair, Ivan Drago is probably the most unsympathetic of the villains while the real Max Baer felt bad for killing those men. General Sanpo is almost a fair balance of the other two, he believes in the sanctity of the martial arts battles and frowns upon another soldier killing a man who after losing a fight attempts to take the rice he was promised regardless of the fight’s outcome, but he still enjoys asserting Japanese dominance and at one point won’t accept the surrender of opponents. His smaller, mousier comrades are actually all bigger pricks than him despite the fact that his concept of a fair fight could use a little tweaking.
The film has a lot of strengths, the fight scenes by Sammo Hung are all pretty exceptionally well choreographed and also while not generally regarded as a plus the fights are relatively brief which works when you’re fighting for pride more than showmanship. However, unless Ip Man is one of the participants the showier pricks tend to win the battles. I guess you wouldn’t be much of a symbol of hope, a legend or a savior if you didn’t have to rescue people though.
The key element to the success of “Ip Man” is Donnie Yen, who plays Ip Man with lots of dignity and, when it rears its head, a controlled sense of fury. Man’s poise and fury comes from his never stated but possibly unconscious desire to assert Wing Chun as a man’s martial art. He never looses his cool when an opponent calls him a bitch for practicing a woman’s martial art (Wing Chun was invented by a woman), but he swiftly confidently kicks lots of ass and in a tongue-in-cheek moment uses a feather duster while an opponent uses the obviously showier sword. Man’s wife also yells at him to be the aggressor lest all the antiques in the house get broken. Whatever the case may be, Yen takes every opponent, every hardship in stride and adds a third trophy to his case of bad ass martial arts dudes after “Sha Po Long” and “Flashpoint.”
If you like inspirational sports films (which you do if you’re human), biopics and ass kicking of a pretty high order then “Ip Man” will probably make your vagina tingle.
I remember watching “Iron Monkey” for the first time about six years ago and there was a kid in the movie named Wong Fei Hung who would be portrayed in countless films as China’s greatest patriot and champion, but in that particular film he was only a peripheral character and also a child but the eventualities of what he would do and become loomed large; I get a similar feeling from Ip Man, a martial arts biopic about the man who taught Bruce Lee Wing Chun, this film takes place in the years before Man taught Lee or even had his own martial arts studio. It ends with a climactic battle with a Japanese general some thirteen years before Lee was a student of Ip Man, but the shadow of Lee looms large especially if it’s all you know about Man going into the film and makes one yearn for the second half of Man’s life to be committed to film because “Ip Man” leaves off in exactly the right place. And I also want to know if they can find someone so perfectly suited to play Bruce Lee as Yen is to play Ip Man.
For all intents and purposes Ip Man’s story plays like the Chinese “Cinderella Man” or “Rocky IV” as a man fights for national and personal pride, to feed his family and goes up against a villain who seems monstrous but in his heart of hearts is fighting for at least one of the same reasons as the hero but is only portrayed as monstrous to amp up the tension. To be fair, Ivan Drago is probably the most unsympathetic of the villains while the real Max Baer felt bad for killing those men. General Sanpo is almost a fair balance of the other two, he believes in the sanctity of the martial arts battles and frowns upon another soldier killing a man who after losing a fight attempts to take the rice he was promised regardless of the fight’s outcome, but he still enjoys asserting Japanese dominance and at one point won’t accept the surrender of opponents. His smaller, mousier comrades are actually all bigger pricks than him despite the fact that his concept of a fair fight could use a little tweaking.
The film has a lot of strengths, the fight scenes by Sammo Hung are all pretty exceptionally well choreographed and also while not generally regarded as a plus the fights are relatively brief which works when you’re fighting for pride more than showmanship. However, unless Ip Man is one of the participants the showier pricks tend to win the battles. I guess you wouldn’t be much of a symbol of hope, a legend or a savior if you didn’t have to rescue people though.
The key element to the success of “Ip Man” is Donnie Yen, who plays Ip Man with lots of dignity and, when it rears its head, a controlled sense of fury. Man’s poise and fury comes from his never stated but possibly unconscious desire to assert Wing Chun as a man’s martial art. He never looses his cool when an opponent calls him a bitch for practicing a woman’s martial art (Wing Chun was invented by a woman), but he swiftly confidently kicks lots of ass and in a tongue-in-cheek moment uses a feather duster while an opponent uses the obviously showier sword. Man’s wife also yells at him to be the aggressor lest all the antiques in the house get broken. Whatever the case may be, Yen takes every opponent, every hardship in stride and adds a third trophy to his case of bad ass martial arts dudes after “Sha Po Long” and “Flashpoint.”
If you like inspirational sports films (which you do if you’re human), biopics and ass kicking of a pretty high order then “Ip Man” will probably make your vagina tingle.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Dexter and violence
All aboard the "Dexter" train...
Well I finally got on board the "Dexter" train and so far the shit has been a ride. I declared at some point during the first episode that I hated Doakes then sometime during the second episode I declared that I hated LaGuerta (or maybe Laguerta) even more. Then around episode three I decided that Doakes' story took an interesting turn and I thought he was on the precipice of being likeable and that he routinely fucked that up for himself. Three more episodes later he has stepped farther from the edge but can't seem to make the leap. LaGuerta, on the other hand, hasn't done much for herself. Telling Tucci's family (Tucci, by the way is a victim of Dexter's latest playmate-- The Ice Truck Killer, who has been amputating the guy's body parts and recreating photos from Dexter's family album. The photos are actually a trail to where Tucci can be found) he was alive was something I thought was going to blow up in her face for sure. I'm glad it didn't though, not for the character's sake, but because I like the show's humanity. There's not much more satisfying than watching what I think will be a soulless demon who sates his murderous impulses by killing other demons trying to achieve humanity in a way that will be much more than the facsimile of such that he's managed to produce so far.
I think the show is fantastically acted (even by the characters I hate). Michael C. Hall is magnetic and Julie Benz etches a believable portrait of a woman hiding behind a constant mask of smiles. I don't know if that mask of smiles will fail her in a big way or even what and when Dexter will reveal to her, but I find her nervousness and trepidation endearing. James Remar and Michael C. Hall's chemistry and code is the glue that hold's the show together and Remar even gets my favorite moment of the show thus far. When Dexter steps out of his apartment and it starts to rain and the rain turns to blood and Harry says, "Storm's coming." If moments like that don't get your engine revving then you might not be human. It's also kick ass and reliable foreshadowing. Props.
Also, how'd you like Scott William Winters of "Good Will Hunting" fame as the brother-in-law of a slain cop who looked to be setting up Doakes for a fall? I liked them apples. Of course, by apples I mean the whole goddamn thing.
Action....
I watched "Punisher: War Zone" this weekend and found it to be gloriously over-the-top but, in truth, I appreciated the manic overacting by Dominic West and Doug Hutchinson a little bit more than I appreciated the violence. Nick Santoro (a writer for "Prison Break") was one of the co-writers of this thing and despite knowing this film is based on a certain run of the comic book series, Santoro's touch which is a "Prison Break"ian staple can be felt in the undying loyalty between Loony Bin Jim (Hutchinson) and his scar faced brother Jigsaw (West) who manage to love each other unconditionally whilst simultaneously hating everything else in the world... Speaking of "Prison Break," Robert "T-Bag" Knepper plays the lead villain in "Transporter 3" which is, putting it mildly, something of a still birth. It's not bad enough to make me yearn for "Transporter 2" but it's enough to make me wish I hadn't been so fond of the first film.
Well I finally got on board the "Dexter" train and so far the shit has been a ride. I declared at some point during the first episode that I hated Doakes then sometime during the second episode I declared that I hated LaGuerta (or maybe Laguerta) even more. Then around episode three I decided that Doakes' story took an interesting turn and I thought he was on the precipice of being likeable and that he routinely fucked that up for himself. Three more episodes later he has stepped farther from the edge but can't seem to make the leap. LaGuerta, on the other hand, hasn't done much for herself. Telling Tucci's family (Tucci, by the way is a victim of Dexter's latest playmate-- The Ice Truck Killer, who has been amputating the guy's body parts and recreating photos from Dexter's family album. The photos are actually a trail to where Tucci can be found) he was alive was something I thought was going to blow up in her face for sure. I'm glad it didn't though, not for the character's sake, but because I like the show's humanity. There's not much more satisfying than watching what I think will be a soulless demon who sates his murderous impulses by killing other demons trying to achieve humanity in a way that will be much more than the facsimile of such that he's managed to produce so far.
I think the show is fantastically acted (even by the characters I hate). Michael C. Hall is magnetic and Julie Benz etches a believable portrait of a woman hiding behind a constant mask of smiles. I don't know if that mask of smiles will fail her in a big way or even what and when Dexter will reveal to her, but I find her nervousness and trepidation endearing. James Remar and Michael C. Hall's chemistry and code is the glue that hold's the show together and Remar even gets my favorite moment of the show thus far. When Dexter steps out of his apartment and it starts to rain and the rain turns to blood and Harry says, "Storm's coming." If moments like that don't get your engine revving then you might not be human. It's also kick ass and reliable foreshadowing. Props.
Also, how'd you like Scott William Winters of "Good Will Hunting" fame as the brother-in-law of a slain cop who looked to be setting up Doakes for a fall? I liked them apples. Of course, by apples I mean the whole goddamn thing.
Action....
I watched "Punisher: War Zone" this weekend and found it to be gloriously over-the-top but, in truth, I appreciated the manic overacting by Dominic West and Doug Hutchinson a little bit more than I appreciated the violence. Nick Santoro (a writer for "Prison Break") was one of the co-writers of this thing and despite knowing this film is based on a certain run of the comic book series, Santoro's touch which is a "Prison Break"ian staple can be felt in the undying loyalty between Loony Bin Jim (Hutchinson) and his scar faced brother Jigsaw (West) who manage to love each other unconditionally whilst simultaneously hating everything else in the world... Speaking of "Prison Break," Robert "T-Bag" Knepper plays the lead villain in "Transporter 3" which is, putting it mildly, something of a still birth. It's not bad enough to make me yearn for "Transporter 2" but it's enough to make me wish I hadn't been so fond of the first film.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
just more about the movies
So I managed not to update this thing with all deliberate speed so I suppose I owe an apology to the one reader I have out there. So here's to you reader: My bad.
Eden Lake [**1/2]
First thing right off the bat I'm not entirely sure this three star rating is what I want to go with. Don't get me wrong it left me feeling nasty and every once in a while a horror film doing so as unrelentingly as this one (and as cynically) is just what the doctor ordered but I can't help but feel a little dissatisfied all the same. The pretty gorgeous Kelly Reilly plays Jenny, one half a couple looking for a quite weekend getaway at a quarry- that's about to become lake front property for an exclusive neighborhood- who gets harassed by a gaggle of youths to the degree where a misunderstanding results in her boyfriend Steve (Michael Fassbender) killing their dog in self-defense and the ringleader of the youths leading a murderous charge against them.
I know I gave "Red" a serious amount of grief for being about the consequences of a dog's murder, but the crucial difference is this: the kid with the dead dog is already a nutjob this just gave him a reason to kill and exert his evil influence on his peers. A sane person wouldn't be so aggrieved by their beloved dog's passing that this kind of rage would be justifiable, at least not in my factpinion. Anywho the kid/s want to kill the couple, they get away but a debilitating accident puts them right back in the hands of the evil little fuckers. The film is best viewed as a combination of "Them" (the French film that "The Strangers" bears a pretty close resemblance to) and the moment in any horror movie where you stumble into a gas station looking for help and you realize you would have been better off picking any gas station but the one you chose.
There is some first rate bastardliness going on in this film: the ringleader pressures his friends to help torture Steve while they have him bound in barb wire and he films them on his video phone so that no one can make an attempt to grow a conscience. He browbeats people until they puke and cry. He even sets a kid who just wants to be one of them on fire. I haven't really hated a British maniac this much since Stephen Wight played a still meaner variation on this character, who shanks people and pisses on them (sadly, not at the same time) in the equally aggressive but ultimately more satisfying "Wilderness."
Steve, to be honest, is kind of a pushover. He's a pretty cut guy who looks like he could take care of himself but he is too much of a buttow down yuppie type who would rather scoff than get righteously medieval on someone. Truthfully, it sucks to be in this situation because neither of the characters get to embrace their inner animal appropriately and it's the means to a very cynical end. An end that is in the moment more satisfying than it is upon reflection.
If it sounds like I'm dancing around spoilers it's because I am. It's hard to get to the heart of the dissatisfaction without spelling it out pretty blatantly but if the words "proper comeuppance" will do enough for you in this context then there you go.
The work of make-up effects guru Paul Hyett ("The Descent," "The Cottage," "The Killing Gene") is pretty great if in short supply. A spike through the foot is dealt with in a painful and memorable way. Nothing else in the film has the wince-ability of that moment, but it's always a treat seeing the man's work in any way.
"Eden Lake" is certifiably cynical and doesn't cheat to get there. It seems like it plays out honestly in terms of how average joes might fare in a horrific situation such as this, but it doesn't sate the bloodlust properly and for that it's hard to call "Eden Lake" a paradise.
Eden Lake [**1/2]
First thing right off the bat I'm not entirely sure this three star rating is what I want to go with. Don't get me wrong it left me feeling nasty and every once in a while a horror film doing so as unrelentingly as this one (and as cynically) is just what the doctor ordered but I can't help but feel a little dissatisfied all the same. The pretty gorgeous Kelly Reilly plays Jenny, one half a couple looking for a quite weekend getaway at a quarry- that's about to become lake front property for an exclusive neighborhood- who gets harassed by a gaggle of youths to the degree where a misunderstanding results in her boyfriend Steve (Michael Fassbender) killing their dog in self-defense and the ringleader of the youths leading a murderous charge against them.
I know I gave "Red" a serious amount of grief for being about the consequences of a dog's murder, but the crucial difference is this: the kid with the dead dog is already a nutjob this just gave him a reason to kill and exert his evil influence on his peers. A sane person wouldn't be so aggrieved by their beloved dog's passing that this kind of rage would be justifiable, at least not in my factpinion. Anywho the kid/s want to kill the couple, they get away but a debilitating accident puts them right back in the hands of the evil little fuckers. The film is best viewed as a combination of "Them" (the French film that "The Strangers" bears a pretty close resemblance to) and the moment in any horror movie where you stumble into a gas station looking for help and you realize you would have been better off picking any gas station but the one you chose.
There is some first rate bastardliness going on in this film: the ringleader pressures his friends to help torture Steve while they have him bound in barb wire and he films them on his video phone so that no one can make an attempt to grow a conscience. He browbeats people until they puke and cry. He even sets a kid who just wants to be one of them on fire. I haven't really hated a British maniac this much since Stephen Wight played a still meaner variation on this character, who shanks people and pisses on them (sadly, not at the same time) in the equally aggressive but ultimately more satisfying "Wilderness."
Steve, to be honest, is kind of a pushover. He's a pretty cut guy who looks like he could take care of himself but he is too much of a buttow down yuppie type who would rather scoff than get righteously medieval on someone. Truthfully, it sucks to be in this situation because neither of the characters get to embrace their inner animal appropriately and it's the means to a very cynical end. An end that is in the moment more satisfying than it is upon reflection.
If it sounds like I'm dancing around spoilers it's because I am. It's hard to get to the heart of the dissatisfaction without spelling it out pretty blatantly but if the words "proper comeuppance" will do enough for you in this context then there you go.
The work of make-up effects guru Paul Hyett ("The Descent," "The Cottage," "The Killing Gene") is pretty great if in short supply. A spike through the foot is dealt with in a painful and memorable way. Nothing else in the film has the wince-ability of that moment, but it's always a treat seeing the man's work in any way.
"Eden Lake" is certifiably cynical and doesn't cheat to get there. It seems like it plays out honestly in terms of how average joes might fare in a horrific situation such as this, but it doesn't sate the bloodlust properly and for that it's hard to call "Eden Lake" a paradise.
Friday, October 17, 2008
The horror...the horror!
I've seen a handful of horror movies recently and I haven't written on this blog since the first post so I guess it's high time I hit this bitch up with a little more flavor, so I'm going to talksies about them. It is also, I recently discovered, October and people like being scared this month more than any other so it seems appropo.
Feast 2: Sloppy Seconds [2008] **
I've been waiting for the "Feast"sequel for about a year and it was announced to be filming just before the writer's strike began last October so it was pretty much the only good news for about ninety days and now a year later I can officially say that it wasn't really all that great of news to begin with.
The meat of the picture (Ha! I said meat) concerns a gang of biker chicks led by the twin sister of Harley Mom (Diane Goldner) from the first film, looking for Bozo (Balthazar Getty) because he blew Harley Mom and one of the monsters to hell with a homemade bomb. We know this because Bartender is briefly tortured into giving Biker Queen (that's her name) the goods on Bozo. He omits, and possibly on purpose because everybody thought he died of a heart attack so they left him, the fact that Harley was as good as dead because the monster had severed one of her legs. Or maybe Sis just doesn't give a damn and would have buried her proper but all she can find is a damn hand. So Biker Queen, Bartender and her cohorts head into a neighboring town looking for Bozo.
Bozo's Trans-Am is gone and they eventually stumble upon a small group holed up in an apartment, guns are drawn and people are killed then out stumbles Honey Pie (Jenny Wade, bloody, beautiful and long suffering), the abandoner from part one, who is beaten viciously by Bartender and thrown out a window. She finds refuge in a convenience store for most of the movie, separated from the eventual group of survivors that includes the biker gang, bartender, a used car salesman named Slasher (Carl Anthony Payne), his adulterous wife and the salesman puttin' the meat to her, a couple of Lucha Libres and their grandma who spends most of the film rotting after getting sprayed with acid during the monster autopsy.
"Feast 2" is a pretty big departure from what I would do with a sequel and, you know, it's not that I'm jealous that I didn't get to write the thing I can just tell you that mine would have been better in every way with the possible exception that I wouldn't have had keen sense enough to add people vomiting ad nauseum, nor would I have had a monster dick spray semen during an autopsy for about a minute straight. The discharge of body fluids is about the only thing in the movie that subscribes to the more is more approach of filmmaking.
I think they're might be the same amount of blood, its a hell of a lot less funny and more characters are standing at the end. The monsters are slower and suckier and the reprisal of the dead kid joke from the first one, applied for shock and legitimately raising the stakes for one of our heroines in the original, is applied to an even more unpopular target (read: cuter and smaller) and felt pretty firmly like a "f-ck you" to me for coinciding with the moment I thought that the film had more affection for it's characters than the original. I never thought the kid's death felt cheap in the first one and none of the little people slams like calling them "pygmy motherf-ckers" feel wrong. Beating the shit out of a woman who abandoned you and your friends to die and then biting off her ear doesn't feel wrong and neither does an alien having sex with a cat on-screen but this other thing kind of makes me feel like less of a person.
The monster attacks are a little more coherent this time around and I don't know whether to attribute that entirely to John Gulager realizing that shaky cam monster attacks are a pretty surefire way to disengage and disorient your audience or if the movie is just so damn bright you can't help but notice things when they happen. There is, towards the end, pretty copious use of CGI and blood and I can see the legitimacy of marrying the two here and there like when a freak accident unrelated to a monster attack befalls a character, but when you have human and monster interaction with CGI thrown in when the monsters are clearly rubber suits then you don't really succeed at doing anything other than reminding us that what we're watching is an inferior product that isn't as engaged with delivering the goods as the first film was.
All that being said, "Feast 2" is kind of less of everything but discharge. It is, after all, only half of a movie in the grand scheme of things.
Red [2008] **
I've been a pretty big fan of the last two Jack Ketchum adaptations given the cinematic treatment, the terrifically disturbing and unforgiving "The Girl Next Door" and "The Lost" about a frighteningly charismatic psychopath in the vein of Charles Manson, if "Girl" is pefect and "The Lost" is a little long in the tooth it bears wondering how exactly "Red" could go off the rails. Like it's precursors "Red" seems firmly rooted in the nostalgia of by-gone eras, tinted in nostalgia or filmed exclusively on lazy Sunday afternoons, it has the crucial atmosphere of a Jack Ketchum story translated to film going for it, it is also a somewhat slow moving character study with many pretty damn good performances. So where does it go wrong and how?
"Red" is not a story of evil in the same way as "Lost" or "Girl Next Door" it is about a man actively seeking justice for a wrong that has been committed against him. I wish I could tell you that the problem is that the movie is about a hero instead of a villain, but the villain gets some pretty decent face time and he's a pretty big son of a bitch (not in size, but in attitude). The question really is sanity. There are psychos and schadenfreudes abound in the filmed adaptations of Ketchum's work and I can't really complain about that but the hero of "Red" is Avery Ludlow (Brian Cox), a widower whose dog gets murdered by a couple of punk kids that want to rob him. For Avery this is like losing his family all over again, his dog Red is the only reminder of his once idyllic life and to a very small extent I can see how a dog is one's lifeline to the world. Man's best friend and all that but everytime I see a dog lover in real life I still see a sane person. Ketchum doesn't seem to feel the same way and it's a problem.
Avery finds out who the kids at the lake are and he pays a visit to their respective families, hoping for an apology from the offenders and maybe even for their parents to impress upon them the wrongness of their actions, but the boys' denial of the events is enough for their parents who dismiss Avery as a crazy old man. The law isn't offering Avery much comfort as killing animals carries a punishment so paltry that Avery prefers the apology. In an effort to obtain the apology, a reporter (Kim Dickens) does a human interest piece on the local news, but it becomes clear that nobody gives a damn about Red except for Avery and a couple of sympathetic locals who by comparison don't care nearly enough. The apathy drives Avery batshit and he wants to get all "old testament" on their asses. This is where "Red" runs into all of it's problems-- hoping for anything more than an apology is too much and the way the situation escalates into a final shootout is beyond belief. The old man probably would have been arrested for his persistent stalking or a judge would order the boy to pay a fine long before it came to the point of throwing bricks through the old man's window or burning down his store became the order of the day. Also, as much as the local gun dealer loves his dog, who saved him, when he accidentally shot off his own foot, something tells me that were his dog brutally murdered he wouldn't kill the people who did it. Maybe he's got a family at home unlike Avery that can help him along in his grief or maybe he is just a rational person. Anger is one thing, being a psycho is quite another and even still I can't reconcile getting hell bent over a dog.
"Red" is probably just fine as a read. It works on paper as a cathartic exercise to purge yourself of the anger you feel towards the brutal murder of your dog, but turning it into a film throws into sharp relief how crazy the notion of being an avenging angel for a murder dog is. The premise is noble and I'd like to say that I understand it, but I don't. People laugh when they hear the synopsis for the film but it isn't funny it's tragic yet there's no denying that it can't work as a film because it's too irrational for anyone with sense to comprehend regardless of their sympathies.
That said, the performances are terrific pretty much all around with Cox and Kim Dickens as the reporter forging a pretty believable relationship rooted in how noble she finds his cause, but also in how much she likes the sad haunted old man. Kyle Gallner plays the younger brother of the film's sociopathic murderer and he brings a much needed degree of sympathy to the bad teens who wronged Avery. Noel Fisher plays the son of a bitch ring leader pretty well.
For a movie I don't have overwhelmingly negative things to say anything about from a craft standpoint it might be too much of an overtly dick move to drop two stars on the film, but a lot of what happens doesn't feel right. It would never get this far regardless of the emotions of the people involved so sympathy be damned I'm just not with you on this one.
Dance of the Dead [2008] ****
There's a pretty astonishing moment about midway through the unapologetically awesome "Dance of the Dead" that redefines what you might realistically expect from a movie about the kids who couldn't get dates to the Prom (or didn't quite make it there) showing up with their gym teacher to kick some zombie ass and save what's left of the townspeople from impending flesh eating doom. After taking refuge in a funeral parlor and fighting their way into the morgue the group's resident badass/school bully is besieged by a cadaver sprung to life and suffers a fatal bite to the jugular. With his dying breath he asks Steven (Chandler Darby) to make him a promise to "kill them all." As much as they hated him everyone is shocked, saddened and feeling pessimistic about their situation without him. In the midst of their mourning he wakes up and everyone beats him to death. In this moment, the film finds an honest gravity to the faux life or death importance we give certain situations (getting a date to the prom, getting "the girl") or the sometimes morbid fantasy of taking the school bully down a peg. It isn't the first time the film does it either, but the less said about those moments here the more surprises the film will ultimately have.
It's probably worth noting at this point that I think "Dance of the Dead" is perfect. Every character archetype is represented in a way that feels like reverence. There is no smugness on behalf of the characters or the filmmakers, moments of humanity are allowed to float to the surface and comedic and serious tones are perfectly balanced. Chandler Darby as Steven, the unlikely boyfriend of student council president/ prom queen hopeful Lindsey (the lovable Greyson Chadwick), has an attitude that is best described as not giving a fuck. He gets dressed down by his asshole chemistry teacher, gets head butted by the school bully for insinuating that his sister would be his prom date, gets dumped the day of the prom and still, in the midst of zombie fighting, talks about Mr. Badass' predilection for farm animals. I'd like to call him this film's Bruce Campbell where it not so screamingly obvious he is Judd Nelson. On a similar note, the school bully is this film's "Some Kind of Wonderful" Elias Koteas first scene skinhead. And Greyson Chadwick is hot now unlike a certain Molly Ringwald who didn't get hot until 40.
Is it fair to put "Dance of the Dead" in the shadow of John Hughes? No, but it is fair to say this kicks John Hughes' ass in every way. If any American movie can use a song on it's soundtrack as expertly as this film utilizes Shadows of the Night during it's climactic prom showdown I'll show you a movie that I might just have to (in the words of Tracy Jordan from "30 Rock") take behind the middle school and get pregnant.
==============================
This isn't the end of the horror reviews by any stretch of the imagination. We've still got some time in October and I love horror so you should expect these kinds of writing with some frequency. Thanks for stopping by.
Feast 2: Sloppy Seconds [2008] **
I've been waiting for the "Feast"sequel for about a year and it was announced to be filming just before the writer's strike began last October so it was pretty much the only good news for about ninety days and now a year later I can officially say that it wasn't really all that great of news to begin with.
The meat of the picture (Ha! I said meat) concerns a gang of biker chicks led by the twin sister of Harley Mom (Diane Goldner) from the first film, looking for Bozo (Balthazar Getty) because he blew Harley Mom and one of the monsters to hell with a homemade bomb. We know this because Bartender is briefly tortured into giving Biker Queen (that's her name) the goods on Bozo. He omits, and possibly on purpose because everybody thought he died of a heart attack so they left him, the fact that Harley was as good as dead because the monster had severed one of her legs. Or maybe Sis just doesn't give a damn and would have buried her proper but all she can find is a damn hand. So Biker Queen, Bartender and her cohorts head into a neighboring town looking for Bozo.
Bozo's Trans-Am is gone and they eventually stumble upon a small group holed up in an apartment, guns are drawn and people are killed then out stumbles Honey Pie (Jenny Wade, bloody, beautiful and long suffering), the abandoner from part one, who is beaten viciously by Bartender and thrown out a window. She finds refuge in a convenience store for most of the movie, separated from the eventual group of survivors that includes the biker gang, bartender, a used car salesman named Slasher (Carl Anthony Payne), his adulterous wife and the salesman puttin' the meat to her, a couple of Lucha Libres and their grandma who spends most of the film rotting after getting sprayed with acid during the monster autopsy.
"Feast 2" is a pretty big departure from what I would do with a sequel and, you know, it's not that I'm jealous that I didn't get to write the thing I can just tell you that mine would have been better in every way with the possible exception that I wouldn't have had keen sense enough to add people vomiting ad nauseum, nor would I have had a monster dick spray semen during an autopsy for about a minute straight. The discharge of body fluids is about the only thing in the movie that subscribes to the more is more approach of filmmaking.
I think they're might be the same amount of blood, its a hell of a lot less funny and more characters are standing at the end. The monsters are slower and suckier and the reprisal of the dead kid joke from the first one, applied for shock and legitimately raising the stakes for one of our heroines in the original, is applied to an even more unpopular target (read: cuter and smaller) and felt pretty firmly like a "f-ck you" to me for coinciding with the moment I thought that the film had more affection for it's characters than the original. I never thought the kid's death felt cheap in the first one and none of the little people slams like calling them "pygmy motherf-ckers" feel wrong. Beating the shit out of a woman who abandoned you and your friends to die and then biting off her ear doesn't feel wrong and neither does an alien having sex with a cat on-screen but this other thing kind of makes me feel like less of a person.
The monster attacks are a little more coherent this time around and I don't know whether to attribute that entirely to John Gulager realizing that shaky cam monster attacks are a pretty surefire way to disengage and disorient your audience or if the movie is just so damn bright you can't help but notice things when they happen. There is, towards the end, pretty copious use of CGI and blood and I can see the legitimacy of marrying the two here and there like when a freak accident unrelated to a monster attack befalls a character, but when you have human and monster interaction with CGI thrown in when the monsters are clearly rubber suits then you don't really succeed at doing anything other than reminding us that what we're watching is an inferior product that isn't as engaged with delivering the goods as the first film was.
All that being said, "Feast 2" is kind of less of everything but discharge. It is, after all, only half of a movie in the grand scheme of things.
Red [2008] **
I've been a pretty big fan of the last two Jack Ketchum adaptations given the cinematic treatment, the terrifically disturbing and unforgiving "The Girl Next Door" and "The Lost" about a frighteningly charismatic psychopath in the vein of Charles Manson, if "Girl" is pefect and "The Lost" is a little long in the tooth it bears wondering how exactly "Red" could go off the rails. Like it's precursors "Red" seems firmly rooted in the nostalgia of by-gone eras, tinted in nostalgia or filmed exclusively on lazy Sunday afternoons, it has the crucial atmosphere of a Jack Ketchum story translated to film going for it, it is also a somewhat slow moving character study with many pretty damn good performances. So where does it go wrong and how?
"Red" is not a story of evil in the same way as "Lost" or "Girl Next Door" it is about a man actively seeking justice for a wrong that has been committed against him. I wish I could tell you that the problem is that the movie is about a hero instead of a villain, but the villain gets some pretty decent face time and he's a pretty big son of a bitch (not in size, but in attitude). The question really is sanity. There are psychos and schadenfreudes abound in the filmed adaptations of Ketchum's work and I can't really complain about that but the hero of "Red" is Avery Ludlow (Brian Cox), a widower whose dog gets murdered by a couple of punk kids that want to rob him. For Avery this is like losing his family all over again, his dog Red is the only reminder of his once idyllic life and to a very small extent I can see how a dog is one's lifeline to the world. Man's best friend and all that but everytime I see a dog lover in real life I still see a sane person. Ketchum doesn't seem to feel the same way and it's a problem.
Avery finds out who the kids at the lake are and he pays a visit to their respective families, hoping for an apology from the offenders and maybe even for their parents to impress upon them the wrongness of their actions, but the boys' denial of the events is enough for their parents who dismiss Avery as a crazy old man. The law isn't offering Avery much comfort as killing animals carries a punishment so paltry that Avery prefers the apology. In an effort to obtain the apology, a reporter (Kim Dickens) does a human interest piece on the local news, but it becomes clear that nobody gives a damn about Red except for Avery and a couple of sympathetic locals who by comparison don't care nearly enough. The apathy drives Avery batshit and he wants to get all "old testament" on their asses. This is where "Red" runs into all of it's problems-- hoping for anything more than an apology is too much and the way the situation escalates into a final shootout is beyond belief. The old man probably would have been arrested for his persistent stalking or a judge would order the boy to pay a fine long before it came to the point of throwing bricks through the old man's window or burning down his store became the order of the day. Also, as much as the local gun dealer loves his dog, who saved him, when he accidentally shot off his own foot, something tells me that were his dog brutally murdered he wouldn't kill the people who did it. Maybe he's got a family at home unlike Avery that can help him along in his grief or maybe he is just a rational person. Anger is one thing, being a psycho is quite another and even still I can't reconcile getting hell bent over a dog.
"Red" is probably just fine as a read. It works on paper as a cathartic exercise to purge yourself of the anger you feel towards the brutal murder of your dog, but turning it into a film throws into sharp relief how crazy the notion of being an avenging angel for a murder dog is. The premise is noble and I'd like to say that I understand it, but I don't. People laugh when they hear the synopsis for the film but it isn't funny it's tragic yet there's no denying that it can't work as a film because it's too irrational for anyone with sense to comprehend regardless of their sympathies.
That said, the performances are terrific pretty much all around with Cox and Kim Dickens as the reporter forging a pretty believable relationship rooted in how noble she finds his cause, but also in how much she likes the sad haunted old man. Kyle Gallner plays the younger brother of the film's sociopathic murderer and he brings a much needed degree of sympathy to the bad teens who wronged Avery. Noel Fisher plays the son of a bitch ring leader pretty well.
For a movie I don't have overwhelmingly negative things to say anything about from a craft standpoint it might be too much of an overtly dick move to drop two stars on the film, but a lot of what happens doesn't feel right. It would never get this far regardless of the emotions of the people involved so sympathy be damned I'm just not with you on this one.
Dance of the Dead [2008] ****
There's a pretty astonishing moment about midway through the unapologetically awesome "Dance of the Dead" that redefines what you might realistically expect from a movie about the kids who couldn't get dates to the Prom (or didn't quite make it there) showing up with their gym teacher to kick some zombie ass and save what's left of the townspeople from impending flesh eating doom. After taking refuge in a funeral parlor and fighting their way into the morgue the group's resident badass/school bully is besieged by a cadaver sprung to life and suffers a fatal bite to the jugular. With his dying breath he asks Steven (Chandler Darby) to make him a promise to "kill them all." As much as they hated him everyone is shocked, saddened and feeling pessimistic about their situation without him. In the midst of their mourning he wakes up and everyone beats him to death. In this moment, the film finds an honest gravity to the faux life or death importance we give certain situations (getting a date to the prom, getting "the girl") or the sometimes morbid fantasy of taking the school bully down a peg. It isn't the first time the film does it either, but the less said about those moments here the more surprises the film will ultimately have.
It's probably worth noting at this point that I think "Dance of the Dead" is perfect. Every character archetype is represented in a way that feels like reverence. There is no smugness on behalf of the characters or the filmmakers, moments of humanity are allowed to float to the surface and comedic and serious tones are perfectly balanced. Chandler Darby as Steven, the unlikely boyfriend of student council president/ prom queen hopeful Lindsey (the lovable Greyson Chadwick), has an attitude that is best described as not giving a fuck. He gets dressed down by his asshole chemistry teacher, gets head butted by the school bully for insinuating that his sister would be his prom date, gets dumped the day of the prom and still, in the midst of zombie fighting, talks about Mr. Badass' predilection for farm animals. I'd like to call him this film's Bruce Campbell where it not so screamingly obvious he is Judd Nelson. On a similar note, the school bully is this film's "Some Kind of Wonderful" Elias Koteas first scene skinhead. And Greyson Chadwick is hot now unlike a certain Molly Ringwald who didn't get hot until 40.
Is it fair to put "Dance of the Dead" in the shadow of John Hughes? No, but it is fair to say this kicks John Hughes' ass in every way. If any American movie can use a song on it's soundtrack as expertly as this film utilizes Shadows of the Night during it's climactic prom showdown I'll show you a movie that I might just have to (in the words of Tracy Jordan from "30 Rock") take behind the middle school and get pregnant.
==============================
This isn't the end of the horror reviews by any stretch of the imagination. We've still got some time in October and I love horror so you should expect these kinds of writing with some frequency. Thanks for stopping by.
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