by ·Comments Off on Bones (2001, Ernest R. Dickerson)

Demon Knight director returns with a gang of (mostly) lower-tier actors. Patrick buys a spooky murder house to turn it into a club with buddies Tia and The Resurrection Brothers. This makes Patrick’s rich realtor dad J-Bird and neighbor Pam Grier very nervous. Movie is boring and bad for 45 minutes, then they get to resurrecting Snoop Dogg and it turns crazy.

It seems Snoop was the local mensch until crack dealer Eddie Mack murdered him along with corrupt cop Loopy Lupovich, Snoop’s friend J-Bird and gf Grier betraying him out of fear. Resurrection bro Maurice finds Snoop’s skeleton and steals his ring, then Snoop reconstitutes a la Frank in Hellraiser and a ghost dog eats Maurice then vomits maggots all over Patrick and the club (also very Hellraiser). Undead Snoop proceeds to burn the place down then goes on a revenge spree until he and Grier self-immolate together. All this has already been covered in Biosalong.

Patrick had costarred with Tupac in Juice, and his girl / Grier’s daughter had recently played Diana Ross in a biopic. The corrupt cop costarred in Howling IV, realtor dad is from Dead Presidents, and the crack dealer was in Tales from the Hood, which is what Katy keeps calling this movie. Tia (the girl who gives the ghost dog a burger) is horror royalty, having starred in Ginger Snaps the year before.

Baddies:

Come die with us:

by ·Comments Off on Nadja (1994, Michael Almereyda)

Since I just watched his New York Hamlet, here’s New York Dracula. With two Hal Hartley actors, My Bloody Valentine music, David Lynch cameo, black and white film with additional low-res Fisher Price material, hot lesbians in the city, and perverse ending, it’s the most cool-’90s vampire film.

Nadja, Pantera:

Nadja is Elina Löwensohn, daughter of the late Dracula. Peter “Van Helsing” Fonda and his man Martin Donovan (married to Lucy) are on the case, making sure Nadja can’t resurrect her father. Nadja flees to Romania with Van Helsing’s daughter Suzy Amis (The Usual Suspects) in tow. The others catch up and kill her, but her spirit has possessed Suzy, who then marries Nadja’s brother Jared Harris.

The Harkers:

by ·Comments Off on Four by Man Ray & Sqürl

The Starfish (1928)

He’s loving distorting the camera view and irising in, cross-fades, the poem as intertitles to the action. The starfish motion diorama halfway through is very great.

I stand by what I wrote last time. Watched the new restoration with music by Sqürl which I love whenever there’s guitar/feedback and/or drums (the all-keyboard sections feel too tame for these films). Man Ray and I were alive within a year of each other.

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Emak-Bakia (1926)

What I said before, and add double exposures, plus Man Ray inventing the anamorphic lens-twisting effect 55 years before The Evil Dead.

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Return of Reason (1923)

Film-surface object patterns, an underlit carnival.
Sqürl getting into it with the drums and keys, intense.

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Mysteries of the Chateau of Dice (1929)

Faceless dice men drive out from Paris, leading to some excessive shaky-cam driving scenes, arriving at a very modern castle. Judging from the sliding panels full of canvases it’s the home of a rich art collector – is this movie a tour of a rich benefactor’s fancy house, like that one Cocteau? Apparently.

by ·Comments Off on Torso (1973, Sergio Martino)

Opens with a threesome sex scene over the credits, nice. “Torso” turns out to be code for “boobs.” This was technically pre-shocktober, part of Criterion’s giallo series from which I also watched Who Saw Her Die? and The Girl Who Knew Too Much.

Someone is strangling hot young people with scarves. Flo goes out to a sex commune and gets drowned and mutilated in the swamp on the way home. The local scarf vendor (of Toby Dammit, also a good scarf movie) knows who bought the murderscarves but instead of telling the cops he calls the killer to blackmail him, then is immediately smooshed by a car. Mostly this raises the question of why a weirdo running a scarf kiosk keeps his customers’ phone numbers.

Suzy Kendall (kidnapped girlfriend of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) and macaw:

A group of hot girls decide to take a trip to the country after failing to locate their friend Stefano (Roberto Bisacco of Stavisky), presumed scarf murderer – though after watching more than one giallo, we know the most suspicious guy is least likely to be the killer, and sure enough when Stefano finally shows up he’s been scarf-strangled.

Jane’s car has Chicago (not Illinois) plates:

Jane wakes up and the others are dead, then hides while the killer hacksaws them. Their professor John Richardson (victorious hero of Black Sunday) is the baddie, and the moment he’s discovered he narrates his entire traumatic triggering backstory which involves a Mac & Me-esque cliff fall. Some guy fights him and saves her, I’m not sure who. Have I mentioned that all the dialogue is super ridiculous?

Girls who need a vacation:

What girls do on vacation:

by ·Comments Off on A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 (1989, Stephen Hopkins)

They’re done with sequel numbering, but I’m not – it’s part five. A few years ago I watched four and a half of these in a month, but as much as these movies repeat themselves, it’s better to put a year or two between them. Opening titles sex scene with our survivors from part four, hell yeah, but things are amiss – Alice almost gets showered to death, and has a backstory vision of Freddy’s birth story (a nun assaulted by an asylum full of maniacs). Freddy always “dies” convincingly then comes back inexplicably in the next one, and the gimmick here is he can visit Alice while she’s awake through the dreams of her unborn child.

Prince of Darkness this ain’t:

Alice has four friends with diverse interests, ideal for getting murdered in character-appropriate ways in the first half of a 90-minute movie. Generic Saved by the Bell-lookin’ Boyfriend Dan gets beat up by his self-driving car then Tetsuo-the-Iron-Man‘d by a Freddycycle… anorexic model Greta gets force-fed… Mark gets Take On Me-d into his comics… star diver Yvonne (Kelly Jo Minter of Popcorn and Miracle Mile) actually lives, releasing the momma nun’s spirit (she’d been sitting long-dead in some abandoned church), then Alice’s baby uses vomit-attack on Freddy, who once again loses/frees the souls of dead high schoolers.

It’s slightly less goofy than the previous one, but no better. Has Freddy always called every woman bitch? Final showdown where Alice rescues her baby from Freddy on Escher-stairs feels like a Labyrinth ripoff. Hopkins had a good 1990s career, including Judgment Night. The writer did House III the same year, and was a member of Sparks. Rosenbaum raved: “zero-degree filmmaking … flaccid editing.”

You can tell a movie has no prestige when its blu-ray extras are just music videos by The Fat Boys and Whodini. The former is from Mondo director Harvey Keith, opens with a very awkward sketch, making me doubt my memories of the Fat Boys’ great acting talent in Disorderlies. The three then run around a very well-dilapidated movie house pursued by Freddy. Good use of movie clips in the song, and Englund gets to rap. The Whodini is a much better song, has twin dancing Freddies on a staircase, and the band wisely doesn’t go inside the horror house, just dances on the porch.

by ·Comments Off on Once Upon a Time in China V (1994, Tsui Hark)

The stupidest, goofiest entry, thanks to the full line of disciples and family members from parts one through four being together for the first time – and also the most shootiest and explosionest. This time they’re fighting sea pirates, led by Elder Paco (a Yes Madam spinoff), Junior Stephen (Hard Boiled), and Elaine (The Bride with White Hair), and fortunately Katy didn’t watch this one (the pirates have an entire crate full of the severed fingers of their victims). It’s not as exciting as it sounds.

The gang:

by ·Comments Off on The Roaring Twenties (1939, Raoul Walsh)

Felt like following the early-30s gangster movie with a late-30s one. Apologies to Hawks, but this one’s much better, despite the shouty narrator explaining very recent history to the audience. Auto mechanic Cagney, bartender Bogart, and posh law student Jeffrey Lynn (Whiplash) are thrown together during WWI, then after the war Cagney can’t find work and turns to bootlegging with backing from new friend Gladys George (who’s also in postwar drama The Best Years of Our Lives). Schoolgirl Priscilla Lane who’d written him letters during the war is now a grown hottie and aspiring singer, so Cagney uses his power to get her nightclub gigs.

Things are looking good, then they bring on Bogart, who has no morals and starts killing people and getting them in trouble with the cops and rival gang led by sharp-chinned Paul Kelly (Adventure in Sahara). When Cagney calls a meeting for an all-gangster alliance Kelly doesn’t show, drops off the body of their man Frank McHugh instead. Nothing left but for the girl Cagney loves and the girl who loves him to watch his downward spiral ending in a hail of bullets – but belatedly. First Bogart takes over the business, years pass, Cagney becomes a drunken cabbie, the hottie marries the lawyer, old grudges resurface, hail of bullets.

by ·Comments Off on Scarface (1932, Howard Hawks)

Guess I watched an old disc when the 4k remaster is right around the corner, oops. Big showy camera moves in an early sound film, impressive. A good start towards dialogue based cinema, also a cavalcade of atrocious accents. It’s the Ferrari Theory, or just typically Italian: the accents can be as random as you want if the picture is on point. Ben Hecht (and maybe an uncredited Hawks) had written one of the great silent gangster movies Underworld, then after Little Caesar and Public Enemy started a craze, they came back to claim their throne.

Rich party thrower Louis is shot dead, Paul “Scarface” Muni was supposed to be his bodyguard. Scarf’s new boss is Johnny Lobo (Osgood Perkins, grandfather/namesake of the Longlegs director). During Johnny’s rise to the top, Scarface kills all their competition except dapper Boris Karloff, then comes for him too, then kills his own boss and steals his girl Karen Morley. But Scarf is also overprotective of his sister Ann Dvorak, and after he catches her with his prize henchman George Raft, the siblings have got nobody left but each other, and go out in a hail of bullets.

Scarfie having a moment with his sister:

Mabel has parrots:

by ·Comments Off on Demon Knight (1995, Ernest R. Dickerson)

This has a cute intro sequence with John Larroquette and the Cryptkeeper to justify its Tales from the Crypt title, but really it’s a standalone feature with an excellent script and cast. I would’ve loved to see this follow the original Halloween model, an anthology movie series where every year a new cast of characters in a single location gets killed by demons to a pop metal soundtrack (I waited in vain for Sepultura’s “Policia”). That was probably the intention, but then Bordello of Blood starred Dennis Miller and nobody wanted to see that, and the dream died.

Pounder, Church:

Our location is a New Mexico hotel where Jada Pinkett works for CCH Pounder… angry fired postman Charles “Roger Rabbit” Fleischer and old-timer Dick Miller and prostitute Brenda Bakke are hanging out when the sheriff and Deputy Gary Farmer arrive to investigate a car crash. The drivers were Jesus Blood Defender William Sadler and Demon Lord Billy Zane, and soon the sheriff is dead, Pounder’s arm gets ripped off, and hunky latecomer Thomas Haden Church is challenging Sadler for command of the survivors.

Jada, Dick, Postman:

The Church-led brigade fails to escape through the ol’ abandoned mineshaft, but they do find a kid, who will later be possessed by a Tales from the Crypt comic book (unlike Dick Miller, possessed through a bare-tittied liquor fantasy). As more people get taken by demons, Sadler reveals his supernatural burden, passed on from a WWI buddy named Dickerson (haha), now handed off to Jada. Billy Zane (great in this) is hot on her trail at the end, eager to claim the blood key and start the demon apocalypse. Shot by Rick Bota (the three worst Hellraisers), Dickerson’s followup to a Most Dangerous Game movie with Ice T.