by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 22: NebrasKING Edition

I’d planned to fill this out post-SHOCKtober with some Netflix originals or Star Wars spinoff sequels but never got around to it, so this is a short one.

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1922 (2017, Zak Hilditch)

New movies of Stephen King’s It and The Dark Tower and Gerald’s Game came out this year, and if it was 1993 I would be so excited. Two new Kings went straight to streaming, so I’m starting with the one I’ve never heard of. Slingblader Thomas Jane (The Mist, The Punisher, The Predator) is trying to unload some land on Neal McDonough (Minority Report, Ravenous), who is complaining that their children have died, says the land is cursed. Then Jane shoots his dying horse and the voiceover tells us “that was the end of 1922,” but not of 1922, since there’s an epilogue where Jane loses the farm, drinks heavily and is haunted by rats. “I went to Omaha, city of fools,” then in the final seconds the ghosts of his dead family arrive to murder him. Zak is following up two apocalyptic movies in a row: a short and a last-day-on-earth redemption drama.

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Gerald’s Game (2017, Mike Flanagan)

Carla Gugino (Watchmen, the Spy Kids trilogy) is out of bed and driving under a red eclipse sky, being haunted by Moonlight Man, (Carel “it is happening again” Struycken) then slams into a tree. I remember about a quarter of this book, but don’t recall the ending at all. Months later she’s had surgery to fix the hand she messed up while escaping, and she gives a long, terribly explainy voiceover telling us Moonlight Man was a real person and not a supernatural dream figure, then she busts into the courtroom where he’s being sentenced to deliver a pithy kissoff line. Flanagan also made Hush, which I watched the last ten minutes of earlier this year.

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Children of the Corn (1984, Fritz Kiersch)

“I think we’re safe in here for now,” says a man in a dilapidated barn being battered by a supernatural evil. Holy shit, Linda Hamilton plays the mom. The man enunciates very clearly, which is handy when shouting orders at your family while under attack by He Who Walks Behind The Rows. He runs outside like an idiot and gets attacked by sentient corn, then a fake-looking red cloud rolls in as he sprinklers the corn field with gasoline and lights that sucka up. Mostly it’s members of an overly large family shouting each other’s names, which is consistent with my experience of living in Nebraska. Our man Peter Horton worked on Amazon Women on the Moon, which I was just thinking about, and the local kid who helps him start fires was one of the Monster Squad. Sadly, I didn’t see the main kid with the big black hat, but there was a jump-scare scythe-girl in the final scene, at least. Kiersch went on to greater successes, directing an Armand Assante film and a couple episodes of Swamp Thing.

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The Reaping (2007, Stephen Hopkins)

Yesss, a Christian-apocalypse thriller. Lincoln, Nebraska’s own Hilary Swank is about to re-murder her resurrected daughter in a field of burning trees while having major culty flashbacks. Bleeding white guy David Morrissey (The Walking Dead, Red Riding) shows up, is revealed to have killed Idris Elba, then 200 people are destroyed by God in a hail of videogame fire effects. This movie actually seems better than the previous two. Swank realizes she might be pregnant with the antichrist, then cut to credits, nice.

by ·Comments Off on The Unknown Girl (2016, Those Dardennes)

Another empathy machine from those Dardennes. I preferred this to Two Days, was more involved in the story and more impressed by the performances. Although I wasn’t too surprised when the crime finally got solved… when you cast regular Dardenne star Jérémie Renier as the dad of a possible witness to the crime in a minor scene, you can assume he’ll be coming back in a major way in the second half of the film. Supposedly this has been re-edited since Cannes, but it’s hard to imagine what that means since the scenes are mainly long takes.

“A good doctor has to control his emotions.” Jenny (Adèle Haenel of 120 BPM, House of Tolerance) is a young doctor just getting her own place, doesn’t answer the door after hours, and is told the next day that the woman trying to get in was found dead. The police tell her all they can, then she investigates by asking employees and patients if they’d seen anything, eventually figuring out that one sick kid isn’t physically ill but has made himself sick worrying since he witnessed his dad killing the girl. The movie builds up so much goodwill in its first half and through Haenel’s sensitive performance that I didn’t even mind when it turned into a mystery-thriller towards the end.

by ·Comments Off on Ingrid Goes West (2017, Matt Spicer)

Not nearly as good as one of my least-favorite Black Mirror episodes, Nosedive, but it’s got Aubrey Plaza at least, expanding her range from the April-as-a-nun movie. After apparently just having done a similar thing to someone else, Ingrid obsesses over social-media star Elizabeth Olsen to a dangerous degree. Wyatt Russell (Black Mirror: Playtest) is Olsen’s failed-artist husband, Billy Magnussen (Black Mirror: USS Callister) her shitty brother, and O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Ice Cube in Straight Outta Compton) Aubrey’s landlord and Batman-loving fake-boyfriend. Feature debut by Spicer, who previously made shorts with members of Stella and Human Giant.

by ·Comments Off on Tampopo (1985, Juzo Itami)

A hell of a weird, fun flick. The central story is a sort of Western parody: a couple of truckers come across a lousy ramen place run by a woman named Tampopo and decide to help her improve it, recruiting more experts until she has the best ramen in town, then disappear into the sunset. But the movie’s most genius idea was cutting little food-related vignettes into the main film, basically an improvement on the structure and focus of The Kentucky Fried Movie.

The first I’ve seen by Itami, who also made episodic comedy The Funeral, and died twenty years ago this week. Tampopo is Nobuko Miyamoto (Itami’s wife, star of Sweet Home), along with her team: main trucker Goro (Tsutomu Yamazaki: Farewell to the Ark, Kagemusha, Rikyu), his sidekick Gun (Ken Watanabe, the most famous Japanese man in Hollywood), broth master Yoshi Kato (a bunch of Shinoda films including Silence), noodle expert Shohei (Kinzô Sakura of Itami’s A Taxing Woman), and hardass interior designer Pisken (Rikiya Yasuoka of some early Miike movies).

I’ve already forgotten half of the incidental sideplots, but the recurring one featured a white-suited gangster (Kôji Yakusho, the guy from Doppelganger, Tokyo Sonata, Eureka) and his girl (Fukumi Kuroda of Tales of a Golden Geisha) having weird food sex.

by ·Comments Off on 78/52 (2017, Alexandre Philippe)

In-depth into the shower scene in Psycho, how it was done, why it was important, context and reactions. Entertaining, and full of film clips from Psycho and others, celebrity and critic talking heads, and even some fun reenactments. Definite highlights are Marli Renfro (Janet Leigh’s body double), and Elijah Wood and his buddies having a great time. The director previously made docs about zombie culture, Star Wars fans’ opinions of George Lucas, and the soccer-prediction octopus.

There are nine days left in the year and I only finished my SHOCKtober posts yesterday, so I’m gonna have to rush some entries… not that I had an awful lot to say about this movie either way.

by ·Comments Off on Angel Heart (1987, Alan Parker)

After sitting through two stiff early horrors, this was more like it – the voodoo-magic of White Zombie and satanism of The Devil Rides Out thrown into a noir-blender. Unlike The Fly its style and music can’t quite transcend its 1980’s origins, but it’s a good try.

Angel is Mickey Rourke, and I’m not used to seeing him pre-Sin City – he looks more like Mathieu Amalric here. He’s hired by the devil Robert De Niro (“Louis Cyphre… Lucifer… even your name is a dime-store joke”) in 1955 to track down devil-dealing singer Johnny Favorite who disappeared without paying his debts (reminiscent of Hellraiser from the same year). Angel follows the leads to New Orleans, meets Favorite’s ex Charlotte Rampling, Favorite’s daughter Lisa Bonet, and Favorite’s bandmate Brownie McGhee, all of whom end up murdered. But Angel himself is the missing Johnny, and after he tracks down all his old friends and family (and has sex with his own daughter btw), he blacks out and murders them, before the devil reveals all and Johnny/Angel is taken away.

by ·Comments Off on The Devil Rides Out (1968, Terence Fisher)

Another film with a dense, confused audience-surrogate character: pilot Rex (Leon Greene, a Holmes in The Seven Percent Solution), who meets his old buddy Christopher Lee (same year as Dracula Has Risen From The Grave), then goes searching for their missing friend Simon. They find that he has joined a posh group of satanists (Britain was too polite for all this – the satanists reel in horror when their leader kills a goat), and try to rescue him through frequent use of crosses. Rex falls for satanist Tanith (Nike Arrighi: Day for Night, The Perfume of the Lady in Black) so they attempt to rescue her too, pursued by the Victor Garber-looking cult leader Mocata (Charles Gray, another Holmes in The Seven Percent Solution). Satanic possession and kidnapping follow, then evil is defeated in a very Christian ending.

Lee uses the interrotron on Simon:

Giant spider terrifies little girl:

by ·Comments Off on White Zombie (1932, Victor Halperin)

I guess the title refers to the ultimate horror, that in darkest Haiti, not only the deceased natives are being resurrected as workhorse zombie slaves but… white people, too! Good evocative opening, the clueless foreigners arriving to encounter a burial in the middle of the road (to avoid grave robbing) then asking directions from local zombiemaster Bela Lugosi. Of course the Christian missionary has been here 30 years and insists all this zombie nonsense is primitive superstition, but even he comes around by the end.

How are hipsters not waxing their eyebrows like this?

Since all 1930’s movies are about two white people wanting to be married, we’ve got Neil (John Harron of Satan in Sables, Karloff’s The Invisible Menace): simple, impulsive, a very slow learner… and Madeline (Madge Bellamy, star of Lazybones, who would later become infamous for shooting her millionaire ex-lover)… who is also desired by local fancyman Beaumont (Robert Frazer of The Vampire Bat), who has hired Neil in order to get closer to Mads. Beau fails to woo her from Neil, so he poisons her at the wedding, then has Lugosi resurrect her to marry.

“Surely you don’t think she’s alive in the hands of natives? Oh no, better dead than that!”

Even dense Neil figures out what has happened, teaming up with the pipe-smoking missionary (Joseph Cawthorn, William Powell’s dad in The Great Ziegfeld) to meet Haitian Witch Doctor Pierre (played by a Brit) for advice, learning that houses of the living dead can be identified by nearby vultures (played by hawks or falcons). Meanwhile Beau is bummed that Zombie Mads has no facial expressions or speech or emotions (but can still play piano), gets zombified himself for daring to complain to Lugosi about it. After a couple of attempted murders and a slow-motion shove-fight atop a cliff, Lugosi falls dead and Mads awakens (so her resurrection was permanent, but her stupor-state was maintained by Lugosi’s will?). Mostly the movie seems important for its historical place as the first zombie film, and for its wealth of Bela Lugosi poses and expressions, silently controlling zombies with hand gestures like he’s playing a Wii game.

Beau and Mads:

Nice pose… but not a vulture:

Produced by Victor’s brother Edward, the two Halperins also made a loose sequel set in Cambodia, gangster KKK drama Nation Aflame, and the Carole Lombard ghost thriller Supernatural.

by ·Comments Off on Blue Sunshine (1978, Jeff Lieberman)

I was ambivalent about Zalman King in Sleeping Beauty, but his particular intensity was perfect for this one – he’s sort of a late Jean-Pierre Leaud mixed with early Sean Penn. Zalman’s at a swinging party with some friends, when Dr. Richard Crystal has his wig torn off and sorely overreacts, beating up the party girls and burning them in the fireplace. Zalman follows and fights his buddy, throws him in front of a truck, and ends up being blamed for all the deaths so he spends the rest of the movie in hiding. Zal’s girlfriend Alicia (Deborah Winters of some forgotten 60’s and 70’s movies) helps him investigate, finding other balding psychotics who participated in a psychedelic experiment in college, including babysitter Ann Cooper (of the similarly titled Blue Thunder and The Sunshine Boys) who chases a child with a knife, and the bodyguard Wayne (Ray Young, best known for playing Bigfoot on TV) of politician Mark Goddard (TV’s Lost In Space and The Detectives).

The parrot survives the massacre:

Zalman and Deborah:

Politician Ed’s slogan: