by ·Comments Off on Raising Cain (1992, Brian De Palma)

The missing link between Bonfire of the Vanities and Carlito’s Way.

image

Movie’s chugging along fine for a half hour, then helloooo awkward voiceover. Something must’ve gone wrong in the editing process, or maybe test screening audiences were confused.

John Lithgow:
image

I love how De Palma keeps trying to make artful tributes to Psycho, then Gus Van Sant just up and remakes Psycho, the dummy. Killing the female lead 40 minutes in… check. Same shot in the police station from Dressed To Kill, also in a police station. Characters named Dante and Cain, heh. With the knife to the hand, the wig/dress costume, the elevator scene and the multiple personalities, this thing has Dressed To Kill written all over it. De P. is referencing himself more than Hitch this time around.

John Lithgow:
image

The fun is to figure out which characters are John Lithgow and which aren’t (spoilers: his twin brother and the kid at the restrooms are, his dad is not). Whole movie is worth it for the awesomely choreographed long-shot slow-motion finale at a hotel.

John Lithgow:
image

DVD box says: “When Jenny cheated on her husband, he didn’t just leave… he split”. But he was split from the start, and the cheating only got him to try to blame her new guy for one of Lithgow’s murders (it only stuck for about 10 minutes).

John Lithgow:
image

Looked for a second opinion but it’s (the only one?) missing from Reverse Shot’s De Palma discussion page. Maybe I’m alone, but I think it’s a real cool movie.

aaaaand John Lithgow:
image

by ·Comments Off on The Blob (1958, Irvin Yeaworth)

“this has never happened before… what am i gonna wear?”

image

Starring Steve(n) McQueen as a 28-year-old teenager, with his 25-yr-old teenage girlfriend.

image

Awful dialogue and delivery, low budget sets, long talky parts, nothing-special cinematography, inept sound editing, really it’s near-mst3k fare minus McQueen’s capable lead and a cool premise and neat creature. I suppose the criterion commentary’s gonna go on about how symbolic the thing is (note: no, just talking about the making-of, giving a little context). Weird movie for them to release… is it “important” or is it just a cool sci-fi movie with a big star to which they could secure the rights? Website says it was an indie movie (unusual for the 50’s) but can’t help throwing in that the blob was “comparable to if not incarnating the growing consumerism of 1950’s America). Probably not a must-see… the 1980’s remake will do fine.

image

image

by ·Comments Off on Cabin Fever (2002, Eli Roth)

“That guy asked for our help and we lit him on fire”

image

Wasn’t until the party-man cop arrived that I realized this was a comedy, not just a horror with some funny parts. Was the torture-porn Hostel a comedy? Maybe I’ll see Hostel 2 with my funny hat on, and I’ll enjoy it more than part 1.

image

Kids go off to cabin in rural town after graduation for weekend of sex and drugs and hunting and confessing long-held crushes. But! Local hunter gets crazy skin-rotting disease and goes off to die in the water supply. One kid gets skin disease, then another then another. Awesome fuckin high-kicking kid in town bites one of them, gets sick, his dad and buddies come rippin’ after the kids. Then the cops come, and shoot up the place. But wait, also total stoner dude (played by our fearless writer/director) gets eaten by his crazy dog, which then terrorizes our kids. Kids have no chance, do not escape, last one dies in the river upstream of the big town festival, where some cute girls are selling lemonade made from river water. Kinda like Pirahna but funnier.

image

Not totally paying attention cuz I was working on the last 20 entries for this here journal, but it dragged me in by the second half. Full of your obvious horror references (even has your Night of the Living Dead ending) but with plenty of original / unexpected bits and Slither‘s sense of humor. Well shot, nothing special there, and better than usual writing. Had no idea I’d like it this much.

image

by ·Comments Off on Brain Damage (1988, Frank Henenlotter)

“You fucking named him elmer??”

image

Opens with 80’s-sounding music over shots of african masks to set spooky mood. Katy would be pleased. Movie wastes no time setting an utterly bizarre tone, with a very looney looking old couple trying to find their escaped brain-eating creature which has already attached itself to Brian (soap actor Rick Hearst). Creature looks like something between the brain stems from “fiend without a face” and a penis.

image

Movie sets off making howling sex and drugs references, using hilarious puppetry and video effects. When Brian gets juiced by Aylmer, he hallucinates hysterically. Climbs into an empty junkyard and parties to the lightshow coming off the cars that only he can see. In exchange for the trips, Aylmer gets to kill people and eat their brains. Brian finds out and tries to kick, but his brain juice addiction is too strong and he comes crawling back. Aylmer eats Brian’s girlfriend via french kiss on the subway (which is nothing compared to the blowjob scene earlier, which I am not surprised was cut from theatrical release). Movie has a kickass ending, with Brian overdosing on brain juice as the old couple return and squeeze Aylmer to death.

image

Along with the African mask bit, I love the movie’s understanding of homeless people. Brian passes a dirty homeless guy who spends his time under a fire escape drinking and crying.

image

I liked it. Very recognizably eighties, but still a psycho good time… weird enough and good enough to see again sometime.

image

by ·Comments Off on El Topo (1970, Alejandro Jodorowsky)

Feels appropriate that I watched this over the course of a week, since it’s pretty episodic. Apparently (according to scraps of the commentary track that I checked out) it’s about the gradual enlightenment of Jodorowsky’s title character. The dude could use some enlightenment, too, what with his woman issues, his murderous obsessions, his strange attraction to people with deformities, and his tendency to kill animals on-camera.

El Topo, riding across the desert dressed in black, abandons his son in favor of some woman. The woman demands he prove himself by defeating the four gun masters of the desert. Somewhere along the way they pick up an evil hot woman who talks like a man and I don’t know what that’s about. Anyway, Topo tricks and murders all four masters: blind guy; digs a hole in front of him, fall, fire… guy who always hits heart; ash tray in front of heart… guy who lives for love; distract him by crippling his wife… and crazy guy with no possessions, no gun, nothing; shoots himself to prove he has left no material desires!

Okay, but woman leaves him for the other woman, and they shoot him all up on a rickety bridge (give him the five wounds of christ, as a.j. immodestly explains on the commentary), then some mutants drag him into a hole, the end.

No! He wakes up 30 years later all white-bearded. The cripples and deformed have kept him alive as a god, and now he must leave the cave, go to the town and get help so they can all be free. Of course he does this by bringing a short woman with him and performing awful vaudeville routines for money to afford dynamite. Long story short, they free the cripples, the townsfolk mow them all down, and Topo duels his now grown son.

I had not-great memories of this one… remember most of it taking place inside the mountain (hardly any of it does!) and the picture and sound being bad, bad bad. New DVD looks miraculous… the desert sky so bright and blue. Movie not nearly as dull and drab as I remember it (and as recent restoration reviews have been saying), it’s totally watchable, and its horrible weirdness makes it worth watching.

Is it a GOOD movie then? Well it’s got some style (love the bridge scene, the rides through the desert) and it’s weird enough to recommend (most movies could stand to be weirder). I liked it more than I didn’t, so yeah, why not?

by ·2 Comments

image

Sooooo bleak. Not the normal kind of resistance movie. Their struggle is necessary but hopeless. Movie opens with our main guy escaping from a camp, then having the guy who ratted on him killed. Many small triumphs and large defeats later, we end with the gang shooting one of their own then driving away as the titles tell us how each of them later got killed in the struggle.

image

Hardly any non-diegetic music, superbly shot, dark and dreary but not in a tiring way, more of a matter-of-fact “this is how things are” straightforward way.

image

These are not heroes in the regular movie sense of the word. Theirs is not a glorious fight… it’s hardly a fight at all, more a struggle for survival. The problem is that it would be easier to survive by living ordinary lives, by cooperating with the nazi regime, by ratting on their fellows, by doing any of a number of things they refuse to do, by giving in. The movie is about how much it can suck to be moral, to stick to your convictions. While those in the resistance who survived the war can’t have much to be proud of… unlike most residents of their country, they also can’t have much to be ashamed of. A great, great movie. Nice contrast to the portrait of resistance to nazi occupation in Black Book this year.

image

by ·Comments Off on Vengeance Is Mine (1979, Shohei Imamura)

Imamura’s comeback film a decade after Profound Desire of the Gods. Flashed back and forth in time and space and starts at the end, rather like most of today’s movies, telling story of a sociopath killer with a troubled past. Iwao Enokizu is on a delivery run when he kills a couple of guys. Goes on the run for a couple months, pretends to be a professor and takes up with a girl at the boarding house he’s hiding at. They seem to like each other, but he ends up killing her (and her distrustful ex-con mother) and I think one other person before getting caught.

image

image

Style to spare. Not my favorite movie, but definitely good and possibly great, makes up for the last Imamura movie I wasn’t too sure about, The Eel. Happy to see a very modern Japanese movie, not a sloggy period piece. Watched with Jimmy Lo, who also liked. Made about the same time as Days of Heaven, Apocalypse Now, Stalker, Stroszek, Kagemusha, Zigeunerweisen, Altered States and The Elephant Man.

image

image

by ·Comments Off on Spider-man 3 (2007, Sam Raimi)

Felt kinda empty and unexciting. Too bad. Bruce Campbell has a longer, funnier scene than usual, but otherwise it’s a big ol’ studio comic picture. The Sam Raimi that brought us Evil Dead is gone. Oh well, enjoy the aerial acrobatics and the sandman effects and wait in line for the next one.

Tobey is still our man, Kirsten is still better to look at than to watch, and Franco is still a rich and vengeful third wheel (feat. a welcome Daddy Dafoe cameo). But we need more baddies with half-assed excuses to dislike spiderman, so we’ve got Parker responsible for photographer Topher Grace losing his job, and we’ve got Thomas Haden Church who apparently killed spidey’s uncle and I think Topher convinces Haden that Tobey did something I dunno it doesn’t matter.

Coincidentally, Tobey turns the dude he fired into Venom, and the dude who killed his uncle turns into Sandman. but first, Tobey experiments with the Venom suit and goes all Chris Gaines in some horrible dance/club sequence. Sandy blows away unharmed, Venom “dies” strangely, and Franco dies by rocket sled, same as his dear daddy.

Also Theresa Russell was Haden’s wife but I didn’t notice at the time, and Bryce Dallas was Topher’s girl.

Anyway, there was some effects and stuff, and I dig Topher’s style. Movie was just good enough to keep seeing the sequels. This ranks somewhere between the grim and badly paced Batman Begins and the surprisingly decent X-Men 3.

by ·Comments Off on The Valet (2006, Francis Veber)

Still shocked that I liked this, after the awful cheesy trailer. It’s well-played light comedy, a story of little consequence, but kept on a high enough level that I even recommended it to people. The director is well known for quality (The Dinner Game), but I’d so grown to dislike that trailer that my enjoyment of the movie was as surprising as if I’d ended up liking The Italian or the last two Pirates of the Carribean films.

Anyway, valet is standing next to fabulously rich dude arguing with his supermodel girlfriend when a photo is shot by tabloid journalist. In order to keep his fortune from a wife who’d love to catch him cheating, the rich guy has to pretend the supermodel wasn’t with him at all, but with the other guy, the valet. So he and the wife hire competing teams of spies to follow the two around, one group trying to prove the valet and supermodel are not together and the other trying to make it look like they are. Fun premise, and it’s carried through well. Valet ends up with his childhood girlfriend after they get plenty jealous of each other’s new lovers, and model gets her revenge on rich guy, with the closing shot having the same photographer catch him in a trap standing next to a transsexual.

The Farrelly brothers are supposed to helm the U.S. remake in 2008.