by ·Comments Off on Dust Devil (1992, Richard Stanley)

Hardware was silly fun, Color Out of Space a real cool time, this movie is the Richard Stanley tiebreaker, and… I can dig it. We got just-okay storytelling, but baller filmmaking – South African post-Twin Peaks cult-killer stuff, with at least three cool birds.

Shelter me from the power of the finger:

Chelsea (one of Deborah Unger’s girls in Lynch’s Hotel Room) is on the run, and connects with roaming psycho Robert John Burke (between Hal Hartley movies). Everything this guy does, he does ominously. Her husband (of Space Mutiny: MST3K season 8) is after Chelsea and cops Joe and Ben (both of Cry Freedom) are after RJB. Eventually everyone will die except Chelsea, but she takes on the serial-psycho spirit and becomes the new RJB. The DP supposedly shot Highlander III: The Sorcerer in 1994, but that must be an AI hallucination – there were only two Highlander movies.

by ·Comments Off on Jennifer Reeves shorts

Girls Daydream About Hollywood (1992)

Rapid-fire cut-ups of film and TV and sound clips, slowed down and distorted and strobed, about misogyny and other fun topics.

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Monsters in the Closet (1993)

Stories of queer youth: sex, crimes, and sex crimes. Sound and visual are again subject to speed tampering and flickering.

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The Girl’s Nervy (1995)

Single-frame flickers of beautiful colors covered in fractured-web patterns. Towards the middle a circular field in the frame makes me think nervy = optical nerve, then in the last segment we’re outside among flowers and the patterns look like veins in a plant leaf. Three 1930’s songs, the first of which sounds reversed.

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We Are Going Home (1998)

More reverse audio, images that look embossed, or posterized, whatever that photoshop filter was called. Double(?) exposures turn people into phantoms or twins, pull them apart from the background, the color flitting from pink to blue like a 3D movie in collapse. People walk slowly, someone is buried, breasts and toes get sucked on.

by ·Comments Off on Live Flesh (1997, Pedro Almodóvar)

After a shooting during a Buñuel movie, aggrieved pizza guy Liberto Rabal goes to jail while his mom Penelope Cruz is dying of cancer and his crackhead girlfriend Francesca Neri marries the cop Javier Bardem who the pizza guy put in a wheelchair. This all makes the pizza guy crazed for revenge, so he plans to ruin everyone’s lives (also everyone has sex with everyone else).

Crackhead, Pizza Guy:

Josh Lewis:

If for nothing else this should be on your radar for the excellent early Javier Bardem performance as the sexy Madrid cop turned paralympic basketball star who spends most of the movie in various Tasmanian Devil t-shirts while he goes voyeur-detective mode on this guy he suspects is Cape Fear-ing him and his wife, and instead unraveling all kinds of secret affairs, domestic abuse and sexual obsessions that the characters eventually start pointing guns at each other over.

by ·Comments Off on The Longest Nite (1998, Patrick Yau)

Tony Leung is a bad cop in Macau whose specialty is smashing people’s hands to pulp, and Sean “Mad Detective” Lau is a tough guy working for one of the two gangs under uberboss Mr. Lung. Better than the same year’s A Hero Never Dies, this is nonstop gangster double-crosses. It ends where all 90s action movies must end: in an exploding box warehouse that doubles as a Wellesian mirror trap, as the killers become each other. They both die unceremoniously, as Mr. Lung arranges to erase both gangs and take the territory for himself, only his undercover man Lam Suet surviving. The girl is PTU star Maggie Shiu, Mr. Lung is from God of Gamblers, and loose cannon Mark was in Peking Opera Blues.

Bad cops:

Bad ass:

Mark with crazy lighting:

by ·Comments Off on Castle Freak (1995, Stuart Gordon)

How did Gordon get mixed up with Full Moon Entertainment? Guess I shouldn’t act like he was in a position to choose his own studio, between Fortress and Space Truckers – at least this one’s a Lovecraft story. Probably the only time the editor of Puppet Master 2 worked with the cinematographer of Dillinger Is Dead.

Jeffrey Combs inherited a spooky castle, always a bad sign, arrives to claim it with his wife who hates him (Barbara Crampton in a thankless role) and blind daughter, and without their son who he recently killed in a drunken car crash. And inside the castle lives the titular freak, who recently murdered its keeper/tormentor, and now chews off its thumb to escape the cuffs and go exploring (finger-trauma handcuff escapes are becoming a theme this month).

Combs brings home a local hotgirl – she wanders into the castle and gets freaked (it chews her boobs off). Combs is arrested because people are going missing, and you’d think it would help his case that the freak kills two more cops while their suspect is in custody, but Combs still has to conk a cop on the noggin and escape to save his imperiled family and battle the freak to their deaths on a rainy roof.

by ·Comments Off on Candyman (1992, Bernard Rose)

Virginia “V-Mad” Madsen (Highlander II: The Quickening) is researching urban legends with friend Kasi Lemmons (Vampire’s Kiss), who almost sinks the movie as the rational best friend trying to hold back V-Mad from her suicidal quest. Rose and his Roeg-ian DP get some good light and imagery, but between the Philip Glass score and Tony Todd’s voice, the soundtrack is the star. Movie seems to get going when she’s beaten up in the bathrooms by a fake Candyman, but soon afterwards she awakens in Vanessa Williams’s apartment with a dead dog, a missing baby, and a knife in her hand, she’s on her way towards becoming an urban legend herself, starting with her faithless husband Trevor (a cop in The Guardian). Much is made of this movie’s themes of racial violence and gentrification, but little is said about how the backstory murder scene has Ted Raimi in it.

Fake Candyman:

Real Candyman:

It’s All For You, Damien:

by ·Comments Off on New Nightmare (1994, Wes Craven)

For years I’ve suspected I was wrong to hate this movie, which I saw in the dollar theater where they spray windex on the popcorn, and now can confirm it’s actually a good movie. They try hard to sink it, having two out of three scenes turn out to have been only a dream, which becomes tiresome, and including a haunted child (who Poltergeists and Shinings and Exorcists) and giving digital assistance to the claw effects, and evoking worst sequel #5 in the climax of a mom searching for her kid in dream world, and Craven learning to make everything All About Trauma, and Freddy looking like a Dick Tracy villain.

Linking the Elm Streets with the Scream series, Freddy interferes with the making of an Elm Street movie, killing the effects crew and tormenting Heather/Nancy and her kid. Englund and John Saxon play their actor selves, concerned friends of Heather, then gradually turn into their Nightmare selves, pulling her back into the movie-world. Since the kid is full of fairy-tale bedtime stories, Freddy gets wicked-witched again – after the silliness of the last few movies this one is trying to get darker and more serious with higher stakes, then she stabs Freddy in the eye with an eel and he fights back by extending his hundred-foot tongue.

by ·Comments Off on A Chinese Ghost Story III (1991, Ching Siu-Tung)

Tony Leung is our buffoon young monk, taking over while Leslie was off filming Once a Thief. Jackie Cheung returns as the swordsman and Joey Wong as the ghost, but I can’t even tell if there’s character continuity (it does open with the title “100 years later”) or if they keep remaking part one with the same cast and different action scenes. Either way, all three movies are wonderful and mad.

Tony and his Master are hiding out at the dilapidated temple after greedy townspeople glimpsed their golden buddha, where Tony falls for Joey but has to keep his ghost gf a secret from his ghost-banishing master. Introduced giving each other sexy tattoos, Joey has a frenemy in Nina “Wife of Jet” Li, both of them in the power of the Tree Demon Priestess. Epic fights and aggressive praying ensue, but mostly… tongues. Evil ghosts have mile-long tongues, and the tongue-POV shots kill me every time. I guess Tony ascends from the earthly plane and becomes the new golden buddha to save them all.