I’m no King Hu expert, but his final film feels flabby and dated, not so much a late masterpiece. Horny Wong (Adam Cheng, played twins in Zu Warriors) falls for hot Joey Wong (the year before she was White Snake) who is actually a gross ghost wearing a human mask while trying to escape from the limbo-cult she’s been trapped in. The energy decidedly picks up when monk Sammo Hung takes up her cause in the last half hour.
Wes Craven got sent to diversity training after the first movie, and this time Drew Barrymore and her doomed bf are played by Jada Pinkett (Demon Knight) and Omar Epps (Dracula 2000), who get killed during the premiere of the movie Stab based on Cox’s character’s book about the events of part one. This sort of meta-spiral inevitably leads to the Cinderhella scenes in Detention.
Neve is at college now, even more traumatized than she was in the last movie, with boyfriend Derek and roomie Hallie, who will both end up in Mission to Mars after failing to survive this movie. Also not surviving: Jamie Kennedy (this is for the best, he’s much less charming here than in part one) and sorority sister Buffy, who gets a big solo scene.
Or maybe Buffy is the Drew Barrymore, I dunno:
Arquette comes to campus after the killings start, crippled from getting stabbed in the first movie, as does Cox of course, and they are cute together. Her new cameraman Joel (Duane Martin of The Faculty) quits his job before getting killed, amazing. Jamie explains the sequel rules (bigger setpieces, higher body count) and Wes leans into the clever references with Friends jokes and generic Hollywoodized scenes of his own movie in Stab (feat. Luke Wilson as Skeet Ulrich), and there’s even a play-within-the-play (Neve is playing Casandra for drama teacher David Warner), which gives us a location for the final showdown.
They’ve kept the tradition of ghostface getting beat up in every encounter, and that of ghostface being two people. Everyone thinks it’s Neve’s boyfriend again but he’s innocent, fake-tortured by frat guys to a Jon Spencer song then murdered by film student Timothy Olyphant (Dreamcatcher), the crazy Lillard-type partner of Skeet’s revenge-seeking mom Laurie Metcalf. The ending needs work – we are asked to believe that a high-stacked pile of stones in a college theater production is made of actual stones. Liev Schreiber, wrongly imprisoned for Neve’s mom’s murder before part one, just wants TV interviews and fame and cash, keeps getting overlooked because of the second wave of killings so he will presumably get fed up and become the killer in part three.
Liev found your cat:
Zombie conspiracy movie with lots of birds and boobs, from the director of O.G. Puppet Master, this videotape was very popular with some teens I could mention who were stuck at their great aunt’s house. The wannabe-Phantasm flying stone hand never looked extremely cool, and holds up even worse in HD, but the birdies have never looked better. The stone hand facehugs a would-be rapist using its barbwire grapples and maybe transforms the guy into a bird, and we’re off.
These red-crested cardinals and a cockatoo get carted into the background of every room/scene:
Verbose young man Corey arrives at his late dad’s estate and meets the staff, including lawyer Robert Burr (a doctor in Return to Salem’s Lot), Anjanette Comer who runs the place (she starred in The Baby with Arletty from Messiah of Evil), and her hot young horsegirl daughter who is constantly hitting on Corey (naming her “Diane Palmer” was probably supposed to spark some connections I didn’t catch at the time). The horsegirl says to stay away from the feather-eared bird people at the brothel next door, but her mom is one of them. Corey got a note from his late dad saying someone named Dolores can help resurrect him, and guess where Dolores hangs out.
The director appears onscreen, at left, as if to say “don’t take any of this too seriously”:
Corey keeps acting confident as he blunders around, way over his head, risking his ass to save the father he never met. He gets it on with his dad’s girlfriend while guest star Edgar Winter blows a sax solo. Anjanette maybe tries to kill him, but gets blinded by Dolores. The alliances are confusing… and the meaning of the stone hand… lotta good birds though. Zombie Dad gets almost-resurrected, intending to inhabit his son’s body, but Corey fights back at the last minute and dad turns into a zombie muppet eclectus.
Most notable thing here after watching Trap a couple times last month is how still and quiet this is, a properly haunted-feeling movie completely unlike M. Night’s post-Signs style. Besides being seen as a weird loser at school, Haley Joel is always swinging between unease and complete terror as he’s visited by the recently-dead. Child psych Bruce helps HJ develop ghost communication strategies, and HJ helps Bruce realize that Duddits Wahlberg murdered him last year and that’s why Bruce’s wife Olivia Williams doesn’t speak to him anymore. Toni Collette is too young in this – she’s excellent as HJ’s mom but doesn’t look Collette-ish enough yet.
I love finding uniquely bizarre movies like this one, wacko in all the best ways. Our pharma villain is introduced nude, injecting her man with a serum that will turn him goopy by sunrise. After looking up an address on his rad computer, he makes it all the way to the cul-de-sac where he was trying to warn(?) the residents that they’re all unwitting test subjects of the secret drug.
It’s vacation time, and the cul-de-saquers head out on their adventures. Slick-haired Paul (narrator of the Adam Elliot shorts) goes to the airport and sees people who aren’t really there. Two young guys on a road trip stop to get a new windshield where freaky kids are eating kangaroo adrenal glands. Family of four start melting (the son dies unrelatedly in a freak skateboarding accident), while the pregnant couple stay home and experience placenta-attacks. I’m not sure of the drug’s intended purpose, but the lead scientist’s ex-partner (father of the gland-chewing kids) ran off with the special ingredient that makes people not explode. Too much raver music, otherwise a perfect movie, the sole feature by a gang of art weirdos.
Did I mention it’s Australian?
“This is hell on earth.” Produced by the guy behind the Death Wish sequels and opening with Johnny and Barbara recast as worse actors, this remake is starting out looking like a bad idea. Romero had already returned to the Dead with Day and Dawn, and the first couple Return movies had come out in the 1980s, but inexplicably there were no straight remakes of the public-domain original NotLD until Romero initiated this one, handing the reins to gorehound Savini, whose new zombie designs attempt to offer a reason for this movie to exist.
They’re coming to get you:
Tony Todd soon arrives with a second reason. A theoretical third would be Barbara (who had costarred with Savini in Knightriders), rewritten as a stronger character who does more than just cower in the corner, and even survives the movie, but I dunno. The original movie had the character behaviors and dark ending appropriate for its moment, and this one’s doing its own late-80s thing (but maybe still set in 1968 – hard to tell in a farmhouse).
Local kids, Tony, the normally basement-bound Coopers:
Local kid Tom is a horror regular, having appeared in at least five sequels including a Mark Hamill Watchers, and his fiery death at the gas station is a big improvement over the original version (and just as stupid), so, movie has three and a half reasons to exist – that’s more than most movies. The mean baldie in the basement who endangers them all and is righteously murdered by Barbara at the end later became a Rob Zombie star.
Do not shoot at the lock on the gas pump:
Opens with long takes stalking an increasingly upset Drew Barrymore, who tells the horror-trivia mystery caller/killer that the first Nightmare on Elm Street was great but the rest sucked, a confident/funny move from Craven. I last watched this the week before it opened wide, and liked it. But 1996 being the greatest year in human history for music and cinema (aka when I was 18), and having seen tens of thousands of teenagers murdered in horror movies since then, it’s hard to remember anything that happened past Drew’s terrible death, or to know whether this will still hold up (it does, now looking forward to the sequels).
Killahs:
Students who are vaguely bummed after the death of Drew and her barely-seen boyfriend: chaste ’96 Neve and her ever-patient boy Skeet, Rose and her boy Lillard, and lone wolf Jamie Kennedy, very funny as Randy the horror guy. Neve is still recovering from her mom’s violent murder a year ago, and being bothered about it by reporter Courteney Cox, who’s befriending Rose’s brother Deputy Arquette for access. Then they all start getting calls and visits from ghostface killahs and slinging blame around (to Jamie: “Maybe your movie-freaked mind lost its reality button”). Also good from Rose: “You’re starting to sound like some Wes Carpenter flick.”
Wes Carpenter, school janitor:
The kids always have alibis because the killer is both Skeet and Lillard. If I watch this again I’ll have to see if either of them walks with difficulty after the fight scenes, because Ghostface gets hit in the nuts in almost every encounter. So it’s a fun twisty mystery horror-comedy, with some absolute psychopaths at the center – they kill Neve’s mom and the school principal, kidnap her dad, and intended to slaughter everyone at the climactic party. I would’ve risked death to be at that party (Republica on the stereo, Prom Night on VHS, popcorn and original flavor Doritos).
Not returning in the sequels due to their deaths: Matthew Lillard, who went on to be Shaggy and also SLC Punk… Rose McGowan, who was only doing this between Araki films… Skeet: The Newton Boys then Ride With The Devil then nothing… Cox’s cameraman W. Brown: Deadwood… Drew Barrymore: Donnie Darko… and Henry “Winkler” Fonzarelli: Barry.
Apprentice blacksmith Vincent Zhao is set to become the new shop master when he learns details of his father’s death at the hands of a heavily-tattooed Clubfoot, so he takes dad’s broken sword and heads off on a revenge quest. But the boss’s daughter likes him and tries to follow, and when he tries to help her he loses an arm.
Long frustrating recovery/training process ensues, Vincent now with some girl in another town. Sure enough he gets his revenge after inventing a one-armed half-sword whirling fighting style, and stays with the new girl, the boss’s daughter still pining for him into old age. After the increasingly safe cookie-cutter comedy-action style of the Once Upon a Time series, the most notable thing here is the electrifying anything-goes filmmaking technique, turning the action into abstract jags (as opposed to the abstract smears of Ashes of Time), matching the brutality of the story.
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:
