by ·Comments Off on The Happening (2008, M. Night Shyamalan)

I figured double-featuring this film maudit with The Sixth Sense would mean that at worst, only half of my evening would be wasted. Most people agree this is terrible, but as an established Trap enjoyer, maybe I’d join the sickos calling it a masterpiece? Turns out I’m in an even smaller group: those who thought it was fine. A solidly constructed, terrifically shot thriller showcasing the most idiotic human behavior. Maybe idiocy is the point – this isn’t humanity at its finest, it’s the same dummies who choked the planet into violently defending itself – but there’s no excuse for those two stupid boys knocking at the cabin until they get shotgunned, or for Zooey Deschanel. All told, a slight improvement on Long Weekend (The Happening of the 1970s, which shows up on best horror lists).

Opens with the Cabin in the Woods girl on a park bench as the mass suicides begin in the densest cities and spread into ever less-populous spaces. Marky (whose brother Duddits was in Sixth Sense) is dismissed by Principal Cameron, then he and Zooey take colleague John Leguizamo’s daughter so John can go on a doomed hero mission towards his wife in New Jersey (the garden state, oh no). The three get a ride from hotdog-obsessed plant growers. Marky tries to make everything about himself, but the hotdog husband (Turturro’s evil brother in O Brother) has a good sense of what’s going on, while TV news hosts blame the government. Later they get a meal from an ornery white-haired woman (The Horde’s psychiatrist in Split) who refuses all news from the outside.

“Be scientific, douchebag” – the movie has a healthy sense of humor about itself, Marky talks to a plastic plant like it’s holding him hostage, and of course characters try to run away from the wind. Some disquieting death scenes via gun and glass and lawnmower, multiple oblique 9/11 references. Victims’ language malfunctions right before death – this the same year as Pontypool.

Adam Nayman in Cinema Scope calls it “deeply stupid”:

This idea of needing to split off from the herd to survive is endemic to the apocalypse sub-genre, but it has a greater significance for Shyamalan. Simply put, the guy has an isolation fetish … when Elliot concludes, “We’ve got to get away from other people,” it’s more than a plot point: it’s the author’s rallying cry.

by ·Comments Off on New Blood (2002, Soi Cheang)

Dude survives the suicide pact with his now-dead girlfriend thanks to three blood donors: architect Eric, cop Lok, and cute girl with mental illness Joy. Now they’re all seeing blood visions and being haunted by the bald-capped dead girl. This drives them all nuts – Eric throws blood around at the girl’s funeral, a possessed Lok kills his dad, both men (and the surviving lover) die and Joy ends up in an asylum. Grim movie, to the point of stealing the Requiem for a Dream music during the blood transfusion scene.

tfw you have mental illness:

by ·Comments Off on Ichi the Killer (2001, Takashi Miike)

One of those movies I watched in grungy lo-fi copies enough times that I thought it would feel weird to see in HD, but Ichi is going to be kinda grungy no matter how much resolution you throw at it. It’s also a movie with two prolific actors who I see every year and call “that guy from Ichi The Killer” (most recently when BOTH appeared in Kubi). Lumped in with the Asian horror crowd when it came out, but its over-the-top death and torture scenes are mixed in with the perverse Ichi story, a yakuza war, fucked up music by Boredoms and much crazed humor.

Besides Ichi and Kakihara, we got Shinya Tsukamoto as Ichi’s handler/manipulator – everyone calls him an old fart then he’s revealed to be massively muscled, killing head enforcer Shun Sugata (Tokyo Gore Police chief). Sabu of Shinjuku Triad Society is an ex-cop turned bodyguard for Kaki’s gang to pay the bills, and Suzuki Matsuo (Shin Kamen Rider) plays their identical twin colleages. The rival who Kaki repeatedly tortures is Kitano regular Susumu Terajima.

Ichi’s traumatic backstory is only partly true, Kaki’s attacks on his rivals are based on misinformation and bad guesses, Ichi panics and kills the girls he likes and the boy trying to befriend him. Everyone’s a real mess – but at least Kaki gets what he wanted (to be killed).

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 Ghosts of Mars (2001, John Carpenter)

I had rewatched O Brother and La Samourai the same week I saw a Rohmer movie and two by Claire Denis, so needed to counterbalance all that good art somehow. Between the hokey miniatures, the CG projectiles, instru-metal soundtrack, Star Trek-caliber fight scenes, the dodgy editing and cliche dialogue it does have all the marks of a Bad Movie, but the lead baddie’s babytalk gibberish barking has stuck with me over the years, and “Hellraiser In Space” is one of my favorite genres, and it’s a John Carpenter movie about a group of cops and criminals who come under assault in a precinct, so perhaps it’s actually good? I’m here to tell you that it’s not good.

Natasha “Species” Henstridge becomes team leader after Pam Grier is beheaded, assisted by rookie Jason Statham. The team’s mission before getting derailed by alien assault was to escort dangerous prisoner Ice Cube to a different facility, but of course it becomes necessary for cops and crooks to team up for survival against the invaders – who are not aliens really, but self-mutilating zombie humans a la Return of the Living Dead 3 led by the Marilyn Mansonesque Richard Cetrone (the merman in Cabin in the Woods), possessed by the spirits of the planet’s native inhabitants as a defense against colonizers.

Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope:

Carpenter goes for an ambitious but not entirely successful mash-up of his earlier works … The film’s otherwise standard action template is given weirdly dreamlike shape through flashback-within-flashback narration and surreal superimpositions, to the point that it feels like a dirge for a type of filmmaking gone out of fashion. Even the KISS-style monster makeup confirms that nothing has changed since the ’80s, the red hell of Martian future just an apocalyptic projection of the capitalist wasteland we’ve been speeding into since the days of Reaganomics.

by ·Comments Off on O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000, Coens)

Rewatched for the first time since theaters.

I’ve been reading the Adam Nayman book on the Coens:

Nothing in the film is “original” except for the reconfiguration of elements, which is why the opening citation is more honest than it seems and, in its way, a signifier not of smarminess but of humility. The nod to The Odyssey admits that any artist in the Western tradition owes some currency of debt to Homer, and that to mount any story about homecoming is to reconnect with the roots of storytelling itself – to return to the primal scene.

Nayman:

“If it’s not new and it never grows old, it’s a folk song,” quips the hero of Inside Llewyn Davis, which is O Brother, Where Art Thou?‘s spiritual sequel. Taken together, the two films clarify the Coens’ relationship to a musical genre founded on familiarity. For filmmakers perpetually interested in circles and circularity, the cyclical proliferation and popularity of folk and bluegrass standards – songs largely without cited authors, passed down and performed by different singers through the generations – serves as a potent analogue to their thematic preoccupations.

by ·Comments Off on House of 1000 Corpses (2003, Rob Zombie)

Tourists stop at Captain Spaulding’s then foolishly decide to check out the nearby grounds of the Dr. Satan killings. Momma Karen Black was delightful – don’t think I knew who she was last time I saw this.

RIP Jennifer Jostyn (The Brothers McMullen), Rainn Wilson (Super), and the cooler and less condescending Chris Hardwick (RZ’s Halloween II). Final (but still doomed) girl Erin Daniels was on The L Word, her also-doomed dad played a cop in Humanoids from the Deep (alongside Deputy Walt Goggins), and Sheriff Tom Towles (Fortress) will sorta have his revenge in part two.

by ·Comments Off on Hamlet (2000, Michael Almereyda)

Almereyda’s followup to The Eternal, and my followup to the Olivier version. More voiceover-monologues here, with overall quieter speaking volumes. Opens with Ethan “Hamlet” Hawke watching standard-def video of his parents in happier times, and the play-within-the-play is a screening of Hamlet’s found-footage video project – Almereyda loves his low-res textures.

Is it irony that Ham is in the *action* section of Blockbuster while drearily whining about his indecision? Or is it meant to rhyme with the closing line, “and lose the name of action.” Olivier wrote out Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for efficiency, while Almereyda makes a meal of their scenes and interjects them wherever he can. This entire movie was better than the Olivier except for the final swordfight, which – even though it features Paul Bartel in the Peter Cushing role – is anticlimactic when they all just shoot each other on a rooftop. My first priority when I get a job will be to buy Cymbeline on blu-ray.

Ethan Hawke vs. Kyle MacLachlan. I love Esko Nikkari but Bill Murray is now the best Polonius. Julia Stiles shrieks at the Guggenheim. They acknowledge the shadow of Romeo + Juliet by casting Juliet’s mom Diane Venora as the queen. Chuck Yeager as the ghost, Liev Schreiber (then of the Scream movies) as Laertes, and some really small cameos that make me think longer/extra scenes were shot and cut later. They manage to get one extra woman into the movie, by swapping out one of the ghost-spotting guards for Horatio’s girl (Katniss’s mom). Ophelia’s memento box looks suspiciously like the Smashing Pumpkins The Aeroplane Flies High box set re-pressed with White Stripes coloring.

Rosenbaum was a fan, notes Hawke as “better than you’d expect.” I thought of Lewis Klahr during the film-with-a-film screening, turns out Klahr really made it.

by ·Comments Off on Hotel (2004, Jessica Hausner)

German Chloe Sevigny gets a job at a haunted hotel where everyone is unfriendly then she disappears into the woods like her predecessor did. Think this was Hausner’s second feature – I looked it up after watching her sixth. Our girl’s sinister coworker was Birgit Minichmayr, star of Everyone Else.