Quincy Jones memorial screening. Messy at the beginning then settles into a song-by-song structure. The most I’ve ever liked Kanye West was seeing him here singing “Smooth Criminal.” Origin stories of Wesley Snipes and Sheryl Crow, and MJ’s “shamon” was a Mavis Staples tribute.
Tag: 2010s
Lake Michigan Monster (2018, Ryland Brickson Cole Tews)
Very grateful that people are putting in excessive amounts of effort to make extremely silly movies. I laughed every time the soundtrack plays “what do you do with a drunken sailor,” and after watching Guy Maddin movies and reading Cinema Scope for 20 years, my brain’s pleasure sensors light up from this Canadian-adjacent content.
I guess Ryland pretends to be rich and assembles a team to find the monster, and I guess it kills team member Sean “Nessy” Shaughnessy during their third mission. There’s not much more I can tell you, since the Mets were getting trounced in game 3 of the NLCS and I was unevenly splitting my attention between these two things and drinking pumpkin beer.
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010, Eli Craig)
Not the most excellently made movie, but it gets pretty far on a great concept, good writing and charming leads. Due to a misunderstanding, eight vacationing college kids believe two yokels are killers, while our guys (Alan Tudyk and Escape Room‘s Tyler Labine, both of whom need to be in more movies) think the incompetent kids are a suicide cult since they accidentally kill themselves whenever they encounter something pointy. Cerie from 30 Rock is the only one who understands them, while the alpha “Chad” (murderous goth of Final Destination 3) is their biggest threat.
Our heroes:
Okay the policeman’s death was a little bit their fault:
Cerie attempts peace talks:
The goth ain’t having it:
Terrifier (2016, Damien Leone)
A sleeker production than expected – I thought these were grungy little movies, but I guess they are quality pictures about a killer klown. The attraction is that there’s no backstory or motivation. Art the Clown simply kills people, whoever he can, as horribly as possible. Obviously this is a good concept and I’ll be watching these regularly, just a few years delayed from everyone else. Hope the music is better in the next one.
A couple girls get leered at by a creepy clown while out for a Halloween pizza slice, he stalks them to an abandoned-ish building and bone-tomahawks the blonde with a hacksaw (typecast, she played “murder victim” in The Lovely Bones). Her friend Tara (also in Bye Bye Man with Abe Sapien) plays the wounded victim who summons the strength to fight back using a big piece of wood, then Art simply pulls a gun and kills her. He buffalo-bills a cat lady, decapitates a rat man – none of these people have any peripheral vision – then runs down Tara’s belatedly-arriving sister and eats her face off until the cops appear.
Curse of Chucky (2013, Don Mancini)
A respectable and effective back-to-basics story, cutting itself free from the previous sequels by simply setting a new Chucky loose in a house full of new victims, then belatedly explaining how the various movies tie together.
Delivery of a mysterious doll, screaming ensues, and gramma is dead and the doll forgotten. Wheelchair single mom Mika (Fiona “daughter of Brad” Dourif) is joined by her horrible sister (“Mother Mortis” of the Insidious series) and her husband (a Hallmark Christmas movie actor) and the local priest (Adolfo Martinez of sci-fi rip-off The Terminators) so we’ll have more people to kill off. The priest suffers a car-accident decapitation, the babysitter is electrocuted via laptop and horrible sister is stabbed in the face. Husband thinks Mika did all this, until Chucky smashes his face with an axe. Mike decapitates the doll but that’s ineffective, and he wheelchairs her through the second-floor railing. While she’s bleeding out he explains that he was close with her late mom, and she’s the one who called the cops leading to the toy store chase at the beginning of part one. Now that we’ve established continuity we can have late-movie cameos by Jenny Tilly and the original Andy, all still alive at the end as Mika is shipped to the hospital for the criminally insane.
Final Destination 5 (2011, Steven Quale)
Funny from the start, “Practical Pictures presents” and then a titles montage of very non-practical effects. Opening death-escape setpiece is a company (called Presage, lol) retreat aboard a bus on a collapsing bridge, and based on the first death (Intern Candace impaled on a sailboat mast Flesh For Frankenstein style) I assume this was shot in 3D like the last one.
Premonition Boy is Sam – he’s a lousy salesman at the company moonlighting as a promising restaurant cook. Law & Order veteran Courtney Vance can’t prove the kid caused the bridge collapse, decides to keep tabs on things, but is in the wrong movie and can’t keep up. And then off we go: gymnast Candance flips into a catastrophe crunch and all her bones explode in front of boyfriend Peter, then horrible PJ Byrne (of a Mary Lynn Rajskub Charles Manson movie) gets his head smooshed by a Buddha during acupuncture, and Tony Todd tells the rest of them they’re doomed.
Hotgirl Who Is Useless Without Her Glasses opts for lasik, oh no, gets her eye burned out AND falls out the window. It’s always more than one thing – they go through hell, not a simple lawnmower rock to the head. Newbie factory supervisor Arlen (of a Friday the 13th remake) “kills” disgruntled union man Brent (The Damned Thing), possibly saving his own ass, as the kids are re-figuring out the death-plot everyone figured out in previous movies. Then shithead boss Koechner (Run Ronnie Run, Piranha 3DD) catches a simple wrench to the head, ok.
When your job is to watch people mock you on video:
When your horror movie is anti-union:
Peter with the dead girlfriend decides to kill everyone, they thwart his plan at Sam’s restaurant kitchen (a place full of intriguingly dangerous implements), the cop gets in the way and dies, and now the weird death-logic they’ve devised (or invented) means the final couple (Sam is TV’s Harvey Dent, Emma of Frozen) gets to live natural lives and move to Paris together – but the movie is a sneak prequel as they board the flight with the kids from part one.
Quale worked on Titanic and The Abyss, the writer did some ill-advised remakes then hit the big time with Arrival, and I’m all caught up on Final Destinations until (potentially) next year.
Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen (2012, György Pálfi)
Even more so than the Bouquets there’s no point in getting screenshots of this one: a generic boy-and-girl plot composed of shots from other movies. This is usually pretty nice and clever, a cute time waster, except in the “Put the Blame on Mame” musical montage when it is electrifying, with clever lipsync matching. The first movie Katy has watched/finished with me since Ren Faire, which was the first since May.
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (2017, Stephen Schible)
Environmentalism, nuclear power, aging and death and forgetting, found sounds as music, notes that sustain eternally and notes that don’t. He goes to the north pole to examine global warming effects, and records sounds of melting snow. Sakamoto has scored some great and less-great films, and not being a big soundtrack listener I don’t know his work well, so I started playing his albums (including the glitch-ambient Insen and cool 1980s Esperanto) in prep for the VR Big Ears concert which was quietly canceled after he passed away.
Krabi, 2562 (2019, Anocha Suwichakornpong & Ben Rivers)
Laconically follows a few main-ish characters: a visiting actor on an advertising shoot and an unrelated location scout, and locals such as a tour guide, a retired cinema worker, and a caveman. Their little barely-narratives intermingle with ghosts and legends and interviews with the real(?) people involved. I liked it – even more so after reading Michael Sicinski’s writeup.
