by ·Comments Off on Blade I & II

Blade (1998, Stephen Norrington)

I didn’t intend to watch Blade within a week of The Blade, but when you need a Kris Kristofferson memorial screening in SHOCKtober it’s either this or The Jacket. Snipes and Kris hella cool, perfect genre writing by Goyer, and expensive-looking, New Line’s money put to good use. Wesley’s stunt double gets a good sword fight, even some wire jumping. The hair and music is very 1998 (complimentary) and so is the cutting (derogatory), with judicious use of instantly-dated CG in the finale.

Donal Logue gets set on fire in the first fight and the movie makes a running joke of destroying him over and over. He’s a henchman for sneery Stephen Dorff (who hasn’t been in a good movie since Public Enemies but as the kid from The Gate he will always be a horror prince), who disagrees with vampire lord Udo Kier’s strategy of lurking in the shadows, preferring to rise and enslave humanity. Dorff uses a PowerMac with OS7 to AI-translate the ancient texts to enable his plan.

Meanwhile Blade and Kris gruffly help prevent a hot Donal-victim (N’Bushe Wright of Fresh and Dead Presidents) from vamping out while sleuthing Dorff’s plan. Unfortunately Blade turns out to be the plan, his daywalker-blood required to bring about an apocalypse. Dorff sunrises Kier to death, and bullet-dodges (the year before The Matrix came out). Movie portrays police as the dumbest people on the planet. Norrington went on to direct The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and after that travesty he deservedly never worked again.

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Blade II (2002, Guillermo del Toro)

Guillermo’s fourth feature and it’s still showy-expensive, a harsh transition from the practical 1998 to the CG 2002. Worse and less coherent than part 1, more of a horror. The lighting and colors are cooler anyway, but it’s got overstuff’d sequilitis (adding ten new characters and giving short shrift to Snipes-Kristofferson).

The Man:

After a rescue operation, Blade works on rehabilitating vamped Kris, while Kris’s old job is being filled by vamp-spy Scud (Cigarette Burns), a fan of Powerpuff Girls and Krispy Kremes, making me wonder which production designer was from Atlanta. Meanwhile some new immortal vampire-hunting creatures are running amok out there. Either Resident Evil 4 (game) ripped off the head-splitting creature design of Blade II (movie), or vice versa, or they both ripped off a third thing. Our guys team up with way too many elite vampires (including Ron Perlman and Donnie Yen) to fight the new beasts, tables are turned and poor Wesley’s blood gets harvested again, nearly everyone dies, and thus far I have avoided literally every Ryan Reynolds movie so let’s keep that going and not watch part three. In the Elm Street tradition, the only blu extra I watched was the Cypress Hill video.

Ron explodes someone using pure love and light:

by ·Comments Off on Demon Knight (1995, Ernest R. Dickerson)

This has a cute intro sequence with John Larroquette and the Cryptkeeper to justify its Tales from the Crypt title, but really it’s a standalone feature with an excellent script and cast. I would’ve loved to see this follow the original Halloween model, an anthology movie series where every year a new cast of characters in a single location gets killed by demons to a pop metal soundtrack (I waited in vain for Sepultura’s “Policia”). That was probably the intention, but then Bordello of Blood starred Dennis Miller and nobody wanted to see that, and the dream died.

Pounder, Church:

Our location is a New Mexico hotel where Jada Pinkett works for CCH Pounder… angry fired postman Charles “Roger Rabbit” Fleischer and old-timer Dick Miller and prostitute Brenda Bakke are hanging out when the sheriff and Deputy Gary Farmer arrive to investigate a car crash. The drivers were Jesus Blood Defender William Sadler and Demon Lord Billy Zane, and soon the sheriff is dead, Pounder’s arm gets ripped off, and hunky latecomer Thomas Haden Church is challenging Sadler for command of the survivors.

Jada, Dick, Postman:

The Church-led brigade fails to escape through the ol’ abandoned mineshaft, but they do find a kid, who will later be possessed by a Tales from the Crypt comic book (unlike Dick Miller, possessed through a bare-tittied liquor fantasy). As more people get taken by demons, Sadler reveals his supernatural burden, passed on from a WWI buddy named Dickerson (haha), now handed off to Jada. Billy Zane (great in this) is hot on her trail at the end, eager to claim the blood key and start the demon apocalypse. Shot by Rick Bota (the three worst Hellraisers), Dickerson’s followup to a Most Dangerous Game movie with Ice T.

by ·Comments Off on Executioners (1993, Johnnie To & Ching Siu-Tung)

A quickie follow-up to Heroic Trio codirected by the Chinese Ghost Story guy. Nothing but commercial fluff. I’m not angry about it – Criterion can do whatever they want, and I got to see another Johnnie To movie in nice HD.

In the post-apocalyptic future, Maggie Cheung is a water thief and bounty hunter, Michelle Yeoh is working with the mad scientist trying to revive the supply of fresh water, and Anita Mui is retired with a kid and a politician husband (Paul Chun of Peking Opera Blues). But when the idiot police bring a freshly-captured killer to a press conference with the President (Guan Shan of A Better Tomorrow II) without checking him for bombs first, Anita’s husband is murdered and she’s thrown in jail. Maggie takes care of the kid – the two whiniest characters adventuring together with her rival Mad Detective, who she decides she loves ten seconds before he’s crushed by an underwater gate. Takeshi Kaneshiro’s debut as a charismatic pretty boy used as an expendable publicity tool for the mad scientist. Anthony Wong can’t be seen in this movie since he died so hard in part one, so he plays every deformed masked character. Anita finally breaks out of jail, regaining her powers, and takes on the evil inventor Kim, who was really hoarding fresh water while pretending to be providing it. He accidentally blows up his own iron-fisted superfighter with a grenade crossbow, then extremely kills Yeoh, then gets blow’d up.

Lau “Mad Detective” Ching-wan and Maggie:

Yeoh:

R. Emmet Sweeney for Metrograph:

With Executioners, Ching and To pivot from postmodern comic book to survivalist Mad Max paranoia. They turn the fears and anxieties over 1997 up to 11, detonate a nuclear bomb, and let the trio live in a post-apocalyptic state where most of the drinking water has been poisoned by radiation and survivors are at war for what remains. To claims the sequel was only made to cover the cost overruns of the first movie: “The reason why we produced the second one was because the budget for the first one was very high and we needed to make two films to cover the whole production cost.” Executioners is perhaps more of an accounting trick than a movie, but though it is heavy on exposition it also features moments of crazed creativity — such as Anthony Wong’s unhinged performance as an operatically depressed monster who conspires with the police to hoard water and who keeps the severed head of his unrequited lover (Takeshi Kaneshiro) in a sumptuously appointed leather box.

Anthony:

by ·Comments Off on Day of the Dead (1985, George Romero)

I wasn’t sure about this one, been too long since I’ve seen it. It’s the one where the zombies start learning, the gruesome makeup effects are better than ever, but we’re in the hands of paranoid racist military goons and overall it’s a bummer movie – that circus elevator music from Dawn wouldn’t fly here.

Nice fakeout for Dawn fans, opening with four all-new people in a chopper. Our main girl is Sarah, whose main man Miguel is starting to lose his mind in the underground zombie containment facility. Lead military guy is also gone over the edge, starts killing scientists. Meanwhile the heart of the movie is Dr. “Frankenstein” Logan and his pet zombie Bub – they’re both very good if we could only tune out everyone else.

Dying Miguel lets the Z horde into the facility, Sarah and a couple others escape yet again by chopper, and the only “survivor” on the ground is Bub. Logan/Frankenstein was also in The Crazies, Miguel in Monkey Shines, Sarah’s drunk friend Bill in the Coen True Grit, chopper pilot John in Amateur and The Horror Show, and lead asshole Rhodes in Wishmaster.

by ·Comments Off on Metalocalypse: Army of the Doomstar (2023, Brendon Small)

Nathan is supposed to write the song that saves the world, but never got around to it (this would make a good double-feature with Bill & Ted 3). Murderface becomes possessed by evil. That cocaine clown is back, and the producer guy with bionic eyes. Sweet ending: “We forgive you, Murderface. You bring balance to this band by sucking. You suck so fucking much we can’t live without you.”

by ·Comments Off on Bird Movies 1: The Language of Birds (2022, Erik Bullot)

Hands flipping through archival media, yep.

Postapocalpytic framing story, check.

Much of the movie is people holding up objects, more exciting stuff than D’Ambrose.

People singing bird songs in resonant rooms.

In chapter 1 we only hear birds… in chapter 2 we finally see some.

I liked this better than most people did. It’s the rare bird movie that follows through on its title. We are celebrating the video release of All That Breathes with a festival of bird movies, beginning with this one.

by ·Comments Off on Knock at the Cabin (2023, M. Night Shyamalan)

Gay couple in Pennsylvania gets tied up by apocalyptic home invaders. Jon “King of Hamilton” Groff gets a concussion, Ben Aldridge of the latest Michael Showalter movie tries to fight and reason their way out, pokes holes in their story. But Dave Bautista, Nikki Amuka-Bird (the only member of Old Beach here) and Abby Quinn (Shithouse) are not to be reasoned with, and they ritual-sacrifice fourth member, Racist Rupert Weasley. Two sacrifices and three world-historic catastrophes later, our guys gain the upper hand, then Ben kills Jon to make the planes stop falling out of the sky.

by ·Comments Off on Prince of Darkness (1987, John Carpenter)

Rewatching some barely-remembered Carpenter movies this month, and this one turned out much better than The Fog. Science vs. Satan as priest Donald Pleasence unlocks an ancient chamber with a swirling green portal inside, and calls in a team of professors (who bring along their grad students) to attempt to halt the apocalypse. We know that’s at stake since they all have the same night visions (“you are receiving this broadcast as a dream”). As the church starts to attract worms, insects, and dirty weirdo humans seemingly led by Alice Cooper, the teams inside get to work analyzing and translating.

When the ancient texts of mysterious origin say that Jesus was a humanoid alien, evil is a real physical substance, and the son of satan is locked in the chamber, lifelong priest Pleasence is quick to discount all Christianity and believe this new thing. The green chamber shoots foul liquid at Meg-Ryanish Susan, who becomes evil and starts to kill people or drive them outside using plagues of beetles. Translator Lisa also gets juiced, oh no, then Kelly with a cross-shaped bruise absorbs the remaining liquid and becomes very evil indeed, looking for a mirror through which she can pull Satan into the world. Pleasence and student Catherine team up to stop this, but Cath falls through the mirror, in one of Carpenter’s most astounding scenes. Apocalypse not averted, now the dream transmissions show a possessed Cath standing menacingly in the “Saint Godard” church doorway.

Great music, of course. Our university group includes Victor Wong and Dennis Dun, both of Big Trouble in Little China. Doomed redhead Cath is Lisa Blount of Dead & Buried and Radioactive Dreams, her sad mustache boyfriend is Jameson Parker of White Dog. The first girl to get juiced is Anne Marie Howard of identical twin thriller Twinsanity, the girl who becomes very evil is Susan Blanchard of Russkies, and the Black Guy Who Does Not Die First is Jessie Lawrence Ferguson of Darkman.