by ·Comments Off on We All Scream For Ice Cream (2007, Tom Holland)

From the non-auteur behind the classic horror hits “Fright Night” and “Child’s Play” and the less classic S. King adaptations “Thinner” and “The Langoliers” (also writer of Psycho 2). This is from the writer of “The Fury”, which makes me a little less excited to see that one.

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Holland must not have been allowed to adapt King’s “It”. Here we’ve got a story about grown men being hunted down by a killer klown, with flashbacks of these guys as young kids doing bad things together. Sounds like “It” to me. But this one adds exciting story elements that “It” never had, such as that the young kids once conspired to kill a retarded ice cream man, and that the ice cream man comes back as an evil klown and if the now-grown-men’s KIDS fall under the klown’s spell and eat a special ice cream bar, the men will turn into ice cream and melt and die.

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Ridiculous story, reasonably well acted/directed, not a bad thing to half-watch while I’m doing something else, like writing these entries.

by ·Comments Off on Dolls (1987, Stuart Gordon)

Part three of my Stuart Gordon run during Shocktober 2007. Never thought I’d rent Dolls, but here I am. This movie predates Puppet Master by two years, Dollman and Demonic Toys by four and five years. Of course, stuff like Devil Doll has been around forever, but I used to see the box art for Dolls and assume it was a Puppet Master ripoff… guess not.

This is a gory horror movie for little kids. I’ll bet it didn’t do very well. A doll-loving little girl with an active imagination has a neglectful father and a wicked stepmother. Their car breaks down outside a huge house in the country owned by an elderly dollmaker couple. Coincidentally, a big doll-loving man-child and two brit-punk hitchhikers he picked up are in the same situation. Who will survive the night? Hint: only those who are pure of heart, treat children with respect, love dolls and don’t attempt to steal from the elderly.

Disturbingly, instead of (or in addition to?) outright killing people, the dolls capture them and turn them into new dolls, with awful little apple mummy heads behind their gentle ceramic faces. There are some doll-sized stabbings and shootings, but sadly no Puppet-Master blowtorches or drill-heads. Story really does play out like a children’s tale, which is just confusing. Kinda cool movie overall, cute and short.

The writer of this thing later co-wrote Honey I Shrunk The Kids with Gordon and Yuzna, and is now writing those badly-animated christian movies.

One britpunk girl starred in A-Ha’s “Take On Me” video. The manchild played the Big Bopper in La Bamba and costarred in Gordon’s Pit and the Pendulum. Gabriel the old man played Toulon in four of the Puppet Master films (heh, typecast as a murderous puppetmaker). The stepmother, awesome at being a completely horrible person, is the electroshock-giving evil doctor in From Beyond who gets her brain sucked out her eye socket by Jeffrey Combs. And the bad dad appeared in the Charles Band-written classic Terrorvision.

Movie starts the same way as Dagon… family vacation threatened by a suspiciously sudden thunderstorm.

by ·Comments Off on Labyrinth (1986, Jim Henson)

Back in fashion because of Pan’s Labyrinth.

I keep coming back to the “Dance Magic Dance” song, the biggest batch of silliness that Bowie gets himself mixed up in. He manages to be pretty cool throughout the rest, despite being a glammed up villain in a pg-rated movie. Jennifer Connelly is fine as a spacey, dorky girl. She was better in Phenomena.

Warwick David AND Kenny Baker played goblins. Terry Jones and Elaine May writing, and George Lucas exec produced.

All that talent involved, all those puppets and matte paintings, and what do we have? An over-expensive little mess of a movie. Pretty funny in parts, but not too cool anymore as an adult. Another one lost. Saw parts of Beetlejuice on TV the other day and I’m sure that one’s still good. Still, a fun enough time at the movies. There aren’t enough puppets in movies these days.

Katy says she shouldn’t have even gone.

by ·Comments Off on Harry Potter / Order of the Phoenix (2007, David Yates)

From the esteemed director of The Tichborne Claimant and Sex Traffic comes yet another Harry Potter adventure that I’ll forget three weeks from now. I don’t mind forgetting them though, because I’m looking forward to the mindless six-movie DVD marathon the week before the final movie premieres. So no plot summary.

What We’ve Gained:
Oscar-nominated abortionist Imelda Staunton as a transparently evil teacher.
More Gary Oldman screen time than part 4.

What We’ve Lost:
All the life and energy from Gary Oldman’s performance.
Those broomstick hockey games.
Any sense of art or interest to the proceedings…

by ·Comments Off on Little Miss Sunshine (2006, Dayton & Faris)

Among the top 200 movies ever made, according to the IMDB!

Failed motivational speaker Greg Kinnear hops aboard the family’s busted VW bus along with goodwife Toni Collette, heroin-sniffin’ grandpa Alan Arkin, silent sullen teen Paul Dano (the kid from L.I.E.), suicidal gay Proust scholar brother Steve Carrell, and little miss sunshine candidate Abigail Breslin to get from Albequerque NM to somewhere in California in a day or two.

Grandpa dies, Dano finds out he can’t fly jets cuz he’s colorblind, Kinnear goes bankrupt when his buddy can’t sell his program at a big conference, Carrell runs into his crush at a gas station, and mom ties it all together and doesn’t get any quirks of her own. The little miss sunshine pageant is a disaster, and after Abigail does a striptease dance her grandpa taught her, the whole family dances on stage and is thrown out.

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Not really a plot-strong movie, but funny, especially in the first half. Alan Arkin won an oscar for delivering the funniest lines and swearing a lot, narrowly beating out Marky Mark for doing the same thing in The Departed… that’s all it takes these days. I’m just glad he beat Eddie Murphy, who dared to expect an Oscar for his work the same week he released Norbit.

Movie has caught some flack for being depressingly negative with its hopeless characters, but it’s not like I took any of them seriously, so I didn’t think so. Grandpa’s death wasn’t even sad (or funny, really… I would’ve preferred to see him laughing at the strip dance at the end). Wasn’t painting a dark, downward-spiralling portrait of the american family, just showing a bunch of silly weirdos on a road trip. Don’t think the movie had any higher purpose than that, which makes you wonder why it got a Best Picture nomination I guess. Nowadays you’ve just gotta hand it to any halfway-funny comedy that doesn’t die in the second half.

Katy liked it too.

by ·Comments Off on The Host (2006, Joon-ho Bong)

Nice monster movie, funny most of the time, a few good scares, good effects and everything. Full of death and serious situations, but never feels heavy or grim.

GUY is a dim slacker with a young daughter, a drunk college-grad brother, a champion archer sister, and a dad who owns a food stand on the beach, where guy and his daughter also live. One day a legged, tail-swinging fish monster attacks the beach and steals the daughter. After they find out she’s still alive via a cellphone call, they set out to rescue her. Of course the archery will play a part in this, along with a homeless man with a tank of gasoline. The girl actually dies at the end (so does grandpa), but she helps an even younger homeless boy, who ends up living with our guy after the almost-successful rescue attempt.

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Americans are implicated everywhere! First a belligerent US lab guy orders his assistant to dump a whole lot of used formaldehyde down the drains into the river. Then the US forces (which have laughably low security throughout the movie) take charge of hunting down the monster and quarantining the area. Then they apparently lie about the monster being “the host” of a crazy killer virus that never really exists, capturing our guy and extracting tissue samples from his brain! Finally they try to destroy the monster with “agent yellow”, a gas that causes all the cops and student protesters and our family members to cough and bleed from their mouths and ears, but of course doesn’t hurt the monster one bit. One particular American military doctor just looks so ludicrous in close-up that the whole theater was laughing at him. Not such a pro-US film, then… but they take us down in entertaining ways.

A good movie, worth waiting to see in theaters (video has been out for a while). A dysfunctional family teams up to fight a giant monster… sort of Little Miss Sunshine vs. Godzilla.

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The lead guy and his sister starred in Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance, and the men of the family were all in Memories of Murder, Joon-ho Bong’s popular 2003 movie.

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by ·Comments Off on The River (1951, Jean Renoir)

Postcolonial Wednesday, part one. I loved everything about the movie, but Katy didn’t like it because of its colonialist politics.

Based on a Rumer Godden novel, and she was on set during filming. Harriet is a young aspiring poet, who thinks she knows all about India… neighbor Valerie is the daughter of a rich American… and neighbor Melanie is half-Indian with an American father (Mr. John) trying to maintain both her American and Indian heritage. One day Captain John shows up and they all fall for him, though Melania tries to hide it. Oh and Harriet’s little brother Bogey has an unhealthy (and eventually fatal) interest in animals, especially poisonous snakes.

A gorgeous movie, looked great on the big screen. Life/death/love/loss themes throughout, all loosely tied (by Harriet more than by the Indians) to the river. The dream sequence told by Melanie (featuring two Indian gods and some dancing) is so great it even impressed Katy. Renoir movies make me feel more alive.

Harriet’s father, Esmond Knight, was in some Powell/Pressburger movies. Most of the other actors were in plenty of other films, except the nanny “Nan” who was in one more IMDB-credited movie… and Harriet, who never was in another movie, and died from cancer in 1967. Her real dad, a comic movie star in the early 30’s, died three weeks later.

CONTEXT: Jean Renoir made The River semi-independently in India after his Hollywood period (Woman on the Beach, Diary of a Chambermaid, etc) and right before his return to France with the celebrated Coach / Cancan / Elena trio. Came out around the same time as Statues Also Die… Samuel Fuller was getting started… Bunuel’s Olvidados, Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest… some good sci-fi was out in the States… Fritz Lang was making House by the River and Clash by Night and Ophuls had “Madame de…” and “Le Plaisir“.

by ·Comments Off on Hard Candy (2005, David Slade)

Music video director Slade does a fine job here. He should be One To Look Out For in the future. Actually-18-yr-old Ellen Page (Kitty Pryde in X-men 3!) stars with Patrick Wilson (in his second movie featuring pedophilia and castration in a single year, jeez louise), and Sandra Oh has a single scene as a nosy neighbor.

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Great looking movie, candy-bright and colorful, lots of close-ups and private-ryan framing. About a predatory 14-yr-old girl who lets herself get picked up by an obvious pedophile online only to turn the tables, tie him up, torture him, and lead him to kill himself. The spoiler twist is that she’s done this before, and that he and another guy once kidnapped and killed another girl, who may have been our heroine’s friend.

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That’s pretty much the whole thing. A great first half gives way to a not-as-great second half. The ending doesn’t exactly kill the whole movie, but it comes close. I’ll blame the writer. Straightforward. She always seems to be in control, there’s never any question that he’s a pedophile, and he is never sympathetic. The girl calling his ex-girlfriend and pretending to be a cop is the only part that doesn’t quite fit – she’s a little too thorough in her psychological profiling for a 14-yr-old.

Next up for this director, writer and cinematographer: a Josh Hartnett vampire movie set in Alaska! Can’t wait.

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by ·1 Comment

Would Katy have liked it? One day I hope to find out.

Kid has divorced parents, is picked Kirin Rider at an annual festival. Meets a red-faced guy, a cute gerbil muppet, and a hot naked girl:

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Kid must wield the legendary goblin sword and defeat the big evil guy (actor from Loft) and his hot girl assistant:

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Once we have our two opposing hot girls in place, the movie just cuts loose with nutty imagery:

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Awesomely disturbing children’s movie on the level of Neverending Story. Want to some day show this movie to actual children to warp them forever. Will have to narrate the japanese subtitles live, I guess, but it will be worth it. Me, I enjoyed every minute of this cruelly twisted flick.