by ·Comments Off on Tennen Shojo Mahn Next (1999, Takashi Miike)

Thought I’d kick off SHOCKtober this year with Miike’s epic vampire TV- movie which I bought on DVD years ago but never actually watched. Bad move: either it was too stupid or I was not drunk enough to enjoy it properly. I think the problem is simply that it’s a giggling teenage sparkly-vampire flick and I am in my thirties.

Dig the shadow:

Opens with some guy who doesn’t matter getting his whole gang’s ass kicked by a teen girl in motorcycle gear – Riona, I think, who is friends with Mahn (Ayana Sakai of Battle Royale II and Devilman), I think. I didn’t take very good notes here, so I’ll omit the words “I think” (also “teen”) from now on, or else you’ll see them everywhere. Together they’re some kind of Teen Girl Squad who practice sweet fight moves, and maybe kill vampires. Not sure if vampires were a big deal before the scope of this movie, but presumably they fought something in Tennen Shojo Mahn, the previous chapter of this series. Both movies came out the same year as Audition and Dead or Alive and Silver and a couple others, so these didn’t exactly receive Miike’s full attention.

Mahn and Riona, I think:

Vampires have sparkly blood, of course, but they can walk in the daylight and go places they’re not invited and other stuff. Local hunk Yuya runs the city’s dreamiest fashion modeling agency (despite being nineteen) and is the public face of the vampire organization, while his buddy Kamio lurks moodily atop a skyscraper wishing for more power. Then there’s a winged “Saint Vampire” who controls them all from behind an Argentoesque red curtain.

Vamp boys:

Saint V:

Cheap cheap cheap looking movie. Reviews say it has amazing FX for television, but these reviewers have low expectations. The girls aren’t great actors either, but the fight scenes are surprisingly okay.

More intrigue: the girls’ friend Maki (who is big into donating blood – don’t ask) wants to be beautiful like top model Maria (played by porn star Shiori Fujitani), so gets bitten and joins the vamp club, immediately becoming a bitch to her former friends. Head vamp Yuya is a misogynist who is “taking revenge on all women”, though despite his big talk he kinda seems nice And Mahn meets a bullied young boy who happens to be Yuya’s little friend. She gives him a time-killing training montage set to some bland mid-tempo pop songs, teaching him not to be such a little wuss, while Yuya (who could’ve taught the kid himself) looks on disapprovingly. Everyone gets facile back-stories, including characters I won’t bother to mention. And this beardy preacher (Shingo Tsurumi of Freeze Me and Dead or Alive) shows up, embarrassing everyone whenever he’s on screen:

“Mahn, I wish I’d met you earlier… I might not have hated all women.”

Things Of Slight Interest: The word “vampire” isn’t spoken for the first hour. Kamio has a Dr. Claw-via-Minority Report virtual TV (below) that shows him what’s happening anywhere in the city. Only virgins can become vampires, so one girl’s dad tries (unsuccessfully and pathetically) to rape her in order to save her. And vampires are immune to garlic, crosses and sunlight but grow weak when they hear piano music. That one was never explained.

Turns out only the saints have eternal life. Girls become super beautiful and powerful when bitten, but only live 500 days after that, so Maria has an electric death scene on the beach. The girls decide to act, so their former friend won’t suffer the same fate. Then the grand vampire turns out to be the long-lost dad of one of the girls, or maybe of Taichi, I wasn’t paying attention. Some shit goes down and he dies easily, then Yuya stabs Kamio and himself and has a dull, protracted death scene

Maria on the beach:

Based on a comic, obviously, from the writer of Stop The Bitch Campaign, and adapted by the writer of Andromedia and (surprisingly) Visitor Q. So, not a killer Miike adaptation, but we do get a couple cool moments reminiscent of Big Bang Love:

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 2: Dario Argento spotlight

Now that I’ve seen some exciting, excellent/horrible Argento movies from his peak period (Suspiria, Inferno) and some depressing, horrible/horrible movies from his more recent period (Giallo, Pelts), it’s safe to say I never need to watch these three all the way through (although I’m still undecided on Mother of Tears), so here’s The Last Ten Minutes of them:

Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005, Dario Argento)
First thing I see is a black-gloved hand. First thing I hear is an unconvincingly delivered line. It’s an Argento movie, all right. Looks like I’ve stumbled into a crap remake of Rear Window. Police chase the black-gloved girl onto the rooftop, where she falls, hanging Vertigo-style from the gutter while the crippled Giulio (Elio Germano of musical Nine) watches across the alley. But a minute later everyone is friends? So there was no killer? Down on the street a shopping cart lady puts on a wig. Huh? Anyway, months later, Giulio watches a hot nude girl across the alley and enters a confusing flashback montage. One of the girls was Elisabetta Rocchetti, who later appeared in something called Last House in the Woods (oh Italian movie industry, how you amuse me).

The Card Player (2004, Dario Argento)
“I’m sorry, I had to kill him,” says a dude with a cellphone (and disappointingly, no long mustache to twirl) who has tied a girl to the train tracks. He cranks up a CD of funky electro music and lies on the tracks with her playing cards on his laptop, while she taunts him instead of smashing the computer into his face like it seems like she should do. He gets run over by a train, and she shoots out his car stereo, mercifully stopping the electro music. Someone in the movie was Liam Cunningham of Wind That Shakes The Barley – hopefully not the card-playing killer, because that guy was terrible.

Phantom of the Opera (1998, Dario Argento)
Oh no, it’s a period piece. Asia Argento is pretty convincing as an opera star until a sewer troll interrupts the performance and handsome Julian Sands (Warlock himself – the description says he’d not physically disfigured in this one, but was “raised by telepathic rats”) sweeps Asia away. It is very dark, and a man with a funny mustache stumbles upon an enclave of dead bodies. Long-haired hero Andrea di Stefano (star of a Marco Bellocchio movie) shoots Julian and escapes the bloodthirsty search party (wasn’t he part of the search party), as Asia screams in horror (she’s good at that sort of thing). This looks a ton better than the last two movies, though it has the lowest rating. Maybe that’s from people thinking they were getting the Joel Schumacher version. The rat-squealing sound effects over the finale got my birds very excited.

First Snow (2006, Mark Fergus)
This dude Vince says he still considers Guy Pearce his best friend, but says that Guy has fucked up and pulls out a gun. Vince goes off with a long, tortured speech then tries to kill them both but only manages himself. Guy Pearce is sad, flashes back to a pretty girl in a cowboy hat as it starts to snow. The writers/director worked on Children of Men and Iron Man, so I suppose this should’ve been good. Didn’t look awful, but I’m not saying I wanna see 90 more minutes of it.

Noise (2007, Henry Bean)
Tim Robbins’ car is making a ton of noise and William Hurt is angry, then he makes it stop, then start again, then he has some kind of noise-epiphany as judge Chuck Cooper smashes his car with a golf club. A Baldwin tackles the judge, who is arrested under suspicious of being Tim Robbins’ anti-noise vigilante. A way unrealistic court scene follows, in which Tim helps Chuck win in order to set precedent that noise can be considered assault and battery. High on his success, Tim considers joining a pimply militant in blowing up city eyesores but chooses not to. He smashes cars Michael Jackson-style as the credits roll. Overall the movie looks pretty fun, if kinda silly. From the writer of Basic Instinct 2.

Lakeview Terrace (2008, Neil LaBute)
Controversially interracial couple Patrick “Little Children” Wilson and Kerry “Last King of Scotland” Washington come home to a mess of a house, then dude goes out back to thank Samuel L. Jackson for helping him for a break-in. But Jackson knows that Wilson knows that Jackson knew the guys who broke in, and now Jackson’s on the attack. Much punching and many gunshots ensue. I wish Samuel L. had the integrity I always imagine he had. Ugh, his character name is Abel. Cops shoot Sam a bunch, the couple turns out semi-okay and family values are protected. Besides rogue cop Abel, the rest of the LAPD force is portrayed as remarkably restrained and competent. Follow-up to The Wicker Man by Neil LaBute’s doppelganger – the one who killed the real Neil and replaced him in 2000, halfway through production of Nurse Betty.

Obsessed (2009, Steve Shill)
Beyonce catches Ali Lartner (Resident Evil 3) in bed surrounded by rose petals, presumable waiting for Idris “Stringer Bell” Elba. Girlfight ensues! So which one of these girls is “obsessed”? I think it’s Lartner, who plays it weirdly affectless. Generic thriller music, fight scene, camerawork and everything. Lartner is killed by a falling chandelier and family values are protected. Idris Elba comes home just in time for the credits, dammit, the only reason I watched this was to see him.

It’s Alive (2008, Josef Rusnak)
Thought I’d peep tha remake since I recently saw the original and more recently saw Splice. Oh it’s the ol’ flashlight-into-the-camera trick from X-Files. This is taking place in a very dark house, not a sewer – the movie probably couldn’t afford a sewer. Father Frank (TV’s James Murray) catches the baby (how? we don’t know) in a trash can and creeps off to a very dark outdoor area, then unwisely opens the can and gets savaged by the baby (played by an out-of-context CG effect). Motherly Bijou Phillips (of Hostel II, here with the horror-in-joke character name Lenore Harker) catches up with them and takes the baby into a burning house where they both perish… or DO they?? Hmmm, no cops – the movie probably couldn’t afford cops. That seemed longer than ten minutes.

Simon Says (2006, William Dear)
Key phrase from the description: “Simon and Stanley (both played by Crispin Glover), backwoods twin brothers with a fondness for booby traps.” That’s all you needed to tell me! Helpless Stanley is being groped by some girl – but he’s got a knife!! She’s got a bigger knife! Did he just headbutt a corpse? Now he’s screaming with a fake southern accent in the woods, wounded and toting a scythe. Could this be the end of Crispin Glover? Yep, got a knife in the skull by a girl who I assume is Margo Harshman (good name). Where’s the twin brother? Maybe there never was one. Oh Crispy is still alive and gets the girl, twist ending. They said “you forgot to say simon says” about four times. I missed the epilogue bit since someone knocked on the door, but I saw a bunch of mirrors and I’m guessing there was never a twin brother, which is disappointing. William Dear, also the writer, once made Harry and the Hendersons.

by ·Comments Off on Splice (2009, Vincenzo Natali)

A pleasantly surprising flick from the guy who made ambitious indies Cube and Nothing, now with wider scope, more ambitious sfx and an oscarrific cast in Adrien Brody (fortunately much better than in Giallo) and Sarah Polley (of No Such Thing). Feels shorter than it was – full of twists and changes, the movie doesn’t slow down to relish its concept, but throws out and leaves behind any number of ideas and directions it could’ve explored as it hurtles forward. I’ve seen complaints about weak screenwriting and plot holes, but I was satisfied. No need to wrap everything up in a neat package.

David Hewlitt, star of Nothing and Cube (and Scanners II: The New Order), and Simona Maicanescu (of Marc Caro’s Dante 01) are company bosses over married couple Brody and Polley, who are rebel genius geneticists fond of splicing things in more scientific/less ridiculous ways than The Human Centipede. Or perhaps Brody is more the rebel and Polley is more the (psychologically disturbed) genius. They split their attention between two cloning projects: publicly “Fred and Ginger,” two creatures that look like leather sacks full of chipmunks, and secretly “Dren,” which looks like Lily Cole with creepy legs, a tail and hidden Wolverine wings. Polley has huge motherhood issues and the human couple are torn between love, disgust, scientific curiosity and fear of being caught over their humanoid beastie (bred from Polley’s own DNA).

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Finally the movie destroys itself. Ginger turns into a male, and he and Fred kill each other with their poison spikes in front of the shareholders. Stashed in the family barn, Dren seduces Brody (it’s surprisingly easy to seduce Brody) and they make sweet interspecies love. Hewlitt and Brody’s little brother (an actor who’s been made up to look comically similar to Brody) crash the party and both wind up missing or dead at the hands of Dren, who has suddenly turned male like the chipmunk-sack before her. Dren, now looking less like Lily Cole than a terrifying, winged CGI effect, rapes Polley while stabbing Brody to death, the movie making up for any baby-Dren cuteness with a sudden turn towards queasy horror. Nice sequel setup with a pregnant Polley meeting with boss lady Maicanescu is the payoff from all her psycho-mother issues earlier.

Afterwards, went to pick up Katy at Sex & The City 2 and caught the end of that, featuring a closeup of a widescreen TV showing Cary Grant in The Talk of the Town, improperly cropped to fill the screen. S&TC2 has no respect for cinema!

by ·2 Comments

Another head-clearing crap horror movie in between Pedro Costa movies. As hyped as this movie has been lately, it didn’t transcend the tag “another crap horror etc,” mainly because it played out the cliche-filled trailer without adding any centipede-based innovation. We’re left with “madman kidnaps, tortures young people, until stopped.” From that standpoint, the crap-looking Adrien Brody clonus horror Splice might end up being the more original movie.

Vacationing girls’ car breaks down – at night – in the middle of nowhere – in the rain – walk until they find a house, but it is the wrong house. Maybe Six is purposely setting up a cliche plot just to shatter expectations with his cra-a-azy centipede concept, but even if you hadn’t seen the trailer, you know you are watching a movie called The Human Centipede, so there is no need for the cliches. I think he just wrote it in a hurry.

A girl tries to escape, is punished by becoming the center segment, eww. Dude who only speaks Japanese (what was he doing in rural Germany?) is the head. Once the girls are in place, they never do anything again besides make noise and follow the Japanese guy as he tries to escape. Cops finally show up with warrant, get shot by madman, who himself gets definitively killed (but what about the sequel?), rear girl drops from infection and malnutrition and front guy kills himself, leaving the center girl unable to go anywhere. Ha ha, center girl! It’s not ironic or a deserved fate, and she’ll be found soon anyway since two cops with search warrants just disappeared at the house. The scientist (who is a fun actor, the main reason the movie doesn’t drag) is obsessed with splicing things for no apparent reason (I kept thinking of the Brando scientist in South Park and his monkeys with many asses), and doesn’t do anything with his Centipede besides, seriously, trying to get it to fetch the newspaper.

Filmmaking is quite good for a horror movie, but nothing to brag about. Really the greatest things are that the movie exists (a la Snakes on a Plane), that the cinematographer is named Goof de Koning and lead actor named Dieter Laser, and that the director might get around to doing something interesting in the sequel. Then again, those hopes didn’t pan out for Rob Zombie’s Halloween sequel, so I’ll wait for reviews.

by ·Comments Off on Halloween 2 (2009, Rob Zombie)

I figure since Zombie made the already kinda boring Halloween series even more boring by going nuts on the psychological back story, this sequel was his chance to cut loose, to make a proper slasher picture. But no, more psychological crap, more fuckin’ Dr. Loomis, and another undistinguished movie. This time instead of Michael’s background and trauma leading to his becoming an indestructible serial killer, we focus on sister Laurie’s Michael-caused trauma leading to her becoming a serial killer (one assumes – I’m not gonna watch part three).

Dourif, an island of cool in the horror-movie muck:

I’m glad to see Sheri Moon Zombie as Michael’s mom, but I’m not glad that she’s dead, appearing in Michael’s mind along with his own child self and sometimes a white horse (the psychological significance of which is spelled out by the opening titles). Also glad to see Brad Dourif, but I spend the whole movie feeling bad for him, since it’s bookended by the torture and almost-killing of his daughter two years earlier, and the final torture and killing of his daughter. Not even slightly glad to see Malcolm McDowell, but only because he’s playing Samuel Loomis, the least appealing regular character in any horror series.

McDowell admiring himself:

Picks up right where Halloween left off. The coroners truck carrying Michael hits a cow in the road, Michael wakes up and kills the surviving coroner, disappears for two years before rampaging back to Sunnydale or wherever on Halloween night to torment Laurie, who finally goes over the edge and kills (I hope) egomaniac Dr. Loomis.

Oh right, Haddonfield:

There’s an awfully long dream sequence (or WAS it) in a hospital where pretty much everybody is killed except Laurie. Lois Lane plays Laurie’s therapist, with a giant extremely-white-horse-looking inkblot painting on her wall, saying things like “he’s objectively dead, but he’s living in your mind and he’s living in your heart and your emotions.” Some movie talk: Brad Dourif gets excited over Lee Marvin and Cat Ballou. A dude gets his head stomped, and lotta people get killed from brutal, brutal pounding and knives aplenty. The girls’ slutty friend is predictably killed. Lots of unmotivated camera angles. And as Halloween night approaches, the movie starts getting boring right when it should not be getting boring.

The girls work at an indie coffee shop, a rare look at Rob Zombie the junkman collector who I’ve been missing ever since his first movie:

Scout Taylor-Compton (who filled time between Halloween movies appearing in a direct-to-video horror called April Fool’s Day) returns as Laurie and Danielle Harris (no stranger to crap horror videos herself) is her buddy Annie (Dourif’s daughter). Sabretooth returns as Michael. “Love Hurts” plays over the final scene, the final dumb nail in the stupid coffin.

Michael and his imaginary friends:

by ·Comments Off on Paranormal Activity (2007, Oren Peli)

Handicam horror, but not all blair-witch super-shaky (or cloverfield or whatever). Dude hears that his girlfriend has been haunted since she was little (she rolls out the backstory gradually since there’s not much else in the way of plot development) so he gets the camera and tries to document her hauntings. Psychic tells them it’s demons not ghosts, shows them a clip from The Exorcist and skedaddles. Doors open themselves, chandeliers shake, footprints appear. The dude escalates things by buying a ouija board, spoiling things for everyone, including the viewer who’d been enjoying the general lack of hackery up to that point.

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Movie is as great as advertised for the first half – I was scared to death. The ouija thing takes it from convincing-fake-doc into clearly-scripted territory, where it remains as she reveals more backstory and discovers a long-lost family photo in the attic of the boyfriend’s house. Then the ending (one of a few, apparently) didn’t do it for me. She sleepwalks downstairs, screams until he comes running, then slowly comes back upstairs holding a bloody knife. No problem there, and apparently the theatrical version ends into “she was never seen again” title cards, but mine had the cops come in and shoot her dead when they saw the knife. Halfway worth the hype, then… still impressive for indie horror. Let’s see if its sequel can avoid the Blair Witch 2 trap.

by ·Comments Off on Collapse (2009, Chris Smith)

“In the new human paradigm everything will be local.”

L.A. policeman starts by talking about the CIA smuggling drugs into the country, moves on to the recent/current financial crises, explains the concept of peak oil (we’re running out) then leads us down the Road to global devastation, huge drops in population, suburbanites starving in their homes.

I need to start growing vegetables in our back yard this spring. Quitting my job, opening a bicycle repair shop. Can rain barrels be used for drinking water?

by ·Comments Off on Dread (2009, Anthony DiBlasi)

Stephen (dreamboat Jackson Rathbone from M. Night’s Last Airbender and the Twilight series) is a black haired film student who meets Quaid (edgy dude who studies fear). Stephen’s editor is a vegetarian girl, and I remember what happens to her from the short story. Abby is a girl with a dark goth birthmark all over her face and body – I liked her best.

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The ol’ “kid upstairs watches his family get killed by a maniac below” bit. Didn’t I see the same scene in Giallo last week? Everyone in this movie has tattoos and listens to teen hard-rock. It’s like the vision of underground youth culture put forth by 8mm or Blair Witch 2. Whoops, there’s my favorite M83 song over a clubbing/sex/film editing montage so I guess I’m guilty too. They hang up their fear-study flyers (on red paper, of course) among gratuitous ads for the new Dresden Dolls album.

A stupid, awful, violent little movie. Makes sense that the vegetarian-trapped-in-room-with-rotting-meat scene from the short story would make it to the movie intact. There’s nothing horror movies enjoy more these days than a psychological (yet gruesome) torture chamber. This also shared a hint of the ending of Martyrs, the torturer gaining enlightenment by staring into the dying eyes of his victim, but that movie somehow seemed both far more violent and less gratuitous. Stephen ends up killing everyone, gets away, ho-hum.

The writer/director has his hands on most Barker-related movies of the recent past and near future, including Midnight Meat Train, Book of Blood, something called The Plague and the upcoming Hellraiser remake.

by ·Comments Off on Nightmare Detective 2 (2008, Shinya Tsukamoto)

As the title character in childhood flashback sits for minutes at a time on the floor while his mom quietly cooks hamburgers I’m thinking that Tsukamoto is punishing the people (fans? studio?) who insisted on a sequel to the great Nightmare Detective. I didn’t ask for this, just enjoyed the first one and trusted the director enough to watch another, but he gave me some bullshit, reminiscent of Noriko’s Dinner Table following Suicide Circle (fortunately not quite that bad).

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Seems like horror series usually save the long, unnecessary backstory scenes for part three (or for the remake, in Halloween‘s case), but we’re gonna explore the ND’s troubled past right here in part two, making a third movie unnecessary. His mom was psychic, became afraid of everything and everybody including her own son, and finally hung herself. ND can hear thoughts as well, but he’s less afraid than perpetually miserable. Somehow that two-sentence backstory takes up half the screen time, mostly through ND’s dream sequences which don’t do much to build atmosphere or further character development, but just begin to hang around and repeat themselves.

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Meanwhile some high-school girls (led by Yukie) terrify another girl Kikukawa (Hanae Kan, a star at 11 in Pistol Opera then the unrelated “family member” in Nobody Knows) who proceeds to haunt them Elm Street style. ND is interested because Kikukawa has the same fear issues as his late mother, gets belatedly involved after the deaths of two girls.

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At least Shinya’s got enough energy and interest to pull off a mysterious dream-murder scene among all the boredom and backstory. Yukie and friend Mutsumi nod off in class and dream a restroom in the gymnasium. K. appears, face hidden, walks backwards towards them and tosses a glass of water into Mutsumi’s face. Y. awakens, sees M.’s head has fallen through her school desk. Shades of Elm St. 4 minus the fumbled inhaler and sucking-face joke.

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Same video look but little of the epilepsy camerawork of the action scenes in part 1. Some cool imagery near the end, especially the N.D. stepping through Yukie’s body, dropping it like a rubber suit (which in fact it is), entering her dream to confront the out-of-control Kikukawa.

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