by ·Comments Off on Peeping Tom (1960, Michael Powell)

Things noticed during this, my third viewing of Peeping Tom and first in a theater:

  • Moira Shearer doesn’t do much dancing – but she does a little.
  • Similarities to Hitchcock’s Psycho with the psychoanalysis of a killer, probably better done here than in Psycho.
  • Written by Leo Mark, my old databases teacher!
  • The girls Mark kills don’t try very hard to get away.
  • Mrs. Stephens (Maxine Audley, Chaplin’s queen in A King In New York) is drunk during her close-call confrontation in Mark’s back room. She is always drunk!
  • Helen (Anna Massey, later in Frenzy and still a prolific actress) has the best “thank you”s that I have ever heard on film. This was her second film, and her first (John Ford’s Gideon’s Day) also featured a serial killer. She is kind of annoying at times, though, like when she sees the lizard on one of Mark’s films.
  • Powell appears as Mark’s father, who abuses Mark in the name of science.
  • The color and cinematography are awesome.
  • The movie is awesome!

by ·Comments Off on Diary of the Dead (2007, George Romero)

I didn’t like it much. The handheld aspect makes it seem like it should be “reality,” but a little while in, I gave a big Juno-shrug and decided that it’s not more “real” than Land of the Dead was, just more annoyingly shot. That’s when you gotta sit back, admit that you’re watching a trashy movie, and enjoy it for what it is.

Rather than waste any more time on this one, here’s a confused and hastily-written email I sent to PG:

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I re-read the article (was actually in Film Comment) and they call the movie brilliant without saying why. Film people think that the confused subtext about media people excuses everything else. Gives them license to say it’s a “brilliant vision, an important work, a masterpiece, though obviously flawed”. It’s real cool to champion a genre movie, makes you sound like you know what’s what, as opposed to those high-minded losers who sit around talking about jean renoir and citizen kane. And it’s especially cool to praise Romero since he has the reputation of being an important and gifted filmmaker in a typically ignored genre and has the good fortune of having been Belatedly Discovered in the academic community (sometime between “bruiser” and “Land of the dead”). Therefore, in the eyes-wide-shut way of seeing things, any new film he releases can automatically be called a masterpiece without any need for justification.

Usual thoughts that arise in this situation (“Maybe eyes wide shut IS a masterpiece and I just don’t understand it yet? Time will tell!”) don’t seem to apply here, as DiaryOTD will only get less relevant over time, and unlike EWS it does not have hidden layers of obscure meaning, it splays itself right out on the dissection table for the viewer to feast on its brains. I’ve heard two things from Romero interviews… 1) He is a big fan of SHAUN of the dead and 2) He is pondering an immediate sequel to Diary, possibly re-using the girl-narrator character-actor. It’s easy to find comedy elements in previous DEAD movies, but nothing as outright nutty as that mute amish farmer segment. You can groan in pain at that segment but I found it pretty funny and exciting, and I read the Professor as a comic caricature (which ruins the whole “this is a documentary of something which is really happening” feel), and see a different kind of movie here. ARE romero’s thoughts on the media confused, or is the movie-in-the-movie confused because it is looking through the eyes of two people… the obsessive and immature male media/filmmaker and his girlfriend who never agreed with his way of doing things, and so is editing against his intentions.

Anyway, reason I brought up Romero’s sequel comment and the comedy aspect is because I am going to go ahead and say that Diary is Part One of a new Dead series. They’re not numbered so I can say whatever I want. LAND is part 4 of the original, and the final part to date. If there’s a Diary Part 2 it’ll only confirm this.

Unrelated: Professor reminds me of Mark Borchardt’s actor friend… you know the one… Thee ACTOR. And that guy was a “real” person. But of course, he was on camera, and always knew when he was on camera… so the Professor can actually be seen as realistic, a cross between that playing-it-for-the-cameras american-movie fellow and the Bob Odenkirk blustery prof caricature.

Whatever I was gonna write when I started this email is now forgotten, as was the point I was gonna make on “diary” since I went off on tangents and there’s rock music in my head and I crave pizza.

by ·Comments Off on Valerie on the Stairs (2006, Mick Garris)

Another Clive Barker story that was either badly adapted or bad to begin with. And another story about writers’ creations coming to life. This is all writers think about.

At first it seemed like it was headed exactly in the direction of “dreams in the witch-house” but it took a far more boring turn. The episode seems like the creation of a repressed network-TV writer… it exists just so dude can yell “shit” and “fuck” and we can show a naked girl on TV.

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Star actor Christopher Lloyd has little to do. Barker vet actor Tony Todd (candyman!) plays the beast. Whole thing is just terrible. Oh, our main guy turns into book pages and blows away at the end… he was a fictional creation, just part of the story all along!!!

Season 2 overall kinda sucked. Maybe my expectations were just high because s1 was half good, but it seemed like this one’s hit-to-miss was much lower.

I am not making this screen shot up:
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by ·Comments Off on Sounds Like (2006, Brad Anderson)

A supervisor for a call center (bizarrely located in the USA) finds that his ears have turned against him, greatly amplifying certain sounds, making him annoyed and finally insane:

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I could talk for a while about the last four episodes in a row I’ve seen from MoH, how two featured parents who tragically lost a kid, one had a kid who kills his father, and another had a father who tries to kill his kid. Or I could go on about Brad Anderson, who is exhibiting auteurist tendencies with this and Session 9 and The Machinist having people with body issues who hear voices. Or I could ask how our guy trashes his house with a baseball bat without awakening his wife upstairs. But I’m busy, so I’ll just say that the music over the closing credits was “Don’t Have To Be So Sad” by Yo La Tengo.

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by ·Comments Off on The V Word (2006, Ernest R. Dickerson)

From writer Mick Garris and director of Snoop Dogg horror Bones, I wasn’t expecting much. It’s actually a kind of alright movie in search of direction from a better script. The young actors are fine, the ringer Michael Ironside (Scanners, Starship Troopers) is suitably awesome (but he’s no George Wendt) and the atmosphere and horror elements are there, but the story is slack and pointless.

Opens with kids playing Violent Video games (v-words) and one of ’em fighting with his dad over the parents’ divorce, then suddenly it’s all Stand By Me as they head for the funeral home to check out a dead body. Long, “suspenseful” (actually kinda boring) scene follows checking out the home and finally (finally!) discovering it has been taken over by Vampire (v-word!) Ironside (which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense since the movie later emphasizes that vampires can only drink blood from the living). Long story short, both kids become vampires, one kills himself and the other heads for New York to join the cast of Blade.

by ·Comments Off on Family (2006, John Landis)

Okay, any show that opens with George Wendt dissolving his father in a bath of acid is gonna be good. Never quite lives up to its promise (or its predecessor, “Deer Woman”), but it gets 80-90% there, and that ain’t bad at all.

His coolest horror role since House:
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Young couple moves in next door to utter lunatic Wendt. Besides being a bit socially awkward, he’s also creating himself a lovely family of well-dressed skeletons in an upstairs room and imagining whole conversations (even fights) with them. Young couple is an investigative reporter and an ER doctor whose daughter is part of Wendt’s family. Turns out they have tracked him down in order to torture him to death, a perfectly horrible ending (and I mean that as a compliment). Some of the couple’s own fights, which we assume are about deciding to have a new baby, are actually about deciding to go through with the murder plot, a detail which makes the somewhat-slack middle of the episode come to life upon reflection. And the more lighthearted & comedic moments come from Wendt’s delusions and the care with which he assembles and dresses his skeleton family, so it’s probably a darker piece than “Deer Woman”.

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by ·Comments Off on The Damned Thing (2006, Tobe Hooper)

Time to trudge through the rest of MoH season 2, since season 3 (now called “Fear Itself” and moved to a network) isn’t due till summer (or later, thanks to the writer’s strike). Looks like Gordon, Carpenter and Anderson will be back along with Mary Harron and Ronny Yu, all very promising. But for now, there’s nothing better to half-watch while I pay bills and wrap ebay packages than a TV movie by Tobe Hooper.

It’s hard to say if this movie is worse than “Dance of the Dead”, but I think it might be. Inconsistent, blurry storytelling (patched over, but not enough, by character voiceover, even after that character has died) with that annoying overlapped visual effect used in “Dance”, and a story that leads nowhere and explains nothing, and not in a “increase suspense by withholding information” way. At least the inexplicably-acclaimed “Pelts” was a straightforward story, and at least “Dance” had that beautiful end-of-the-world rain-of-death moment. This has got none of that.

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Either this one dude or the whole town (or a neighboring town?) has a history of violence. Once every generation, they go berserk and kill each other. Or some of them do. And this is related to a demonic force or possession and/or oil in the ground and drips from the ceiling. Traces of the infectious family violence plot in “The Screwfly Solution” but to no purpose. Sometimes the damned thing is under the ground, external force, and sometimes it’s inside someone

One effective horror bit has a guy killing himself in the head with a hammer. It’s not clear why he turned on himself instead of the people around him. Ted Raimi is cast as a killer priest, but he can’t help much. A mess of a flick. That’s okay, I didn’t expect it to be very good.

Ted Raimi:
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by ·Comments Off on The Thing (1982, John Carpenter)

A remake (of the Hawks film which I liked very much) which is about to be remade, ha!

Little did I realize when I watched this right after “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” that it was written by Burt Lancaster’s son. Starred rugged Kurt Russell as an alcoholic helicopter pilot and a buncha people whose names I vaguely know like Wilford Brimley and MST3K fave Richard Dysart.

Ancient alien organisms are dug up by Swedes and escape (within a dog) to American Arctic base. Dog sprouts killer tentacles and wipes out the other dogs, then starts to assimilate the other men… but which men? Turns into a body-snatcher paranoia movie and a “cold” war (ha!) with totally badass makeup effects by Rob Bottin, Stan Winston and a huge team of fangoria-reading dudes. Nice widescreen, with unexceptional music by Ennio Morricone.

I was proud of Carpenter and young Lancaster that the black guy who plays his music too loud was NOT the first one to die, and in fact lived almost to the end. The other suspicious-acting black guy “lives” at the end, along with Kurt, both about to freeze to death having hopefully been successful in eliminating the creature in all of its forms.

Jimmy brought beer. Thanks, Jimmy.

by ·Comments Off on Sweeney Todd (2007, Tim Burton)

N.P. Thompson: “the most numbingly inert movie musical ever made”.

Watched it twice in a week, the second time with good sound.

Barber is imprisoned and wife-snatched by judge, returns years later (with young sailor) for revenge, kills blackmailing rival barber, finds then loses interest in own daughter, starts meat pie business with neighbor, mistreats and tries to kill young assistant, kills judge, neighbor, and (accidentally) own wife, is killed by assistant while young sailor rides off with barber’s daughter.

Loving the songs, especially “not while I’m around,” “pretty women,” “I’ll steal you joanna,” and “these are my friends”. The actors all do wonderfully, and the ol’ Burton goth murk is back with a vengeance. Katy disliked the horror aspects and wished that any character besides the two kids in love was a likeable protagonist, someone she could root for, and not a horrible corrupt monster. I thought the two kids were plenty enough brightness in the black, black. I wouldn’t call it numbingly inert, but for a musical it doesn’t exactly pop off the screen. Maybe Thompson will dig the 3-D re-release.