by ·Comments Off on A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 + 4 (1987-1988)

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987, Chuck Russell)

Kicking off the second Elm Street double-feature, and Videodrome was right, this is the great sequel, a big blockbustery movie, more inventive than it is jokey. Classy intro music until Kristen (Patricia Arquette’s debut) plays a cock-rock song on her boombox. Freddy slashes her wrists to send her to the psych ward where Nancy now works helping people with dream issues. We meet a new group of weirdos and misfits, who will be killed off one by one, their personality quirks weaponized against them.

Kristen’s thing is that she can pull others into her dreams (good sfx on this), which is how Freddy plans to get new victims, something like that. Is there any reason Nancy’s house should be so important in the hauntings, besides visual reference for the viewer? We get some new backstory, as we must, meeting Freddy’s nun mom’s ghost (Nan Martin: a nun named nan) who reports FK was “the bastard son of a hundred maniacs.” They need to find FK’s bones and bury them in hallowed ground, but the kids don’t know where that is – maybe Heather’s drunk, washed-up dad John Saxon can help, before getting killed by a cool skeleton.

Arquette’s fellow survivors will be mute Joey (Rodney Eastman of I Spit On Your Grave Remake) and combative Kincaid (Atlanta’s own Ken Sagoes of the What’s Happening reboot). Memorable deaths include sleepwalker Bradley Gregg (of some major 80’s movies and also Class of 1999) featuring good stop-motion puppetry, and TV-loving Penelope Sudrow (the Jon Cryer ep of Amazing Stories). We also got punker Jennifer Rubin (Screamers) and wheelchair nerd Ira Heiden (Elvira: Mistress of the Dark) and a slumming Laurence Fishburne as a doctor.

I was getting Hellraiser II vibes from some of this – Arquette can’t help looking like Imogen Boorman, but the mute kid screaming and shattering mirrors, and Freddy pretending to be Nancy’s dad then stabbing the shit out of her all added to the feeling. Nancy gets another doctor (Body Double star Craig Wasson) to believe her crackpot stories about dream murders, the kids imagine themselves as the titular warriors, the bones are buried, and Chuck would go on to direct the pretty good Blob remake.

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988, Renny Harlin)

They were “the last” of the Elm Street kids in part 3, so what’s left for this movie, which opens with a shitty pop song, and stars nobody? Part three felt like a real movie, now suddenly all the dialogue feels made-for-cable. Wikipedia says the writer’s strike was to blame for this. Parts 2 and 3 were like alternative sequels, different ways to follow up the original, but this one just feels like a part four, so I’m holding off on the next Nightmare movies before they get too depressing.

Should’ve watched Hairspray instead:

It’s a little funny that the dog who digs up Freddy’s bones (which reanimate using Frank’s Hellraiser re-fleshing effect) is named Jason. Different Actress Kristen is now Tuesday Knight, singer of the opening theme and star of Sex Demon Metropolis: Vampire Madonna and AI-generated werewolf film The Amityville Moon, but we’ve still got the real Kincaid and Joey, for a few minutes at least, before they succumb to junkyard and waterbed.

New Kristen is out of the psych ward and in regular school, starts losing classmates left and right. First goes asthma nerd Sheila, then Kung Fu Rick (of the same year’s Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama – it’s a shame John Saxon didn’t live to meet Rick) and Weightlifter Debbie, who gets Gregor Samsa’d. At some point Kristen herself gets burned alive, and the various powers of all these kids are absorbed by classmate Alice (Lisa Wilcox of Watchers 4) who chases after Freddy with her useless boyfriend Dan. Calling back to the childlike magic of the original movie’s ending, Alice shows FK his own reflection, and his imprisoned souls tear him apart. The movie’s one cool addition is sticking the kids in a time loop, a very dreamlike scenario. Harlin had a big moment in the 90’s, but I haven’t heard of any of the ten films he’s directed since he botched that Exorcist prequel.

by ·Comments Off on The Amusement Park (1973, George Romero)

I watched The Lost George Romero Movie just because it’s hot from being freshly rediscovered. Should’ve watched Two Evil Eyes instead, but I hit my Argento quota yesterday. This is a basic Twilight Zone scenario, but unconvincing and overlong, the time-loop plot being the one cool thing about it. If you set an industrial film in a heavy-metaphor theme park, you’re gonna get Carnival of Souls vibes.

Lincoln Maazel explains that he is an actor (it’s true, he’s in Martin), then healthy Link interviews a beaten-up, agonized Link wearing the same suit. We follow healthy Link through various scenarios outside until he eventually becomes his miserable beat-down version. How did this happen? The movie wants us to think it’s elder abuse, but it seems everyone is just selfish dicks and society favors the rich. Anyway, the only Romero movie where the grim reaper rides a merry-go-round.

by ·Comments Off on L’Ange (1982, Patrick Bokanowski)

A swordsman attacks a doll hanging from a string… the motion freezes, stutters and repeats, and the music begins doing the same. A hand-less balding man seated at a table surrounded by inky blackness – his pitcher falls to the floor in a time-locked Brain Candy loop, then appears in a Muybridge time-lapse still, with dark, severe string music. I think we’re inside one of the houses from The Endless.

Librarian and his eagle:

There’s a silly bathtime romp, a scene shot in reverse, a busy library in which all the all the old men are wearing the same old-man mask, the masks and their clockwork motion giving the thing a sense of animation. Naked woman in a wasteland gets trapped in a box. After these unrelated(?) vignettes (DVD description says they’re “all connected by a central staircase”), the last 15 minutes bring something new – all angles and bright lights, TV-static-beings tearing through the screen, revealing perhaps l’titular ange.

Light:

Rotterdam says it “lies on the edge between optical and plastic art, in a gap of constant reinvention.” Bokanowski had another hourlong light-vs-darkness film a few years ago which almost nobody has seen, though those few said it’s great, and he’s been producing shorts regularly since the 70’s.

Bathed Man:

More Light:

by ·Comments Off on TV/Q4/2020

TV roundup for the second half-ish of 2020

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On Cinema at the Cinema seasons 1-? (201?)

On Labor Day, since I’d already seen Bisbee ’17 I watched season one of On Cinema on the Adult Swim roku app while repainting the furniture… then I drank some, and watched seasons two and three? Or maybe also season four… or just season two, I don’t know how to figure this out.

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Search Party season 3 (2020)

Dory and the gang become absurd anti-celebrities during their murder trial. We know she is found guilty because of the flash-forward intro of the first episode, but this turns out to be a good fakeout – after being declared innocent, she’s kidnapped by a maniac. Not my favorite season – I’ve never loved court dramas, and the final episode is too Seinfeld, but I’m still here for whatever’s next.

Newbies: Dory’s rookie lawyer is Shalita Grant of the series You, and Drew’s lawyer is Louie Anderson. The all-business prosecutor is Groundling Michaela Watkins, lately of Brigsby Bear and Sword of Trust. Wallace Shawn is a shady businessman who gets Chantal arrested by the FBI.

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Russian Doll season 1 (2019)

“This is like The Game. I’m Michael Douglas!” Writing this up is a lotta pressure because since finishing this I’ve watched time-loop movies Tenet and I’m Thinking of Ending Things and Bill & Ted Face the Music, and it seems like there are a lotta details in this four-hour existential comedy that I’ve forgotten. Natasha Lyonne keeps dying then waking up back at her birthday party hosted by Greta Lee (Inside Amy Schumer) with “Gotta Get Up” playing, and tries to discover why this is happening, then runs into fellow time-looper Alan (Charlie Barnett of TV’s You). I think it’s possible that everything gets fixed at the end, but maybe not since a second season is rumored.

The slimy-Cagney-lookin guy she goes home with is Yul Vazquez… her psychiatrist is Elizabeth Ashley of Treme… her drug dealer is Waris Ahluwalia (The Life Aquatic)… Tinfoil Kevin is a regular at the bodega run by Ritesh Rajan (Mowgli’s dad in the latest Jungle Book), and her mom in flashback is Chloe Sevigny. Co-created by Amy Poehler, directors include Leslye Headland (Terriers) and Jamie Babbit (But I’m a Cheerleader).

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The Tick season “two” (2019)

“Destiny is on the phone. It’s a party line and we’re all invited!”

Such good writing – even if I saw some of the season-long story endings coming, each episode is full of pleasures. Dot discovers she has powers, can see the near future, and their father-in-law Walter has been an agent under deep cover. Tick’s new nemesis/partner is a bank-robbing lobster. Aegis Commander Ty Rathbone, who has a black-hole heart, recruits Arthur and Tick and Lint to the Flag Five, which is sabotaged by Dr. John Hodgman. Superion spends a few episodes depressed on the moon deciding whether to spin the earth backwards to reverse time. Lint’s sidekick is a computers/weapons whiz named Edgelord.

Writers include original Tick comics creator Ben Edlund, two Detective Pikachu writers, two writers of teen comedy On My Block, and Kit Boss (King of the Hill). Directors include a DP of Dexter and True Blood, a Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Black-ish director with over a hundred other credits, the script supervisor of Mallrats and Dogma, the editor of Roger & Me, and an AD on Buffalo Soldiers. Flexon is on the new Snowpiercer series, the Aegis paperwork twins are in The Assistant.

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Documentary Now! season 2 (2016)

The Bunker is a War Room parody, Hader doing a southern accent.

Juan Likes Rice and Chicken is a celebrity-chef doc about a difficult little restaurant that makes a basic dish but with impossibly high standards.

Location Is Everything is a Spalding Gray parody! Lennon Parham (personal advisor to Veep) plays his girl Ramona, who is onstage refuting all his stories.

Globesman is of course Salesman, which I’ve still never seen, but I doubt the original involves a rival atlas salesman who stalks and torments our protagonists.

Final Transmission is a really specific Stop Making Sense parody with Armisen as Byrne, Hader as Tina, Maya Rudolph and Jon Wurster, I am in heaven. Why did they stick a Tom Waits parody into this?

“As a bald kid with a dead dad, movies became my refuge.” Double episode Mr. Runner Up is doing The Kid Stays in the Picture, which I didn’t realize, about an awards-obsessed movie producer who’s only constitutionally able to create schlock, mostly starring his unfunny Italian comic friend Enzo.

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Primal season 1 (2019-2020)

Gruesome and lovely. Caveman and Dinosaur each saw their families eaten by predators, but found each other as friends and protectors. Perfect show, with one heck of a finale – introduction of a woman with metal implements and a spoken language, collapsing even more of history together. I think of Genndy as the Dexter’s Lab/Powerpuff guy, but everyone involved in this also worked on Samurai Jack, which I probably should not have skipped.

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Barry season 2 (2019)

Maybe less fun than season one, but deeper, as Barry tries to control his rages and stop killing people, and leads the acting class in experimenting with telling personal truths. In the end, of course, he falls into a massive rage and kills many people, Fuches turns on him tragically and repeatedly, and the people who cop out on personal truth and tell lies are rewarded for it.

Noho Hank’s Chechen bestie Cristobal (Michael Irby of True Detective s2) forms an unstable alliance with Ester, head of a Burmese crime family (a deadpan Patricia Fa’asua). Sally’s abusive ex Sam (Joe Massingill of Die Hard 5) returns to stalk her. Gene tries to reconcile with his estranged son Leo (Andrew Leeds of Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist), and is told that Barry killed his girlfriend Janice. Janice’s ex-partner Loach (John Pirruccello, a Twin Peaks s3 deputy) tracks down Barry and gets Fuches to wear a wire. And most wonderfully, the Loach plot ends in the one time Barry and Fuches work together all season, when Loach “hires” Barry to kill the guy sleeping with Loach’s wife, a stoned Tae Kwon Do master (stunt/action regular Daniel Bernhardt) with a feral daughter.

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Also sampled quite a few shows:

– Star Trek Lower Decks seems bad
– Central Park seems good, going to see if Katy wants to watch it (we still haven’t returned to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend)
– Black Jesus is good but I dunno if it’s got a whole season in the tank.
– Infinity Train looks imaginative, but for kids, not for me.
– Los Espookys seems up my alley, would watch more.

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And of course I watched a pile of concerts and livestreams and other things, including Nick Cave’s Idiot Prayer, which probably would’ve gone to theaters, had there been theaters.

Waco Brothers:

Robyn & Emma:

Cave:

Pigface:

by ·Comments Off on Tenet (2020, Christopher Nolan)

My notes include things like “Ives leads red team splinter group to recover algorithm,” which didn’t even make sense at the time, so I’m skipping the attempted plot summary of this cinematic Sator square. Branagh is an arms dealer helping execute attacks from the future, smuggling in reverse-kinetic objects and backwards-moving people. His abused wife is Debicki, the helpless woman only concerned for her child’s safety while the real men do all the work. Those men are serious spy-dude Washington and his chill buddy Pattinson. Bits of exposition via Dimple Kapadia, Michael Caine, and Martin Donovan! I took some advice and just watched the hell out of this (with subtitles) without insisting that it make any sense – though I guessed early on that anyone half-glimpsed in the first half of the movie would turn out to be our reversed heroes in the second half – and had a good time. It never stops talking utter nonsense for 150 minutes, and none of the action scenes were as impressive as expected. Michael Sicinski on Patreon: “But then again, I’ve never seen a building un-blow-up on the top, only to re-blow-up on the bottom. That was cool.”

by ·Comments Off on Palm Springs (2020, Max Barbakow)

Groundhog Day but “the pain is real,” which adds a haunting edge. It’s still a Lonely Island adjacent movie, often funny and extremely likeable, and I assume the phrase “dark edgy Groundhog Day” has already been claimed by Russian Doll, so I am allowed to say this. Samberg (argh, Brigsby Bear) picks up Cristin Milioti (lead captive of USS Callister) at her sister’s wedding and ends up trapping her in his time loop, along with his archenemy JK Simmons, who chills out once he realizes the pain is real.

Not a remake of the 1930’s David Niven gambling cowboy movie. Director Barbakow has met Werner Herzog! We saw five Sundance/True/False crossover features this year, and after Shirley last week, this is my second film from the USA Drama section.

by ·Comments Off on Resolution / The Endless (Benson & Morhead)

Can’t say that I loved Spring, but The Endless sounded enticing, and when I realized Benson & Moorhead’s first feature Resolution was a semi-prequel I went ahead and double-featured ’em. Great idea – I dug both movies and they’re even better when viewed close together.

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Resolution (2012)

A tense, comic hangout movie with unusually good dialogue about two old friends, one having lost his mind on drugs in a shack on the woods, and the other one handcuffing him to a wall for a week so he’ll get clean. Mike is a normal-looking guy with mild sideburns, and Chris is an unstable beardy Jason Lee type, has a gun, rants about bugs and birds, just wants to be left alone and get high in his forest full of junkies, cultists and crazies.

Things get horrory when Mike starts to believe that he’s being given clues to a mystery, starting with the video from Chris that brought him here, which Chris says he didn’t send… the digital video leads to a book to some slides to a grave to a videotape. The first definitely supernatural discovery is a video showing what happened in their cabin minutes earlier, shot from inside the room. The clues start revealing alternate futures, showing them killed by the junkies, or by the owners of the cabin, and this somehow relates to some missing students who stayed in the cabin doing research on “manipulating light and sound waves.”

“I think it wants a story with an ending.” References to these guys being trapped inside the movie while the script is messing with them, but it’s not too blatant… edits are abrupt with a bloom of scratchy color. The inevitable happy ending, after all this adventure Chris agrees to go to rehab – then some Blair Witchy Twin Peaksy WTF mystery in the final shot.

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The Endless (2017)

The movies have a different feel though they sound similar… again we’ve got two guys hanging out, smartass dialogue, receiving a mysterious tape in the mail which later the sender will claim they never sent. Directors Aaron and Justin played cultists accosting Mike in a scene of Resolution, and now they’re the leads, having left the cult a decade ago to live ordinary lives. After watching the video, young Aaron is antsy to return to their doomsday cult for a visit, and his beardy older brother Justin agrees.

“I can assure you that nothing here ends.” This movie has more of a normal setup, as we get to know various cultists with their own quirks, old resentments gradually surface (apparently Justin spread lies about the cult to the media after escaping), but the camp is surrounded by the shimmer and Mike’s wife from Resolution shows up looking for him. Timelines don’t always match up, but it turns out the movie’s whole point is time manipulation, trapping characters in looped routines, offering the illusion that they can choose their own fates then resetting back to zero. Of course our guys visit the Resolution house, stepping back into their own movie, like the View Askewniverse inside The Cabin in the Woods. There should be more of this kinda stuff.

by ·Comments Off on Twin Peaks season 3 (2017, David Lynch)

“Is it future or is it past?”

This was pure pleasure. If the show’s original run taught us anything, it was to enjoy the mystery, because if you’re just enduring a show for eighteen hours waiting for clever answers at the end, you’ll be deservedly disappointed. The blu-ray has already been announced, so I’m saving the thinkpieces and episode recaps and conspiracy theories for after a second viewing.

“It is in our house now.” The Tall Man appears in the first scene, and almost everyone from seasons one and two and Fire Walk, whether characters or actors are alive or dead or refused to appear in the show, will be present in some way or another. And I really need screen shots with updates for each character and situation. Lynch merges the casts of Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me with Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, brings in new mood music and his own paintings as visual design, forming an Expanded Lynchian Universe. Each episode is dedicated to a different departed actor (or character) which combines with the resurrections (Don Davis, David Bowie) and final testaments (Catherine Coulson, Miguel Ferrer) of its cast, and the limbo/afterlife storylines of the Black Lodge and Laura Palmer, the aged actors and out-of-time (“what year is this?”) feel of this belated sequel give the whole thing a sense of death and mystery beyond the storyline alone.

Some people not in the original show lineup:

Dougie “Mr. Jackpots” Jones (Kyle MacLachlan) works in insurance, lives in the Las Vegas suburbs, married to Janey-E (Naomi Watts of Mulholland Drive), with son Sonny Jim (Pierce Gagnon, dangerous telekinetic kid of Looper).

The Mitchum Brothers (Jim Belushi, and Robert Knepper of Carnivale) run a casino insured by Dougie’s firm, assisted by comic-relief Candie (Amy Shiels, Luna in the Final Fantasy games). Dougie’s boss is the very patient Bushnell Mullins (Don Murray, Marilyn Monroe’s costar in Bus Stop), and his coworker/rival is sweaty Tom Sizemore, who is working as a spy for Mulholland Drive‘s Dinerbrows (Patrick Fischler) trying to frame Dougie.

New FBI agent Chrysta Bell works with Gordon Cole and Albert, along with the previously unseen Diane (Laura Dern in a wig), on the case of Bill (Matthew Lillard) who appears to have killed a woman he was having an affair with, or possibly her body was replaced with that of the late Major Briggs by interdimensional gas-station-dwelling black-faced woodsmen.

Young, serious Sam (Ben Rosenfield of Person to Person) and his girl Tracey (Madeline Zima of Californication) are paid to watch and videotape an interdimensional box, but instead they have sex, and in classic horror movie tradition, get brutally murdered for it.

Evil Cooper/Bob (Kyle MacLachlan) drives around with minions Jennifer Jason Leigh and Tim Roth and Ray (George Griffith), beginning in South Dakota.

Londoner Freddie (Jake Wardle) got turned into One Punch Man by The Giant (aka The Fireman), now works as a security guard with James Hurley, who still sings his hit song “Just You & I” at the Bang Bang Bar some nights. Fate brings Freddie to Twin Peaks to destroy Bob, which emerges from Evil Coop as an orb.

Some series regulars:

Andy and Lucy (now with son Wally Brando: Michael Cera) still work at the Twin Peaks sheriff’s office with Hawk, and now with Truman’s brother Robert Forster (with naggy wife Candy Clark of American Graffiti), Deputy Bobby Briggs, and traitor Deputy Chad (John Pirruccello of an upcoming hit-man comedy)

Log Lady Margaret speaks with Hawk on the phone from her death bed, feeding him cryptic clues. One-armed Mike appears to Coop-as-Dougie, feeding him pretty straightforward clues.

Nadine runs a silent drape shop, religiously watches the pirate TV broadcasts of Dr. Jacoby, who sells gold spray-painted shovels. Norma is franchising the diner with help of her guy Walter (Grant Goodeve of Eight is Enough, Northern Exposure), while Big Ed still pines for her.

Amanda Seyfried (daughter of Shelly) is dating psycho cokehead Caleb Landry Jones (son of Audrey Horne), who runs over a kid then tries to murder a witness living in Harry Dean Stanton’s trailer park.

Walter Olkewicz, who played the late Jacques Renault, runs the Bang Bang Bar as an identical Renault relative.

Jerry Horne is looking more like Jerry Garcia, gets lost in the woods, fights with his own foot, is finally discovered naked in Wyoming.

Bobby Briggs is a level-headed, good-hearted policeman, and the best surprise of the new series.

Laura Palmer’s mom doesn’t do well in social situations, freaks out at the convenience store, watches TV on a time-loop, her house a screaming dim red hell.

I never figured out who Judy is, where Audrey Horne was or where she ends up, who Balthazar Getty played, or various other threads which a second viewing will probably not enlighten.

Plus cameos by Ray Wise, David Duchovny, Jack Nance, and almost everyone else, living or dead (except Harry Truman and Donna) and some fifteen music acts, Ethan Suplee, John Ennis, Ernie Hudson, etc.

Other things:

an eyeless woman with a connection to Diane… Diane is Naomi Watts’s half-sister… the picture glitching back and forth like a Martin Arnold film… an obsession with numbers… digital spaces like Chris Marker videos, and effects completely unconcerned with looking realistic… the green ring from Fire Walk With Me… Lucy doesn’t understand cellphones… the best closing songs at the Bang Bang Bar… “hellllOOOooooOOOooo”… a short stabby hit man with his own theme music… a kung-fu drug dealer who does intense magic tricks… inside a 1945 atomic bomb… alien vomit… flickering lights and a giant tesla diving bell… a galaxy of firefly ghosts… beetle-moth-frog crawls out of a desert egg… “this is the water and this is the well”… references to “The Zone”… teens at the Bang Bang Bar with random teen problems and other scraps of side-character drama… Ashley Judd searches for a the source of a droning sound in Ben Horne’s lodge… a history of the FBI’s involvement with UFOs… Dougie electrocutes himself… Evil Coop gets taken out in the best possible way… the final Lynch/Frost logo noise scares the hell out of my birds… “We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives inside the dream.”

by ·Comments Off on After Hours (1985, Martin Scorsese)

Griffin Dunne (An American Werewolf in London) is a hopeless single dude working a boring job with Bronson Pinchot. After work he meets diner patron Marcy (Rosanna Arquette of Desperately Seeking Susan the same year), bonding over their shared love for Henry Miller, and she refers him to her artist roommate Kiki (Linda Fiorentino of Jade). After an undercranked cab ride to their loft, his night spins out of control in tragicomic fashion. Not to get all auteurist on a 1980’s wild-crazy-night picture, but it’s better-looking and more intricately designed than this genre generally gets.

O’Hara and Bloom:

Buncha people with tendencies to panic and lose their cool about small things, not excepting our main man – in Marcy’s bed smoking a bad joint he suddenly sneaks out ranting about needing paperweights. He gets into a barter situation with bartender Tom (the late John Heard), gets shamed by Kiki’s dom boyfriend, wanders over to waitress Teri Garr’s place, then to Catherine O’Hara’s place, then a beardy guy’s place, then Verna Bloom’s place – what is it about Griffin Dunne that makes everyone want to take him home? Verna paper-maches Griffin to hide him from an angry mob who believe he’s responsible for a string of break-ins, then the actual thieves Cheech & Chong steal him, believing he’s art. It’s a very good ending, pulling Griffin abruptly out of the situation and back to his office, which could make the whole thing seem like a harmless dream if not for Marcy’s suicide.

Teri Garr is skeptical:

John Heard is skeptical:

Made by Scorsese between King of Comedy and The Color of Money, after a first attempt to make The Last Temptation of Christ fell apart. Reportedly the flashy camera moves were designed as a Hitchcock parody. Joseph Minion wrote (with some help from Kafka), also wrote Vampire’s Kiss and Scorsese’s episode of Amazing Stories. Tied with Blood Simple at the first Independent Spirit Awards, but it was better-loved in France, where it got a César nomination and won best director at Cannes.

Mouseover to make Dick Miller wink at you:
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