Brandon's movie memory – Page 430

In Sickness and in Health (2008, John Landis)

October 27, 2009 by Brandon·Comments Off

The vibe I’m getting so far from Fear Itself is “lazy.” This was pretty bad, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of bad I should hold against John Landis – he just turned in the same lazy work as everyone else on this doomed TV series. If I’m gonna blame someone for this mess, it’s writer Victor Salva, the controversial convicted pedophile behind Powder and Jeepers Creepers (I didn’t know he wrote it, so this is coincidental timing to the current Polanski brouhaha). The other three episodes (almost forgot I watched Family Man last year) at least had some aspirations to horror, and they made sense, while this one’s more plot-hole than plot.

The idea is that it’s the wedding day of Maggie Lawson and James Roday (costars of a show I’ve never heard of called Psych), everyone’s telling her it’s too soon to marry this guy (we never find out how soon), then she gets an anonymous note delivered via the hard-of-hearing priest (played by The Cigarette Smoking Man) that says:

“Person?” Strangely phrased, think I. She runs around acting panicked, has a pointless scene with new hubby’s red-herring uncle Marshall Bell (of Starship Troopers, Nightmare on Elm Street 2), while we tolerate sluggish pacing and tons of church imagery. In the end we learn that SHE is a serial killer and the warning, written by her mysterious brother, was intended for the husband… the kind of twist ending which, rather than making all the puzzle pieces fit together, invalidates the whole rest of the movie, like some stupid anti-Sixth Sense. Well, at least we got to see how the Cigarette Smoking Man has been doing since X-Files ended (he doesn’t smoke anymore; it’s not allowed on network television).

Pin… (1988, Sandor Stern)

October 27, 2009 by Brandon·Comments Off

I watched this at random because I had it… but why did I have it? I don’t know! It’s an unremarkable little made-for-TV-looking movie (lots of close-ups!), more of a slightly-disturbing drama about coping with mental illness than a horror flick. Kinda looks like it was aiming to be a prestige suspense flick – certainly it’s not as crappy as your usual horror movie (or your usual made-for-TV mental illness drama) but only climbed the ladder as high as “slightly better than average” before losing steam.

Kids grow up in a small town with physician ventriloquist father who gives them important father-to-child talks through his skinless doctor dummy Pin. His daughter grows into a normal girl, but the son Leon grows into mildly psychopathic David Hewlett. After the parents die in a car crash, Leon refuses to accept that Pin isn’t a real person. Brings him home in a wheelchair, and the sister tiptoes around the matter, trying to have a normal school and love life until Leon kills his aunt (never proven) and his sister’s boyfriend (caught red-handed).

traumatic event, Leon catches a nurse using Pin as a sex aid:

Sandor Stern, screenwriter of the original Amityville Horror, would go on to direct its third sequel (the one about the haunted lamp). David Hewlett is good in this, and was rewarded with starring roles in Cube, Nothing and Scanners II. In fact, almost everybody here would go on to bigger and better things. His sister, Cynthia Preston, would star in Prom Night III: The Last Kiss. Dad Terry O’Quinn would become the star of TV’s Lost (stopping along the way to star in Stepfather 2: Make Room for Daddy and My Stepson, My Lover) and mom would appear in Gothika, the murdered boyfriend in Hard Core Logo and Larry Fessenden’s Fear Itself episode, Aunt Dorothy in Atom Egoyan’s The Adjuster, and even teenage backstory Leon would star in Terence Davies’ adaptation of Neon Bible.

T. O’Q:

Spooked (2008, Brad Anderson)

October 24, 2009 by Brandon·Comments Off

“Why are you so bad?”

A brutal anti-police-brutality story. Eric Roberts (The Prophecy II) stars as a burnout drunk ex-cop P.I. with a history of brutality (and accidental firearm fratricide), set up by the sister of a suspect he once killed to go on a stakeout in a haunted house. She’s hoping he’ll go mad and kill himself, but incredibly he figures out the plot and goes after her in a rage. She’s saved by Roberts’ partner Larry Gilliard Jr.

Got your Session 9 haunted-house business and your Sounds Like hearing-things-that-aren’t-there, so one could make a case for Brad Anderson auteurism, but one would have to be more interested.

Look, it’s D’Angelo from The Wire! That’s the second Masters of Horror episode in a row to feature a Wire alumnus – and not just any old minor Wire actor, but a main character of a season. Looking forward to seeing Avon, Bubbles… hey, maybe Herc and Carver can do an episode together.

Eater (2008, Stuart Gordon)

October 24, 2009 by Brandon·Comments Off

“Nothing worse than a horror movie geek.”

My three-year quest to see every Jacques Rivette film is slowly ongoing, my five-or-six-year quest to see every Luis Bunuel film proceeds at one title per year, but I thought it was best to push those cinematic luminaries aside and watch everything by Stuart Gordon, creator of classic 80’s horrors Re-Animator and From Beyond. Why is that? Because during SHOCKtober it’s nice to have someone you can rely on. While I admit there was nothing special about Daughter of Darkness, his Masters of Horror episodes have always been good, and this one, from the quickly-cancelled and rumored-to-be-crappy season 3 (aka Fear Itself) was excellent.

Starts out promising, setting a creepy horror mood off the bat, with a shadowy, rattle-shaking voodoo prisoner Dwayne (horror regular Stephen Hart) loaded into a police station jail cell for the night, the station lights flickering so badly that I’m thinking the episode’s budget didn’t include lighting and sets.

Our protagonist, eager rookie Bannerman (Mad Men star Elisabeth Moss) is a horror fan, turned on by proximity to Dwayne, wants to hear more about his crimes. I figured it’d go in a more Silence of the Lambs direction here, but there’s no time for quiet spooky conversations about fava beans – Dwayne “escapes” by possessing the bodies of the other cops, saving her for last. Interesting horror tactic – we don’t see any killings, just find bodies left behind, like the ending of Halloween, hidden all over the place. Bannerman is trapped in the locked station with a cannibal psycho killer and is definitely going to be eaten, so she eats rat poison, so when he catches up and takes a bite out of her neck, it kills them both.

It’s not like Gordon to have such a shocking, depressing ending, but it works. Anyway he didn’t write the episode – the guys behind WTF story The Washingtonians did. Nicely done, extremely tense little flick (maybe a tad underlit) with a great supporting cast. Witness:

Stephen Lee, star of Dolls over 20 years ago and still kinda looking the same

Russell Hornsby, whom I loved as the boyfriend in Stuck

Nick Sobotka, star of The Wire season 2.

Daughter of Darkness (1990, Stuart Gordon)

October 24, 2009 by Brandon·Comments Off

Why, right after watching the classic original Dracula, would I waste time on a cheapo 80’s made-for-TV vampire thriller? Because it’s one of only two unseen titles on Stuart Gordon’s filmography, and SHOCKtober seems like a good excuse to tackle the last of them.

It’s a rare film indeed which stars Mia Sara (Ferris Bueller’s girlfriend) – looks like after Ferris Bueller it was mostly this and Timecop. She shows up… somewhere… Romania? I shouldn’t have waited three weeks before writing this. I’ve fallen behind, you see. The question comes up often, “watch movies or write about movies?” and watching them wins. So three weeks ago I watched a crappy vampire movie starring Mia Sara… in what country did it even take place? Let’s say Romania.

Ferris’s girlfriend and her enchanted necklace:

Friendly cab driver Max, “Americans and me, we kill many nazis,” drives her around as she seeks her long-lost father. She has a dramatic encounter with Anthony Perkins (in between Psychos 3 and 4) who says her father is dead, which clearly means Perkins is her father. Writer Andrew Laskos apparently didn’t think we’d figure that one out.

Perkins and Grigori:

Oh, but I said it was a vampire movie and I mentioned Romania. Yes, Perkins is a good vampire, and Mia’s love interest Grigori (Robert Reynolds of Howling 6: The Freaks) is a bad vampire. The former wants to protect her, while the latter wants to have sex with her and create a race of super half-vampire babies like Blade or Ultraviolet.

Anthony Perkins, sunburned vampire:

There’s a vampire war (a very minor one), Perkins is left in the sun, Mia rescues him, he saves her from Grigori killing them both, oh and the cab driver from before turns out to be a vampire crony. The movie apparently thought it now needed to rescue the derailed romantic subplot, so it pairs Mia up with an American ambassador (current Heroes star Jack Coleman), who has only been grudgingly nice to Mia for the entire flick.

“Shut up, I’m your new love interest!”

Wonder if this was Stuart Gordon’s sole interesting contribution or if this was in the script… the vampires don’t have fanged teeth, they have little toothy mouths in the tips of their tongues, like the girl’s breasts in Trapped Ashes.

Movie looks very made-for-TV, which it was. Gordon must’ve needed work after Dolls, and fortunately (in the long run) didn’t get himself tied up in the Puppet Master series.

Dracula (1931, Tod Browning)

October 21, 2009 by Brandon·1 Comment

Not as big a horror fan as I claim to be, I’d never seen Dracula before. Watched at least three other Tod Browning pictures, and at least seven other Dracula movies, but never the original that kicked off Universal Horror in the sound era. And I probably should have started with it, because it’s anticlimactic after having just watched Hammer’s blood-soaked version. The sound work is primitive compared with Lang’s M, the horror isn’t horrific compared with Browning’s own Freaks (or even Frankenstein if my memory serves), and the story is nothing to rave about if you’ve ever seen a vampire movie before (I suppose most of Dracula’s original audience had not). One of those movies I can’t unqualifyingly like, just say something weak like “it seems good for its time.”

Exceptions: not much Ed Wood-style hand acting, but Lugosi is a striking figure in wide shots and close-ups. Dwight Frye as Renfield starts out as your standard easily-amazed eyeliner-wearing actor, but turns into a creepily intense giggling psycho after being bitten. He’d play Fritz (the sidekick mistakenly known as Igor) in Frankenstein the same year. And there’s a surprising scene at an opera, where Drac first meets our heroes and has a sober line about fates worse than death, giving an edge of unfortunately-tortured-soul to his standard murderous-villain role.

Tame: no fangs, no bite marks, and needless to say no blood. No score, either – some scenes are conspicuously quiet, lacking any sound effects for minutes at a stretch. No money at Universal to film the storm at sea during the crossing from Transylvania to London (one of my favorite parts of Herzog’s Nosferatu) so they used a scene from a silent film, comically sped-up from 18fps to 24. It works, though, making the scene more intense (it’s the biggest action scene in the entire film, and it’s stolen).

Renfield, not Harker, visits the castle at the beginning, gets turned (halfway?) and helps Drac move to England where he meets useless, boring Harker (David Manners would costar with Lugosi and Karloff in The Black Cat) and his girlfriend Mina, along with Mina’s dad and friend (?) Lucy. He goes about his business draining blood from the girls until family friend Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan, who appeared in Frankenstein and The Mummy) catches on after Lucy’s death. VH runs down Drac, catches him burying Mina (?), chases him into the castle and pulls down the curtains as the sun rises, turning the vampire to ash and freeing Mina. And Universal stood behind that death – Dracula wouldn’t appear in any sequels until the mid-40’s. Lugosi wouldn’t even fare as well as his most famous character. He’d play Dracula in one more film, Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, before ending up in Ed Wood hell and giving Martin Landau an oscar.

Mythology: They’ve got the no-reflection thing, the turning into bats and wolves, aversion to sunlight and crosses, wooden stakes through the heart, but Drac can enter a room without being invited and vampires avoid wolfbane, not garlic.

Karl Freund, formerly F.W. Murnau’s image-man in Germany, would go on to shoot most episodes of I Love Lucy.

Midnight Meat Train (2008, Ryûhei Kitamura)

October 21, 2009 by Brandon·Comments Off

From the director of Versus and Godzilla: Final Wars, two movies I didn’t like at all. Guess I should’ve looked that up before I rented it, but I’m a sucker for anything Clive Barker-related, so it probably wouldn’t have stopped me. Barker’s elliptical story has been handily adapted into a full-length movie by the writer/director of Insanitarium, a little-seen horror starring Peter Stormare. Add a hundred producers and the cinematographer of Soul Plane and you’ve got yourself a movie.

Bradley Cooper (Jennifer Connelly’s cheaty husband in He’s Not All That Into You and an enthusiastic drama counselor in Wet Hot American Summer) plays a dullard photographer who wants to get deeper, go further into the depths of the city to get the most real, unflinching photographs anyone has seen, to the frustation of girlfriend Leslie Bibb (who was she in Iron Man?). They have a good-looking friend (Roger Bart of Hostel II) and they know a couple of other undeveloped characters, so much the better since a horror flick needs bodies. Oh and Bradley’s photo guru is Brooke Shields, whose name you hear a lot though she’s hardly been in anything I’ve heard of.

20 minutes in it announces itself to be slapstick horror, with a three-person train massacre filmed in the hammiest way possible with all From Dusk Till Dawn 2 POV shots. I didn’t think it would stoop to that. Then it straightens up and goes serious suspense for a while – can’t figure out what it wants. Maybe the slapstick thing would’ve worked if they’d stuck with it. Clashes with Barker’s style, but I’m sure Vinnie Jones would’ve been game.

Clearly game for anything:

Oh, so Vinnie is “Mahogany,” butcher by day, filler of train cars with murdered naked bodies for subterranean mutants to eat by night. They pull the thing where Bradley finds out, fights Vinnie and wins, but now has to replace Vinnie as the purveyor of bodies for mutants under the guidance of he sinister magic conductor. Neither as good as I’d hoped nor as bad as I’d feared.

Trapped Ashes (2006)

October 19, 2009 by Brandon·Comments Off

From skimming the extras, it sounds like this was a labor of love by American Cinematheque programming head Dennis Bartok, friend of Dante and Hellman, who wrote and produced. So on one hand, I respect the years spent assembling this, getting the help of excellent but underworked filmmakers, crafting an old-time hollywood-referencing haunted-house anthology story. On the other hand, it’s neither scary nor visually interesting nor creatively written – not exactly destined to be a horror classic.

Looks like the only non-Dante-directed films Dick Miller has been in since 1995 are a Lou Diamond Phillips thriller and a sci-fi comedy from the Lost Skeleton of Cadavra guy:

In the wraparound story directed by Joe Dante, bunch of Hollywood residents have received free tickets to tour an abandoned studio. Henry Gibson drives them around, getting an ornery Dick Miller to open the spooky gate leading them to the haunted house set. Or is it a real haunted house?!? The bunch (eight or so) seem to be trapped, so Henry prompts them to each tell a personal scary story in hopes of coaxing the house to let them leave.

Cool model shot from the haunted house:

GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN BREASTS

The latest work I’ve seen by Ken Russell since I wasn’t able to finish Whore. He’s still at it, making flamboyant, perverse little pictures. Girl gets breast implants to make herself more appealing to casting directors. It works, and soon she’s bonking some stud (both in a picture and behind the scenes), but her breasts have a tendency to bite, which is upsetting her man.

She goes back to the plastic surgery joint, but her doctor is on ice so she’s confronted with these guys instead:

The middle one is Mad Ken himself. Boobs, computer graphics and campy hilarity… it’s all downhill from here.

JIBAKU

Sean S. Cunningham (who hasn’t done anything I’ve heard of since Friday the 13th) immediately drags everything down after the blitz of fun provided by Ken a few minutes earlier. Julia and her husband are in Japan for some boring business. They run into a dead guy, so a monk (Ryo Ishibashi – warden in Big Bang Love, star of Suicide Circle and Audition) tries to comfort them.

He was also in Dream Cruise:

Julia has an affair with a young dude named Seishin (is it the guy who killed himself earlier?), goes to some kinda sex-hell which awkwardly combines live-action and anime. Her husband saves her, whew. Key line: “I was sexually molested by a dead monk and dragged into the mouth of Buddhist hell.”

Hell looks like a Japanese cartoon; Why am I not surprised?

STANLEY’S GIRLFRIEND

Monte Hellman, formerly known for such awesomeness as Two Lane Blacktop and The Shooting, now this is his first film since Silent Night, Deadly Night III. A shame. The movie itself is a shame, too…

John Saxon (Nightmare on Elm St., Mitchell), looking good for being in his seventies:

This is a deadly dull segment (with some classic film references, including L’Atalante) about a young filmmaker (no longer played by John Saxon, alas) who hangs out with his talented friend Stanley, who stops going out one month after he gets a hot girlfriend. Stan suddenly disappears, leaving the hot girlfriend to our man Leo, who proceeds to have a torrid affair with her.

But she ruins his life and sucks away his talent, leaving him a hollow shell of a failed Hollywood burnout for the rest of his life. While Stanley (last name withheld) moves to England, freed from the woman’s curse, and makes such classics as A Clockwork Yellow, Half Metal Jacket, Dr. Lovestrange and The Shinning, leaving Leo in his will a short film from the early 1900’s of the girlfriend, an ageless vampire!

Nice color for 1900:

MY TWIN, THE WORM

John Gaeta, VFX guy from the Matrix series, shines here. Maybe it’s because he had more to prove, or because he’s had recent practice making decent films, but this is pretty good.

The story is nothing much… woman is unable to get a tapeworm removed because she’s pregnant, so baby and worm develop together, and as girl grows up, she has a secret worm-sister who avenges her against evil babysitters. Some nice visual style almost makes up for the by-the-books plainness of the previous two episodes. The last three segments need visual style to survive, because they’re talky and the dialogue is boring (I have the feeling Ken did some uncredited writing on his bit).

Back to our framing story and it turns out everyone here is… dead? Or damned? Or supposed to be dead but escaped Final Destination style and now being rounded up by grim reaper Henry Gibson?

Oh no, Henry Gibson (Magnolia, The ‘burbs, The Nutty Professor) died last month. I hadn’t heard. This was his second to last film.

“Trapped Ashes is a reflection of Hollywood as a place that’s sort of between living and dying, between being famous and being forgotten.”

Y tu mamá también (2001, Alfonso Cuarón)

October 18, 2009 by Brandon·Comments Off

Katy was surprised that Diego Luna used to be cuter than Gael Garcia Bernal.

Maribel Verdú (currently costarring in Tetro, also the rebel servant who befriends our girl in Pan’s Labyrinth) is the cousin who gets a ride to the beach with a rich kid and his not-rich friend while their girlfriends are away, has sex with them both, stays at the beach while they go home then dies of cancer a month later. Oh also the kids make out with each other while drunk, destroying their friendship.

Great cinematography by one of my favorites, Emmanuel Lubezki (The New World, Children of Men, Like Water for Chocolate). Oddly negative omniscient narrator fills us in on the gloomy details surrounding the characters. Really a lovely movie, despite my crappy summary.