by ·Comments Off on Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes (1986, Piotr Szulkin)

Unflappable prisoner is sent from one horrid planet to another, his mission to plant a flag claiming the new world for humanity. But this place has received “heroes” from space before and has a ritual for dealing with them: they’re given booze and prostitutes, encouraged to commit crimes, then sentenced to sitting on long sharp pole. At his first stop, hero Daniel Olbrychski (great, of The Tin Drum) is attacked by a severed arm and served fingers instead of hotdogs, then his preferred girl has been replaced by an annoying new one, so he plots to find his original girl and exit this shitty planet. Inspirational, I’ll have to check out more by Szulkin. Having just rewatched Crimes of the Future, I appreciate when a sci-fi movie makes do with a minimum of shabby locations. Everyone here has also been in Wajda and Kieslowski movies, particularly the hero’s handler Jerzy Stuhr.

by ·Comments Off on Wolf’s Hole (1987, Vera Chytilová)

I think it’s a commentary on society? Bunch of kids are chosen for a special skiing getaway, which starts out bad (the road’s out and they have to bribe a ski lift operator to get onto the mountain) and gets worse (the lead ski instructor calls himself Father, says he’s a space alien and the kids need to choose one to be sacrificed). But the kids are all dumb assholes (they start a foodfight with their dwindling supplies), and the counselors are terrible (one ends up dead inside a snowman).

The kids discuss what’s going on and what to do about it, while Father (also of Ikarie XB1 and The Devil’s Trap) is always lurking unnoticed in a doorway. When the movie wants to set a mood, the camera stalks the snow surface to stuttering music, and when we’re lucky there’s a sweet shot of reversed time-lapse ice melt. Father says their alien blood is frozen, so the gang-affiliated kid burns down the cabin and they all flee, but the lift is too heavy to hold them all, so they leave their coats behind (and one sacrifices their hearing aid, come on) and escape together, with no dumb kid left behind.

Ten of the eleven kids:

by ·Comments Off on Scream 2 (1997, Wes Craven)

Wes Craven got sent to diversity training after the first movie, and this time Drew Barrymore and her doomed bf are played by Jada Pinkett (Demon Knight) and Omar Epps (Dracula 2000), who get killed during the premiere of the movie Stab based on Cox’s character’s book about the events of part one. This sort of meta-spiral inevitably leads to the Cinderhella scenes in Detention.

Neve is at college now, even more traumatized than she was in the last movie, with boyfriend Derek and roomie Hallie, who will both end up in Mission to Mars after failing to survive this movie. Also not surviving: Jamie Kennedy (this is for the best, he’s much less charming here than in part one) and sorority sister Buffy, who gets a big solo scene.

Or maybe Buffy is the Drew Barrymore, I dunno:

Arquette comes to campus after the killings start, crippled from getting stabbed in the first movie, as does Cox of course, and they are cute together. Her new cameraman Joel (Duane Martin of The Faculty) quits his job before getting killed, amazing. Jamie explains the sequel rules (bigger setpieces, higher body count) and Wes leans into the clever references with Friends jokes and generic Hollywoodized scenes of his own movie in Stab (feat. Luke Wilson as Skeet Ulrich), and there’s even a play-within-the-play (Neve is playing Casandra for drama teacher David Warner), which gives us a location for the final showdown.

They’ve kept the tradition of ghostface getting beat up in every encounter, and that of ghostface being two people. Everyone thinks it’s Neve’s boyfriend again but he’s innocent, fake-tortured by frat guys to a Jon Spencer song then murdered by film student Timothy Olyphant (Dreamcatcher), the crazy Lillard-type partner of Skeet’s revenge-seeking mom Laurie Metcalf. The ending needs work – we are asked to believe that a high-stacked pile of stones in a college theater production is made of actual stones. Liev Schreiber, wrongly imprisoned for Neve’s mom’s murder before part one, just wants TV interviews and fame and cash, keeps getting overlooked because of the second wave of killings so he will presumably get fed up and become the killer in part three.

Liev found your cat:

by ·Comments Off on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981, Walerian Borowczyk)

Walerian: I’m making a fancy-dress period-drama based on classic literature.
Serious Actors: sign us up!
Walerian: the plot is fourteen people in a large house get fucked to death by a beast.

Some actors’ dialogue is in sync on the French soundtrack, Patrick Magee’s in sync on the English, and Udo Kier is never in sync, so there’s no correct way to watch this. I chose English, excited to see the Prisoner guy, until I realized that Patricks Magee and McGoohan are different people. Of course Magee is the tormentee-turned-tormentor of A Clockwork Orange, so still pretty cool. Let’s avoid the Waxwork movies this year, we don’t need Patrick Macnee getting mixed up in this.

ARE Magee and McGoohan different people? Does the editor know?

I feel I’ve formed a satisfying triangle this SHOCKtober between Udo Kier starring in this beast-with-killer-penis movie, Udo Kier starring in Flesh for Frankenstein, and all the dick jokes in Young Frankenstein. Dr. Udo Jekyll has a nice transformation scene in the bathtub, but there are no cool makeup effects – Hyde is just a different actor. He stalks his party guests while they panic (General Magee shoots the coachman then dejectedly confesses), belatedly getting around to killing the General and his daughter, then Udo’s girl Fanny (a Walerian regular, unfortunately for her) becomes Hyded as well and kills her mom. I appreciate that Paul Duane enjoys Borow movies – Rosenbaum says diversity of opinion is healthy for the culture – but to me they are stupid and bad.

Fanny Osbourne will have her revenge on Seattle:

Hyde shoots some arrows into the General, his daughter doesn’t seem concerned:

by ·Comments Off on Horrors of Malformed Men (1969, Teruo Ishii)

Wild 1920’s-set mad-scientist movie. The title and concept are more fun than the experience of watching it. I fell asleep with my finger on the screenshot key and had to delete ten thousand files the next day.

Can’t say you weren’t warned, I’m superdeformed (dig it):

Young doctor (lead actor from the also-nutty Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell) escapes from an asylum, seeking a half-remembered island, and finds a doomed circus girl who also half-remembers it. He makes his way to the shore right as his doppelganger dies, so he pretends to be that guy, saying “actually I’m still alive,” then hangs out with his weird family and sleeps with his sister.

Chair goals:

He makes it out to the family island and finds his madman web-handed dad who deforms people, and hopes to one day deform everyone… one at a time I guess, since he doesn’t have a Magneto-scale operation here. Dad reveals various hidden identities and plots and backstories – such as when he locked his wife in a cave, and she fed on the crabs that fed on her dead lover – then a cop who’d been posing as a family servant explains some more.

Dad is a disability-rights advocate:

But it’s true he has issues:

After all this, the young doctor’s sister-lover reaches the correct conclusion: “We will embrace atop the fireworks mortar. We will scatter magnificently across the great sky.”

by ·Comments Off on Rumours (2024, Maddin/Johnson/Johnson)

A different sort of thing for Maddin, his most restrained feature. More Bunuelian perhaps, tricking viewers with a political arthouse drama with Cate Blanchett then gradually accumulating unnatural quirks until the giant brain in the woods is only a distraction from whether sentient pedo-hunting AI has Lawnmower-Manned all communications in an apparently depopulated Germany. Seven world leaders were in a gazebo hard at work crafting the most bland and vague statement they could, when they found themselves cut off from outside contact. Each one gets their standout moment, but Canada (the most emotional and least respected) steps up during the crisis, triumphantly editing and reading their final statement aloud to the masturbating bog people.

Germany is the Australian Blanchett, Canada is Roy Dupuis (I think he’s the woodsman who yells “strong men!” in Forbidden Room, which also features a giant brain). UK is late Shyamalan fave Nikki Amuka-Bird, USA is the inexplicably British gent Charles Dance (who I just saw in The First Omen). Then there’s Italy (I got nothing on Rolando Ravello), France (Denis Ménochet, the violent PTSD guy in Beau Is Afraid), and Japan (Takehiro Hira of the new Shogun). They come across two suicidal European Union workers: Zlatko Buric of Triangle of Sadness, and Alicia Vikander, subject of the best joke in the movie (they think the brain’s influence has got her speaking in ancient lost languages, but it turns out to just be Swedish).

by ·Comments Off on Lake Michigan Monster (2018, Ryland Brickson Cole Tews)

Very grateful that people are putting in excessive amounts of effort to make extremely silly movies. I laughed every time the soundtrack plays “what do you do with a drunken sailor,” and after watching Guy Maddin movies and reading Cinema Scope for 20 years, my brain’s pleasure sensors light up from this Canadian-adjacent content.

I guess Ryland pretends to be rich and assembles a team to find the monster, and I guess it kills team member Sean “Nessy” Shaughnessy during their third mission. There’s not much more I can tell you, since the Mets were getting trounced in game 3 of the NLCS and I was unevenly splitting my attention between these two things and drinking pumpkin beer.

by ·Comments Off on Alice, Sweet Alice (1976, Alfred Sole)

Alice is a creepy kid who loves masks and torments her popular little sister Brooke Shields. After Brooke is murdered in church and her mom’s shitty sister is repeatedly stabbed in her legs and hands, Alice is brought in for questioning. The parents take her home against psych recommendations, and more people get stabbed, but the masked raincoat killer has been the family’s psycho-catholic housekeeper (a Spike Lee regular)… all along? It’s confusing since Alice wears the same getup, but given the movie’s half-giallo half-Don’t Look Now influence, it’s probably meant to be confusing.

Unlike Tucker & Dale we got real filmmakers in charge, though you wouldn’t know it from checking their other credits – Sole made porn and did production design for the Wishmaster and Donnie Darko sequels, the producers and DPs made nothing, and the editor cut The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. But for a brief moment in the mid-70s they made a beautiful slasher film in which the vibes are so far off.

by ·Comments Off on Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010, Eli Craig)

Not the most excellently made movie, but it gets pretty far on a great concept, good writing and charming leads. Due to a misunderstanding, eight vacationing college kids believe two yokels are killers, while our guys (Alan Tudyk and Escape Room‘s Tyler Labine, both of whom need to be in more movies) think the incompetent kids are a suicide cult since they accidentally kill themselves whenever they encounter something pointy. Cerie from 30 Rock is the only one who understands them, while the alpha “Chad” (murderous goth of Final Destination 3) is their biggest threat.

Our heroes:

Okay the policeman’s death was a little bit their fault:

Cerie attempts peace talks:

The goth ain’t having it: