Author: Grant

I love characters who punch their problems in the face, movies that "normal" people think are stupid, and way too many video games. In case you're wondering why I'm cranky, I haven't smoked a cigarette since September 12th, 2015.

The Exorcist is one of the best shows nobody’s watching

So why hadn’t I seen the television version of The Exorcist yet? Because I had no idea it existed until earlier this week. And when I did find out, I rolled my eyes and started the first episode on Hulu just to see how bad it was so I could move on.

Fast forward to this weekend and I’m all caught up on the eight episodes (episode 9 of 10 doesn’t air until December 9th, by the way). Putting aside some terribly distracting CGI moments and a questionable plot twist, The Exorcist is kicking all kinds of ass. 
Here are some of the pros:
1. It’s not a reboot like Lethal Weapon, it’s a respectful continuation. 
2. This is one of the strongest casts I’ve seen on TV in a very long time. Ben Daniels as the exorcist is the closest you can get to topping Max von Sydow.
3. While not as graphic as the film (or the stuff AMC frequently gets away with), the extra crazy stuff is still implied. You just have to pay attention or you’ll miss it sometimes.

I wish the show would catch on, but it’s probably not going to. It’s a damn shame, too.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992) [Midnight Movie]

You have to admire the simplicity of this setup: Nick Holloway (Chevy Chase) becomes invisible after a freak accident. Rogue CIA spook David Jenkins (Sam Neill) will stop at nothing to capture the invisible man for nefarious, espionage-related reasons. So far, so good, right? Poor Daryl Hannah, unfortunately, gets relegated to playing the afterthought love interest who’s simply here to stretch out the middle portion of the movie. Can you imagine being the star of Splash, then having to eat shit in a role like this?
It’s hard to make invisibility boring, but Memoirs of an Invisible Man forgets to include any of the built-in fantasies most people would have when daydreaming about the subject. In Unnecessary Monologue #2,356, Chase’s voiceover confesses he thought being invisible would be fun, but it’s not.

Seriously? Being invisible isn’t the most awesome thing in the world? Maybe that’s why I like the movie a lot more today than I did when I was a kid: a kid can’t look past the preposterous notion that invisibility would be a burden rather than a useful super power. 

Here’s my other problem with Memoirs: Chevy Chase didn’t want to be funny in it. That sounds like I’m being snarky—and I am, to an extent, because his notorious ego is the entire reason this film doesn’t work—but director John Carpenter said this about Chase:

He wanted to sort of slowly, whether this is right or wrong, to slowly move away from broad comedy and do something with a little more depth. And so he resisted the comedy all the way through it. 

On the plus side, the score is exciting, Sam Neil plays a great bad guy, and the special effects are out of this world. You automatically know how they did an effect in 99% of today’s movies, and the answer is usually: “Oh, that’s just CGI.” In Memoirs, there are some head-scratchers. The invisible man will chew bubble gum, inhale cigarette smoke into his lungs, and see his own stomach full of food (minus the stomach) before puking the contents up. I really had no idea how they did some of this stuff before looking it up.

Otherwise, it’s not a great movie for fans of John Carpenter. There are times a scene can have a bit of a whimsical Starman feel to it, but most of the time the camera is moving far too often (and far too conventionally) for this to be a genuine Carpenter flick. Meanwhile the concept isn’t deceptively simple in Carpenter’s usual style, it’s just straight forward and simple. It’s one of his few movies which really is about what it’s supposed to be about, yet the result still isn’t bad enough to pan it.

It’s just a movie. Often an enjoyable one. I have nothing more or less to say.

Arrival (2016)

There’s so much I want to say about Arrival, but the movie works so much better the less you know about it. I certainly wouldn’t say the trailers ruined it, just that I was disappointed I saw them before letting the film unfold naturally. I’ve felt uneasy about the idea of a sequel to Blade Runner, but now that I’ve seen director Denis Villeneuve’s follow-up to Sicario (my fourth favorite film of 2015), I can breathe easy. Here’s a director who’s probably going to be a household name like Spielberg and Scorsese. He’s also the guy who’s going to pick up the torch Neill Blomkamp dropped.

This is my favorite science fiction film since last year’s Ex Machina. It might be the best movie I’ve seen all year. Arrival is so far removed from Hollywood’s narrow view of science fiction, it’s no wonder it released in November rather than the summer (it will also help get it the Oscar nominations it deserves). I don’t remember the last time I saw a non-summer movie in the middle of the day which was as packed as this one, either, so hopefully it’s making boat loads of money.

We need more of this.

No, entire cities aren’t destroyed in the opening act. The President of the United States doesn’t look out the window of the White House and whisper, “My God.” Not only are no landmarks destroyed, they’re nowhere to be found—the alien ship which settles over America chooses to do so in Montana of all places. Even though the trailer gives away the reveal, it’s no less breathtaking seeing it within the context of the story.

The characters representing the government agencies provide strong conflict for the scientific characters without becoming the Jaws Mayor. Usually you’re supposed to hate the military character Forest Whitaker is playing, but you typically don’t draw actors as accomplished as he is if you’re so predictable. Michael Stuhlbarg’s CIA stooge also has clear and understandable motives, even though he, too, would have been made a villain in lesser movies.

I’ve complained several times on this blog about how scientists are often portrayed in movies. I’m glad I can say Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner nail it. They’re not pizza-eating losers in lab coats and they’re just the right amount of nerdy—the kind of people you would actually see interviewed in science documentaries. Adams’ character especially is complex and to say any more than that might give away some of the best stuff in the movie.

Gods of Egypt (2016) [Midnight Movie]

How did this happen? How did I enjoy something as absurd and silly as this? How could I go into it so negatively and come out so satisfied? Because it’s a surprisingly fun fantasy film, that’s how.

In fact, here’s a long list of fantasy films I enjoyed a lot less than I enjoyed Gods of Egypt:

  • 300
  • Peter Jackson’s King Kong
  • The Hobbit trilogy
  • Howard the Duck
  • Independence Day movies
  • Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
  • Jumanji
  • Men in Black II
  • Any of The Mummy films
  • Any of the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels
  • Sin City 2
  • Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
  • Stardust (actually, I liked this one about the same)
  • Star Wars prequels
  • Underworld
  • Wild Wild West
  • Willow

So why did Gods of Egypt get some of the same negative press as the more infamous films on the list above? How in the hell did it get such a low Rotten Tomatoes rating while painfully routine comedies and remakes consistently garner higher ratings? I don’t have the answer to those questions and I suspect anyone who claims to know for sure is reaching just a little too far. Even so, I can’t help but feel something dishonest is going on here, such as pressure from social media groups or… okay, now even I’m reaching. (Let’s not forget this stuff is subjective… maybe the movie really is shit and I’m just out of touch.)

Yet it seems Gods of Egypt was dragged through the mud long before its February release date and everyone wanted it to fail. I expected pretty much what everyone else expected: another mind-numbing 300 ripoff with loads of bad CGI and no creativity whatsoever. I’m not saying the CGI in Gods of Egypt isn’t bad, just that it’s a lot less distracting than I expected. This is a huge, somewhat complex fantasy world—how else could they have filmed it? On location? (The Lord of the Rings filmed an awful lot on location, sure, but this ain’t Lord of the Rings. It set out to be a lot richer than that world.) It also doesn’t feel nearly as phony as Sky Captain and the Star Wars prequels did.

Yes, there’s an awful lot of white faces and English-speaking characters for a story that’s allegedly Egyptian. And no, this isn’t a very accurate portrayal of that particular mythology, either. (I guess that’s where the fantasy part comes in, isn’t it?) I’ll be honest: most of the humor was what you would expect from bad children’s movies, and the action is pretty lackluster whenever it goes all Matrix-y. On the other hand Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who hasn’t found a lot of mainstream success beyond Game of Thrones, has “movie star” written all over him while Gerard Butler is an extremely likable screen presence as well. Both of these guys aren’t getting the hits they deserve.

Look, if you’ve ever enjoyed Highlander, Flash Gordon, or Krull, you should really give this one a chance, especially now that it’s on HBO. I can’t say I would have liked it as much had I paid money for it, but for a free movie, this is some very creative entertainment.

A Boy and His Dog (1975) [Trailer]

I don’t normally post fan edits, but this one’s poignant. (The official trailer, on the other hand, is all kinds of lame). Somehow I’ve never seen this movie despite the fact Harlan Ellison is one of my favorite writers of all time. I’m still deciding whether I want to rent it or buy the Blu-Ray.
As usual, there’ll be a Midnight Movie featured here this Friday so be sure to come back and check it out. Or don’t. It’s a free country, last I checked, but I must confess I didn’t see the results of the election at the time of scheduling this post. 
And I feel fiiiiiiiiiiiiine.

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) [Midnight Movie]

In the opening scene, the handheld point of view is following a diverse group of Los Angeleno gang members who are obviously up to no good. The gritty style, in combination with John Carpenter’s pleasantly droning music, is immediately inviting. We begin to wonder: Why are we here? What are these guys up to? Just when you think you’re about to get an answer, the players are ambushed by police and brutally gunned down.

Come to think of it, you never really know what the gang members are up to or why they do what they do. Carpenter chooses to keep them enigmatic, which makes their resolve doubly spooky. You rarely (if ever) see them talking and there isn’t a singular villain who explains his diabolical plot to the audience. Lesser movies, such as the embarrassingly average 2005 remake with Ethan Hawke, would have missed the point: these guys are scary because we don’t what makes them tick. If Anton Chigurh had been the type to join a street gang, this is where he would have pledged.

Soon after the gundown, we’re introduced to Lieutenant Bishop (Austin Stoker), a green policeman who’s just been assigned overnight duty at the titular precinct which is about to be permanently closed down. It’s a thankless job, the last thing Bishop had in mind when he became a police officer. There he meets Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston), a lifer who’s unexpectedly brought to the holding cells along with a handful of other prisoners. Then there’s Leigh (Laurie Zimmer), an oddly collected and level-headed clerical worker who seems as mysterious as the gang which besieges the precinct.

When Leigh first meets Bishop, she offers him coffee. “Black?” she asks him. “For over thirty years,” replies Bishop, before breaking out in a huge grin. It’s the kind of exchange modern movies really suck at. It’s reminiscent of the scene in the original Shaft, in which the characters compare the color of their skin to coffee mugs and point out they’re not so black and white after all. Fast forward to today and I’m guessing 1995’s Die Hard with a Vengeance is probably the last time a major action film dealt with race without completely embarrassing itself, which is pretty sad if you ask me.

So there are many details along the way, showing how the characters find themselves in the dangerous situation, but here’s all you need to know: the good guys are holed up in the building and the bad guys will stop at nothing to kill them. The great thing about Carpenter is he was a working class filmmaker who wasn’t interested in making movies the modern way. All you really need is a camera, a hero, and bad guys. That’s movies in their purest form.

Assault on Precinct 13 is one of my favorites—easily in my top fifty, perhaps twenty. The last time I saw it was on a badly worn VHS rental. Seeing it in HD blew my mind because I had no idea it looked this damn good. (Please forgive the low quality of the screenshots… I was having technical issues.) I’ve never enjoyed the film more thoroughly than I did tonight.

Maniac Cop (1988) [31 Days of Gore]

This is it, folks: the year’s final 31 Days of Gore post. It’ll be eleven whole months until the next one.

I hadn’t seen Maniac Cop in so long I forgot how good it is. With a screenplay by the legendary Larry Cohen, who wrote some seriously offbeat genre flicks (It’s Alive, God Told Me To, Black Caesar, and The Stuff), the pacing of the movie is extraordinary. The movie opens with a kill, does a normal scene, shows another kill, normal scene, kill, normal scene, etc, etc. The titular maniac cop snags himself more victims in the first twenty minutes than the average horror movie dispatches in its entirety. Sometimes you see where an individual scene is going—and sometimes you’re right—but overall this is one surprising cookie.

Imagine you’re being chased by a couple of thugs through the dark, curiously empty streets of New York City. Then you spot a rather large cop (Robert Z’Dar) standing in the shadows of a nearby park and race to him for assistance. When you get close, however, you realize something is wrong and, before you have the time to recoil, he wraps his hand around your throat with superhuman strength and wrings your neck. It’s a creepy premise, the implications of which are properly explored through news segments which reflect the city’s growing fear and distrust toward police officers. Most genre films wouldn’t bother going so deep.

Now check out this cast of players: Robert Z’Dar, Tom Atkins, Bruce Campbell, Lauren Landon, William Smith, and Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree. As far as exploitation movies go, can it get any better? It rarely does. I love this cast.

Tom Atkins plays a straight-shooter lieutenant who can’t stand the thought of some bozo walking around in a police uniform and killing people. When Bruce Campbell’s character, also a cop, is implicated as the serial killer, Atkins is the only one who stops to consider it could be a setup. It turns out the real maniac cop knows exactly how to set someone up because he has inside information. And he has that inside information because he really was a cop at one time in his life, which leads to the whodunnit elements of the film.

Naturally, when the maniac cop shows up to the police station to tie up loose ends, Bruce Campbell escapes custody with the help of his mistress, fellow cop Lauren Landon. The two lovers then team up with Atkins to work out the killer’s identity and clear Campbell’s name.

I love this movie. It turns out Nicholas Winding Refn, the director of Drive and Bronson, is also a big fan. He and director William Lustig are co-producing a remake. I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited for a remake in my life.

Cameos include Jake LaMotta (Lustig’s uncle) and Sam Raimi.

Note: I was planning to feature the entire trilogy, but I think I’ll be getting the sequels on Blu-Ray to review at a later date. Right now, the streaming options available to me aren’t even in widescreen. 

Would You Rather (2012) [31 Days of Gore]

Would You Rather looks like the kind of movie I usually despise. But recently, Bloody Disgusting’s YouTube channel give it a recommendation so I decided to check it out because I haven’t covered many newer movies this year. I must say I’m impressed.

Iris (Brittany Snow) is a wholesome young blonde who’s had to put her life on hold in order to care for her sick brother. One day she meets the super rich Shepard Lambrick (Jeffery Combs) who invites her and a handful of others to a mysterious dinner party. Iris reluctantly accepts, but when she makes it known she’s a vegetarian, Lambrick offers her a deal: if she eats all the meat on her plate, he’ll give her ten thousand dollars, cash. When Lambrick notices another dinner guest (John Heard) hasn’t touched his wine because he’s sixteen years sober, the charitable host offers the ex-alcoholic a similarly fucked up deal.

And that’s only the appetizer. What the guests soon learn is they’ve been invited to play a twisted version of Would You Rather, which goes something like this: Would you rather stab the person next to you in the leg, or give the person at the end of the table three lashes with a whip? The problem with most movies with built-in candy bar scenes is they find trouble topping the previous ones. Would You Rather manages to top everything that came before it time after time. This is one diabolically entertaining movie with a lot of gruesome surprises. The pleasure Lambrick gets from orchestrating the game is some darkly funny stuff to see.

Brittany Snow’s presence makes you suspect this is yet another mindless horror movie aimed solely at the kind of teens who’ve never seen a legitimate horror movie in their lives, but it feels more like a Twilight Zone episode or a Richard Matheson story. I think I would have preferred it more if the dinner guests were voluntarily playing the sick games, rather than forced by gunpoint, but that’s a superficial complaint. (I mean, come on, isn’t it sicker when good people do fucked up stuff when they don’t actually have to?)

I made three predictions during the movie and two of them (including the end) turned out to be right. Even so, I hesitate to call this movie predictable. “Predictable” suggests I disliked the movie, yet I really, really liked it. No, I don’t think it’s predictable, just that it’s a certain kind of a story that has to go the way it did. The more I think about Would You Rather, the more I like it.