Category: Movies

IT, Alien Covenant, and Life (2017) [31 Days of Gore]

Time to catch up on some of the stuff I should have written about when I was taking a break from this blog.

IT

You already know the story: a group of kids—The Losers’ Club—descend into the sewers in search of a missing boy. What they find is a clown that’s anything but funny. I find the clown a lot creepier in theory than in execution, but I genuinely like clowns so maybe that’s a personal problem.

IT looks great and it rarely bores, but I almost get the feeling it thinks it’s better than what it really is: a monster movie. Don’t get me wrong, I went for pulp and I certainly got it, but then there’s oddly placed pieces of character development—or under-development; it’s obvious the stuff from the book wasn’t designed for a brisk two-hour movie, and there are so many characters you couldn’t possibly spend enough time with all of them, so it feels a little weird to see it all truncated. I don’t think IT is a great movie as is, but if another hour of it ever shows up in a director’s cut some day, it very well could be great.

Early on, it’s established that one of the kids freezes up when it comes to slaughtering lambs at his job. You think this is setting up important character information, but it turns out it’s merely setting up the cattle-gun itself, which the kid will eventually use for protection. The town bullies, too, sort of feel like an awkward detail now; The Losers’ Club wouldn’t exist without ’em, but the resolution of the subplot seemed utterly rushed and ultimately pointless to me.

I usually love stuff like this, but this time I’m left feeling a little underwhelmed. Decent horror movie with great performances, but I think I need to see it again when the sequel comes out.

Alien Covenant

The internet really hated Alien Covenant, almost as much as it hated Prometheus (my review can be found here), and because I felt no urgency to see it, I passed on seeing it in theaters. A curious thing happened when I caught it on VOD: I liked it a lot. I’m kind of exhausted by the Giger xenomorphs and expected Alien Salvation, but I was pleasantly surprised the aliens aren’t a huge part of this movie and they aren’t quite like the ones we’ve seen before. It’s not a radical change, but it’s enough to breathe new life into the franchise.
Some time after the events of Prometheus, a group of space-faring colonists take a detour to investigate a distress signal. An android identical to the previous film’s (Michael Fassbender) is the closest thing we’ve got to a main character, until another character steps up to become the Ripley analog. Meddling with one of the most beloved movie characters of all time doesn’t sound like a good idea, but it somehow never felt insulting or cynical to me. In fact, I was kind of happy to see Ridley Scott pay so much tribute to the direct sequel of his original film.
One of the biggest complaints I repeatedly heard about Covenant is the characters are stupid. I don’t think they’re stupid. Naive, sure, and maybe a little dim, but if you can get past the first film’s idea that modern day truckers can be astronauts, then you should be able to suspend your disbelief that completely unprepared people would ever be sent on a mission like this, if only because A) it gives the film an excuse to get to the horror bits quicker and B) it puts Danny McBride in a role he’s surprisingly good in.
Another complaint is the obvious twist near the end of the movie. Why Ridley Scott thought it needed to be a twist, I’ll never know—it would’ve been a lot more suspenseful had he not tried to hide it so sloppily. Still, it leads to an ending that’s not comforting, which is rare for $100 million dollar movies, and the fact there were decent R-rated horror movies in theaters this year is nothing to sneeze at.

 

Life

 

Life stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ryan Reynolds as astronauts who intercept an extraterrestrial sample on the International Space Station. This is no spoiler, though it takes too long for the movie to get to it: the biological sample rapidly evolves and begins killing them one by one. In a matter of days, it’s smart enough to understand the inner workings of the ISS and forms a plan to reach Earth.Okay.

I like this movie on paper, but it’s a little too obvious about what it’s trying to do. It’s nice to see astronauts appropriately reacting to their amazing surroundings with awe (an oversight in Alien Covenant), but these heavy-handed scenes drag on. In one scene the crew is having dinner in a scene that’s reminiscent of the original Alien, but it’s lifeless and unbelievable. I’m not sure the cast was firing on all cylinders.

I think there’s a fun story here, it just isn’t executed particularly well, and I’m getting a little bored with “rapidly evolving” monsters. (2009’s Splice handled this trope much better, and you can read that review here.) Life’s not a bad movie, but it’s not a good one, either. Like Alien Covenant, the ending’s the best part because it doesn’t want to reassure us that everything’s a-okay in the world.

Still, I’m glad we’re getting movies like these in theaters. I think it’s a good sign for the future of horror. It’s been a long time since mainstream movies had any bite.

 

Body Parts (1991) [31 Days of Gore]

The problem with Body Parts, at the time of release, was the marketing: the TV promos gave away the film’s biggest surprise and a wonderful (if not unlikely) moment involving a pair of handcuffs. The scene I’m referencing really requires you to suspend your disbelief, but it’s unexpected and wild enough you won’t mind. If you haven’t seen the movie or the trailer yet, I envy you.

I won’t talk about the last third of the movie. I’ll just say that, even though it’s completely different than the two-thirds proceeding it, it’s every bit as good. It involves the kind of turning point which usually breaks these kinds of movies. Body Parts pulls it off expertly.

Jeff Fahey plays a criminal psychologist who loses his arm in a car wreck. When he wakes up he discovers he’s the beneficiary of a revolutionary limb transplant. The new arm takes getting used to, but he tells his family that it’s even better than the old arm in some ways.

The catch? His control over the arm is only tenuous. When curling a dumbbell, the arm lashes out of his control for no good reason. When shaving, he has another malfunction which ends up gouging his face with the razor. When he makes love to his wife and the new hand slides between her legs… well, that’s about as good as suspense gets. The main character can’t run away from the horror, can’t hide from it in a closet. It’s always there, wherever he goes.

After Fahey begins having nightmares which he believes are a direct result of the transplant, he goes to the police station and has his new fingerprints taken. It turns out the hand belonged to a recently executed death row inmate who murdered over thirty people with his bare hands. When Fahey fails to get answers from the doctor who did this to him, he seeks out others who got the killer’s parts. One of the other beneficiaries is played by Brad Dourif, who’s just as compelling as Fahey. In fact, the entire cast is a cut above most horror movies, which is one of the reasons it’s so damn good.

There are some moments which will test your intelligence. In one scene a bar fight breaks out and a gaggle of policemen show up in seconds—including the homicide detective who’s pertinent to the plot (Zakes Mokae). The fact that Fahey’s character is a psychologist allows him to come up with all kinds of cockamamie hypotheses about what’s going on, but the monologues come off as flimsy technobabble at best. Still, these moments aren’t nearly as insulting as they could be and they’re few and far between. To mention them at all is nitpicking because this is a remarkably mature and entertaining horror film, the middle section of which kind of plays out as a detective story.

I’m often annoyed when movies keep teasing what we already know, but that’s because most movies feel so artificial and contrived in the way they go about generating suspense. Fortunately, there’s something inherently unsettling—and thrilling—when the source of that suspense is a physical part of the hero. I’d go so far as to say it’s a great movie, with good music and solid camera work. And even if the trailer was misleading about the movie as a whole, it eventually gives us exactly what was advertised.

I think it’s a rare movie that, potentially, could be just as appealing to non-horror fans as it is to gore hounds. The gore, when it finally arrives, is both tasteful and utterly satisfying.

Blood Rage (1987) [31 Days of Gore]

Welcome to 31 Days of Gore Part III! I’m running on fumes at this point, so next year it’ll be set in space!

 

Movies like Blood Rage are the reason slasher fans slog through one miserable rip-off after another. Despite being made in 1983, it didn’t come out until 1987. If you saw it back then, there’s a good chance you saw a heavily censored version called Nightmare at Shadow Woods. Curiously, the title card on the new(ish) Arrow Video release calls it Slasher. Why? No clue.

Here are the goods on display:

 Cheesy opening credits montage? Check. Generic 80s music? Check. Lingering shots of passable gore effects? Check, check, check, check, aaaaaand check. You’ll see hands hacked off, heart stabbings, and a head-splitting.
Speaking of that cheesy opening: it takes place in a drive-in theater. Few things tug on my heartstrings more than scenes which take place in drive-ins. Not a very objective standard to have, but by god I just can’t help myself. Adding to the fun, a background character meets a suspicious condom dealer in the men’s room of the drive-in, played by none other than Ted Raimi. Yes, I said “condom dealer,” and he’s displaying the rubbers on his inside flap like a counterfeit Rolex peddler.

Also at the drive-in is Louise Lasser’s character, the mother of twin boys, who’s on a date. While she’s making out with her suitor, the kids sneak off and roam the grounds. One of the kids discovers a hatchet in the back of a pickup and, for reasons no more complex than simple insanity, murders a naked man in the back of a car. The psychotic child hands the makeshift weapon off to his innocent brother, who’s so paralyzed with shock he’s convinced he really did commit the murder.

Fast forward ten years later and the innocent brother has a breakthrough in his therapy: he remembers it was his brother, now gleefully living the life he should have had, who committed the murders. Realizing that his mother is living with a deranged psychopath, he escapes the mental institution… which means that the psychotic brother now has an alibi for a killing spree.

Mark Soper does a fantastic job playing the grown-up twins. No, his performance wouldn’t win an Oscar, but it’s not supposed to, either. What he does is perfect for this kind of movie: insane, but not too far over-the-top, and he makes one of the most memorable slashers I’ve ever seen. Also good here is Louise Lasser, who thankfully knows exactly what kind of movie she’s gotten herself into.

I see so many irredeemably routine slasher movies that I can’t help but jump for joy when I find one as entertaining as this.

 

31 Days of Gore III is still happening!

This is probably the longest break I’ve taken from this blog in something like nine years, but if 31 Days of Gore doesn’t happen this year it’s because I’m dead. (And I’ll haunt whoever reads this… I ain’t got nothin’ better to do in death.)

I can’t tell you exactly what to expect this year, but I tend to feature at least one shot-on-VHS horror flick, a melt film, a Full Moon movie, and a Troma movie. I also plan to feature an entire trilogy or series each Friday of the month. The rest of the month I like to play by ear so I don’t get bored.

The only thing I can say for sure: it’s going to be the best one yet. Catch up on the last two years here.

Baby Driver (2017) [Midnight Movie]

You know what Baby Driver reminds me of? A musical version of Layer Cake, which was one of the finest crime movies of the twenty-first century. No, it’s not a musical, it’s just musical, man. Anyone who saw Edgar Wright’s previous movies know what I’m talking about. His stuff doesn’t move like your run-of-the-mill genre movie. Music plays a big part, sure, but you don’t always have to hear it to feel it… a point the movie makes quite literally.

The kid’s name is Baby. He’s the getaway driver for Kevin Spacey who plays a business savvy crook. Spacey never uses the same crew twice in a row, but ever since he met Baby he uses him on each and every heist he organizes. Speaking of heists: you never really see them. The movie’s not about the heists. It’s all about the driver and the orbital role he plays in Spacey’s underworld.

Baby wants out because he never really wanted in. It turns out he owes Spacey a lot of money due to an unfortunate coincidence. The details don’t matter. What matters is Baby’s in love and when things fall apart, as they inevitably do in crime movies, his ruthless associates set their sights on his girlfriend.

The first scene of Baby Driver contains more wit and creativity than most summer movies can muster in two hours. As soon as it’s over, Wright treats us to a stunningly choreographed credits sequence, which tracks Baby as he goes out to order coffee. He’s not quite dancing, but he’s not merely walking, either. He’s a character, I think, who’s modeled after Han Solo and Gene Kelly. How do I explain it? Just see it.

As he’s waiting for his coffee, she walks by the window. And my god, that moment… it’s movie magic, plain and simple. Everything else doesn’t matter. That tiny moment is what matters and the movie is so effortless at making it clear. Baby and his waitress girlfriend were destined for each other. Their scenes together are so good they hurt.

You know what irritates me? Hearing moviegoers say they’re sick of seeing car chases and romance on the screen. But aren’t those just about the two most cinematic things you can get at the theater? It’s like saying you’re sick of seeing tragedies on the stage. If these people really mean to say they’re sick of seeing routine car chases and lazy romances, then I wholeheartedly agree. Baby Driver proves it’s not the subject matter that’s the problem, it’s the bloated studios’ inability to get this stuff right.

I adore crime movies. Seeing a good one can pump me up like no other genre. Unfortunately, the audience I saw this movie with had no pulse. Go see the weekend showing, with a large group of friends, at one of those theaters that serves beer. This is electric stuff, maybe even Wright’s best. I walked out of the movie over two hours ago and I’m still on cloud nine.

The Lobster (2016) [Midnight Movie]

In the opening scene a distressed woman parks her car on the side of a road, in the middle of a rainstorm, and shoots a cow repeatedly. I can’t not like a movie that starts out like this.

The Lobster is a lite science fiction tale in so far it’s set in a world in which unwed adults are forced, by law, to find mates. If they fail to take lovers, they’re sent to a machine which transforms them into an animal. The good news is the losers get turned into the animal of their choice. The main character, played by Colin Farrell, wants to become a lobster should he fail his probation period as a single adult.

Why a lobster? Farrell’s character doesn’t have a great reason (most of the characters don’t), but I wouldn’t be surprised if it meant something deeper… or nothing at all. Either way, it’s pretty damn funny. The Lobster is a strange movie, not in a look-how-quirky-and-offbeat-I-am! sense, but genuinely strange. It seems to find being strange as natural as breathing. Then again, maybe it’s not as strange as the social norms it satirizes.

So in case you’re not clear on the setup, let’s go over it in detail: if you’re single you get sent to a hotel in which you’ve got forty-five days to find a match before you’re sent to the animal transformation room. The management arrange a variety of activities for the, uh, contestants, so to say, encouraging everything from phony meet-cutes to premature marriages. Each morning the men are tortured by sexual stimulation, but anybody caught relieving the tension without a partner are punished severely. The hotel manager (Olivia Colman) seems to have a contingency for any kind of dating crisis: at one point she tells a newlywed couple, “If you encounter any problems you cannot resolve yourselves, you will be assigned children. That usually helps.”

The guests talk like they’re auditioning for Love Connection. The management sound like those insufferably happy folks who’re constantly trying to set up their single friends. I’m not sure how these actors pull it all off with a straight face, but the blooper reel is probably longer than the movie.

Another activity the hotel encourages is hunting. Rather than hunt the animals roaming the wilderness around the hotel (because they used to be humans), the guests are forced to hunt runaway single people with tranquilizer darts. The guests who bag the most are rewarded.

I’m trying to avoid spoilers here, but Rachel Weisz and Léa Seydoux are in this, only they don’t come into the movie until it becomes an entirely different movie altogether. (It’s the kind of movie which blows up spectacularly early on, rather than meting out its fun until the very end… thankfully, it’s got enough fun to spare.) John C. Reilly is right there from the start, playing the kind of dopey character he plays so well. (Can we all just stop and marvel at how he gets in so many different types of movies, even though he often only plays a certain character?)

I’ve grown to like Colin Farrell in movies like In Bruges and the better than expected (but not great) Fright Night remake. You’ve got to have massive talent to claw your way up from the likes of 2003’s Daredevil, in which his role was nothing short of embarrassing. The Lobster makes me like him even more. It’s my favorite dark comedy in years, but heed this warning: things can get very dark at times.

The Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (1996) [Midnight Movie]

I recently featured The Lawnmower Man, which was so far removed from the short story it was allegedly based on, Stephen King sued to have his name removed. (It turns out the script existed prior to the producers acquiring the rights to King’s story, so they amended his name and title to the project in order to sell tickets.) It only makes sense I would check out the sequel this week, right? Well, now that I’ve seen it I’m not sure anything about this movie makes sense.

Spoilers for the original film follow….

Jobe, whose digitized consciousness escaped the lab explosion in the original film, is inexplicably human again. Even though we saw his abandoned body wither away and catch fire, the corporate characters of this sequel have managed to recover it from the debris and employ him as a super sophisticated hacker in cyberspace. This time Jobe’s played by Max Headroom’s Matt Frewer, which has gotta be one of the laziest typecasting decisions in the history of film.

Pierce Brosnan is nowhere to be found, either. That’s fine. I have no problem with a sequel continuing the story without the original actors. After all, that was par for the course with these genre films back then. What I do have a problem with is the fact the only returning character is Brosnan’s kid neighbor, who was so insignificant to the original film I didn’t need to mention him when I explained the plot of the previous film two weeks ago.

See, actor Austin O’Brien was a no-name when the original Lawnmower Man came out, but in the following year he co-starred with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Last Action Hero. There’s no reason for the kid to be in this movie, but some executive likely thought they could bank on his newfound fame. That might have worked in more capable hands, but the filmmakers obviously wanted to take the story far into the future. Instead of setting the movie a reasonable amount of time into the future, they set it only six years after the first one (because O’Brien’s character would have been all grown up otherwise) and ask us to believe the world became a dystopian future practically overnight.

Worse, the adult nature of the original film has been sabotaged by a PG-13 rating and a cast of annoying children. I knew I was in trouble as soon as the kids flew around cyberspace via the magic of green screen. It looks like one of those totally radical 90s commercials for Kool-Aid or sugary cereal.

spoilers

In the lead role you have Sleeping with the Enemy’s Patrick Bergin who more or less looks like Tommy Wiseau. That’s not a complaint. He’s a lot more interesting to look at than Brosnan was in the previous film. He’s also more interesting than Fewer’s portrayal of Jobe, which is a major step back from Jeff Fahey’s nutty take on the character.

What’s amazing about The Lawnmower Man 2 is how far CGI progressed in the four years since the original. I complain about the overuse of CGI quite a bit, but it’s perfectly suited for films with this subject matter. I just think it was a mistake to insert the actual actors into the cyberspace sequences rather than digitize them the way the first film did, if only for continuity’s sake.

If you enjoy cheese as much as I do, this movie isn’t terrible. It’s entertaining enough and the production value is much better than expected—perhaps better than the first—but there are some serious flaws contained within. Again, that’s par for the course when you’re dealing with these kinds of movies.

I honestly don’t remember this movie getting a theatrical release. I always assumed it was a cheap, straight-to-video sequel, but it turns out it was actually a theatrical release which was a lot more expensive than its predecessor. Too bad it’s nowhere near as good.

Alien Dead (1980) [Trailer]

Another winner from Fred Olen Ray. I haven’t seen it. I don’t want to see it. I’ll probably watch it anyway. This is because A) that’s a brilliantly bad title and B) I’m stupid. 
I forgot to do Midnight Movie last Friday. It totally slipped my mind. I’ll probably feature Lawnmower Man 2 this week. 
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Best news you’ll hear all month: Scream Factory is in the middle of their summer sale. Everything in the catalog is half off until June 19th. I’ve never featured it here, but The Resurrected is one of the better Lovecraft adaptations so it’s nice to see it get the factory’s treatment. And if you know what you’re getting into, Dark Angel (it was called I Come in Peace when I saw it on HBO or Cinemax many moons ago) is a steal at eight bucks. Dolph Lundgren and Brian Benben is such an intriguing combination, it really doesn’t matter if it works or not—just marvel at the fucking thing.
After two unbearably busy weeks, I have an unexpected day off. Time to marathon a bunch of stupid movies.