Sinister (**1/2)

A decent start to this one from Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose). The familiar element: a family moving into an old house, where a writer (Ethan Hawke) hopes to be able to finish his latest true crime novel. His wife (Juliet Rylance) is supportive in one scene and threatens to leave him in the next. But it’s the unfamiliar element, a batch of home movies with murders on them, that makes him a little crazy. (Which sorts of fits the movie into the batch of recent horror films involving found footage, camcorders, and/or otherwise crude-looking visuals.) And the way he keeps hearing noises, noises his wife and young children never seem to hear.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I have trouble suspending my disbelief when it comes to horror movies. To my mind, if your movie involves the supernatural, keep the supernatural elements to a minimum. So, where I lost interest was where the symbols expert (Vincent D’Onofrio) came on to explain some ancient mythology I never heard of and what it means. To me this is just lazy screenwriting because it lets you explain anything. (I think one reason people like vampire and zombie films is because there are known rules for these beings.) I won’t give away the twist, but the explanation for it pretty much amounts to, well, because it’s pretty creepy.

IMDb link

viewed 10/9/12 7:30 [PFS screening] at Ritz East and reviewed 10/10–12/12

 

Black Swan (**1/2)

Obsession, jealousy and repressed desire are the themes in this Darren Aronofsky-directed drama. All of Aronofsky’s lead characters seem to be obsessed with something. Here, the pressure of mastering the lead role in Swan Lake threatens to undo ballet dancer Nina (Natalie Portman). Her director (Vincent Cassel) tells her she has the technique necessary to play the White Swan, but seems to lack the passion to play her alter ego, the Black Swan. Nervous about her chances of landing the role, she sees a woman on the subway who looks exactly like her, her own alter ego. And then there is the company’s new dancer Lily (Mila Kunis), who may be a friend, may be competition, or may be the Black Swan of Nina’s imagination.

This is all very stylish, so that it seems both that Nina’s mind is playing tricks on her and that Aronofsky is playing with his audience. The direction is skillful, the shots crisp, with an effective use of close-ups. Cliff Mansell’s piano-driven score is also very dramatic. Aronofsky’s camerawork doesn’t call attention to itself as often as in early efforts like Pi and Requiem for a Dream, his first two features. Nor, with The Wrestler and this film, are his stories as pretentious as in Pi, or the ambitious mess that was The Fountain. Possibly this is because he no longer is co-writing his own films (or at least isn’t credited). Hence he plays to his strengths as a visual stylist here. It’s certainly a lot artier than The Wrestler, but the story is even simpler.

It’s a showcase role for Portman, who’s in every scene and herself must embody both swans, the repressed “mama’s girl” at the start of the film and the one who awakens to her own desires as the story moves to a climax (pun intended). Barbara Hershey plays Nina’s overbearing mother, and Winona Ryder makes a nice mini-comeback as a retiring dancer who feels pushed aside. Cassel, so excellent as the title character in the Mesrine gangster films, is well cast as the director who presses and manipulates Nina into letting herself go. The reason my rating is not higher is simply because, like Nina, Aronofsky has a lot of technique, but his movie feels full of artifice. It’s more psychological horror film than psychological drama. Black Swan is, metaphorically though not literally, bloodless.

IMDB link

viewed 12/8/10 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 12/8–9/10

Splice (**1/2)

Coming barely a week after Craig Venter’s announcement that his team had created a synthetic bacteria from man-made DNA, this release is nothing if not timely. One day, its premise that a couple of pharmaceutical company researchers (Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley) could combine human and animal DNA into a new creature may become quite plausible. And yet, should that happen, it's certain not to be like this.

As sci-fi, Splice is weak. You would think with the wealth of new information on DNA that there would be more science in a movie like this. We never find out what got spliced with the human DNA, but apparently it’s whatever’s required by any given scene. The two scientists—named Clive and Elsa after the actors in Bride of Frankenstein—are supposed to be brilliant, but their scientific process seems akin to mixing up a witch’s potion. Even they’re surprised, several times, by their own creation, which grows into something, or someone, looking like a little girl with a tail and chicken legs. This actually looks better on screen than it sounds.

As for the human elements in the movie, I can imagine that real scientists will groan at the usual Hollywood portrait of arrogance, impulsiveness, and seeming disregard for moral implications. In fact, the film does try to grapple with ethical issues—the meaning of humanity, the responsibilities of scientists, even, indirectly, abortion—but does so clumsily. Elsa especially veers from cool rationality to overt emotionality and back again, but Clive also has some abrupt shifts in character. Brody and Polley, an actress and director who’s stayed under the American radar by sticking to Canadian productions (like this one, filmed in Ontario), do their best. But by the end, it’s hard to tell who's nuttier, Elsa, Clive, or cowriter-director Vincenzo Natali. Natali would have be better off not to compress the story into such a short time frame, or, alternately, not to have so much happen so quickly. Steven Spielberg’s A.I. takes a similarly kitchen-sink approach to a sort of similar theme (though it’s about robots), but by having the story happen over a long period makes it seem philosophical.

I have to admit, Splice is a lot of fun for a bad movie. It’s not a straight horror movie, and is rarely gory, but there are a number of very creepy scenes. So it may be that horror fans, particularly fans of old monster movies, will enjoy it. (The effects are a lot better than in many of those old horror films.) Frankenstein is one obvious inspiration. But James Whale’s original film has a poignancy to it, and Splice just seems silly. A key scene in the movie produced both gasps and laughs. Coming early in the second half of the movie, it signals the moment where the story goes off the rails. Like most train wrecks, it’s not dull. But in this case, less would have been more.

IMDB link

viewed 6/1/10 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/2–4/10

Jennifer’s Body (**3/4)

Screenwriters are the unsung heroes of the film world. Directors usually get the credit for a film’s success. But Diablo Cody is the exception to that rule. Maybe it was the weird name, maybe the stripper background, maybe her slangy teen-speak that helped her parlay a single produced screenplay into an Oscar, an Entertainment Weekly column, a Showtime series (The United States of Tara) and celebrity status befitting a starlet. So this, her follow-up cinematic effort (directed by Girlfight’s Karyn Kusuma) will probably garner this movie a little more attention that a genre flick like this might otherwise get. It fuses the high school drama with a teen horror film, and like Juno features a troubled teen girl at its center.

The troubled one is played by Amanda Seyfried, who gives a versatile performance starting with the opening, in which she's a very angry asylum inmate. We see her two-month journey from halter-topped good girl to orange-jump-suited badass. Semi-mean girl Jennifer, played by Transformers fox Megan Fox, is her BFF who truly transforms after an elaborate accident involving a bar, a band, and flirty banter. An unfortunate, bloody encounter brings out the diablo in Jennifer and, as often happens in this sort of movie, only her BFF can see it. (This requires you to believe that the police and almost everyone else are idiots.) Lots of guys want Jennifer’s body, and, after the accident, she wants theirs, though not quite in the same way.

Diablo’s hand is apparent in some of the dialogue, like the way the two girls refer to attractive guys as “salty,” and a few other elements stick out as original, like the application of the Faust legend to the indie rock band. (Seems it’s devilishly difficult to make it in today’s music scene.) The uneven relationship between the two girls is also a subtext. The scary parts are scary enough, the funny parts are funny enough, but nothing more. Jennifer’s Body would like to be the Heathers of the 2000s, or something along that line, but it’s not even up to the level of World’s Greatest Dad in satirizing high schoolers’ shallowness. Still, you could do worse if light horror is your thing.

IMDB link

Viewed 9/14/09 [screening at Ritz 5] and reviewed between then and 9/24/09

Let the Right One in (***)

It’s boy-meets-girl in this not-so-cuddly Swedish import, in which the main characters are two twelve-year-olds. Oskar, chosen victim of the school bully, wonders why his new friend Eli doesn’t know her birthday, why she doesn’t wear a jacket, and why she doesn’t like candy. He doesn’t pry too much, but we know better, having seen another of her kind dispatch one of the locals and drain his blood. I've never completely understood the enduring appeal of vampire movies, and can have trouble suspending my disbelief. I mean, if vampires were really roaming about Sweden, how come the country’s murder rate was so low? Yet this one draws you in as much with drama as horror.

The movie is not highly stylized, or particularly rich with vampire lore. I have no idea whether Eli is afraid of garlic. The minor characters—Oskar’s divorced parents, the older vampire, who may or may not be Eli’s father, the bully—barely register. What does is the wintry desolation of the setting, an apparently isolated town near the Soviet border, some time during the Brezhnev era. Not all of the scenes are in darkness, but nearly all evoke the mood of a lonely twelve-year-old. Like nearly any good vampire movie, the violence escalates, but it’s the mood that will haunt.

IMDB link

viewed 11/13/08 [screening at Ritz Bourse]; reviewed 11/18/08

The Happening (***)

People are going to disagree with me about this M. Night Shyamalan movie, I realize that, but I liked it. They’ll disagree because it has pretty much no ending, more pseudoscience than an astrology textbook, and precious little action. But I still marveled at Shyamalan’s ability to conjure up creepiness out of stillness and silence, out of amber Pennsylvania fields and widescreen Americana. Even the opening, a time-lapse shot of clouds moving against a darkening sky to the James Horner score, is creepy.

In the 1960s, the term “happening” gained currency as a term applied to large gatherings of people for some hip purpose. Here, something is attacking large crowds and turning them into suicidal automatons. The movie’s R rating comes from some of the gruesome ways they off themselves. As for the cause, I won’t give that away, and really, the movie doesn’t either with any degree of specificity, which is one of the things that will probably annoy a lot of people. Let’s just put it this way. Mark Wahlberg is supposed to be a science teacher at “Philadelphia High School,” and in one of the first scenes we see him telling his students that nature is something “beyond our understanding” and that reasons science posits will be “just a theory,” thereby echoing the language creationists use to disparage evolution. At this point I rolled my eyes, and not for the last time. This is a science teacher?

Yet I was enthralled by the way Shyamalan depicts the frightened people trying to figure out what is happening as they fan out from Philly to the countryside, where loonies live. (That’s the director’s apparent opinion, not mine.) Shymalan focuses primarily on the teacher and his googly-eyed wife (Zooey Deschanel), who seem to have grown apart. To Shyamalan, a continental catastrophe is worth years of $150-an-hour counseling. At least he doesn’t (overtly) suggest that it was God’s plan, which just ruined Signs for me (along with lame aliens). Think of this as Signs with an anticlimactic ending instead of a stupid one. I mean, you don’t even get to see how many people die. All that matters is whether one married couple get over their rough patch.

My suspicion that this would be a polarizing movie was confirmed by looking at the IMDB score, which confirmed a higher-than-usual percentage of both 1 and 10 ratings. I admit that the movie is dumber than Britney Spears’s last baby, but the small details and atmosphere made it work for me. Or maybe I was just glad not to be re-watching Shyamalan’s last effort, the godawful fairy tale Lady in the Water. Sometimes these things are just beyond understanding.

IMDB link

viewed 6/14/08; reviewed 6/17/08

The Signal (***1/4)

This low-budget triptych is a collaboration among three directors and features one story with three distinct tones. The basic plot is that something has disrupted all mass communication forms; televisions only emit a disturbing pattern and noise. More importantly, the signal has distorted people’s perceptions, turning ordinary people into killers. The first section, called “Crazy in Love” is more or less a straight horror film following a cheating wife deciding about whether to leave with her lover. The second part, “The Jealousy Monster,” turns unexpectedly comical as the the signal distorts the reality of the survivors. A very recent widow wavers between mournfulness and concern about whether her party guests will show up. This is probably the only movie I’ve seen where “Who wants cocktails?” is a big laugh line. The third part, “Escape from Terminus,” continues playing out the confusion of the main characters, but with a more dramatic, humanistic tone.

There is some graphic violence utilizing a wide variety of household items, but the some of the grisliest scenes are off camera. AJ Bowen, as the cuckolded husband and apparent villain, gives a varied and nuanced performance that helps to hold this surprisingly original movie together. (The main plot idea is similar to the Stephen King novel Cell, but how it plays out is quite different.)

IMDB link

viewed 2/19/08; reviewed 2/21/08

Cloverfield (***1/4)

This is a monster movie, but not an old-fashioned one. The gimmick is that the whole movie is actually camcorder footage, filmed in and around the area “formerly known as Central Park” in New York City. Yep, this means 80 minutes of shaky images. It’s especially annoying in the exposition, which takes place at a surprise party full of twenty-somethings in a Manhattan high-rise. After 15 minutes of that, I was earnestly hoping that the beast would knock the whole building down and the camcorder would be found by a tripod-wielding Martin Scorsese.

But then, oddly, the gimmick started to work for me. At any rate, I did jump back in my seat more than once, and the technique provides a kind of intimacy that your average Godzilla movie lacks, though the story is no more sophisticated. Still, it succeeds precisely by not trying to do too much. Omitted are elaborately corny back-stories about estranged fathers, unimaginably daring rescues by unaccountably fearless hunks, and buildings that predictably collapse precisely half a second after said rescues. The basic story, credited to Drew Goddard, a writer on TV’s Lost, does rest on the male lead’s (Michael Stahl-David) willingness to aid his imperiled girlfriend, but doesn’t turn him into an action hero. Everyone seems appropriately scared when the beast is around, and tense the rest of the time, and so was I.

The monster looks like a big dinosaur and was fairly fearsome, though it’s only around for ten or fifteen minutes. There are a couple of other scary things, but revealing what they are would spoil the fun. Meanwhile, director Matt Reeves makes the camcorder idea work. In reality, the machine’s battery would have failed, or the tape would have run out, in the time taken by the events in the film, and maybe the friend holding the camera wouldn’t have been quite so conscientious about keeping it rolling during certain events, but the scenario still seemed more plausible than I’d have thought. You never really do learn how it is that a 50-story creature came suddenly to be terrorizing Manhattan, but that’s to the good. Trying to explain the preposterous only ruins the fun.

IMDB link

viewed and reviewed 1/14/08

The Orphanage (***)

The adoptive parents of a young boy with AIDS (Belén Rueda) buys the wife’s childhood home in this psychological horror film from Spain. It’s not the sort of movie where heads are getting sliced off, but rather the kind where something mysterious is going on. The boy’s imaginary friends, already a source of concern, begin to occupy much of his time, and the elaborate games they play unnerve his mother. His drawings of them seem uncannily particular, and when he disappears in a cave one day there are other footsteps besides his. Is this a ghost story, or one of madness, and how does it connect to the house’s days as a home for orphans?

This reminded me of The Others and older movies in feel. It has a couple of genuinely scary moments but more often maintains a creepy sense of foreboding. The use of a lighthouse and other visual motifs is effective. There is very little dependence on special effects; the story builds with subtlety, though in terms or horror it flags somewhat in the middle. The ending doesn’t pack quite the same shock as The Others, or The Sixth Sense, but fits the movie, which in any case works well as a drama.


IMDB link

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (**1/2)

Tim Burton was the right director for this adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim/Hugh Wheeler musical, itself adapted from an earlier play by Christopher Bond, who based his story on a long-told urban legend. The legend concerned a murderous barber in league with a purveyor of meat pies. The title character is played by Johnny Depp, who has already played an assortment of oddballs for Burton, including Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, and Willy Wonka. Burton is one of the film world’s most distinctive visual stylists, and the success of his movies tends to rest on what you think of the stories he adapts. When they’re thin, you get a movie as one-dimensional as Mars Attacks! With better material, Burton’s visual sense has greatly enhanced movies such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Big Fish. Almost all of the director’s films have had a fantasy element, and this visually recalls another retelling of a legend, Sleepy Hollow. With a filter casting a bluish pall over most scenes, Burton brings out the grime and gruesomeness of industrial-age London. Only a lovely looking fantasy sequence, and the copious outpouring of blood, put a little color into the picture. If you fancy the story, and the song-speech that propels much of the plot, and you’ll probably like the movie. I’m not crazy about those things, and didn’t like it. I did appreciate the casting of Helena Bonham Carter as Todd’s partner in crime and Alan Rickman as his nemesis.

IMDB link

reviewed 1/09/08

Saw IV (**1/4)

This movie begins unpleasantly enough, with the autopsy of one John Kramer. Mr. Kramer, known better as Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) to moviegoers, died along with his protegée in Saw III, but only the naive would have thought that meant the end of the series. As his ex-wife (Betsy Russell, seen briefly in the last installment) explains, John planned everything, even anticipating his own death. Or is it that yet another Rube Goldberg of torture devices has carried on his work? Whomever it is, he (or she) has been busy. There are several victims here. The first two are actually shown before the autopsy. A blinded man is chained to another whose mouth has been somehow sealed shut. One has the key, one the lock, and cooperation is not in the cards. If you’ve seen the other Saw films, you’ll know that this seemingly unrelated sequence will tie back into the story much later, and in fact everything here is tied together in a way that probably took a lot of thought on the part of the multiple screenwriters. (They are new, but the director, Darren Lynn Bousman, returns from the last two films, preserving the herky-jerky editing style and reliance on jarring mini-flashbacks to tie everything together.) Even more than before, the events of the last installment are tied into this one.

The main storyline relates to officer Rigg, who is being punished by Jigsaw (or whomever) for being a neglectful husband and having a hero complex. Lots and lots of microcassette tapes, typed instructions, and scrawls on the wall, and watching others suffer accompany his lesson. If you’ve missed these films, Jigsaw’s modus operandi is to teach a moral lesson by engaging the victim in a device from which the only escape involves a harsh variation on Hammurabi’s “eye for an eye” code. None of his devices fails.

Only occasionally does the film seem to want us to sympathize with the killer, as when a rapist must blind himself to survive; in that case the filmmakers are sure to make him obese and slovenly. Immoral simply isn’t enough. There is cleverness in these movies, but still I am repulsed by the idea that their appeal is as fictional snuff films. As an “objective” critic, I’d say that the section of the film in which we learn about Kramer’s conversion into Jigsaw is trite. I think that for those who haven’t seen Saw III, or don’t remember it well, certain aspects of the plot will be confusing, though I suspect it all fits together seamlessly. (It’s only the overall concept that’s ludicrous.) But it makes me wonder, is this really the sort of movie that people really want to see more of? As Jigsaw would say, make your choice.

IMDB link

reviewed 10/28/07

30 Days of Night (**1/2)

What with vampires being so allergic to sunlight and all, why didn’t they think of this before? Head for Barrow, Alaska, where for a time (not actually 30 days, but never mind), the sun never comes up. That’s the premise of this graphic novel adaptation, which fancies Barrow as a tiny town of under 500 residents, most of whom split when the lights go out. The real Barrow’s population is close to 5000, mostly Eskimos. Maybe the vampires started off with ethnic cleansing, because everyone in town is white like the swirling snow that hinders the townfolk but later provides cover. The sheriff (Josh Hartnett) is the standard-issue leader type, and there’s a side plot where his ex-girlfriend (Melissa George) winds up sharing his space. Nothing like the threat of being bled dry to heal old wounds.

A lot of vampire movies romanticize their subjects, or at least give them a decent backstory. This is more like a zombie movie, though. True, the bloodsuckers are a lot smarter—we hear them scheme in their Eastern European voices (subtitled)—and stronger. But they seem to have few goals other than to wipe out the humans. Hence, as in many a zombie flick, the scared Barrowites who survive the initial massacre hole up in the buildings that they hope will provide the most protection, and the evildoers pick off the weak or unlucky. I kept wondering why it didn’t bother them to have all the blood dripping off their face; they just chow down and leave it there. Guess it looks all badass.

The setting is the one original element here, and more could have been done with that, like making some of the characters Inuit. You don’t get as much of a sense of everyone trying to wait out the days until daylight as I would have thought. It isn't as dark either; I guess all the events take place during the twilight that remains. I realize that it won’t do having it be pitch black the whole time, but a couple of scenes where the characters are truly blinded would have been scary. There’s more interest from a suspense standpoint than if the film is seen from a strict horror viewpoint. The ending, in which the gained knowledge of the vampires’ ways is used against them, is slightly above average, but the movie as a whole isn’t.

IMDB link

reviewed 10/26/07

Resident Evil: Extinction (***)

The very last of the summer 2007 “threequels” is also the most unassuming. Based on a video game, these future-set actioners haven’t been blockbusters, merely low-key successes. Maybe that’s why this doesn’t come off as overblown and pretentious like so many others. Each of the movies is a little different too. In the first movie, Alice escapes from the scientists experimenting on her. In the second, she confronts the effects of the virus that has spread across “Racoon City” and turned much of the populace into flesh-craving zombies. Now, with the virus spread across the planet, cool, collected Alice (Milla Jovovich) aids a convoy (of which Ali Larter plays the leader) and opposes a mad scientist in a world that resembles that of Road Warrior, only with zombies. All those undead folks gives the opportunity for lots of mayhem without it seeming too gruesome. The virus has also spread to other life forms, leading to sequences featuring mad dogs and birds. Fuel and food shortages represent other obstacles for the few that survive. The whole subplot with the scientist is on the goofy side, and missing is much detail about how the world got to be the way it is. But the strength of the movie is that it doesn’t try to do too much. Some good action scenes—Alice’s signature move is twirling twin knives in each hand before she offs a couple of zombies—enough story to move things forward, and some variation keep things interesting. Probably the other two films are slightly better, but it’s close enough that I suspect many people will disagree. Enough loose ends remain to see that writer Paul W. S. Anderson has some ideas about a fourth entry (though none is planned).

IMDB link

reviewed 9/24/07

Day Watch (**1/2)

This is yet another sequel to a blockbuster special-effects extravaganza to open in the summer of 2007. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s because Night Watch was a Russian hit that saw only limited release in the US. This is part two of a planned trilogy, adapted by director Timur Bekmambetov from novels by Sergei Lukyanenko, that envisions a Moscow where powerful humans called “Others” live alongside ordinary folks. Divided into Light and Dark Others, they’ve maintained an uneasy peace for a thousand years partly maintained by a special law enforcement branch that keeps Dark Others from staging vampiric attacks when the Lights are in control. This and more is explained in an English-language voiceover that I would have replayed had I been watching the DVD. (I wish the Pirates of the Caribbean and Lord of the Rings producers had been kind enough to supply such summaries.) The main character, Anton (Konstantin Khabensky), is an enforcement agent whose new trainee (Mariya Poroshina) proves to be unusually skilled. She’s also a potential love interest. Anton’s asked to hide some evidence to protect one of the intruders, but winds up in trouble himself. That’s the short version of the plot. I’d tell you the long version if only I’d been able to follow it.

Those not burdened by the need to be able to follow everything that’s happening will find a visually compelling world with a knock-your-socks-off finale to equal most any Hollywood blockbuster. Part police procedural, part alternate-universe fantasy, and part horror-thriller, with a bit of off-kilter humor in the mix, Day Watch is very mainstream. The characters have a lot of history, but little depth, and, apparently unlike the novels, moral ambiguities are in short supply. But you can see why Day Watch, like its predecessor, set Russia’s all-time box-office record in 2006. This is not only because of the special effects and the industrial-rock-scored action sequences, but because of the complete alternate universe imagined by its creators. (I didn’t understand all of the rules of this world, but it’s clear that Bekmambetov did, and presumably all is explained in the novels.) No doubt Russian geeks have spent as many hours dissecting these movies as, say, The Matrix.

In addition to the altered voiceover, the subtitles in the English-language version are also worth commenting on. As with Night Watch, they don’t merely translate, but add to the atmosphere, shuddering along with the image when Anton tries to exceed his powers by entering the “second level of gloom,” turning red when blood is mentioned, and so on. The business about the different levels is just one of the ideas the movie introduces but has no time to develop. I haven’t even mentioned most of the characters, the Great Others who could bring about the end of the truce, or the Chalk of Fate, an ancient object of Asian provenance with the power to change history. This isn’t the sort of movie I tend to enjoy, with a confusing plot revolving around supernatural powers, but I admire the scope of Bekmambetov’s ambitions.

IMDB link

Severance (***1/2)

Think of The Office (the British version, thank you) reconfigured as a horror film and you get close to the sensibility of this bloody funny movie set in the woods of Eastern Europe. A motley group of coworkers for a weapons manufacturer has gathered for a corporate retreat. There’s the pothead, the tool of a boss, the American girl, and so on.

As one thing after another goes wrong, tensions flare, and that’s before anyone spots the large person stalking them. Well, anyone except the audience, who’s seen the opening teaser with the scared man hanging from the tree, and the pothead, whom the other characters don’t believe. The horror storyline is only a little better than the usual crazy-man-with-a-chainsaw scenario, but it’s deployed for maximum suspense.

The mayhem is extremely, though briefly, gruesome in a couple of places. The humor is welcome and demonstrates some of the personality of the characters. But it never undercuts the scares, which aren’t played for laughs.

In sum, terrifyingly funny.

[reviewed 5/31/07]

IMDB link

Grindhouse (**3/4)

? Writer-directors Robert Rodriguez (Sin City) and Quentin Tarentino (Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill) indulge their love of 1970s exploitation films with this double feature that includes intentionally “damaged” film, fake retro trailers, and other bits meant to re-create the ambience of a beat-up old theater in the pre-megaplex era. The two features are Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, a zombie flick, and Tarentino’s Death Proof, a girls-night-out adventure culminating in a car chase, with Kurt Russell playing a mysterious, has-been stuntman. A few of the actors, like Planet Terror star Rose McGowan, show up in both halves of Grindhouse.
+ Really the appeal of both movies is in nostalgia. Both movies are apparently set today (judging by the cell phones both plots employ), but everything else feels deliberately old-fashioned, including the special effects. This makes the zombie stuff look more cheesy, and the car-chase stuff more realistic. That was among the reasons I liked Tarentino’s half better, but the main one was that where Rodriguez’s film is a straight homage, Tarentino’s movie blends the sensibility of his earlier works with a car chase that, while not the best I’ve seen, has some unusual elements that help make it a little different than something I’d have seen on a UHF station late at night 25 years ago. In addition to better characters and more compelling dialogue, Death Proof shows off the director’s quirky side, such as his affinity for forgotten pop and soul gems. (Kudos to Rodriguez, too, for writing his own score.) As in the talkier parts of Pulp Fiction, Tarentino blends in lots of stuff that doesn’t advance the plot, simply because it’s interesting.
- Aside from the retro appeal, and the innovation of having a machine gun used as an artificial leg, I found Rodriguez’s half of the movie pretty tedious, exactly like I probably would watching some of the bad 1970s movies that probably inspired it. Death Proof barely has a plot at all, but it partly makes up for it with other elements.
= **3/4 overall. (Slightly upgraded for the clever concept.) Planet Terror **1/4 I guess your opinion of Rodriguez’s half depends a lot on your reaction to the phrase “typical zombie movie.” It’s not my favorite genre, I’ll confess. Death Proof *** For those who like Tarentino’s quirkier side, or pre-CGI car chases, or both.

[reviewed 4/26/07]

The Host (***)

? South Korea’s all-time box-office champion is a monster movie that, like the original Godzilla, has pretensions of social commentary. Extrapolated from an actual incident in 2000 when an American military employee poured a large quantity of formaldehyde down the drain, the story here is that chemicals released into the Han River cause a mutation that unleashes a truck-size amphibious creature thought to carry a deadly virus on the local populace.
+ The computer-rendered beast, looking like a reasonably realistic version of a fish with legs, is pretty good, and its initial rampage when it terrorizes the populace is mostly terrific, but the best thing about the movie overall is the characters. If you go by movies like Anaconda or Primeval, you’d expect that there’ll be, say, a brainy female journalist, a cocky male adventurer, a tourist or three, and assorted sidekicks who will get offed, one-by-one, until the two most attractive characters are left to kill the beast and probably hook up. But nope, here we get an ordinary family of five. The father’s narcoleptic and not too bright, the grandfather’s old, the brother’s a drunk, and even the sister, a competitive archer, compromises her superior skills by being seemingly afraid to pull the trigger. It’s this goofy lot that has to outwit the government trying to quarantine them and locate the youngest one, the daughter who’s been carried off by the beast. Just as writer-director Bong Joon-ho subverted the conventions of the serial-killer mystery (a little like Zodiac did) with his last movie, Memories of Murder, he injects a similar note of melancholia into this most unlikely vehicle for a family drama.
- After the beast’s opening rampage, things get a little too calm as the plot plays out. Also, some of the attempts at humor are on the hokey side. As for the plot, it didn’t bother me that the American government and military are villains (the Korean authorities fare no better, in any case), but if Bong had come up with a mad scientist instead it would have seemed only slightly more cartoonish and one-dimensional.
= *** Most of the action occurs at the beginning and end. So people looking for another King Kong, or even another Godzilla, might be disappointed if they start hoping the beast will start tearing up downtown Seoul. I expect the planned American remake will be more to their liking. I was on the fence about this one, but I’m giving it an upgraded rating for having a surprisingly poignant conclusion that, though containing familiar elements, has one really big surprise.

IMDB link

reviewed 3/16/07

Ghost Rider (**1/4)

? One of the lesser-known Marvel comics was the inspiration for this reworking of the Faust legend. Nicholas Cage is the older of the two actors who portray the hero, a stunt motorcyclist called Johnny Blaze who sells the Devil (Peter Fonda) his soul for love, not money, but is cursed all the same. Decades later, Mephistopheles requires a favor, the sort of favor that seriously interferes with Blaze’s attempt to reconnect with his childhood sweetheart (Eva Mendes).
+ Haven’t you wondered what it would look like if a chain-wielding guy with a flaming skull where his head should be would look like riding a motorbike at a couple of hundred miles per hour trailing fire from the sides of the vehicle? Sure you have, and here’s where you get to see it, not to mention a jump that’d put Evel Knievel to shame. Wouldn’t you have thought Peter Fonda would make a good Satan? He does. Sam Elliot as Caretaker, a grizzled mentor of sorts to the possessed Blaze, is also well cast.
- This is kind of a hybrid movie, a little fishy and a little foul. It’s not a conventional superhero movie, because Ghost Rider is too busy figuring everything out and saving himself to do much superheroing. It’s got a lot of creepy imagery, but you probably wouldn’t call it scary. There’s a boy-girl story, but it’s no romance. Compare the Spider-Man movies to see how much better heartbreak and longing can be incorporated into even a superhero movie. In one scene here we have Mendes’s reporter character berating Johnny for standing her up at dinner, then inexplicably apologizing to him in the next. Writer-director Mark Steven Johnson also helmed another superhero adaptation, Daredevil, and even more than there we see the difference between being darkly mysterious and dully mystifying. The main plot revolves around old Lucifer’s having to rein in his son who, I gathered, wanted to head up his own network of evil. Mostly this ends up being an excuse for a bunch of gruesome-looking supernatural types to face off against Blaze, who’s forced into playing Devil’s advocate. And, on a minor note, why are Mendez and Cage, ten years her senior, playing characters of about the same age?
= **1/4 Supposedly this was a labor of love for Cage, who was a fan of the comic, but it’s hard to see anyone feeling that kind of passion for this movie version, which is no marvel. See it if you particularly like movies where men who are just about infallible stage battles where they get shot and stabbed but still come back for more.

IMDB link

reviewed 2/23/07

The Hitcher (**1/2)

? Yet another horror remake finds Sean Bean essaying the Rutger Hauer role from the 1986 cult hit. As the title character, he menaces two college sweethearts on a road trip through rural America.

+ Basically what this has going for it is that it’s fairly scary while only moderately gruesome, excepting one key scene toward the end. Bean is aptly non-emotive, and the plot doesn’t rely on the kids being complete idiots, or the cops never being around. There’s even one cop who seems to know what he’s doing.

- That’s not to say the movie shies away from other horror staples. The villain seems to have the tracking abilities of a bloodhound and never makes a mistake except when he encounters the college kids. I mean, even I anticipated the way one college boy gets away when he’s driving and has a knife to his throat. And you have to figure from the premise that either that the Hitcher has killed hundreds of people before in an obvious way and gotten away with it or that he decided in middle age to become randomly, and expertly, homicidal.

= **1/2 I managed to miss the original version back in ’86, but if you seen 2001’s Joyride you’ve seen the same sort of thing done better, with more personality. The last words uttered by the main character are “I feel nothing.” Just so.

IMDb link

Primeval (*3/4)

? As if avoiding the crossfire in an ongoing civil war weren’t enough, the good people of Burundi also have to contend with a killer crocodile named Gustav wending the waters of Lake Tanganyika. But the real question is, which of the American journalists sent to investigate will end up as a reptilian aperitif?

+ It’s not every movie that incorporates ethnic warfare into a story about a bloodthirsty beast. If you watched Anaconda or Cujo and said to yourself, yes, but how does this play into regional geopolitics, this could well be your movie. The star of the movie is Dominic Purcell of TV’s Prison Break, but cameraman Orlando Jones gets the funny lines. Sample: “This is Africa, the cradle of civilization. This is where Bryant Gumbel comes from.”

- Unfortunately, even though the dangerous men and dangerous animal provide dual sources of peril, the whole thing comes off as kind of toothless. True, a subplot involves the crew getting the goods on a local warlord, but as a thriller it’s extremely tepid. The best thing about the exotic setting is that it provides nice scenery. (Filming was in South Africa.) As for the horror aspect, there are surprisingly few opportunities for the crazy creature to bite. This is just as well, since the glimpses we do get aren’t especially impressive.

= *3/4 I saw Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid a couple years ago, and say what you will about silly plots, it delivered the scary goods. This comes off like someone got a hold of a few pages of the Blood Diamond script and decided to make a horror ripoff. An on-screen title tells us this is actually “based on true events,” but it’s a croc.

IMDb link

viewed 1/13/07 at Moorestown