So I have this list of 60 movies that I was By God gonna watch this year, and I entered December not really sure I was going to pull it off. That’s generally a very busy period for me, and I was contemplating the very real possibility of carrying over any leftovers into 2013. Yes, I will be doing this again next year, the list is almost completely built. The major innovation will be starting it in January instead of later in the year.
So, anticipating this crushing personal defeat, what was my best course of action? Well, as a self-absorbed and pointlessly self-destructive child of the 60s, I felt the thing to do was to watch a movie that was not on The List. It makes sense if you’re me.
So, if you’re one of the bored people who follow me on Facebook, one evening you got to see this:
Yes, I fully admit that I am behind the social arc in many ways – that’s why I have things like The List. I’m in a perpetual state of catch-up because I don’t like to rush. Hell, I’m pretty much physically unable to rush. Anyway, there it was, on Netflix Instant, a movie that had been represented to me as the absolute nadir of movies for a couple of years.
So like I said: Inevitable.
I rarely live-Tweet movies, with the exception of Crapfests, where I don’t want moments to slip by and vanish in the increasingly inebriated Lost Weekend of my brain. But there was something about Birdemic that just forces the dismayed broadcasting of your pain, like vomiting to get tainted food out of your system:
Oh, yes, I was finding out that this was, indeed, a perfect storm of bad movie-making techniques. Flat acting (in the instances it could be called acting at all), pauses in the dialogue that you could drive several delivery trucks stuck in first gear through, and that very special horror, the blossoming of ambient sound before and after a line, bespeaking no ADR or even laying down an ambient bed to make each line of dialogue sound like it might have been recorded on the same day.
Gavin R. R. Smith tells me that there is a very obvious Getty Images watermark on the news “footage”. I’m going to take his word for it, cuz damned if I’m going back to check it out.
I assumed the awkwardly choreographed CGI birds were a hint of things to come – either that or this was a story from an alien world where physics do not work the same as ours. That interpretation is, in fact, still a possibility.
The dolly comment could come from several different scenes, but this one is particular was prompted when it is announced that Generic Software Company has been bought by Oracle for ONE BEELION DOLLARS and there is a series of shots of various people being cued to look excited while the camera dollies past their table. I think these people work for Generic. I don’t know, they’ve never been introduced and I’m too busy wondering what the director is trying to say by dollying past a six foot long table over and over again.
1) There’s no band, only a singer; 2) Our heroes are the only people in the bar 3) I’m still watching this 4) …
Finally after almost an hour of relationship-building, intermittent blurbs about global warming jammed into the narrative and saying “And… scene!” while actors wait for the camera to be turned off after they run out of lines, we finally come to the birdy apocalypse.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, *in* flight. My brain was attempting to claw its way out the back of my head. If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid Birdemic – eagles can hover effortlessly by flapping their wings once a second, and they do this in formation and unison.
So our heroes fall in with another pair of campers who are, fortunately, traveling around in a van with enough guns and ammunition to take on the pesky birds. Or maybe the guns are just magic, because I never see anybody reload.
As Birdemic progresses, the M*E*S*S*A*G*E* portions get more and more preachy and obvious. They’re the opposite of subtle. Really, all global change denialists had to say over the last two years was “What, did you see that in Birdemic, or something?” to shut down all debate.
Writing dialogue for four characters is hard (six, actually, but two rescued children never get to say anything) so the picture kills off the two gun-running campers. The second one, who buys it while trying to rescue three idiots from a double-decker bus, does so by falling prey to a Birdemic attack that has never been seen before and will never be seen again in the remainder of the movie: he and his idiot rescuees are doused by either bird puke, or bile, or poop or some goddamn thing that burns them to death or makes them die of embarrassment. Anyway, our hero drives off, leaving the assault rifle behind, and I really doubt the ammo is compatible with the pistol hero is packing.
I haven’t even mentioned the hero shooting the pistol and playing the recoil a second after the animated muzzle flash and sound effect. I’m not that mean.
Otherwise the hero would know that the proper response to hundred-dollar gallons of gas is to pull a gun on the price-gouging bad actor and pay the posted amount. But, although he already has a gun in his hand, he simply hands over his credit card. Ray Milland would have bitch slapped him.
Yeah, occasionally you’ll witness one of the birds divebomb something and explode on impact. Why? Global warming, that’s why. Our hero has multiple opportunities to scavenge more guns and gasoline but passes them up, so I’m more than a little miffed with him when he runs out of gas and has to catch a fish with dead camper gear. The two kids he’s rescued start whining about wanting Happy Meals, but – you guessed it – he’s run out of bullets and can’t shoot the ungrateful little louts. The birds fly in for one last swoop, but decide that since he doesn’t have bullets anymore, he’s no fun and fly off. In an end credit sequence that lasts forever.
Best comment of the night goes to @MovieMike:
Oh, and atheists? Stop arguing. Here is your proof that there is no God:
Somehow, somewhere in there, I watched Eyes Wide Shut and didn’t write about it. Certainly an ignoble end to one of my more ambitious projects this year: watching all of Stanley Kubrick’s movies, in order. The reasons for this are many, and most do not have anything to do with the movie itself. The ones that do, are, primarily: I hadn’t heard good things about it, and I am not a fan of Tom Cruise.
Well, the first image you’re going to see in Eyes Wide Shut is a nude Nicole Kidman, which should let you know what kind of a movie you are in for. For some reason, a naked woman in the opening shot for Student Teachers signals exploitation; in the opening moments of a Stanley Kubrick movie, it presages art. It probably has something to do with the lighting.
Cruise is successful Manhattan doctor Bill Harford and Kidman his wife, Alice. They’re preparing to go to a Christmas party held by one of Harford’s patients, a fabulously wealthy man played by another film director, Sydney Pollack. Bill and Alice, being young, beautiful people, are hit on by various sexual scavengers during the party. Afterwards, in a marijuana-fueled confrontation (Alice has that strain of pot that makes you aggressive, which I must admit is something I’ve never encountered), Alice is a little too frank about a fantasy she once had about a naval officer. This shakes Harford to his core, and in the next twelve hours, he is accosted by a recently dead patient’s daughter who claims to love him, nearly has an assignation with a prostitute, and finally ends up at a mansion in the middle of nowhere, a masked interloper in a bizarre Hellfire Club-type evening of debauchery, filled with naked women and others all similarly masked.
It’s this gathering that forms the center of our story, and the aftermath provides the remainder of the film. Discovered and ejected from the gathering, his life apparently saved by a woman willing to sacrifice herself in his stead, Harford attempts to piece together what exactly happened. Unable to admit to his wife what he did the night before, he also finds each of the brief, unfulfilled relationships of that evening terminated and unavailable. His paranoia becomes a feverish thing, as he becomes aware of a tough-looking individual following him. Finally, in a scene that is remarkably stolid for a Kubrick film, Sydney Pollack explains everything to him, and it’s not quite as weird or evil as we or Harford suspected.
In a fit of contrition, Harford admits everything to Alice, and the final scenes, in which the Harford take their daughter Christmas shopping, is actually a small masterpiece of acting. There is a lot of room between Bill and Alice, as they follow their child through the hectic store; their minds are obviously anywhere else than where they are, physically, at the moment. There is a note of rapprochement before the final fade, at least.
Eyes Wide Shut is taken from a novella called Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler, basically, dream story. Cruise really does move through the story as if it were a dream, frequently surprised, confused, often trying to extricate himself from events unfolding around him, and when he does initiate a situation, instead of having it thrust upon him – by hurriedly putting together a disguise and catching a cab into the super-wealthy wilderness – he pays a hefty price, suddenly finding himself in the weirdest Hitchcock movie ever made.
In all, it’s intriguing, if not especially fulfilling, watching Eyes Wide Shut unfold. The increasing unreality of Harford’s situation finally washed away in the overly-bright ultra-consumerism of a Christmas Macy’s. Seeing Cruise walk the night streets of a New York which we know – just because we know Kubrick – is really somewhere in England. The sudden, unheralded appearances of Alan Cumming and Fay Masterson. And the fact that I didn’t really mind Tom Cruise in this, at all (even if I find it dismaying that a well-to-do doctor drinks Budweiser, for God’s sake). Also, I like Nicole Kidman in eyeglasses, surprise, surprise.
And the fact that the very last word said in the last Kubrick movie, ever, is “Fuck”… well, dark humorist and cynic that he was, I’m sure that makes Kubrick chuckle occasionally in Movie Maker Heaven.
As I begin to write this out, it is December 5. I’ve managed to winnow The List down to 12 movies that I have 26 days to watch. Gosh, this is sort of exciting. Next year remind me to start this nonsense in January instead of March or April or whenever I began it this year.
So I bumped a few:
The biggest problem I have with watching The Last King of Scotland is reminding myself that what I am watching is not a docudrama, it was never meant to be a docudrama, it is supposed to be a thriller that just happens to feature one of the most infamous dictators of our time, Idi Amin. I’m going to blame Crapfest for this and the fact that for some reason we’ve watched Amin – The Rise and Fall twice and there are even people talking about a third go-round (to which I usually respond “Well then, we’ll have to watch Astrology Songs again, too.”).
In any case, Last King involves a fictitious young doctor (James MacAvoy) who comes to Uganda to help in a rural hospital, and who, through somewhat bizarre circumstance, becomes Amin (Forest Whitaker)’s personal physician and close adviser. Which all seems rather peachy until the man starts getting increasingly unstable and MacAvoy finds out about the massacres and people vanishing. By that time it’s too late, and he’s trapped.
Last King isn’t as tabloid-driven as The Rise and Fall, but there’s plenty of sensationalism to go around, much of it having the ring of truth. Things get very messy toward the end, though, both in terms of violence and plotting, such that it’s a relief when the end credits roll. Love or hate the subject matter, though, it is undeniably a marvelous showcase for Forest Whitaker’s considerable talent, rightfully earning him the 2007 Best Actor Oscar.
And hey, besides his love for Scotland, Amin was a big Man Called Horse fan! Who knew?
It’s small wonder that very same evening I followed up with Vanishing Point, a movie I have been assured for decades that I would love, and yet I had never seen. Well, now I have, and they were right. I could easily lavish 1000 words and more on this movie alone.
Famously, this movie stars Barry Newman as Kowalski, a man who drives cars to their destination for a delivery service. Picking up a white Dodge Challenger in Denver, he makes a bet that he can get it to San Francisco in 15 hours. Police don’t like muscle cars breaking all sorts of speed limits, so there is an effort across three states to stop him, even though the authorities admit that the only reason they’re trying to stop him is to ask him why he’s going so fast. And as the attempts to stop Kowalski escalate, he becomes a counterculture phenomenon, “The Last American Hero.”
The video box proclaims this to be “The Ultimate Car Chase Movie”, but Vanishing Point is as far removed from something like Eat My Dust as Seven Samurai is from Sgt. Kabukiman. It’s an existential mind trip, as you should guess when, at the movie’s beginning (which sets up just a few minutes from the movie’s end), Kowalski races past himself, which leads us into the beginning of the movie. Director Richard Sarafian says he wanted to construct the movie like a Möbius strip (and hoo boy, you can’t get much more of a 1971 sentiment than that).
As Kowalski travels across the desert, ripped on speed, he meets interesting characters, and we are given brief snippets of his past: a Viet Nam vet, decorated for bravery, a disgraced cop, busted for beating up his partner when he tried to rape a hippie girl. Motorcycle racer, car racer, a life full of wrecks. He forms an odd rapport with a blind radio DJ, Super Soul (Cleavon Little), who tries to pass important information to Kowalski, and pays the price for it.
If you have the blu-ray, I recommend the UK version. It has a scene, approximately five minutes long, where Kowalski picks up a hitchhiker – considering it’s Charlotte Rampling, cripes, who wouldn’t? – and tokes up with her. Considering he’s been offered marijuana several times in the course of the movie, this is pretty extraordinary. He also pulls off the road when he starts getting stoned. Rampling has an odd conversation with him, wherein she says “I’ve always waited for you, Every time, Every where. Patiently.” They kiss. Kowalski sleeps, probably for the first time in weeks, and when he wakes… she’s vanished.
It actually sets up the end very well, instead of hitting you between the eyes with it.
Other reactions: “This is a counterculture movie, where the hell is Severn Darden? Oh, wait, there he is.”
Also, the Naked Motorcycle Rider (Gilda Texter) was entirely justified artistically.
I should mention that it is now December 6, and the number of movies is down to 11. I feel like I’m racing toward some vanishing point myself.
The Fountain, on the other hand, is not an existential movie. It’s very layered, and I think it wants to think itself more profound than it actually is.
Hugh Jackman plays three roles, though two are actually the same man. You see, he plays a doctor who is desperately searching for a cure for brain tumors, in particular the type his wife (Rachel Weisz) is dying from, and on the way he accidentally discovers the Fountain of Youth in the form of an old growth tree in Central America. (The third character is a Conquistador searching for that very tree in a novel his wife is writing) Jackman literally finds out his treatment is actually causing tumors in experimental animals to shrink the moment his wife goes into her final seizure and dies.
Most of this is revealed in flashback while the now ageless Jackman travels through space in one of those bubbles that must be science so far advanced as to be magic. His only companion is that same Tree of Life, ancient and dying. Jackman intends to bathe it in the dying sun at the heart of the Orion Nebula, which his wife identified as the Mayan underworld, Xibalba; through what mystic avenues we may not know, he feels this will revive the Tree.
The story switches between these three narratives, which is a device that forces you to be involved or you’re going to get lost. That involvement invests you in the story, though the fact that Jackman and Weisz are both great actors also helps. The movie is gorgeous; director Darren Aronofsky eschewed CGI for the space sequences and used, quote, “micro-photography of chemical reactions on tiny petri dishes” resulting in a totally unique visual palette, which he stitches together with golden light in the other two storylines. It is a gorgeous movie, wonderful to behold; I’m just not sure who its audience might be.
When it was over, my wife said, “That was not a chick flick.” To which my only response could be, “Well, it certainly wasn’t a guy flick either.” I don’t regret watching it, I just have to go, Hm. Art. and let it wash over me.
One of the reasons I came up with The List was to force me to watch some movies I’d had around forever, or at least most of a decade or so. Now one of my favorite movies of the last year or so was Scott Pilgrim vs The World, and over the years I had picked up Edgar Wright’s last two movies, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, yet had not watched them. The List has put an end to such nonsense, eh?
So Simon Pegg is Nick Angel, a London cop who is so good at his job that he’s promoted sideways to a peaceful little village so he’ll stop making all the other cops look bad. The usual fish-out-of-water hijinks follow, except for a series of gruesome deaths that only Angel can perceive are murders. Nick Frost is along again as the larger, slightly slower-witted PC Danny, who loves movies like Point Break and Bad Boys II and is ecstatic to find himself serving with a genuine badass.
If there is a problem with Hot Fuzz, it’s that it takes a little too long to get itself moving, and even when it does, there is still a lot to get through until the third act – but by God you feel like you’ve earned that third act, which is spectacular and has one of the best twists I’ve seen. Edgar Wright is a master of the complete mood swing in the third act.
Wright seems to be making one of every genre movie he wants to, and with results like this and his other movies, I’m not about to complain.
There. Now to see if I can get the outstanding movies down to 10 before The Show eats my weekend.
Crap. You know what I watched and never wrote up? Eyes Wide Shut.
Let’s see how many of these I can spit out without going 1000 words for each.
Dark of the Sun (1968) had been getting some good notices at revival screenings around this time last year; it was pointed to as a forgotten gem of manly 60s cinema. Warner Archive put it out as one of their MOD (Made On Demand) discs, and I bit, mainly because The Wild Geese is one of the movies I keep returning to every couple of years.
Rod Taylor, you see, is a mercenary working the Congo Crisis in the late 50s. Along with his partner, Jim Brown (playing an American college-educated native), he is given the task of journeying into unfriendly territory and extracting a bunch of mining employees before the Simbas arrive and slaughter them all – and, oh yeah, also bring along the 50 million or so in diamonds they have in their vault. Things are made more complicated by a wannabe Nazi German merc in charge of the native forces, Yvette Mimieux, who survived a Simba massacre and is gathered up along the way, and the fact that the head of the mining operation set his time release vault way too far in the future, meaning everyone must escape under fire by the Simbas.
That seems complicated, but believe me, the movie itself gets even more complicated. I read through the Wikipedia article on the Congo Crisis, and I’m still pretty much at sea about the backstory. I’m more than a little suspicious of the way the Simbas are portrayed, in their savagery as they overrun the mining outpost; I’m reminded of John Wayne’s The Green Berets, when the Viet Cong overrun the firebase, and are dubbed with war whoops from one of Wayne’s earlier westerns, complete with an Injun motif on the score.
Our main players are solid and professional, and this may be one of Brown’s best roles. I wonder what happened with Peter Carsten’s lines, as Paul Frees winds up overdubbing a lot of them, which gets distracting when you’re a Paul Frees fan. I guess I bought into the hype a little too wholeheartedly, as I rarely felt caught up in the story or the characters. There’s a bit too much “Oh come on” action here, as events spiral out of control, stay out of control, and then proceed to get out of control. I have no idea how Rod Taylor’s merc gets so much work, because he has the worst damned luck.
After that less-than-salutary experience, I decided it was time to swing back to the Quality Portion of The List and watch – finally – Black Orpheus.
I had owned the soundtrack to Black Orpheus for years – overheard it in a back room at a cast party, and I fell immediately in love with it (Same guy also played the score to The Egyptian, and I really hope to have enough bread to buy that Twilight Time blu-ray before it sells out). My Criterion disc tells me this is the movie that “brought the infectious bossa nova beat to the United States.” And infectious it is, there is little wonder that whenever it breaks out, everyone on the screen begins dancing with wild abandon.
It’s hard to know anything about movies and not know the central concept here: director Marcel Camus re-tells the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, against the backdrop of Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival. It all starts out normally enough, and gets more fantastic as the story progresses. Eurydice is a country girl who comes to visit her cousin in Rio because she’s convinced a man is stalking her with the purpose of killing her; she meets neighbor Orpheus, a singer local children are convinced makes the sun rise with his songs. They fall in love, of course, much to the dismay of Orpheus’ vain and faintly psychotic fiancée. Then this fellow in a Death costume starts following Eurydice through the Carnival…
It’s amusing that the movie likes to mess with your head; when Orpheus and Mira (the aforementioned fiancée) get a marriage license at the beginning of the movie, and the clerk is informed his name is Orpheus, the clerk brightly exclaims, “Then you must be Eurydice!” to the predictably pissed-off Mira. The legend is common knowledge, what must happen as Orpheus finds himself falling in love with Eurydice is inevitable.
Using the modern Bacchanal of Carnival is so logical and perfect it also seems inevitable. The scene of Death in the parade crowd, ensnaring Eurydice with paper streamers is beautiful and memorable, and Eurydice’s death – though we know it is coming – still manages to be almost entirely unexpected, coming at the end of a cat-and-mouse chase worthy of any horror movie or giallo.
I had wondered how Camus was going to handle Orpheus’ descent into the Underworld to find his deceased lover, and once again, I was surprised and amazed. Orpheus, unwilling to believe Eurydice is dead, searches for her in the aftermath of Carnival; he arrives at the chaotic police building and is told to check with Missing Persons, which is a room full of stacks of paper in a labyrinth of halls where sheets of paper blow in an eerie wind. “People are lost in paper,” advises a janitor, filling in for Charon, He takes Orpheus to a voodoo ceremony where the spirit of Eurydice possesses a woman behind Orpheus to speak to him one last time, and despite her cautions, he turns around, losing her forever. Unexpected yet completely logical, given the setting.
As I say, this is a fairy tale wrapped in the trappings of the real world, a trick Camus managed magnificently. I can see now why it was recommended to me for years, if not why I didn’t watch it for years.
It’s a pity that a little of that magic couldn’t have hung around for my next movie, Then Came Bronson.
This is another oddity from my youth: this was the pilot for a TV show on NBC, and it ran a full season. 1969-70. I vaguely recall the series, and I seem to recall really wanting to watch it, but it was always on opposite something else my parents wanted to watch. Ah, the days of single TV sets and three networks! Warner Archive made the pilot available, allowing me to re-discover that Michael Parks was Bronson. I really dig Parks’ work, so I got the disc.
Well, now.
The pilot gives us the set up, Jim Bronson is a reporter who witnesses the suicide of his best friend, a biker named Nick, played by none other than Martin Sheen. When Bronson’s boss at the paper tells him he’s about to lose his job for writing a full story about “some greaser who offed himself”, Bronson tells him to take this job and shove it, buys Nick’s bike, and sets off on the road to find himself, because that is what you did in 1969. Along the way he picks up a literal runaway bride (played by a 21 year-old Bonnie Bedelia) and on the way to New Orleans, they manage to fall in love.
There seems to be a lot of French New Wave in this movie – now, I may be wrong about that, because frankly I’m more than a bit of an idiot about labels like those, and there’s likely a better one for this movie. There’s no plot, perse, Bronson and his passenger – she spends a lot of the movie not telling Bronson her name – ride around and have… well, not adventures, but stuff kinda happens, and… hm. Bonnie eventually winds up realizing that she needs to go back West and pick up her life, and Bronson rides off into the sunset. That was apparently the thing about Bronson in the series: he always changed people through his simple decency and coolness, but he never changed himself. Makes you think, don’t it?
Anyway, the quality of the disc is wonderful. Then Came Bronson apparently had a theatrical release, as the print bears a “GP” rating. It’s also possible that Warner Archive is giving us the European release, as in our first encounter with Bedelia’s character, when she takes off her bridal gown and throws it in the surf, we are given a very good view of 21 year-old Bonnie Bedelia breasts, and we are going to get flashes of this same scene throughout the movie (in that 1969-70 rapid-cuts-to-induce-epilepsy style). Then again, I seem to recall in this period you could get away with a surprising amount in a “GP” – Parental Guidance Suggested – movie.
It’s tempting to paint this as an Easy Rider wannabe, but the two movies are pretty contemporaneous – If anything, Bronson debuted a few months before the more famous movie. Easy Rider is similarly light on plot but has the power of a lot of pretension going for it; it tries to say something, whereas Bronson… just seems to exist.
(As quoted by Mystery Science Theater 3000)
From the sublime to the ridiculous, I suppose, because the next movie – and likely the last I’ll try to cram in this entry, was Snakes on a Plane, the movie the Internet wrote.
Well, to a degree anyway. There are lots of rumors about this: it has its origins in a bunch of suits boozing it up and deciding to see who could come up with the worst movie pitch. That the working title “Snakes On A Plane” was going to be changed to something more generic like “Boiling Point” or something but A) Samuel L. Jackson said hell no, I agreed to do it because of that title, or B) The Internet as a whole said, no, it’s awesome, keep it that way. One thing is certain, however: the Jackson line “I am sick of these motherfuckin’ snakes on this motherfuckin’ plane” came from the Internet. I was also looking forward to hearing Jackson yell into a radio microphone “We got motherfuckin’ SNAKES!” but I suppose cooler heads prevailed and someone decided that “Leaving them wanting more” would be good in this case.
And that is about the last time we can accuse Snakes on a Plane of subtlety. The central concept is goofy enough: Jackson is escorting an eyewitness from Hawaii to LA to testify against a big drug boss. Since the drug boss can’t kill the guy in any traceable fashion, he instead stocks the plane with a staggering variety of venomous snakes – and, for some reason, a python – and sets up a way to release them mid-flight. To cover up the fact that snakes would normally either attack each other or just hide until the plane landed, there is a macguffin about leis that are treated with some pheromone to make them go berserk. And turn into CGI snakes because real snakes don’t take direction worth a damn.
After spending a lot of time establishing our cannon fodder in the seats, once the snakes get loose, I have to admit the movie squeezes every bit of possibility out of the situation. Snake attacks come from all angles – how the hell that one got in an airsick bag is beyond me – and things keep getting worse and worse in a somewhat believable fashion. I totally get why you wouldn’t want all the vital parts of the plane’s systems in the same place, but why the hell they’re also so inaccessible is puzzling. And dammit, the movie proves it has its heart in right place when a desperate flight attendant, encountering a snake in the galley, tosses it in a microwave and hits the SNAKE button.
I respect that sort of gumption.
So yeah, I admit I went into Snakes with expectations extremely low, but I enjoyed it beyond the level the lowered expectations should have granted. Not bad for Venom on a plane, and that python did eventually pay off.
I actually recovered from a week and a half of Extreme Bizzitude the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Wednesday night was spent brining the turkey, Thursday, of course, was cooking and eating, then eating after a nap, then eating some more. Friday was more restful, as old chum Cabot Parsons was down from Noo Yawk to visit, and we made each other remember stuff from our more youthful days that we had good cause to forget (and then I ate). That was the restful day my body had really needed. And Saturday… ah Saturday… was the rest my soul needed, as I had no Show and therefore bullied everyone into a Thanksgiving Crapfest, or, as it is known, Crapsgiving.
Our Author, ready for action.
I think I actually stuffed myself more at Crapsgiving than I had at Thanksgiving. Host Dave had cooked up some excellent beef-and-venison sausages and sautéed the hell out of a mix of mushrooms and peppers and some dirty rice – nay, filthy rice – to accompany them. As the evening wore on we would also tuck into a huge pepperoni pizza Rick had snagged from Costco – I believe the crust was also made from pepperoni, as were portions of the box. In any case, there was a hell of a lot of pepperoni. Then the usual snacks, and Paul brought supplies for root beer floats. After a year spent losing weight, I am finally back to my fightin’ weight of 500 pounds.
While various people arrived, I played a disc of terrible things from, appropriately, everythingisterrible.com. Alas, the only people to be scarred by this were myself, Dave, Rick and one of two new guys who had arrived early, Erik. Erik brought his A-game, I must say; he came with some movies of his own, about the worst of which (that I had seen, anyway) was The Angry Red Planet, and I loveThe Angry Red Planet. But I don’t think he was entirely prepared for the brain-blasting awfulness we put ourselves through on a regular basis; though Everything is Terrible should have been a fair intimation.
We started off Crapsgiving Proper with The Big Doll House, Jack Hill’s first Filipino Women In Prison flick for Corman’s new company, New World Pictures. It isn’t the absurd perfection of The Big Bird Cage, but it is still pretty entertaining in its own right. This is apparently Pam Grier’s first big movie role, where Sid Haig is giving her acting tips as the shoot progresses. Their chemistry is damned good, so much so that Hill would pair them again for The Big Bird Cage the following year.
There is really only one plot in these movies: there are women in a hellish Filipino prison, and they want to escape. What sets each apart is the bizarreness of the setpieces. Granted, there must always be at least one shower scene, one wrestling match (usually in mud, if Corman has anything to say about it), and at least one torture scene involving nudity, ideally several. Doll House also has a food fight followed up by a general fire-hosing of the inmates (which, legend says, the inmates didn’t know was coming). This particular prison is also, for some reason, run by female Nazis, though there is also a shadowy hooded military man who seems to operate things behind the scenes, leading Erik to deduce that the prison is actually being run by Cobra Commander. (“I hate you, Joe! Now get undressed!”)
Surprisingly little nudity, given the movie’s ultimate venue was the drive-in, but some little caution was apparently called for in 1971. The next year Deep Throat would put “porno chic” on the cultural map and things would loosen up considerably for a few years, providing the teen-aged me with a short Golden Age at the Drive-In. The Big Doll House’s major problems are a Shakespeare-sized cast list (with an identically Shakespearean body count), getting rid of Pam Grier way too soon, and that there is no Vic Diaz. If I had been Ferdinand Marcos, I would have required every movie made in the Philippines to cast Vic Diaz. Dammit, A Filipino movie without Vic Diaz is like a Women in Prison movie without a shower scene.
Also best line of the night comes from Dave: “Sid Haig is like the Cary Grant of Women in Prison movies.”
Best of all, Big Doll House was one of the movies from The List – I now only have 15 to go before the end of the year (oy). Thank you, gentlemen.
Alan and Paul and the other newb, Joe, sauntered in toward the end of Doll House. Paul might have gotten to see an exposed breast, or two; Alan was not so lucky. Dave called upon me to put something on while he prepared martinis to fortify ourselves against his choice. I put on my new Shazzan disc, but when Dave sneered at it, I huffily withdrew it and substituted something I had promised Paul a long time ago: the very first episode of Hee Haw.
Most of you sneered just then. But then, most people are familiar with Hee Haw from its later, syndicated years, when the bits were old and worn and the writers were desperately pawing through whatever joke books they could find in resale shops to fill up time between country stars. But the first year, all this stuff was new, and the material was smart, surreal and sharp. There was no doubting the musical ability of the visiting stars (in this case Charley Pride and Loretta Lynn, who sang a feminist song about squaws going on warpaths) and there is no gainsaying Buck Owens. No, there is not, because Buck Owens kicks ass. The very first song, on Hee Haw, on the country & western version of Laugh-In, is not a country song. It is “Johnny B. Goode” with Dogpatch-styled go-go dancers.
(You know, when I wrote this, all these things were available on YouTube. I leave this horrid placeholder up by way of protest)
This is your monthly reminder that Buck Owens always disclaimed he played country. “I play American music,” he would say, and go back to rocking out. The twin brothers in the background were the Hager Twins, there for youth appeal. Their songs were likewise good, and I always find myself infected with their “The Gambling Man” for weeks after watching this first episode. Dig the kazoo action:
So despite initial disbelief, the room wound up enjoying Hee Haw. It opened up old memory through-ways and if nothing else, it was a memory you could sing along with:
Then, finally, Dave was ready to spring his horrifying choice of the evening on us. But it was a digital copy, running off a server in a back room, so while it transferred itself to a closer hard drive (honestly, we were one hot chick with short hair shy of a 90s hacker drama), we popped in an emergency disc I had gotten from Warner Archive some time before: Hollywood Party (1934). The trailer will give you some idea of the surrealism packed into its 69 minutes:
Yes, that’s a shockingly young Jimmy Durante going mano a mano with Mickey Mouse, and that is not the weirdest thing on display in this movie. The contents are surprisingly saucy – Hollywood Party just barely slipped out before the Hayes Code started being sternly enforced. This is the sort of movie that gives you some context into older Looney Tunes gags. We never made it to Mickey Mouse, much less The Three Stooges (still shackled to Ted Healey) or Laurel and Hardy. We never had time to ponder the allure of Lupe Velez, the Mexican Spitfire, whose act consisted of combining a spoiled brat with the worst psycho girlfriend you ever had. Hollywood Party was interrupted by the completed transfer of Dave’s choice: Abby (1974).
Abby is William Girdler‘s blaxploitation version of The Exorcist; it was reportedly more successful than Blacula, and one of several Exorcist knock-offs suppressed by Warner Brothers. I was a bit bemused by the other members of our gathering saying, “Abby? Abby? What’s that?” I sometimes forget what a strange little specialized bubble I occupy.
Snappy pith helmet, Bishop. You must be in Africa!
Abby is the fourth of five movies Girdler made in his native Louisville, Kentucky; he was known for making them fast and cheap, even when he moved on to Hollywood. I’m pretty sure most of Abby‘s budget went to paying William Marshall, and that is always a wise investment. Marshall plays Bishop Garnett Williams, who heads off to Nigeria to aid in pestilence and famine relief, but winds up unleashing an ancient demon who possesses his innocent daughter-in-law, the title character, played by Carol Speed. Again, there’s not much budget, so any demonic activity is limited to cursing, flailing around, popping an alka-seltzer into the mouth, renting a fog machine for one night, and scaring white women to death. And, oh yeah, screwing a bunch of men, much to the dismay of her husband, Williams’ son, himself a minister. I guess that’s a valid (and economical) path to take when your possessed character isn’t a schoolgirl.
Well, Pop comes back from Nigeria and after his son and Abby’s brother, a cop, track her down to a local nightclub, Marshall dons his holy dashiki and lays the righteous smack down on the devil. There’s a lot of not-quite subliminal flashes of Speed in some monster makeup (to echo the one in Exorcist) in the lengthy exorcism scene. They even pull out the stage illusion levitation trick, possible because they didn’t have to bother lifting a bed. Genius!
I’ve never been a big fan of The Exorcist, for much the same reason The Omen leaves me cold; I don’t have much in the way of religious roots to shake. So I’m afraid a cheap copy of The Exorcist (and Girdler, whatever his shortcomings, was refreshingly honest about that) isn’t going to do much for me. At least now I can say I’ve seen Abby.
Really, the most frightening thing about it: It has thrown the door open to a viewing of Exorcist II: The Heretic. Which, surprise, surprise, I have just gotten from the Swap A DVD Club.
You can take that earlier phrase “At least now I can say I’ve seen Abby” and use it for our next movie. Its possibility as a Crapfest entry had been danced around for some time, and finally, it seems, it was time to actually experience it.
Sweet Sassy Molassy. We’ve been through a lot at Crapfests. We’ve subjected ourselves to Dondi, Things and Strange Beings. We keep thinking we’ve developed scar tissue. But The Room punched us in places that hadn’t been touched before.
Writer/director/producer Tommy Wiseau also stars as Johnny, who is a saint, I tell you, a saint. His girlfriend, Lisa (Juliette Danielle) lives with him, and he buys her flowers, dresses, a ring, soon a car and a house. They are to be married in a month. Lisa, though, confesses to her Mom and everyone who will listen that she finds Johnny “boring”, doesn’t love him anymore, and isn’t going to marry him. Then she has an affair with Johnny’s best friend, Mark (Greg Sestero).
The Room is like a vanity novel about human relationships written by Martians; they know what relationships look like, but not what they sound like, what truly makes them tick.
Characters keep getting introduced, right up into the third act – at least I think that was the third act – mainly to tell us how awesome Johnny is and how evil Lisa has become. “She’s a sociopath!” Conveniently Introduced Psychologist tells us. Lisa also finishes every conversation with “I don’t want to talk about it!” and we were really sorry we hadn’t known to count those.
There’s a fair piece of your six million dollar budget right there.
There are four sex scenes in The Room. One is simply the first sex scene between Johnny and Lisa played again, with a different fake rock song on the soundtrack. These scenes make you wonder if you haven’t accidentally flipped to Cinemax; in fact, if not for the tragic ending, I would assume this was Wiseau’s audition tape for directing Cinemax flicks.
Wiseau is working through some issues here, and I don’t need a Conveniently Introduced Psychologist to tell me this. Johnny is just a wonderful human being, everybody agrees about this, even Mark while he’s schtupping Johnny’s girlfriend. So after everything is revealed at Johnny’s birthday party, and he makes everyone leave, Johnny tears the place apart (“I saw Orson Welles do this in Citizen Kane and it was awesome!“) and then blows his brains out, leaving Lisa and Mark to boo hoo hoo over their loss and transgression and doubtless the President to declare a day of mourning.
It’s that last scene, the oh-what-have-we-done scene, that leads me to believe that the vanity novel was written by an adolescent Martian. God, how many stories have we constructed in our little hormone-cooked brains where we died and everybody agonized over how badly they’d treated us? That’s what the last scene in The Room is, and the difference is that Wiseau managed to pull together a reported $6 million to make a movie version of it.
I also can’t help but laugh at the last part of that trailer, the “quirky black comedy” part. That’s the part that finally makes it salable, but The Room was not shot as a black comedy. It’s a teenage I’ll-show-them-all put to film, and I’m glad that Wiseau got some catharsis out of this, even if I and everyone who’s seen it has not.
My first encounter with The Room:
It’s the “Oh, Johnny, I didn’t know it was you” followed by “You’re my favorite customer” that still gets me.
Of course, I was live-tweeting the Crapfest, and about three-quarters of the way through The Room, I had to say this:
Little did I know that there is a Room bot out there, and I came home to this:
AAAAHHHHH! Stop haunting me, Tommy Wiseau! STOP HAUNTING MEEEEEEEEEE!
I’ve managed to survive that hellish week-and-a-half, though there were times I was fairly certain that it would have been possible to just lie down and die, like you hear about aboriginal elders doing. I would eventually exit those scenarios, and would lie down, but didn’t die, and that’s all to the better, I suppose. We’ve all heard the “I’m tired, but it’s a good tired” canard before, and yeah, I’ve experienced that. Not this time, though. It was a bad, cranky , irritable tired, a good-christ-will-you-people-get-it-in-fucking-gear-so-I-can-go-home tired.
It was a big week for The Show, the interactive dinner theater murder mystery thingie that supplements my part-time day job, almost adding up to a living wage. I have been doing this Show for, off and on, 15 years or so now. Yes, that is a pretty sobering realization.
Here is the thing about The Show: it is a gypsy operation with no true permanent space. There is a bit of room in the hotel’s banquet office where we keep our costumes, but by and large, everything else is packed into an aging minivan. This means I start every show by being a stagehand, carrying equipment from the van into whatever room we are occupying that evening. Then I get to be a technician, setting up the sound equipment and testing it. Then I get to be an actor for two-and-a-half to three hours. Then I return to technician land, breaking down and putting away the sound, then I get to be a stagehand again, loading equipment back into the van.
Sometimes, when you get several shows in a row, you luck out and get to stay set up in the room, with only minimal changeover activity. Last week was not one of those weeks, being the holiday season and all; in fact, the hotel’s schedule is so jammed that we wound up cooling our heels for close to an hour and a half while the room’s prior occupants finished up their presentation. This had happened once before, years ago and in another hotel. That time was bitterly amusing because the offending group was a time management seminar. This time it was a bunch of telecomm suits who didn’t seem much interested in the blather coming from the Power Point operator, and kept coming out into the hall to chat on their cellphones and be glared at by surly actors.
Setting up everything takes an unhurried hour or so. Thanks to this late group and the early scheduling of a weeknight show, we were being asked to accomplish this in 15 minutes. That didn’t happen; most of it was accomplished in 35 minutes, but then actors had to get in costume and make-up. All in all, the client group spent 45 minutes in the bar, which they didn’t mind, oh no, far from it. They were pretty well lubricated by the time they took their seats.
I hate drunks.
This is one very important reason why I never ever seriously considered a career in stand-up. Folks with a genial buzz on laugh more easily as their inhibitions loosen, but drunks have all barriers removed, they think they are funnier than you will ever be (never mind that you have been doing this professionally and successfully for 17 years), and for a drunk, volume is equal to hilarity. That particular show was a struggle to maintain control, and the aftermath, after the laborious loading back in, was the inevitable period of “What the hell am I doing with my life?”
Roger Murtaugh has become my spirit animal, “I’m getting too old for this shit” my mantra. That became very stark Sunday when the Show traveled; we were actually performing at some teenage girl’s birthday. The teenagers, I should hasten to say, were fabulous; they enjoyed themselves immensely, and the only slight problem was getting our stuff loaded out while they were dancing at the end of the evening. But we got really good at dodging each other.
The exhaustion hit in earnest that evening, and now, on Tuesday, I’m only starting to dig out from under. I obviously haven’t done bupkis on this blog, though I’m way behind in reporting on the movies I’ve watched. Then there’s the other writing project, the one I can’t tell you about, but the one that’s actually paying me money. Absolutely nothing got done on that front, but then most everyone else involved in that project was off at some conference all last week, so I’m not the only one.
In case you were wondering, the movies seen were Dark of the Sun, Black Orpheus, and Eyes Wide Shut. One day, I may get to tell you about them. I still have 18 movies left on the Lists to watch before the end of the year. If I don’t figure out how to lie down and die before then.
I keep looking at Google Calendar, and expecting the bad blocks to go away, but it isn’t happening. Monday is going to kick off the most hellaciously busy week-and-a half I have had in some time. So busy that getting up at a ridiculously early hour to cook on Thanksgiving day is going to seem like a lovely break. So I better write about this backlog, quickly, and while I can.
Night before Halloween night belonged to Dead Snow (2009) a Norwegian flick I knew very little about, except it obviously concerns Nazi zombies. Yes, I know, I said I was done with zombie flicks almost ten years ago – House of the Dead was the straw that broke the undead camel’s back. But, like Al Pacino, they keep pulling me back in. The reason I own this? It was 99 cents at a dying Blockbuster. What the hell.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but five medical students go to a remote cabin for the weekend. Your plot twists here are that it’s in Norway, and the cabin is a ski cabin, so you’re dealing with some trees, but a whole lot of snow. Medical student #6 is the one whose family owns the cabin, but she’s a real outdoorsy type, and is cross-country skiing to the cabin. Except she’s not, as we see her die in the pre-credits sequence.
Now, the old-timer local drops in from Central Casting to tell the annoyed students about the Nazi occupation during WWII, and how the villagers turned on the greedy krauts at the tail end of the war, and the Nazis ran off to the mountains – with all the gold they’d stolen – never to be seen again. So there’s an eeeeeeevil in the vicinity. Well, haha, old-timer gets eviscerated in his tent that night – that’s what he gets for not heeding his own warnings – and Dead Owner Girl’s boyfriend goes looking for her with the only snowmobile, leaving the others to find Nazi gold in the world’s worst hiding place, have sex in outhouses, and be set upon by Stormtrooper Zombies who are after the gold.
Dead Snow, if nothing else, wears its inspirations rather nakedly. When Token Movie Nerd asks his friends, “How many movies start with people going to a cabin with no cell signal?” and Token Movie Nerd Girl answers with a number of them, notably Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2, it doesn’t get more blatant than that (yes, it does, Movie Nerd is wearing a Braindead T-shirt – Dead Alive to us Yanks) – of course Movie Nerd Me points out both movies were made before years before the current cell phone boom and that is not a plot point in any of them.
Anyway, once we reach zombie siege territory and (oh alright, SPOILER) both movie nerds get offed (end SPOILER) so we’re spared anymore annoying meta humor, things start moving at a brisk pace and rarely let up. The only real problem is the feeling that we’ve tread this ground before, it’s just that this time that ground covered in snow. The gore is enthusiastic, give them that, and well-done. It’s just that truly inspired moments – like one of the students, after raiding a tool shed, charges a Nazi with a crossed hammer and sickle – serve mainly to point out how familiar the other gags have become.
Absolutely no idea why the Nazis were killing people before that errant gold was found. Guess they just enjoy being evil fucks.
Entertaining enough, but this is a definite rent or Netflix. Although, Norway: Still beautiful.
Halloween night, I know I’m going to get stuck with door duty because a) my wife always goes next door to watch Survivor, b) then she has to pick up my son who is helping his classmate guide her younger siblings around their neighborhood for trick-or-treat. I might as well watch a movie, but it’ll have to be something I’ve already seen, so I don’t mind the interruptions. Last year it was John Carpenter’s The Thing. This year? Well, I’d bought this impressively cheap blu-ray of The Omen. The original, of course. Which is odd, because I’ve never really liked The Omen.
At the end of the horror boom started by The Exorcist, Omen at least put an end to the seemingly infinite exorcism movies that were clogging the drive-ins and pointed the way to a wider variety of religion-based, or at least Catholicism-based, horror movies, to be carried on by The Sentinel and Holocaust 3000. Then 1977 came and Star Wars demonstrated that the new way to get rich was to throw spaceships at the screen.
So here is, I guess, my major problem with movies like The Exorcist or The Omen: I don’t find them particularly frightening, because I am simply not very religious. Not in the traditional Christian sense, anyway. I can appreciate the horror elements in both stories, the structure, the build-up, the FX – but that’s all they are to me. Elements. Ingredients in a recipe. I don’t experience these flicks the same way as the rest of the Western world, apparently.
Something else weighing against The Omen, thirty-five years later, is its deliberate pace. Its refusal to get to the Good Stuff, the stuff I was told about breathlessly on its first theatrical run – is actually something I respect. A movie this long was a bit of an anomaly in ’76, and usually the sign of a prestige Hollywood product… and make no mistake, this is what that was, with full-page newspaper ads and one hell of a cast, from Gregory Peck and Lee Remick to David Warner, Patrick Troughton and Leo McKern. The Omen franchise became known for its extreme death scenes, and you don’t really get the first one until 45 minutes into the movie, The second, another 45 minutes later. I never bothered with the remake (go figure!), but did it have the same structure? Were more Damien-inspired setpieces inserted for today’s ADD audiences?
I will likely never know. And I’m actually pretty okay with that.
So I admire The Omen for its craft, if not its status as a horror classic. What I do find interesting (and not at all surprising) is that David Warner’s death scene, in my memory, had become something quite more realistic, and done in a way that would be possible today with CGI, but not in 1976. (David Letterman used the beheading scene from the new Omen to punctuate a joke, and I admit it was well done. Then I have to point out that we live in an age when a bloody decapitation is used to punctuate a joke.)
That blu-ray is also packed with three commentary tracks, two of which feature Richard Donner. Those will be worthwhile.
I need to skip forward in time a week or so to keep a thematic thing going. In other words, about a week later, I saw another horror movie, and that movie was Grave Encounters. Oh yeah. Another found footage movie.
Grave Encounters‘ hook is that the footage was shot by the crew of a TV series called – um hm – Grave Encounters. A producer type, at the very beginning, tells us its production preceded all the other ghost hunting shows by a couple of years, and was showing great promise – “until they got to episode 6.”
For “Episode 6” the crew is going to be locked overnight in an abandoned mental hospital, hopefully to actually find some sort of evidence of the paranormal. Unedited footage as they scope out and set up in the hospital reveals they’ve pretty much had no luck in the previous five eps, and therefore none of them is a true believer, least of all their “psychic” – an actor who’s padding his resume.
Needless to say, as the night wears on, they find themselves rather in over their heads.
Grave Encounters has some decent scares, though too many are of the Paranormal Activity “Ooooh, that shouldn’t be moving by itself” type. When it reaches outside that economical comfort zone and get really weird, it hits paydirt. It’s tempting to go into some detail, but… no. If you’re interested, you deserve to experience them on your own.
I will say this, however: this is another movie that shows it’s inspirations, though not with a sense of humor as Dead Snow does. The influence of other abandoned asylum movies like Session 9 and the remake of House on Haunted Hill are dreadfully, wincingly obvious.
But I’m inclined to cut Grave Encounters some slack. It gets creative many times, and let’s face it: I really hate ghost hunter shows. My son is addicted to them, and frequently gets my wife sucked into them, too, but all I see is some people who found a way to monetize standing in dark rooms freaking themselves out.
Currently available on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. You could do worse. I certainly have.
While things moved around and clicked and cackled over the last week or so, I would find myself with some time, but not a lot of time, or if it was a lot of time, it was at the waning end of a long day, So what to do with that time? Watch movies, but not have time to write about them. That’s the cartoon snowball rolling down a mountain and growing into a giant all-devouring globe of hungry ice that is my life.
I’m staring down the barrel of beginning of a new writing project in the next week or so – in fact, the first step of that was what rolled over my Sunday. So pretty soon, my time for staring at a blank piece of virtual paper is going to be spent in the service of another master. Sorry. But this one will be paying me money.
So I better write about that growing list while I still can.
First there was the run-up to Halloween.
In any book or article about Hong Kong movies in general, or Asian horror movies in particular, you’re going to run into Black Magic (1975) a lot. This was an attempt to catch the wave of Western horror that was sweeping the markets in the wake of The Exorcist, a movie that moved HK cinema beyond ghost stories and into the land of the extreme. Black Magic kicks off a cinematic trend that would eventually lead to outrageous stuff like Centipede Horror and Seeding of a Ghost. As I started exploring Asian cinema in the early 90s, I had to take what I could get, so Seeding was one of my first experiences; it’s no wonder that Black Magic seems tame by comparison.
It starts strongly enough, with our Black Magician slicing off pieces of a corpse (handily stored in his hut) and burning them in a ritual to send a death spell at a philandering husband and his lover. Our White Magician shows up at the murder scene, immediately deduces who did this horrible thing, and starts a spell that sends horrible things back at Black Magician, who manages to escape while his hut collapses and burns.
Well, enough of that, though. In the big city, a youthful Ti Lung plays an architect who is being stalked by an incredibly horny (but rich) widow played by Lily Li. Ti wants nothing to do with her though, planning to marry his sweetheart. When a spurned gigolo (played by Lo Lieh, no less) hires the Black Magician to put a love spell on Lilly so he can get his hands on her money, Black accurately sizes up the Gigolo’s character and only applies a one-night spell. Lilly forces the Gigolo to tell her about the Black Magician, and visits him to place the Architect under her spell for a year. The love spell is applied on his wedding day, and Ti leaves his bride at the reception.
When the spurned bride and Ti’s friends try to find out what the hell is going on, Lilly pays the Black Magician to put the Death Hoodoo on the bride; Her landing in the hospital, her body riddled with parasitic worms leads an old retainer to remember the White Magician of his youth. White cures her by ramming a bamboo straw in her back so the worms crawl out (ew), and the battle for Ti Lung begins in earnest.
The trappings of the various spells are intriguing: pieces of corpses, human breast milk, centipedes (White has the best line when Ti Lung is recovering from his first bout of bewitchment: “Feed him these centipedes in the morning. He’ll come to his senses for a while.”). The structure is a bit repetitive, though, with Ti under the spell, then rescued, then put under the spell again, to pad out the running time. The climactic battle between the Black and White Magicians is supposed to wow you, of course, with Black pulling out all sorts of skull mirrors and a rotting head that shoots green laser beams, but all it really does is convince you that William Girdler saw it while working out the ending for The Manitou all cartoon ray blasts and lightning. As the first of its kind, it commands some respect, but make sure you see it before any of its weirder and grosser and more insane progeny.
Next up was Ravenous (1999) yet another movie on my list of Stuff I Hadn’t Seen But It Was High Time I Did. In its heyday, it had lots of Internet buzz, many of my friends positively love it, I’ve had this copy forever. So. Time to watch it.
Ravenous is a deuced odd movie.
Disturbed Mexican-American War veteran Boyd (Guy Pearce) is exiled to Fort Spencer, a remote, ramshackle frontier outpost populated by damaged individuals. He arrives just in time for a horror story from a bedraggled refugee (Robert Carlyle) whose wagon train, trapped in winter storms, turned to cannibalism. The commanding officer (Jeffrey Jones) states, rightly enough, “This is what we’re here for,” and leads most of the fort – five men – to investigate. Things go rather downhill for everyone from there, and half the fun of Ravenous is watching these berserk circumstances develop.
I had a general idea of the subject matter and how the story would develop (and as two of the characters at the Fort are Native Americans, you just know the Wendigo legend is going to pop up); but what I wasn’t prepared for was how it developed. The Wendigo legend states that whenever a man turns to eating the flesh of another man, this is all he ever wants, forever. Another thread of cannibal legend – that by eating another person, you gain their strength and vitality – is also laden all through the movie, and presented as absolutely true – characters are saved from mortal wounds by the rapid healing engendered by a diet of long pig. That kind of caught me unawares.
It was like watching that episode of Chuck Norris Karate Kommandos that presents voodoo black magic, including voodoo dolls and zombies, to be absolutely real, which is not the sort of thing you expect in a children’s cartoon. That sort of disconnect.
(Where else can you find a discussion about cannibalism, Chuck Norris, and cartoons? The Internet, ladies and gentlemen!)
It is amazing Ravenous exists at all, given the oddness of the story, and its troubled history. The original director was sacked two weeks into production and replaced by Antonia Bird, largely a TV director, who rises to the challenge magnificently. I daresay having a woman at the helm helped to punch up the black comedy quotient quite a bit, because this is truly what this is: jet black comedy wrapped in a horror movie masquerading as a Western. I can’t say I love it as much as my friends, but it is a unique movie, well worth seeing.
Saturday morning belonged to Drive Angry (2011), another movie that had gotten good buzz. As I recall, I bought this Blu-Ray at a Black Friday sale last year for $5.00.
And finally, here is a movie I can be enthusiastic about.
Nicolas Cage plays the appropriately named John Milton, a hardass felon who breaks out of Hell because the Satanic cult who murdered his daughter is now planning to sacrifice his infant granddaughter during the next full moon. Milton teams up with Piper (Amber Heard). a similarly hardass ex-waitress who’s not afraid to throw a punch or shoot a gun. Besides the apparently limitless number of murderous cult members standing in his way, there’s also the small matter of a demon named The Accountant (William Fichtner, who is having a grand time) sent to bring Milton back to Hell. Fortunately, Milton also stole an arcane weapon called The Godkiller…
It has been a long time since I’ve seen a movie like this deliver on all its promises. Action-packed, dripping with sardonic humor, gory, loud, profane. Why in the hell this movie was not a bigger hit is beyond me, but then I also have to admit that my tastes are somewhat more rarefied than that of the rest of the movie-going public. The fact that its smart enough to give Tom Atkins an extended cameo only enhances it in my eyes.
If I have two cavils about Drive Angry, it’s these: the movie seems to owe a debt to author Richard Kadrey’s punk-occult-neo-noir Sandman Slim novels; and the sex-during-a-gun-fight scene was done in one of my other favorite stupid over-the-top action movies, Shoot ‘Em Up. Then, Hollywood has always rather been like Ravenous, anyway: constantly eating its dead. So why I should be surprised to find DNA from other movies is a measure of my naiveté, I suppose.
Anyway, yeah, I dug Drive Angry. Much better Ghost Rider movie than either of the flicks bearing that name.
I haven’t even hit Halloween yet, and we’re already over 1500 words. We’ll leave on a high note, and pick this up later.
In my book, there are a few things you don’t discuss, and by you I mean me. These are the usual suspects, politics and religion. Yes, I have my opinions and beliefs. They are mine. If you ask, I will likely tell you them, but they’re not open to discussion. If I’m interested, I’ll ask yours. But frankly, I’m usually not interested.
Nothing comes of these discussions. Well, if there was an actual discussion, it might; but generally, on these subjects, it just becomes an acrimonious debate, each side attempting to score points and drown out the other. I don’t have time or the patience for it. My blood pressure is finally stabilized, and I intend to keep it that way.
Yes, future archeologists, I am writing this in an Election Season. How very astute of you.
I voted on the very first day of Early Voting, another reason why political discussion is a waste of time with me. It’s done, I’ve moved on. In the car, if I don’t need a traffic report, I use an MP3 player instead of the radio (Houston radio is mostly garbage, anyway). I don’t watch much TV in the first place; Netflix and DVDs are my entertainment source. There is no other media solution for the Already Voted, no surcease from political advertising, and if there were, it would probably be infested with those waiting until Election Day or not voting at all… everybody’s sick of it.
It could be worse. I could live in one of those “battlefield states”. Texas is as red as undercooked steak, something my nose gets rubbed in repeatedly. It is a place where you can wear a T-shirt that says “Fuck Obama” to a family restaurant with apparent impunity.
But there I go, getting political. It’s infectious, in the worst way. It surrounds you, engulfs you like an amoeba. I check Facebook only sparingly; I’m not inclined to shun any friends because they hold a differing opinion from mine, unless it’s on some subject like whether we should eat arsenic or not. But it can be distressing in a very real sense. As I say, these things have a tendency to get ugly very quickly.
Our neighbor across the street has had a sign reading “Vote Republican – We’ve Can’t Afford Any More Change” in his yard. I find it intriguing it is not specifically a Romney endorsement, but I shrug and move on. His yard, his opinion. That is what makes America cool.
My wife is an ardent Obama supporter, however, and that sign rankled. So much she obtained a larger Obama sign and placed it in our front yard. And got Obama magnets to put on our cars. All very well and good. They’re the only political signs on our little cul-de-sac, so we’re nice and balanced.
Then I found a little leaflet in our mailbox, shoved far back, farther back than the mailman ever does – with studied efficiency he places the mail near the front, slaps the box shut, and moves on. It was a small, trifold religious pamphlet with the words “DEATH — ARE YOU PREPARED?” on the front, the screed in the middle, and a form for more information on the back. That’s what caught my attention:
Yeah, I got smart and blotted out actionable stuff. But, let me attempt to translate:
obama voter are taker
wake up and smell the roses
“obama” is the baby killer party
Gay marriage (although that might be “Guy marriage”, which is to them, I am sure, the same thing)
you can’t be a Christian and vote for a baby killer
The party who kicked “God” out
This is my first actual, physical piece of hate mail. Oh, I’ve gotten hateful e-mail before, mainly from fanboys who were butthurt that I did not regard KISS Meets The Phantom of the Park with proper reverence, or that I might have hurt the BeeGee’s feelings when I trashed the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band movie. I am quite, quite serious about this. Those e-mails had the same general tenor.
Of all that, I find myself most drawn to the quotation marks around “God”. I mean, was it not actually God who was kicked out, but an air-quotes “God”? Some sort of simulation? Was the writer not even certain? It’s like the quote marks around “obama” that turns “obama” into the name of the party, if not the party itself. This is the sort of thing that makes the copy editor in me nuts. Sorry, the “copy editor”.
Besides the number of Christians that have voted for baby killers in the past and will continue to (sorry, you start slinging around a broad epithet like “baby killer” I’m going to have to point out it doesn’t just refer to abortion, but every child that’s been killed in a war, that dies of malnutrition, that dies from lack of proper medical care), there is also the lovely cliché, “wake up and smell the roses”. implying I am asleep and cannot smell, which, coming from someone who intended to tell me about why their particular interpretation of a Sky Wizard should affect my life, (at least until they saw the baby eater sign in the front yard) is risible to me at the very least.
There was a cold moment of “You fucking coward, you couldn’t even say this to my face, could you?” And then, I laughed. All their saying this to my face would have gotten them was my door slammed in their face, if I had even opened it in the first place. (Last time I checked, there was no law that stated I have to open my door just because you knock on it). No, this time they had not even approached my door, perhaps afraid the evil Obama sigil would reach out and grab them like a lamprey, sucking out all their sweet moral fiber.
So that one sign had done what no amount of not answering the door or Sorry, not interested or Could you come back later? I’m sacrificing a black goat in the back yard right now could accomplish: it deflected the missionaries, it left me in peace. I wonder if I should leave it out there after the election.
There, that’s that. I found it interesting, that this person was so discomfited by a sign that he or she not only ignored their supposed calling but felt it necessary to put pen to paper to tell me how horrid and rotten I am. It has been that sort of election. Each side is filled with demons, and they just look like our friends used to look, they can’t be our friends anymore, they believe in the wrong things. There are times I really wish the panic merchants were right and the world would end in December. It would almost come as a relief. Things really cannot continue like this without something breaking.
In the meantime though, I’m going back to writing things not for myself and then maybe write about something safe like the movies I’ve watched (well, safe as long as I don’t diss any rock stars) and then work my three jobs in an attempt to pay this month’s bills. Cuz, you know, I’m such a taker.
It must be Fall, although the outside temperatures are still freakishly hot and humid. Honestly, the worst thing about my laziness (and lifelong pursuit of becoming so sedentary I am declared a rock formation) is that I never bothered to move somewhere colder. I like wearing jackets and sweaters, boots. I find gloves bizarrely sexy. All these things are unnecessary 10 months out of the year here in the swamplands of Texas.
So how do I know it’s Fall? Things are getting busier. Much busier. Last week I alluded to squeezing in some movies in between a weeknight show and editing two stories (I didn’t even mention shooting a third, that came up at the last minute). This week, not much better. Edited one story, trying to set up interviews for three more. Not shooting this week but I have two shows this weekend. Monday night my family celebrated my birthday, because my actual birthday night I was working the Economic Development Corporation. This afternoon I journey into town for a preliminary meeting on another educational writing project which will allow me to pay bills in a timely manner for a few months. Such is life.
In the meantime, however, there are movies. Yes, many movies. Let us begin.
Last Tuesday I gave in to an urge I’d been feeling for a while and re-watched Psycho (the original, puh-leeeeeze). This is one of those movies I just have to watch every now and then, just to drink in Hitchcock’s master class in how to do slow-burn tension-ratcheting. The set-ups are so simple, so economical, that you despair why more filmmakers can’t do equally well with so little. The answer, of course, is they’re not Hitchcock.
There are a lot of different stories about the whys and wherefores of why Psycho is in black and white. That Hitchcock thought it would make the gore less offensive, the studio didn’t want to spend a lot of money on such obvious trash that was so obviously destined to fail, that Hitchcock noticed that crappy little B&W B-movies were making money hand over fist so what would happen if we made a good one?… in the final analysis, it doesn’t matter, it just works, and at the time it probably heightened the almost documentary feel of the movie, thanks to TV news every evening in black and white. Hitchcock was using a 50mm lens, the closest to human vision, to really drag out the feeling that the viewer was a voyeur in the whole matter.
Psycho is also interesting to me as the movie that changed the way we watched movies. I remember when I was a kid in the early 60s, you went to a movie whenever you felt like it. If you arrived in the middle, well, fine, you played catch-up with your native wit, stayed through the changeover, then watched until you hit the point you entered; kids, this is where the phrase “This is where I came in” comes from. Hitchcock insisted no one be seated after Psycho began, and though I have no way of determining how well this was enforced, it still ushered in a sea change of how we attended movies. The “exclusive road show engagements” of the 50s-60s helped also, but it’s possible to point to Psycho‘s box office success as a touchstone in the practice of seeing a movie from the beginning.
I also feel the need to point out the stunning work done on my Universal Blu-Ray’s audio tracks – the crew pulled a very nice 5.1 track from the original soundtrack. It doesn’t call attention to oneself, but it beautifully broadens a monophonic track into a true soundscape that I think Hitchcock himself would have appreciated.
Next up was The Woman in Black, one of those movies I intended to see in a theater but didn’t. This is the first movie from the revived Hammer Films, leading me to expect good things. There were strands of the old Hammer DNA in evidence; a good cast, led by Daniel Radcliffe (trying to put Harry Potter behind him and somewhat succeeding) and Ciaran Hinds as the most modern member of a superstitious village; great period detail matched a superb production design. What I didn’t get was the Hammer mastery of all that is Gothic.
Woman in Black relies throughout its first half on cheap jump scares administered far too frequently; there is some good scary stuff in the second half – and more jump scares – but those times that a person suddenly appears WITH A LOUD MUSICAL STING totally squanders any good will the creepy stuff engenders. I’m still looking forward to further Hammer offerings, but this one does not go on the shelf next to the others.
And cripes, wouldn’t it easier on everyone if these superstitious villages would simply come clean with out-of-towners and just tell them why they shouldn’t go to the Old Dark House?
The Show that Saturday was cancelled – actors out-of-town – and that would usually be cause for moping about all morose-like, because that’s disastrous for my fragile economic ecosystem. But you know what? not this time. This time I knew what to do. I dropped Rick a line and asked if he wanted to waste a Saturday watching movies again. Well, by golly he did, and thereby hangs the rest of this post.
The night before this epic meeting, Rick e-mailed myself and another Crapfest pal, Alan, about finding a gray market site that was selling a piece of 70s/80s softcore to which Alan had gotten attached in his teen cable-watching days. I fired back to Rick “Never mind that, Savage Sisters is playing on Channel 11-2 RIGHT NOW.”
You see, back during one of the Crapfests, I had infected Rick with my perverse love for Cheri Caffaro. To this point, I have played the Ginger Trilogy to an appreciative (and more than a little perverted) Crapfest crowd, and I know they’ve watched H.O.T.S., on which she has a producer credit (due diligence: sweet Jesus, but I hate H.O.T.S.). More due diligence: I haven’t seen her first movie, A Place Called Today, in which she has a supporting role. But Savage Sisters is the only remaining movie I would have shown at a Crapfest, such is its quality.
To get back to our narrative: Rick doesn’t get good reception on that particular channel, so he didn’t see it, breaking his heart. Guess what, then, was the first thing we dropped into my player? (And all due glory to Brit Stand-Up Guy Dave Thomas for supplying me a flawless, letterboxed copy)
This starts in pretty typical Filipino territory; Cheri is the girlfriend of the head of the Rebels, who gets double-crossed by the villainous team of Sid Haig and Vic Diaz. Cheri and another hardcore rebel, Rosanna Ortiz (who herself has a killer filmography in the Philippines) wind up in jail under the tender care of Gloria Hendry, who is the Vice President In Charge of Torture at the prison (which I believe I recognize from Women in Cages), and knows Rosanna from their earlier prostitute days. MEANTIME, hustler John Ashley has found out Sid Haig killed the Rebels (including Cheri’s boyfriend) for a “MEELION dollars, US currency!” and recruits old pal Hendry to spring Cheri and Rosanna so they can all chase after the bucks.
PHEW. As you can tell, this isn’t your typical Filipino WiP movie; besides the complicated set-up, it also contains a rich vein of bizarre comedy, especially with the incidental characters. The corrupt General, of course, has a chest full of medals; when he removes his jacket, his dress shirt is equally decorated, so naturally, when he removes that, his undershirt is also festooned with medals. A Punjabi sidekick who speaks in gibberish only Ashley can understand, a failed kamikaze pilot, and Sid Haig doing his best to masticate the entire landscape. Since his character is “a bandit”, he wears a serape and sombrero, and uses the adjective “Stinking” every third word. As his sidekick, Vic Diaz essays an eyepatch and is apparently only invincible when his plumber’s crack is showing, like some slovenly Greek legend.
This really is one of the best Cheri Caffaro movies around, mainly, I think, because hubby Don Schain was nowhere near it.
Afterwards, we were talking about the movie while making queso, and Rick was amazed at the unexpected humor. “Yeah,” I said, “it’s like they gave Eddie Romero this amazing cast and said, Make us a women in prison picture, and what he did was give them the Death Race 2000 of women in prison movies.”
“You know,” said Rick, “I’ve never seen Death Race 2000.”
There was silence for a moment. “Keep stirring that cheese,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
No friend of mine is going to say he’s never seen Death Race 2000.
The premise of Death Race 2000 is simplicity itself, especially if you’ve ever played the sick game in a car about how many points each pedestrian is worth. In the far-flung future of 2000, in a world devastated by “The Crash of ’79”, Mr. President (from his Summer mansion in Peking), gives the official start to the most popular sporting event evar, the Transcontinental Road Race. Five racers and their navigators, representing various tribal cliques and possessing pro-wrestler-like larger-than-life personas, charge across America, solving the overpopulation problem where they can.
Death Race 2000 is a goofy good time. Early Sly Stallone as a bad guy! Walter Cronkite impersonators! Mary Woronov! Illinois Nazis! Breasts are exposed every so often to remind us that it is, indeed, a drive-in movie. The second unit race footage is pretty good, but it’s Bartel’s sense of the absurd and savage barbs at media culture that edges this one from the ranks of forgettable action fare to actual classic. I had fun with the “remake” starring Jason Statham, but I don’t see anyone, forty years from now, excitedly pulling it from a shelf to share with their friends.
And as many times as I have seen this movie, I had never before realized John Landis had a line in it. Stallone runs him over for it.
(Oh, yeah, that guy on GetGlue who posted “This movie sucks. The remake was 10 times beter (sic).”? Keep looking over your shoulder. One day, I’ll be there.)
It was starting to get dark out. I cooked up some chicken fajitas while we played a bootleg DVD Rick had brought over, of a 1975 KISS concert. I’ve never been a fan, but Rick was exclaiming over how young they were, how energetic was the guitar work. Myself, when I walked through the room, marveled at the black-and-white video, complete with streaks and ghosting and trails whenever the highlights overpowered the tube cameras. Took me back to my days in public access at the local cable company, it did.
As we ate (and damn, I’m a good cook), we tried to get back to the concept that I have a List to watch and we were supposed to be whittling that down, so we slipped in Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold.
This is honestly about the best-looking, if most absurd, blaxploitation movie I have ever seen.
So the 6’2″ Tamara Dobson is back as Cleopatra, and this time she’s come to Hong Kong to track two of her agents who were trying to infiltrate a heroin ring, only to be captured by the Dragon Lady (Stella Stevens, keeping up the tradition of odd female villains in the short series). Cleo immediately disses her boss, Norman Fell (engendering the phrase, “Oooh, Norman Fell burn!”) and decides to go out on her own. In a foreign city. Where she doesn’t even speak the language.
Well, that’s not the only extraordinary thing that’s going to happen in this movie. Cleo falls in with an equally tough HK woman and her gang of motorcycle-riding investigators, and we’re off. Like I said, this is an amazingly well-shot movie. Run Run Shaw is listed as a producer, and money is thrown at the screen in all the right places. Chase scenes through the crowded streets of Hong Kong are thrilling, and there is plenty of pyro and gunfire. What there isn’t, sadly, is much of a compelling story, but it is overall a painless way to spend 90 minutes.
Then, at last, the Final Round. What Rick had been looking forward to all evening, if not all week: Fight For Your Life.
Fight For Your Life carries with it a lot of baggage. What we have here is a bona fide video nasty, put on that daunting list along with such movies as Driller Killer and I Spit On Your Grave. Banned outright in Sweden. Legend is it caused riots in the grindhouses of 42nd Street.
Rick was looking forward to the ultimate in transgressive cinema. What I have learned about Rick is that he can buy seriously into hype. He still curses the day he bought a ticket to Gates of Hell and saw neither gates, nor hell, nor reason it was supposedly banned in 39 countries.
Anyway.
Fight For Your Life concerns three escapees from a prison van: Jessie Lee Kain ( a very early appearance by William Sanderson) , Chino (Daniel Faraldo, who went on to a decent enough TV career) , and Ling (Peter Yoshida, who… well, not so much). After a fairly brutal crime spree as they edge toward the Canadian border, the three take a middle class black family (the Turners) hostage, intending to steal their car and make their run after dark.
This is apparently racist.
As you might imagine with a musical name like Jessie Lee Kain, the leader of the thugs is not just a bigot, he is a unrepentant suuuuuper bigot. A whole lot of the movie is Kain spouting his racist bile at the Turners and generally being a hateful jackass. Rick and I were concerned that he would run out of epithets, and to be sure, at one point he begins referring to Mom Turner as “Deputy Dawg”. This frankly bewildered me, because I remember Deputy Dawg. He was a TerryToon back in the early 60s, and moreover, he was a white dog. I don’t get it. but anyway…
So what we have here is basically a racist version of The Desperate Hours, with some diversions along the way, like young son Turner’s white friend showing up and finding out the family is hostage, but (work with me here) Ling, who was sent out to capture the white girlfriend of the (now deceased) elder Turner son – and winds up accidentally killing her – well Ling finds the white boy running away and kills him with a rock. Not too swift, is Ling.
So there’s a little more going on here than a hostage drama. We also cut away every now and then to the antics of Rulebook Riley, a New York police detective pursuing our ne’er-do-wells. As his name implies, Rulebook has a zero-tolerance policy toward everything. Jaywalkers, drunk drivers, spitting on the sidewalk. If Rulebook catches you breaking the law, you are screwed.
Some actual detective work does bring the police, at last, to the Turner house (not that Kain and company have been particularly stealthy). One policeman finds the white kid’s body in the forest and carries him to the command center, and wouldn’t you know it, he was the Sheriff’s son. One screaming charge at the house later, Kain has put another cop on his kill list. But! The distraction allows our hostages to turn the tables, and now it’s revenge time!
This is what Rick was looking forward to, and so was I and so is every audience member that ever watched this (except for the ones that thought Kain was the hero and that he was exercising some restraint. God help me, I said that as a joke but it occurs to me there are actually are such people). I mean, one of the alternate titles was The Hostage’s Bloody Revenge, for pete’s sake. So let’s see what we get. Spoilers ahoy.
Now first of all, the cops have this parabolic listening device that no one can get to work properly, until Rulebook, in a fit of frustration, bashes it a good one and it suddenly works like a charm. He hears the Turners discussing what to do with their tormentors, and he also finds out all three men raped the daughter. Rulebook suddenly switches to a much older rulebook and orders the cops to wait.
Chino gets shot in the balls. Okay, that’s a start, a fitting end for a rapist. Ling freaks out and jumps through a window, and gets himself impaled on an absurdly long and apparently strong piece of glass. That… was weird. The daughter approaches Kain with an electric carving knife, but she can’t go through with it.
It’s all going to end up with a standoff between Pop Turner (Robert Judd, incidentally) and Kain, with Rulebook tossing Turner his pistol. Kain gives us the final piece of his backstory, that his mother ran off with a black man, and then he gets shot in the throat. The end.
Rick – and the aforementioned masses who bought a ticket – were expecting a climax like The Last House on the Left times ten, but got… well, some blood but not a whole lot of catharsis.
Fight For Your Life is a pretty competently made little thriller that goes a little long in the second act, but then we’re also talking about a video nasty with some actual character beats. The Turner family is well drawn – the filmmakers made damn sure where our sympathies lie – and it all comes just that close to making it to the next level of actually good movie as compared to grindhouse button-pusher. There’s something to be said that all the real violence, save the daughter’s rape, is perpetrated against white people. The cops, a gas station attendant, a liquor store owner, the white kid, the white girlfriend… but now, having made that observation, I have no idea what to do with it.
The Turners themselves have a broad range of racial opinions. Mom doesn’t like honkies and is still pretty pissed off that her elder son had a white girlfriend (this is one of the saddest ignored threads in the movie: had Ling brought the girlfriend to the house instead of chasing her over a cliff, there would have been a whole new dimension of racism and possible character reconciliation… but no, we went with some boobs and a mannequin tossed into a waterfall). Daughter loves the white girl friend and wishes she’d had time to get married into the family.The young son, of course, has not only a white boy as his best friend, but the friend is the son of The Man. Pop Turner is a preacher, who is going to have his faith righteously tested and eventually returned to its Old Testament roots. And Grandma has seen it all and weathered it all, and gets the best lines.
Like I said… this close.
So a sadder but wiser Rick went home that night, denied once again the ultra-violent extravaganza that had been promised him. But, as the mantra of the crap cineaste goes, “now we can say we’ve seen it”, and hopefully, next time, we won’t get fooled again.
Yes, we will. We’re saps, and really, I think there’s a part of us that enjoys being saps, we enjoy making movies in our heads that do not exactly turn out the same on screen… for some of us, that’s the only way we have left to be surprised.
So I have this list of 60 movies that I was By God gonna watch this year, and I entered December not really sure I was going to pull it off. That’s generally a very busy period for me, and I was contemplating the very real possibility of carrying over any leftovers into 2013. Yes, I will be doing this again next year, the list is almost completely built. The major innovation will be starting it in January instead of later in the year.
Yes, I fully admit that I am behind the social arc in many ways – that’s why I have things like The List. I’m in a perpetual state of catch-up because I don’t like to rush. Hell, I’m pretty much physically unable to rush. Anyway, there it was, on Netflix Instant, a movie that had been represented to me as the absolute nadir of movies for a couple of years.
Oh, yes, I was finding out that this was, indeed, a perfect storm of bad movie-making techniques. Flat acting (in the instances it could be called acting at all), pauses in the dialogue that you could drive several delivery trucks stuck in first gear through, and that very special horror, the blossoming of ambient sound before and after a line, bespeaking no ADR or even laying down an ambient bed to make each line of dialogue sound like it might have been recorded on the same day.
Gavin R. R. Smith tells me that there is a very obvious Getty Images watermark on the news “footage”. I’m going to take his word for it, cuz damned if I’m going back to check it out.
I assumed the awkwardly choreographed CGI birds were a hint of things to come – either that or this was a story from an alien world where physics do not work the same as ours. That interpretation is, in fact, still a possibility.
1) There’s no band, only a singer; 2) Our heroes are the only people in the bar 3) I’m still watching this 4) …
Yeah, yeah, yeah, *in* flight. My brain was attempting to claw its way out the back of my head. If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid Birdemic – eagles can hover effortlessly by flapping their wings once a second, and they do this in formation and unison.
As Birdemic progresses, the M*E*S*S*A*G*E* portions get more and more preachy and obvious. They’re the opposite of subtle. Really, all global change denialists had to say over the last two years was “What, did you see that in Birdemic, or something?” to shut down all debate.
Otherwise the hero would know that the proper response to hundred-dollar gallons of gas is to pull a gun on the price-gouging bad actor and pay the posted amount. But, although he already has a gun in his hand, he simply hands over his credit card. Ray Milland would have bitch slapped him.
Yeah, occasionally you’ll witness one of the birds divebomb something and explode on impact. Why? Global warming, that’s why. Our hero has multiple opportunities to scavenge more guns and gasoline but passes them up, so I’m more than a little miffed with him when he runs out of gas and has to catch a fish with dead camper gear. The two kids he’s rescued start whining about wanting Happy Meals, but – you guessed it – he’s run out of bullets and can’t shoot the ungrateful little louts. The birds fly in for one last swoop, but decide that since he doesn’t have bullets anymore, he’s no fun and fly off. In an end credit sequence that lasts forever.
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