Q2 Review Purge: Volume 2

You thought I’d finished clearly out my backlog with just five measly reviews? Ha! You underestimate my movie-watching prowess. We’ve got another set of hot ‘n ready reviews coming atcha.

Night of the Comet (For the Scream 101 episode about this film, click here. For the Scream 101 interview with Kelli Maroney, click here.)

Year: 1984
Director: Thom Eberhardt
Cast: Catherine Mary Stewart, Kelli Maroney, Robert Beltran
Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

After a deadly comet reduces the world’s population to ash, two valley girls must fight their way through a silent LA filled with radiation zombies, crooked scientists, and shopping montages.

Night of the Comet is one of those great 80’s movies that has not only a towering high concept, but an intimate, human story to tell within it. While the idea of “valley girls vs. the apocalypse” is like bread and butter for trashy horror fans, NotC is much more than meets the eye. Its valley girl veneer is certainly mined for comedy, but there’s something intensely thoughtful pulsing beneath the surface of the film. These are two girls with a severely narrow worldview (“This happened everywhere? Like, even in Burbank?”) that are stripped of everything they took for granted and forced to face a cold, dead world.

The shallow creature comforts they pursue pale in comparison to survival and connecting with the few humans that still remain. It’s hilarious because it’s so bleak, but the emotions that well up from time to time, especially in Kelli Maroney’s striking performance and Mary Woronov’s world-weary acceptance of destruction, are completely earned for that very same reason.

But Night of the Comet, despite its surprising heft, isn’t a tearjerker. It’s a cotton candy blast lit with bright, sci-fi comic slashes of neon color. While I do wish it had the budget to take its perfect concept even further, it’s an intelligent, fun movie with well-drawn characters, masterful production design, and a hellishly witty script jam packed with instantly memorable one-liners.

Rating: 8/10


The Changeling (For the Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.)

Year: 1980
Director: Peter Medak
Cast: George C. Scott, Trish Van Devere, Melvyn Douglas
Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

A bereaved composer takes up residence in a historical house that turns out to be haunted.

The Changeling is a very classical ghost story almost to a fault. Although the drawn-out, methodical scares pack a punch, sometimes the story lingers a little too much on the past. As our hero investigates the history of the house, the third act slowly unravels until it’s a feeble drama about two old men screeching at one another. Until, of course, it isn’t. The finale is the best kind of grandiose, plunging its low-key atmosphere into a shrieking inferno of special effects and frenzied, unpredictable editing.

While the third act swings from dull to gonzo, the first two are firmly set in traditional haunted house mode á là The Haunting. Though modern viewers may be numb to the effects of these scenes after decades of rip-offs and copycats, they’re expertly executed, with lurking camerawork suggesting an uninvited presence, sharp editing linking the protagonist’s tragic past to the history of the house, and an echoing, sinister sound design that will drives spikes of fear directly into your spine.

The two most startling sequences are birthed from this atmosphere: one the best séance I’ve ever seen, using performance and rhythm to scare rather than special effects, the other a subtle, lingering reaction shot that milks every last heebie jeebie out of something appearing somewhere it patently shouldn’t be.

Without talented filmmakers at the helm, The Changeling would be dry and predictable, but its perfectly crafted scares make it an indelible classic of the genre, even if the plot is a little been-there, done-that.

Rating: 7/10


Brokeback Mountain

Year: 2005
Director: Ang Lee
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger, Michelle Williams
Run Time: 2 hours 14 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Two gay cowboys fall in gay love with each other and it’s very gay but mostly sad.

As a gay gentleman myself, it’s basically sacrilege that I waited this long to watch Brokeback Mountain. But you know what I almost never want to watch on an average day? A tearjerker about how super duper hard and sad it is to be gay. At least nobody gets AIDS, like in every other gay movie ever made.

So no, Brokeback Mountain is not in my wheelhouse, though it’s a terrific film. A sweeping romance that spans decades (as evidenced by Anne Hathaway’s chain of increasingly preposterous wigs), it highlights two fantastic performers working at the peak of their abilities. Gyllenhaal and Ledger are so credible and grounded in real emotion that this “gay cowboy” movie becomes a universal love story about passion, loss, and disappointing your parents.

Opening with what’s essentially a silent film about two men thrown together slowly developing respect for one another and culminating in a violently lustful act, Brokeback Mountain uses its epic sprawl to detail the impact that one encounter can have on an entire life. Two entire lives. Its scope is set as wide as the Wyoming sky, covering topics of class disparity, marriage compromise, gender warfare, and dozens more without breaking a sweat. Do I ever want to watch it again? No. But I know I will.

Rating: 8/10


Lust, Caution

Year: 2007
Director: Ang Lee
Cast: Tony Chiu Wai Leung, Wei Tang, Joan Chen
Run Time: 2 hours 37 minutes
MPAA Rating: NC-17

A Chinese actress working for the rebellion poses as the mistress of a cruel government official to draw him into an assassination, but falls in love with him in the process.

Ang Lee needs to hire a better editor. After converting the short story Brokeback Mountain into a sprawling epic, he has taken Eileen Chang’s novella Sè Jiè and stretched it on the rack until it’s over two and a half hours long. It does not serve the material well.

Sure, the opening hour is great. While Lust, Caution is an espionage picture about rank amateurs playacting rebellion until it gets too real, it’s a piano wire thriller with a soaring sense of danger and fun. But then it turns into – gag me with a spoon – a love story, and things quickly spiral out of control. Despite the best efforts of its talented leads, Lust, Caution fails miserably to make a case for these two actually falling in love. Their cold, S&M style liaisons might be rendered romantic with a Pedro Almodóvar or, hell, even a Clive Barker at the helm, but Ang Lee suffocates the film. He draws out the relationship far longer than it can be sustained and his relentless formalism keeps us at a constant remove from his characters’ humanity.

What I do admire about Lee’s work here is that the man knows how to craft a visual metaphor. The endless rounds of mahjong underscore our heroine’s constant awareness that she’s playing a high stakes game, and the latter half is sprinkled with shots that indicate how she’s feeling, even if the movie is too chilly to actually explicitly express it. Lust, Caution isn’t a bad movie, it’s just needlessly prolonged. It’s well crafted but empty, like a Ming vase.

Rating: 6/10


X-Men: The Last Stand

Year: 2006
Director: Brett Ratner
Cast: Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry
Run Time: 1 hour 44 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

The mutant community is dived over a cure for the mutant gene, leading to an all-out war with humanity caught in the middle.

X-Men: The Last Stand, the third and final movie in the original cinematic X-Men chronology, has somewhat of a reputation for sucking hard. While I wouldn’t argue against the fact that it’s a tremendously silly potboiler, it’s hardly the worst movie ever made. It’s not even close to the worst X-Men movie ever made.

Yes, it has deep, fundamental flaws. The final battle is a rickety, one-liner-ridden disaster, and its secondary villain, Jean Grey’s dark alter ego The Phoenix, is both a botched pull from the comics and an egregious anticlimax. But people forget that silly movies can be fun.

I love me an unpredictable piece of cinema, and The Last Stand’s almost psychotic willingness to kill off its own characters is captivating. And the CGI is unforgivably crummy, but it provides a flavor blast of summer movie fun by upping the number of effects sequences to a delirious degree. Little comic touches in the script actually work, and two performers pull the beast back from the brink of destruction: Hugh Jackman and Ian McKellen. Jackman is a charismatic badass that provides Wolverine with gruff sympathy so well that he spackles most of the holes in his mothbitten plot. And McKellen is once again a crackerjack villain with a wounded human soul, relishing in his own dastardly ego while drawing from his Holocaust background to provide an actually powerful, compelling turn as Magneto once again.

There’s not a ton to praise about X-Men: The Last Stand, but it’s a sugar rush that only hurt your stomach a teensy bit.

Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1528
Reviews In This Series
X-Men (Singer, 2000)
X2: X-Men United (Singer, 2003)
X-Men: The Last Stand (Ratner, 2006)
X-Men: First Class (Vaughn, 2011)
X-Men: Days of Future Past (Singer, 2014)
X-Men: Apocalypse (Singer, 2016)

Census Bloodbath: Thank You, Have A Nice Day

For the crossover review of this film at Kinemalogue, click here.

Year: 1986

Director: Jim Wynorski

Cast: Kelli Maroney, Tony O'Dell, Russell Todd

Run Time: 1 hour 17 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Over the course of my romp through slasher history, I've run into some incredibly strange premises. Together, we've battled a killer scarecrow, a possessed mirror, a demonic computer, the ghost of a prom queen, and the angry spirit of a Native American medicine man. We're no strangers to strangeness, so don't take it lightly when I tell you that the Jim Wynorski picture Chopping Mall -produced by Roger Corman's wife Julie in 1986 - has one of the downright weirdest slasher premises I've ever encountered.

And I don't just mean that fact that we're supposed to suspend our disbelief and accept this implausible hairstyle.

Chopping Mall has the perfect slasher setup. A group of friends parties together in a mall after closing, only to find that they're trapped inside with a crazed killer. Only instead of a masked psychopath or territorial mountain man, the particular threat they're facing is... a trio of security robots that have gone haywire following an electrical storm. Seriously.

While we let that sink in, let's Meet the Meat. Our midnight revelers include Ferdy (Tony O'Dell), a nerdy young man whose uncle owns the store where they're holding the party; Allison (Kelli Maroney of Night of the Comet), a sweet young waitress who has been set up with Ferdy by their mutual friends; Suzie (Barbara Crampton of Re-Animator and From Beyond), Allison's party girl best friend; Rick (Russell Todd of Friday the 13th Part 2 and He Knows You're Alone) and Linda (Karrie Emerson), a married couple who own a mechanic shop together, and who for some reason are equally enthused about this mattress party/teen orgy; Greg (Nick Segal), who exists and is dating Suzie; Leslie (Suzee Slater), the bubble-headed shop owner's daughter and thus Ferdy's cousin, though this is never explored; and Mike (John Terlesky), a douchey stud muffin who chews gum in literally every scene and whose hairdresser I dearly wish was included in the body count.

This haircut should be included on the list of capital punishment-worthy offenses.

As my previous two captions may have informed you, Chopping Mall is urgently, endearingly 80's. The cast, the genre, the fashions, and the dialogue are unrelentingly entrenched in the cultural battleground of 1986, and it's an indelibly fun treat throughout. 

Like nearly all Corman pictures, the film is an extremely chintzy, thin affair that values ass shots and waggling breasts more than story and character development, but director Jim Wynorski squeezes every ounce of cinema magic out of the circumstances as he possibly can. This might sound like scant praise considering that the man also directed Sorority House Massacre II, but Chopping Mall is Wynorski's magnum opus, making the most out of its low budget, silly special effects, and ludicrous villains. 

But let's begin with the most pressing topic of any Chopping Mall discussion: The Killbots. By all accounts they should be a campy, cheesy mess, but if we're going to be completely honest (which I know we all hate to do, this being the Internet after all), they're really quite remarkable. Their creation is the oldest trick in the book: slap a motor on some shiny plastic boxes, tack on some lights, and call it a day. But the old tricks were used for a reason: they worked.

The Killbots, through the surprisingly professional methods with which they are framed and coordinated, are an utterly believable menace. There's hardly a crack in the special effects (largely because they are so simple), lending to the sense that these robots are acting of their own volition. They have purpose and agency, roaming the mall with specific, calculated, and (dare I say) character-driven movements.

Also their little tank tread feet are adorable.

Chopping Mall also boasts a surprisingly sophisticated lighting plan. The mall itself is full of heavy shadows, complemented by tickles of gaudy pinks and blues in the corners, reminding the audience of the cheery, commercial nature of the setting as it's plunged into a surrealist hellscape of killing and laser beams. Oh, did I mention the robots have laser beams? The only thing that could make this film more 1986 is an Alice Cooper cameo.

But I digress. The lighting uses the power of suggestion to expand upon its sparsely decorated sets (which largely consist of blank white walls with a handful of Corman posters tacked to them, not even in particularly good condition), most notably in the diner scenes. As visible in the first photo of this review, a false window casts shadow over the actors, cementing in the idea that they're hiding in a restaurant, and not a parking garage hallway. There's also some tremendously fun gags using silhouettes, but I'm not here to replay the movie, I'm here to sell it.

Not that it needs the help.

Chopping Mall is also remarkably funny, rife as it is with the typical 80's gags and guffaws. But there are moments that transcend the expected, especially in one admirably well-placed editing gag that will have hawk-eyed viewers nursing a stitch in their side. The cherry on top is that all the characters have generally intelligent reactions to their predicaments, almost never resorting to Dumb Horror Character antics, save for some truly, epically insane moments where the film briefly converts into a testosterone carnival of gun-totin' action.

But here I go acting like Chopping Mall is the second coming of Craven. It's certainly no grand classic of horror cinema, merely a shockingly decent turn for a trash auteur. The acting is bottom of the barrel (Russell Todd especially fails to make any attempt at an actual performance; only Barbara Crampton escapes the fray, bringing Suzie to vivacious life and igniting some terrific chemistry with everyone around her), the characters are exceedingly shallow, and the fun - while genuine - is ephemeral.

It's a cotton candy delight, tantalizing the taste buds for 77 short minutes before completely dissolving as if it were never there. It may be considerably more well made than other Corman/Wynorski films, but the fact remains that it's a Corman/Wynorski film, and that's a pretty dreary place to be at the best of times. I stand by Chopping Mall as a beacon of pure light in the B-movie community, but its charms only go so far. You have my blessing to seek it out and have a rollicking great time, but it won't change your life.

But sometimes, we don't need a film to radically change our perspective on the cinema. We just need the Killbots. And Chopping Mall is worth breaking out the jelly bracelets and borrowing daddy's credit card, if only for one night of fun with your friends.

Killer: The Killbots

Final Girl: Alison Parks (Kelli Maroney)

Best Kill: Leslie's head is exploded with a freaking laser. I love the 80's.

Sign of the Times: It's genuinely astonishing that Barbara Crampton has the mobility that she does, weighed down as she is by a pile of crimped hair and about 8,000 jelly bracelets. Oh, and she says "bitchin'!"

Scariest Moment: Alison hides from the final robot in a pet shop. When it destroys some glass cages, snakes and tarantulas crawl over her, but she must keep quiet to avoid detection.

Weirdest Moment: The robots reveal that they can shoot laser beams in the middle of the film, when up until that point they've just been using flimsy little claws.

Champion Dialogue: "I guess I'm just not used to being chased around the mall in the middle of the night by killer robots."

Body Count: 9

1. Marty is choked to death by a robot arm.
2. Marty's Friend has his neck broken with a grappling hook.
3. Janitor is electrocuted in a puddle of mop water.
4. Mike has his throat slit.
5. Leslie has her head exploded with a laser.
6. Susie burns to death.
7. Greg is tossed off a balcony.
8. Linda is shot to death with lasers.
9. Rick is electrocuted.

TL;DR: Chopping Mall is pure campy fun, with a surprisingly masterful aesthetic for a film out of the Corman stable.
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1361

July Cleanup

When I began this blog, I made a pact to myself to write about every movie I see, even if I've seen it before and no matter how old or random it was. The thing is though, sometimes it's hard to keep up. When I hang out with Henri or Cassidy, we'll usually watch two or three movies at a time and writing one review takes me about two hours with research, pictures, formatting, writing, and distribution. Did I mention I have a job?

So while I've done an admirable job (if I do say so myself) of matching review output with movie input, there are a couple films that slipped through the cracks. In an attempt to catch up with myself, I'm gonna throw down some mini-reviews.

Chopping Mall

Year: 1986
Director: Jim Wynorski
Cast: Kelli Maroney, Tony O'Dell, Russell Todd
Run Time: 1 hour 17 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

My notes on Chopping Mall are just as scattershot and hallucinatory as the film itself.

"flare in boob/spiders and snakes/can't imagine life/if all movies were good"

Produced by Roger Corman('s wife), Chopping Mall very clearly wants you to think it is a slasher movie, but it is so much more than that.

Park Plaza Mall has just installed a new security system in the form of robots that shoot lasers. This is awesome. And while the movie does follow a slasher recipe for a while - a group of teens has a late night party in the mall and begin to get mowed down one by one by the malfunctioning robots - by the third act it has transformed into an explosive 80's cheesy action extravaganza.

Full of Terrible Horror Movie Decision Making, weird sci-fi/action setpieces, and chipper robots telling their still-smoking victims to "have a nice day," Chopping Mall is one of those B movies that will forever have a devoted following.

Champion Dialogue: "Waitress, more butter!"

Rating: 6/10

The Truman Show

Year: 1998
Director: Peter Weir
Cast: Jim Carrey, Ed Harris, Laura Linney
Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG

Although I already talked about this film in Sunday's installment of the Movie ABC's, it is worth pointing out that the world building in The Truman Show is unmatched in most 90's comedies. To carry out a high concept like "man's life is unwittingly broadcast worldwide" involves a lot of examinations of the repercussions of this format which are explored somewhat in the film - enough to hint at a much larger world around Truman that is clearly well thought out but not detracting from the major storyline of the film.

Rating: 8/10

The Kids Are All Right

Year: 2010
Director: Lisa Cholodenko
Cast: Julianne Moore, Annette Bening, Mark Ruffalo
Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

I had been pressed on all sides to see The Kids Are All Right. Sergio wanted me to see it because he loved the film. My mom wanted me to see it because she didn't care for it. Naturally, I resisted. My childish impulse was to shy away from the film that other people so clearly wanted me to watch, but I finally bit the bullet and popped in the DVD.

It turns out I fall just about exactly in between. The Kids Are All Right is a very human depiction of a particularly strong upheaval in the lives of a family headed by two lesbian partners. When Laser (Josh Hutcherson) convinces his sister (Mia Wasikowska) to contact their birth father Paul (Ruffalo), a wrench in thrown into their "idyllic" family life.

The control freak Nic (Bening) and her partner, the free-spirited Jules (Moore) find themselves on opposite sides when Jules embraces Paul's presence and begins work redesigning his back garden. The tensions that had previously existed between the two (Nic is too focused on her work; Jules doesn't understand the consequences of her actions) flare up brighter than ever in the presence of this new catalyst.

With an ensemble cast that breathes life into a pretty routine story, The Kids Are All Right is a pleasant but meandering exploration of the relationship between a long-standing couple that has taken their mutual love for granted. The most important element, the fact that a central couple is a pair of lesbians, is not treated as a novelty or a gimmick, which is the factor that led most to my enjoyment of a film that I typically wouldn't consider to be in my wheelhouse.

Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 756