Popcorn Kernels: Smashing Pumpkins

In which we explore mini-reviews of movies I watched during the month of October, but weren’t quite important or horror-y enough to break their way into my scary movie-exclusive run of reviews.

Miss Bala

Year: 2011

Director: Gerardo Naranjo

Cast: Stephanie Sigman, Noé Hernández, Irene Azuela

Run Time: 1 hour 53 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A beauty pageant contestant accidentally witnesses a raid on a club and becomes embroiled in a Tijuana drug war.

I was quite excited to see Miss Bala. A Mexican thriller from producers Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal, from the description I was imagining an edgy, female-led action romp that’s part Miss Congeniality and part Sicario. Of course, that’s not how the Mexican drug wars work. Unfortunately in its pursuit of grim, arty authenticity, Miss Bala completely eradicates any reason for it to exist.

If there’s one thing I hate in movies, it’s a protagonist without an ounce of agency in her body, and our beauty queen Laura Guerrero is empty of almost everything else, too. We know nothing about her, save that she has a friend who pushes her to join a beauty contest. We can guess as to why she agrees, but one hypothetical trait does not a lead character make. Laura is an empty plastic bag drifting through this movie, doing what other people tell her and consistently making the single dumbest choice it’s possible to make in any given situation. This is a chick who would order the salmon at a Denny’s if given the opportunity.

I get what they’re doing here. Laura is meant to be an innocent who is randomly swept up in the pure evil of the drug wars just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She’s not allowed an arc or a happy ending, because that’s the reality of it. Frankly, it’s a Halloween-esque storyline. That pure simplicity could have worked, but we need to understand more about Laura in order to sympathize with her plight. Unfortunately Miss Bala is an arid thriller that doesn’t allow any humanity to leak out.

Also the character motivations (both from the good guys and the bad guys) are incoherent, and the criminal plot is a sloppy mess, so Miss Bala is running on three flat tires. The opening act has a confused, frenzied energy, but as the story plays on and things don’t get any clearer, the film shows its hand: It really doesn’t know what it’s doing, and pretty much everything good is an accident. Then the pointlessly artsy lingering shots suffocate the film even more, as if it needed the help. It’s a damn shame that this movie utterly failed to meet its staggering potential, but they can’t all be winners I suppose.

Rating: 5/10

Death Proof

Year: 2007

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Kurt Russell, Zoë Bell, Rosario Dawson

Run Time: 1 hour 53 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Two groups of girls are stalked y a psycho stuntman who commits murders with his tricked-out car.

I’ve seen the highlights of the oeuvre of one Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, what have you), but I’ve still seen far too few of his films, by some people’s accounts. I probably shouldn’t have rekindled that viewing with Death Proof, his contribution to the 70’s throwback double feature Grindhouse, which he created with Robert Rodriguez back in 2007. And no, I didn’t watch Planet Terror, but if you have a spare three hours handy, I would gladly borrow them.

Anyway, it turns out there’s a genre of film that Tarantino does not have mastery of, and that’s 70’s-style exploitation, which you think he’d fit into like a glove. But all his usual Tarantino-isms, which he applies liberally to Death Proof, are actively rejected by the genre like a bad transplant. First off, a key element he totally missed about grindhouse movies is that they’re short. The simplistic plot, which at certain points maps onto either the proto-slasher or rape-revenge genres is too elemental to be sustained for two f**king hours, especially when there are five minute swaths of film that so obviously could have been cut if he wasn’t so obscenely overconfident in his writing and his obnoxious cameo performance.

Speaking of writing… Tarantino is well-known for his dialogue, especially his long conversations laced with pop culture ephemera, during which he tosses all pretense of filmmaking to the floor and bathes in his own words for eight to ten minutes. This happens no fewer than four times in Death Proof, inflating the already punishing run time, and proving one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt: Tarantino can’t write for women.

These conversational scenes have worked extremely well in his other films, but the dizzyingly high proportion of women in Death Proof mean that these scenes usually take place within a group of 3 to 5 females. When you’re a person who views that half of the population as giant pairs of feet with assess attached to them, it becomes difficult to craft compelling characters, which he fails to do ten times over, at one point literally forgetting about the existence of a girl who had – until that moment – held a major role.

Some of the dialogue itself is still fun taken on its own (although the single best line is beaten to within an inch of its life with ceaseless repetition), but these scenes drag the film’s already wonky pacing down like an anchor. And it’s not like the sole major male character, Kurt Russell’s Stuntman Mike, fares much better. He’s given way too much to say, babbling like an infant in a way that completely undercuts his eventual menace. Russell does a great job of course, hamming it up to a pitch perfect degree in the gonzo grindhouse finale, but across the board this is probably the worst script Tarantino has ever written.

The feeling I’m left with after Death Proof is frustration, and I wish that wasn’t true. But after being pummeled with yet another of his overwritten black characters, endless conversation essentially using foot massages as a currency, and a scene with a cell phone that pointlessly derails its period authenticity for a subplot that never comes to fruition, who can blame me? There is good here, mainly in the kinetic sequences of violence that close out the film’s two distinct chapters, and a car chase that will have you biting your nails until your cuticles bleed, but just like everything else, they go on for waaaay too long.

Death Proof saps the energy out of itself at every turn, and as dearly as I want to like it, it’s its own fault that I can’t.

Rating: 6/10

Kristy

Year: 2014

Director: Oliver Blackburn

Cast: Haley Bennett, Ashley Greene, Lucas Till 

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

A college student alone in the dorms over Thanksgiving break is targeted by a bloodthirsty cult.

Kristy is a Netflix horror movie if I’ve ever seen one. And I assure you, I most definitely have. Not quite a slasher, not quire a cultist film, not quite good, it is a film that clings to its own sorry existence by the skin of its teeth. But it’s reasonably entertaining and it’s free, so you might as well watch it.

By far the most interesting thing about Kristy is that it seems to genuinely still believe it’s the 90’s. There’s no winking throwback involved here, just a bunch of crop tops and an addiction to the wonders of modern gadgetry that seems to have missed the last decade or so of Apple press conferences. It’s odd that a movie that includes a crane shot clearly recorded by a drone (an exquisitely beautiful one, I might add, if a bit wobbly) should also insist that people still text like this: “U kil Kristy? ☺”

Its fabulously ill-conceived technobabble doesn’t stop there. Nor does it start there, as the entire opening is an exhausting slog through pixelated Darkweb nonsense that makes the webcam footage in Halloween: Resurrection look like 4K. Alright, after that brief detour to film nerd town, let’s get down to brass tacks. Kristy is a heaping helping of nonsense (apparently, by knowing Kristy’s phone number, the cult can hack 911?) but that has the unintended side effect of making it a pretty fun watch.

Kristy gets the job done in record time, never showing a full scene when a quick montage will do, and not overstaying its welcome by indulging in anything as ostentatious as a “theme” beyond the most superficial level. The crumpled tinfoil masks worn by the killers are pretty creepy, and although the film’s girl power finale is ruthlessly half-baked, it’s enough to have you rooting for her, even though her name isn’t even f**king Kristy.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1469

Where Did You Come From, Where Did You Go?

Year: 2016

Director: Dan Kwan & Daniel Scheinert

Cast: Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead 

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

We must always allow a movie its concept, that core flight of fancy that lays the groundwork for its plot. Sure, some concepts are more of a slight against decency, but since when did decency ever make much sense? You’d think a farting corpse would be much less offensive and controversial than one that rises from the grave to devour the flesh of the living, but The Walking Dead’s ratings proudly announce that they’re not. So, there you go. Decency be damned. Those that condemn Swiss Army Man as “that Farting Corpse Movie” are entirely missing the point. It’s a wonderful, beautiful hilarious, elegant, intelligent… Farting Corpse Movie.

I mean, a spade’s still a spade.

So, the flatulent cadaver in question belongs to Manny (Daniel Radcliffe). One day he washes up on the shore of a desert island just when the stranded Hank (Paul Dano) is about to give up and kill himself. Many farts later, Hank discovers that Manny’s gas can propel him through water, so he rides him like a jet ski to the mainland. Thus begins a journey to find home, where Hank discovers that Manny has many wonderful, helpful properties that allow him to act as an axe, a thermos, a compass, a gun, and much more. 

He’s mildly phased when Manny begins to talk, but is ecstatic to have a companion. He begins to teach Manny about what it means to be a human, but slowly realizes that maybe he doesn’t actually know. His life before this was empty, friendless, sad, and kinda creepy. He stalked a girl he sees on the bus (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and sent e-cards to his dad, and that’s about it. So it takes the friendship of a dead person to help him feel truly alive.

You know, just like in ALL movies with fart jokes.

It’s true that Swiss Army Man is frequently sophomoric and never stops being deeply weird, but it’s a movie that explicitly deals with the concept of weirdness in a way that most indie shock flicks wouldn’t even dream of. It blows up the idea, deeply examines the societal structures that dictate normality, finds them wanting, then tears off in a refreshingly bold direction. At its core, Swiss Army Man is a member of a hallowed, ancient genre (the male buddy comedy), but it remixes that conceit into something dazzling and original.

Although the basic plot structure adheres to that surprisingly mundane formula, there is no point at which Swiss Army Man stops pushing the envelope. It is a scatological, explicit, vaguely homoerotic adventure that drags you up and down your scale of emotions and plunks you down at the end, bewildered and exhausted yet strangely satisfied. This is a definition-defying movie, entirely open to interpretation yet nevertheless presenting a solid, identifiable story. It’s an enormously cumbersome task to describe it, but I feel an urgent need to push on because it struck a chord deep within me.

Like most viewers with the fortitude to soldier past the opening ten minutes (a sequence almost entirely centered upon farting – the easily-shocked don’t possess the strength required to break through that hardened crust to find the comedy crème-brûlée hiding beneath), I felt a deep, primordial, almost involuntary connection to Swiss Army Man that I can’t quite put my finger on. Not that I particularly want to. I’m perfectly content that my feelings are as tangled, perplexing, and ineffable as the movie itself. 

But the fact remains that Swiss Army Man is an intensely emotional, intelligent journey that it has absolutely no right to be. But the weirdness of its concept is exactly what opens it up to a whole new level of philosophical discourse.

Yeah, I used the phrase “philosophical discourse” in this review. I’m as shocked as you that it came up.

Alright, I think that I’ve got all my babbling out. Let’s talk for a bit about solid facts that we can actually quantify. Like this one: The score for Swiss Army Man has instantly risen into my Top Ten movie scores of all time.* 

It’s an incredibly important facet of the film’s atmosphere, an eclectic, mostly a cappella work that is integrated with the onscreen action so thoroughly that the characters literally interact with it. Their actions, dialogue, and the snippets of cultural detritus that make up their worldview are all incorporated into this stunning, bright score that’s simultaneously a soaring celebration of the film’s sense of adventure and a reflection of the ramshackle facsimile of the world that Hank has created around himself, composed of bits and pieces of litter he has found in nature. It’s the first score I’ve heard in a long time that feels like a vital and integral part of the narrative alongside driving the emotion of the scenes. Also, it accomplishes the impossible by transmogrifying f**king “Cotton Eyed Joe” into a hauntingly beautiful melody. There’s some straight-up black magic going on here.

I will not go into detail about myself tearing up over “Cotton Eyed Joe,” but I will close this rapturous segment with the idea that this music (especially a song entitled “Montage”) calls a lot of attention to the artifice of Swiss Army Man, which performs a manifestly important service. By reminding us that this is all a work of fiction, it allows us to escape that constant dithering between what is real, what is fake, and whether Manny is imaginary or not. It’s all imaginary. This is just a movie, after all. That frank admission cuts through the BS and brings you up close and personal with the actual content.

Speaking of black magic, Swiss Army Man would not work whatsoever if it weren’t for the herculean efforts of Daniel Radcliffe and Paul Dano, whose fearless performances propel the comedy into the stratosphere. On the most fundamental level, the fact that they commit enough to allow us to believe in what’s happening to them is astounding. Then they craft an emotional throughline around that core, another Sisyphean task. Then they have the gall to make it funny?

*For the record, that Top Ten also includes a fair bit of John Williams, maybe some Carpenter, and definitely Jim Dooley’s score for Pushing Daisies, which I’m well aware is not a movie, but I could not care less.

God damn it guys, leave some talent for the rest of us.

Radcliffe is downright perfect, maintaining his corpselike stiffness while creating an emotionally resonant character and precisely modulating his voice to capture the innocent wonder and fish-out-of-water hilarity of a corpse discovering the world for the first (or is it second?) time. It’s a physically, vocally, tonally unsurpassable work, and he does it all in an accent that isn’t even his own. While his body shakes with farts. And a prosthetic erection wiggles around in his jeans. Honestly, it’s a miracle any performer played this role, let alone Harry Potter. 

Dano is likewise superb, but his character falls into a much more recognizable vein (for the purposes of the film’s commentary on the sad, vaguely repulsive, self-serious lives of the young adults that inevitably populate these types of movies), so his performance is intentionally a bit less noticeable.

These two actors power-charge the giddy tone of this ridiculous, beautiful movie, so much so that they even survive its terrible ending. There is perhaps no way this movie could have ended in a proper, satisfying way, but the overlong finale is a little too intent on flooding Hank’s world with actual reality, then scuttling it all once more. It’s an ending that provides too little and too much explanation, defying an important set of character dynamics to return to the now-faded shock value of its opening. But other than that, Swiss Army Man is an incredible piece of work that defies Hollywood’s strict storytelling structure, reinventing the wheel of a hoary, predictable comedy genre in an innovative and intensely compelling way.

TL;DR: Swiss Army Man is a blissfully weird, surprisingly beautiful movie.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1361

I Think We're Alone Now

Year: 2016

Director: Dan Trachtenberg

Cast: John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Gallagher Jr.

Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Can we all just agree that 10 Cloverfield Lane’s alleged connection to the 2008 found footage monster film Cloverfield is a heap of garbage? That would make the rest of this review a whole lot easier. Put a pin in that title, which sounds more like a sequel to 9 Chickweed Lane anyway. Throw a sheet over the viral marketing campaign. And clear a special place in your septic tank for that snake oil salesman J. J. Abrams’ rickety claim that the films are “blood relatives.” And gag me with a spoon.

There. Now doesn’t that feel better?

In 10 Cloverfield Lane, Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is a young woman on the run from a boyfriend, who runs straight into the arms of somebody much worse. After a car accident, she wakes up in the underground bunker of the surly and intimidating Howard (John Goodman, in his first non-Pixar role as a monster). Howard tells her that there has been an attack on American soil, the air is tainted, and that everybody outside the bunker is dead. Never certain whether or not she should believe the man who is holding her hostage while claiming to have saved her life, he must survive the bunker for as long as possible with Howard and the clueless handyman Emmett (John Gallagher, Jr.) until she can figure it out.

It’s a real Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt story, to be sure.

10 Cloverfield Lane is a small-scale film by necessity. Three actors, a handful of rooms, and the occasional overhead rumble aren’t exactly the stuff of Cecil B. DeMille style epics. However, the film doesn’t suffer for its smallness. Certain conversations in the film begin to chafe at the limited amount of shots available, but these rough patches are thankfully infrequent.

What the intimate setting truly achieves is a constant tension, an unflagging awareness of Michelle’s lack of privacy. She is trapped with a bipolar lunatic, her three-room world a sinister microcosm of the evils hat might be lurking aboveground. She’s pretty literally stuck between a rock and a hard place. Of course, none of this atmosphere would be quite as effective without the cornerstone of 10 Cloverfield Lane: John Goodman.

Goodman, of course, is a reasonably well-respected actor despite a rather profound lack of leading roles, but here he proves his worth as an endlessly versatile character actor. He dominates the screen, both with his size and sheer personality, exuding a sinister aura that clings to everything it touches. His shifting, sinister performance is far from over-the-top, which could have derailed such a tiny film, instead lurking in that oh so subtle realm of banal evil.

He is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, papering a kind face over a bristling maw of anger that constantly lurks beneath the surface. He’s so compelling, in fact, that even when he’s not onscreen, you can still feel his presence looming omnipotently over every scene. Of course, it helps that he has two solid performers to play off of. Winstead is an ever-reliable genre presence who certainly earns her keep, and Gallagher’s dopey kindness provides an excellent foil, but Goodman is the star of the show and by God he earns it.

That’s what you get for finding a stranger in the Alps.

Goodman may be the crux of this operation, but 10 Cloverfield Lane likewise could not have survived without Ramsey Avery’s production design, a perfect evocation of the film’s peculiar tone. The slick metal and sharp edges of the bunker are softened with an outwardly cheery layer of homey, rustic decoration that contrast both with the harshness of the environs and the aggressive gruffness of Howard. It’s a wickedly playful set, one that exquisitely evokes the same dark sense of humor that produced this incredible pairing of music and material in the trailer.

And while the production design might provide a subtle juxtaposition, the sound design is here to remind us that this film can jar us out of our seats. A perilously indelicate combination of stark silence, far-off rumblings, and in-your-face shrillness, 10 Cloverfield Lane’s soundscape pummels you within an inch of your life. It’s nothing less than abrasive poetry designed to startle and to pummel.

All of these elements collide during the film’s best sequence: A game of Taboo that’s more unsettling than anything that’s been seen in theaters this year. It’s an intricate, successful attempt at combining the film’s best assets in a meticulously-crafted moment that’s simultaneously an unnerving character development, a canny switcheroo, and a genuinely threatening perversion of banal family life. It’s pretty much perfect.

And after that paragraph, I don’t feel so bad airing a couple grievances as we close out this review. Obviously, there’s those back-and-forth conversation scenes that can get a little drab, and a couple scenes repeat the same beats a little too close to each other, but for the most part my only real issue is with a rather crude character arc that Mary Elizabeth Winstead is jammed into. Well, that and a pretty dopey climax.

But that’s not enough to sink what is a very well-constructed ship. 10 Cloverfield Lane is an excellent, original exercise in small-scale psychological drama and it’s a superb way to spend a night out. Try not to come to it with any expectations based on that majestically idiotic title, and you’ll be golden.

TL;DR: 10 Cloverfield Lane is a solid, tense little film.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 927

Reviews In This Series

10 Cloverfield Lane (Trachtenberg, 2016)

The Cloverfield Paradox (Onah, 2018)

New Year's Resolutions: Stocking Stuffers

Let's finally put a nail in the coffin of the holiday season with a dose of mini reviews for some festive favorites!

Fred Claus

Year: 2007

Director: David Dobkin

Cast: Vince Vaughn, Paul Giamatti, Elizabeth Banks

Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Santa Claus has a naughty older brother who is jealous of living in his shadow all those years.

Is there a word for holiday flicks where the plot’s every beat is pretty much telegraphed from the poster, and whose sole reason for existence is to act as cinematic comfort food during the Christmas season? I’m pretty sure there isn’t, but I would like to submit for your consideration the phrase “Fred Claus.” No moment or character in this entire film is original (save a totally arbitrary cameo by Ludacris as an elf DJ, but that’s only because the people who brainstormed that for previous holiday movies were fired), but that doesn’t mean it won’t wash down like cookies and a glass of milk.

The cast is admittedly pretty grand, including Kathy Bates, Paul Giamatti, and Kevin Spacey (in another one of those thankless roles he kicked around in while waiting for the world to invent House of Cards), but the script is so rote, nobody can make much of a dent in it. Surprisingly, the one performer who breaks from the pack is lead actor Vince Vaughn, because he (mostly intentionally) seems to be inhabiting a completely different universe than everyone else. His acerbic, quick-tongued performance is a reminder that the man can be genuinely good when he tries to be, creating a totally relatable, humorously durable con man out of thin air. It’s a bleak and humble character, and he’s remarkably arresting to watch.

The comedy outside of Vaughn’s sphere is largely a tacky fruitcake, leaning too heavily on cartoonish sound effects and too-safe character relationships, but Vaughn’s presence makes Fred Claus ten chimney loads more watchable than your average Santa Clause sequel.

Rating: 6/10

The Christmas Shoes

Year: 2002
Director: Andy Wolk
Cast: Rob Lowe, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, Max Morrow
Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

A workaholic lawyer learns the true meaning of Christmas when a young boy enlists his help buying shoes for his terminally ill mother.

As a TV movie based on one of the most notoriously bad Christmas songs of all time, Sergio and I went into The Christmas Shoes expecting to get a barrel of unintentional laughs. Unfortunately, as happens so often with made-for-TV fare, we found that it refrained from erupting into the expected over-the-top antics, instead plodding through the same typical sub-Lifetime fare as any other on-air holiday trifle.

Sure, there are some sparkling moments, like the mom’s inexplicably shoe-centric backstory, the network’s insistence on playing the “Christmas Shoes” song over a climactic moment, or any scene where you get to watch Rob Lowe flounder through the syrupy dialogue, but for the most part, the movie puts its head down and trudges to the finish line. Save for one actress, the whole thing would have been an insipid wash.

That actress is Kimberly Williams-Paisley as the shoeless mother. She displays a frankly flabbergasting range showing off her natural charisma in her pre-illness scenes and stoically embracing the symbolic role she is forced to shoulder in the second half of the story. Considering that her role, while secondary, forms the emotional core of the entire piece, his is an indomitable triumph. The script may be slack, but she picks up the reigns and manages to make them sting, elevating Christmas Shoes’ shallow gruel into a still meager but at least tasty holiday meal.

Rating: 5/10

Black Xmas

Year: 2006
Director: Glen Morgan
Cast: Michelle Trachtenberg, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Lacey Chabert
Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Sorority girls are celebrating Christmas, only to discover that the serial killer who used to live in their house has just escaped and is picking them off one by one.

Being a horror fan in the 21st century, one needs to get used to pointless remakes of beloved properties. And as much as I despise the likes of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010 or Rob Zombie’s Halloween, I always try to come to remakes with an open mind. And when we land on Black Christmas, a property I began to truly appreciate only recently, I figured a screening of the remake wouldn’t sting quite so bad as a franchise I had a much more abiding affection for. I was wrong. It was worse.

Black Xmas is a much more palatable bad remake than many that I’ve been subjected to, but watching it in close conjunction with the original masterpiece is like trying to pretend Red Lobster microwave rolls are just as delicious as the real thing. Hell, it’s like trying to pretend they’re just as edible as the real thing. There are absolutely reasons to recommend Black Xmas, but they are so divorced from the ideals of character and suspense that dominated the original, it is all the more devastating and unsatisfying.

When I was watching Black Xmas, I found myself not being able to tell the characters apart. It didn’t help that the actresses looked pretty much the same, but I don’t think there’s a single member of the sorority who has character traits beyond having skinny legs, wearing seasonably inappropriate clothing, and being kind of mean. And for every actual good thing in the film, there’s a niggling flaw latched onto it like a lamprey. For example, there really is an ambitious amount of gore in the film, but a lot of it is too demurely shot to actually make out what’s happening, and almost every kill utilizes a plastic bag. This is presumably 1) an homage to the original, and 2) cheaper than buying prosthetics. However, the end result is that the movie feels like a repetitive assembly line of carnage.

I closing, it’s obviously too much to hope for a good script (“Merry Christmas, motherf**ker!” Bracingly original work, right there.). It’s obviously too much to ask for good villains (the reveal is nonsensical and leads to a grossly unnecessary, overlong coda). But when I get a campy gorefest and it’s bogged down by limp characters that are distractingly supermodel hot, even by remake standards, it’s like getting coal in your stocking. Santa skipped my DVD player this Christmas.

Body Count: 18

1. Claire is smothered and stabbed with a pen.
2. Guard is stabbed in the neck with a candy cane.
3. Megan is smothered, stabbed, and has her eye ripped out.
4. Santa’s neck explodes.
5. Billy’s Dad is smothered and hit with a hammer.
6. Billy’s Stepdad is stabbed through the face.
7. Billy’s Mom is beaten with a rolling pin.
8. Dana gets stabbed in the back of the head with a three-pronged garden tool.
9. Eve is decapitated.
10. Heather explodes.
11. Mrs. Mac is impaled with an icicle.
12. Melissa is hit with an ice skate.
13. Lauren has her eyes gouged out.
14. Kyle is stabbed in the head with a glass unicorn.
15. Morgue Worker is bone sawed.
16. Leigh has her neck snapped.
17. Agnes is defibrillated in the face.
18. Billy is impaled on a tree topper.

Rating: 5/10

New Year's Eve

Year: 2011

Director: Garry Marshall

Cast: Sarah Jessica Parker, Jessica Biel, Ashton Kutcher

Run Time: 1 hour 53 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A veritable army of airbrushed celebrities attempt to find love on New Year’s Eve.

Garry Marshall’s Valentine’s Day was a crappy film. But it made money because it was cute and its cast included every known star this side of Alpha Centauri. Naturally, they were going to milk that for all it was worth. And thus New Year’s Eve was born. Notice that fours years have passed since that fateful premiere and there’s still no St. Patrick’s Day.

The bottom line is, New Year’s Eve stinks. It stinks like a sewer rat-gorgonzola sandwich. There are exactly five humorous moments in the entire film, two of which are unintentional, one of which is a thirty second Larry Miller cameo, another of which is Seth Myers being funny in spite of the script and his own body because that’s his natural state of being, and the last (and best) of which is a blooper that plays during the credits. And this is a film that’s two f**king hours long.

The thing about transplanting Valentine’s Day’s sprawling romantic comedy to the New Year’s holiday is that nobody in the world particularly cares about New Year’s Eve except as an excuse to dilute their bloodstream with as much alcohol as possible. Thus, the movie is forced to contort itself, plying a ridiculous amount of meaning to the day (“It’s New Year’s Eve. Anything is possible.”), frantically altering holiday archetypes (Ashton Kutcher plays a Grinch who despises New Year’s Eve, because that’s totally a thing), and straight-up inventing traditions (“Second chances expire at midnight.”) to the point that the holiday providing the film’s backbone is virtually unrecognizable.

Without a spine, New Year’s Eve is paralyzed, utterly incapable of even attempting to elicit laughter. Some gags fall flat on their face and some pop and fizzle like wet fireworks, but most of the time it’s hard to even identify an attempt to be funny. Do yourself a favor and make it your New Year’s resolution to quarantine yourself from this film. That’s one that I sincerely hope you keep.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1566

Reviews In This Series
Black Christmas (Clark 1974)
Black Xmas (Morgan, 2006)

Abe Ruthless

Year: 2012

Director: Timur Bekmambetov

Cast: Benjamin Walker, Rufus Sewell, Dominic Cooper

Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Let me just say that there is very little reason for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter to exist. Based on the lesser-known mashup property by Pride and Prejudice and Zombies scribe Seth Grahame-Smith, the concept is so fundamentally strange that it seemed unlikely that the ever-so-safe Hollywood studios would ever take a whack at it, let alone throw Tim Burton on as executive producer and pour 70 million into its coffer. 

The fact that it's quite fun - much better than it should have ever possibly been able to be - is also surprising, but I continue to lie back in awe at the fact that the monstrosity was ever given the chance to exist in the first place. But here we are. Also, we can all look forward to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in cinemas in 2015 directed by the guy who did 17 Again, so never ever tell me that the world isn't an incomprehensibly wonderful place sometimes.

There should be whole new fields of science invented to discover how this film came to be. And to see if we can tap into that to get Saw VIII: The Battle of Jigsaw Island off the ground.

The plot is presumably self-explanatory, but I'll jam through it for formality's sake. Abraham Lincoln (Benjamin Walker) lost his mother to a vampiric plantation owner (Marton Csokas) as a child and, once he grows up, is taken under the wing of expert hunter Henry (Dominic Cooper). While he attempts to balance his friendship with childhood buddy Will (Anthony Mackie) and relationship with - of all people - Mary Todd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) with the stern, lonely life of a vampire hunter, a team of vicious Southern vampires led by Adam (Rufus Sewell) and his sister Vadoma (Erin Wasson) make eeeeeevil plans in the shadows.

There's actually a rather large amount of mythology bundled up in the film (evidently vampires can endure sunlight just fine, but they lack they ability to murder one another), both vampiric and otherwise. The attention to detail is impressive, though I am of the opinion that the film leans far too heavily on the book for an accurate understanding of the universe's (and the characters') mechanics.

Far too many moments feel rushed, especially some of the more emotional beats, leaving the impression that maybe you accidentally sat on the remote and skipped ahead a couple scenes. Attempting to coast through on the details of the novel, Mary Todd's character is glossed over with a generic "modern woman in olden times" sheen and Henry especially is (from what I have been told) not given his due diligence, his brutal and vivid origin story from the book instead replaced with a treacly vignette.

Now we'll never know how he can tree-lean so flawlessly.

But for all the dashed-off character material (Why does Mary Todd fall in love with Lincoln? Because history says so, that's why.) and chockablock narrative, AL:VH makes up with gonzo action setpieces that not only go over the top but send the top itself careening into a different dimension. We get slow-mo explosions of blood and splinters! A combination battle axe/musket! Men atop a runaway train on a burning bridge! A footrace atop a stampede of horses!

The whole affair is unfortunately laden with a heavy blanket of CGI, but the action is too nonstop to be bothered with handwringing about it. And while the details are a little cloudy, the broad strokes of the plot are campy genius. The film elects to ignore historical fact (I mean, duh) in favor of a stark black-and-white Civil War tale in which the Pure Good Abe Lincoln fights off the Wicked Monsters of the South - all the vampires are plantation owners who keep slaves in order to feed. If that's not the most zanily patriotic metaphor you've ever in modern American cinema, please let me know in the comments so I can watch that other movie right now.

And honestly, the screenwriter and make-up artist conspire to create what can only be described as an inutterably accurate portrayal of how our 16th president would speak, look, act and think if he had come from a background of vampire hunting rather than whatever the hell it was that early American teens did with their time. Tending fields and tipping cows I guess. The style of his speechcraft (if that's not a word, I'm making him so) is alarmingly accurate to the period and his look as he ages only improves.

I never saw the movie Lincoln, but this frame tells me I might as well have.

So yes, there are rough patches in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. In fact, this movie could be sold at Bath & Body Works as an exfoliant. But it rather makes up for them with a masterful sense of style and horror movie fun that makes it a uniquely strange thrill ride. It's not going to rewrite cinema history, but this buoyant look back over America's alternate past is worth visiting for fans of vampires, exuberant action, or hot presidents.

More like BABE Lincoln, amirite?

TL;DR: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a little too reliant on its source material, but is a wacky fun retelling of a historical turning point.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 898