Census Bloodbath: Re-Modeled

Note: The only copy of this movie that I could access was in unsubtitled Hindi, so take my review with a huge grain of salt.

Year:
1984
Director:
I.V. Sasi
Cast:
Kamal Haasan, Reena Roy, Tina Munim
Run Time:
2 hours 10 minutes

Plot: Karishmaa follows photographer Sunny (Kamal Haasan, who also starred in the 1981 Kollywood movie of which this is a remake, Tik Tik Tik) as he befriends a group of models and begins dating one of them, Nisha (Reena Roy). When they begin dying one by one, he becomes the prime suspect.

Analysis: It is not uncommon for successful regional Indian films to be adapted into full-scale Hindi-language Bollywood productions, so it was perhaps inevitable that we'd be retracing our steps with an Indian slasher at some point. Although the Tamil-language movie Tik Tik Tik was not a success in its original run (nor did it really deserve to be), a Telugu-language dub later found a major audience, and I guess that was enough for Bollywood to snap it up, along with its original star.

Considering the fact that it's the same guy giving the same performance in the same story, it's a little hard to review Karishmaa on its own merits. In fact, it's practically a scene-for-scene remake (down to the weird moment where the horse shot glasses behind the main character's head trigger a neighing noise on the soundtrack whenever they appear), so the only texture comes from the slight differences between the two movies.

For instance, thanks to some careful tweaking, Karishmaa is even less of a horror movie than Tik Tik Tik, instead amplifying the action scenes. While this was annoying for the purposes of Census Bloodbath, it at least allowed for certain pleasures like the stately Bond villain of the original movie being transmogrified into an Evil Karate Guy.

Unfortunately, a great many of the changes that were made are for the worse. The main character is still a pathetic sleazebag (even more so, in fact) and they've given him a disgustingly precocious child sidekick this time around, just to rub salt in the wound. Plus, while the lingering specter of rape culture was present in every scene of the previous movie, Karishmaa adds a sexual assault element to the opening murder that pulls the subtext into text in a particularly gross way.

There are some good changes, at least. The kills we do get are slightly more grody and intense, which elevates the slasher element somewhat in spite of the fact that horror in general is hardly a priority here. Also, the musical numbers here are actively good rather than being bland lumps of nothing. 

The choreography (which includes a number where Nisha keeps teleporting around Sunny, and a fun moment where the couple is dancing with one another face-up on the ground) is creative and well-performed. Actually, Kamal Haasan is such a charming dancer that I almost liked his character more than I did in Tik Tik Tik.

That said, I enjoyed watching Karishmaa slightly less overall, presumably because I was essentially watching the exact same movie within a few hours of seeing the original. The changes aren't major enough to stand out, and the more or less even balance between good and bad changes results in the whole thing being kind of a wash.

Killer: Evil Karate Guy and His Henchmen

Final Girl: Sunny (Kamal Haasan) feat. Nisha (Reena Roy)

Best Kill: Even though I object to it lacking the operatic melodrama of the villain's death in Tik Tik Tik, Evil Karate Guy is crushed by a statue that falls on him, which is still a pretty exciting way to go.

Sign of the Times: The opening credits sequence is a disco meltdown featuring Sunny dancing in silhouette as eye-searing colors surge across the screen.

Scariest Moment: Sunny takes photos of Nisha while a fan is blowing her skirt up, and we're meant to like him. (This doubles as a secondary Sign of the Times.)

Weirdest Moment: Sunny discovers an important clue because he is woken up by it while napping on the beach.

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 5; not including a goon who gets dragged on the ground by horses, but whose fate we never specifically learn.

1. Model #1 has a diamond carved out of her with a knife.
2. Model #2 is stabbed in the chest offscreen.
3. Goon is shot.
4. Bearded Guy dies of wounds sustained in a fight.
5. Evil Karate Guy is crushed by a falling statue.

TL;DR: Kharishmaa is a mostly useless remake, with the good changes and bad changes largely canceling each other out.

Rating: 5/10

Fly Away Home

Year: 1986

Director: David Cronenberg

Cast: Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, John Getz 

Run Time: 1 hour 36 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Well, four films deep into a marathon we weren't even supposed to do, we've arrived at the reason I started this whole mess in the first place: David Cronenberg's classic remake The Fly, which until now was one of my biggest horror blind spots (now the movie at the number one spot is probably The Haunting, in case anyone is keeping track). Not only is it my first real excursion into the Cronenberg oeuvre (I saw The Dead Zone as a kid and I've seen the mediocre non-horror M. Butterfly, but that's it), it's the movie that I decided would be the final brick in my opinion of Jeff Goldblum.

I've never been taken with the actor's endless array of tics and "ums" and "uhs," but I'll be the first to admit I came at his career from the wrong direction. You're probably not supposed to familiarize yourself with his work starting at The Switch, Morning Glory, and his cameo on Friends. Thor: Ragnarok was a step in the right direction, less so Jurassic Park (which is a masterpiece, but no thanks to him). Anyway, there was a lot riding on this movie, and I'm happy to say it withstood my probably too-intense demands upon it.

At least now I know he was weirdly ripped once and had a baboon friend.

So I still don't like Jeff Goldblum, but I can finally at least accept that he is well cast when he is asked to play wildly intelligent men who are also pompous asses. Said pompous ass is Seth Brundle, a man who is in the final stages of developing a teleportation machine, spurred on by his own intense motion sickness. Enter Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis), a reporter who falls in love with him, but also wants to document the final stages of his experiments in a bestselling book that honestly sounds like it would have been pretty boring if all went according to plan.

Alas, all does not go according to plan. When Veronica leaves in the middle of the night to clear things up with her troublemaking ex/editor/Game of Thrones name-haver Stathis Borans (John Getz), Seth tests his teleporter on himself in a fit of drunken egomania. Unbeknownst to him because he isn't caught up on his 50's sci-fi classics, a common housefly joins him in the teleportation booth and they are bonded together on the molecular level. At first, this manifests itself as a surge of superhuman energy that causes a rift between Seth and Veronica, but then Brundle's body slowly degenerates into a half-human, half-fly monstrosity.

It's, shall we say, hella gross.

The Fly really only takes the skeleton of the original's plot, and applies a great deal of gooey flesh to it, but the overall feeling remains substantially the same, in a really interesting way. The context of both stories is so very different, but they're both at their core about the trials of a loving couple who are suddenly and inexplicably faced with the fact that one partner is doomed to die much sooner than anticipated, thanks to their own hubris. Cronenberg's film definitely foregrounds the metaphor of a fatal illness, because of course it does, but it shares the emotional core of a woman staring directly into the face of her love interest's mortality. And that face is pretty ugly, if you hadn't noticed.

And while I have my qualms about Goldblum's general Goldbluminess (it was certainly fresher back in 1986 at least, before he had the chance to Christopher Walken himself and eventually become a caricature of his own mannerisms), Geena Davis knocks it out of the park here. Especially in the third act when she is doled out her own little slice of body horror, the existential dread that crashes upon her is truly harrowing and spellbinding.

Maybe she fueled her performance by drawing from the pure horror that is both of their haircuts in this movie.

Honestly, The Fly is probably one of the most essential remakes ever made, respecting the intent and form of the original while applying a new director's very strong personality to the material, improving it without denying its inherent special qualities. And boy does Cronenberg have a personality. I have it on good authority that this is his warmest, most emotional movie, but he sure does find a way to work in a lot of talk about transcending the flesh and whatnot. 

And transcend the flesh he does. The final act of this movie is replete with some of the most disgusting ooey gooey special effects you ever did see. I'm a bit of a horehound myself, but the things that really get my skin crawling are intimate bits of gore like, oh, the fact that there are scenes involving the removal of both teeth AND fingernails because why the f**k not? It's certainly not for everyone, to the point that it's hardly for anyone, but the fly transformation is certainly a makeup masterwork, showcasing just how far movie magic had come in the almost three decades since the original movie hit theaters. 

It's only aided by the incredible production design, which updates the pedestrian glass cases of the "matter transmitter" into a vaguely alien pod that spews billowing white smoke like the mouth of a cauldron.

Ridley Scott is shook.

The thing they don't tell you is just how much of a slow burn it is to get to any of that. There is a lot of movie before we go full-tilt body horror, and while the structure isn't as wonky and riddled with filler as its source material, there are a couple of moments where it flags before it reaches that home stretch. Maybe I'm just being a petulant gay who's sick of watching straight people fall in love, but something about their romantic chemistry wasn't exactly pulling me in at first, and I had a tough time reconciling how quickly they seemed to form a bond we were supposed to view as unbreakable. Well, not unbreakable, but strong enough to be rough to watch when it's tested.

Look, they get there in the end, but it was just a bit of a struggle for me personally. Anyhow, who could possibly care about some niggling first act qualms when the movie delivers such a marrow-churning display of geek show grotesquerie with a dash of existential subtext for flavor? The Fly is certainly the best of the franchise without a doubt (although I've liked all of them so far to one degree or another), but you didn't really need me to tell you that, did you?

TL;DR: The Fly is the ultimate example of a director decanting their brain directly onto a property and fundamentally changing it for the better.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1153
Reviews In This Series
The Fly (Neumann, 1958)
Return of the Fly (Bernds, 1959)
Curse of the Fly (Sharp, 1965)
The Fly (Cronenberg, 1986)
The Fly II (Walas, 1989)

Popcorn Kernels: Even The Wind Is Afraid

In which we review the final two Mexican horror films screened during month 4 of the Scream 101 podcast: a classic 60’s horror film and its New Millennium remake.

Hasta el Viento Tiene Miedo (1968) (listen to our episode right here)

Year: 1968
Director: Carlos Enrique Taboada
Cast: Marga López, Maricruz Olivier, Alicia Bonet
Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes
MPAA Rating: N/A

The students at an all-girls school are haunted by the ghost of a past student who committed suicide.

Hasta el Viento Teine Miedo faces two hurdles right off the bat. First, it’s a 60’s horror movie. Second, it’s a classical haunted house film. Both of those genres tend to be too stately and antiseptic to provoke blood-curdling chills in today’s audiences. However, the film’s antidote to this is writer-director Carlos Enrique Taboada, who is as close to a Dario Argento as classic Mexican cinema would get.

Although Hasta el Viento still lacks powerful scares, it does boast a sense of creeping dread provoked by an extremely powerful and well-crafted aesthetic. Its use of light and shadow is a perfect stepping stone between German expressionism in the silent era and the stylistic rush of 70’s giallo filmmaking in Italy. The plot might be straightforward and predictable (even at the time), but it lives in a lush, exciting world. This profound grip on style arrives fully fledged in the very first shot, which shows the feet of a hanging body in the top of the frame before revealing its full silhouette on the wall in a flash of lightning. It both skirts the heavy censorship of the period and creates a more dreamlike, provocative image out of a vision that could have merely been crass and blunt.

This delightful handle over the style spreads to every aspect of Hasta el Viento, including the score, which soars up and down in a blustery refrain, and the framing that turns the mundane into an eerie fantasia. It shows a consistency of vision that allows it to transcend from being a horror flick to being an actual bona fide work of cinema art.

Then the characters that occupy that bare bones plot are just delightful. And I’m not just talking about their gravity-defying go-go hairstyles. Each girl has a distinct personality and set of motivations, and their interactions ring with truth, simultaneously sparkling with naturalistic humor. Their dialogue is what makes the movie, buoying the down moments.

I wouldn’t advise going into Hasta el Viento expecting anything other than a stately foreign film, but it delivers its atmosphere with an engaging, surprisingly modern flair. Another Mexican horror film about the terrors of institutional oppression, it’s both a political and stylistic triumph, even if it really isn’t scary anymore.

Rating: 8/10

Hasta el Viento Tiene Miedo (2007) (listen to our episode right here)

Year: 2007
Director: Gustavo Moheno
Cast: Martha Higareda, Verónica Langer, María Aguilera
Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

After a suicide attempt, Claudia is sent to a home for troubled teens that is haunted by the vengeful spirit of a past patient.

It turns out Hollywood isn’t he only place where we can make a hash out of a classic foreign film with a ham-handed remake. Those foreign countries are perfectly capable of doing it to themselves. By updating the classical ghost story of Hasta el Viento Tiene Miedo to the modern age, they drown it in detail and sleaze, stripping away every last element that made it an enduring horror tale.

They’ve given Claudia a gritty origin story, updated the setting to be more grim, and tossed in about half a dozen superfluous lesbian subplots, all in a desperate attempt to jazz it up and appeal to a jaded modern audience: More blood! More boobs! An unnecessary backstory for the tower where the action takes place! It’s an unholy mess, and proof positive that more story detail does not equal a better movie.

I will admit that the story here is more coherent and structured than the original, which had an elemental, almost campfire-esque quality. But the plot will always be simplistic, no matter how much you accessorize it. What made the film click was its inimitable style and engaging characters, two things that the remake entirely lacks. In the habit of most 2000’s remakes, the characters are reduced to interchangeable assholes in the name of “edginess,” and the aesthetic is crude at best, eliminating all mood and shadow with wide blasts of light that make the whole thing look like a forgotten TV movie.

At least this movie attempts to add one element that could be interpreted as intelligent. A major visual and narrative motif is menstruation, as the blood is linked to the characters’ fears of aging, sexuality, and life itself. Naturally, it’s too dumb to do anything particularly exciting with this development, but at least it’s trying. I guess.

However, beyond that, Hasta el Viento 2007 has nothing to offer. Having removed all the best qualities of the original, it’s trapped with that dud story and is left as a miserably tedious slog. I always do my beast to give any remake a shot, but like all too many entries in the genre, this one is just a wailing waste of time.

Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 881

Christmas In July: Slay Bells Ring, Are You Listening?

Year: 2012

Director: Steven C. Miller

Cast: Malcolm McDowell, Jaime King, Donal Logue

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Yeah, they remade Silent Night, Deadly Night. It’s one that kind of slipped through the cracks, late to the remake party in 2012. Although the retitled Silent Night is a loose remake if there ever was one (and boy have there been a few), it shares enough elements with the original (like a Santa killer punishing the naughty, which some of the sequels couldn’t even manage, as well as an antler-based kill, a child gifted with a bloody weapon, etc.) that it at least proves that the original was on its mind, as opposed to the Sex Kitten romps of Prom Night and Sorority Row. That’s by far the best thing I can say about it, because – keeping in tone with the rest of the franchise – it kinda really sucks.

I’m so glad I’m finished with these garbage fires they called movies.

In Silent Night, Deputy Aubrey Bradimore (Jaime King) is forced to work on Christmas Eve when her coworker fails to show up. A line is dropped about this being her first Christmas without her husband, and by “dropped” I mean “hurled off a cliff” because this is literally never mentioned again. Together, she and Sheriff Cooper (Malcolm McDowell, essentially reprising his role as the scenery-masticating Dr. Loomis in Rob Zombie’s Halloween) discover that a killer dressed as Santa Claus has been rampaging through their little town of Cryer, Wisconsin punishing the naughty. This being a slasher movie (a subgenre we finally return to after two hyperbolically bizarre detours), Cooper elects not to call the FBI and handle the threat on his own.

Their search is hampered by a parade in which nearly every able-bodied adult man in town is asked to don a Santa suit, but they narrow down the suspects to a group of bad Santas that would make Fred Claus proud, including a wandering vagrant and a local coke dealer.

You’d think they’d find the killer with ease, considering he’s wearing giant steampunk goggles, but you would be wrong.

To be fair, Silent Night has a lot in common with SNDN1. It’s just as mean-spirited and poorly acted, but it lacks that veneer of 80’s charm that makes the original an enduring mainstay of the slasher genre. While SNDN featured a few too many rape scenes for my taste, it was a loopy, idiosyncratic film that told a strangely detailed, unwittingly compelling story about the societal ills that molded our apple-cheeked Santa killer. Silent Night just pulls a reverse Rob Zombie, stripping away the villain’s backstory and filling in that extra run time with an extra helping of nasty-minded sleaze.

There’s just something deeply depressing about watching a horde of wooden, amateur hour performers get chopped up in 2012 rather than 1984. It might just be the buffer of time making the legwarmered, permed 80’s seem a couple degrees askew from reality, but I think I can blame two movies in particular: Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2003 for igniting the remake boom, and Scream for rendering it basically impossible to make a straightforward slasher ever again. By virtue of being a remake, a movie openly challenges the original film with the unspoken claim that it will either be better or at least satisfyingly different. When it is neither, it doubles down on disappointment. And Silent Night is neither in a spectacularly unpleasant way.

This movie is just plain vicious. In addition to being callously exploitative (a topless woman runs around for what feels like hours before being fed into a wood chipper; while slasher movies are best known for boobs and blood, titillation and mutilation are actually pretty rarely in the same frame save for the sleazier entries – The Prowler, Bloody Moon, etc.), it’s horribly misguided.

Horror films always need to walk on eggshells when it comes to killing a child, and while certain slashers have succeeded (SNDN among them), the death of a minor here is despicably prolonged, involving electrocuting her with a cattle prod until she stars foaming at the mouth before finishing her off. It is at this point where the over-the-top violence of Silent Night crosses the line. Hell, it throws a tarp over the line hoping you won’t notice, and dashes right on over it. Its obscene, boundary-free eagerness for butchery is vaguely sickening.

And I’m someone who watched Maniac without batting an eye.

I will, however, give Silent Night points for its occasional doses of pure, inexplicable lunacy.  There’s certainly a whiff of bad-good charm around Malcolm McDowell’s flagrant disinterest in the project, but by far my favorite scene belongs to the pre-slaughtered 13-year-old- girl and her mom. The spoiled little brat knocks her mother’s heart medication to the floor (!) and demands “F**k church! I want to go to the mall!” instantly becoming the most compellingly unlikeable child this side of Veruca Salt. She’s awesome. And then of course we have a whole scene lit with red and green emergency lights like it’s a Saw holiday special, and then there’s the fact that every time Jaime King walks through her impossibly idyllic small town, greeting everyone she sees and smiling at the whirl of Christmas activity, you expect her to burst into song à la Belle in Beauty and the Beast.

As you well know, I am a sucker for crazy camp, so this goes a long way toward helping me survive the dismal disarray of the rest of the film. And to be fair, there is some incredible gore that would be a real treat if Silent Night hadn’t poisoned the well by frontloading its most distasteful killings. A gushing leg wound and a head split by an axe are two particularly convincing Grand Guignol effects of the highest order.

The movie would at least be a passable horror roller coaster if it weren’t for the out-of-control tone that nose dives into torture porny grunge every chance it gets. Or the story that aimlessly wanders around, sloughing off subplots like a snake shedding its skin. Or the anonymous killer performer that lumbers around like a plumber who just soiled his pants. Ugh, what a waste. I’m terribly disappointed to end our Christmas in July segment like this, but Silent Night is just another abortive holiday thriller with enough potential energy to keep me on the hook, but not enough ambition and drive to do anything with it.

TL;DR: Silent Night is a thoroughly unpleasant, mean-spirited watch.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1094
Reviews In This Series
Silent Night, Deadly Night (Sellier Jr., 1984)
Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (Harry, 1987)
Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! (Hellman, 1989)
Silent Night, Deadly Night IV: Initiation (Yuzna, 1990)
Silent Night, Deadly Night V: The Toy Maker (Kitrosser, 1991)
Silent Night (Miller, 2012)

I Ain't Afraid Of No Girls

Year: 2016

Director: Paul Feig

Cast: Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon

Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Man alive, am I glad the remake of Ghostbusters is in theaters so people can finally shut up about it. This needlessly divisive remake has had the one-two punch of taking on the mantle of a virulently nostalgic property and igniting the raging misogyny of certain online cave dwellers, so it has not been a fun time being a member of the horror community. 

As pointless and awful as many remakes are, I’m always willing to give them a chance. Especially when they’re from the team behind Spy, my favorite comedy of last year. Not to mention the fact that Ghostbusters is an iconic franchise with a series of major narrative flaws spiderwebbing across its surface, making it a more or less perfect property to update, if we have to reboot movies at all.

Hollywood certainly seems to enjoy it.

Ghostbusters doesn’t recreate the original plot so much as it sets it back to square one with different characters and sees where they go from there. These characters are Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig), a meek doctor of particle physics who has attempted to suppress her belief in the paranormal in a weak stab at getting tenure; Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy), her high school best friend and a true believer who has dedicated her life to paranormal research; Jillian Holtzman (Kate McKinnon), a dubiously sane engineer with an anarchistic flair for creating extremely dangerous, untested machinery; and Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones), a subway worker who is the Ghostbusters’ first client and quickly becomes a part of the team.

As the Ghostbusters jet around New York City investigating apparitions, spirits, and grim grinning ghosts, they realize that a sinister someone is creating devices the amplify paranormal activity (which might explain why it got five sequels). They must figure out his plan and stop him before it’s too late.

Probably how most people felt when they heard this film was in development.

Is Ghostbusters better than the original? No. If you’re here on a hate odyssey, this is your cue to stop reading.

OK, now that the angries are gone, I’m safe to tell you that the remake is actually pretty good! As it should be. This is Paul Feig and Melissa McCarthy, not some anonymous music video director and Tiger Beat’s plastic Teen of the Week. Just like the original four Busters, these ladies weren’t chosen because they were sexy, of-the-now superstars. There’s a reason they didn’t cast Margot Robbie, Gal Gadot, Olivia Munn, and hell, Jennifer Lawrence, why not. They cast genuinely funny women who can sell a joke like it’s a Pokémon Go in-app purchase.

And Ghostbusters really is funny. That’s its greatest strength, which is probably good news considering it’s a comedy film. Obviously, humor is in the gut of the beholder, and the jokes are in a vastly, almost unrecognizably different vein from the original, but there’s a lot of great stuff at work here. Chris Hemsworth is an obvious standout because every line he’s given is a joke, but his ditzy receptionist nabs the best scene in the movie, a job interview-cum-Abbott and Costello routine that is delivered with diamond-sharp comic timing. Kate McKinnon is also a magnetic presence, presenting a spectacularly offbeat, unpredictable set of line readings that are always bizarrely fascinating. 

Probably the best overall performance is Wiig’s, because she effortlessly finds the po-faced wackiness in her straight-woman character while maintaining enough of an emotional throughline that she provides us an easy access point to the more out-there characters and developments.

Everyone else is good too, but I can’t just copy-paste the cast list here and call it a review.

Ghostbusters is very funny from beginning to end, but here’s the thing. At a certain point in the second act, it kind of stops trying to be funny. When the jokes come, they’re mostly just as solid, but during the course of its typically vast Feigian run time it slowly starts to kind of take itself seriously, presenting lots of ghostly action and the series’ traditional deus ex machina climax with hardly a glimmer of irony.

Then it attempts to tie a goopy little bow around everything with a series of character moments that strain to pump raw emotion from a one-dimensional well. These characters are great to watch as they quip and bounce off one another, but only Erin and Abby’s arcs have any meat on their bones. Everyone else is far too weak to support the more dramatic turn the film abruptly shifts into in the middle of the finale. Hell, even Erin and Abby are given a scene so heavy with melodrama and a wailing Schindler’s List score that it topples face-first into the dirt.

But after a bit, Ghostbusters remembers what it is and course corrects. It never fully recovers from that massive hit, but it’s still a sprightly, amusing popcorn picture. Once again, the trailers for this Feig comedy dreadfully undersold what it had to offer, so while it was better than I worried it might be, it wasn’t really as great as I’d hoped. Oh sure, it’s unique and hilarious enough to stand on its own two feet in the Ghostbusters canon and its fun cameos mostly avoid incessant pandering (mostly), but it’s not a resounding success to the tune of a Spy or a Bridesmaids.

The only thing I will concede to the haters is that the FallOut Boy cover of the Ghostbusters thing is truly dreadful (they also donated the worst song of 2014 to Big Hero 6), but the filmmakers know what’s up and they give Ray Parker, Jr. more than enough airtime. Anyway, go see it! It’s a dizzy, fun summer movie the likes of which haven’t really been packing multiplexes this year.

TL;DR: Ghostbusters is a wholly decent remake that isn't better than original but offers a unique enough entry to be worth watching.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1003

Reviews In This Series
Ghostbusters (Reitman, 1984)
Ghostbusters II (Reitman, 1989)
Ghostbusters (Feig, 2016)

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)

What Have I Done?

You might remember my spring cleaning period, where I unloaded a barrage of mini-reviews (well, if seven paragraphs still counts as "mini") to slough off the weight of just how many films I had seen that I still needed to review. You may remember this because it was literally a week ago. Well, guess what? Even though I still need to finish off my Chucky and Wes Craven marathons and tackle the current movies I've seen this month before the Halloween season comes crashing down in earnest, I went ahead and watched three more movies this week. I've made a huge mistake.

Whiplash

Year: 2014

Director: Damien Chazelle

Cast: Miles Teller, J. K. Simmons, Melissa Benoist

Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A young drummer takes a class with an angry, abusive teacher in an attempt to push himself to be the best.

It’s not often that my interests intersect with the year’s Oscar noms (The House on Sorority Row was snubbed!), but just last year a miracle happened. The scrappy horror production company Blumhouse took a break from making piles of money to assist in the creation of Whiplash, which went on to sweep all the Academy Awards categories that nobody particularly cares about. Despite its minted status as an Oscar flick, it still has the stylistic trademarks of a Blumhouse production, and that’s what makes it a fascinating watch.

The limited sets, small cast, and stylistic experiments typical to low budget horror filmmaking are all reinterpreted to this new genre, which is admittedly a horror story in its own right. Centering primarily on Miles Teller’s ingénue Andrew and J. K. Simmons’ domineering professor Fletcher, these two become locked in an emotionally brutal and occasionally violent enterprise: turning Andrew into one of the greats. This brutishly simple story requires a lot of its audience, asking if the pursuit of fame and talent is truly worth the price one must pay.

The plot is straightforward as all hell, which allows director Damien Chazelle free range in visually portraying it. He doesn’t go institutionally crazy with that freedom, but he taps directly into the film’s adrenal gland, sending shock waves of pure electricity through the audience. I suppose it goes without saying that the cinematography and editing adhere to the beat of the music played in the film, but there’s so much more than that to chew on.

The yellow, underlit music room casts a sickly pall on all who inhabit its space, red blood splashes vividly onto stark white drums, and the rapid cuts abruptly stand stock still to emphasize intense moments. There is no act of cinematic upheaval more profoundly affecting in Whiplash than its fearless finale, an audacious sprint to the finish line that combines rapid whip-pans, whirlwind cutting, and oppressively extreme close-ups in a mesmerizing effort that instills the feeling that the action is happening so fast, the film can’t even keep up with itself. When it finally lets up the sense of release is so drastic that you’re forced to sit there a minute, processing in stunned awe.

It’s a cool film, with two unforgettable actors behind wheel. Miles Teller finally breaks free from his Zac Efron/Skylar Astin twentysomething hell to deliver a well-rounded character that portrays raw, open-faced ambition in a frankly alarming but thoroughly committed manner. His fire is matched with panache by J. K. Simmons’ powerful hurricane of a performance, swinging from stone-faced impenetrability to spittle-flying rage beast. It’s stunning, nuanced stuff that simultaneously humanizes the characters yet exposes their darkest flaws.

The best thing about this crackling, angry film is its awareness of how insulated its world is. After all the fighting, screaming, bleeding, crying, and chair throwing (that music room has the world’s most resilient walls – definitely call their contractor next time you need remodeling done), it’s still only jazz. Time and again, the film reminds the characters just how little everybody else in the world cares about jazz. It leaves you with a bittersweet taste and compels you to consider the consequences of the sacrifices people make for their art. It’s a daring, kinetic picture and more horrifying than half the Blumhouse stock. Check it out!

Rating: 8/10

House of Wax

Year: 2005

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra

Cast: Chad Michael Murray, Elisha Cuthbert, Jared Padalecki

Run Time: 1 hour 53 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A group of college students on a road trip get stranded in a town with a house of wax run by two maniacal brothers who murder tourists and turn them into wax figures.

2005 was such a barren wasteland for horror that we ended up with House of Wax, a remake of a remake. But, although it’s hardy a cinematic triumph, House of Wax is intriguing for several reasons. First, it is a reinterpretation of a classic Vincent Price property in the immediate wake of the zeitgeist hit Saw. Second, it’s actually a pretty beautifully shot little movie despite its host of remake calling cards, like uselessly pretty actors, a nigh-on nonsensical plot, and drama that’s shallower than a dorm shower.

Let’s linger on that first one, shall we? Where the Vincent Price flick was of sanitized 1950’s vintage, the new House of Wax was born into a meaner epoch, smack dab in the middle of the rise of torture porn. As a result, there are obviously much more prolonged and miserable scenes of people being chained to giant metal contraptions and whatnot. Really, it comes with the territory. But the striking thing about House of Wax’s new grim perspective is the artistry put into rendering the gore as realistically as possible.

From close-up grue like superglued lips and peeling wax skin to the realistically bloody aftermath of punches and blows, House of Wax makes an art form of turning the stomach. And the biggest showstopper of the film transcends even the gooey carnage, abuilding made entirely of wax melting to the ground. It’s visually arresting stuff, and if I rated films solely on effects, House of Wax would be an unequivocal 10/10.

Unfortunately I rate films on a variety of criteria, and in nearly every other respect, House of Wax fails spectacularly. One of the film’s most notable deficits is the acting. Featuring a notorious performance by the self-indulgent heiress Paris Hilton, the stakes become ludicrously low as she fails to entirely convince that she isn’t already made of wax. Any performer in the world would look like Brando when compared to Little Miss Trust Fund, but by golly do her co-stars push to give her a run for her money.

To be fair, providing motivation for the mountain of dumb-ass white horror character decisions that comprise the plot (“Let’s wander into a closed house of wax! And take a ride from a stranger whose car is decorated with rodent carcasses And then go home and floss with a rusty chain saw!” At one point, a hapless teen literally runs into a wall.) would be a challenge for Stella Adler herself. But wet-behind-the-ears stars Elisha Cuthbert and Jared Padalecki flail to find any sort of purchase on the impenetrable blocks of dialogue and Chad Michael Murray’s strained attempts to portray an “edgy” and “hard” criminal type just one year after A Cinderella Story are flecked with flop sweat and patchy stubble.

The basic story structure starts off interesting, splitting up the core cast between widely disparate locations, but it devolves into an aimless piece that reliably and impressively fails to follow through on the tortured seedlings of themes it attempts to plant, like the idea of two sets of twins facing off (Cuthbert and Murray are ostensibly siblings, although her brunette weave – probably mandated to accentuate Hilton’s golden tresses – isn’t doing her any favors) or small town vs. city living.

Luckily, as I mentioned before, the film is kind of disproportionately gorgeous, with dizzying, roving camera shots that highlight the moody gothic lighting scheme. It’s unfair, really, because the quality cinematography (as well as the terrific gore) prevents me from unequivocally panning the film like I urgently desire to. The acting might be dramatic backwash, the killer might look suspiciously like Tommy Wiseau, and the plot might be risibly coherent – bordering on absurdism – but there’s just enough to make it a remotely pleasing remake. Yay!

Rating: 5/10

Obvious Child

Year: 2014

Director: Gillian Robespierre

Cast: Jenny Slate, Jake Lacy, Gaby Hoffman

Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A heartbroken comedian sleeps with a cute stranger and discovers that she’s pregnant.

Whatever else it may be, Obvious Child is a charming film. It is also a romantic comedy, no matter how much its glowing reviews attempt to push and prod it into a  more agreeable shape. Along with that genre comes a bricklike tome of rules and conventions that the film does a great deal to subvert, but it can only do so much.

For a lot of the time, Obvious Child is astoundingly typical: a drunken montage of leaving voicemails on the ex’s phone, the sassy gay friend who can hardly keep from gagging on the arch dialogue jammed with ultrahip slang words that haven’t even been invented yet, a protagonist that spins world-shattering problems out of a situation that could easily be cleared up with a thirty-second conversation… It’s sweet, but you’ve had this dessert before. If it’s not Jenny Slate, it’s Julia Roberts, Katherine Heigl, Reese Witherspoon, Cameron Diaz, Meg Ryan, Marilyn Monroe.

But the thing is, it is Jenny Slate. And it is Gillian Robesspierre, directing and adapting a feature version of her 2009 short film. And where the film breaks from romantic comedy convention, it breaks hard and fast like an unleashed puppy. [MID-FILM SPOILERS ABOUND IN THE REMAINDER OF THIS REVIEW] Where Obvious Child could easily have been a female-centric Knocked Up riff, it bites down and takes the risk to discuss what that film was too terrified to contemplate: what if abortion really is the right decision in some cases?

Telling even a dopey, generic story with that backdrop is a bracingly fresh approach, and Obvious Child’s social impact is practically limitless. It juggles all the trials of that decision (weighing your options, deciding to tell the father, examining one’s own moral principles) in a raw, straightforward manner without dropping the cheery torches of humor and new love. 

I just wish it were a tad funnier, you know? It’s never unfunny, but a lot of the humor is far from groundbreaking. Thinking back, there’s only one line that legitimately stuck with me and a couple of the more vulgar scenarios tickled, but the bulk of the film is deliberately low key and indie chic. It’s as if they didn’t have the budget to cover the medical expenses of keeping people in stitches.

Luckily, Jenny Slate manages to keep it all together. Her performance is unequivocal proof that, in order to be a good comedian, you must be a deft storyteller. So much of the film requires her to wring humor from moments of genuine emotion and she fearlessly bares her soul for the good of the story, always keeping herself comfortably far from flying over the top and turning into an SNL sketch.

Her character takes “flawed protagonist” to an almost surreal level (and her best friend/foil Gaby Hoffman – who gladly drops everything and does Jenny’s job while she mopes in a box – is clearly a figure from high medieval fantasy), but she manages to cobble a likeable, effervescent presence from the wreckage. And when all is said and done, the films speeds by like a hamster on crack.

It’s a lopsided flick, but as a first directorial effort it’s spectacular. There are certainly kinks to work out, but Robespierre is a woman to watch out for. She has delivered a tight, silly, emotionally honest flick that goes for the jugular of typical social norms. It might not have you rolling on the floor, but it’s important, well crafted, and – most of all – just darn pleasant.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 2010

How Do We Know She Is Alive?

Year: 2009

Director: Stewart Hendler

Cast: Briana Evigan, Rumer Willis, Carrie Fisher

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Slasher remakes are a much maligned bunch. When you earn the disrespect of fans of a genre as notoriously disreputable as the slasher movie, there's pretty much nowhere left to turn, artistically speaking. But still the wheels of the remake machine kept spinning, chewing up and spitting out properties like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, The Hitcher, and even poor April Fool's Day, polluting cinemas with its noxious cloud. Notable exceptions like Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre would crop up time and again, mostly to be ignored by genre purists, but for the most part it's an anemic crop.

Then there’s Sorority Row. It’s not the best of the late 2000’s remakes (for my money that would be The Wizard of Gore, which converts H. G. Lewis’ unwatchable smear of a film into a twisted splatterpunk fairy tale), but it takes after its source material in the best possible way. You see, its forebear, 1983s The House on Sorority Row, is also a true gem among a diseased crop – the ebbing dregs of the first wave of slasher films. While the remake can hardly reach its giddy heights, it certainly manages to do it proud by at least being a successful conveyor of popcorn thrills, which is more than can be said for the bulk of its contemptible contemporaries.

I still have stress dreams about the fact that I spent money n Rob Zombie’s Halloween II.

Sorority Row hews closer to the original’s plot than most in-name–only remakes, but it makes sure to leave plenty of room for the classic reboot standbys: actresses so sexy there’s a team of airbrushers listed in the credits, a script populated exclusively with outrageously privileged douchebags, and a half-dozen lines that name drop Facebook or whatever it is the kids are using to send nudes to each other these days. 

When the Theta Pi sorority sisters, led by Queen Bee Jessica (Leah Pipes) – play a prank on a man wut done them wrong, convincing him that the “roofies” he gave to Megan (Audrina Patridge of the seminal drama The Hills) have killed her, the last thing they expect is for him to actually attempt to dismember her totally just kidding body. Now that they’ve actually got a corpse on their hands, the girls dump the body at the bottom of a mine shaft, against the protestations of goody goody Cassidy (Briana Evigan) and to the gentle whimperings of Ellie (Rumer Willis, who is an anthropomorphic spaghetti noodle.

At their end of the year graduation party, the girls find themselves being menaced and killed by somebody using Megan’s phone (which had kept its charge all this time – evidently she hadn’t switched to Apple yet). Is it their friend, back from the grave and ready to part? Is it the boy who killed her, finally having snapped? Or is it somebody else entirely, who found out about the cover-up and want these girls dead? Also Carrie Fisher plays the house mother, so that’s happening.

Help me, Xanax Extra Strength, you’re my only hope.

Perhaps the single best decision made during the production of Sorority Row was to keep it R-rated, especially considering that it meant pushing against the tide of the unforgivably successful PG-13 dribble of cinematic santorum masquerading as a remake of Prom Night. That rush of producer bravery gave the film a lot of freedom, and though it mostly restrains itself to typical slick, slack remake shenanigans, there are moments where it throws caution to the wind and embraces its exploitation pedigree.

There’s an almost shocking (for the time) amount of nudity in the film, rivaled only by Friday the 13th 2009’s gleeful excess, and while it can hardly be considered “edgy,” it at least comes close to considering attempting to be. There’s more nipples than a dinner rush at Applebee’s. less than a Grateful Dead concert, I’ll leave it at that. And while the gore is largely content to putter around offscreen, the kills themselves are creative and brutal. The quick flashes of implied violence have been done better (I mean, obviously), but the setpieces are clever, the results are messy, and the weapon of choice (a wickedly modified tire iron, - the tool used to kill Megan) is – in a word - radical.

Sometimes a movie reviewer must toe the line between objective observer and twelve-year-old. “Knifey tire iron” is, evidently, my line.

I daresay I doubt that anybody will fall out of their chair in shock if I say that, in spite of its very real successes as a remake, Sorority Row is not in the least bit scary. If I did shock you, please accept my humblest apologies, send me the dry-cleaning bill for your soiled PJ pants, and feel free to follow this link to the index of my blog. I suggest you start at the A’s and work your way down. By the time you get to The Gallows at least, I think we’ll understand each other a bit better.

For the rest of you, suffice it to say that Sorority Row favors quippiness over frights and portentous whooshing transitions over legible cinematic style. The spasmodic seizings of the camera are a little too close to found footage for comfort, but I’ll be damned if that quipping doesn’t pass the time with flying colors. Sorority Row is blessed with a surprisingly credible cast for a film of its caliber, and Leah Pipes especially delivers her lines with a held-back cattiness that’s so wildly out of proportion with the horrific circumstances that surround her, you can’t help but feel a chuckle soldier its way out of your windpipe.

Its irreverent humor is perhaps its most prominent attribute, but an enthusiastically bonkers (if mildly misogynistic) third act is the savory whipped cream on top of a surprisingly tasty vanilla shake.

You know, one of those that looks uniform and bland but has flecks of sprinkles of something providing enticing bursts of colorful flavor in your straw… I’ve eaten nothing but quesadillas and boxed cereal for three days, does it show?

All in all, Sorority Row is a keeper. It pales in comparison to the original material, but it’s probably the most fun I’ve ever had revisiting an iconic horror property. And any remake that doesn’t make me want to tear my hair out then light that hair on fire is a plus in my book.

Body Count: 10

1. Megan is stabbed in the throat with a tire iron.
2. Dr. Rosenburg has a tire iron thrown through his face.
3. Chugs has a bottle shoved into her throat, which is slit.
4. Shower Girl is stabbed through the bottom of the chin.
5. Mickey is impaled in the gut.
6. Garrett is run over with a car.
7. Claire has a flare shoved in her mouth.
8. Mrs. Crenshaw is impaled through the back.
9. Lyle is slashed in the back of the head.
10. Jessica is stabbed through the mouth.

TL;DR: Sorority Row is a totally acceptable remake of a bona fide slasher classic.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1193

Reviews In This Series

The House on Sorority Row (Rosman, 1983)

Sorority Row (Hendler, 2009)