Claw of Desire

Year: 2016

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Cast: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, John C. Reilly

Run Time: 1 hour 59 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The Lobster is a preposterously divisive movie. The two movie review blogs I follow religiously gave it a 10/10 and a 0/10 respectively. The patrons at the theater I work at either walk out halfway through or come back for second and third helpings. It’s like – for lack of a better comparison – seafood. Some people despise the taste, but others can’t get enough. So with all this debate raging, of course I had to dive in there for myself and see what all the hubbub was about. 

Did I enjoy The Lobster? No. Do I regret it? Well, mostly.

I’m not allergic to shellfish, but I might be allergic to art films.

In The Lobster, love is mandated by law. Newly single people in The City are sent to The Hotel, where they must find a mate within 45 days or else they are turned into an animal. They also must hunt single refugees known as Loners who live in The Woods. If my disdain for all these oh-so futuristic capital letters isn’t already palpable, let me make it clear that the only thing stopping me from vomiting all over my keyboard right now is the fact that I really don’t feel like cleaning it.

One of these single people is David (Colin Farrell), a schlubby man whose wife has left him. While he struggles to find someone with whom he shares a Defining Characteristic, he ends up desperately pairing with a psychopath (Angeliki Papoulia) before escaping to The Woods and striking up a furtive courtship with Short-Sighted Woman (Rachel Weisz), igniting the ire of the strictly anti-partnership Loner Leader (Léa Seydoux).

Another thing I absolutely adore is movies that don’t give their characters proper names. More, please!

I see what The Lobster is doing. I really do.  A society that focuses so fundamentally and grotesquely on pair-bonding is shallow and conformist, with no wiggle room to be an individual. In terms of achieving the film’s intended effect of muting all personality from its characters and design, it’s a masterpiece of intention. The ensemble is perfectly cast, especially Colin Farrell, who intimately understands the mechanics of his severely isolated role and knows how best to wring comedy from the character when he can.

The world-building of this incredibly unique setting is likewise terrific, dumping you in with no context and allowing you to uncover the depths of detail as the movie progresses. It’s not quite as rich in history as the production design of a Mad Max: Fury Road, but it gets the job done with ethereal efficiency. And the beginning is an absolute winner, slamming you into the story with a gonzo, out-of-context image that leaves you slavering for more (although, the more you learn about this film’s world, the less sense this scene makes).

So while I see the point of The Lobster and understand the polished mechanics that make it tick, that doesn’t mean I see why anybody would find themselves entertained by this droning didacticism.

Ooh, burn! This Lobster is getting BOILED!

The Lobster is so subdued that it practically fades out of existence. It’s like absurdism on tranquilizers, the monotonous performances and color scheme relentlessly pounding your brain with a sledgehammer of boredom. It’s got the pace of a Kubrick film, the flatly literal dialogue of Invention of Lying, and the music of a murder mystery, the atonal shrieks only highlighting how uninteresting everything you’re watching actually is.

For the entire film, it feels like you’re in a doctor’s waiting room, wondering if they’ve forgotten about you. Then as soon as there’s a knock on the door and you perk up, the film ends. After all, they can’t let us get too excited, or else we’ll start to think this is a fun movie. As much as The Lobster claims to be a black comedy, it does everything in its power to stile any and all joy. The scattered chuckles that escape are almost incidental, owing to the fact that there really is a great concept at the heart of this story. Only one singular moment made me laugh out loud, and I get the sense that the movie actively lamented my enjoyment, because it immediately doubled down on ponderous contemplation and a liberal slathering of slow motion.

Seriously, entire scenes of The Lobster are slomo. Not just key action moments (ha! Like it has any), but full minutes. Minutes upon minutes of pretentious napalm, obliterating the pacing and tearing the storyline to shreds. Watching The Lobster is like being trapped in a nightmare. Your feet move like molasses as you run toward an exit that glides further and further away. And anytime something even microscopically interesting happens, it’s immediately chucked from the film like so much dead weight. The biggest conflict in the movie (between the Loners and The Hotel) is never resolved. Even though we see the two sides briefly clash, these scenes are immediately forgotten and never followed up on.

It’s like listening to your grandfather tell a story.

The most extravagantly frustrating thing about The Lobster is that every now and then it shows flashes of asthmatic brilliance. It never exerts itself too much, but the occasional brutality nestled in this world of soft apathy is jarring and gut-wrenching in a magnificent way. One scene depicting the crowd’s blasé reaction to a particularly maudlin act of self-harm is coldly stunning, like an ice-chilled scalpel slicing down your spine. And then of course the film returns to flatly droning about how to properly launder a stain or the comparative weight of different sports equipment.

I GET IT. I do. But The Lobster really needs to take a chill pill. It’s so far up its own ass that it can see daylight. Everything good about the film (and there really is a lot of potential here) is quietly smothered with a scratchy, off-white pillow. I can see why this movie appeals to the Lonely Heart cinephiles of the world, but care as little about The Lobster as it does about me, or any of humanity for that matter.

TL;DR: The Lobster is a monotonous ordeal that stifles a pretty excellent absurdist premise.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1055

Women Are From Venus, Men Are From Hell

For our Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.

Year: 1987
Director: Clive Barker
Cast: Andrew Robinson, Clare Higgins, Ashley Laurence
Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Of the horror franchises birthed in the back half of the 80’s, most withered and died on the vine (The Stepfather, Pumpkinhead, etc.. Very few survived into the modern era save the likes of Child’s Play (which got 5 increasingly batty sequels) and Puppetmaster (which people have long since stopped paying attention to, though it has propagated some 10 sequels). One of the more prevalent of these (in terms of size and cultural prominence) is the Hellraiser franchise, which sits at a robust eight sequels with Hellraiser 10 on the way.

I’m hardly able to begin yet another marathon at the moment, but consider this a prologue to an inevitable retrospective of the delirious B-list franchise that exists solely because of a staunchly A-list villain. So let’s introduce ourselves to that genre icon right now. Ladies and gentlemen: Please welcome… Lead Cenobite!

That’s right, the name Pinhead wasn’t used until the sequels. We’re learning already!

In Hellraiser, Frank (Sean Chapman) purchases a mystical puzzle box that, when opened, will take him to a dimension of unbearable pain and unbelievable pleasure (did I mention that Clive Barker is basically the crown prince of S&M?). He does this in the attic of his ancestral home in England (no, I don’t know what that means either), and shortly afterward his brother Larry (Andrew Robinson) moves in with his wife Julia (Clare Higgins).

Julia, who had been party to an extremely sordid affair with said Frank, is disgusted when he emerges from the attic floor as a skinless goo monster. But a good lay is hard to find, and she gets sucked into his sinister plot to murder unsuspecting men, using their blood to give him a corporeal form before the Cenobites – the monstrous demons who rule the S&M dimension led by the monster known colloquially as Pinhead (Doug Bradley) – find out that he has escaped. Bu will she draw the line at murdering her husband?

Also, Larry’s teen daughter Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) is there, because god damn it, this is 1987 after all.

We’re dealing with a 1987 movie that features at least five murders, a spunky teen survivor chick, and an iconic horror franchise villain, so you may wonder to yourself why Hellraiser isn’t an entry in my Census Bloodbath slasher feature. The answer is quite simple: Clive F**king Barker. The man behind Nightbreed couldn’t possibly stop to such a human level, following a formula that dictates anything like plot, character, or normalcy. He carves his own path, and he carves it in his skin with the dull end of a butter knife.

Much like Nightbreed, Hellraiser isn’t so much a story as it is a collection of disturbing images and situations that only cohere into a satisfying whole when you step back and unfocus your eyes. It’s a much more structured piece than Nightbreed, which was already baffling before it was savaged by producers, but it still operates on a level of pure, gut-wrenching horror rather than constructing a traditional narrative.

You mean the guy who invented this chick isn’t traditional? What a shock.

It might not be totally comprehensible at first bite, but Barker is above all else an artiste, and his brutally beautiful imagery is enough to sustain Hellraiser in its monstrous entirety. In fact, if it weren’t for the web of mythology he spins around his Cenobites, you could strip every last line of dialogue out of the film and still fundamentally grasp exactly what’s going on, which is a hallmark of pure cinema. Barker constructs his frames with utmost precision. Utilizing every element at his disposal to rub your nose in a tone or a feeling.

Whether it’s the cramped bed that signals an uncomfortable marriage, the expert juxtaposition between an adulterous flashback and a mattress-moving mishap, or the hellish splashes of light over a bloody love affair, Hellraiser is a sickly erotic masterwork Barker’s stunning imagery is bolstered by dripping, ghastly effects from Cliff Wallace that hold up marvelously well. Frank’s grotesque, malformed stages of resurrection are perpetually stunning work and the Cenobite design is sublime. The only shoddy work in the whole piece is a bizarre dragon monster that feels like a Harryhausen reject, but the scene in which it appears already reeks of rushed reshoots, so it can be forgiven for not living up to the proper standard.

Hellraiser is birthed from a feverishly creative intelligence on all sides of the board. It’s a rubber reality showcase of the best effects the 80’s had to offer, supporting one of horror fiction’s sickest, most original minds. It may read more like a gallery piece than a traditional narrative, but horror has the ability to transcend formula. As long as it can knock the break out of you, it has done its job. And Hellraiser does that and then some in its own inexplicable, screeching, blunt manner. This is some of the best of what horror has to offer (if you don’t mind a bit of camp acting): a glimpse into a world that looks like our won and yet is something wholly, nightmarishly different.

TL;DR: Hellraiser is a visceral, tonal masterpiece that doesn't bother itself too much with a plot.
Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 900

Popcorn Kernels: Teamsters

In which we release mini-reviews of two films that pit two teams who have a lot in common against one another.

X-Men

Year: 2000

Director: Bryan Singer

Cast: Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellen 

Run Time: 1 hour 44 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Metal-clawed Wolverine and life-sucking Rogue discover the X-Men, a team of mutants who want to stop the metal-controlling Magneto from carrying out an evil plot against the government, which is considering implementing a Mutant Registration Act.

You know the fiery hellscape of superhero movies that Hollywood has become? For better or for worse, our current boom of caped crusaders can be traced directly back to X-Men, director Bryan Singer’s first foray into comic books. X-Men was hardly the first Marvel movie, but it was the film that resurrected the brand, leading to the dizzying heights of Spider-Man and Iron Man and the crushing lows of Zack Snyder’s parade of half-cocked abortions.

But let’s scrub all that history and all those feelings away to come face to face with X-Men. The comic movie landscape has been quiet as of late. Hugh Jackman is not yet a megastar. Bryan Singer barely knew that Superman existed. It’s the turn of the millennium and the U.S. has survived the potential horror of Y2K, yet is about to be plunged into a long national nightmare the following September. But for now, the world looks fresh and full of potential. Nobody seems to have noticed yet that George W. Bush is a wee bit kooky. The Backstreet Boys are still a thing. For the time, the world seems pretty OK.

Enter X-Men. For a time of such (relative) peace, this film is starkly political, which was pretty much unheard of for comic adaptations. You see, although America was coasting along alright, there were plenty of minority groups that weren’t getting the TLC they deserved, one of which Bryan Singer had personal attachments to: the LGBT community. A group that was despised for something they were born with and couldn’t control, feared following the AIDS epidemic in the 80’s, they mapped almost perfectly onto the X-Men’s own persecution, updating the series’ original subtext, relating to the Civil Rights movement of the 60’s.

It’s a bleak, gray film with a sharp political edge, which makes it great. But it’s also a fun action film with engaging characters and the birth of Hugh Jackman’s meteoric rise to stardom, which made it massively successful. Mind you, it’s no masterpiece. As fun as the characters are to watch, there are plenty of X-Men who are choked out by the Big Guns (Wolverine, Rogue, Professor X, Magneto…) so they don’t get the development they sorely need, and everything about Halle Berry’s Storm is a head-to-toe misstep from her eviscerated South African accent to her battering ram dialogue (Do you know what happens to a blogger when he has to listen to that line about a toad being struck by lightning? The same perplexed disgust as everyone else.).

With a relatively low budget and certain pieces in place that wouldn’t fully begin to pay off until later entries in the series (*cough cough* Sabretooth), X-Men is better as a pilot for the franchise than it is as a work of cinema, but it’s still tremendous fun. From a mind-numbingly on-the-nose battle atop the Statue of Liberty to Ian McKellen’s James Bondian over-the-top gravity (including a massive mutation machine and a decked out Evil Lair), X-Men is a lurid comic book movie on top of its substantial political agenda, and I greatly enjoy both of those things.

Rating: 7/10

Bring It On

Year: 2000

Director: Peyton Reed

Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Eliza Dushku, Jesse Bradford 

Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

When a high school senior becomes cheerleading captain, she discovers that her predecessor had been stealing routines from an underprivileged school. As she makes peace with an edgy newcomer, will she lead the team to a literal victory at the National Cheerleading Competition or a moral victory?

You know those zeitgeist movies that all your friends were quoting in middle school but you just never got around to watching? Bring It On is one of mine, and while I’m glad to have finally seen it, being immune to the nostalgia factor is like peeping behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain. It’s not really as great as everyone would have you believe, though it’s hardly an awful movie. It’s just that, rather than being a gut-splitting, generation-defining work, it’s a decent wisp of teen fluff.

If you’ve seen any high school movie from the 90’s, you pretty much know what to expect here: Lots of emphatic teen acting that’s more Disney Channel than Uta Hagen and a heaping helping of fabricated slang that visibly begs for entry into the popular lexicon: “We can’t mack in front of the parentals.” “She puts the whore in horrifying.” This stuff practically carbon dates he film, as if the mix tape that’s actually on a cassette and the teen girl begging for a private phone line haven’t already done it well enough. It works as a cheesy glimpse into times gone by, but it’s a pretty routine film.

The story isn’t so much an organic arc as a 90-minute long montage of haphazardly-placed teen movie scene, but I would like to give it credit for having a surprising amount off grace when handling the topic of race relations and white privilege in the public school system. I can’t say I expected that in my cheerleading movie, but for the most part, bring it on is a little too concerned with the trivialities of cheerleading competitions to be of particular interest (although, amusingly, Glee would cop this movie’s exact formula for nearly every season finale).

Weighed down by too many tropes (the edgy girl who learns to embrace her femininity, the gay BFF who has almost zero interaction with dudes), Bring It On limps across the finish line in vaguely amusing but generally unimpressive style. The one scene that really did stand out to me is an awkward slumber party flirtation between Kirsten Dunst and her character’s best friend’s brother while brushing their teeth. It’s a perfect little microcosm of awkward teen romance. Their oddly competitive dental hygiene is effortlessly cute and terrifically acted, but it’s also romantically charged in a way that the rest of their interaction is patently not.

If I had to sit through the rest of this OK film in order to earn one sterling scene, it’s not a half-bad tradeoff. It’s just not an all-good one, which is disappointing.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1102
Reviews In This Series
X-Men (Singer, 2000)
X2: X-Men United (Singer, 2003)
X-Men: The Last Stand (Ratner, 2006)
X-Men: First Class (Vaughn, 2011)
X-Men: Days of Future Past (Singer, 2014)
X-Men: Apocalypse (Singer, 2016)

We've Got Spirits, Yes We Do!

For our Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.

Year: 2016

Director: James Wan

Cast: Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Frances O'Connor

Run Time: 2 hours 14 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Really, the most spectacular thing about The Conjuring 2 is that original director James Wan actually returned for it after being offered a revolting amount of money to helm Furious 8. This is only the second sequel Wan has directed to one of his own films. While I was excited to see him returning for the follow-up to his pretty unequivocal best work, the last time he sequelized a movie, things got a little ugly. So it was with more than a little trepidation that I approached this one, but I can now officially say with a sigh of relief that The Conjuring 2 is leagues better than Insidious: Chapter 2.

Although that bar is so low it’s practically subterranean.

So, the plot. The Conjuring 2 has a more satisfying, tighter story than the original, although it necessarily runs into some of the same pitfalls: this film still has no idea whether it’s dealing with a ghost or a demon and in the process of telling its “true story” it continues to stolidly profess the undying verisimilitude of infamous paranormal hucksters Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), something that always rubs my ectoplasm the wrong way.

But anyway, this – after all – is just a movie. It’s 1977. The Warrens are taking a sabbatical after an experience at a haunted house in Amityville (never heard of it)  has left Lorraine rattled. Their post-Amityville media tour has also gone haywire, with naysayers denying their claims left and right. When the church asks them to investigate a happening in England  (to make sure it’s not just one more of a rash of hoaxes before they get involved), Ed convinces Lorraine to come along because they never deny a family in need.

The family in question is down-on-her-luck matriarch Peggy Hodgson (Frances O’Connor) and her four children. Her youngest girl, Janet (Madison Wolfe) has become a conduit for a spirit who died in their house that has been tormenting them for weeks, or so they claim. Is this a real paranormal event or a ploy to get better housing? The Warrens are joined by believer Dr. Gross (Simon McBurney) and skeptic Anita Gregory (Franka Potente) to document the case.

Roll film, Lola, roll film!

There are certain things The Conjuring 2 does very well that utilize its nature as a sequel to actually better itself. The rapport between audiences and the Warrens has already been built, but instead of leaning on that crutch to paper up some quick and dirty exposition, screenwriters Chad and Carey Hayes (with Wan) use this to deepen their relationship and take it to the next level. You see, around the edges of this taut little supernatural shocker is a surprisingly rich love story. It’s not the most complex work in the world, but Farmiga and Wilson nail their chemistry. And the film’s structure commits to its tone, never allowing the romance to fade into the background, even in the gonzo third act setpiece where most movies of this ilk seem to forget that they were even telling a story at all, converting their characters into shrieking pinballs.

Now, the structure of the A-plot is a whole nother ballgame. While it’s much more linear and straightforward than the tangled mess woven by The Conjuring, at times it’s a hair too eager to tie up its loose ends. Two key plot points in the finale are solved with deus ex machina so brutally efficient that they shear off all but the barest residue of tension.

It’s a little too easy, like an episode of Dora the Explorer has been spliced onto the finale of an R-rated ghost story. Plus, the production design so viscerally yearns to foreshadow a third act reveal that you can practically feel it drooling over your shoulder. Imagine if M. Night Shyamalan had put little gravestones on Bruce Willis’ tie in The Sixth Sense, or put a huge poster of Ghost in his bedroom. This doesn’t ruin the flow of the movie in any terribly meaningful way, but it’s a bit of a letdown after a solid buildup.

I get let down, but I get up again. You’re never gonna keep me down, Hollywood.

A little better, a little worse. Seeing how this is a horror sequel, we should be glad to have any of the former, let alone in the abundance we get here. Before we move on, let’s step off at two more of these. First, the production design is astounding here, turning a crummy British subdivision into a gothic nightmare castle using oppressive slate greys, subtle decay, and a balls-to-the-wall flooded basement that makes an impression even among the endless parade of creepy basements that is the horror genre. And then there’s the comic relief, which is warm, perfectly spaced out, and genuinely humorous, striking a balance that the more overtly wacky Insidious movies haven’t yet achieved.

But what of the scares, Brennan? They are, after all, the reason $40 million worth of people went to see it this weekend. Rest assured, Wan brings his almost metronomic perfection at shooting and timing jump scares in a way that makes them seem unexpected and elegant. Of course, they’re only jump scares, but he does them so well. Probably the most chilling scene in the film is a single, drawn-out shot that slowly alters your perception of reality using camera focus, but – you know – the jumps are good too. There is a certain haphazard approach to the buildup of the scares, trundling out some Big Boos then expecting us to still get scared by rocking chairs and whatnot, but for the most part it gets the job done.

I’ve always said that James Wan has made a career out of cribbing tropes and elements from pre-existing horror classics and repackaging them for newer audiences. Of course that’s what happens here as well, although he has amassed a large enough body of work that he can start copying himself now, too: haunted toys, elderly ghosts, and women in face paint abound, along with quotations from The Exorcist (obviously), Poltergeist, The Haunting, and even newer properties like Sinister or Oculus. It gets a little wearisome at certain points, but the individual elements of the film are strong enough that even the weaker patches don’t dull the shine.

The Conjuring 2 is a terrific sequel, more or less succeeding at matching the tone and pace of the first film and even fostering some improvements. Its weaknesses are perhaps more glaring and bothersome, but you could hardly expect a better result for a haunted house Part 2.

TL;DR: The Conjuring 2 is a worthy sequel with some diminishing scares but the same sure-footed classicism as the original.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1149
Reviews In This Series
The Conjuring (Wan, 2013)
Annabelle (Leonetti, 2014)
The Conjuring 2 (Wan, 2016)
The Nun (Hardy, 2018)
The Curse of La Llorona (Chaves, 2019)

Blogaversary: Third Time's A Charm

Hey, everybody! Today is a very special day. June 12th. Filipino Independence Day. The beginning of summer break (for those plebs who are still in school). And the anniversary of Popcorn Culture! The traditional gift for a third anniversary is leather, so today our celebratory list is...

The Top Ten Horror Movie Punks

Now, to be fair, I did fudge the term a little bit and threw in four leather-clad characters who aren't actually punks, but it's my list so I can do what I want. Also, please do a blogger a favor and hop on over to my good friend Hunter Allen's blog Kinemalogue to wish him a happy blogaversary too! That's right, we both started our blogs on the exact same day! Talk about fate.

#10 Rod Lane (A Nightmare on Elm Street)

After watching his girlfriend be dragged across the ceiling and eviscerated by an invisible maniac, he rightly assumes he'll take the blame so he takes off: in just a leather jacket and jeans. No shirt, no shoes, no service. How hardcore is that?

#9 Dr. Katherine McMichaels (From Beyond)

This outfit might just seem like another bout of Stuart Gordon exploitation, and it is. But it's also an exploration of a buttoned-up doctor discovering a new dimension of experience and being ruined by its cessation. It's dark, it's sexy, and it's hilariously 80's.

#8 Aaron Boone (Nightbreed)

The newly immortal Boone strolls around bearing a bloody stab wound and a bullet-riddled leather jacket, making him an instantly iconic Halloween costume. That is, if anybody had actually ever watched Nightbreed.

#7 Sex Machine (From Dusk Till Dawn)

I loved Tom Savini long before seeing this film, but now it's more of an undying all-consuming passion. With his beer whip and penis gun, Sex Machine is the badass of a generation.

#6 Amber (Green Room)

She's not the punkiest of the bunch in her look, but her blasé attitude to violence and death is unparalleled. It's the best performance by Imogen Poots maybe ever, and her prickly humor serves the film tremendously.

#5 Vinnie and Pete (Friday the 13th: A New Beginning)

OK, I couldn't find a great picture of these two leather-clad bros, but their car unfortunately breaks down on the side of the roads within the vicinity of the motiveless copycat killings that plague the film. So what do they do? One of them sings a song while the other goes to crap in the woods. Gotta love 'em. "Crap, my ass!"

#4 Boom Box Punks (Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan)

These punks are just minding their own business in the Day-Glo nightmare vision that is Toronto-Manhattan (although this particular scene was shot in actual Times Square) when Jason crushes their good time by smashing their boom box. They prepare to fight, but one glimpse under the hockey mask shuts them up real quick.

#3 David (The Lost Boys)

The bleached blonde mullet that defined a decade of filmmaking. Kiefer Sutherland's super gay seduction of Jason Patric is both deliriously subtext-sexy and the ultimate punk manifesto. "Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire."

#2 Taryn (A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors)

"In my dreams, I'm beautiful... and bad."

The dream of the late 80's came alive with Taryn, an ex-heroin addict whose dream power is being a tarted-up, butt-kicking punk. She didn't deserve what came to her, but she took it with style and panache.

#1 Trash (The Return of the Living Dead)

The standout in a group of dementedly hilarious punks, Linnea Quigley's trash does a graveyard striptease while fantasizing about the best way to die. It's only fair that she becomes one of the first zombies, wreaking naked havoc upon her punk friends. Isn't that the ultimate dream?

Word Count: 640

Census Bloodbath: Cheers For Fears

For our Scream 101 episode about this very film, click here.

Year: 1988

Director: John Quinn

Cast: Betsy Russell, Leif Garrett, Lucinda Dickey

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

After intense examination, I have concluded that the period between about 1986 and 1988 is when the cheesiest, most vomitously unfashionable concentration of campiness hit the slasher genre. Unfortunately, right around this period is when the subgenre was in its most severe decline. The glut of slashers had been flooding the market since 1980, only increasing in strength following the home video boom of the mid-80’s. Of course, when a high pressure perm front meets a low pressure quality snap, you get a maelstrom of memorable bad-good delights.

Take Cheerleader Camp. A woods-based slasher flick that was exactly too late to meet its prime market, it’s still a memorably entertaining crapfest. Co-produced, by – of all companies – the Japanese Daiei Films (progenitors of the Gamera franchise), Cheerleader Camp is deliriously out of touch with anything resembling reality.

Starting with the campers’ ages, which bottom out at about, oh, 32.

Camp Hurrah. Where dreams come true. Where men can be men and women can be topless. The particular cheerleading group we will be following is from Lindo Valley, composed of the cooing nymphette Pam (Teri Weigel, who you might recognize from Lesbian Babysitters 5), the blonde bubblehead Bonnie (Lorie Griffin), the Ethnic One Theresa (Rebecca Ferratti), the requisite fat prankster Timmy (Travis McKenna), the sweet, doting mascot Cory (Lucinda Dickey), the lascivious team captain with a gravity-defying hairline Brent (Leif Garrett), and his girlfriend Alison (Betsy Russell, who would later marry another onscreen psycho – Jigsaw. She appeared as his wife Jill in Saw IV-VII). Alison has been plagued by bad dreams, because you saw how much money that Freddy movie made, right?

When people who defy Alison start dying under mysterious circumstances, Alison worries that not all might be right in her mind. Is she killing these people? Or is it somebody else? The snobby camp owner Deedee Tipton (Vickie Benson)? Pop (Buck Flower of Maniac Cop, Pumpkinhead, and a million other things), the leering handyman with the Southern drawl who feels transplanted from some other movie entirely? When the killer turns their sights on the Lindo Valley team, their cheerleading getaway quickly becomes a bloody fiasco.

They did NOT stick the landing.

You’d think from that setup that Cheerleader Camp would be more or less a boob showcase, highlighting the best and bustiest of today’s youth. But take a look at that calendar, sucker. This is 1988, and the MPAA had long since choked out the genre’s capacity for sleaze like a pernicious weed. Although there IS a highly amusing sequence that could only be classified as a Bikini Removal contest, this is largely an exploitation-free zone. Shirts are practically super glued on, and the gore is shooed offscreen (though, in the few kills that do have blood, the effects are shockingly solid).

What Cheerleader Camp does have in spades to make up for its deficiencies is pure, unadulterated lunacy. Three characters in particular have tapped into a rich vein of incredulity. While Alison, Brent, and Pam stumble their way through a musty, run-of-the-mill slasher pic, Timmy, Miss Tipton, and pop the handyman are quietly constructing a Looney Tunes cartoon on the sidelines.

While Timmy spies on bathing women using a periscope and decked out in full Mrs. Doubtfire regalia, Miss Tipton (who could totally be played by Judy Greer in the remake) gets blasted on cocktails and has nudity-free cheerleading themed sex with the local sheriff. You’d think that description would be enough to sufficiently explain the nature of that scene, but you would be dead wrong. Deedee Tipton is a shining paragon of inexplicable slasher sexuality, and this convoluted, needlessly detailed scene is so crazy go nuts that it’s worth the price of admission alone. I mean, you can catch Cheerleader Camp for free on YouTube, but it’s such a sterling scene it’s legitimately worth paying actual human money for.

And then there’s Pop. Actor Buck Flower knows exactly where this movie stands in the pantheon of cinema (he was in Back to the Future and Escape from New York, so I’m pretty sure he knows that Cheerleader Camp is not his career peak), so he goes hog wild, ad-libbing all his lines and not giving half a hoot if his character makes sense. He is an endless repository of folksy, down-South sayings and lecherous, sweaty hyperbole that will stun your mind into submission. He’s the only genuinely good actor here, and his screen presence is like a giant electromagnet.

He’s a true role model.

While most of Cheerleader Camp’s fun falls into the unintentional bad-good category, there is a primitive but surprisingly effective sense of humor at work here. A scene of the mascots attempting to eat lunch while still in costume is as funny and well-shot as any contemporaneous ten comedy. And there are a handful of clever cuts that provide punchlines through the film’s editing itself, which is a level of comedic foresight almost unknown in the genre.

So as much as I want to hate Cheerleader Camp for its plot (which is as dense as a sponge, skipping through a loosely linked series of vignettes) its dreadful third act (which hinges on a red herring the screenwriter couldn’t be bothered to call out attention to and is basically a perpetual motion machine of teens running through underlit woods), or its total lack of scares (save for two nightmare scenes which are appropriately surreal), Cheerleader Camp is still a bucket of bloody fun. It’s not as recommendable a bad movie as, say, Killer Party, but it certainly has more focused, solid material than a Girls Nite Out. Don’t rush out to see it, but if you stumble across Cheerleader Camp in a dusty bargain bin, at least give it a second thought.

Killer: Cory (Lucinda Dickey)

Final Girl: Alison (Betsy Russell)

Best Kill: Pam’s “hedge clippers through the back of the skull” demise is shear ecstasy.

Sign of the Times: Every time the camera cuts back to Theresa, her hair is teased about a foot taller.

Scariest Moment: In a nightmare, Alison’s pom poms slice her arms open like razors.

Weirdest Moment: While being chased through the woods, Timmy decides to take a break to film a monologue – and then decides to take a piss, all while still filming.

Champion Dialogue: “That judge in the orange skirt… Make yer peepee harder than a ten pound bag of nickel jawbreakers.”

Body Count: 9; 7 perpetrated by the killer, 1 by a gaggle of scared cheerleaders, and the last by the Final Girl herself.

1. Suzy’s wrists are slit.
2. Pam is stabbed through the skull with shears.
3. Theresa is hit with a van.
4. Deedee is cleavered in the back.
5. Timmy is axed in the tummy.
6. Sheriff has his head crushed with a bear trap.
7. Pop is shot to death.
8. Bonnie is strangled with a phone cord.
9. Brent is shot.

TL;DR: Cheerleader Camp is a weak, late entry in the slasher genre, but it's silly enough to be diverting.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1197

Punk Is Dead

Year: 2016
Director: Jeremy Saulnier
Cast: Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat
Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

It definitely helps to have been alive during the 80’s to appreciate the punk movement. I mean, it’s not like I’m against liking 80’s pop culture (and boy is that the understatement of the century). Slasher movies form the very core of my being, and I can discuss the intricacies of the Duran Duran discography like it’s my job (Rio might have stronger singles, but Seven and the Ragged Tiger is where it’s at). It’s just that a thorough appreciation of the punk scene requires a certain nihilistic standpoint that could only have sprouted from the fertile loam of Reaganomics under the shadow of impending nuclear doom.

So as much as I’d like to live outside the established norms of society, there’s not a punk bone in my body. This severely limits my ability to connect with Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room on a superficial aesthetic level in addition to its deeper, thematic underpinnings. That’s no fault of the film’s, just my own bias. But that’s enough dilly-dallying. Let’s knock laced-up boots with that plot!

And then we’ll mosh with some analysis.

In Green Room, down-on-their-luck punk band The Ain’t Rights – led by Pat (Anton Yelchin) alongside Sam (Alia Shawcat), Reece (Joe Cole), and Tiger (Callum Turner) – get a gig at a crummy bar buried in the lush woods of the Pacific Northwest. This club turns out to be a skinhead joint run by Darcy (Patrick Stewart). After accidentally witnessing a murder, The Ain’t Rights and defector Amber (Imogen Poots) are trapped in the club’s Green room, forced to fight their way out through a crowd of Neo-Nazi thugs with guns, knives, and attack dogs.

Wow, the new Benji movie is DARK.

What Green Room has going for it is a strong directorial hand. Although Saulnier’s ponderous, nihilist indie milieu isn’t exactly in my wheelhouse, he lets his frame breathe, vividly displaying the majestic expanse of his exteriors in widescreen and reversing that aesthetic to highlight the cramped claustrophobia of our trapped heroes indoors.

And when that pace tightens up and sh*t hits the fan, we get some of the most well-realized gore I’ve seen in years. I’ve always said that movies can cut off heads and dismember limbs with abandon, but where it gets truly grisly is when the gore gets intimate. That’s the mode in which Green Room operates almost exclusively, slashing flesh with box cutters, smashing small but vital bones, and just generally showing its characters a pretty bad time. There’s a lot of it, but it’s never over-the-top.

There are no cartoonish geysers of blood in Green Room (if there were, it would be called Red Room. Eh? Eh?). There are no bombastic, gooey rippings and slashings. It’s all up close, personal, and so well made that your stomach won’t unknot for hours.

The popcorn will just start piling up in your esophagus like it’s rush hour.

Green Room also has a sly comedy edge, perhaps given away by the casting of Alia Shawcat (who, to be fair, gives a very serious, convincing performance). There are jokes slipped in so subtly that you barely even notice that your disgusted grimace has converted into a grin. Most of the greatest material is delivered under her breath by Imogen Poots, whose careless character is disconnected from our main group and thus totally unpredictable.

Frankly, it’s the best performance of her entire career, effortlessly cool but with splinters of “at the end of her rope” vulnerability. It’s the first time she’s ever stood out in any of the many great ensemble casts she’s somehow found herself in (28 Weeks Later, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, That Awkward Moment, Fright Night, V for Vendetta – she’s been everywhere and never made a mark, like a pretty blonde Where’s Waldo).

I suppose since we’re talking about the acting, I should bring up Patrick Stewart. His villainous turn is definitely a change of pace for the much-typecast actor, but to be completely honest, he’s not given much to do here. He imbues his role with a chilling, soft-spoken menace, but his scenes are so separate from the bulk of the plot, it reeks of Three Days on Set-itis. His antagonistic reversal is solid, but honestly I’d prefer either the ecstatic vamping of a Juliette Lewis in Jem and the Holograms or the intimately involved participation of a Heath Ledger’s Joker. As it stands, Stewart is performing well, but he’s pointed in the complete opposite direction of the movie itself.

At least he didn’t have to shave his head for the role.

While many individual elements of Green Room are strong, they never really cohere into a full, satisfying story. An intensely erratic lot is eventually drowned in a bucket of blood as the thriller mechanics take over, and the characters just float through their predicament. The only one who changes or adapts in any way is Pat, but we get so little sense of who he is at the beginning of the film that his descent into madness has zero frame of reference. Although, there is a pretty solid fart joke, so who am I to complain?

Green Room is a tense, effective thriller even if it didn’t make as much of an impression on me as I wish it did. It’s a swell-looking piece made by a talented team. It might not be for me, but that doesn’t mean it ain’t for you. As long as you’re OK with gruesome violence that makes you want to staple your eyes shut, feel free to go ahead and check it out.

TL;DR: Green Room is a well made, tense, gory thriller that lacks a certain sense of depth.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 969

Popcorn Kernels: The Fairer Sexploitation

In which we present mini reviews of two female-directed entries in stereotypically male-directed genres.

American Psycho (For our Scream 101 episode about this very film, click here.)

Year: 2000

Director: Mary Harron

Cast: Christian Bale, Jared Leto, Reese Witherspoon

Run Time:1 hour 42 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A pent-up Wall Street VP lashes out in a variety of homicidal ways.

American Psycho is a crazy film. One of the few generally accepted horror classics that I hadn’t seen, it defied my expectations at every turn. Based on the controversial Bret Easton Ellis novel that divided critics between viewing it as a dressed-up misogynist tract or a razor-sharp satire, the film was directed by – of all species – a woman. In case you’ve never read this blog before, let me make it very clear that this puts me firmly in the movie’s camp pretty much from the get-go. As far as I can figure it, this is the only popularly regarded staple horror film to have a woman behind the camera (I’m not counting The Babadook, which is far too new to qualify as a classic, as much as I may love it. And I’m certainly not counting Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare).

And how does having a female director affect the horror and humor of American Psycho? Not one whit. Well, maybe we linger a little longer on a showering Christian Bale, but you ain’t catching me complaining there. Other than that, it’s a perfectly sharp yuppie satire for people who liked Fight Club a little too much.

Perfectly skewering the venal, acquisitive nature of Reaganomics-fueled Wall Streeters who are all shallow, greedy, and interchangeable, American Psycho depicts the meltdown of a single individual: Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman – in this massive horde. As he strains to rein in his homicidal outburst, his peers ignore him entirely, even when he publicly confesses to his many sins. This is best encapsulated in a key scene where Bateman trundles a body into the trunk of a cab and a passing coworker coos over the trendy duffel bag he’s using to perform the deed. This is a world where you can be a murderer or, in fact, be murdered yourself, and you won’t make the slightest dent in the indestructibly grinding clockwork of capitalism.

It sounds intense, and it is. But it’s also pitch-black hilarious humor so grim that even the folks on the gallows might find it distasteful. Patrick Bateman is a man who murders people who can nab reservations at better restaurants than he can, discussing the finer points of Huey Lewis and the News while zipping up a plastic poncho to protect his designer suit from stains. Patrick Bateman is a man who trembles at the mere sight of  trendy business card, who has a stroke of panic when an opponent’s apartment is nicer than his. His viewpoints and motivations are so pointlessly inane that you can’t help but laugh, even as you cringe at the thought that the world around him allows him to get away with his crimes.

The only thing stopping American Psycho from being a flat-out black comedy masterpiece is a tendency toward repetition in the second act. Every scene follows a very precise structure, hobbling its ability to shock. A glorious ATM scene that simultaneously implies that Money is God and kicks the film’s craziest sequence into gear provides the jolt that the system needs, but the film enters a holding pattern for a little too long to preserve my patience. But we can’t all be perfect. American Psycho is a clever, superb little lick that’s just as keen to reference The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as Ivana Trump. I love that, even if it houses a half hour that falls short of being a masterpiece.

Rating: 7/10

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Year: 1982

Director: Amy Heckerling

Cast: Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The teens at Ridgemont High really love bangin’.

Another entry in an exploitation genre secretly helmed by a woman, Fast Times at Ridgemont High definitely wears its gender on its sleeve, at least a teensy bit more. Despite its unfair proportion of bare breasts (a male full frontal scene was excised by the ever-progressive MPAA), Ridgemont High is first and foremost a story of a young woman discovering her sexuality and learning what she wants from men. Of course, this is a rote toss-up between a smooth talking stud and a namby pamby Nice Guy, but this was 1982. Let’s not expect too much.

This young woman, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh in the role that made her a star (though she showed great promise in the previous year’s Eyes of a Stranger), is a sexually active teenager treated with a tremendous amount of respect. Her sexual misadventures are never presented as shameful, and an abortion scene late in the film is presented as a natural – if difficult – part of life, used to further Ridgemont High’s sweetest relationship, between Leigh and her ne’er do-well brother Judge Reinhold.

Of course, she’s the only character given anything even remotely resembling a story arc. The movie around her is a haphazard explosion of random, occasionally comic vignettes following stoners, football players, cool guts, and nerds through their daily lives. Each fragmented piece is part of a vast mosaic, depicting nothing in particular. It’s vexing, and the tendency to showcase overlong, almost actively unfunny sequences (an imaginary surfing championship interview, an enraged football player winning a game) is damning. To be fair, I have the personal bias that Sean Penn’s stoner drawl and Robert Romanus’ droning deadpan rub me exactly the wrong way, like a sandpaper suit.

This total disconnection from the concept of “story” or “character” is intensely frustrating and the movie’s habit of poor continuity editing only highlights how scraped-together the overarching plot feels. Even Phoebe Cates’ iconic bikini scene suffers from – frankly – a dreadful botch-job on the part of the splicer. This is less like cutting a movie and more like cutting the cheese (Hey! Rimshot!).

Of course, the “time in a bottle” aspect of Ridgemont High does much to soothe any wounds it may have caused. With a pitch perfect soundtrack of 80’s hits that have actually aged terrifically (Jackson Browne, The Go-Go’s, The Cars… This is a synthcrap-free zone) and a horde of future stars (joining Penn and Leigh are Forest Whitaker, Nicolas Cage, and horror icons Amanda Wyss – Freddy Krueger’s first victim in A Nightmare on Elm Street – and Kelli Maroney, who would eventually return to the Sherman Oaks Galleria where this film was shot four years later in Chopping Mall), Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a dreamy time capsule of days gone by.

It might not be a perfect high school sex romp, but it’s decently funny and occasionally sweet. I can make do with that while jamming to “We Got the Beat.”

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1155
Reviews In This Series
American Psycho (Harron, 2000)
American Psycho 2: All-American Girl (Freeman, 2002)

Cool To Be Kind

Year: 2016

Director: Shane Black

Cast: Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Angourie Rice

Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

If you pretend that Shane Black was never courted by the Marvel universe, he’s the least prolific, most exciting genre-bending pastiche artist in Hollywood today. He’s obviously written classic action flicks like Lethal Weapon and Last Action Hero, but today I’m largely concerned with his directorial output: He burst onto the scene (which he then immediately burst off in a puff of smoke) in 2005 with the sharp neo-noir mystery comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a film I utterly adore. 

But he’s finally back after a frustratingly prolonged radio silence. I haven’t seen his Iron Man 3 all the way through (though I have seen the opening scene half a billion times while babysitting a toddler with a short attention span), so I have no opinion on it, but if his 2016 effort The Nice Guys indicates any sort of pattern, I look forward to a decade from now when he knocks out yet another crime-comedy masterpiece.

Although I certainly wouldn’t complain if he picked up the pace a smidge.

It’s the 1970’s. Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) is a thug for hire, beating up people who have done bad things. One of said people is Holland March (Ryan Gosling), a widowed private detective who shoulders easy cases for batty old women in between (and sometimes during) getting sloshed. He has been searching for Amelia (Margaret Qualley), who may be the missing link in the case of a murdered porn star, Misty Mountains (Murielle Telio). Amelia pays Jackson to get Holland off her case then disappears, leaving them to join forces to find her before it’s too late. Tagging along is March’s plucky tween daughter Holly (Angourie Rice), who – in typical Hollywood fashion – is far more capable and clever than her ne’er-do-well dad.

Though she doesn’t have quite as magnificent a moustache. 

Playing on TV in the background of a certain scene is an episode of Get Smart, a show which certainly informed the comic ineptitude of our very own Mr. March. If it hasn’t been made clear already, let it be known now that – while The Nice Guys is a solid mystery pastiche, it is first and foremost a character-driven comedy, pitting two buddy cop archetypes against one another in a realm of sophomoric, clever, sometimes intimidatingly intricate humor.

If there’s one thing that Shane Black (co-writing with Anthony Bagarozzi) does best, it’s grafting comedy onto an utterly alien genre framework, and his two stars serve him well. Crowe is excellent as the surly straight man who powers the film’s emotional throughline, but Gosling outdoes himself here, undermining his typical ultrasuave pretty boy act. Holland march is a real loser, and Gosling isn’t afraid to embrace that, painting a weak-willed character with girlish shrieks, fumbling blocking, and a sorely misplaced confidence that unequivocally earns that comparison to Maxwell Smart. He just goes for it, and he’s a surefire success at being a failure.

But let’s not downplay Angourie Rice, who plays against the big boys with aplomb. The virtually unknown Australian actress (unless you’re a rabid fan of Walking with Dinosaurs 3D) gives a consummately professional, sharp performance that shows she actually is as clever and alive as her role, instead of just reciting a script. It takes real talent to purposely layer that kind of childlike naïveté over a naturally smart character, a talent that should have taken decades to develop. She’s frustratingly good, to the point that I’ve rethought every single decision that led me to being 21 years old and not yet a massive movie star. 

This chick is a lead in a major motion picture. At 13, I was still drinking Tang and leveling up my Ivysaur.

It’s a funny cast so it’s a funny movie, though the script is so solid that it would still be the most laugh-out-loud movie of the year so far if they had cast Dane Cook and Larry the Cable guy. There is an astonishing level of control apparent in this screenplay, hammering out joke after joke that are all funny in their own right, but turn out to be setups for third act surprise punchlines that explode your gut like land mines. This is a movie that manages to imbue comedy into both dialogue and action sequences, wave intricate layers of jokes in the moment and the long term, and on top of that have time for a fiddly little structural joke on the sidelines: recurring imagery of birds and bees, presumably meant to evoke the film’s salacious subject matter.

It’s a snappy, clever film that’s a relentlessly entertaining thrill ride, though there are certain jigsaw pieces that don’t quite fit. A couple of character details (especially between March and his daughter) don’t get any payoff, leaving some emotional loose ends. Their connective tissue is presumably slowly bleeding out on the cutting room floor. However, these infractions are very slight. The Nice Guys tells the story it wants to tell with verve and audacity, and if it’s not one hundred percent pristine, that’s not really its problem.

Plus, although Shane Black the director tends to stay out of the way of Shane Black the writer, there are some neat visual gags during action sequences that make great use of the frame’s background to paint a complete tapestry of carnage. The visual style isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but it’s kinetic and knows how best to serve its comedy, which is the one true reason it exists.

Is The Nice Guys quite as perfect on the first viewing as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang? No way. But I can’t stop thinking about it, making it easily one of the best movies of the year. If this flick doesn’t land in my December Top 10, then this might just be the best year Hollywood’s ever had.

TL;DR: The Nice Guys is an excellent crime comedy, and a worthy followup to the director’s terrific debut feature.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1007