Popcorn Kernels: Movies I Missed (On Purpose)

In which we release mini-reviews of two fairly recent comedy films that managed to pass me by until now.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Year: 2008

Director: Kevin Smith

Cast: Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Craig Robinson

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

In order to make enough money to pay their rent, two slacker friends decide to produce and star in a porn film, but how will this affect their relationship?

Pretty much any movie starring Seth Rogen between 2007 and 2010 was created explicitly to cater to the greasy, speckly daydreamers of the world who wanted to believe the busty blonde down the hall would find the lovable oaf buried deep beneath the Cheeto dust-crusted exterior. It’s the kind of nerd-fulfillment fantasy Judd Apatow has been trafficking in since day one, and the only person I can think of who is more suited to bring that icky feeling to life is Kevin Smith. …Enter Kevin Smith.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno is about Elizabeth Banks falling for Seth Rogen and while both are admirable performers, the spark isn’t even there on paper. I’m not even talking about their disparate physical attractiveness. Zack could be played by Hugh Grant and Miri’s interest in him would still be deeply questionable. It’s all in the writing, which is skeevy and sweaty in a deeply disconcerting manner despite the supposed sex positivity of the script. 

The film crows over the female form like a cackling magpie, exempting men altogether from its bone-chilling leer. This is a movie strewn with completely naked women that treats its one full frontal male scene like it’s something shocking and disgusting. Male perspectives in sex films are just the worst, aren’t they? Despite Banks’ attempt at creating a shaded, multi-dimensional human being, Miri is merely a prize to be won: a fun fair sack of flesh, blood, and mammary glands. 

And Zack and Miri treats its minor characters even worse, if you can believe it. Craig Robinson is forced to contort into every stereotype in the book, and some that have been scribbled in the margins (whipped sitcom husband, wise best friend, irrationally angry black man), and the rest of the porno cast are given no introduction, with personalities ranging from one-note (Jason Mewes’ clueless sex fiend) to topless window dressing to “no seriously, who are you?” Then they’re sent floundering through a fundamentally broken story with a distended first act that swallows half the run time, a bungled time jump that kills the momentum at a climatic juncture, and a central relationship that vomits out manufactured filler drama in an unending stream. There are such deep cracks in the narrative here that James Cameron wants to make a documentary exploring them.

Is it funny? I suppose. Justin Long has an excellent extended cameo as a gravel-throated gay porn star, and there are jokes throughout that work when they’re not being extravagantly racist, sickeningly misogynistic, or they completely miscalculate the film’s capacity for scatological humor. Zack and Miri aims to shock, and it succeeds, but hardly in the way it intends to. Its sex is too tame to be titillating, and it can’t sustain such a deeply disjointed story on a pocketful of dick jokes. I say Zack and Miri Make a Porno is a tremendously lazy film, and the Windows Movie Maker credits that grace its front and back end seem to agree with me. I’d love to see this material handled by another director, but unfortunately Zack and Miri – and especially Kevin Smith – just don’t turn it on.

Rating: 4/10

Vacation

Year: 2015

Director: John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein

Cast: Ed Helms, Christina Applegate, Skyler Gisondo 

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A now grown-up Rusty Griswold decides to take his family on a road trip to Wally World in an attempt to smooth over their problems.

Now, here’s a movie I never thought I’d see, let alone like. A belated straggler from the 2000’s remake boom (seriously, other than Ghostbusters, who’s making remakes anymore? Remakes are so passé, sequels are what’s In this season), updating material that nobody has given a passing thought to in over a decade, Vacation seemed like the most obnoxious kind of family comedy. And to be honest, it doesn’t really try to be anything different. All the scatological gags, picked-clean sexual references, and oddly violent slapstick that you might expect are front and center, but Vacation prevails in spite of that.

I blame the cast. Ed Helms has always been a reliable comic presence, even if he doesn’t stand out in a sea of funny 40-something white guys. And he’s surrounded by a bevy of delightful professionals, first and foremost Christina Applegate. I’ve never paid much attention to Applegate beyond her cameo appearance on Friends, but she’s utterly brilliant here, wrapping up the classic Apatowian pent-up manboy archetype within the guise of a tired suburban mom. And then we have, packed in like sardines, Leslie Mann, Charlie Day, Caitlin Olsen, Michael Peña, Keegan-Michael Key, and f**king Chris Hemsworth, who Ghostbusters has taught us is a bona fide force of nature.

This cast elevates the mostly generic material, making it funny enough that when the script hits its patches of actual genius, they don’t seem out of place. The family car is a bubbling fount of hilarity with its endless absurdities and M.C. Escher-esque design, the young brothers are a wonderfully mismatched pairing, and there is a spot of psychosexual terror that cold-cocks your funny bone. It’s not highbrow, to be certain, but there are actual laughs here - laughs that Vacation comes by honestly, and that is a remarkable achievement.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 953

Popcorn Kernels: Two-Stop Shop

In which I share mini-reviews of two comedies I watched over the course of a weekend with Sergio. He fell asleep during both of them, but I was only upset about it once. The other time I was jealous that he managed to escape.

Marci X

Year: 2003

Director: Richard Benjamin

Cast: Lisa Kudrow, Damon Wayans, Richard Benjamin

Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A Jewish-American heiress struggling to protect her father’s reputation attempts to bond with an out-of-control rapper who is tanking his music label.

I love Lisa Kudrow. I think she is an underappreciated comic genius whose work on Friends was just the beginning of a career that included the farcical heights of Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion and the caustic, improbably hilarious The Comeback. But there’s a thing that happens when the peak of your fame was in the 90’s. Somehow, some way, the fates will conspire to dump you into a project like Marci X, a film that makes Soul Man look like a carefully thought-out racial tract.

The film is such a gargantuan miscalculation that it overflows the “offensive” reservoir almost immediately, spilling over everything until it pools around the “adorably quaint” drain. This might be a more effective defense if it had come out 43 years ago instead of 13, but it’s a perfect time capsule of Hollywood’s most embarrassing proclivities: Lisa Kudrow raps in the movie, you guys, and it is tremendous. If you approach this movie as a huge slice of camp rather than a film attempting to reflect any sort of truth about any ethnic or minority culture, it becomes a little easier to swallow. You’re still ingesting a whittled-down turd, but at least you’re not choking on it.

The real troubling thing is that I had so much fun watching Marci X. It’s a truly ludicrous movie, and its ability to completely ignore every last stricture of logic and decency makes for a madcap hullaballoo of completely unpredictable, off-the-rails filmmaking. It helps that pretty much everyone in the cast is genuinely talented. Damon Wayans might not be operating at the top of his game, retreating into half-assed, breathy line deliveries like a turtle hiding in his shell, but look at the comedy cavalry that’s assembled: Kudrow, 30 Rock’s Jane Krakowski, a very young Matthew Morrison, Christine Baranski, Richard Benjamin (who also directed)… No, it’s no Ghostbusters line-up, but they’re charming performers who convert a surprising amount of material into genuinely fun humor. 

Marci X is probably at its best when lampooning one-percenter socialite culture, not only because these moments are free of the lingering shame residue that comes any time the film even glances in the direction of hip-hop, but because it’s intentionally, satirically, successfully amusing. These upper class bubbleheads parade around disabled children at charity balls, assume they understand minority plights even better than the minorities do, and generally attempt to solve all the world’s problems without realizing that they are one of them. It might be low-hanging fruit, but they pluck it with vim and vigor.

Of course, in the third act the plot loses its goddamn mind and spirals blindly down a hundred narrative dead-ends before just sort of giving up and plastering over its missing ending with another ill-advised rap sequence. It’s a steaming bowl of nonsense, but the music (co-written by Marc Shaiman of Hairspray and Smash) is an apt stylistic parody of the worst of late 90’s pop (the flick may have premiered in 2003, but it was made in 2000 – I wonder what could possibly have held them up?), the fundamental misunderstanding of the rap scene is pitifully endearing, and the secret abundance of genuinely good jokes hiding in the wings make it a must-see masterpiece of Hollywood crap.

Rating: 7/10

Clerks

Year: 1994

Director: Kevin Smith

Cast: Brian O'Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Marilyn Ghigliotti 

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Two clerks at a convenience store and a video store bond over the course of an extremely long shift.

Indie flicks were such a Thing in 1994. Pulp Fiction immediately became the biggest movie in the galaxy and Clerks toddled along to prove that anyone could make a movie. Literally anyone. Kevin Smith was a convenience store clerk from Ass Nowhere, New Jersey, and he made himself a megahit using a cheap camera on his off-hours. It’s a truly inspirational story, and it wouldn’t have worked if Smith wasn’t an incredibly savvy creative mind, but damn if Clerks isn’t a slog.

Fans of cheap movies are used to forgiving such films their many technical flaws, but Clerks isn’t even a movie. It’s a staged reading of a screenplay. The screenplay is admirably sharp, to be sure, restaging Dante’s Inferno as a miserable day shift and casually tossing off some incredibly tight comic vignettes as it putters along. But there’s literally nothing else to Clerks. The camera is either hibernating on its tripod or whipping back and forth between its subjects like a rabid squirrel. The black and white cinematography is not a choice but a necessity, and it makes a drab, uncomplicated set look even less interesting. Which I guess emphasizes the theme of the narrative, but that’s certainly not on purpose.

With the script front and center and nothing waiting in the wings to prop it up, every tumble it makes violently topples the film. And let me remind you, this is the first script Smith ever produced. It’s inherently composed of stumbles. The dialogue tends to be both overwritten and underperformed, women are treated like interchangeable hogs on a spit, and certain chapters (oh yeah, the film is divided into nine segments with different titles) just dump a bucket of words on your head, hoping there’s a joke in there. And I’m sorry to say it, but Jay and Silent Bob are not commanding presences at this juncture in their lives.

There’s some genuinely funny stuff in Clerks (my favorite being an anti-smoking advocate inciting an in-store riot), but when it lulls as most comedies tend to do, there isn’t a white of redeeming quality to lean on. It’s a treacherous slog to get to the good stuff, and the good stuff is too laconic to really boost your energy and recharge your interest. It’s a clever debut film, but it wears its amateur status on its sleeve, which it then tears off and drapes over its entire face.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1078

Into The Woods

For our podcast episode about this very film, click here.

Year: 2016

Director: Adam Wingard

Cast: James Allen McCune, Callie Hernandez, Corbin Reid

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I like the output of director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett more than I like the legacy of The Blair Witch Project. The 1999 found footage phenomenon was a masterpiece of grassroots viral marketing, but the film itself is only a passable entry in the genre. And the less I think about its quick and dirty follow-up Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, the happier I’ll be. So unlike many rabid fans, I am very open to new blood in this stunted franchise.

I’ve been a fan of Wingard and Barrett’s partnership since their 2013 magnum opus You’re Next and their bubblegum action smash The Guest. They tend to blend genres in an exciting, refreshing manner, and Wingard’s directing has been blossoming as his visual toolbox develops. When I heard they were both being plunked into a found footage shocker, I was skeptical about whether or not this stripped-down methodology would hinder their progress, but hoped it might allow them to focus on making a singularly terrifying movie, which is something they haven’t accomplished just yet.

It’s nice to want things.

In Blair Witch, film student Lisa Arlington (Callie Hernandez) is making a documentary about her friend James (James Allen McCune) and his unresolved grief. You see, his sister Heather disappeared in the Maryland woods some 15 years ago. When a tape of her disappearance surfaces online, he gathers Lisa and his friends Peter (Brandon Scott) and Ashley (Corbin Reid) to trek out into the woods to find the abandoned house depicted in the tape and hopefully find out what became of her. They reluctantly allow the local Witch-philes Lane (Wes Robinson) and Talia (Valorie Curry) to tag along with them, because they know the location where the tape was found.

It’s only a matter of time before things start getting weird. They get lost, hear mysterious noises at night, see strange apparitions, and generally discover the reason why nobody should ever go camping.

Seriously, camping’s the worst.

Is Blair Witch a scarier film than The Blair Witch Project? Oh, effortlessly. But is it a better film? That’s where things get a little dicey. As a 2016 found footage film, it has the disadvantage of audience overfamiliarity, and it doesn’t do much to steer itself away from a lot of the clichés of modern POV horror. Why do these people keep filming when sh*t hits the fan? Who cares. (Their cameras are mostly head-mounted, which is a good excuse for recording during the climax, but the characters rather emphatically turn their cameras on for no blessed reason at the weirdest possible times so we can get valuable exposition.) And who invited this unpleasant extraneous couple? Well, we needed a higher body count. And where the hell is that droning, atonal score coming from that’s trying desperately to avoid being noticed? Well, I’ve never had an answer for that one.

The thing that sucks is that the silence in Blair Witch is so eerily, awe-inspiringly complete, it would be far more disturbing if all we could hear was the characters breathing and the whir of a camera. The sound design was good enough to have pulled it off, but the misstep of including any sort of score, no matter how subtle, reeks of a lack of confidence, exposing the movie’s artifice in the process.

Plus, being an honest continuation of The Blair Witch Project means you inherit all of its problems. Notably, the mythology of the Blair Witch herself gets a little fuzzy in favor of providing startling scares. Obviously, we’re not meant to truly understand how this shadowy, unknowable menace operates, but there are so many ingredients thrown into this stew that it just turns into mud. Combining ghostly apparitions, Satanic magic, creature features, body horror, and time warp sci-fi into a single narrative, Blair Witch completely fails to build a coherent menace, making it difficult to understand and thus be invested in the characters’ plights, even if individual moments are tremendously creepy.

Including, but not limited to, this guy’s uncanny resemblance to a loathed classmate of mine.

And thus concludes the section where I’m perhaps unfairly critical toward Blair Witch. Although it never feels quite like a unified whole, the sum of those parts is still pretty freaky. After ramping up with a punishingly long opening act, Blair Witch slips easily into pure terror, crafting images that harness the corner-of-your-eye imagination of the original film while giving the audience a sumptuous visual meal thanks to its higher budget.

There is some Gross. Sh*t. in Blair Witch, you guys. A lot of the most terrifying images are reminiscent of other horror favorites, but they’re presented in an electrifying new way that keeps you on your toes. The second and third acts do what a proper horror roller coaster should, keeping you reeling and cringing at a manic pace. There are a couple of longer setups with payoffs that fall flat, but it’s a heap of fun just the same.

I feel this need to temper most of my praise, because the problems in Blair Witch are numerous and frustrating, but they pale in comparison to its raw energy and power. It’s a fun campfire movie, and I wouldn’t take that away from anyone. It may not be changing the course of horror as we know it, but it’s an excellent Blair Witch Project sequel that manages to bring on the jolts, even if it’s hardly the all-encompassing phenomenon of the original.

TL;DR: Blair Witch is a solid, frightening sequel, even if it doesn't quite cohere.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 950
Reviews In This Series
The Blair Witch Project (Myrick & Sanchez, 1999)
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (Berlinger, 2000)
Blair Witch (Wingard, 2016)

Popcorn Kernels: Funny Girls

In which we dole out mini-reviews to two female-led comedies, released 30 years apart. Let’s see how things have changed, shall we?

Valley Girl

Year: 1983

Director: Martha Coolidge

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Deborah Foreman, Elizabeth Daily

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A girl from the Valley falls for an LA dude with a bitchin’ bod, but her friends think he’s, like, totally grody. Will she choose him or get back with her old beau, Tommy?

I feel like such a traitor to the cause. Like, every cause. As a staunch feminist and an 80’s movie advocate, I’m always delighted when I find out that a classic high school movie was actually directed by a woman. But Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemeont High failed to wow me, and now Martha Coolidge’s Valley Girl has suffered a similar fate. Obviously, this has everything to do with the state of second-tier 80’s teen flicks and not women in the director’s chair, but I can’t help feeling like a heretic.

At least with Valley Girl, I can see why it became such a zeitgeisty hit, and it’s not just Phoebe Cates misplacing her bikini top. Simultaneously canonizing a parade of 80’s megahits, including Modern English’s evergreen “Melt with You” and calling into existence an entire lexicon of slang like an omnipotent pop culture deity, Valley Girl struck teen culture during a pivotal transition period. As a cultural artifact, it’s pristine, but as an actual piece of film narrative, it’s a major bummer.

Copping the classical “forbidden love” story arc so hard that our couple literally makes out in front of a movie theater marquee advertising Romeo and Juliet, Valley Girl assumes that the drama is baked in automatically and doesn’t actually bother to create its own meaningful conflict. It’s hard to care about a relationship that has lasted the course of a montage, but it’s even harder to believe that Julie’s decision is challenging in any way, because Tommy is such a collar-popping Cobra Kai asshole that it’s literally impossible to imagine that anyone would even give him the time of day without smacking that smug grin off his greasy face.

Plus, Nicolas Cage is obscenely attractive at 19 years old. He might be giving a performance bizarrely reminiscent of David Schwimmer, but he’s got the goods, and that’s something I never thought I’d say about the star of the National Treasure franchise. This extremely superficial narrative (which expends a lot of energy trying to emphasize how “different” this white dude from 20 miles away is) can’t even pick up on that, which is immensely frustrating.

The film’s emphasis on vérité conversational scenes that meander through halfheartedly improvised dialogue while straining to grab guerilla snatches of downtown LA betray its low budget, as does its lack of proper nighttime lighting. Far be it from me to punish a movie for being cheap, but it doesn’t cost money to punch up the script a little more. A whole lot of nothing happens in Valley Girl, and it takes forever to do it. 

I admire its veracity as an on-the-ground examination of the totally arbitrary class warfare of teen culture, but Deborah Foreman is a deeply uninteresting lead (her second biggest credit is the forgotten 1986 slasher April Fool’s Day, in which she’s also the least interesting presence), the story is lazy, and just like Ridgemont High, the film is packed with side characters and subplots that we spend an arbitrary amount of time with before they vanish. At least we’ll always have Nic Cage’s eyebrows.

Rating: 5/10

I Give It a Year

Year: 2013

Director: Dan Mazer

Cast: Rose Byrne, Rafe Spall, Anna Faris

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A newlywed couple struggles to make it through their first year of marriage, both presented with temptations in the form of romantic partners far better suited for them.

I Give it a Year is a curious beast. A small British alterna-rom-com nestled in the underbrush of the Netflix catalogue, you’d think you know exactly what you’re getting. And that’s what you get: A Spartan narrative with few twists and turns, a half-cynical but still heteronormative-monogamous takedown of love and marriage, and a revolving door of broad comedy stock characters. So why did I find it so f**king delightful?

Well, ingredient number one is Rose Byrne, a vastly underrated comedy actress who I would follow to the ends of the Earth. Hell, I would watch Paul Blart: Mall Cop in Space if she was in it. She has an uncanny ability to take an extremely sour character, sharpen her to a deadly steel point of hilarity, and swoop in with her natural charisma to tie you down and force you to care for her anyway. She handles all the film’s copious negativity with charm and grace, keeping the tone light and airy.

That’s not to say the rest of the cast don’t pull their weight. I mean, Anna Faris is in this movie. Her character is probably the most flat on paper, but she grabs her nebbish role by the horns to craft a lived-in character with more dimensions than scenes. And in the wings are the male leads; Rafe Spall to play cavalry with dunderheaded charm and physical comedy, and Simon Baker to project handsomeness and overconfidence all over the place like a fire hose.

Surround this cast with a battalion of British character actors, and you’ve got yourself an unforgettable movie. I Give it a Year is simple, sleek, unadorned, and pretty hilarious. It’s no classical masterpiece of the form, but it’s a ridiculously fun time that I would recommend to anybody who fancies themselves edgy and cynical, but is still a soggy romantic at heart.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 961

It Ain't Easy Being Green

[EN: Check out my collected writings on Wes Craven's works in the new "Wes Craven" page on the top bar or right here.]

Year: 1982

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Louis Jourdan, Adrienne Barbeau, Ray Wise

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

The early 80’s were a tough time for Wes Craven. A decade or so out from his terrifying debut The Last House on the Left, and half that from his grisly but mediocre sophomore effort The Hills Have Eyes, he just wasn’t finding purchase in Hollywood. In 1982 he was only two years off from altering the face of world cinema with A Nightmare on Elm Street, but for now his CV boasted the meager one-two punch of Deadly Blessing and Stranger in Our House, a TV movie with Linda Blair (yeah, we’re gonna get to that one).

So when he was offered the opportunity to direct a high profile superhero movie based on the DC Comics character Swamp Thing, do you think he would say no? Of course not. Superhero movies didn’t have quite the caché that they do today, but Superman had crushed box office coal into diamonds, so who was Wes Craven to tempt fate? Now, was the grindhouse horror director remotely equipped to handle an action-oriented blockbuster with a studio breathing down his neck and slashing the budget to ribbons so savagely they probably inspired Freddy Krueger?

Of course not.

In Swamp Thing, government scientist Alice Cable (Adrienne Barbeau) is sent to a remote research lab in the swamp to replace an injured worker during the last week of the operation. There she meets and becomes enamored with Dr. Alec Holland (Ray Wise), who is working with his sister to create a recombinant cell with both animal and plant DNA for… reasons. Science reasons. When the wicked Dr. Arcane (Louis Jordan) storms the lab to steal the formula, Holland is accidentally coated in it and falls into the swamp. This transforms him into the monstrous Swamp Thing (Dick Durock), and he sets out to save Cable from Arcane’s clutches, while he attempts to recreate the formula and use it on himself.

I mean, wouldn’t YOU want to look like this?

Swamp Thing represents a lot of firsts for Wes Craven. His first superhero movie. His first action movie. His first Wilhelm Scream. Of course, it also represents a lot of lasts because he would never do any of those things again. And while I’m delighted that he got a shot at operating outside of his horror wheelhouse before his single true departure from the genre in 1999’s Music of the Heart, it’s for the best that his action career didn’t go anywhere.

The sequences in the first act that develop character and build the world are pretty solid, but Craven’s script flails once the actual Swamp Thing is introduced. And yes, Craven himself got to write the script on this thing, because literally nobody gave a rat’s ass about overseeing comic book movies in the 80’s. But I digress. Swamp Thing’s powers are ill-defined (we don’t find out a key strength of his until the final 20 minutes, in which Cable sedately repeats it to him as if we should’ve known this the whole time) and his heroism is poorly staged, as Adrienne Barbeau wanders vacantly through the swamp, gets captured, and twiddles her thumbs until he leaps from the reeds to her rescue over and over and over again. It’s like Groundhog Day if Bill Murray were a damsel in distress.

The action sequences are spectacularly hammy, too. There’s a decent boat chase at one point, but every fistfight is as lumbering and slow as an old Godzilla movie, using that 40’s cinema standby of people falling down even though their opponent’s fist is clearly a foot and a half away from them. What makes this even more embarrassing is that most of the fight scenes involve David Hess, a participant in Craven’s most luridly brutal and realistic depiction of violence, in 1972’s The Last House on the Left. It’s a major stumble for a director who had found his voice, but hadn’t quite locked down his visual mastery yet.

Watching Swamp Thing, it’s almost impossible to believe this was only two years later.

The second and third acts range from boring to dreadful, but when Swamp Thing is good, it’s at least amusingly campy comic book fun. Wise and Barbeau have enough chemistry that I’m willing to go along with their preposterous love story, and though Cable is hardly an empowered female character, she gets a couple opportunities to kick an appropriate amount of ass. Then the comic-y flair comes in with the absurd squiggly wipes Craven uses to transition between scenes. And it’s impossible to completely hate a movie that has a scene where a character grabs the corner of their face and removes their impeccably lifelike Mission: Impossible mask.

Probably the single best element of the film is Jude, a ten-year-old comic relief gas station attendant who accompanies Cable on her Act Two journey. This is almost certainly damning Swamp Thing with faint praise, because he’d probably be the worst thing in any other movie, but the characters (played by Reggie Batts) exemplifies the best of Craven’s occasionally lever, quippy, and warm screenplay. Too bad he’s shunted to the side for a grand finale featuring this masterpiece. 

And I didn’t think any Craven effect could be worse than the werewolf in Cursed.

As you can see, Swamp Thing is no charmer. It’s a parade of shoddy special effects and circuitous narrative, plodding endlessly through a flat, tedious swamp. And the cherry on top is the score by Harry Manfredini, who – as he has with every other film he’s composed since 1980 – liberally slathers the film with shrill outtakes from his Friday the 13th score, smothering it with blunt strings that completely ignore the tone of whatever scene they’re in, blasting it into sub-slasher oblivion. Swamp Thing is a disappointment, but so were most comic movies of that era (Hell, DC is still churning them out). I’m not shifting the blame entirely from Craven, whose hands were all over this project, but the director took a shot at material he was wholly incompatible with. It’s an admirable venture but an unsuccessful one.

TL;DR: Swamp Thing is an admirable failure from a director ill-equipped to handle the genre.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1049

Popcorn Kernels: Fangs For The Memories

Everyone, please welcome back our dear friend Scream 101! The podcast has risen from the grave for a second season, and this September we’re all about vampires. Please enjoy a set of mini-reviews about the first two flicks in the lineup.

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

Year: 1931

Director: Tod Browning

Cast: Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, David Manners 

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: Approved

C’mon.

I do my best to approach classic horror with the respect it deserves, bringing as much context as possible to understand why people might have been scared of it back in the day, even if it doesn’t phase modern audiences. I get how Psycho shocked a post-Code audience and respect its tense thriller mechanics. I understand Halloween’s game-changing, stylish approach even if it doesn’t particularly spook me. And every time I watched The Exorcist… OK, The Exorcist is still terrifying. I’m just saying, I’m not speaking as a live Tweeting, torture porn-bred millennial when I say that the massively important, influential-even-to-this-day 1931 Universal smash hit Dracula is a pretty awful movie.

Please keep in mind that I don’t hate all Universal horror. Bride of Frankenstein is a doggone triumph. It’s just that Dracula is cut off at the knees twice over by its source material. While Dracula works well as an epistolary novel, its meandering, country-hopping plot is not the stuff of great cinema. And then our Dracula goes one step further by actually adapting its script from a stage play based on the novel, confining that addled narrative into one suffocating location.

The pacing chokes on its own blood as a handful of characters shout at one another, circling back to the same points over and over again. And far be it from me to knock an iconic performance, but Bela Lugosi is no Karloff. His slow-as-molasses line deliveries are just exhausting. The word “boring” is bandied about a lot when it comes to movies released more than a decade before our time, but Dracula truly earns that description. 

There are exactly three things that are genuinely good about Dracula, and they are what prevent it from teetering over a precipice of despair and tedium. First is Dwight Frye, our Renfield. Frye just goes for it, bringing an immutable energy to the role that sends him careening up into the rafters, but appropriately sells the character’s stylized insanity. The second stems off from that over-the-top quasi-expressionism: the production design of settings that aren’t the main mansion. Dracula’s castle is an excellent chiaroscuro nightmare, and the staircase in his London hideout is a deliciously overwrought jagged cliff.

The third and final element is one scene, a bedtime conversation between Mina and Lucy that thrums with naturalistic chemistry, providing a tiny breath of fresh air between all the hammy tagines. But a couple gasps do not a full lung make. I’d rather be buried six feet under than spend an eternity with Dracula, and that’s exactly what this 80 minute expanse of celluloid felt like.

Rating: 3/10

Let the Right One In (For the Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.)

Year: 2008

Director: Tomas Alfredson

Cast: Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar

Run Time: 1 hour 55 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A young Swedish boy falls in love with the girl who moves in next door, only to discover that she’s a vampire.

I love the book Let the Right One In, as it’s one of the few works of modern literature that has turned my stomach as I was reading it. That might explain why I’m so chilly toward its film adaptation, which defangs most of its more questionable content in favor of a languorous arthouse vibe. Now I’ll be the first to admit that Let the Right One In is a great arthouse horror movie, but I’m well aware of what it could have been, which is supremely frustrating.

But it’s only fair, I suppose, to focus on what it is. Which is beautiful. Like many a Scandinavian film, Let the Right One In uses sprawling fields of snow as giant canvasses of negative space onto which it paints its frame. Given that vampire films tend to predominately feature blood, this aesthetic is especially suited for the subgenre, juxtaposing lurid reds against the pure white snowfall. This is especially especially meaningful when you consider that both our monster and our twisted protagonist falling for her are children, the traditional innocents.

Yeah, there’s a lot going on in Let the Right One In, though you might not suspect that from its sedate pacing. It truly succeeds in combining thoughtful, thematic imagery with intensely visceral horror, sometimes even in the same frame. Certain moments are achieved so elegantly that they could be framed and put in a gallery, even though they depict, say, a woman being engulfed in flame or a man burning off his own face with acid. … Maybe I’m being too harsh when I judge this movie for not being hardcore enough.

And let’s not discount the film’s love story, which is believably clumsy, childish, sweet, and dark. The two child actors are superb, especially Lina Leandersson, whose Eli has the eyes of someone who has seen a million lifetimes come and go.

Hell, Let the Right One In is terrific. I don’t love it, because I sometimes have trouble penetrating its icy exterior, but I’d be a liar if I didn’t sing its praises and recommend it to fans looking for more intellectual horror fare.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 926

Leggo My Ghetto

Year: 1991

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Brandon Adams, Everett McGill, Wendy Robie

Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes 

MPAA Rating: R

August 20th marked the one-year anniversary of the passing of horror master Wes Craven, which prompted me to redouble my efforts to finish watching through his deceptively vast filmography. Considering that my last foray into his work was the surreally compromised Cursed, I decided to treat myself to the best of his movies that I haven’t seen yet, at least according to consensus opinion: The People Under the Stairs. I made the right choice.

Equal parts goofy, clever, disturbing, and socially aware, The People Under the Stairs is like directly communing with Craven’s spirit. All of his most beloved qualities are present, dressed in their Sunday best.

Which didn’t mean much in the fashion-impaired 90’s, but still.

In The People Under the Stairs, Fool (Brandon Adams) lives in the ghetto with his family and his ailing single mother. They’re the last family standing in their crumbling apartment complex, which the landlords want to tear down and replace with office buildings, and they’ve been given one day to pay the rent before they’re evicted. Friend of the family Leroy (Ving Rhames) convinces Fool that the only way to get the money is to rob the landlords themselves, who are said to have a vast collection of gold coins.

They break in and soon discover that their crime might not be so easy. The landlords, who call themselves Mommy (Wendy Robie) and Daddy (Everett McGill), look like the perfect suburban couple, but their inescapable house hides sinister secrets, including their abused daughter Alice (A. J. Langer) and a basement full of mutilated boys they’ve captured in an attempt to find the perfect son.

It’s cheaper than adopting, I guess.

I’d say that The People Under the Stairs is the most Wes Craven-y movie he ever made, but for the fact that it doesn’t feature a single dream sequence. That was kind of his thing. But for a movie with both feet planted firmly in reality, it’s decidedly surreal. It’s another twisted nightmare vision of white suburbia, but from a unique angle. Instead of depicting the skeletons in the closet of a nuclear family from the perspective of their own children, Craven has a complete stranger discover the abuse and evil while trapped inside with it.

The People Under the Stairs is also the Craven movie with the most consistent setting, as over 80% of the film takes place in and around the landlords’ household. So as much as it is a perfect evocation of his favorite themes and styles, it’s also a wholly distinct entry in his filmography. All of these factors combine to create a film that is claustrophobic, startling, and extremely special.

Like getting engaged in a mineshaft.

But enough of my Craven fandom pontification. What I really want to impress upon you about The People Under the Stairs is that it’s freakin’ awesome. It’s a no-holds-barred adventure through a cavernous home full of secret doors, booby traps, and hidden crawlspaces, a non-stop thrill ride of blood and guns and slavering dog jowls. It’s everything Don’t Breathe wanted to be but couldn’t quite muster the energy.

It’s also an over-the-top geyser of goofiness, but that only highlights the insanity of the situation. This delicate tonal balance rests easily in the hands of Everett McGill and Wendy Robie who, as Twin Peaks alums, know exactly how far to take things. McGill is hilarious, mugging through his scenes like he’s a fourth Stooge in a leather gimp suit, and Robie goes full Mommie Dearest, channeling her best Grand Diva as a shrill, knife-wielding harpy. Their insane couple is like Ward and June Cleaver by way of Tobe Hooper: Unpredictable and captivating, sublimely funny yet effortlessly chilling.

This vein of silliness is actually perfect for the film, because it creates a heightened reality that allows for hyperbolic horror to enter the picture. The family’s basement of reject children might have been laughable in a different movie, but in People Under the Stairs it’ a disturbing yet pitiful display. When Fool discovers this basement of horrors, the sight imprints itself on your mind as one of the iconic images of horror that you will remember until the end of time.

Or maybe that’s just me. But still. Great.

The People Under the Stairs is just plain fun chock full of clever dialogue and well-shaded, memorable characters. And none of that undermines its powerful but reasonably subtle anti-gentrification message. It’s a film about the cruelty other humans inflict upon one another, but it’s also a humanist fairy tale about how oppressed minorities can rise up and stand together as a community.

Seriously, Wes Craven was killing it in the 90’s. Between The People Under the Stairs, New Nightmare, Scream, and Scream 2, he was operating at the top of his game (Vampire in Brooklyn? Never heard of it), and this film is just one more dab of cement that solidifies his reputation as a true blue master of horror.

TL;DR: The People Under the Stairs is a gleefully campy, tense, massively underrated Craven gem.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 862

Raved With Good Intentions

Year: 2016

Director: Christopher Louie

Cast: Sarah Hyland, Graham Phillips, Brett DelBuono

Run Time: 1 our 32 minutes

Rating: TV-MA

I have no idea why XOXO exists. Combining the central conflict and half the cast of Jem and the Holograms with the EDM subject matter of We Are Your Friends, the Netflix original film is cobbled together from the two biggest flops of 2015. Nevermind that I kinda like both those movies, it just doesn’t seem like a solid investment. And the first-time writer-director, former animator Christopher Louie, is no Duffer Brothers, to say the least. Oh well. Maybe I’m just getting old.

He who is tired of watching other people party is tired of life.

XOXO wants to be the Love, Actually of the rave scene, detailing the myriad adventures of the attendees of the XOXO EDM show and how they cross paths. Our de facto protagonist is Ethan Shaw (Graham Phillips), an aspiring DJ who lands a coveted last-minute slot on the XOXO lineup, but is too shy to play his own demos. He doesn’t seem aware of how raves actually work. Or record deals, as evidenced by his seduction by the skeevy headliner Avilo (Ryan Hansen). Or USB drives. There are literally two separate scenes where the tension hinges on his inability to plug things in. This guy’s our hero.

Anyway, the other characters are Tariq (Brett DelBuono), Ethan’s best friend/manager who attempts to hold a meeting with a record producer and find Ethan among the throng after being accidentally dosed with LSD; Shannie (Hayley Kiyoko) and Ray (Colin Woodell), a couple trying to enjoy their last day together before she moves across the country for a year; Neil (Chris D’Elia), a music shop owner/rave Grinch who used to be a DJ but is bitter about the scene; and Krystal (Sarah Hyland, the film’s biggest “name”), a rave virgin/regular virgin who is there to meet a guy she’s been talking to online for a month. But is she really ready for this?

And, more importantly, are we?

Like any film dedicated to depicting a very now subculture, XOXO is hastily assembled, slapdash, and kind of hilarious. Now I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve never been to a rave, and I’ll die happy if that never changes. But judging from XOXO’s too-trendy teens and depiction of the show as a drug-soaked erotic bacchanal as envisioned by a suburban soccer mom’s G-rated nightmare journal, Christopher Louie has been to even fewer than I. 

I mean, at least I have Instagram friends who go to Electric Daisy Carnival.

When XOXO is an adult’s attempt at translating the world of teens for other teens, it’s a doofy but loveable flop. Then when it really settles down for some deep interpersonal drama, the engine drops out at 40,000 feet. But before it plummets to its saccharine demise, it’s worth at least keeping on in the background while you wash dishes. Let’s focus on that part for the time being.

Full of the hip teenage standbys of giant text bubble chockablock with random emojis, zooms on YouTube pages as the numbers rack up, and ridiculous ABBA reject outfits that adults think people actually wear, the first act of XOXO is a manic slalom through too many characters doing too many things that make too little sense. There’s actually some genuinely good dialogue in this sequence, though the lazy clunkers start here and only pick up momentum as the show goes on. It’s a shoddily tossed-together sugar rush that’s easy to mock but easier to find at least a  little endearing.

However as the stories progress, they either settle into an entirely predictable formula, stop making any semblance of sense, or lose steam and evaporate from the film entirely. There are still some pockets of campy B-movie magic, like the reclusive creator of the rave, who’s one part Great Gatsby and one part Willy Wonka, but the film’s attempts at emotional sincerity are stunted by its Dollar-Tree-wrapping-paper-thin characters.

Seriously, that stuff tears if somebody’s using scissors NEXT DOOR.

It’s kind of impossible to care about these people because, other than Ethan, they’re only given one character trait to beat over and over like a bongo drum. And they don’t have “arcs” so much as linear stretches from point A to point B, and point B is dancing. I find watching other people have fun onscreen to be an intolerably boring experience, and if you’re anything like me, XOXO will grate on you like your brain is a block of parmesan.

There are some alright moments. Chris D’Elia is amusingly misanthropic. You get to see Ryan Hansen’s arms, and man is that dude aging like a fine wine. But for the most part, XOXO is a transient burst of energy, like a Pixie Stick. There’s still a little powder left in the tube after the initial rush, but you have to work way too hard to get to it. Stick to Netflix’s original series and don’t bother with this half-baked feature.

TL;DR: XOXO is a slightly bad-good but mostly messy exploration of an exhausting teen subculture.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 855

The Barely There Project

Year: 2000

Director: Joe Berlinger

Cast: Jeffrey Donovan, Stephen Barker Turner, Erica Leerhsen

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It’s all happening! The Woods, the upcoming found footage flick from Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett (You’re Next, The Guest) has been revealed to be an official sequel to The Blair Witch Project! The newly retitled Blair Witch looks incredible, and I’m excited to revisit that 1999 classic through the goggles of 16 years of progress.

…Wait a second. Why did I say 17 years of progress? Could this be? Was there a Blair Witch in 2000? Yes folks, today we’ll be exploring the quickly assembled, quickly forgotten sequel to The Blair Witch Project, entitled Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. In excitement for the new film, I popped in this DVD (which is a double disc containing the film’s soundtrack on the flipside, because the millennium was awesome), ready to complete my Blair Witch education.

Pro-Tip: Don’t follow in my footsteps.

In Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, there’s even less Blair Witch than the first film. But that’s OK, because there’s also no Book of Shadows, so at least things are fair and square. So here’s what happens. The backwater town of Burkittsville, MD suddenly has a booming tourist population thanks to Blair Witch Project fans who want to visit the site where it took place. One such tour group includes Stephen (Stephen Barker Turner) and Tristen (Tristine Skyler), a couple who are writing a book about the phenomenon; Erica (Erica Leehersen), a happy-go-lucky Wiccan who wants to commune with the “misunderstood” Blair Witch; and Kim (Kim Director), a goth psychic because why not.

Their tour guide is Jeff (Jeffrey Donovan), a local with an entrepreneurial flair. The group camps out in the ruins of the Rustin Parr house, and wake up after blacking out. A medical emergency cuts their trip short, and Jeff takes them back to his house, which is an abandoned factory. Seriously, 2000 was just a great time to be alive. While going over footage they taped, they notice strange anomalies that might be linked to the murders of another tour group that very night. Tensions flare among the group, and their paranoia only grows as supernatural occurrences begin to haunt them.

And that’s how we ended up with a Blair Witch movie that only spends like 20 minutes in the woods.

Writing a review for Blair Witch 2 is like writing a eulogy for the horror genre itself. It’s like a smear campaign for the original film, which certainly doesn’t need the help, given its tendency toward being not that great in hindsight. But you don’t need more than two seconds of separation to tell that Book of Shadows is a stinker.

With an expanded cast, a traditional shooting style, a score, et cetera, et cetera, Book of Shadows was clearly going to cost more money than the infamously thrifty original. I assumed from the tinny TV movie vibe that it was probably operating at a comfortable $1 million as opposed to the original’s $600,000. Buy do you want to hear what the budget on this sucker was? Reader discretion is advised. You can’t unsee this number: $15 million. That’s. Bananas. There’s no excuse for this movie looking like something you scrape off the bottom of your shoe after a visit to a landfill. They must have been putting those actors up in the f**king Ritz, because not one cent of that budget is onscreen.

The only genuine attempt at horror in the whole thing is a fistful of those goofy flash cuts that 90’s horror liked so much, and literally about 23 seconds of a totally arbitrary ghost girl who is never explained. Well, I can explain it. The producers were lent a tape of Ringu by one of their much savvier friends. Then the rest is just bottle episode mayhem, with a harried ensemble bouncing around a single location and over-emoting like their mother is in the front row with a camcorder.

Although, come to think of it, camcorder footage would definitely have been more faithful to the original.

Deep breath. OK, Book of Shadows isn’t all bad. The first act is even decidedly pleasant if you approach it as a time capsule of the loopy fringe cultures of the early 2000’s. Kim’s character is introduced taking a nap on a grave, for crying out loud. This cheesy charm matches up with some genuinely decent quippy dialogue for a solid stretch of about 20 minutes. That promises a bearable, maybe even recommendable movie before it all crashes and burns. And Tristine Skyler at least is up to something fun and mildly creepy in her performance.

Faint praise is still praise, I guess, and I’m glad this movie had anything to offer other than muddled editing, community theater effects, and a complete lack of fidelity to the Blair Witch property. I’m not sure these people even watched the first movie. Book of Shadows feels more like a sequel to the “Smells Like Teen Spirit music video than anything. Avoid this movie at all costs, unless that cost is free and you’re bedridden with a fever.

TL;DR: Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is a pox on the original film, and on filmmaking in general.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 886
Reviews In This Series
The Blair Witch Project (Myrick & Sanchez, 1999)
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (Berlinger, 2000)
Blair Witch (Wingard, 2016)

Freshman Orientation

Year: 2016

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Blake Jenner, Tyler Hoechlin, Ryan Guzman 

Run Time: 1 hour 57 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I dug Boyhood, my first foray into the Oscarbait half of Richard Linklater’s filmography. So I was excited to check out Everybody Wants Some!!, his entry into the college movie subgenre, a personal favorite of mine. It also didn’t hurt that it featured two actors I like, one for unrecognized talent reasons (Glenn Powell, whose Scream Queens performance I determined the best of 2015) and one for… personal reasons (Ryan Guzman of The Boy Next Door). Boyhood was a slice of life narrative that said what it had to say, albeit in a very relaxed manner, so I was intrigued to see how he could follow it. Turns out, he did the exact same thing, only way more scatterbrained and self-indulgent.

Though I can’t complain about certain indulgences…

Everybody Wants Some!! details the weekend before class starts at a Texas college in 1980. We follow a baseball team living in an off-campus house, mostly via the entry point of freshman Jake (Blake Jenner), who strikes up a tentative flirtation with theater girl Beverly (Zoey Deutch). The boys that pack this film include McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin), a sore-losing alpha jock; Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), a laid-back stoner; and Finnegan (Glenn Powell), a fast talking  know-it-all whose faux-intellectual bravura just barely obscures his crippling self doubt. The rest of them blend together in a miasma of sun-baked testosterone. So… that’s pretty much it.

If you’re coming to a Linklater flick looking for plot, just watch School of Rock again.

Richard Linklater loves his cultural signifiers. In Boyhood, pop music and developing technology form a rich tapestry of time over which he presents his story. In Everybody Wants Some!!, he wants to remind everyone that the music scene was so very cool in 1980, wasn’t it? It’s more mix tape than movie, and the prioritization of capturing the look and feel of the period causes the rest of the story to suffer.

The truly frustrating thing about this is that so much of Everybody Wants Some!! is so good. Or at least, it has so much raw potential. The act of looking back on the movie is far more pleasurable than actually sitting through it, because it encompasses a lot of important themes about life, youth, and identity.

And weirdly, not baseball. Like, at all.

As the boys head out each night to different bars and parties trying to get some (which, as rumor has it, they all want), they view themselves as the most desirable men in the world. They play baseball. They have a future. An exciting one, not like all those future office drones around them. Only Finnegan seems aware of the bitter truth that college baseball won’t last forever. And their habit of constantly dressing up to fit the requirements of whatever bar they’re visiting that night (cowboy hats and boots for swing dancing, leather and studs for a punk club) prove that they’re just blank slates with no personality of their own. Of course, Linklater has Jake point this out in a hideously clanging piece of dialogue that smashes the subtlety to smithereens, because he really doesn’t seem to care all that much about his story.

Given this lackadaisical attitude toward the storytelling, it becomes more and more difficult to actually give a crap about the characters. If the director isn’t doing it, then why should I? Look back at my plot summary for this film. I described exactly three boys, because those are the only ones I could remember from this cast of over a dozen. I wish I could pretend Finnegan was the protagonist because Glenn Powell is the best performer and has his hands on the most interesting material, but no. We have Jake, the blandest cypher this side of a Tobey McGuire movie, and most of the cast gamely plays the wallpaper behind him.

I’ve never been this disinterested in a movie full of shirtless men.

Everybody Wants Some!! is best described as a hang-out movie, but there’s nobody here I would remotely even consider being friends with. They’re just a gaggle of hormone-addled über-morons who are nipping like chihuahuas at the heels of life. If you’re a white, heterosexual male between the ages of 25 and 45, this movie might just speak to you, but let’s be honest. Do we really need any more of these?

A word that a film reviewer should always be cautious about throwing around is “boring,” but I must honor my truth. I was bored to tears by the hedonistic antics of this motley crew, as much as I desperately wanted to be on their side. They’re unpleasant and occasionally engaging, but they’re mostly just dull as watching paint grow. I don’t need two hours with these people. I’d rather spend my time listening to the soundtrack in a dark room. And I don’t even like The Knack all that much.

TL;DR: Everybody Wants Some!! has some solid potential, but it's too dull and meandering to make it work.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 853