Completion Anxiety

Year: 2013

Director: Don Mancini

Cast: Chantal Quesnelle, Fiona Dourif, Jordan Gavaris

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

As you may or may not have noticed, I have several features up and running that are unfinished. My blog is like a spider web of loose ends that I’m scrambling to pick up between two jobs, an attempt at a normal human life, and my incessant, unquenchable need to consume as much content as humanly possible. Rest assured, I’m working diligently to create these final posts for your reading convenience.

Which brings us to Curse of Chucky, the sixth and, as of this writing, final film in the Child’s Play franchise. Scooting in just under a decade after Seed of Chucky, this direct-to-video sequel comes after the longest gap in franchise history. Not only that, but it’s directed by longitime screenwriter Don Mancini, who also helmed Seed of Chucky, which despite its charms is indubitably the worst of the series. This is a tried and true Julia Childs recipe for cinematic disaster, and yet it turned out to be one of the best sequels in a fascinatingly strong franchise. Let’s dive in, shall we?

Thank you for waiting. You’ve been a real doll.

In Curse of Chucky, horror is back at the forefront for the first time in at least three entries. Nica (Fiona Dourif) is a wheelchair-bound young woman living under the thumb of her overprotective mother in a sumptuous gothic house that would give Guillermo del Toro chills. One day, a Good Guy doll is mysteriously shipped to their front door. Not long afterward, Nica’s mother is found lying in a pool of blood at the foot of the stairs, an apparent suicide.

Two guesses as to what really happened. As Nica’s extended family – her toxic sister Barb (Danielle Bisutti) who wants to sell the house, Barb’s disgruntled hubby Ian (Brennan Elliott), their “sex on two toothpicks” au pair Jill (Maitland McConnell), and their young daughter Alice (Summer H. Howell) – come to stay, mysterious happenings begin, well… happening. Alice befriends the talking doll, Chucky (Brad Dourif), and the residents of the house begin to die one by one whenever he’s around.

You’d think people would have issued a recall on these at some point.

Curse has a lot of what Seed lacked, and curiously I don’t mean money. Despite having less than half the budget of his already shortchanged previous entry, Mancini brings his A-game. Lord knows what he’d been doing since 2004, but whatever drugs he took certainly expanded his visual vocabulary something fierce. To put it simply, Curse of Chucky is downright stunning, tossing Seed’s overlit sitcom aesthetic into a woodchipper and pulling a shadow-drenched gothic dreamscape out of thin air.

The camera pirouettes gracefully over the action, highlighting the aggressively baroque production design, and damn is it ever apparent that this movie is directed rather than merely dumped into a camera. It’s a gorgeous-looking piece, especially in a flashback that allows bold yellow flowers to assert themselves over a crisp black and white frame. This environment provides the perfect atmosphere for Chucky to return to his horror roots, and in fact this is the scariest he’s ever been since his eerie tour de force in Child’s Play 2.

Actually, scratch that. Chucky himself is still very rarely a credible menace (his adorably chubby, bootie-clad legs still fail to strike fear into my heart, incredibly). It’s the movie around him and the situations he creates that provide the true spine-crawling power. The fear is subtle, frequently character-based, and returns the franchise to a very classical horror style. In fact, the single best scene in the movie is straight out of the Hitchcock camp of suspense – one of the bowls of soup at the dinner table has been poisoned, but we don’t know which. It’s playful, chilling, and doesn’t require massive budget expenditure.

Kind of like a date with Yours Truly.

Also despite its budget, Curse of Chucky’s gore is pretty wet and wild. Necessarily, some of the kills aren’t quite so outré, but a solid handful are grotty, glistening pearls. Never say Mancini doesn’t know what people who stuck around a slasher franchise for six entries are looking for.

OK, now that we’ve been as sweet as punch for the longest sustained period Popcorn Culture ahs ever seen, it’s time to get down and dirty. Curse of Chucky is a direct-to-DVD film. An unnecessarily fantastic example of the form, yes, but it is nevertheless beholden to a certain standard of quality. It just can’t match the expressionistic celebration of cinema that was Bride of Chucky, and there are sinewy hunks of filler that stick in your throat on he way down, especially any scene featuring a pre-doll Charles Lee Ray in de-aging makeup that makes him look uncannily like Tommy Wiseau on a hot day.

It ain’t perfect, though it is a perfect vehicle for the lovely and talented Fiona Dourif, who got the part through her dad, but kept it through sheer charisma and skill. At the end of the day, Curse of Chucky isn’t the best Child’s Play sequel, but the fact that a sixth entry in a franchise could be in the top 50 percent in terms of quality is pretty damn remarkable.

Body Count: 7

1. Nica’s Mom is stabbed in the chest with scissors offscreen.
2. Father Frank is decapitated in a car wreck.
3. Jill is electrocuted.
4. Barbie is stabbed in the eye.
5. Ian is axed in the mouth.
6. Cop has his throat slit.
7. Grandma is smothered with a plastic bag.

TL;DR: Curse of Chucky is an astoundingly good fifth sequel, with a gothic aesthetic that far outpaces its direct-to-DVD limitations.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 955
Reviews In This Series
Child's Play (Holland, 1988)
Child's Play 2 (Lafia, 1990)
Child's Play 3 (Bender, 1991)
Bride of Chucky (Yu, 1998)
Seed of Chucky (Mancini, 2004)
Curse of Chucky (Mancini, 2013)

New Year's Resolutions: And Another Thing

Just when you thought it was over… My implacable backlog continues to grow, necessitating another slate of mini reviews.

South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut

Year: 1999
Director: Trey Parker
Cast: Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Mary Kay Bergman
Run Time: 1 hour 21 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

The kids of South Park become obsessed with a vulgar Canadian movie, prompting a parental crusade against Canada that erupts into all-out war.

South Park: The Movie. It’s just like South Park the show, only bigger! If you like the show, you’ll love the movie! Otherwise, steer very clear. I could just end my review there, honestly, but I would like to take this time to commend Trey Parker and Matt Stone for being two of the leading musical theatre songwriters of our generation. That statement sounds less ironic following the success of The Book of Mormon, but the fact remains that the duo has been writing incredibly rewarding musical theatre essentially since their careers began.

In addition to ramping up the vulgarity and offensiveness of their show, the movie also expanded their fairly frequent lyrical moments into a full scale musical extravaganza that’s just as much Les Misérables as it is South Park. That is, if Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg had seen fit to include a truckload more F-bombs. With an endless array of catchy tunes including the Oscar-nominated “Blame Canada,” the über-catchy “What Would Bryan Boitano Do,” and the downright genius, reprise-laden “La Resistance (Medley),” SP:BLaU is legitimately one of the better original movie musicals of all time.

Fun music with a sharp political agenda is most certainly an ironclad reason to recommend South Park, although the plot sequences do lack a bit of the thrust required to render the film itself a true blue classic.

Rating: 7/10

My Soul to Take

Year: 2010
Director: Wes Craven
Cast: Max Thieriot, John Magaro, Denzel Whitaker
Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Seven kids were born prematurely on the same night a notorious serial killer died. Now they’re being hunted down on their 16th birthday. Could one of them carry his reincarnated soul?

I love Wes Craven and end to appreciate his works, good or bad, but boy am I glad that My Soul to Take didn’t wind up being his final film. His first self-penned script in nearly a decade and a half, My Soul to Take certainly contains nuggets of his typically idiosyncratic ideas, but it flops in its execution. Craven is nothing if not a skilled storyteller, but as a 70-year-old man, it becomes understandably difficult to write teen dialogue and situations. His script is littered with sub-Diablo Cody slanginess and a nigh-on incomprehensible story flow. It’s like one of those arcade games where your quarter bounces randomly down the pegs, with every turn almost exclusively going somewhere unpredictable and frustrating.

There is a lot to dislike about My Soul to Take, all of which I heartily do. The killer is everything Craven’s villains never were: Vulgar, crude, and loudmouthed. The less hardcore mindset he acquired as he grew older is queasily unsuited to bring this character to life, and his direction leans a little too heavily on MTV-style quick flashes and arbitrary slomo. It’s a garbled mess with subtext that pretty clearly announces that he’d rather be out bird watching than working on this film. Every genius has their duds, and their willingness to try new things make my appreciation for them even stronger, but damn is this ever a flabby, sputtering dud if I ever saw one.

Body Count: 12

1. Sarah is killed offscreen.
2. Doctor is shot in the head.
3. Ambulance Driver explodes.
4. Kay is stabbed in the gut and tossed into the river.
5. Penelope has her throat slit.
6. Brandon is stabbed in the gut.
7. Brittany is stabbed to death.
8. Quinn has his neck broken offscreen.
9. May is killed offscreen.
10. Cop is stabbed in the back.
11. Jerome is stabbed in the chest.
12. Alex is stabbed in the gut.

Rating: 3/10

Jurassic Park III

Year: 2001
Director: Joe Johnston
Cast: Sam Neill, William H. Macy, Téa Leoni
Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

Dr. Alan Grant is tricked into visiting Isla Sorna by a rich couple who want to save their stranded son.

So, the third Jurassic Park movie. This is the one that absolutely nobody talks about, so I was definitely apprehensive. Fortunately, no JP movie could be worse than The Lost World with its quiet bongo antics so I was in for a treat. I didn’t love it with quite the spittle of Friend Hunter over at Kinemalogue, but I certainly feel it doesn’t deserve its ignominy. It’s a popcorn flick through and through, but that doesn’t mean it ain’t worth a watch.

The stunning action setpieces that typically define these movies are back in full force, with a third act that leaps from stellar moment to stellar moment like stones across a stream. JPIII knocks its characters down, slits them up, drags them through the mud, attempts to drown them for good measure, and still comes back for seconds. It’s an exhilarating whirl, like being trapped in a washing machine. As an overall story it’s a little more generic, but it does the trick, bringing an estranged family together with the power of Amblin.

It’s got its action, a healthy sprinkling of comedy bits, a splash of theme about paleontology becoming defunct no that real life dinos are alive and stomping… There’s naught to complain about. It’s certainly tackier than the original masterpiece, and a talking raptor dream sequence is just about one of my worst movie watching moments of the whole year, but it’s a fun jaunt back into Crichton’s world, minus his heavy-handed political bleating.

Rating: 7/10

Getting Go: The Go Doc Project

Year: 2013
Director: Cory Krueckeberg
Cast: Tanner Cohen, Matthew Camp, Ramon O. Torres
Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes
MPAA Rating: UR

A college student pretends that he’s shooting a documentary to get close to a go-go boy he’s obsessed with.

I’ve always been a proponent of applying the found footage style to non-horror genres, so this low key vérite romance is right up my alley. Part Weekend, part Breathless, all pretentious, it’s an interesting look at modern romance without getting too obnoxiously hung up on that “modern” part. It’s not all treatises on social media and tech trends, but a human portrait of a relationship between two people who fundamentally don’t work together. One is obsessed with his perfect ideal, the other is confident enough to know not to change himself for a man.

Mostly just conversation-based, Getting Go could very easily have been a snoozefest, but a layered script and some colorfully innovative editing keep the pace brisk, save for a closing ten minutes that could really use a trim. The acting is a little rough, especially from the nonprofessional Matthew Camp, but the two leads have enough chemistry to smooth out most of the clunkier line readings. Getting Go lives in its silent moments, which let the dialogue-packed scenes settle into your brain with contemplative stillness. It’s no new classic, but it’s sexy, it’s stylish, and it has a great soundtrack. What more could you want?

Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1207
Reviews In This Series
Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993)
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1997)
Jurassic Park III (Johnston, 2001)
Jurassic World (Trevorrow, 2015)
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (Bayona, 2018)

New Year's Resolutions: Everything Else

OK, not all my mini review collections can have cute little themes. Here’s the rest of the less relevant viewing I’m clearing off my slate from 2015.

Source Code

Year: 2011

Director: Ducan Jones

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A helicopter pilot wakes up on a train in a different body, forced to keep reliving a terrorist bombing until he catches the culprit.

A movie doesn’t need to be complicated to be great. Source Code gets in, lays out its plot, wraps up, and jams the hell out of there. It’s a swift, exciting 90 minutes that triumphs by cutting the fat and delivering the gods. Just like Wes Craven’s Red Eye, it’s a stellar genre exercise for the very reason that it’s sleek and taut, using tropes the audience is already familiar with to bypass the exposition bottleneck and immediately begin pouring gasoline directly onto the flames.

A sci-fi reimagining of the Groundhog Day format, Source Code tells the bulk of tis story through subtle changes in the repeated formula, letting character and theme organically build off from that constant structure. Jake Gyllenhaal easily navigates the ever-shifting goals of his character, giving a breezy performance that reliably sells anger, humor, fear, and angst, sometimes sandwiched within seconds of each other. There’s a little slippery CGI and Jeffrey Wright’s performance as a shadowy government figure slips a little to often into honey-baked hamminess, but overall Source Code is a dazzling jolt of genre electricity.

Rating: 8/10

The Day After Tomorrow

Year: 2004

Director: Roland Emmerich

Cast: Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum

Run Time: 2 hours 4 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A scientist races to save his son, who is trapped in New York during a world-shattering superstorm brought on by global warming.

Here’s one of my favorite anecdotes about The Day After Tomorrow: Director Roland Emmerich screened an early cut for a group of scientists to get their opinion on its accuracy. They said it was laughably incorrect, but they still enjoyed the heck out of it. That’s a pretty accurate descriptor of the Emmerich style. Where he goes wrong in depicting hard science, viable survival techniques, and human emotion, he goes right in delivering an inimitable popcorn disaster movie experience.

Emmerich must have a really strong glasses prescription, because he sees everything bigger than anybody else can. He sees storms and story beats as grand, operatic measures, a parade of bold images and sounds totally devoid of detail or nuance. Characters that we’re never asked to care about will suddenly burst forth with a monologue about a wasted future of humanity’s hubris, because Emmerich will never subtly develop a theme for his audience when a sledgehammer will do.

Frankly, his style works. The man knows how to frame himself some elegant destruction. His commitment to capturing the most instantly iconic images possible does come at the expense of character, plot, and (occasionally) pacing, but since when does a disaster film need those things? When it comes to characters we actually know, he plays it annoyingly safe with their fates, but his destruction of inanimate objects and nameless extras is beyond compare. He does indulge a bit in his 2012 habit of “people outrunning improbably finite weather patterns,” but not enough to cause any lasting damage. All in all, The Day After Tomorrow is a fun, incredibly realized disaster flick with a message. It might be burned across the film in gasoline, but it means well.

Rating: 7/10

The Descendants

Year: 2011

Director: Alexander Payne

Cast: George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller

Run Time: 1 hour 55 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Matt King’s wife has an accident and winds up in a coma, giving him the job of telling friends and family that she’s going to die. People can be unhappy even in Hawaii, see?

The Descendants is a movie for actors. A setting that’s a major vacation destination, a big ensemble cast that allows oodles of free time, and plenty of opportunities to cry? It’s a paradise! It’s not necessarily a movie for viewers, unless you want to see screensaver gorgeous B-roll of Hawaiian vistas. The drama provides some intriguing food for thought, but its relatively straightforward story is stretched on the rack until it can fill the two hour run time. Luckily, some laid-back comedy meanders its way into the proceedings so it’s not such an unbearable slog.

The movie is essentially composed of Big Cry scenes that stack like Tetris blocks until they create a big enough whole. Not a single actor slips, even young ingénue Shailene Woodley, though they do tend to run together by the end. Curiously, the film’s one true standout is comedy actress Judy Greer, whose character’s breakdown comes from many different directions, each of which she acknowledges with full sincerity. It’s compelling work, and it’s a same we don’t get to see more of her actually acting instead of just playing superheroes’ ex-wives. All in all, I’m not leaning toward recommending The Descendants, but if you happen to get trapped with it, it’s not the worst time at the movies.

Rating: 6/10

Titanic

Year: 1997

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane

Run Time: 3 hours 14 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Jack and Rose fall in love on the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic. It won’t work because she’s rich and he’s poor. Also, the boat sinks.

The reason Titanic survives such an unsustainable runtime is that, in all actuality, it is two distinct movies. The latter of these is markedly superior, which also helps to keep audience interest from sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic. Split pretty neatly about the middle, Titanic is first a star-crossed love story, then a high octane action vehicle on a sinking ship.

Let’s tackle that behemoth love story, shall we? One of the true classic romances of modern cinema, it turns out to be just as clunky and frustrating as the true classic romances of early cinema. The character of Rose is anachronistically progressive to the point that she’s practically Rose-tradamus, expressing interest in artwork, psychology, and philosophy that wouldn’t be relevant for decades or more, in the hope of endearing her to modern audiences. This unbelievable character is shunted into a haphazard romance that is sold exclusively by her sizzling chemistry with young panty-dropper Leonardo DiCaprio rather than by actual plotting or dialogue, which feel like they were penned by a highschool playwright. Luckily, most of the talking is drowned out by the endless orchestral reprises of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” Frankly, it’s kind of a mess.

Luckily, James Cameron suddenly remembers that he’s an action filmmaker and all hell breaks loose. An iceberg T-bones the Titanic, sending crushing sprays of water through the engine rooms, splitting the boat in half, and tipping it almost vertical while people frantically board lifeboats and generally try to have a good time. It’s an explosive, adrenaline-pumping thrill ride that slams our young lovers through setpiece after freezing, flooded setpiece. For nearly an hour, it totally forgets about that wan romance nonsense and careens into blissful action oblivion. It’s the nearer my God to me, alright. Where the first half is dully adequate, the second is the ride of your life, full of state-of-the-art effects, bombastic emotions, and generally excellent filmmaking. Titanic is about as backloaded as the actual ship, but the means are totally justified by the end.

Rating: 7/10

My Big Fat Greek Wedding

Year: 2002

Director: Joel Zwick

Cast: Nia Vardalos, John Corbett, Michael Constantine

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

A Greek woman wants to marry a white man, against the wishes of he loud, proud, enormous Greek family.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding is one of the most profitable indie movies of all time, so basically anything negative I have to say about it can just f*ck right off. Luckily, there’s almost nothing to complain about with this film, which kind of puts me out of a job. MBFGW is a charming romantic comedy filled with love for life, the world, and the people living in it. Essentially a diary of writer-star Nia Vardalos’ experience growing up Greek in a white world, its comedy almost exclusively derives from culture shock (and the extent to which the Geeks – still technically from a European nation – differ from the hyperbolically bland, WASPy Caucasians in the film is surprisingly vast) and the wacky antics of her herd of family members, a perfectly cast ensemble that for some reason has Joey Fatone in it. Remember when he was a thing? Yeah, me neither.

The biggest black mark on the film is that it has essentially no conflict. Sure, it has plenty of contrast, but the plot pretty much glides serenely forward without a hitch. The family has hangups that they quickly get over by repeating platitudes, Vardalos’ Tula has a teaspoon of internal struggle, and John Corbett’s fiancé character continues to be as boringly compliant as Silly Putty. Almost nothing actually happens, though when you’re spending your time in the company of a talented group of actors largely underserved by Hollywood (especially Andrea Martin, the film’s secret weapon), it’s difficult to find much of a problem with that. Opa!

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1556

Reviews In This Series

My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Zwick, 2002)

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 (Jones, 2016)

New Year's Resolutions: Yuk Yuk Yuck

Who’s ready for a tsunami of white posters? Here’s a heaping platter of mini reviews for comedy films I screened in the fourth quarter of 2015.

Miss Congeniality

Year: 2000

Director: Donald Petrie

Cast: Sandra Bullock, Michael Caine, Benjamin Bratt

Run Time: 1 hour 49 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A tomboyish FBI agent is given a makeover to go undercover and stop a terrorist attack on the Miss USA pageant.

What is there that I can possibly say about Miss Congeniality that could contribute to the conversation? See, there’s the trouble with comedies. You know what you’re going to get and you get it. It works or it doesn’t work, but only in a very finite number of combinations. Sandra Bullock is a charmer as an FBI agent so flamboyantly tomboyish that she doesn’t own a brush I mean, come on. I’m as macho as they come and I own a brush. Don’t fact check that.), her sassy gay mentor can’t figure out how he could possibly make her beautiful despite the fact that she looks like goddamn Sandra Bullock, and she finds a balance between love and work. It’s funny. Bada bing, bada boom.

The truly interesting thing about Miss Congeniality is the gender politics that form the story’s backbone. At its heart, the film is a story about a woman learning to love other women and accepting that traditional femininity is a valid choice, even if it’s not one that she personally wishes to make. More than romance or action sequences (of which there are a surprising amount of the latter), the film focuses on female friendship, which is always a welcome addition to any comedy, especially such a humorous fish-out-of-water extravaganza.

Rating: 8/10

Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous

Year: 2005

Director: John Pasquin

Cast: Sandra Bullock, Regina King, William Shatner 

Run Time: 1 hour 55 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Gracie Hart is now the public face of the FBI, but she struggles against the organization’s restraints when her friend, the former Miss U.S.A., is kidnapped.

First and foremost, I would like to commend Miss Congeniality 2 for forgoing the typical comedy sequel route. It could very easily have been, “Gracie! We need you to go undercover at the Miss Universe Pageant in Acapulco! It’s bigger so it’s funnier!” However, instead of that claptrap, this film continues the universe of the original in a realistic and satisfying way. There is no pageant this time, because there’s no way such a high profile mission could actually be repeated, but the skills and friends that Gracie made there must come into play again, all with the undercurrent of women from different walks of life forming bonds: this time in the shape of a buddy cop story between Gracie and an aggressive new recruit.

The comedy itself is broader and glitzier, and never quite as effective, but as a story continuation it’s satisfying as hell. Drag shows, celebrity cameos, and old lady shtick prevent Miss Congeniality 2 from launching itself above the lowest common denominator, but strong women are once again front and center in this action-comedy, so it ain’t all bad. Plus they save their absolute worst tawdry callback to the original film until the final scene, so there’s plenty of goodwill saved up to cancel it out. All in all, it’s not a film I’ll ever feel the need to watch again, but I’m not sorry I saw it in the first place.

Rating: 6/10

Ghost Town

Year: 2008

Director: David Koepp

Cast: Ricky Gervais, Greg Kinnear, Téa Leoni 

Run Time:  1 hour 43 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A misanthropic dentist briefly dies during a botched surgery and discovers that he can now see ghosts. He reluctantly agrees to help one out in exchange for being left alone and ends up falling for his newly engaged widow.

As you can probably tell, this is pretty much a comedy remake of The Sixth Sense, one of my favorite horror movies. I find no shame in admitting that, as a result, Ghost Town is one of my favorite comedies. They’re also two of the only movies that make me cry every time. I feel like with those last three sentences, I have given you a pretty deep glimpse into my soul. Geez, buy me a drink first.

Giving Greg Kinnear his Jason Bateman The Gift role, in which he finally embraces the fact that his stock character is kind of an asshole, Ghost Town matches his acid-tongued charms with the professional curmudgeonry of Ricky Gervais. It’s a match made in Hell, and these two awful people bounce off one another until they slowly learn what it means to be human. It’s a typical comedy setup, really, but with a fantastically offbeat cast. Throw in Téa Leoni as the begrudging love interest and Kristen Wiig as a vacant surgeon and you have an utterly unforgettable ensemble.

The comedy isn’t flash-bang, light up the room funny, but it’s never a dud, always hitting its marks with idiosyncratic charisma. As delivered by its stunning cast, it presents an emotionally valid storyline that vies for subtle humanism over grand romantic overtures. Plus, it probably has the best soundtrack of the century (Drive would probably be a close second). I love this movie, perhaps way more than anybody else in the entire world, but that’s fine. If you want to experience life through my eyes for 90 minutes, pop this movie on and bask in the glow.

Rating: 10/10

What's Your Number?

Year: 2011

Director: Mark Mylod

Cast: Anna Faris, Chris Evans, Ari Graynor

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A woman who has slept with 20 men finds out that women with over 20 sexual partners rarely find their soulmate. She teams up with her lothario neighbor to track down her exes and see if they’re The One because she has already hit her ceiling.

For totally safe, female-led sex comedies, What’s Your Number? is totally adequate. It ticks all the boxes to be what it needs to be without striving for something more. Imminent wedding of a close friend/relative? Check. Kitschy hobby that’s more satisfying than actual job, but she only needs a push to make it a career? Checkaroony. Somehow affording an enormous apartment on literally no salary? Hell yeah, that’s a check. Two people who don’t realize they’re perfect for each other until the very end? Ding ding ding! We have a winner. And don’t you dare complain that that’s a spoiler. You literally don’t need to have seen a single movie in your life to predict the end of What’s Your Number?.

Its two main functions, both of which is performs with mechanical perfection, are to provide a heaping hors d'oeuvre tray of man meat courtesy of Chris Evans (who graciously braves the cold every other scene) and give a showcase to Anna Faris’ ever-underappreciated talents. Faris and Chris Evans(’ torso) are both served well, but the thin script holding them up sags a bit in the middle, like a generic brand paper towel in one of those comparison commercials. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but it’s charming and has font jokes, so it’s an at least tolerable good time.

Rating: 6/10

Sex and the City

Year: 2008

Director: Michael Patrick King

Cast: Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Cynthia Nixon

Run Time: 2 hours 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Carrie Bradshaw and her friend continue to struggle with the responsibilities of life, love, work, and sex… in the city.

Sex and the City was a huge hit, so it was no surprise when it was bestowed with one of TV’s very rare movie continuations, four years after it went off the air. What is surprising is that director/writer Michael Patrick King attempts to jam an entire season’s worth of material into the feature, leaving it teetering with a bloated and unwieldy 2 ½ hour runtime. In sitcom format, Sex and the City is a sprightly watch, but at this staggering volume, the flaws of the show become concentrated into one punishing punchbowl of pain.

Our tacky materialistic single gal Carrie Bradshaw is now a tacky, materialistic engaged gal, and she calls upon her far more interesting friends to coo and fawn over her while suppressing their vomit at the sight of the mammoth plastic flower she has grafted to her sternum. You can tell that they’re matured since the show’s finale, because sometimes there’s a toddler in a high chair shoved into the corner of the frame. 

While her friends deal with a variety of realistic human problems (well, Miranda and Sam at least deal with spousal betrayal, sexual dry spells, and unsatisfying relationships. Charlotte has a series of successes quietly in the corner and resurfaces every once in a while to chirp and make shocked faces over lavishly overpriced lunches), Carrie whines about having the wrong area code and wrecks her relationship because this movie needs a plot.

Sex and the City is greeting card comedy for miserable white 40-somethings, at least whenever Carrie is around. The only recognizable jokes she makes come in the form of truly ludicrous brand name-dropping and self-centered bleating. Cut her out of the movie and it would be a sultry breeze. But alas, that’s the one thing that’s never going to happen, so we’re stuck with this interminable Titanic of nauseating commercialism.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1565

Reviews In This Series

Sex and the City (King, 2008)

Sex and the City 2 (King, 2010)

New Year's Resolutions: Overlooked

Continuing my slate-clearing to begin 2016 with a bang, here is a selection of mini-reviews of classic and classic adjacent genre flicks that I have watched but unfortunately failed to cover over the past few months.

Escape From New York

Year: 1981

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Renowned criminal Snake Plissken is coerced into rescuing the president from the island of Manhattan, which has been converted into a prison in the distant future of 1997.

Now, here’s a film that’ll put hair on your chest. If you squeezed all the testosterone out of every pituitary gland in the world, Escape From New York would put it in a glass and drink it for breakfast. A towering tribute to the American testicle, Escape From New York is essentially the U.S. translation of the Mad Max ethos (with all the musky homoeroticism that that implies).

Depicting a prison state populated exclusively by men and the handful of objects that other, lesser beings know as women, Escape From New York indulges in excess of the highest caliber in the costuming, production design, and performance. On paper, the film’s action would also join that list, but unfortunately this leads us directly into the most fatal flaw of the film. Although there are plenty of exciting ideas crammed into the script (ninja stars, cab chases around bridge minefields, etc.), much of the actual excitement is choked out by the films all too casual approach to their execution.

John Carpenter as a director likes to pace his films as deliberately as possible, which works for a ponderous fablistic slasher or a relentless experiment in Arctic isolation. However, when that tendency is transplanted into the action genre, everything feels like it’s playing at half speed. Car chases, fistfights, and sudden attacks are staged about the same as a character making a sandwich. They play out at a snail’s pace, which makes it awfully difficult to care about the tremendously operatic plot beats that drive them.

As a cheesy, macho ham sandwich, EFNY is worth a watch. However, it’s a Mad Max world with a Calm Max execution.

Rating: 6/10

The Shining

Year: 1980

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd

Run Time: 2 hours 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A man gets a job as a winter caretaker for the secluded Overlook Hotel. When he and his family are snowed in, the haunted building starts to drive him crazy.

By now, any horror fan has probably heard that Stephen King hates Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of his bestselling novel. For good reason, too. His thinly veiled tale of a father struggling to redeem himself while backsliding into his alcoholism is deeply personal and utterly obliterated by Kubrick’s standoffish direction and casting of the permanently deranged Jack Nicholson. But while it’s true that Kubrick’s Shining is a downright abysmal adaptation of its source novel, the things that make it a classic are completely, exclusively different from what made the book a classic. Taken as two separate works, one a spine-tingling allegory and the other as a chilly mood piece, both Shinings have a place in the canon of classic horror history.

This incarnation of The Shining is certainly style over substance, but oh what a style it is. This is perhaps the film where Kubrick’s habitually precise style and the content work best. His penchant for lengthy Steadicam shots pulls you into the preternaturally still world our characters are trapped in, and the smooth gliding of his frame evokes a sinister presence keeping watch over our characters. His camera really drives home the sheer enormity of the Overlook, dwarfing its subject every chance it gets. There’s an occasional bit of ego wanking (was it absolutely necessary to zoom in on the cook’s apartment for six minutes?), but for the most part – and in a 146 minute film, it’s ALL the most part – it clicks.

And another thing. If you show me a 1980 film with a more exquisite sound design than The Shining, I will cry tears of gratitude from my ears. Listening to The Shining in cranked-up surround sound is the best burst eardrum you’ll ever have, with its atonal jangling score careening into common household noises expanded to unearthly proportions. It’s like the Devil’s white noise machine.

Last but not least, we have the actors. Kubrick’s casts tend to be largely incidental, but here they are integral cogs in the film’s mechanism. Shelley Duvall is the standout as the shrill, mousy wife, giving such irritating nuance to the role that you can begin to understand why the hell her character might continue to be married to the professionally psychotic Jack Nicholson. Naturally, he too inhabits his role with aplomb, but even young Danny Lloyd (as their son Danny) is unbearably terrifying, giving maybe the best child performance of the decade. And the 80’swere nothing if not crawling with child performers.

So no, The Shining ain’t no Stephen King movie, but it’s certainly worth its reputation. Just make sure you empty your bladder before sitting down to watch it.

Rating: 8/10

Trick 'r Treat

Year: 2007
Director: Mike Dougherty
Cast: Anna Paquin, Brian Cox, Dylan Baker
Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

A variety of stories play out in a small town on Halloween night, in which people are punished for not respecting the traditions and rituals of Halloween.

I’ve seen my share of horror anthologies, so please don’t take it lightly when I say that Trick ‘r Treat is one of the best. Not only does it integrate its distinct stories in a colorful, creative way, it is actually pretty great. Not content to merely avoid being unwatchable crap (something many anthologies flagrantly fail to do), Trick ‘r Treat is genuinely well-directed, by first-timer Mike Dougherty (who has since lent his holiday fever to the largely charming Krampus).

Combining traditional Halloween imagery with a uniquely spooky atmosphere, Dougherty has birthed a series of unforgettable shots, my favorite being the lights from jack-o-lanterns flickering in the fog as children vanish one by one. Trick ‘r Treat manages to sustain its campfire tale atmosphere, even during the more overtly silly vignettes, including an excellently timed Dylan Baker tale.

Embracing and inverting typical horror tropes, Trick ‘r Treat is a film that truly loves Halloween rather than just taking place on the holiday as a gimmick. Trick ‘r Treat wants to marry Halloween and massage its feet for the rest of its life, and it shows. This spirit can e felt in the film’s major contribution to popular culture, the bag-headed Sam, a trick or treating spirit of holiday vengeance with a singularly prepossessing design. Just like Sam, Trick ‘r Treat is fun, spooky, and oh so stylish. It should earn an immediate spot in everybody’s October screening list.


Rating: 8/10

Red Dragon

Year: 2002

Director: Brett Ratner

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes

Run Time: 2 hours 4 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Will Graham must enlist the help of his imprisoned ex-partner, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, to capture a serial killer known as the Tooth Fairy.

Red Dragon is a pointless, pointless movie. An essential remake of Michael Mann’s Manhunter (also based on the Thomas Harris crime novel Red Dragon), Red Dragon was a cash-in on the only remaining Hannibal Lecter property that hadn’t had Anthony Hopkins crudely grafted onto it yet. Although it boasts Ralph Fiennes in an electrifying villainous role, the rest of the film is a wan redo of Silence of the Lambs from the structure down to the production design details, glossing over its own story in order to properly service its connection to the Oscar-winning (read: box office smashing) property.

In and of itself, Red Dragon is a competent, adequate film, but there’s a reason that when looking through my notes, all I can find is ralph Fiennes comments. The relationship between Hopkins and Edward Norton’s Graham is a malnourished trifle, a flaxen imitation of Jodie Foster’s chemistry that refuses to engage with the mountains of readily available backstory that could actually make sense of their alleged connection.

This film is worth seeing for the Tooth Fairy alone. If you pretend that the actual A-story is just the commercial breaks between a nuanced, deranged, transformative character study full of blazing twists and turns, it’s completely palatable. Otherwise, it’s pretty much a bust. It’s less operatically indulgent than the worst Hopkins Lecter film (Ridley Scott’s Hannibal), but it’s even less interesting for it.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1433
Reviews In This Series
The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991)
Hannibal (Scott, 2001)
Red Dragon (Ratner, 2002)

New Year's Resolutions: Stocking Stuffers

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

Fred Claus

Year: 2007

Director: David Dobkin

Cast: Vince Vaughn, Paul Giamatti, Elizabeth Banks

Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

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

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

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

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

Rating: 6/10

The Christmas Shoes

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 5/10

Black Xmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

Body Count: 18

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

Rating: 5/10

New Year's Eve

Year: 2011

Director: Garry Marshall

Cast: Sarah Jessica Parker, Jessica Biel, Ashton Kutcher

Run Time: 1 hour 53 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1566

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

May All My Backlog Be Forgot

Happy New Year, everybody!

I know you’re probably still sifting through that gargantuan post I dumped on you two days ago, but I would like to take this first week of 2016 (Oh man, we really are living in the future, aren’t we? The other day I met a Big Lots cashier who was born in 2000.) to enact one of my New Year’s resolutions. As you may or may not know, I have vowed to write a review of every single movie I’ve watched since I started this blog. However, as my work gets harder and my free time shrivels away, it has become more difficult to pen my ambitiously wordy reviews with my old frequency.

I’ve already begun to transition to a new format, bestowing full reviews on current or featured movies and penning medium-length reviews for the rest. But the avalanche of film with which I’ve concluded my year has left me with a backlog of embarrassingly overwhelming magnitude. In an attempt to clear my slate before the cinema offerings of 2016 really get kicking, over the next few weeks I’ll be flushing out my system with a glut of mini-reviews. I’ll also be finally catching up with some promised titles. Sorry, Hunter. We’ll be starting with a set of films already reviewed in full on my podcast, Scream 101.

Please enjoy this Popcorn Culture reboot and have a wonderful 2016!

The Thing

Year: 1982

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, Keith David 

Run Time: 1 hour 49 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

An Arctic team discovers a spaceship buried in the ice, along with a shape-shifting alien creature that infiltrates their group.

The thing about The Thing is that it has pretty unequivocally the best practical effects in the history of cinema. Sure, some scenes have aged better than others. But even the most jaded of modern viewers, those caustic children of CGI, will be utterly unable to keep their spines from turning to jelly when that severed head sprouts spider legs and stars skittering across the floor. It’s a movie full of gooey, bombastic effects setpieces, and yet it still lets its smaller moments (of which there are plenty, because John Carpenter isn’t made of money) breathe.

This can be seen in both the special effects (a cut thumb and the subtle detail on an icicle of blood are just as chilling as the grand latex arias that follow) and the tension building. This is a story about paranoia. Whether it be AIDS or commie related (pick your metaphorical poison), it’s a harrowing masterwork of distrust that places just as much emphasis on the dialogue scenes as the blockbuster heebie jeebie showcases. The characters themselves are a smidge shallow, but it works in the context of not really knowing your fellow man (there are no women in this film, the musk from Kurt Russell’s bear repelling femininity like Kryptonite).

And at any rate, they’re all very well-performed. Even the dog is an incomprehensibly terrific actor, providing a powerful argument for the introduction of a Best Animal Wrangler Academy Award. Overall, The Thing is a chilly menace, propelled by a thumping Ennio Morricone score, John Carpenter’s stark, Arctic cinematography, and enough latex to smother a small army.

Rating: 8/10

Listen to the podcast episode here!

Troll 2

Year: 1990

Director: Claudio Fragasso

Cast: Michael Stephenson, George Hardy, Margo Prey

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A vacationing family learns that the rural town they’re staying in is populated by wicked, people-eating, vegetarian goblins.

There are bad movies, there are fun bad movies, and then there are comprehensive experiences that transcend the mere act of filmmaking. Guess which category Troll 2 falls into. A jumbled hash of lunacy, Troll 2 is a treasure trove of unintentional comedy. Humor thrives on the unexpected and the increasingly wacky ways the film flies off the rails are an endless spring of entertainment. There is literally no way of predicting what scene might be around the corner. It’s a funhouse ride of lime green amateurism.

Yes, it’s a bad movie. Poorly translated lines are drunkly performed by amateur actors in front of cardboard sets and community theater special effects. But the madcap intensity and genuine earnestness with which the film was created have made it an instant cult classic.

Incredibly, given its reputation, there are actually a small handful of actually OK filmmaking moments, betraying director Claudio Fragasso’s long history with Italian B-movies. Two shock gags actually hold water, some low angle shots are legitimately imposing, and the finger trauma gore as one character is turned into a plant (don’t ask) is quite stomach-turning. But that semi-skill is part of why Troll 2 is so indelible. It actually sort of knows what it’s doing the whole time (as opposed to the rampant inadequacy of, say, The Room), and those moments help provide contrast for the truly inspired awful bits, of which there are a couple million. 

Troll 2 is a must-see for any aspiring cult film fan. Watch it with a friend and seal your bond together with the super glue of dozens of new inside jokes and shared peals of snorting, gasping laughter. Plus, you’ll want a spotter in case you choke on your popcorn during the process.

Rating: 8/10

Listen to the podcast episode here!

Nightbreed (Director's Cut)

Year: 1990

Director: Clive Barker

Cast: Craig Sheffer, David Cronenberg, Anne Bobby

Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A young man is accused of murder and flees to the underground city of Midian to live with the monsters.

Nightbreed is a very scatterbrained movie. Sold as a slasher when it was really a parable about how minorities are treated by a society that doesn’t understand them, it made next to no money at the box office with its monstrous mish-mash. Now here comes the director’s cut two decades later, to finally restore the original monster-fueled, gothically romantic intent. It’s still a hell of a mess, but with Clive Barker at the wheel, at least you know the crimson tide is flowing in the right direction.

Nightbreed is like a magic eye puzzle. The individual pieces (a button-eyed slasher, a hillbilly shootout, a full rock ‘n roll number…) don’t exactly gel, but when you step back and unfocus your eyes, you can see the shape that it has created. An over-the-top, bold exploration of its universal themes of being sidelined and misunderstood by the world at large, Nightbreed is an orgiastic, hallucinogenic canvas on which Barker paints his magic.

More than character or plot, the headliner of Nightbreed is its spectacular make-up effects, used to create glorious (and gloriously expensive) creatures of every shape and size. A triumph of macabre monster manufacturing, the wicked creativity of Nightbreed is its goopy oozing, raison d'être. It’s an art gallery of nightmares more than it is a film, but that’s hardly a problem if you’re in the mood.

Rating: 6/10

Listen to the podcast episode here!

From Dusk Till Dawn

Year: 1996

Director: Robert Rodriguez

Cast: Harvey Keitel, George Clooney, Juliette Lewis 

Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A pair of criminals and a kidnapped family end up fighting for their lives in a biker bar run by vampires.

Many fans of notorious foot fetishist/occasional filmmaker Quentin Tarantino have been yearning for him to create a horror film for quite some time. And while some detractors of From Dusk Till Dawn might still argue that he hasn’t, the truth is that the film is a campy horror flick penned by the greasy maestro himself, so it’s about as close as we’re gonna get to that wish, under the circumstances.

Directed by Robert Rodriguez in signature “Baby Quentin” style, FDTD is a fun thrill ride. Actually, it’s two fun thrill rides. The first hour, which is focused on the criminal exploits of the Gecko brothers, and the second, full of balls-to-the-wall vampire mayhem, don’t quite cohere together as well as they should, but they’re both excellent, flippant exemplars of the craft. Sometimes campy, sometimes creepy, always irreverent, the tone is what carries the stories through to the finish line rather than the actual plot.

However, it’s hard to find much to complain about when the ensemble comes together as ludicrously, ingeniously well as this film’s. George Clooney dishes out a standout role as a churlish, protective thug, and Tarantino gives the performance of his career as his little brother, an all too human monster imbued with sweaty, clammy menace. The rest of the cast also rises to the challenge, but the true blue standout is gore imperator Tom Savini as Sex Machine, the purest, most effortless bad-ass of Rodriguez’ career. From Dusk Till Dawn might not be a coherent whole, but the sum of its parts is far greater than that, anyway.

Rating: 7/10

Listen to the podcast episode here!

Ghost Cat

Year: 2004

Director: Don McBrearty

Cast: Michael Ontkean, Ellen Page, Lori Hallier

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

A young lady and her father move into a home that is watched over by the spirit of its former occupant, Margaret the cat.

The crux of our episode was that this “supernatural thriller” was quite easily repackaged as the heartwarming family film The Cat That Came Back, so as you can imagine, it wasn’t exactly a spine-tingling excursion into Animal Planet original content. A basically adequate Lifetime-esque cheese puff about saving the animal shelter from the wicked real estate developer, Ghost Cat ticks all the boxes for being as safe and bland (not to mention disappointing) as it could possibly be. There is one almost absurdly dark scene where the villain attempts to asphyxiate an entire barnful of adorable baby lambs and puppies, but it’s more a runway for Ellen Page’s ludicrous mid-2000’s fashions than anything resembling a horror movie.

As an insipid, rote story, it does the trick, but there’s nothing to make Ghost Cat stand out above all the other formulaic crap that daytime TV stations force sick (and hopefully delirious) people to sit through. There are some vaguely amusing tidbits, like how a lantern-jawed 21-year-old is supposed to be both a high school student and a viable love interest for Ellen Page (gag me with a spoon), or the presence of My Bloody Valentine Final Girl Lori Hallier as the animal rescuer with a heart of gold. 

But the only reason to watch this movie in today’s enlightened age is the presence of Ellen Page, who gives far from a star-making performance. She’s clearly a step up from the other youngsters around her, but this is not a script that challenges its performers to push the envelope. My recommendation is to steer clear of Ghost Cat like you’re allergic to animal dander. Even in ectoplasmic form, it can still screw you up.

Rating: 4/10

Listen to the podcast episode here!

Word Count: 1821