America First

Year: 2018

Director: Gerard McMurray

Cast: Y'lan Noel, Lex Scott Davis, Joivan Wade

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The Purge franchise and I have a very special, very troubled relationship. The original Purge was the first film I ever reviewed on this blog, so its rise is inextricably linked with mine. And you know I love me some political subtext in my horror movies. But as the franchise go on the subtext becomes text and that text becomes ridiculous. So I equally look forward to and dread each upcoming entry for the new heights of shameless browbeating, exciting inclusivity, and further demolition of the very concept of subtlety. It's a delicious combination of love and disappointment that keeps me coming back.

... Get it?

The First Purge tells the story of, well, the first Purge: the experiment that began the yearly 12 hour holiday of punishment-free crime and catharsis that has come to define America in the near-future. Spearheaded by apolitical psychologist Dr. Updale (Marisa Tomei, who is in the movie so little that I think she legally qualifies as an extra) and the deliciously villain-named Arlo Sabian (Patch Darragh), the Chief of Staff for the New Founding Fathers who have recently taken office in the White House.

The first Purge will take place on Staten Island, with the residents enticed to stay with a financial incentive. Certain, more unstable individuals like the crackhead known as Skeletor (Rotimi Paul) are also granted additional money for each person they kill during the experiment. Let's just say the experiment is getting goosed a bit so it goes well for the White House, who want to eliminate the lower classes as efficiently as possible.

The lower classes we're concerned with in particular are brother and sister Nya (Lex Scott Davis) and Isaiah (Joivan Wade), their neighbors in a prominent housing project, and the drug kingpin Dimitri (Y'lan Noel, who you may know from being super hot, but also from Insecure on HBO) who used to date Nya before she turned to a straight and narrow life of poverty and activism.

Although any decision that leads you away from the most ripped man in Staten Island is probably a bad one.

This movie could have walked right into that "The Worst Purge" joke, and luckily it avoids that pitfall, but it doesn't rise far above "adequate" at any given moment. There are certain traditions that the Purge movies have become very good at that it continues, for certain, but it also doubles down on some of the worst habits of the franchise. But let's start with the good, I say.

For one thing, these movies always bring fresh new non-white-people talent to the board. Although this film doesn't have a particular standout like Election Year's Betty Gabriel, instead the entire cast provides a solid example of badass women and non-stereotyped men. By positioning ethnic minorities and lower class individuals as the protagonists, as they have in the last two or three entries (of course the original film had to follow a wealthy white family, this is the horror genre), they always bring a solid crop of young actors-to-watch, giving them a chance to finally grab the spotlight by being leads instead of being eleventh billed in Tyler Perry movies.

I commend this decision making, as always, though The First Purge seems unaware of the exact implications of positioning a drug kingpin as the hero of the story. He is just as culpable of killing minorities and terrorizing poor neighborhoods, but we're supposed to trust that the people he kills are the right ones, at least by the end. They toss a couple lines in the direction of that particular wrinkle, but mostly they don't seem to be aware of some of the deeper meanings they're creating.

Look, I know his guns are distracting, but you need to focus on the GUN sometimes.

The other good thing that keeps this film consistent with the franchise's milieu is the pretty unimpeachable visual and audio design. There is one particular sci-fi design choice I don't like (certain participants of the experiment are using video-recording contact lenses that give them goofy glowing eyes), but the masks they showcase here are - as ever - creatively creepy to the millionth degree, and the sound design that ignites the beginning of the Purge is still a chillingly grating bit of sonic shrapnel that sinks deep into your bones.

You may have noticed that I keep undercutting my compliments, but that's the rub of The First Purge. It is aggressively devoted to averaging out, sanding off the edges of anything worth watching. To be fair (or not, let's point some fingers), lots of material seems to have landed on the cutting room floor. There are a half dozen subplots and characters that practically never appear again or completely fail to have a showcase moment (especially in the case of a trio of old men who are clearly set up to be the Mykelti Williamson of this movie, but completely vanish before they get a chance to). It's a messy plot at best, a disastrously compromised one at worst.

And at the very worst, you have Marisa Tomei, who isn't technically slumming it because I don't think she's actually in this movie. We get to see her walk a little, stand a lot, and mumble a couple words before she's unceremoniously shoved from the movie. This is not how you treat your only established cast member, folks! I'm sure they could only get her for a couple days, but give her something to do for one of them!

Other than rock awesome wardrobe pieces from The Craft.

The thing about genre movies is that its strengths and flaws all rely on the bedrock of action or terror to support them, and The First Purge doesn't have much of either. The third act conflict is set within an obnoxious strobe light gag that I disliked for more reasons than my photosensitivity, and most of the Purge Night shenanigans don't really match the mania and almost beautiful phantasmagoria of previous entries. It's just enough to keep you invested in the basics of the plot and characters, but that's all you ever get. 

It's not the worst Purge by a long shot, but it's the blandest Purge, and that's almost worse because these movies are nothing if not zesty.

TL;DR: The First Purge is a bland, overserious action-horror flick, but it also continues some of the best traditions of the Purge franchise.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1092
Reviews In This Series
The Purge (DeMonaco, 2013)
The Purge: Anarchy (DeMonaco, 2014)
The Purge: Election Year (DeMonaco, 2016)
The First Purge (McMurray, 2018)

Census Flashback: Kicking Ass... Together!

On our Fright Flashback/Census Bloodbath crossover, every week this summer we'll be exploring an 80's slasher film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to the weekend's upcoming blockbuster.

In anticipation of Ant-Man and the Wasp, which is about two romantic partners being superheroes together, I'll be reviewing Psychos in Love, which is about a married couple who just so happen to both be mad slashers.

Year: 1987

Director: Gorman Bechard

Cast: Carmine Capobianco, Debi Thibeault, Cecelia Wilde

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: UR

That awesome poster may cry "too gory for the silver screen," but we should know by now not to trust slasher marketing. This is a direct-to-video project through and through, and DTV slashers are a real risk to one's sanity. Shot by amateurs on budgets that would barely cover a studio craft services table, DTV (especially SOV - ones that are shot on video, which I'm fairly certain this one is) 80's slashers are direct mainlines to the purest (usually worst) instincts of unprofessional filmmakers. Psychos in Love is quite proudly the very same, but the filmmaker in question has such an unusual and twisted imagination that it's actually a pretty fascinating experiment. Let's dive in!

It's time to really get into the meat of the movie.

Psychos in Love is a lightly mockumentary-style film, frequently cutting to confessional interviews with its two leads from an indistinct point in the future, those leads being Joe (Carmine Capobianco) - the owner of a strip club (or, at least, a bar with one stripper) - and Kate (Debi Thibeault) - a manicurist. They meet and fall in love over their common hobby - being homicidal maniacs. Their relationship plays out over the course of many, many, many killings, until they eventually face off against a third killer who we see in occasional snippets - a plumber named Herman (Frank Stewart) who murders his customers.

It's very bad for word of mouth.

Psychos in Love explicitly positions itself as a comedy first and foremost, which is a terrific decision because it is a very bad horror film. Just like last week's slasher La muerte del chacal, whose main character was a cop, the leads here are not actually in the potential body count (in this case because they're the killers themselves), preventing you from ever spending time with or identifying with their victims. This obliterates the tension, as does the endlessly repetitive series of drearily similar, mostly offscreen and bloodless slashing scenes that come shooting down the pike like chocolates on I Love Lucy's conveyor belt.

But as a comedy, it... Well, I wouldn't say "excels," but I honestly don't know what I'd say. The repetitive plot that wanders in circles across the screen like it's lost in the woods does a lot to deflate all the energy, be it horror or comedy. But the humor has a unique spark that you can't look away from. In between the killing bits are bizarre vignettes that are totally unpredictable. Sometimes they're Abbot & Costello routines with a deaf pastor or a French waiter, sometimes it's gross-out cannibal humor (in the random interludes starring Herman), sometimes it's minutes-long monologues about grapes, sometimes it's a live action cartoon that literally includes a pie-in-the-face scene, and every time it's something completely out of left field. I can't tell if it's idiotic or genius, but it's certainly captivating.

And some of it is actually laugh-out-loud funny. I giggled during a gag about spiking a drink with poison that turns into an over-the-top extended sequence straight out of Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, and during quite a few of the more well-written lines that sneak in. But the thing that makes it most fascinating as a scrap of weirdo outsider humor is just how meta everything gets. There's already the mockumentay angle, but there are occasional moments where the film crew becomes active participants in the goings-on, and one moment where Joe hums along with the film's score that sorta blew my mind. I haven't seen a movie since Swiss Army Man where the musical score is so effortlessly, bizarre integrated with the actual events of the film. That takes a lot of forethought for such a throwaway joke, and it's not the only time this sort of thing happens. Sometimes, characters will seem to step out of their skins and interact directly with the script or the frame in a brain-melting, astonishing way. It shows that writer-director Gorman Bechard is a true junk-auteur and not just a money-grubbing weirdo.

Well, maybe both.

Unfortunately, there's still a lot that prevents me from wholeheartedly singing this film's praises. For one thing, good comedy needs good actors, and Carmine Capobianco's unhinged performance has a kind of anti-charisma that leaves you tasting flop sweat for hours. Debi Thibeault picks up some of the slack with a reasonably lived-in, chemistry-forcing performance, but Capobianco's terrible timing doesn't help matters one bit. Though I guess it does prove that the script is strong, because most of these scenes do tend to still be funny in spite of him. I can't say I expected good performances from my DTV slasher, but anything could happen in a film as weird and unpredictable as Psychos in Love.

Its other flaws stem from that exact same place. I've already commented on just how dull of a slog the actual kills are (especially since they're all hung on the weak-ass comic hook of how lightly ironic it is that this happy couple are also violent killers), but most scenes have aimless blocking that see the participants sort of hovering onscreen waiting for something to happen. And there's a near-rape scene that suddenly converts Kate into a victim for two grueling minutes that have no business in a film that's attempting to be a frothy, pitch-black romp.

I really don't think I can recommend Psychos in Love to anybody but the most committed patrons of weird horror, but I count myself among that number and will probably revisit it from time to time just to take a break from the rigors of reality and enter a universe that's this thoroughly, delightfully off-kilter.

Killer: Joe (Carmine Capobianco) and Kate (Debi Thibeault) and sometimes Herman (Frank Stewart)

Final Girl: N/A

Best Kill: The only decent gore effect is probably the dude getting stabbed in the eye with cuticle scissors.

Sign of the Times: Joe compliments Kate on her "small ass." Maybe this is just a gay thing, but I feel like the ideal body type - while still totally whack - has moved a bit past that particular trait.

Scariest Moment: Anytime Herman comes onscreen, you know stuff is about to get gross.

Weirdest Moment: After announcing "time for a strange interlude" in the middle of a scene, Joe launches into a non sequitur monologue about grapes and Julie Andrews.

Champion Dialogue: "Baby, you look hotter than the weather!"

Body Count: 19; 11 by Joe, 5 by Kate, and 2 by Herman

1. Pee Girl is hung in a bathroom stall.
2. Woods Girl is garroted, the wire twisted with a stick like Friday the 13th Part V.
3. Topless Girl has her throat slit.
4. Diane is stabbed in the shower.
5. Leisure Suit Dude is shot in the head with a shotgun.
6. Picnic Guy is stabbed in the gut.
7. Manicure Man has his throat slit with a cuticle knife.
8. Sauna Lady drinks poison.
9. Manicure Man #2 is chainsawed.
10. Groupie Girl is stabbed.
11. Cathy is hit in the head with a wrench.
12. Mechanic is bludgeoned in the head with a rock.
13. Redneck is shot.
14. Susan is stabbed.
15. Rasputin Stripper is shot, stabbed, has her throat slit, and is chopped into tiny pieces.
16. Hooker is stabbed in the back.
17. Weatherman is stabbed in the eye with cuticle scissors.
18. Temptress has a knife embedded in her neck.
19. Herman is killed in a blackout.

TL;DR: Psychos in Love is surprisingly funny, but its lack of focus is damning.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1324

Life, Uh...

Year: 2018

Director: J. A. Bayona

Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall

Run Time: 2 hours 8 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Jurassic Park is one of my favorite movies in the history of cinema, so I don't know whether that makes it shocking or completely understandable that I felt no interest in checking out Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. The fifth entry in the long-running blockbuster franchise is about as far from that original film as you can get while still being about CGI dinosaurs. Jurassic Park has more in common with When Harry Met Sally than Fallen Kingdom.

Approach with caution.

So, Fallen Kingdom picks up several years after Jurassic World. Dinosaurs are living in peace on Isla Nublar following the destruction of the theme park, but a volcanic eruption threatens their survival. Dinosaur rights activist Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) and velociraptor trainer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) are sent to the island on a rescue mission by Eli Mills (Rafe Spall), a proxy for John Hammond's former business partner Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell). Because you can never trust the rich, in real life and especially the movies, this trip may not be as kosher as it seems.

Along for the ride are sharp-tongued paleobiologist Zia (Daniella Pineda) and wimpy tech dweeb Franklin (Justice Smith), as well as what the movie paints as years of emotional baggage and sexual tension between Owen and Claire, even though it's just thin air. Also there's a little girl (Isabella Sermon) running around, because what's a Jurassic Park movie without an unnecessary child character?

Better.

Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom is a phenomenally dumb movie that takes the franchise in a phenomenally dumb direction that paints future Jurassic directors into a corner, forcing them to make a phenomenally dumb movie as well, whenever that should come down the pike. It's so dumb that its dumbness is literally infecting the future. Its dumbness has slipped out of the timestream, and not even Doctor Who can stop it.

Sometimes this dumbness is used to its advantage, like how every shot of Claire begins at her sensible shoes and pans up, throwing a hilariously overbearing number of winks at the "high heels in the jungle" controversy. Mostly it is used to its detriment, like the rapidly fluctuating number of guards around at any given time when our heroes need to sneak around the bad guy's lair that totally diminish any tension or stakes because they're never around when plot stuff needs to happen. 

Sometimes Fallen Kingdom hits the bad-good strides I was hoping for, including a sterling moment where Bryce Dallas Howard shrieks the word "Chair!" with a hurricane-blast of emotion like she was gunning for that clip to end up on her Oscar reel. In fact, she's frequently too good for the material, but in the completely wrong direction, turning random lines into scenery-obliterating grenades of diva drama that would make Gone with the Wind blush. 

"These raptors will never be hungry again!"

While Howard is busy either giving the best or the worst performance in the movie, the rest of the cast just flounders around, drowning in a sea of unmotivated decision-making, inscrutable dialogue, and CGI mayhem. Chris Pratt seems devoted to being as bland a male cypher as possible, and a heap of character actors dawdle around the edges with nothing in particular to do. And don't get me started on Jeff Goldblum, who I don't particularly like on a good day, and who is positively catatonic in his one-scene cameo.

The only person who seems to have actually showed up to work is J. A. Bayona, who directs the crap out of the movie. Not out of the actors, mind you. But as far as the imagery goes, Bayona is the second best director to ever touch one of these movies. His composition of light and shadow is frequently exquisite, especially in the bizarre turn the film takes toward gothic mansion horror in the third act. He directs the movie like a German expressionist masterpiece, only instead of using the implication to drive the horror, you also get to see a whole lot of CGI dino-monster.

If this were any other movie, I'd call that the best of both worlds. But Fallen Kingdom isn't the best of anything. Bayona really is working it (to the extent that I'd even recommend seeing this movie, just to bask in the way he captures the feeling of majesty and awe that Spielberg so capably honed in the original film), but it's still a dumb, milquetoast popcorn epic that doesn't have a lot to offer in terms of narrative, character, acting, fun, or much of anything a person would come to this movie for.

I mean, I came for the visual references to Nosferatu, but I ain't your average bear.

Oh, and the score isn't even good. John Williams' iconic themes are mostly shelved in favor of a bizarre choral piece that shrieks in your face how big and important every scene in the movie is. It's the movie in a nutshell: Fallen Kingdom tries very hard to be a lot of different things, and it fails in a lot of spectacular ways. The things that work really work, but if you made a list of those things, it would fit on a Post-It note.

TL;DR: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is a bland nothing of a popcorn flick, although its director clearly has his head in the game.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 916
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)

Census Flashback: South Of The Border

On our Fright Flashback/Census Bloodbath crossover, every week this summer we'll be exploring an 80's slasher film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to the weekend's upcoming blockbuster.

In anticipation of Sicario: Day of the Soldado, the most necessary sequel ever conceived, I'll be reviewing La muerte del chacal, a film that hails from that franchise's domain: the nation of Mexico.

Year: 1984

Director: Pedro Galindo III

Cast: Mario Almada, Fernando Almada, Cristina Molina 

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

I don't know if you're aware of this, but Census Bloodbath is a pretty comprehensive project. In the process of watching every slasher movie the 80's ever churned out, we are gonna cross a lot of borders and oceans. The thing is... If you're watching a bootleg of an obscure foreign film from three and a half decades ago, it turns out that you can't just switch on the subtitles. So yes, I did watch La muerte del chacal (AKA Death of the Jackal) in its original language, and let me tell you - my great grades in AP Spanish don't really carry over into watching a poor VHS rip, so some nuance may have been lost in the process.

Luckily, much like with the previous film I had to watch this way (the 1980 Italian flick Trhauma), the strict adherence to slasher formula makes it pretty damn easy to get the gist of every single scene whether or not you specifically understand the lines being spoken. But I do want you to take this review with a grain of salt, because I certainly didn't watch this under the ideal conditions.

But you know what doesn't need subtitles? Screaming.

So, as far as I can tell, La muerte del chacal tells the story of The Jackal, a serial killer terrorizing the sexy young women of a Mexican town (which, through a bizarre and amusing set of circumstances and tax laws, was shot in Texas). Sheriff Bob (Mario Almada, who also appeared in the film's quasi-sequel Masacre en Rio Grande) is hot on the trail, but before he gets his man a great deal of strippers, horny teens, and various bystanders are felled by the Jackal's awesome sword cane and his two Doberman sidekicks.

Also, like most people you shouldn't trust, he lives in a boat.

Would it shock you if I told you that this film was low budget? It shouldn't, if you've been paying attention. Films made for foreign markets don't land huge sums, and slasher films never do, in any market. But brilliance can thrive in the cheapie environment, and while I wouldn't call La muerte brilliant per se, it definitely has a unique filmmaking quality that can't be denied.

It actually operates in a similar manner to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, utilizing a choppy and erratic editing structure that on the surface seems amateurish but (intentionally or not) drives an eerie chill deep into your bones with its off-kilter glory. Especially in the opening sequences, which depicts the murders of two weirdly middle-aged horny couples in a shipyard, after each kill we get a glimpse of a window closing that doesn't directly correspond to any action in the scene itself, but feels like a grim final note that gets more and more creepy. Also, exactly like Chain Saw, there are random unmotivated shots of the moon that slice through the film at inappropriate times, jamming a shot of adrenaline into otherwise routine proceedings.

Also, there's a boat chase in the middle of the movie, where the watercraft zoom along in wickedly fast motion like they're cars in Mad Max, which is just rad as hell.

I know I'm not making this sound great, but I promise it works. And there are some shots that are just plain great too, so let me make my case with those instead. There's a scene after the killer has escaped from the asylum (about halfway through the killer is caught, and the film suddenly, inexplicably becomes its own sequel), where he's standing in his hospital gown staring up at an apartment building in a beautiful shot that mimics the best of both The Exorcist and Halloween. 

Actually, the killer's appearance in general is some tremendously exciting slasher material. He cuts a striking giallo-esque figure with his black gloves and identity-obscuring Zorro hat, and his weapon of choice is utterly classy and itching to be iconic. Check it out for yourself:

 So spooky!

I can even follow the movie for the ride when it transitions from a giallo into a telenovela in the third act (although I do not know what the killer's true identity turned out to be, because I couldn't keep people's names straight for the life of me, and he was one of many identical old men in the film).

So honestly, I enjoyed a lot of my time with La muerte del chacal. But if I end the review here, you're going to be very confused about the score I gave this film at the bottom of the page. You see, as much good as there is here in terms of outsider filmmaking, there's not a ton of good as a slasher qua slashers. 

For one thing, the kills aren't tremendously impressive. Most are offscreen, and none are bloody. The weapon is neat, but we don't see it in action quite enough for it to be truly memorable. And the fact that the killer uses dogs to hunt his victims is an interesting twist on the format (albeit one used to better effect in 1981's Madhouse), but it's extremely difficult to pull off a convincing mauling in a film at this budget level.

The worst slasher sin La muerte del chacal commits is the fact that it's a police procedural, my least favorite of the sub-subgenres I've come across over the course of this project. Having the protagonist being a policeman chasing the killer prevents you from ever getting to know the victims or caring about their fates. After each murder you just return to the cop, and you only ever get a minute or two with the new victims before they're dead, so it's hard to be scared. Also, there's no denying how regressive the gender politics in the movie are, especially when there is no Final Girl to even out the score.

One last thing is that we don't find out the killer's identity through the Sheriff's ingenuity and hard work. The film just decides to show us the killer's face during a murder sequence at about the place in the plot that you'd need to find out who it was. It's a lazy storytelling technique, and one that's compounded by the fact that I could not remember what character I was looking at. 

So all in all, while I found a lot to like here (and even I can't believe I compared it to that many classics of low budget cinema), it's just not the type of film that really nails me to my seat. I'm glad I've seen it, but it probably won't stick with me for longer than it takes to post this review and have done with it.

Killer: The Jackal

Final Girl: I guess Sheriff Bob's wife? This is a police procedural slasher, which kind of throws a wrench in this section.

Best Kill: A woman in her bathrobe (I have no idea how she relates to the plot, but keeping in mind that this is a slasher movie, she probably doesn't) is stabbed through the neck so forcefully that it pins her to the wall, hanging several inches above the ground.

Sign of the Times: The secretary in the police station has a major side pony that becomes its own separate character in the scene.

Scariest Moment: A woman wanders into a room on the boat that is full of bodies hanging on hooks.

Weirdest Moment: No fewer than three women decide to explore an old rusty boat in their high heels like they're regular Bryce Dallas Howards.

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 15; and yes, I'm including the dogs because their deaths are probably the most slasherific of the bunch.

1. Man is mauled by a dog.
2. Woman is killed offscreen.
3. Man is stabbed in the neck with a sword.
4. Woman is impaled with a sword.
5. Woman is pulled into a closet and killed.
6. Stripper is impaled with a sword.
7. Man dies in a boat explosion.
8. Captain dies offscreen.
9. Mistress is stabbed in the neck.
10. Orderly has his neck broken.
11. Security Guard has his head slammed into iron bars.
12. Mama has her throat slashed offscreen.
13. Woman is stabbed through the neck.
14. Doberman #1 is smashed against a wall and thrown overboard.
15. Doberman #2 is shot.

TL;DR: La muerte del chacal is a shabby but visually intriguing shocker with a few tricks up its sleeve.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1482

Popcorn Kernels: Get To Da Choppa!

In which we review the Predator trilogy, because the forces of my life have conspired to make it a requirement to watch it. Keep an eye out for my Dread Central column and Geek K.O. podcast appearance, both about this franchise, both coming soon!

Predator

Year: 1987

Director: John McTiernan

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Kevin Peter Hall 

Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

An elite military squad on a mission in the Central American jungle runs afoul of a bloodthirsty alien creature bent on hunting them down.

Predator sure is a boy movie, innit? This whole franchise has definitely been one of the biggest gaps in my genre film knowledge, and it probably stems all the way back to the fact that I didn't play with toy trucks as a tot. This movie is the cinema equivalent of a blue onesie patterned with footballs, assigning a great deal of meaning to the sheer act of existing as a biological male. We get doting closeups of biceps flexing during arm wrestling (mid-air arm wrestling I might add, the lamest way to go about that particular display), lots of sweaty yelling in sleeveless/fabricless/shameless military vests, and a whopping one female character who has maybe two lines.

You don't hire Arnold Schwarzenegger by accident. Predator knew what it was doing and it sure as hell went and did it. But I do have to say... The man certainly cuts a striking figure onscreen, but he's a liability the second he opens his mouth. And I'm not talking about his accent. Look, I super duper knew the man couldn't act, but watching Predator, it's not so much something you know as something you feel deep in your bones; a primordial, ancestral revulsion that leaves you quivering in your seat.

Simply put, Schwarzenegger is an enormous liability in this movie (in every sense of the word "enormous"). He has way too much dialogue that isn't quippy one liners, which he shoves out through gritted teeth like a constipated school principal. The rest of the cast is fine, although the only reason anybody but Shane Black is here is to wear a vest that shows off their biceps.

Honestly, I found Predator pretty boring. The non-action scenes are numerous and entirely indistinguishable. People mutter nonsense in an endless expanse of green jungle while walking around with machetes. It's not compelling visually or narratively, it just exists, in much wider swaths than one might hope. The action itself is totally fine though, especially when the gore quotient amps up about halfway through.

However, there is no denying that the Predator itself is an unholy triumph of monster-making ingenuity. Stan Winston sure as hell knew what he was doing when he put together the wholly inhuman look of the creature, both masked and unmasked. With the mask on, he cuts the figure of a space-age knight, and with it off he's an unnaturally fleshy collection of organic odds and ends that you just believe. That is the true triumph of Predator, and the reason the movie earned itself (god) five additional movies at this point. You don't get that without a cool monster, no way no how.

Rating: 5/10

Predator 2

Year: 1990

Director: Stephen Hopkins

Cast: Danny Glover, Gary Busey, Kevin Peter Hall 

Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

This time, Los Angeles!

Because L.A. is the urban jungle, geddit?

That's about as deep as Predator 2 ever gets, not really utilizing its arbitrary near-future setting to make much commentary other than "things is violent in the cities." Instead, we get a Predator film grafted onto a Lethal Weapon as Danny Glover stalks through the LA streets taking the law into his own hands when the titular extraterrestrial gets in the middle of a gang war that tears through the city streets. This is emphatically not a bad thing.

Sure, Predator 2 is stupid, but so is Predator 1, and at least this movie has a kick-ass lady cop with actual dialogue. This is probably the only time director Stephen Hopkins has actually improved a franchise, but I'll take it. Predator 2 is weirdly demure in its violence (the 90's were a rough time for gorehounds), but the action is varied and fun (an early street shootout has some delightful stunt car work), kicking up the energy with its loony antics. And the dialogue scenes benefit from actors with actual charisma, including the reliably weird Gary Busey and the sniveling worm that is every character Bill Paxton played in late 80's.

The Predator's weaponry has also received an upgrade, and although his invisibility booster is still annoyingly on-the-fritz (I understand he needs to be invisible for a long time because that's expensive as hell otherwise, but the brief glimpses we get of the Predator early on are annoyingly obvious audience pandering), his new space arsenal is a creative expansion of the universe of the first film. Here, the design team turns traditional hunting weapons like nets and spears into alien weapons of mass murderization, combining the primitive with the high tech in a satisfyingly brutal way.

As always, the Predator is the most important element of this film, and they do get it right. Sure, it's an empty 90's action flick, but that's a sweet spot for bad-good cinema, so you won't catch me complaining.

Rating: 6/10

Predators

Year: 2010

Director: Nimród Antal

Cast: Adrien Brody, Laurence Fishburne, Topher Grace

Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A group of strangers find themselves fighting for their lives on a Predator hunting reserve.

Is Predator the only trilogy that improves as it goes along? OK, probably nobody would agree with me, but I've finally found an entry in this franchise that I like! Predators is a delightful popcorn thriller, dumping a fistful of character actors (also including Walton Goggins, Mahershala Ali, and Danny Trejo),  into a scenario that's part Cube, part Lost, and full of Predator mayhem. Yes, these folks are also randomly wandering through a jungle, but this time there's actually a mystery to solve outside of "what is shooting us with lasers?"

Predators throws a lot of bizarre, dime-store Annihilation imagery at its characters before it reveals what's actually going on (given the title of the movie, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out), and the dynamics of the characters as they're funneled through a gauntlet of sheer revulsion and terror is a fun way to spend the plotty bits. And the cast really is game for bringing these crude, one-dimensional characters to life. Goggins channels his skills at chaotic evil, Trejo does his Trejo thing, I actually really like Topher Grace and he turns in some solid comic relief, and Adrien Brody gains 25 pounds of muscle and dang if that isn't a good distraction from how boring his character is.

Predators does fall apart somewhere in the middle of the third act, where the plot starts taking twists and turns that come out of nowhere to jostle the movie off its track, then vanish without a trace. But before that it's a tremendously satisfying one-time watch. Its subtext about how all the human beings themselves are "predators" falls flat too, but I can't say I expected much to start with, and at least it's trying something.

Then there's the Predators themselves! The design of the new Super-Predator isn't a particularly inspiring piece of work, but for the most part the film uses improved CGI to smooth out the very few rough edges of the classic design, and this is the first movie where the Predator's heat vision isn't incredibly crude and annoying. You can actually see what the Predator is seeing instead of chunky blobs of red and yellow that you can assume are Arnold Schwarzenegger because the blob has biceps. 

All in all, Predators did it for me, and I'm not ashamed to admit that. At this rate, Predator 6: The Predating is gonna be an out-and-out masterpiece!

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1337

Reviews In This Series

Predator (McTiernan, 1987)

Predator 2 (Hopkins, 1990)

AvP: Alien vs. Predator (Anderson, 2004)

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (Strause & Strause, 2007)

Predators (Antal, 2010)

The Predator (Black, 2018)

Census Flashback: Doing All The Old Bits

On our Fright Flashback/Census Bloodbath crossover, every week this summer we'll be exploring an 80's slasher film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to the weekend's upcoming blockbuster.

In anticipation of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which has hired Jeff Goldblum to recite every line ever spoken in the previous films, I'll be reviewing Boogeyman II, a sequel that is mostly comprised of flashbacks to the original 1980 supernatural slasher.

Year: 1983

Director: Bruce Starr

Cast: Suzanna Love, Ulli Lommel, Shannah Hall

Run Time: 1 hour 19 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The clip show slasher is a grand tradition of the subgenre, helping out sequels that ran out of money across the board from The Hills Have Eyes Part II to Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2. To my knowledge, Boogeyman II AKA Revenge of the Boogeyman, one of Britain's infamous Video Nasties,  is the first of them. This is partially because its original film came out so early in the slasher Golden Age, and partially because arthouse dropout director Ulli Lommel really didn't want to make this movie.

Pictured: Lommel's face during the pitch meeting.

So what did old Lommel do to make a quick buck? He slapped together a ton of old footage from the original, mediocre killer mirror slasher, and whipped up a scathingly meta script with wife/star Suzanna Love. The footage they added was clearly shot as quickly and with as little equipment as possible (my guess is three days, tops), bada bing bada boom.

The story revolves around Lacey (Love), the survivor of the first film, visiting her childhood friend Bonnie Lombard (Shannah Hall, who also shares co-writer credit) in Hollywood, where she lives with her pretentious director husband Mickey (Lommel himself). After telling the story of the killer mirror in excruciating detail for the first fifty minutes or so, she reveals that she has brought a shard of said mirror with her, and it begins wreaking havoc upon the Hollywood hob-knobbers who have gathered at the Lombards' party and want to make a movie out of Lacey's story.

This image returns once more to strike fear into the hearts of men and women alike! Quiver in abject terror! 

Much like Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 before it, Boogeyman II actually negates any reason to watch the original film. It cuts out all the boring bits in favor of the showstopping kills, which were by a wiiiiiide margin the only reason to watch. Unfortunately, it also does this to its own narrative, whatever thirty-some minutes of it that we get. It's a nonstop Lazy Susan of murder sequences, strung together with maybe three or four lines like a bad community theater musical revue show. Although honestly, that honestly doesn't disqualify it from being a good slasher movie.

What does disqualify it is that these murder sequences in no way have the creativity or impact of the original film. The kills are always presented in pairs, choppily cutting between the two players in a way that makes it entirely unclear what is happening, and to whom. Not to mention the fact that the cinematography is murky as hell and the gore is practically nonexistent. It's dark, cheap, and unsatisfying, like a can of generic-brand grocery store beer. 

Then there's the fact that every man in the movie is a Harvey Weinstein, with each kill introduced by some producer or other attempting to trade sex for a role in a movie that hasn't even been greenlit yet. That has aged even worse than the practically obligatory regressive sexual politics present in the average 80's slasher.

It must be so fun to be a woman.

So yes. Boogeyman II is almost entirely void of artistic merit. Almost. You see, Ulli Lommel's disenchantment with Hollywood bleeds through every frame, starting with the fact the he cast himself as the reluctant, put-upon director. Every character on this film's platter of Meat is a grotesque caricature of the L.A. lifestyle, spouting hilariously vain, clueless dialogue that wouldn't be out of place in an episode of Barry. 

In the few seconds we're given to breathe between kills, Boogeyman II is a savage satire, frequently funny on its own merits, with enough memorable screenwriting pearls that my shortlist of Champion Dialogue quotes was longer than the body count. The shallow, callous way that these Beverly Hills types treat Lacey and attempt to manipulate her trauma for their own gain is kind of magnetically funny, in a twisted, pitch black kind of way.

Sure, it's still a piece of crap. We're introduced to these characters as they step into frame (lit from below like they're telling a spooky campfire story) and recite their names one by one. They teleport around the party and die while in conversation with people we've never seen them interact with before. They name drop Halloween and Blow Out like they have a snowball's chance in Hell of ever being favorably compared to either. I'm not here to say Boogeyman II is a masterpiece. But for a 75-minute fluffball slasher, I feel like I got more than my money's worth. (It probably doesn't hurt that the soundtrack liberally indulges in the first film's license of tracks from the D.C. New Wave band 4 Out of 5 Doctors, my absolute favorite slasher movie party band.)

Mind you, I didn't actually spend any money to watch this movie, but the sentiment remains. The film would have even dragged itself over the threshold to a positive score if the kills had been any good at all. But I enjoyed spending the time with my favorite parts of the original while indulging in a few genuine chuckles, a privilege that very few slashers can afford a discerning viewer. Not that it encounters many of those.

Killer: The Mirror

Final Girl: Lacey (Suzanna Love)

Sign of the Times: The world was apparently clamoring for a sequel to The Boogeyman.

Best Kill: There's a lot of phallic imagery to choose from here, but I'm partial to the one where a man gets an electric toothbrush shoved down his esophagus.

Scariest Moment: The child's toys come to life all around him while he sleeps.

Weirdest Moment: The dialogue turns all echoey for a poolside conversation about goblins between a child clearly dubbed with an adult's voice and the German servant.

Champion Dialogue: "Without people, there wouldn't be... anybody."

Body Count: 18; 8 of which are from the previous film.

1. Mom's Lover is stabbed in the back in flashback.
2. Woman is stabbed in the throat with scissors in flashback.
3. Boy has his neck crushed in a window in flashback.
4. Woman is hit in the face with a medicine cabinet in flashback.
5. Boy is impaled in the back of the neck in flashback.
6. Girl is impaled on the same spike in flashback.
7. Lacey's Husband has his face melt in flashback.
8. Elderly Priest is killed during an exorcism in flashback.
9. Sally is weed whacked.
10. Sandor is killed by hedge clippers.
11. Producer gets choked with an electric toothbrush.
12. Brunette gets her face covered in shaving cream, which somehow kills her.
13. Bernie is hung with a garden hose.
14. Blonde gets spanked by a ladder, which shoves her mouth onto an exhaust pipe.
15. Priscilla has her neck crushed with barbecue tongs.
16. Jim is corkscrewed.
17. Joseph is drowned.
18. Bonnie dies in a car explosion.

TL;DR: Boogeyman II is almost completely devoid of artistic merit, but as a nuts and bolts body count movie, it's weirdly satisfying.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1250

Reviews In This Series
The Boogeyman (Lommel, 1980)
Boogeyman II (Starr, 1983)

Mr. Mom, Who Was Bitten By A Radioactive Mom And Now Has All The Powers Of A Mom

Year: 2018
Director: Brad Bird
Cast: Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Sarah Vowell
Run Time: 1 hour 58 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG

A quick caveat: That epilepsy warning is no joke. I have a photosensitivity, so the strobe effect that dominates three scenes lasting one to two minutes each prevented me from watching a certain portion of the film. Maybe those were the worst scenes in the movie or the best, but at any rate they don't factor into my review except for sound design I guess.

It's been fourteen years since the superhero family The Incredibles first graced cinema screens. It would probably suffice to say that the superhero movie landscape has changed since then, so I was interested in seeing how well the film played against the inundated landscape of the Marvel cinematic universe and its sickly basement-dwelling cousin the DC extended universe. Probably to its advantage, it doesn't change its stylized retro sci-fi gleam one bit. We sure get a lot of superheroes but we're still not getting that.

Angle-wise, there's just SO much going on here.

Incredibles 2 picks up literally the second the previous entry left off, with the Incredible family - superstrong dad Bob/Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson), stretchy mom Helen/Elastigirl (Holly Hunter), force field-creating invisible girl Violet (Sarah Vowell), and super fast Dash (Huck Milner) - stopping an attack by the villainous Underminer (John Ratzenberger). However, the destruction caused by this effort hasn't helped the public perception of "supers," and the law enforcing the illegalization of superpowers is holding fast.

That is, until Winston Deavor (Bob Odenkirk) puts his hat in the ring. The wealthy telecommunications magnate is a fan of supers and has put together a plan with his inventor sister Evelyn (Catherine Keener) to hire Elastigirl for an underground PR campaign showing the world just how necessary superheroics are. While she heads off to the nearest metropolis to begin work, Mr. Incredible is left at home with the kids, which would be overwhelming even if the baby Jack-Jack (Eli Fucile) wasn't developing, oh, every power in existence.

Conveniently, this Elastigirl gig is timed with the rise of the Screenslaver, a freaky masked villain who uses screens to hypnotize people and is hellbent on tearing a lazy public away from the television they seem to worship. She sets off to stop the Screenslaver while Bob stays home with the kids. You know, just like the woke cinema classic Mr. Mom!

This is also maybe the freakiest thing ever included in a Pixar movie and they literally made two movies about monsters.

I obviously wasn't super sold on the Mr. Mom angle the trailers made apparent. It still reeks of the mentality that women in the workforce is a bizarre novelty and that men are dumb cavemen idiots who can't parent their own children. The most recent incarnation of this story was that soul-bleachingly mediocre Matt LeBlanc sitcom Man with a Plan, so I can't say I had high hopes.

Luckily, Incredibles 2 doesn't foreground the gender normative elements I was worried it would. It tells a story of the universal struggle to be a parent, with the chaos of having a newborn baby amplified by Jack Jack's powers. He can multiply his body, set the house on fire if he doesn't get a cookie, and his atomic sneezes send him phasing through various walls and ceilings. He's uncontainable and every parent's literal nightmare.

Naturally, he continues to be the best part of the film, and his mini-fight scene with a raccoon is maybe the best superhero moment in cinema this decade. But the other characters are all given a lot to do, with the exception of maybe Dash, whose energy generates a whole lot of fun, but it's all sugar and no substance. But yes, once again the family is at the center of the film, their characters and dynamics being the primary driving force of the story, aided and abetted by all the useful metaphors that superheroics can provide.

I'm not a regular mom. I'm a cool mom.

But although they're certainly not the crux of the story, those crime-fighting sequences really are exciting. They run the gamut from Spider-Man 2 setpieces to James Bond high camp villainy to good ole "capable people work together to prevent a disaster," and it's probably the best choreographed and edited animated action in American cinema, followed far behind by maybe Big Hero 6 and almost nothing else. Incredibles 2 is so fun and splashy that it makes you forget that we've already gotten a Black Panther, an Infinity War, and a Deadpool 2 within the past eight seconds. It's popcorn movie magic at its finest, using the limitless imagination of animation to deliver some impossibly dazzling stunts.

It maybe lacks the depth of the original film's more concrete, well-thought-out storyline, but I'd be hard-pressed to look at this year's slate of summer films and see anything that will be remotely as exciting and fist-pumping as this triumph, the best non-Toy Story Pixar sequel to date, and most likely in perpetuity.

A Note on the Short Film Bao: I'm obviously very glad that Pixar has started to realize that other cultures can and should be represented in animation, and this video about an anthropomorphic dumpling is certainly working Pixar's formula in a unique way - from its soft, stylized character designs to its casually magical, circular narrative. It's certainly very cute and a lively dialogue-free effort in visual storytelling, but I found the central metaphor to be more than a little bit ruined by the narrative turn it takes in the end, which for me undermined the story I thought I was watching. But nevertheless, a worthwhile effort that is no "Piper" but it's certainly no "Lava," so I'll take that middle ground any day. 7/10

TL;DR: Incredibles 2 is the best non-Toy Story sequel Pixar has ever made.
Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 988
Reviews In This Series
Incredibles 2 (Bird, 2018)