Popcorn Kernels: Hell Hath No Fury

As we continue to clear out the wreckage of Halloween, let’s take a couple quick jaunts into the depths of Hell and see what we can dredge up.

Drag Me to Hell

Year: 2009

Director: Sam Raimi

Cast: Alison Lohman, Justin Long, Ruth Livier

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

An enterprising young banker denies a gypsy woman her loan and is cursed to be tortured by the Lamia then dragged to hell.

Like most horror icons, Sam Raimi has done all in his power to not actually direct horror movies. After helming the unforgettable Evil Dead trilogy, he moved on to projects like the Kevin Costner baseball treacle For the Love of the Game or the Spider-Man trilogy, all three of which are superhero flicks, but one of which is inexplicably a musical. After years and years of this nonsense, Raimi finally stepped back into the ring with Drag Me to Hell, and the really surprising thing is that it’s freaking awesome.

It pretty strictly adheres to the Evil Dead formula of invoking an ancient evil, being tormented in grotesquely hilarious ways, and then facing an unrelenting denouement, but from the perspective of an older and wiser director. He’s no longer 21 years old, and while in his maturity he has somewhat lost the borderline callous disregard for traditional film language that made his Evil Dead so uncannily kinetic, he has gained a sharper talent for embedding story and character in among his zany showboating.

These characters re still pretty rudimentary, but compared to Ash Williams and his meatbag friends, they’re Chaucer. Alison Lohman’s Christine is set up with a whirlwind flurry in a series of swiftly efficient scenes that paint her personality in bright splashes like Jackson Pollock canvas: she’s timid, eager for promotion, afraid of being branded a country hick, and ashamed of being overweight in her younger years. These qualities come into play again and again throughout the film, so they’re broad but hardly the pointless shading of 80’s cannon fodder that just needs to be differentiated from the next blonde over before she can be exploded into goo.

The dominoes are hardly even in position before the first one topples. Christine is suddenly plunged into an ancient nightmare and for the duration of the first act, it’s legitimately scary. Classic Sam Raimi touches electrify the proceedings (giddily twirling camera, looming silhouettes on faces, you know, the usual) and Drag Me to Hell goes through the motions of an utterly effective horror flick.

That is, until about he midway point. A talking goat and a necrotic mazurka smash the film off its hinges, sending it flying into a classic Raimi fever dream. The subtle and chilling horror jumps screeching into your face, putting Lohman through the Bruce Campbell ringer, smearing her with filth, gore, and excrement, beating her to a pulp with a gypsy corpse, and just generally making a mockery of her attempts at normalcy. It’s buoyantly silly, with enough references to Evil Dead II to be a hearty nod and not a brazen rip-off.

An exquisite blend of gushing camp and bleak fearlessness (they kill a child, for goodness sake), Drag Me to Hell isn’t Raimi’s best film, but it’s certainly a dazzling return to form. Between this and the pilot episode of Ash vs. Evil Dead, I’d say it’s time for the man to ditch the producing game and get back on the horse. And yes, we’re pretending that Oz the Great and Powerful never happened.

Rating: 8/10

Bedazzled

Year: 2000

Director: Harold Ramis

Cast: Brendan Fraser, Elizabeth Hurley, Frances O'Connor 

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

An unloved loser sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for wishes, which invariably go awry.

“Starring Elizabeth Hurley and Brendan Fraser.” Could a phrase possibly be more early 2000’s? How about “comedy where a lead actor performs caricatures in a variety of zany, vaguely racist costumes?” Bedazzled, a remake of the 1967 movies of the same name, is an effortful, ridiculous comedy that reeks of flop sweat. As Brendan Fraser attempts to channel his inner Jim Carrey, jokes are flung out into the audience like wet fish. They can be funny in a nostalgic “the new millennium was so stupid” kind of way, but that’s the only thing that has allowed itself to hold any vestige of esteem past its demographic’s infancy.

OK, maybe I’m being a little harsh. The opening credits are genuinely fantastic. I really mean that. And there is good in Bedazzled, it’s just sandwiched between a whole lot of “wacky” artifice, Sometimes the film stumbles into thickets of such sublime stupidity, that you let your guard down and it can actually tickle you. You absolutely, positively must be in the right sophomore Stifler mood to watch this movie, but it’s entirely possible to enjoy it all the way through.

The biggest setback to the comedy is the smokin’ hot Elizabeth Hurley as the Devil, who gets the film’s funniest lines but delivers them with the nuance and vivacity of a mailbox. I bet she and Rachel Ward are having crumpets in some fantasy realm beyond our understanding, because they share the same vacant, pouty stare. The lines are humorous enough a la carte that they still work, but Hurley does everything in her power to vacuum every last crumb of comedy from them. She is the knife in Bedazzled’s back if you’re not attracted to women, because otherwise she has absolutely zilch to offer.

It’s not like the movie needed help sucking the air out of itself, what with its preponderance of offensive stereotypes. In one fell swoop, Bedazzled knocks down Latinos, gays, and wise old black men. In the fantasy where Fraser becomes a basketball player, I’m legitimately surprised they didn’t put him in blackface. I’m grateful they showed a modicum of restraint, although the hulking albino beanpole he becomes is pretty unsettling just the same. I forgive that scene’s woeful makeup for providing a pretty hilarious lampoon of less-than-erudite players in post-game interviews.

But Bedazzled isn’t finished with us quite yet. We still need to talk about the way it treats the women. Oh, the women! There are brief specters of progressive values here (merely being rich and powerful can’t win someone’s heart, etc.) but the love interest here is never treated as anything other than a vapid, mercurial prize to be won. [SPOILERS] Even once Fraser realizes that he just wants her to be happy and accepts her rejection, he is rewarded for his morality with an exact twin of her. I hate to get too political on movies that are irrevocably from a certain time period, but it’s not exactly on message.

So, here we are. Bedazzled is palatable if and only if you can manage to completely unscrew your brain. It’s problematic and its narrative is nothing more than a sequence of sketches, but if you’re in the mood for a juvenile time capsule flick, look no further.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1173

Creeper Features

Forgive me for my radio silence for the past couple days, my sleeping patterns have been like the Long Beach bus schedule this week - inconsistent and wildly out of sync with expectations. But the good news is I've had the incredible opportunity to be a PA for a nonprofit production headed by David Zucker, none other than the man who directed Airplane!, which is only my third favorite movie of all time!

It was a great experience and a good addition to my résumé, but my will to write - and my will to stay awake - has been dulled for the past couple days, so I'm gonna lay one on you to make up for it. Seeing as it's January and virtually nothing worthwhile is coming into cinemas, Sergio and I have spent the past couple days catching me up on a minor horror phenomenon of the early 2000's, a decade I am sorely lacking in, having spent so much of my time wallowing in the muck of the 80's.

Because he's a minor expert in scary movies of that time period after having gone through a brief horror phase himself (mine is much more persistent than his and refuses to go away any time soon), he deemed it wise to lead me on a journey through the Jeepers Creepers franchise, one of the few truly original horror creations of the Millennium.

It was an important gap to be filled, and I shall share my newfound knowledge with y'all.

Jeepers Creepers

Year: 2001
Director: Victor Salva
Cast: Gina Philips, Justin Long, Jonathan Breck
Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

I see you eyeing Justin Long's name up there. For not a single second of Jeepers Creepers' 90 minute run time was I ever not focused on the fact that he's a Mac. The man's ageless, too. In fact he even looks younger during his brief cameo in the sequel. And I was not expecting what I saw in the scene where he takes off his shirt. All around, a very interesting casting choice after the fact.

But where does that leave the movie? Two college-aged teens, brother and sister Darry (Justin Long) and Trish (Gina Philips), are returning to their Midwest home via the Middle of Nowhere when their car gets buzzed by a junky looking van. After careening off the road to avoid being converted into a red smear on the pavement, they pass by the abandoned church where the van is parked and see a mysterious man dumping bodies into a chute on the grounds.

It turns out that this man is the Creeper (Jonathan Breck), an ancient demon that emerges for a period of 23 days every 23 years to feed. It likes to tailgate drivers on the freeway because it can smell their fear and use that to determine if they have a good part that he needs - whatever body parts he eats become reconstituted into his body, making him immortal.

All of this exposition is given to us by a Convenient Medium (Patricia Belcher) who has had psychic dreams about all of this. She also knows that whenever you hear the song "Jeepers Creepers," you'd better hightail your way out of there because 1) that's the title of the movie and 2) apparently the demon loves old lady music.

Honestly, most of this information dump goes absolutely nowhere, but it's unique and creative and in service to a sort of Nick at Nite horror narrative - demure gore that in no way deserves the R rating it's given attached to some surprisingly powerful scares with great use of deep focus cinematography.

It's atmospheric (perhaps a little too dark at times, but it serves to disguise the deeper flaws in the demon make-up and thus is a worthy cause) and sprightly fun in a way that the dull chalky horror of the time absolutely wasn't.

Salva's wise choice to make the characters brother and sister and eliminate any possibility of sexual tension serves the story well and allows for an unusually full exploration of the characters. Overall, definitely a film worth spending time on if you happen to catch it on TV or want a fun nostalgic sleepover night.

Rating: 7/10

Jeepers Creepers 2

Year: 2003
Director: Victor Salva
Cast: Jonathan Breck, Eric Nenninger, Nicki Aycox
Run Time: 1 hour 44 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

I was definitely excited for this one. Jeepers Creepers 2 didn't land on Cracked's Five Most Unintentionally Gay Horror Movies list for no reason. It's the 23rd day of the Creeper's (again played by Jonathan Breck) feeding spree and when a busful of teenagers breaks down on the highway in the Middle of Nowhere on the way home from winning a state championship in Sport (darned if I know what they play. I feel like it might be basketball, but there's absolutely no indication and they have a javelin on the bus so who even knows).

The first thing they do is lounge shirtless on the roof and pee together in groups all while accusing each other of being homos. You know. Like boys do. When night falls and all of a sudden their coaches are whisked away by a mysterious winged demon, things turn sour and the team ends up cowering inside the bus and frantically calling for help on the radio.

Right off the bat, Jeepers Creepers 2 has a much better concept, at least for my tastes. There's a bigger cast which allows for more interpersonal tensions and a higher body count. And the slasher tone keeps the camp factor high. The idea of being trapped in a single location greatly benefits the terror which was diluted in the second half of the original as Darry and Trish jetsetted across the Midwest. The mythology is put to better use as we see the Creeper actually picking out his victims and utilizing their resources. And there's like twenty shirtless boys. That is inarguably the most important addition to the franchise.

However, all of this is given in exchange for a pronounced lack of atmosphere or craft. There's still some nice deep focus and silhouette work in the opening scene and a dream sequence is particularly good, but for the most part the terror is completely overwritten by camp. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing in my book, but the original was one of the few even mildly scary films of its time, so it's somewhat of a disappointment.

Jeepers Creepers 2 also suffers from being exactly one Hella too long. Although the camp elements (especially Evil Leapfrog and the closing scene) serve it well, it can't muster enough steam to keep it from limping to the finish by the third act. However, it too is a great party film. Especially if you have a bunch of friends who don't mind you loudly making jokes the entire time.

Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1151