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Reviews
Terrifier 3 (2024)
If you want blood, you've got it
I had a palpable feeling of dread while watching "Terrifier 3", but I'm not sure if that was because of the movie itself, or because of my experiences watching the first two movies: I bailed on "Terrifier" during the hacksaw scene because it was making me feel sick. I went back and watched it in preparation for the second one, which ended up making the first look tame. "Terrifier 2" made me feel genuinely distressed in one scene, like somebody had filmed one of my nightmares. If this third entry was going to top that, I thought, I didn't know if I could handle it.
Funnily enough, it really didn't top it. Nothing in this one made me feel as anxious as the first sequel.
I guess where they did raise the bar was in terms of budget. This series has been a really surprising success story, so this one has the biggest budget yet.
I can't believe how much things have changed. When I was a teen in the 2000s, kids went to Saw and Final Destination and Hostel movies for a shock and a giggle at some graphic violence. And some of those movies were panned by critics for their violence, eg. I have never forgotten David Stratton giving zero stars to "Hostel" because he was "repelled by it".
The Terrifier series makes all those movies look like episodes of "Sesame Street". I remember how surprised I was when I saw that the majority of critics gave the first film a positive review. Luckily Stratton had retired by then, it would have given him a heart attack.
This is how much things have changed: I had a rep for being a gorehound in high school, and as I've already said, I quit on watching "Terrifier" the first time. Now it seems like average high school kids are watching this stuff. Does the average kid today have a stronger stomach than a gorehound from twenty years ago? What caused this change? I have often wondered if the increase in sex in TV shows is a result of the cable networks trying to compete with the porn that seemingly everyone watches constantly these days. Is horror movies becoming this much more violent a result of the actual footage of real-life gore we have available to us now, perhaps more easily available than it was in my youth? Or is it that kids have grown up watching that stuff from ever younger ages, so they've arrived in their teens much more hardened than we were?
You see, to me Terrifier is more interesting as a sign of the times than as a film series. I watched it, admittedly, out of curiosity of how much further it was going to push the envelope. I do appreciate the way Damien Leone is sort of able to conjure a kind of nightmarish atmosphere at least some of the time, and the music is also good. I thought the movie held itself back with some unnecessary plot points and call-backs to the previous ones that weren't really necessary. One of the returning characters, in particular, didn't really seem to add anything and I'm not sure why he was in it.
It still kept me entertained for most of its length.
Bad Boys: Ride or Die (2024)
Pretty forgettable
"Bad Boys: Ride or Die" is about what I expected. It has some pretty good action sequences, and the chemistry between Lawrence and Smith is still there. I just never really understood what the movie was about all that much. I didn't get into the plot, and none of the other characters registered all that much. Especially the villain. I'm not even sure who the villain was. There was another character who kind of looked like him and it was hard to tell them apart.
There is a weird plot point where Martin Lawrence's character has a near death experience and wanders through the movie like a seer. Will Smith's character is sceptical.
This new agey stuff made Lawrence's character a little annoying, though maybe that's the point? Will Smith seemed curiously muted. You can't help but view his performance here as connected to his infamous Oscar slap. He seems like he's not too sure what he's doing, so he's just going to put his head down and do what he's told. The charisma and humour isn't there so much.
The movie tries a few gimmicks that seem to be typical for Netflix. It's like they know you're probably watching their movie in one tab with a bunch of different tabs open, so they're trying to make you stay on theirs. For example, in one scene the angle changes to behind the gun like in a first person shooter video game. Then Will Smith tosses the gun to Martin Lawrence and the camera follows it as though mounted on it.
The movie really needed more of this. It needed more attention grabbing tricks in general. The script, particularly, barely has any.
Cat's Eye (1985)
Above average anthology with an unforgettable wraparound story and conclusion
I just rewatched "Cat's Eye" for the first in, I don't know, 30 years? I used to have it on VHS tape.
I always remembered it for its cool wraparound story, about a cat coming to save a little girl, turning up at the scene of the movie's first two vignettes, before finally getting its own story in the last act, my favourite part of the movie.
With Stephen King's short stories, I always thought he was at his best when he was just trying to have fun with cool ideas, and that's what that last story is. The first couple of stories are pretty good, but they're not his best work, in my opinion, and they're nowhere near as interesting as that last one.
It's strange going back and watching something you haven't seen since childhood. You see it with different eyes. I never noticed, for example, all the references to King's work in the movie. I also didn't recognise any of the actors when I was a kid. I had no idea the protagonist of the first story was played by James Woods, nor that the girl in the last story is played by Drew Barrymore.
What's funny is, I appreciated the second story way more this time, and the last one a bit less, but for the same reason. That reason is special effects. In the second story, a guy is forced to circumnavigate the penthouse floor of a tall building, edging around the building's perimeter on a ledge. This is shot convincingly enough that I was actually scared for him in places. I used to find this story colourless and dry.
With that last story, featuring the cat facing off against a troll that comes out of the wall in a little girl's bedroom, I was constantly aware of the effects. I kept wondering how they did certain things, because you can kind of see the wheels showing, if you know what I mean.
For example, in one shot you see the troll approaching Barrymore's face, and it looks like her face is a still image, but the troll is shot in motion, and they've interposed live action over a still.
I was distracted by how weird the troll looks. It's obviously a little person in a costume. You start noticing trick shots, and it takes you out of what you're watching.
I still liked "Cat's Eye'. It's entertaining enough, though only that last story really sings with the joy of creativity. The others do have some neat moments.
Witchboard (1986)
Maybe the remake will be better?
"Witchboard" is a horror flick that just never gets anything going. It's about a few people that use a Ouija board to contact the dead, and apparently communicate with a dead child. Bad things start happening, I guess, though I wasn't really paying attention.
What's weird is that "Witchboard" never really gives you anything to be scared of. Those Final Destination flicks proved that you could have the "villain" in the movie just be some kind of invisible and unexplainable force. They worked because the premise was established and the story was told.
"Witchboard" I just didn't get. You know one of the characters is going to get "possessed" and go crazy or whatever, and when that finally happened, I'd lost interest, and the character who is possessed is not scary.
I just didn't get into this movie and was just waiting for it to end.
For min brors skyld (2014)
Tommy Wiseau tackles child abuse and pornography
We're all used to watching bad movies, and if you don't mind obscure b-flicks, you get used to inept ones also. But what is less common is a marriage of genuinely upsetting real-world material that could be plucked from any newspaper, with handling so amateurish that it would be better suited to a Godfrey Ho movie with the word "Ninja" in the title.
"For My Brother" is a movie that makes you realise so-bad-it's-good material like "The Room" and "Samurai Cop" aren't really as inept as you may have thought. At least they didn't feature shockingly graphic footage of abuse, handled so badly that you can't believe what you're watching.
Take the opening scene, for example, which just ladles on distressing material well past breaking point until what we're left with just feels ridiculous. A husband and wife are on holiday in the woods with some random guy who is obviously there simply to molest the couple's son. Somehow the wife is unaware of this arrangement, but when the man leads the kid off into the anonymity of the woods, with the father's blessing, she realises immediately and hysterically goes looking for him. She finds him in time, resolves, loudly, to call the police on the duo of husband-and-stranger, and runs off with a mission - until, boom, she's hit by a car.
The fact that this collision is shown totally unconvincingly doesn't help, but this whole sequenceis so unconvincing it doesn't matter. It is catastrophe upon catastrophe, none of it is believable, but the inclusion of abuse and incest into the equation leaves a truly bad taste in the mouth; you certainly can't enjoy it as camp.
The movie jumps ahead some years and we see what this disastrous family situation has turned into: the alcoholic pederast father not only abuses his oldest son, he also pimps him out to friends and films the sex to sell on DVD. He even has a female client who pays to have sex with the son. There is a younger son, and the whole purpose of the eldest's life is to prevent the dad from doing to him what he has long done to the first born.
This is pretty unbelievable. How is the eldest able to keep his violent father from his younger brother? The movie seems to think this is achieved by making sure he is always available for the old pervert. Even if this is possible... what about the other abusers the old man apparently makes his living off? He is not merely a pederast, he's also a pimp and pornographer. Clearly he is not beholden to any form of morality, so it doesn't make sense that the younger boy isn't involved in it already.
Clearly the reason for this lack of involvement is that the movie is supposed to be a touching depiction of the older boy's concern for the younger. These actors actually do what they can with their parts - in some scenes they are convincing, in others not - but we never see anything like insight into how kids in their situation might really feel about each other.
They are cardboard cut-outs, forced to act out the stupid morality play the inept director has constructed for them.
Revenge (2017)
Stupid, derivative exploitation flick adds nothing to its woeful subgenre
The types of b-movies that "Revenge" fits into have always been among my least favourite exploitation movies. There is only one thing to like about the subgenre, and that's the title, which I will not write here: it couldn't more neatly sum up what these movies are about if it tried. In fact, it's such an accurate and brief summation that not only does it tell you what the movies are about, it also tells you what's wrong with them, ie. That all that happens in each one is a type of assault that begins with "R", and "revenge". The end.
"Revenge" might have the biggest budget of all of this type of flick, and it was also made by a woman, so I guess that got it more attention and guaranteed some positive reviews. The filmmaker might be cleverer than she seems: perhaps she knew that being a woman in contemporary society makes her pretty much bullet-proof when making a movie that features assault, and as such she wouldn't need to do absolutely anything in her movie other than show it, and then show the revenge, and that's it.
This movie has no feminist bent. Stop lying to yourselves. It's not enough to just show men doing horrible things to a woman, and then for that woman to kill them. Perhaps the only quasi-feminist line of dialogue in the whole movie is when one of the guys she gets revenge on says "Women always have to put up a fight". Wow. That's cutting edge stuff. "I Spit on Your Grave" came out almost forty years before this one, and it was rightly derided as cheap exploitative trash. Here we have expensive exploitative trash, just with a filmmaker people are too scared to criticise.
This one does everything that one did with a better budget and less intelligence. Yes, it was smarter for the filmmakers of "Grave" to not bother to explain how the woman at the centre of the plot survived her ordeal. Watching "Revenge" actually made that stupid movie seem smart. You see, here the protagonist is shoved off a cliff and impaled on a tree and left to die, as she certainly would have. But the movie needs her to survive, so she uses her cigarette lighter to set fire to the tree so that the tree collapses, pulls the wooden spike from her guts and uses a beer can somehow to cauterise the injury, which also burns the image of a bird onto her body for some reason.
Okay. So ignoring the fact that her method of getting out of the tree is ridiculous, as setting fire to the tree would have burnt her alive as well, how were any of the 92% of critics who gave this crap a positive review on Rotten Tomatoes able to keep a straight face? This character is a socialite, but apparently she turnesinto Rambo mixed with McGuyver... well, you can swallow that because it's only a movie. But, uh, she got impaled completely through her abdomen, and then only has to light her lighter up and she's right as rain? What about all the blood she would have lost? What about her life-threatening internal injuries?
And what's the deal with the bird being burnt onto her body? Is it supposed to be funny? You see, the violence in this movie is so over-the-top, and the reactions from the actors are often so unbelievable, that it feels like a comedy. But there's no attempt to make it funny, just as there's no attempt to make it feminist.
Perhaps the filmmaker knew that just as kowtowing critics would be eager to slap the "feminist" label on her stupid, derivative movie, whether or she did anything to warrant it, and as such, perhaps she'd try her luck with "comedy" as well.
Kinds of Kindness (2024)
Weird doesn't mean interesting
I appreciate the fact that there are filmmakers around like Yorgos Lanthimos. When every other movie is a copy of some other, ie. A sequel, a prequel, a remake, a reboot, Lanthimos makes original works. You never really know what's going to happen in his movies.
I just wish I could enjoy them. I don't need to understand them, mind. I'm not sure if I "understand" David Lynch, and that's fine. He can get as weird as he wants and I just lap it up because I always find his stuff stimulating.
This is not the case with me and Lanthimos. "Kinds of Kindess", his new one, is probably the movie of his I have enjoyed the least. The film is a "triptych", meaning it's three stories in one movie, which all feature the same actors playing different characters.
Three times the story from Lanthimos just means three times the confusion from me, I guess. And three times the boredom. One thing you should never get from a filmmaker who has been given free rein to basically make anything he wants is boredom. It should at least be interesting.
There was the odd interesting touch here and there, but I just didn't care enough to try to make sense of it all.
Monkey Man (2024)
A good attempt, but with all the usual problems that plague martial arts flicks
This was a surprising movie for me. Dev Patel the director, and Dev Patel the action movie star. It's like an Indian version of "John Wick".
I didn't know Patel was a martial artist. Well, he definitely puts those skills to use here. The fight scenes here are pretty impressive. They're visceral and hyperkinetic. However, for those who've seen "The Raid 2" and "The Night Comes for Us", they don't really raise the bar.
I'm not totally sure what the movie was about. I know it was a revenge pic with Patel as a guy out to avenge his mother. The movie has the typical problem all martial arts flicks have: there is too much cumbersome story and it gets in the way of the action.
It also never really emerged with a distinctive villain. I assume the guy Patel wants to get revenge on was the main bad guy. It's not a good sign when the movie is over and you don't even know which one he was. The movie just has far too many characters in general.
A good martial arts flick needs a hero with a clear goal, a plot that doesn't get in the way of the action, and a distinct villain. "Monkey Man" doesn't have any of these things, but it's occasionally entertaining.
MaXXXine (2024)
Disappointing final entry in a good trilogy
Ti West, who I'd never been a fan of previously, released that rarest of things for genre fans with "X": a classic slasher movie. How many other recent slasher classics can you think of? I'd have assumed that the genre was incapable of having new life breathed into it, but West managed it with "X", and seeing that it was the first part of a trilogy, I couldn't wait to see what came next.
"Pearl", which followed "X" immediately, wasn't a slasher flick, but more a psychological horror piece, and particularly a showcase for Mia Goth's brilliant performance. I didn't like it as much as "X", though. It just didn't grab my attention as much as "X" did.
Now, "MaXXXine", the final part of the trilogy, is the first I actually disliked. The first two parts of the trilogy had purpose, a strong sense of a story that needed to be told. "MaXXXine" doesn't. It's baggy and dull and unmoored. I'm not even really sure what it was about, other than Mia Goth's Maxine chasing her dreams of stardom while the night stalker is on the loose.
It never got me interested in it, and I was just waiting for it to end.
Sex-Positive (2024)
My head hurts
"Sex-Positive" is one of those movies that is so bad it borders on surrealism.
There are so many off-putting things about it, so many obstacles the filmmakers put up between you and any enjoyment or investment in their film, that you have to wonder if they aren't doing it on purpose.
Take the music, for example. It is constant and obtrusive and annoying. It's not used to underline dramatic moments in scenes like in a proper movie. Instead it detracts from what you're watching, to the point you sometimes can't hear dialogue because of it.
It doesn't help that the dialogue is also poorly recorded, often with a strange and distracting echo effect.
What is the movie about? The rather thin set-up involves our protagonist, a young woman, being dumped and finding herself in a house in which everyone is either naked or in a state of undress.
I guess it's supposed to be that she comes from a repressive, button-down society and begins to loosen up once surrounded by sexually liberated people, but this character arc is not depicted effectively.
The guy who takes our protagonist to this ethereal sex-house is apparently her love interest, but he doesn't even seem like he is interested in women, so you can't believe anything could ever happen between them.
It should have been a relatively simple matter to show our plucky and sassy protagonist loosening up, discovering sexuality and embracing it. Instead key moments happen off-screen, or aren't communicated to the audience effectively. For example, at first our protag is the only character who is uncomfortable with her nudity. She appears only in panties, but covers her nipples with her forearm, leading the audience to wonder if she's going to show anything. Well, she does, which should have been a key moment in her character's development, and a point of contact with the audience, acknowledging what they were no doubt wondering. Instead, the movie handles her eventual unveiling like it's nothing, like the filmmakers had no idea anyone in the audience would wonder about it.
The direction is also dull and pedestrian, keeping us at a distance from the characters like everything else in the movie does.
Trying to get into this movie, trying to make out the dialogue through the music, trying to find any spark of motivation, gave me a headache.
This could have been an unusually frank and disarming movie about sexuality, like the classic "Shortbus". There is a scene in which a man appears completely naked with three clothed women, who discuss what it might be like to have his anatomy, and ask him to jump up and down and run on the spot. This could have been key to the movie's themes about understanding sexuality and other people's bodies. Instead it's just a sad reminder of what this movie should have done. The cast were totally up for it. Why weren't the filmmakers?
Force of Nature: The Dry 2 (2024)
Unnecessary sequel confuses rather than expounds
"Force of Nature: The Dry 2" has all the problems the original movie had, but none of its saving graces.
If anything, it is more overcomplicated than the first flick, despite actually having a simpler story. It also features excessive use of flashbacks, only here it is overwhelming and confusing.
The movie is set after a hike turned deadly. We get flashbacks to the hike itself, but also to irrelevant experiences experienced by Aaron Falk, perhaps to link this movie to the original one.
Surprisingly for an Australian flick, "The Dry" only had one actor I recognised aside from Eric Bana. "Force of Nature" has a bunch more: Jacqueline McKenzie, Deborah Lee Furness, Richard Roxburgh. They all seem to be doing good work, but for the service of what? A plot nobody can understand? I wonder what they thought the movie was about.
Roxburgh, particularly, seems inspired by something nobody else has any knowledge of.
"Force of Nature: The Dry 2" is running on the fumes of whatever fuelled the first movie.
The Dry (2020)
The why
"The Dry" is a rare movie that upon finishing I immediately watched again. There were enough intriguing details, and also loose ends, to make me want give it another go, knowing what to expect.
I liked it a bit better the second time. There's a lot going on in it: it's a novel condensed for the screen, and at times it shows. I think maybe it could have been cleaned up a little.
You see, it tells two stories simultaneously: one contemporary, the other through flashbacks. Two crimes, separated by decades, are nevertheless linked, and we get the story of both.
It's the contemporary one that gets the most time, though. The one from the past is told sparsely, shown to us as memories might appear to the one haunted by them.
These flashbacks give the characters in them short shrift, particularly Ellie, the victim of the first crime. She is kind of the soul of the movie, and the actress who plays her really steals her scenes. It leaves you wanting more, which I know is probably the point, but considering there's so many perplexing details in the movie even after a re-watch, perhaps they should have given us more.
I'm still unclear about both of the crimes, really. I know what happened, but not so much how. Why did they lie to the police? Why was only Eric Bana's Aaron implicated in the crime, when people believed Luke lied too? Why did Gretchen never suspect Luke in the death of Ellie, when he had pretended to drown her earlier, and her death was supposedly a drowning?
Every conversation in the movie feels overburdened with meaning. I liked "The Dry", but I think it could have been better, maybe as a miniseries. It needed more breathing room. It's like I wanted to be haunted by this movie, its great performances, its evocative location of a drought-stricken country town, its universal themes of nostalgia, pain and heartache. It's just these unanswered questions get in the way.
The Ninth Gate (1999)
Pedestrian and forgettable horror romp is buoyed by a winning performance from Johnny Depp
"The Ninth Gate" is a strangely pedestrian offering from the great director Roman Polanski. It feels like he didn't commit fully to making it. Maybe he didn't believe in the story.
The movie takes a long time to tell its story, and this is time you'd expect to be spent carefully building suspense, like Polanski did in his classic horror movie "Rosemary's Baby". Here, it just feels like dawdling, a director spinning his wheels.
"Rosemary's Baby" was able to suggest an evil so great we were glad it was kept off screen. "The Ninth Gate" suggests nothing, really. The movie goes through the motions of guy-investigating-shadowy-conspiracy story, with people he interviews turning up dead, unconvincing attempts on his life, him trying to quit but getting pulled back in.
Remember the climactic scene from "Rosemary" where we meet the baby for the first time, and see the members of the conspiracy all standing around the basinet, and they're all the more terrifying because they look like normal people? In "Ninth", the worshippers wear those black hooded robes, and yet don't look or seem scary at all.
Depp does his best. In fact, I think the only reason why I really stayed engaged is because of his subtle, winning performance.
The movie only really grabbed my attention, though, in some striking shots in the final scenes. By that time, it was too little, too late.
Abigail (2024)
Yawn
It seems like there's so many horror movies like this now. You know, this kind of high-concept thing that can be summed up in one neat line, like "group of crims kidnap a girl who turns out to be a vampire". Or "young fiancée is forced to play a game with her husband-to-be's eccentric family that turns deadly", which was from one of the directors' previous flicks, the also-overrated "Ready or Not". Or, I dunno, "group of crims try to burgle a blind man's house, only to discover he is extremely dangerous" ("Don't Breathe").
These ideas sound good on paper, so it's not surprising they keep getting turned into movies. And I know it's an unwritten rule in Hollywood that all movies' plots need to be neatly summarised in one line.
The problem is this: these "high concepts" are supposed to be jumping off points for creative people to come up with some stuff we haven't seen before. You know, think of a new angle. Maybe even come up with some social commentary, though that's not a requisite.
They never do. If you got excited for any of these flicks when you heard what they were about, imagining what they could possibly be like, you probably have a better imagination than the people who Hollywood keeps throwing money at to make these movies.
This movie does go for a twist, but it's too little too late, and not interesting. There's a stupid, unbelievable and unnecessary scene where the wafer thin Melissa Barrera easily incapacitates the man-mountain Kevin Durand because of course there is. And then later, there's a surprise conversion into a vampire, and a late-term alliance against it.
Except this isn't surprising, because none of the characters register with personalities. The only ones that really made an impression were Angus Cloud (R. I. P.), all too believable as a sociopathic druggy, Durand as a dimwitted Quebecois, and the girl who plays Abigail, herself.
Have you noticed that child actors always seem to be stand-outs? I guess they're usually up against a ton of other wannabes for their roles.
If only they could be that picky when choosing the people to write the screenplay. Give us some originality. Give us something different. Be bold. Be imaginative. Stop wasting our time with this boring garbage.
Ashes and Sand (2003)
A silly movie, poorly shot and put together, with two stars who should have had bigger careers
"Ashes and Sand" (why such a weird title?) is a silly and unconvincing movie that also feels downright weird.
Its plot is hard to swallow, a lot of the action is poorly choreographed, and the soundtrack is relentlessly Mickey-Moused out the wazoo.
In the film, Lara Belmont (of "The War Zone") is the leader of a girl gang who bully other girls and rob men unconvincingly. Police show up at their school to investigate, including a young detective named Daniel (Nick Moran, the pretty boy from "Lock Stock"). Daniel never acts, or even looks, like a copper. Instead he seems more like a college guy who interacts with the girl gang like they're his little sisters' giggly friends.
Just as this character is never believable as a detective on investigation, nor is the girl gang ever believable as... a gang. Or even as criminals. They seem younger and more immature than they're supposed to be. At one point, the Belmont character (Hayley) grabs a cashier's head and bangs it on the counter repeatedly, though she doesn't look anywhere near strong enough to do that.
This film needed some realism. There's a ton of British flicks they could have taken lessons from. British movies, especially those about social issues, are often more gritty and realistic than American ones. Instead we watch actors going through the motions, pretending to do things we don't believe they're really doing. It's like watching those Lars von Trier flicks with actors pretending to open and shut doors that don't exist ("Dogville" and "Manderlay").
We also have two lead actors who should have had better careers. Belmont, in particular, gives it her all: in fact she's the movie's one saving grace, her performance actually being believable in places, even if some of her actions are not believably depicted. Nick Moran isn't too bad, though he seems kind of bemused here, perhaps because his role is never clearly defined.
It gives evidence that Belmont, particularly, should have gone on to bigger and better things, so I wonder why she didn't. Maybe it was because she chose to appear in turkeys like this? It was apparently screened at Cannes, but then presumably it was immediately forgotten, and deservedly so. It's not bad enough to make a dent in your mind, it's just silly and inexplicable.
In a Violent Nature (2024)
Unusual art-slasher prototype is a cut above the rest
"In a Violent Nature" gives the lie to the idea that there is no new life to be breathed into the most clichéd of film subgenres, ie. The slasher flick. It takes an original approach that, while not always involving, is at least something different and unique.
The director Chris Nash has said that he was influenced by Terence Malick, and if not for this film being proof, probably nobody would have been able to imagine a Malick-like slasher flick. The movie was filmed in north Ontario, in and around the woods, and that nature is so omnipresent it feels like a character in and of itself.
It's not just the influence of auteurs like Malick (and, I believe, Gus Van Sant) that the director uses to distinguish his film, however. It also finds a radically different approach to any other slasher film, in that the movie mostly follows the killer. We see so much of the film from over his shoulder or through his eyes. It's not the typical slasher set-up where the movie introduces a group of obnoxious teens in a remote location, and we only glimpse the killer when they start getting bumped off, and in the conclusion we find out who the killer really is.
Here, there's no surprise about that.
What is surprising, though, aside from the movie's artful cinematography and slow style, is the level of gore in it. The "kills" here remind me of something like the Hatchet movies. I wasn't expecting this level of violence because it seems at odds with the realism of the photography and performances. It's hard to imagine too many slasher fans would complain, though.
If the movie has a problem it is probably the pacing being a bit too slow. Maybe we see too much from over the killer's shoulder? The characters are barely introduced or differentiated, because what we see is always what he sees.
"In a Violent Nature" might not be quite up there with "X", but it's still one of the best slashers of the new millennium. Not that there's been that many.
Bayou (1957)
Tedious low budget melodrama is a thirty minute story padded out to feature length
I only watched this movie because of its striking description in Timothy Carey's IMDB page. The looming, hatchet-faced Carey is one of the most unique and unforgettable character actors Hollywood ever had, and he was apparently very eccentric in real life.
Whoever wrote that IMDB got one thing right: the only memorable scene in "Bayou" is when Carey does a bizarre, tortured jig to some Cajun music, twisting his head around and contorting his long body as though he's being electrocuted.
Besides that, this movie just doesn't have much in it. It's one of those movies that should have gone for half an hour. The plot is so simple: Man meets girl and falls in love, but some bad guy already has his eye on her, so you know they're headed for a clash, which takes far too long to arrive.
This was first released as "Bayou" in 1957, but nobody saw it, so it was shelved and re-released in '61 as "Poor White Trash", now apparently with an added scene in which Carey sexually assaults the girl, ripping her clothes off. The movie surprisingly shows her bare tush.
Now that I think about it, it's obvious that scene was added later, because it's shot so differently. It makes striking use of close-ups to really drive the point home. The rest of the movie, feels like the filmmakers (and other actors) were asleep at the wheel. Only Carey really signed on, but it's not really worth watching just for him, either.
Holy Spider (2022)
Two great performances in an extraordinary true story that nevertheless kept me at a distance
"Holy Spider" is a hard movie to review. It has a pretty clear-cut purpose: to shed light on an actual situation in Iran, in which a real-life killer of prostitutes demonstrated the culture's shocking attitude to his victims.
This it does, and more. It has two great performances at its centre: Mehdi Bajestani as the killer, and Zar Amir Ebrahimi as the female journalist who comes back to her home country to attempt to bring him to justice.
When we first see the journalist, she is being refused a room in an Iranian hotel because they don't rent to single women. When she shows them her journalistic credentials, they let her in reluctantly, though with a warning she should tighten her headscarf: too much of her hair is visible.
It's the headscarf, ironically, that Saeed (the killer) uses as his weapon. It's surprising, and bizarre, to see a prostitute wearing the hijab, symbol of women's enforced modesty in Muslim societies. Of course, Iran is one of two countries in which women must wear one, but presumably these women are already breaking the law by working on the street. Is it more illegal to go without a hijab, than it is to sell one's body?
Saeed's performance is striking because he seems so normal and restrained. There's no attempt to make him seem like a cardboard cut-out villain. And of course, this is how psychopaths generally appear to everybody else, as Average Joe Normal. When you first watch the movie, you have no idea who the killer is, he seems like just another guy.
If the movie has a fault, I think it is overlong, and the direction seems too removed. The movie was motivated by anger at the crazy situation it depicts, but you can't feel that watching it. The two cast members do great work, and so does everybody else, but in a film with a purpose like this - probably the most purposeful film released that year - I think you need to feel the director's hand as well. I didn't feel that much watching it, it kept me at a distance.
Tomato Kecchappu Kôtei (1971)
Here's hoping I don't get arrested for watching this
"Emperor Tomato Ketchup" is pretty typical for an experimental and/or underground film made in the time it was made. Of course it's in black and white, on grainy film stock, and many of the scenes are lit so poorly you can barely see anything, nor tell what's going on.
There's also no dialogue, but a bit of voice-over, and this supposed exposition only makes the movie more confusing. A little seems to allude to the movie's premise, ie. A world in which children have overthrown adults. Most of it, however, tells you nothing. It's just a voice making bizarre, nonsensical statements. You're already trying to work out what it is you're seeing, and then the voice-over only adds more to puzzle you.
If this movie is remembered by anyone, it will probably be for two things: one, the premise, which still seems like it could make an interesting movie if its handling could be less bizarre, and two, the scene in which a young boy is stripped naked by a group of three women, and then we see him rolling around on the bed with one of the women, who is also naked.
It never ceases to amaze me what you can get away with in the world of cinema. If this footage was separated from the movie, it would be called child pornography. And the scene goes on for so long, I kept expecting the FBI to kick my door in.
You could argue it's not porn because it's probably not intended to arouse (though what is it intended for if not that?). How is what that woman did, and the filmmakers by extension, not molestation? I wonder how the kid felt about being made to do that. I remember Mario van Peebles said he was probably traumatised after the sexual scene he had to perform in as a child, with an adult woman, in "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song". This was far more full on than that. I wonder how the kid felt about it.
Birdman of Alcatraz (1962)
Good but overlong
"Birdman of Alcatraz" has Burt Lancaster playing Robert Stroud, a famous prisoner at Leavenworth and later Alcatraz Island who seemed to leave his violent ways behind after he became interested in the study of birds.
Despite the title, Stroud was never allowed to keep birds in Alcatraz. However, at least in the movie, he seemed a changed man by the time he made it there, ironically considering its reputation as housing the worst prisoners.
I wasn't surprised to find that this was one of director John Frankenheimer's first movies. He directs like a kid fresh out of film school with a bunch of new ideas, and the movie is often strikingly shot. It reminded me of "Ivan's Childhood", Tarkovsky's first movie.
I was less sure about Lancaster. He seems to grow into the part as the movie goes on. When we first meet him, he's a violent, inward man who has killed once and will again. I had trouble buying that. He doesn't seem that dangerous, and the one murder scene is clumsily handled. You do, however, accept his transformation, and I guess that's the important part.
Trouble is, "Birdman of Alcatraz" is overlong. It's quite interesting for most of its length, but then toward the end, I was just waiting for it to be over. By the time he got to Alcatraz, I wasn't really paying attention anymore.
Brubaker (1980)
Keeps us at a distance and never gets off the ground
"Brubaker" begins with an intriguing premise, but its constant focus on issues rather than characters keeps you at a distance from it, and it never really gets off the ground.
Robert Redford plays Henry Brubaker, a replacement warden who poses as a prisoner first to find out what his new place of work is like for the other side. He discovers numerous examples of abuse and brutality, and sets about trying to reform the gaol, but finds the usual variety of spineless bureaucrats blocking the way.
The prison seems to be run like a slave plantation.
The end scenes recall moments of climactic rebellion from movies like "Spartacus" and the later "Dead Poets Society".
It's surprising "Brubaker" keeps you at a distance from its characters, because it's got quite a few great character actors. Yaphet Kotto is a standout, though he seems to have been largely forgotten now. There's also David Keith, Everett McGill (from "Twin Peaks") and M. Emmet Walsh.
Most interesting for modern audiences, though, is a short, scene-stealing role from Morgan Freeman, who everyone is familiar with playing basically a wise, god-like character in films, but could do much more than that, and did.
Da zui xia (1966)
Great hero(ine) & villain but an underwhelming conclusion
In "Come Drink With Me", a young woman known as Golden Swallow goes to town to rescue her brother who is being ransomed by a heavily made up dandy known as Jade-Faced Tiger. Golden Swallow proves to be a formidable fighter, but is outnumbered, and a beggar named Drunken Cat, with an army of alfalfa-headed youngsters, comes to her aid.
Golden Swallow was wounded by a toxic dart from Tiger, so he takes her to his hut in the woods and nurses her back to health.
So far so good, right?
But then, something strange happens. Not only does the protagonist of this movie change, so too does the bad guy. We had an all time great hero(ine) in Golden Swallow. We're still getting this stupid woke garbage about how there aren't enough "strong female characters" in movies or whatever nonsense. Hello? Here's a great one from sixty years ago. Why is that still an issue? Oh, that's right: it's because feminists always have to act like we're in the 1950s to try to stay relevant.
The different bad guy, though, is an even worse choice. The manicured, coiffed and made-up Jade-Faced tiger could have been an all-time great bad guy. But instead, we get a different guy... I think.
You see, the story kind of lost me when they swapped people around. Like so, so, so many martial arts flicks, this one's story is just too complicated. Apparently Tiger gets his comeuppance (not a spoiler, because you know he's going to), and I don't even remember seeing that. I do remember Drunken Cat killing some other guy, though, who I assume was the new antagonist.
If they'd just kept the great heroine played by Cheng Pei-Pei front and centre, this movie could have been great. Instead, it's a great protagonist and antagonist, wasted in a disappointing final act.
She's Gotta Have It (1986)
"please baby please baby please..."
Spike Lee's first movie is a good one. It has a similar scrappy feeling to Martin Scorsese's first one, but is surprisingly more watchable.
It also features some of the director's trademarks, ie. Actors directly addressing the camera, and Spike Lee casting himself (for better or worse).
The movie is about a character named Nola Darling, who has three men all jocking for her, and one woman, too. The men are Jamie, a decent man, Greer, a self-obsessed male model, and Mars, the one played by Spike Lee, who is kind of immature and you have to wonder what Nola sees in him.
Lee hadn't mastered breaking the fourth wall yet. Sometimes, the actors' speech to the audience sounds stilted and weird, and I was reminded of the beginning sequence of "Plan 9 From Outer Space".
Also, at one point Lee breaks the fourth wall by mistake, when he glances at his own camera. It looks like he's worried whoever's holding the thing might have put it in the wrong place, or maybe they forgot to turn it on.
This movie is mostly pretty interesting and enjoyable. I did lose interest at some points. There's one scene I have to tell you about, though, and that's a rape toward the end of the movie.
Now, that got my attention, because aside from it being obviously horrible to watch, it was also totally unexpected. The movie has a light, amusing tone, and then it drops that on you. I wasn't sure what to make of it.
It seems like Spike Lee didn't know how to end the movie. Maybe he slept on it, and came back to the screenplay in a totally different, more aggressive mood.
Slumber Party Massacre (2021)
Lame remake is neither homage or parody
The original flicks in the Slumber Party franchise are remembered, if at all, for being among the few (the only?) slasher movies written and directed by women.
Aside from that, they are only distinguished, if at all, by having more gratuitous nudity than most other slashers, having a killer whose identity is known from the beginning and not fodder for a twist ending, and for being perhaps the most formulaic film series in an already notoriously formulaic sub-genre.
Seriously, the three movies in the original trilogy are basically the same. They repeat key scenes, and don't seem to deviate from the first film's plot at all.
The only difference is that the budget gets a bit better, and in the second (or third?) movie the bad guy is a zombified rockstar with a drill coming off his guitar, which he uses to kill people.
Supposedly the whole "you have sex, you die" rule with slashers was even more evident in the Slumber Party flicks, but I never noticed.
Anyway, you could be forgiven (I guess) for expecting some kind of feminist subtext in a series of movies written/directed by women, from a subgenre typically viewed by men. Or at least a new approach to the material? You'd be disappointed.
It feels like with this remake - which was also written and directed by women - the filmmakers tried to right the wrongs of the original trilogy by finally injecting some kind of girl power angle into it. They fail in that aim, with just a couple of throwaway scenes (or mere lines of dialogue) that will barely strike a chord with anyone in the audience or even register as feminist odes.
The parts that were apparently supposed to have a feminist point are few and far between and stick out like a sore thumb amongst the tedium and confusion of the rest of the movie. Remember what I said about the original movies having copious female nudity? Well, here there's one scene showing a guy in the shower with a close-up of his butt.
The original movies all have a scene in which the boys spy the girls undressed. Here, the girls spy the boys having a pillow fight or some such nonsense, and it's so weird it's inexplicable.
The movie's tone isn't light or madcap enough to permit these scenes so they're just weird and confusing.
The movie also contains other weird references to the original flicks in throwaway lines of dialogue and blink-and-you'll-miss-them scenes, that seem unnecessary, but at least aren't as bizarre as the above.
Do the filmmakers of this remake like the original films, or hate them? It's hard to tell.
What I do know is that people will go on remembering "Slumber Party Massacre", if only for its rare pedigree as a female written, female directed slasher movie in the heyday of the genre.
Nobody will remember this remake, or homage, or parody, or whatever it's supposed to be.
Chung Hing sam lam (1994)
A special energy in an improvised film
"Chungking Express" is the kind of movie you might have to see more than once to fully appreciate it. It took me a while to understand the movie's approach and get into it, but when that happened, I started to enjoy it.
I'm surprised its rating on IMDB is so high. Perhaps that's from repeat viewers.
The movie is kind of like jazz. I wasn't too surprised to read in the trivia that Wong Kar-Wai wrote each scene either the day before shooting, or the morning of. It feels improvised, and the movie has a pretty tenuous grasp of plot, if you can say it really has one. It also seems to end out of nowhere, but by the time you get to that point, you're not surprised.
I was surprised by the way the movie suddenly changed protagonists about mid-way. It felt sort of like "Lost Highway", or "That Obscure Object of Desire", where you're wondering if it's supposed to be the same character, just played by a different actor, or perhaps the first character morphed into the second.
It's weird that they are both cops. You'd think they'd make them more different like "Lost Highway" did. Here, it's a cop (presumably a detective) who is fixated on a blonde-haired, dark glasses wearing female criminal. Midway, we get a different cop, wearing a uniform this time, and he may or may not be into a short-haired, babin' little pixie who works at a restaurant.
At least, I assumed it was heading that way, but then it seemed like maybe she became interested in him? At least she kept showing up when he was eating dinner, and at one stage maybe broke into his apartment?
Movies like this leave you with a lot of unanswered questions. If you're one of those people who needs everything in a movie to make sense, you should avoid it like the plague. But if you're someone who likes movies that break free from conventional ideas of plot and structure, you should check it out. There's an energy to it, a joy of creation, that most movies don't have.