Shocktober Revisited: The Evil Dead Series

 editor's note: this includes portions of reviews from various points in the Blogorium history.


 Other than a mention in the closing notes of Horror Fest V, you might be surprised to see there's no review of The Evil Dead anywhere in the Blogorium. For that matter, there's even less about Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn: it merits less than a sentence and a half in the Horror Fest III recap. In my defense, early Fest recaps were written between movies, usually during smoke breaks for others, so you'll find much of that coverage to be, frankly, lacking. It feels unfair to not give them a proper discussion, considering the lengthy Retro Review for Army of Darkness (see below) and their place in Cap'n Howdy's arrival to watching horror films regularly. Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell are, in many ways, responsible for the person I am today. If I can talk about how Oz: The Great and Powerful is, in many ways, a family friendly remake of Army of Darkness, surely there can be some digital space carved out for the films that made both of them household names. Well, very particular households. Like ones who signed up for Starz after Ash vs. Evil Dead was announced.

 (note: I have left the Army of Darkness Retro Review largely untouched, which should be amusing considering that both the remake and Ash Vs. Evil Dead have rendered the first paragraph moot)


 The Evil Dead is, I'm reasonably certain, the last of Raimi's "Dead" trilogy that I saw, although it's very likely I'm not alone in saying that. Unless you were old enough to have seen them in the order they were released, odds are you came into the films with the second or third film, and then worked backwards. It's an understandable way of doing things: Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn and Army of Darkness are more comedic in tone, while The Evil Dead plays it largely for horror, bringing a few uncomfortable chuckles as the narrative continues. The first time I experienced any part of The Evil Dead may have been late at night one weekend, back when Syfy was The Sci-Fi Channel, back when their "original programming" consisted of Sci-Fi Buzz and they didn't mind showing horror movies to pad out their schedule.

 My memory of it is vivid: I came in at the very end of the movie, right before Ash (Campbell) kills Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss) and Scotty (Richard DeManincor) by burning the Necronomicon. I can specifically remember the stop motion, clay-faced Scotty beginning to melt as he falls forward and hits the cabin floor, before the rest of his skin bubbles off and he becomes a skull in a goopy pile. I'm not even sure if I stuck around for the ending, when the "camera on a 2x4" manifestation of evil catches Ash and it cuts to black, but it's likely I did. When you start watching The Evil Dead, from wherever you start, it's hard not to finish. It's even harder when it comes to Dead by Dawn, but we'll get to that shortly.

 What I've come to appreciate over the years about The Evil Dead, and why it's still my favorite of the three (in a very hard "choose your favorite child" scenario), is the immediate sense of dread for the protagonists. Cheryl, Ash, Scotty, Linda (Betsy Baker), and Shelly (Theresa Tilly) have no idea how doomed they are as they drive up to the "cabin in the woods" for the weekend. We've already seen a seemingly untethered camera floating through the swamp, and Raimi is continually warning us with distorted visual and audio cues that something very bad is going to happen. The exaggerated attention paid to the porch swing hitting the wall, boosting the sound to a ludicrously ominous level, hints at what he'll do again in Drag Me to Hell. But most of The Evil Dead isn't played to for laughs.


 The visceral quality of the film still gets to me - when Linda takes a pencil to the ankle, I cringe. Every time. I know it's coming, but it still works. It's hard not to mention the "tree" scene, because that's clearly the moment that Raimi oversteps his boundary, even by his own admission. It doesn't stop him from making a more comical version of it in Dead by Dawn, but there's nothing funny about what happens to Cheryl in The Evil Dead, and that's really what kicks off the horror. I always found it interesting that Ash and Cheryl were siblings, because it gives The Evil Dead a different level of connection than in the prologue to Dead by Dawn (and, I suppose, Army of Darkness). It's the only time we find out his real name is Ashley, because only his sister is going to call him that, and he's more fiercely protective of her after she's violated in the forest.

 While Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness increase the budget (and scope), I'm quite fond of the grimy, no budget aesthetic of The Evil Dead. There's something to its low-fi ambience, to Raimi's inventive ways around budget limitations, and the sound design that sets the first film apart. It's more assured than the rough draft short film, Within the Woods (which is functionally the same story, only Campbell is evil), and provides the groundwork for a lot of what became Sam Raimi auteur-ial flourishes. If there's anything that keeps it from being the classic it ought to be, it's that people often come to it last, and in doing so are often disappointed that Ash isn't as central a character as they've become accustomed to. He is, in many ways, like Ripley is in the first half of Alien - a member of the gang, but hardly the focus of the story. There's very little of the wisecracking, boomstick wielding lunkhead-turned-hero that people expect. But I don't hold that against The Evil Dead, and neither should you.

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 Before I ever saw Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, I can remember reading the review in Mick Martin and Marsha Porter's Video Movie Guide. It described Dead by Dawn as "less of a sequel and more of a remake," which was sort of the conventional wisdom passed around about the film until the internet came along to set things straight. Had Raimi been able to use footage from the first film, Ash's trip to the cabin with Linda (now Denise Bixler) might have simply been a recap, picking up immediately after the camera hits him. In truth, I've always been tempted to cut the two (well, even three, really) films together into a super-cut, since the seams are actually very easy to locate.

 Dead by Dawn is still technically a horror movie, but Raimi's fondness for slapstick comedy (particularly The Three Stooges) comes through more in the sequel, and it's a much easier entry point for the series. Not as easy as Army of Darkness, which is how I imagine most of you came in, but it's a great way to ease someone into gory movies. After Evil Dead 2, show them some early Peter Jackson, and they can handle just about anything. Well, maybe not the pencil to the ankle. Or Martyrs. But Martyrs is really an outlier. Where was I? Oh, yeah, Dead by Dawn. So the first twenty minutes or so retells The Evil Dead, just without Cheryl, Scotty, and Shelly. It's just Ash and Linda, and the words are spoken on the tape and she's still possessed and he still cuts her head off with a shovel and buries her. And then the film goes bonkers.

 I actually really like the way that Raimi continues from where The Evil Dead ends to where Dead by Dawn begins in earnest: Ash doesn't die, he's just prohibitively possessed and can't leave. The bridge is still destroyed, and the "force" is still trying to find him in the cabin. But it doesn't, in one of the more amusing scenes: it's chasing him through the cabin, and all of a sudden loses him, and just gives up for a while. Then Linda comes back, and we're introduced to the chainsaw in this version (as well as Freddy's glove, if you're looking carefully in the toolshed), and what will become the hallmarks of the Ash most people know start. It's also a tour-de-force for Bruce Campbell, who spends the lion's share of Evil Dead 2 by himself, fighting with furniture, blood, and most notably, himself.

 There are people out there who don't know who Bruce Campbell is, or at least have never seen him on-screen, and without fail you can win them over by showing them Evil Dead 2. His gift for physical comedy, his willingness to go all out to sell a gag, is impressive to say the very least. Campbell makes you believe his hand is possessed and he has no control over it, and the scene where "it" drags his unconscious body towards a meat cleaver always impresses me. Sure, the sound design for the hand helps, as does the editing, but Campbell is doing the lion's share of holding up Evil Dead 2 for the first half of the movie, so much so that it almost loses steam when everybody else shows up.

 It's probably important to clarify the "almost" - it's not as though the movie was only going to be Ash, because while he's been going nuts in the cabin, we've already met Annie (Sarah Berry), Ed (Richard Dormeier), Jake (Dan Hicks), and Bobby Joe (Kassie Wesley). Annie is the daughter of Professor Knowby (John Peakes in flashbacks), whose voice we hear reciting passages from the Necronomicon. She's on her way back to the cabin, so eventually there's going to be a crossing of paths, and since Ash has reduced the cabin to a smashed up bloodbath, it's not really a surprise she leaps to conclusions. Also, he shot Bobby Joe - accidentally and through the door, but it doesn't help his case. Their presence shifts the direction of the movie quite a bit, but it does lock Ash in the basement, where he meets the Deadite version of Knowby's wife, Henrietta (Ted Raimi). That's a plus.

 Aside from providing Raimi with more bodies to do horrible things to (Bobby Joe swallowing a projectile eyeball, Ed getting hacked to pieces, and the many times Jake is hurt after he's been stabbed with the Kandarian dagger), the only purpose that any of the other four characters serve is to bring the passages from the Necronomicon that can banish the demons in the woods. And yeah, Ash isn't really in any state to do it by himself, so I get more characters, but there's a marked shift in the film after they enter the cabin that doesn't really resolve until three of them quickly exit the narrative. Ed gets possessed, eats some of Annie's hair, and gets an axe to, well, everything. Bobby Joe gets Raimi's cleaned up version of the "tree" scene, and poor Jake gets abused repeatedly before being torn asunder by Henrietta. And then the pages end up in the basement.

 This, if you watch the series backwards, is when Ash finally starts to meet the iconography that fans of the series associate with him. How he goes from barely functioning to able to craft his chainsaw arm is better left unquestioned, but when I saw Dead by Dawn recently on the big screen, the moment brought loud cheers, many before he even had time to say "Groovy." Much of this is where I base the "people watched The Evil Dead series backwards" theory on: not only is that how I did it - I had a VHS tape of Army of Darkness, and then a friend bought me a copy of Evil Dead 2 - but it was as though everybody was waiting for the Ash they knew to show up.

 I'm tremendously fond of Evil Dead 2 - it's the last entry in the original trilogy (to date) that makes any effort to be a horror movie, even if it's also largely a comedy. The film is a great way to introduce someone to horror, because you can ease them into over the top gore while giving them something to laugh at, so they don't get too squeamish. It's a fantastic showcase for Bruce Campbell, and if I'm being honest, it's better than Army of Darkness. Maybe not as quotable as the third film or as visceral as the first, but a happy middle ground. The effects from the fresh off of Day of the Dead KNB still hold up, and it has maybe one of the best puns to go along with cutting your hand off that you're ever going to see.

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I saw an article a few weeks back perpetuating the cycle of "will Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi ever make Evil Dead 4, or will they just remake it?" where Campbell had been interviewed for something he's doing with Burn Notice and he casually mentioned that he'd read the screenplay for the ED remake. The person writing the article included some commentary about how they'll eventually "wake up" and realize that people want Evil Dead 4 and not an "idiotic redo."

The argument has been going on since a remake was announced some seven years ago, and the great "will there be an Evil Dead 4" has been kicking around since 1993's Army of Darkness, but really kicked into high gear when the director's cut arrived on DVD around 2000. This is not actually another editorial about the relative merits of ED 4 vs. ED: R, but instead will dance around elements that consistently appear in said arguments, based on the 18 year history the Cap'n has with Sam Raimi's third journey into the battle between Ash and the Deadites.

I wasn't allowed to see Army of Darkness in February of 1993, and it wasn't because the News and Observer panned the film - it was that pesky "R" rating. It was the same reason I couldn't see The Crow a year later, and why the 14 and then 15 year-old Cap'n had to wait for my Dad to "check them out" to see if they were fit for consumption*. After Dad laughed throughout Army of Darkness, he told my mother it was "too silly" to seriously corrupt my already corrupted mind**, and I was allowed to begin watching The Evil Dead films in the opposite order.

Yes, I saw Army of Darkness first; then Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn; then, eventually, The Evil Dead. I'd been aware of the other two thanks to Carbonated Video, but if you think they had trouble letting me watch the tamest, least horrific of the three, just imagine if I'd tried to rent anything from the "horror" aisle.

As I've mentioned before, horror comedies were my gateway into harder edged films of the genre, well beyond the Universal Classic Monster films that populated my youth. The violence in Evil Dead 2 is so extreme, so impossible to take seriously, it ceases to horrify and instead induces laughter.

Similarly, the blood geyser in Army of Darkness (anyone familiar with the film knows exactly what I'm talking about) became the great ice-breaker in high school - just throw on Army of Darkness in the dressing room during plays and watch as every single cast member shifts their focus from last minute line memorization to Bruce Campbell involved in skeleton-related slapstick. The film (which is honestly harmless in just about every measure you'd gauge "horror" by) was a great introduction to crazier movies, not only Raimi's other films, but Peter Jackson's gross-out trifecta of Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles, and Dead Alive.

Now I've mentioned that Army of Darkness has a Director's Cut, and that it had a VHS and DVD release in '99 / 2000 (respectively), but the funny thing is that I already knew it existed well before it came out. Though I cannot recall why or how I found it, clips of the original ending were already available on the internet in 1997, albeit in postage stamp-sized Quicktime files that took hours to download on a 28.8 modem. This, coupled with the launch of BC Central - the original version of Bruce Campbell's official website - allowed the high school era Cap'n to pursue more information about the "two" Army of Darkness's.

When I say "original" version of Bruce Campbell's website, I don't mean this. That's what BC Central became (the original domain name is now up for sale, I just checked), but in the beginning, Bruce recorded .wav files that were embedded into the page and shared personal anecdotes (many of which ended up in If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor). He also had an email address to send questions to, and back in those early days of the "internet," Bruce Campbell would respond personally to your email (things were different back then, you see).

Logically, having seen the original ending where Ash oversleeps and finds himself in a post-apocalyptic London, I thought I'd be the clever fellow who emailed Bruce asking why they'd changed the ending. While the email is lost to time, I still remember what he replied:

"We didn't change it - the studio did. Cheers, Bruce Campbell"

That's all; I didn't say he wrote long responses, but he did respond, and in all fairness Bruce Campbell did answer my question, which was poorly worded to be sure.

Okay, so the Director's Cut was out there, including on a bootlegged VHS tape we had a copy of in college from a video store that no longer exists but still doesn't have to be "out-ed," and it entered the rotation with the likes of Clerks, Cannibal! The Musical, and Pecker***.

Over the last 15 years or so, I've had a copy of Army of Darkness in just about every iteration you can find: the 1996 VHS release, the Universal DVD, on Blu-Ray, and even on HD-DVD. Oh, and then there are the numerous Anchor Bay releases, of which I only didn't have the "Bootleg" edition, in part because I still had the "Limited" edition with the Theatrical and Director's Cuts. You'll find pictures of all of them scattered around this Retro Review.

With time, I've come to prioritize my Evil Dead preference in the opposite order I saw them: The Evil Dead is a relentless, disturbing, graphic horror film that I enjoy more every time I see it; Dead by Dawn is basically the same movie but with the disturbing replaced with some seriously wicked black comedy, a more enjoyable experience but hints at the direction Raimi was going in; Army of Darkness is essentially a series of one-liners with a dash of Ray Harryhausen "horror" in the guise of an adventure film. There's nothing scary about Army of Darkness, and one will find the 90% of "Ash-holes" prefer the Ash from the third film to the other two - he has the better catchphrases. I watch Army of Darkness less than the other two, but the Cap'n still appreciates its role in dragging me back into horror.

As to whether a remake or sequel happens (or, more likely, doesn't) I must admit I don't give it much thought. Drag Me to Hell was by and large as close as we're going to get to an "Evil Dead" -type film from Sam Raimi, and to be honest, I'm happier with that than a continuation of the "give me some sugar, baby" that closed out the Ash saga.

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 And then there's the remake. Oh, I know, Sam Raimi didn't direct it: he merely produced it, along with Bruce Campbell and Robert Tapert, thereby giving it their tacit "seal of approval", but you didn't really think I was just going to pretend it didn't exist, did you? I may not like it very much, but Fede Alvarez's reboot-sequel-thing can technically be argued to continue the story, thanks to some specific visual cues, and who knows what's in store after Ash vs. Evil Dead...

 The presence of "the classic" - Sam Raimi's 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 - covered in vines seems to indicate that this is the same cabin that Ash was in at some point, although it's not clear that he ever left based on the film. The grittier, less "comedic" approach Alvarez brings to the remake allows for certain elements from The Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 to be reused - the tree rape (even more uncomfortable), losing a hand (even more graphic), and the chainsaw (more blood), while pushing the boundaries of Deadites in different directions. Now they're self-mutilating demons, not unlike the possessed Ghosts of Mars, and you should never want me to have to compare your movie to Ghosts of Mars. Ever.

 It's no secret that I don't like Evil Dead, and I've tried to give it another chance. I kind of like the idea that Mia (Jane Levy)'s friends bring her to the cabin to detox, and they don't listen to her when things get nasty because she's prone to lying in order to use. Unfortunately, that plotline is all but abandoned halfway through the film, and it's never really explored enough to be more than a device to kick off the movie. The idea that the Necronomicon has been in the cabin and that people try to keep it out of the hands of others is a good one, but is again not especially well developed. Instead it seems to provide a good excuse for Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci) to bleed on the book. I don't really think that addressing the raining blood third act or the Abomination (the, uh, ultimate manifestation of the Deadites) is worth getting into. Or why Mia needs to rip her own hand off - not cut, like literally tear it off - in order to get away. that's just how this Evil Dead rolls.

 Here are my original thoughts, from a recap written in 2013. I think they cover how I feel about the tone of Evil Dead pretty well:

  I get that people like that the remake of The Evil Dead is really violent. Like non-stop, unpleasant, close-up on the gore violent for most of the movie. Got it. I 100% don't believe the continued insistence that the effects are practical and that there's "almost no digital effects" in the movie. Sorry, I've seen it twice and you can see the digital effects, even during parts of the commentary where the director claims there aren't. But that is another argument for another day. The problem with Evil Dead isn't that it exists - there can and are good remakes of horror films out there, so I'm willing to put aside my affection for the original and let this exist in its own right.

 The problem with Evil Dead is that it's extremely violent, and nothing else. If you're looking for a movie where people are slowly, painfully mutilated, with long shots of the aftermath where they're half-crying and half in shock while removing needles or nails from their skin, good news - you'll find it in spades in Evil Dead. There's no humor, no characters, not much in the way of plot (that isn't abandoned, anyway), but lots of moments designed to remind you that this is a remake of The Evil Dead. Just one that's grittier and gorier and more hardcore. Because that's all horror fans care about, right? Oh, also just throwing Bruce Campbell onscreen after the credits to say "Groovy" in silhouette., because you gotta have Bruce, right?  It's no secret why the best and worst reviews of this film said the same thing: "It's REALLY violent." That's all there is to Evil Dead, and it's not enough.

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 For now, that's all there is of The Evil Dead series. That's going to change in a little over a week, when Raimi, Tapert, and Bruce bring Ash back for a new series. They've hinted it could be more than just a one-off, but I'm looking forward to seeing how Ashley J. Williams has been living in a post-Army of Darkness world. Well, also one where they aren't allowed to say "S-Mart" or have a metal hand because Universal won't let them use anything specifically from Army of Darkness. I've tried to steer clear of learning too much about it, but Bruce is looking good and it appears to be tonally similar to Dead by Dawn. Bring it, I says. Then I'll have to update this sucker again...

* The issue for The Crow was the "raped" part of "criminals rape and kill the hero's girlfriend before killing him."
** Long time Blogorium readers are already aware that the Cap'n had been exposed to Blade Runner, Downtown, Aliens, and Animal House at a much younger age. For that matter, they would take me with them to see the much harder "R" Alien 3 later that year...
*** Sorry, I know we had to watch more than those movies, but for the life of me I can't think of one right now and I know we DID watch Pecker at least once...

Shocktober Revisited: Mini-Reviews!

 Sometimes, horror movies get rolled up in other quick reviews, and accordingly can be missed. The following quick takes are from various points over the years, so the quality of the review(s) can vary wildly:

Die, Monster, Die! - Based on H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space in the same way that The Haunted Palace is based on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (loosely), this AIP production has some effective imagery, but finds a way to drag on long enough to make 78 minutes feel like two hours. It's not lacking in atmosphere, and Boris Karloff certainly gives as much as he possibly can (which is saying something, as the actor was in poor enough health that he spends most of the film confined to a wheelchair), but I had trouble remembering much about the film hours after finishing it.

 Lovecraft's town of Arkham, Massachusetts, is relocated to England so that American student Stephen Rinehart (Nick Adams) can travel to the Whitley manor on the outskirts of town. Nobody in Arkham wants to talk to him about the Whitleys, nor will they provide him with any means of transportation, so Rinehart has to walk. It gives us the opportunity to see the desolate lands on the outskirts of the manor, and what looks like a huge crater, surrounded by dead trees that crumble to dust when touched. After dodging a bear trap at the gate, he enters the Whitley manor to find himself unwelcome by its patriarch, Nahum Whitley (Karloff), despite having been invited by Nahum's daughter, Susan (Suzan Farmer).

 Something is obviously very wrong at the Whitley house, and Nahum's wife Letitia begs Stephen to take Susan away (they were students at an unnamed university in the U.S.), against Nahum's objections. Letitia is bedridden and refuses to let anyone see her, and Nahum is opposed to taking her to a doctor in town. Their maid went insane and lurks around the grounds under a black veil, and their butler Merwyn (Terence de Marney) is barely capable of lifting silverware without collapsing. A strange glow is coming from the (locked) greenhouse, and it's rumored that Nahum's father, Corbin Whitley, practiced black magic (because, you know, it kind of makes it sound like it's connected to The Haunted Palace, maybe?), which seems to be confirmed from the artwork scrawled in the cellar of the mansion.

 Unfortunately, for all of the mystery surrounding the Whitleys and what writer Jerry Sohl cobbled together from The Colour Out of Space and more topical concerns (circa 1965) about radiation, Die, Monster, Die! is mostly a movie about wandering around a spooky house with candles until something jumps out. Audiences who bemoan "jump" scares in modern horror films will roll their eyes at no less than three such moments in Die, Monster, Die!, all of which have the bad form to continue well after it's clear they aren't scary. There are some nice images - the matte painting of the meteor crash looks very good, and the "zoo" of deformed creatures / aliens (it's never very clear) in the greenhouse "shed" make an impression, but the pacing of the film drags on endlessly.

 Lovecraft fans will, in all likelihood, not enjoy the explanation given to why the meteorite causes strange and horrible things to happen to the vegetation (SPOILER - it's Uranium) or the way that Die, Monster, Die! devolves into a "we have to fight the monster before we escape," wherein Boris Karloff is replaced by a stuntman wearing a glowing prototype of the "Green Man" outfit under his suit. I honestly can't remember if they even explain what happens to the maid after she tries to attack Stephen and falls down, but it's not the kind of plot point I'm even worried about following up on. While I've seen worse adaptations of Lovecraft stories, I'd be hard pressed to say I've seen one that's more of a slog to get through than this one.

Terminal Invasion - Cranpire's love of this film used to vex me. Admittedly, I'd only seen it in pieces on the Sci-Fi Channel and it looked like their run of the mill crap, just with Bruce Campbell. Now that I've watched the whole thing, I can understand why he enjoys it so much. Kind of.

I'll give credit where credit's due: director Sean S. Cunningham (Friday the 13th) is a more competent director than most of the "Sci-Fi Original" stable of no-names. Terminal Invasion is a cross between Pitch Black and John Carpenter's The Thing, with a small dose of Assault on Precinct 13 thrown in for good measure, and Cunningham rises to the occasion. For what's essentially a ripoff of other sci-fi / horror movies, it's pretty good. There's certainly no fat on this movie, so every scene exists to set up something later.

The story takes place on a snowy night while a small band of travelers are trapped in a charter plane lobby. Campbell is a criminal being transferred who ends up in their midst, along with some nasty alien invaders disguised as humans. You can figure out where it goes from there if you've seen any of the movies above.

What I appreciated about Terminal Invasion is the way it sets up twists in the story based on things you assume to be true at the beginning. While I was pretty sure I knew who was an alien and who wasn't (and was mostly right), there's at least one genuine surprise halfway into the movie. Cunningham uses the limited geography of the terminal to telegraph plot points later, which I find to be rare of Sci-Fi Originals.

That being said, this is still a made for TV movie, and it shows. Most sets are over-lit so that shooting can commence from any angle, so even the dark scenes are pretty bright. The cgi, while used sparingly, is still five or six steps below the early Nasonex commercials. At least twice during Terminal Invasion, the movie "Fades to Commercial", and it looks silly without actual commercials.

However, most of these are acceptable if considered in the context of how Terminal Invasion came to be. The unfortunate cost cutting exercise comes during "attack" scenes involving the aliens. The camera is normally pretty stable, but when the aliens attack there's a postproduction "herky-jerky" effect that just looks dirt cheap.

Still, with expectations set properly, Terminal Invasion is pretty good for what it is, and I'd probably watch it again. Bruce is pretty good despite having to play the "stoic" type for most of the movie. Not many wisecracks to be seen here, but there is some decent gore and Terminal Invasion would be good times with a six pack and your buddies.

Dark Shadows and Frankenweenie - Tim Burton continues along his path of "things you recognize, re-imagined by a director you really used to like" by adapting the long running gothic soap opera Dark Shadows and his own short film, Frankenweenie, but this time it's stop-motion animated and three times as long.

Are you ready for the shocker? I actually liked Dark Shadows more than Frankenweenie. Nobody else did, but Dark Shadows isn't nearly as horrible as I expected it to be, and instead of nonstop jokes about the 1970s, it's a surprisingly atmospheric and violent meditation on family ties. That said, it has too many characters, superfluous cameos that really don't move the plot forward (Alice Cooper, I'm looking at you), and while it's better than I was prepared for, that doesn't mean it's even close to the best Tim Burton is capable of. I suppose after being disappointed by Sweeney Todd, Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Corpse Bride, the idea of a marginally entertaining Tim Burton film was refreshing. That said, everybody else seems to hate it, so be warned.

 Frankenweenie could be better if Burton could figure out how to stretch a 30 minute short film into a full narrative, but he didn't. Basically the structure of the original Frankenweenie has been elongated and stitched together with a clever pastiche of Joe Dante-esque "monsters run amok" - including the best (and possibly only) Bambi Meets Godzilla reference I can remember. Unfortunately, the first forty five minutes drag so much that it's more of a relief than a delight when the reanimated pets wreak havoc all over New Holland. I will say it was nice to (hear) Catherine O'Hara, Martin Short, and Winona Ryder return to the Burton-verse, but ultimately Frankenweenie overstays its welcome before it has the chance to be any fun.

 Zombeavers - I didn't go into Zombeavers expecting it to be any good. This sounds counter-intuitive with what I said earlier in the recaps about trying to avoid bad movies, but I didn't watch Sharknado and this seemed like it might be an acceptable substitute. I mean, it couldn't possibly get better than the poster, or the inherently stupid premise, right? It would quickly get lazy and then I would get bored, like I normally do with Syfy Originals or movies that look like that (*coughTheAsylumreleasescough*).

 So imagine my surprise to discover that Zombeavers is a (slightly) higher budgeted version of a movie like Blood Car or Rise of the Animals. True, this is not a scrappy, home made production - how could it be with a "From the Producers of American Pie, Cabin Fever, and The Ring" on the poster? - but it has the same anarchic spirit of those movies. At times, it's actually as bad as those can be, but what helps Zombeavers (a lot, actually) is that every time you think it's not worth sticking through, something you wouldn't expect either happens or comes out of someone's mouth. Either the film takes a truly unexpected turn - which it does - or one of the characters has a line that evokes a "wait, what?" and you don't mind sticking around.

 I felt like I was in pretty good hands during the prologue, which features Bill Burr and an unrecognizable John Mayer (yep, "Your Body is a Wonderland"'s John Mayer) as drivers hauling around chemical waste and shooting the shit, often in increasingly strange ways. They eventually hit a deer, which leads to a barrel of said chemicals rolling down into a stream and to (dun dun DUUUUNNN) a beaver dam. Because, yes, this is a movie about zombie beavers. Or Zombeavers, if you will. Also, there are three college students: Mary (Rachel Melvin), Zoe (Courtney Palm), and Jenn (Lexi Atkins), who are having a "girls' weekend" in order to forget about Mary's boyfriend Sam (Hutch Dano) cheating on her. But he shows up anyway, with Tommy (Jake Weary) and Buck (Peter Gilroy) in tow, so it becomes a slightly uncomfortable couples weekend. With Zombeavers.

 You might struggle through the "set up" part of the film, and I nearly turned it off while the girls were on the way to the cabin, but some of the lines are so out of left field that I stuck with it. The tone is borderline surreal, from the "is this serious" hunter (Rex Linn) that they run into, to the neighbors near the cabin (Brent Briscoe and Phyllis Katz), who turn out to be way more savvy about kids than you'd expect. And there's a bear, but mostly, it's the Zombeavers. Which look like nothing more than marginally articulated puppets and are hilarious. You see, sometimes a cheap looking monster can elevate a B-Movie from "that was okay" to "that was amazing," and the titular zombified beavers are worth the price of admission. It doesn't hurt that Zombeavers gets even weirder when the "rules of infection" kick in, but the monsters are the stars of the show. Stick around after the credits - which include a song about the movie that puts Richard Cheese to shame - for an even better zombie related pun. If it sets up a sequel, I could be onboard with that, but if not, well played, Jordan Rubin...

 John Dies at the End -This is a faithful adaptation of David Wong's novel by Don Coscarelli (Phantasm, Bubba Ho-Tep), at least for the first half. The film gets to about the halfway point in the book, and then realizes it has thirty minutes to wrap up the rest of the story, so liberties are taken. Honestly, I didn't mind them, because I knew what was being condensed and most of the spirit is kept intact.

 That said, I totally understand why people who haven't read John Dies at the End don't like the movie. There's a sense of context that's missing from the film as it hurtles towards its conclusion that further confuses the comedy / horror tone and probably loses a lot of people. If you haven't read the book, I wouldn't watch the movie at all. You're going to hate it because of how it collapses in the last thirty minutes. If you have read the book, know Coscarelli mostly made sensible changes (not going to Vegas, diminishing Amy's role in the overall story, dropping certain elements of Korrok's plan), and made at least one I don't really understand (changing Molly's name), and two I don't know how I feel about (no Fred Durst and John's band doesn't sound nearly as bad as I thought it would). I dig John Dies at the End, and if it ever happens, I'd watch This Book (Movie?) is Filled with Spiders, although with what they had to do on a low budget here, I can't imagine that ever happening. That's a shame.

 World War Z - One could suppose that if Warm Bodies was a zombie movie for teenage girls, then World War Z is a zombie movie for people who vaguely know the word "zombie" in popular culture. It's not even really a horror movie - more of an action / disaster hybrid with a redesigned third act that inches towards suspense but still ends up like a tamer 28 Days Later. And I watched the "unrated" version, for the record. I can only imagine how toothless World War Z must have been in theaters. Still, it has a scrappy, amiable charm for a big budgeted blockbuster studio "tent pole" movie.

 Based almost not at all on the book of the same name by Max Brooks, World War Z is the story of Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), a retired UN investigator living with his family, until the zombie outbreak begins, that is. Then the Deputy Secretary General Thierry Umutoni (Fana Mokoena) brings him back in to travel around the world and see what caused the outbreak, from South Korea to Israel and eventually to a World Health Organization research center in Ireland. Separated from his family, and with continually dwindling support, Gerry finds that the zombie outbreak is capable of overcoming even the most fortified of cities, and unless they can find a cure, humanity is doomed.


 World War Z is essentially a travelogue designed to show off various big action set pieces, which director Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, Quantum of Solace) does fairly well, and which Brad Pitt responds to with a reasonable sense of urgency. The zombies are sometimes people in makeup but are usually great swaths of CGI mayhem, particularly during the siege of Jerusalem. The movie makes an abrupt turn in the section in Ireland, due in large part because the delay in World War Z's release had everything to do with the third act not working, so they scrapped the original ending in Russia and went with a more sparse, claustrophobic ending. It works, although you can see loose threads of plot line in the film as a result - the main example is Matthew Fox's UN soldier who doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose other than to help move Gerry's family around, but who in the original version "takes" his wife and daughter as his own. Now it just seems like an oddly high profile casting choice for a minor role at best. Doctor Who fans already know the prescient casting of Peter Capaldi as the WHO Doctor (that IS how he appears in the credits).

 There's not really much else to say about the movie. I thought it was watchable, if mostly average. The story behind the movie is more interesting than the finished product. The survival bits near the beginning and towards the end are good, but have been done better before. All of the big action sequences are bombastic and if you like explosions and zombies and some degree of violence, the unrated cut is certainly worth your time. It's popcorn fare through and through, which is fine and dandy every now and then, but I can't imagine that I'd be all that enthused for World War Z 2.

The ABCs of Death 2 - is like V/H/S 2 in that it takes everything that worked about the first film, jettisoned most of what didn't, and was more fun to watch. The premise is still the same: twenty six directors each receive a letter from the alphabet, and have free reign to come up with a 2-3 minute short film that conveys a word and, in some form or fashion, death. The ABCs of Death had some interesting entries ("Unearthed" was a good one), but leaned heavily on scatological humor ("F is for Fart" was the tip of the iceberg, it turned out), and then there were the "oh, I didn't need to see that, not ever" letters. Like "Libido" and "Pressure." It turns out there are things you might want to un-see, and several of them are in The ABCs of Death.

The ABCs of Death 2, by comparison, has nothing as traumatic, and I would suspect it would play a lot better with an audience than the first one did. Watching that one at Nevermore, there was a lot of... shall I say, stunned silence as the film went on. There are certainly some "what the hell was that?" parts in the sequel, but nothing you're going to apologize for exposing someone to. The only thing that comes close is the last segment, "Z is for Zygote," which is centered around an already unforgettable image that closes on an even more disturbing note. I know that people don't like "P is for P-P-P-P-Scary!" but I thought it had an unhinged quality, somewhere between the weirder Betty Boop cartoons and Black Lodge-era David Lynch, that worked for me.

 As with the first film, you'll find highlights ("A is for Amateur") and lowlights ("V is for Vacation"), but there's nothing in The ABCs of Death that comes close to 2's "M is for Masticate," a slow motion gross out with a wicked joke at the end. There's also "D is for Deloused," which reminded me a bit of a Brothers Quay short. I'll leave most of the discovery for you, but if you kind of liked the first film, I strongly suspect you'll enjoy this one more.

 Horns - I feel like there's a better movie somewhere in Alexandre Aja's Horns. Maybe it got lost in the editing, or maybe it's just inherent in the adaptation of Joe Hill's novel, but the finished product just don't quite work. It's as though Aja made a bitterly funny, black comedy, and also made a more generic, teen-friendly story of good and evil, and then smashed them together at the worst possible junctures. For the opening twenty minutes of Horns, you're probably going to think the movie is great: it has a wicked mean streak, Daniel Radcliffe is spot on as a guy everyone thinks is a murderer, that embraces the horns he grows and the power that comes with it. The way people react, first telling him their darkest fantasies and then acting on them when he says they should, is often hilarious.


 And then we hit the first of what turn out to be several, lengthy, flashbacks, giving us the backstory of Ig (Radcliffe) and Merrin (Juno Temple), leading up to her death - the one everyone assumes Ig is responsible for. Everyone, including his family - played by James Remar, Kathleen Quinlan, and Joe Anderson - is positive he did it and that he's lying, with the exception of his friend, Lee (Max Minghella). The "whodunit" is pretty easy to work out for yourself, even if Aja, Hill, and screenwriter Keith Bunin throw in a number of red herrings. I bet, without telling you anything else, you can guess who the real killer is. That's not the problem, so much as the flashbacks that put the mystery together. There's a massive tonal shift from black comedy to slightly tragic story of temptation and of good and evil (on a biblical scale), and for some reason, ne'er the twain shall meet in Horns.

 I can understand how it might have worked in Hill's novel - which I haven't yet read, but plan to - but as a film, the structure of the story is at times jarring and disruptive. Maybe there was no way to properly balance the two in a film, because Horns alternates between wicked and bland, between clever and obvious, without ever finding a good middle ground. There are some fantastic moments sprinkled throughout the film, and the cast is game for anything, playing both the best and worst versions of themselves as they encounter "evil" Ig, but Horns gets away from them. It's never quite the movie that it could be, so I'm left feeling ambivalent with the end result.

 The Innkeepers - From Ti West, the director of The House of the Devil, comes another slow burn horror film where tension continues mounting and the sense of dread is palpable. Instead of replicating the horror of the early 1980s, West's "haunted hotel" follow-up is set squarely in the present, and he's just as adept at creeping you out with slow tracking shots, suggested noises, and believable characters you relate to. Sara Paxton's Claire is a young woman without much of a clue what she want to do or be, who becomes way too interested in Luke (Pat Healy)'s hobby: ghost hunting. She's fixated on finding the spirit of Madeline O'Malley, a bride who killed herself in the hotel in the 1890s.

 On the last weekend that the Yankee Padler hotel is open, Luke and Claire trade off shifts, watching over the last remaining hotel tenants - former actress / new age guru Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis) and a mysterious Old Man (George Riddle) - while they hunt for evidence of O'Malley's presence. West doles out the scares slowly but surely, and only towards the very end do things go the way most horror films go. In fact, if there's any fault to be found in The Innkeepers, it's that what comes before and after the climax of the film are undermined ever so slightly by what we know HAS to happen, even if the subtle clues of why it happens don't always add up. Without spoiling too much, I can say that the film is an example of the kind of movie 1408 could have been, one that eschews cheap histrionics and trickery and deliberately ratchets up the "willies" factor.

 Fans of The House of the Devil are going to find a lot to love about The Inkeepers, but if you like your horror fast and relentless, this may seem a little slow for your tastes. For me? Let's just say I had to watch something else after I finished it, because I wasn't going to bed.

Shocktober Revisited: More Brains and Swallowed Souls

editor's note: this was originally posted in November of 2011.
 
 I finally caught up on some horror documentaries, specifically More Brains: A Return to the Living Dead and Swallowed Souls: The Making of Evil Dead 2. The former you might have heard of; the latter is more incentive to pick up Lionsgate's 25th Anniversary Edition of Sam Raimi's splatter classic.

 Dan O'Bannon fans will be elated and disappointed while watching More Brains - the film reunites most of the surviving cast and crew members (including the special effects artist fired halfway through the film), but until the very end, O'Bannon - who passed in 2009 - is absent from the oral history of Return of the Living Dead. There's a lot of talking about O'Bannon, often in conflicting narratives (he was too demanding, too aloof; he was easy to work with and open to suggestions), but only in the closing moments does the writer / director have a chance to speak to the film's cult status. In what was his final interview, O'Bannon is candid about the audience embrace of the film and its legacy, and makes a knowing comment about "if I die tomorrow" before the film goes to credits.

 The story of the making of Return of the Living Dead from John Russo (producer / writer of Night of the Living Dead)'s original pitch to the decision of Hemdale Films to hire Dan O'Bannon to write and direct the film as a horror comedy, from casting to premieres, is an affair filled with gossip, contradictory stories, and debates about whether Clu Gulager really threw a can at the director in a fit of rage. I'm tempted to share anecdotes from the cast, or to mention the ongoing bad blood between the production designer (William Stout) and first make-up effects (William Munns) over the inadequate zombie masks and "headless zombie" appliance. The memories are sometimes contentious, sometimes defensive, but always entertaining. More Brains: A Return to the Living Dead is well worth the time of fans of Return of the Living Dead.

---

 Meanwhile, I'd like to thank a video store in the mall that will go unnamed until later this week for erroneously placing two copies of the 25th Anniversary Blu-Ray of Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn the weekend before the disc is actually released (it comes out tomorrow). I've bemoaned the endless re-releasing of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead films on DVD before, and we're seeing the first instance of "double-dipping" in high definition for the trilogy. As Anchor Bay closes (or whatever is going on with Anchor Bay) and their catalog is divvied up by Image Entertainment and Lionsgate, we're likely to see another release of The Evil Dead before long, and I find it hard to believe that Universal's underwhelming "Screwhead Edition" of Army of Darkness is the be-all-end-all of HD releases.

 But for now, let's look at the Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn 25th Anniversary double-dip. As a sucker for supplements, I must admit the list of extras seemed very promising - collections of featurette's about the casing, effects, conception, direction, and filming. When I put the disc in, I didn't realize that all of these individually listed extras were part of one 98 minute documentary, Swallowed Souls. It's reminiscent of segments of Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, and is broken into chapters complete with claymation vignettes to bridge them.

 Like More Brains, the primary element lacking in Swallowed Souls is the presence of Sam Raimi. It's not as though his presence isn't felt, because the "making of" footage shot by Greg Nicotero features young Sam Raimi in abundance, but he's noticeably absent from the proceedings. On the other hand, the doc features an abundance of newly shot interviews with Bruce Campbell, who speaks candidly about Evil Dead 2 and shares stories I don't think I've heard anywhere, including in If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor. Swallowed Souls also prominently features the rest of the leads of Evil Dead 2: Sarah Berry (Annie), Dan Hicks (Jake), Kassie Wesley (Bobbi Joe), Richard Dormeier (Ed) and Ted Raimi (Possessed Henrietta). Hearing their perspective on making the film is in and of itself a treat - many of them had no idea what they were in for.

 The entire makeup effects team, including Mark Shostrom (From Beyond, A Nightmare one Elm Street Part 2) and the first time in years that I've seen all three members of KNB (Robert Kurtzman, Greg Nicotero, and Howard Berger) on camera talking about a project they worked on together*. Their camcorder footage, which documents the conception of Evil Dead 2's effects all the way through the film's production, are a treasure trove of unseen footage from Wadesboro, North Carolina in 1986. They gleefully exploit their creations and play around with camera tricks, mimicking Raimi's "evil force" camera shots.

 So here's where it gets tough - do you want to drop another $14 for Evil Dead 2 to see an admittedly great "making of" documentary? If you still have the Anchor Bay disc, you'll notice that The Gore the Merrier is still included, the commentary is still included, and I'm not sure that the picture is that much different. The price is fair so if you don't already have Evil Dead 2 on Blu-Ray this is a no-brainer, but wary double dippers are going to have to ask themselves if the making of justifies buying the film again. I will say that if it were released on its own, Swallowed Souls would be worth picking up in the same way as Halloween: 25 Years of Terror or His Name was Jason are. Evil Dead fans, prepare yourselves for the impending moral quandary. I don't regret it, but I also have the added bonus of picking the disc up early...


 * Since Kurtzman moved on to create his own production company, it's common just to see Nicotero and Berger appearing in "making of" documentaries that KNB did makeup effects for.

Bad Movie Night 2014 Recap (Part One)

 It's an off and off tradition here at the Blogorium to take a Saturday in April and devote it to some of the very least that cinema has to offer. I try to keep the "bad" movies entertaining, and generally speaking am successful, but these one day events are strictly for the willing. I'm not going to promise you're going to have a good time, but the door is also unlocked. That last part will be important in a little bit. Previous Bad Movie Nights have included titles like Mac and Me, Troll 2, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, Hard Ticket to Hawaii, She Devil, and Masters of the Universe. I don't always go for the low hanging fruit (okay, we did watch Batman & Robin the first year), but if you're going to sift through the best of the worst, it helps to have some familiar titles.

 The following winners comprised our 2014 edition, which to date includes the most infamous, most hated of all Bad Movie Night entries. And I knew it would. And none of them left. Remember that.

 We didn't start out at the bottom, but The Neanderthal Man isn't exactly high art. I like to kick off BMN's (and Summer Fests) with a B-Movie from the 1950s, particularly one with questionable "science." In The Neanderthal Man, Professor Clifford Groves (Robert Shane) is furious that his colleagues won't accept his theory that primitive man was as intelligent (or more) than modern man. And why won't they take him seriously? Only because he admits he has no proof for this theory. None. But, it turns out, he does! Using "science," Professor Groves has invented a serum that activates a regressive state in cats (and later, in humans), turning cats into sabretooth Tigers and his deaf / mute / illiterate housekeeper into Tim Curry from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

 The Neanderthal Man is a hoot; it's a hodgepodge of borrowed sets (why the mountains of California hosts a cafe that looks suspiciously like an Old West saloon, complete with cowboys, is never addressed), mismatched footage (the tiger is clearly just a tiger, complete with chain in most shots, and in close ups is a stuffed animal with tusks to indicate it's not just a tiger loose in the mountains of California). Groves' fiance Ruth Marshall (Doris Merrick) is partial to long winded monologues about the meaning of love and science that make it feel like the screenwriters thought five dollar words literally translated to five dollars per word. The titular creature that Groves becomes is clearly wearing a mask and sometimes forgets to put his hairy gloves on. He has a grown daughter, Jan (Joyce Terry), and wears a wedding ring, but has a fiance. Jan only owns one dress and wears it for the entire movie, which takes place over a few days. Groves kicks out a zoologist (Richard Crane) who investigates the shenanigans, but doesn't bat an eye when he's back in their house the next day and the day after that. It's the perfect recipie of "let's get this done and get it in drive-ins" that kicks things off in the right spirit.

 After that, we transitioned to one of the most requested Bad Movie Night entries: Gymkata. At movie designed to capitalize on Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas, it's a perfect example of nothing really working in a movie, and yet still being quite entertaining. Thomas plays Jonathan Cabot, whose father disappeared during a super secret challenge in the nonexistent Eastern European country of Parmistan. In addition to being a gymnast, Cabot is also a spy, so he infiltrates the competition with the help of Princess Rubali (former Playboy model Tetchie Agbayani), who doesn't say anything for the first fifteen minutes, but when she does, you realize why. He father, The Kahn (Buck Kartalian), who looks and acts like a character Mel Brooks would be playing, rules Parmistan, but his Australian right hand man Zamir (Richard Norton, back when Australians were the bad guys, before Crocodile Dundee) is plotting a coup and using the games as a ruse to set it in motion... or something.

 Following a lengthy training montage that never mentions that "gymkata" is the style Cabot uses (a combination of gymnastics and karate) and his ability to walk up stairs while doing a handstand (never used again in the movie), John and the Princess are off to Parmistan to be betrayed in a salt mine, float down a river, be captured, and eventually rejoin The Kahn who apparently was expecting them. Yeah, don't expect coherent through lines in this movie. Just look for hanging bars or pommel horses, because Cabot seems to find them just when he needs to attack many people who happily stand there and let him kick them while swinging. I feel bad for the poor, toothless people of Bulgaria who stood in for citizens of Parmistan - they're clearly excited to be in a movie, but at least one of them is knocked over by a horse on camera and they kept it in the film! The entire fictional country is treated like a shithole that these foreign combatants need to survive through, including the closed off city of the insane, which is at least the most surreal part of a film that involves Kurt Thomas climbing a rope while holding his legs straight out for no good reason. I can understand why we never saw a Gymkata 2, or any other action vehicles starring Thomas. Still, quite amusing in a stupid way.

 The Demolitionist, on paper, sounds like a movie geek's dream come true. Directed by Robert Kurtzman (the "K" in KNB visual effects, and also the creator of From Dusk Till Dawn), this quasi-Robocop knock-off exists in its own heightened reality where "over the top" isn't quite good enough for the cast. Oh, and did I mention the cast includes Susan Tyrell (Forbidden Zone), Tom Savini (Dawn of the Dead), Jack Nance (Eraserhead), Reggie Bannister (Phantasm), Heather Langenkamp (A Nightmare on Elm Street), Bruce Abbott (Re-Animator), Joe Pilato (Day of the Dead), a young Derek Mears (Jason Voorhees from Shit Coffin), and an uncredited Bruce Campbell (Crimewave)? Yes, it's a dream come true, until you realize that most of them are barely in the movie.

 Instead, we spend most of our time with Nicole Eggert (Blown Away) and Richard Greico (Point Doom) as the titular Demolitionist and the bad guy, respectively. And wow, do they not know how to play camp like the rest of the cast. I'm not sure what Kurtzman was thinking, but these two blocks of oak drag down everything that could be fun about The Demolitionist and quickly explain why you've never heard of this movie before. Eggert plays undercover cop Alyssa Lloyd, who is seriously injured by "Mad Dog" Burne (Grieco), and dies in the hospital. Her partner takes a bullet point blank to the brain but somehow lives (he also kind of looks like Crispin Glover, but isn't). Burne is one half of a brother team who has a sadistic side and loves brazen daylight robberies (Kurtzman apparently has a favorite "type" here, since you're going to think about how much cooler the Gecko brothers are than the Burnes). When his brother dies from electrified pee (don't ask), he decides to... I don't know. Kill the mayor (Tyrell), replace her with the corrupt chief of police (Peter Jason, wearing a leftover costume from Demolition Man and otherwise known as "that guy!") and generally continue to run wild with his biker gang (which includes Mears, Savini, Campbell, as well as a Greg Nicotero /Howard Berger cameo two-fer).

 But science can bring Alyssa back! Professor Jack Crowley (Abbott) injects nanobots into her bloodstream and she becomes a super cop - for a while, until she needs more injections or she'll rot. There's a LOT of "do I want to be like this" and contemplative staring from Eggert, or maybe she just forgot her lines. I don't know. The potential for The Demolitionist to be schlocky fun pretty much fizzles out before it gains any momentum, so by the time Bruce shows up it becomes the highlight of the movie as you a) recognize him, b) debate whether you really saw him, and c) hear his one line and realize that it is, in fact, Bruce Campbell to save the day. And then he dies when the Demolitionist kills everybody in the biker gang. It's almost as lame as the wasted potential of abandoning a little girl holding two live grenades. Such a shame.

 Peering into the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I returned with Doctor Strange, starring Johnny Depp and directed by Tim Burton. Now that I've sent half of you away squealing with joy and the other hand angrily stomping off to complain on a comic book forum, we actually watched the almost totally forgotten 1978 TV movie version of Dr. Strange. It's 80% origin story, 10% magical showdown, and 10% setup for the continuing adventures of Stephen Strange that television audiences never got. And yet, Stan Lee contends that the only reason that Dr. Strange didn't do well was that it aired opposite Roots.

 Were that true, Dr. Strange might have been a curious case for counter-programming, but the truth is that the movie is just pretty bad. It mostly meanders through its plot, about Morgan LeFay (Arrested Development's Jessica Walter, looking way hotter than you'd ever want Lucille Bluth to) trying to destory Thomas Lindmer (Special Guest Star John Mills) - split his name up and you'll get it - with Clea Lake (Anne-Marie Martin, of The Boogens fame) and Dr. Stephen Strange (Peter Hooten, of The Inglorious Bastards, but looking suspiciously like John Holmes) caught in the middle or their mystical feud. Morgan's demon master sounds like Bane and has an unfortunate stop-motion mouth, while Merlin - er, Lindmer - just has Wong (Clyde Kusatsu), his butler / assistant.

Most of the movie takes place at the hospital where Strange works, and after LeFay possesses Clea and uses her to push Merlin off of a bridge (which doesn't kill him, because he uses his regenerative Time Lord magic powers to get up and walk away), she ends up in the psych ward. Strange tries to help her, ends up meeting Merlin and fighting Morgan (in the last fifteen minutes of a 90 minute movie) and gets two magical costumes, one worse than the other. There are sources of amusement to be drawn from New York in the 1970s, including a prominently featured Seinfeld Book store that hints at what's to come in television. But unless you're a fan of Doctor Strange - and I must admit, I didn't know much about him - this isn't going to ring your bell. People who know Jessica Walter from Archer or Arrested Development will probably enjoy this, although it's going to feel weird seeing her in so many low-cut dresses and showing so much leg. On the other hand, I spent most of Dr. Strange trying to figure out why I recognized Clea, and now I know it's because of my fondness for The Boogens... Oh, The Boogens.

 We're only at the halfway mark, gang! I'll be back tomorrow to wrap it up with A Talking Cat?!?, Mutilations, Things, and Samurai Cop!

"O" is for Oz - The Great and Powerful

 Allow me to begin with a seemingly unrelated anecdote: the reason I was hesitant to write a full review of The Hobbit last December was that when I found myself describing it to friends, I almost always began by saying "well, it's not as bad as you've heard it is." Beginning a review from a defensive position is tricky, and I find it's much more helpful when you have the benefit of time and context to help support enjoying a film with strong assumptions about its quality or lack thereof (see Retro Reviews of Tron and Dazed and Confused, both of which refute the most common stereotypes surrounding the films.)

 Meanwhile, movies that are more recent exist in the echo chamber that is the internet, where everything sucks more than it might actually and movies that are considered to be very good to great will also suck in a year's time*. So movies that are good but not great or that generally succeed in being entertaining for the target audience - let's say, kids - from directors held to impossibly high standards are therefore "total crap" and "a waste of time."

 And so the Cap'n finds himself in the unenviable position of explaining to you that while Sam Raimi's Oz - The Great and Powerful is nowhere as good as we thought we deserved, it's still a mostly harmless bit of Disney-fied Raimi as anyone should reasonably expect. Considering that trying to make anything tied to The Wizard of Oz without anything specifically trademarked in the MGM film (which, let's be honest, is where more people base their knowledge of Oz than Baum's novels), it's an admirable, if flawed, end result.


  Being that it's a prequel, I'm guessing you know that Oz - the Great and Powerful doesn't have Dorothy or the Tin Man or the Scarecrow or the Cowardly Lion (well, the latter two in a form you'd recognize, anyway) but it does have a young version of the Wizard - Oscar Diggs (James Franco) is a carnival con-artists and serial ladies man who finds himself in the wrong hot air balloon during the wrong tornado in Kansas and ends up in Oz. You might have heard of it. He meets three witches - Theodora (Mila Kunis), Evanora (Rachel Weisz) and later, Glinda (Michelle Williams) - one of whom will be a Wicked Witch of the West by the end of the film. Can you guess which one?

 SPOILER - It's Glinda. Totally Glinda. Those bubbles are toxic, man.

 Since Oscar isn't the Wizard we know yet, that means he has some adventures with characters not appearing in that other Oz movie (and also not that OTHER Oz movie or the OTHER OTHER OZ movie - sorry Tik-Tok and Pumpkinhead), so we meet some other Baum characters or variations thereof, like Finley (Zach Braff), a talking money who wears a bell-hop's uniform, and China Girl (Joey King) who is thankfully not a racist stereotype but is instead a little girl made of china. Also there's Knuck (Tony Cox), who I mention because it amuses me that the only thing he really wants to do is play a fanfare and nobody will let him.

 They have adventures, etc, and then Oz becomes the Great and Powerful by slaying the Jabberwocky... wait. Wrong Disney reboot of a famous children's novel turned movie. Actually Oz - The Great and Powerful manages to resolve itself without a huge battle, which puts it a notch above similar relaunches of crap that was for kids but is now bad-ass action (Snow White and the Huntsman, Jack the Giant Slayer, Alice in Wonderland). There's some ingenuity and good old fashioned misdirection to Oscar's plan that logically places him where we remember the Wizard from that other movie we can't see the likenesses of characters from. Hence the "sexy" Wicked Witch.

 I know, I know - I'm making it sound as bad as you assumed it was. The truth is that Oz - The Great and Powerful does a few things very right and plays it safe in a lot of other ways, and the end result is pleasant but mostly forgettable. It's summer popcorn fare a little bit earlier than usual and I suspect children love it. Good for them. It's not a timeless classic but it's a LOT better than I was expecting considering Alice's Adventures in Narnia is its spiritual ancestor in this round of "what property do we have people remember fondly?" If Oz - The Great and Powerful HAD to happen, this is at least a better version of it than I'd anticipated. There are some nice homages to the film done within legal parameters and I appreciated the Academy Aspect Ratio that opens the film (black and white, full frame, not sepia. We don't want to upset the ghost of Louis B. Mayer!)

  Also, when you compare it to the Raimi-produced Evil Dead remake, Oz - The Great and Powerful is a LOT better!

 Speaking of Evil Dead movies -  I'm not sure why people are clamoring so much for Army of Darkness 2 when it seems pretty clear to me that, like he did from Evil Dead to Evil Dead 2, Raimi remade the film and Disney slapped a different title on it. Make no mistake, were this film to star a younger Bruce Campbell and not James Franco (The Ape), you'd be wondering why Ash was fighting flying monkeys and non Deadites. But how, you ask? Allow me to explain:

 Both Army of Darkness and Oz - The Great and Powerful have a protagonist who is basically a good guy but who has some serious character flaws. Both are sucked through a vortex to another time / place and they immediately agree to the assumption that they are the great savior everybody has been waiting for. They take advantage of this for a brief period of time before being sent off on a quest that will rid the land of evil, and subsequently fail to do what they set out to do (yes, the reasons are different, but stick with me). They rally a small group of willing locals to fight a witch they were somewhat to directly responsible in creating and use modern science to overcome their foes. The only difference is that one leaves and the other one terrorizes a lion he will one day bestow courage onto. Also another witch turns into the "Raimi Hag" after being defeated, and will eventually be crushed by a house.

 (I couldn't find "The Classic" but have heard it's somewhere in there, despite the fact that Raimi's Oldsmobile would stick out like a sore thumb in turn of the twentieth century Kansas or in the land of Oz)

 I'd like to point out that I disagree with the common held argument that James Franco is wrong for the Oscar Diggs / the Wizard but that Robert Downey, Jr. (initially cast) or Johnny Depp (approached after Downey left) would have been better choices. While hating James Franco is almost as in vogue as hating Anne Hathaway or Kristen Stewart, he brings the right kind of sleazy but affable charm to the role. I like that he has his con man act down, and he's a non-threatening sort of lothario - charming but ultimately incapable of much more than skipping town.

 Robert Downey, Jr. has, for all intents and purposes, been showing us what his version of Oscar Diggs would be like since Iron Man - and to be frank, his presence would be overpowering in this movie. He's sweep in to Oz like a human tornado, chewing the scenery and owning the place from the moment he arrived, and it would, quite frankly, rob the reveal of "the Wizard" at the end of much of its power.

 Similarly, bringing Johnny Depp in would for Oz - The Great and Powerful into one of two directions - either Oscar Diggs would end up an eccentric when the audience desperately needs a protagonist who is closer to normal or we'd end up with the toned-down Johnny Depp of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, a leading man he was never meant to play. You bring in Depp for eccentricity, because when he plays the straight man or is forced to carry a film like this without being quirky, it collapses on itself.

 Not to mention furthering the connections between Oz - The Great and Powerful and The Tim Burton Players Present Alice in Wonderland, which already share a studio and producers. So hate James Franco all you want, but shy of Bruce Campbell circa 1993, he's as good of a choice as Raimi could make.

 Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Oz - The Great and Powerful's tangential connection to Disney's other Baum-inspired film, the traumatizing Return to Oz. Is Return to Oz a better movie? Well, it certainly elicits a stronger reaction from me than The Great and Powerful did, but that's because it scared the living daylights out of me as a child and some of the imagery (the hall of heads, the Mountain King) continue to haunt the recesses of my memory. Oz - The Great and Powerful mostly plays it safe instead of opting to give children nightmares, but one aspect of the film that I think gets overlooked is that it's still very much a Sam Raimi film - just in a context we're not necessarily used to seeing it.

 You need to wait no longer than the hot air balloon scene in the tornado to see the love that Raimi has to torment his leading man, as sharpened stakes of wood come at Diggs from every direction with ferocity and a sense of cruel glee coming from behind the camera. It continues throughout the film, after Diggs lands in Oz, although Raimi saves a bit for Bruce Campbell (who apparently managed to make it into the opening credits by spending the 60 seconds he has on screen by being beaten by Tony Cox with a stick). As I mentioned before, the return of the "Raimi Hag" was a nice surprise, although how I could have forseen him making a movie with witches and NOT including that, I don't know.

 For a film about goodness and light or some crap, the man in the title never really drops any of his misleading ways, right down to the establishing of his iconic throne room (I guess MGM couldn't prevent that one from happening, although the ruby slippers, Munchkins, and Flying Monkeys are absent or changed considerably). He's still a charming scoundrel, one that scared off one truly wicked witch and one that was basically evil because of him. While you can go home happy with your children, there's an undertone of cynicism in the film that I don't think gets attention.

 Since most of you will probably Redbox or Netflix Oz - The Great and Powerful (I can't believe I just used both of those as verbs), the hyperbole of internet complaining will be softened and you might even enjoy it. It's a trifle of a film, to be sure, and I'm not convinced we need more of these movies (don't tell Disney that), but it's honestly not as bad as you've heard. In fact, sometimes it's pretty good, or at least better than okay.

 Can you choose something better? Of course you can - there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of fantastic films out there just waiting for you - but let's be honest with ourselves. We all like a little mindless popcorn fun every now and then, and this isn't going to ruin your day with nit-picking or insultingly stupid narrative decisions. And it's Sam Raimi, so if you're going to make your case that I should watch Evil Dead because his name is attached, the least you can do is meet me half way.


* True story - while reading the comments under a review of Oblivion, I learned that Wall-E is over-rated, that Tron Legacy is better than Prometheus, and that Wall-E ripped off Short Circuit, therefore Wall-E sucks. Also that Wall-E is shit and everybody hates it just like Christopher Nolan fuck that guy.