Bad Movie Night Recap

 The time has once again come for Bad Movie Night: my shameless celebration of the movies that just aren't quite good enough, but also aren't so terrible they become unwatchable. It's a fine line, and sometimes it's just the right goofy element that pushes it over. Sometimes it's just who you watch it with, and the Cap'n has a fairly loyal crew of masochists willing to descend on Blogorium Headquarters every year. Even though I subjected them to Things last year, they came back. What that says about their cinematic fortitude is up to you, but I'm proud to call them my friends. This year, I opted to give them a less agonizing experience, but not without some serious brain bending. Let's take a look at what you (hopefully) missed out on:

 We started with Devil Girl from Mars, based on the hit London stage play (or, that's what I'd like to believe), and it shows. Despite the fact that a Martian spaceship lands outside of a remote Scottish Inn, most of the motley crew of patrons are concerned with their own stupid problems, leaving time for Naya, the titular character, to enter and exit through the same door, repeatedly. At least it's nice to know that Martians also call their planet Mars. They - well, she - arrived on Earth with her new prototype spaceship, which has organic metal and runs on an engine that creates nuclear reactions that explode inward, creating perpetual motion. Their science is vastly superior to ours, but in the great war of the sexes, all men were wiped out and they need some breeding stock, if you catch my drift. Perhaps if she'd landed in America, rather than Scotland, this would have been an easier task, because the citizens of the United Kingdom are more interested in cockamamie plans to shoot or electrocute her, to no avail.

 Brave newspaper columnist Mike Conner (or Carter, depending on who's saying his name) has the scoop of a lifetime, but would rather his on a fashion model hiding out in the inn. Thankfully his indeterminate accent doesn't bother her, and she even falls in love with him in the two hours between when they meet and when he agrees to join the Devil Girl on her ship. That, of course, is a ruse for him to try to steal the remote control for Johnny, a robot who "looks very similar to you Earth people," in that he looks nothing like humans but instead a guy in a robot costume. Naya has a ray gun that's effective on everything but glasses, constructs an invisible wall that the only scientist in the group somehow runs into headlong, and loves to open the same doors over and over and make sweeping pronouncements about how stupid we humans are. There are other characters, because we clearly care about an escaped adulterer who murdered his wife or some dumb kid, but the innkeeper's husband's name is Jamie Jameson, which is amusing. Also, they sit down to eat dinner at 10 o'clock at night. If only Mike and the Professor had taken the turn to "Loch Something" (actual line), they might have missed this unfortunately duller than it sounds movie.

 Speaking of dull, I hadn't seen Disney's knock-off of Star Wars, The Black Hole, in close to 25 years, so I didn't remember what a bore it was. Fortunately, I also didn't remember a lot of other things about it, like the fact that a 90 minute film had an overture and that all of the music - by James Bond composer John Barry - sounded just like any other Bond music. I did remember the robot with the Texas accent, and that Event Horizon lifted quite a bit from this terrible, terrible movie. When it's not ripping off Star Wars, it's borrowing liberally from the released-the-same year Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Forbidden Planet, and Battlestar Galactica, and pretty much any other vaguely popular science fiction film they could think of. To be perfectly honest with you, we lost interest about fifteen minutes in, started talking about the new music on Star Wars and about The Hobbit, and eventually made some jokes about Ernest Borgnine's libido and the movie Alligator, while pausing to note just how badly one could steal from George Lucas. I might have even said something kind about The Phantom Menace, which might be a first for the Cap'n.

 High School Confidential! eased us out of the "boring" zone of bad movies - hey, I try, but sometimes things just don't land with the crowd - by being entirely too interested in being "hip" and "with it". That works wonders in its favor, because the ridiculous overuse of slang, coupled with what seems to be not even veiled suggestions about incest between Tony (Russ Tamblyn) and his aunt Gwen (Mamie Van Doren). In Tony's defense, it's mostly one way, and given there's a twist, I guess it's possible that they maybe aren't related, but why would he refer to her as his aunt behind closed doors? There are a number of questionable "bait and switch"-es in High School Confidential!, a movie about Tony moving in to town and taking over the high school drug trade in the course of two or three days. He's tough talking and backs it up, and pops his collar, even when it's on a sweater. Why? Because he's hip, daddy-o.

 There are so many ways to address how hard the writers are trying to sound "cool" and failing miserably: the hip version of Columbus that J. I. Coleridge (John Drew Barrymore) "lays" on his class, or the awful (even for Beat Poetry) performance at a "Jazz Club" the kids all go to. Or the notion that marijuana is a gateway drug to heroin, and nothing else. Tony, a "7th year" high school student, immediately starts hitting on his teacher and also moves in on Coleridge's girl, who turns out to be a junkie. The drug kingpins in town are played by Charles Chaplin, Jr. and Jackie Coogan. Yes, Uncle Fester forces Tony to shoot up to prove he's not a narc. But wait, he is! (SPOILER) Tony is really Mike, who works with the cops, and there's a big shootout at the jazz club when a deal goes bad. Fortunately, the leader of The Rangers - played by Michael Landon - is there to help out, even though they're the rival gang to Tony's Wheelers and Dealers. Also, Jerry Lee Lewis begins and ends the film playing the title song, in what appears to be the same shot.

 High School Confidential! picked up the pace a bit, and after a musical interlude, it was time to dive right into Raw Force. It's an almost perfect storm of kung-fu zombie cannibalism interspersed with gratuitous nudity and hokey special effects. And yet, some people were grumbling, perhaps because I oversold the "cannibal monks who raise kung-fu zombies" part of the movie. Yes, most of Raw Force's 86 minutes is devoted to a Kung-Fu cruise to "Warrior Island," where disgraced martial artists are buried. It's also where Hitler sells prostitutes in exchange for jade. Is his name Hitler in the movie? I honestly don't remember, but if he looks like Hitler and talks like Hitler, we're going to go with "that guy is Hitler". The cannibal monks eat the girls because it gives them power to raise the dead, which they use (eventually) for the final showdown.

 In the meantime, there's a lot of showing off of kung-fu skills, coupled with late 70s / early 80s clothes, music, and nudity aboard the cruise ship. Almost everyone on the boat - from the cook to the bartender - seem to know how to fight, and are therefore well equipped to handle Hitler's lackeys. You see, despite the fact that Warrior Island is the home of an illicit human trafficking ring, it's also the subject of its own tourism guide. Because, why wouldn't it? When the cruise ship catches on fire (or, rather, has fire overlaid over the image), some of the passengers escape, and the rest are presumably killed. We never hear from them again, so let's just assume they died. What's important is that the life raft lands on Warrior Island and the monks raise the dead. There's lots of chop sockey, some decapitations, some dynamite, and piranhas. How are there piranhas in salt water, in the ocean? My guess is they couldn't find any stock footage of sharks. So Hitler gets munched on by piranhas (SPOILER).

 Rather than launching into the "Luc Besson Presents an Affront to Science" double feature as promised, I gave them the option of getting the Trappening out of the way, which they decided was best. What they didn't know was that this year's mystery feature wasn't just a Bad Movie - it was a Great Bad Movie. By no stretch of the imagination could one call Commando a "good" movie, but I'll be damned if it isn't one of the most fun films to throw conventional cinema out the window. Continuity errors? Check. Bad one liners? Yessir. Gratuitous nudity? Well, it has absolutely nothing to do with the fight scene, so yep. The mall from Chopping Mall? Sure is! Arnold Schwarzenegger killing an entire army, single-handedly? You know it.

 To get Alyssa Milano back, Arnold will plow his way through David Patrick Kelly (John Wick), Bill Duke (Predator), Dan Hedaya (Alien Resurrection), and finally The Road Warrior's Vernon Wells (Weird Science) for the mother of all bad puns. Oh, and his name is John Matrix, because Rambo is a pansy. I firmly believe that Commando is what everybody thinks all action movies from the 80s are like (that, and First Blood Part II), and why they hold the admittedly average Expendables series to an impossible standard. Matrix is introduced hauling a log down to a cabin (on his shoulder), and then eats ice cream and feeds a deer with his daughter. Because he's tough, but sensitive. Until you steal his daughter, and then he just kills you. Rae Dawn Chong's Cindy isn't even developed enough to have Stockholm Syndrome when she assumes the role of "new mom" at the end, having been kidnapped by Matrix less than twelve hours before. Commando is all killer and no filler, but I asked attendees to give it the same scrutiny as any of our other howlers, which is exactly the point at which you realize the many logic gaps and inherent flaws that make it technically "Bad." Now that everybody was in a great frame of mind, it was time to throw common sense out the door and let Luc Besson insult our basic intelligence...

 I've been hosting official fests for nearly a decade now, and in all that time I have never heard the phrase "wait... what?" as many times as I did during Luc Besson's Lucy. Perhaps the mini-review in the "Worst Of" recap didn't quite convey just how painfully cavalier Lucy is with the concept of "science," but the reactions were hilarious. During the film, at least one large bottle of Kraken was consumed, and descriptions of what they'd seen ranged from "an atrocity" to "amazing." A friend of mine whose dissertation is on Philip K. Dick insists that it's not science fiction at all, but rather a brilliant example of "slipstream," a newer iteration of magical realism. The entire room erupted with laughter when Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) explained that she could "feel her brain" in what's supposed to be heartfelt scene over the phone with her mother. The comical, video-game-esque use of brain percentage "unlocked" was also a source of enjoyment, but nothing stood out quite as much as figuring out how long it took for Johansson to "say this horseshit with a straight face." One viewer worried that she could no longer take Morgan Freeman's Through the Wormhole seriously after seeing him in Lucy. I freely admit that Lucy is a bad movie, but it's a very entertaining one, and it was somewhat validating to see the baffled reactions as they tried to take Besson's affront to science seriously.

 That said, I made a critical mistake in putting Lockout after Lucy, because by comparison, the former is just a "run of the mill bad science fiction film". It's true that after you've heard Scarlett Johansson explain what it's like to feel your bones growing, or to become the monolith from 2001, a high speed unicycle chase just doesn't have the same impact. Even my favorite line of awful science, "the gravity should keep you floating" just can't compete with Besson's double-down on Insane Clown Posse-like disdain for science. Lockout is still a bad movie, and it's insistence on identifying everyone and every location on screen (repeatedly, in the case of the latter) is amusing, but it just wasn't the same head-scratcher that it was in 2012. On the other hand, the outcries of mental anguish reconciling what Lucy was saying vs. what they knew to be true was more than worth it.

 By the end of Lockout, just about everybody was ready to go, but a few stragglers felt like they had one more Bad Movie in them. Despite the fact that it meant Cap'n's Choice - I hadn't planned on anything past Lockout - they were willing to suffer through another one. Being that it was late, or comparatively late (we can't do movies until sunrise anymore), I opted to go short and show Cranpire a "Cranpire Movie": Sorority House Massacre II. As I'll be writing about that and the first Sorority House Massacre soon (and possibly Hard to Die), I won't go too into detail about it, but he enjoyed it. There's barely a plot, and most of the first half of the movie is devoted to showing as much gratuitous nudity as possible, followed by another 30 minutes or so of women running around a house in their nighties and going out in the rain for no good reason. Jim Wynorski (Chopping Mall) even takes a pointless side-trip to a strip club to shoehorn in more nudity under the specious logic that one of the characters from a flashback is now dancing topless. Classy stuff.

 For the immediate future, I think I've hit my quota of schlock (although that doesn't rule out watching Furious 7). There's enough time to reload the queue in time for Summer Fest, where I think 80s cheesefests Without Warning and Deadly Eyes are going to be a hit. Thanks to everybody who made it, and to the folks at home who didn't, you now have a roadmap for your own Bad Movie Night. Just have alcohol and a good support system of friends nearby. And whatever you do, don't watch Things.

Blogorium Review: Ms. 45

 Abel Ferrara's third film, Ms. 45, is an unusual entry into the "revenge" film subgenre. The trailer sells it as a vintage slice of grindhouse cinema, but in truth, Ferrara is less interested in titillation and cheap shocks than exploring a character slowly losing her grip on reality. In some ways, it is a "revenge" film, but not in the way that an I Spit on Your Grave is; I found odd but persistent parallels to Taxi Driver throughout Ms. 45, although the films approach their respective protagonists very differently.

 What causes Thana (Zoë Tamerlis) to radically shift from a meek seamstress to a an alluring siren of death is, even for grindhouse films, a pretty rough way to start a movie: on the way home from work, Thana is dragged into an alley and raped by a man in a mask (played by the director, billed as "Jimmy Laine"), and when she pulls herself together from that violation, she comes home to find another criminal who broke in and is furious that he can't find any money. He decides to also rape the already shell-shocked Thana, but she manages to subdue and, ultimately, kill him. Thana, unsure of what to do, cuts his body into pieces and stuffs him in the fridge and freezer, determining it would be best to leave his parts around New York City, so as not to raise suspicion. She also finds his .45 next to the couch, which brings us to the next phase of Ms. 45.

 The content of the film certainly fits inside of the wheelhouse of "grindhouse" and "revenge" cinema, but there are some critical distinctions that are likely to surprise fans looking for some cheap, grimy thrills.  Both rape scenes are grim, unpleasant affairs, with limited nudity that focus more on violation. The horror plays out on Thana's face, and what little nudity that follows is almost always coupled with a traumatic memory of the one-two punch that sets the narrative in motion. Unlike most "grindhouse" cinema, we're not meant to enjoy the taboo, but to experience it for what it is - in that respect, Ms. 45's opening is similar to Irreversible. The other factor that separates Ms. 45 from most "revenge" films is the fact that the first rapist never returns - while the violation of I Spit in Your Grave is atrocious, the audience gets some satisfaction from the brutal retaliation on the men who committed it later in the film. What happens instead in Ms. 45 at first seems to be a cultural statement about macho stereotypes and Lotharios in the late 70s and early 80s, but then turns into something quite different.

 What I found most interesting is that the first time Thana kills someone with the .45, it's the result of panic, but not totally unjustified. Like nearly every man in the film, the greaser who chases after her is introduced trying to pick up literally any woman who walks past him, but the reason he's chasing Thana has nothing to do with sex. He mistakenly thinks that she forgot her bag (in fact, just a body part) and is trying to return it to her, and when she runs down an alleyway and panics, she shoots him point blank in the head. It's an accidental reaction and happens for reasons neither fully understand, but it sets Thana on a different path for the rest of the film. She begins dressing more provocatively, wandering the streets at night, and finding men who stalk her, and then kills them ruthlessly.

 This is not to say that most of the men in Ms. 45 don't deserve what's coming to them, at least initially. The best example is a sleazy fashion photographer introduced making out with his girlfriend in a restaurant where Thana and her coworkers are eating lunch. As soon as the girl leaves, he begins to hit on their table, and manages to talk Thana into coming up to his studio, only it doesn't quite work out the way that he planned (the scene is reminiscent of Blow Up, or perhaps Brian DePalma's early film Murder à la Mod ). Other random street thugs get theirs, including an impressive scene where Thana kills five guys surrounding her in rapid succession (Ferrara never does explain how she learned to shoot with such accuracy and only once addresses the lingering question of ammunition).

 As the film goes on, however, Thana's grip on being "wronged" by men slips away. She picks up a guy at a bar who relays a long story about his wife cheating on him with another woman, which ends with him accidentally killing himself. In another scene, Thana decides to kill a young man who doesn't even know she exists, but has committed the cardinal sin of making out with his girlfriend in front of a Baskin Robbins. She fails in killing him only because he manages to open the door to his apartment building (without ever knowing his life was in danger), but her frustration at not shooting him is the first sign of misplaced aggression. Her boss, Albert (Albert Sinkys), a fashion designer, initially seems to be overbearing but sympathetic to her trauma, but shifts to just another sex starved creep by the end of the film. At the end (SPOILER), Thana goes on a shooting rampage at a Halloween party, indiscriminately gunning down any man she sees, whether or not they made any passing glances at her. In the end, she's taken down by a co-worker, Laurie (Darlene Stuto), who she can't bring herself to shoot. Laurie, by the way, is holding a knife like this, which can't be mistaken for anything but a phallic metaphor:

(in case you're wondering, that's how she holds it the entire time)

There's something important worth mentioning that makes Ms. 45 more unorthodox from its "revenge" ilk: Ferrara and Tamerlis made the unorthodox choice to play Thana as mute, so that we see everything play out on her face, but without ever hearing her say anything. Tamerlis does wonders conveying the transformation of Thana, first as timid and withdrawn, to overwhelmed and traumatized, and finally to a woman unwilling to deal with the amorous advances of men in New York. It also gives the added benefit that her undivided attention to many of her victims is read as interest, and not a single one of them ever seems to be aware that she can't talk. That they don't care is only more damning and essentially seals their fate.

 It seems unlikely that Ferrara and screenwriter Nichols St. John chose the name Thana ("what is that, Greek?" "It is to you.") for their protagonist and didn't intend it to be a reference to Thanatos, the Greek personification of Death. Ms. 45 is littered with references to Thanatos, Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (which describes the dueling creative forces of Eros [love] and Thanatos [death], a central theme in the film), and a few, less subtle, religious allegories. The first rape leaves Thana curled up in a fetal position in the alleyway, with an apple at her feet, and the second ends when she smashes a glass apple into the head of her (pun intended) intruder. The "loss of innocence" metaphor, coupled with her final burst of violence dressed as a nun during a Halloween party, is unlikely to just be a coincidence.

 I mentioned Taxi Driver earlier, and while Travis Bickle seems to wait the entire movie to finally burst into violence, there is a component of his nihilistic outlook on life that is mirrored in Thana for much of Ms. 45. As she transitions from drawing out the worst examples of masculinity (and ending them) to randomly attacking anything that resembles sexual activity - whether it involves her or not - there's something about Bickle's misanthropy that is familiar. Near the end, there's a scene that's very hard to argue isn't Ms. 45's equivalent of "you talking to me?" despite the fact that Thana cannot, in fact, talk to the mirror. The explosion of violence at the end (again, directed at men in both films, but for somewhat different reasons*) is similarly chaotic, and their mental states are comparable heading in the the climax of their respective narratives.

 There's certainly more under the surface than just gratuitous violence and nudity in Ms. 45, something that might surprise audiences who only know it from the poster or seeing the trailer on the 42nd Street Forever compilation. I was pleasantly surprised, and when I realized that Zoë Tamerlis was the same Zoë Lund who wrote Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, it made a certain kind of sense. Abel Ferrara has always found as way to imbue the trashy with art house sensibilities, so if you don't mind not getting nudity every fifteen minutes in your "revenge" film, or a film that challenges the idea of satisfaction through violence, Ms. 45 will be a refreshing experience to the subgenre. It's not always pleasant, and given the subject matter, it really shouldn't be. If you aren't coming in looking for grimy kicks, you might find something really interesting to come away with.

 * Since the central premise of Ms. 45 is about men treating women as nothing more than objects, one could argue that Travis Bickle killing pimps and johns is actually doing exactly the same thing than Thana is doing, if for a different reason, although by that point in Thana's story she's just killing any man she sees.

Cap'n Howdy's Best of 2013: Spring Breakers

 It was around the ski masks and shotguns ballet to Britney Spears' "Every Time" that I began to really appreciate the twisted brilliance of Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers. That happens later in the film, to be sure, but up to that point I had appreciated, yet not quite been sure what to make of Korine's first brush with mainstream cinema since Kids* nearly twenty years ago. Audiences were polarized early in 2013 by a movie being sold as titillation but was anything but. Don't get me wrong, there's a great deal of nudity, almost all of it gratuitous, but nothing titillating about it. If anything, the opposite effect is the case. It's not meant to join the realm of Skinemax late night fare, and in tricking audiences into thinking otherwise, Korine pulled a fast one and brought them in to a fancier version of his art house fare.

 For Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), Cotty (Rachel Korine), and Faith (Selena Gomez), college life is a drag. The town they live in sucks, and no amount of drugs is going to change that. Faith at least has her Church Youth Group (led by former WWF Women's Champion Jeff Jarrett), but the other girls are obsessed with sex and living the wild life, like you see in movies. They want to go to Florida for spring break, and come hell or high water, that's what they're going to do. The only problem? They don't have enough money, so Candy and Brit decide to hold up a restaurant with toy guns. "Just pretend it's a movie," they tell each other, and with Cotty behind the wheel (of a car they stole from her professor), they get the money. Spring break, here we come!

 And for a little while, Spring Breakers is exactly what you'd think it is: a Bacchanalian celebration of excess. Gratuitous nudity, copious drug use, drinking, all in the open with Korine's (and by extension, our) voyeuristic gaze taking it all in. If you groan at the use of the phrase "phallic imagery," I suggest you watch Spring Breakers to see exactly what people mean when they use it. When I say a character literally fellates a gun like it's a phallus, I mean it. There's no other way to read that scene, but we'll get to that in a bit. One of the negative reviews that sold me on Spring Breakers compared the film to "Terrence Malick making a Girls Gone Wild video," which doesn't sound like a reason to stay away, and it's not far off. The credits sequence alone is a slow motion orgy of booze, boobs, and bros mugging for the camera, set to the cacophonous dub-step of Skrillex. That's just the mood setter.

 Korine gives us spring break as everybody imagines it (think that movie nobody saw, The Real Cancun, from a few years ago, or Piranha 3D), and as he giveth, so too does he taketh away. While the daytime is overblown contrast and bright sunlight, the nights are awash in a flourescent glow, giving way to a pallid, unseemly vibe as the girls continue to party on their own. The bright colors wash away, and everything and everyone looks worn out. Faith grows slightly uncomfortable with the joy Brit and Candy take from robbing the diner, but they're her friends, and spring break is everything she ever dreamed of (or, so she tells her grandma in a narrated letter). Reality just doesn't cut it.

 During a particularly raucous hotel party, things come crashing down and the girls end up in jail. Unable to pay their bail, they face another two days locked up, until an unlikely (and unsavory) savior comes to the rescue - Alien (James Franco), a local drug dealer / rapper / sleazeball. He runs a mid-sized drug operation with the Twins (Thurman and Sidney Sewell) and takes a liking to the girls because they're wild. Maybe even wilder than he counted on. Franco is the tipping point for Spring Breakers, where the debauchery becomes more interesting and less about just drinking and doing drugs, and it's when Korine really begins layering repetition of sound and imagery to create a hallucinatory effect.

 Alien seems to be a big man, but it's not long before we realize it's even more bluster than he's willing to admit. Showing off his house to the girls, with a bed covered in money, one wall covered in ball caps and another with guns and "ninja weapons," Alien reveals just how small time he is when he starts his "look at my shit" speech by saying "I got shorts of every color." He doesn't even take them to see the poolside pearl white piano until later - classic rookie mistake. Franco's Alien as a guy who acts the part but doesn't really want to deal with the consequences of who he is. He's a boy playing a thug, but he can't commit to it. Candy and Brit see through it immediately, which leads to the aforementioned fellating a glock scene, when Alien falls in love with them. They're really in for it, farther than he knew he could go, and it emboldens him. It's a reminder that when Franco isn't being "weird," he can really bring something to a character, and if often unrecognizable behind Alien's facade.

 Faith, on the other hand, sees right away what's going to happen, and she decides to leave. Later, when things get a little too real, Cotty also leaves, and Korine repeats the visual motif of riding away on the bus, right down to the positions the girls take in their seats. For Alien, Brit, and Candy, it's "Spring break... spring break forever," but too much of a good thing is enough for half of the original gang. From here on out, reality no longer applies. Just pretend you're in a movie.

 Korine repeats Franco's line about "spring break forever" over and over for the remainder of the film, punctuating montages and overlapping images that jump forward and backward in time. It's the only way Alien can mentally deal with the reality that his former friend / mentor Big Arch (Gucci Mane) is tired of sharing the drug scene in St. Petersburg, and has decided to end it, violently if necessary. With Brit and Candy egging him on, there seems to be only one way to go, but is Alien ready to go there?

 The final scenes of the film, when Korine turns the "just pretend you're in a movie" mantra into an actuality, works precisely because of the juxtaposition between reality and the fantasy of spring break. Alien wants to believe he can live spring break forever, but the girls really are living in some kind of warped version of reality, where they alone can survive a shootout unscathed and leave town on their own terms, not on some bus. By casting 3/4's of the female leads with former Disney / ABC Family stars, Korine is tapping into some sexualization of teen stars and turning it on its head. The girls are more dangerous than the gangsters, and they are (from the very beginning) as sex crazed as the boys (and men) who flocked to see Spring Breakers.

 Korine's larger point? I'm still mulling that over, because for all of the exploitation on display, it's worth noting that most of the nudity of the lead actresses comes from Kornine's wife. Up until nearly the very end, it's a bait and switch - promising Dirty Disney Girls and then providing flesh from nearly everybody else who steps near the camera - but Spring Breakers leaves one feeling sleazy during most of the partying. It is, to a degree anti-voyeuristic, showing too much, providing a sensory overload, so that when the real movie starts about halfway in, you're beaten down, ready for the dark undercurrent to bubble up. And then, and only then, does Korine let the movie fantasy take over, pushing further away from "reality," until the impossible ending is all but inevitable. There's something admirable about that, especially when you consider that Spring Breakers was marketed as a T&A comedy of sorts. Not too shabby coming from the guy who made Trash Humpers a few years ago.

 * Korine wrote Kids, but is probably (if at all) better known for directing Gummo and Mister Lonely. I'm guessing more of you are aware of Kids than the other two.

Blogorium Review: Corman's World - Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel

 I may be totally wrong about this, but one of the points made in Alex Stapleton's fine documentary Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel is that the average "twenty year old film buff" doesn't know who Roger Corman is. During an interview late in the film, Martin Scorsese (who made Boxcar Bertha for Corman) says "I think it's very important to let the generation of today know who he is, and we all, we knew it almost forty years ago, so it's time to reintroduce him as a director, but also what he represented to American entertainment." It's probably true that the average moviegoer doesn't know who Corman is, and I don't totally disagree with Scorsese or Penelope Spheeris (who makes the earlier point about his obscurity), I would argue among film buffs that the prolific exploitation director / producer is not only well known, he's revered.

 Roger Corman is credited with producing over 400 films, most of which are some variety of exploitation if not outright schlock. He's known for making films on a shoestring budget, sometimes in less than a week, and for providing many writers, directors, actors, and producers their first "break" in Hollywood. That list includes Jack Nicholson, Joe Dante, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, John Sayles, Pam Grier, Dick Miller, Johnathan Demme, Spheeris, Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Allan Arkush, William Shatner, David Carradine, Robert DeNiro, Monte Hellman, Francis Ford Coppola, and Ron Howard (who directed his first film, Grand Theft Auto, for Corman). Many of these "Corman School" graduates appear in Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel, to help tell the story of a fiercely independent filmmaker.

 Corman started his career as a script reader at 20th Century Fox, but when the story editor took his notes for The Gunfighter and took credit for it, he decided to go at it alone. He produced and assistant directed Monster from the Ocean Floor, then The Fast and the Furious (using borrowed sports cars from dealerships), and learned the keys to making films cheap in order to always turn a profit. He teamed up with American International Pictures and produced and directed a string of no-budget films (Dick Miller points out a scene in Apache Woman where he, as a cowboy, kills himself as an Indian).

 Corman's World breathlessly covers his stock actors, his period at AIP, the success Corman had producing a series of Edgar Allan Poe stories with Vincent Price, and the development of "teenage" pictures with Nicholson. The influence of The Wild Angels on Easy Rider (a film that AIP refused to make with Hopper as director and accordingly lost Corman a producer's credit), the decision by Corman to take LSD before The Trip, and the only Corman movie that ever lost money, The Intruder, are covered in some degree. Jack Nicholson makes his case why The Terror doesn't make any sense (the film had at least four directors, one of which Corman can't remember), and Scorsese used the "no-frills" schedule on Boxcar Bertha to make Mean Streets (which, had Corman produced the film, would have been changed to Blaxploitation!)

 The Intruder, in fact, may be the surprise for many people who only know Corman for films like Attack of the Crab Monsters or Little Shop of Horrors. Made in 1962 by Roger and his brother Gene and based on the novel by Charles Beaumont (who also wrote the screenplay), the film is a condemnation of the segregated South, told through the perspective of a racist rabble rouser named Adam Cramer (William Shatner), who arrives in the fictional southern town of Caxton to incite riots as a result of court-ordered integration of schools. The film, which is surprisingly un-exploitative, reflects Corman's own view of racial tensions, but was met with hostility when released. When he lost money on the film, Corman opted to go back to the formula that worked, and The Intruder, while highly regarded, remains unseen by many of his exploitation devotees.

 The documentary uses a wide cross section of Corman's output, from the monster flicks to biker films, women in prison films, blaxploitation films, and science fiction cheapies, and once the rating system came into being, the gore and gratuitous nudity required every few minutes. Stapleton also includes the tidbit that when Corman left AIP to form New World Pictures, he not only distributed his own films, but also provided US releases for Bergman's Cries and Whispers, Fellini's Amarcord, Laloux's Fantastic Planet, Fassbinder's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum, and Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala. The desire to distribute foreign films when no one else would and, in some instances, play them in drive ins, reflected Corman's actual taste in films, despite his reputation.

 Also appearing in the film are Corman's wife Julie, herself a producer, director Eli Roth and Paul W.S. Anderson, the latter a director of the remake / sequel Death Race. At the beginning and near the end of the film, Corman's World shifts to the production of Dinoshark, one of the new films Corman is producing in a partnership with the Syfy Channel (you might have seen Sharktopus, another entry last year). It's star, Eric Balfour (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake) talks about the guerrilla filmmaking techniques employed and general cost saving techniques that can make shooting the film difficult (including walkie talkies that don't work because they were made for children to play with).

 It's not too far away from the experiences of Corman's previous collaborators, who made do with too few extras, too little time, and not enough money. Bogdanovich's first "job" for Corman was taking a Russian science fiction film and turning it into The Gill Women of Venus, despite the fact that there were no women in the original film. He shot footage with Mamie Van Doren and other scantily clad women on the beach, and was told to shoot it with no sound. Once he delivered the footage, Corman decided that it needed dialogue, so the silent footage was overdubbed even though no one was speaking. Because he delivered the film in time and under budget, Bogdanovich had the opportunity to use an extra day of shooting from The Terror and made Targets. Corman may be fiercely independent and incredibly cheap (Nicholson mentions this repeatedly), but he knows how to spot talent and nuture it. Arkush and Dante started their careers as trailer editors for Corman before going on to make their own films.

 Corman's World manages to be both breezy and thorough in most points of Corman's career, but there are a few points of contention the film raises when dealing with his period running New World pictures. There's a distinct lack of coverage for the films Corman produced at New World (they instead focus on the distribution of respected foreign directors). The reason, at least one might argue, is that those films directly contradict an argument that Corman and Eli Roth make: in the wake of Jaws and Star Wars, Hollywood figured out the "Corman formula" and beat the schlockmeister at his own game. Accordingly, Corman couldn't compete with the major studios.

 What the film glosses over is the fact that a great deal of Corman's New World Pictures were ripoffs of the Hollywood films he claims beat him at his own game. It explains why Joe Dante's Piranha is moved around in such a way that the fact it was designed to cash in on Jaws never seems to come up, and other pictures like Battle Beyond the Stars (Star Wars), Forbidden World (Alien), and Galaxy of Terror (also Alien) aren't mentioned at all. Corman also claims he had no interest in slasher films, even though he put his name on a boxed set of the Slumber Party Massacre films (he produced parts 2 and 3) and The Sorority House Massacre parts one and two.

 It's not a serious problem, but Corman's World does gloss over a lot of the 1980s and 90s in favor of leaping forward into his work with the Syfy Channel (specifically Dinoshark). The "New World Pictures" section of the film is more devoted to footage from an earlier documentary about Roger Corman explaining his interest in distributing foreign films and also including interviews with director Jonathan Kaplan (Night Call Nurses) the late Paul Bartel (Death Race 2000, Eating Raoul). While it may be an odd omission, Stapleton's chronology does smoothly transition from the birth of the blockbuster to the death of the independent film (including a pointed comment from Nicholson to that effect) to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences awarding Corman a Lifetime Achievement Oscar. At the ceremony, many of the faces we've seen during Corman's World are in attendance, as well as Quentin Tarantino, an acolyte of the Corman style. The section caps the story nicely, although it is clear that Roger Corman is far from done producing exploitation films.

 And folks, that's not a bad thing. Even if it is the Syfy Channel.

Year End Recap Part One

 Okay, I have to call it some time. Believe me, I'm only halfway through the movies I wanted to watch before writing this recap, but it's already the second week of January and I'll be eating up most of the month chipping away at the list. With that in mind, I'm going to give up on watching the following films before I start talking about the good-to-best films I saw in 2011:

 The Skin I Live In, The Future, Tabloid, Project Nim, The Adventures of Tintin, Win Win, Our Idiot Brother, 50/50, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Catching Hell, The Captains, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, The Mill and the Cross, Troll Hunter, The Devil's Double, and Blackthorn.

 They'll join other movies, like Captain America: The First Avenger, Cowboys and Aliens, Kung Fu Panda 2, The Beaver, Source Code, Meek's Cutoff, Moneyball, Super 8, Wrecked, Friends with Benefits, and 30 Minutes or Less in the list of movies I wanted to get around to seeing but haven't. Yet. It sounds like reviews for the first three months of 2012 are going to be pretty stacked, eh?

 Oh, and there's Your Highness. Well, I'll explain when we get to Your Highness. That's going to need its own review, I think.

 Let's start today with the middle. I've already dealt with the bottom on Monday, and from here on up every movie is one I'd recommend in some form or fashion. Many of them are movies you really should see and as soon as possible, even if not perfect in every way.

 I've divided the films into three distinct levels, from "enjoyed" to "holy crap!" and will move through them over the next three days.Today we're going to start with movies I think back fondly on, will almost certainly will watch again, but that didn't have the distinction of haunting my dreams for days to follow (and the top six are still bouncing around in my brain, even a week later from the most recent).

  Not to damn the following films with faint praise, but we have to start somewhere. Again, these all come with strong recommendations; I'll be including thoughts on films that don't have existing reviews and some additional notes on things I saw earlier this year. They are presented in no particular order.

 A Dangerous Method - I'm a little surprised to find the new David Cronenberg film - one about Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, no less - on this part of the list, but I have to admit that the film didn't really pull me in the way I'd hoped it would have. Intellectually, I can't argue that A Dangerous Method is worth the price of admission, and the scenes between Michael Fassbender's Jung and Viggo Mortensen's Freud crackle with electricity, but they make up so small a portion of the film that I wanted more.

 Fassbender and Mortensen are excellent (the latter particularly so, as the guarded Freud, wary of those who want to discredit his burgeoning claim to fame, psychoanalysis) and Vincent Cassel has a nice moment or two as Otto Gross in what amounts to a trivial role in the film. It feels like I'm hanging the failings of A Dangerous Method on Kiera Knightley, which I genuinely don't wish to. As Jung's patient (and later mistress), Knightley is asked to act out the tics of a mentally disturbed young woman, and because Fassbender and Mortensen are so reserved, Knightely sticks out immediately, like a visitor from another world. Her contortions, strange accent, and mannerisms are a sharp contrast to the reserved, distant approach that Cronenberg brings to the film.

 That's not to say it's her performance that's the issue - it's more that Sabina Spielrein feels like a contrivance of a character in the film, rather that an actual person who lived and breathed alongside Freud and Jung. While the story is true (or some variation thereof), I can't help but feel that she adds very little to a film that orbits around the slow falling out between legends of psychoanalysis, the teacher and the pupil. It may simply be that the film reminded me of Cronenberg's Crash, but instead of car sex fetishes, it was instead about suppression of sexual desires and Freud's omnipresent cigar (seriously, I don't think there's a scene in the film where Viggo isn't holding one). While nobody has sex in a car, there is ladder sex followed by an escape from Jung's institution and descriptions of humiliation fetishization, all told with the same level of detachment in Crash.

 Again, it's not that I didn't find A Dangerous Method interesting; I just wasn't as engrossed by the finished product as I was in the premise.

 The Dead

 Thor - I've watched Thor again, and I still think it's fun. I don't know how I didn't mention Branagh's use of dutch angles that give JJ Abrams' lens flares in Star Trek a run for their money, but otherwise it's still fun. Joss Whedon is going to have to push much harder for Loki to be a credible threat in The Avengers, but otherwise I still dig it.

 Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows



 Don't Be Afraid of the Dark - It could have been better, sure, but the first half of the film is still pretty creepy.

  The Adjustment Bureau - Apparently I liked it a lot more than Professor Murder did.

 Pearl Jam Twenty

 Jackass 3 and Jackass 3.5 - What I like here is that 3.5 really feels like a rebuttal to the "guys are getting old and even they know it" reviews for Jackass 3. They're both still funny in a way you can enjoy and then never tell your "civilized" friends about, lest they shun you.

 Hobo with a Shotgun - Almost everybody else I know who saw it loved it. I still think it's too nihilistic to be properly trashy fun, but I admit it's sleazy enough to kick back a few beers to.

 More Brains: A Return to the Living Dead

 American: The Bill Hicks Story

 Paul - I can't put my finger on why the first sections with Paul don't quite work, but Kristen Wiig's arrival raises the film up almost immediately. A movie that could have been really special is instead clever and is engaging enough by the end to be worth checking out.

 Drive Angry - Trashy. I mean traaaaaaaashy. The best thing Nicolas Cage was in this year by a long shot, and that's not a knock on Cage or the movie. If you're in the mood to pair Hobo with a Shotgun up with something, invite some friends over, get out the booze, and have a grind-tacular double feature.

The Puppet Monster Massacre

 

 Fright Night - I think I was one of the three people in the world that still likes this movie. It doesn't have a good reason for being, especially with the changes, but Anton Yelchin, David Tennant, and especially Colin Farrell make this worth your time.

 X-Men: First Class - I wasn't as gaga about this as everybody else seemed to be, but I admit it was better than X-Men Origins: Wolverine and X-Men: The Last Stand. Matthew Vaughn now is two for four in Cap'n Howdy's book. At this point the review is probably better known for the fallout from incorrectly identifying the concentration camp than anything else, although I'm not interested in saying any more about that. It's enough that it's over and done with.

 Come back tomorrow for more! If this is the "low end" of the middle that you should see, the high end and the top are movies you MUST see.

Blogorium Review (kinda): Blackenstein

 So maybe this weekend wasn't the best time to watch Blackenstein - I wasn't exactly paying attention (at all) during the second half. Hell, I wasn't even indoors after 45 minutes, but time is not on my side with this new schedule, so you have to take your lemons and make some lemonade. Besides, it's not like I couldn't figure out exactly where it was going (a prediction affirmed by seeing the last two or three minutes).

 So Vietnam veteran Eddie Turner (John De Sue) returned from the war missing his limbs, the result of a run in with a landmine. Dr. Winifred Walker (Ivory Stone), his fiance, is seeking a way to help Eddie when she comes across Dr. Stein (John Hart), who is working on experimental DNA therapies to help graft limbs on to para and quadriplegics. Since he won the Nobel Prize for "solving DNA," surely nothing can go wrong, right?

 Things are actually going just fine until Malcomb (Roosevelt Jackson), Dr. Stein's assistant, develops a crush on Dr. Walker. Of course, she declines his advances, so he decides to switch the "DNA solution" that Eddie is being injected with, and Turner's condition begins to deteriorate, and before you know it, he looks exactly like Frankenstein's monster. But black. See what they did there? Blackenstein? But this time the title character isn't the doctor, but the monster. Why is he Blackenstein? Well, if you're going to make a blaxploitation film based on Frankenstein because Blacula was successful, things like logic in titles aren't going to bother you. Right William A. Levey, director of Blackenstein (and Skatetown, U.S.A., Wam Bam Thank You Spaceman, and The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington)? Don't think I'm letting you off the hook, writer Frank R. Saletri - you're just as responsible for this extremely slow exploitation film. That said, if you actually did direct a movie called Black the Ripper, I'll give it a shot...

 Well, Blackenstein took what felt like forever to get to the actual monster action, dwelling instead in amateurish camerawork, clumsy editing, and some really bad acting. I did chuckle at the superimposed fog on top of the "day for night" shots of Dr. Stein's hospital. It didn't look real in any way, but it was funny. Also funny? The ending. Since you're probably never going to see Blackenstein, I suppose it's only fair to mention that while I did miss most of the Blackenstein action, I did catch the end where the police corner the monster with dogs. And then the dogs EAT Blackenstein.

 So yeah, I'm not really recommending Blackenstein - it's neither as bad or as funny as something like Scream, Blacula, Scream, or Abby - but I thought it would be worth sharing that. As blaxploitation goes, it doesn't really fail enough to be worth watching, nor does it succeed in pretty much anything. From what I saw, anyway. But then again I wasn't exactly operating under the ideal conditions for Blackenstein. Something tells me that watching it in a cabin in the middle of nowhere wasn't the best bet. But I didn't want to bring The Evil Dead or Cabin Fever. Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you. You best bet is to just go bearing.

Spoiler of the Day: Hobo with a Shotgun

 The Hobo kills The Drake and then dies in a hail of gunfire because the police all work for The Drake. Just when it looks like the Hobo is actually dead, he's whisked off in a time machine to help hunt Ice-T in the 1990s.


Tomorrow's Spoiler of the Day: Surviving the Game.

Spoiler of the Day: Teenage Mother

 The miracle of life. Also, a prudish teenager gets her comeuppance, and a Swedish Sex-Ed teacher gets molested and kind of likes it. Future David Hyde-Pierce does not approve. Fred Willard doesn't seem to mind.


Tomorrow's Spoiler of the Day: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Two Reasons I Don't Always Understand Geek Culture

 The Cap'n is, unavoidably, a geek. While I don't always identify as such, it's hard to write on a blog where you adopt the moniker of a demon from The Exorcist and plaster artwork of Dr. Re-Animator and The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman on the page. I try to mix up the content, but let's be honest here: after devoting a weekend to a "virtual" version of a horror film festival I usually host in person, I bounced back with a documentary about what Conan O'Brien did after NBC dropped him for Jay Leno. While I haven't read many comic books in the last year, I still watch movies about them, and am looking forward to Joss Whedon's The Avengers.

 However, I don't always understand my geek brethren; there are things about the internet in particular - the nesting place of the "geek" - that seem counter-intuitive to what people claim they want. Today I'll take a look at two things that don't really make sense to me, especially in a time when "geek" culture seems to be getting everything they want from major studios and television networks. I'd normally do four, but the first two were so long that I thought I'd cut it in half.

 1. "We want to see it, but we're not going to go see it!" - I call this the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World effect, although you could just as easily replace that with Kick-Ass, Serenity, Your Highness, or a dozen or so other movies designed specifically for a geeky demographic. You can't throw a rock without hitting someone complaining about how Hollywood is constantly recycling, remaking, or re-imagining something from the 1980s. Now, it is true that this happens with increasing regularity, in part because people go see these remakes. I mean, why not? They already know the title, vaguely remember the story, and it beats going to see something else.

 The chatter is loud and not necessarily without cause, but then when a project that comes out that ISN'T a remake, re-adaptation, retooling of something we've already seen, or even just not another "reboot" of a series we're invested in, the same geeks crying out suddenly get very quiet about putting their money where their mouths are. I was very, VERY hard on Scott Pilgrim fans in particular because instead of going to see the movie they constantly hyped as "finally, something that isn't like everything else," they instead stayed home and complained about how stupid it was that people went to see The Expendables instead. It's not Sylvester Stallone's fault that you didn't go see you new favorite movie, nor is it Julia Robert's fault with Eat, Pray, Love. I have tried to move away from using Box Office figures as a barometer for anything, but if you read "geek" coverage of Scott Pilgrim vs the World after the first two weeks, you'd think that it was hovering right below the aforementioned films. Nope. Scott Pilgrim vs the World came in behind The Expendables, Eat, Pray, Love, The Other Guys, and Inception. Inception is, by the way, an exception to the rule, although the "it was overrated" chants are getting louder every week.

 Mind you, it's not just Scott Pilgrim: Sucker Punch, a film that caters to geek fetishes, was also widely ignored by its target audience. Serenity, a film based on Joss Whedon's short-lived Firefly, apparently had a legion of fans called "Browncoats" who went to the free screenings the summer before the film came out, and then were so enthusiastic that they didn't go see it again. Or tell their friends to see it. Or tell anyone to see it, even though you'll be hard pressed to find a Firefly fan who won't talk about Serenity until they're blue in the face. So if you're this enthusiastic about a film, this excited for an alternative to the "same old thing," something directed to the very vocal internet, why is it you're happy to let the film die a lonely death in theatres, complain about the films people went to see while you stayed home, and then wait for the Blu-Ray? Eventually they'll stop listening to your pleas, stop catering to your whims, and then you're left with the same old thing.

 Don't believe me? Look at Universal: they're smarting from the Scott Pilgrim debacle, coupled with big losses for Your Highness and modest returns for Paul. Now that Comcast bought the company, they've already put Guillermo Del Toro's At the Mountains of Madness on indefinite hold, and have delayed further development of Ron Howard's adaptation of The Dark Tower series. These are two highly sought-after geek adaptations, and considering how much muscle they have behind them, the reason they've been put into development hell has a lot to do with the "We want to see it, but we're not going to see it" precedent.

Normally, when Guillermo Del Toro wants to adapt H.P. Lovecraft in a big budget, R rated horror film in 3D with the backing of James Cameron and star Tom Cruise, a studio isn't going to say "no" to that. Del Toro is the only "x" factor there, with his critically popular but financially modest films, including Universal's disappointing Hellboy II: The Golden Army. The argument was that Universal was concerned about the "R" rating, but it's not as though high profile projects with an "R" rating haven't performed well for them. The concern seems to be that the geeks clamoring for this film might not bother showing up (again), so why invest that kind of money when the precedent says there's no good reason to?

 The Dark Tower series is even more ambitious: Howard wants to adapt the entire series, split up between films and a running TV series that would bridge the movies. Javier Bardem is virtually a lock for Roland, and yet Universal is hedging about "the budget." Why? Again, because even with someone as reliable as Ron Howard and his long time producer Brian Glazer, there's concern that the people who claim to want to see this (the geeks) might be so fickle that they just won't show up. It's killed potential series before: just look at The Golden Compass, or Push, or Jumper, or I Am Number Four. Relative quality aside, those were designed to be "first chapters" in longer narratives, and they probably will never be. Even the geekiest of all geek properties, Tron Legacy, was met with derision by geeks and Disney is debating how much of a budget cut a third Tron will get, if they make it at all.

 It turns out that "if they build it," geeks won't come. Even if they love it. That boggles my mind. The negativity surrounding "bad" films is understandable to a point, but if you're just going to blow off genuine olive branches from people who speak your language, what exactly do you expect to be on the big screen next time?

2. TV Wasteland...? - We live in a time where television is littered with "geek" friendly shows: zombies, alien invasions, dinosaurs, time travel, super heroes, galactic battlestars, and even a "monster of the week show" that's really just about monsters. Oh yeah, and Doctor Who is back. So is Futurama. And yet, week after week, I come away enthusiastic from another episode of a show I enjoyed only to find the internet is littered with nit-pickers complaining about how that great episode was actually "underwhelming" or "lame." I was just looking to see if I missed some small detail, but instead have to wallow through criticism of the "revelation" that ended season six of Doctor Who (okay, the first half). How The Walking Dead is "boring" or "not what we wanted," etc.There was a television show about THE TERMINATOR, and all people did was complain about it.

 I'll freely admit that the ending of The X-Files and Lost disappointed me, and I've made it clear why, but one of the reasons I try really hard not to critique individual episodes before the show is over is because I like to give the creators the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they are making it up as they go along, maybe not. Thanks to the internet, I now know that by the time I get to the end of Battlestar Galactica, more likely than not I'll feel cheated. I didn't want to know that, but shy of never visiting any "geek" site and totally avoiding my friends, it's almost impossible not to be inundated with negativity during a period where networks are actually catering to the audience that shouts the loudest. It's no surprise that shows don't last long when the feedback they see is negative. I'm already worried about Torchwood: Miracle Day, the return of a series I thought was really finding its footing, because the buzz around the first few episodes is not good. Ugh.

 This is hard for me, because I realize that I am essentially complaining about complaining. I'm throwing my two cents into a bottomless pit of negativity, but I just don't understand what's going on here. This is as good of a time to be a geek as humanly possible, and instead of celebrating it, there's a ceaseless echo chamber of backhanded compliments and outright hostility directed at people like us, who grew up watching the same movies we did, and are now trying to represent that point of view for the rest of the world. Now we're at a point where Patton Oswalt (perhaps with tongue in cheek) is suggesting that geek culture "needs" to die so that we can learn to appreciate our roots. The relative quality of films and shows are no longer important, because they all "suck" to people who can shout the loudest. When asked for an alternative, they ask for something and then blithely ignore the result.

 I don't understand you, geeks. I am trying. I thought I was one of you, and I tried to make my own rules clear: there are movies I am interested in and ones I'm not. I'll try to branch out every now and then, and whenever possible not look at gift horse in the mouth. I know that movies like Machete and Black Dynamite and Hobo with a Shotgun were catered to my demographic, and while I maybe didn't love everything about all of them, I try to be clearer than "it just sucks and you suck if you like it." I genuinely wanted to understand what it was about the Saw films that people gravitated towards - it didn't work for me, but obviously they have a strong following. I will ceaselessly sound the horn for films that I think people would really like; films you might not see or know about otherwise. I didn't ask for Scott Pilgrim, so I didn't see it, but I sure as hell was enthusiastic about Tron Legacy and I sure as hell saw it in 3D on an IMAX screen. I backed that geekdom up, and I need to do the same for The Tree of Life soon.

 To close, I don't want to criticize the internet critics, the home of geekdom in its many forms. I just want to understand what's going on here: it's an almost unprecedented time to enjoy having geeky interests, so why is the target audience ignoring it in droves, flooding message boards, and unleashing on people for not doing it for them? 

Blogorium Review: Jackass 3.5

 As some of you may remember, I reviewed Jackass 3 nearly two months ago, and the consensus was that the prank and stunt heavy troupe of daredevils were going out with a bang. Their desire to do bodily injury was on the wane, and some of the Jackass guys were more hesitant to go crazy. Even harder to watch was how much longer it took them to get up after bad landings. The film closed out with a montage of Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Chris Pontius, Steve-O, Wee Man, Preston Lacy, and the rest as children, in their first appearance on the show, and during the filming of Jackass 3. It felt like a fitting closing to the series from director Jeff Tremaine, with the small caveat that they filmed a LOT more footage than the film contained.

 How much more footage? Well, if you took Jackass 3 and Jackass 3.5's runtimes, edited out the connective tissue of the latter, you'd still have nearly two-and-a-half hours, plus another fifteen minutes of scenes deleted from 3.5. The good news for Jackass fans is that none of 3.5 feels tacked on, or superfluous. You could easily switch out vignettes from the theatrical release to the home video sequel (and vice versa) and be just as entertained.

  The structure is a little different from previous Jackass films: instead of transitioning from bit to bit, there are a series of interview segments with the cast (many of which appear to be in London) that provide context for why footage didn't make it into Jackass 3. It gives parts of the film more of a documentary / making of feel, although as the interviews increasingly become excuses for more pranks (especially between Bam Margera and Ryan Dunn). There's more fun with the Phantom camera's high speed frame rate, more mountain horseplay with the Dudesons, a great fake-out prank involving a fake "human bowling ball" that's actually an excuse for Johnny Knoxville to use a remote controlled helicopter to shoot paintballs at them. We also see some of the aftermath of failed sketches, like the Blowback (an attempt to clothesline a pole with a long wooden board), some more "painted man" gags, and at least one segment I couldn't believe didn't make it into Jackass 3. Let's just say it involves a wind-up metal rat, an electric mouse trap, and Steve-O's testicles.

There's a greater sense of fun in 3.5; the laughs are heartier, the sense of glee that accompanies each stupid stunt (and many of their failed outcomes) brings back some of the juvenile glee of the TV show and the first two films. Well, for everyone except Brandon Novak: in Jackass 3, it seemed like he was just hanging around for Margera to punch during a "Rocky." In 3.5, it's clear he was involved in a few stunts (one involving riding a toilet down a ramp and the other involving belt sander "skates") that end... badly. For the suffering Novak endured, I'm a little surprised none of his bits made it into the theatrical release.

Jackass 3.5 also seems to be a reaction to the "these guys are getting old" reviews that figured into the best reviews (the film does, by the way, have a "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes). After a hesitant start from Steve-O to let an alligator snapping turtle to bite into his posterior, the boys open up for a number of ridiculous, dangerous, and silly stunts. Steve-O's excitement to run down a wooden beam surrounded by fire (while dodging flaming medicine balls) is a marked contrast to the "Why do I have to be Steve-O?" in Jackass 3. To counterpoint the last film, Tremaine opens 3.5 with the boys racing somewhere in France from the train station to a crowd of cheering fans. He closes the film with another montage of footage from the film, but set to "Young At Heart," a rebuttal to the suggestion that the Jackass crew are in any way over the hill.

 It almost seems silly putting this disclaimer so late in the review, but Jackass 3.5 is really only going to appeal to someone predisposed to enjoy the series to this point. If you didn't like it already, I don't know how this would turn you around. Fans, on the other hand, will be happy to know that Jackass 3.5's 81 minute running time is more robust than Jackass 2.5, which felt like a collection of leftover footage. While it sometimes straddles the line between full-fledged extension of Jackass 3 and an extended "making of" documentary, Jackass 3.5 never feels like a "lesser than" entry. If you're looking for more trashy fun, or just to sate your desire for comical human suffering, look no further.

Newer News and Older Notes

 It looks like the inevitability of The Hangover Part III became a little more inevitable with the Box Office madness last weekend. While I tend to joke that box office numbers are directly proportional to the quality of the film, in this case I really can't even say that with a straight face. While The Hangover Part II is funny, which technically means it succeeds as a comedy, the sequel is one of the most flagrant examples I can think of recently of not straying too far from the original Or straying at all: the changes are all superficial, the character arcs are basically unchanged, and The Hangover Part II becomes strangely predictable even if you've only seen the first film once.

 Todd Phillips recently suggested that "if" they made a third film (Warner Brothers has subsequently hired Part II screenwriter Craig Mazin [Scary Movie 3 and 4] to start writing the next film) it would be the "finale" and would be "different" from the first two. Now it would be nice if that happened, and I don't doubt Phillips is sincere in his desire not to continue remaking The Hangover, I doubt Warner Brothers is very excited at the concept of a radical departure from the formula. Since audiences have demonstrated that they're willing to pay for tickets to a movie they've already seen, why risk scaring them away, or worse still, "ending" this emerging franchise?

But we all know the more pressing matter is what the Cap'n will do if I decide to see The Hangover Part III: Diminishing Returns - I can't repeat my repeat review. That's so passe, and besides, I must stress that it wasn't even my idea to begin with. I guess I have a year-and-a-half or so to figure that out, although if I'm going to watch a movie I've seen before, it probably isn't going to be The Hangover.

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However, if you're looking for a way to separate me from money I don't have, you could come up with worse ideas than Shout Factory's Mystery Science Theater 3000 volume XXI, also known as MST3k vs. Gamera. As Volume XX was a Joel-centric set, Volume XXI is also a "theme" set, this time collecting all of Joel and the Bots' encounter with the giant, fire breathing turtle (or whatever Gamera is supposed to be). They also happen to come from Season Three of MST3k, when the show was really hitting its stride, and benefit from the fact that all of the films had already been a part of the KTMA pre-series season, giving the writers a second go-round.

For some reason, it never occurred to me that when Shout Factory picked up the Gamera series for release, it dramatically increased the chances that exactly this boxed set should come to pass. Since there's almost no chance we'll see Godzilla vs. Megalon again, this may be the best gaijin Mistie you can expect for a while.

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Finally, I thought this tidbit might be interesting, and it allows the Cap'n to keep hoping: this week, Criterion's Facebook page posted a screen cap from Krzysztof Kieślowski's Red, hinting at a Blu Ray release of the "Three Colors" trilogy. What's significant about this? At first, it merely seems logical: Criterion has already released The Double Life of Veronique and fans hope that The Decalogue may find its way to "Spine Number" status down the line.

 That said, what I noticed immediately, because I still have the DVD boxed set of the Three Colors trilogy, is this impending announcement is significant for another reason. Red, Blue, and White were released on DVD by Miramax, who owned the rights and presumably sold them during the great "catalog dump" when the mini-major studio folded. Previously I had mentioned that as far as the press announcement indicated, the catalog was being split between Lionsgate and Echo Bridge (the former not being such a bad thing; the latter more so).

 At the end of the post I said that I hoped people would avoid Echo Bridge's mangling of From Dusk Till Dawn because a better studio might pick up the rights. I half-jokingly suggested Criterion pursue the film, not ever expecting it be reality. While it still remains hope on my part, the fact that the Criterion Collection is pursuing rights to previous Miramax titles (like the Three Colors trilogy) means that my pipe dream may not be so outlandish after all. Maybe we could see that Spine Number after all. Right after C.H.U.D.*.

* It was a great April Fool's Day joke, Criterion, but seriously get on that disc. Did you see the out-pour of fans supporting the idea of an actual C.H.U.D. release? I'd buy it today and I'm flat broke.

Blogorium Review: Drive Angry

(editor's note: thanks to some of the pictures below, this review is probably NOT SAFE FOR WORK.)
(supplemental note: thanks to all of the google searches for "Drive Angry naked chick," the Cap'n has opted to digitally alter one of the pictures below. Sorry, but you'll have to perv out somewhere else.)

Drive Angry is the trashiest movie I've seen in a long time. Were it not for John Waters, one might argue that Drive Angry is the trashiest film I've ever seen, and even with that caveat, it's still impressive watching a film that just doesn't care whether you identify with (or even care about) anybody in the film. I could write about Drive Angry without SPOILERS, but then I would remove all incentive for you to see the film. Seeing as nobody went to see Drive Angry in the first place, I feel I owe it to the people involved making the film to send a few of you in the right direction, so SPOIL I shall.

John Milton (Nicolas Cage) is a man on a mission - specifically a mission to stop Jonah King (Billy Burke), a Satanic Cult Leader, from sacrificing his granddaughter during a full moon and unleashing Hell on Earth. Milton already has a bone to pick with King for murdering his daughter (a member of the cult) while the not-so-good-father was in "prison," so there's no way he's going to stop chasing the Satanists all the way from Colorado to Louisiana. The problem is that Milton keeps destroying / abandoning his muscle cars, so he picks up a ride from Piper (Amber Heard), the kind of girl that puts the "trash" in "trailer trash." Unfortunately for Milton, The Accountant (William Fichtner) has been sent to return him to "prison," and he's not going to take "no" for an answer...

This first SPOILER isn't necessarily one depending on how easily you can pick up on an obvious image of John Milton's car speeding out of Hell. Yes, Hell; there's some quick exposition about how members of the cult could have sworn he was dead, and Milton seems to the ability to survive being shot in the eye at point blank range. That said, director / co-screenwriter Patrick Lussier (My Bloody Valentine 3D) and writer Todd Farmer (Jason X) find every way possible to avoid directly mentioning the central conceit of the film.

Nearly every person I mentioned Drive Angry to didn't know that Nicolas Cage's John Milton escapes from Hell to save the baby, and all of them were more interested in the film when they found out. It seems to me that if you want to market a "grindhouse"-style movie, you might want to include that critical component in the marketing. Otherwise, it looks like another silly movie starring Nicolas Cage, like Season of the Witch (which preceded Drive Angry by only a month).

It's a shame, because Drive Angry is a lot more fun than Season of the Witch, and for that matter many Nicolas Cage films people have been avoiding since Ghost Rider*. I sense that more people would tune in if they knew that Drive Angry had a more ludicrous hook. Mind you, the hook, while never directly spelled out, is crystal clear for anyone paying attention. The Accountant's ability to manufacture phony FBI badges by flipping a coin, or the fact that he tells nearly everybody he meets when he'll "see" them again should be a dead giveaway. If, for some reason, it isn't, hopefully the "God Killer," a giant handgun that Milton steals during his escape, will give you the hint this isn't your average "chase" film.

Fichtner steals the show as the unflappable Accountant, and is easily the preferred antagonist to Burke's Jonah King. It isn't just that Fichtner easily owns every scene he's in; Jonah King is such an ill-defined villain that you a) never know what he's really trying to do, and b) never feel threatened by him. Other than having coke fingernails and shooting his revolver like a cowboy, all King does is talk about his "new world order" and watch his followers kill (or get killed).

At one point, without having done anything to demonstrate it, King boldly proclaims that he is "armored with a power that you will never know" and that "nothing of this Earth can kill me." However, other than having a bit of a fight with Piper in an RV, the only other information we have about Jonah King is that people keep stabbing him with his Satanic Pendant and that Milton's daughter bit his penis off.

Did I mention this was a trashy movie? The kind of movie where Piper knocks out the girl her boyfriend Frank (Todd Farmer) is cheating with in the middle of a trailer park, and then some fat guy walks up, smirking, and snaps a picture of the naked girl. The kind of movie where a guy is, for no apparent reason, wearing a wig that looks like... you know what? Why don't I show you. A picture is worth far more than any description I could give you (and also mostly NSFW):

Lussier shot Drive Angry in 3D, and it shows early on, even if I saw it in 2D; there are quite a few "coming at the camera" gags but things seem to settle down quickly, which may or may not have improved watching it without the gimmick**. Lussier and Farmer explore similar subplots to their remake of My Bloody Valentine (a film I must admit I didn't enjoy much); Drive Angry is their not only does Farmer once again play a mostly naked guy chasing a totally naked girl through a parking lot, but Tom Atkins (Night of the Creeps, The Fog) appears as a police chief that is largely ineffectual in his pursuit of Milton.

Drive Angry is less of a remake than an homage (of sorts) to films like Race with the Devil, although that's not the only place it borrows from. A sex scene with Milton and Candy (Charlotte Ross) quickly turns into a gunfight, and the fact that Milton doesn't stop having sex would be more impressive if I hadn't already seen Shoot 'Em Up, which is already more of a cartoon than anything in Drive Angry.

That said, I have one more image from Drive Angry, from a promise made by Milton too silly not to pay off at the end of the film. Someone asks him if he wants a beer, and Milton says "not unless I drink it out of King's skull." So after he sends his granddaughter off to be raised by Piper (a horrible idea, as anyone who watched the movie should know), we get his promise fulfilled.

The best part about this is how nonchalant Cage, Fichtner, and Lussier treat the "skull drinking," as though we shouldn't be surprised this is happening at this point. Then again, Drive Angry is exactly the kind of movie not to make much ado of skull drinking. And that, my friends, is trashy in all the right ways.

* Including the actually, not-being-ironic-when-I-say-this-no-really-I-mean-it, really good Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which is trashy in a different way but again let me stress that it's a WERNER HERZOG film so maybe you should rethink your whole "that movie has to suck" prejudgment. ** I can't imagine it made anyone who paid an extra $5 for the glasses happier, since there are huge chunks of the movie where 3D would have been negligible a best.