Shocktober Revisited: Fright Night (2011)

Tonight I'll be taking a look at the 2011 remake of Fright Night, a film I've been looking forward too. That's odd, because I don't usually look forward to remakes, but the combination of an intriguing cast and a vampire-versed screenwriter had me on board. Was it a story worth revisiting? Let's see...

 Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) is a geeky teenager in the outskirts of Las Vegas trying to maintain a relationship with Amy (Imogen Poots), a girl he'd have had no shot with a year prior. It comes at the expense of his life-long friendship with "Evil" Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), who has been desperately trying to get Charley's attention. Students have been going missing, and Ed is convinced that Brewster's next-door neighbor, Jerry Dandridge (Colin Farrell) is actually a vampire. Charley is eventually convinced, but it comes too late to help his friends, his mother Jane (Toni Collette), or even Amy. He turns to illusionist Peter Vincent (David Tennant) for help, but it may be too late to stop Jerry from destroying everything important to Charley...

 In the interest of full disclosure, I did not sit down and rewatch Fright Night in preparation for this remake. I have seen Fright Night several times (boy, that sounds defensive, right?), starting in high school and periodically on TV, and I really wanted to show it during a few Summer Fests but could never fit it in. However, I didn't feel like it was necessary to come in to the new Fright Night with the original fresh in my mind. There are a number of changes made between the 1985 version and the 2011 version - some superficial, some significant - and I was intrigued enough by the cast, as well as screenwriter Marti Noxon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and director Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl) that it seemed like a leap of faith worth taking.

 Strangely, the superficial changes are the ones that aren't so much of a problem: changing Peter Vincent from a horror show host to a Criss Angel-esque illusionist doesn't impact his role in the third act, although it complicates it in the same way a major change to the narrative does. Evil Ed's role in the film is basically the same, although Noxon adds an interesting narrative shift where Charley has outgrown Ed's obsessive nature, to the point that he now has to blackmail Brewster into investigating Jerry. The transplanting of the film to Las Vegas (actually Albuquerque, New Mexico) helps overcome some logistical issues - the neighborhood is sparsely populated with people who often sleep all day and work all night, cell phone reception is terrible, and a vampire like Jerry could easily sustain himself without drawing attention.

 While most of the changes to this version of Fright Night work pretty well, some of them hamper the story with respect to pacing. For example, there's no good reason for Charley to seek out Peter Vincent the magician - his website makes some superficial claims about Vincent being a "vampire expert," but it's not as though Brewster couldn't do most of the work on his own. In fact, he has, as a scene in the school library with Amy makes clear - Vincent only confirms his research. Beyond that, Peter Vincent's motivation for helping Charley and Amy comes waaaaay too late in the film and seems to exist to give Jerry and Peter something to talk about in the basement. Even the reason Vincent's show is called "Fright Night" seems perfunctory.

 It's a similar problem that Fright Night suffers from early in the film - everybody knows Jerry is a vampire, and Colin Farrell is playing him as the slightly creepy guy who toys with his prey, so getting Charley on board takes longer than it needs to. To illustrate the point, both films have a scene where Charley and Amy are about to have sex, but Charley is more interested in Jerry than his girlfriend. In the original, this happens at the beginning of the film, setting up that Brewster is already suspicious. In the remake, it happens at least half an hour into the film, after we've seen Jerry turn Ed into a vampire.

 Pacing and motivation issues didn't actually affect my enjoyment of the film, though; there's still plenty that Fright Night has going for it. The cast is uniformly ideal for their roles, with Colin Farrell being the standout as Jerry Dandridge, a vampire who clearly doesn't feel threatened by Brewster, Ed, Charley's mother, Amy, or Peter Vincent. He's cocky, dangerous, and slightly off-putting - there are weird touches with Jerry that elicited uncomfortable laughter from the audience. Anton Yelchin has an interesting line to walk as a geek who is trying not to be geeky, and Imogen Poots' Amy is a character that shifts from mostly inconsequential to very important as the story progresses.Toni Collette's Jane Brewster doesn't have much to do outside of the chase sequence which is, for all intents and purposes, the centerpiece of this Fright Night.

 Much has been made of David Tennant's Peter Vincent; I've heard people say he's making fun of Russell Brand, that he's too "over the top," and that this Vincent isn't as compelling as Roddy McDowall's. To the last complaint, it is true that Peter Vincent's role in the story feels less significant because he doesn't mean the same thing to Charley that host Peter Vincent did. To those who throw the Russel Brand comparison out there, aside from a British accent, lack of shirt, and what turns out to be a wig, the argument is superficial. He's playing a variation of the "David Tennant" tenth Doctor from Doctor Who. If you haven't ever seen the show, I guess it might be easy not to catch that, but he's much closer to the Doctor in Fright Night than to Criss Angel or Russell Brand. I actually enjoyed Tennant's profane, guarded Vincent - he's not trying to outdo McDowall, or even draw comparisons, and whether he needs to be in Jerry's house with Charley or not, Tennant is a welcome presence at the end of the film.

 A note on the 3-D: I opted to see Fright Night in 2 dimensions, in part for cost but also because an already dark movie made dimmer by glasses didn't seem that enticing to me. There are a handful of silly "at the camera" shots, and it seems clear that the car chase, where the camera circles around inside of the car (similar to Spielberg's War of the Worlds) is meant to be seen with "depth." That said, it really didn't make much of a difference, so I recommend seeing the film without the gimmickry, otherwise you might not be able to make out important sections of the story.

 In summary, Fright Night is an entertaining, if imperfect, re-telling of the other Fright Night, which I have not seen very recently. It's different enough not to bother purists and certainly has enough going for it that I easily recommend the film to anyone looking for a horror movie in the dog days of summer. When I get around to Horror Fest: The Remake (and it is going to happen in the next three years), Fright Night is going to play, and not on the "shitty but kind of funny" night like, well, Shit Coffin. It's somewhere between Piranha and The Hills Have Eyes as remakes go, but let's be honest here, that's not bad company to be in, is it?

Shocktober Revisited: Halloween H20 and Halloween Resurrection

 Originally, I had planned a Retro Review for Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, but  after doing some cursory research on the film I realized that I don't remember Halloween 6 at all. I saw it once, in the fall of 1995, and was surprised to discover Paul Rudd played Tommy Doyle in the film. Until I watch The Curse of Michael Myers again (or can locate the "Producer's Cut" mentioned online), there's really no point in revisiting a film I can't recall.

 Which brings me to Halloween: H20 and Halloween Resurrection, two movies I've barely seen again since the first time I watched them. They did, however, leave a greater impression on my mind than Donald Pleasance's final film appearance, and since I enjoy one of them more than anyone else seems to and really hate the other one, it's fitting to comment on the close of the pre-remake sequels to John Carpenter's Halloween. This one-two punch will leave the Cap'n with only Halloween 3, 5, and 6 to cover in the Blogorium*.

For those of you looking for a series recap, here's one in 60 words or less: Michael Myers kills his family, goes to a sanitarium under the care of Doctor Loomis, escapes, tries to kill Laurie Strode, fails, tries again, is replaced by an evil toy mask manufacturer, returns, tries to kill Laurie's niece Jamie, fails, tries again, fails, tries again, succeeds, but is then foiled by Loomis and a grown up Tommy Doyle**.

 Then there was a three year break, leading us to 1998, twenty years after the first Halloween. We move from Haddonfield, Illinois to somewhere in Northern California, where Keri Tate (Jamie Lee Curtis) is the dean of a private school with her son John (Josh Hartnett) and boyfriend Will (Adam Arkin). The funniest thing is that Keri Tate is a dead-ringer for Laurie Strode, and we discover that (SPOILER ALERT) she IS Laurie Strode. Laurie faked her death to keep Michael from chasing her (which is good, because Michael instead decided to wipe out the rest of her blood relations), and she'd been pretty successful avoiding (SPOILER ALERT AGAIN) her brother for the last twenty years. That is, until Doctor Loomis (the late Donald Pleasance, heard in narration) dies and Michael just happens to find his house and discover exactly where Laurie is. He also kills some kid (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) with an ice skate.

 Anyway, school's out for fall break(?) and Laurie's colleague Norma Watson (Janet Leigh, who is Jamie Lee Curtis' mother, which is technically a SPOILER for family tree detectives. I won't spoil that her father is Tony Curtis. Oh, crap) drives off in a car that looks a lot like Marion Crane (Janet Leigh)'s car from Psycho***. Michael begins stalking the campus, killing off students dumb enough to watch Scream 2 (gee, I wonder why? We'll get to that in a second...), and John and Molly (Michelle Williams) find the bodies and become "next" on the kill list. Unless Laurie, Will, and security guard Ronny (L.L. Cool J) can stop Michael.

 Why am I being so glib about H20? Well, the more I think about the film - based on a treatment by Scream co-creator Kevin Williamson - the stupider it seems. It's funny, because I guess I overlooked how stupid and obvious these references were when I was 19 (something the people who saw it with me did not), and the Cap'n instead focused on the Laurie Strode / Michael Myers story line. To be fair, that is the only thing H20 has going for it: the film decides to pretend that Halloween 4, 5, and 6 never happened****, which you can debate the relative merits of, I guess, in order to focus on the lethal sibling rivalry. The ending, where (SPOILER ALERT) Laurie decapitates an ambulance driver Michael's head is still a satisfying close to their story, one that the following film manages to ruin in the first five minutes.

 It's worth noting that even at the time we were impressed that L.L. Cool J took five or six rounds to the chest from a revolver and walked away at the end of the film. I don't remember if they said he was wearing a vest, but why would a prep school security officer need to?

Anyway, back to the way that Resurrection mangles everything, even making people who didn't like H20 say "well, at least that one didn't kill Laurie Strode." Oh, (SPOILER ALERT). Yeah, in addition to retrofitting H20 so that Michael somehow does a switcheroo with an ambulance driver before Laurie can lop his head off with an axe, they leap forward in time to an asylum where Laurie's been locked up, waiting for Michael to wander in unabated. Sure enough, they tangle, she tries to kill him (hanging? maybe?) but he stabs her or something and she falls from the roof of the asylum in what is the least effective death of a Final Girl since Jason Vorhees followed Alice Hardy back to town for some apartment complex murderin'.

But wait! That's the BEGINNING of Halloween: Resurrection, a movie that gets EVEN WORSE before Busta Rhymes drops some Kung Fu on Michael Myers. That does happen, by the way, and you don't need a SPOILER ALERT because we both know you don't have to watch this film.

So what, pray tell, could the plot of the 8th Halloween film be if the villain kills the Final Girl in the opening of the film? How about a webcam reality show about some stupid contestants wandering around the Myers house? Sound good? Freddie Harris (Busta Rhymes) and Nora Winston (Tyra Banks) sure thought so, and their web company, DangerTainment, is sponsoring this MTV's Fear knock-off. A group of college students (including Katee Sackhoff, Sean Patrick Thomas, and Thomas Ian Nichols) who "won" the chance to be on this show, wander around the house looking for clues about Michael Myers. Want to guess who has nowhere else to go after he killed his sister? Want to guess who isn't happy to find people in his childhood home? Want to place bets on whether a charred Michael Myers opens his eye for the final stinger in this turdstorm of a sequel?

The 19 year-old Cap'n may have been kind to H20, but the 23 year-old knew he hated Resurrection well before the halfway point. I remember not liking Halloween 6, but that's not as clear to me as the hatred for the last gasp of the Halloween franchise after Miramax squeezed everything left out in 2002. In retrospect, had I watched Resurrection again before Rob Zombie's Halloween, I might have been kinder, even with all of the idiotic "I'm gonna skullfuck you" dialogue. It's like the Weinstein brothers perceived a certain formula from H20 (a handful of "hot" young actors from better movies*****, a popular rapper, some referential dialogue, and whatever the newest fad was) and recycled it into a crappier version, a xerox of Kevin Williamson's already growing stale pop culture screenplays.

 Halloween: Resurrection is what people are complaining about when they talk about how awful sequels are, and devoid of the one consistent narrative thread between the first seven films (okay, six, since Halloween III isn't about Michael or his family tree), there's nothing worth investing your time in. I honestly can't say I've seen a moment of the film since we saw it on the big screen, and I know I've watched parts of H20 on cable. If one was on, the other one must have been at some point. After part 8, there was a five year layover, and then Zombie took over. At the time I write this, Patrick Lussier and Todd Farmer (My Bloody Valentine 3-D, Drive Angry) have pitched a Halloween 3D to the Weinsteins that they may eventually get to after rebooting Hellraiser (you read that right), but for now, at least I can say that Rob Zombie's Halloween 2, for as many detractors as it has, is a MUCH better movie than Halloween Resurrection, and it's probably better than H20. Now who would've thought I'd ever say that?



*For write-ups of Halloween (kind of), Halloween II, Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers, Halloween the Remake and Halloween 2 the Remake, follow the respective links.
** This much I gathered from IMDB's coverage of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.
*** SPOILER: It IS Marion Crane's car from Psycho.
**** In the interest of fairness, Williamson's original draft did include 4,5, and 6 as continuity, and writers Robert Zappia and Matt Greenberg wisely dropped the subplot.
**** And by that I mean American Pie and Save the Last Dance, and eventually Sackhoff would be in Battlestar Galactica but I'm not giving Bob and Harvey any credit for that one...

Shocktober Revisited: Four Reasons (Friday the 13th Edition)

It's been a while since the Cap'n did a "Four Reasons", and we certainly learned a bit during our mini-Friday the 13th marathon, so I thought I'd share a few of them with you, under the auspices of "Four Reasons You Should Consider Watching the Jason Films Again":

1. Misdirection - We tend to think of the Friday the 13th films as fitting the "slasher" mold perfectly: character types are set up who are easily predictable as "oh, they'll die. he'll die. she's totally dead" and then play out accordingly. However, by the second Friday the 13th film (and the first we watched), director Steve Miner is already fucking with those rules.

There are a bunch of counselors introduced in Friday part 2, and only a handful of them die. Many of the ones Jason kills probably don't even deserve it - the dude in the wheelchair, his would-be girlfriend, the crazy old man. Okay, the skinny dipper and her jerky, clothes stealing, boyfriend probably deserved it, but the hippie kids didn't do much worse than wandering over to Camp Crystal Lake. They weren't even having sex there, because a cop made them go back to their camp! For his trouble, what does the cop get? Killed! And he was on Jason's side of the argument: close the camp down.

The most egregious break in "slasher movie" rules is that the "Prankster" type lives by virtue of the fact that he NEVER GOES BACK TO THE CAMPSITE! He stays at the bar when Ginny and Paul go back. We never see him again, but I suspect that fucker lived a long and productive life of playing stupid pranks on people, like having their cars towed or providing Jason with spears to murder people. This, I strongly suspect, is why Shelly gets it the way he does in Friday part 3 - it's justice being visited upon him for something he had nothing to do with, which brings us to reason number 2...

2. For Critical Analysts, there might be a hint of Antisemitism in the first four films - I'd have to watch the first one again to be perfectly sure about this, but certainly for parts 2-4, you do yourself no favors by being Jewish in a Friday the 13th film. Every character who looks vaguely of Abrahamic descent in these films is destined to an undeserved punishment from Jason. Worse still, they're often the ones who aren't doing anything that breaks slasher movie "rules". Only Shelly really does anything wrong by being the prankster, but the girl in Part 2 dies for having a crush on Wheelchair dude, and the girl in part 4 should, by all counts, be the "Final Girl', down to the fact that I can't account for what happens to her in the film.

I'm not necessarily saying Jason is pro-Nazi in the Friday the 13th films, but it's the only really consistent thread we noticed through the early films about who does and does not die. If you wanted to go way out into the realm of speculation, one could argue that based on his last name, Corey Feldman's character goes insane at the end of part 4, but even I admit that's pushing it a bit...


3. Shameless Product Placement Undermined by Tiggling Jitties - This pertains specifically to the hippie couple in part 2. For some reason, every time there's a prominently placed corporate sign (Exxon, Coca Cola) in the background, the foreground is consumed by the bra-less antics of hippie girl, who is almost always jiggling. It doesn't matter if she's running or just standing still - it's like the living embodiment of an Aqua Teen Hunger Force line, "Commence the jiggling!"

In some ways, it undermines the shameless product placement philosophy of the early 80s. Not to mention that despite the fact that she's constantly bra-less or just wearing a bikini top, hippie girl never joins the ranks of slasher movie "gratudity". Friday the 13th part 2 manages to undermine both cliches of the 80s in this regard, and it's pretty funny.

4. The early Fridays look much better than Jason X - Until we put Jason X on at the end of the night, I never would have argued that a grainy, beat up, low-budgeted product of 1981-84 could look better than a film from 2002. Alas, it is so. The one thing that's consistent from the beginning of Jason X to the end of Jason X is how cheap it looks. How we never noticed this, I don't know, but in retrospect I can now understand why there was no Jason XI. Shot on what looks like cheap digital on sets that look like they were borrowed from television, X wears its very low budget on its sleeve.

That being said, it's still a fun movie. Not a great movie, and you definitely don't want to compare it to the early Friday the 13ths - as we discovered - because despite the "meta" nature of most of the film, the pacing isn't as good, there's very little surprising about suspense, and not one of the characters really deserves to live to the end. Jason doesn't even kill two of them directly, although he does (by proxy) kill thousands of people in a space station.

At any rate, while I do recommend Jason X, it's probably better to watch it in the context of Jason Goes to Hell as part of the New Line era of Vorhees films, before Freddy vs Jason and Platinum Dunes got a hold of the character. The earlier films, by comparison, do manage to look pretty good by utilizing actual locations and considerably better camerawork. I really never thought I'd say that, but these are the things you learn during these mini-thons.

"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.

Cap'n Howdy Presents: The Five Worst Movies I Saw in 2012

 For a change, I saw more good movies than terrible movies in 2012. I know, this must come as a shock to you, but it's true. Looking back, there are several movies I saw that were "okay" to "meh," but very few that outright stank. Well, that were made in 2012 anyway: Horror Fest and Summer Fest entries don't count this year, with one exception.

 The very bottom and the very top lists for 2012 aren't going to be too long, but while I try to put together some kind of notion of how I want to organize the "Best Of"'s, there's not much question in my mind how the bottom of the barrel stacks up. (The middle is going to take me a little while...)

 In the interest of fairness, I didn't see many of what people tell me are the very worst of this year, including: That's My Boy, Battleship, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Total Recall, The Watch, Guilt Trip, For A Good Time Call, Twilight Breaking Dawn Part 2, Parental Guidance, or The Apparition. Unfortunately, I can't be of any help to you in that respect, but I can promise you that this list serves as one last So You Won't Have To for last year.

 So without further ado, let's count down from 5 to 1 of the Worst Movies of 2012.
 

 5.Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies - So of the three films about Abraham Lincoln released this year, I saw two of them, and instead of picking the one with the vampires from the director of Wanted, the Cap'n wisely(?) chose the knock-off instead. From what I hear, The Asylum's cash-in / rip-off is arguably the better of the two, and if that's the case then I'm glad I didn't watch Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. This movie was terrible, and only became watchable as the anachronisms began to pile up, along with the shoehorning in of a young Theodore Roosevelt, who helps Lincoln, his secret prostitute mistress, Stonewall Jackson, and John Wilkes Booth (a member of the Secret Service... yeah, I know) to protect Fort Pulaski from zombies.

 And trust me, while that last sentence may have you intrigued, Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies in no way deserves your attention.


 4. (tie) Underworld: Awakening and Resident Evil: Retribution - Here we have the case of two sequels, well into their franchise lives (four and five, respectively) that serve no purpose other than to set up the next sequel. While it's true that I've given up on the Resident Evil series, I held out just a sliver of hope that the return of Kate Beckinsale to the Underworld universe might up the trashy factor, but it was not to be. Underworld 4 was a lot of moping, Scott Speedman body-doubling, more pointless philosophical debate about what it means to be a vampire when Lycans control the world, and just a smidgen of Stephen Rea chewing scenery. If there's a fifth film (and Awakening is going to look awfully silly if there isn't), I can't say I'm all that enthused that we'll ever get back to the campy tone of the first flick.


 As for Retribution, well, there isn't much I would add to the review linked above. It's not really a movie, but a series of extended (read: boring) fight sequences peppered with pointless dialogue designed to reset the story (again) so that we can get to a "more interesting" movie next time. Since it looks like the next film is going to have even less of a plot, it's hard to imagine how hard Paul W.S. Anderson is going to have to work to screw it up. Then again, he lives to disappoint, so he'll find a way...

 3. (tie) Piranha 3DD and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance -  Speaking of disappointing, what the hell happened with these two totally unnecessary sequels? They were primed to be very necessary, very schlocky, audiovisual overload based solely on the combination of source material and director. On the one hand, you have John Gulager, director of the hyper-ridiculous gorefest Feast, directing the sequel to Alexadre Aja's T&A meets Blood & Guts remake of Piranha. And on the other hand, you have Nicolas Cage returning as Ghost Rider and behind the camera are the directors of Crank and Crank 2: High Voltage, two of the most ridiculous movies in Jason Statham's already ridiculous action movie career. Oh, and both movies were shot in 3-D! They couldn't lose! It was impossible!

 Somehow, both films end up being complete and total wastes of time. Not only are Piranha 3DD and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance not the anarchic clusterfucks you would hope for, but they're something even worse: Boring.

  Yes, boring: neither film is remotely fun to watch, in a trashy way or in a "what the hell was that?" way, which is a cardinal sin when making sequels to two absurd movies. Gulager not only doesn't deliver on the DD's his title promises (unless you count the first and last five minutes of the film), but all of the energy of Feast is replaced by the worst tendencies on display in Feast II and III. Instead of kinetic camerawork and editing, he instead falls back on a love of flatulence and cameos for the sake of having cameos, so that while he can't make a baby piranha swimming up a girl's va-jay-jay and biting her boyfriend's pecker interesting, he sure can give us three different montages devoted to David Hasselhoff running in slow motion.

 Far be it from me to point this out, but when the Spongebob Squarepants Movie finds a better way to use a superfluous cameo by David Hasselhoff, then you're doing something wrong.

 Meanwhile, Neveldine and Taylor not only don't add to the gonzo stupidity that was the first Ghost Rider, but they dial back the insanity and Mega-Acting / Neo-Shamanism by Cage and give us the tamest possible version of Spirits of Vengeance. We get less Ghost Rider, more mumble-cage, a supernatural knock-off of Terminator 2, and to top it off they find a way to waste Anthony Stewart Head, Ciarán Hinds, and Idris Elba. Thanks, assholes. Now we'll never get a properly stupid Ghost Rider movie.

 2. Taken 2 - Can we just agree not to let Olivier Megaton make movies anymore? While I didn't see Columbiana and maybe it's actually good, Megaton has now ruined not one, but two franchises with shitty sequels. First he stripped the absurdity from the Transporter films, giving the world the first boring Jason Statham action film, and then in 2012 he took Taken and drained everything good out of that with his awful sequel.

 Taken was a pretty simple concept: sex slave traders take Liam Neeson's daughter. Liam Neeson kills everyone standing between him and his daughter, in increasingly brutal ways, because that's what he does. He has a very particular set of skills, skills that make him a nightmare for people like you. Presuming that you are Eastern European sex slave traders, of course. It's a stripped down action film that delivered simple, no frills beat downs and torture.

 So logically you'd follow that up by having the families of everyone Liam Neeson murdered (yes, he has a name, and it's Brian Whogivesashit) want revenge on him and his family. In his infinite wisdom - well, really to nail Famke Janssen now that Xander Berkley wasn't asked to come back - he invites his wife and daughter to join him in Istanbul, where Neeson and Janssen are promptly kidnapped. So okay, that means Maggie Grace is going to have to do the inverted version of Taken, right? She'll save her father and mother than maybe kill Rade Serbedzija, because who else would be playing the father of the guy Neeson electrocuted to death?

 Nope. Liam Neeson gets out, crashes into the American Embassy and somehow doesn't end up being shot or prosecuted for property damage (because he calls Leland Orser, returning along with John Gries and D.B. Sweeney who is reprising someone else's role for a quick cameo paycheck). We then don't see Maggie Grace (sorry, Kim Whogivesashit) until after Neeson goes back to rescue Lenore Whogivesashit and kill all of the bad guys. Because that's what he does. Also she passes her driving test, which is somehow integral to the plot. (Not kidding)

 Only this time you can't tell that's what he does because Olivier Megaton doesn't know how to shoot a comprehensible action sequence to save his life. I literally ended up with headaches during the three (the ONLY three) fight scenes in Taken 2. It's virtually impossible to tell what's going on, who is hitting who, or where anyone is in relation to the person they're in combat with because Megaton and his editor throw rapid cuts of extreme close-ups on the screen to guarantee that nobody has the slightest idea what they're seeing. So not only is Taken 2 a LOT of setup for very little payoff, but when the time comes for Liam Neeson to use his particular set of skills, you don't even know what the hell is going on, and it hurts your brain.

 I HATED Taken 2, and there's no possible way that an "Unrated" version could be an improvement, because unless they hired a competent director and editor to reshoot the entire movie, it's a total waste of time.

 But Taken 2 isn't the worst movie I saw this year. It's not even the worst Luc Besson produced movie I saw this year, because that distinction goes to:


1. Lockout - Here's the deal: I'm willing to be veeeerrrrrry forgiving when it comes to cheesy science fiction. There are a lot of things I'll put up with if a movie can easily be summed up as "Escape from New York in Space," so even if Lockout was rocking a 17% Fresh Rating on Rotten Tomatoes the night we went to see it, I was prepared for that. I knew we wouldn't be watching high art, but instead a goofy, illogical, dumbed-down crowd-pleaser that catered to the cheap seats. As long as I got Guy Pearce as a bad-ass for ninety minutes, I figured we'd be okay. Besides, after that we'd be seeing The Cabin in the Woods. Surely it couldn't be that bad.

 And sure enough, it starts out promising. In fact, the opening of the film is the European Trailer, which is Guy Pearce making wisecracks and being punched while Peter Stormare interrogates him. And then we flashback to why he's being interrogated, and there's a clever joke involving jumping out of one window and into another gone wrong.

 And then there's the high speed unicycle chase that looks like a Playstation (One) cut-scene.

 Okay, that's really bad, but let's keep going, right? It'll get schlocky soon.

 And then Lockout fell apart. As I said, I'm pretty forgiving when it comes to movies like this, so I'll let things like repeatedly putting up a title card to let us know what we're looking at even if we've seen it five times. It's like watching a TV movie without the commercial breaks, I guess. It supports the theory that Lockout is "a series of movie-like images taped together." But then it gives up on the laws of physics while still trying to use said laws of physics as critical plot points. Then your brain begins to melt a little bit, then you start laughing. Not at what's going on in Lockout, because that ceased to make sense a long time ago, but because it's the only way to express what the movie is doing to your brain.

 Do yourself a favor and click on the link embedded in the title. It's called "Four Reasons You Might Be Drunk Enough to Watch Lockout," and while I don't recommend watching Lockout, especially not while drunk - as you are likely to do harm to your television for subjecting you to Lockout - it may give you some idea why, try as I may, I couldn't find a worse movie to watch in 2012.



 (Dis)Honorable Mention: Men in Black III, American Reunion, The Campaign - All of which were okay, I guess, but not movies I'm probably going to watch again.

 Extra (Dis)Honorable Mention to The Amazing Spider-Man, a reboot so pointless and so tedious that I couldn't even talk myself into finishing it.

Blogorium Review: Men in Black 3

 It turns out that when I said that "I'd rather write a review for Men in Black 3" rather than discuss Prometheus last week, I may have been overstating the case. You see, there isn't really a lot to say about Men in Black 3, a movie that is, at best, adequate. Provided that you haven't seen Men in Black in a while or don't mind what feel like blatant character contradictions, you'll probably have fun watching Men in Black 3, walk out of the theatre, and promptly forget everything about the movie. It's a cinematic Neuralizer (tm), so to speak.

 There may have been a better movie about Agent J (Will Smith)'s and Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones)'s frosty relationship after working together for 14 years, but this isn't it. I don't really remember Men in Black 2 because I haven't seen it in ten years, but Men in Black opens on a light, goofy note as K deals with an alien trying to smuggle himself across the border. After a moon prison escape for Boris "The Animal" (Jermaine Clement), Men in Black 3 opens with the preparations for the funeral of Zed (Rip Torn) and K's eulogy. J is irritated that he still doesn't know anything about K after being his partner for a decade and a half, and K's brief statements about Zed only make him angrier. On top of that, there's an indication that Agent K and the new head of MIB, Agent O (Emma Thompson) have a history, but the only answer J gets is "don't ask questions you don't want to know the answer to."

 The visibly disinterested Tommy Lee Jones isn't in much more of the movie as Boris travels back to 1969 and helps the younger version of himself kill K and erase everything the Agent accomplished between then and now from history. That way his species, the Bogladites, will be able to invade Earth rather than being wiped out. J is the only person who remembers history changing, and with the help of Jefferey Price (Michael Chernus), the man who gave Boris a time machine, he jumps back to 1969 to prevent the time tinkering happening.

 Men in Black 3 picks up when the notably subdued Smith arrives in New York circa 1969, where J meets the younger Agents O (Alice Eve) and K (Josh Brolin). Brolin's version of Tommy Lee Jones is uncanny, and at times reminds you of the Agent K that enjoys his job in Men in Black. It livens up Smith and the surly, frustrated J begins to disappear, and before you know it Men in Black 3 is more fun than somber. That won't last, but we can enjoy the middle of the movie anyway. Rick Baker's alien makeup and costumes are fantastic, Bill Hader breathes some life into a superfluous Andy Warhol cameo, and Michael Stuhlbarg's Griffin, an alien who can see multiple realities at once, brings a sense of wonder back to the series, something we've been missing since the first film.

 For a while, the movie almost works. There's a sense of fun, a more mature Will Smith is comfortable not delivering wisecracks every other line (there's a great moment where J meets two racist cops and has to explain that while, yes, he did steal the car he's driving, that doesn't mean they should assume he did), and Brolin gives us hints of K before he "shut down" emotionally (this is why I recommend not watching Men in Black too closely to 3, because the character of K doesn't make much sense from one film to the other). Stuhlbarg is a lot of fun as the innocent Griffin, although he never serves much more of a purpose than to say "oh, this is the one where _____ happens, unless it's the one where ____ happens." He's really a convenient plot device to get J and K where they need to be at the end of the film that happens to have a great actor elevating the role. On the flipside, Clement doesn't have much to do as Boris (in either iteration) than look like an alien Hell's Angel that shoots spikes at people. It's not clear why bringing in a member of Flight of the Conchords to play the villain and then not use any of his comic timing, but a lot of this movie just seems to happen for no reason.

  But it can't really last because shoehorned into the J and K relationship in the present is the suggestion that something happened to K, something that hasn't happened yet when J meets the younger version. So we know it's going to happen during the climax at the launch of Apollo 11, where Boris and future Boris are trying to thwart K. I guess if you thought the Men in Black series needed more pathos, you might buy into what director Barry Sonnenfeld, writer / mirror universe "Coen brother" Etan Cohen and how ever many other uncredited script polishers came in during the production hiatus, had in mind. But keep this in mind, the end of Men in Black suggests we're no more important than a bag of marbles in the cosmic sense.

 Well, that's as much as I can really wring out of a review of Men in Black 3. Considering that the only thing I remember about the second film was not liking it, then certainly is successful. What it succeeds at is up for debate, but it's the kind of movie that isn't going to offend your sensibilities for 90 minutes, will probably make you chuckle a little, and then let you go back to enjoying your summer. It's adequate, which really shouldn't be enough, but then again I said the same thing about Dark Shadows. Compared to some of the garbage out there, if you REALLY need to see something and want to bring the whole family, this is definitely a movie.

Things We Learned from Prometheus (and Some Other Reactions)

  I never thought I'd write the sentence "I'd rather be writing a review for Men in Black 3 right now" but you can't throw a virtual rock anywhere in the internet right now without it hitting something about Prometheus. And, at least in my experience, 90% of it has been negative. The hostility that the Ridley Scott / John Spaihts / Damon Lindelof prequel to Alien but not exactly movie has been deafening since Friday night, and while I don't argue with the reasons why commenters and reviewers and discussion board posters have been tearing Prometheus apart, I'm astonished at their ferocity.

 There are a few different points of attack, but many of them fall along the following lines: a) Ridley Scott hasn't made a good movie in years and this falls far from a "return to form" that we (the internet) were promised, b) The script is laughably bad, with one or two developed characters and a bunch of people that only do what the narrative needs them to do regardless of their "role" in the story, c) It isn't scary, d) It embarrasses the Alien series more than Resurrection (okay, I laughed out loud at that one*), or e) The movie lacks an ending and instead resembles Lindelof's strategy on the show Lost of "we'll save this for the next one" raising answers and plotlines they have no intention of addressing in Prometheus.

 With that in mind, I'm going to look a a few things to take away from Prometheus, some of which are tied to the criticisms listed above, and some tied to last week's post about Alien and Prometheus. Until the echo chamber of negativity dies down, I don't think I'm actually going to review Prometheus, even though I enjoyed it more than seemingly most of the chatterverse online. It's funny, because I liked it and my friends liked it and everybody I've spoken to that I know has seen it liked it, but if I start looking around online, Prometheus is the "WORST MOVIE EVAR ALL CAPS!!1!!!11!!"

 So let's get into it, starting with the indefensible:

 1. The Writing in Prometheus is a Mess - One of the most cited problems with Prometheus, even in positive reviews, is that the writing is anywhere from half baked to terrible. And you know what? It's true. I can't even begin to argue this, and no amount of thematic "Big Ideas" can overcome basic story problems (speaking of "Big Ideas," if you're looking for an interesting breakdown of the religious / philosophical / mythical references in the film, I suggest reading this post). They fall into two categories, one of which I'm not sure who is responsible and the other seems to follow the M.O. of Lindelof, but let's deal with the first part, the one where characters do things that don't make any sense.

 The primary offender here is Charlie Holloway, who along with Elizabeth Shaw is responsible for the Prometheus being there in the first place. It's unclear in the film itself whether both of them are scientists or if Holloway is the scientist and Shaw is the believer that pushes him forward (I've seen this idea floated out there in a few reviews). I'm inclined to believe that both of them have some interest in ancient civilizations, but Shaw is also apparently capable of overseeing a dissection / genetic analysis of one of the Engineers (Space Jockey) without question by the other scientists aboard the Prometheus. This is kind of a side note, but other than Janek (Captain), Chance (Pilot), Ravel (Pilot), Milburn (Biologist), and Fifield (Geologist), it's not clear what the other "scientists" / non-Weyland personnel do. Does anybody have an idea what Ford does? She's in the pyramid, is involved in the genetic analysis, and delivers exposition about how toxic the air is on LV-223. That's all we know.

 Anyway, I got off track. So the premise is that Holloway and Shaw convinced Peter Weyland to pay a trillion dollars to design a state-of-the-art research ship (hence the holographic displays and fancy equipment that, let's be honest, you aren't going to see on the mining ship Nostromo or the war ship Sulaco) and send 17 people two years into space to follow a space map. They arrive, find a pyramid with a skull on the top, David activates a holographic projection of Space Jockeys / Engineers running from something that ends with one of them being decapitated. They open a room with a giant head, murals, a sculpture that looks like a xenomorph, and jars filled with a black liquid that reacts to the change in temperature. They're forced to leave the room because of the reaction, but the body of the decapitated Engineer is roughly 2000 years old. They leave the pyramid structure because a storm is coming in, but Holloway and David are both lingering. David wants one of the jars, and Holloway dismissively declares "this is just another tomb."

 From this point forward, after being in the pyramid once (after he insisted they go in immediately after landing), Holloway becomes a drunken cynic, convinced everybody is dead and that he'll never be able to "talk" to the Engineers. After being in the pyramid once. Having explored one room, a few hallways, and being forced to leave because of external circumstance, Holloway gives up and starts drinking. His inexplicably newfound fragile mental state allows David to slip him some black liquid and let it do... whatever it does. Decode DNA? Recode it to create new life? Guarantee miraculous births? Look, I don't have any quarrel with the ambiguity of the opening of the film, whether it takes place on Earth or not (Scott says it doesn't matter where it is), and I'm even okay with the obvious horror movie setup of leaving Milburn and Fifield behind (in fact, it plays into two of the most known horror tropes paying off: smoking pot and having sex, the former in the pyramid and the latter preventing Janek from knowing they were in trouble).

 That said, Holloway's turn is arbitrary and only really seems to exist so that he can drunkenly insult Shaw and then get them together in bed so we can get to the "medical pod" scene in the film. It's a perfunctory character shift that doesn't make sense in the story, either as a scientist or as a "believer" - Holloway simply doesn't have enough evidence to leap to the conclusion he does, and since Weyland clearly pushes David to "try harder," it's not hard to see that Charlie giving up gets him out of the way midway through the film. It's logistical, not organic, and I can't get past that.

 The other problem, the "Lost" issue, is part of this notion that everything should be "sequel-ized" for continued franchise use. I fully admit this is nothing new and that complaining about it is like Clint Eastwood chasing hoodlums off his lawn in Gran Torino, but Damon Lindelof seems to be approaching Prometheus like it's a guaranteed ongoing series (and hell, it probably is, it's tied to the Alien franchise that 20th Century Fox has been desperate to reboot), and like he did with Lost, Prometheus raises lots of questions with no intention of answering them. In this film. That's the distinction between Alien and Prometheus. Yes, Alien never explains who the Space Jockey is or how the alien life cycle works in specificity (Aliens does, kinda) or how the derelict got there or a number of other questions, but Alien wasn't made with Aliens in mind.

 Prometheus doesn't even really have a beginning, middle, or end: it has an ambiguous opening shot, an earthbound introductory sequence, and jumps forward to the ship at the end of its voyage. Again, I don't have much of a problem there because the logistics aren't that important. I'm cool with the ambiguity about David's motives (actually, I love that and the tiny ways Scott ties how Shaw and Holloway treat David to the way Replicants are regarded in Blade Runner), the quick way the scientists are introduced and the plan Shaw and Holloway have, but once they land on LV-223, the narrative collapses. We're continually introduced to mysteries, one after the other, as characters are shuttled back and forth from the Prometheus to the pyramid, and instead of addressing these problems we get perfunctory explanations from the strangest sources. Yes, Janek is right that the Engineers are developing weapons in a pyramid with a skull on top in the middle of nowhere (how do I know this, read the previous piece where Scott repeatedly asserts in the Alien commentary what his reading on the derelict is), but is he the only person who realized this? Vickers is content to stick around under Weyland dies, even though she figures out pretty quickly how badly things are going to end.

 Okay, let's take a step back. What do we know about the Space Jockey / Engineers at the end of Prometheus that we didn't know in Alien? Okay, they engineered us for reasons we don't know (but are constantly reminded by characters in the film is VERY IMPORTANT), they were planning on wiping us out with biologically engineered weapons of mass destruction (including creatures that will evolve into the facehuggers and Xenomorphs we recognize from Alien) for reasons we don't know (but again, Shaw finds this VERY IMPORTANT) and that they're incompetent. How are they incompetent? Well, taking what we know from Alien and what we learn in Prometheus, they have no idea how to contain the weapons they create and as a result their WMDs end up killing them.

 That's it. We're given the carrot that Shaw and David aren't going back to Earth, but will instead fly one of the "bombers" to the Engineers' home planet (which isn't LV-223) to get answers that Lindelof, Spaihts, and Scott have NO intention of addressing in the film. We get lots of puzzle pieces, a promise that the story will pick up in the next movie, and a final shot introducing us to a proto-Xenomorph to give the audience something to be excited about when they leave realizing that Prometheus didn't actually end so much as throw up a "to be concluded..." ala Back to the Future Part 2.

 Side Note: I only call it a bomber because there's a distinction between the ship at the beginning of the film and the U-shaped, Giger designed spacecrafts, so let's assume that if several ships that look like that are stationed at a weapons facility that they're designed to haul volatile cargo to targets.

 Okay, so I watched six seasons of Lost that continually pushed the "we'll address this next year" only to get to an ending that failed miserably. But that's not my quarrel with the "sequel-izing" of movies. It's more fundamental than that. A movie with sequels can still have a beginning, a middle, and an end, even if it's designed to be part of a larger story. For example, while I don't know why you would do it, you could watch The Empire Strikes Back without seeing A New Hope or Return of the Jedi and feel like you've seen a narrative arc for every character in the film. It still raises questions, it leaves one character frozen in Carbonite, but it's still satisfying as it's own film.

 Movies that intentionally set themselves up with sequels in mind can fail. Case in Point: The Golden Compass. The writers decided they'd leave a bunch of open ended plot threads for the future installments of the His Dark Materials trilogy, and in the process forgot to make a satisfying film for audiences. As a result, the other two films were never made. They probably never will be. The same goes for Push, Jumper, and I Am Number Four. Prometheus will almost certainly get its sequel, but if Lindelof, Spaihts, Scott, and anyone else involved in future entries into this franchise don't tighten up the films so that people can enjoy them on their own (again, that's WHY people argue about whether Alien or Aliens is better, because they work in tandem but also as their own distinct experiences), I don't know that I want to be dragged along for two more hours.

 2. Other Things from the Last Post - Well, I think I've covered that LV-223 is not LV-426 and any speculation about where they are in relationship to each other is still up in the air (depending on which wiki site you visit, it seems to vary, but Google LV-426 and LV-223 and go to any link other than this to keep looking). Speaking of which, a friend asked me what the LV stood for, and even after digging around, I'm still not certain. If you know, please leave a comment for other readers and I'll also try to incorporate it into this section. I would gather it's the classification for planets discovered in the Alien universe, but the the "L" and "V" mean, I'm not sure.

 Since the mission of the Prometheus ends with Peter Weyland, his daughter Meredith Vickers, and the rest of the crew dead (at least as far as Earth is concerned), one can see how Yutani moved in to merge with Weyland Corporation in the absence of the family who ran the "Company." We can probably guess that Weyland-Yutani took the information David gathered about the "weapon" and that leads us into their obsession with bringing a Xenomorph back for research.

 It may sound silly to say this, but Prometheus is a prequel to Alien, just not in the way people expected. This is possibly why expectations are met with such vicious reactions, because other than the mid-section, Prometheus isn't really strictly trying to be a horror film. It's a film more fascinated with the origin of humanity, even if it has very little to offer other than more questions. Where it becomes an explicit prequel is a little white lie that Ridley Scott told about there being "No Xenomorphs" in Prometheus.

 Let's say it's safe to say that if you're still reading this after I broke down most of the major plot points (the Prometheus crashing into the Space Jockey's ship is in the trailer, but since I haven't mentioned it yet, there you go), so it's not going to bother you to mention the last scene in the film. After an obvious homage to Alien - Shaw recording voice-over explaining what happened to the crew playing over a ship leaving - we cut back to the last surviving Space Jockey, last seen on the losing end of a fight with an oversized facehugger. Its body begins shaking, and instead of a chestburster, a scrawny version of what we recognize to be a Xenomorph emerges, stands up, and screams (with second mouth). It's not "technically" a Xenomorph, just like the big tentacled thing wasn't "technically" a facehugger (although if it's anything like the tiny one in the pyramid, it has acid for blood). Therefore, Scott was only kind-of lying.

 What I'm a little curious about is that if the Alien wiki sites say about the chronology of the films (Prometheus taking place thereabouts 30 years before Alien). What we see at the end of Prometheus is are creatures that will evolve into facehuggers and Xenomorphs, but with only thirty years for the species to evolve to that point? Well, they're aliens, so I guess we should just ignore that. Also, I hope that this particular facehugger / Xenomorph combination don't have anything to do with what the Nostromo eventually encounters. Seriously.

 Just think about that: the "alien" in Alien is descended from Charlie Holloway and Elizabeth Shaw, with some tinkering from David, a Weyland Corporation android. It makes it a little less "Alien," doesn't it?


 I don't want to end things on a sour note, because despite the story problems I have with Prometheus, I completely disagree that it's not a good movie. I think Ridley Scott did a fantastic job with the 3D, bringing LV-223 to life, and in generating the tension when Prometheus moves into horrific territory. The medical pod scene is pretty disturbing, as is what happens to Milburn and Fifield in the pyramid (less so the Sunshine-esque reappearance of Fifield later in the film. And it's Fifield, not Holloway - I've seen that mistake made in a few reviews). I really enjoyed watching Prometheus, and would like to see it again. It's true that there's a lot going on in the film that would benefit from another viewing, but I'm not enough to cover story elements that don't make sense. So it's a very good film, but not a perfect one. It's certainly not the travesty or failure that I keep seeing online, but that's just my take. I'm happy to hear your thoughts.



* So I liked Alien Resurrection as a strange, heightened take on the Alien films by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, but I'm in the minority. You have to REALLY be able to get past how wildly uneven the film is, how the combination of Jeunet's direction and Joss Whedon's screenplay - and I could probably write another entry just about the script - drains any sense of tension and replaces it with overacting and incongruous jokes. That, and the hybrid. I can't defend the hybrid. Anyway, it is not better than Prometheus**. What's next? Are the AvP defenders going to see their opening and go after Prometheus?


** Why yes, I put a post-script in a post-script, but where else should this go? I do think it's funny that various comments and forum posts insisted that only Alien and Aliens were now "canon" for the series and that Prometheus would assure that. Why is it funny? Because one of the things we see David doing while he's waiting for the crew of the Prometheus to wake up is wandering around with a basketball and eventually doing trick shots on a bicycle. Rather than this being an arbitrary decision, I choose to believe Scott made a conscious decision to pay homage to the silliest moment in Alien Resurrection, thus validating its existence in series "canon."

Blogorium Review: Piranha 3DD

 I think I understand where my friends are coming from. You see, I haven't experienced Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance yet, but everybody I've talked to about the sequel to a movie nobody but the Cap'n liked has warned me how boring the film is. How it should be better, should be more gonzo, should be more, well, anything than the inert mass of exposition punctuated with the madness we expected. I mean, you're taking Nicolas Cage as Johnny Blaze / Ghost Rider, building on one of the dumbest movies Marvel's been involved with, and handing that over to the directors of the Crank films. That's a shame, because I was really looking forward to seeing Mega-Acting meets Mega-Filmmaking.

 Piranha 3DD, it turns out, suffers from the same problem of "what the hell happened?" because this movie is, on paper, a can't miss experience. Alexandre Aja's remake of Joe Dante's Piranha was a blood and boob soaked blast of exploitation unleashed on audiences. It was a gleefully perverse movie that managed to sneak in a few characters you were rooting for, even with wafer thin development. It was funny, disgusting, titillating, and juvenile. It also ended with an opening for an even crazier sequel. So two years later, Aja moves on, and the Weinstein brothers hand the directing reigns over to John Gulager, who brings along Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan to write it (with Joel Soisson), reuniting the team that made Feast.

 If you've seen Feast, you know why the idea of them making a sequel to Aja's Piranha sounds like a no-brainer: the film is a relentless, irreverent gorehound's wet dream, and even if the Feast sequels didn't live up to the original, surely they could bring this manic energy to a movie that's basically killer fish going wild on idiotic teenagers. I mean, they took the existing title and immediately turned the sequel into a joke about boobs. Surely they were embracing the schlock and preparing to up the ante.

  So what the hell happened? Piranha 3DD is a film that's dead on arrival, a movie that abandons all of the momentum generated in the Feast films in favor of playing conventional horror / slasher movie for 85% of its screen time. When it isn't moving as slowly as possible to hide the fact that the film is nothing but an elongated climax, 3DD fixates in dragging out cameos or on developing characters that nobody gives a shit about. The editing is horrendous: take, for example, a pointless scene in a hospital that exists in the finished film to go ahead and drop two extraneous characters we've been following since the beginning of the film. After some sloppy exposition about the characters, the deputy indicates he's going to talk to one of them, the scene fades to black, and cuts to a shot underwater, Gulager's go-to transition when he can't figure out how to get from one part of the film to another.

 Piranha 3DD is cobbled together from ideas from the original Piranha (the water park that shouldn't open but does), deleted / unshot scenes from the remake (a van where a couple is making out ends up in the water and piranha eat them before they can escape), and a LOT of filler. The opening of the film uses footage of the Lake Victoria party from the last film with an off-screen newscaster informing us that anything we thought we might see based on the end of Piranha 3D wasn't going to happen. Instead we cut away to Arizona, where Gary Busey and Clu Gulager are wading through a creek to find a dead cow that farts piranha eggs out. Now, I've seen Feast 2 and 3, so I know that Gulager is partial to flatulence in horror films, but it immediately removes the tension of their (inevitable) piranha-based demise. If it was meant to echo Richard Dreyfuss being gobbled up after a prehistoric cave unleashes the beasties, it failed. Instead, we get Gary Busey biting the head off of a baby piranha, spitting it into the air, and falling back into the water.

 But hey, we came for the 3DD's, right? With a title like that, surely we're going to get even more on the "titties" front! Well, if you only watch the beginning and the ending of the movie (the parts in Big Wet, the water park), then yeah, you'll get some nudity. Not a lot, mind you, because the gratudity is limited to the "Adult Pool" part of the park, which turns out to be a lot less integral to the film than you're led to believe when Chet (David Koechner) gives step-daughter Maddy (Danielle Panabaker) the tour. She objects, but he has a controlling stake and Deputy Kyle (Chris Zylka) keeping things running smoothly. Also, he's pumping water in from a prehistoric lake beneath the park.

 So is there anything worth recommending in Piranha 3DD? Well, in theory some of the gore setpieces would be worth checking out. For example, while skinny dipping, virgin Shelby (Katrina Bowden) has a baby piranha swim up her hooha, and she's so afraid that she's dying that she asks Josh (Jean-Luc Bilodeau) to deflower her, only to have the piranha swim out of her intestines(?*) and onto his dick. It should be a moment of madness, but the combination of bland direction, shoddy editing, and Bilodeau's acting make the ensuing self-castration more ho-hum than it should be.

There's a similar set up with a character named Big Dave (Adrian Martinez) who likes to have sex with the water pump valves in the water park, but instead of paying off that setup, a piranha just swims into his asscrack until nebbish hero Barry (Matt Bush) pulls it out. Barry and Maddy are the heroes, by the way, and Maddy is a marine biologist. You don't know this by anything she does, really, but because another character says "you're a marine biologist, right?" or something to that effect.

 If nothing else, you can have a little bit of fun with the cameos in Piranha 3DD, however superfluous they may be. Christopher Lloyd is amusing in a brief, if pointless, visit to the abandoned Lake Victoria, although it's really just to set up the end of the film, which borrows a visual gag from Dante's piranha (a walking fish) that doesn't amount to much in this film. Faring better are Ving Rhames and Paul Scheer, both returning from Piranha as survivors with a fear of water who arrive at Big Wet on the worst possible day. The joke about Rhames and his hatred of "punk ass water" goes on too long, but the payoff of what he did with his "legs" makes up for it. David Hasselhoff appears as himself and is good for a chuckle (a moment with a kid who has no idea who he is and the actor rattling off just about anything you'd remember him from) but Gulager is far more enamored with the Baywatch jokes than I was. There's a LOT of the "Hoff" during the credits sequence, which is a seven minute blooper reel with titles playing in between, and a little bit goes a long way.

 I wish I could recommend Piranha 3DD, but despite all of the schlocky elements you think you're in for, the movie is just too boring to sustain a few good moments. For an 83 minute film, it feels twice that long and I found myself losing interest well before Big Wet opened. Not only is it not the movie it could have been, it's not even interesting enough to qualify as a shitty sequel to a exploitation film. There's no fun to be had in Piranha 3DD (or many DDs), and since it's not playing theatrically anywhere near here (the film is available on VOD), you're not even going to be able to see it in 3D. Ultimately, you're better off putting on Dante's Piranha or Aja's Piranha 3D and having fun with this kind of movie - you won't find any with this film.


 * I know it should be in her uterus, but watching the "sex" scene, it sure looks like it's swimming through her intestines on the way to his johnson.

Happy Crom Day to You!

 Interesting tidbit: thirty years ago today (May 14th), Conan the Barbarian opened in theatres (and, I can hope, Drive-Ins) across the country. The Cap'n was a little too young to see Conan the Barbarian (being three years and exactly one month old), so I missed out on that and the rest of the "Class of '82," what has become a semi-legendary year for geek cinema. That's how geeks characterize it now, because I don't remember it being a big point in pop culture during the 80s or 90s, but it's all good. Starting in 2007, when the "Class of '82" turned twenty five, retrospectives kicked in, and now we're at the thirty year mark, which is right around the age of people who pay attention to things like this. Like me.

 Well, that got away from where I wanted it to go. Anyway, so if you aren't in the mood to check it out, here are some of the movies released in 1982:

 The Boogens
 Annie
 Death Wish II
 Victor / Victoria
 Rocky 3
 Six Pack
 The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
 Zapped!
 Yes, Giorgio
 Halloween III: Season of the Witch
 Tootsie
 Gandhi
 48 Hours
 The Verdict
 The Toy
 Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
 One from the Heart
 Visiting Hours
 Airplane 2: The Sequel


 Wait... what do you mean "that's the wrong list"? What the hell is wrong with that list? I like those movies. Geeks like The Boogens, right? What do you mean "they haven't seen The Boogens?" That's not my problem! They love Rocky 3 and Death Wish II and 48 Hours! Hell, some of them will even defend the indefensible, like Zapped! and the misguided but I guess not unwatchable Halloween III...

 Okay, fine. It's true that the list above is an "alternate" list I compiled while I was trying to get the "canonized" releases right. Honestly, I'm standing by the assertion that about half of them still fit in just fine with the actual "Class of '82" which includes:

 Conan the Barbarian
 E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
 Blade Runner
 John Carpenter's The Thing
 First Blood
 Das Boot
 Friday the 13th Part III (in 3D)
 Porky's
 Cat People
 The Sword and the Sorcerer
 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
 Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
 Poltergeist
 The Secret of Nimh
 Tron
 Pink Floyd: The Wall
 Fast Times at Ridgemont High
 Class of 1984
 The Beastmaster
 Eating Raoul
 Creepshow
 Q: The Winged Serpent
 The Last Unicorn
 The Dark Crystal

 I included movies like Das Boot and cult films like Eating Raoul and Q in this list because they're frequently mentioned, but like Halloween III I suppose they could go on either list. It's a shame more of you haven't seen The Boogens though...

 Now, that is an impressive lineup. It comprises the list of movies that many people my age watched on home video along with the likes of Ghostbusters, The Goonies, and Back to the Future all the way through adolescence. I can only imagine what it must have been like to see Conan the Barbarian one week and then to see The Road Warrior the next. To be old enough to really take in a summer filled with that many cherished entries into "geek" cinema is something I can only envy from afar. I wasn't old enough to even be cognizant that Ridley Scott was adapting Philip K. Dick and John Milius would set the bar for "sword and sorcery" films that hasn't ever really been matched in the 80s, 90s, or 21st century. And it was the second of three "sword and sorcery" films just that year!

 To wonder what the guy who made Halloween, The Fog, and Escape from New York was going to do with The Thing from Another World or how Paul Schrader was going to reinvent Cat People. Most of all, to see it with fresh eyes, in a world devoid of the internet and where cable television didn't have the range of coverage it does now. By the time I'd heard of most of these movies, it was through people who had already seen them or through movie guides. By the time I knew what Season of the Witch was, I had been warned that it didn't continue the Laurie Strode / Michael Meyers story and was therefore a "mistake." On the other hand, Blade Runner's failure and stature as something of a "cult" phenomenon allowed me to approach the 1992 "Director's Cut" with intrigue.

So looking back at the way these films were released, it's understandable how Tron, Blade Runner, and The Thing were all swept aside by the "summer of E.T." Steven Spielberg had a massive hit on his hands, and Scott's narrative-ly dense dystopia and Carpenter's misanthropic and nihilistic alien invasion film weren't exactly going to fit in with a friendly extra terrestrial eating Reese's Pieces. Tron? Well, it took twenty eight years for Disney to even consider making a sequel to its "world inside a computer" film, and it fared about as well. I happen to like Tron, partly because of its place in my childhood but also because as I grew up more of it made sense and it's really not a "one sitting" kind of movie. E.T., on the other hand, has a little something for everybody, and in one go-round.

 There are so many different things you could talk about here, like Star Trek II getting everything fans wanted right where The Motion Picture didn't (again, this is based mostly on what I understand, as I was introduced to Star Trek films through Wrath of Khan and not The Motion Picture) or the way that the otherwise formulaic sequel Friday the 13th Part III introduced the iconic image for the series (Jason's hockey mask) while also having just about every "point something at the camera" 3D gimmick you can think of. You had the first John Rambo film, Sylvester Stallone fighting Mr. T, the first Mad Max film most Americans had seen (and without dubbing), the movie that launched Arnold Schwarzenegger as an action star, two legendary comedies, and George Romero and Stephen King's homage to EC Comics.

 Okay, so I poked a little fun at the beginning, but it is clear why 1982 was such a rich year for revisiting. Most of those films were regulars at the Howdy household, at least during age-appropriate periods. Some of them were discoveries in high school and in college because of their release in proximity to the rise of home video. It was hard not to know they existed because whether I'd seen them or not, the box covers were at both video stores in town. Filling in the context came later, and being nostalgic for a period that I lived through but couldn't participate in after that. I get why so many geeks of my generation fixate on this particular year.

  But the real takeaway here - other than wishing Conan the Barbarian a happy 30th birthday / anniversary - is that you should see The Boogens. Seriously - it's a pretty good slasher movie with kinda goofy monsters but you don't see them until the very end. It's one of those under represented horror films that deserves its day. And if you're not the horror type - and honestly, if you're reading this blog I don't know how that's possible - there's always Six Pack. Kenny Rogers, Diane Lane, Anthony Michael Hall, Erin Gray, an RV full of orphans and a grizzled stock car racer. Or something like that. It clearly doesn't suck is what I'm saying here.