Shocktober Revisited: Mini-Reviews!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Shocktober Review: Cooties

 Give Cooties this: it brings an approach to horror comedies that hasn't been done to death before. In fact, it might even be novel in the "evil children" subgenre, because of the way the menace is presented. If you want to call it a "zombie" movie - and I don't, for reasons I'll get to shortly - it's been since Dawn of the Dead that I can really remember a movie that featured undead children attacking adults. But then again, since I'd say this is a little more 28 Days Later than Dawn of the Dead, we'll have to put that to the side. Also feel free to school me in all of the "zombie children" movies I am forgetting. The point is that premise-wise, Cooties feels like a breath of fresh air. It's just a shame that so much of the film is uneven, ruining the fun.

 After having a go as a writer in New York, Clint (Elijah Wood) is taking some time to focus in his hometown of Fort Chicken. In a twist, he's living upstairs, and not in his parents' basement, but it's littered with geek friendly posters and toys, presumably when he was younger. Clint is working on his novel, about a guy who buys a killer boat (as a character points out later, "so it's Christine?" and Clint replies, "well no, this is a boat"). Honestly, the book sounds awful from what we hear him working on, but it's supposed to. To make a little money, he signs up to be a substitute teacher at the same elementary school he went to, and on his first day he meets a slightly less than welcoming faculty: P.E. coach Wade (Rainn Wilson), alarmist Rebekkah (Nasim Pedrad), science teacher Doug (screenwriter Leigh Whannell), and, uh, whatever Tracy (Jack McBrayer) teaches. Vice Principal Simms (Ian Brennan) confiscates his phones ("if the students can't have them, neither should we") and crosswalk guard Rick (Jorge Garcia) mistakes Clint for his drug dealer.

 The only person who seems happy to see Clint is Lucy (Allison Pill), who it turns out he knew taught there. They went to school together, and she's very impressed that he's been living in the big city. She's also dating Wade, who introduces himself to Clint by parking him in with a huge truck (there's a running joke about Wade being unable to say "dual rear wheel"). He's hostile to Clint, but he might have a good reason, since Clint is clearly flirting with Lucy, and she's flirting back. But then it's time for classes, and elementary school is not how Clint remembered it. The first student he runs across is named Patriot ("born on 9/11") who wrote "Eat a Cock" on his window and still has his phone. The other students are even less polite, except the girl who has some serious boils on her face. And her hair falls out. Then she bites Patriot on the cheek.

 It turns out she ate a tainted chicken nugget, one we saw during the opening montage, and as Doug surmises later, the disease infected her brain, turning her into a zombie-like rage monster. Doug does imply their brains are dead and turning to mush, but considering how much of Patriot's personally exists throughout the movie, you're closer to Return of the Living Dead Part 2 "zombie" territory (see, I remembered another one!). I'm still of the mind it's more 28 Days Later, and this is a live virus - traditional zombie rules don't apply. Head shots are not necessary, just violence against children.

  The teachers are trapped inside, while Rick sits in his van tripping on mushrooms. The police are no help and the only parent who arrives at 3:00 is quickly dispatched of, thanks to her inattentive use of phones and tablets. They have to navigate the corridors, and when Patriot lets the infected inside, their options are limited to a Die Hard inspired trip through the air ducts. While Clint and Lucy are trying to get Wade's keys, Doug discovers that the disease only infects children who haven't reached puberty yet, which is why Clint's bite only made him very sick for a few hours.

 Cooties suffers from an unusual tonal dissonance, but not necessarily from the plot. The film itself is more or less a straight up horror comedy, deriving most of its laughs from a combination of vulgarity and extreme violence directed at the children. Where it stumbles is the characters, and it's not clear if that's because of the decisions made by the actors or if it was inherent in Whannell's screenplay. Half of the cast makes a concerted effort not to be stereotypes: the man-child, the meathead coach, the "kooky" science teacher, and the other half just embrace their one note characters. Wilson tries very hard to keep Wade from being the character we immediately expect him to be the moment his truck parks Clint in, but it takes most of the film before there's any kind of validation that he's not just a stock "type".

 I understand that there's a separate, infected / zombie children story and that you need to put things in order, but Clint, Lucy, and particularly Wade aren't fleshed out until late in the film, at which point the scene in the library feels like it's disrupting the narrative, rather than serving it. Compare it with a throwaway line from Doug, given in the middle of explaining what they're up against, that contextualizes his character without a long conversation over walkie-talkies. It's not unwelcome to have a horror comedy that makes the effort to establish its characters a little bit, but the it happens in Cooties is uneven at best. That also, unfortunately, applies to the structure of the film, particularly its third act.

 By necessity, I'm going to have to enter SPOILER territory to discuss the end of the movie, so be warned. Skip down a few paragraphs if you just want the wrap up. SPOILERS AHOY!

 While I can understand the decision to leave the school for the last act, I'm not convinced it was a good idea. The mad dash out, coupled with leaving Fort Chicken, introducing Danville, the next town over, covering the spread of the epidemic, and creating a new "you're doomed" scenario happens within the span of about ten minutes. In a lot of ways, it removes the tension of the confined space while Clint and company are in the school. It also unsatisfactorily resolves the Patriot story line with an almost perfunctory scene between towns. Yes, Clint has a great callback line and the kill is a good one, but there's something about the sudden change in scenery and the fact that it's resolved so quickly (Wade's truck does all of the work) that renders it less significant than it was built up to be.

 I honestly wouldn't have minded if where they were going had any relevancy other than to demonstrate the virus had spread, but it doesn't. There's a half-hearted attempt to put Doug in the same place as the tainted nuggets, but it's more in the service of getting them into another "oh shit" scenario. The reveal of where they ended up - a Chuck-E Cheese-like indoor playground - is a tense moment, but that too is disrupted almost immediately by the surprise return of the not dead Wade who somehow figured out where they were and is now in Rick's van. (His explanation that "I always know where my truck is" doesn't really give them a pass). Everything is resolved so quickly that there's not really time to appreciate that Wade just immolated an entire jungle gym's worth of infected kids. Again, I appreciate the idea behind it, but the tonal and spatial shift don't really jibe with most of Cooties.

 (HERE ENDETH THE SPOILERS)

 Character development bumps aside, there are a lot of things to like about the cast of Cooties. Leigh Whannell, in particular is a lot of fun as the "not quite there" Doug. He's introduced in the teacher's lounge reading a book called How to Talk Like a Human Being, and the payoff for why he's so off-kilter is actually a good one. Novel even, because I can't recall many characters who seem that gimmicky to have such a logical explanation why. Elijah Wood and Allison Pill ground the movie, even if Clint and Lucy are more of a collection of "character quirks" than anything cohesive. Once we finally get to know Wade - two thirds of the way into Cooties - Rainn Wilson has the opportunity to make him memorable and not just stereotypical and runs with it. They fare better than McBrayer, Pedrad, and Garcia, who have pretty much one note to play throughout the film. There's nothing necessarily wrong with their performances, but I doubt you'll remember much about them once Cooties is over. It's a bit like when you realize the (one) police officer who shows up is the guy who played Badger on Breaking Bad: funny for a minute, but quickly forgotten.

 Cooties is a little too lopsided as a horror comedy - it's only really funny towards the end, but when it is, I fully admit that it can be very funny. That is, provided you have a particularly misanthropic streak towards children. There's some tension in the first half that sustains the build up of the "zombie" plague, hampered a bit by character beats but ultimately effective as long as they're in the school. Things kind of fall apart in the last act as the film jumps around, tonally and visually, but in the end Cooties is amusing. Perhaps not memorable, but a fun trifle if you're looking for a decent horror comedy with an ensemble that came ready to play. In that regard, I suppose it's fitting I saw it on VOD: not to denigrate the quality of the "On Demand" movement, but I'm more forgiving of Cooties' problems than I would be having seen it in theatres.

Shocktober Revisited: Dead Snow

Tommy Wirkola's Dead Snow is a fairly entertaining Norwegian horror film with one very enticing gimmick: Nazi Zombies. That it doesn't quite live up to the expectations one might expect from that premise shouldn't scare genre fans away from the film; there's enough quality gore to overcome a slightly derivative script that, at times, relies heavily on Sam Raimi's early work to get from plot point to plot point. It's funny enough to distract you from a familiar plot and even more familiar story beats, and while the zombies aren't exactly zombies, they're certainly a fun twist in otherwise well trod territory.

Stop me when this sounds familiar: college students (in this case, all med-school) go to a secluded cabin on a mountain to spend the weekend. There's an even mix of girls and guys, with two couples and four singles of recognizable types - the missing girlfriend who everybody assumed would be there, the guy who always talks about movies, the girl that's kind of nerdy herself, and the squeamish guy with the self-reliant girlfriend.

Okay so far? Let's add the "Creepy Older Guy" who warns them about the history of this particular mountain - Nazis occupying Norway that stole the village valuables and were killed by the townspeople... or were they? - and then leaves. Where's the girl who owns the cabin? Is she okay? What's all this gold from 1942 doing in the cabin? People start dying? Could it be undead Nazis? Oh, you know it is! Let the evisceration commence!

I say that the Nazi Zombies aren't exactly zombies, in part because while yes, they are undead, they don't behave like traditional zombies. They behave like undead Nazis, ones that really like fist fights, using knives, and in one instance, gutting a girl to put a grenade inside her torso. The makeup is pretty nice, particularly on General Herzog, who just happens to be missing his lips. All of the Nazi zombies (who do bite people, but don't really seem interested in eating them) are menacing, if easily dispatched with late in the film.

Since I mentioned General Herzog, now's as fair a time as any to talk about how intertextuality-laden Dead Snow is. Not only do the characters discuss other horror films with a similar premise at the outset of their trip, but at least one of the films mentioned comes into play repeatedly during the film. There are two explicit references to Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn - one is part of a "if this were a horror movie" conversation and the other one is a direct visual reference to Ash cutting off his hand, used to set up an "Oh yeah, now what are you going to do?" joke involving a crotch-level Nazi zombie.

Erlend, the character constantly quoting films (including Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Terminator) is also wearing a Brain Dead shirt (better known in the States as Dead Alive). Fans of Machete are going to be saying "Dead Snow did it!" when they see a very similar gag involving guts from two years earlier. The references aren't overly distracting, but they do underscore how much of Dead Snow is familiar territory, particularly the end, which lacks the kind of punch I suspect it was supposed to have.

That being said, you're going to have a lot of fun moments, and a few surprises - the nerdy film fan is the only character to have sex with someone - and for horror fans, plenty of gore. I'm not really sure I've seen a film so obsessed with intestines as Dead Snow is, and the fact that the protagonists are medical students does actually come into play in a meaningful - if totally unrealistic - fashion. Also, the crow scene is pretty funny. Dead Snow isn't going to reinvent the zombie wheel, and the Nazi Zombie concept isn't as developed as one would hope, but it's still definitely worth renting or (as the Cap'n did) "Watch(ing) It Now."

Nevermore Film Festival Recap (Day Two)

 Saturday is always the grinder at Nevermore, because I have the entire day and try to take advantage of seeing as many movies as I can. After breakfast at a greasy spoon, we were on out way to a healthy mixture of features, foreign short films, and the Retro feature of the Festival: William Castle's The Tingler Starring Vincent Price (yep, still pretty sure that's the title, so no need to check up on that). There wasn't anything that quite matched the surprise and entertainment that was The Shower (well, maybe The Tingler, but that's a movie I'd already seen), but overall Saturday turned out to be a pretty solid lineup.

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 We started with The Returned (which, it turns out, is not the same as the show Les Revenants), which is kind of a contagion / sort-of zombie movie that also isn't. It uses the idea of an outbreak that turns people into flesh eaters and jumps forward twenty years to a world that's learned to cope with the virus. Anyone who is bit (it's only transferred by blood) becomes one of them, but if a retroviral drug is administered immediately, there's a chance they can survive and become what's referred to as "The Returned." They have to continue injecting themselves every day to prevent the virus from breaking down their bodies, but the contagion is largely under control - until the supply of the drug starts running low.

 At the center of the story, which is less about the disease and more about how the world responds to its continued presence are Kate (Emily Hampshire), a doctor who works with "Returned" and prepares them for life outside of the hospital's rehabilitation center, and her boyfriend Alex (Kris Holden-Reid), a guitar instructor who met Kate when he was infected. As Kate struggles to convince private firms to invest money into developing a synthetic form of the drug (the natural can only be made from untreated victims), she works to buy more medicine for Alex, illegally if necessary. After a hospital break-in from an anti-Returned group ends violently, the clinician who was smuggling medicine to Kate, Eve (Melina Matthews) warns her that they also stole information about where registered Returned live, and that she may be in danger. Alex's friend Jacob (Shawn Doyle) and his wife Amber (Claudia Bassols) offer them a place to hide out, but the world seems to be falling apart as tensions increase between pro and anti-Returned groups...

 I was rather impressed by how writer Hatem Khraiche and director Manuel Carballo slowly provide exposition in The Returned. Rather than devoting time to an exposition dump early on, we're eased into the world where the presence of Returned is already accepted (by some, anyway) and learn about its origins and effects through conversation. Alex is nervous about telling Jacob he's Returned, and we don't know what that means or the ramifications of it until later, during one of Kate's presentations, where it's treated like any other life-long disease. There's no long discussion about where it came from or how the world handled it at first, just a handful of flashbacks involving one of the main characters. The Returned deals with this world as it is and is comfortable enough in the strength of the story to let the audience put the pieces together.

 As would turn out to be the trend for the day, The Returned is less of a horror film than the premise might imply and more allegorical, similar in a sense to David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly. It has a similar sense of hope and desperation, but on a broader scale - while there are four main characters, the lives touched by families with Returned is explored repeatedly and in differing approaches. It's an intimate story with a broader scope, one that maybe stumbles a bit near the end (it's really the only way the movie could end, but you can probably guess what's going to happen halfway in) but is quite well directed and acted. Think of it as a sort of alternate universe response to 28 Days Later, story-wise, and it has some nice ideas to wrestle with. A great way to start the day off.

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 After The Returned, we settled down in Cinema Two for the long form and short form foreign shorts, Across the Styx and Revolution of the Foreign Invaders (respectively), which I'll try to cover in short bursts, with links to the films (or their trailers) when possible.

 Across the Styx:

 Agophobia - I'm not going to lie - I watched this film, was impressed by the visuals, but didn't know what the hell I'd seen when it was over. I think the best way I can describe it is if you imagine William Gibson going on a walkabout with some serious hallucinogens. If it helps, the synopsis is on the official site. It was interesting to watch, but I freely admit that I didn't follow most of it.

 The Other Side - A student working on his thesis goes to the home of a writer and her lover, convinced they found a portal to another world. It's a slow build and a bit of a rushed final scene, but has an interesting premise. There are so many results for this title that I couldn't find the specific one based on Nevermore's site, but if I locate it I will update this entry.

 The Crimes of All Hallow's Day - After an introduction from filmmaker Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi, we're presented a story of true crime from Ibiza in the 1970s about a Danish couple who run across the wrong "nice old couple" while out for a drive. It has a very late-sixties, early-seventies vibe to the lighting and cinematography, and a wicked sense of humor.

 AM/FM - A student has a chance encounter with a homeless man who makes a compelling case for alien invaders in this short from Brazil. Some of the cutaways to what the aliens look like are rather amusing and reminiscent of Ed Wood films, but it takes a surprisingly dark turn at the end. After The Crime of All Hallow's Day, my second favorite of the long form shorts.

 Revolution of the Foreign Invaders:

 Euthanas, Inc.- A cheap family wants to euthanize grandma, so they take drop her off with a company who specializes in unique deaths. If you want to die like in your favorite movie, Euthanas, Inc. can make it happen. But Grandma has other plans...

 Don't Look Here - When her fathers dies, a young woman returns home to comfort her mother and sister, but it appears that his connection with the younger daughter is stronger than anyone may have expected. It's a brief, Guillermo del Toro-esque take on communicating with the dead, that's effective but perhaps too quick to conclude. (Searching for the title has been extremely difficult, both in English and in Spanish. I will update accordingly if I locate it).

 Hibernation - An astronaut prepares for deep sleep as he heads out for interstellar exploration, but he's more interested in the girl whose place he's taking. More straight-ahead science fiction than anything resembling horror, but it has some nice cinematography and a distinctly retro-vibe.

 Mr. Bear - Steve and his wife are running late to their children's Christmas dinner, and when the car breaks down next to a mechanic, he's mistaken by the men inside for a "cleaner" of, unusual circumstances. Quite clever and surprisingly gory with some sadistic humor thrown in for good measure.

REM - To be honest, I wasn't a huge fan of this short. It wasn't that it was very reminiscent of Inception (which it is), but that it essentially exists to tease either a) more short films or b) a feature length continuation of the story, neither of which I'm particularly interested in.

 Nexo - A man's new phone has a strange camera: instead of showing what's in front of him, it displays the yard of his friends, where the man appears to be, even though he's inside his house alongside his girlfriend. There's some genuine suspense, but it's often hampered by not seeing the image on the phone and an abrupt conclusion. (I was having trouble finding this short as well in any form online).

 Le Revenant - My favorite of the foreign shorts involves a young man who is convinced he can cheat death, so he tests his theory with hilarious results. Often cartoonish with a healthy dose of black comedy, Le Revenant ramps up the insanity as the now undead man decides he's going to stop Death from doing his job, often with disastrous consequences.

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 The main event for Saturday night was Nevermore's "Retro" screening of The Tingler (shortened title for the sake of brevity), presented by Bruce Goldstein of Rialto Pictures. Goldstein mentioned in his introduction that despite his reputation and recognition for film programming, he's probably best known around the world for The Tingler due to his interest in screening it (and other William Castle films) with the original "gimmick," Percepto. The Tingler also happens to be John Waters' favorite movie, and with good reason. While House on Haunted Hill might be better known, The Tingler exemplifies "camp" cinema before anyone had a firm grasp on what "camp" was, not to mention the distinction of having an onscreen LSD experience in 1959, nearly a decade before it caught on with the counter-culture.

 If you're a fan of very questionable "science" and even more questionable scientific techniques of experimentation, or of characters who exist to out-chew the scenery of their co-stars, or of William Castle / Vincent Price and you haven't seen The Tingler, you're really missing out. Price is gnawing all over the scenery like an overgrown rat as Dr. Warren Chapin, a prison mortician who also researches fear in his home laboratory with his assistant, David Morris (Darryl Hickman). David is dating Lucy Stevens (Pamela Lincoln), the younger sister of Chapin's wife, Isabelle (Patricia Cutts). Warren and Isabelle have a "hate / hate" relationship; she is constantly (and openly) carousing around town with other men, and at one point he tricks her into thinking he's going to kill her for the sake of an experiment. Their dialogue is also dripping with innuendo, like this bon mot from Warren:

 "How is it that the back door slams whenever the husband comes in the front door?"

 I'll let you mull that one over. The title creature comes in after Warren meets Ollie Higgins (Phillip Coolidge), the husband of deaf / mute theater owner Martha (Judith Evelyn). Warren is explaining his theory that an organism lives inside of us and materializes during periods of extreme fear, which gives it enough strength to shatter vertebrae. Ollie suggests calling it "the Tingler," and when Warren mentions it to David, he agrees that "we can't give a Latin name until we've discovered it, so the Tingler works." David also traps a cat, leaves a dog outside in a car, and makes a strange joke about hoping that Lucy can't run fast. Screenwriter and Castle regular Robb White, intentionally or otherwise, packs the film with lines that could imply something far less innocent. Although, considering that Chapin is open to the idea of experimenting with Martha because she can't scream (the only way to stop the Tingler) in order to manifest the creature should give you some idea of how morally questionable every character is in The Tingler. When (SPOILER) Isabelle tries to murder Warren with the Tingler, it hardly seems unreasonable after what he's done in the name of "science."

 The great fun of watching a movie like The Tingler is seeing it with an audience, in particular because Percepto! is designed for theatres. While we didn't get the exact Percepto! experience, it was nevertheless a fun time, and they found a way to throw in another gimmick during Chapin's LSD experiment, where the black and white film turns color for a short period of time in what can only be referred to as "proto-psychedelic." When Chapin tricks Martha later and "doses" her, there's another, stranger hallucinatory sequence that improbably ties into the story's "twist," one that's jettisoned almost immediately so that the Tingler can get loose in the theatre below Ollie's apartment.

 Oh yes, I haven't mentioned what the Tingler looks like, have I? Well, imagine a large rubber cenitpede being pulled along by string and you'll have a pretty good idea. It's gross, but not exactly scary, and when it tries to choke Warren but looks suspiciously like it's humping his chest, it's hard to be frightened. Then again, that's probably not the point. William Castle specialized in "interactive" movie experiences, and the audience in Fletcher Hall was certainly having a grand time shrieking and laughing along with The Tingler, fifty five years after its original release. Call it schlock if you like, but Castle knew what he was doing with his gimmickry.

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 It's hard to imagine topping The Tingler, but at it was barely nine o'clock when we left Fletcher Hall to move to Cinema One, there was no reason not to see one of the two movies closing out Saturday at Nevermore. The options were Battle of the Undead, an Israeli film about zombies, or The Last Days (Los últimos días), a Spanish film set just before and slightly after a sudden disease causes all of humanity to be incapable of being outdoors. While I enjoy a zombie movie as much as any red blooded gore hound, if you're offering me post-apocalyptic cinema, I'm going to take it. (Long time Blogorium readers will attest that if there are two subgenres the Cap'n is a total sucker for, it's anthologies and post-apocalyptic cinema).

 Marc Delgado (Quim Gutiérrez) is a software programmer in Barcelona who lives with his girlfriend Julia (Marta Etura), a puppeteer. He's hesitant about having children and there's some visible strain in their relationship, but something strange has been happening around them. People are shutting themselves in, finding they are incapable of going outside. When Enrique (José Coronado), a corporate restructuring expert (nicknamed "The Terminator") fires an employee who had been living in the office for two weeks, he goes into shock as soon as he leaves the building and dies in front of everyone. Before long, this unexplained affliction is widespread, and Marc finds himself trapped in his office building while Julia is at home. After three months, he'll do anything to get back to her, and when they break through the parking garage to the subway, he sees his opportunity. The only problem is that someone already took the only GPS - Enrique. In order to find Julia, he's going to have to make a deal with a man he barely trusts, but what other option is there?

 There was a technical error at the beginning of the film that, for reasons unknown, prevented us from seeing subtitles on every other line of dialogue, so we'd catch half (or less) of a conversation in the first ten minutes, and every time someone would head outside to tell the projection staff, the subtitles would come back on, only to immediately drop out. Eventually they stopped the film and restarted it (and everything worked that time), but it's a testament to how well The Last Days is made that something that disruptive didn't impact the overall film experience.

 Writer / Directors David and Àlex Pastor crafted a story about the apocalypse that isn't directly about how the apocalypse happened. Scattered throughout the film are flashbacks that fill in details about Marc and Julia's life, including one revelation that increases his need to find her, but like The Returned, there's no grand attempt to explain what happens to everybody that keeps them indoors. We see what it feels like to go outside and understand why they're afraid to try, but the explanation remains a mystery. What's more important is how people learn to adapt to this new world, where humanity is crammed together in pockets, unable to contact each other.

 The Last Days is a very well made film that covers a lot of familiar post-apocalyptic tropes in interesting ways and structures the story in such a way that you're always interested to see where it goes next. The surprisingly upbeat ending feels appropriate, particularly when it could have gone in a much darker direction with one or two minor changes. At the heart of the film is the bond between Marc and Enrique, who each have their reasons for venturing out into the unknown, where anyone is capable of anything. While Marc's quest for Julia is the impetus for the narrative, the performances of Gutiérrez and Coronado are the glue that holds The Last Days together, and the film is a fine addition to the post-apocalyptic cinema family. There's even a tiny reference to the Mad Max films during a conversation about whether all of humanity is affected or not. At least, I choose to see it that way - there's a way The Last Days and The Road Warrior could exist in the same world...

 I'm even more worn out today than I was last night, but Sunday awaits, along with the last two Nevermore experiences of 2014. Join the Cap'n tomorrow for Grand Piano and the U.S. short films, They're Coming to Get You, Barbra!

2013 Recap: Closer and Closer to the Top (Part Three)

 Continuing in the seemingly never-ending "Middle" section of the Recap-o-Rama-Rama, you'll be happy to know that Cap'n Howdy is finally getting to some horror movies. I didn't see a lot of the new horror movies this year, although I certainly will check out (in order of interest) You're Next, The Conjuring, Insidious Part 2, and The Lords of Salem at some point in the New Year. What I did see, I mostly enjoyed (Evil Dead aside), and will cover more thoroughly in just a moment. And some other stuff, but who am I kidding? This site is called Cap'n Howdy's Blogorium, and you came for the horror, so let me give it to you!

Found Footage, Zombies, Dolls, and Learning the Alphabet for the Last Time.

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

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


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

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

 I already have some degree of coverage for V/H/S 2, Curse of Chucky, and The ABCs of Death, but it doesn't seem fair to have a section devoted to horror that only covers a movie that isn't really a horror movie, so let's talk about them some more, shall we? I saw The ABCs of Death at the Nevermore Film Festival, along with The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh and The Casebook of Eddie Brewer, both of which I'm pretty sure are movies from 2012 and don't count, but feel free to click the ABCs link to read about them. Rosalind Leigh is out on video now, and I'm not sure about Eddie Brewer, but I'll keep an eye out. Good independent horror is always worth checking out, especially when there are so many bad ones clogging the shelves. Or queue, or Redbox - whatever it is you modern kids use these days.

 Oh, right, I was talking about The ABCs of Death, which is now getting a sequel that I'm cautiously looking forward to. Not because I'm worried about quality, necessarily, but when I say there are things in the first anthology you can't un-see, I mean it. Not just in the "you literally saw it and can't un-see something you saw, dummy," but in the "great, I'm not going to be able to forget that, hard as I may try." Believe me, if I could go back in time and take a bathroom break during "L is for Libido" I would. Or "Pressure" or whatever "Z" was. Twenty six shorts films means there are some terrible ones mixed in with some genuinely inspired ones, and there are some truly bizarre entries (like "Fart" or the Harakiri one), and a surprising amount of toilet humor, probably more than one movie needed. If you're interested in the concept, the first film allowed people to vote for "T" and you can find many of them on Vimeo or YouTube. For The ABCs 2, the voting is for "M." So far I've seen some pretty interesting entries ("Masticate" might be my favorite) and they're fairly easy to find. If you'd rather wait for the movie to come out to see what wins, they should still be around afterwards.

 It's no secret that I like anthology horror films (that's probably a sentence I've written more times than I'd care to admit), and V/H/S 2 is a better one at what it sets out to do than The ABCs in construction, if not ambition. The more I think about it, the less it really has anything to do with "found footage," especially VHS tapes, as someone would have to go through extraordinary effort to edit most of the digital footage they "found" and then transfer it to a VCR in order to fit into the wraparound narrative's gimmick. I've heard that the WFUN Halloween Special does a better job of actually using the "VHS" conceit, but since I have not been able to watch it, I don't want to comment definitively. That said, I still think V/H/S 2 is an improvement in every way over the first film and will be keeping an eye out for successive entries into whatever you want to call this anthology format. Also, I need to get that special edition that has V/H/S 2 on VHS, just because.

 And Curse of Chucky. I've already gushed over it twice, because as mentioned with Furious Six last time, by the time you make it to six movies in a series, it's usually something terrible like Freddy's Dead, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, or Hellraiser: Hellseeker. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives is the exception to that rule, and now it has some company with Curse of Chucky. (Sorry, I don't think I ever saw Children of the Corn 666 or, uh Puppet Master 6 if there is one. All of the Saw movies sucked, so it's not like VI was any better or worse, but I guess the whole "health insurance" thing was pretty dumb.) I think it would have had a pretty good shot in theaters, and I wish I had seen it with an audience, but DTV it was and the crowd at Horror Fest ate it up, so I can't complain too much. Let's just hope there isn't another eight year gap between Child's Play sequels.

Novel-less Adaptations

 Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine)'s The Place Beyond the Pines feels like his Great American Novel adaptation, but without a book to be based on. It's a sprawling, multi-generational story of small town America, of politics and crime and the sins of the father(s). At nearly two-and-a-half hours, it still feels shortened, as though there were threads of the story that were left out, chapters unvisited. While not altogether successful, the ambition to make such a dense story is nevertheless most impressive.

 The Place Beyond the Pines is broken up roughly into three sections: the first involves Luke (Ryan Gosling) a circus motorbike stuntman who decides to visit Romina (Eva Mendes) while in Schenectady. They hooked up the last time he was in town, and he figures maybe they can again, but when he arrives at her home unannounced, he discovers that he's the father of her infant son, Jason. Luke, despite being something of a drifter and generally shady character, immediately quits his job and decides to stay in town to help raise Jason, even though Romina is with Kofi (Mahershala Ali) and makes it clear that Luke isn't needed.

 The drifter ends up staying in the trailer of mechanic Robin (Ben Mendelsohn), who mentions he used to rob banks when Luke asks for work. The adrenaline junkie in Luke takes to robbing banks, and he uses the money to help Jason, despite Romina and Kofi's protests. When Luke turns violent, Robin abandons him and destroys his bike, giving the stuntman less to work with when he insists on robbing two banks in one day. While escaping on a faulty motorbike, Luke is pursued by Officer Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper), with violent repercussions for both men.

 Without spoiling too much (because you really should see The Place Beyond the Pines), the focus of the film shifts from Gosling to Cooper as he navigates the Schenectady Police Department, corruption, and his own ambitions. We're introduced to his wife Jennifer (Rose Byrne), his own infant son, A.J.,  his father, Jude Al Cross (Harris Yulin), fellow officers Scotty (Gabe Fazio) and Deluca (Ray Liotta), and District Attorney Bill Killcullen (Bruce Greenwood), and the ways that they intersect with his crisis of conscience following the encounter with Luke and his new reputation as "Hero Cop."

 The film then jumps ahead fifteen years and picks up with Cross running for New York Attorney General, when Jennifer drops off the teenage A.J. (Emory Cohen) with his father. Avery transfers A.J. to a Schenectady high school for his final year, and the drug enthusiast teen quickly seeks out the first kid who acts like him, the quiet Jason (Dane DeHaan). Neither know their histories are intertwined, but A.J.'s negative and bullying presence soon brings Jason more trouble than he wanted while at the same time introducing him to a father he never knew. Romina and Kofi are helpless bystanders as Jason realizes a whole piece of his history, of who he is, has been withheld from him, and the path to discovery takes some dark turns.

 The Place Beyond the Pines' success for you is going to hinge on how you feel about the somewhat abrupt transition between protagonists midway through the film. The Bradley Cooper section of the film is compelling, but not as immediately gripping as the early stretch with Gosling, and the Avery Cross "chapters" of the movie take a slow, but deliberate, change of pace in developing the characters. Things pick up again when we meet A.J. and Jason as teens and see that much of The Place Beyond the Pines has been building to their stories, but the middle stretch might be too jarring for some. I personally felt that the beginning and the end are more than enough to make up for it, and that the middle leaves something to be desired (Avery Cross simply isn't as interesting a character as a young cop), but in laying the groundwork for Jason's story, it's a necessary detour. It still feels like there are a number of unresolved issues from the middle section of the film that seem like setups which are never paid off. Maybe they were never meant to be addressed again, but it does feel like reading a book and seeing the movie that needs to drop some critical moments for the sake of time or narrative flow. The end result is epic, but simultaneously intimate, and a welcome change of pace from conventional storytelling.

 There's no easy way to say this, but To the Wonder didn't really do anything for me. The Cap'n isn't alone in this, and apparently 2013 was the year of declaring that "The Emperor Has No Clothes" about Terrence Malick. Maybe it is possible to have too much of a good thing; up until 2005, when he released The New World, Malick made three films in three decades (Badlands, Days of Heaven, and The Thin Red Line), which gave audiences plenty of time to anticipate his next film, to pore over the last one, and the mystique of the reclusive director grew. But since The New World, Malick has been on a tear (comparably speaking) releasing The Tree of Life in 2011, To the Wonder in 2013, and Knight of Cups later this year. That's four movies in nine years (with another one underway), and perhaps Malick hit a saturation point none of us knew was coming, or could come.

 Critics were split on To the Wonder, and audiences mostly seemed to reject it as "pretentious" (which is not a new pejorative for a Malick film) and "empty." His films have, at least since Days of Heaven, valued the experiential over narrative structure. He tends to introduce themes that ask "Big" questions, like "what should humans follow, the path of nature or grace?" and as Malick gets older, the characters in his films become less important than the cosmic issues. You have to take it or leave it, because I don't think we're ever going to get something like Badlands again - the characters in a Malick film are merely cyphers for him to work out philosophical issues. To the Wonder isn't really any different, in that regard. I think the problem was that, for once, I didn't really connect to the issues he was grappling with.

 That is, at least, one of the problems I had with To the Wonder, and it's a fundamental one that kept me from letting the film wash over me (as they usually do). I can understand grappling with doubts about love and faith, but they don't personally engage me in any way, so the visuals were all I had to hang on to. Coupled with this is the fact that I'm not sure Malick knew what he wanted to say with To the Wonder, other than to put the issue out there and repeat it over and over again. Father Quintana (Javier Bardem) only seems to exist in order to provide (subtitled) narration about God's absence from his life, and to ask how to find spiritual enlightenment again. His role in the story is perfunctory, as the emotional travails of Neil (Ben Affleck), Marina (Olga Kurylenko), and - very briefly - Jane (Rachel McAdams) eat up most of the film.

The plot is bare bones, even compared to The Tree of Life. I can boil down into three sentences: Neil and Marina meet in Paris, and she agrees to move back to Oklahoma with him, where he works. She has doubts and returns to Paris with her daughter, and in their absence Neil reconnects with Jane, a childhood friend. When Marina returns, they marry but struggle and seek assistance from Father Quintana, but is it already too late?

 By the way, I only know their names because of the credits, because if someone says them in the film, I missed it for every character. Affleck mentioned in an interview that Malick films with a script and dialogue for the actors, and then tends to remove most of it during editing, and increasingly relies on narration to bridge the imagery (Sean Penn indicated something similar while disparaging his diminished presence in The Tree of Life). Neil says almost nothing at all in the film - he's really there more for Marina and Jane to project onto, and Affleck has, undeservedly I think, been shouldered with much of the blame for its failure in execution. In truth, it's not really his fault - the film, in its finished form, is a meditation on the inability of Marina to connect to Neil juxtaposed with Quintana's spiritual crisis. Marina is, for all intents and purposes, the main character - it's her we hear speaking in narration (subtitled, this time from French), and when she leaves the story for a while, McAdams steps in as a surrogate lover, but it's not long. Affleck is understated, largely because it isn't his story. It's not his crisis to deal with - of the cyphers in the film, Neil is the one we're left with to project all of our doubts on.

  I can't decide if the reason that the visual fallback doesn't work is because this is the first time Malick isn't working at all in period. It's such an odd thing to get hung up on, but To the Wonder is the only film he's made that's set entirely in the present, and once Neil and Marina leave Paris, it settles into a very flat, somewhat drab Midwestern location. The open sky is always nice to look at, but there was only so much of Kurylenko twirling in the "magic hour" light that can sustain a movie, and the sterility of their home in America didn't help. I realize that's the point - comparing it to the Old World of Europe, but for the first time it didn't feel like that was enough. Being visually boring isn't something I ever thought I'd equate with Terrence Malick, but I did check the running time of the movie midway into the film which is the first time I've ever done that with one of his movies.

 So To the Wonder is the punching bag that naysayers have been waiting for, and I don't want to add any more fuel to the fire, but it didn't really do much for me. It's disappointing, but these things happen, unfortunately.

 In the absence of the critical acclaim for Terrence Malick, critics suddenly found themselves scrambling to name the director's heir apparent, and it seems they've settled on David Lowery's Ain't Them Bodies Saints. I can certainly see the appeal, as Lowery (who edited Shane Carruth's Upstream Color, a film you'll be hearing about before this recap is over) crafted a tale of Texas in the 1970s that's bound to remind viewers of Badlands. It opens with a title card that states "This Was Texas," and drops us right into the lives of Bob Muldoon (Casey Affleck) and Ruth Guthrie (Rooney Mara).

 We don't know much about them, other than Ruth helps Bob and his partner Freddy (Kentucker Audley) rob someone and make a getaway with police in hot pursuit. During the shootout at an abandoned Muldoon family farmhouse, Ruth shoots Office Patrick Wheeler (Ben Foster) in the shoulder after Freddy is killed. Because Ruth is pregnant, Bob takes the blame for the shot and is sent to prison for 25 years. Four years later, Ruth is raising her daughter, Sylvie (Kennadie and Jacklynn Smith) with the help of Patrick and Skerritt (Keith Carradine), a man with ties to Bob and Freddy. That is, until Bob escapes, and everyone anticipates he'll make good on his promise to come back for Ruth...

 Ain't Them Bodies Saints is more narrative driven than anything Malick's ever done, but otherwise I can see the comparisons to Badlands. It's a lush, atmospheric film, one that slowly reveals information, leaving plenty of open-ended plot lines throughout the early stretches. Bob's letters to Ruth are read in narration (as well as Ruth's one response), and much of the latter half of Ain't Them Bodies Saints is conveyed visually rather than with dialogue. The title itself is something of a mantra, not meant to symbolize anything in particular, but to put you in the frame of mind to experience the film. Affleck, Mara, Foster, and particularly Carradine turn in great performances, as does Nate Parker as Sweetie, Bob's friend on the outside that helps him when he returns to Meridian to find Ruth.

 It's a fine film, and I look forward to seeing more from Lowery, although I'd hesitate to call him the next Terrence Malick. For one, I don't see that such a title is necessary for an emerging director, and may in fact be more burdensome than laudatory. Ain't Them Bodies Saints has everything it needs to stand up on its own without crowning the director as the successor to another director's legacy. Taken on its own terms, there's more than enough for you to enjoy Ain't Them Bodies Saints.

Apatow in the Hand is Worth Two in the Bush (Or, a Tale of Two Apatows)

 It feels like there are three camps in the "Apatow Productions" industry: there's the Judd Apatow camp, which sort of ties things together but are mostly relationship based movies that go over two hours and have lots and lots of improv. Then there's the Adam McKay / Will Ferrel Gary Sanchez Productions / Funny or Die group, that focuses by an large on outlandish roles for Ferrell and company (Talladega Nights, Step Brothers). And then there's the Seth Rogen / Evan Goldberg camp, that brings us weird genre hybrids like Pineapple Express, Observe and Report, and Superbad. Sometimes they overlap and you'll see actors from one film in another of the camps (actually, more often than not, you will) but they seem to remain distinct entities unto themselves.

 As Apatow did not have a movie out this year, having released This is 40 in 2012, the Apatow Production brand fell into the capable hands of the Rogen and McKay camps to release two of the funnier movies I saw this year: This is the End and Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (respectively). Until Anchorman 2, I don't think I'd laughed harder at anything all year than This is the End (although there's one other movie I'll get to next week that's pretty close). They're very different types of movies, and I won't pretend that blatant vulgarity is a large part of their appeal, but laugh I did, and repeatedly.

 It never really occurred to me, but there was a very good chance that This is the End could have been a disaster. For lowbrow comedy, it's strangely high concept: a group of well known comedy actors play versions of themselves in the middle of the apocalypse. Actually, save for a few people in the background of the party and at the convenience store, everybody in This is the End is playing themselves, or an exaggerated version of their on-screen "persona"'s. Having seen actual interviews with Danny McBride, it's pretty clear he's not just Kenny Powers, but the "Danny McBride" in This is the End is absolutely a variation on that. Seth Rogen is the amiable stoner, Jonah Hill is the eager to please guy, Craig Robinson is the unflappable man about town, and James Franco is the weirdo. Well, okay, the last one might not be an exaggeration at all, but the screenplay by Rogen and Goldberg takes most of its shots at the "lesser" films on Franco's resume.

 I haven't really seen enough of Jay Baruchel outside of supporting roles in other Judd Apatow productions to know how close his "Hollywood Outsider"personality is to real life, but beneath all of the dick jokes and nonstop profanity is the simple story of two friends who grew apart. It's really the only thing that holds together the otherwise episodic nature of This is the End. Beyond the story of Seth Rogen (Rogen) and Jay Baruchel (Baruchel) trying to figure out where their friendship in compared to the Hollywood lifestyle, the movie is mostly a series of set ups that put Hill, Rogen, Baruchel, Franco, McBride, and Robinson in bizarre situations.

 And don't get me wrong, it's all VERY funny while you're watching it, and afterwards to boot, but don't go in expecting some kind of sustained story. It's more like "okay, it's the apocalypse - what do they have to eat? what drugs will they do? what happens when they run out of water? hey, Emma Watson survived and wants to stay with the guys - who's going to screw that up?" Even the ending feels like, "well, how are we going to end this movie?" and the answer is with the Backstreet Boys, paying off something we didn't even realize was a set up from earlier in the movie.

 In the meantime, there's a lot of improvisation, lots of poking fun at themselves (particularly Franco, who in the movie saves memorabilia from all of his films, leading them to have the prop gun from Flyboys as their only weapon). The party at Franco's house (where the movie takes place) is loaded with cameos, many from Apatow veterans who meet horrible ends. Michael Cera makes the best impression playing the coked out asshole from hell that we all know he is, but my favorite might be Paul Rudd accidentally crushing a woman's skull with his foot when the apocalypse starts. And yes, that's exactly how that happens.

 For those of you looking for consistent and raucous laughter, This is the End is a guaranteed winner. It plays like gangbusters with a crowd, too.

 After the first trailer, I must admit that I was worried Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues was going to suck. The long in development sequel (that almost didn't happen) just didn't look very funny from the ads, and to be honest some of what I saw made me groan. "Oh no, not Ron Burgundy being accidentally racist at the dinner table..." Fortunately, I had nothing to worry about. Like the first film (which I saw on a whim, also assuming it would only be intermittently funny), it's even better than you could have expected.

 With that much time to work on it, Adam McKay and Will Ferrell found plenty of time to hone the screenplay to perfection, and with a cast that clicks so well together, the improv doesn't stick out at all amidst the actual story (there is, apparently, an alternate cut of the film that replaces every single joke with a different one being released on Blu-Ray). The callbacks to the first film are limited, but well placed, and the new cast members fit in like a glove.

 Since Anchorman 2 is still playing at the time I'm writing this and I highly recommend you go see it, I won't say too much about the plot. It involves the News Team joining GNN, the first 24 Hour News Network (run by a psychotic Australian millionaire), but Ron (Ferrell), Champ (David Koechner), Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd) and Brick (Steve Carrell) aren't there to headline - no, that's for Jack Lime (James Marsden), the big time anchor. The Channel Five boys have the graveyard slot, and they decide to fill it with the news audiences want, not what they need, to the dismay of producer Freddie Shapp (Dylan Baker) and manager Linda Baker (Meagan Good). But it works!

 Make no mistake - Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues may be rated PG-13, but it's so close to an R that I would have sworn it was one. In fact, I had to look, because I thought it was an R. The "shit"'s fly almost as frequently as the non sequitur(s) do, and the film is loaded with sight gags you might not catch on the first viewing (and yes, I've seen it twice already). The use of a Simon and Garfunkel song near the end of the movie had me laughing so hard that I almost missed the subtitles from Baxter. Oh, and Kristen Wiig is a great addition as the love interest and only person dumber than Brick Tamland. The less I say about the "rumble" in this film, the better, because not knowing who's going to show up makes it even better, but I will say keep a close eye on the ghost of Stonewall Jackson...

 I'm not sure this is going to be as immediately quotable as the first film, but honestly I don't care. It's funny, and that's what is more important in a comedy. Not only did McKay and Ferrell not drop the ball, they carried it across the length of the field for a touchdown. Or do I mean "Whammy!"? Oh, and the bats... Oh, the bats. I'm trying hard not to spoil this movie for you, but when I think of it, there's so much that comes to mind.

 At any rate, both This is the End and Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues have tremendous replay value, and I'm looking forward to watching both yet again in the coming year(s).

 We're very nearly done with the middle, and as you can see my enthusiasm is growing as things progress. If you think these are getting ecstatic, just wait until you see the "Best Of."