It started with Monsters (2000). Someone, probably in Twitter, recommended it, so I rented it without much thought. Since I knew the (first) twist - it’s a plant monster - I figured I’d queue up RiffTrax: The Little Shop of Horrors (1960). We picked the RiffTrax in case it got boring. I figured we’d round it out with The Day of the Triffids (1962), but that wasn’t available on Netflix. But we could watch on Amazon Prime, so our botanical horror weekend was complete.
Monsters is Gareth Edwards’ (Rogue One) first feature. It takes place in the near future, where giant tentacled monsters from outer space have been devastating the Infected Zone, a region on the US/Mexico border. Scoot McNairy is a photojournalist, having a field day around the Zone, when his boss calls. His boss’ daughter, Whitney Able, is more or less stuck in the Zone, and he has to get her back to the US. This is all filmed in a very verite style, with glimpses of the monster on the TV news, and the wreckage they encounter as they travel. They are young and foolish, so they do quite a bit of drinking and fooling around, which causes McNairy to lose their passports.
There are scenes of downed airplanes and helicopters, and graffiti that indicates that the local populace aren’t happy about being bombed by the Americans, on top of hosting the rampaging monsters. The enormous wall at the border doesn’t seem to have kept out the monsters, and it’s all a pretty clear political metaphor - or maybe it’s just what things are like, plus monsters.
The monsters turn out to be trees infected by fungus, and the tentacles are roots. Hey, we saw it after spoilers, why shouldn’t you? This was a different and interesting movie, although the leads were a little on the unlikable side.
It might be a bit of a surprise, but we’d never seen Little Shop of Horrors (or the musical version either). It is a bizarre and ramshackle little horror comedy. It stars Jonathan Haze as a clumsy and not very bright shop boy in a Skid Row florist shop. He sort of looks like Dick Miller, but Miller has a different role - he comes into the shop and order a dozen carnations and begins eating them. Don’t knock it until you try it.
The shop is run by Mel Welles, with a broad Jewish schtick. He also employs Jackie Joseph as Audrey, a ditzy dame that Haze is in love with. He has been growing a unique plant that he names Audrey Junior, after her. It’s kind of sickly, but perks up when it gets a taste of human blood. Soon Haze is feeding it bodies, and it learns to talk. But it’s good for business.
There is a lot of random nonsense here - Jack Nicholson as a masochistic dental patient for no reason, the cops who investigate the disappearances are parodies of Dragnet, and Dick Miller eats flowers. Also, Haze makes Sammy Petrillo look like Jerry Lewis. But it’s also pretty much nonstop fun.
I wish I could say the same for Triffids. I was sure I had seen this as a kid, but I didn’t recognize any of it. For one thing, I thought it starred James Mason, but actually, it stars Howard Keel as Bill Mason. He’s a navy man in the hospital with his eyes bandaged after an operation. A meteor show is making a beautiful display, and he has to miss it. But when he wakes up and takes off the bandages, he discovers that anyone who watched the shower has gone blind. Plus, the odd little flowers called triffids that someone discovered a few years ago are now capable of walking and eating people.
So he goes around finding sighted people, a little girl and later, a Frenchwoman, Nicole Maurey. Maurey had a large chateau, and was helping to shelter a large number of the blind. But when some escaped convicts, who were in the Hole for the meteor shower come along, Keel, Maurey and the girl take off.
It’s weird the way the blind are treated here - almost as if they were dead already. Of course, considering how easy it would be to stumble into a man-eating plant (even if they couldn’t walk, and they can), maybe that’s realistic.
In the meantime, on a lighthouse off the coast of Cornwall, and alcoholic biologist and his wife are studying something or other - too busy studying and/or being drunk to watch the meteors. When they realize that the rest of the world is going to pieces, they start looking for a way to kill the triffids. The answer was right under their noses.
If you’ve seen Horror of Party Beach, you probably guessed “Sodium”.
So, in conclusion, I have to say that most ambulatory carnivorous plant props (or CGI effects) look silly, and the ones in Triffids don’t look much better that the one in Little Shop.
Thursday, October 31, 2019
Monday, October 28, 2019
Wicked Good
Although I’m not a big fan of Ray Bradbury, or Disney in general, I thought Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) would be worth checking out. I think it was.
It takes place in October in a small Illinois town, just after the war. A lightning rod salesman, Royal Dano, comes to town to tell the townspeople of the storm that’s coming. Youngsters Vidal Peterson as Will Halloway and Shawn Carson as Jim Nightingale get let out of school when their old battle axe teacher Mary Grace Canfield releases them from detention. They go to meet Will’s father, Jason Robards, at his work as town librarian. When they get home, the lightning rod salesman sells one to Jim - this will come in useful.
As the wind rises, it starts blowing around posters for a carnival - Dark’s Pandemonium - which is strange because the carnivals usually stop coming after Labor Day. The kids hear a train and sneak out their bedroom windows to see the carnival set up. It is all ready, but no one is there, and it gets pretty spooky.
The next day they go to the carnival, and find that it’s just an ordinary carnival. But we’ve been introduced to some of the townspeople - the tobacconist who is money mad, the barber who dreams of exotic women from exotic lands, the bar tender who was a football star until he lost an arm and a leg. The carnival will tempt all of them and more. First the tobacconist wins $10,000 in a game of chance and gets on the Ferris Wheel with a beautiful lady - who gets off alone. Then the barber goes to the hootchy-kootchy show - and doesn’t come back. And so forth.
Finally, Mr. Dark, Jonathon Pryce, will come for the kids (who know too much) and for Robards, who is an old man with heart trouble, who feels that life has passed him by.
A lot of this reminds me of The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao - a carnival where everyone sees what they need to see. In the hall of mirrors, this is made concrete, when the bartender sees himself with all his limbs, and the schoolteacher is young and beautiful. These are a little puzzling - are these dreams really so bad that the dreamers will be condemned (somehow) because they succumbed?
There’s a nice spider attack with a lot of tarantulas (which Ms. S liked, since she is a spider fan and has a few for pets), but that’s about it for children in peril. The real peril is that one of the kids would “ditch” the other and take Mr. Dark’s offer without the other.
But my favorite parts were the special effects, which weren’t that special, but we found rather psychedelic. The final scene involves slow-motion explosions of glass, which reminded me of the end of Zabriskie Point.
Bradbury’s superpower is poetic nostalgia mixed with horror or fantastic elements. I think the movie does a good job giving you this. In some ways, it seems like It’s a Wonderful Life, with that small town feel, and the characters who yearn for a bigger life. So, even though that’s not our favorite thing, we liked the way they did it, and enjoyed this a lot.
It takes place in October in a small Illinois town, just after the war. A lightning rod salesman, Royal Dano, comes to town to tell the townspeople of the storm that’s coming. Youngsters Vidal Peterson as Will Halloway and Shawn Carson as Jim Nightingale get let out of school when their old battle axe teacher Mary Grace Canfield releases them from detention. They go to meet Will’s father, Jason Robards, at his work as town librarian. When they get home, the lightning rod salesman sells one to Jim - this will come in useful.
As the wind rises, it starts blowing around posters for a carnival - Dark’s Pandemonium - which is strange because the carnivals usually stop coming after Labor Day. The kids hear a train and sneak out their bedroom windows to see the carnival set up. It is all ready, but no one is there, and it gets pretty spooky.
The next day they go to the carnival, and find that it’s just an ordinary carnival. But we’ve been introduced to some of the townspeople - the tobacconist who is money mad, the barber who dreams of exotic women from exotic lands, the bar tender who was a football star until he lost an arm and a leg. The carnival will tempt all of them and more. First the tobacconist wins $10,000 in a game of chance and gets on the Ferris Wheel with a beautiful lady - who gets off alone. Then the barber goes to the hootchy-kootchy show - and doesn’t come back. And so forth.
Finally, Mr. Dark, Jonathon Pryce, will come for the kids (who know too much) and for Robards, who is an old man with heart trouble, who feels that life has passed him by.
A lot of this reminds me of The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao - a carnival where everyone sees what they need to see. In the hall of mirrors, this is made concrete, when the bartender sees himself with all his limbs, and the schoolteacher is young and beautiful. These are a little puzzling - are these dreams really so bad that the dreamers will be condemned (somehow) because they succumbed?
There’s a nice spider attack with a lot of tarantulas (which Ms. S liked, since she is a spider fan and has a few for pets), but that’s about it for children in peril. The real peril is that one of the kids would “ditch” the other and take Mr. Dark’s offer without the other.
But my favorite parts were the special effects, which weren’t that special, but we found rather psychedelic. The final scene involves slow-motion explosions of glass, which reminded me of the end of Zabriskie Point.
Bradbury’s superpower is poetic nostalgia mixed with horror or fantastic elements. I think the movie does a good job giving you this. In some ways, it seems like It’s a Wonderful Life, with that small town feel, and the characters who yearn for a bigger life. So, even though that’s not our favorite thing, we liked the way they did it, and enjoyed this a lot.
Thursday, October 24, 2019
Swinging the Classics
As we approach Halloween, we decided to go for some classical scares. Believe it or not, we’d never seen any of these.
Or so I’d thought. Ms. Spenser told me we has seen The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) together. I doubted her until we got to the carnival scene, when it started to come back to me. This is the one where Quasimodo is played by Charles Laughton, in truly grotesque makeup. Maureen O’Hara is Esmerelda, the gypsy dancer that everyone is in love with. First, Quasimodo, because she gives him water when he is whipped. Then the slimy Frollo (Cedric Hardwicke). Then Edmond O’Brien as idiot poet Gringoire stumbles into the Court of Miracles, where the blind see and the lame walk - that is, where the sham beggars drop their disguises. The beggar king decrees he must die or marry a gypsy, and Esmerelda volunteers. But she’s really after Captain Phoebus, a handsome playboy type.
We get to see a lot of Notre Dame sets and backdrops, some great spectacle, and Laughton (or his double) ringing the bells with his feet. Gringoire is less of an idiot than in that book, and actually saves the day and gets the girl. In the book, he winds up with the goat.
Hollywood's Legends of Horror Collection: Mad Love / The Devil Doll (1935/936) is a great and odd double bill by Tod Browning. Devil Doll stars Lionel Barrymore as French convict. We meet him escaping with another aged prisoner, Henry B. Walthall. Walthall takes him to his secret laboratory, where his wife is waiting for him. His wife is played Rafaela Ottiano, with wild, bulging eyes and a bride of Frankenstein skunk stripe in her hair. Walthall has been working on reducing living beings to one-sixth size. He hasn’t gotten the brain to work, but the miniatures can be controlled by his mental willpower. After shrinking their halfwit maid, he dies. So Barrymore decides to use the process and the widow to carry out his own plans.
He was a banker who was framed by his three partners, who are now worried that he has escaped. They have put up a big reward for him, so he goes about disguised as an old lady (!). Madame Mandalip (not to be confused with Mandalit del Barco) has a toy store where she sells lifelike dolls. She uses them to get her revenge.
Seeing Barrymore playing a little old woman is a lot of fun, the special effects were fine, and the little touches, like having the dolls dress as Apaches (French gangsters) and do the Apache dance made it great.
But Mad Love was even better. It starts at a Grand Guignol sort of theater in France. Francis Drake is the star, Yvonne Orlac. Her husband, pianist Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive) is off playing a concert, which she listens to on the radio. After her show, an admirer drops by - Peter Lorre as Dr. Gogol. He looks amazing by the way - with a shiny bald head and coat with a big fur collar. Gogol is a famous surgeon, known for treating children and never worrying about payment. He clearly dotes on Drake, and is crestfallen when he discovers that she is married. On his way out of the theater, he sees that they are throwing out her wax statue, and buys it, calling it his Galatea.
On the way back from the concert, Clive meets a famous American knife murderer, Ed Brophy (fireplug shaped character actor), on his way to the guillotine. When the train derails, Clive is badly injured and his hands, which are his profession, are crushed.
Lorre attends the execution of Brophy along with American reporter Ted Healey (the Three Stooges first straight man). When Drake contacts him to get him to save her husband’s hands, he gets the idea to use Brophy’s hands.
Soon, Clive finds that though his hands can’t play piano, they can throw knives. That will come in handy (no pun intended).
We get Key Luke as Dr. Gogol’s assistant, May Beatty as Gogol’s drunken, parrot-toting housekeeper, and a scene with Drake pretending to be the wax Galatea. When she comes alive, Gogol goes really mad! Lorre is wonderful in this. He plays a man of great skill and compassion, a man of taste, and an odd kind of beauty, but with something repulsive at his core, which bursts forth in madness. This may have been a better role than M, maybe even better than Joel Cairo. Not sure about Sr. Ugarte.
The Phantom of the Opera (1925) may be the only silent movie that I’ve blogged about - not counting Guy Maddin. It starts with an amazing scene at the grand staircase at the Paris Opera. Young Raoul (Norman Kerry) is hoping to hear his belove Christine Daae (Mary Philbin) sing - she has been understudy for the prima donna. He professes his love for her backstage, but she insists on putting her career first. Her star is rising since she started working with a mysterious mentor.
The opera has been haunted by rumors of a threatening Phantom. The prima donna gets a letter threatening her if she goes on, so her understudy gets her chance to sing the part of Marguerite in Faust. But this can’t go on. Finally, the prima donna decides to do a show whether threatened or not, and the great chandelier in the hall falls, killing a bunch of people. The work of the Phantom!
When Daae finally meets her mentor, she finds him in a mask. He takes her to his underground lair, deep in the sewers and catacombs below Paris. He promises her he will make her the greatest singer in the world, as long as she doesn’t touch the mask. But of course, she takes it off and discovers Lon Chaney in his famous make up. And it is spectacular.
There is a lot of underground hugger-mugger, and a mob of Parisians (torches, but unfortunately no pitchforks - not too common in Paris) that seem to take forever to show up. Will they be too late?
I was pleasantly surprised by how exciting this silent feature was - the opera quite grand and the underground labyrinth was suitably Piranesian. My main regret is that the score they used was pop classical piano, and there should have been some Faust.
So that was a fun set of classic movies, coincidentally all set in France. In the next few weeks, we’ll do a few more horror theme sets, then back to regular programming.
Or so I’d thought. Ms. Spenser told me we has seen The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) together. I doubted her until we got to the carnival scene, when it started to come back to me. This is the one where Quasimodo is played by Charles Laughton, in truly grotesque makeup. Maureen O’Hara is Esmerelda, the gypsy dancer that everyone is in love with. First, Quasimodo, because she gives him water when he is whipped. Then the slimy Frollo (Cedric Hardwicke). Then Edmond O’Brien as idiot poet Gringoire stumbles into the Court of Miracles, where the blind see and the lame walk - that is, where the sham beggars drop their disguises. The beggar king decrees he must die or marry a gypsy, and Esmerelda volunteers. But she’s really after Captain Phoebus, a handsome playboy type.
We get to see a lot of Notre Dame sets and backdrops, some great spectacle, and Laughton (or his double) ringing the bells with his feet. Gringoire is less of an idiot than in that book, and actually saves the day and gets the girl. In the book, he winds up with the goat.
Hollywood's Legends of Horror Collection: Mad Love / The Devil Doll (1935/936) is a great and odd double bill by Tod Browning. Devil Doll stars Lionel Barrymore as French convict. We meet him escaping with another aged prisoner, Henry B. Walthall. Walthall takes him to his secret laboratory, where his wife is waiting for him. His wife is played Rafaela Ottiano, with wild, bulging eyes and a bride of Frankenstein skunk stripe in her hair. Walthall has been working on reducing living beings to one-sixth size. He hasn’t gotten the brain to work, but the miniatures can be controlled by his mental willpower. After shrinking their halfwit maid, he dies. So Barrymore decides to use the process and the widow to carry out his own plans.
He was a banker who was framed by his three partners, who are now worried that he has escaped. They have put up a big reward for him, so he goes about disguised as an old lady (!). Madame Mandalip (not to be confused with Mandalit del Barco) has a toy store where she sells lifelike dolls. She uses them to get her revenge.
Seeing Barrymore playing a little old woman is a lot of fun, the special effects were fine, and the little touches, like having the dolls dress as Apaches (French gangsters) and do the Apache dance made it great.
But Mad Love was even better. It starts at a Grand Guignol sort of theater in France. Francis Drake is the star, Yvonne Orlac. Her husband, pianist Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive) is off playing a concert, which she listens to on the radio. After her show, an admirer drops by - Peter Lorre as Dr. Gogol. He looks amazing by the way - with a shiny bald head and coat with a big fur collar. Gogol is a famous surgeon, known for treating children and never worrying about payment. He clearly dotes on Drake, and is crestfallen when he discovers that she is married. On his way out of the theater, he sees that they are throwing out her wax statue, and buys it, calling it his Galatea.
On the way back from the concert, Clive meets a famous American knife murderer, Ed Brophy (fireplug shaped character actor), on his way to the guillotine. When the train derails, Clive is badly injured and his hands, which are his profession, are crushed.
Lorre attends the execution of Brophy along with American reporter Ted Healey (the Three Stooges first straight man). When Drake contacts him to get him to save her husband’s hands, he gets the idea to use Brophy’s hands.
Soon, Clive finds that though his hands can’t play piano, they can throw knives. That will come in handy (no pun intended).
We get Key Luke as Dr. Gogol’s assistant, May Beatty as Gogol’s drunken, parrot-toting housekeeper, and a scene with Drake pretending to be the wax Galatea. When she comes alive, Gogol goes really mad! Lorre is wonderful in this. He plays a man of great skill and compassion, a man of taste, and an odd kind of beauty, but with something repulsive at his core, which bursts forth in madness. This may have been a better role than M, maybe even better than Joel Cairo. Not sure about Sr. Ugarte.
The Phantom of the Opera (1925) may be the only silent movie that I’ve blogged about - not counting Guy Maddin. It starts with an amazing scene at the grand staircase at the Paris Opera. Young Raoul (Norman Kerry) is hoping to hear his belove Christine Daae (Mary Philbin) sing - she has been understudy for the prima donna. He professes his love for her backstage, but she insists on putting her career first. Her star is rising since she started working with a mysterious mentor.
The opera has been haunted by rumors of a threatening Phantom. The prima donna gets a letter threatening her if she goes on, so her understudy gets her chance to sing the part of Marguerite in Faust. But this can’t go on. Finally, the prima donna decides to do a show whether threatened or not, and the great chandelier in the hall falls, killing a bunch of people. The work of the Phantom!
When Daae finally meets her mentor, she finds him in a mask. He takes her to his underground lair, deep in the sewers and catacombs below Paris. He promises her he will make her the greatest singer in the world, as long as she doesn’t touch the mask. But of course, she takes it off and discovers Lon Chaney in his famous make up. And it is spectacular.
There is a lot of underground hugger-mugger, and a mob of Parisians (torches, but unfortunately no pitchforks - not too common in Paris) that seem to take forever to show up. Will they be too late?
I was pleasantly surprised by how exciting this silent feature was - the opera quite grand and the underground labyrinth was suitably Piranesian. My main regret is that the score they used was pop classical piano, and there should have been some Faust.
So that was a fun set of classic movies, coincidentally all set in France. In the next few weeks, we’ll do a few more horror theme sets, then back to regular programming.
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Mimzy were the Borogroves
Although I was aware of Golden Age science fiction authors Henry Kutcher and C.L. Moore, writing as Lewis Padgett, I didn’t exactly remember any of their work. But when Ms. Spenser mentioned that one of their stories had been made into The Last Mimzy (2007), I queued it up.
It starts in a Utopian future where children learn telepathically in fields of flowers, and the teacher recounts this tale. It seems that the Earth was dying of pollution, and there wasn’t any untainted DNA to clean up humanity. So a scientist sent packages back in time, hoping they would be found by someone who could set things right.
They wash up on a beach where two kids are playing: Chris O’Neill and Rhiannon Leigh Wryn. There mom, Joely Richardson, has taken them on vacation while dad, Timothy Hutton, has to work. The package contains some mysterious items, and a stuffed rabbit that Wryn says is named Mimzy.
They hide these from the grownups and explore their powers. One is a slab that looks like an iPhone with a smashed screen. When O’Neill shows it to his mother, she just sees a flat rock. But soon the kids are learning telepathy, how to levitate rocks and to control spiders with sound.
O’Neill’s science teacher, Rainn Wilson, is an open-minded groovy type, who begins to suspect the kids know something. He has had psychic experiences before - he once dreamed of a lottery number and it won. To his girlfriend’s chagrin, they didn’t buy a ticket, and now she asks him if he sees numbers after any dream.
When the kids cause a major blackout, the FBI finds them and “borrows” Mimzy. Under extreme magnification, they find that it’s made of advance nanotech, and has a sub-microscopic Intel logo on it. Oddly, the FBI, led by Michael Clarke Duncan, aren’t evil or uncaring. They are pretty helpful actually.
And of course, it all comes out OK. I was a little worried that Timothy Hutton was going to be a problem, what with him always “stuck at work”. But no, he’s just kind of busy.
We enjoyed this as a nice mix of Golden Age SF (1950s era) and modern kids movie. I wonder what kind of audience there is for that, though. Don’t we want more conflict, more peril now? Or more quaintness or nostalgia on the other hand? So, like A Wrinkle in Time, this just didn’t do much business. I don’t think I even heard about it when it came out. Well, at least we got a chance to enjoy it.
It starts in a Utopian future where children learn telepathically in fields of flowers, and the teacher recounts this tale. It seems that the Earth was dying of pollution, and there wasn’t any untainted DNA to clean up humanity. So a scientist sent packages back in time, hoping they would be found by someone who could set things right.
They wash up on a beach where two kids are playing: Chris O’Neill and Rhiannon Leigh Wryn. There mom, Joely Richardson, has taken them on vacation while dad, Timothy Hutton, has to work. The package contains some mysterious items, and a stuffed rabbit that Wryn says is named Mimzy.
They hide these from the grownups and explore their powers. One is a slab that looks like an iPhone with a smashed screen. When O’Neill shows it to his mother, she just sees a flat rock. But soon the kids are learning telepathy, how to levitate rocks and to control spiders with sound.
O’Neill’s science teacher, Rainn Wilson, is an open-minded groovy type, who begins to suspect the kids know something. He has had psychic experiences before - he once dreamed of a lottery number and it won. To his girlfriend’s chagrin, they didn’t buy a ticket, and now she asks him if he sees numbers after any dream.
When the kids cause a major blackout, the FBI finds them and “borrows” Mimzy. Under extreme magnification, they find that it’s made of advance nanotech, and has a sub-microscopic Intel logo on it. Oddly, the FBI, led by Michael Clarke Duncan, aren’t evil or uncaring. They are pretty helpful actually.
And of course, it all comes out OK. I was a little worried that Timothy Hutton was going to be a problem, what with him always “stuck at work”. But no, he’s just kind of busy.
We enjoyed this as a nice mix of Golden Age SF (1950s era) and modern kids movie. I wonder what kind of audience there is for that, though. Don’t we want more conflict, more peril now? Or more quaintness or nostalgia on the other hand? So, like A Wrinkle in Time, this just didn’t do much business. I don’t think I even heard about it when it came out. Well, at least we got a chance to enjoy it.
Monday, October 21, 2019
Sphere-o-sphere
We’re watching Sphere (1998) partly as part of our 90s undersea horror fest (The Abyss, Deep Rising, from the same year as Sphere), but also because the chuckleheads on the We Hate Movies are doing it on a recent podcast, and I wanted to be in the loop.
It starts with a title card “The Surface”, but they are in the air. A helicopter is taking Dustin Hoffman to the middle of the ocean for reasons not discussed. He is a psychologist who often counsels survivors of air disasters, so that’s what he assumes. When he gets to the one of the many ships out in the middle of nowhere, he finds out that’s not what happened. He meets his team members: Astrophysicist Liev Schreiber, mathematician Samuel L. Jackson, and biologist Sharon Stone. It seems that the Bush administration had paid Hoffman to write up the protocol for alien contact. Figuring no one would ever need it, he kind of half-assed it, and put in some smart people he knew as the ideal team. After all, why sweat it? The team will be lead by Navy Captain Peter Coyote.
The next chapter is “The Deep”. They head to the underwater lab that is investigating the sunken spacecraft. There are several very Michael Crichton touches, describing submarine life. For instance, since they are all breathing oxy-helium, they have a scene with everyone talking like Mickey Mouse. Then Coyote tells them to put on their voice compensators and it stops. That’s what I mean by Crichton touches - some specific, well-researched technical detail, and some bullshit, made up to keep the story moving.
We get a bit more of Hoffman’s backstory - not everyone he put in the report is glad to be on this expedition, and that he had an affair with Stone that ended badly. Actually, I think it started badly too - she was both his student and his patient. When she tried to commit a little light suicide (Hoffman doesn’t think it was too serious), she did it with pills he prescribed.
Then, in “The Spacecraft”. This giant spacecraft has been at the bottom of the sea for 300 years, by the coral growth (not sure it grows that deep, but anyway), They suit up and head over to the alien vessel, and discover a lot of familiar things. Like, the ancient corpse died eating a pack of Blue Diamond almonds. It isn’t alien - it’s from the future.
But it does have an alien on board - a 20-foot floating golden sphere, with ripples. They can’t see in, and it doesn’t do anything, so they all head home to bed. Just before lights out, Jackson says, “We’re all going to die down here.” You see, the people in the future didn’t know what was going to happen on their mission. But if the team had reported it, they would have known. So - they don’t make it back alive. Then he sneaks out and gets into the sphere, by way of his reflection.
And then people start to die. First, crewmember Queen Latifah (!) is out walking underwater when she is swarmed by jellyfish. At first it’s cute, but then she starts to freak out, and they bust into her suit. Meanwhile, everyone else inside is just watching and nobody even mentions like saving her. After she’s gone, everyone kind of goes about their business. Hoffman mentions that he has kind of a jellyfish phobia. But nobody cares about Latifah. I can’t decide if this is because the characters are all self-absorbed dicks, because Crichton is a dick, or because this is supposed to represent some kind of dream-state.
Speaking of dreaming, they found Jackson under the sphere in a coma. When he wakes up, he’s happy and hungry (don’t try to feed him calamari, though), but won’t really answer questions about the sphere. Actually nobody really asks, and again, I wonder why.
We’re only about halfway through, and just getting to the meat of the story, but I’m going to skip all the rest. It does become kind of a horror movie, with some gruesome deaths. Hoffman and Stone’s personal problems get way out of hand, and so do everyone else’s. There’s some psychological and philosophical stuff that isn’t bad but maybe not great.And an ending that is acceptable but not really satisfying.
After I admit that this is a cool high-tech sci-fi adventure, with a touch of Alien but underwater, I’m going to say that I don’t think this is very good. Part of it is Hoffman’s extreme dickishness to Stone. At the end, he sort of apologizes, and it just seems to show how little he gets it. But the same problem applies to pretty much everyone - people die and no one cares. Jackson sleeps through most of it. He becomes odd and autistic, and nobody cares or seems concerned.
I really like Michael Crichton - take The 13th Warrior or a classic like Andromeda Strain. But like a lot of old-timey SF authors, he seems to have trouble imagining what people’s feeling would be like.
It starts with a title card “The Surface”, but they are in the air. A helicopter is taking Dustin Hoffman to the middle of the ocean for reasons not discussed. He is a psychologist who often counsels survivors of air disasters, so that’s what he assumes. When he gets to the one of the many ships out in the middle of nowhere, he finds out that’s not what happened. He meets his team members: Astrophysicist Liev Schreiber, mathematician Samuel L. Jackson, and biologist Sharon Stone. It seems that the Bush administration had paid Hoffman to write up the protocol for alien contact. Figuring no one would ever need it, he kind of half-assed it, and put in some smart people he knew as the ideal team. After all, why sweat it? The team will be lead by Navy Captain Peter Coyote.
The next chapter is “The Deep”. They head to the underwater lab that is investigating the sunken spacecraft. There are several very Michael Crichton touches, describing submarine life. For instance, since they are all breathing oxy-helium, they have a scene with everyone talking like Mickey Mouse. Then Coyote tells them to put on their voice compensators and it stops. That’s what I mean by Crichton touches - some specific, well-researched technical detail, and some bullshit, made up to keep the story moving.
We get a bit more of Hoffman’s backstory - not everyone he put in the report is glad to be on this expedition, and that he had an affair with Stone that ended badly. Actually, I think it started badly too - she was both his student and his patient. When she tried to commit a little light suicide (Hoffman doesn’t think it was too serious), she did it with pills he prescribed.
Then, in “The Spacecraft”. This giant spacecraft has been at the bottom of the sea for 300 years, by the coral growth (not sure it grows that deep, but anyway), They suit up and head over to the alien vessel, and discover a lot of familiar things. Like, the ancient corpse died eating a pack of Blue Diamond almonds. It isn’t alien - it’s from the future.
But it does have an alien on board - a 20-foot floating golden sphere, with ripples. They can’t see in, and it doesn’t do anything, so they all head home to bed. Just before lights out, Jackson says, “We’re all going to die down here.” You see, the people in the future didn’t know what was going to happen on their mission. But if the team had reported it, they would have known. So - they don’t make it back alive. Then he sneaks out and gets into the sphere, by way of his reflection.
And then people start to die. First, crewmember Queen Latifah (!) is out walking underwater when she is swarmed by jellyfish. At first it’s cute, but then she starts to freak out, and they bust into her suit. Meanwhile, everyone else inside is just watching and nobody even mentions like saving her. After she’s gone, everyone kind of goes about their business. Hoffman mentions that he has kind of a jellyfish phobia. But nobody cares about Latifah. I can’t decide if this is because the characters are all self-absorbed dicks, because Crichton is a dick, or because this is supposed to represent some kind of dream-state.
Speaking of dreaming, they found Jackson under the sphere in a coma. When he wakes up, he’s happy and hungry (don’t try to feed him calamari, though), but won’t really answer questions about the sphere. Actually nobody really asks, and again, I wonder why.
We’re only about halfway through, and just getting to the meat of the story, but I’m going to skip all the rest. It does become kind of a horror movie, with some gruesome deaths. Hoffman and Stone’s personal problems get way out of hand, and so do everyone else’s. There’s some psychological and philosophical stuff that isn’t bad but maybe not great.And an ending that is acceptable but not really satisfying.
After I admit that this is a cool high-tech sci-fi adventure, with a touch of Alien but underwater, I’m going to say that I don’t think this is very good. Part of it is Hoffman’s extreme dickishness to Stone. At the end, he sort of apologizes, and it just seems to show how little he gets it. But the same problem applies to pretty much everyone - people die and no one cares. Jackson sleeps through most of it. He becomes odd and autistic, and nobody cares or seems concerned.
I really like Michael Crichton - take The 13th Warrior or a classic like Andromeda Strain. But like a lot of old-timey SF authors, he seems to have trouble imagining what people’s feeling would be like.
Monday, October 14, 2019
The Return of Dr. Bogart
Few people realize that Humphrey Bogart was in a horror movie - and only one. Or maybe many people do - what do I know? But he was - and it was a sequel. So we watched both the original and the sequel: Hollywood's Legends of Horror Collection: Dr. X/The Return of Dr. X (1932/1939).
Dr. X stars Lionel Atwill as the head of a research center for mad scientists. There have been a string of murders of women killed under a full moon with scalpel and partially cannibalized. Police detective Lee Tracy goes to Atwill’s lab because they use the kind of scalpel the murderer used. Atwill can’t believe his scientists could have done anything like this. They include some of the following: Preston Forster is a cannabilism specialist with a missing hand. John Wray has a sexual attraction to cannabilism. Arthur Edmund Carewe studies the psychological implications of the phases of the moon. And Harry Beresford is just a guy with a beard and a bad attitude in a wheelchair.
To test if one of them is the murderer, they decide to re-create the murder while the scientists are monitored to see if their heart rate gives them away. Since the victims were strangled by two strong hands, Forster is excluded. But the lights go out and the one of the scientist is murdered. Darn.
They plan to try again, but can’t get a woman to play the part (because they are smart). So the mad scientist’s beautiful daughter, Fay Wray, volunteers. And this time, all the scientists, including Atwill, will be handcuffed to the chair. No spoilers for who the killer is or how Lee Tracy saves the day.
By the way, I was just talking about Lee Tracy, who I always get mixed up with Jack Haley and Jack Oakie. Know what I mean?
In The Return of Dr. X, we get a series of murders where the victims were drained of their rare Type 1 blood (I don’t know why they started numbering types with a rare one, but whatever). Reporter Wayne Morris gets his pal Dr. Dennis Morgan to introduce him to mad scientist John Litel, an expert in blood types. There, they meet his assistant, Humphrey Bogart (!). Bogie has a skunk streak in his hair, big round glasses, and assumes the “sissy” manner he used when he was undercover in the bookstore in The Big Sleep. It’s a look, all right.
I’ve got to admit, I sort of fell asleep after this. This is not a good movie, and other than Bogart, I don’t think it has much to recommend it. At least the original had the whole lab full of mad scientists. This one barely has two. On the other hand, the first was in two-strip Technicolor, while the second was good old black and white. So maybe it’s a wash.
Dr. X stars Lionel Atwill as the head of a research center for mad scientists. There have been a string of murders of women killed under a full moon with scalpel and partially cannibalized. Police detective Lee Tracy goes to Atwill’s lab because they use the kind of scalpel the murderer used. Atwill can’t believe his scientists could have done anything like this. They include some of the following: Preston Forster is a cannabilism specialist with a missing hand. John Wray has a sexual attraction to cannabilism. Arthur Edmund Carewe studies the psychological implications of the phases of the moon. And Harry Beresford is just a guy with a beard and a bad attitude in a wheelchair.
To test if one of them is the murderer, they decide to re-create the murder while the scientists are monitored to see if their heart rate gives them away. Since the victims were strangled by two strong hands, Forster is excluded. But the lights go out and the one of the scientist is murdered. Darn.
They plan to try again, but can’t get a woman to play the part (because they are smart). So the mad scientist’s beautiful daughter, Fay Wray, volunteers. And this time, all the scientists, including Atwill, will be handcuffed to the chair. No spoilers for who the killer is or how Lee Tracy saves the day.
By the way, I was just talking about Lee Tracy, who I always get mixed up with Jack Haley and Jack Oakie. Know what I mean?
In The Return of Dr. X, we get a series of murders where the victims were drained of their rare Type 1 blood (I don’t know why they started numbering types with a rare one, but whatever). Reporter Wayne Morris gets his pal Dr. Dennis Morgan to introduce him to mad scientist John Litel, an expert in blood types. There, they meet his assistant, Humphrey Bogart (!). Bogie has a skunk streak in his hair, big round glasses, and assumes the “sissy” manner he used when he was undercover in the bookstore in The Big Sleep. It’s a look, all right.
I’ve got to admit, I sort of fell asleep after this. This is not a good movie, and other than Bogart, I don’t think it has much to recommend it. At least the original had the whole lab full of mad scientists. This one barely has two. On the other hand, the first was in two-strip Technicolor, while the second was good old black and white. So maybe it’s a wash.
Thursday, October 10, 2019
Oh, No, There Goes Tokyo
Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) is both terrific and ridiculous. It’s basic plot made no sense and we loved every minute.
It starts right in the middle of everything, with a family searching for a lost child in a San Francisco destroyed by Godzilla. The father (Kyle Chandler, who I thought was Timothy Hutton), mother (Vera Farmiga) and their daughter (Millie Bobby Brown, from Stranger Things) never find the son. Fast forward several years. Farmiga and Brown are living together in what looks like a suburban home, and Brown keeps up with Hutton on by email. But it turns out that the house is a monitoring station for the Chinese step pyramid (?) that houses a monster egg. And it’s hatching.
Mother and daughter head for the egg, and Brown has a moment of empathy and awe when she touches the egg. Just as Mothra hatches, a gang of eco-tourists - or terrorists, not sure - led by Charles Dance bust in. And not in a nice way - in a shoot everyone who moves, then shoot the ones keeping still way. Farmiga and Brown are taken as hostages, but it looks like Farmiga is cooperating. And Mothra flys away.
So Sally Hawkins and Ken Watanabe of the secret Monarch monster squad get Chandler back on the team to get them back. It’s the usual rag-tag bunch of quirky scientists, mostly mad. They head to Antarctica, where Monarch has been monitoring the frozen “Monster Zero”, Ghidora. When Dance’s gang arrives to awaken Ghidora, it becomes clear that Farmiga isn’t a hostage, but another eco-tourist. Like Dance, she thinks that humanity has become a plague on the earth, and that the monsters used to keep balance. If they are revived, the earth will bloom again.
Now, I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed. Two, three billion killed, tops.
And that’s the big ask of the movie: that we believe that a woman, who has seen a monster destroy a city, and kill her son, would think it’s a good idea to release more monsters and kill more people for an abstract ideal. And expects her daughter to go along with it. Millie Bobby Brown is way to smart for that.
Oh, and it’s not just Godzilla, Ghidora and Mothra - there are monsters hibernating all over. Yes, every country has a monster.
But while we’re laughing at this, Ghidora is killing soldiers, Godzilla is fighting Ghidora, Mothra is helping Godzilla, volcano bird Rodan is helping Ghidora, and so on. It’s all state of the art - no barely glimpsed figures in the night. I kind of wish there had been more of guys in rubber suits stomping miniatures, but I’ll take what I get.
Also, there’s a fairly cheesy score by Bear McCreary, but the roars and screams of the monsters made the best music - up until the credits. That’s right: With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound, he pulls the spitting high-tension wires down!
Aside from the very far-fetched eco-tourism angle, there’s another, deeper, “loving the alien” theme. Millie Bobby Brown hints at it a few times when she reacts to a monster like Mothra with awe at its majesty rather than fear of it’s power. But they don’t seem to be able to pull this off, so it’s like a glimpse at a plot point that was mostly written off. Which is too bad, because I like that theme.
It starts right in the middle of everything, with a family searching for a lost child in a San Francisco destroyed by Godzilla. The father (Kyle Chandler, who I thought was Timothy Hutton), mother (Vera Farmiga) and their daughter (Millie Bobby Brown, from Stranger Things) never find the son. Fast forward several years. Farmiga and Brown are living together in what looks like a suburban home, and Brown keeps up with Hutton on by email. But it turns out that the house is a monitoring station for the Chinese step pyramid (?) that houses a monster egg. And it’s hatching.
Mother and daughter head for the egg, and Brown has a moment of empathy and awe when she touches the egg. Just as Mothra hatches, a gang of eco-tourists - or terrorists, not sure - led by Charles Dance bust in. And not in a nice way - in a shoot everyone who moves, then shoot the ones keeping still way. Farmiga and Brown are taken as hostages, but it looks like Farmiga is cooperating. And Mothra flys away.
So Sally Hawkins and Ken Watanabe of the secret Monarch monster squad get Chandler back on the team to get them back. It’s the usual rag-tag bunch of quirky scientists, mostly mad. They head to Antarctica, where Monarch has been monitoring the frozen “Monster Zero”, Ghidora. When Dance’s gang arrives to awaken Ghidora, it becomes clear that Farmiga isn’t a hostage, but another eco-tourist. Like Dance, she thinks that humanity has become a plague on the earth, and that the monsters used to keep balance. If they are revived, the earth will bloom again.
Now, I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed. Two, three billion killed, tops.
And that’s the big ask of the movie: that we believe that a woman, who has seen a monster destroy a city, and kill her son, would think it’s a good idea to release more monsters and kill more people for an abstract ideal. And expects her daughter to go along with it. Millie Bobby Brown is way to smart for that.
Oh, and it’s not just Godzilla, Ghidora and Mothra - there are monsters hibernating all over. Yes, every country has a monster.
But while we’re laughing at this, Ghidora is killing soldiers, Godzilla is fighting Ghidora, Mothra is helping Godzilla, volcano bird Rodan is helping Ghidora, and so on. It’s all state of the art - no barely glimpsed figures in the night. I kind of wish there had been more of guys in rubber suits stomping miniatures, but I’ll take what I get.
Also, there’s a fairly cheesy score by Bear McCreary, but the roars and screams of the monsters made the best music - up until the credits. That’s right: With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound, he pulls the spitting high-tension wires down!
Aside from the very far-fetched eco-tourism angle, there’s another, deeper, “loving the alien” theme. Millie Bobby Brown hints at it a few times when she reacts to a monster like Mothra with awe at its majesty rather than fear of it’s power. But they don’t seem to be able to pull this off, so it’s like a glimpse at a plot point that was mostly written off. Which is too bad, because I like that theme.
Wednesday, October 9, 2019
Circle Cross Wavy Line Triangle
The Gift (2000) isn’t really a ghost movie - more of a supernatural thriller. I think Netflix recommended it, and since it was directed by Sam Raimi, it made sense. But it was Cate Blanchett that really sold it.
Blanchett plays a small-town fortune teller, who works with ESP cards - circle, square, wavy line, triangle. She does a reading for the battered wife (Hilary Swank) of a local bully, telling her that he’s just a mean redneck, and wouldn’t really kill anyone. She also does a reading for Giovanni Ribisi, a mechanic who hears voices telling him to do terrible things.
Then Swank’s husband show up in his big pick-up to tell Blanchett to stop seeing Swank. He’s played by Keanu Reeves, so he’s pretty threatening, especially when he threatens her kid. But not too threatening, because he’s Keanu.
But someone has gone missing. Greg Kinnear comes to ask her help in finding his fiancé, Katie Holmes. Now, Blanchett has seen Holmes in action, and knows she’s fooling around on Kinnear. And also, Kinnear and Blanchett seem to be getting attached.
Blanchett has a vision of Holmes floating in the air, and thinks she might be in a pond (of which there are many in this swampy Georgia town). She tells sheriff J.K. Simmons, and he drags Reeve’s pond, and finds the body. So Reeves goes to jail for murder - he confesses to sleeping with her, and knocking around his wife, but swears he didn’t kill anyone.
Then Blanchett gets a vision saying he didn’t do it. Since the DA was also sleeping with Holmes, he isn’t interested in re-opening the case. So she will need the help of Simmons and Kinnear, and maybe even psycho Ribisi - although he is in the funny farm upstate.
It’s sort of surprising, given the great cast with Sam Raimi directing, that this is such an ordinary movie. It has it’s share of tension and even madness, and some great acting (Ribisi more than anyone, I’d say), but not really out of the ordinary. But Cate Blanchett elevates it above just fine to great, just through the special effect of her face. What cheekbones!
Blanchett plays a small-town fortune teller, who works with ESP cards - circle, square, wavy line, triangle. She does a reading for the battered wife (Hilary Swank) of a local bully, telling her that he’s just a mean redneck, and wouldn’t really kill anyone. She also does a reading for Giovanni Ribisi, a mechanic who hears voices telling him to do terrible things.
Then Swank’s husband show up in his big pick-up to tell Blanchett to stop seeing Swank. He’s played by Keanu Reeves, so he’s pretty threatening, especially when he threatens her kid. But not too threatening, because he’s Keanu.
But someone has gone missing. Greg Kinnear comes to ask her help in finding his fiancé, Katie Holmes. Now, Blanchett has seen Holmes in action, and knows she’s fooling around on Kinnear. And also, Kinnear and Blanchett seem to be getting attached.
Blanchett has a vision of Holmes floating in the air, and thinks she might be in a pond (of which there are many in this swampy Georgia town). She tells sheriff J.K. Simmons, and he drags Reeve’s pond, and finds the body. So Reeves goes to jail for murder - he confesses to sleeping with her, and knocking around his wife, but swears he didn’t kill anyone.
Then Blanchett gets a vision saying he didn’t do it. Since the DA was also sleeping with Holmes, he isn’t interested in re-opening the case. So she will need the help of Simmons and Kinnear, and maybe even psycho Ribisi - although he is in the funny farm upstate.
It’s sort of surprising, given the great cast with Sam Raimi directing, that this is such an ordinary movie. It has it’s share of tension and even madness, and some great acting (Ribisi more than anyone, I’d say), but not really out of the ordinary. But Cate Blanchett elevates it above just fine to great, just through the special effect of her face. What cheekbones!
Tuesday, October 8, 2019
Train in Vain
Backtrack (2016) is another ghost story for Spooktober (hope we don’t run out!). It’s kind of a small movie, starring Adrian “Broody” Brody.
Brody is a psychiatrist, deeply traumatized by the death of a young daughter. He’s better off than his wife, Jenni Baird, who can barely get out of bed. He drags himself to his mentor Sam Neill, who is referring patients to him - he seems to have moved to this city from somewhere else - it’s all vaguely in Australia, although pretty much no one has an accent. He sees a few patients, looking pained and sad while they tell him their problems. Actually, since it’s Adrian Brody, he can’t help but look pained and sad. One woman tells him she feels like she’s invisible, and wants to kill herself but she can’t.
A girl appears in his waiting room, who doesn’t seem to be able to talk. He tries to communicate, find out her problems, but she vanishes again. On his way home on the subway, he sits next to the woman who feels invisible, and doesn’t recognize her until she speaks up. She tells him she knows why she can’t kill herself - she’s already dead. Then she turns into a demon and attacked him. And then he wakes up on the train.
In fact this happens a few times in the movie: things spiral out of control and then Brody wakes up. Not as much as in Twixt, but still a motif.
So, to SPOILER the first twist, it turns out that all of Brody’s patients are ghosts, and so is Neill, his mentor. They all died in a train wreck, in Brody’s old home town. So he goes back to find out what he is repressing. He leaves his wife behind, because she isn’t really in this movie.
Back in his home town, he sees his father, a retired policeman. He also meets up with an old school friend who tells him not to investigate and to leave him out of it. He also checks in with the local policewoman, Robin McLeavy. It turns out she was the mother of the ghost girl in the waiting room. Brody finally recovers the memory of biking out to the train tracks to watch lovers park and make out. The train hit their bikes on the tracks and derailed, killing many. He confesses to McLeavy, who takes it pretty well, considering. His friend, on the other hand, hangs himself.
But this isn’t the end - there’s one more twist and a tense standoff on the train tracks. But I’ll leave that for people who haven’t watched yet.
Not sure I have much to say about this - it was a good ghost movie with a few flaws, like the weird almost-not-Australia setting. A lot depends on how you feel about watching Adrian Brody looking hurt, sad, worried, concerned and broody for a whole movie.
Brody is a psychiatrist, deeply traumatized by the death of a young daughter. He’s better off than his wife, Jenni Baird, who can barely get out of bed. He drags himself to his mentor Sam Neill, who is referring patients to him - he seems to have moved to this city from somewhere else - it’s all vaguely in Australia, although pretty much no one has an accent. He sees a few patients, looking pained and sad while they tell him their problems. Actually, since it’s Adrian Brody, he can’t help but look pained and sad. One woman tells him she feels like she’s invisible, and wants to kill herself but she can’t.
A girl appears in his waiting room, who doesn’t seem to be able to talk. He tries to communicate, find out her problems, but she vanishes again. On his way home on the subway, he sits next to the woman who feels invisible, and doesn’t recognize her until she speaks up. She tells him she knows why she can’t kill herself - she’s already dead. Then she turns into a demon and attacked him. And then he wakes up on the train.
In fact this happens a few times in the movie: things spiral out of control and then Brody wakes up. Not as much as in Twixt, but still a motif.
So, to SPOILER the first twist, it turns out that all of Brody’s patients are ghosts, and so is Neill, his mentor. They all died in a train wreck, in Brody’s old home town. So he goes back to find out what he is repressing. He leaves his wife behind, because she isn’t really in this movie.
Back in his home town, he sees his father, a retired policeman. He also meets up with an old school friend who tells him not to investigate and to leave him out of it. He also checks in with the local policewoman, Robin McLeavy. It turns out she was the mother of the ghost girl in the waiting room. Brody finally recovers the memory of biking out to the train tracks to watch lovers park and make out. The train hit their bikes on the tracks and derailed, killing many. He confesses to McLeavy, who takes it pretty well, considering. His friend, on the other hand, hangs himself.
But this isn’t the end - there’s one more twist and a tense standoff on the train tracks. But I’ll leave that for people who haven’t watched yet.
Not sure I have much to say about this - it was a good ghost movie with a few flaws, like the weird almost-not-Australia setting. A lot depends on how you feel about watching Adrian Brody looking hurt, sad, worried, concerned and broody for a whole movie.
Sunday, October 6, 2019
Natural Born Eastman
Buck and the Preacher (1972) was supposed to be a comedy adventure western, but it was something more serious - including a history lesson on race in the West.
Director Sidney Poitier is Buck, a wagonmaster leading freed slaves from Louisiana to a fertile valley in Colorado, prophesied by an old man who reads the bones. They are dogged by nightriders, led by Cameron Mitchell. These are unreconstructed confederates, being paid by Louisiana plantation owners to bring the ex-slaves back to work the fields - or kill them to discourage others. Buck leads them away from the wagon train and meets up with his wife Ruby Dee, then rides off again.Needing a fresh horse, he negotiates for and then outright steals Harry Belafonte’s horse. Belafonte is the Preacher, a shady, threadbare drifter who claims to be doing the Lord’s work.
But while he is away, the wagon train is hit by the nightriders, who trash the camp, destroy their supplies and steal their money (probably while raping the woman who was wearing it in a money belt - as soon as I saw them put it on her, I knew that was a bad hiding place). When the Preacher comes along, he is most concerned about getting his horse back. But soon he is throwing his lot in with the wagon train.
Poitier doesn’t trust him and calls him an “Eastman”, which is an old term that I’ve been researching for a while. It shows up in songs, like “On the Road Again” (“Natural born Eastman, on the road again”) and Furry Lewis’s “Kassy Jones” (“See it written on the back of my shirt, I’m a natural born Eastman and I don’t have to work”). Nobody seems to know where it comes from, but it seems to mean “someone who lives off the labor of others, especially women.” Belafonte certainly looks shifty here, with a scruffy beard and mustache. Poitier, on the other hand, looks as noble and strong as John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Randolph Scott put together.
There is a little bit of comedy-action when Buck and the Preacher go to steal the money back. But Buck meeting with the Indians to negotiate for free passage for the train is more typical. The movie is mostly about the actual historical experience of African Americans in the western frontier. Exciting and interesting.
Director Sidney Poitier is Buck, a wagonmaster leading freed slaves from Louisiana to a fertile valley in Colorado, prophesied by an old man who reads the bones. They are dogged by nightriders, led by Cameron Mitchell. These are unreconstructed confederates, being paid by Louisiana plantation owners to bring the ex-slaves back to work the fields - or kill them to discourage others. Buck leads them away from the wagon train and meets up with his wife Ruby Dee, then rides off again.Needing a fresh horse, he negotiates for and then outright steals Harry Belafonte’s horse. Belafonte is the Preacher, a shady, threadbare drifter who claims to be doing the Lord’s work.
But while he is away, the wagon train is hit by the nightriders, who trash the camp, destroy their supplies and steal their money (probably while raping the woman who was wearing it in a money belt - as soon as I saw them put it on her, I knew that was a bad hiding place). When the Preacher comes along, he is most concerned about getting his horse back. But soon he is throwing his lot in with the wagon train.
Poitier doesn’t trust him and calls him an “Eastman”, which is an old term that I’ve been researching for a while. It shows up in songs, like “On the Road Again” (“Natural born Eastman, on the road again”) and Furry Lewis’s “Kassy Jones” (“See it written on the back of my shirt, I’m a natural born Eastman and I don’t have to work”). Nobody seems to know where it comes from, but it seems to mean “someone who lives off the labor of others, especially women.” Belafonte certainly looks shifty here, with a scruffy beard and mustache. Poitier, on the other hand, looks as noble and strong as John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Randolph Scott put together.
There is a little bit of comedy-action when Buck and the Preacher go to steal the money back. But Buck meeting with the Indians to negotiate for free passage for the train is more typical. The movie is mostly about the actual historical experience of African Americans in the western frontier. Exciting and interesting.
Saturday, October 5, 2019
Shaken and Stirred
We’re fans of Illeana Douglas, although mainly for one movie and her podcast. Because she is in Stir of Echoes (1999), and because Ms. Spenser likes ghost stories (and it’s rolling into Spooktober), we queued it up.
It stars Kevin Bacon as the father of a little boy who has an imaginary friend - a ghost. Bacon is a blue-collar guy married to Kathryn Erne. They have moved into an old house in a working class Chicago neighborhood near the college. It’s kind of a fratty atmosphere - they put the boy to bed and take the baby monitor across the street where there’s a semi-rowdy house party going on.
Erbe’s sister, Illeana Douglas is there, and Bacon is kind of getting into it with her, because she’s a kind of new agey, almost-certified hypnotherapist. He goads her into hypnotizing him, and he goes right under. He has a horrific encounter with the ghost of a young girl while under, although his friends just see him talk about childhood memories and get a pin pushed through his hand.
After this event, he starts seeing more visions - he sees one of his own teeth fall out, for instance - and he learns that Douglas gave him a post-hypnotic suggestion to “be more open”. Turns out, he’s open to the spirit world, like his son. When Erbe is walking the son, he homes in on a funeral and a black policeman, Officer Exposition, explains that the son has the sight, and suggests that Bacon drop in on their support group. Note that this is a literal Magic Negro, but this actually comes to pretty much nothing, since Bacon is doing the strong, silent man thing and won’t admit there’s anything going on.
So of course, he gets more and more unhinged, even as he tries to act normal, socializing with the bonehead neighbors, going to a football game, etc. Eventually, he begins digging up the backyard and smashing the walls of the house while his wife and son are away.
The solution to the mystery is rather banal and tawdry, and realistic. I’ll let you discover the details if you watch it. It’s worth it - a solid, if not groundbreaking ghost story (it came out the same year as Sixth Sense). Bacon’s refusal to talk about what’s going on is kind of annoying, but it isn’t one of those movies that would be over in 10 minutes if someone just communicated with anyone else. Also, Douglas’s slightly airheaded sister-in-law is quite endearing. There’s a silly scene where Bacon bursts in on her getting high with a girlfriend that gives her a mysterious backstory. I wonder if she’s in the sequel.
It stars Kevin Bacon as the father of a little boy who has an imaginary friend - a ghost. Bacon is a blue-collar guy married to Kathryn Erne. They have moved into an old house in a working class Chicago neighborhood near the college. It’s kind of a fratty atmosphere - they put the boy to bed and take the baby monitor across the street where there’s a semi-rowdy house party going on.
Erbe’s sister, Illeana Douglas is there, and Bacon is kind of getting into it with her, because she’s a kind of new agey, almost-certified hypnotherapist. He goads her into hypnotizing him, and he goes right under. He has a horrific encounter with the ghost of a young girl while under, although his friends just see him talk about childhood memories and get a pin pushed through his hand.
After this event, he starts seeing more visions - he sees one of his own teeth fall out, for instance - and he learns that Douglas gave him a post-hypnotic suggestion to “be more open”. Turns out, he’s open to the spirit world, like his son. When Erbe is walking the son, he homes in on a funeral and a black policeman, Officer Exposition, explains that the son has the sight, and suggests that Bacon drop in on their support group. Note that this is a literal Magic Negro, but this actually comes to pretty much nothing, since Bacon is doing the strong, silent man thing and won’t admit there’s anything going on.
So of course, he gets more and more unhinged, even as he tries to act normal, socializing with the bonehead neighbors, going to a football game, etc. Eventually, he begins digging up the backyard and smashing the walls of the house while his wife and son are away.
The solution to the mystery is rather banal and tawdry, and realistic. I’ll let you discover the details if you watch it. It’s worth it - a solid, if not groundbreaking ghost story (it came out the same year as Sixth Sense). Bacon’s refusal to talk about what’s going on is kind of annoying, but it isn’t one of those movies that would be over in 10 minutes if someone just communicated with anyone else. Also, Douglas’s slightly airheaded sister-in-law is quite endearing. There’s a silly scene where Bacon bursts in on her getting high with a girlfriend that gives her a mysterious backstory. I wonder if she’s in the sequel.
Friday, October 4, 2019
Cootie Call
Cooties (2015) is another one of those zombie horror comedies - not one of the best, but not too shabby.
It stars Elijah Wood as a sad sack wannabe novelist who has moved back to his old home town after spending some time in New York. He has a job as a summer substitute teacher, and he’s not too happy about it. He shows up at school in a beat up car and is immediately parked in by the Rainn Wilson, the buffed out gym teacher. The new-age principal confiscates his cellphone (school policy and convenient plot device) and sends him to the teacher’s lounge.
There he meets hostile Nasim Pedrad, spacey science teacher Leigh Whannell, and sweet Alison Pill. Wood and Pill went to school together, and he’s obviously sweet on her. Too bad Wilson is her boyfriend.
But the cafeteria had some bad chicken nuggets, causing one girl to go pycho and start biting faces off. Wood is not too concerned - he didn’t like the bitten kid anyway, and is more interested in his novel and trying to flirt with Pill. Pretty soon they are cut off with a few uninfected kids while the rest run around eating the other grownups.
There’s a lot of gross out gags in this, and a lot of just plain fun ones. When Wilson is insulting Wood, he calls him a little hobbit. Then there’s Whannell, telling people to keep quiet when they aren’t saying anything, and reeling off imaginary science. Also, in the gross category, handling body waste and parts with no gloves.
The initial joke is that Wood can’t focus on the life-threateningly horrible stuff going on because he’s thinking about his novel - a horror story about a haunted boat. Wilson calls it The Shining on a boat, like Speed II, which is a pretty good gag. Also, Pill - but she actually seems kind of dim.
Also, shout out to Jorge Garcia, who picked the wrong day to take shrooms. And Peter Kwok, who is barely in this movie.
I guess this went to streaming pretty quickly, and I can see why. But it does have some good gags, some gross gags, and good character acting. It won’t beat out Zombieland or Shaun of the Dead, but we liked it.
It stars Elijah Wood as a sad sack wannabe novelist who has moved back to his old home town after spending some time in New York. He has a job as a summer substitute teacher, and he’s not too happy about it. He shows up at school in a beat up car and is immediately parked in by the Rainn Wilson, the buffed out gym teacher. The new-age principal confiscates his cellphone (school policy and convenient plot device) and sends him to the teacher’s lounge.
There he meets hostile Nasim Pedrad, spacey science teacher Leigh Whannell, and sweet Alison Pill. Wood and Pill went to school together, and he’s obviously sweet on her. Too bad Wilson is her boyfriend.
But the cafeteria had some bad chicken nuggets, causing one girl to go pycho and start biting faces off. Wood is not too concerned - he didn’t like the bitten kid anyway, and is more interested in his novel and trying to flirt with Pill. Pretty soon they are cut off with a few uninfected kids while the rest run around eating the other grownups.
There’s a lot of gross out gags in this, and a lot of just plain fun ones. When Wilson is insulting Wood, he calls him a little hobbit. Then there’s Whannell, telling people to keep quiet when they aren’t saying anything, and reeling off imaginary science. Also, in the gross category, handling body waste and parts with no gloves.
The initial joke is that Wood can’t focus on the life-threateningly horrible stuff going on because he’s thinking about his novel - a horror story about a haunted boat. Wilson calls it The Shining on a boat, like Speed II, which is a pretty good gag. Also, Pill - but she actually seems kind of dim.
Also, shout out to Jorge Garcia, who picked the wrong day to take shrooms. And Peter Kwok, who is barely in this movie.
I guess this went to streaming pretty quickly, and I can see why. But it does have some good gags, some gross gags, and good character acting. It won’t beat out Zombieland or Shaun of the Dead, but we liked it.
Thursday, October 3, 2019
Twixt Ending
Twixt (2011) is a funny creature - a small horror comedy, by one of the biggest names in cinema, Francis Ford Coppola.
It stars Val Kilmer as a minor horror writer on a book tour. He’s booked into a tiny town that doesn’t even have a bookstore - just a few bookshelves in the corner of the hardware store. He meets Sheriff Bruce Dern, who could tell him a few stories, by gum. He takes Kilmer to see a fresh body that he claims was murdered by a serial killer. Kilmer is intrigued and agrees to take Dern on as a writing partner.
Later, he discovers that Edgar Allen Poe stayed at the hotel in town and decides to stay awhile. He meets Elle Fanning, a quiet, outcast girl who won’t come into the hotel with him. She also points out that all of the clocks on the seven-sided clock tower in town show different times. Then Fanning bites the hotel proprietress and is chased off by a priest, and Edgar Allen Poe (Ben Chaplin) comes along. And Kilmer wakes up.
He is now inspired to stay on, and discover the truth behind these dreams. The sheriff tells him that there’s an encampment of kids across the river, probably satan cultists, possibly vampires. Their leader is a sensitive biker called Flamingo (Alden Ehrenreich). Dern has even developed an automatic vampire staking machine to execute them, if need be.
But all this doesn’t help him get his book written. His editor wants a draft soon, and the ending has to be bulletproof. So he gets the sheriff to buy him all the sleeping aids he can find, and settles down to finish the dream.
I won’t go into it too much (or spoil the ending), but it is fun to see how Coppola blends dream and reality. I guess this is a popular horror trope, where a scene starts normal, then gets weirder and weirder, and then the character wakes up (but not always!). There are also a lot of eerie, beautiful images - Fanning’s character, the clocks, Flamingo gang of freaks, runaways and fire jugglers. But it kind of doesn’t come together - too much dream logic, not enough story. And the real story, which I will spoil, is not really presented fully: While Kilmer is dreaming up a horror fantasy, Dern is probably the actual serial killer, murdering children as “vampires”. I get that the joke is that he doesn’t care about something so serious, while chasing the trivial. I just don’t think Coppola pulled it off.
Also - and I say this as someone who loves him - Kilmer has a weirdly tiny face in a big, puffy head.
I guess Coppola had a good time making this - he filmed from his home in Napa. And he deserves it, after all he’s given to cinema. It’s just not that great - twixt bad and good?
It stars Val Kilmer as a minor horror writer on a book tour. He’s booked into a tiny town that doesn’t even have a bookstore - just a few bookshelves in the corner of the hardware store. He meets Sheriff Bruce Dern, who could tell him a few stories, by gum. He takes Kilmer to see a fresh body that he claims was murdered by a serial killer. Kilmer is intrigued and agrees to take Dern on as a writing partner.
Later, he discovers that Edgar Allen Poe stayed at the hotel in town and decides to stay awhile. He meets Elle Fanning, a quiet, outcast girl who won’t come into the hotel with him. She also points out that all of the clocks on the seven-sided clock tower in town show different times. Then Fanning bites the hotel proprietress and is chased off by a priest, and Edgar Allen Poe (Ben Chaplin) comes along. And Kilmer wakes up.
He is now inspired to stay on, and discover the truth behind these dreams. The sheriff tells him that there’s an encampment of kids across the river, probably satan cultists, possibly vampires. Their leader is a sensitive biker called Flamingo (Alden Ehrenreich). Dern has even developed an automatic vampire staking machine to execute them, if need be.
But all this doesn’t help him get his book written. His editor wants a draft soon, and the ending has to be bulletproof. So he gets the sheriff to buy him all the sleeping aids he can find, and settles down to finish the dream.
I won’t go into it too much (or spoil the ending), but it is fun to see how Coppola blends dream and reality. I guess this is a popular horror trope, where a scene starts normal, then gets weirder and weirder, and then the character wakes up (but not always!). There are also a lot of eerie, beautiful images - Fanning’s character, the clocks, Flamingo gang of freaks, runaways and fire jugglers. But it kind of doesn’t come together - too much dream logic, not enough story. And the real story, which I will spoil, is not really presented fully: While Kilmer is dreaming up a horror fantasy, Dern is probably the actual serial killer, murdering children as “vampires”. I get that the joke is that he doesn’t care about something so serious, while chasing the trivial. I just don’t think Coppola pulled it off.
Also - and I say this as someone who loves him - Kilmer has a weirdly tiny face in a big, puffy head.
I guess Coppola had a good time making this - he filmed from his home in Napa. And he deserves it, after all he’s given to cinema. It’s just not that great - twixt bad and good?
Tuesday, October 1, 2019
No More Bonk-Bonk on the Head
As we head into Spooktober, the spooky stuff starts hitting our queue. Some of it, like Stephen King's Children of the Corn (1984) is pretty silly.
It starts Gatlin, in a small Nebraska farm town, with a boy going to a diner with his dad after church. On a signal, all the older kids start murdering the adults. Fast forward 3 years - Burt Stanton and Linda Hamilton are driving through Nebraska when they hit a kid in the road. Stanton notices that his throat was cut just before he was hit, and loads the body up and starts looking for a town. A mechanic at a gas station tells them to avoid Gatlin, but all the roads seem to point that way. While they are driving in circles, lets meet the kids.
The children who murdered all the adults in Gatlin are lead by the child preacher Isaac, who has the kids sacrifice to He Who Walks Behind the Rows. He has a thuggish lieutenant, Malachi, who just likes killing adults. The kids are mostly happy to be out from under the grown ups, but the little boy from the diner and his sister (who draws pictures of the future) still like to go to their old house and play with toys and records. When our adult protagonists finally get to Gatlin, these kids will be their allies and vice versa.
So it’s the kids vs. adults story - just like the Miri episode of Star Trek. My favorite part of this one is how easily the grown ups here just shrug off the kids attacks and knock them down. Even if they are outnumbered, they’re just kids.
I know King has a reputation as a great horror writer, but it seems to me that, outside of The Shining, all of his movies are trash. (And he hated The Shining.) This one is no different. Not even all that scary, although pretty gory.
It starts Gatlin, in a small Nebraska farm town, with a boy going to a diner with his dad after church. On a signal, all the older kids start murdering the adults. Fast forward 3 years - Burt Stanton and Linda Hamilton are driving through Nebraska when they hit a kid in the road. Stanton notices that his throat was cut just before he was hit, and loads the body up and starts looking for a town. A mechanic at a gas station tells them to avoid Gatlin, but all the roads seem to point that way. While they are driving in circles, lets meet the kids.
The children who murdered all the adults in Gatlin are lead by the child preacher Isaac, who has the kids sacrifice to He Who Walks Behind the Rows. He has a thuggish lieutenant, Malachi, who just likes killing adults. The kids are mostly happy to be out from under the grown ups, but the little boy from the diner and his sister (who draws pictures of the future) still like to go to their old house and play with toys and records. When our adult protagonists finally get to Gatlin, these kids will be their allies and vice versa.
So it’s the kids vs. adults story - just like the Miri episode of Star Trek. My favorite part of this one is how easily the grown ups here just shrug off the kids attacks and knock them down. Even if they are outnumbered, they’re just kids.
I know King has a reputation as a great horror writer, but it seems to me that, outside of The Shining, all of his movies are trash. (And he hated The Shining.) This one is no different. Not even all that scary, although pretty gory.
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