People Tell Me I Look Like Han Solo.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Men In Black 3, Escape From New York remake, and...the death of Jason?
I’m really not sure who out there will be excited about this, but apparently Men In Black 3 is getting close to being official. Stars Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones and director Barry Sonnenfeld have all reportedly signed on for the sequel, which will be in 3D (of course) and is due in theaters in May of 2011.
I liked the first Men In Black okay back in the day, but the sequel (often held up as an example of the worst-case example of what happens when you rush a film into production with half a script to beat an impending writers’ strike) is just a sketchy collection of half-baked gags and ideas, and is about as forgettable a big summer blockbuster as Wild Wild West (oops). And don’t even get me started on the use of 3D gimmickry…but Sony needs a big blockbuster in 2011 – that’s when Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 4 was due out until the studio scrubbed it for a 3D Twilight-flavored reboot the following year – so I guess the studio calculated that it’s easier to park dumptrucks full of money in front of Smith’s, Lee’s and Sonnenfeld’s respective homes and get Men In Black 3: A License to Print Money into theaters for Memorial Day weekend next year.
* * *
Breck Eisner, director of the recent not-quite-a-zombie-movie The Crazies, is reportedly in final talks to helm the remake of John Carpenter’s classic Escape From New York (one of my personal all-time faves). I’m pretty much over being upset about remakes of movi
es I love – a remake of Escape From New York, no matter how awful, won’t retroactively erase my DVD of Carpenter’s magnificent original – and Hollywood’s been threatening to remake it for years, so it was bound to happen eventually. The only detail that sort of irked me in the report is that the script apparently combines the story from the original Escape From New York – the President is trapped in a walled-off NYC that now serves as a supermax prison and an soldier-turned-outlaw is promised a full pardon to rescue him – with an origin story for Snake Plissken. One of the coolest things about the original Escape is precisely that you don’t really know what Snake did before or who he was exactly, except through small snippets of dialogue from other characters.
Remaking Carpenter has been a thing the past few years – Rob Zombie remade Halloween in 2007 (check out my review here) and they’re shooting bits of the prequel to Carpenter’s The Thing a few blocks from my office here in Toronto this week. But there’s a magic to Carpenter’s movies that none of these remakes can hope to touch (and I’m one of the few who liked Zombie’s Halloween), but that doesn’t mean they can’t be enjoyed on their own merits. There aren’t many bigger Escape From New York fans out there than me, but I’m trying to keep an open mind. But nobody will ever top Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken for pure cinema badassery.
Stay tuned for more on this project as I hear about it.
* * *
One final item that I find genuinely confusing. Producer Brad Fuller recently Tweeted that the planned sequel to last year’s Friday the 13th remake is “dead – not happening.” I assume there’s a story behind this – studios don’t typically kill sequels to horror remakes that make more than $100 million worldwide (and I can’t believe that a Friday the 13th movie is that expensive to make). The Friday sequel was planned to be in 3D, and it also would have marked the 13th film in the Friday franchise, obviously an important milestone. I can’t wait to find out what happened here.
Labels: horror movies, John Carpenter, Movie news, remakes
¶ 10:21 AM 0 Comments
Thursday, March 25, 2010
[REC] 2 gets U.S. release date
News came down yesterday that Magnolia Pictures has picked up the Spanish horror sequel [REC] 2 for distribution in America. The original [REC], the best zombie movie I've seen since Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake (it's like Cloverfield or Blair Witch meets zombies, and it's remarkably effective), was remade in America as Quarantine, which is basically a shot-for-shot remake of the Spanish original. (As a devoted movie snob I always try too seek out the original, and it's almost always superior.) The film is due in U.S. theaters on July 9, which is significant if only because the original [REC], which had some serious buzz going for it, was basically buried for fear that it would hurt the box office for Quarantine (why pay $12 to see something in a theater when you can rent the original movie it's a remake of for $5?), but it's available on DVD now, and I recommend it highly if you're into horror movies. It's terrifying in ways the American remake (which really isn't bad) isn't.
Original [REC] writer-directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza are back for the sequel (which means it will probably also be awesome), and they're already talking about making [REC] 3.
Check out the teaser for [REC] 2 below. But be warned, it's not for the faint of heart.
Original [REC] writer-directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza are back for the sequel (which means it will probably also be awesome), and they're already talking about making [REC] 3.
Check out the teaser for [REC] 2 below. But be warned, it's not for the faint of heart.
Labels: horror movies, Movie news, trailers, zombies
¶ 10:39 AM 0 Comments
Friday, November 6, 2009
Wanna be in the Paranormal Activity credits?
So this Paranormal Activity business.
I always think it’s cool when a movie becomes a success in a genuinely grassroots way, especially when it climbs the top box office list over the course of several we
eks. It almost never happens anymore, when positive word-of-mouth fuels a movie’s success rather than a “trick millions into going to see it the first weekend” marketing blitz. And as much as Paranormal Activity isn’t really my thing – I more appreciated it than liked it, and I thought it was very well-made and effective, but I wouldn’t really call it “scary,” but that’s just me – Paramount clearly has something special on their hands. The film was made for a pittance ($15,000!) a few years ago, and is currently nearing the $100-million mark. (It was also the horror film that finally broke the Saw franchise’s grip on the Halloween box office, and for that I am thankful.)
The ‘Demand It’ campaign, which prompted people who watched the trailer online to go to the movie’s website and demand that the film be released in their city too – Paranormal Activity only opened in a handful of theaters initially – eventually got millions of votes, and directly led to the film now being in just about every cinema in North America. I remember when it opened here in Toronto at one theater just for midnight showings, and now it’s everywhere. And to thank fans, Paramount is allowing anyone to register at http://www.ParanormalActivityProject.com/ any time before next Monday, November 9 at noon PST to have their names included in the credits of the Paranormal Activity DVD (for which there’s still no official release date, but that’s undoubtedly coming soon).
I think this is a great little thing for fans of the movie. Paranormal Activity, more than just about any hit movie this year (with the possible exception of District 9), was a success because the movie really connected with people, and the “buzz” had less to do with a marketing campaign than with people just getting excited about seeing it and genuinely digging it and telling their friends to check it out. It’s a nice acknowledgement of the role that “the people” played in the movie’s success, and it’s cool that basically anybody who wants to can get their name into the DVD credits.
Look for a proper DVD review of Paranormal Activity in the coming weeks or months (assuming Paramount sends one along for me).
I always think it’s cool when a movie becomes a success in a genuinely grassroots way, especially when it climbs the top box office list over the course of several we
eks. It almost never happens anymore, when positive word-of-mouth fuels a movie’s success rather than a “trick millions into going to see it the first weekend” marketing blitz. And as much as Paranormal Activity isn’t really my thing – I more appreciated it than liked it, and I thought it was very well-made and effective, but I wouldn’t really call it “scary,” but that’s just me – Paramount clearly has something special on their hands. The film was made for a pittance ($15,000!) a few years ago, and is currently nearing the $100-million mark. (It was also the horror film that finally broke the Saw franchise’s grip on the Halloween box office, and for that I am thankful.)The ‘Demand It’ campaign, which prompted people who watched the trailer online to go to the movie’s website and demand that the film be released in their city too – Paranormal Activity only opened in a handful of theaters initially – eventually got millions of votes, and directly led to the film now being in just about every cinema in North America. I remember when it opened here in Toronto at one theater just for midnight showings, and now it’s everywhere. And to thank fans, Paramount is allowing anyone to register at http://www.ParanormalActivityProject.com/ any time before next Monday, November 9 at noon PST to have their names included in the credits of the Paranormal Activity DVD (for which there’s still no official release date, but that’s undoubtedly coming soon).
I think this is a great little thing for fans of the movie. Paranormal Activity, more than just about any hit movie this year (with the possible exception of District 9), was a success because the movie really connected with people, and the “buzz” had less to do with a marketing campaign than with people just getting excited about seeing it and genuinely digging it and telling their friends to check it out. It’s a nice acknowledgement of the role that “the people” played in the movie’s success, and it’s cool that basically anybody who wants to can get their name into the DVD credits.
Look for a proper DVD review of Paranormal Activity in the coming weeks or months (assuming Paramount sends one along for me).
Labels: DVD, horror movies
¶ 10:19 AM 0 Comments
Friday, October 30, 2009
Under the Radar: Near Dark
It’s been too long since I’ve done an Under the Radar entry, and given that Halloween is tomorrow, I thought I’d spotlight my favorite vampire movie ever (w
hich I’ve mentioned here more than once), the 1987 cult classic Near Dark. It was directed by the great Kathryn Bigelow (one of my favorite directors ever; she also made Point Break and this past summer’s brilliant The Hurt Locker), and it’s one of the most unique vampire movies I’ve ever seen. It’s also scary as hell and totally awesome.
Near Dark is, in Bigelow’s words, a vampire western. Except it’s set in the modern day (well, 1987), so the western aspects come from the setting and the feel rather than the time period. It’s set in the American southwest, and follows a young country boy named Caleb (Adrian Pasdar, who’d go on to play Nathan in Heroes) who meets a beautiful, mysterious girl named Mae (Jenny Wright) while out with his friends one night. Intrigued, he pursues her, and she seems to return his interest, but pretty soon she’s making cryptic statements about still being around in a billion years when the light leaving distant stars reaches the Earth and imploring him to drive her home before sunrise. In an apparent fit of passion, she bites him on the neck, and soon Caleb is trapped, as the old Marvel comics covers used to say, in a world he never made. Not long after Mae’s love nibble, Caleb falls in with the gang she runs with, led by the menacing Jesse (Lance Henriksen), the father figure of a little family of nomadic vampires. The mother figure is his woman, Diamondback (Jenette Goldstein), and their “kids” are Mae, the hot-headed psychopath Severen (Bill Paxton), and Homer (Joshua John Miller), an adult man trapped in a child’s body.
It may seem almost gimmicky now, but Near Dark is a vampire movie in which nobody ever says the word “vampire,” and not a single fang is ever glimpsed. Instead of the usual vampire mythology, Bigelow’s bloodsuckers are dirty, vicious predators, in contrast to the more traditional European vision of vampires as sleek, seductive charmers. By melding the standard vampire-romance plot with iconic western imagery, Near Dark becomes a distinctly American vampire tale, and, with the exception of Wright’s Mae (who actually is beautiful and seductive), the vamps in Near Dark are more like a gang of outlaws from a western, with ragged clothes, filthy faces, plenty of guns and a serious hate-on for law enforcement. (There’s even a sequence where the gang holes up in a small motel room for a shootout with police.)
Near Dark is an interesting reversal of what has become the standard “innocent human girl falls for dreamy vampire hunk” premise. The inversion benefits largely from Wright, who is astonishingly gorgeous; I might consider going through the hell Caleb suffers through in the movie for a shot with her.
But as much as Near Dark hits many of the usual vampire-movie notes with its pair of star-crossed lovers and lead character torn between the human and vampire worlds, it’s also scary as hell, but not in a jump-scare, monster-movie way. Near Dark is scary more in the way really tense crime movies are scary, with the threat of random, brutal violence always looming. The best example is the scene midway through the film (arguably the movie's centerpiece) where Jesse’s gang, with Caleb the new recruit in tow, enters a dusty redneck bar. From the second the vampires enter the frame, you know it’s going to get ugly, but Bigelow ratchets up the tension very deliberately, at an almost agonizingly slow pace, and the result is chilling. The terrified bystanders can only watch helplessly as the vampires casually kill everyone inside one by one.
In keeping with its western vibe, Near Dark veers into action-movie territory as the story progresses, particularly the Terminator-esque showdown between Caleb and Severen in the final act. That’s not a problem for me at all – Bigelow’s one of the best action directors to ever pick up a camera – but viewers looking for a movie about sexy young vampires making goo-goo eyes at each other for 90 minutes might be put off by all the gunplay and chases and explosions.
But an original idea and brilliant direction can only take you so far if you don’t have actors bringing it. Adrian Pasdar is great as Caleb, who has a nice arc going from wide-eyed country boy to vampire outlaw, and the scenes where he’s starting to enjoy his new life are particularly good; I could watch a whole movie about this band of bloodsuckers criss-crossing the country causing trouble. Jenny Wright doesn’t have to do that much other than look hot, but she’s pretty good at that. The only problem with her character is that Mae is played with such an inherent decency and goodness that it’s a little difficult to understand how she’s managed to run with this gang of killers for as long as she has.
It’s in the gang of evil vampires, though, that the casting of Near Dark really shines. Lance Henriksen in particular is fantastic and terrifying as Jesse, the leader, but it comes more from the feeling that he’d rip out your throat as soon as look at you, and his being a vampire doesn’t really have much to do with it. It’s all in Henriksen’s attitude and the way he plays the role. (I’ve been a huge fan of Henriksen for years; I think he’s one of the best character actors out there and few are better at playing villains.) Bill Paxton is also a treat; he gets the more flashy, scenery-chewing work as the playfully brutal Severen. And Jenette Goldstein manages to make Diamon
dback hard-edged and brassy but still give her an odd, motherly quality as well. (A big reason these three work so well together is that Bigelow cast them essentially right off the set of James Cameron’s Aliens, where they all played space marines and endured a pre-production boot camp, and between that and the actual shoot, they developed a camaraderie that Near Dark benefits from tremendously.) And while Near Dark may not have invented the idea, it was the first vampire movie I’d ever seen that looked at tragic concept of the vampire kid who’s actually an adult trapped in a child’s body, and Joshua John Miller brings a world-weariness to Homer that most child actors couldn’t come close to.
Near Dark has been a popular cult movie for years, and the two-disc Anchor Bay DVD set I managed to get my hands on years ago has some excellent extras on it, including commentary from Bigelow, deleted scenes and a great retrospective making-of documentary. Lionsgate has since repackaged the Near Dark DVD to capitalize on the success of Twilight, basically making the cover resemble the poster for Twilight as much as possible. It’s sort of a shame, but the movie itself is great, and if aping a better-known, more recent hit film will drive more people to see this awesome little gem of a movie, I can live with that. If you want to see a truly original, dark, violent and sexy vampire movie, Near Dark comes with my highest possible recommendation.
hich I’ve mentioned here more than once), the 1987 cult classic Near Dark. It was directed by the great Kathryn Bigelow (one of my favorite directors ever; she also made Point Break and this past summer’s brilliant The Hurt Locker), and it’s one of the most unique vampire movies I’ve ever seen. It’s also scary as hell and totally awesome.Near Dark is, in Bigelow’s words, a vampire western. Except it’s set in the modern day (well, 1987), so the western aspects come from the setting and the feel rather than the time period. It’s set in the American southwest, and follows a young country boy named Caleb (Adrian Pasdar, who’d go on to play Nathan in Heroes) who meets a beautiful, mysterious girl named Mae (Jenny Wright) while out with his friends one night. Intrigued, he pursues her, and she seems to return his interest, but pretty soon she’s making cryptic statements about still being around in a billion years when the light leaving distant stars reaches the Earth and imploring him to drive her home before sunrise. In an apparent fit of passion, she bites him on the neck, and soon Caleb is trapped, as the old Marvel comics covers used to say, in a world he never made. Not long after Mae’s love nibble, Caleb falls in with the gang she runs with, led by the menacing Jesse (Lance Henriksen), the father figure of a little family of nomadic vampires. The mother figure is his woman, Diamondback (Jenette Goldstein), and their “kids” are Mae, the hot-headed psychopath Severen (Bill Paxton), and Homer (Joshua John Miller), an adult man trapped in a child’s body.
It may seem almost gimmicky now, but Near Dark is a vampire movie in which nobody ever says the word “vampire,” and not a single fang is ever glimpsed. Instead of the usual vampire mythology, Bigelow’s bloodsuckers are dirty, vicious predators, in contrast to the more traditional European vision of vampires as sleek, seductive charmers. By melding the standard vampire-romance plot with iconic western imagery, Near Dark becomes a distinctly American vampire tale, and, with the exception of Wright’s Mae (who actually is beautiful and seductive), the vamps in Near Dark are more like a gang of outlaws from a western, with ragged clothes, filthy faces, plenty of guns and a serious hate-on for law enforcement. (There’s even a sequence where the gang holes up in a small motel room for a shootout with police.)
Near Dark is an interesting reversal of what has become the standard “innocent human girl falls for dreamy vampire hunk” premise. The inversion benefits largely from Wright, who is astonishingly gorgeous; I might consider going through the hell Caleb suffers through in the movie for a shot with her.
But as much as Near Dark hits many of the usual vampire-movie notes with its pair of star-crossed lovers and lead character torn between the human and vampire worlds, it’s also scary as hell, but not in a jump-scare, monster-movie way. Near Dark is scary more in the way really tense crime movies are scary, with the threat of random, brutal violence always looming. The best example is the scene midway through the film (arguably the movie's centerpiece) where Jesse’s gang, with Caleb the new recruit in tow, enters a dusty redneck bar. From the second the vampires enter the frame, you know it’s going to get ugly, but Bigelow ratchets up the tension very deliberately, at an almost agonizingly slow pace, and the result is chilling. The terrified bystanders can only watch helplessly as the vampires casually kill everyone inside one by one.
In keeping with its western vibe, Near Dark veers into action-movie territory as the story progresses, particularly the Terminator-esque showdown between Caleb and Severen in the final act. That’s not a problem for me at all – Bigelow’s one of the best action directors to ever pick up a camera – but viewers looking for a movie about sexy young vampires making goo-goo eyes at each other for 90 minutes might be put off by all the gunplay and chases and explosions.
But an original idea and brilliant direction can only take you so far if you don’t have actors bringing it. Adrian Pasdar is great as Caleb, who has a nice arc going from wide-eyed country boy to vampire outlaw, and the scenes where he’s starting to enjoy his new life are particularly good; I could watch a whole movie about this band of bloodsuckers criss-crossing the country causing trouble. Jenny Wright doesn’t have to do that much other than look hot, but she’s pretty good at that. The only problem with her character is that Mae is played with such an inherent decency and goodness that it’s a little difficult to understand how she’s managed to run with this gang of killers for as long as she has.
It’s in the gang of evil vampires, though, that the casting of Near Dark really shines. Lance Henriksen in particular is fantastic and terrifying as Jesse, the leader, but it comes more from the feeling that he’d rip out your throat as soon as look at you, and his being a vampire doesn’t really have much to do with it. It’s all in Henriksen’s attitude and the way he plays the role. (I’ve been a huge fan of Henriksen for years; I think he’s one of the best character actors out there and few are better at playing villains.) Bill Paxton is also a treat; he gets the more flashy, scenery-chewing work as the playfully brutal Severen. And Jenette Goldstein manages to make Diamon
dback hard-edged and brassy but still give her an odd, motherly quality as well. (A big reason these three work so well together is that Bigelow cast them essentially right off the set of James Cameron’s Aliens, where they all played space marines and endured a pre-production boot camp, and between that and the actual shoot, they developed a camaraderie that Near Dark benefits from tremendously.) And while Near Dark may not have invented the idea, it was the first vampire movie I’d ever seen that looked at tragic concept of the vampire kid who’s actually an adult trapped in a child’s body, and Joshua John Miller brings a world-weariness to Homer that most child actors couldn’t come close to.Near Dark has been a popular cult movie for years, and the two-disc Anchor Bay DVD set I managed to get my hands on years ago has some excellent extras on it, including commentary from Bigelow, deleted scenes and a great retrospective making-of documentary. Lionsgate has since repackaged the Near Dark DVD to capitalize on the success of Twilight, basically making the cover resemble the poster for Twilight as much as possible. It’s sort of a shame, but the movie itself is great, and if aping a better-known, more recent hit film will drive more people to see this awesome little gem of a movie, I can live with that. If you want to see a truly original, dark, violent and sexy vampire movie, Near Dark comes with my highest possible recommendation.
Labels: horror movies, Under the radar, vampires, westerns
¶ 11:10 AM 0 Comments
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
DVD Review: Harper's Island
THE SHOW
Harper’s Island is a shining example of an absolutely brilliant idea completely botched in the execution. The premise – a self-contained, 13-episode murder mystery
in which dozens of characters are killed off one at a time – is a phenomenal idea. But the people behind Harper’s Island seem to have little or no understanding of the mechanics of the slasher movies they’re attempting to emulate (albeit for network television, so they’re unfortunately starting with one hand tied behind their proverbial backs), and virtually no ability to properly build tension beyond superficial jump scares. Harper’s Island was an intensely frustrating viewing experience because of all the things the show does wrong, while a great idea filled with promise is sitting right there waiting to be properly executed.
Harper’s Island follows a wedding on a secluded island off the coast of Washington state that was the scene of a brutal series of murders seven years earlier. Naturally, the main character, Abby (Elaine Cassidy), has a very personal connection to the previous murders – her dad is the local sheriff and her mom was one of the victims – and has spent the past seven years in Los Angeles trying to forget her gruesome past. She returns to Harper’s Island for the wedding of her best friend, Henry (Christopher Gorham of Ugly Betty fame) and his wealthy heiress fiancée, Trish (Katie Cassidy, no relation), and finds herself, along with the rest of the wedding party, the targets of a new series of murders that echo the prior slayings. It’s a great premise – a wedding party of 25-plus characters getting picked off one by one as the viewer tries to figure out which one is the killer – and I was actually quite interested to sit down and watch Harper’s Island. So where does it all go wrong?
It actually starts off quite poorly. The first few episodes have an overheated, primetime-soap vibe (it somehow manages to simultaneously be over-the-top silly and totally straight-faced) that’s not even campy or fun, just bad. The first few hours are mostly devoted to introducing the paper-thin, clichéd characters, like Henry’s gang of buddies, straight out of central casting for a crappy beer commercial, or the effete, wussy British boyfriend of the token flirt/skank, or Trish’s evil, scenery-chewing, father (who would totally twirl his mustache in every scene if he had one), who seems like he stepped out of another, far more fun show. The producers seem to be shooting for Scream, but they hit somewhere closer to The Young and the Restless with graphic murders.
Fans of horror movies know that creative kills are one of the most integral parts of an enjoyable slasher experience, but the kills in Harper’s Island are just sort of stock, and nowhere near as clever or fun as the producers seem to think they are. Granted, the fun in slasher movies is usually largely because the films are so graphic, and they can’t really do graphic on a show that ran in primetime on CBS. But there’s also a sense of fun to slasher movies that Harper’s Island totally lacks. Slasher movies, even ones with a “whodunit” angle, like the Scream saga (chunks of which the producers lift wholesale, and the nautical-themed killer was already done in the mediocre I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise), are typically fun to watch, but for some reason Harper’s Island opts for a gritty, realistic sense of dread, and it simply doesn’t work. To make a slasher movie seem dark, you have to go really dark, into Halloween territory (either the John Carpenter original or the Rob Zombie remake, pick one), and that’s (a) far too oppressive a tone to maintain for 13 episodes, and (b) even less possible to pull off on network television. So Harper’s Island falls into the awkward middle of trying to pull off a dark, serious vibe (but still mixes in awkward, tacked-on comedy bits in a transparent effort to lighten things up) along with wacky kills, that, because of the aforementioned tone, just come across as overly elaborate and silly.
Yet for all my complaining about Harper’s Island – I made this weird sort of half-groan, half-sigh about 500 times while watching the show, usually at the latest dumb plot twist – I can’t pretend it didn’t get its hooks into me at least somewhat. I won’t spoil anything, but something happens around the fifth episode that changes the direction of the show; basically it’s the point at which all the characters come to understand that they’re being stalked by a killer (up until then people were being picked off without the others knowing), and from there the show gains a bit of momentum. Most whodunits can maintain at least some viewer interest, if based in nothing more than curiosity to find out what happens next and who the killer is, and Harper’s Island is no different. (I actually ended up correctly predicting the killer’s identity in about the second episode, not because I’m a genius but rather because I’ve seen enough movies to see through all the little red herrings the producers and writers tried to use, but I still wanted to find out if I was right and see what the explanation for his/her motives would be. I was ultimately unimpressed.) But I ended up tearing through Harper’s Island’s 13 episodes (about 9 hours of television in all) in a couple of days, and more than once I did the thing where I ended up watching two or three episodes in a sitting than I planned to, even if I was scoffing loudly most of the time.
Overall Harper’s Island is a failure, albeit an ambitious one. I usually have a soft spot for movies and shows that bite off more than they can chew, but in this case the pitfalls the show falls into are totally avoidable. There’s no reason beyond the producers’ lack of understanding of the genre they were attempting to play in that Harper’s Island shouldn’t have worked much, much better. It tries to be too many things at once – a primetime soap, a murder mystery, a long-form slasher movie – that it can’t make up its mind what it’s trying to be. Add to that the fact that anyone who’s seen the Scream movies will see just about all the twists coming a mile away, and I have to classify Harper’s Island as a disappointing failure.
GRADE: D+
THE EXTRAS
As much as the show Harper’s Island didn’t work, I can’t fault the people behind the DVD edition for skimping on extras. There’s deleted scenes and commentary from the producers and writers on four of the episodes (including the first and last), which is sort of interesting if only because they largely seem to think they were successful in their endeavor – though I caught at least one semi-bitter crack about how frustrated they were by the constraints of working in network TV – as well as featurettes on the casting and production. There’s also a cute bit in which the cast members are questioned on the set about who they think the killer will be revealed to be (the writers kept them all in the dark as much as possible), and another segment called ‘The Grim Reaper,’ about the producer who had the task of informing each of the actors that their character was being killed off, and the lengths some actors went to to avoid him. It’s a fairly solid DVD set, it’s just a shame the show it’s built around isn’t better.
Harper’s Island is a shining example of an absolutely brilliant idea completely botched in the execution. The premise – a self-contained, 13-episode murder mystery
in which dozens of characters are killed off one at a time – is a phenomenal idea. But the people behind Harper’s Island seem to have little or no understanding of the mechanics of the slasher movies they’re attempting to emulate (albeit for network television, so they’re unfortunately starting with one hand tied behind their proverbial backs), and virtually no ability to properly build tension beyond superficial jump scares. Harper’s Island was an intensely frustrating viewing experience because of all the things the show does wrong, while a great idea filled with promise is sitting right there waiting to be properly executed.Harper’s Island follows a wedding on a secluded island off the coast of Washington state that was the scene of a brutal series of murders seven years earlier. Naturally, the main character, Abby (Elaine Cassidy), has a very personal connection to the previous murders – her dad is the local sheriff and her mom was one of the victims – and has spent the past seven years in Los Angeles trying to forget her gruesome past. She returns to Harper’s Island for the wedding of her best friend, Henry (Christopher Gorham of Ugly Betty fame) and his wealthy heiress fiancée, Trish (Katie Cassidy, no relation), and finds herself, along with the rest of the wedding party, the targets of a new series of murders that echo the prior slayings. It’s a great premise – a wedding party of 25-plus characters getting picked off one by one as the viewer tries to figure out which one is the killer – and I was actually quite interested to sit down and watch Harper’s Island. So where does it all go wrong?
It actually starts off quite poorly. The first few episodes have an overheated, primetime-soap vibe (it somehow manages to simultaneously be over-the-top silly and totally straight-faced) that’s not even campy or fun, just bad. The first few hours are mostly devoted to introducing the paper-thin, clichéd characters, like Henry’s gang of buddies, straight out of central casting for a crappy beer commercial, or the effete, wussy British boyfriend of the token flirt/skank, or Trish’s evil, scenery-chewing, father (who would totally twirl his mustache in every scene if he had one), who seems like he stepped out of another, far more fun show. The producers seem to be shooting for Scream, but they hit somewhere closer to The Young and the Restless with graphic murders.
Fans of horror movies know that creative kills are one of the most integral parts of an enjoyable slasher experience, but the kills in Harper’s Island are just sort of stock, and nowhere near as clever or fun as the producers seem to think they are. Granted, the fun in slasher movies is usually largely because the films are so graphic, and they can’t really do graphic on a show that ran in primetime on CBS. But there’s also a sense of fun to slasher movies that Harper’s Island totally lacks. Slasher movies, even ones with a “whodunit” angle, like the Scream saga (chunks of which the producers lift wholesale, and the nautical-themed killer was already done in the mediocre I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise), are typically fun to watch, but for some reason Harper’s Island opts for a gritty, realistic sense of dread, and it simply doesn’t work. To make a slasher movie seem dark, you have to go really dark, into Halloween territory (either the John Carpenter original or the Rob Zombie remake, pick one), and that’s (a) far too oppressive a tone to maintain for 13 episodes, and (b) even less possible to pull off on network television. So Harper’s Island falls into the awkward middle of trying to pull off a dark, serious vibe (but still mixes in awkward, tacked-on comedy bits in a transparent effort to lighten things up) along with wacky kills, that, because of the aforementioned tone, just come across as overly elaborate and silly.
Yet for all my complaining about Harper’s Island – I made this weird sort of half-groan, half-sigh about 500 times while watching the show, usually at the latest dumb plot twist – I can’t pretend it didn’t get its hooks into me at least somewhat. I won’t spoil anything, but something happens around the fifth episode that changes the direction of the show; basically it’s the point at which all the characters come to understand that they’re being stalked by a killer (up until then people were being picked off without the others knowing), and from there the show gains a bit of momentum. Most whodunits can maintain at least some viewer interest, if based in nothing more than curiosity to find out what happens next and who the killer is, and Harper’s Island is no different. (I actually ended up correctly predicting the killer’s identity in about the second episode, not because I’m a genius but rather because I’ve seen enough movies to see through all the little red herrings the producers and writers tried to use, but I still wanted to find out if I was right and see what the explanation for his/her motives would be. I was ultimately unimpressed.) But I ended up tearing through Harper’s Island’s 13 episodes (about 9 hours of television in all) in a couple of days, and more than once I did the thing where I ended up watching two or three episodes in a sitting than I planned to, even if I was scoffing loudly most of the time.
Overall Harper’s Island is a failure, albeit an ambitious one. I usually have a soft spot for movies and shows that bite off more than they can chew, but in this case the pitfalls the show falls into are totally avoidable. There’s no reason beyond the producers’ lack of understanding of the genre they were attempting to play in that Harper’s Island shouldn’t have worked much, much better. It tries to be too many things at once – a primetime soap, a murder mystery, a long-form slasher movie – that it can’t make up its mind what it’s trying to be. Add to that the fact that anyone who’s seen the Scream movies will see just about all the twists coming a mile away, and I have to classify Harper’s Island as a disappointing failure.
GRADE: D+
THE EXTRAS
As much as the show Harper’s Island didn’t work, I can’t fault the people behind the DVD edition for skimping on extras. There’s deleted scenes and commentary from the producers and writers on four of the episodes (including the first and last), which is sort of interesting if only because they largely seem to think they were successful in their endeavor – though I caught at least one semi-bitter crack about how frustrated they were by the constraints of working in network TV – as well as featurettes on the casting and production. There’s also a cute bit in which the cast members are questioned on the set about who they think the killer will be revealed to be (the writers kept them all in the dark as much as possible), and another segment called ‘The Grim Reaper,’ about the producer who had the task of informing each of the actors that their character was being killed off, and the lengths some actors went to to avoid him. It’s a fairly solid DVD set, it’s just a shame the show it’s built around isn’t better.
Labels: DVD review, horror movies, TV on DVD
¶ 9:04 AM 0 Comments
Friday, February 13, 2009
DVD Review: Friday the 13th Parts 1-3
I’ve mentioned in this space before that I’m not really much of a horror movie guy, and slasher flicks in particular aren’t my thing. There are exceptions of course – I love t
he original John Carpenter Halloween, and I quite enjoyed Rob Zombie’s remake (my review of the latter is here), and I dig the Scream movies, but that’s more to do with their meta-humour/satirical aspects – but I was never a gorehound during my formative movie geek years, which I think is crucial to loving the slasher genre. (I was more into robots and spaceships as a kid than masked, knife-wielding psychopaths.) And no franchise best exemplifies the slasher than Friday the 13th. Following the box office success of remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween, everyone’s favourite machete-wielding amateur goalie, Jason Voorhees, is the next passenger on the remake train. And to promote the new Friday the 13th film, Paramount has reissued new DVDs of the first three films in the franchise.
Before I go any further, I should mention there will be spoilers ahead (mostly for the first movie, as it’s the only one with something resembling a “twist”), in case you’ve somehow managed to not see the 1980 original and yet also really don’t want to know what happens at the end. (It turns out the killer is Jason’s mom.)
What I find the most fascinating about the Friday the 13th franchise is that the thing it’s most famous for – Jason – doesn’t actually show up as most people think of him until partway through the third film in the franchise. (I’ve heard the remake basically condenses the first three films in order to get to Jason with the mask and machete killing teens, which would explain why the first three got the DVD reissue treatment.) The original Friday the 13th, which screenwriter Victor Miller openly admits was never intended to be anything more than a quickie rip-off of Halloween (he says producer/director Sean S. Cunningham said to him literally “Halloween made a lot of money; let’s rip it off.”), basically just borrows heavily (VERY heavily) from Carpenter’s film, including an opening flashback sequence shot in the first person.
The other thing that amuses me about Friday the 13th is that it’s basically an R-rated Scooby Doo movie. The story follows a bunch of randy camp counselors preparing to re-open Camp Crystal Lake, which is said to be cursed, known as “Camp Blood” by the locals. About 20 years earlier, a developmentally-challenged boy named Jason Voorhees drowned because the counselors at the time were too bu
sy drinking and copulating to notice, and the following year some teens were brutally murdered. The camp was then shut down, and the local rumours began. When more counselors show up, disregarding the local folklore, the mysterious killer – Jason’s mom, who now hates all horny teens, especially randy camp counselors – starts killing again to try to scare people away. Except instead of Shaggy and Scooby and the gang, we get a young Kevin Bacon getting an arrow stabbed through his neck.
The original Friday really doesn’t hold up all that well. It’s not particularly suspenseful, and it predates the slasher genre’s latching on to the gimmick of increasingly violent, crazy kills, so the murders are fairly unspectacular, and Cunningham – who never really had any affection for the genre, and was just following the money, having helmed a couple of Bad New Bears rip-offs previously – doesn’t have much talent for building suspense. It’s an interesting artifact given the stature this franchise has since achieved in movie history, but as a stand-alone piece of work it’s pretty underwhelming. But the twist of having the killer being a sweet-looking middle-aged woman remains genuinely clever, so it gets points for that.
Part 2 came out a year later, in 1981 (but is set five years later), following the first movie’s surprise success. Of the original three, I found it the most enjoyable as a straight-ahead slasher movie. But while this time around Jason himself is the killer, he’s still not yet the Jason fans came to know and love. He’s just a maniac with a sack on his head. It’s still not exactly mind-blowing stuff by today’s standards, but producer/director Steve Miner does a decent enough job crafting a movie about a psycho who stalks camp counselors. Part 2 is also noteworthy for really upping the gore and pointless-nudity quotients, both staples of the genre as it would develop (one scene in particular, in which a girl out looking for her lost dog in the middle of the night by herself, up and decides to go skinny dipping for no discernable reason in the midst of her search had me in hysterics). It’s not anything incredible, but Part 2 moves along at a brisk enough pace and does what it’s trying to do well enough.
Part 3 is both the worst of the original three and also the entry where much of what the series became known for takes shape (but these aren’t necessarily rel
ated). It’s hampered in part for being part of the ill-advised 3D fad from the early ‘80s, so it’s filled with ridiculous shots of things flying or pointing at the camera intended to blow the audience’s red-and-blue-glasses-wearing minds. But the problem is that the film takes forever to get going. Nothing really happens for basically the first hour of the movie, which, in a 90-minute slasher movie, is almost unforgivable. But it’s the film where Jason first dons the iconic hockey mask, and it’s also the first movie where he’s portrayed as a hulking brute, as in Part 2 he was a just an average-sized guy with a sack on his head.
An interesting (and, presumably, unintentional) side effect of the 3D gimmick in Part 3 is that in order to fully take advantage of the 3D angle, the film is filled with ridiculous kills (my fave is when Jason squeezes a guy’s head until his eye pops out right and it flies directly into the camera), which eventually became a trademark of the series, and the slasher genre in general. (Part 3 also features Jason running around without a mask for a little while, and he looks almost exactly like Chunk from The Goonies.) But unfortunately the sluggish pacing and the focus on the 3D stuff make it the worst film of the original three.
The Friday the 13th franchise is synonymous with horror/slasher movies for millions of people, and as much as the films on their own may not stand the test of time for casual moviegoers or non-fans like myself, it’s great that fans get these really cool DVDs of the original three movies.
GRADE: Friday the 13th: C-; Part 2: C; Part 3: D+
THE EXTRAS
The amount of extras on the three new Friday the 13th DVDs gets thinner the later into the series the discs get. The original is now an extended cut, with a few more bits of gore added in that had been cut out for decades (it had been previously available as deleted scenes in earlier DVDs, but this marks the first time the footage has been reincorporated into the film proper), and it also includes commentary from producer/director Sean S. Cunningham and various cast and crew. It’s a little bit piecemeal, sounding more like a series of separate audio interviews spliced together (moderated by Peter Bracke, author of the coffee-table book Crystal Lake Memories). It’s not necessarily bad, but the participants don’t really comment on what’s happening on the screen, but rather they just talk while the movie’s playing. The people are still pretty interesting though (at leas
t Cunningham and writer Victor Miller are). Also included on the DVD for Part 1 is a series of featurettes, including one on Cunningham himself and retrospective items on the cast. There’s also something called ‘Lost Tales from Camp Blood – Part 1,’ some sort of newly-created horror short that has seemingly nothing to do with Friday the 13th at all (some teens get murdered by a big guy, but he’s not wearing a hockey mask and it doesn’t seem like he’s supposed to be Jason, so I have no idea what’s going on here.)
The Part 2 DVD has an interview with aforementioned Crystal Lake Memories writer Peter Bracke, and I found it the most interesting piece on any of the discs. Bracke’s a walking encyclopedia of Friday the 13th lore, and he provides lots of interesting insights into the franchise, such as why Cunningham, Miller and makeup effects guru Tom Savini didn’t return for Part 2 (they thought bringing Jason back as an actual character after turning up in a dream sequence at the end of the first movie to be too much of a credibility-stretcher – hilarious in light of how out-there and supernatural the franchise would eventually get). Also included are featurettes on horror conventions (of which the Friday the 13th movies are always a staple) and a 2004 panel discussion with all the actors who had played Jason up until that point. And there’s ‘Lost Tales from Camp Blood – Part 2,’ which makes as little sense as ‘Part 1.’
The DVD extras on Part 3 are nonexistent, at least in the traditional sense; the only thing on the DVD is the theatrical trailer, though the disc gives viewers the option of watching the standard two-dimensional version of the movie or the 3D version, thanks to the inclusion of two pairs of old-school, red-and-blue-3D glasses (which are decked out to resemble Jason’s mask). I wish I could say the 3D worked well, but it doesn’t really, but I give Paramount an A for effort for even including it. It’s a cool little feature to put on the DVD, and I can’t say I didn’t have fun watching the last half-hour or so with the ‘80s-era 3D technology.
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that all three movies have new digital transfers and 5.1 surround sound audio tracks, and they all look and sound pretty slick. And it’s not really a DVD extra, but all three come with sweet lenticular covers. I’m a sucker for cool packaging.
THE MOVIE
I’ve mentioned in this space before that I’m not really much of a horror movie guy, and slasher flicks in particular aren’t my thing. There are exceptions of course – I love t
he original John Carpenter Halloween, and I quite enjoyed Rob Zombie’s remake (my review of the latter is here), and I dig the Scream movies, but that’s more to do with their meta-humour/satirical aspects – but I was never a gorehound during my formative movie geek years, which I think is crucial to loving the slasher genre. (I was more into robots and spaceships as a kid than masked, knife-wielding psychopaths.) And no franchise best exemplifies the slasher than Friday the 13th. Following the box office success of remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween, everyone’s favourite machete-wielding amateur goalie, Jason Voorhees, is the next passenger on the remake train. And to promote the new Friday the 13th film, Paramount has reissued new DVDs of the first three films in the franchise.Before I go any further, I should mention there will be spoilers ahead (mostly for the first movie, as it’s the only one with something resembling a “twist”), in case you’ve somehow managed to not see the 1980 original and yet also really don’t want to know what happens at the end. (It turns out the killer is Jason’s mom.)
What I find the most fascinating about the Friday the 13th franchise is that the thing it’s most famous for – Jason – doesn’t actually show up as most people think of him until partway through the third film in the franchise. (I’ve heard the remake basically condenses the first three films in order to get to Jason with the mask and machete killing teens, which would explain why the first three got the DVD reissue treatment.) The original Friday the 13th, which screenwriter Victor Miller openly admits was never intended to be anything more than a quickie rip-off of Halloween (he says producer/director Sean S. Cunningham said to him literally “Halloween made a lot of money; let’s rip it off.”), basically just borrows heavily (VERY heavily) from Carpenter’s film, including an opening flashback sequence shot in the first person.
The other thing that amuses me about Friday the 13th is that it’s basically an R-rated Scooby Doo movie. The story follows a bunch of randy camp counselors preparing to re-open Camp Crystal Lake, which is said to be cursed, known as “Camp Blood” by the locals. About 20 years earlier, a developmentally-challenged boy named Jason Voorhees drowned because the counselors at the time were too bu
sy drinking and copulating to notice, and the following year some teens were brutally murdered. The camp was then shut down, and the local rumours began. When more counselors show up, disregarding the local folklore, the mysterious killer – Jason’s mom, who now hates all horny teens, especially randy camp counselors – starts killing again to try to scare people away. Except instead of Shaggy and Scooby and the gang, we get a young Kevin Bacon getting an arrow stabbed through his neck.The original Friday really doesn’t hold up all that well. It’s not particularly suspenseful, and it predates the slasher genre’s latching on to the gimmick of increasingly violent, crazy kills, so the murders are fairly unspectacular, and Cunningham – who never really had any affection for the genre, and was just following the money, having helmed a couple of Bad New Bears rip-offs previously – doesn’t have much talent for building suspense. It’s an interesting artifact given the stature this franchise has since achieved in movie history, but as a stand-alone piece of work it’s pretty underwhelming. But the twist of having the killer being a sweet-looking middle-aged woman remains genuinely clever, so it gets points for that.
Part 2 came out a year later, in 1981 (but is set five years later), following the first movie’s surprise success. Of the original three, I found it the most enjoyable as a straight-ahead slasher movie. But while this time around Jason himself is the killer, he’s still not yet the Jason fans came to know and love. He’s just a maniac with a sack on his head. It’s still not exactly mind-blowing stuff by today’s standards, but producer/director Steve Miner does a decent enough job crafting a movie about a psycho who stalks camp counselors. Part 2 is also noteworthy for really upping the gore and pointless-nudity quotients, both staples of the genre as it would develop (one scene in particular, in which a girl out looking for her lost dog in the middle of the night by herself, up and decides to go skinny dipping for no discernable reason in the midst of her search had me in hysterics). It’s not anything incredible, but Part 2 moves along at a brisk enough pace and does what it’s trying to do well enough.
Part 3 is both the worst of the original three and also the entry where much of what the series became known for takes shape (but these aren’t necessarily rel
ated). It’s hampered in part for being part of the ill-advised 3D fad from the early ‘80s, so it’s filled with ridiculous shots of things flying or pointing at the camera intended to blow the audience’s red-and-blue-glasses-wearing minds. But the problem is that the film takes forever to get going. Nothing really happens for basically the first hour of the movie, which, in a 90-minute slasher movie, is almost unforgivable. But it’s the film where Jason first dons the iconic hockey mask, and it’s also the first movie where he’s portrayed as a hulking brute, as in Part 2 he was a just an average-sized guy with a sack on his head.An interesting (and, presumably, unintentional) side effect of the 3D gimmick in Part 3 is that in order to fully take advantage of the 3D angle, the film is filled with ridiculous kills (my fave is when Jason squeezes a guy’s head until his eye pops out right and it flies directly into the camera), which eventually became a trademark of the series, and the slasher genre in general. (Part 3 also features Jason running around without a mask for a little while, and he looks almost exactly like Chunk from The Goonies.) But unfortunately the sluggish pacing and the focus on the 3D stuff make it the worst film of the original three.
The Friday the 13th franchise is synonymous with horror/slasher movies for millions of people, and as much as the films on their own may not stand the test of time for casual moviegoers or non-fans like myself, it’s great that fans get these really cool DVDs of the original three movies.
GRADE: Friday the 13th: C-; Part 2: C; Part 3: D+
THE EXTRAS
The amount of extras on the three new Friday the 13th DVDs gets thinner the later into the series the discs get. The original is now an extended cut, with a few more bits of gore added in that had been cut out for decades (it had been previously available as deleted scenes in earlier DVDs, but this marks the first time the footage has been reincorporated into the film proper), and it also includes commentary from producer/director Sean S. Cunningham and various cast and crew. It’s a little bit piecemeal, sounding more like a series of separate audio interviews spliced together (moderated by Peter Bracke, author of the coffee-table book Crystal Lake Memories). It’s not necessarily bad, but the participants don’t really comment on what’s happening on the screen, but rather they just talk while the movie’s playing. The people are still pretty interesting though (at leas
t Cunningham and writer Victor Miller are). Also included on the DVD for Part 1 is a series of featurettes, including one on Cunningham himself and retrospective items on the cast. There’s also something called ‘Lost Tales from Camp Blood – Part 1,’ some sort of newly-created horror short that has seemingly nothing to do with Friday the 13th at all (some teens get murdered by a big guy, but he’s not wearing a hockey mask and it doesn’t seem like he’s supposed to be Jason, so I have no idea what’s going on here.)The Part 2 DVD has an interview with aforementioned Crystal Lake Memories writer Peter Bracke, and I found it the most interesting piece on any of the discs. Bracke’s a walking encyclopedia of Friday the 13th lore, and he provides lots of interesting insights into the franchise, such as why Cunningham, Miller and makeup effects guru Tom Savini didn’t return for Part 2 (they thought bringing Jason back as an actual character after turning up in a dream sequence at the end of the first movie to be too much of a credibility-stretcher – hilarious in light of how out-there and supernatural the franchise would eventually get). Also included are featurettes on horror conventions (of which the Friday the 13th movies are always a staple) and a 2004 panel discussion with all the actors who had played Jason up until that point. And there’s ‘Lost Tales from Camp Blood – Part 2,’ which makes as little sense as ‘Part 1.’
The DVD extras on Part 3 are nonexistent, at least in the traditional sense; the only thing on the DVD is the theatrical trailer, though the disc gives viewers the option of watching the standard two-dimensional version of the movie or the 3D version, thanks to the inclusion of two pairs of old-school, red-and-blue-3D glasses (which are decked out to resemble Jason’s mask). I wish I could say the 3D worked well, but it doesn’t really, but I give Paramount an A for effort for even including it. It’s a cool little feature to put on the DVD, and I can’t say I didn’t have fun watching the last half-hour or so with the ‘80s-era 3D technology.
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that all three movies have new digital transfers and 5.1 surround sound audio tracks, and they all look and sound pretty slick. And it’s not really a DVD extra, but all three come with sweet lenticular covers. I’m a sucker for cool packaging.
Labels: DVD review, horror movies
¶ 10:03 AM 0 Comments
Friday, November 7, 2008
Review: Let the Right One In
A few weeks ago I wrote about a vampire movie from Sweden called Let the Right One In that had been winning raves at film festivals. I noted then that I’m not the bigg
est fan of the horror genre, particularly vampire movies, but this one had an interesting twist: it’s about a vampire who appears to be a 12-year-old girl. Between the the premise and its origins – one of the reasons I like foreign movies is they typically lack the more formulaic, clichéd aspects of most Hollywood productions, vampire movies being among the worst offenders – I was curious to see if Let the Right One In could live up to the hype. I’m happy to report that it more than surpassed my expectations.
The story of Let the Right One In follows Oskar, an awkward, solitary 12-year-old boy who gets picked on at school and divides his time at home between his separated parents. A new girl moves in to the apartment next door to his mother’s, along with a silent older man who appears to be her father. The girl, Eli, soon introduces herself to Oskar one night when he’s outside fantasizing about fighting back against his tormentors with his knife. (It’s the dead of winter in Sweden, but she’s out in her pajamas, but she insists she’s not cold. “I guess I've forgotten how,” she tells Oskar.) The two children strike up a friendship, and Oskar slowly realizes there’s a lot more to his strange new friend than he first realized.
Let the Right One In is a haunting, beautifully-crafted film from director Tomas Alfredson, and written for the screen by John Ajvide Lindqvist, based on his own novel. It’s not your typical vampire movie – it’s quiet, moody, and builds slowly to its astonishing climactic scene, and some people in the theatre with me who were presumably expecting a more traditional vampire movie seemed bored by its deliberate pace. That’s not to say there aren’t scares in the movie, because there are, but it’s more psychological and atmospheric, the sort of tension you find in a good thriller. Alfredson fills the film with gorgeous shots of the snowy landscape, and the scenes set outdoors at night, with the contrast between the stark white snow and the oppressive darkness beyond, are particularly creepy.
But the thing that impressed me the most about Let the Right One In was its emotional punch; this is one of the most genuinely moving films I’ve seen this year. The young actors (Kåre Hedebrant as Oskar and Lina Leandersson as Eli) are both amazing, and as their friendship blossoms into something more, I realized that not only is this a phenomenal vampire movie, it’s the most affecting love story I’ve seen
in a long time. I went into Let the Right One In expecting a good vampire movie, but I didn’t expect to have my heart broken.
I know the teen-girl-friendly Twilight, based on the massively successful series of novels by Stephenie Meyer, is the vampire flick getting all the attention right now, and I’m sure it’ll be a big box office success. But that really (to me, at least) looks like more of the same; dreamy, vaguely Eurotrash-looking blodsuckers brooding and looking pretty and all that other played-out, gothic claptrap. But Let the Right One In (an actual European film) doesn’t have time for clichés, and while it does delve into vampire mythology – the title alludes to the “rule” about vampires needing to be invited into a person’s home – it’s a truly unique and wholly original film. It’s not only the best vampire movie I’ve ever seen, but it’s a lock for my year-end best-of list. Let the Right One In is simply a brilliant piece of cinema, and it comes with my highest possible recommendation.
GRADE: A
est fan of the horror genre, particularly vampire movies, but this one had an interesting twist: it’s about a vampire who appears to be a 12-year-old girl. Between the the premise and its origins – one of the reasons I like foreign movies is they typically lack the more formulaic, clichéd aspects of most Hollywood productions, vampire movies being among the worst offenders – I was curious to see if Let the Right One In could live up to the hype. I’m happy to report that it more than surpassed my expectations. The story of Let the Right One In follows Oskar, an awkward, solitary 12-year-old boy who gets picked on at school and divides his time at home between his separated parents. A new girl moves in to the apartment next door to his mother’s, along with a silent older man who appears to be her father. The girl, Eli, soon introduces herself to Oskar one night when he’s outside fantasizing about fighting back against his tormentors with his knife. (It’s the dead of winter in Sweden, but she’s out in her pajamas, but she insists she’s not cold. “I guess I've forgotten how,” she tells Oskar.) The two children strike up a friendship, and Oskar slowly realizes there’s a lot more to his strange new friend than he first realized.
Let the Right One In is a haunting, beautifully-crafted film from director Tomas Alfredson, and written for the screen by John Ajvide Lindqvist, based on his own novel. It’s not your typical vampire movie – it’s quiet, moody, and builds slowly to its astonishing climactic scene, and some people in the theatre with me who were presumably expecting a more traditional vampire movie seemed bored by its deliberate pace. That’s not to say there aren’t scares in the movie, because there are, but it’s more psychological and atmospheric, the sort of tension you find in a good thriller. Alfredson fills the film with gorgeous shots of the snowy landscape, and the scenes set outdoors at night, with the contrast between the stark white snow and the oppressive darkness beyond, are particularly creepy.
But the thing that impressed me the most about Let the Right One In was its emotional punch; this is one of the most genuinely moving films I’ve seen this year. The young actors (Kåre Hedebrant as Oskar and Lina Leandersson as Eli) are both amazing, and as their friendship blossoms into something more, I realized that not only is this a phenomenal vampire movie, it’s the most affecting love story I’ve seen
in a long time. I went into Let the Right One In expecting a good vampire movie, but I didn’t expect to have my heart broken.I know the teen-girl-friendly Twilight, based on the massively successful series of novels by Stephenie Meyer, is the vampire flick getting all the attention right now, and I’m sure it’ll be a big box office success. But that really (to me, at least) looks like more of the same; dreamy, vaguely Eurotrash-looking blodsuckers brooding and looking pretty and all that other played-out, gothic claptrap. But Let the Right One In (an actual European film) doesn’t have time for clichés, and while it does delve into vampire mythology – the title alludes to the “rule” about vampires needing to be invited into a person’s home – it’s a truly unique and wholly original film. It’s not only the best vampire movie I’ve ever seen, but it’s a lock for my year-end best-of list. Let the Right One In is simply a brilliant piece of cinema, and it comes with my highest possible recommendation.
GRADE: A
Labels: horror movies, Movie review, vampires
¶ 10:18 AM 0 Comments
Friday, October 31, 2008
DVD Review: Halloween
THE MOVIE
Rob Zombie’s remake of John Carpenter’s classic slasher film Halloween is one of the more polarizing horror flicks in recent years. Just about every critic on the Internet (that I’ve come across at least) absolutely loathes the film, and Rotten Tomatoes says it has a freshness rating of 26%. So it’s not a stretch to say the 2007 version of Halloween was not a critical success. It did make a nice c
hunk of cash at the box office however (setting a new record for a Labor Day opening), but it’s hard to know if that’s due to people genuinely responding to the film, or the usual bored teenagers flocking to the new slasher film on opening weekend for lack of anything better to do. Either way, the film has a bit of a mixed legacy, which I find odd, because I think it’s a great horror movie that’s scary in ways most slasher flicks aren’t.
When I was in high school, I was a pretty serious metalhead. I wasn’t into weird Scandinavian church-burning “black metal” stuff, but I was pretty into ‘90s metal bands like Pantera and Sepultura and Helmet, but my favourite band, hands down, was White Zombie (also my first concert, so they hold a very special place in my heart). They weren’t the heaviest band out there by any means, but singer/songwriter Rob Zombie injected the group with a very specific aesthetic that I guess appealed to my 16-year-old, comic book-reading brain. The music was great but there was so much else going on. The band dressed crazily, more like a harder-edged grunge band than a metal act (most metal bands at the time subscribed to Metallica’s stripped-down, no-frills sense of fashion, which was chiefly defined by a total lack of interest in it), and their CD jackets were filled with amazingly detailed illustrations of cartoon demons and monsters and ‘40s-style pinup girls with devil horns (which I later learned were drawn by Zombie himself). A huge movie geek, White Zombie’s oeuvre is filled with references to movies (the band takes its name from the title of a 1932 Bela Lugosi film), with references to classic black and white horror movies from the early days of cinema, as well as more modern ‘60s and ‘70s schlock like Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat! Kill Kill!, Night of the Living Dead, The Omega Man (the 1971 Charlton Heston sci-fi flick based on the same story as I Am Legend, which is also the title of another White Zombie song), and probably the band’s signature song, ‘More Human Than Human,’ takes its title, as well as a few lyrics, from Blade Runner (probably my favourite movie). So Rob Zombie was sort of like the heavy metal Quentin Tarantino, and it set my teenage brain on fire all those years ago.
But like most great bands (“great” being a particularly subjective term in this case), White Zombie broke up after releasing a tiny number of proper albums (two), and while Rob Zombie released some solo albums that, sonically were not all that different, for some reason it just wasn’t the same to me. This could be because I grew out of his stuff, but I still listen to White Zombie somewhat regularly on my iPod, and I’m always surprised at how well it holds up. But one way or another, I found myself growing apart from Rob Zombie the musician. So when I heard he was making the jump to feature film directing with 2003’s horror flick House of 1,000 Corpses, my interest was piqued. Zombie directed all his own videos, and he had a real visual aesthetic that he brought to every aspect of his work, from album design to concert stages to t-shirts. He was obviously much more than just a musician, and I think this more visual approach to his band was one of the things that most attracted the teenaged me to his work (I used to draw a lot, and in high school my goal was to be a comics artist).
Unfortunately, House of 1,000 Corpses was a pretty big letdown, even with my lowered expectations of the film being set in a genre I didn’t much care for. It’s basically just a half-assed rip-off of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, about a group of road-tripping teens in the ‘70s who stumble across a psychotic family in Middle of Nowhere America. Zombie’s lack of interest in the actual plot is palpable, and the movie feels more like a collection of ideas and visual gimmicks (it’s also chockablock with annoying ‘MTV-syle’ editing and crazy lighting and colours and angles, etc.) than a proper film.
Zombie followed House of 1,000 Corpses with a sequel, and a ballsy one at that: 2005’s The Devil’s Rejects is the rare sequel that actually totally switches genres from the movie that preceded it. Devil’s Rejects is an outlaw/road movie, following three of the villains from Corpses on the run from a vengeful sheriff operating above the law (the murderous Firefly clan killed his brother in the first movie, and he’s determined to hunt them down at any cost). The Devil’s Rejects the work of a filmmaker just hitting his stride, and seems to reinforce the impression that he only made a horror movie first because it was expected of him. At any rate, I think The Devil’s Rejects is a brilliant little film (though it’s not without its flaws), and it also features my all-time favourite opening credits sequence, set to the Allman Brothers Band’s ‘Midnight Rider.’ It’s also very violent, not just physically by psychologically, with one scene in particular, set in a motel room as the trio of antiheroes (played by Bill Moseley, Sid Haig and Zombie’s wife, Sherri Moon Zombie) terrorize a vacationing family, among the most disturbing and genuinely intense sequences I’ve seen in a movie. It’s definitely not for the faint of heart.
Which, finally, brings us to Halloween, Zombie’s third film. Zombie is interviewed on a really cool feature-length documentary about the Halloween franchise called Halloween: 25 Years of Terror (produced, I believe, before he was attached to the remake, so he’s speaking purely as a fan), and he’s one of the funnier and more articulate people featured in
the film. So I knew going in that Zombie truly “got” John Carpenter’s 1978 original, and it made the overwhelmingly negative response to the 2007 version seem ever stranger to me. But as much as I appreciate the brilliance of the original Halloween – I think it’s the best slasher film, period, and it’s basically the first one, unless you want to count Psycho – I don’t share the devotion to the series that many others do; that aforementioned documentary taught me that Halloween fans are apparently as devoted as any Star Wars or Star Trek or Harry Potter fans. I can only assume that most fans couldn’t get past the idea that Zombie had the gall to actually explore Michael Myers as a character rather than simply as a killing machine.
And that’s the crucial difference between the Carpenter original and Rob Zombie’s remake. The original opens with six-year-old Michael Myers killing his teenage sister on Halloween for no apparent reason, before cutting to 15 years later as he breaks out of the sanitarium he’s been in ever since to go on a rampage in his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois. It’s scary precisely because the Michael Myers kills without any seeming motivation whatsoever. It’s never explained why he killed his sister, or why he’s stalking Jamie Lee Curtis and her babysitter friends (it’s revealed in the sequel that Laurie Strode is actually Michael’s younger sister who was put up for adoption as a baby, a plot point Zombie includes in his film as part of Michael's motivation). He’s pure evil, killing for no apparent reason whatsoever.
Zombie’s remake takes a totally different approach, with the first half of the movie exploring Michael’s home life before he kills for the first time. This time he’s 10 when he’s locked up, and instead of just killing his sister he also kills her boyfriend and his mother’s abusive boyfriend. Giving Michael Myers a dysfunctional family was a plot point many took issue with, but Zombie’s Halloween doesn’t actually try to use that as an explanation for why Michael kills, establishing instead that he's simply a messed-up kid. Even his stripper mom (Sherri Moon Zombie) eschews the stereotypes; her Debra Myers is actually a loving mother who works a demeaning job to provide for her family. Zombie’s movie isn’t really so much remake (though it is that, obviously) as it is a companion piece to the 1978 original. You don’t have to have seen it to appreciate the 2007 version, but Zombie’s film fills in a lot of the gaps in Carpenter’s; whether or not those gaps should have been filled is a matter of opinion. Zombie says on one of the extras that he typically prefers working on original stuff, but he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to remake Halloween, and his version is very much Rob Zombie’s take on that classic film. But it’s also not meant to replace it for younger audiences, the way, say, the 2003 Texas Chainsaw remake or the upcoming revamp of Friday the 13th are. A lot of Zombie’s Halloween takes place in the spaces between scenes in Carpenter’s version, and it was a filmmaking choice that really worked for me. Why bother with essentially a shot-for-shot remake when the original is as good as it is?
The other big difference is the style of the horror. The original Halloween is, as I mentioned, very much the proto-slasher film, but Zombie isn’t interested in the usual crew of pretty teenagers getting slaughtered in innovative, over-the-top ways while the audience cheers (though to be fair, neither was Carpenter). The murders in his Halloween aren’t the kind that make people cheer and whoop at the screen, as most slasher movies do these days. When his Michael Myers kills people, it’s brutal and violent and very unsexy. People scream in agony and cry and beg for their lives, crawling pathetically down bloodied hallways while Myers stares at them from behind his mask, and it’s pretty damn scary. Zombie has also thankfully ditched the flashy camerawork that made House of 1,000 Corpses a chore to sit through. Halloween has an almost documentary feel to it, though the shaky, Bourne-esque handheld camerawork in some scenes may irritate some.
The film’s not perfect, however. It feels like Zombie’s trying a bit too hard to make Myers a sympathetic character – thought it’s worth mentioning that former pro wrestler Tyler Mane, most recognizable as the hulking Sabretooth from the first X-Men movie, actually manages to convey things despite his never saying a word and the viewer never seeing his face. Also, the film is really brutal, even for a pretty desensitized guy like myself. There’s a pretty rough rape scene in the sanitarium there that I still don’t really see the point of; apparently this was cut out of the theatrical release (which I never did see) and is the main difference between that and the unrated version on the DVD, and it probably should have stayed on the cutting-room floor. Also, almost every actor in this movie wears a ridiculously obvious wig at some point, and it ends up being a surprisingly distracting detail in some scenes (Malcolm McDowell, filling Donald Pleasence’s shoes as Dr. Loomis, gets saddled with a dreadful hippie wig near the beginning, and it looks totally ridiculous and stupid). And in terms of pacing, hardcore slasher fans may be bored by the amount of time Zombie takes moving the action back to Haddonfield on Halloween night; we’re not introduced to Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) and her babysitter friends until halfway through the movie.
Overall I was surprised how much I enjoyed Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake. It does some cool things in a genre that’s become pretty by-the-numbers in a lot of ways, and he’s clearly attempting to make a “real” movie more than a gory slasher flick to scam money out of teens’ wallets. A lot of thought and care went into this film, and I’ve seen it three times now, and I dig it more each time. It’s definitely not your usual horror movie, and certainly doesn’t make for campy, light viewing the way, say, House of Wax or the later Friday the 13th movies do, but it’s a nicely dark, violent little flick that I think has gotten an unfairly bad rap.
GRADE: B+
THE EXTRAS
Halloween was originally released on DVD as a two-disc special edition, and up until relatively recently, two-disc DVDs were pretty much as extravagant as special editions got. I assumed that edition was pretty comprehensive (I saw the movie but not the extras), so I was surprised when I learned of a three-disc set coming out. Turns out the first two discs are the same as the initial release, with a third disc bolted on. But that third disc has one of the most in-depth making-of documentaries I’ve ever seen. Clocking in at four-and-a-half hours (!), Michael Lives: The Making of Halloween was produced and directed by Rob Zombie himself. Initially I figured I’d just sort of skim through it – as much as I like the film, four-and-half-hours is a lot. But I watched it in pieces (it’s divided into 25-minute chunks, and those are in turn divided into shooting days), and it’s sort of half-documentary, half ultra-detailed video diary. It covers the entire production, from pre-production and casting through shooting, reshoots and even the score. It’s probably the most comprehensive making-of doc I’ve seen on a DVD. Whether or not Halloween deserves this level of detail is definitely debatable, but I found it surprisingly interesting. Granted, I’m a geek for this sort of stuff, but I felt like I actually came away from this thing with a better understanding of what it’s like to make a movie, having felt like I was actually on the set with Zombie and his cast and crew.
There’s also commentary on the film by Rob Zombie, and just like in the making-of documentary and the other extras, he’s far more thoughtful and articulate than one might think to look at him (or even read his name). At various points in the bonus features he mentions films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Blow-Up, so it’s not like he’s some dude raised exclusively on cheesy B- and C-grade genre movies. He’s smart and funny, and never once does the commentary drag, nor does he get too bogged down with boring minutiae about what day of the shoot they shot this scene.
Disc 2 is filled with more traditional extras, like a featurette on the props (particularly recreating Michael Myers’ iconic mask), the cast as well as the whole idea of remaking (excuse me, “reimagining”) Halloween. It’s all fine, and mostly better than the usual PR fluff. There’s also a ton of deleted scenes featuring whole characters cut from the movie, and one of the funniest blooper reels I’ve seen in a while, particularly the bits with McDowell and the wonderful Brad Dourif trying do complete a scene in a car.
The three-disc Halloween DVD is easily one of the most packed DVDs I’ve seen, and definitely the most loaded that I’ve reviewed for this blog. If anything there’s probably too much material here, but fans of this movie will be in heaven. Considering how often I’ve grumbled about a lack of decent features on some DVDs, I certainly can’t complain.
Rob Zombie’s remake of John Carpenter’s classic slasher film Halloween is one of the more polarizing horror flicks in recent years. Just about every critic on the Internet (that I’ve come across at least) absolutely loathes the film, and Rotten Tomatoes says it has a freshness rating of 26%. So it’s not a stretch to say the 2007 version of Halloween was not a critical success. It did make a nice c
hunk of cash at the box office however (setting a new record for a Labor Day opening), but it’s hard to know if that’s due to people genuinely responding to the film, or the usual bored teenagers flocking to the new slasher film on opening weekend for lack of anything better to do. Either way, the film has a bit of a mixed legacy, which I find odd, because I think it’s a great horror movie that’s scary in ways most slasher flicks aren’t. When I was in high school, I was a pretty serious metalhead. I wasn’t into weird Scandinavian church-burning “black metal” stuff, but I was pretty into ‘90s metal bands like Pantera and Sepultura and Helmet, but my favourite band, hands down, was White Zombie (also my first concert, so they hold a very special place in my heart). They weren’t the heaviest band out there by any means, but singer/songwriter Rob Zombie injected the group with a very specific aesthetic that I guess appealed to my 16-year-old, comic book-reading brain. The music was great but there was so much else going on. The band dressed crazily, more like a harder-edged grunge band than a metal act (most metal bands at the time subscribed to Metallica’s stripped-down, no-frills sense of fashion, which was chiefly defined by a total lack of interest in it), and their CD jackets were filled with amazingly detailed illustrations of cartoon demons and monsters and ‘40s-style pinup girls with devil horns (which I later learned were drawn by Zombie himself). A huge movie geek, White Zombie’s oeuvre is filled with references to movies (the band takes its name from the title of a 1932 Bela Lugosi film), with references to classic black and white horror movies from the early days of cinema, as well as more modern ‘60s and ‘70s schlock like Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat! Kill Kill!, Night of the Living Dead, The Omega Man (the 1971 Charlton Heston sci-fi flick based on the same story as I Am Legend, which is also the title of another White Zombie song), and probably the band’s signature song, ‘More Human Than Human,’ takes its title, as well as a few lyrics, from Blade Runner (probably my favourite movie). So Rob Zombie was sort of like the heavy metal Quentin Tarantino, and it set my teenage brain on fire all those years ago.
But like most great bands (“great” being a particularly subjective term in this case), White Zombie broke up after releasing a tiny number of proper albums (two), and while Rob Zombie released some solo albums that, sonically were not all that different, for some reason it just wasn’t the same to me. This could be because I grew out of his stuff, but I still listen to White Zombie somewhat regularly on my iPod, and I’m always surprised at how well it holds up. But one way or another, I found myself growing apart from Rob Zombie the musician. So when I heard he was making the jump to feature film directing with 2003’s horror flick House of 1,000 Corpses, my interest was piqued. Zombie directed all his own videos, and he had a real visual aesthetic that he brought to every aspect of his work, from album design to concert stages to t-shirts. He was obviously much more than just a musician, and I think this more visual approach to his band was one of the things that most attracted the teenaged me to his work (I used to draw a lot, and in high school my goal was to be a comics artist).
Unfortunately, House of 1,000 Corpses was a pretty big letdown, even with my lowered expectations of the film being set in a genre I didn’t much care for. It’s basically just a half-assed rip-off of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, about a group of road-tripping teens in the ‘70s who stumble across a psychotic family in Middle of Nowhere America. Zombie’s lack of interest in the actual plot is palpable, and the movie feels more like a collection of ideas and visual gimmicks (it’s also chockablock with annoying ‘MTV-syle’ editing and crazy lighting and colours and angles, etc.) than a proper film.
Zombie followed House of 1,000 Corpses with a sequel, and a ballsy one at that: 2005’s The Devil’s Rejects is the rare sequel that actually totally switches genres from the movie that preceded it. Devil’s Rejects is an outlaw/road movie, following three of the villains from Corpses on the run from a vengeful sheriff operating above the law (the murderous Firefly clan killed his brother in the first movie, and he’s determined to hunt them down at any cost). The Devil’s Rejects the work of a filmmaker just hitting his stride, and seems to reinforce the impression that he only made a horror movie first because it was expected of him. At any rate, I think The Devil’s Rejects is a brilliant little film (though it’s not without its flaws), and it also features my all-time favourite opening credits sequence, set to the Allman Brothers Band’s ‘Midnight Rider.’ It’s also very violent, not just physically by psychologically, with one scene in particular, set in a motel room as the trio of antiheroes (played by Bill Moseley, Sid Haig and Zombie’s wife, Sherri Moon Zombie) terrorize a vacationing family, among the most disturbing and genuinely intense sequences I’ve seen in a movie. It’s definitely not for the faint of heart.
Which, finally, brings us to Halloween, Zombie’s third film. Zombie is interviewed on a really cool feature-length documentary about the Halloween franchise called Halloween: 25 Years of Terror (produced, I believe, before he was attached to the remake, so he’s speaking purely as a fan), and he’s one of the funnier and more articulate people featured in
the film. So I knew going in that Zombie truly “got” John Carpenter’s 1978 original, and it made the overwhelmingly negative response to the 2007 version seem ever stranger to me. But as much as I appreciate the brilliance of the original Halloween – I think it’s the best slasher film, period, and it’s basically the first one, unless you want to count Psycho – I don’t share the devotion to the series that many others do; that aforementioned documentary taught me that Halloween fans are apparently as devoted as any Star Wars or Star Trek or Harry Potter fans. I can only assume that most fans couldn’t get past the idea that Zombie had the gall to actually explore Michael Myers as a character rather than simply as a killing machine.And that’s the crucial difference between the Carpenter original and Rob Zombie’s remake. The original opens with six-year-old Michael Myers killing his teenage sister on Halloween for no apparent reason, before cutting to 15 years later as he breaks out of the sanitarium he’s been in ever since to go on a rampage in his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois. It’s scary precisely because the Michael Myers kills without any seeming motivation whatsoever. It’s never explained why he killed his sister, or why he’s stalking Jamie Lee Curtis and her babysitter friends (it’s revealed in the sequel that Laurie Strode is actually Michael’s younger sister who was put up for adoption as a baby, a plot point Zombie includes in his film as part of Michael's motivation). He’s pure evil, killing for no apparent reason whatsoever.
Zombie’s remake takes a totally different approach, with the first half of the movie exploring Michael’s home life before he kills for the first time. This time he’s 10 when he’s locked up, and instead of just killing his sister he also kills her boyfriend and his mother’s abusive boyfriend. Giving Michael Myers a dysfunctional family was a plot point many took issue with, but Zombie’s Halloween doesn’t actually try to use that as an explanation for why Michael kills, establishing instead that he's simply a messed-up kid. Even his stripper mom (Sherri Moon Zombie) eschews the stereotypes; her Debra Myers is actually a loving mother who works a demeaning job to provide for her family. Zombie’s movie isn’t really so much remake (though it is that, obviously) as it is a companion piece to the 1978 original. You don’t have to have seen it to appreciate the 2007 version, but Zombie’s film fills in a lot of the gaps in Carpenter’s; whether or not those gaps should have been filled is a matter of opinion. Zombie says on one of the extras that he typically prefers working on original stuff, but he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to remake Halloween, and his version is very much Rob Zombie’s take on that classic film. But it’s also not meant to replace it for younger audiences, the way, say, the 2003 Texas Chainsaw remake or the upcoming revamp of Friday the 13th are. A lot of Zombie’s Halloween takes place in the spaces between scenes in Carpenter’s version, and it was a filmmaking choice that really worked for me. Why bother with essentially a shot-for-shot remake when the original is as good as it is?
The other big difference is the style of the horror. The original Halloween is, as I mentioned, very much the proto-slasher film, but Zombie isn’t interested in the usual crew of pretty teenagers getting slaughtered in innovative, over-the-top ways while the audience cheers (though to be fair, neither was Carpenter). The murders in his Halloween aren’t the kind that make people cheer and whoop at the screen, as most slasher movies do these days. When his Michael Myers kills people, it’s brutal and violent and very unsexy. People scream in agony and cry and beg for their lives, crawling pathetically down bloodied hallways while Myers stares at them from behind his mask, and it’s pretty damn scary. Zombie has also thankfully ditched the flashy camerawork that made House of 1,000 Corpses a chore to sit through. Halloween has an almost documentary feel to it, though the shaky, Bourne-esque handheld camerawork in some scenes may irritate some.
The film’s not perfect, however. It feels like Zombie’s trying a bit too hard to make Myers a sympathetic character – thought it’s worth mentioning that former pro wrestler Tyler Mane, most recognizable as the hulking Sabretooth from the first X-Men movie, actually manages to convey things despite his never saying a word and the viewer never seeing his face. Also, the film is really brutal, even for a pretty desensitized guy like myself. There’s a pretty rough rape scene in the sanitarium there that I still don’t really see the point of; apparently this was cut out of the theatrical release (which I never did see) and is the main difference between that and the unrated version on the DVD, and it probably should have stayed on the cutting-room floor. Also, almost every actor in this movie wears a ridiculously obvious wig at some point, and it ends up being a surprisingly distracting detail in some scenes (Malcolm McDowell, filling Donald Pleasence’s shoes as Dr. Loomis, gets saddled with a dreadful hippie wig near the beginning, and it looks totally ridiculous and stupid). And in terms of pacing, hardcore slasher fans may be bored by the amount of time Zombie takes moving the action back to Haddonfield on Halloween night; we’re not introduced to Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) and her babysitter friends until halfway through the movie.
Overall I was surprised how much I enjoyed Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake. It does some cool things in a genre that’s become pretty by-the-numbers in a lot of ways, and he’s clearly attempting to make a “real” movie more than a gory slasher flick to scam money out of teens’ wallets. A lot of thought and care went into this film, and I’ve seen it three times now, and I dig it more each time. It’s definitely not your usual horror movie, and certainly doesn’t make for campy, light viewing the way, say, House of Wax or the later Friday the 13th movies do, but it’s a nicely dark, violent little flick that I think has gotten an unfairly bad rap.
GRADE: B+
THE EXTRAS
Halloween was originally released on DVD as a two-disc special edition, and up until relatively recently, two-disc DVDs were pretty much as extravagant as special editions got. I assumed that edition was pretty comprehensive (I saw the movie but not the extras), so I was surprised when I learned of a three-disc set coming out. Turns out the first two discs are the same as the initial release, with a third disc bolted on. But that third disc has one of the most in-depth making-of documentaries I’ve ever seen. Clocking in at four-and-a-half hours (!), Michael Lives: The Making of Halloween was produced and directed by Rob Zombie himself. Initially I figured I’d just sort of skim through it – as much as I like the film, four-and-half-hours is a lot. But I watched it in pieces (it’s divided into 25-minute chunks, and those are in turn divided into shooting days), and it’s sort of half-documentary, half ultra-detailed video diary. It covers the entire production, from pre-production and casting through shooting, reshoots and even the score. It’s probably the most comprehensive making-of doc I’ve seen on a DVD. Whether or not Halloween deserves this level of detail is definitely debatable, but I found it surprisingly interesting. Granted, I’m a geek for this sort of stuff, but I felt like I actually came away from this thing with a better understanding of what it’s like to make a movie, having felt like I was actually on the set with Zombie and his cast and crew.
There’s also commentary on the film by Rob Zombie, and just like in the making-of documentary and the other extras, he’s far more thoughtful and articulate than one might think to look at him (or even read his name). At various points in the bonus features he mentions films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Blow-Up, so it’s not like he’s some dude raised exclusively on cheesy B- and C-grade genre movies. He’s smart and funny, and never once does the commentary drag, nor does he get too bogged down with boring minutiae about what day of the shoot they shot this scene.
Disc 2 is filled with more traditional extras, like a featurette on the props (particularly recreating Michael Myers’ iconic mask), the cast as well as the whole idea of remaking (excuse me, “reimagining”) Halloween. It’s all fine, and mostly better than the usual PR fluff. There’s also a ton of deleted scenes featuring whole characters cut from the movie, and one of the funniest blooper reels I’ve seen in a while, particularly the bits with McDowell and the wonderful Brad Dourif trying do complete a scene in a car.
The three-disc Halloween DVD is easily one of the most packed DVDs I’ve seen, and definitely the most loaded that I’ve reviewed for this blog. If anything there’s probably too much material here, but fans of this movie will be in heaven. Considering how often I’ve grumbled about a lack of decent features on some DVDs, I certainly can’t complain.
Labels: DVD review, horror movies, Theme weeks
¶ 12:12 PM 0 Comments
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
DVD Review: The Strangers
THE MOVIE
The Strangers isn’t really a horror movie, in the traditional sense. As someone (I think it was the DP or production designer) says on one of the extras, it’s more of a “terror movie” than a horror movie. Which sounds like a strange (and nitpicky) distinction, but it’s very accurate. The Strangers plays on very real fears most of us share, some rational (fear of violence agai
nst randomly-selected victims) and some not (fear of the dark). For the most part it’s an incredibly well-made film, and is often very effective in what it’s trying to do. But it ultimately loses steam before its bizarrely anticlimactic ending.
The Strangers is the feature film debut from writer-director Bryan Bertino, and I vaguely recall reading something about how it was one of those movies that languished on the studio’s shelf for months (maybe even years) before eventually getting a release. This is typically not a good sign, but in the case of The Strangers, I’m guessing it had more to do with the way in which the movie is decidedly not your typical teen-skewing slasher flick or another Saw-esque piece of torture porn. And in this day and age where the above two choices, along with J-horror remakes (though thankfully the latter seems to be dying off for the most part), seem to make up the vast majority of horror movies released here, I can see how a movie like The Strangers would seem like a tough sell to studio suits.
The simple plot follows a young couple, James Hoyt (Scott Speedman) and Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler), staying at the Hoyt family cottage, when in the middle of the night, a random girl knocks at the door, ostensibly looking for someone. Shortly after they turn her away, a trio of masked….strangers (sorry, couldn’t avoid it) begin terrorizing them, evidently for no reason other than because they were home.
The premise of The Strangers is the foundation of the film’s scares. Horror movies typically work best when the viewer can put themselves in the proverbial shoes of the characters onscreen (usually, but not always, t
he victims), and have the scares come from that. And very little is scarier than the idea of being the victim of a random, brutal crime. The Strangers gets a lot of mileage out of its concept, using atmosphere and psychological terror to instill fear in the audience rather than “gotcha” scares, violence and gore. James and Kristen (and the audience) rarely even see their tormentors, and the glimpses we catch of the masked figures standing silently in the darkness are genuinely terrifying. Bertino also uses sound very effectively; a lot of the movie’s scariest moments are when Kristen or James is stumbling through the house reacting to weird noises in the night. The Strangers is one of the most technically impressive horror films I’ve seen in a long time, and Bertino and his crew do an excellent job of building tension and continually upping the ante in the opening half of the movie.
Another thing The Strangers does better than most horror films is ground the main characters in an emotional reality that better allows the viewer to identify them. When we’re introduced to James and Kristen, they’re returning to the cottage after some sort of formal party (probably a wedding reception, but it’s never made totally clear), and it’s clear they haven’t spoken for the entire car ride. In the next several minutes, Bertino cleverly reveals – again, without the characters explicitly stating it – that James proposed to Kristen earlier that night, only to be rejected. The strained state of their relationship doesn’t really add much to the story on the surface, but that sort of small but important detail makes the characters far more relatable than your average slasher-movie fodder. I actually found myself so compelled by the story of this couple as their relationship hits a crossroads that I was almost disappointed when the masked psychopaths showed up.
But this same grounding ultimately worked against the film, if that makes any sense. The buildup works so well that, like a lot of movies with killer premises, the resolution sort of can’t help but be a bit of a letdown. And personally, I found that letdown to be pretty hug
e in The Strangers. I’m obviously not going to spoil anything (which will potentially make this part of the review frustratingly vague, so I apologize in advance), but about midway through the movie there was a somewhat major event, a clear turning point in the film, that sort of took me out of it, and things never really got back on track. By about halfway through the movie, I began to tire of the masked trio just sort of messing with the couple’s heads, coming in and out of the house to turn on record players and write stuff on windows and bathroom mirrors and so forth, and realized one of the film’s other big faults – because Speedman and Tyler are the only real victims, The Strangers has to spend a lot more time than most movies like this showing them being stalked and harassed, and it begins to get old after a while. In a more traditional horror flick like Friday the 13th or Halloween, the pace can be maintained with a few minor kills here and there, but The Strangers lacks that. While The Strangers is short – the extended ‘unrated’ cut is still under 90 minutes – it still manages to drag in places.
The resolution of The Strangers was the part that left me the coldest. Again, without giving anything away, I literally shouted to my TV (I live alone, so this happens a lot, unfortunately) “That’s it?!?! What was the point of all that?” To call it anticlimactic is an understatement, and while I appreciate Bertino’s attempt to end the film a bit of a question mark in the final scene (another slasher movie staple), it’s far too little and way too late.
Overall there’s much in The Strangers that works, and it works very well. I’m not a huge horror movie fan, but I could definitely appreciate the craftsmanship on display. Setting it in a remote cabin gives the movie a sense of being simultaneously claustrophobic and out in the open, and the tiny cast and intimate set makes it feel almost like a play in places. But the whole thing loses steam midway through, and the ending is a major letdown. Horror buffs will probably be able to look pass the film’s shortcomings, and if you’re looking for some Halloween night viewing, you could do much worse than The Strangers, a flawed yet fascinating little fright flick.
GRADE: C+
THE EXTRAS
There isn’t a whole lot of extras on the DVD for The Strangers. The disc features both the theatrical cut and an extended unrated version that runs a few minutes longer. The main feature is a brief making-of featurette that actually manages to cram a lot of information into under 10 minutes. There are also two short deleted scenes, both of which further develop the relationship between James and Kristen before things get crazy. They’re both nice little scenes, but with a film like The Strangers, I can understand the need to really get to the stuff people ostensibly paid to see as quickly as possible.
The Strangers isn’t really a horror movie, in the traditional sense. As someone (I think it was the DP or production designer) says on one of the extras, it’s more of a “terror movie” than a horror movie. Which sounds like a strange (and nitpicky) distinction, but it’s very accurate. The Strangers plays on very real fears most of us share, some rational (fear of violence agai
nst randomly-selected victims) and some not (fear of the dark). For the most part it’s an incredibly well-made film, and is often very effective in what it’s trying to do. But it ultimately loses steam before its bizarrely anticlimactic ending.The Strangers is the feature film debut from writer-director Bryan Bertino, and I vaguely recall reading something about how it was one of those movies that languished on the studio’s shelf for months (maybe even years) before eventually getting a release. This is typically not a good sign, but in the case of The Strangers, I’m guessing it had more to do with the way in which the movie is decidedly not your typical teen-skewing slasher flick or another Saw-esque piece of torture porn. And in this day and age where the above two choices, along with J-horror remakes (though thankfully the latter seems to be dying off for the most part), seem to make up the vast majority of horror movies released here, I can see how a movie like The Strangers would seem like a tough sell to studio suits.
The simple plot follows a young couple, James Hoyt (Scott Speedman) and Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler), staying at the Hoyt family cottage, when in the middle of the night, a random girl knocks at the door, ostensibly looking for someone. Shortly after they turn her away, a trio of masked….strangers (sorry, couldn’t avoid it) begin terrorizing them, evidently for no reason other than because they were home.
The premise of The Strangers is the foundation of the film’s scares. Horror movies typically work best when the viewer can put themselves in the proverbial shoes of the characters onscreen (usually, but not always, t
he victims), and have the scares come from that. And very little is scarier than the idea of being the victim of a random, brutal crime. The Strangers gets a lot of mileage out of its concept, using atmosphere and psychological terror to instill fear in the audience rather than “gotcha” scares, violence and gore. James and Kristen (and the audience) rarely even see their tormentors, and the glimpses we catch of the masked figures standing silently in the darkness are genuinely terrifying. Bertino also uses sound very effectively; a lot of the movie’s scariest moments are when Kristen or James is stumbling through the house reacting to weird noises in the night. The Strangers is one of the most technically impressive horror films I’ve seen in a long time, and Bertino and his crew do an excellent job of building tension and continually upping the ante in the opening half of the movie.Another thing The Strangers does better than most horror films is ground the main characters in an emotional reality that better allows the viewer to identify them. When we’re introduced to James and Kristen, they’re returning to the cottage after some sort of formal party (probably a wedding reception, but it’s never made totally clear), and it’s clear they haven’t spoken for the entire car ride. In the next several minutes, Bertino cleverly reveals – again, without the characters explicitly stating it – that James proposed to Kristen earlier that night, only to be rejected. The strained state of their relationship doesn’t really add much to the story on the surface, but that sort of small but important detail makes the characters far more relatable than your average slasher-movie fodder. I actually found myself so compelled by the story of this couple as their relationship hits a crossroads that I was almost disappointed when the masked psychopaths showed up.
But this same grounding ultimately worked against the film, if that makes any sense. The buildup works so well that, like a lot of movies with killer premises, the resolution sort of can’t help but be a bit of a letdown. And personally, I found that letdown to be pretty hug
e in The Strangers. I’m obviously not going to spoil anything (which will potentially make this part of the review frustratingly vague, so I apologize in advance), but about midway through the movie there was a somewhat major event, a clear turning point in the film, that sort of took me out of it, and things never really got back on track. By about halfway through the movie, I began to tire of the masked trio just sort of messing with the couple’s heads, coming in and out of the house to turn on record players and write stuff on windows and bathroom mirrors and so forth, and realized one of the film’s other big faults – because Speedman and Tyler are the only real victims, The Strangers has to spend a lot more time than most movies like this showing them being stalked and harassed, and it begins to get old after a while. In a more traditional horror flick like Friday the 13th or Halloween, the pace can be maintained with a few minor kills here and there, but The Strangers lacks that. While The Strangers is short – the extended ‘unrated’ cut is still under 90 minutes – it still manages to drag in places.The resolution of The Strangers was the part that left me the coldest. Again, without giving anything away, I literally shouted to my TV (I live alone, so this happens a lot, unfortunately) “That’s it?!?! What was the point of all that?” To call it anticlimactic is an understatement, and while I appreciate Bertino’s attempt to end the film a bit of a question mark in the final scene (another slasher movie staple), it’s far too little and way too late.
Overall there’s much in The Strangers that works, and it works very well. I’m not a huge horror movie fan, but I could definitely appreciate the craftsmanship on display. Setting it in a remote cabin gives the movie a sense of being simultaneously claustrophobic and out in the open, and the tiny cast and intimate set makes it feel almost like a play in places. But the whole thing loses steam midway through, and the ending is a major letdown. Horror buffs will probably be able to look pass the film’s shortcomings, and if you’re looking for some Halloween night viewing, you could do much worse than The Strangers, a flawed yet fascinating little fright flick.
GRADE: C+
THE EXTRAS
There isn’t a whole lot of extras on the DVD for The Strangers. The disc features both the theatrical cut and an extended unrated version that runs a few minutes longer. The main feature is a brief making-of featurette that actually manages to cram a lot of information into under 10 minutes. There are also two short deleted scenes, both of which further develop the relationship between James and Kristen before things get crazy. They’re both nice little scenes, but with a film like The Strangers, I can understand the need to really get to the stuff people ostensibly paid to see as quickly as possible.
Labels: DVD review, horror movies, Theme weeks
¶ 9:13 AM 0 Comments
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Horror Movie Week
In the spirit of Halloween, it's Horror Movie Week this week here at the movie blog. I'll be looking at the chiller The Strangers tomorrow, and on Friday, I'll be celebrating Halloween with a look at Rob Zombie's Halloween remake, which was just re-released as a deluxe three-disc DVD set. Because two discs just aren't scary enough.
Labels: horror movies, Theme weeks
¶ 7:50 AM 0 Comments
Monday, October 20, 2008
DVD Review: Doomsday
THE MOVIE
Doomsday is a lot of things. It’s a post-apocalyptic sci-fi action movie. It’s a “virus outbreak” movie à la 28 Days Later or, I guess, Outbreak. It’s a zombie movie. It’s a medieval adventure movie. But mostly, Doomsday is totally awesome.
Doomsday follows an improbably gorgeous British special forces operative sent into near-future Scotland years after that country was walled off due to a viral outbrea
k. It seems the virus, believed to have been wiped out when Scotland was sealed off and everyone on the island died off (or so they thought!), has resurfaced in London. So it’s up to Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra) to lead a team of British commandos into Scotland, now a lawless no man’s land populated by cannibals, to return with a live human, who will hopefully provide the key to finding a cure to the virus.
Your enjoyment of Doomsday relies entirely on what you think of the above plot description. If it sounds stupid to you, then yeah, it is. If it sounds like fun, buckle up and enjoy, because Doomsday is one of the most fun B-movies to come along in years.
Doomsday is the third movie from writer-director Neil Marshall, a British filmmaker who wears his love for cult genre movies on his sleeve. His first movie, Dog Soldiers, was a low-budget (even by British standards) action-horror movie about a group of soldiers on a training mission in the Scottish highlands who stumble across a pack of werewolves. It’s a fun, gory little flick that borrows liberally – and knowingly – from genre classics like Aliens and Assault on Precinct 13. Marshall followed that up with 2005’s The Descent, one of the best horror movies I’ve seen in years, about a group of women on a caving expedition who stumble across a pack of flesh-eating mutants. The Descent is a quantum leap forward from Dog Soldiers, ditching the earlier movie’s sly humour and self-awareness for an oppressive atmosphere and straight-ahead chills. It’s a genuinely brilliant horror movie that I recommend to anyone – particularly women – even those who normally aren’t into scary movies.
But with Doomsday, Marshall takes the slicker, bigger-budget feel of The Descent and fuses it with his knack for riffing on the movies that inspired him. The big influences on Doomsday – and Marshall admits it freel
y on the commentary on the director’s cut and on the featurettes – are the Mad Max sequel The Road Warrior, Walter Hill’s cult 1979 gang movie The Warriors and John Carpenter’s classic Escape From New York. The latter happens to be one of my all-time favourite movies, so I made Escape From New York the first half of a double bill with Doomsday when I sat down to review it. Marshall borrows so lovingly from that film (not unlike Quentin Tarantino does in his movies), he even uses the same font for the opening credits, as well as a “London, 2035: NOW” title card that evokes Escape From New York’s famous “1997: NOW.” (The gangs of mohawked cannibals and their viciously crude weapons, as well as the entire climactic car chase across a dead plain, borrows just as liberally from The Road Warrior.)
Evoking awesome older movies is all well and good, but if the actual movie under discussion doesn’t hold up, then it’s all for nothing. Luckily Doomsday doesn’t disappoint. It’s an absolute blast from start to finish, from it’s insanely over-the-top violence (we don’t just take it on faith that the roving bands of maniacs are cannibals; Marshall shows them cook and eat one of Sinclair’s team members in shocking detail). Marshall not only gets why movies like Escape From New York and The Warriors and The Road Warrior and 28 Days Later are “cool” on a superficial level; any hack can dress up extras in tattered leather and football shoulder-pads, or set up a gladiator fight between the hero and a giant, menacing brute. He gets what makes them so enjoyable on a deeper level, and he’s clearly having a ton of fun riffing on not only post-apocalyptic action flicks, but in the later portion of the film when Sinclair tracks down Kane, the rogue scientist believed to be sitting on the cure (Malcolm McDowell, picking the scenery out of his teeth), Doomsday becomes a medieval adventure movie. It seems Kane has set himself up as the head of his own little kingdom in a Middle Ages theme restaurant built into a real Scottish castle, surrounding himself with knights and archers. This allows Marshall to have his heroine swordfight her way th
rough legions of armoured soldiers right before his Mad Max car chase at the climax, which is also pretty spectacular. A genre mash-up this ambitious could easily have been a total mess, but Marshall pulls it off and then some.
Doomsday though, is no Escape From New York. As fun as it is, Mitra lacks Kurt Russell’s dry wit as the iconic Snake Plissken (though Marshall does give her one eye for good measure). But saying she’s not as good as one of the greatest movie antiheroes of all time isn’t really that much of a knock; Mitra’s performance is a bit too grim and humourless, and if she allowed herself to have a bit more fun, it really could have elevated what’s already an insanely fun B-movie to a higher level. And of course, if everything I’ve described just sounds stupid to you, well, that’s probably what you’ll think of the movie – Doomsday is the kind of genre movie that isn’t trying to be any more than it is, and the downside to that is if you’re not on board for that, then I suspect there’s not much here for you. But if a hot chick fighting cannibals and knights in post-apocalyptic Scotland sounds like fun to you, Doomsday is an absolute riot.
GRADE: B+
THE EXTRAS
The Doomsday theatrical-cut DVD (which is the version I was sent to review, but I bought the unrated director’s cut, just because I dig the movie that much) has a nice little array of features, the only thing to miss the cut from the unrated version being commentary from writer-director Neil Marshall. There’s a cool making-of featurette called ‘Anatomy on the Brink,’ which covers the cast and crew and various aspects of production. The whole thing runs about 20 minutes, and gives enough detail to remain interesting, but is short enough to not drag. Everyone involved with the movie seems to be having a blast, which comes across in the final product, and Marshall and the crew mention movies like Escape From New York, Mad Max and The Warriors enough to convey how much of a love letter to those genre classics Doomsday really is.
Also included are shorter featurettes on the visual effects, from the CGI to the makeup effects used in the movie’s many gory action sequences (exploding bodies/heads, etc.), as well as a segment on the movie’s weapons, the awesomely high-tech, and brutally low-tech alike. On the surface it’s all pretty basic DVD-extra stuff, but it all gets across how much effort went into the movie, as well as the level of care and detail absent from a lot of bigger movies. Overall it’s a solid DVD package for a great little action flick.
Doomsday is a lot of things. It’s a post-apocalyptic sci-fi action movie. It’s a “virus outbreak” movie à la 28 Days Later or, I guess, Outbreak. It’s a zombie movie. It’s a medieval adventure movie. But mostly, Doomsday is totally awesome.
Doomsday follows an improbably gorgeous British special forces operative sent into near-future Scotland years after that country was walled off due to a viral outbrea
k. It seems the virus, believed to have been wiped out when Scotland was sealed off and everyone on the island died off (or so they thought!), has resurfaced in London. So it’s up to Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra) to lead a team of British commandos into Scotland, now a lawless no man’s land populated by cannibals, to return with a live human, who will hopefully provide the key to finding a cure to the virus.Your enjoyment of Doomsday relies entirely on what you think of the above plot description. If it sounds stupid to you, then yeah, it is. If it sounds like fun, buckle up and enjoy, because Doomsday is one of the most fun B-movies to come along in years.
Doomsday is the third movie from writer-director Neil Marshall, a British filmmaker who wears his love for cult genre movies on his sleeve. His first movie, Dog Soldiers, was a low-budget (even by British standards) action-horror movie about a group of soldiers on a training mission in the Scottish highlands who stumble across a pack of werewolves. It’s a fun, gory little flick that borrows liberally – and knowingly – from genre classics like Aliens and Assault on Precinct 13. Marshall followed that up with 2005’s The Descent, one of the best horror movies I’ve seen in years, about a group of women on a caving expedition who stumble across a pack of flesh-eating mutants. The Descent is a quantum leap forward from Dog Soldiers, ditching the earlier movie’s sly humour and self-awareness for an oppressive atmosphere and straight-ahead chills. It’s a genuinely brilliant horror movie that I recommend to anyone – particularly women – even those who normally aren’t into scary movies.
But with Doomsday, Marshall takes the slicker, bigger-budget feel of The Descent and fuses it with his knack for riffing on the movies that inspired him. The big influences on Doomsday – and Marshall admits it freel
y on the commentary on the director’s cut and on the featurettes – are the Mad Max sequel The Road Warrior, Walter Hill’s cult 1979 gang movie The Warriors and John Carpenter’s classic Escape From New York. The latter happens to be one of my all-time favourite movies, so I made Escape From New York the first half of a double bill with Doomsday when I sat down to review it. Marshall borrows so lovingly from that film (not unlike Quentin Tarantino does in his movies), he even uses the same font for the opening credits, as well as a “London, 2035: NOW” title card that evokes Escape From New York’s famous “1997: NOW.” (The gangs of mohawked cannibals and their viciously crude weapons, as well as the entire climactic car chase across a dead plain, borrows just as liberally from The Road Warrior.)Evoking awesome older movies is all well and good, but if the actual movie under discussion doesn’t hold up, then it’s all for nothing. Luckily Doomsday doesn’t disappoint. It’s an absolute blast from start to finish, from it’s insanely over-the-top violence (we don’t just take it on faith that the roving bands of maniacs are cannibals; Marshall shows them cook and eat one of Sinclair’s team members in shocking detail). Marshall not only gets why movies like Escape From New York and The Warriors and The Road Warrior and 28 Days Later are “cool” on a superficial level; any hack can dress up extras in tattered leather and football shoulder-pads, or set up a gladiator fight between the hero and a giant, menacing brute. He gets what makes them so enjoyable on a deeper level, and he’s clearly having a ton of fun riffing on not only post-apocalyptic action flicks, but in the later portion of the film when Sinclair tracks down Kane, the rogue scientist believed to be sitting on the cure (Malcolm McDowell, picking the scenery out of his teeth), Doomsday becomes a medieval adventure movie. It seems Kane has set himself up as the head of his own little kingdom in a Middle Ages theme restaurant built into a real Scottish castle, surrounding himself with knights and archers. This allows Marshall to have his heroine swordfight her way th
rough legions of armoured soldiers right before his Mad Max car chase at the climax, which is also pretty spectacular. A genre mash-up this ambitious could easily have been a total mess, but Marshall pulls it off and then some.Doomsday though, is no Escape From New York. As fun as it is, Mitra lacks Kurt Russell’s dry wit as the iconic Snake Plissken (though Marshall does give her one eye for good measure). But saying she’s not as good as one of the greatest movie antiheroes of all time isn’t really that much of a knock; Mitra’s performance is a bit too grim and humourless, and if she allowed herself to have a bit more fun, it really could have elevated what’s already an insanely fun B-movie to a higher level. And of course, if everything I’ve described just sounds stupid to you, well, that’s probably what you’ll think of the movie – Doomsday is the kind of genre movie that isn’t trying to be any more than it is, and the downside to that is if you’re not on board for that, then I suspect there’s not much here for you. But if a hot chick fighting cannibals and knights in post-apocalyptic Scotland sounds like fun to you, Doomsday is an absolute riot.
GRADE: B+
THE EXTRAS
The Doomsday theatrical-cut DVD (which is the version I was sent to review, but I bought the unrated director’s cut, just because I dig the movie that much) has a nice little array of features, the only thing to miss the cut from the unrated version being commentary from writer-director Neil Marshall. There’s a cool making-of featurette called ‘Anatomy on the Brink,’ which covers the cast and crew and various aspects of production. The whole thing runs about 20 minutes, and gives enough detail to remain interesting, but is short enough to not drag. Everyone involved with the movie seems to be having a blast, which comes across in the final product, and Marshall and the crew mention movies like Escape From New York, Mad Max and The Warriors enough to convey how much of a love letter to those genre classics Doomsday really is.
Also included are shorter featurettes on the visual effects, from the CGI to the makeup effects used in the movie’s many gory action sequences (exploding bodies/heads, etc.), as well as a segment on the movie’s weapons, the awesomely high-tech, and brutally low-tech alike. On the surface it’s all pretty basic DVD-extra stuff, but it all gets across how much effort went into the movie, as well as the level of care and detail absent from a lot of bigger movies. Overall it’s a solid DVD package for a great little action flick.
Labels: DVD review, horror movies, John Carpenter, zombies
¶ 1:29 PM 0 Comments
Friday, October 3, 2008
Time to Let the Right One In
I’m not really a huge horror-movie guy. There’s some brilliant stuff in the genre, don’t get me wrong, but slasher flicks and monster movies don’t really turn my crank. (I will explore this some more in my upcoming review of the ridiculously-packed three-disc DVD of Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake, which, if the Internet is any indication, I am in the minority for enjoying quite a bit.) So when I start hearing ridiculously positive buzz around a horror movie, I remain a bit more skeptical than I usually do. But I’ve been reading about a strange little Swedish vampire movie called Let the Right One In for a few months now, and I’m very intrigued. It’s receiving some pretty high praise, and not just from the types who consider torture-porn schlock like Hostel and Saw high water marks of the horror genre.
The premise of Let the Right One In is what immediately grabbed me: it’s about a shy 12-year-old boy who strikes up a friendship with a similarly-aged girl who moves in next door. Except that the girl is actually a centuries-old vampire. The idea of an old vampire who appears to be a child is creepy as hell, and is explored quite well in 1987’s Near Dark, my favourite vampire movie of all time (if you haven’t seen it, check it out, it’s brilliant). In that film the child-vampire is one of the supporting characters, so that concept as the focus of a full movie is a great idea. And in the advance film-festival reviews I’ve been reading online, the word “masterpiece” is being thrown around enough to really pique my curiosity.
As with any awesome foreign movie, Hollywood’s got a hankering to piss all over it with an unnecessary remake, this time apparently directed by Cloverfield director Matt Reeves. (A perfect illustration: the horror flick Quarantine, opening next week, is a quickie remake of an acclaimed Spanish zombie movie called [rec], and the original filmmakers are apparently less than thrilled with the American version.) Thankfully, a potential American remake doesn’t erase the original, and Magnolia pictures will be giving Let the Right One In a limited U.S. release starting Oct. 24, but in the meantime, check out the spiffy new trailer below. I for one can’t wait to see this thing.
The premise of Let the Right One In is what immediately grabbed me: it’s about a shy 12-year-old boy who strikes up a friendship with a similarly-aged girl who moves in next door. Except that the girl is actually a centuries-old vampire. The idea of an old vampire who appears to be a child is creepy as hell, and is explored quite well in 1987’s Near Dark, my favourite vampire movie of all time (if you haven’t seen it, check it out, it’s brilliant). In that film the child-vampire is one of the supporting characters, so that concept as the focus of a full movie is a great idea. And in the advance film-festival reviews I’ve been reading online, the word “masterpiece” is being thrown around enough to really pique my curiosity.
As with any awesome foreign movie, Hollywood’s got a hankering to piss all over it with an unnecessary remake, this time apparently directed by Cloverfield director Matt Reeves. (A perfect illustration: the horror flick Quarantine, opening next week, is a quickie remake of an acclaimed Spanish zombie movie called [rec], and the original filmmakers are apparently less than thrilled with the American version.) Thankfully, a potential American remake doesn’t erase the original, and Magnolia pictures will be giving Let the Right One In a limited U.S. release starting Oct. 24, but in the meantime, check out the spiffy new trailer below. I for one can’t wait to see this thing.
Labels: horror movies, Movie news, Random thoughts, trailers, vampires
¶ 9:51 AM 0 Comments
