Worth Mentioning - Put Up Your Dux

January 25, 2013, 12:37 pm

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We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Cody viewed early Van Damme, unpopular Stallone, and some more Mark L. Lester.

BLOODSPORT (1988)

 

Jean-Claude Van Damme, the good ol' Muscles from Brussels, got his first starring role in this film, which is based on the experiences of Frank Dux, an American martial arts master. Between 1975 and 1980, Dux is said to have fought 329 matches in underground Kumite tournaments, brutal fights that can result in serious injury or death.

The real Dux retired from the Kumite undefeated. The movie tells the story of his first tournament, which he goes A.W.O.L. from the Army to compete in. Flashbacks to the training in Ninjitsu he received from Japanese master Senzo Tanaka over his formative years explains why the Kumite is so important to him: Tanaka had been training his own son to someday compete in the tournament, but after the boy dies at a young age Dux takes it upon himself to honor Tanaka at the Kumite. A noble idea, but it doesn't keep Army detectives (one of whom is Forest Whitaker) from attempting to track him down in Hong Kong, where the Kumite is being held.
 

Dux proves to be a very impressive fighter, breaking records as he climbs the ranks, drawing the attention of the reigning champion, the undefeated Chong Li, a fighter who too often crosses the line and causes unnecessary harm to his opponents. He even killed a man at the previous tournament and showed no remorse for it. As Chong Li is the legendary Bolo Yeung, the nose-clearing 5'6" mountain of muscle who made many a martial arts/action movie in his day and always made an impression on the viewer.

Between bouts, Dux romances an attractive female reporter who's out to learn the secrets of the Kumite and befriends fellow fighter Ray Jackson, played by the awesome Donald Gibb, who's best known as Ogre from the Revenge of the Nerds series.

Tournament matches between fighters with a wide variety of styles make up the better part of an hour in the 92 minute film, making Bloodsport an easy movie to watch and quite enjoyable if you're in the mood for this sort of thing.
 

 

My brother was certainly into it back at the end of the '80s and into the early '90s, Bloodsport was recorded onto a VHS during one its airings on HBO or Cinemax and that video got a lot of play. This and the similar JCVD vehicle Kickboxer were my brother's go-to movies for quite a while.

Bloodsport's success, making $11 million theatrically on a $1 million budget, really got Van Damme's career rolling, and looking at the marketing materials makes me long for the simpler days when a moment like a muscular Belgian delivering a jump kick to the chest of Bolo Yeung could be a movie's biggest selling point, being both the last shot in the trailer and the image on the theatrical poster.

 

NIGHT OF THE RUNNING MAN (1995)

Las Vegas cabbie Jerry Logan (Andrew McCarthy) ends up with a million dollars of mob money in his possession thanks to an ill-fated fare who gets murdered right in front of his eyes. To eliminate the taxi driving witness and retrieve the cash, the mob sends hitman David Eckhart (Scott Glenn) after him. Jerry goes on the run, Eckhart hot on his trail and willing to take any ruthless action necessary to stay on it.

Eckhart is a great role for Glenn; a calm, relentless badass totally bereft of any good qualities as a human being. John Glover has some memorable moments as a cohort of Eckhart's who is his own type of laidback evil. The lovely Janet Gunn gets involved with Jerry along the way as an inordinately helpful nurse, providing the film with the required love interest. Appropriately, given the Vegas setting, Wayne Newton has a couple scene cameo.

A very quick and simple crime story, Night of the Running Man is another example of director Mark L. Lester (Commando, Showdown in Little Tokyo, Class of 1999) delivering some straightforward entertainment.

 

 

 
EYE SEE YOU (2002)

Sylvester Stallone had his closest brush with the horror genre since 1986's Cobra in this murder mystery from I Know What You Did Last Summer director Jim Gillespie.

Stallone stars as FBI agent Jake Malloy, on the trail of a serial killer of police officers who leaves the mutilated corpses of his victims strung up in grotesque displays to torment the other officers who have to deal with the crime scene. When the killer targets Malloy and orchestrates an event that is hugely traumatizing for him, the investigator's life goes spiralling out of control.

After a suicide attempt, Malloy ends up at a newly opened detox center, run by cops for cops and set up at a remote location in the Wyoming countryside. Once Malloy is at the center, it's Ten Little Indians time. The killer has followed him. The phone line is severed, a blizzard hits, the heat goes out, the doctors and patients are trapped and the killer starts whittling down the supporting cast, which includes such notable names as Charles S. Dutton, Kris Kristofferson, Jeffrey Wright, Tom Berenger, Stephen Lang, Robert Patrick, Polly Walker, Dina Meyer, Robert Prosky, Rance Howard, Sean Patrick Flanery, and Courtney B. Vance, one-by-one.

This movie gets a bum rap. Its rankings are in the toilet, the studio that funded it was so disappointed with it that they shelved it for three years before it finally escaped pretty much direct-to-video. It's not nearly bad enough to deserve that kind of treatment. It's not one of Stallone's greats, it's not on the level of the movies it brings to mind along the way like Seven, The Shining, or John Carpenter's The Thing, but I think it's a pretty decent little thriller in its own right.

The original title was D-Tox and the story is based on a novel by Howard Swindle called Jitter Joint, but while the movie was gathering dust on the shelf someone in marketing decided that the goofy Eye See You was the title to go with in the U.S. Funny though it is, it does make sense for the movie - "I see you"/"ICU" is a repeated taunt from the killer, who has an obsession with eyes and a proclivity for damaging them.

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How Many Times Has the World Ended?

January 30, 2013, 9:21 am

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In response to the talk of apocalyptic predictions in the This is the end Worth Mentioning article posted on December 21st, the world's most recent supposed expiration date, guest contributor Allison Morris sent over a very interesting graphical look at some of the most notable end days predictions that have been made over the years.

Worth Mentioning - Some Bastard Who Fights Like the Devil

February 1, 2013, 4:55 pm

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We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

 

Cody cheers from ringside for all five films in the Kickboxer series.

KICKBOXER (1989)

Jean-Claude Van Damme stars as Kurt Sloane, and when the film begins he is not a fighter. His older brother, the permed and mustachioed Eric "The Eliminator" Sloane, is the ISKA World Heavyweight Champion and he's played by Dennis Alexio, who held that title in real life. Kurt is just working as his corner man while the two reconnect after childhoods spent being raised on different sides of the globe following the divorce of their parents.

Kurt is the voice of reason in Eric's life, a voice that Eric largely ignores. Big brother's success in the ring has led him to believe that he's truly untouchable, he's arrogant about his abilities and irreverent when it comes to the fights and his opponents. When he's told that kickboxing was invented in Thailand, he decides it's time for him to go kick some ass at the roots of the sport.

As soon as Kurt gets a look at the Thailand Champion that Eric has challenged, he knows his brother is way out of his league. The physically imposing, crazy-eyed "Tiger" Tong Po is, like Bloodsport's Chong Li, a fighter who too often crosses the line and causes unnecessary harm to his opponents. The "Tiger" makes quick work of "The Eliminator", then finishes him off with an elbow to the spine, paralyzing Eric on purpose.

An enraged Kurt vows to avenge his brother in the ring and fight Tong Po himself. But first he'll need extensive training in Muy Thai. Luckily, since he's played by JCVD he's already in damn good shape. With the help of party-loving former Special Forces American expat Winston Taylor, Kurt is able to get that training from eccentric recluse Xian Chow.

The bulk of the second act focuses on Kurt going through the Xian Chow training program, which includes such elements as Xian dropping heavy objects onto Kurt's abdomen from a height, making him shin-kick trees, attaching raw meat to him so he'll run faster to escape a hungry dog, and tying him up to a makeshift leg stretcher so Kurt will be able to kick higher and perform JCVD's trademark splits. In the midst of all this work, Kurt also strikes up a romantic relationship with Xian's niece, Rochelle Ashana as Mylee.

Kickboxer has a good sense of humor running through it, and Dennis Chan as Xian and Haskell Anderson as Taylor are quite good at providing funny moments and delivering laugh lines. Both the comedy and Xian's unconventional training methods reach their peak when he takes Kurt to a bar, gets him drunk, then has him show some "American dance moves" to the local girls. Kurt doesn't realize Xian is doing this to upset the local guys and instigate a fight, instead he throws everything he has into his moves, which rank right up there with Crispin Glover's dance in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter.

When Kurt finally gets the fight with Tong Po he wants, it's memorably fought in the "ancient way", in a chain-encircled ring in an underground tomb lit with torches, Kurt and Tong Po's hands wrapped and dipped in glass.

The scarred, taciturn, ponytailed Tong Po is a fantastic villain for this type of film. The credits claim that Tong Po plays himself, but beneath the uglifying makeup he's actually Michel Qissi, a friend of Van Damme's since they were kids. Qissi also had a small role in the previous year's Bloodsport as a fighter who gets his leg broken by Chong Li.

Tong Po isn't just a bad guy when he fights, being a bad guy is also part of his day job working in a criminal organization, a fact that plays into some third act action that Xian and Taylor get up to concurrent to the Kurt/Tong Po fight, in case a great climactic kickboxing match isn't enough to satisfy you.

Van Damme came up with the story with Mark DiSalle, who also co-directed the film with David Worth after Glenn A. Bruce wrote the screenplay. Not only were there two directors, but Van Damme also gets a credit as director and choreographer of the fights.

I can clearly remember when Kickboxer first came out on VHS, the poster high on the wall right inside the door of a local video store. We rented it as soon as it came out, with the owner of the store informing us that Van Damme was the new big action hero, following in the tradition of guys like Schwarzenegger and Stallone. Bloodsport was a good start and Kickboxer confirmed it, Van Damme was someone to watch.

Many viewings of Kickboxer followed after that first rental. As I said in the Bloodsport Mention, my older brother watched this film and that one repeatedly for a while in the early '90s, and I think that Kickboxer was the one that played out on our TV the most. Watching it again for this writing, I was hit by a wave of nostalgia as soon as the song over the title sequence began, much like I was recently when rewatching another childhood favorite, Blind Fury. Kickboxer reminds me of easier days.

KICKBOXER 2: THE ROAD BACK (1991)

Neither Van Damme nor Alexio return as the Sloane brothers in this sequel, instead screenwriter David S. Goyer, who wrote the 1990 JCVD movie Death Warrant and would go on to be Hollywood's go-to guy for comic book adaptations, came up with a story that follows a third brother who was never mentioned in the first film, David Sloan. (He lost the E from their last name somewhere along the way.)

Kurt did avenge Eric and best Tong Po in their fight, but turns out that it was all for naught, the Sloanes should've just packed up, gone back to the U.S. and left Tong Po alone, because the "Tiger" was so humiliated by his loss that he gunned Kurt, Eric, and Mylee down.

With his brothers dead and no other relatives to turn to, David is left struggling to keep the family gym in Los Angeles, at which he's a kickboxing instructor and enjoys working with the local kids, up and running by himself. He used to fight in some competitions, though he always felt overshadowed by his older brothers. He wasn't as strong or as fast as they were, but Kurt always said that David had the biggest heart, and heart can win a lot of fights. David is encouraged to do some more fighting to make money to keep the gym afloat, but he's reluctant to get back into the ring. Fighting got his brothers killed.

It doesn't help that all of the matches in the area are being run by a shady con man played by Peter Boyle, Justin Maciah, who has created the United Kickboxing Association and is looking to turn the sport into an international commodity with cable deals and product endorsements. In David's opinion, he's going to destroy the sport by selling it out. And Maciah is in league with a character played by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, so you know he's up to no good.

The situation that builds out of Maciah's criminal dealings and the financial strain that David's under not only draws Xian Chow, a returning and still entertaining Dennis Chan, to L.A. to help David out, but also sees the organization behind Tong Po orchestrate a fight between the disgraced Champion and the youngest Sloan. The idea is that by beating David, Tong Po can regain the honor he lost. And really never had. Hands are wrapped, dipped in glass, things get bloody...

Kickboxer 2 is a lesser film than its predecessor, not as interesting or fun and built on a foundation of retcon and letdown (Kurt being killed between movies), but as far as sequels like this go, low budget follow-ups that the star doesn't return for, it's actually not too bad.

David Sloan is a likeable enough character as portrayed by Sasha Mitchell, who this same year got a standout role on the sitcom Step by Step, playing a dimwitted character named Cody who I enjoyed watching as a kid.

It is a decent idea to have Tong Po go up against a third brother who has been built up as being weaker than his elder siblings, since we've seen how much trouble the other two with him. The idea works because Michel Qissi is back in the role and retains the intensity he had in the first movie.

Famed and prolific B-movie director Albert Pyun (Invasion) was behind the camera for this one, beginning a working relationship with Sasha Mitchell that they've recently revived for a couple of Pyun's latest movies.

Like the first Kickboxer, we had Kickboxer 2 recorded on VHS. I made sure my mom caught it and taped it during one of its cable airings. It didn't get watched as much as the first, nor was it the second most viewed Kickboxer movie in my household. The next one was.

 

KICKBOXER III: THE ART OF WAR (1992)

Coming from writer Dennis Pratt (Leprechaun 4: In Space) and director Rick King (who got a story credit on the previous year's Point Break), the third film in the series took a bit of a different approach, as was evident when you walked into your local video store and saw that the movie's VHS box art featured a glowering David Sloan wielding a machine gun.

Since neither of them have any family left, David and Xian have stuck together since the events of part 2. David is back in the world of professional kickboxing and Xian now works as his corner man. Business takes them to Rio de Janeiro, where they become acquainted with a pair of homeless youths, the tough-talking Marcos and his teenage sister Isabella.

David and Xian hang out with the kids in their downtime, get them cleaned up and take them to events with them... and that's how the trouble starts. Isabella is a cute girl, and her looks catch the attention of Frank Lane, a wealthy fighter manager who moonlights in human trafficking. When Lane's henchmen kidnap Isabella, Lane's intention being to force her into prostitution, David and Xian hit the streets to track her down, asking questions and busting heads.

There are a couple pivotal kickboxing matches with an unreasonably brutal opponent, but this time the most memorable action sequence is David and Xian's raid on a guarded compound with bullets flying. As Xian says when they make their firearm purchases, "Just as water adapts itself to the conformation of the ground, so in war, one must be flexible."

Part 3 is an entertaining entry in the series, quickly paced and full of action, a standout among the DTV action flicks of the '90s. Once the movie hit cable, it got a good amount of viewings in my house, viewings that were again initiated by my brother.

Of note to horror fans is the fact that Harry Manfredini, composer on most of the Friday the 13th films and others including Swamp Thing, provided the score for this film. This being 1992, Manfredini's music had evolved at this point from the violins and horns of the earlier F13s to synth work along the lines of Jason Goes to Hell and Jason X.
 

KICKBOXER 4: THE AGGRESSOR (1994)

Albert Pyun returned to the franchise to write (with David Yorkin) and direct another chapter in the Sloans vs. Tong Po saga.

As the film begins, David Sloan is serving a prison sentence at the Sante Federal Penitentiary. Through some vague exposition, we learn the confusing reason for why David ended up there: seems he got roped into doing a mission as a favor for the DEA to bring a major drug dealer to the U.S. to stand trial. Somehow Tong Po manipulated things so that David was forced to kill the drug dealer. David says that Po framed him for the crime, yet there's no doubt that he did kill the man, in what he calls a "him or me" situation. The court didn't agree with David's point of view and he was convicted for murder.

Since the events of part 2, Tong Po has moved to Mexico and over the course of five years set himself up as the most powerful drug lord in the country. Also sometime between movies, David met and married a woman named Vicky. Once David was behind bars, Po struck another blow against the Sloans by having Vicky kidnapped and brought to be held captive at his compound, a "fortress in the desert". He sends David a mocking note assuring him that he's "taking good care of her".

Two years into his sentence, David is visited by a DEA agent who offers him a chance to get out of prison, get revenge on Tong Po, and save his wife, if she's still alive. The agency has been trying to get to Po for years, but they can't get close to him. Every Day of the Dead, the former kickboxing champion invites all of the top fighters from around the world to compete in a tournament at his compound. The winner takes on Po for a million dollar prize. David is sent to Mexico to compete in the tournament, under the assumed identity of Jack Jones, with the hope that Tong Po won't recognize him once he gets there.

As the tournament commences, David finds two allies amid the fray: a young man named Lando and tiny, foul-mouthed firecracker Megan Laurence, who's played by real life world champion martial artist Michele "Mouse" Krasnoo.

The tournament setting allows the film to feature a good amount of fighting, and David gets up to some extracurricular fisticuffs as well, even taking part in a prison yard fight, a street fight, and a bar fight before he gets to Tong Po's place.

Like 3, The Aggressor features the work of a notable Friday the 13th player. This time, it's Thom Mathews, our hero Tommy Jarvis from Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI, as Tong Po's lead henchman, Bill.

Though Tong Po is back and ugly as ever, it's not Michel Qissi beneath the makeup. This time, Kamel Krifa stepped into the role. Like Qissi, Krifa was a childhood friend of Van Damme's. He appeared in several of his pal's films: Lionheart, Death Warrant, Double Impact, Universal Soldier, Maximum Risk, and Legionnaire.

Kickboxer 4 wasn't one that got a lot of replay on our TVs, but I do remember renting it the day it hit video. Appropriately, my first viewing of the movie was had with my brother in the room. He was in his early twenties at that point, and had some friends over to the house that evening. If they hadn't already been drinking by the time we were watching the movie, alcohol was certainly on their agenda for the night. They had a lot of fun watching the movie and carrying on like jackasses. Lots of chatter about characters and fights and laughing at in-jokes, finding particular amusement from the fact that there was a character named Bill, which was their nickname for my brother for some reason unknown to me. Their favorite scene was obviously the gratuitous softcore threesome that David witnesses while sneaking around Tong Po's property.
 

THE REDEMPTION: KICKBOXER 5 (1995)

Unlike the previous four movies, I never saw a copy of Kickboxer 5 on video store shelves and I never caught the movie on cable. I didn't know the movie existed until years after its release, and wasn't able to watch it until much later, when I rented the DVD from Netflix.

Directed by Kristine Peterson (Critters 3) from a screenplay by Rick Filon, the fifth film in the series again takes things in a different direction, with a new lead actor and character.

David Sloan appears only in silhouette during the title sequence, during which the film's title is presented as simply "The Redemption", the "Kickboxer 5" part of it never appears. David('s silhouette) is working out when (the silhouettes of) three men attack him. He manages to incapacitate one of the men, but the other two proceed to beat the life out of him with fists and kicks...

David's killers are the henchmen of a man named Negaal, a former kickboxing champion who was accused of unsportsmanlike conduct by the World Kickboxing Council after killing an opponent in the ring, though he claims the killing blow was a legitimate hit. His fighting career ended, Negaal moved to Johannesburg, South Africa and built his own criminal empire, making a fortune on gambling, drugs, and prostitution. In his down time, he enjoys shooting giraffes from his back porch. Now he's using his money to create the Negaal Kickboxing Federation, with the intention of ruining the WKC. He's signing champions from around the world to the Federation, and if they refuse to join or balk at the demands of the contract, which puts him in total control of the fighters' careers, he simply kills them and makes the offer to the next champion who comes along.

David Sloan was the American champion. He refused to join the Federation. Negaal had him killed. The next American in line is named Johnny Styles. Styles refuses to sign the contract, so Negaal's henchmen kill him too.

Unfortunately for Negaal, Sloan and Styles were both friends with undefeated fighter-turned-instructor Matt Reeves, who's played by action star/Iron Chef Chairman/martial arts champion Mark Dacascos. When Matt figures out that Negaal is behind the murders, he heads to South Africa to avenge his pals, aided along the way by a local brother and sister who have history with Negaal.

As the final battle nears, Matt prepares by doing tai chi surrounded by sheep and breaking an arrow shaft between a post and his neck.

The fights are good and plentiful, and the story is fine. If Sasha Mitchell had returned as David Sloan, it could've been a perfectly serviceable Kickboxer 5 with him in place of Matt Reeves. I wonder if Mitchell did turn it down or the plan was to bring in a new star from the beginning. That question aside, the movie does still work as it is. Dacascos, who starred in another of my brother's martial arts favorites a couple years before this, the capoeira-based Only the Strong, is an enjoyable screen presence and handles the physical action quite well.

The biggest issue is David's death. It's even more of a letdown than finding out his brothers had been murdered between 1 and 2, because at least they were shot by Tong Po. After all the people we've seen David fight and take down in the last three movies, he's rather easily beaten to death by a couple nobodies called Pinto and Bull. Two guys who Matt has no real problem with when he goes up against them. It was just a very lame way to write David out. Because of that, and the fact that I saw the movie so much later than the others that I have no nostalgic connection to it, 5 is the outsider of the bunch for me. But if you're into low budget DTV action, again, you can do much worse.

There's another cause for feeling unfulfilled when you reach the end of the Kickboxer series, a loose end left dangling. As far as we know, Tong Po is still out there in the world, raping and pillaging and enjoying the criminal life. The last we saw of him, he was scurrying away to safety after being bested by David once again at the end of 4. He was never brought to justice, and now every Sloan brother is dead. With 18 years having passed since Kickboxer 5, it doesn't look like we're ever going to get a part 6 in which Tong Po gets his final comeuppance. That thought is so disappointing, it makes me want Albert Pyun and Sasha Mitchell to get a Kickboxer 4½ made that rights this wrong.
 

Final Girl Film Club - The Descent (2005)

February 5, 2013, 9:00 pm

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Cody is endeavoring to write about all of the Final Girl Film Club entries he missed over the years. The movies will be covered in the original Film Club order in most cases, while some of the articles will be posted to coincide with certain dates.

You should explore Neil Marshall's The Descent.

My appreciation for the work of director Neil Marshall goes back to the October 2002 twenty-four hour Nightmare at Studio 35 horror marathon. While the big draw of that particular show was that Bruce Campbell was in attendance to introduce a screening of The Evil Dead, do a Q&A, and sign copies of his book If Chins Could Kill, Campbell wasn't the only special guest there. Also in the film line-up was a rare theatrical screening of Marshall's feature debut Dog Soldiers, with producers David E. Allen and Brian Patrick O'Toole there to introduce the film and answer Qs. Though the movie had aired on the SciFi Channel a few months earlier, this was still the first time most people in the audience had seen Dog Soldiers and it went over like gangbusters with the marathon crowd. Laughs, claps, cheers, the enthusiastic response the film got there made it one of the best viewing experiences I've ever had. The movie was awesome, and with the story of a group of military men on a training exercise in the wilderness finding themselves up against a pack of werewolves being heavy on the action, sort of like Predator with a different kind of creature, it was one of the rare horror movies that I could get my father to watch with me once it hit DVD, and he enjoyed it as well. I looked forward to whatever Marshall would do next.

I had to wait almost four years for Marshall's follow-up, as it didn't reach theatres in the U.S. until August 2006, which is when Final Girl picked it as a Film Club entry. As you can see in the Life Between Frames archive, this blog didn't even start until 2011. That's how I missed participating in so many Film Club events that I'm now doing this Catch-Up project.

Marshall's second film starts charming horror fans as soon as it begins, with him having chosen the same style of font for the title cards as John Carpenter used on many of his films. The cast of characters in The Descent is the opposite of Dog Soldiers and its group of men with one token female. Here there's only one man who gets any lines to deliver, and he's not around for very long. The story follows a group of women who regularly get together on holidays to go rock climbing, white water rafting, dive and jump off of things, do that sort of stuff. A group of women who are way ballsier than I am. The cast is quite good, the actresses assembled from all around Europe - Scotland, England, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden - and even the American of the bunch having been raised in Asia, Australia, and England as well as New York City.

At the center of the story is our lead, Shauna Macdonald as Sarah. One year after losing her husband and young daughter in the car accident that opens the movie, Sarah joins her friends on another getaway. This time they've gone to America, to the Chatooga National Park in North Carolina, on a spelunking adventure in the Appalachian Mountains. After we get to know the group for a while, they begin their descent into the chosen cave while one of them rattles off all the complications a person could encounter while doing this. Beyond physical risks the dangers include disorientation, claustrophia, panic attacks, paranoia, hallucinations, visual and aural deterioration.

The deeper into the earth the women go, the tougher the journey gets and the worse it goes. After a passage collapses behind them, sealing off access to the way they came in, the one who took the lead on this excursion reveals that they're not even in the mapped-out cave they were supposed to be in. That cave was just a lame tourist trap, she chose this one because it's an unnamed system that no one has ever explored before.

Stuck underground with no idea of how to get out of this cave, their only choice is to keep going further and hope to come across another exit.

Marshall went for the slow build on this one. He wanted us to get to know the characters, like them or dislike them, get emotionally invested in them and their journey through the cave. He makes the most of the cave setting, which never feels false, and he gets some excellent shots drenched in the colors emitted by the group's equipment.

He gradually raises the tension level and puts bigger and bigger obstacles in the group's way. Things get worse and worse, and just when the cave seems to have thrown everything bad at them that it possibly could, that's when he turns it into a monster movie.

The monsters of The Descent, referred to as Crawlers, don't appear until just under an hour into the movie, at which point members of the group have already suffered serious injuries. The monsters show up late, but at a point that still allows for around 40 minutes of horrific action. The idea behind the Crawlers is that they're a race of humans who have been living and evolving under the ground in this cave system since prehistoric times, a bat-like variation on humans with razor sharp teeth and amazing rock climbing skills.

That's the explanation for why they are the way they are and how they could've come about, but there is a theory among viewers that the Crawlers don't even really exist, that they could just be a figment of Sarah's imagination. She is still suffering from the loss of her loved ones, she has nightmares about them, she sees glimpses of her daughter. As is said when they enter the cave, a person could have hallucinations down there... It's left up to the viewer to decide whether this is truly a monster movie or a mindscrew. (The sequel that followed a few years later went with the former option.)

Either way, The Descent is a great horror film, an effective balance of suspense and bloody terror that I would highly recommend to anyone looking for a dark, serious, unnerving genre movie. If you're claustrophobic, all the better.

Part of

 

Worth Mentioning - Once You're Bit, That's It

February 8, 2013, 4:53 pm

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We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Cody follows zombies from fundraising to completion.

 

COST OF THE LIVING: A ZOM ROM COM (2011)

During the opening title sequence, a series of internet video clips catches us up on the world of Cost of the Living. What first seemed to be an outbreak of cannibal attacks soon proved to be an epidemic of re-animated, flesh eating corpses. As the plague spread, the number of flesh eaters growing into the millions, society collapsed and big cities fell. Zombie apocalypse time. But people fought back, found ways to survive. Areas were secured, the walking dead held at bay, a solution of sorts found. Now a company called Z Core performs brain surgeries on zombies to remove their lateral hypothalamus, without which they no longer hunger to feed on people. If you can't afford the Z Core treatment for your favorite zombie, other companies offer the procedure at a less costly price (and are less reliable.)

After the title sequence, the start of the zombie outbreak is many years behind us. Docile, lateral hypothalamus-less zombies, referred to as "post-ops", co-exist peacefully with humans in the barricaded city the movie is primarily set in and are used as cheap labor for monotonous tasks, hired as theatre ushers, landscapers, postal workers, store stockboys, etc.

 

A zombie named Brian works at a fast food joint called Burgerrrrrs, and this romantic comedy gets its "meet cute" when a young man named Andrew instinctively stops Brian from stepping out in front of a car driven by Emily, who happens to be one of Brian's co-workers. Andrew is instantly taken with Emily and pursues a relationship with her, but of course things are complicated. Not only does Emily already have a boyfriend, who turns out to be a work-obsessed jerk, but she and Andrew are also from different sides of the tracks. Or wall, in this case.

 

Andrew is an outlier, meaning he lives outside the city's barrier, where it's still a zombie free-for-all. He goes on regular zombie hunting trips with his militantly anti-dead sister. Emily's a city-dwelling leftist who believes in dead rights. She lives amongst zombies, works with them, her best friend even dates zombies, trading up when her boyfriends' rotting bodies start stinking. Emily keeps her zombie mother in her home, and has a tough time taking care of her. (Though she doesn't have nearly as much trouble as Lionel had with his dead mother in Dead-Alive.)

These issues provide the characters with obstacles to overcome to make their relationship work, necessary for any good rom com, and are also director Daniel Lee White doing what most of the best zombie movies do, using the zombies as a backdrop for character study, human drama, and social commentary. White had the topics of same sex marriage, migrant workers, abortion, and euthanasia on his mind when putting his story together, and while that comes across in the film it's never overdone, the movie finds the right balance of reflecting reality while entertaining with its zombie world.

The movie does have some shortcomings, the biggest problem for me being that it feels like it goes on a bit too long at 105 minutes. It was made on a very small budget, which is apparent when watching it, but I think the story overcomes the budgetary and technical limitations, as does the acting. Everyone does well in their roles, with Kevin Killavey and Sarah Nicklin making Andrew and Emily very likeable and enjoyable to watch.

 

Cost of the Living first came to my attention almost three years ago, when I heard about its fundraising campaign. I've contributed to a handful of independent productions over the years, so far all directly to the filmmakers rather than through sites like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, and about half of those experiences have been disappointing, with the people behind the campaigns turning out to have lousy communication with their contributors and neglecting to go through with the terms of the deal. It seems to me that totally ignoring people who have donated money to their productions and/or are potential customers is about the worst move an independent filmmaker could make, but it happens. So I'm glad to say that was not the case with Daniel Lee White and Love Thy Job Films. I donated some money to the production of Cost of the Living and got an e-mail acknowledging the donation within a few days. My name has been on a list of thank yous on the movie's website for quite a while, and as promised at the time of donation I also got a special thanks in the end credits. Love Thy Job did it right.

 

Now that it's finished, Cost of the Living is making the rounds screening at film festivals and conventions, and is currently available for viewing on YouTube for a limited time, which is how I watched it this week. I haven't heard anything about a DVD release yet, but I look forward to owning a copy whenever it's possible.

 

Film (TV) Appreciation - Flashing Back to Lost

February 11, 2013, 9:01 pm

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Film Appreciation reaches into the pre-LBF archives to find what Cody Hamman wrote about the television series Lost soon after the show's finale. Spoilers ahead.

5/28/10

Six years ago, I was a fan of JJ Abrams' show Alias when I heard that he was involved with the creation of new show about a group of people who survive a plane crash on an uncharted desert isle. Sounded sort of like a dramatic Gilligan's Island. I was intrigued by the idea, largely because I wasn't sure how they could make it work for a full, multi-season series. So I checked this show out... and it turned out to be much more than I expected.

The mysteries get all the attention and they're a big part of the fun, but I was never one in a rush for answers, I would just take them as they came. There were a lot of answers along the way, some things remain unclear, some are just left up to fan imagination. I'm fine with what we got. For me, it was about taking the journey with the characters. I ended up connecting to the characters, caring about them, emotionally investing in their stories and situations on a deeper level than I have with any other TV drama. Loving these people, hating these people, getting wrapped up in it all.

Building up to finale night, I rewatched the entire series, pilot through season 6. It was my first time going through it all again, and it was interesting to see how it played once I knew the answers to so many of the mysteries and really knew what was going on. I enjoyed it, I re-connected and got wrapped up all over again. It confirmed that even though the series is over, I'm not done watching it.

Season 1 is fantastic. The crash, meeting the characters, watching them learn how to survive, realizing things are a bit off on the island, a lot of great stuff. Season 2 is awesome. The hatch, the button, the Others, things get stranger, a bit darker, the "man of science, man of faith" debate really amps up. Season 3 and its adventures in New Otherton is good, but the flashback aspect was getting played out, kind of tired. They did all they could do there and were in danger of starting to tread water - then the showrunners negotiated an end date with ABC, and everything changed with the s3 finale, which is still my favorite of all the finales. Charlie's sacrifice, NOT PENNY'S BOAT, flash forward, "We have to go back!" So awesome. Season 4 took a hit by the writers strike and they had to drop a few episodes, speed things up a bit after the eight that they had completed before the strike, but it works and I love the freighter folk story and the flash forwards. Season 5: The Return is fun with its time jumps and dropping the Losties into '70s Dharmaville, building up to The Incident. And now season 6 and the full leap into mythology. "Man of science, man of faith" has a clear winner here. It was different, but I was still engrossed.

Throughout the series, the character I've most related to and sided with was Jack. My journey through watching the show has really matched the one he went through in it. I was a "man of science" with him. Don't push the button, fight against accepting the supernatural. I thought John Locke was an ass, if you crash on an island you don't fight to stay on it, these people need rescued... And my perspective changed along with Jack's. I accepted the supernatural/spiritual side of things and gained new respect and caring for Locke. Locke could be annoying and he did some jerky things - blowing up subs and throwing a knife into a woman's back, come on - but he was also often on the right track. He was also a very sad, pathetic character and on rewatch, knowing that the Locke alive on the island after the return is not really him, he had a really tragic end. Poor John Locke. I loved Jack's line to Smokey in the finale, "You're not John Locke. You disrespect his memory by wearing his face."

The season 6 flash sideways... An alternate 2004 where the plane doesn't crash and the characters are slightly different. Or so it seemed at first. I know the resolution to the flash sideways stories did not go over well with everyone. I can understand why, and some could even bash it with the same words used by the guy in Juliet's book club at the beginning of season 3, "by-the-numbers religious hokum pokum". It wasn't at all what I thought it would be, I was hoping it would remain an alternate time and everyone would just be able to continue living their lives, the knowledge of the other existence fully rounding out the character. But what I got is probably better than that, because my hope doesn't make for much of an ending, and still leaves some people living in two different timelines at once. A lot of people are upset, a lot are very confused and misinterpreting it, thinking it means that everyone died in the plane crash and everything they watched didn't happen. But that's not the case, as Christian tells Jack, everything was real. Everything happened, it's just that at the end of everyone's lives, whether they died during the show or long after Smokey's defeat, they all meet up in the sideways. It may be sappy for some, but I thought the ending was pretty beautifully done. I loved all the reunions and the flashes of awareness, of memory, and it all gets me a bit choked up. Full acceptance came when someone online put forward an idea that didn't occur to me, but made sense - the bright light that they enter when they "move on" in the afterlife is the same light that glows in the heart of the island and inside everyone, tying together the job of the island's protector and the objective to keep the light lit with the resolution of the sideways. I like it.

So, I checked this show out... Six seasons and 121.5 hours (I think) of episodes later - it was a fun journey, it was a hell of a ride. I had a great time.

Remember. Let go. Move on.

With thanks to the F13 Community

Worth Mentioning - Memories & Mayhem

February 15, 2013, 2:34 pm

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We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

 

Reminiscence on a favorite, '50s sci-fi, and a beloved sitcom played out before Cody's eyes.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD 25TH ANNIVERSARY DOCUMENTARY (1993)

We here at Life Between Frames have made it clear over the last couple of years that we have a lot of admiration for, and are obsessed with, George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead. I personally watch the movie several times a year, with or without the audio commentaries on, sometimes with the movie being presented by various horror hosts. I've read books on and watched documentaries about the making of it. 2013 marks the 45th anniversary of Night of the Living Dead, but this week I was able to get in a viewing of an out of print 25th anniversary documentary (the title may have tipped you off) that was produced, co-edited, and photographed by Tempe Video mastermind and fellow Ohioan J.R. Bookwalter, with Bookwalter's Maximum Impact and Galaxy of the Dinosaurs collaborator Thomas Brown writing and directing.

What made this particular documentary especially nice to watch is that it's largely made up of an "informal roundtable" between four of the main men behind NOTLD - director/co-writer George A. Romero, co-writer John A. Russo, producer/"Johnny" Russell Streiner, and producer/"Harry Cooper" Karl Hardman. They've been gathered together in a room to speak about the making of the movie, but they're not talking to an interviewer behind the camera, not addressing the viewer, there is no moderator, they're talking to each other. It's four regular guys having a conversation, thinking back on when they got together and just happened to make a classic.

The discussion between the men covers the making of the movie from the moment they had the idea to make a movie through the decision to make it a horror/"monster flick" (they figured they could at least make something as good as some of the movies that were featured on the local Chiller Theatre horror host show), fundraising, realizing that their initial budget of $6000 was not going to be enough, the equipment, casting, effects, filming, etc. Some of the stories I had never heard before, and even the ones I had heard before, it was still interesting to me to hear them told in a different way, in a different environment, with different details coming through.

Intercut with the chat are clips from the movie as well as interviews with horror filmmakers like Fred Olen Ray, Tobe Hooper, David DeCoteau, Sam Raimi, John Landis, and Wes Craven talking about their experience watching NOTLD for the first time (Ray saw it in a double feature with Play Misty for Me as the A picture, Raimi and his sister saw it in a double bill with Freaks), how it affected them, and what their favorite scene is.

There's also a segment in which Karl Hardman and his wife Marilyn Eastman, who shared makeup duties on NOTLD with him and played his character's wife Helen Cooper, look through their pictures from production. It's very charming to watch them go through the collection of memories, they obviously look back on the time fondly, and they come off like kindly grandparents leafing through a family album. But in this case the album covers that time when they were involved with one of the greatest movies ever made.

THE COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK (1958)

On his way to receive the International Peace Prize for his work in trying to solve world hunger, particularly for developing a strain of frost resisting plants, scientist Jeremy Spensser is killed in a vehicular accident. Jeremy is survived by a wife and young son, his brother Henry, himself a scientist in the field of automation, and their brain surgeon father William.

William is understandably distraught at the loss of his favored son, and enraged that a mind with so much to offer the human race could be taken from the world due to the weakness of the body it was in. Jeremy's body is buried. But William keeps his brain. With the aid of a disapproving Henry, William revives the brain in a hulking, indestructible mechanical body.

Told that his wife and son died as well, Jeremy is kept hidden away in the laboratory to continue his scientific works. As time passes, the cyborg develops unexpected powers, both mentally (ESP, hypnosis) and mechanically, being able to concentrate energy into deadly rays blasted from its eyes. A friend warned William that a human brain kept in a mechanical body would eventually lose its humanity, and that begins to happen with Jeremy... And when he finds out that not only was he lied to about the fate of his wife and son but also that his brother has fallen in love with his widow, things really get bad.

A well told and interesting MechaFrankenstein story, this movie is especially effective because the imagery captured by director Eugene Lourie and cinematograher John F. Warren has a sort of cold and desolate feeling. That, paired with the sound design and a striking piano score by Van Cleave, makes some of the scenes dealing with the cyborg quite unsettling.

Primarily a production designer/art director, Lourie did do a good bit of directing on television shows, and every time he helmed a theatrical feature it was a monster movie: The Colossus of New York. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. The Giant Behemoth. Gorgo.

The performances are good across the board, but I was really impressed by Ohio-born actor Otto Kruger as William, the father desperate to keep his son's brain alive no matter what. Kruger had a very prolific career, racking up credits on 117 different titles between 1915 and 1964.

CHEERS (1982 - 1993)

Cheers was just a handful of episodes into its second season when I was born and the show remained on the air until well past my ninth birthday, so it was something that was regularly on television throughout my childhood. I watched many an episode with various grandparents who may well have been weekly viewers. It was a show I always liked, though it wasn't a kids' show there was still characters and humor on there that could appeal to people of all ages. The show entered syndication and has lived on in reruns ever since, and I've continued watching sporadically over the years.

When I saw that the entire run of Cheers was available for streaming on Netflix Instant, I decided that I was going to watch my way through all of it. And so I did. Characters came and went, Kelsey Grammer and Woody Harrelson lost their hair an episode at a time, but I made it all the way through. Just over thirteen months later, I have successfully completed the eleven season, 275 episode journey.

I've been in several bars in my life and hated the experience every time, it's just not my scene. But I really enjoy spending time in this fictional variation on a Boston bar. I love the atmosphere of the show, am entertained by the humor, and really like the characters; Ted Danson's skirt chasing Sam Malone, George Wendt's eminently lovable Norm, who's usually unemployed and always spends more time at Cheers than anywhere else, John Ratzenberger's know-it-all postman with mommy issues Cliff, tough talking waitress Carla (Rhea Perlman), etc. In early seasons, Nicholas Colasanto played senile bartender Coach, but when the actor unfortunately passed away new cast member Woody Harrelson was brought on as dimwitted farm boy Woody. 

I crush on 1980s Shelley Long, and one of the biggest cast shakeups of the series happened at the end of the fifth season, when her character, the excessively erudite Diane Chambers, was written out because Long was ready to move on and do other things. Her choice has been mocked ever since, even on episodes of the show as it went on, but I can't fault her for it. Five seasons is a good run, even if it wasn't half as long as the show ended up going. The void left by Diane's exit was filled by Kirstie Alley as the desperate for love and riches, especially riches, Rebecca Howe. A fine replacement, though Long/Diane will always be my favorite of the two.

Another popular character was Kelsey Grammer's psychiatrist Frasier Crane, who was introduced at the beginning of season 3 and ended up not only sticking around for the rest of the show but also got his own spin-off... Which I actually haven't seen very many episodes of, but since it also lasted for 11 seasons he was obviously quite successful on his own. During his time on Cheers, Frasier married Doctor Lilith Sternin, an icy character who I didn't like very much when I was a child, but I enjoy her now and see actress Bebe Neuwirth in a much different light.

Taking over 13 months to watch 275 episodes, obviously there were over 100 days when I didn't log in a full episode, but that still leaves many days in the last year when I was watching Cheers. Most nights, I would go to bed with the show playing out on a computer or a television, eventually drifting off to sleep, picking up the next time at the point where I fell asleep. The last year has been a very tumultuous one, and it was nice to have Cheers there to provide laughter along the way.

As the smartly low-key final episode came to its quiet conclusion, with the final line of "Sorry, we're closed" and Sam Malone stopping to straighten the picture of Geronimo on the bar wall (a picture Nicholas Colasanto had in his dressing room that was put up on the set after he passed away) before walking off into the shadows, my viewing spree came to an end. And I got goosebumps.

Cheers is awesome.

Final Girl Film Club - The Exorcist

February 19, 2013, 9:07 pm

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Cody is endeavoring to write about all of the Final Girl Film Club entries he missed over the years. The movies will be covered in the original Film Club order in most cases, while some of the articles will be posted to coincide with certain dates.

The 1973 classic.

Father Merrin, an elderly priest taking part in an archaeological dig in Iraq. Father Karras, a young priest living in Washington D.C., struggling with a loss of faith and the fact that his job has taken him away from his ailing mother in New York. Chris MacNeil, an actress staying in the Georgetown area of D.C. while she works on a movie in the city. Regan MacNeil, the actress's daughter, dealing with her parents' divorce, her mother showing interest in a new man, and her own burgeoning adolescence. A film-loving police detective. Like people in a Robert Altman or Paul Thomas Anderson film, all of these characters' lives will intersect, but in this case the event tying them all together will be the possession of young Regan by an ancient evil.

Regan's first contact with the demonic entity comes through the use of a Ouija board, that tool of evil mass produced by Parker Brothers. A spirit with the innocuous moniker Captain Howdy can move the Ouija's planchette around the board and answer questions. No big deal, kind of fun. The contact with Howdy coincides with strange occurrences around the house Regan and her mother are staying in. Noises in the attic. A shaking bed. Soon, Regan begins to act strangely herself.

At first, Regan's problems are passed off as symptoms of a nerve disorder. Lying, hyperactivity, lack of concentration, profanity. Her doctor prescribes Ritalin. But that's not the answer. Regan's behavior becomes increasingly bizarre and inappropriate. Very inappropriate. Urinating on the floor in front of party guests inappropriate. The doctor then begins to suspect she might have a lesion on her temporal lobe, which could cause hallucinations and convulsions.

It isn't until 53 minutes into (the director's cut of) the film that it becomes very clear that Regan doesn't have a behavioral disorder or a medical condition. Something evil has a hold on her. Karras is brought in to examine the situation, and when he decides that an exorcism is in order, that's when Merrin, an experienced exorcist, gets involved.

A lot of people have stories to tell about the first time they watched The Exorcist. The luckiest ones were those who were able to discover how frightening it was at the time of its initial release, the best stories would be from the people who actually passed out or vomited in the theatre because the movie got to them so. Now people seek it out and go into it knowing its reputation, so there's a lot of build-up and hype, but it can still work for them.

A girl I used to know has a story about the first time she watched The Exorcist, but it's not an ideal one. The girl was watching the movie with her father, and when Chris MacNeil says something about a "witch doctor" around halfway into the movie, that immediately made him think of the David Seville song. He started singing it and was ting tang walla walla bing banging all over the action from then on. It was disruptive for the girl at the time, but it did make the viewing memorable. She still remembered it 10 years later, and I'm sure she looks back on it fondly in a way.

My own father has a story about the disturbing day on which he first saw The Exorcist, in either 1973 or '74. A day that comes to his mind whenever he drives through a certain intersection. It was thunderstorm season, and as he exited the theatre after watching the movie, a storm was blowing in. Windy, dark sky. Driving home, he came upon a single vehicle accident at an intersection where a car had gone through a stop sign beside a cemetery, crossed the street, and crashed into a tree. The driver and passenger of the car were both killed - a just married bride and groom, still wearing their wedding dress and suit. Unnerved by the movie and the sight of the deceased newlyweds, my father still had to go to work that dark and stormy night, working as a truck driver hauling farm supplies. That night, he had to pick something up at a rickety old building. Walking through the building, the wind blowing outside, the wood plank floors creaking under his shoes... The way he talks about that day, his story has a very creepy and even apocalyptic sort of feeling to it. He and I sometimes have to drive through that intersection, and the tree the couple hit is still missing bark where the car made impact.

Myself, I don't have an interesting story to tell about the first time I watched The Exorcist. I don't really remember it, I just know that I rented it on VHS at some point in my childhood. As years have gone by, I've seen it twice theatrically, first during the 2000 release of "The Version You've Never Seen Before" and the second time at an all-night horror marathon in 2004.

It's a fact that The Exorcist is widely regarded as one of the greatest horror films ever made and one of the scariest. For me personally? I've always liked it, but it's not high on my list of favorites, and I never thought it was scary. Unsettling at moments, yes, but it didn't scare me. When I was a teenager, when it seemed cool to make belittling comments about popular things, I would say that The Exorcist worked best for me as a comedy. Like the line from Beetlejuice, "I've seen The Exorcist about 167 times and it keeps getting funnier every single time I see it!" That's not the case anymore, but in my teens I found the vulgarity spewed by possessed Regan to be amusing.

So The Exorcist isn't one of my top favorites, it never gave me sleepless nights, and my first viewing of it was nothing special. But I do think it's a very well made film. I have a lot of respect for it and the cultural impact it had. It's a movie that does the horror genre proud.

Director William Friedkin was coming straight off of a huge success with The French Connection when he signed on to bring author/screenwriter William Peter Blatty's story to the screen. The French Connection had been nominated for several Academy Awards and won quite a few, including for Adapted Screenplay, Best Picture, and Best Director. And after setting the Oscar on his mantle, Friedkin didn't approach doing horror as slumming it, he didn't work down to the genre like so often happens, he was on his A game making an A picture.

Because of that, a Friedkin film again got a slew of Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. William Peter Blatty won for his screenplay. Friedkin was nominated for Best Director, but while he didn't get the Oscar for The Exorcist, he did get a Golden Globe for it.

The performances from the cast are fantastic. Ellen Burstyn as Chris MacNeil, Linda Blair as Regan, and Jason Miller as Karras all got Oscar nominations. Max von Sydow is wonderful as Merrin. My favorite character in the film is Lee J. Cobb as Kinderman, the detective investigating the possible link between desecration at a church and the mysterious death of the director of the movie Chris MacNeil is working on.

Between the horrific moments, the movie works as a great drama and takes its time letting us get to know the characters. Sometimes it takes a little too much time (the director's cut runs 132 minutes), which is part of why I rank it less highly than some. For example, the first 10 minutes are just Merrin making his way around in Iraq, disturbed by the fact that the archaeological dig has unearthed a statue of the demon Pazuzu, the demon that was involved with a very difficult exorcism he performed years earlier and the demon that will soon inhabit Regan. I find 10 minutes to be a bit much for this sequence, it's always been an awkward start to me. Interestingly, we don't see Merrin again for another 90 minutes, when he's contacted about the exorcism.

The exorcism itself is awesome, a lengthy sequence of intensity and thrills, and the "The power of Christ compels you!" moment gives me goosebumps.

There were some issues getting a score done for the film, it has been said that composer Lalo Schifrin's music was rejected by the studio for being too frightening when paired with the images, a reason which doesn't make much sense to me. The movie does, of course, very memorably feature Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells".

Evangelist Billy Graham was so shocked by The Exorcist that he claimed a demon lived within its celluloid film reels. I've heard similar things before, my schooling was done through Christian schools and at least one of my teachers told her class that watching horror movies made you more susceptible to demonic possession. That didn't go over well with me, already an established horror fan, and my timely reply was that making that claim was like saying watching Jurassic Park made you more likely to be attacked by a dinosaur. In her own Exorcist write-up, Final Girl makes a good point about this movie: beneath the vile images and vulgarity, this really is a story of religion overcoming all, showing its relevancy even in our modern world that has turned to science and psychiatry. Churches should be as open to and accepting of The Exorcist as they are the latest Kirk Cameron movie.

It's not even the demonic possession aspect of the movie that gets to me. As with Rosemary's Baby, it's the medical stuff. Ranting demon kids I can take in stride, but before the possession confirmation, when the doctors are trying to figure out what could be wrong with Regan medically, giving her an EEG and an arteriogram, that stuff bothers me. Clunky, noisy machinery in a hospital room. A needle stuck in Regan's neck. Squirting blood. A doctor warning that she might "feel some pressure" before he sticks a needle into her artery and feeds a line into it. And this being done in the primitive early 1970s. Those are moments to cringe over, that's a situation that scares me to think about.

Part of

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Worth Mentioning - Winner Take All

February 22, 2013, 9:05 am

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We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

 

Cody watched people, one of them Van Damme, take a beating to benefit their families.

 

WOULD YOU RATHER (2012)

Twenty-something Iris has gotten a rough deal from life. Her parents were killed in an accident, leaving her to be the caregiver for her teenage brother Raleigh. Raleigh is very sick, in desperate need of a bone marrow transplant. With her brother's medical bills stacking up, Iris is broke. A man named Shepard Lambrick just might be her salvation. He's the head of The Lambrick Foundation, which has funded the building of clinics and schools around the globe, and he believes in creating opportunities for people less fortunate than himself. When Iris is introduced to him by her brother's doctor, Lambrick invites her to a dinner party, where all of the guests will be people the Foundation is considering helping out. The party will culminate in the playing of a game, and the winner of the game will be completely taken care of. Debts will be paid, investments made, treatments provided, medical donors found and waiting lists bypassed, whatever they need.

Iris goes to the dinner party and finds herself one of eight guests who have gathered from around the country. All of them are in need of Lambrick donations for one reason or another. Soon after dinner is served, the game commences and, unfortunately for his guests, Lambrick proves to have a very twisted idea of fun. He starts off by gleefully breaking down convictions - offering $10,000 to a vegetarian if she'll eat meat, giving a former alcoholic the option of drinking a glass of wine for $10,000 or downing an entire decanter for $50,000.

Then, they move on to the game of "Would You Rather". A game of choices between two painful, harmful options. Choices of whether to hurt a fellow guest or themself. With Lambrick's armed guards watching over the table, everyone is forced to participate. Items like icepicks, razors, and makeshift electroshock devices are involved.

I didn't have high hopes for Would You Rather when I started watching it. With a set-up that basically just amounted to people in one room torturing each other, it sounded like just another cash-in on the fading "torture porn" trend, which I have never really been into. I have a soft spot for the Hostel movies, though I don't revisit them very often, but most of the last decade's torture flicks have been too mean-spirited for me.

It was Would You Rather's cast that got me interested in watching it, an interesting and eclectic mix of personal favorites and familiar faces like Brittany Snow (The Vicious Kind) as Iris, John Heard, retired porn star Sasha Grey, comedy stars Eddie Steeples (My Name Is Earl) and Robb Wells (Trailer Park Boys, Hobo with a Shotgun), and horror icon Jeffrey Combs (Re-Animator) as Shepard Lambrick. It was due to their performances and the pleasant surprise that the film had a dark and ornery sense of humor running through it that I ended up being entertained.

With the choice on the table, I would watch Would You Rather again, and I wouldn't need to be given $10,000 to do so. Although if someone were to make the offer, I'd take it.

LIONHEART (1990)

When his brother is murdered in Los Angeles, burned to death during a drug deal gone bad, Lyon Gaultier (Jean-Claude Van Damme) goes A.W.O.L. from the French Foreign Legion and heads to the United States. Trying to cover his expenses and help out the wife and daughter his brother left behind, Lyon gets caught up in a world of underground fights organized and bet on by thrill-seeking, bloodthirsty rich folks.

Dubbed Lionheart by his foul-mouthed manager, Lyon fights his way through the ranks of the circuit's fighters in bouts held in venues like a parking garage, raquetball court, and an almost-empty swimming pool. In his down time, Lyon has to evade the Legionnaires sent to arrest him for desertion.

The action builds up to a climactic match between Lionheart and a cat-stroking, mutton chopped beast of a man called Atilla. Like Bloodsport's Chong Li and Kickboxer's Tong Po, Atilla is a fighter who crosses the line and causes unnecessary harm to his opponents, sometimes even killing them. To add to the trouble, Lyon goes into their fight nursing a broken rib...

Lionheart was a re-teaming of Van Damme with Bloodsport co-writer Sheldon Lettich, this time they wrote the screenplay together and Lettich directed the film. The first film Lettich received a writing credit on was Josh Becker's 1985 indie cult classic Thou Shalt Not Kill... Except, which was co-written by Evil Dead II co-writer Scott Spiegel. Spiegel went on from there to write and direct the great slasher Intruder, which was produced by longtime Quentin Tarantino collaborator Lawrence Bender. Spiegel and Bender both cameo in Lionheart, Spiegel as a bookie at the pool fight and Bender as a heckling spectator whose date is excited to get a splatter of fighter blood across her chest, even licking some of it off her finger.

Van Damme handled the fight choreography along with Frank Dux, the man whose life story inspired Bloodsport, and Kickboxer's Tong Po himself, Michel Qissi.

Lionheart is an enjoyable film, and though I don't find it quite as entertaining as those two preceding Van Damme movies now, I was very impressed by it when it first hit VHS, when I was seven years old. We rented it as soon as it came out and I watched it several times, even inviting my friend from across the street over to watch it with me. After the movie, we had one of our own play fight tournaments. Unfortunately, the Van Damme movie-esque dynamics of our fights did not work in my favor. We were the same age, but I was bigger than him and could pick him up and throw him around if given the chance. But he took karate lessons, and with his training in the arts could overcome my brute strength. He was a tough one and his hits hurt.

When watching Lionheart back in those days, I was totally convinced that Atilla was played by Andre the Giant. That's a belief I held on to for the last twenty-two years, and only found out upon revisiting it this week that Andre the Giant is not in this film. Atilla is actually played by Michel Qissi's older brother Abdel Qissi.

Film Appreciation - Like a Virgin

February 25, 2013, 9:01 pm

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Cody Hamman looks back on the track at Quentin Tarantino's 1992 debut Reservoir Dogs for Film Appreciation.

Young cinephile Quentin Tarantino had long been trying to figure out the perfect way to get his own filmmaking career started, what would be the right film to be his first film. He had started filming a couple different projects, Love Birds in Bondage and My Best Friend's Birthday, but they had gone unfinished, the footage for both either partially or completely destroyed. He considered directing his screenplays True Romance and Natural Born Killers, but ended up selling them to be made by others. When the True Romance script was passed along to Tony Scott, who would go on to direct that film, it came along with NBK and another screenplay by Tarantino. That third one was entitled Reservoir Dogs, and Scott liked it so much that he wanted to direct it as well. But it wasn't for sale. Though there had been some thought given to the idea of Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop) possibly directing it, Tarantino had decided: Reservoir Dogs was going to be his directorial debut.

 

Dogs had the perfect set-up for a low budget first film; following a group of criminals with colorful codenames (an aspect inspired by The Taking of Pelham One Two Three) dealing with the aftermath of a diamond heist gone spectacularly wrong, it was a dialogue-heavy story requiring a small cast, most of its action set inside one warehouse location, with flashbacks to flesh out the characters and occasionally widen the scope beyond the warehouse walls. The production started out on a level comparable to other breakout indie films of that time like Richard Linklater's Slacker and Kevin Smith's Clerks, Tarantino had a $30,000 budget and was going to shoot the movie on 16mm, the cast to be filled out by himself and his friends. That plan changed when the script ended up in the hands of an established and highly respected actor. Harvey Keitel.

 

With Keitel's support, and with him signing on to play the prominent role of Mister White, Tarantino and his producer Lawrence Bender were able to raise a budget over just over $1 million and cast some familiar faces. In the summer of 1991, Quentin Tarantino began shooting his first film at the age of 28. A very successful career was born.

It's no wonder that Tarantino skyrocketed from there. His only film school was a life of watching and studying movies, as well as his experience on the troubled My Best Friend's Birthday, but it's clear in Reservoir Dogs that he had learned a lot along the way. The style he brought to the film and choices he made behind the camera yielded results that are very impressive and would be for someone at any point in their career, the fact that he was just starting out only makes it more so. This guy knew cinema. And music, judging by the awesome soundtrack. He also showed natural ability in writing dialogue and crafting characters, and he assembled a cast that brought his characters to life in a fantastic way.

 

Each member of the criminal crew stands out in their own way, regardless of the size of their overall role; Keitel as White, Michael Madsen as the bloodthirsty Mister Blonde, Tim Roth as the secretive Mister Orange, prolific character actor Lawrence Tierney and Chris Penn as the boss and his Nice Guy son, convict-turned-author Eddie Bunker in a cameo as Mister Blue, and Tarantino himself as the Madonna-ruminating Mister Brown. But probably the most popular of the bunch is Steve Buscemi as the anti-tipping, alias-complaining Mister Pink.

Buscemi is how I heard about Reservoir Dogs, and the publicity for the movie is how I heard about Buscemi. The first time I saw him, he was an MTV VJ as far as I knew. He was hosting a show on the music channel and seems like he did it for a few days at least. I would come home from school, turn on MTV, and watch this guy introduce videos. I liked him. At a point he mentioned that he had a role in a movie that was coming out soon, and he showed a clip from Reservoir Dogs, a clip of the scene in which Pink finds out that his codename is Pink. I enjoyed it. I was in. When I got a chance, I was going to watch the movie this guy was in.

 

My chance came soon after Reservoir Dogs was released on VHS soon before my tenth birthday. Despite my age, I was determined to check this movie out, and I convinced my parents to rent it during a visit to a local video store. I didn't have many restrictions when it came to movie watching. Unfortunately, soon after the movie started I ran into an obstacle that could not be overcome: bedtime. It was a school night.

 

When my mom picked me up after school the next afternoon, I asked her how the movie had gone over. My father was the only one of us who had watched the entire movie the night before, and I found out that he hadn't liked it. The main reason? "They never left the warehouse." He never was a big fan of things outside the norm. When I watched it myself that evening, I enjoyed it much more than my father had.

I remembered Tarantino's name after that and looked forward to his follow-up film, Pulp Fiction, when news started coming out about it. In 1994, I hesitantly checked out a movie called True Romance and was totally taken by surprise at how cool it was. And I noticed that Tarantino had written it. By the time Pulp Fiction reached VHS almost a whole year after it had played in theatres, I was beyond hyped to finally get to see it. Watching it solidified my fandom.

 

I've been writing my entire life, I started before I could even write words formed with letters from the alphabet, filling papers with stories told in squiggles. My intention was always to write screenplays (and comic books), and eventually I learned how to format a script when my mom ordered bound copies of the Star Wars trilogy screenplays for me from a home shopping channel. When Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, True Romance, and Kevin Smith's Clerks and Mallrats started reaching video in rapid succession, my writing started evolving. The dialogue in these movies was something much different than I was used to hearing, and through watching these movies over and over again, it helped me develop and improve the dialogue in my own work.

 

Until last year, I had only ever seen Reservoir Dogs on home video. VHS rental, then recorded onto a VHS, then a purchased copy, and finally the 10th anniversary DVD. The DVD came out with variant slipcovers featuring different characters, and I chose to buy one with the Mister Pink slipcover. Last December, Fathom Events hosted a one-night-only 20th anniversary theatrical screening of Reservoir Dogs, and I was there. It was nice to finally see the movie on the big screen, with a handful of fellow fans in attendance. Reservoir Dogs started it all for Quentin Tarantino, and his career has meant a lot to me over the years.

Worth Mentioning - The Dead Offer No Quarter

March 1, 2013, 4:55 pm

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We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

 

After several months divided, Cody and Jay are reteamed to talk action, documentaries, and horror.

 

GANGSTER SQUAD (2013)

In 1949 Los Angeles, gangster Mickey Cohen is making a ruthless play to take over the city's illegal enterprises, killing, intimidating, and buying his way to the top. Cohen owns cops, judges, high-ranking officials that could impede his progress, and he's doing well in his endeavors. When he comes home at the end of the day, his maid is waiting at the door for him with a hot fudge sundae. It appears that crime really does pay.

But the Chief of Police is not in Cohen's pocket, and he has decided to assemble a secret task force with the goal of stopping Cohen from establishing an all-powerful empire. The officers on the squad will not present themselves as cops, they will not make arrests, they will just wreak havoc on Cohen's businesses and thwart his plans.

The squad is led and assembled by war veteran/fledgling family man John O'Mara, who finds his team members not by going after the best and the brightest who are likely to be promoted up the ranks, since Cohen would already have his eye on them, but from people who know the streets and are a little rough around the edges. There's a techie, one who's an expert knife thrower when the situation calls for it (The Magnificent Seven and Young Guns taught us that any good team needs a knife thrower), a legendary gunslinger/cowboy throwback who prefers to keep fanning the hammer on his six shooter even when the baddies are double fisting tommy guns, the cowboy's protégé, and another damaged WWII vet who doesn't get involved until things get personal for him, and who's seeing Cohen's mistress/sophistication tutor on the side.

Sean Penn gives an awesome performance as the brutal, sadistic, scummy Cohen, the typically captivating Emma Stone continues to captivate as the moll stuck in the middle, and the gangster squad itself is made up of bunch of actors who are great to watch - Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Anthony Mackie, Robert Patrick, Michael Peña, and Giovanni Ribisi.

Inspired by real events that were chronicled in a seven article series published in the Los Angeles Times, Gangster Squad uses the basics of the true story as a jumping off point for a fun cops and criminals action flick. Stylishly directed by Ruben Fleischer, it mixes period style with a slightly heightened reality, looking like a pulp comic come to life but not going all the way to Sin City territory.

THE LAST STAND (2013)

Taking the lead role in a movie for the first time in 10 years, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Ray Owens, the sheriff of Sommerton Junction, Arizona, a tiny desert town on the Mexico border. Owens came to Sommerton to live a quiet life after working narcotics in Los Angeles, and a whole lot of peace appears to be exactly what he's gotten. Owens only has three police officers working under him, and they don't see much, if any, action. Until drug kingpin Gabriel Cortez escapes from F.B.I. custody in Las Vegas and makes a run for Mexico on a course that will take him right down the Main Street of Sommerton Junction.

This movie is sort of a modern day Western, its story has echoes of Rio Bravo and High Noon, though I've never seen a Western where the villain had a superpowered horse: with his henchman setting up things ahead of him and running block, Cortez is racing toward Mexico in a modified Corvette Zero One that can reach 200 mph.

As Cortez rapidly approaches their town, Owens, his officers, a deputized troublemaker, and a local resident with a deep appreciation for firearms make it their duty to stop the criminal from reaching freedom.

South Korean director Jee-woon Kim makes his English language film debut with The Last Stand, and while he may not have an ear for American accents yet, judging by the dodgy fake ones a couple cast members put on, he does good work with the visuals and action, and shows a welcome willingness to let our heroes take some battle damage.

Though Schwarzenegger's return hasn't done very well at the box office, it's a good, cool movie that I would say is actually one of the better films of his career.


Jay's Mentions:

It's been eight months since I've found the time or energy to sit down and write some mentions, so I'm briefly going to list a few titles that I've found worth mentioning as of late.

UNDEFEATED (2011), which won the Oscar for Best Documentary at the 2012 Academy Awards. The film is directed by Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin and follows a volunteer football coach who is trying to resurrect a fledgling football team in the inner city of North Memphis, Tennessee. It's a very touching film and well worth a watch if you enjoy a good documentary or are a sports fan. It's interesting to note that this film beat out Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory which is based on a story out of West Memphis, Arkansas. The two towns are only a few minutes apart and are both parts of the greater Memphis, Tennessee area.
 

Speaking of West Memphis, and the West Memphis Three story, I also really enjoyed the Peter Jackson produced documentary WEST OF MEMPHIS (2012), which isn't connected to the Paradise Lost saga, but is a continuation of the same story. The film is directed very well by Amy Berg and is extremely emotional.

The Walking Dead is a pretty solid show on AMC, and if you haven't checked it out yet, I recommend giving it a try. My favorite thing "Walking Dead" isn't the show or even the comic book the show is based on, but a spinoff of the franchise in the form of a video game released by Telltale, with the same title as both the comic and show.

I was a pretty big gamer in my early teens, mainly focusing on sports related games, but I haven't had much interest in playing anything in years. To keep me busy during the wait between episodes for AMC's The Walking Dead, I decided to give the Telltale game a shot, and fell in love with it. It's been the most emotionally impactful piece of art that I have encountered in quite a while, and when I call it art, I mean it.

The game is a point and click adventure in which you play as a former college professor who is currently on his way to prison for murder. You don't make it that far, as the zombie apocalypse hits while you are being transferred to prison, and you seek refuge in the home of a young girl who has no one to care for her. You and the girl team up and meet a number of highly entertaining characters along the way as you try to keep each other safe.

This isn't so much a zombie killing game as it is a character driven game. It's extremely well written and voice acted for a game and leaves you making some very difficult decisions. At a moment's notice you will be forced to choose to save one person over another, to hold out hope someone isn't turning into a zombie or to kill them on the spot, and even how far you'll go to risk your own body in order to stay safe. If you are into gaming, or just want to be sucked into a world where your decisions determine the fates of those around you, give this game a look. It's available for your computer (both PC and Mac) or PS3 and XBox 360.

Here's a teaser trailer for the game as well as my favorite score piece.

Die Hard Marathon

March 6, 2013, 6:24 pm

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On February 13th, select theatres had a marathon of the Die Hard movies, ending with the premiere of A Good Day to Die Hard. Cody was at one of those theatres.

I'm really liking this new trend of theatres holding marathons of franchises to coincide with the release of new sequels and/or Blu-ray collections. Last year, I attended and enjoyed such marathons for the Marvel Avengers movies and the Indiana Jones series, and there were others, like Lord of the Rings and Twilight marathons, that weren't as appealing to me personally but I'm sure were fun experiences for their attending fans. So when I heard that the same was being done for the Die Hard franchise, I was totally up for it. The Die Hards are movies I'd be happy to spend a day watching in a theatre, and it's perfect timing for this - 2013 is the 25th anniversary of the first Die Hard, the Blu-ray collection just came out, and the marathon would culminate with the 10pm premiere of the latest sequel in the series.

Before hearing about the marathon, I had been contemplating having a different mini-marathon on the opening day of the new Die Hard. Since Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Willis were going to have movies coming out every other week, I was thinking of having an '80s throwback triple feature of The Last Stand, Bullet to the Head, and A Good Day to Die Hard. That wouldn't have worked out anyway, since The Last Stand had already left the first-run theatre by the time AGDTDH hit. In the weeks since, I have managed to see Arnie and Sly's new movies at the dollar theatre.

I've been missing a lot of new releases over the last couple months because, as mentioned in my Spider-Man 3 write-up, I've been worrying over and dealing with the health issues that my dog Zeppelin has been going through. Over the three days prior to the Die Hard marathon, it was looking like that situation wasn't quite as taken care of as it seemed to be when I wrote about S-M3, the growth of his lip seemed to be coming back and that didn't jibe with the veterinarian's initial belief that it had been benign. The marathon was on Wednesday and Zeppelin was scheduled to have a second surgery that Friday. So if I hadn't already bought my ticket, I would've skipped the Die Hard spree to focus on my dog, but with the money already invested I made my way to the theatre to spend the day watching John McClane save the day.

I opted not to drive to the marathon, since it was being held at a theatre in a town I wasn't familiar with, and instead got dropped off there around 11:30am. I got my pre-printed ticket ripped, bought a large drink with free refills, and went to the auditorium where the marathon would be screening. Auditorium 4, which was in "the basement" of this 16 screen theatre. That meant walking up and down a flight of stairs to get to and from this auditorium for restroom breaks and concession stand visits, providing some light exercise over the course of a day largely spent sitting in a dark room. I took a seat among the other attendees, a group that numbered in the 40s, and at noon the show began.
 

DIE HARD (1988)

In 1968, Frank Sinatra played a character named Joe Leland in the Twentieth Century Fox release The Detective, based on a novel of the same name by Roderick Thorp. So when Fox started developing a film adaptation of Thorp's 1979 sequel novel Nothing Lasts Forever, Sinatra was offered the chance to reprise the role of Leland. After Sinatra turned it down, ties to The Detective were cut. Internet rumors say the studio considered adapting the story into a sequel to 1985's Commando starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, but Steven E. de Souza, a screenwriter on both Commando and Die Hard, has denied that. Instead, it became a standalone film with a main character named John McClane.

Many popular actors of the '80s were up for the role of McClane, many of them turned it down, the names that were gradually crossed off the list included Burt Reynolds, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone. When Bruce Willis, star of TV's Moonlighting, signed on, there were those who questioned whether he was suited to be an action hero. But when the finished film reached screens, it turned out that Willis, director John McTiernan, and writers Jeb Stuart and de Souza had created an action icon.

What makes McClane such a great character is that he's not the sort of superhero that action stars so often portray and which he could've been in the hands of a different director and actor. He's a regular guy, a police detective, an 11 year veteran of the NYPD. He's a man with flaws and relatable problems. When we first meet him, he's scared, gripping the armrests of his seat tightly as the plane he's on comes in for a landing in Los Angeles. He's afraid of flying. McClane has come to L.A. to spend Christmas with his wife Holly and their two young children, who moved out to the west coast six months earlier so Holly could continue moving up the ranks with her career at the Nakatomi Corporation. We get the impression that this visit is make or break for John and Holly's marriage, especially when he arrives at the new, still partially under construction Nakatomi Plaza skyscraper office building to find that she's reverted to using her maiden name.
 

 

The only people in the thirty-five story building this evening are the ones attending a Christmas party/business deal celebration on the thirtieth floor. McClane goes up to 30 to check in and catch up with Holly, have a talk that turns into an argument... And when the party is crashed by thirteen terrorists, McClane is the only person who manages not to be killed or taken hostage. He's the only person who can stop the terrorists, and in doing so, save Holly. An average cop, barefoot and in his tank top undershirt when things go down, armed initially with only his service issue Beretta, going up against thirteen men armed with pistols, machine guns, assault rifles, C4, and cases of guided missiles. McClane is in way over his head.

Willis/McClane is surrounded by a great supporting cast; Bonnie Bedelia as Holly, Reginald VelJohnson and De'voreaux White as LAPD Sergeant Al Powell and Argyle, McClane's friends on the outside, Paul Gleason as the frustratingly dim and mistrusting Deputy Police Chief Dwayne T. Robinson (basically Gleason's Principal Vernon character from The Breakfast Club with more authority), William Atherton as overzealous and unscrupulous TV reporter Richard Thornburg, Robert Davi and Grand L. Bush as FBI agents Johnson and Johnson (no relation). There are characters you connect with, who you care about, and even the ones you don't like are enjoyable to watch. Especially entertaining to me is Hart Bochner as Holly's co-worker Ellis, a coke-snorting yuppie douche with bad ideas, an interest in Holly that goes beyond professional, and a very high opinion of himself.

Alan Rickman does fantastic work as Hans Gruber, the sharp dressed and classically educated head of the villains. His interplay with this "cowboy" who's messing up his plans is great, and partially improvised - Willis has said that he came up with the "Yippee ki-yay" line that became his character's catchphrase on the spot.

 

Rickman is British playing German, and his crew of baddies is made up of actors from all over Europe - Russia, Germany, Italy, Austria - with a couple Americans and the legendary Al Leong thrown in for good measure. They don't all get a lot of screen time, but most of them make an impression in their own way, whether it be certain lines, the way they react to what's going on, or even taking a moment to eat some candy bars. Two of the henchmen are brothers, and even before we know that for sure it's nicely conveyed in a scene where one antagonizes the other with his different, more brash approach to a task they have to perform. One of the brothers is Karl, played by Russian ballet star Alexander Godunov, who becomes one of McClane's biggest problems, because he has a personal vendetta against him - Karl's brother Tony (Andreas Wisniewski, who fought James Bond in The Living Daylights the year before Die Hard) is the first of the bad guys to be killed by McClane.

While Gruber puts on a front that this raid on Nakatomi is all about punishing the company for the greediness of its international endeavors and to negotiate the release of imprisoned fellow "freedom fighters", Gruber has no real allegiance to any other groups or belief in causes - the terrorist act is a front for a heist, the theft of $600 million from a vault within the building. $600 million is only ten days of operating capital for Nakatomi, it shouldn't be such a problem. But McClane causes a lot of trouble for Gruber...

And McClane doesn't have an easy time of it, either. He takes a hell of a beating along the way. In a very effectively emotional scene late in the film, McClane is bloody and hurting and feeling backed into a corner, knowing that he's not likely to get out of this alive, so he contacts Al Powell via walkie talkie to send out a heartfelt message that Powell is meant to relay to Holly when this is all over, an imperfect husband's final words to the wife he loves.

 

Die Hard is a simple set-up masterfully executed on every level. Direction, writing, acting, the cinematography by Jan De Bont, the musical score by Michael Kamen, it's all top notch. It's easy to understand why the film became so popular and why it ranks as a favorite for so many people. It's certainly one of my favorite action movies, and has been since I first saw it at the age of five.

I've watched Die Hard many times over the years, on cable and on VHS, eventually on DVD. I watched it with parents and grandparents, and it's what I was watching when I discovered that no matter the quality of the film, my paternal grandmother would not abide any movie that had multiple droppings of the F bomb. I had never seen the movie on the big screen before, so getting to see it at the marathon with an audience of forty other appreciative fans was a really fun experience.


After the movie ended, there was a brief intermission, uneventful aside from some musical chairs played by latecomers looking for a better vantage point. When 2:35 rolled around, it was time for

DIE HARD 2 (1990) 

The first sequel is based on a novel by Walter Wager called 58 Minutes, which had nothing to do with Die Hard or John McClane (or even Joe Leland) before Fox had screenwriters Steven E. de Souza and Doug Richardson take the story and adapt it into a second McClane adventure. First published in 1987, the novel is about a police officer getting caught up in the middle of a terrorist plot at an airport during a Christmas season blizzard. While Die Hard had been a relatively faithful adaptation of Thorp's Nothing Lasts Forever, name changes and tweaks to motivation aside, Die Hard 2 mainly just went with the basic set-up of 58 Minutes.

Producer Joel Silver gave the directing job to Renny Harlin, based on the dailies of The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, a job Harlin had gotten at Fox after his version of Alien 3 fell apart. Harlin went straight from Fairlane to work on Die Hard 2, and filming began just seven months before the set release date. This wasn't the only sequel Harlin was hired to do extremely quickly - on A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, which he pulled off impressively enough that Fox gave him that ill-fated Alien 3 gig, he started shooting just four months before release.

As part 2 begins, we find that John McClane has transferred from the NYPD to the LAPD to live happily with Holly and the kids, but now he's back on the east coast, spending the holidays at his in-laws' in Virginia. Holly is flying in from LA to the Washington Dulles International Airport on Christmas Eve, and while John waits for her flight to arrive he's thinking that the biggest trouble he'll have to deal with today is the fact that the car he borrowed from his mother-in-law has been towed to the impound because he left it in a No Parking zone.

But then McClane notices a couple guys acting oddly in the presence of airport police officers, catches a glimpse of a gun under one guy's coat. He follows these suspicious characters into a restricted area of the airport, shots are fired, a bad guy is killed, and McClane has stumbled into another terrorist situation. Soon the runway lights have been shut off remotely, communications between the tower and the planes cut off. The flights that had been coming in for a landing, including Holly's, are forced to circle in the sky overhead, waiting for comms and lights to come back on.

McClane is in over his head again, but he has some experience with this sort of situation now, so the threat level is increased. This time the terrorists are a team of former Special Forces soldiers. All of them were believed to have died while serving their country, but they've faked their deaths to go rogue and take part in this mission headed up by their commander, William Sadler as Colonel Stuart.

Only one flight will be allowed to land at Dulles while Stuart and his men are in control, the one carrying deposed dictator General Ramon Esperanza (played by Franco "Django" Nero). Most of what we know about Esperanza is gleaned from exposition delivered through television news reports: Two years earlier, Esperanza led the army of the South American country Val Verde (a fictional place that de Souza has used and referenced several times in his work, including in Commando) in a fight against Communist insurgents, a fight that the U.S. supported and funded. Those funds were cut off when Esperanza's men started violating the neutrality of neighboring countries, but a certain official in the Pentagon kept supplying Esperanza with weapons despite a Congressional ban, while he made up for the money loss by going into the cocaine smuggling business. Now Esperanza is a political prisoner, touted as the first prisoner in the war on drugs, and is being extradited to the U.S. One reporter informs us that despite his illegal actions, Esperanza still has ardent supporters in Val Verde and abroad. Stuart and his men are some of those supporters, Stuart was in fact the man who kept supplying Esperanza with weapons. He sees Esperanza as a noble warrior in the fight against Communism, and when he lands in Dulles, Stuart will rescue him from captivity.

That's the plan, anyway. McClane does his best to make sure it doesn't happen, while hoping to get all of this sorted out before Holly's plane runs out of fuel.

McClane's reputation proceeds him in this film, as the Nakatomi situation got a lot of press and even got him a guest spot on Nightline, and you'd think that might make people more likely to listen to him, but it actually has the opposite effect with Captain Carmine Lorenzo of the airport police. Played by Dennis Franz, Lorenzo is completely over-the-top in his resistance of having anything to do with McClane, constantly shooting him down, berating him, belittling his opinion. He's so high strung that you waver between hating him and feeling concerned for him because he seems like he might burst something vital inside at any moment during his rages and just drop dead. McClane slaps him with a zinger at one point that makes absolutely no sense - "What sets off the metal detectors first? The lead in your ass or the shit in your brains?" That seems to get to Lorenzo for a moment, but he's probably just confused by the nonsense McClane has thrown at him.

Luckily, McClane doesn't just have to deal with Lorenzo, there are some more helpful people at the airport, like Fred Dalton Thompson and Art Evans as tower workers Trudeau and Barnes, Tom Bower as Marvin the tunnel rat janitor, and Sheila McCarthy as a reporter. Eventually an anti-terrorist Special Forces unit called Blue Light arrives, led by John Amos as Major Grant, a man who knows Stuart personally. Indeed, he taught Stuart everything he knows.

I can remember when this movie was first coming out. I knew when it was made being made because my father had been close to the set on one of his trucking jobs, the bright lights nearby had been shining down on the filming of Die Hard 2. I was already a fan of the first, so I was excited that there was going to be a sequel. My film fandom had taken a step forward in 1989 as I had started buying movie magazines and reading about productions, and DH2 was covered in some of the magazines I got. When I finally got to see it on video, I thought it was great.

Thinking back, I didn't really judge movies in franchises against each other when I was a kid, I just took them all as a whole, a package deal, and if I liked a series it was always fun to get more entries in it. I'm still into following franchises, but I don't still hold that "all sequels are equal" idea (that will be very clear later in this write-up), and Die Hard 2 has fallen down a few notches for me over the years. Watching it now, I can see that there was a dip in the quality of the writing between the first and second movies, and it's way too much of a "repeat the beat" sort of sequel. Christmas, Holly in peril, Lorenzo is the Robinson stand-in, Marvin humorously references World War II like one of the Johnsons did Vietnam, Al Powell lends a hand, Thornburg just happens to be on Holly's flight and causes trouble again. Like McClane himself opines, "How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?" It's crazy.

But I still think it's an enjoyable movie, the airport setting and the villain angle are good stuff. The effects like the model airplanes and exploding miniatures are quite charming these days, and I've always had a soft spot for the moment when McClane escapes an exploding plane in an ejector seat. When I was a kid, the aerial shot looking down on the explosion with McClane flying up into the camera was one of the most spectacular things I had ever seen. This also has one of the best henchman kills in the series, especially from a horror/slasher fan's perspective, with McClane jamming an icicle into the guy's eye, then snapping it off. I can remember that kill even getting mentioned in Fangoria a time or two. In a TV cut of the film, there's an edited version of a swear that I've often used myself since hearing it - while one TV version famously ended the "Yippee ki-yay" catchphrase with "Mister Falcon", the one I heard and repeat is "motherfather".


Today, the most shocking thing about the first two movies is the sight of McClane smoking cigarettes while walking around inside public buildings, surrounded by people who are just going about their business instead of looking at him in disgust or telling him to step outside. During part 2, I noticed that someone in the theatre auditorium was doing some smoking of their own, but this fellow was puffing away on an e-cig. First time I had seen that happen.

The intermission between the second and third films is when I decided to stop by the concession stand to get a large bucket of popcorn, which I could get refilled for free later. Then it was 5pm and my favorite of the sequels began.

 

DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE (1995)

The third film in the series started out as an original script titled Simon Says. Written by Jonathan Hensleigh, it made the rounds in the spec market for a while and there were possibilities that it could become a film starring Brandon Lee or that Warner Bros. would purchase it and turn it into Lethal Weapon 4 before it ended up in the hands of John McTiernan, who thought it was the perfect story to drop John McClane into. So Hensleigh rewrote Simon Says into Die Hard with a Vengeance, and McTiernan returned to the director's chair.

 

When we catch up with McClane this time, we find that he has pretty much self-destructed since "Die Harder". His marriage to Holly has fallen apart again, they haven't even spoken to each other in almost a year. He's living in New York again, back on the NYPD, but he's also been hitting the booze hard and his behavior has earned him a suspension. He's nursing a hangover when he gets dragged into another terrorist situation.

 

 

After setting off a bomb in a department store, a man who calls himself Simon and likes to speak in riddles phones the police and demands that McClane be forced to perform specific tasks within certain amounts of time or else more bombs will be detonated in other places around the city. McClane is sent running all over New York at Simon's whim, a Harlem shopkeeper named Zeus Carver and played by Samuel L. Jackson getting caught up with him along the way. The things McClane and Zeus are forced to do are sometimes humiliating, usually dangerous, and occasionally seemingly impossible. With them being sent all over the place and having to check in with Simon through pay phones, the first hour of the film reminds me a bit of one sequence in Dirty Harry, it's sort of an action-packed expansion on that idea.

 

The film switches gears when the identity of Simon is revealed - Simon Gruber, brother of Hans. He's not just a mad bomber and he's not only seeking vengeance against McClane. The fact that he's able to toy with McClane in this situation is just icing on the cake, most of the bombs are just creating distraction, he and his team of henchmen are actually seeking to pull off a heist even bigger than robbing Nakatomi Plaza: emptying the Federal Reserve of all its gold, $140 billion worth. Simon is played by Jeremy Irons, appropriately a British actor playing German just like Alan Rickman, and in that accent soup Irons drops a delivery of "Good Lord" that is another Die Hard line I quote regularly.

 

The supporting cast features some solid work from Larry Bryggman, Graham Greene, Colleen Camp, Anthony Peck, and Kevin Chamberlin as McClane's boss and co-workers at the police department, and despite his issues he doesn't meet much resistance from them, he doesn't have to deal with any bullheaded jerks, the good guys are actually on his side for once. On the villain's side there are most notably Nick Wyman as Simon's collaborator Targo, who thinks too much time and attention is being wasted on McClane, and Sam Phillips as the mute and bloodthirsty Katya, who makes a badass entrance. She's the first henchwoman in the series, and the two films that have followed both have one.

 

 

With a Vengeance is a fantastic film in itself and as a sequel it takes the approach that I prefer one to take - rather than going formulaic and doing all it can to shoehorn every element and character that made an impression in its predecessors, it takes the most important element, the character of John McClane, and goes its own way, in a story with a wider scope. Other ideas developed for part 3 between '90 and '95 had smaller settings, taking place on a cruise ship (Steven Seagal's Under Siege was integral in the scuttling of that version) and in the Los Angeles subway system. They likely would've been the same thing all over again, which would've been a mistake when "Die Hard on/in a ---" plots were already a joke.

The movie has balls, the last Die Hard movie to really have them as the two sequels since have both played it safe in their own ways. It's sort of astonishing that a big summer tentpole blockbuster release opens the way this one does, with McClane walking through Harlem wearing a sign with a racist message on it dictated by Simon, and that it deals with racial tension in the interaction between McClane and Zeus. There's a grittiness to DH3 that feels reminiscent of 1970s movies.

The violence is brutal and bloody, and McClane again takes a beating in some great encounters with henchmen. He may have been hurting more at the end of the first film, but he's still a mess in this one. As far as nasty bad guy deaths go, I really enjoy the moment when a henchmen gets sliced in half by a tow cable and McClane and Zeus end up dragging his two pieces away side-by-side.

McTiernan again did awesome work behind the camera, and the quality of the writing swung back upwards. Hensleigh's set-up is great and McClane was worked into it flawlessly. Other writers did some uncredited revisions, including Die Hard 2 co-writer Doug Richardson. I've always suspected that Quentin Tarantino might have done a polish, there's just something there that feels vaguely Tarantinoid, but I could just be imagining it because this movie is a Pulp Fiction reunion with Willis and Jackson and was made right in between PF and the anthology movie Four Rooms, in which Willis appeared in a segment directed by Tarantino. They were around each other at that time, why wouldn't Willis pass the script over to him and ask him to punch it up? Then again, if it happened we'd probably know about it for sure by now.

The only slightly weak point in the movie is the climax. They had trouble figuring out how to end it, and the final battle that they ended up with was a reshoot. But it works. Interestingly, the ending of the previous year's big action release from Fox, Speed, was originally written by Doug Richardson for a draft of DHWAV.

 

Die Hard with a Vengeance was the first of the series that I got to see in theatres. I was hyped up for it, I had followed the Die Hard 3 developments in movie magazines over the five years since part 2, read rumors that 3 and 4 were going to be shot back-to-back, watched TV reports about the production. My father and I were there opening day, reaching our seats so early that we sat through the end credits of the screening before the one we were there for. It was worth the anticipation I had built up for it. I loved the movie from the first time I saw it and caught a bit of DHWAV fever that summer - I bought the novelization, I bought the soundtrack, I had my uncle read the novelization since he had missed the movie in theatres. Almost 18 years later (that's insane), I was glad to get to see it on the big screen with an audience again.


And with that, we had reached the ending of the original trilogy and were about to enter ground both shaky and uncertain. It took twelve years for the sequel after Vengeance to come out, but we only had to wait until 7:30pm for it start.

 

LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD (2007)

It should come as no surprise that the fourth film didn't start out as a Die Hard movie. The roots for the story go back to an article about information warfare written for Wired magazine in 1997 by a journalist named John Carlin. Fox bought the rights to turn the article, titled "A Farewell to Arms", into a film soon after it was published. Years of development followed, writers Jon Bokenkamp and James Robinson did drafts, Enemy of the State co-writer David Marconi signed on to work on the script after the release of that film. The working title was WW3.com and there was talk that it could be a tentpole release in 1999. Obviously they missed that year. Luc Besson was attached to direct in 2000, then moved on at some point. Marconi's script got some press soon after 9/11 because the climax featured a plane crashing into a Simon & Garfunkel concert in Central Park. The similarities to reality slowed the project down for a while... until there came the idea of turning it into Die Hard 4, which had long been in development hell itself. Multiple potential DH4 plots had been passed around over the years, at one point the project was called Die Hard 4: Tears of the Sun, and that subtitle so appealed to Bruce Willis that he negotiated to have it used as the title of a movie he made at a different studio.

Mark Bomback was the screenwriter tasked with retrofitting Marconi's WW3.com script into a new episode in the life of John McClane. 9/11 wasn't the only real life tragedy that was mirrored in this project, on the way to the shooting draft Bomback wrote in a sequence where the Huey P. Long Bridge in New Orleans is blown up, along with an oil tanker in the water below, the power of the blast flooding the city under seventy foot tall waves. That was written out after Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005. Bomback's work got the project a greenlight, but Bruce Willis wasn't satisfied with it. He went to Doug Richardson personally to get him to write a completely different take on the third sequel, which Richardson did. And Willis loved it. But in the end, Fox felt the Marconi/Bomback story was more marketable, so they stuck with it. And filming commenced with a script that Willis didn't like.

Fox sought to increase the film's marketability even more by making it the only one in the series to be released with a PG-13 rating. The others were rated R and had the profanity and blood to earn it, but this would be a Die Hard that my grandmother who had objected to the original would be able to give an OK to. (An unrated version with blood and F-bombs put back in was released on home video.)

As the screening of the fourth movie began at the marathon with the 20th Century Fox logo flickering out and losing power, someone sitting behind me gasped in mock horror, "It's a fire sale!" I didn't know what he was talking about then, but it turned out he remembered this movie better than I did.

A "fire sale" is what the cyberterrorist villains in the Die Harded version of WW3.com are threatening to pull off, a three step attack on the infrastructure of the United States: transportation, financial base and telecomms, power and utilities. Everything that's run by computer, they can gain control of. They manipulate traffic signals, make it look like the stock market is crashing, take over network broadcasts to announce to the American citizens that the country is under attack on 4th of July weekend.

The first tip-off that something is going down comes when the cyber division of the FBI is hacked. All of the hackers on their watch list who could pull off such a feat are to be brought in for questioning. That's how John McClane, still working in the NYPD and now a thirty year veteran, gets involved. Since the hackers are high value suspects, the Bureau requests that they be brought in by a senior detective. McClane is dispatched to pick up one of the suspects, a young guy named Matt Farrell, from his apartment in Camden, New Jersey and transfer him to Washington D.C.

Several of the hackers on the list, including Farrell, were unwittingly involved with the crafting of the fire sale. They just contributed some code to an employer without knowing the big picture. To clean up their tracks, the villains knock off the hackers before the FBI can get to them, blowing them up with C4 planted on their computers. Farrell is about to be detonated himself with McClane knocks on his door... But the baddies have a plan B if a hacker's abode doesn't explode: a heavily-armed team of henchmen ready to go in and perform the execution themselves. So McClane almost immediately finds himself in a gunfight and things are off and running from there.

With the villains still gunning for Farrell and the Feds overwhelmed by the stages of the fire sale throwing the country into chaos, McClane is forced to stick by the hacker's side and use his knowledge to try to get figure out what's happening where and when so they can thwart plans and get to the person behind it all.

It's a decent enough set-up in theory and plays on McClane's ignorance of and aversion to technology, which had previously been most featured in Die Hard 2, where he's surprised by the existence of airplane phones, baffled by fax machines ("Just the fax, ma'am."), and states his belief that progress peaked with frozen pizza. I just find the way it was brought to the screen to be lacking, and not just because director Len Wiseman chose to coat the image with hideous, cold, blue-green color grading.

The character of Matt Farrell, as played by Justin Long, annoys the hell out of me. Which is a problem, since McClane is saddled with him for the whole movie. Completely out of his league, he complains and whines and cries his way through and grates on my nerves. I've liked Long in other movies, but I can't stand his character here. Maybe if he had used his Brandon St. Randy voice from Kevin Smith's Zack & Miri Make a Porno.

Speaking of Kevin Smith, he shows up in the role of a hacker called Warlock to deliver the exposition needed to explain the backstory of the lead villain, Timothy Olyphant as Thomas Gabriel. A former employee of the Department of Defense, Gabriel is a legendary computer whiz who's doing this to prove a point and get some cash... And he and his group of techies who spend the movie sitting in front of monitors are a very weak and dull presence.

The mobile henchmen, with Mission: Impossible III's Maggie Q as Gabriel's right hand woman/girlfriend, do liven things up a little, mixing it up with McClane in action sequences that become a bit too overblown and CG at times. Strangely, McClane uses a vehicle as a weapon at some point in almost every action scene, most famously launching a police cruiser into a helicopter, but he even manages to get an SUV involved with a scuffle in an elevator shaft. The biggest vehicular action pits McClane in a semi truck against a missile-firing fighter jet, and the moment when our everyman hero falls from a crumbling road system onto the back of the jet has been deemed by some to be this franchise's "jump the shark"/"nuke the fridge" event.

My favorite element of the film is Mary Elizabeth Winstead as McClane's daughter Lucy, having aged nineteen years since we last saw her in the first movie and now attending Rutgers. She shows up early on to establish that McClane has had just as shaky of a relationship with his kids as he did with Holly - Lucy goes by her mother's maiden name, tells friends that her father's dead, and doesn't want to speak to him. She's brought back for the third act, after Gabriel figures out that no offers and no other threats, including deleting his 401k, will deter McClane. Lucy is kidnapped, and while she's held hostage Winstead gets to shine in the role. Lucy's a tough girl, she puts up a fight, threatens her captors, and tells the wussy Farrell to get a bigger set of balls. She is awesome, and there's not enough of her in the movie.

Despite the ugly picture, annoying sidekick, weak villain, and action that stretches beyond the series' limits, I would still say that Live Free or Die Hard is an alright movie in itself, but a letdown compared to the previous three. Aside from Winstead as Lucy, there's nothing about it that makes me want to rewatch it, and in fact the marathon viewing was only the fourth time I had seen the movie in the almost six years since it came out. I watched it opening day, then bought the DVD to watch the unrated cut and listen to the audio commentary, then never put it in again. As time went by since my last viewing it fell in my esteem more and more, so at least this one showed me that it wasn't as bad as I remembered.


I had eaten half of my popcorn during DHWAV and finished it off during LFODH, and had wiped out my drink over the course of all four of the movies, so in the intermission that followed Live Free I returned to the concession stand to get my free refills. I didn't intend to eat much of the second bucket of popcorn, I just got the refill to take advantage of the deal.

My drink and eats replenished, I returned to the basement auditorium and took my seat for what was probably seen by the organizers as the main event. For me, seeing the first three movies on the big screen was the main draw of the day, watching the fourth I was less enthused about, and I was cautiously curious about what was going to play out before us at 10pm.

 

A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD (2013)

Unlike its predecessors, the story for the fifth film was always intended to be a Die Hard sequel. The character of John McClane wasn't added into it in rewrites, he was part of it from the day screenwriter Skip Woods started typing it out. So it's very odd that it's the one which least effectively utilizes the character.

McClane's son Jack had been written into various drafts of the fourth film, from rejected plotlines that had the pair running into trouble while vacationing abroad to versions of the Live Free story in which Jack would've been the hacker his father was teamed with. Bruce Willis mentions such drafts in the Live Free commentary, saying that there were scripts written where McClane's estranged son was jailed and working for the government, but it was too convoluted so the son got written out and daughter Lucy written in with her own troubled relationship with her father. 5 sort of combines elements from unused Die Hard 4 scripts, mixing the idea of the son being in jail and working for the government with the idea of father and son getting in trouble abroad, in this case setting the story in Russia. At first, Woods had McClane going to Afghanistan and Russia to investigate his son's murder, but that was deemed too dark, so the son was kept alive and made part of the action.

On the eve of the trial of former billionaire turned Russian political prisoner Yuri Komarov, Jack McClane walks into a Moscow nightclub and shoots a man dead. Jack is arrested and tells authorities that he'll testify against Komarov, say Komarov hired him to kill the man, in exchange for leniency.

Jack and his father have always had an uneasy relationship, Jack was a problem child, the two had a falling out and haven't spoken in a few years. When news of his son's legal trouble reaches John McClane back in America, he doesn't seem all that surprised, just disheartened. Wanting to see his son through this, he hops a plane to Moscow and gets there just as the trial is set to start... But a team of heavily armed villains bomb the courthouse before it can begin, and in the ensuing chaos Jack manages to escape with Komarov in tow. McClane sees them flee the scene, sees the villains give chase, and decides to join in the chase himself. And so he gets involved with another situation that's way out of the norm for an NYPD detective.

All is not as it seems. Jack McClane is a CIA agent, the CIA knew the courthouse was going to be attacked, the murder in the nightclub (we never do find out who the guy he killed was, just that his name was Anton) was part of a mission to get him close to Komarov to protect him. Komarov's incarceration for unexplained reasons was at the behest of his former partner Viktor Chagarin, who's now a high ranking politician. Chagarin had him imprisoned to get him out of the way and hopefully force him to hand over a mysterious MacGuffin of a file, but he didn't want Komarov to go through with the trial. The CIA also want that file and offer a deal to Komarov to extract him from the country if he hands it over.

Things don't go as expected, the extraction mission falls apart, the two generations of McClanes are stuck in Russia with Komarov, a team of mercenaries after them. What's the secret at the middle of the conflict? A stockpile of nuclear materials that's ridiculously tied in to the real life Chernobyl meltdown.

A Good Day to Die Hard didn't work for me on any level, I was never engaged by it. I was disappointed with Live Free or Die Hard when it came out, but at least you can tell that everyone involved was really putting in an effort. They were trying to live up to the movies that came before, it just fell a little short. Good Day doesn't feel like any effort was put into it at all.

The problem starts with the script. There's hardly anything to it, maybe a lot of it got thrown out along the way or something. Nothing really happens in this movie, it's just a few action scenes pasted together with "bonding moments" that feel entirely obligatory. The writing comes off as lazy in the finished film and the plot makes little sense, so meaningless that two weeks into filming director John Moore was able to make the villain a different character than originally intended. That speaks to how empty the characters are as well.

Moore also made the questionable decisions to shoot the film in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio, despite every previous installment being 2.35:1, of shooting with swaying, zooming, shaking handheld cameras to put the audience in the perspective of the "caught off guard" McClane, and lathering the image in horrendous teal color grading.

My opinion of Bruce Willis has been in decline for several years now, due to stories of him being troublesome on sets and my perception that, aside from bright spots like Looper and Moonrise Kingdom, he's largely abandoned portraying different characters and has decided to just walk through movies as the smirking icon that he is. This is the first Die Hard movie to be affected by that switch - the heart and soul of the John McClane character is largely lost, now he's just an older guy with a superhuman ability to walk out of situations unbelievably unscathed. He could be anybody in this movie.

Jai Courtney showed potential as the lead henchman in Jack Reacher, but is given nothing to do as Jack McClane but bitch out his father and act like a petulant dick for most of the movie.

Sebastian Koch and Sergei Kolesnikov are the feuding Russians, Rasha Bukvic is Alik, a laughing, dancing, carrot chomping clown of a henchman, and Yuliya Snigir is Irina, who mainly makes an impression because she's beautiful and a shot of her stripping out of motorcycle leathers to reveal her underwear was heavily featured in the film's marketing materials. That shot was almost completely cut from the movie itself.

A Good Day also comes off a lesser entry in the series because of its running time of 97 minutes, 26 minutes shorter than the next shortest Die Hard movie (part 2). There is an extended director's cut that might end up coming to home video, and that could fill in some of the movie's gaps, but I can't imagine that it'll help too much. The only sequence that has been confirmed to be longer is the car chase, which is boosted by 30% in the director's cut. At eight minutes long already, the car chase is one of the last things that needed to have any more to it. Oddly, the chase ends not with a freshly recorded ADR line, but with dialogue lifted straight out of the fighter jet sequence in Live Free, and it doesn't make much sense in this moment.

Skip Woods has implied that the 97 minute running time was a studio demand. It's very strange that Fox was aiming so low with this, demoting the series from a summer tentpole all the way down to a February release date. Aside from horror releases, which do well in the early months, February is often seen as a dumping ground for disappointing features. It's unusual for something like Die Hard, and the February date wasn't chosen because it didn't live up to expectations. The release date was set months before filming started, it's just by chance that it ended up feeling like it deserved to be in the dumping ground.

The basic idea is not something that I ever would've chosen for Die Hard, but it could've worked. I love spy movies and I know that dropping John McClane into the middle of one of his CIA agent son's spy missions could've been something fun if it was done right. But it wasn't.

I hate to badmouth people and rail against a movie, that's not what this blog's about, but I had low expectations for A Good Day to Die Hard and it fell far below even what I was prepared for. I was astounded that it was such an inept mess. I've been let down by sequels before, but this may have been the one I've disliked more than any other bummer sequel I've seen. The mighty had fallen hard, and watching the other movies before it just drove it home even more. I would usually say that fans of a franchise might as well stick with a series through all of its sequels, but this was the first time I advised a fan to skip a new entry. I told Jay Burleson (who has written about Die Hard before) to pretend he had never even heard a fifth movie had been made.

But my dislike of the latest Die Hard sequel was the least of my concerns as I walked out of the theatre at the end of the marathon. I had been thinking and worrying about my dog throughout the day, so I was very happy to find that Zeppelin had been brought along on the ride to pick me up after the show. Within 36 hours, he had been back in and out of the operating room, and a few days later the pathologist's report brought good news: the veterinarian had been right the first time, the growth was benign, and should undoubtedly now be gone for good. Zeppelin is proving to be as resilient as John McClane himself, and he's doing just fine now.

The bad ending and my worries throughout the day aside, I did really enjoy the Die Hard marathon experience. They're a good bunch of movies to spend the day watching. For the most part. A Good Day to Die Hard isn't a complete write-off, its existence did lead to a couple good things: theatres brought the other movies back to the big screen for a day, and it also inspired Lee Hardcastle to make a very cool claymation version of the trailer.

Worth Mentioning - A Reckless Girl, A Nervous Gun

March 8, 2013, 4:33 pm

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We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Cody digs a chick from fifty years in the past and Sylvester Stallone keeps doing what he does.

RING OF FIRE (1961)

After spotting a stolen car in their quiet little Pacific northwest town, a couple police officers find the perpetrators in a cafe, two young toughs and the female hitchhiker who's gotten caught up with them. The three criminals are taken into custody, but things go wrong on the way to the police station thanks to the fact that it's against regulations to search females. The girl had a gun on her. The hoodlums take control of the situation and ditch one of the cops, but take the other, Sergeant Steve Walsh, hostage to help them get out of the area. The escape attempt sends the four off on a more than twenty mile hike through the middle of a million and a half acre forest, with a search team of police and volunteers on their trail.

Two of this film's stars would go on to become very popular in the '60s: David Janssen, soon to be cast in the lead of the original The Fugitive television series, makes a good heroic-type in the role of Walsh, and Frank Gorshin, who would go on to be The Riddler on the Batman TV series, is the leader of the criminal pack, adding kidnapping to his list of crimes that also includes armed robbery, assault, and burglary.

But the standout for me is Joyce Taylor as hitchhiker Bobbie Adams, nicknamed Skidoo. Taylor is given some great, very much of the time dialogue to deliver, and she's captivating from the moment she first appears on screen. She's eating dinner in the cafe when Walsh approaches her table and comments that he hasn't seen her around before, and without looking at the man who's speaking to her she starts mockingly questioning him about where he wants to take her and if his wife is out of town. When she sees she's talking to a cop, she explains why she was talking that way: "guys think every chick's an easy ball."

She's sharp and she's playful. Walsh puts her in his cruiser, and while he walks around to the driver's side she gets out of the car and runs back into the diner... Not to get away, just to get her hamburger to take with her.

She seems to take an instant interest in Walsh, who she often refers to as "daddio". She offers him a drag from her cigarette, now "lipstick flavor" since it's been on her lips, "the taste that satisfies." She doesn't usually rat him out when he's doing things to work against her cohorts, she doesn't give him much trouble because "I don't dig that gas chamber deal." She's the most mixed up character Walsh has ever met, and the more they're around each other the more suggestive her interactions with him get.

Joyce Taylor is stunning in this film, whether in her initial delinquent look of tied back hair and blouse tied in front or the more adult look she adopts when she lets her hair down and tucks her blouse in, and especially in the scene where she strips down to nothing but Walsh's uniform shirt. Taylor was in her late twenties when the film was made, so it's alright for viewers to fall for her, but the character she's playing is "under eighteen", so Walsh has to resist her advances.

The hostage situation is resolved in time for the movie to become a disaster film of sorts in the second half; the area it's set in is experiencing its driest summer in years, and a cigarette dropped thoughtlessly during the trek through the woods ignites a forest fire, one that threatens to destroy Walsh's town. If the inferno and the evacuation of citizens wasn't enough for him to worry about, Walsh also has a charge of statuatory rape hanging over his head - Gorshin's character accuses him of getting up to some illegal activity with Skidoo while they were in the woods, and she backs up his claim despite Walsh's denials. There was a fade to black at a crucial moment so we can't be sure who's telling the truth, we can only decide whose word we trust.

The action climax features a train on a crumbling, burning bridge, and more than fifty years later the wreckage from this sequence can still be found lying in, and on the banks of, Washington state's Wynoochee River.

In the end, it looks like Skidoo has come around. She seems like she's going to straighten her life out and clear up what happened between her and Walsh... Then again, the way Walsh kisses her in the final moment, he might just earn the charge.

I found Ring of Fire to be a very entertaining film to watch, and my enjoyment of it was mostly due to Taylor's performance and appearance as Skidoo. She rocked that role. It's a shame that she didn't have a bigger career.

I'd definitely recommend that people check the movie out, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be officially available on home video. I caught it with my DVR when it aired on Turner Classic Movies a while back. Looks like it won't be on TCM again until June 2nd, but next weekend there will be two theatrical screenings of it in Shelton, Washington, where it was partially filmed. If only I could be there to see that.

 

 

BULLET TO THE HEAD (2012)

This adaptation of a French graphic novel went through some twists and turns on its way to the big screen. Originally the film was set to be the intriguing pairing of star Sylvester Stallone with director Wayne Kramer, who had previously made The Cooler (2003) and Running Scared (2006). That could've led to something interesting, but unfortunately the two had creative differences over the tone they should be shooting for, and Kramer left the project. His very cool replacement: Walter Hill, director of The Warriors, 48 Hrs., Southern Comfort, Streets of Fire, Extreme Prejudice, Red Heat, Trespass... the list goes on, and finally the list would include a film starring Stallone. It was a match made in Action Heaven.

There was a big change in front of the camera as well, as Thomas Jane was the actor initially cast beside in Stallone in this "buddy picture", but he was replaced before filming began, a decision made by producer Joel Silver. Silver is said to have wanted a more "ethnic" co-star to appeal to a wider audience, thus the casting of Korean actor Sung Kang. Kang is also more appealing to the youth audience, due to his likeable role in several of the Fast and Furious films. I assume the script went through a rewrite to play up that youthful aspect as well, since Kang's character is a young man who's very reliant on his smartphone, which is commented on throughout. "Thank God for Google."

After filming was complete, the movie hit another speed bump when it was delayed for almost a year, finally reaching screens last month.

The names attached and the marketing have indicated that Bullet to the Head would be a throwback of sorts, and as the film begins with a gunshot to a head and the title sequence featuring credits for Stallone, Silver, and Hill playing over shots of nudity and coke-snorting, fans of '80s action will be feeling right at home.

The story covers ground that is very well-trodden; an uneasy, odd couple pair are forced by circumstances to work together to right wrongs and thwart mutual enemies. Things kick off when Jimmy Bobo, a lifelong criminal and a professional hitman, and his partner are hired to kill a corrupt cop. They do the job, but then their mysterious employer sends in hulking mercenary Keegan to kill them as well. He succeeds in killing Bobo's partner, sending Bobo on a mission of revenge and opening him up to working with Taylor Kwon, a cop investigating the murder of his fellow officer. Kwon knows Bobo pulled the trigger, but he wants to know who hired him to do so and why.

Stallone and Kang work well enough together and there are some nice supporting turns from Sarah Shahi as Bobo's tattoo artist daughter, who took a year of med school so she also comes in handy for extracting bullets when you get shot, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Lost's Mr. Eko), Christian Slater, and Jason Momoa as the bad guys. Momoa is especially badass as Keegan.

The film is indeed a throwback, but it doesn't quite live up to the similar films that its director and star have made before. There are some good fights and plenty of gunfire, the action is enjoyable but not all that spectacular, and the story and execution are about as generic as it gets. The movie would've been fine going to direct-to-video, and looking at its box office numbers it might've been better off doing so. It's worth checking out for fans of those involved, but I'm glad I didn't spend much money to see it. I saw it at the dollar theatre, which was a fitting venue for it. But if I had watched it on DVD, I would've been able to add a screen cap of a strategically blocked shot of Sarah Shahi in the bathtub to this write-up.

Film Appreciation - We're in for a Nightmare

March 11, 2013, 9:01 pm

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Cody Hamman shows some Film Appreciation for 1977's Tentacles.

1977 was an amazing year for movies. Several of that year's releases have already been talked about or mentioned on the blog: The Spy Who Loved Me, Smokey and the Bandit, George A. Romero's Martin, Citizens Band, The Car, Hitch-Hike, The Haunting of Julia. And among the other cool '77 movies that haven't been discussed yet, there was of course the release of Star Wars. I would've been in cinematic bliss that whole year if I had been around.

The 1975 success of Jaws had opened the gates to a flood of aquatic horrors and nature run amok movies. By the middle of 1977, William Girdler had made Grizzly and Day of the Animals, Susan George and Priscilla Barnes were having shark encounters in ¡Tintorera! on screens in Mexico (the U.S. release wasn't until '78), and Mako: The Jaws of Death had been out for a year. More were to come over the years, including the Spielberg favorite Piranha as well as the Jaws sequels.

One month before Orca, and the same week the Peter Benchley (author of Jaws) adaptation The Deep hit theatres, there was the release of one of my favorite Jaws cash-ins: Tentacles.

Filmed in California, Tentacles was an Italian co-production, and if you can't tell that from the names in the credits or the moments of obvious dubbing, it also comes through in the score by Stelvio Cipriani. In moments of building suspense or fright, a harpsichord kicks in on the soundtrack, which is fantastic.

The trouble starts when the construction of an underwater tunnel stirs up a giant octopus, which proceeds to besiege the coastal community of Solana Beach. Driven to a homicidal rage by the high frequency radio signals that are being used by the construction crew, the octopus attacks anyone it can get its suckers on and kills them with a vacuum effect that strips their bodies down to the bone and sucks the marrow dry. Unlike the victims in a shark or other sort of flesh-eating fish movie, the unlucky saps in this movie don't even have to be in the water to fall prey, the octopus can also grab them off of boats, tear the boat apart to get to them, or snatch them off the shore. The first victim in the film is a baby left sitting in a stroller beside the water.

Like the 4th of July celebrations happening on Amity Island in Jaws, the Solana Beach area is having a big event of its own concurrent with their octopus problem: the annual Junior Yacht Race, held on August 21st, which brings in a lot of tourist money. And provides the octopus with an opportunity to wreak more havoc.

The characters who populate Solana Beach are portrayed by some well known, highly respected actors: Henry Fonda as the head of the construction company, John Huston as the investigative reporter who does more to get to the bottom of this situation than the local authorities (and who goes to bed in a bitchin' men's nightgown), Shelley Winters as the sister the reporter cohabitates with. Helping Huston's character solve the mystery is man of action Bo Hopkins as Will Gleason, an oceanographer who trains a pair of killer whales on the side.

When Will's own wife ends up part of the 'pus's bodycount his outward reaction is about on par with my regular bouts of melancholy, but it still sets him off on a mission of revenge, with a plan that requires putting his whales inside a portable tank and hauling them out into the ocean. He has a deep connection to his whales, Summer and Winter, and before he sets them loose on the octopus for the climactic battle, the greatest scene in the film plays out. Will sits atop their tank and delivers an emotional monologue. While having flashbacks to the good times he's had training his whales, he asks them for their help, relates to them (people call them killers, just like they did to him on the streets), lets them know how much he cares for them and that he'll understand if they just swim off. "I know people think we're crazy. Maybe we are... Maybe we are."

Before seeing Tentacles for the first time in September of 2010, all I had heard about it was that it was a bad movie. That month, I got the chance to see it screened at a very cool event - an all-night horror movie marathon held at a drive-in theatre. This was the first drive-in experience I had had in around twenty years, and I had a lot of fun that night, kicking back in my car, eating popcorn and french fries and watching horror movies from the '70s and '80s play out on a big screen in need of a fresh paintjob. The marathon's lineup: Jaws, Tentacles, Demons, Burial Ground, and Laserblast. It was awesome. And I thoroughly enjoyed Tentacles.

Sure, Tentacles may be considered a "bad movie", but it's the sort of bad movie that's peppered with greatness, moments that are so fun and/or so absurd that it brings a smile to my face several times throughout. After my first viewing of it, I was left with the opinion that this is a movie that deserves to be more popular and more appreciated than it is. A couple years and a few more viewings later, that's an opinion I still have.

So check out Tentacles. It gets a bad rap, but there are others out there who will enjoy it like I do.

Worth Mentioning - A Fanfare for Zoso

March 15, 2013, 7:31 pm

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We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

 

Sam Raimi takes Cody back to Oz and helps name another dog.

OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL (2013)

The Wizard of Oz, Victor Fleming's 1939 musical adaptation of L. Frank Baum's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was one of my favorite and most watched films when I was a child. Fuelled by my repeat viewings of that movie, I was fascinated with the Oz world for several years. I watched any other Oz movie or cartoon I came across, gladly went on a school field trip to see a stage production of the musical, collected some of the novels, joined a fan club that regularly sent out newsletters, and wrote my own Oz fan fiction. My interest waned eventually, so much that I haven't even watched the Fleming film this century (and I really need to fix that), but I'll always have a special place in my heart for the land of Oz.

Many potential Oz projects have come and gone over the years, some enticing and some not so much, but the news that Sam Raimi had signed on to direct a prequel of sorts to the '39 classic really caught my attention. One of my favorite filmmakers presenting the return to something that had meant so much to me as a kid? I was totally on board with that. And so when the movie reached theatres, I was there for the first 3D screening on opening day.

The story follows a man named Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkel Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs, who goes by his first two initials when performing in his magic show, part of the travelling Baum Bros. circus, as OZ the Great and Powerful. Oz is pretty talented as far as a low-level magician goes, but he claims to be something more, someone with actual mystical powers (which leads to some uncomfortable interactions with audience members) and he strives for greatness. He wants to be as great as Harry Houdini and Thomas Edison combined. Unfortunately, while on his quest for fame and fortune he doesn't think twice about taking advantage of others to advance himself. He doesn't treat people very well.

Oz's life takes an unexpected turn one day when an ill-advised dalliance with the strongman's lady comes to light and he uses the circus's hot air balloon to escape from the raging bodybuilder... then gets caught in a tornado. After pleading to the sky that his life be spared because he hasn't accomplished anything yet, that he can change, can do great things if given a chance, he suddenly finds that he's not in Kansas anymore. He's been transported to the land of Oz.

Once in this unusual, magical, colorful world, Oz finds himself caught in a power struggle playing out between three witches - Emerald City-dwelling sisters Theodora and Evanora and the outcast Glinda - in the aftermath of the death of the land's king. Before dying, the king had made a prophecy that a great wizard bearing the name of Oz would descend from the skies to claim the throne and the riches that come with it, and would then fix the land's problems, saving it from the tyranny of the wicked witch who killed the king. Some believe that Oz may be the answer to that prophecy. Seeing an opportunity to fill his pockets with gold, Oz plays along. He hasn't yet made the change he promised to while being thrown around inside the twister. He has lessons to learn over the course of the adventure that ensues...

And so this is the tale of how The Wizard of Oz came to be the Wizard of Oz, but I called it a prequel "of sorts" to the '39 film because legally it can't claim to be one. This movie was made at Disney, while the '39 one was made at MGM and is now the property of Warner Bros. So it has to distance itself slightly, and there are differences in there like Glinda being from the South in this one, as she was in the novels, instead of from the North, as she was in the classic musical. Still, Great and Powerful is clearly tied to Victor Fleming's film as much as possible, there are winks and nods throughout. There's the fact that the hot air balloon gets caught in a tornado instead of just drifting off into the sky, and that some characters Oz meets in Oz are versions of people he knew in his regular life. While today's CGI allows grander landscapes to be shown, the design of Oz still at times resembles the old school sets and matte paintings. The biggest stylistic callback is in the transition from Oz's circus life to his arrival in Oz. The '39 film famously switched from a sepia tone in the scenes of Dorothy's Kansas home life to three-strip Technicolor in Oz. Here, Raimi presents Oz's regular life in black & white and the 1.37:1 aspect ratio that was the standard in 1939. So it's quite a spectacular moment when Oz finds that his balloon is carrying him over the land of Oz and, after twenty minutes of black & white 1.37:1, the film switches to full, bright color and the image gradually widens out to 2:35.1.

There are some uniquely Raimi camera moves in there, as well as a scene with a witch that's reminiscent of his earlier genre works. As usual, he's also found cameo roles for friends, family, and regular collaborators - his brother Ted is in there, as are Tim Quill and Danny Hicks, the late John Paxton, the three actresses from the original Evil Dead, and his children.

Bruce Campbell is in there of course, given a small cameo as a gate guard who takes some abuse. In my ideal world, he would've been in the role of Oz. Although, that would cause some deja vu in the third act, as Oz becoming the man he could be and leading the citizens on a showy, non-lethal assault against their oppressors did remind me of Ash preparing the villagers for the Deadite attack at the end of Army of Darkness.

My dream casting aside, James Franco does do fine work as Oz. Rachel Weisz does well in the role of Evanora, Mila Kunis has some shaky moments as Theodora, and my favorite of the witches was Michelle Williams, who was very sweet and likeable as Glinda. Tony Cox has some entertaining moments as a character named Knuck and it was great to have Bill Cobbs helping out our heroes.

Like Dorothy gathered the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion as companions on her journey, Oz himself meets and befriends a living doll called China Girl, whose first scene with Oz is a rather poignant one, and a flying monkey named Finley (it's the wicked witch's flying baboons that you have to watch out for.) After Oz saves Finley from danger, the little monkey dedicates his life to the man. All he hopes to receive in exchange is friendship.

I liked the characters quite a bit, and I really enjoyed this movie. It's a nice, fun family film, and Raimi's style and sensibilities were a good match for the spirit of Oz. I can't think of any other director I would've rather taken the journey with.

Its opening weekend came at an interesting time. As I wrote in an Appreciation article, the release of Raimi's first Spider-Man movie coincided with the day I got my dachshund Zeppelin. Coincidentally, I was scheduled to get my second dachshund on the Sunday after Raimi's Oz came out. Thanks to how awesome Zeppelin has been, I've become very fond of the dachshund breed, and with him getting up there in age and having some thankfully false alarm health scares recently (which I've written about a coupletimes), it seemed like it might be a good time to get him a little buddy and hopefully he'll have several years to help raise this kid right and show him the ropes. And since Zeppelin was named after the band Led Zeppelin, it seemed to me that the perfect name to give the new dog would be Zoso. Each member of Led Zeppelin chose a symbol to represent themselves, and the symbol chosen by guitarist Jimmy Page appears to form the word Zoso. The band's fourth album (which contains my favorite song, "Stairway to Heaven") is sometimes referred to as Zoso. Zoso is the name of a popular Led Zeppelin tribute band.

It just seemed right to follow Zeppelin with Zoso.

I got Zeppelin the day I went to the theatre to see Raimi's Spider-Man for the second time, and that's how he ended up being named Zeppelin Maguire. I got Zoso two days after I saw Raimi's Oz the Great and Powerful, and that's why he's named Zoso Finley.

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Final Girl Film Club - Deathwatch (2002)

March 19, 2013, 9:00 pm

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Cody is endeavoring to write about all of the Final Girl Film Club entries he missed over the years. The movies will be covered in the original Film Club order in most cases, while some of the articles will be posted to coincide with certain dates.

Horror in the trenches.

Michael J. Bassett's directorial debut is centered on a group of British Army soldiers on the battleground of the Western Front in 1917, the midst of The Great War, "the war to end all wars", which twenty years later would begin to be referred to as World War I.

We first meet the men of Y Company as they stand in a trench, preparing to charge into battle. Among them is Jamie Bell as a character nicknamed Shakespeare, a sixteen-year-old who lied his way into service and is now seriously rethinking that decision. Scared and crying, Shakespeare is forced into the fight, partially at gunpoint. As the charge begins, another soldier tells him, "Welcome to Hell."

And Y Company is about to face levels of Hell they couldn't have even imagined.

Bullets fly, bombs go off, soldiers are killed, some get caught up in barbed wire, wounded lay screaming in the mud, the enemy sets off gas bombs... And with the transition of the film's titlecard, nine survivors of Y Company, along with a mortally wounded tenth, find that the battle has ended, the gas replaced by fog, and night has turned to day.

Marching through the fog, the men soon come across a trench occupied by German soldiers - who are so afraid of something else in the area that they completely disregard the presence of their enemies until they're forced to pay attention to them. Y Company take control of the trench and it's their duty to hold it until reinforcements arrive... Reinforcements that they can't reach with their poor radio signal. When they do contact someone through the static, all that comes out of the interaction is the person telling them that there were no survivors from Y Company.

Lost in the battlefield and considered dead, the men of Y Company are stuck in a rat-infested enemy trench. A trench that's full of the corpses of German soldiers who appear to have massacred each other. A trench where blood leaks through the dirt walls. As time passes, it becomes apparent that something very strange and perhaps otherworldy is going on here. Madness, paranoia, death, and intense hallucinations and/or supernatural experiences ensue.

Bassett did fine work with the writing and directing, and the actors all put in good performances. The most memorable character and the standout of the film is Andy Serkis, out of a mo-cap suit and in uniform, as Quinn, a man who starts off clearly mentally disturbed and gets worse over the course of the film. He's the sort of guy who goes into battle because he likes the idea of killing people, and war provides him with copious potential victims. He regresses so far as the story goes on that he draws comparisons to a caveman, even finding a spiked club to arm himself with.

It's a good set-up, mixing the horrors of war with the horrors of the presumably supernatural, and the setting is effectively unsettling/disgusting, with constant rain turning the surroundings into sloppy mud with rats crawling through it and corpses decomposing into the ground.

With all these positive things said, I still have to admit that this is not a movie that I particularly enjoy watching. I don't think it's bad on any level, but it doesn't hold my attention and my mind starts to wander every few minutes. It's just not for me. I would recommend others check it out for themselves, because it is a well made movie that will definitely appeal to some viewers more than it does to me. While my two viewings in the last ten years have been enough, I know it has fans who consider it an underrated and overlooked gem.

 

Part of

 

Worth Mentioning - Monsters by the Bucket

March 22, 2013, 12:22 pm

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We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Cody's week was all about indie monsters and puppetry.

THE PUPPET MONSTER MASSACRE (2010)

A horror/comedy set in 1985, the feature debut from writer/director Dustin Mills starts off with the House on Haunted Hill-esque set-up of four young people being offered the chance to win a million dollars, all they have to do to earn the cash is survive one night in the local "haunted house", the Wagner mansion. Everyone accepts the challenge and gathers at the mansion, but as the night goes on the group - which consists of meek good guy Charlie Hawkins, his best friend Gwen, who he has a crush on but has never had the guts to ask out, punk rocker Iggy (whose girlfriend Mona tags along), and horror movie aficionado Raimi Campbell - starts getting picked off one-by-one by something much worse than restless spirits.

The mansion's owner, the mysterious Wolfgang Wagner, is a scientist with a very dark history, and now he has successfully replicated an experiment he first worked on during World War II. He has created a monster. The result of mixing the genetics of vicious animals with the essence of demons and having been incubated in the body of a hapless hunter, this beast has an insatiable hunger, and the more it eats, the bigger it grows. And Wagner has set it loose in the mansion to feast on his houseguests.

Mills is clearly as big of a fan of the genre as his Raimi character is, and the movie is a very cool, entertaining and funny homage to old school horror. With the unique twist that the cast is made up of felt puppets.

This entire movie was made in Mills's living room for a few thousand dollars, the puppets filmed against a green screen that was replaced with CG sets and locations. It's an admirably innovative way to get a film career going, and if I were told to try to make something that looked like it I would be at a complete loss.

The scope of the movie builds over its 70 minutes, getting bigger as the monster grows, going from the creature stalking teens in a mansion to a climax that's an all-out war on a demonic kaiju.

Puppets fire machine guns and drive tanks, there's puppet breasts with pencil eraser nipples, there are references to movies like Night of the Living Dead, the Evil Dead trilogy, and Aliens throughout (as well as a Chasing Amy "Finger Cuffs" nod), there is, as Wagner says, "blood by ze gallon", there are farting bunnies and a badass penguin, a foul-mouthed grandpa, there's even an animated flashback to World War II. It's all pretty awesome.

Mills has been stunningly prolific in the couple years since The Puppet Monster Massacre was finished, having already completed and released three more movies (Zombie A-Hole, Night of the Tentacles, Bath Salt Zombies), with a few more in various stages of production. His next to reach DVD is the killer Easter Bunny movie Easter Casket, for which he is currently taking pre-orders by way of an Indiegogo campaign. As of right now, there are only 4 days left to get in on that. I've got my copy ordered.

 

SNOW SHARK: ANCIENT SNOW BEAST (2011)

Like the title promises, this movie deals with a prehistoric creature, which looks similar to a Great White when it's shown, being released from a block of ice by an earthquake. This creature is somehow able to move through the ground (and the snow on top of it) as well as a Graboid in a Tremors movie, and it sets out to wreak havoc on a small town in the dead of winter. It's "Jaws in the woods".

What makes Snow Shark especially notable is the fact that its distribution is one of the most impressive success stories I've seen in a while. Directed by Buffalo, New York-based independent filmmaker Sam Qualiana, it was shot with a Sony Handycam and produced for less than $7000, but thanks to distributor Independent Entertainment, a micro-budget branch of Alternate/Pop Cinema, it's available for rent in Family Video stores and in Redbox machines, it's for sale on the shelves of Walmarts and FYEs. Qualiana landed a dream deal with this one.

A lot of viewers who rent or buy Snow Shark will probably be resistant to or mocking of its production value, but the fact that it will be able to reach the eyes of so many viewers is kind of amazing.

The movie earns bonus points from me for the casting of Jackey Hall, an indie favorite of mine from her roles in Dorm of the Dead (2006) and Chainsaw Cheerleaders (2008).

A GUY, A GIRL AND THEIR MONSTER

Monsters are real, and in the land of California parents can buy their children monster companions from a talent agency for $149.95, a much more reasonable price than the 15 grand that imaginary friends go for.

The title characters of this YouTube web series are engaged couple Phil and Jenn, who have recently moved to Los Angeles when Henry, a monster of the under the bed variety who was Jenn's companion in the '80s, shows up at their apartment, down on his luck and hungry for bacon. To her fiance's apparent chagrin, Jenn lets her old pal move in with them. Thus, their life has become a sitcom, and it makes for a fun show with cute, family friendly humor.

Henry and his fellow monsters are played by puppets, which interact with a human cast that includes series creator Jenn Daugherty, who is collaborating with emerging writers/directors from the USC Film Graduate Program to bring her show to life. The first season just started at the beginning of February and is set to run for 13 episodes, interspersed with character vlogs and bonus videos called Monster Bites. Branching into other media, there's also a comic strip that gets posted on the show's Facebook page.

The series can be found on YouTube here: GuyGirlMonsterTV.



Film Appreciation - The Scariest Movie I've Ever Seen

March 25, 2013, 9:01 pm

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Cody Hamman has Film Appreciation for Sam Raimi's 1981 The Evil Dead.

"The Ultimate Experience in Grueling Horror" is the subtitle given to The Evil Dead in its end credits. Often misquoted with "Terror" in the place of "Horror", this line was likely thrown in there by writer/director Sam Raimi with tongue in cheek, but it very aptly describes my first time watching the film.

The Evil Dead is the only horror movie that has truly scared me since I became a fan of the genre. Sure, I had freaked out over glimpses of horror movies before I became a fan, I screamed and cried over the opening sequence of Jason Lives when I was three years old, but after I gave Jason Lives a second try and then fell head over heels for horror, nothing really bothered me from then on. Until I saw The Evil Dead when I was nine headed toward ten.

Yes, nine is still quite a young age, a lot of kids haven't even started watching horror yet at nine, many aren't allowed to. But I was a six year veteran by that point, familiar with and fascinated by all sorts of monsters and slashers. The modern icons of Freddy, Jason, Leatherface, and Michael were established favorites and I watched their exploits regularly. I wasn't scared by movies, it was just entertainment.

But none of the Evil Dead movies had ever gotten play in my home. I had read references to the well regarded films in the pages of Fangoria, I had seen them on the shelves of video stores and was intrigued by them, particularly by the cover of part 2 and the skull with still intact brown eyes staring out at me, I just hadn't rented them. I was aware of trilogy capper Army of Darkness when it was coming out in February of 1993, it was advertised in comic books and magazines I read, I even read the Mad magazine parody of it. I wanted to see it. So maybe it was the fact that Army of Darkness was coming to VHS (in August '93 if the internets aren't lying), perhaps coupled with the knowledge that the strange book briefly featured in Jason Goes to Hell (which hit theatres on August 13, 1993 and which I saw on opening day) was connected to the Evil Dead series, that finally spurred me on to rent the first one.

Raimi and his cohorts watched and studied many of the popular horror films of the time before setting out to start filming The Evil Dead at the end of 1979, and the influence of movies like Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween can be seen and felt in the finished product. There's even a direct reference to The Hills Have Eyes in the form of a torn poster. Raimi mixed together elements that worked in other films to assemble his own story which then goes off in its own direction, and he pulled it off quite effectively.

Though the set-up is standard stuff, following five young college students from Michigan who have rented a cabin in Tennessee sight unseen for a relaxing getaway, something about the look and feel of the movie, its tone, the sound design, the music by Joe LoDuca, the camera angles and cutting, had me on edge from the beginning. The cabin is very isolated, requiring a drive across a crumbling wooden bridge and down an overgrown path to its location in a clearing within a woods, and there's something off about the place as soon as they arrive, something creepy. Whether they want to admit it or not, the characters are unnerved, and so was I, as Raimi even managed to make a swing that suddenly stops banging against the side of the cabin on its own disturbing.

The group of vacationers consists of the loudmouth Scotty, his cynical girlfriend Shelly, the nice guy Ash and his sweet, optimistic girlfriend Linda, and Ash's sister Cheryl, and as night falls it's the quiet and artistic Cheryl who proves to be the most sensitive to the supernatural forces lurking around the cabin; the deep, unearthly voice growling "Join us", the evil entity moving through the woods. She knows it's a bad idea for the others to explore the cabin's cellar when the door in the floor flies open on its own.

Scotty and Ash find a shotgun, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a weird dagger, and a very strange old book in the cellar, and decide to take these things back upstairs to mess around with. The book is the Naturon Demonto (a.k.a. the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, a.k.a. the Book of the Dead), bound in human flesh and inked in human blood, and it "deals with demons and demon resurrection and those forces which roam the forest and dark bowers of man's domain". These things were left behind by a professor who was staying in the cabin while working on translating the book, and the guys make the unwise decision to play the audio recording of his translations. As the professor's voice recites an incantation, Cheryl grows increasingly agitated, repeatedly asking that they stop playing the tape until soon she's standing up and screaming, "Shut it off!"

It's too late. The professor's recital of the passage from the book has unleashed demonic forces upon the cabin and things go to hell from there, the young people's vacation becoming a living nightmare of possession and dismemberment.

Most people who watch the movie now will know who gets out of this situation before they even push Play, I certainly knew of one survivor during my first viewing, but the film actually does a good job of making it unclear who's destined to make it to the end. At first, it appears that Cheryl could be our Final Girl heroine. When she's forced out of the lead, it's Scotty who proves to be most effective in handling the demonic threat and chopping up what used to be his friends. But Scotty's too much of a jerk to carry on the heroic duties, placing the second half of the film on the shoulders of Bruce Campbell as Ash.

The man who goes on to be an egomaniacal, demon-killing badass with a chainsaw prosthetic in the sequels has very humble beginnings in this first film. Ash is pretty much totally incompetent for most of it, getting tossed around and pinned under busted furniture during the action in two different sequences, and it isn't until Scotty abandons him that he finally steps up and takes care of business while being relentlessly tormented, losing his mind in the process.

It was the demonic forces and the way they were presented in the movie, the invisible evil presence in the woods and the way the possessed people became hideous, taunting, babbling, homicidal maniacs who could only be stopped by hacking them into pieces that frightened me to my core. I was used to slashers showing up and knocking off young people one-by-one, I was familiar with simple flesh-eating ghouls, but this was something much different than I had seen before. I had probably even seen The Exorcist already, but that movie hadn't gotten to me because its demon was in the safety of a slow-paced, Oscar nominated film. These demons were vicious and insane and the filmmaking amplified the intensity. I was a fourth grader attending a Christian school, I was studying lessons every day from a book that told me demons were real, at some point I would even have a teacher who would tell the class that watching horror movies made the viewer more susceptible to demonic possession. While I would dismiss that claim as nonsense, I did basically believe in some of what this movie was showing me, and I had a feeling that just by watching it I had set something evil loose in my own house. Like playing the audio of the professor's incantation had unleased the evil on the cabin, I feared that piece of audio coming from my TV could have the same effect. It was late at night and I was sitting in a dark living room watching this movie by myself, afraid that the demonic force from The Evil Dead was in the shadows of my home. It was the scariest movie watching experience of my life.

Because it had scared me so, the film earned a deep respect from me. But it took me a while to work up the guts to watch it again. One viewing was all I gave it during that initial rental. As a kid, I would use sleepovers at my house to introduce my friends, whose parents forbade them from watching horror movies, to what I considered to be the essentials of the genre. Some weeks after my first viewing of The Evil Dead, I had one such sleepover and showed two of my friends a movie from each of the big franchises. The schedule I had worked out was all set to build up to The Evil Dead, the movie that even scared me. But when I presented it that way to my friends, who were a bit shellshocked from what they had already witnessed on the television screen that night, they declined to watch the movie and we called it a night instead. And I'm not sure I was even brave enough to watch it again during that rental period...

Of course, a second viewing did happen eventually, many more have followed, and the fear gradually wore off. I watched the sequels as well, and at first I was disappointed by them, by the fact that something that had been so frightening to me got so comedic and silly so quickly, but I soon came around to accepting them for what they were and greatly enjoying them as well. I once thought I had met the perfect girl when I asked her if she had seen the Evil Dead movies and she replied, "Ash is my hero!" As it turns out, she wasn't the perfect girl, but she did have the perfect answer.

While I like the sequels, the first movie remains my favorite of the bunch, and it's the one I revisit the most. Years after the film had earned my respect and fandom, I learned the story behind it and that made me appreciate it even more. Up there with the behind-the-scenes of Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), the making of The Evil Dead is one of my favorite filmmaking stories. A bunch of young kids from Michigan scrape together a low budget for a feature through cold calls and based on the merits of their 8mm short films, then go down to Tennessee to make their movie in a ramshackle cabin that they have to completely renovate before they can film in it. They film in this cabin with no modern conveniences during a cold winter, their six week shooting schedule doubles and they lose most of the cast and crew at the midway point, leaving just five people - Raimi, Campbell, producer Rob Tapert, transportation captain Dave Goodman, and sound/lighting man Josh Becker - to finish the movie. The Evil Dead was Raimi, Campbell, and Tapert's entire world for quite a while, and the post-production process stretched on for years, during which time editor Edna Ruth Paul got some assistance from a young man named Joel Coen, who would go on to be a very popular filmmaker himself, alongside his brother Ethan. The commentaries by Raimi, Tapert, and Campbell on The Evil Dead DVD/Blu are some of my favorites to listen to, and The Evil Dead Companion by Bill Warren, Josh Becker's Evil Dead Journal (also reprinted in his book Rushes), and Bruce Campbell's If Chins Could Kill are all very interesting reads that cover the struggles these independent filmmakers went through while crafting what was to become a cult classic.

I have family who live near the area where the cabin, which has since burned to the ground, was located. I've thought about taking a trek into the woods to visit what's left of it, but have never gone through with it.

Thanks to special screenings and conventions, I have been able to meet several people who were involved with the movie. The first was Bruce Campbell, who I met at the 2002 "Nightmare at Studio 35" 24 hour theatrical horror marathon. Campbell did an intro for a screening of The Evil Dead, did a Q&A after, then signed copies of If Chins Could Kill, a copy of which was included with the marathon tickets. I got my book signed by him, I shook his hand, and when I told him that I didn't have a camera with me for a photo op he said, "Cody's travelin' light." The Evil Dead II was also screened later during that marathon. Every six months, I'm in the presence of the movie's special effects artist Tom Sullivan, a really nice guy who has his own room for his artwork at the Cinema Wasteland convention. I enjoyed meeting Josh Becker at the October 2010 Wasteland. Actresses Ellen Sandweiss and Theresa Tilly/Sarah York were at the Spring 2011 Wasteland, and did a live commentary on The Evil Dead with Sullivan, which was very entertaining to see and hear. The third actress, Betsy Baker, was booked to appear at that show, but had to cancel because she was working on a play. The actresses were selling posters that had been pre-signed by Baker, but having an autograph from someone I hadn't actually interacted with in any way didn't feel right to me, so I was going to buy a The Ladies of The Evil Dead shirt from them instead. They sold out of shirts before I could get one, so when I returned home I tried to order a shirt from their website, but it turned out that by selling out of them at the convention they had sold out their entire stock. I found this out through a pleasant surprise: an e-mail from Betsy Baker, the actress who hadn't been at the show, offering a refund or an alternate item of my choice. So since I had met two of them and exchanged e-mails with the third, an interaction, I went ahead and ordered a poster, signed by all three and personalized.

The Evil Dead is one of my favorites, one of my viewing essentials, and I find the story of its production inspiring. It will always be a special movie to me, and it's all because of that one dark night twenty years ago when it scared the hell out of me.

Worth Mentioning - Deth Tosses An Exploding Ham

March 29, 2013, 4:31 pm

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We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

This week, Cody takes a look at the second chapter in the Trancers saga.

TRANCERS II (1991)

Last December, I wrote about Full Moon Pictures head Charles Band's 1985 movie Trancers, a Christmasy sci-fi action flick in which a cop from the year 2247 named Jack Deth is sent back in time (or "down the line") to protect the ancestors of the High Council of the Western Territories from being murdered by Martin Whistler, a cult leader with the psychic ability to turn the weak minded into zombie-like beings called trancers. The only way for a person to travel into the past is via an injection that sends their consciousness into the mind of an ancestor, so Jack's mind ended up in the body of his lookalike ancestor Phillip Deth.

The sequel picks up six years after Deth thwarted Whistler. The Council has been so vigilant about protecting one member's ancestor Hap Ashby, former pro baseball player turned alcoholic homeless man, that they've ordered Deth to remain in the past, keep an eye on Ashby, keep him alive so he can procreate. Deth hasn't minded this job so much, since the events of the previous film he's gotten married to Lena, his punk rock party chick sidekick who has matured into a responsible adult with computer skills, and he spends his leisure time cruising the California coast, which he knows will end up under the sea after the Killer Quakes of 2063. The Deths live in a mansion with Ashby, who has sobered up, gotten rich through commodities speculation, and now collects fire trucks as a hobby.

Everyone's doing pretty well. But take a moment to think about poor Phillip Deth. Jack has been living in his body for six years now, which means Phil's consciousness is trapped in some kind of limbo. There's worse news for Phil, if he could hear it. Jack has been in the past for so long that his own body, lying in stasis in 2253, has calcified. He'll never be able to return to it, so he's stuck in Phil's body and Phil is gone for good. Nobody ever seems too concerned about that.

Not being able to bring Jack Deth back to their present with a simple injection is troubling for the Council, who needs his help in preparing to fight a new wave of trancers. But there has been a technological advancement in time travel since the first film, something called a TCL Chamber that plays into some complicated situations and convoluted explanations. The chamber can carry a person into the future, but not into the past. Someone has to go down the line the consciousness way, set off a tapback device, then the chamber will appear in the past and after 48 hours it will boomerang back into the future with whoever happens to be inside. The Council wants Jack Deth to catch a ride in the chamber, and to retrieve him they send his fellow Angel City Trooper McNulty.

McNulty isn't the first cop to get sent on this mission. It gets more complicated. The first Trooper to get this assignment was Alice Stillwell, Jack Deth's wife, who was killed six months before the first movie. A Council technician went back to the day before she was killed and sent her back down the line to 1991... but she didn't complete her mission, she just disappeared. That's because the ancestor Alice ended up inhabiting was locked up in a state asylum. That's been very inconvenient for her, but it's also put her in the perfect situation to get close to the film's villain.

The trancer program has been revived by Whistler's brother, who has travelled down the line to '91 and is presenting himself as a man named E.D. Wardo, head of an organization called Green World. Among Green World's many enterprises is a detox center where they gather mental patients and homeless people under the pretense of training them to work in the ecology movement. What Wardo is actually doing is getting the patients hooked on Skurb 78, the crack of the future, a designer drug more addictive than heroin that wasn't made until 2078 in the normal timeline. While the patients sleep, a tape of Wardo speaking to them in hypnotic tones is played over and over. It sort of reminds me of Blofeld in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Wardo gradually takes full control of his patients through drugs and hypnosis, then it's trancer time.

During his six years of peace in the past, Jack Deth has set aside his style rule of "Dry hair's for squids." But when it's time to get back into the action, he gets out the pomade and slicks back his locks. Deth has to stop Wardo/Whistler, end this new trancer threat, decide what time period he truly wants to be in, and deal with the fact that he now has two wives in 1991, knowing that his first wife is doomed if she returns to 2247.

Charles Band returned to the director's chair for Trancers II, the last film in the series that he would direct himself. Every actor whose character was back for the sequel also returned, from Tim Thomerson reprising his role as the awesome and iconic Jack Deth to Helen Hunt as Lena, Biff Manard as Hap Ashby, Telma Hopkins as Raines the techie of the future, Art LaFleur as tough Angel City cop McNulty, and Alyson Croft as the youthful female ancestor McNulty has to unwillingly inhabit. Having aged into her teens by the time part 2 came around, Croft is given more to do this time, bantering with Deth and smoking stogies. Even the long second watch is back.

Joining the heroes is the lovely Megan Ward, a '90s favorite of mine, as Alice Stillwell. The villainous Wardo is played by late, great, burn-scarred character actor Richard Lynch, with Re-Animator's Jeffrey Combs and two time Bond girl Martine Beswick (From Russia with Love and Thunderball) as his main lackeys.

In smaller roles are a couple actors I always enjoy seeing; Sonny Carl Davis as orderly Rabbit, a former mental patient himself, and Barbara Crampton in a cameo as an interviewer who Wardo informs he's on "a holy war against polluters". Hunt and Band's fathers Gordon and Albert also cameo as a couple homeless guys looking for a little more from the free hot dogs Green World workers are handing out.

While I don't enjoy part 2 as much as I do the original film, it's a decent sequel. Considering who plays the baddies I think they're underused, but Lynch does have some moments where he gets to shine and creep. The film has a humor to it that is well handled by the actors, particularly Tim Thomerson, who is also a comedian in addition to being a badass. When Alice escapes from the Green World compound and gets mixed up in Jack and Lena's life, it leads to some sitcom-esque scenes of misunderstandings.

This movie also shows that the best weapon to bring to a gun fight is a pitchfork.

The trancer attacks in the first weren't exactly played dead serious, with the trancers Deth fought including a kindly old waitress and a mall Santa, but they seem sillier this time around, mainly because of the actors playing the trancers and the way the action is shot and/or cut together. That's a negative point for me overall, but the goofiness works really well in one scene.

Deth runs into Wardo's followers several times throughout the film, but the best attempt on his life comes at about the halfway point and it's not only the standout moment of the movie, it's one of the greatest moments in the whole series. In this case, the trancer is a delivery boy from a deli who drops off an order of groceries like normal. But then McNulty notices something strange... a ham that's stuffed like a turkey. Deth immediately springs into action, grabbing the ham and throwing it through a window. The ham blows up in a large fireball. The scene ends with McNulty saying something that pisses Deth off, to which our hero responds, "The next time someone hands you an exploding ham, I'm gonna pass the mustard."

It's ridiculous. I love it.

Final Girl Film Club - John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness

April 3, 2013, 4:01 pm

≫ Next: Worth Mentioning - The Backwoods' Darkest Hour

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Cody is endeavoring to write about all of the Final Girl Film Club entries he missed over the years. The movies will be covered in the original Film Club order in most cases, while some of the articles will be posted to coincide with certain dates.

A master of horror's 1987 vision of the apocalypse.

A rundown inner city church in Los Angeles sits atop an underground chamber that was built in the 1500s to house a mysterious container filled with swirling green liquid and capped with a lid that can only be opened from the inside. For the last 30 years, a "guardian priest" has lived in the closed church, leaving only once a week for supplies, going into the cellar every day to check on the container. The priest is a member of The Brotherhood of Sleep, a forgotten sect formed to watch over the container, its existence hidden even from the Vatican. The container holds a lifeform referred to as "the sleeper", and the sleeper has begun to awake, its stirrings coinciding with a change in the Earth and sky, a change in feeling.

The death of the guardian priest puts the keys to the ancient secret in the hands of a priest played by Donald Pleasence. Pleasence's character name is said around the internet to be Father Loomis, a nod to the Doctor Loomis character he played in John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), but I didn't catch it if the name is ever said or displayed in the film, and the end credits simply list him as "Priest".

Along with the container, there's also a two thousand year old book in the underground chamber which has been written and rewritten in multiple languages over the years, telling the entire story of the sleeper. The Brotherhood of Sleep's purpose was to keep the secret until science had advanced enough to prove the claims within the book. That time is now.

With the help of Professor Howard Birack (Victor Wong, who worked with Carpenter on the previous year's Big Trouble in Little China), the priest gathers a large group of grad students to the church for a weekend of research and tests on the container. Physicists, radiologists, microbiologists, biochemists, they all get to work. The task of translating the book falls to a woman seeking a doctorate in theology, analysis of ancient scriptures. The more their work reveals, the more disturbing the situation gets.

The stories in the book are very different takes on stories and characters from the Bible, and if these stories are true, that means the self-forming life within the container, the sleeper, is Satan himself, the Antichrist, son of an even greater evil, the Anti-God. The Anti-God was banished into the world of anti-matter, which is accessible through mirrors, and when the sleeper is powerful enough he will try to bring his father into our world... Of course, that's exactly where this story is going.

One-by-one, students fall under control of the sleeper, while others who try to leave the church are immediately struck down by a group of murderous, zombie-like homeless people who have surrounded the building (one of whom is played by Alice Cooper). If the people trapped within don't figure out a way to thwart a plan set in motion millions of years ago, this church in Los Angeles might be the starting point for the end of the world.

Writer/director John Carpenter apparently has some very different ideas on how to spend a relaxing downtime than I do, and it was his hobby of studying theoretical physics and atomic theory that was the inspiration for this story combining science and the supernatural. He wrote the screenplay under the pseudonym Martin Quatermass, a nod to a character in science fiction/horror stories by writer Nigel Kneale which were also a source of inspiration. Kneale and Carpenter had worked together a few years earlier, when Kneale worked on the screenplay for Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Kneale had his name removed from the credits of that film because he didn't like the way it turned out, and he also wasn't pleased that Carpenter paid homage to him on this one. Oh well.

Prince of Darkness is one of Carpenter's lesser known and lesser seen works, but I find it to be very effectively unsettling. The tone is dark, the story unnerving, it's filled with disturbing and gross images, many of which have to do with bugs and worms, with yet another cool Carpenter/Alan Howarth score moving things forward.

The cast is good, featuring several people Carpenter had worked with before, like Pleasence and Wong, Big Trouble in Little China's Dennis Dun, and Starman's Lisa Blount and Dirk Blocker, people he would work with again, like Peter Jason, Robert Grasmere, and Susan Blanchard, as well as a lead role for Jameson Parker, at this time six seasons into his eight year run on the "brother private eyes" show Simon & Simon, a childhood favorite of mine.

The movie is a slow build, with a deliberateness that does hold it back from quite reaching the level of horrific batshit insanity that I'd like to see it get to. The sleeper zombies are pretty low-key for the most part and with the beleaguered characters being grad students, they tend to be sensibly analytical about what's going on. Still, there is some good action in the last 15 minutes. Carpenter never has Dun use his Big Trouble moves to deliver any jump kicks to demon-zombie skulls, but Dun is involved with what I find to be the best and most memorable sequence in the film, in which his character is trapped in a janitor's closet by a room full of the possessed, once of which is going through some terrifying changes. Other students have to attempt to bust through the back wall of the closet to save Dun before the servants of the sleeper get to him.

I've seen Prince of Darkness several times on home video over the years, but the best viewing I've ever had of it was at the 2010 Shock Around the Clock twenty-four hour theatrical horror marathon, where it was shown as the last film in the line-up, playing out before a room full of the exhausted and sleep deprived. It was the perfect film for that position, dealing with sleep and dreams as it does. As the characters' night in the church goes on, some of them start falling asleep and each of them has the same dream, which is actually a transmission being broadcast from the future (the year 1999!). At one point, the Pleasence character asks the others, "How many of you have fallen asleep tonight?" Those who have raise hands. Since I had nodded off at various points throughout the marathon, I raised my hand in the theatre as well.

Prince of Darkness was first released to theatres on October 23, 1987, a very appropriate release date. It'd be a good horror film to see for the first time around Halloween, and if any horror fans reading this haven't seen it yet I would recommend adding it to your October viewing list.

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