Worth Mentioning - The Backwoods' Darkest Hour

April 5, 2013, 9:27 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 discusses one of his favorite slashers.

JUST BEFORE DAWN (1981)

1981 was a big year for slasher films. Theatres were flooded with new entries in the subgenre that year, and among the deluge were some of the best and most respected slasher flicks to come out of the entire decade: Friday the 13th Part 2, My Bloody Valentine, The Burning, The Funhouse, Halloween II, Bloody Birthday, Hell Night, The Prowler, and Jeff Lieberman's Just Before Dawn.

Lieberman was no stranger to horror when he set out to make Just Before Dawn. His feature directorial debut had been 1976's awesome killer worm movie Squirm, and he had followed that up with Blue Sunshine (about bald maniacs going batshit) and a TV movie version of the Frankenstein story. 1981 was the perfect time for his take on the backwoods slasher.

The first characters we meet in the film are hunters Ty and Vachel. They've caught a deer, Ty is catching a hell of a buzz from the booze he's swilling, now as soon as they steal a decoration from inside an old, abandoned church they've stumbled across so Vachel can take his wife home a present, they'll be ready to head out of the wilderness. But taking this sidetrack of thievery turns out to be a deadly mistake when a hulking, giggling, machete-wielding mountain man shows up.

Ty, who manages to survive this encounter and escape into the woods, is played by character actor Mike Kellin. Kellin had been working steadily since 1950, but of his 102 credits he might be best known (and certainly is to me) as Mel, the teenage counselor-dating creep of a camp owner from the 1983 slasher Sleepaway Camp, which was actually the last movie he worked on before he passed away in the summer of '83.

Most of the film centers on the next set of characters who show up, a group of five young friends who roll into the forest in their RV with Blondie's "Heart of Glass" blasting on the radio. The driver, veteran outdoorsman Warren, has recently bought property in the movie's mountainous wilderness setting and has come to check out his new land with his girlfriend Constance (Connie for short), a nice tomboy-next-door sort, and their pals; the fun-loving Jonathan, his nerdy photography enthusiast brother Daniel, and Jonathan's girlfriend Megan. As they go deeper and deeper into the wilderness, and further up the mountain, they receive warnings from a Forest Ranger played by George Kennedy, who doesn't expect them to be able to come back down off the mountain, from the running-for-his-life Ty, who incoherently goes on about being chased by demons, and from a shotgun-toting local who tells them to "skidoot" before they "raise the devil". Being characters in a slasher movie, they ignore all of these warnings and continue on with their camping plans.

Soon enough, the young group's idyllic vacation has become the camping trip from hell, as they fall prey to the murderous mountain man one-by-one. Sometimes the killer seems to have the ability to be in two places at once, or to cover distances surprisingly quickly... You know, there does seem to be a lot of twins in this area...

Lieberman was drawing from 1972's Deliverance as his main source of inspiration when putting together Just Before Dawn, and you can see traces of it in the finished film, from the setting to the portrayal of the mountain-dwellers, and there are even some vague character similarities.

The film works as well as it does thanks to the atmosphere of creepy isolation Lieberman and cinematographer Joel King (who shares credit with his late brother Dean) got out of the locations. It's a slow build that still feels like it moves at a good pace, and the stalking and attack scenes are effective and exciting.

The characters are likeable and well written, and the cast is very good, from the previously mentioned Kellin and Kennedy to Gregg Henry (who would go on to be the hilarious Mayor in 2006's Slither) as Warren, Chris "son of Jack" Lemmon as Jonathan, Ralph Seymour as Daniel, Jamie Rose as Megan, and Kati Powell as a mountain girl named Merry Cat. Though Lieberman says on his audio commentary that Hap Oslund, the local who tells the group to skidoot, was frustrating to work with, I quite enjoy his performance. The unnamed slasher(s) is (are) played by John Hunsaker.

Deborah Benson does great work as our Final Girl heroine Connie, who's given a character arc over the course of which she has to tap into her primal nature to survive the ordeal she finds herself in. She starts off wearing a flannel shirt and khaki pants, her hair pulled back, and by the end of the film she'll have let her hair down, danced around the campfire, tied her unbuttoned blouse at the navel, put on short shorts that barely do the job of keeping her bum covered, and wrestled with some maniacs.

The score was provided by Brad Fiedel, best known for the work he'd go on to do on The Terminator. I like the music in this, especially the element of a haunting whistle sound, inspired by the characters' repeated use of a rescue whistle.

The film was shot in Oregon's Silver Falls State Park and features some locations that are amazing to look at, while at the same time being ones that you would definitely not want to be trapped in.

I've been a fan of Just Before Dawn for several years now, having first discovered it on VHS in the mid-'90s and having owned its special edition DVD since its release in 2005. Within hours of this post going up, I'll be attending the latest Cinema Wasteland convention, and one of the main draws for this spring's show is a JBD reunion of Jeff Lieberman and his actors Chris Lemmon and Jamie Rose. (Deborah Benson was booked but had to cancel.) They'll be there to meet with fans all weekend and will be doing a Q&A panel tonight. I'm very much looking forward to it.

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In Memory of Richard Brooker

April 8, 2013, 9:13 pm

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Cody Hamman pays tribute to Jason Voorhees performer Richard Brooker.

Yesterday, I was shocked and saddened to read the news that Richard Brooker, who played Jason Voorhees in 1982's Friday the 13th Part III, had passed away of an unspecified and apparently very sudden illness. 2013, the year in which we would ideally be celebrating the release of a new Friday the 13th film had the studio made the no-brainer decision to greenlight one for such an appropriate year, will instead be remembered as the year in which we lost a Jason performer for the first time.

Brooker's portrayal of the character is one of my favorite performances that has been given in the role, and he was the man behind the mask for what is my absolute favorite version of the character. I've written about part III twice before on the blog, naming it my favorite slasher movie and doing a full Appreciation article on it, and in those posts I went on about how I love the look of Jason in its final third, when he has put on the hockey mask for the first time in the series. Jason is perfect in that film, and Brooker's acting beneath the badass look has a lot to do with it.

Brooker did quite a few conventions in recent years, but I was only lucky enough to meet him one time, at the spring 2006 Cinema Wasteland. That was actually the first horror convention I ever attended, and the fact that Brooker was a guest, along with fellow Jasons Ari Lehman (part 1), Steve Dash (part 2), C.J. Graham (Jason Lives), and Kane Hodder (parts 7, 8, 9, and X) is what got me there. They were all really nice and it was great to be able to meet them. I got them all to sign the title page of my copy of the Crystal Lake Memories book, and that book became my most prized collectible that day. It has been signed by a lot of other people since then, and over the years I was able to add the signatures of Ted White (part 4), Tom Morga (part 5), Ken Kirzinger (Freddy vs. Jason), and Derek Mears (F13 '09) to that title page, as well as Betsy Palmer, Mrs. Voorhees. I'm very proud of that signature collection, that I was able to meet every primary Jason performer and get them to sign that page, collecting a complete set. With the loss of Brooker, it's a feat that could never be repeated, so I cherish that book and those experiences meeting the actors even more now.

 

The Friday the 13th franchise is very important to me, it's been a big part of my life since I was three years old. As far as I'm concerned, the F13s are some of the most entertaining movies out there. They're a cinematic comfort to me. Jason Voorhees is one of my all-time favorite characters. I wear his image on my clothes, I carry (a miniature version of) his mask on my keychain whenever I leave the house, I have a six foot tall animatronic Jason in my house. I've said that no matter how down I get in life, one thing that is always there for me is Jason. When I'm feeling depressed, I can put on a Friday the 13th and get enjoyment from it. Watching Jason in action puts a smile on my face. So the fact that Richard Brooker played what I find to be the perfect version of this character that means so much to me, that's a big deal in my life. A former trapeze artist, Brooker put on the makeup and wardrobe of Jason Voorhees and, while doing stunts and going through the motions of hacking up a bunch of people, gave a performance that has entertained me, awed me, thrilled me, and brought moments of happiness to me throughout my life, and will keep on doing so. The viewings of Friday the 13th Part III and the enjoyment they bring will continue.

Richard Brooker is gone now, and I offer my condolences to his friends and family. I may not have known him personally, but I do deeply appreciate his contribution to the character of Jason Voorhees, and he will always have a place in my heart and mind because of it. I thank him for bringing the character to the screen in such an awesome way.

R.I.P.

1954 - 2013

Worth Mentioning - Blood-Soaked Celluloid

April 12, 2013, 2:04 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 caught Tarantino's latest on film.

DJANGO UNCHAINED (2012)

In the film vs. digital debate, Quentin Tarantino is a big proponent for sticking with film, even going so far as to say a couple years ago that he'd be retiring from making movies when digital projection fully takes over. That's probably happening quicker than he realized it would, as last year the word came out that studios will stop producing 35mm prints for their movies in the major markets by the end of 2013 and for the whole world by 2015. Most multiplexes are already completely digital, while independent theatres and the remaining drive-ins around the U.S. are struggling to raise enough money to make the costly switch over. A lot of these places will probably be going out of business if they can't afford to go digital. The little guy loses again.

There is one theatre I go to regularly that still shows its movies primarily on 35mm. The dollar theatre. So when I missed the window of opportunity to see Django Unchained during its first-run release a couple months ago, I wasn't too concerned. I could wait a little while, see it at the dollar theatre projected on 35mm and have the proper, Tarantino-approved viewing experience instead of seeing it projected digitally, which he has called "television in public". When the movie finally did reach the dollar theatre, I was there. I couldn't miss it. Thanks to the Fathom Events screenings of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction back in December filling in the gaps, I've seen every other Tarantino movie theatrically, so I had to keep the streak going.

When Tarantino first hit the scene, there were some who called him a rip-off artist. Exposé articles were written and videos made to show the world that Tarantino was drawing story and shot inspirations from other films. It seems ridiculous now. As Tarantino's career has gone on, it's become very clear that his films are built on homage to others that he has seen and loved, that he's filtering his appreciation and enthusiasm for his favorites into his own versions of the genres and stories. Django Unchained is his take on the Spaghetti Western, set in the American Southeast. He calls it a Southern.

The year is 1858, before the Civil War, and the story focuses on slavery and racism much more than most Westerns have. It begins with German bounty hunter/former dentist King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) "acquiring" a slave named Django (Jamie Foxx) because he's familiar with the men Schultz is currently tracking down. Schultz despises slavery, so rather than force Django to do what he wants him to, he makes a deal with him - if he helps him find the men he's looking for, they'll split the bounty and Schultz will give Django his freedom.

The partnership between Schultz and Django lasts longer than initially expected. Knowing that life will be very dangerous for Django once he has his freedom, Schultz decides to spend the winter getting him prepared to go out on his own, teaching him skills he'll need while they hunt bounties together. During their months as partners, Django becomes the fastest gun in the south. Schultz is also a big softie, so when he hears Django's backstory about his German-speaking slave wife Broomhilda (a name she shares with a character in a popular German legend), who was taken from him by a disapproving plantation owner, both of them beaten mercilessly and sold to different owners at an auction, Schultz agrees to help Django find his lost love and free her from whatever sort of situation she may be in now.

The search for Broomhilda leads Django and Schultz to a man named Calvin Candie, a creep who's currently getting entertainment from and making money off of "mandingo fights", basically human cockfights where slaves are forced to fight each other and every bout ends with the death of one of the fighters.

Things get quite bloody along the way of Django's journey, although the shock of the violence is lessened by how cartoony it is. The blood squibs are often like explosions of raspberry milkshake.

The title of the film, and the name of the lead character, is a reference to director Sergio Corbucci's 1966 Spaghetti Western titled Django, which starred Franco Nero as the titular character. Django was so successful that the titles of dozens of other films were changed to fit the name "Django" into them, even though they had nothing to do with Corbucci's film or the character. The only proper Django sequel, with Nero again in the role, was 1987's Django Strikes Again. Like most films with Django in the title, Django Unchained is not really connected to the 1966 film, but they do share some elements - both Nero's Django and Jamie Foxx's are out to avenge wrongs that were committed against their wives - and Tarantino gives Nero a great little cameo in the film, where Foxx-Django is introduced to the character played by Nero. Django spells his name out and notes that "the D is silent", to which Nero replies "I know" before walking away.

The cast of the film is great. Nero isn't the only actor who shows up for a brief cameo, and I didn't even catch or recognize some whose names I saw in the credits. The movie is coming out on DVD/Blu on Tuesday and I look forward to watching it again so I can spot actors like Robert Carradine or take a moment to realize that that was The Dukes of Hazzard's Tom Wopat as another character. Kerry Washington plays Broomhilda, so it's understandable why Django goes through so much trouble for her. Jamie Foxx does fine work as Django, but the character is a bit overshadowed by the shining performances from Waltz as Schultz (a role that won him his second Best Supporting Actor Oscar, he won his first for his role in Tarantino's previous film, Inglourious Basterds) and Leonardo DiCaprio as Calvin Candie.

One moment of DiCaprio's that really blew me away was a scene in which he injures his palm while going off on a raging rant and plays out the scene while blood runs down his hand. I'm even more impressed by that scene now that I've read that DiCaprio actually did hurt his hand in that moment but stayed in character long enough to act out the scene while his real blood poured out, blood which he wipes on the face of Kerry Washington. When the scene was finished, DiCaprio had to be taken to get stitches in his palm.

Actors who I hadn't heard of before also caught my attention in smaller roles, like Daniele Watts as a slave girl called Coco. In a French maid outfit with a big bow in her hair, Coco has to greet Candie's guests in French and keep herself in cutesy poses even when horrible things are going on around her. Looking her up later, I found that Watts had written a very interesting essay about how getting cast in the film led her to a discovery about her own heritage.

Django Unchained is a simple action/revenge tale that Tarantino takes nearly 3 hours to tell, and yet it moves at a good pace and felt to me like it was an hour shorter than it actually was. I was interested in seeing how he would write it, because the period setting makes this the first time he's written a script where he couldn't have the characters discuss movies and pop culture randomness. He still finds ways to draw out the dialogue a little more than necessary sometimes, but more instances of that were cut between script and screen and overall it's a refreshing change of pace to not have the direct references to fall back on. The Academy was impressed, giving Tarantino his second Best Screenplay Oscar for it. (His first was shared with Roger Avary for Pulp Fiction.) As of right now, I wouldn't list this film as one of my top favorite Tarantino movies, but it was an enjoyable watch.

Cinema Wasteland Spring 2013

April 16, 2013, 2:16 pm

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Over the weekend of April 5th, the spring 2013 edition of the Cinema Wasteland convention was held in Strongsville, Ohio. Cody was there, and his weekend went something like this:

FRIDAY (April 5th):

Even though I had been looking forward to it since the Fall 2012 show ended, had my three day pass secured and my hotel room booked for months, I still felt like I was making a last minute rush to this, the 23rd Cinema Wasteland show and the 15th that I've attended. That's because during the week building up to the show I had to fight my way through the worst cold that I've had in many years. I still wasn't back to full health by the time I had to leave for the hotel, but fortunately I had recovered enough that I wasn't likely to be the Patient Zero of the convention.   

I arrived at the Strongsville Holiday Inn, the venue the Wasteland has been in since the beginning and which its shows are booked at through at least 2016, right around my check-in time of 4pm. I picked up my Wasteland pass from the table in the lobby, finding that the passes for this show were handily attached to a lanyard, then got the key card to my room and went to check it out. After I got things set up there, it was time for the show to begin.

　
4:30pm - All 3-Day Pass holders admitted.

I entered the comforting world of the Wasteland soon after the doors opened and took a look around at the dealer and guest tables, some of which weren't yet occupied. I wasn't taking lingering looks yet because I had a specific destination in mind.

One of the guests was Jeff Lieberman, director of the killer worm movie Squirm and the backwoods slasher Just Before Dawn. Lieberman recently tracked down a print of his 1988 sci-fi comedy Remote Control, bought it from a collector, paid for a 2K transfer out of his own pocket, assembled and is self-distributing a limited number of special edition Blu-rays and DVDs. He had been selling copies on his website for a few days before the convention, so I wanted to be at his table as soon as the doors opened so I wouldn't miss the chance to pick up a copy before it sold out.

Lieberman was one who wasn't yet at his table, but I soon saw him come strolling in and approached his table almost immediately after he had taken his seat. I bought a Remote Control Blu-ray from him, as well as a DVD copy of his 1978 film Blue Sunshine, and had him sign and personalize them. Turns out that "Cody" is also the name of his son-in-law, but he said he wouldn't hold it against me. I thanked him for that, and for the successful transaction of discs and signatures. I shook his hand, then went on to take another look around the room.

At the table of an artist selling his work as posters and on T-shirts, I spotted a cool Friday the 13th shirt with the image of the hockey mask from the 2009 film's teaser art with the image of Mrs. Voorhees' rotting head on its part 2 altar below it. Seemed like a good shirt to add to my wardrobe, so I bought one.

At another table were some nice looking hockey masks, the holes and markings screen accurate to the one worn by Jason Voorhees. I've long been wanting to get a more screen accurate mask to put on the six foot tall animatronic Jason that I have because the holes on the mask it came with are too large, throwing them out of alignment. I used to have a good mask for the job, but Jay Burleson borrowed it several years ago and I haven't seen it since. This seller had them available for a decent price, so I bought one. That mask is now on my Jason, and putting an accurate mask on him has given him a much more sinister look.

By this point, I had spent $87, so I decided it was time to take my purchases back to my room for safe keeping. It was around 5:30 when I got to my room and I hadn't had anything to eat yet that day. I figured I should probably get something, so I ordered a pizza from a place nearby, to be delivered to my room. There was a $2 delivery charge added to the total, and I wasn't quite sure how that works. Does that extra money go to the person making the delivery, or am I still required to give them a tip on top of that charge? The total with the delivery charge was $15.24. I was going to pay with a $20 and had it in my mind that I would give the delivery person a dollar back when they gave me the change. But then the pizza guy showed up and asked for "15 and a quarter", and when I paid with my $20 he gave me $4 back. That was it, there was no move made to give me the 76 cents of change, or the 75 cents by his count. So since he was keeping the coins, that's the (extra?) tip he got, shorting himself by 24 cents.

I ate my fill of pizza, then went back down to the convention with the thought that I should look for a DVD copy of Jeff Lieberman's Squirm, which I only owned on VHS. At Cinema Wasteland organizer Ken Kish's table up front, there was a Squirm DVD for sale for $10. Perfect. I bought it.

At previous Wastelands, I had seen screenings of The Legend of Boggy Creek and The Wild Women of Wongo presented by horror host Gunga Jim as part of his mocking Gunga's Drive-In show. A screening of the latest Drive-In episode, featuring the movie Assignment Terror, had been scheduled to play in Movie Room 2 at 6:45pm, but the schedule posted outside the room's doors noted that Gunga Jim had had to cancel his appearance at the last minute due to family issues. Assignment Terror would not be showing. So instead, I went over to Movie Room 1.

6:30pm - MOVIE: Jeff Lieberman’s JUST BEFORE DAWN begins in MOVIE ROOM 1.

The Assignment Terror vs. Just Before Dawn scheduling conflict had been a tough one for me when I was trying to figure out how I was going to spend my day, and seeing the new Gunga's Drive-In episode had barely won out over catching a public screening of one of my favorite slashers. Now that its competition had withdrawn, I was able to watch JBD with a Wasteland crowd.

Since I hadn't expected to be watching Just Before Dawn at the show, I had written a Worth Mentioning article on the movie over the couple days previous and watched it a few times while doing so, so it was very fresh in my mind for this viewing, but still fun to see with a group.

　
After the movie ended, there was a brief wait before the attending guests that were involved with it would be making their ways into the room, and I took advantage of this window of time to go back to a dealer's table that had caught my eye earlier. This particular dealer was Time & Space Toys, a store which is based out of the Monroeville Mall, the mall where George A. Romero's 1978 Dawn of the Dead was filmed. The Time & Space owner was accompanied by Gary Streiner, who was a crew member on the original 1968 Night of the Living Dead, the younger brother of Russ "Johnny" Streiner, and the man who recently spearheaded the Fix the Chapel movement to restore the cemetery chapel featured in NOTLD '68. From Time & Space, I bought a Night of the Living Dead T-shirt featuring the image of Bill Hinzman's Cemetery Ghoul attacking Judith O'Dea as Barbara, a Return of the Living Dead shirt that features that film's awesome poster image in green, and a pack of Friday the 13th playing cards. These purchases joined the Squirm DVD in my tote bag and I returned to Movie Room 1 just in time for -


8:30pm - GUEST EVENT: Join Jeff Lieberman, Chris Lemmon, and Jamie Rose for our first guest panel of the weekend after the Just Before Dawn screening in MOVIE ROOM 1.

This was a very entertaining panel, moderated as usual by Wasteland runner Ken Kish and Art Ettinger of Ultra Violent Magazine. Just Before Dawn was well-covered over the course of the hour long talk. Lieberman discussed rewriting the exisiting script to be more like Deliverance while removing a story element involving a church of snake-handlers because he didn't want to deal with religion or having snakes on set. Jamie Rose was very talkative, to the chagrin of the also very talkative Chris Lemmon, who jokingly complained that he wasn't going to be able to get a word in edgewise. Rose talked about the casting process, how she first bonded with Lieberman over a joke ("Did you hear the one about the jump rope and the lollipop? Skip it, it sucks."), and how the producers were concerned that she wasn't hot enough to be the film's hot girl, so she had to have her mother take provocative glamour shots of her. I always thought she handled the hot girl role just fine. The many people who spied on the filming of her nude scene probably agreed. Lemmon's side of the conversation was also hindered by the fact that he had a faulty microphone, which he would knock around whenever it failed, inadvertently causing pain to headphones-wearing crack A/V guy A. Ghastlee Ghoul. The talk went beyond Just Before Dawn as well, covering Lemmon's first acting role in Airport '77 and the good times he had with Hulk Hogan on Thunder in Paradise, Rose's experience making Chopper Chicks in Zombietown, and a couple questions about Lieberman's Squirm and Blue Sunshine.

　
After the panel, I took a quick walk around the dealer/guest room before it was set to close at 10pm, then took my second batch of purchases back to my room. I only had a few minutes to hang out in there before it was time to head back downstairs and see -

10:00pm - MOVIE & GUEST TALK: THE HIDDEN begins in MOVIE ROOM 2 with a short talk and introduction from director Jack Sholder.

Art Ettinger took solo moderating duties for a fifty minute talk with Jack Sholder before the movie. Sholder discussed how he thought he'd be a director of Merchant Ivory-type features but fell into the genre world by working as an editor for New Line Cinema's Bob Shaye, who would almost always feel that movies he acquired for distribution were 15 minutes too long and it was up to Sholder to cut them down. Soon he was promoted to directing. Sholder was excited to do The Hidden because it was his chance to do something like a Sidney Lumet (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, etc.) film, but with the added bonus of featuring a space monster. Also covered were Sholder's Ohio-based education and the homoerotic undertones of his A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, which came as a surprise to its director.

I hadn't watched The Hidden since the mid-'90s and all I really remembered about it was that Jason Goes to Hell was accused of being a rip-off of it, a pre-fame Danny Trejo has a quick cameo in a jail cell, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre III's Kate Hodge starred in the sequel.

Turns out that The Hidden is a really badass movie. Its villain is an alien that looks like a large slug in its natural form but is able to take over the bodies of human beings by crawling into their mouths. Arriving on Earth, this alien has developed a great appreciation for rock 'n roll, fast cars, and crimes varying from robbery to murder. A good body-hopping alien has chased the evil slug from their homeworld and passes himself off as an FBI agent (in the form of Twin Peaks' Kyle MacLachlan) to team up with a regular LAPD cop in hopes of putting an end to this interstellar crime spree.

Over the course of the film, the bad alien inhabits the bodies of six different people and a dog, and Sholder talked about casting and how they wanted each body the alien took over to show the same giveaway tic. The dog was the key to figuring out what this tic would be, since the actors could more easily copy the dog than it could be made to copy the people. This dog had the quirk of sticking its tongue out when it was riled up but not quite enough to bark. So there's a moment in the film where the dog bares its teeth and sticks out its tongue, and all the people who play the alien also have a moment where they stick their tongue out. I'm pretty sure that the dog in The Hidden is the same dog that pisses fire in the following year's A Nightmare on Elm Street 4.

The alien's favorite band seems to be Concrete Blonde, and there are two Concrete Blonde songs in this film that were also on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 soundtrack, "Your Haunted Head" and "Over Your Shoulder". The Lords of the New Church, another band that had a couple songs on the TCM2 soundtrack, also have a song in The Hidden. It's a bonus for any movie if it can connect itself to TCM2 in my mind.

　

MIDNIGHT  - MOVIE: CHEECH AND CHONG’S NEXT MOVIE wraps up the Friday night up in smoke mini-marathon in grand style, in MOVIE ROOM 1.

By the time The Hidden ended, Cheech and Chong's Next Movie was already in progress and had been for about 30 minutes. I was feeling tired and ready for bed, but I have a chihuahua named Cheech so I couldn't just completely skip a Cheech and Chong movie. I stopped by Movie Room 1 and watched a half hour or so of the comedy duo's shenanigans, then decided to call it a day and head to my room.

Getting in bed, I turned the TV on and did some surfing around. My TV wasn't picking up the signal for the movie channels, so I ended up on a channel that was showing an episode of Rod Serling's horror anthology series Night Gallery. I drifted off to sleep during a segment directed by John Astin about a critic being terrorized by a spider the size of a dog.
　

SATURDAY (April 6th):

When my alarm woke me in the morning, the channel I had left the TV on was airing some kids show featuring ventriloquist dummies. I watched a dummy interview Corbin Bernsen about his Soap Box Derby movie 25 Hill (filmed in Akron, Ohio), then got up and started Cinema Wasteland Day 2.
After a shower and a breakfast of leftover pizza, it was time to head downstairs.

　
10:00am - Doors Open for all pass holders.

Lately I've been daydreaming about someday collecting the entire run of Fangoria through the 1980s, the decade when a lot of my favorites were being made. Since Fangoria lost their back issues in a 2007 warehouse fire, I figured that could be a rather costly endeavor. So I was heartened to see that a dealer who was selling posters and magazine back issues had a copy of Fangoria #1 from August 1979 for sale for $75, quite a bit cheaper than I would've expected. If I ever go through with the full 1980s collection, it might take less of a chunk of change than I was imagining. I let issue #1 go this time, but I did buy a batch of '80s Fangorias from this seller, keeping my spending under control by restricting myself to issues that had Friday the 13th cover stories. I ended up paying $66 for five issues that featured articles on Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, A New Beginning, Jason Takes Manhattan, interviews with Jason performers, and a goodbye to the franchise written by sequel producer Frank Mancuso, Jr. in 1990 after it had been decided that the series was finished at Paramount.

I took the Fangorias back up to my room, pulled the desk chair over beside the window and sat there leafing through the twenty-three to twenty-nine year old magazines and reading articles for a while.

12:30pm - MOVIE: BLOOD ORGY AT BEAVER LAKE begins in MOVIE ROOM 2.

Blood Orgy at Beaver Lake is a low-budget indie horror/comedy about what happens when a drug called Sextasy 69, a mix of ecstasy, heroin (or was it crack?), and Viagra, is accidentally mixed into a batch of moonshine: it creates a bunch of sex-crazed zombies. Gross-out gags involving gore, dicks, farts, poop, and a giant beaver ensue.

The movie was sort of amusing but not really for me, though the audience I watched it with got a good amount of enjoyment out of it. One girl went on to say that her heart grew three sizes the day she watched Blood Orgy at Beaver Lake.

1:30pm - MOVIE: SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE begins in MOVIE ROOM 1.

The screening of this 1982 slasher (which I've written about before) was already well underway by the time the Blood Orgy ended, but I got to Movie Room 1 in time to see most of the actual slumber party massacring. The women behind the film - director Amy Holden Jones and writer/feminist author Rita Mae Brown - played up the sexual aspect of their slasher being a man who penetrates the bodies of women with his weapon, in this case a large drill, and the audience had good reactions to the moments in which the phallic imagery is obvious, like the shot between the legs of the killer as he menaces cowering girls with his dangling drill and the climactic moment when he's "castrated" by having his drill bit broken.


3:00pm - GUEST EVENT: After the Slumber Party Massacre screening, we’re gathering up Debra DeLiso, Joe Johnson, Brinke Stevens, and Michael Villella to talk slumber parties and cordless drill welding killers in MOVIE ROOM 1.

Michael Villella, who played the killer in Slumber Party Massacre, was joined by a trio of his victims for this interesting panel. Villella really shined during the hour-long talk, as everyone talked about his creepy behavior on the set that was due to his method acting, and he revealed that he based his character's movements on a peacock and ad libbed some of his most memorable lines.
When the SPM panel ended, I remained in the room for

　
4:00pm- GUEST EVENT: 42nd STREET PETE’S GRINDHOUSE begins in MOVIE ROOM 1 with a short highlite reel of scenes from Gary Kent’s memorable B movie roles. Then, following the highlite reel, join 42nd Street Pete and his special guest, Gary Kent, as they talk about Gary’s career during the independent era of 60s and 70s filmmaking.

The video Ken Kish had cut together to show before this panel was 19+ minutes long and consisted of clips from 10 of the movies actor/stuntman Gary Kent appeared in. I didn't really know who the man was before this panel, but it turned out that I had seen him in several movies, and judging by the clips he made some awesome ones in his career. Movies featured included One Million AC/DC, The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant, Dracula vs. Frankenstein, Angels' Wild Women, Schoolgirls in Chains, and The Forest.

Then Kent took the stage with moderators Kish and 42nd Street Pete for a great chat, during which Kent told some awesome stories from his career. He worked with Ray Dennis Steckler and Lon Chaney Jr., a friend of his fought Steven Seagal, he shot movies on the Spahn Ranch at the same time that the Manson Family was living on the property, so he met Charles Manson and Tex Watson. Very interesting stuff. Kent has a book out called Shadows & Light: Journeys With Outlaws in Revolutionary Hollywood that I don't have a copy of, he sold out of it at his table very quickly, but I imagine it's pretty cool.


Earlier in the day, I had spotted Shock Around the Clock horror marathon host Joe Neff at the show, the first time I've ever seen him at a Cinema Wasteland. I ended up sitting in his vicinity during the Slumber Party Massacre and 42nd Street Pete panels, and the more I was around him and his entourage the more I began to think that one of them might have been Kevin S. O'Brien, director of the parody short Night of the Living Bread... But maybe I was imagining things. If that really was the director of Night of the Living Bread just walking around the convention like a normie, he should've been surrounded by adoring fans.
　

At the end of their panel, Kish and Pete briefly talked about Spaghetti Westerns for an introduction to a screening of Beyond the Law, starring Lee Van Cleef. I stuck around for the intro, but instead of watching the movie I went over to the hotel restaurant for dinner. There, I was disappointed to find that they had a very simple Wasteland weekend specific menu that didn't include the sandwich that I like to get when I'm there. I was also disappointed that, with the tip, a burger and fries cost me the same as the previous night's large pizza did.

After dinner, I went back to my room for a while, then returned to the dealer/guest room to take another walk around before it closed for the night at 7pm.

7:00pm - MOVIE & GUEST TALK: CHOPPING MALL with Kelli Maroney, begins in MOVIE ROOM 2. We’ll either have Kelli Maroney out to introduce the film, or have her out after the credits roll for a little talk. Stay tuned to find out which Kelli prefers as we near show time.

Kelli Maroney chose the "interview before the movie" option and Art Ettinger again flew solo to have a thirty-five minute talk with her. Maroney talked about how she, as a shy girl from Minneapolis, pursued her dream of being an actress and quickly landed a role on the soap opera Ryan's Hope, soon followed by parts in movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Night of the Comet, and of course Chopping Mall. She discussed the working relationship she has had for over twenty years with director Jim Wynorski, as well as the terrible time she had working with the director of the movie The Zero Boys, and what Traci Lords was like (just a normal girl) when they were in the 1988 version of Not of This Earth together.

Maroney is adorable and seemed like a cool person. It was a bit awkward that when Ettinger opened the talk up to questions from the audience there were only three Fast Times questions asked by two different people, but I can't judge anyone for not being inquisitive because I never ask questions at these things.

When the interview ended, Jim Wynorski's Chopping Mall began. The film first came out in 1986, just the right time for it to hit video when I was beginning to get into horror movies. I watched it back then, loved it, and have been a fan ever since. It's about a group of people (including Kelli Maroney, Re-Animator's Barbara Crampton, Friday the 13th Part 2's Russell Todd, and the legendary Dick Miller) getting trapped in a mall and terrorized by its out-of-control robot security guards, and it's totally awesome. I'll definitely be writing more about it in the future.

9:15pm - MOVIE: The "Scream Queen" documentary, SCREAMING IN HIGH HEELS, begins in MOVIE ROOM 2.

I stayed in Movie Room 2 after Chopping Mall to watch Jason Paul Collum's documentary about the gream scream queen trio of Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens, and Michelle Bauer. Interviews with the actresses and associates like Fred Olen Ray, David DeCoteau, Kenneth J. Hall, Richard Gabai, Jay Richardson, and Collum himself tell the story of how these women, who started off as a shy girl in Iowa, a scientist seeking her doctorate in marine biology, and a housewife ended up being '80s genre superstars and how changes in the independent scene have affected their careers over the years.


When Screaming in High Heels ended, I stepped out of the movie room and into the party atmosphere of Saturday night at the Wasteland. You can see some interesting things on the second night of the weekend when the horror fans unite, some of them in costumes left over from shenanigans in Movie Room 1, with booze steadily flowing for most of them. Undead Hunter S. Thompson, a demonic Santa Claus when Sal Lizard is in attendance, grown men having Nerf arrow and plastic knife fights. Cinema Wasteland has the reputation of being the party convention, and I've heard people in the lobby on a Saturday night talking about how they've heard the hype and have come long distances just to participate in this party. They have no interest in actually attending the show, they just show up on Saturday night and get drunk with the fans. You can always spot the interlopers, they dress differently, like typical club-hoppers instead of people enamored with cult films. There was said to be a crackdown on those sort of people this time around.

The start of my people-watching coincided with dinner time for the guests. Looking into the restaurant, I spotted Brinke Stevens sitting at a table with indie filmmakers Mike Watt and Amy Lynn Best. This is the second show in a row where I've been envious of their Saturday night company, last time they were hanging out with a group of other indie filmmakers and Texas Chainsaw Massacre III/Stepfather 2/Puppet Master 4 & 5/etc. director Jeff Burr. I really should try to make friends with these people, but my social anxiety holds me back. Maybe if my new Paxil prescription works out.

The Just Before Dawn trio dined together, and the guys seemed to be embarrassing Jamie Rose. I saw Kelli Maroney and Jack Sholder were hanging out and wondered if they had ever worked on a movie together. They don't share any credits on IMDb, so I guess they became friends from their tables being side-by-side in the guest room, if they hadn't met before.

What was the table to buy/pick up passes at during the day had been taken over by 42nd Street Pete, who appeared to be recording an episode of his podcast with guests including Evil Dead effects artist Tom Sullivan and actress Janet Jay.

One of the last sights I saw of the lobby festivities was of a flight crew checking in and the pilot taking a moment to have his picture taken with a zombie and a chainsaw-toting drag queen.

I headed up to my room after that. I gave some consideration to going back downstairs to watch an indie slasher called Everyone Must Die, but it wasn't scheduled to start until after midnight and I didn't really feel like staying up until almost 2 in the morning. I was feeling very tired, possibly a remnant of the week's cold, which would still threaten to send snot running down my face whenever I looked down at a guest or dealer table for too long.

So I just hung out in my room for a little while and took this self portrait in the mirror. A Friday the 13th hockey mask, a FleshEater T-shirt, a Cinema Wasteland pass, and a pizza box. This picture is more revealing of my core essence than many may realize.

Before midnight hit, I had climbed into bed and I soon drifted off to sleep with the sounds of the latest Tell 'Em Steve-Dave podcast episode emanating from my phone on the bedside table.

　
SUNDAY (April 7th):

When my alarm awoke me in the morning, I had to get up and get ready for my noon check-out time. Checked out and with my bags and new purchases securely put away, I entered the guest/dealer room for one last walk around.


11:00am - Doors open for all pass holders.

All evening, I had been thinking about a Fangoria back issue that I had passed over on Saturday morning, one that had the line "Friday shocker: No more Jason!" on its cover. The issue was from May 1990, and I began to think that I really should get it because it probably marks the worst moment in Friday the 13th history, the announcement that Paramount wasn't interested in making any more sequels. The series went to New Line Cinema and I enjoy the movies that have followed, but the problem is we've only gotten a mere four more entries in the series in the twenty-three years since that "No more Jason!" news reached the cover of Fangoria.

I returned to the magazine/poster dealer I did business with the day before and nabbed that May '90 issue of Fangoria for myself. While looking through the Fango back issues, I also saw two copies of an issue that I hadn't noticed Saturday morning, with a cover story on 1984's Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter where the magazine is pondering if that's the last article they'll ever feature on F13. Neither copy of this issue was bagged or boarded like most of the others were, and one of them had a cut running through the back third of its pages, with a sticker stuck directly on the cover listing its price as $2. Since it was damaged, I was willing to pay $2 for it, but as I attempted to buy it I found that the price sticker was not the dealer's and the price to walk away with it would be $15. After I pointed out how several pages were cut, the dealer was willing to drop the price to $10. But rather than pay $10 for a damaged magazine, I went back to the back issues and got the stickerless, un-sliced copy of that particular issue and paid the full $15 for it, getting it bagged and boarded as well.

Two more Fangoria back issues in my possession, I continued my walk around the room. As I passed the guests, Kelli Maroney and Jack Sholder were getting their picture taken together.

During one of my walkthroughs on Friday evening, I had seen that 42nd Street Pete had a used DVD copy of Friday the 13th 2009 for sale on his table for $5. I already have the movie on Blu-ray, but I was interested in getting it on DVD for the extra portability, there are a lot more DVD players around me than there are Blu-ray players. Throughout Saturday, I had been considering buying the DVD from Pete, but I wasn't sure, I checked Amazon and saw that I could get a brand new copy for a few dollars more. But during my last journey through the Spring 2013 Wasteland, I finally broke down, grabbed the copy of F13 '09 off Pete's table and handed him my $5.

That was my final purchase of the show. I had given some thought to sticking around and catching the encore screening of Beyond the Law around noon, but regular life obligations were cutting in on the end of my Wasteland time, so I decided I should head home.

My total haul: seven issues of Fangoria published from '84 to '90, a hockey mask, a deck of playing cards, three T-shirts, three DVDs, and one Blu-ray.

Another Cinema Wasteland has come and gone, but there's never too long of a wait for the next one. I'll be back there in October, when the Wasteland will be hosting a reunion of several people who were involved with Wes Craven's 1977 classic The Hills Have Eyes. That should be very cool.

As always, thanks to Ken Kish for creating and organizing the best convention there is, the Strongsville Holiday Inn for continuing to house it all, and my fellow fans for making the Wasteland such a fun place to be.

Worth Mentioning - A Big Chase + A Big Chest

April 19, 2013, 5:48 pm

≫ Next: Film Appreciation - Marines vs. the Manson Family

≪ Previous: Cinema Wasteland Spring 2013

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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 talks Rob Zombie's feature debut, a Wynorski classic, and a lost member of the Bond family.

HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES (2003)

 

The build-up to this weekend's release of Rob Zombie's latest film brought to my attention the astounding fact that this month also marks the tenth anniversary of the release of his feature directorial debut, House of 1000 Corpses. (Referred to as HO1KC by those who are into the whole brevity thing.)

 

There was a lot of hype for the movie in April '03 - three years worth of it, in fact. The announcement that Zombie would be directing the film for Universal hit trades in April of 2000 and shooting commenced soon after, with the initial plan being to have the movie in theatres in early 2001. Instead, what came out in early '01 was news that Universal had decided not to release the film, feeling that it was too graphic and intense to receive an R rating and thus not fit to be put out by the studio. Rather than let it languish on shelf, though, they did hand the distribution rights over to Zombie so he could shop it around. In mid-2002, MGM showed interest in putting the movie out in time for Halloween... and less than two months after that news, MGM also decided to drop it. Eventually, Zombie found a good home for his film at Lionsgate, which I already knew at that time as a bastion for movies with controversial content that made them a hard sell for other studios; they had saved Kevin Smith's Dogma when Miramax dropped it in reaction to protests by the Catholic League, and had also released Bryan Johnson's Smith-produced clown rape and revenge movie Vulgar.

Lionsgate set the release date for April 11, 2003, and I was excited to check it out. I wasn't a huge fan of Zombie's music, but the man clearly had a passion for horror that made it intriguing to see what he would do in the genre himself. Plus he had assembled a great cast that included familiar faces and names like Tom Towles, Karen Black, Sid Haig, Irwin Keyes, Michael J. Pollard, Chris Hardwick, and Bill Moseley, who had played the character Chop Top amazingly in my beloved Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Zombie's story had a very Texas Chainsaw sort of set-up and the trailers made it look like the Chainsaw franchise filtered through the fever dreams of a cracked-out funhouse operator. I was all for it.

When HO1KC did reach theatres, it wasn't at any of the ones in my general vicinity. The closest screen showing it was 90 miles away, but that didn't stop me from seeing it opening weekend. I hit the road. Along the way, I listened to the soundtrack (my favorite tracks were Buck Owens' "Who's Gonna Mow Your Grass?" and The Ramones' "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue") and the car got a flat tire, so the day had to be saved by AAA. Eventually, I did make it to the movie.

 

After three years of waiting and the troubled trip to the theatre, I was very disappointed with House of 1000 Corpses when I first saw it.

It had a solid story at its foundation - a group of friends in the 1970s on a road trip to visit various roadside attractions around the country, gathering information for a book they're compiling, learn the legend of a madman called Doctor Satan, a mental hospital intern who performed experimental brain surgery on the patients in attempt to create his very own race of superhumans. Doctor Satan was hanged from a tree by a vigilante mob, but his body disappeared. The road trippers' search for the hanging tree soon goes bad and they end up trapped in in the home of a family of bloodthirsty maniacs (most of whom are named after characters from Marx Brothers movies, although that's not addressed in the film) just in time for Halloween. The problem was, I did not like the execution.

Zombie had directed the music videos for his own band before entering the feature world, but he was still in music video mode when he was assembling this movie. The editing was quick and scattered, scenes were chopped up like crazy, there were cutaways to oddball interludes and randomness, the stock would change, some shots were negative images. I thought most of this was a misguided attempt to replicate the style of Natural Born Killers, and only NBK should try to be NBK.

 

To be honest, I had read the script before I saw the movie, and that added to my problems with the finished version. It had all come off better on the page, things made more sense. It was clear that the interludes with people going on about a skunk ape or ranting that "This is Hell!" was footage that the road trippers had shot at roadside attractions. There were no Manson Family-esque video clips or moments of cheerleader torture to give away the family's villainy before they attacked the group. Things flowed in a more straightforward manner. What reached theatres, I felt was a mess.

Over the years, with further viewings enabling me to get accustomed to the film's erratic style, I have warmed up to HO1KC. I'm still not a big fan of the movie, but I'm not as put off from it as I was ten years ago. I've learned to take it for what it is rather than what I would've liked it to have been... which I should've done in the first place.

 

Like I said about Tarantino in my Mentioning of Django Unchained, Zombie was clearly filtering his appreciation and enthusiasm for some of his horror favorites into the making of this movie, and he was drawing from some greats. HO1KC does owe a lot to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it's also equally indebted to Jack Hill's 1968 cult classic Spider Baby (which featured a young Sid Haig) and a 1932 James Whale film called The Old Dark House, footage of which is featured in the movie. The Old Dark House was a Universal release, and Zombie took advantage of the fact that he was making his film at a studio that was once a horror powerhouse, filling it with clips from and references to movies in their back catalog like The Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, and Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Interestingly, in my experience the movie has turned out to be especially popular with female viewers. In its discussion thread on a previous version of the F13 Community board at the time of its 2003 release, its biggest fan was a woman. Within the last few years, I've been to the house of two others who proudly displayed House of 1000 Corpses in their DVD collections, singling it out as one of their favorite horror movies and one that they revisit every October.

 

In the ten years since House came out, Zombie has made four more movies, including the HO1KC sequel The Devil's Rejects that won over a lot of his first film's critics - including myself, I loved The Devil's Rejects - and two Halloween movies that were met with an onslaught of ridiculously relentless negativity from some of that series' fans. His latest is The Lords of Salem, which hit theatres today. Unfortunately, much like House of 1000 Corpses, seeing it would require a 90 mile drive for me to get to the closest theatre showing it. I'm very interested in checking it out, but at this point I'm more willing to wait a while to see if a movie will reach a screen closer to me.

SORORITY HOUSE MASSACRE II (1990)

 

Cult film icon/director Jim "Popatopolis" Wynorski has said that the keys to making a successful film are "a big chase and a big chest", a formula that he definitely employed to entertaining effect on this popular slasher flick.

 

Produced by Roger Corman's wife Julie Corman under a pseudonym, the movie started life as an original idea called The Seance. It wasn't until the finished product was screened for Roger that he decided it could be marketed as an in-title-only sequel to Sorority House Massacre, a slasher he had executive produced (uncredited) in 1986 that was an obvious carbon copy of John Carpenter's Halloween.

 

Even though it has nothing to do with the previous Massacre, the Sorority House moniker does fit the film, because it focuses on five sorority girls who are moving into the rundown house that was recently purchased at a cheap price for them to turn into their new sorority house. The place needs a lot of work to fix it up, but that's not the only reason why they got it so cheap: one girl soon reveals to the others that it's also a murder house - five years earlier, a man named Clive Hockstatter killed his wife and daughters there and then went after some of the neighbors before being killed himself. As you might imagine, the girls are unnerved by that information.

 

With the movers scheduled to arrive with their stuff at 6 in the morning, the same time the phone and electric workers will get there, the girls arrive the evening before to spend their first night in their new home. Night falls, a storm blows in, and the girls find that they have a very creepy person living across the street, a guy who likes to lurk around and keep an eye on them - Orville Ketchum, described as "300 pounds of bad news". As the night goes on, the girls investigate the basement, finding a Ouija board. They think it'd be a great idea to hold a seance to contact the spirit of Clive Hockstatter... and that's when their night really goes bad.

 

It is said that Hockstatter was in league with the devil, but the detective who worked the case suspected that he was actually in league with Orville Ketchum. It just couldn't be proven. The detective's suspicion deepens when a disturbance call is received from the old Hockstatter place. A call that he can't respond to because the storm has knocked a bridge out... None of the girls make this call, the phone doesn't work in the house anyway, and nothing has happened yet for them to call the police even if they could have when the detective enters the picture talking about it, but nevermind all that.

 

Soon after the seance, the girls start getting knocked off one-by-one by a mysterious slasher. Hockstatter? Ketchum? Someone else entirely?

 

Wynorski uses the set-up of having a group of girls spending the night in an old dark house to get his actresses to show a whole lot of flesh. They take showers early on and then change into skimpy night clothes that they wear throughout the horrific events that follow. (Thus why it's listed with the subtitle Nighty Nightmare some places.) When the detective goes to talk to a female survivor of the Hockstatter massacre about the possibility of Ketchum being an accomplice, of course the girl is now working as a stripper, and we are privy to her dance routine. Among the cast members are porn stars Barbii and Savannah.

 

While the interiors were sets on a stage, the exteriors of the house were shot on South Harvard Boulevard in Los Angeles. This same house was a location in Teenage Exorcist and some of the Witchcraft sequels, it's right next door to the Evil Toons house, and Orville Ketchum lives in another Witchcraft house that was also the setting for Wes Craven's The People Under the Stairs.

 

I first saw Sorority House Massacre II on The Movie Channel in the early '90s, and at that time I was very confused by the fact that the flashbacks to the Hockstatter murders were actually clips from Slumber Party Massacre, a movie that I had already seen, so I knew that the killer in the footage was Russ Thorn, not Clive Hockstatter, and he wasn't related to his victims at all. I didn't know at that time that the same producer (Roger Corman) was behind both films, or about the money saving concept of using stock footage. My first viewing of SHM2 may well have been hosted by the great Joe Bob Briggs, who gave a popular quote about the movie: "There may have been better horror films made, but not with this many women in their underwear." If you read Joe Bob's essential rules for how to make a horror film, he's basically describing this one.

 

Sorority House Massacre II is an enjoyable slasher cheapie. If you're in the mood for some mindless exploitation fun, it's just what the doctor (Satan) ordered.

　

On April 12th, screenwriter Michael France passed away. France was the man who scripted James Bond's triumphant return to the big screen in 1995's GoldenEye after the series had been hindered by six years of legal issues. I recommend having a viewing of the movie in his memory.

Film Appreciation - Marines vs. the Manson Family

April 23, 2013, 6:28 pm

≫ Next: Worth Mentioning - The World Will Forget About Us

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Thou Shalt Not Kill... Except is a cult movie in more ways than one, and Cody Hamman has Film Appreciation for it.

I'm always slightly envious when I hear that a filmmaker started making movies when they were a youngster and were able to repeatedly gather a group of willing friends to act out their stories in films that would sometimes even have successful screenings in front of audiences. I tried to make movies when I was a teenager, but each attempt was a miserable failure. I couldn't find enough cooperative people to make it work. I only managed a few tries because my friends were either too busy or completely disinterested in what I was trying to do. Why make movies when we can just hang out, smoke cigarettes, and see if we can scrounge up some alcohol? So I'm even more fascinated when more than one film career comes out of a group of friends who grew up together.

Josh Becker made his first Super 8 short when he was just thirteen years old. On his way through high school, he would meet other kids who were shooting Super 8 shorts as well, fellow teenage directors named Scott Spiegel and Sam Raimi, a guy named Bruce Campbell who could act pretty well. This bunch churned out short after short over the years. Becker's interest in film eventually led him to move out to Hollywood when he was one month shy of his 18th birthday in the summer of 1976. He was still living there in July of '79 when he came up with the premise for Thou Shalt Not Kill... Except.

It began with Becker wondering what group would make good villains for a story, and the Manson Family and the horrific home invasion murders that some of its members had perpetrated in 1969 soon came to mind. The year those shocking events hit the news, the United States was in the midst of the controversial Vietnam War, and Becker decided his heroes would be soldiers who fought in the war. He now had a very pitchable concept: "Marines vs. the Manson Family." He took the idea of Marines coming home from Vietnam just to find themselves in another conflict, this time with a murderous cult, to his friend Sheldon Lettich, who came up with a title: Bloodbath.

Becker and Lettich proceeded to write the script together, but it turned out way too long - in the 185 to 200 page range - and much darker than Becker wanted it to be. Lettich had fought in Vietnam himself and wrote serious real world issues into the story that Becker felt took it off track. Characters were dealing with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, you felt bad for the soldiers when they got home and then ashamed for what they did to the cult members... But the script was finished, and with it done Becker and Lettich went off in their own directions.

Becker moved back home to Michigan just in time to join the crew of his old buddy Sam Raimi's feature film endeavor The Book of the Dead, which would go on to be known as the horror classic The Evil Dead. While he worked on Raimi's movie from November '79 through January of 1980, the Bloodbath idea remained stuck in Becker's head, as evident in the journal he kept during the process. By the time filming wrapped at Evil Dead's cabin location in Tennessee, Becker had come up with a different way to approach the concept - "a totally American, John Wayne treatment". Becker and Bruce Campbell rode back to Michigan together, and during the drive Becker told Campbell the new take on Bloodbath and the two spent their interstate journey brainstorming and reworking the story.

When Raimi was trying to get money for Evil Dead, he had shot a smaller version of the idea as a short film called Within the Woods that he used to show to potential investors. Becker decided to take a similar approach to Bloodbath, which got a title change to Stryker's War when Becker rewrote the script and named the lead after John Wayne's character in The Sands of Iwo Jima. With a budget of $5000, Becker was shooting a forty-eight minute Super 8 version of Stryker's War by late summer 1980, starring Bruce Campbell as Stryker and Sam Raimi as the Manson-esque cult leader. Though the shoot went well and Becker was happy with the short, it didn't lead to any takers financing the feature.

Stryker's War was set aside, Becker focused on other projects. Four years later, he and Scott Spiegel were attempting to make a feature length version of a short slapstick Indiana Jones parody called Cleveland Smith: Bounty Hunter that they had shot in 1982 with Campbell and Raimi, but when their self-imposed fundraising deadline of August 17th (Becker's 26th birthday) arrived, they had only raised $18,000 of their $600,000 goal. Cleveland Smith wasn't going to happen. That's when Spiegel brought up the idea of resurrecting Stryker's War. They had 18 grand, the Super 8 short had been made for $5000, surely they could pull off a 16mm feature with about four times the amount of money. Becker was convinced, and they decided that day that filming would begin on October 1st.

And it did. The money ran out in six days, but filming didn't stop and along the way Becker and Spiegel managed to scrape up enough cash to keep things going. Shooting wrapped on November 21, 1984, and Becker officially had his first feature film in the can.

The lack of funds did hinder the film in some ways, most notably in the fact that it meant Bruce Campbell couldn't play Stryker because the movie was made non-union and by the time of filming he had joined the Screen Actors Guild. The role was recast, with an actor named Brian Schulz taking over. Schulz doesn't measure up to The Chin, but that's a near impossible task and he does a fine job. If you don't watch it thinking that it was supposed to star Campbell, it doesn't matter. The loss of an actor aside, Becker didn't let the budget hold him back in many areas, even going ahead and shooting war sequences with the woodsy Michigan countryside standing in for Vietnam, using stock footage for establishing shots and converting the interior of Bruce Campbell's garage into a bunker.

Sergeant Jack Stryker is a Marine serving in Vietnam when he's severely injured in a questionably planned raid on a notoriously dangerous village. Coming home to Michigan, Stryker starts to settle into a life of downing hooch and hanging out at his log cabin with his dog Whiskey. Lest Stryker become an alcoholic hermit, his old pal Otis (Perry Mallette) encourages him to reconnect with his former sweetheart, Otis's granddaughter Sally (Evil Dead "fake Shemp" and Super 8 era regular Cheryl Guttridge). Stryker and Sally's previous try at a relationship fell apart because his military career didn't mesh well with the girl's dedication to high school social events - she wanted him to take her to prom, he had to ship out, they called the whole thing off. But Sally has graduated and matured a bit while Stryker's been gone, so the outlook is brighter this time around.

Unbeknownst to Stryker, a cult of thieves and murderers has moved into the area around his hometown, their leader (Sam Raimi) - who proclaims himself to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ - convincing them to abduct and torture people, invade houses and kill the residents, then leave messages in blood saying things like "The Bloodbath is coming".

When the cult's activities disrupt Stryker's transition back into peaceful civilian life, three fellow Marines who visit him while on leave (John Manfredi, Raimi regular Tim Quill, and Mr. T impersonator Robert Rickman) join him in an assault on this bunch of mad dogs... In other words, the bloodbath that the cult has been prophesying arrives, but not in the way that they're expecting. Instead, it's in the form of an action-filled third act, a twenty minute sequence of Stryker and his cohorts battling the cultists and taking them out in some really cool ways.

Thou Shalt Not Kill... Except is a highly entertaining movie, and a very impressive achievement given the budget it was made for. I first saw the movie rented on VHS in the late '90s and was blown away by it, I was an instant fan. As soon as Anchor Bay released it on special edition DVD in 2000, I bought a copy, and when Synapse Films put out a Blu-Ray/DVD combo upgrade last year, I bought another copy. It's one that I enjoy revisiting regularly, and one that has added to my own vocabulary. At one point Otis drops a line that Becker got from a Stephen King novel (there's a Carrie/Billy Nolan reference in there, too), "Sure as shit sticks to a blanket." In situations where something is certain, that's a line that I'm likely to use myself.

Not only is it a fun action-thriller in its own right, but it's also an interesting movie for fans of The Evil Dead to check out, given how the productions are sort of tied together. The film even got its title from the same man who renamed The Book of the Dead to The Evil Dead, sales agent Irvin Shapiro. Shapiro did not like the title Stryker's War, it sounded to him like it was about characters who were having union troubles, and Becker's suggested fix of calling it Sgt. Stryker's War didn't impress him. He came up with Thou Shalt Not Kill... Except because the Bible has been translated into every language, so to use one of the Ten Commandments in the title would ensure that it was something that everyone would understand, no matter what language was on the marquee or cover art.

Becker's directing career since TSNK...E has included several episodes of Xena: Warrior Process, Lunatics: A Love Story, his self-distributed indie If I Had a Hammer, and, with Bruce Campbell in the lead, Alien Apocalypse and Running Time. Sheldon Lettich, his first co-writer on the script, has gone on to be a frequent Van Damme collaborator on movies like Bloodsport, Lionheart, and Double Impact, as well as writer on Rambo III and writer/director of the Mark Dacascos capoeira flick Only the Strong. His producer and later co-writer Scott Spiegel co-wrote Evil Dead II, wrote and directed the awesome slasher Intruder, directed Hostel III, cameoed in Robot Ninja, and often appears in Sam Raimi's films. Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell... well, everyone knows what they've gone on to do.

In recent years, Campbell has approached Becker with the idea of doing a remake of the concept, now that he's of an appropriate age to play a man retiring from the military. This proposed version would update the story to modern day and pit Campbell's hero character against a villain conceived with Danny Trejo in mind. Becker has completed a draft of the script, last I heard he was just waiting to see if Campbell wanted to move ahead with the project. Someday when Campbell gets some free time away from Burn Notice, it's something that I would love to see happen.

Worth Mentioning - The World Will Forget About Us

April 26, 2013, 2:55 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 sees a classic reborn and goes to the future with Tom Cruise.

EVIL DEAD (2013)

As said in an article I recently wrote for the blog, the original 1981 The Evil Dead is "the scariest movie I've ever seen". My first viewing of that film made for a very frightening night in my childhood. Director Sam Raimi has been touting a remake for quite a while, wanting to produce a new version that would present the story to a new generation with a larger budget and better effects. At times it was said that, since he just a newbie when he directed the original, he wanted to get a well established director for the remake. There was talk that he had offered the project to Korean filmmaker Chan-wook Park, a rumor of Quentin Tarantino. As time went on, the idea changed to giving another newbie his big break with the Evil Dead brand, and while the term "remake" was still used, the description of it was that it would be more like a side story without Bruce Campbell's Ash character in it, showing a different group of youths unleashing the terrors of the Naturon Demonto/Necronomicon Ex Mortis/Book of the Dead, that both stories could exist in the same world and maybe even crossover someday.

The young man who won the jackpot and got handed the reins to the film is Uruguayan director Fede Alvarez, who wowed the internet and Raimi with a 2009 short film called Panic Attack (Ataque de Pánico!), which used impressive special effects to show an invasion of giant robots.

After being discussed and built up to for years, the new version of Evil Dead is now in theatres, and I found the end result to be a mixed bag.

Alvarez wrote the script with his friend Rodo Sayagues (which then got an uncredited polish from Diablo Cody), and they keep the same basic set-up of the original film: five young people from Michigan travel to a remote cabin in the woods where they end up going through the ultimate experience in grueling horror. You have to drive across a stream to get to this cabin, which seems like a bad idea whether you're in a horror movie or not. This group of characters were named so that the first letters would spell the word DEMON: David, Eric, Mia, Olivia, and Natalie. There's also a dog named Grandpa along for the ride, which makes for a funny moment when a character first sees him and exclaims, "Grandpa?" Raimi's bunch were just going to the cabin for a fun time, but these folks have a more serious purpose. Alvarez felt that vacationers have been terrorized too many times in the genre, so his set-up is that this getaway is actually a detox for Mia. She's going to kick her heroin addiction, and her friends and brother David are there to support her through the withdrawals. Unfortunately for them, someone has been messing around the family cabin while they've been away and have left a very dangerous book in the cellar.

Mia's friends are extremely dedicated to getting her sober. They've been through this before, she has said that she was kicking the habit then started using again just hours later. She has previously overdosed, her heart stopped. This addiction has to end now. They're so determined that this will be the end of heroin in Mia's life that they even refuse to leave when blood streaks are found on the floor and the rotting corpses of multiple cats are found hung in the cellar near the flesh-bound book full of demonic images and dire warnings. If they take Mia home, they believe she'll just start using again... So don't take her home, but really, wouldn't a nearby hotel room be just as good for detox as this cabin full of creepy shit?

But they stick around, Eric reads a passage from the book, and all hell breaks loose. Characters get possessed and/or killed one-by-one. Raimi's possessed, his Deadites, were spastic lunatics, but the ones in this one are pretty chill for the most part, reminiscent of the average shambling flesheating ghoul but without the appetite. The worst thing about them is the weaponry they manage to get their hands on. They get some crazy lines to speak, but apparently they're movie fans because most of what they say are paraphrased lines from the first Evil Dead or It or The Exorcist.

It's interesting how the writers provide themselves with ways to approach the story from different angles but don't follow them up. With Mia going through heroin withdrawals, they could've spent some time building the idea that this could all be psychological rather than supernatural, but they don't even try to. Later in the film there's dialogue that reveals David and Mia's mother died in a mental hospital and David fears that Mia has inherited the craziness and gone insane herself. That's also not played up at all, and these alternate possibilities wouldn't have worked anyway since the demonic events to come are spoiled by a neat but unnecessary prologue. If this were a full-on remake meant to be presenting the concept "for the first time again", the prologue would completely ruin the build-up.

The way the story was handled was so-so and the Deadites were a bit of a letdown, but what this movie really has going for it, other than a good cast, is its eye-bulging level of violence and gore. There's vomit and slime and urine and gallons of blood. People get beaten to a pulp and stuck with every sharp object in the vicinity, and the camera lingers on these objects as they're pulled out of body parts and slice through flesh. Luckily they have a roll of duct tape in the cabin to patch up wounds. There are so many close-ups of bodily damage that you get totally desensitized to it by the climax and things that would be huge cringe moments in another film just get shrugged off.

Evil Dead '13 didn't blow me away overall, but damn was it brutal and bloody and gross.

OBLIVION (2013)

A few years from now, the moon is destroyed by an alien race referred to as Scavengers, setting off a series of catastrophes on Earth as the aliens begin to invade the planet as well. Humanity fights back with our military forces, ultimately resorting to using nuclear weapons on the Scavs. We Earthlings win the war, but at the cost of leaving most of our ravaged planet an irradiated wasteland.

Sixty years after the invasion, humans have abandoned Earth and shipped off to a colony established on the Saturn moon Titan. Devices called Hydro Rigs are sucking the Earth dry of its remaining natural resources to take to Titan, draining the oceans. Only two people remain on the planet, in a Jetsons-esque home above the clouds; Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and his co-worker/lover Victoria (Andrea Riseborough). Their only contact with anybody else is through video communications with Sally (Melissa Leo), a representative of their employer who lives on the Tet, a massive space station in Earth's orbit. Every day, Victoria monitors Jack's activities from their home as he has to fly around their designated area, boxed in by Radiation Zones, to make sure the drones that patrol around the Hydro Rigs to protect them from the stray Scavs still surviving on the surface remain in working order.

Jack and Victoria do their jobs well. They are an effective team. And they're almost finished on Earth. In just two weeks, they'll be shipping off to Titan. Victoria is very much looking forward to joining the colony, but Jack is more reluctant. He's a thinker, a questioner, he doesn't understand why they have to just give up on the Earth, he's nostalgic for a world he never knew. Part of his nostalgia is fueled by a recurring dream that not even his mandatory memory wipe was able to eliminate, a dream that he's walking around in a New York City that existed before he was born, meeting up with a woman he doesn't know but seems very familiar.

Unbeknownst to Victoria, sometimes when Jack goes "off comm" during his patrols he's actually going off to a beautiful area in the mountains, where he's set up a cabin beside a lake and filled it with items that have caught his interest during his travels - books, nick-nacks, records. Arriving at his cabin for the first time in the film, Jack leafs through his record collection, looking for just the right one to kick back to. His choice: Led Zeppelin II. The song we hear: "Ramble On". That's when I knew that this was a man after my own heart.

As Jack and Victoria's time on Earth nears its end, the Scavengers have been getting bolder, they've sabotaged several drones recently. The Scavs' actions soon put Jack through some harrowing events, leading him to encounter a man played by Morgan Freeman and a whole bunch of other people who are on Earth when they shouldn't be. One of the people Jack finds himself face-to-face with is the woman of his dreams, played by one of my favorite Bond girls, Quantum of Solace's Olga Kurylenko.

Most of that you can glean from the trailers, and I'm not going to go into any further details. I will say that I had very little interest in seeing Oblivion when I headed out to the theatre. The story as I knew it didn't seem very appealing to me, science fiction isn't really my bag. I only went to see it on its opening weekend out of a fan's obligation. I see everything that Tom Cruise stars in. Cruise has been signing on to more and more action movies, but lately I've been wanting to see him do more dramas like a lot of his '80s movies or Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia or his Cameron Crowe collaborations Jerry Maguire and Vanilla Sky. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Oblivion is actually much more in line with the type of movie I've been wanting to see Cruise in than I expected. This film allows him to perform in more emotional dramatic scenes than he has in several years, and I was very glad for that. Andrea Riseborough shines in her emotional moments as well. I don't know if she was aided by eye drops in her crying scenes, if not the amount of tears she is capable of producing is amazing.

Around the refreshing level of drama, there are some good action sequences, including a fist fight that pits Cruise against his greatest screen opponent ever. The special effects are fantastic, and the world director Joseph Kosinski created, largely shot in natural locations in Iceland, is wonderful to look at.

Even the film's detractors have had positive things to say about the score composed by the band M83, and I have to agree that the music is awesome. Hearing the synth on a track called "I'm Sending You Away" near the ending, my heart soared like it was the 1980s.

I wasn't enthusiastic about Oblivion going in to it, but I was by the time I left the theatre. I really enjoyed this movie, I was entertained by it and connected with it emotionally. It was a great theatrical experience. I might have to go see it again before it leaves screens.

Final Girl Film Club - The Initiation of Sarah (1978)

May 1, 2013, 9:00 am

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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 horror offering from the good old days of TV movies.

The Initiation of Sarah was featured much later in the actual Film Club schedule, so much so that it should've been one of the last movies discussed in this Catch-Up project. While it's noted in the intro that some of these will be done out of order, this movie is not one that I had in mind when I made that note. I've had to bump it up because it was one of many titles on my Netflix Instant queue that expired from the streaming service today. Apparently some big contracts between a  few studios and Netflix did not get renewed. As disconcerting as it was to find, with one week's warning, that around 250 titles would be disappearing from my queue, it is sort of appropriate that this is the one that I had to write about now, since bitchy, popularity-mad sorority girls have been big in the news recently. The Initiation of Sarah features some such characters, although with it being a TV movie those characters are much less foul-mouthed than the one whose ranting e-mail leaked out and drew so much attention that it even got a dramatic reading by Michael Shannon.

The Sarah of the title is Sarah Goodwin, who was adopted into the Goodwin family when she was a baby. Nothing is known about her biological parents. The Goodwins had a daughter the same age as Sarah, and as the film begins the girls are headed off to college together. They are as close as they are different - Patty Goodwin is played by the stunningly gorgeous Morgan Brittany, while Sarah is sort of the "ugly duckling" of the two of them, despite the fact that she's played by Kay Lenz, who was attractive enough herself to land a marriage with one of the biggest teen heart-throbs of the 1970s, David Cassidy.

Sarah is quiet and introverted, and Lenz does do a great job of playing up her character's awkwardness and dowdiness. She's the kind of girl who the recent letter writer would rage at for standing in corners at parties and being a weird shit who does weird shit, maybe even call her "a goddamn boner". Patty, on the other hand, has been groomed her whole life to be a sorority girl at the popular Alpha Nu Sigma by her mother, who was in ANS when she went to college and is now head of the alumni committee. As Mrs. Goodwin says, once Patty gets into ANS, she'll be friends with "all the kids who count".

Patty does quickly get in good with ANS and the head of the sorority, Morgan Fairchild playing a nightmare of a person named Jennifer Lawrence. Sarah, the ANS girls don't like so much. She actually manages to find acceptance at a sorority that ANS looks down their noses at, the laidback and intellectual Phi Epsilon Delta - "Pigs, Elephants, and Dogs", as Alpha Nu Sigma calls them. One of the first things Jennifer does after accepting Patty as a pledge is order her not to associate with any PED girls, including her sister, under any circumstances, threatening to blackball her from all sororities if she does. Patty doesn't need to be around her sister, Jennifer says, the ANS girls are her sisters now.

Sarah and Patty reluctantly agree to go their separate ways for a while, and Sarah settles in at PED, making friends with a suicidal violin enthusiast who'd rather go by the nickname Mouse than her real name, Alberta. Mouse is played by Tisa Farrow, younger sister of Rosemary's Baby/The Haunting of Julia's Mia, best known for going on to appear in the Italian horror movies Zombie and Anthropophagus before leaving the acting profession. Things are sort of strange at PED. There is a secret, locked room in the sorority house that only the house mother, Shelley Winters as Erica Hunter, has a key to. Mrs. Hunter is known to be into magic, spells, and witchcraft. Unlike the other sororities, there are no hurdles for a pledge to go through to become a sister, no hell week, no initiation. Once you're in, you're just in. There hasn't been a proper initiation at PED in almost twenty years, not since the last one left a girl dead someway or another.

The dark secrets don't end with Phi Epsilon Delta. There's something strange about Sarah, something that's first demonstrated when she saves Patty from being raped on the beach and becomes more and more apparent as Jennifer and Alpha Nu Sigma heap more abuse on her. When Sarah gets angry, bad things happen to other people. She has telekinetic abilities.

Yes, this TV movie, which aired about fifteen months after Brian De Palma's Carrie hit theatres, was very much inspired by that Stephen King adaptation. Jennifer even organizes a humiliating prank to pull on Sarah, with the aid of her jock boyfriend (Airplane!'s Robert Hays), that's somewhat reminiscent of the pig blood prom. Sarah does get some light payback when she knocks Jennifer into a fountain and delivers a great verbal smackdown, but it doesn't stop the situations from escalating.

The more Sarah's emotions are manipulated, the more her power is displayed, the more it becomes clear to Mrs. Hunter that she is a very special girl, one worth holding an initiation for in the center of the hedge maze in the back yard. An initiation that seems more like some sort of black mass...

I was a bit apprehensive about checking this movie out, a TV movie Carrie retread full of sorority girls being awful to each other was not a big draw for me, but I ended up enjoying it much more than I expected to due to the characters and the performances of the lead actresses. I didn't think it was anything special, it didn't really bring anything to the table that Carrie hadn't already done before and done bigger, but Lenz, Brittany, and Farrow kept me interested and involved. It was a fine way to spend an hour and a half.

One writer credited for coming up with the story is Tom Holland, who had been working as an actor for 14 years previous to this. The Initiation of Sarah was his first writing credit, he would go on to write several films including Psycho II and become most well known for directing Fright Night and Child's Play.

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Worth Mentioning - Perils of Being a Teenage Girl

May 3, 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.

It's high school prom season, and Cody discusses a few examples of how things can go wrong for girls of that age.

HELLO MARY LOU: PROM NIGHT II (1987)

Tragedy struck at the Hamilton High School prom in 1957. Mary Lou "Hot Stuff" Maloney, a rebellious, gleefully promiscuous hellraiser of a seventeen-year-old girl, was elected Prom Queen, and as she took the stage to be crowned in front of the cheering crowd, a jilted lover tossed a stink bomb onto the stage in a simple, childish act of revenge. Unfortunately, the material of the dress she was wearing was highly/insanely flammable, and when the fabric brushed against the burning fuse, Mary Lou immediately burst into flames. She burned to death on that stage with the whole prom watching in horror.

Thirty years later, Vicki Carpenter is enrolled at Hamilton High and getting ready to attend the senior prom with her boyfriend Craig, to the disapproval of her strict and frigid mother, who considers Craig too low class because he drives a motorcycle. Vicki's mom won't let her get a new dress for the prom, so she goes looking for something nice among the costumes in the drama department's prop room. When she opens a trunk containing items related to the 1957 prom, she unwittingly unleashes the vengeful spirit of Mary Lou Maloney.

Soon this evil supernatural force is knocking people off and Vicki starts having nightmarish hallucinations, going through a change in demeanor, developing a 1950s style and a Mary Lou type of attitude. All these strange events catch the attention of two of Mary Lou's former lovers, one of whom has become a Catholic priest while the other, the prematurely balding teen who caused Mary Lou's death, has aged into Michael Ironside and is now the school principal. These men realize that past sins have come back to haunt them...

Vicki is fully possessed by Mary Lou for the second half of the film and of course this is all building up to her making the 1987 one hell of an experience for the attendees, but the standout scene of the film for many viewers is set in the girls locker room, where actress Wendy Lyons, playing the Mary Lou-infused Vicki, carries out a stalk and attack sequence while fully nude.

When you stop to think that the characters don't realize that they're in a horror movie, the stalking sequence does play a little differently. Vicki Lou is after a friend who has noticed she's been acting strangely. The friend confronted her about her behavior, words were exchanged, the friend went to shower. Vicki joins her in the shower, the friend apologizes, Vicki forgives her and moves in close, putting her hands on the girl's upper arms, and then starts giving her multiple light kisses on the face. Too many pecks are what the girl runs away from. She runs, hides, and fearfully cowers in a locker because her friend tried to seduce her in the shower... Anyway, when Vicki/Mary Lou catches up to her again, she does much worse than kiss her.

As you can determine from this write-up, Prom Night II has nothing to do with the story or characters from the straightforward black-gloved slasher flick that was the first film. The sequel took the anthology series approach, taking the title and setting of prom night and crafting a different story around it. Not that it's entirely original - there are shades of Carrie and The Exorcist, and the hallucinations Vicki has were clearly inspired by the success of the Nightmare on Elm Street films. But the filmmakers acknowledge their horror forefathers, there are references to the story's influences in the dialogue and character names - Vicki Carpenter is named after John Carpenter, and there's also Craven, Henenlotter, Waters, Romero, Browning, Dante, O'Bannon, even an Eddie Wood in there.

The "Hello Mary Lou" part of the title comes from a 1960 song that was co-written by Gene Pitney and most famously recorded by Ricky Nelson in 1961. That song is on the soundtrack, as well as another "Mary Lou". The other "Mary Lou" was first recorded by Young Jessie in 1955, but the version that gets played a couple times in the movie, including when Mary Lou is taking the stage at the 1957 prom, is a 1959 cover by Ronnie Hawkins. Despite being anachronistic, the choice to go with the Hawkins recording makes sense because this is a Canadian production, filmed in Alberta and Ontario, and Hawkins had his greatest success in Ontario.

Prom Night II is actually a very well made and well written film with a good sense of humor, some funny dialogue, and a couple characters who are given a bit more substance than they might usually have in a movie of this sort. Of all the Prom Night movies, part 2 is my favorite. It's also the one that I've been most familiar with since childhood, because in those days of the late '80s and early '90s when TV networks would still show movies in the afternoons, Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II got quite a good amount of play in my area.

Prom Night II and the character of Mary Lou proved to be so successful that rather than sticking with the anthology idea for part 3, the filmmakers made that one a direct sequel.

THE SPELL (1977)

The Spell is, like the following year's The Initiation of Sarah, a TV movie that likely wouldn't have existed if it weren't for the box office success of Stephen King/Brian De Palma's Carrie in 1976.

This time, the put-upon and telekinetically gifted lead character is a fifteen-year-old girl named Rita, who gets a lot of grief in her life because her eating habits have made her overweight. She's just a bit chubby, it should be no big deal, but her peers at school bully her and act like she's the fattest person they've ever seen, calling her names like "tubbo" and "Moby Dick". She doesn't get a respite from this treatment at home either, because her father is similarly appalled by her size as well as being generally mistrusting of her and baffled by her.

Rita uses her special mental abilities to get revenge on those who do her wrong, but unlike Carrie she doesn't keep things bottled up until the climax. She uses her power throughout the film to mess with people, whether it be sending disturbing images to her father's mind or teaching her younger sister a lesson by nearly causing her to drown. A woman who believes she's been hexed by someone has a hellacious experience. Even within the first five minutes of the movie, one of Rita's bullies is killed in a gym class accident that we suspect Rita was responsible for.

Rita's attitude and demeanor change as the film goes on and she sinks further into the dark side, going from a girl who has our sympathies to a potentially indiscriminately violent creep. Rita was the first role for actress Susan Myers, who delivers a great performance. I was so impressed by her, I was surprised that she wasn't a familiar name. She worked steadily through the late '70s into the early '80s, but unfortunately largely disappeared from the acting scene after that. Her last onscreen role was in Revenge of the Nerds.

More recognizable was the actress playing her little sister, Helen Hunt (Trancers). Also great in The Spell is Lee Grant as Rita's concerned mother, who sets out to get to the bottom of what's going on with her firstborn daughter... and there was more going on with her than I expected.

LISA (1990)

The titular Lisa is a fourteen-year-old girl who is desperate to get into the dating scene. She's especially interested in older men, the singer George Michael being one of her big crushes, and she and her best friend Wendy have this routine where, at the end of the school day, they switch their uniforms out for dresses, high heels and makeup, then hit the streets and photobomb older men who are going about their day, so in the picture it looks like the girls and the men are out together. These pictures get kept in a scrapbook the girls are assembling, but then they take things even further, calling the DMV and making up stories so they can use the men's license plate numbers to find out the names and phone numbers that go with their imagined paramours.

These questionable fun and games are the closest Lisa can get to having a boyfriend because her mother has forbidden her from dating until she's sixteen. Lisa's mother knows very well the troubles a young girl can get into, because she gave birth to her daughter when she was a teenager herself. Lisa doesn't feel it's fair that her mother doesn't trust her not to repeat her mistakes. She has to wait two more years to start dating?! Her friend Wendy warns her that if she really does have to wait so long, "everybody's gonna think you're weird".

One night, Lisa bumps into a particularly appealing older man named Richard, and as Wendy lands a boyfriend in their own age range that starts taking up more of her time, Lisa uses their old tricks to pursue Richard on her own. She starts calling him at night, sultrying up her voice and pretending to be someone he knows. Richard is very intrigued.

But Richard has a very peculiar way of romancing the women he's interested in. He likes to sneak into their homes while they're away, set out some candles and a couple glasses of wine, and leave a message on their answering machine for them to listen to when they arrive: "Hi (woman's name), this is Richard. I'm in your apartment and I'm going to kill you." Then he attacks, forcing them to change into lingerie before he strangles them to death.

Richard is in fact the "Candlelight Killer", who has been terrorizing the city and racking up quite a bodycount recently. As Lisa gets deeper and deeper into the game she's playing with him, she's basically unknowingly stalking a serial killer. As you can imagine, this puts herself and those around her in mortal danger as the climax nears.

I watched Lisa several times when it reached VHS and cable in 1990/'91, and revisiting it again on Netflix before it expired from my Instant queue, I understood why. The film was directed by Gary Sherman, the man behind the cult British film Raw Meat and the underrated/underseen Dead & Buried, and he added a really good little thriller to his filmography with this one. In different hands the subject matter could've made for something with a Lifetime sort of feeling to it, but Sherman keeps it from going cornball and manages a good, dark atmosphere for some scenes.

The characters are likeable and watchable, with the actors doing well in their roles. In addition to the psycho killer aspect playing into my viewing preferences, another reason why this movie appealed so much to me when I was around seven years old is because Lisa is played by Staci Keanan, who I thought was very cute. (She was 8 years older than me, so it wasn't creepy that I thought she was attractive at the time.) Keanan went on to play one of the kids on the Brady Bunch-esque 1991 - 1998 ABC/TGIF sitcom Step by Step (co-starring with Sasha Mitchell of the Kickboxer sequels), which I watched many episodes of, and she always held my attention when she was on the screen. Casting bonus: Lisa's mother is played by Charlie's Angel Cheryl Ladd.

Final Girl Film Club - The Innocents (1961)

May 8, 2013, 3:21 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.

When Capote turned the screw.

The Innocents, adapted by William Archibald and pop culture icon/author Truman Capote from Archibald's stage play, which itself was based on the 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, is a slow burn of a chiller that keeps you guessing as to just what sort of a horror movie it really is throughout its running time.

The lead character is a woman named Miss Giddens, and the first time we see her she's in a questionable emotional/mental state, working up a sweaty fervor as she prays and goes on about how "more than anything I love children", wanting to save them and not destroy them... Then we see her interviewing for a job as a governess for two young orphaned children who have been put in the custody of their wealthy bachelor uncle, who is admittedly too selfish to give them as much attention and care as they require. The first question we hear the uncle ask Miss Giddens is, "Do you have an imagination?"

Miss Giddens is hired for the job and moves to the uncle's country estate, where the children live. At first, Giddens only has to take care of the girl, Flora, as Flora's brother Miles is off at boarding school, but the precocious boy soon arrives at the estate after he's expelled from school for being a "corrupting" influence on his fellow students.

As Giddens' time with the children goes on, life at the estate starts taking a very strange turn. Something the housekeeper says makes Giddens suspect that there may be someone else around the house, a man with "the devil's own eyes". There's something odd about the children, like they're keeping dark secrets, they don't seem trustworthy. Miss Giddens keeps seeing a couple strangers lurking around... And then she starts learning about the history of the estate, of servants who used to work there. The deviant valet and his abusive relationship with the previous governess. The fact that the valet died in an apparent accident and was found with Miles by his side, that the heartbroken governess went on to commit suicide on the grounds. As Giddens begins to believe that the restless spirits of the valet and the governess are still roaming around the estate and may be a threat to the living, the children appear to be aware of and entertained by their presence.

Several different possible explanations for what was going on went through my mind while I was watching the movie. Straightforward ghost story? Is Miss Giddens going crazy? Is she just imagining all this? Did Miles and/or Flora murder the former servants, and might they cause the death of Miss Giddens? Even after the film ends, different viewers have different theories on what the truth was.

The Innocents takes a very subtle and highbrow approach to its horror, going for establishing an oppressively creepy tone and atmosphere over big shocks and jump scares.

The most unsettling scene for me in the horror aspect found Miss Giddens out in the garden, where she hears someone singing offscreen. She finds that there's no one around to be singing, just a statue with an insect crawling out of its mouth. Then, the sound completely drops out, as Giddens can no longer hear anything herself. No singing, no natural sound of the countryside. Pure silence. She regains her sense of hearing moments later (after spotting a mysterious figure watching her), but this bit got to me because I could imagine the panic attack that I would have if such a thing happened to me. As I've mentioned in write-ups like the ones on Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and Shivers/They Came from Within, I'm much more bothered by the notion of disease and things going wrong with the body than I am by ghosts and goblins, especially since it's something that we all inevitably have to deal with.

Giddens eventually comes to suspect that Miles and Flora might even be possessed by the valet and the governess, which would certainly explain some of Miles' behavior. That idea plays into the most memorably disturbing moment of the film, in which Miles tells Miss Giddens to kiss him goodnight, then the eleven-year-old actor plants a kiss directly on the lips of the thirty-nine year old actress that lingers while uncomfortable seconds tick by. Miss Giddens is left shuddering and everyone watching the movie is lefting asking, "What the hell?"

The performances delivered by the cast are great all around - Deborah Kerr as Miss Giddens, Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin as Miles and Flora, Megs Jenkins as the housekeeper. Nine years later, Franklin would star in the Film Club entry And Soon the Darkness. Kerr earned six Oscar nominations over the course of her career, eventually receiving an honorary award in 1994. While she didn't get a nomination for The Innocents, she considered it one of her best performances.

Filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Guillermo del Toro have both named The Innocents as one of their favorite horror movies. I wouldn't rank it as such myself, but would agree that it's well worth checking out. The film was directed by Jack Clayton, who would go on to make the awesome family-friendly horror Something Wicked This Way Comes. Clayton wanted to differentiate the style of The Innocents as much as possible from the Hammer horror films of the time, and what he ended up with most notably includes some fantastic, gorgeous black and white cinematography by Freddie Francis, which required so many hot, bright lights to achieve that people would jokingly ask the cinematographer if he was trying to burn down the studio. Francis would go on to direct some popular horror films himself for Hammer and its British horror contemporary Amicus.

Part of

 

Worth Mentioning - We Create Our Own Demons

May 10, 2013, 4:42 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 marvels again, takes anti-depressants, and has a Harryhausen tribute viewing.

IRON MAN THREE (2013)

In The Avengers, Tony Stark/Iron Man helped save the world from an alien invasion by flying a nuclear missile through a wormhole that had opened up above New York City, taking the bomb into space to blow up the alien mother ship. It was an experience that he barely survived, and it's one that he's having a lot of trouble moving on from. When he's reminded of it, he has severe anxiety attacks, and the knowledge that there are greater threats to the world out there than he ever imagined before has made him very paranoid and afraid. He doesn't sleep well, and spends most of his (too many) waking hours locked away in his workshop, building suits of armor for every conceivable situation. By the time we catch up with his progress, he's got more than forty suits ready for action.

Above all else, Tony fears that if something horrible goes down, he won't be able to protect the one thing in the world he cares about most: his girlfriend and company runner Pepper Potts. So when conflicts do arise, of course Pepper is caught right in the middle of it all.

The showiest of the new threats presented in the film, and the one that got the most attention in the trailers, is The Mandarin. The inclusion of The Mandarin in the cinematic series was inevitable, as he's the biggest baddie in Iron Man's comic book rogues gallery. The first film seemed to be hinting that a more down-to-earth version of the character would be appearing down the line, with the terrorist group in it being called Ten Rings - obviously a reference to the power-blasting rings The Mandarin wears on his fingers in the comics. Fans assumed that we would someday find out that The Mandarin was the head of the Ten Rings group, and in fact the character was going to be in the first film as such, but he got written out at the eleventh hour. There was an assumption that he would finally show up in part 3, a villain worthy of capping off a trilogy. But when writer/director Shane Black (the wunderkind action screenwriter behind Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout, among other gigs that included doing uncredited on-set rewrites to the Predator screenplay while he was playing the jokester character in the film), the man whose 2005 directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang served as Robert Downey Jr.'s comeback and brought him to the level of Iron Man consideration, came onboard to do the third film, taking over for 1 & 2's director Jon Favreau, he expressed a disinterest in dealing with The Mandarin, shrugging the character off as a racist caricature. Yet here the character is in Black's film, and he clearly found a way to work around the Fu Manchu-ish racism he perceived.

Black's Mandarin is of unspecified nationality, his style cobbled together from various sources, the ten rings he wears just jewelry. But he is a terrorist, and lately he's taken to disrupting television broadcasts in the United States to air quick clips, stamped with the Ten Rings logo, of himself taunting the President and taking responsibility for bombings that have occurred around the world. Sound like a job for Iron Man? Not to the U.S. government and military, rather they've assigned Stark's old buddy Colonel James Rhodes to the case. Rhodes has a suit of armor himself, acquired in part 2, but his War Machine has gotten a red, white & blue paint job and been rebranded the Iron Patriot.

But soon the Mandarin attacks take a personal turn for Stark and to avenge a friend, protect his girl, and for the sake of the United States, Iron Man once again flies into superheroic battle.

Returning to solo hero movies after the Marvel cinematic world reached the crossover heights of The Avengers, the Iron Man 3 filmmakers have done a great job of following up the mind-blowing events of that film while also showing how/why every following movie wouldn't just be a team effort. The story deals with Stark's own issues and relationships, there are personal stakes and connections, and he's also isolated from everyone he knows for a good portion of the film. Crashlanding in Tennessee with a malfunctioning suit and a failing computer system, Stark has to rely on his smarts and detective skills to figure out what's going on.

Whatever's happening involves the head of a scientific company called Advanced Idea Mechanics, a man named Aldrich Killian, and a scientist named Maya Hansen, both of whom Stark met once before, thirteen years ago, back in his conscienceless playboy days, at which time he was introduced to the concept of something called Extremis, a virus of sorts that "hacks" the brain and "recodes" genetics or something like that. Killian and Hansen have moved on up to human test subjects in the years since their encounters with Stark. Extremis gives people enhanced strength and abilities, even enables them to regrow lost limbs, but there's also a glitch that causes catastrophic side effects in some users.

As Stark gets closer to the truth, Black and co-writer Drew Pearce reveal another change that they've made to the character of The Mandarin, and their reaction to this twist is the deciding factor for a lot of viewers in whether or not they like the movie. As I said in my Marvel Marathon write-up, I haven't read many Iron Man comics, I'm not sure I've ever read an issue of something that had The Mandarin in it, so I don't know what the potential of a film with a more reverential treatment of the character would've been. I was very surprised by how the character was handled, it's quite a gutsy move, it's not what I hoped for after watching the trailers, but I went with it, just a little reluctantly.

Black does a fine job directing, his script is full of good humor, funny lines and scenes, and his actors do well bringing the material to the screen, from the returning stars to fresh faces like Ben Kingsley, Guy Pearce, Ty Simpkins, and Rebecca Hall (though I would've liked if Hall had been given more to do). There are good buddy cop-ish moments with Stark and Don Cheadle's Rhodes, Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper gets more involved with the action this time around and looks great in a sports bra while doing so, and of course Robert Downey Jr. is magic as Tony Stark.

I liked Iron Man 3 a lot. I'm not among those calling it one of the best comic book movies ever made, but I'm also not one of the fans calling for Black's head. I'm comfortably situated in the middle as someone who simply enjoyed my time watching a fun summer comic book action flick.

Issues with my dogs have disrupted my theatrical movie viewings a bit so far this year, and Iron Man 3 was another case of that - I was all set to see the first showing on its opening Friday morning until I realized that its release date was also the same day that my puppy Zoso had a veterinarian appointment to get neutered. So I missed IM3's opening day, but after Zoso had gotten a couple days of home rest, I went to see the movie at a drive-in and took him with me.

SIDE EFFECTS (2013)

Director Steven Soderbergh teams again with his The Informant! and Contagion screenwriter Scott Z. Burns to tell the story of Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara, who rocked my world in David Fincher's version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), who, even though her husband Martin (Channing Tatum) has just been released from prison after serving a four year sentence for insider trading, is still dealing with the depression that first hit when he was initially incarcerated. Emily feels so hopeless and lost in the fog of depression that she even attempts suicide. She starts seeing a psychiatrist, Doctor Banks (Jude Law), and after giving Zoloft and Paxil a try (the SSRIs that I myself have been prescribed during my own quest to become a functioning member of society), she asks about Ablixa, a new-on-the-market anti-depressant that her former psychiatrist (Catherine Zeta-Jones) has taken to recommending.

Emily starts experiencing sleepwalking as a side effect of Ablixa, but the drug works so well for her otherwise that she chooses to stay on it. It looks like Emily and Martin's life together may be taking a turn for the better... Then, during one sleepwalking episode, Emily fatally stabs her husband.

Martin's death occurs around 40 minutes in, and the film is a slow build up to that. Even though I could relate to some of the depression aspect and have experience with the drugs prescribed, the pace was starting to make me restless. But then Martin dies, and the film is a rollercoaster of a murder mystery from that moment on as Emily goes on trial and others try to get to the bottom of what happened. Even though we seemed to have seen everything that went on, there are still twists and turns and ups and downs and I was riveted throughout.

THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953)

When a scientific expedition carries out a test detonation of a nuclear bomb in the frozen lands beyond the Arctic Circle, a test done under the less-than-imaginative codename Operation Experiment, they unwittingly release a prehistoric beast from the ice. The large reptile (33 feet tall, 98 feet long), likely a Rhedosaurus, is soon swimming its way through the Atlantic Ocean along the east coast of North America, taking breaks to destroy ships, kill people, and smash buildings along the way. The creature's destination: the old Rhedosaurus stomping grounds that is now Manhattan and the Hudson River.

The armed forces find that the beast has quite a good defense system to keep them from just blasting it to pieces: its blood contains a virus that is highly infectious to humans, a fact that's discovered when bystanders get seriously ill after confrontations with the creature. When it comes down to it, the fate of the city and its residents lie in the hands of a small group of people who have taken it upon themselves to figure out how to stop the ancient reptile - among them Kenneth Tobey as a military Colonel and Lee Van Cleef as a sharpshooter.

The making of this film was inspired by the success of a 1952 re-release of King Kong (1933). While it takes its title from a short story by Ray Bradbury, there was actually a script already in place before Bradbury was consulted about the project and the producers found that he had written a similar story.

The world of cinema lost one of its greatest legends this week, when stop-motion special effects maestro Ray Harryhausen passed away at the age of 92. Harryhausen himself had been inspired by a viewing of King Kong when he was a young boy, the awesome creatures on display in that film are what got him into doing stop-motion animation of his own, and before long he was working alongside Willis H. O'Brien, the man who had brought King Kong to life one frame at a time. It was Harryhausen who brought The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms wonderfully to life, one of his earliest feature credits.

Harryhausen's Rhedosaurus was the first movie creature to be awakened by nuclear bombs, something that would go on to happen quite often. One of the most famous monsters to draw inspiration from the scenarios, success, and artwork of this Beast was the great Godzilla, who arrived on screens in Japan the following year.

Film Appreciation - Dead Sexy or, Do Zombies Poop?

May 14, 2013, 8:59 pm

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Cody Hamman buries 2005's The Stink of Flesh in Film Appreciation.

Writer/director Scott Phillips's The Stink of Flesh is an apocalyptic tale set in a world overrun by the flesh-eating living dead, and like most of the best zombie stories it uses its walking corpses as a danger lurking in the background of character drama that threatens to boil over into human-on-human violence. The scenario Phillips came up with for his characters is a very unique one, as evident from the movie's tagline: "How do you lead an alternative lifestyle... When everybody's dead?"

The character we follow into this situation is a man called Matool (named after the island in Lucio Fulci's Zombie), a total badass who keeps in shape during the zombie apocalypse by engaging the ghouls in hand-to-hand combat, beating the hell out of them before dispatching them by hammering large nails into their brain. Matool is going about his business, experiencing a typically bloodsoaked day of the dead, when he's knocked out and abducted by another person.

That person is Nathan, who takes Matool back home to his wife Dexy. Nathan and Dexy are the ones who lead the alternative lifestyle which would've undoubtedly been easier to sustain before the dead took over. They have an open relationship. Using terminology that I've picked up while perusing the internet, maybe you'd call Nathan a cuckold, maybe you'd call Dexy a hotwife, but whatever you call them, the fact is that Dexy has a strong sexual desire - she calls it "the ache" - to bring other people into their bedroom. In earlier days they could've just joined a swingers club or something, but now Nathan has to go out and hunt down viable partners for his horny beloved.

Nathan didn't really need to knock Matool out and tie him up to get him to come with him, he could've just asked. Matool doesn't mind this set-up at all; he gets a seemingly safe place to stay for a while and all he has to do in exchange is have sex with Dexy. No problem. Nathan never joins in, he just watches. Who does take part is Dexy's mentally unbalanced sister Sassy, who has a drooling parasitic twin growing on her side and likes to use a section of Matchbox toy car racetrack to smack the ass of the man pounding away at her sister. This is another kink that Matool can easily roll with. Really, the only person around who has a problem with what's going on is Nathan, who is harboring some very dark, disturbing secrets, like the naked female zombie he keeps chained up in a shed to work out his frustrations on and the fact that he is actually intensely, maybe homicidally, jealous of Dexy's f-buddies.

With a creepy/spooky kid also in residence and the few survivors of a military special forces team showing up at the door seeking shelter, the house soon becomes too crowded, and the bedroom too busy, for secrets to stay hidden or its inhabitants to remain safe - from the zombies and each other - for much longer.

I first discovered The Stink of Flesh through my Friday the 13th fandom - in 2005, it was announced that Black Flame, the publisher of the Freddy vs. Jason and Jason X novelizations - would be putting out a series of sequel novels to those films. The first in the Friday the 13th lineup would be Church of the Divine Psychopath, written by Scott Phillips. When I looked Phillips up, I saw that he was an independent filmmaker with a movie called The Stink of Flesh set to soon be released by my fellow Ohioan J.R. Bookwalter's Tempe Video distribution company. To be honest, I found the title of the movie to be a bit off-putting at first, but the writer seemed interesting and with it coming out in June and Church of the Divine Psychopath scheduled for August, I figured I'd check it out while I was waiting for the book. This was back when Netflix was more receptive to micro-budget movies, so I was able to rent the movie from them in July. That's when I became a fan of Scott Phillips.

I thought the movie was great; well-written, with interesting and entertaining characters and situations, and Phillips had a quirkiness to his style that I really enjoyed. He told an original story while working on the heavily trodden ground of the zombie subgenre (and was a bit ahead of the zombie resurgence when he was filming in 2003), and his approach also brought fresh elements to the zombie aspect. His rules allow for both the classic shamblers and the controversial fast zombies, with the explanation that the fast ones are an evolution referred to as "hyper zombies". He also answers the question, "Do zombies poop?" Craig Ferguson would sometimes ask that question on his late night talk show, and I've heard that a fan of the movie passed a DVD copy along to Ferguson at a signing event so he could see the answer for himself.

As I watched the special features on the DVD, I found that Phillips was also a person I could relate to. He was a film and comics lover since he was a kid, and included on the disc were a couple Super 8 shorts that he had shot as a teenager. I've said before that I attempted to do the teen director thing myself, but could never get enough cooperation and support to accomplish anything. Phillips had the same problem - the shorts he shared were made entirely by himself and his friend John Howard because they couldn't get anybody else to help them.

Eventually, Phillips moved out to Los Angeles to pursue a career as a screenwriter, but while some of his projects did get made, like the 1997 Mark Dacascos action movie Drive, he soon grew tired of the Hollywood process and the ridiculous notes he would get from studio execs. He moved back home to Albuquerque and decided to take the Robert Rodriguez El Mariachi/Rebel Without a Crew route to making his own movies. After shooting a couple shorts, he started focusing on making a feature. This time he got the help he required.

Phillips managed to assemble a very good cast. Everyone does fine work, including Ross Kelly and the mononymous Diva as Nathan and Dexy, Devin O'Leary as a soldier who finds some romance with Sassy, who's played by Kristin Hansen, niece of original Leatherface Gunnar Hansen, and Tanith Fiedler and Bob Vardeman as other survivors met along the way. The biggest standouts among the cast for me are Billy Garberina as a soldier named Mandel and Kurly Tlapoyawa, a pride fighter trained in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, as Matool. Tlapoyawa and Garberina choreographed their own fights here, and Tlapoyawa has gone on to become a stuntman and stunt coordinator.

With the script it had, I would've liked The Stink of Flesh regardless of its budget range. The fact that it was made on a budget of $3000 just made it all the more impressive. The movie looks really good, especially given that Phillips and cinematographer Richard Griffin (a prolific filmmaker himself) were working with one light and a standard definition Canon XL-1 camera. After my first viewing of the movie, I would've believed that it was shot in 16mm. Its digital videoness may show more in the hi-def present, but that doesn't affect the movie's quality at all for me, and it still looks better than most.

Scott Phillips and The Stink of Flesh were big inspirations to me as I focused on getting my own filmmaking endeavors moving forward. I was a regular visitor to the website Phillips had for his production company, Exhilarated Despair, and as I started gathering equipment in the summer of 2006, interactions with Phillips and Billy Garberina on the site's forum helped me pick out what I would need.

After The Stink of Flesh, I was hoping to see a steady stream of movies written and directed by Phillips coming out of Albuquerque. For a while, it looked like that would be the case. He took a work-for-hire job that went about as well as some of his crushing Hollywood experiences, but also made another very cool low budget personal project, an "I Drink Your Blood meets Magnolia" slasher called Gimme Skelter. But indie filmmaking came with its own set of troubles, and Phillips soon decided to direct his efforts toward his writing career again, also focusing on concepts that are foreign to me like life and responsibilities. He shut down the Exhilarated Despair website, but he is on Twitter and has a blog called Rattle and Blast. Tweet along viewings of H.O.T.S. and Black Belt Jones with him and pals in 2011 inspired the write-ups I did for those movies.

I still have advice that Phillips and Garberina gave to me in 2006 saved in a document. While I haven't gotten much accomplished for my filmmaking goals in the last seven years, I still do intend to make a feature of my own, as soon as possible, and whenever that happens and I have successfully completed my own movie, Phillips and Garberina will be thanked in the end credits. Because of The Stink of Flesh, they're among those who have made me believe that it's all possible.

Worth Mentioning - Blood, breasts, and beasts

May 17, 2013, 5:36 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 takes on an angry sasquatch and a sharply dressed zombie.

ABOMINABLE (2006)

As promising as the concept of a deadly, hulking, hairy man-beast lurking in the forest is, I haven't seen very many horror movies with a Bigfoot/Sasquatch/Yeti/Abominable Snowman/whatever you want to call it as the antagonist that I've liked all that much. Yet hope springs eternal that the latest release in the sub-genre will bring the creature to the screen in a totally badass way. One that I would highly recommend is Abominable, the first feature from writer/director Ryan Schifrin, son of legendary composer Lalo Schifrin (who did provide the score for his son's movie.)

The story is brilliant in its simplicity and inspiration - it's Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window with a bigfoot. Hitchcock's 1954 thriller starred James Stewart as a man who's stuck in his apartment while nursing a broken leg, so to pass the time he rolls his wheelchair over to the rear window and spies on the outside world, in particular an apartment building across the way. He soon comes to suspect that one of the people he's watching may have committed a murder.

Schifrin's lead character is Preston Rogers, played by Matt McCoy, best known to me as the star of a couple of my childhood favorites, Police Academy parts 5 and 6. Six months ago, Preston was paralyzed in a climbing accident that also claimed the life of his wife. To help him move on from the incident mentally, his doctor has recommended that he return to his cabin in the mountains for a three day trial. The reluctant Preston is accompanied by negligent jackass orderly Otis (special effects artist Christien Tinsley making an impressive acting debut), who will prove to be of very little help to him over the course of the film.

Soon after Preston gets home, a group of attractive young women (Haley Joel, Natalie Compagno, Karin Anna Cheung, Ashley Hartman, and scream queen Tiffany Shepis) arrive at the cabin next door, having rented it as the venue for a bachelorette party getaway. Checking out a noise, Preston rolls his wheelchair out onto his balcony with a pair of binoculars, looking around, innocently turning his sights in the direction of the girls... Then strange things begin to occur. The phone line is found to be knocked out, one of the girls disappears. Before long, Preston is witness to the girls being attacked one-by-one by a murderous bigfoot with an eerie resemblance to character actor Jack Elam.

Preston does his best to alert the girls to what's happening before they're all wiped out and to contact the authorities to help them, but with his condition, no phone line, and the disbelieving Otis trying to obstruct him, this is no easy feat.

Along the way there's a subplot with Rex Linn, Re-Animator/Would You Rather's Jeffrey Combs (playing a scruffy, chain-smoking gas station clerk who totes an oxygen tank), and Lance Henriksen (who was on a bigfoot/sasquatch movie roll around this time) as characters on an ill-fated hunting trip, a cameo by Dee Wallace, and Paul Gleason of The Breakfast Club and Die Hard as the local sheriff.

Schifrin has yet to make a second movie, which is a shame because he did some really nice work on his debut. He captured a good atmosphere for the film, with some effectively creepy moments. One of the jump scares even got me the first time I watched it. There are some cool kills, with a nude Tiffany Shepis exiting the film in an especially spectacular and memorable way. Abominable is a very enjoyable creature feature, definitely one of the best ever made with bigfoot as its monster.

A sequel script was written in 2008 by comics legend Larry Hama, I'm not sure why it never moved forward. Given the image this one ends on, a sequel could be awesome.

ZOMBIE A-HOLE (2012)

There are multiple types of zombies loose in the world. What it takes to destroy these creatures depends on what caused them to return from the dead. Viral and toxic zombies are simple to take down, you just have to pop them in the head. Zombies resurrected through magick are a bit tougher, requiring dismemberment and cremation. Demonically possessed zombies are the worst of the bunch, you don't want to have to deal with any of those.

Pollux was once just a regular guy. It was while he was on a humanitarian mission in Haiti that he found a voodoo medallion and the evil force contained within the object possessed him. When he returned to the states, Pollux became a serial killer, targeting only sets of identical twin females. His own identical twin brother Castor (if you're like me, these names will make you think of John Woo's Face/Off rather than Greek and Roman mythology) attempted to stop Pollux's reign of terror, but by killing him Castor only made him stronger. Pollux rose from the grave a demon zombie.

Now Pollux is continuing his killing spree, wiping out set after set of twins while on a cross country mission to reach a gateway to Hell (there are such places located all over, but Pollux is likely heading for one in the Indiana countryside) and release so many evil souls from the underworld that they'll outnumber the living.

Castor, who has a psychic connection to his twin, is again on his brother's trail, and some bad moves Pollux makes along the way gets a couple others after him. One is a girl named Mercy - Pollux killed her twin sister, she managed to escape his clutches but only after he had ripped out one of her eyes and melted one of her hands by vomiting toxic green silly string onto it. Sporting an eyepatch and a robotic prosthetic she built herself, Mercy is out for some "Biblical grade vengeance". Pollux's antics have also drawn the attention of modern day cowboy Franco Fulci, who has dedicated his life to stopping undead creatures of all sorts, considering himself a "border guard" between the realms of the living and the dead.

Can these three work together to stop Pollux, the titular zombie a-hole (Franco Fulci is not a fan of harsh language), before it's too late?

Zombie A-Hole is the second film from The Puppet Monster Massacre director Dustin Wayde Mills. Mills is really churning out the movies in these early stages of his filmmaking career, his level of prolificacy is amazing to me, and he's been surprising me with how quickly he can get out a new feature ever since I first found out about him, when I went to buy a copy of Puppet Monster from him after a screening of it at the spring 2012 Cinema Wasteland and found that he already had copies of Zombie A-Hole available as well. By the spring 2013 show, he had five features for sale, and I think he's got at least three more coming out by the end of this year.

While Puppet Monster had a cast of puppets shot against a green screen in Mills's living room, Zombie A-Hole is a live action film with many different real world locations. The style of it draws a lot of inspiration from Robert Rodriguez, it's even described as a cross between Sin City and Planet Terror, and the picture has the scratched-up Grindhouse aesthetic.

Mills definitely kept the grindhouse/drive-in exploitation cornerstones of "blood, breasts, and beasts" well in mind while he was putting together his movie, filling it with good amounts of each. Beasts: the demon zombie Pollux, of course, some lesser zombies that are cleverly brought to the screen with the use of skeleton puppets that attack and get blown away by the human characters, as well as a small creature that's shackled in a box and helps Fulci in his search. Blood: a whole lot of (usually CG-enhanced) kill scenes; hearts ripped out, throats slashed, skulls smashed, a girl's head twisted off like a bottle cap, after which her fully nude body stumbles away a couple steps before finally collapsing. Which brings us to breasts: there are several pairs on display. The first bare breast is seen within the first 30 seconds. Full nudity follows within the first 90 seconds. You may realize that even the picture on the disc is a bloody breast, with the hole in the center taking place of the nipple. Joe Bob Briggs would likely approve.

Despite all it has going for it, I have to admit that I was disappointed with Zombie A-Hole when I first watched it, and had to give it more chances before I got into it. I feel that its pacing is off and it's too long - in his Puppet Monster Massacre audio commentary, Mills says that he thinks movies of this type should run between 70 and 90 minutes, a belief that I share. Puppet Monster ran 70 minutes, which was perfect for it. Zombie A-Hole is 108 minutes long and feels like it could've been trimmed. Scenes with music playing over them go on for too long, dialogue could've been cut, less slow-mo used. As cool as some of the kills are, and as smart as the idea is for a micro-budget production (you get two for the price of one every time), the twin murder sequences do get repetitious, some of the set-ups too similar.

The copy I bought in spring '12 was a barebones release, but there is a "Director's Cut" edition available with special features including audio commentary. I haven't seen that cut, so I can't say whether or not the differences in it fixed any of the issues I had. I would really like to hear the commentary, since I've listened to and enjoyed Mills's commentaries on his other movies, so it would be interesting to hear him discuss Zombie A-Hole.

I think the movie (as I've seen it) is flawed, but still worth checking out. It does have a lot of good ideas in it that are executed in imaginative ways, fun scenes and some very cool characters. I'd gladly watch further adventures of Franco Fulci and Mercy if Mills were to bring them back in something someday.



Living in Gatsby's World

May 22, 2013, 11:30 am

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Guest contributor Sandy Moore wrote in to share with us an infographic she created to mark the release of the latest adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

F. Scott Fitzgerald had much in common with "The Great Gatsby" narrator Nick Carraway. He had many famous and well-to-do friends who invited him in to their inner circle to share the decadence of their lifestyle in the 1920s. Fitzgerald's young artist, writer and multi-talented friends inspired his classic novel about one of America's most indulgent periods. Today, we can find intriguing parallels between Fitzgerald's iconic characters and the actors who portray them in the 2013 film directed by Baz Luhrmann. Living in Gatsby's world may be an enviable fantasy, but at least we don't have to pay as much for electricity!

Worth Mentioning - Where No Joe Said Yo Before

May 24, 2013, 4:30 pm

≫ Next: Film Appreciation - Evolution Leaps Forward

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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 doubles up on both Trek and Joe.

I've been getting more into going to drive-ins over the last couple years, for several reasons - nostalgia for a moviegoing era that I largely missed; drive-ins are my father's preferred way to see a movie; I want to see the remaining drive-ins around me stay alive, so I want to do my part in supporting them as they try to raise the funds to make the switch over to digital projection, which will soon be necessary and costs a ridiculous amount, around $80,000 per projector.

You get a good deal going to the drive-in, two movies for the price of one. When I saw that a nearby drive-in was going to be hosting a double feature of Star Trek Into Darkness and G.I. Joe Retaliation this past weekend, I was totally on board for that, and the drive-in booking those sequels together is how this mash-up article happened. I went to the drive-in on Sunday night, so on Saturday I revisited the movies' predecessors:

STAR TREK (2009)

I'm a casual fan of Star Trek, specifically a fan of the movies only. My fandom may extend to the television shows at some point, it's not like I've disliked them - though I've read episode-by-episode summaries of entire series in the past, until this year I had never actually watched a single full episode of any of the TV shows. I'm now a few episodes into watching The Original Series on Netflix. We'll see how that goes, but I have been a fan of the films for a long time, starting by watching them as they aired on cable movie channels, then renting them (I remember having the video store reserve a copy of part VI: The Undiscovered Country for me so I could see it the day it came out), buying the VHS collection, finally starting to see them theatrically as of Star Trek: First Contact, replacing the VHS collection with a DVD collection... I enjoyed the cinematic adventures of the original crew, and when The Next Generation bunch took over the film series, I quickly came to like those characters as well.

I was intrigued when J.J. Abrams came on to revitalize movie Trek after the TNG farewell installment Nemesis (which I liked more than most fans), but also became a little concerned when I heard rumors of the approach that would be taken. Rather than moving forward in a completely new direction, Abrams was taking things backwards, going back to Kirk and Spock's early days in Starfleet. That was an idea that had been getting tossed around for many years, but I wasn't sure about it. Who could fill the shoes of William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and the rest of the original cast members? Would this be a total reboot and wipe out the continuity that Trek fans had devoted thousands of hours to?

I was quite satisfied with how things turned out. Instead of just callously starting all over again, Abrams and his collaborators found a way for their story to both kick off after the events of all the TV shows and movies and give them a clean slate to work from the beginning with. Thank you, time travel.

129 years in the future of the film's primary events, an elderly Spock leads an attempt to save the planet Romulus from being destroyed by a supernova, the plan being to use a substance called "red matter" to create a black hole that would swallow up the supernova's energy burst. Unfortunately, Spock arrives too late to save the planet. A Romulan named Nero, captain of a massive mining ship called Narada, blames Spock for the loss of his homeworld and gives chase to his ship... Causing both of them to get caught in the red matter black hole.

Narada enters the black hole first, and so exits first, being transported into the distant past. The "lightning storm in space" that accompanies the ship's arrival draws the attention of Federation ship USS Kelvin, on which George Kirk is the first officer. As Nero attacks the Kelvin, George has to take over the role of Captain and sacrifice his own life to ensure that the eight hundred others aboard the ship can get away safely. During the attack, George's pregnant wife goes into labor, and seconds before his death he hears the cries of his newborn son over the ship's communications system. James Tiberius Kirk has been born, but unlike the Kirk of The Original Series, this Kirk will never get to know his father. While The Original Series and all that followed continues to exist in its own timeline, Nero's accidental trip into the past has created an alternate reality for J.J. Abrams to play in and tell his own Kirk and Spock origin story.

We're given glimpses into moments from both Kirk and Spock's childhoods, then see how they both come to join Starfleet. The story of the film is centered entirely on these two, where these characters came from, how they'll grow to be versions of the men we know, and the development of their relationship. For most of the film, they don't like each other very much, there are intense moments of the two butting heads, but the arc takes them to a point of mutual understanding and respect, the seeds of the great friendship the two shared in the original timeline.

When the elder Spock emerges from the black hole, mere seconds have passed for him, but it's an event that Nero has been patiently waiting for for twenty-five years. Now he can put his plan of revenge in motion. Nero wants Spock to feel the same pain he felt when Romulus was destroyed, and so he intends to make Spock watch as he uses Narada's mining equipment and the red matter to destroy the homeworlds of Spock's parents - Vulcan, the planet of his father, and Earth, the planet of his human mother.

Luckily, enough time has passed that the young, alternate versions of Kirk and Spock are members of Starfleet and aboard the Federation ship USS Enterprise, under the command of Captain Christopher Pike. As the Enterprise tries to stop Nero from carrying out his intentions to wipe two whole plants out of existence, Pike is captured, and with their Captain out of the equation the rivalry between Kirk and Spock really heats up as they argue over what the best course for them to take is. Who is right, and who will lead?

Remember, this is an alternate reality, so anything can happen... as Trek fans in attendance realized when Nero successfully destroys the planet Vulcan. When I saw the movie theatrically, fans in the audience were visibly and audibly shocked at what they were seeing. Vulcan gone at this point in Kirk and Spock's lives? It took a few seconds for it to settle in for them that it was the fact this was occurring in a different timeline that made this possible.

Abrams' Trek is a very entertaining movie, but it wouldn't work nearly as well as it does if he hadn't managed to find such appropriate actors to step into the shoes of the original cast. Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto are great as the new Kirk and Spock, they put my worries over how anyone could live up to Shatner and Nimoy to rest almost as soon as they arrived on screen. It's also great to have Nimoy himself in the film as the elder Spock, passing the baton, providing exposition about the Nero situation as well as advice and guidance to the young Kirk, and even his young self. The rest of the recast crew also do well in their roles, I could never complain about Simon Pegg and Zoe Saldana being in a cast, Anton Yelchin handles Chekov's thick accent, John Cho is a fine Sulu, and I was amazed by Karl Urban as Doctor Leonard "Bones" McCoy. Though I had seen him before in several other movies, this is the performance that made me like Urban as an actor, his impression of original Bones DeForest Kelley is dead-on perfect. 

G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA (2009)

I was a huge fan of G.I. Joe when I was growing up, a regular viewer of the cartoon series, an occasional buyer of the comic book, a player of the video game, and a major collector of the toy line. I had a healthy amount of toys related to other cartoons I watched, like He-Man and Thundercats, but in sheer numbers of figures and accessories, G.I. Joe trumped them all. I had a ton of Joes and Cobras, a large airship, a space shuttle, a base, battle vehicles, etc. My friend Noah was also big into G.I. Joes, and I had some good times going over to his house and playing out skirmishes with his figures. He lived in a two story house, so we would play our wargames at the top of the stairs, with the forces of good and bad both taking heavy casualties, dying spectacular deaths and tumbling down the steps. I've only recently discovered that fellow fans don't like the seasons of the cartoon that were produced by DIC as much as the original Sunbow seasons and that the 1987 cartoon movie wasn't well received. I was just a young kid, I didn't differentiate between episodes made by different production companies and I dug the movie, I watched them all mixed together, took them as they were and enjoyed it. Action figures of characters introduced in the '87 movie were important members of my team.

If a live action movie had been produced when I was a child, I would've been all about it. By the time one actually did happen, I was a good 15 years away from my G.I. Joe fandom. I had grown out of it and moved on. The toys had been stowed away, viewings of the cartoon had ended. When I heard a G.I. Joe movie was going to happen, I was very wary of it. I found many things questionable as it was being put together. I was sure that it wasn't going to be for me, so I didn't see it theatrically.

When I did watch the movie, I was surprised at how enjoyable I found it to be.

As is the trend, the live action film takes the origin story approach, introducing viewers to the G.I. Joe special forces unit, which consists of the best and the brightest that militaries from all over the world have to offer, through the eyes of a soldier named Conrad "Duke" Hauser as he and his buddy "Ripcord" are accepted in by team leader General Hawk. A different approach than previous iterations of the franchise, as Duke had been an established second-in-command when it all began. Like the title says, we're also shown the beginnings of the evil organization Cobra.

Those aren't the only origin aspects in there, it is a very background-happy movie, giving us flashbacks to the childhood training sessions rival ninjas Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow went through together, a unique-to-this-movie backstory in which Duke is shown to have had personal connections to Cobra Commander and his lackey Baroness before they went bad, we're shown exactly how Cobra Commander becomes his familiar self, and he's neither a former used car salesman (the comics) or a snakeman (the cartoon movie). The film even opens in 1641 France to set up the villainous Destro's metal mask, which he doesn't don until the end.

The story in the present (actually the not too distant future) has Duke, Ripcord, and fellow Joes including Scarlett, Snake Eyes, Heavy Duty, Breaker, Cover Girl, and Sergeant Stone attempting to stop the fledgling forces of Cobra and their performance enhanced soldiers from firing warheads packed with Doctor Mindbender's weaponized nanomites on locations around the world. Despite our heroes' best efforts, the Eiffel Tower is lost to a nanomite bombing. The outcome of the climactic battle will decide if the targeted cities of Beijing, Moscow, and Washington, D.C. suffer similar fates...

This is definitely not my ideal G.I. Joe movie. Some of the backstory elements are unnecessary, there's too much origin telling going on for my taste, there's dopey dialogue and scenarios, things get overblown toward the end, there are attempts at humor that annoy rather than amuse me, which is par for the course when I watch the works of director Stephen Sommers. And yet not only did I find the movie to be much more tolerable than I expected, I actually had fun watching it. It reminded me of those left behind days of watching the cartoon and the enjoyment the brand had previously brought to me. Seeing these characters battling it out with each other once again in big, noisy action setpieces gave me a sort of nostalgic thrill. It wasn't the G.I. Joe movie I would've asked for, but I was entertained for the most part. If it had come out when I was a kid, I probably would've loved it.


With the 2009 films fresh in mind, I was then ready for my drive-in excursion.

STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS (2013)

Four years have passed for us viewers, but only one has gone by for the crew of the Enterprise. As they've been going out on exploration and observation missions for the Federation, everyone's been settling into their classic roles and things are pretty much like old times - except Spock and Uhura are still dating, a relationship established in the 2009 movie that I still can't quite wrap my head around.

Sometimes, Captain Kirk will break rules and take risks to do the morally right thing rather than doing the logical thing or strictly adhering to the limitations of his job, which causes disagreements between him and Spock, even if Kirk's actions are to benefit his Vulcan first officer. Kirk gets into some trouble at the beginning of the film, but his punishment is quickly brushed aside when a serious threat arises.

While Starfleet teeters on the brink of war with the Klingons, one of its own members, John Harrison, whose job entailed doing threat assessment, has gone rogue, masterminding the bombing of a Starfleet location and then opening fire on a room where its higher-ups have gathered, causing the death of Christopher Pike. Kirk wants revenge, and Starfleet head Admiral Marcus gives him the chance to get it, sending him on a mission that others on the Enterprise have serious misgivings about - Harrison has fled to an abandoned city on the Klingon planet Kronos, and the Enterprise is tasked with following him there, not to attempt to capture him but to kill him, opening fire on the city with dozens of torpedos. Kirk and his crew are to be assassins... and if things go wrong when they're in the vicinity of Kronos, this could be the event that kicks off the brewing war.

Of course, some things do go wrong, and orders are not followed to the letter. There are twists and turns, secrets are revealed, our heroes come to find out that things are not at all what they seem.

The story of the film, like Star Treks past, definitely uses politics, situations, and theories from our own time as its base. There are unmistakable shades of world events from the last twelve years in the film, there's even a dedication to soldiers who have fought in the post-9/11 War on Terror in the end credits. It was interestingly done for the most part, with the returning actors handling the material well and Peter Weller and especially Benedict Cumberbatch doing some great work as Admiral Marcus and John Harrison.

Toward the end, things take a turn. Leonard Nimoy has a cameo to deliver some information, and while it's always nice to see him, the set-up is kind of awkward. Young Spock gives him a call to ask his older self a question, but it's not quite clear why he's doing this. The way it happens, it almost feels like the younger version does this all the time, even though the elder version has vowed never to tell him too much, he has to live his own life, figure things out for himself, make his own choices and all that. After the information is given, things got more questionable. The movie seemed to start leaning on the audience's presumed familiarity with scenarios past as situations arose where it starts repeating beats, or reversing beats, from one of the most popular original crew Star Trek movies, and being made to think of that other movie blocked me from being able to make an emotional connection with the moments. During the action-packed, race against time, cathartic climax, I was removed and wondering about the logic of certain issues.

The film's most popular image

I liked Star Trek Into Darkness quite a bit, but there are so many things that put it in direct comparison to a great previous entry that it just made me think of how it didn't match up to that one on a storytelling or emotional level. It was an entertaining movie, but very light and fluffy compared to the one it was referencing. The choice to use their clean slate to go into retread territory, even though the story around things was very different, brought it down a bit for me.

And since Star Trek Into Darkness, Skyfall, and The Avengers have all done it over the last year, I don't think any other movies should do the "villain in a glass cell" thing again for a while. It has worked every time, but it needs a break.

G.I. JOE: RETALIATION (2013)

Four years have passed for us viewers (it would've been three years if the movie's release hadn't been delayed for 3D conversion), but mere months have gone by in the world of G.I. Joe since the events of The Rise of Cobra. Cobra operative and master of disguise Zartan is in the same position he was in at the end of Rise, using the nanomites to pass himself off as the President of the United States while keeping the real President captive in the White House's nuclear fallout shelter. With his stolen executive powers and the aid of the forces of Cobra, particularly members Storm Shadow and Firefly, Zartan sets events in motion to bust Cobra Commander out of the subterranean prison he's being held in and to get the G.I. Joes out of the way so Cobra can begin carrying out an evil plan.

Over the months since we last saw him, Duke has struck up such a great friendship with a fellow G.I. Joe called Roadblock that it feels like they've been hanging out for years. We get to see the Joes go on a couple official missions, which are presented in a more realistic and militaristic manner than in the previous film. The missions are successful, but then things go very wrong... The Joes are framed for a political assassination and the theft of nuclear weapons, and in response President Zartan orders that they be wiped out in strikes by the "special forces unit" Cobra.

Cobra strikes, a lot of G.I. Joes are killed. We don't witness the fates of Rise characters like Scarlett, Ripcord, or Heavy Duty, just the deaths of a lot of nameless faces and a rookie called Mouse. The credits say that Grunt and Clutch were around as well, but they're just background characters who don't have lines. The movie also kills off Duke, which the '87 cartoon feature attempted to do but then backtracked from in fear of fan backlash. When the dust clears, it appears that there are only a few Joes left alive to get to the bottom of what's going on: Roadblock, Lady Jaye, Flint, and Snake Eyes. It's like in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protcol when all of IMF was disavowed and Ethan Hunt and his team had to take it upon themselves to right the wrongs.

While the others head to Washington, D.C. to enlist the help of the man their team was named after, retired General Joe Colton, and figure out why the President had their team killed, Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow's cousin Jinx go on a side mission to capture Storm Shadow and bring him in front of the Blind Master to face justice for his evil deeds that stretch all the way back to the murder of the man who trained Snake and Storm when they were children.

Eventually, we learn that Cobra's Zeus project gives them the capability to threaten countries around the world with satellite weapons that would make some Bond villains jealous. Speaking of James Bond - the G.I. Joes are unable to stop Cobra Commander and Zartan from causing the destruction of London, and every time I see the shots of London falling apart, I can't help but think of how angry that would make 007. Unfortunately, Bond does not show up to help The Rock's Roadblock avenge the city, but he did fight The Rock's grandfather in You Only Live Twice.

Though the story is a direct sequel to The Rise of Cobra, Retaliation's style and tone are very different, things are much more down-to-earth this time around. Designs are also more recognizably based on the cartoons and toys of the '80s. Cobra Commander looks just as he should, and there are classic battle vehicles put to use. The ninja angle allows the film to feature some cool martial arts action sequences, and the climactic battles are refreshingly simplistic compared to the CGI madness the previous film spiralled into. It all comes down to two men beating each other up on a beach.

Retaliation is certainly a mindless popcorn flick, but the script had some fun lines (my favorite scene has Walton Goggins monologuing as the warden of the prison where Cobra Commander is being held) and director Jon Chu did well stepping up into the action world from the dance movies he worked on before. Overall, G.I. Joe: Retaliation feels much more like the sort of live action Joe movie that might've been made in the '80s.

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Film Appreciation - Evolution Leaps Forward

May 28, 2013, 5:00 pm

≫ Next: Worth Mentioning - Hyperdrive to Nowhere

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Cody Hamman displays tolerance and Film Appreciation for X-Men (2000).

"In the not too distant future", humanity comes to realize that some members of our species are entering the next stage of evolution. These people are referred to as mutants, and they are each gifted or cursed, depending on how you look at it, with some sort of superpower. Their mutations typically appear at puberty, their first manifestations usually triggered by moments of stress or excitement. Though they had no choice in the matter, when they reveal their mutant abilities they're often met with hostility and violence. Regular people tend to fear them, believing mutants can't be trusted. Some of these mutants are amazingly powerful, and if they can't control their abilities, or if they use them to commit crimes, they could be very dangerous. Citizens are demanding that their governments do something about this mutant phenomenon, and politicians share their concerns. For example, in the United States Senator Robert Kelly is proposing the Mutant Registration Act, which is just as it sounds; all mutants must register with the government and be completely open about their powers, essentially being put on a watch list and opening themselves up to the possibility of discrimination and hate crimes. Kelly isn't worried about how a mutant's neighbors might react to them, if he had his way he'd "lock 'em all away".

Two factions arise among the mutants in response to society's negative reaction to them. One side is led by Professor Charles Xavier, whose mutant power is high-level telepathy. Professor X runs a school for "gifted youngsters" (mutant children), and his approach to the issues is one of patience and peaceful reasoning. His hope is that people will come around to accepting mutants. He has trained some of his best and brightest students to use their powers for good, becoming superheroes called the X-Men, with a high-tech base located under the schoolgrounds. On the other side is a former friend of Xavier's, Erik Lehnsherr, a.k.a. Magneto, who can generate and control magnetic fields. Lehnsherr knows the evils humans can commit against those they see as different from themselves, as a boy in 1940s Poland he and his family were put in a concentration camp. He sees a war coming between humans and mutants and will not let something so horrible as the Holocaust happen again, this time to mutants. He plans to make the first strike against humans, aided by his own team of villainous mutants called The Brotherhood.

Soon, New York/New Jersey's Ellis Island will be host to a UN world summit, set to be the largest gathering of world leaders in history, where when one of the main topics is likely to be how to deal with mutants. This gathering is Magneto's target. He has devised a machine which emits a radiation that will trigger mutation in any normal human in its path. These world leaders have a problem with mutants, Magneto is going to turn them into the very thing they fear.

Two mutants meet each other by chance in the snowy Canadian countryside - a teenage runaway calling herself Rogue, who briefly absorbs the lifeforce and powers of any human or mutant she touches with her bare skin, therefore making prolonged contact with anyone impossible for her unless she's willing to kill them, and an amnesiac man nicknamed Wolverine, whose regenerative healing factor is so strong that he's nearly unkillable and who doesn't know much about his life other than the fact that his name is Logan and at some point in the past, somehow, his bones were encased in a metal called adamantium, turning the claws that pop out of his hands into razor sharp blades. One of them factors into Magneto's plan, but it's not clear to them which one he wants to force into helping him. He needs them because his radiation machine feeds off the energy of the mutant standing in its center, and to generate enough radiation to pull off the Ellis Island attack it will kill that mutant. He intends one of them to be an unwilling sacrifice to his cause.

Unbeknownst to Magneto, his mutant sacrifice won't be the only one dying. His machine won't just turn the world leaders into mutants so they can see how the other half lives. Since their mutations will be occurring unnaturally, their bodies will reject them, their cells breaking down. The mutation will quickly kill them, as an unlucky test subject finds out over the course of the film.

And so, the stage is set for our heroes, including, in addition to those already mentioned, telepath Jean Grey, the weather controlling Storm, and Cyclops, who blasts energy rays from his eyes, their intensity regulated by the ruby-quartz visor he wears, to take on Magneto and the members of his evil Brotherhood - the agile and long-tongued Toad, the Wolverine-esque Sabretooth, and shapeshifter Mystique - in a climactic battle with many lives hanging in the balance.

Directed by Bryan Singer, the live action adaptation of the X-Men comics is the end result of the project languishing in development hell for a decade, being presented to different studios, passing through the hands of James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez, the script going through several drafts by multiple screenwriters, including Andrew Kevin Walker (Seven), Joss Whedon (The Avengers), James Schamus (Ang Lee's Hulk), John Logan (Skyfall), Michael Chabon (Spider-Man 2), and Ed Solomon (Men in Black). It was Singer and producer Tom DeSanto who crafted the pitch that got things rolling into production, with Singer's The Usual Suspects collaborator Christopher McQuarrie (Jack Reacher, uncredited on Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol) and Metal Gear Solid voice actor David Hayter handling the final drafts of the script, Hayter getting sole screenwriter credit on the finished film.

I was all the time reading rumors of an X-Men film throughout my childhood, seeing fan cast suggestions in magazines, artwork imagining certain actors in the roles. It always seemed like a pipedream. Even when Singer's version started coming together, there was a lot of doubt going around on the internet. There were questions of how good the script could be after being worked on by so many different people. The images that came out of the heroes in black leather costumes screamed "Matrix wannabe". The schedule was very rushed. When production began, the release date they were aiming for was winter of 2000. When the studio told Singer that the date had been moved to summer, his first reaction was to make the logical assumption that they meant summer 2001, giving him an extra six months or so of post-production. Instead, the date had been moved up to July 14, 2000. Filming began at the end of September 1999 and ended in early March 2000, allowing just four months of post-production on a movie that required a large amount of special effects.

Some of the worries about X-Men came out of the fact that the '90s had not been a very good time for superhero properties. Franchises crashed and burned, characters hadn't been done justice, most attempts were low level. And in particular, beyond the Incredible Hulk TV show, Marvel didn't have a very good track record with live action adaptations. At least DC's biggest characters had some hit movies under their belts. 1998's Blade had been a success for a Marvel character, but that was a different type of comic book movie. X-Men was going to be the first big budget, summer blockbuster studio release for Marvel superhero characters. It had a lot to prove.

I had my concerns when I went to see the movie on opening weekend. I didn't think the effects were going to look very good, and when I peeked into the screening room as the showing before the one I would be attending was nearing its end, I saw the "mutation radiation" spreading across the screen in the form of squiggles of white light. Not exactly awe-inspiring. But I was still openminded about the whole thing, I was staying mostly optimistic. The X-Men movie was finally here, and I really wanted to like it.

And I did.

The comic character Juggernaut may not be in the film, but Bryan Singer's X-Men was the beginning of the comic book superhero movie juggernaut that has rampaged through theatres for the past thirteen years. In many ways, it is the template for a lot of the most successful comic book movies that have followed, starting with the hiring of Singer when he was fresh off the critical success of the low budget crime drama The Usual Suspects. Now superhero and action franchises pulling their directors from low budget critical successes is standard practice.

It's interesting looking at and listening to the special features on the X-Men DVD now, after so many comic book movies have followed, as Singer and company talk about how they wanted to prove with their film that comic book movies didn't have to be goofy, that superheroes could be taken seriously, that such fantastical characters could still be relevant to our reality. Singer and his collaborators did a great job grounding the proceedings in real world issues of oppression, bigotry, and civil rights. Many superhero movies since have taken a similarly down-to-earth approach.

Marvel characters doing gangbusters at the box office is a regular occurrence now, at this point they've made over a billion dollars worldwide not just when combined, but individually in some cases. The Avengers crossed the billion dollar mark and, more surprisingly in the grand scheme of things, so did Iron Man 3. The idea that the third entry in an Iron Man series would be so successful would've been unthinkable just six years ago. But it was X-Men, after being kicked around Hollywood for more than ten years, that paved the way, with Spider-Man following soon after. The 1989 TV movie The Trial of the Incredible Hulk aside, X-Men also features what was the start of Stan Lee's cameos in live action Marvel movies. He has done many more cameos since.

Most of the cast around Stan Lee were fine fits for their roles. Patrick Stewart was both the obvious and the perfect choice for Professor X, Ian McKellen is a great Magneto, there are a couple Bond girls on the X team with Famke Janssen (GoldenEye) and Halle Berry (Die Another Day), Rebecca Romijn looks good blue and naked as Mystique, Ray Parks removed his Darth Maul facepaint from Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace and put on the greenish-yellow facepaint of Toad, Sabretooth is played by former wrestler and future Michael Myers Tyler Mane... Of all of them, the biggest casting coup was when Hugh Jackman signed on as Wolverine. Jackman wasn't the first choice for the role. Russell Crowe had turned it down, Dougray Scott had been cast but his turn as the villain in Mission: Impossible II caused a scheduling conflict. The movie had already been filming for a month and a half before Jackman was hired. At that time, the Australian actor was a total unknown, I had never once heard his name before the casting announcement. Although a foot taller than the comic book version of Wolverine, he turned out to be the perfect actor to bring the character to life.

Some fans complain that the film is too Wolverine-centric, but he's one of the most popular characters in the Marvel universe and I think it was absolutely the right choice to introduce audiences to the world of the X-Men through his eyes. He was always one of my top favorite comic book heroes overall - given my proclivity toward watching slasher movies, it should be no surprise that I loved reading about an unkillable guy with blade-claws - and certainly my favorite X-Men character, so Wolverine being at the center of the film is not a problem for me. From the moment he's first brought into the film, making money by cagefighting in a seedy bar, I had a feeling that they were going to pull Wolverine off properly, and I wasn't let down from there as he went on to kick ass, smoke stogies, call people "bub", and shake up the clinical, intellectual world of the X-Men with his tough, irreverent attitude. He has some great interactions with the other characters, growing into being a caring, mentor type toward Anna Paquin's Rogue, flirting with Janssen's Jean Grey, and butting heads with James Marsden as Cyclops. The Wolverine-Cyclops interplay provides one of my favorite moments and lines of dialogue, when Cyclops makes him prove that he's really himself rather than Mystique taking his form. Wolverine replies with his opinion of Cyclops: "You're a dick." Test passed.

The film may not be perfect, the rushed post-production did result in the finished product having some dodgy effects, but I think everyone involved did great work getting the X-Men onto the screen. I was entertained and satisfied, glad to be seeing Marvel characters done big and done right. It may seem a bit quaint these days, but in 2000, X-Men represented a leap forward for superhero movies.

Worth Mentioning - Hyperdrive to Nowhere

May 31, 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 tells of killers, captives, The Rock, Diesel, and Van Damme.

SLAVE GIRLS FROM BEYOND INFINITY (1987)

Daria and Tisa, the bikini top and loincloth-clad slave girls of the title, have been thrown into solitary confinement aboard the spaceship that's escorting them to whatever sort of servitude they're being forced into, but being chained to the floor of this small room has only put them in position to pull off one of the easiest escapes from captivity in history. Through sheer will and determination, Daria is able to bust her chain, and then aid Tisa in doing the same to hers. They steal a lifeboat shuttle and blast off into space, soon coming across a planetoid from which a beacon is being transmitted with landing coordinates. As they near the planetoid's atmosphere, their craft is caught in a beam that pulls them down to the surface, forcing them to crashland on the edge of a tropical island.

In the jungle, the women find a large fortress, long ago abandoned by the space pirates who built it and now inhabited by a man named Zed and his hulking robot servants. Daria and Tisa aren't Zed's only guests, there are also survivors of another spaceship wreck staying in the fortress, brother and sister Rik and Shala. There used to be more people there, but they have gone missing... and it doesn't take long for the crash survivors to figure out the fact that they're not really guests, they are Zed's prisoners.

Zed is obsessed with hunting. He sleeps all day and hunts all night. The walls of the fortress are lined with all sorts of weaponry, the place decorated with the taxidermied bodies of the many varieties of big game alien species he's killed. In his private chamber, he keeps his most prized trophies, the heads of the game he most enjoys hunting: humans. He intends to add Daria, Tisa, Rik, and Shala's heads to his collection very soon. He will set them loose in the jungle and track them down as they try to avoid boobytraps and the alien-mutant-cyborg and green-blooded ghouls that reside in a nearby temple.

Writer/director Ken Dixon's film is an adaptation of Richard Connell's popular 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game, put into a futuristic space setting and populated with scantily clad women. I wasn't expecting much from Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity when I started watching it, but it quickly drew me in, and by the time the end credits were rolling I was truly impressed. For the type of movie that it is, it's very well made. Dixon knew what he was doing when putting together this low budget sci-fi exploitation flick, he kept the tone light and fun, he kept the pace moving quickly through the 74 minute running time, and he kept his female characters in as little clothes as possible.

In fact, the actresses - Elizabeth Kaitan (her last name spelled Cayton here) of Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (which was directed by this film's creature designer, John Carl Beuchler), and most of the Vice Academy sequels as Daria, Cindy Beal as Tisa, and scream queen Brinke Stevens as Shala - are only fully clothed for one scene, a dinner scene in which they wear dresses. For the rest of the film they're either in the slave girl bikinis, lingerie, or nude. They look great, no matter what they're wearing or aren't.

This is the type of movie that laughs at its own absurdity along with the audience, and Dixon wrote in a lot of good, goofy lines and scenes. For example, as Zed's captives are planning an escape from his fortress, Daria asks Rik, "Have you got a knife?" Rik responds with a confident tone while underselling the large knife he pulls out, "Only this." Daria is unimpressed, shrugging, "It'll have to do." None of this is to be taken seriously.

On the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1992, Senator Jesse Helms called the film out as being indecent. Here on Life Between Frames today, I deem it to be a whole lot of fun.

THE CALL (2013)

A serial killer has been stalking the streets of Los Angeles and its suburbs, targeting teenage girls of a certain type. His latest victim of choice is Casey, who has all the makings of the traditional horror movie final girl; a virginal good girl who can't even bring herself to say a word as harsh as "bitch".

The killer captures Casey in a mall parking garage and stuffs her into the trunk of a car, where she'll spend the majority of the movie. While she's being driven to certain torturous death, Casey manages to get a call in to 911. The operator who handles her call is a woman named Jordan, who is very shaken up and emotionally invested in the situation because she had a traumatic experience months earlier when she was on the line with one of the killer's previous victims as they were being attacked and even exchanged words with the killer.

Much of the running time deals with Casey's attempts to escape from the trunk, trying to draw attention from other cars on the road in any way possible, while Jordan tries to gather enough information to identify the vehicle and figure out its location, the police desperately trying to track the killer down and save Casey's life. The cell phone Casey is using is a disposable one, so it's not as simple as just tracking its GPS signal. I hadn't read any reviews of the movie, hadn't seen the trailer, hadn't seen any images from it other than shots of Jordan sitting at her work station, so I had no idea what would happen or where things were going. I was totally riveted throughout.

Directed by Brad Anderson (Session 9), The Call is a very entertaining thriller, with great performances by Halle Berry and Abigail Breslin (who gets major cool points from me for the horror fandom she displays in interviews) in the lead roles and some good work from actors in supporting roles that I don't want to specify because the best way to watch the movie is to be as in the dark about everything as I was.

 

DEATH WARRANT (1990)

The career of screenwriter David S. Goyer, who would go on to become a big name in Hollywood, working on projects like the Blade trilogy, Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, the upcoming Man of Steel, etc., began here. Death Warrant was the first screenplay Goyer ever sold and got produced, written when he was still attending college.

Bloodsport/Kickboxer/Lionheart star Jean-Claude Van Damme plays Québécois mountie Louis Burke, whose partner is among the victims of a serial killer called The Sandman (played by the wonderfully named actor Patrick Kilpatrick). As the movie begins, Burke has tracked The Sandman down to Los Angeles, and when he catches up to the knife-wielding maniac he avenges his partner by pumping several bullets into him.

Burke established a good working relationship with the L.A.P.D. during the Sandman situation, so sixteen months later city officials call him back to L.A. to offer him a special assignment. Several inmates have turned up dead under mysterious circumstances at the Harrison State Prison, so Burke is tasked with going undercover as a prisoner serving time for armed robbery to see if he can find out what's going on. Since he's a cop from a different country, there's no danger that the criminals he's locked up with will recognize him.

Some of the convicts, including Robert Guillaume in a memorably likeable role, do help Burke with his investigation, and he's aided from outside the walls by Cynthia Gibb as lawyer Amanda Beckett, who poses as his wife, and teenage computer whiz Tisdale (Joshua Miller of Class of 1999, among other things), who Beckett hires to hack into the prison's computer system and search through its records. A self-professed "computer cowboy", Tisdale hopes to have his skills rewarded with some older woman nookie, but Beckett is saving her nookie for conjugal visits with Burke.

Burke's investigation is hindered by dirty guards (led by Trancers 1 and 2's Art LaFleur) and jailhouse scuffles with inmates like Die Hard's Al Leong, but his team's efforts soon threaten to reveal a web of corruption and a black market organ harvesting operation. A desperate, villainous official arranges for a prisoner who will cause some major trouble for Burke to be transferred to Harrison: the still alive and bloodthirsty Sandman.

Death Warrant is at times very close to being a Van Damme horror movie, which means it was right up my alley when it came out. I had seen Van Damme's previous movies and thought they were pretty cool, and now he had made one in which he goes up against a seemingly unstoppable slasher? To paraphrase an already over-quoted line from Django Unchained, "Van Damme, you had my curiosity, but now you have my attention." I watched the movie, rented on VHS, when I was seven years old, and that was the only time I had seen it before revisiting it recently. In 1991, I thought it was awesome. I didn't find it quite as good in 2013, but there was enough silly fun to it that it still made for an enjoyable watch.

FURIOUS 6 (2013)

Following the events of Fast Five and the fat stacks of cash they walked away with, the crew of streetracing outlaws that we've been following through the Fast & Furious franchise, headed up by Vin Diesel's Dominic Toretto and Paul Walker's Brian O'Conner, have (for the most part) retired from the criminal life and settled down, some of them starting families.

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's federal agent character Luke Hobbs, who was out to jail the group in the previous film before he ultimately sided with them, pulls them back into action by coming to them for help. A gang of criminals headed by a man named Owen Shaw (Luke Evans), has been making vehicular assaults on military convoys to steal the components needed to assemble a potentially devastating tech device. It's a "it takes a thief to catch a thief" situation, and our outside-the-law heroes agree to help Hobbs in exchange for full pardons and a chance to find out why Dom's former girlfriend Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) is riding with Shaw's crew and, even more importantly, how the hell she's still alive when the character was killed off in the fourth film with a (closed casket) funeral and everything.

This scenario provides all the vehicular action viewers have come to expect from the series, with some of the biggest setpieces and most ridiculous, physics and reality defying stunts yet. Shaw tears through the streets of London in a modified racecar with a front designed to send the cars it hits flipping out of the way like cows in front of a train, a chase sequence involves a tank cold-bloodedly mowing down innocent motorists, people engage in fistfights on top of cars dangling from a plane... It's insane, mindless, and quite entertaining.

The franchise really comes full circle with this one, it could all end here and be nicely wrapped up, if it weren't for a mid-credits tease that makes me want to see part 7 right now.

My viewing of Furious 6 was my third trip to the drive-in this month, as a drive-in seemed like the perfect venue to see it at. The place was packed.

Final Girl Film Club - Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

June 4, 2013, 9:00 pm

≫ Next: Worth Mentioning - Eddie Romero and Pam Grier

≪ Previous: Worth Mentioning - Hyperdrive to Nowhere

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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.

Psycho killer. Qu'est-ce que c'est?

There's a legend around Glen Echo, Maryland of a boy named Leslie Vernon. Born out of a rape committed by a drifter, he was abused by his mother and her husband, mercilessly forced to work their farm by himself, by hand and scythe. Eventually, the boy snapped and murdered his tormentors. But the townspeople did not sympathize with his plight, instead they saw him as a child possessed by evil, so they took him from his home and marched him over the edge of a waterfall.

Nearly twenty years later, Leslie has returned to Glen Echo with the intention of becoming a slasher. In the world of this film, every slasher movie was actually a real life event. Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, Chucky, they're all real. Leslie sees himself as their heir apparent.

A trio of grad students got word of Leslie's plan and have gotten him to agree to let them shoot a documentary about him and his slasher debut. Leslie pulls back the curtain on slasherdom for the crew, which is headed by the ambitious Taylor Gentry. He reveals all - the amount of cardio a killer has to do to keep up with their running targets while they have to keep up the illusion of being calm and deliberate, that sleight of hand is involved, escape tactics planned, that they use sensory deprivation tanks in their downtime to learn how to control their bodily functions so they can appear to be dead if the need arises, how locations can be rigged to the slasher's advantage. He describes the thought process that goes into picking just the right "survivor girl" (or final girl), a virgin with a diverse group of friends, a good supporting cast for him to pick off around her. He even shows how to pull off jump scares.

On the twentieth anniversary of Leslie Vernon going over the waterfall, he plans to orchestrate a situation that will have his chosen survivor girl and her friends spending the night in the long abandoned farmhouse that was his childhood home, where he will kill them one-by-one. The slasher philosophy here is that they're doing a service to civilization. They're in the business of fear, every culture needs its monsters and stories of good versus evil. But as showtime nears, Taylor grows increasingly uneasy. She's dedicated to her documentary, but can she really let this happen?

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is a fantastic debut film for director Scott Glosserman, who also co-wrote the script with David J. Stieve. It's a very entertaining and smart post-modern take on the slasher subgenre, made by people who are obviously fans of the slashers that came before. It's full of Easter egg nods to the classics; at the beginning Taylor talks about Jason, Freddy, and Michael Myers, and her narration plays over shots filmed at the locations where the first Friday the 13th and Halloween movies were made, and of four-time Jason Kane Hodder entering 1428 Elm Street.

Most of the movie plays as a mockumentary, shot with handheld DV cameras by the guys on Taylor's crew, but at times it will switch to the style of a traditionally shot horror movie, footage not shot by one of the characters - Super 16mm film, cranes, etc. This happens in the scenes where we see Leslie perform his slasherly duties, or when he describes how he expects things to go. The third act, when the farmhouse slash-a-thon kicks in, is presented entirely in traditional style.

The cast is great. Leslie Vernon was actor Nathan Baesel's introductory feature film role and he is awesome in it. Leslie is a pretty nice, likeable guy when he's not on the clock. Zelda Rubinstein, best known from the Poltergeist series, appears as a librarian, Freddy himself Robert Englund plays Doc Halloran, Leslie's own Dr. Loomis-esque "Ahab". Scott Wilson, who has gained attention recently for his work on The Walking Dead TV series, steals some scenes as Leslie's retired slasher mentor, who applauds the '80s slashers for raising their craft to artform, while looking down on the one hit wonders who give slashers a bad name, those guys who couldn't make it to a sequel.

From my perspective, the 1993 TV series Phenom was one of the biggest and most memorable shows of the early '90s. Looking it up twenty years later, I was surprised to see that it had only lasted one season. The main reason why it had such an impact on me is because I thought its teenage star, Angela Goethals, was really cute. (She's older than me, so it was fine for me to crush on her.) I again thought she was really cute when she had a small role in 1996's Jerry Maguire. So a decade later, I was very glad when Goethals won the role of Taylor Gentry in this film and entered my beloved slasher subgenre.

Behind the Mask got a limited theatrical release in March of 2007, and I was one of the lucky apparent few who got to see it on the big screen. It was playing at a theatre in Cleveland, where I would just happen to be at the right time to catch it. This was the only time I ever went to that theatre, there was a little trouble finding the place, some uncooperative traffic, and it must've started right on time, because when I arrived in the auditorium the movie had already been playing for thirteen minutes. But I was on a schedule that day and had already bought my tickets online, so I still attended that screening, and thankfully my late arrival didn't hinder my enjoyment. When the movie ended, I went over to the Spring 2007 Cinema Wasteland.

Now that Leslie Vernon has risen, there's been talk over the years of the possibility of a sequel being made. Attempts have been made to raise funding, but I'm not sure what its status is at this point aside from the fact that the actors and filmmakers remain determined to make it happen. Regardless of whether or not Leslie Vernon returns or is a one hit wonder, Behind the Mask is definitely one to watch if you're into slasher flicks. Its existence pretty much put the kibosh on one of my own ideas, but I admire the film too much to be bothered about that.

Part of

 

Worth Mentioning - Eddie Romero and Pam Grier

June 7, 2013, 10:23 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 looks over the three films Eddie Romero and Pam Grier were credited on together.

Two events occurred in the final days of May that are of note to fans of the drive-in/grindhouse/exploitation era and the people who helped make it so memorable.

First, May 26th was a day for celebration: the birthday of the amazing, beautiful and badass Pam Grier.

Then on May 28th, Filipino filmmaker Eddie Romero passed away at the age of 88. Romero started off as a writer, making his first short story sale to the Phillipines Free Press at the age of twelve. Romero's soon "fell into the film business" when director Gerardo de Leon read some of his stories and hired him as a screenwriter. Romero was off and running on a movie career from there, ultimately racking up twenty-five producer credits, thirty-seven writing credits, and fifty-one credits as a director. In 2003, Romero received, by Presidential Proclamation, the honorary title of National Artist of the Phillipines in the Cinema category.

Grier and Romero's paths crossed when legendary producer Roger Corman formed his company New World Pictures and decided to make his movies in the Phillipines to take advantage of how cheaply they could be done there during the era covered in the terrific documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed. "Bigger pictures for less money."

The first New World Pictures Filipino production was The Big Doll House.

THE BIG DOLL HOUSE (1971)

Directed by Jack Hill (Switchblade Sisters), this $100,000 women-in-prison production is set in an unspecified country where revolutionary fighters are trying to overthrow its corrupt authority figures, though they don't seem to be having much luck at it.

The film begins with the arrival of a woman named Collier at the womens prison that is the "big doll house" of the title. Collier has been sentenced to serve ninety-nine years for the murder of her rich, abusive, closeted husband, a killing that she claims was done in self-defense. After Collier's person is searched in a humiliatingly thorough way, she's locked up in the cell she's meant to be in until she dies, which is where we meet the rest of the ensemble, her five cellmates. It's a tough bunch of women in this cell, for the most part - Alcott the loner, revolutionary fighter Bodine, tough-talking former street hustler Grear, doped-out Harrad, and cat-loving Ferina.

A lot of the inmates are in there for espionage and crimes against the state. The place is run by Colonel Mendoza, head of the secret police, and when prisoners break rules, or are suspected of having information about the revolutionaries, Head Wardress Lucian lets her hair down to deal out some severe punishments. These punishments include chaining women up in outdoor cages to be exposed to the elements, beating and whipping them, electrocuting them, threatening them with cobras, shutting them in hot boxes, and/or waterboarding them, and are intended to bring them as painfully close to death as possible without actually killing them. A masked figure (could it be Mendoza?) sits by and creepily observes as Lucian carries out the torture.

Fed up with these cruel and unusual practices, our core group of women begin plotting an escape attempt...

Having just recently moved to California from Colorado, Pam Grier was working five different jobs to afford life in Los Angeles when Roger Corman offered her the chance to be in The Big Doll House. Grier was hesitant at first. At this point she had only worked on projects with UCLA film students and been a background extra in a Beyond the Valley of the Dolls party scene, she wasn't sure she could cut it as an actress and didn't want to risk her losing jobs to go off to Phillipines just to get fired from the movie and sent back home. But Corman and Hill believed in her, and fuelled by the writings of famed actor/theatre director Constantin Stanislavski, Grier dove into her role as Grear. The rest is a history of awesomeness. Grier ended up acting in three films during her first stay in the Phillipines, earning a total of $18,000, enough to pay for two years of UCLA tuition.

Grier also sings the film's theme song, "Long Time Woman", a cool tune which is more from the perspective of Collier ("ninety-nine years is a long, long, long time") than her own character.

Though Grier says that some of her co-stars in the Phillipines-shot movies would take the work less seriously than she did, shrugging the whole thing off as "just a B-movie", most of the actors in this film do well in their roles.

One of the other top standouts is Roberta Collins (who also appeared in Minnie and Moskowitz, Terror on the Beach, Death Race 2000, and Hardbodies), who is rather beautiful and badass herself in the role of Alcott. It's totally acceptable to the viewer that she beats Grier's Grear in a bout of mud wrestling, so Collins was clearly doing something right.

Sid Haig shows up in the film as the comedically sleazy Harry, who makes regular food deliveries to the prison and looks forward to the day when he'll find himself in a situation where he gets "raped" by some desperately horny female prisoner. Haig and Hill had worked together a couple times previously, including on the 1968 cult classic horror film Spider Baby, and would make a few more movies together after this, as would Hill and Grier, a couple of those movies being very popular ones that will be featured on this blog at some point in the future.

For fans of this type of film from this era, The Big Doll House is an essential; silly, fun, and full of attractive women to gawk at.

Eddie Romero is credited as an executive producer on The Big Doll House, along with actor John Ashley. Romero and Ashley had become producing partners after the actor had gone to the Phillipines to star in Romero's 1968 film Brides of Blood. Brides went on to be quite successful, Ashley saw the potential of making movies in the Phillipines, and a thirteen film collaboration had begun. They were introduced to Pam Grier on The Big Doll House, and soon cast her in two more of their productions.

THE TWILIGHT PEOPLE (1972)

Famed scholar/soldier of fortune/hunter Matt Farrell is going about his adventurous life, minding his own business on a scuba diving trip, when he's roped and pulled aboard a fishing boat, taken off to a remote island belonging to a man called Doctor Gordon. This island is 300 miles from anywhere, and once there Matt is trucked deep into the jungle by Gordon's militaristic security force, led by the villainous Steinman, and delivered to the doctor's mansion. It's fifteen miles from the house to the beach in one direction, twenty miles in the other. Escape would appear to be impossible.

Gordon has chosen Matt, because of his mental and physical capabilities, to be part of "the single most important scientific event in the history of the planet". Gordon sees disaster ahead for humanity; the ecological consequences of civilization's pollution, overpopulation, and nuclear bombs will soon destroy the environment and drive the species to extinction if they don't move into the sea, off planet... or remake themselves. Gordon has taken it upon himself to make that last option happen. In his laboratory, he has begun creating a race of superbeings, mixing the genetics of humans with other animals that will be able to live in the wrecked environment. But the mutant hybrids Gordon has created are simple creatures. Matt holds within him a key ingredient that Gordon intends to add to the mix - Matt's essence will be distilled into the animal people. They will all have Matt's memories, feelings, perceptions, personality, and this will ensure their survival. Understandably, Matt is not too keen on the idea of having his brain stewed.

In addition to producing the film with John Ashley, Eddie Romero also directed this one and wrote the screenplay with Jerome Small, the story a reworking of the H.G. Wells novel Island of Dr. Moreau, which has been the basis of many a movie over the years. Romero had produced another Moreau-inspired film in 1959, Gerardo de Leon's Terror Is a Man.

John Ashley took the lead role of Matt Farrell for himself, and does fine work as the tough '70s hero type. In the midst of fighting for his life, he also gets to romance Gordon's conscientious daughter Neva, played by Pat Woodell, who was Bodine in The Big Doll House.

The movie drags a bit in the first half, but it picks up around the midway point when it becomes a pursuit through the jungle as Matt tries to get off this crazy island with Steinman and his men on his trail. The animal people are set free from their cages, and we get to see more of what they're like through their interactions with Neva. The antelope man is pretty normal and chill, the bat man has trouble flying at first, the ape man is a horny bugger, the wolf woman is a good girl...

The Big Doll House reunion

Pam Grier plays Ayesa the Panther Woman, which means she gets no lines to deliver, she just makes panther noises, but at least her animal features are some of the least disfiguring of the bunch. Ayesa also has the most violent nature of the creatures, attacking people, fighting the other animal folks over raw meat, biting throats out, etc.

The Twilight People started out as a New World Pictures production, but Roger Corman and fellow executive producer Larry Woolner butted heads and parted ways. Corman took his name off the picture and Woolner released the film through his own company Dimension Pictures (no connection to the Weinstein company that came later), on a double bill with the bank robbing dogs flick The Doberman Gang.

BLACK MAMA, WHITE MAMA (1973)

Pam Grier was given a much more substantial role the next time she worked on a John Ashley/Eddie Romero production, she being the titular "Black Mama" in this AIP release, which was also directed by Romero. Her character, Lee Daniels, has been sentenced to prison for prostitution, and "White Mama" Margaret Markov, as revolutionary fighter Karen Brent, is among the other prisoners being delivered to the jail on the same bus as Lee.

At first, it seems that this is going to be a standard women-in-prison film and very much a retread of The Big Doll House. It's set in an unspecified country where revolutionary fighters are trying to overthrow its corrupt authority figures, Grier plays a tough hooker, the female convicts are subjected to cruel punishments (with a side of lesbianic leering) from the matrons in charge of them, one of whom is played by Lynn Borden, who went on to be in Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry. Catfights and shower scenes ensue.

Then it takes a turn around the twenty minute mark. Lee and Karen are shackled together and put on a bus to be transferred to a maximum security prison, where they'll be questioned about the people they know - Karen about the revolutionaries, Lee about her boyfriend Vic Cheng, the biggest drug dealer/pimp on the island. Karen's heavily armed associates attack the bus enroute and the two women escape, running off into the countryside, still chained to each other. And so this story, co-concocted by future Oscar winner Jonathan Demme, is actually a gender reversal on the 1958 Stanley Kramer film The Defiant Ones, which starred Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as shackled together escaped prisoners.

As they make their run for it, the women try to figure out how to get loose from the chain that binds them while arguing and tussling over their different objectives - Karen needs to complete a weapons deal for the revolutionaries, Lee just wants to get off the island with the money she stole from Cheng, she doesn't care about "some jive ass revolution". All the while, they're being tracked down by the police, the island military, Cheng's men, and a second gang of criminals led by Sid Haig as a shitkicker named Ruben, who the authorities offer a $10,000 reward if he can be of help.

Beyond the popularity gained from its awesome title, Black Mama, White Mama is quite an enjoyable movie, nicely paced, with some decent and well shot action beats, and a good sense of humor, Sid Haig's character being especially fun. Grier and the lovely Markov are a great pairing, and watching this movie makes we wish that Markov had a bigger, more prolific career herself.

Three Grier/Romero collaborations, each with their own merits and entertaining in their own way. Romero produced more "respectable" works for the Filipino market, earning many screenplay and directing awards for them, while making these sorts of horror and exploitiation movies for American audiences. I may know him primarily for his grindhouse output, but I appreciate what he achieved with them. I love this type of movie, and Romero had a hand in some of the greats.

R.I.P.

1924 - 2013

Film Appreciation - Mutant Freedom Now

June 10, 2013, 9:01 pm

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Cody Hamman geeks out over X2 (2003) for Film Appreciation.

The success of Bryan Singer's 2000 cinematic adaptation of the X-Men comic books opened the floodgates for a new era of big budget, high profile superhero movies. The 2002 sequel to 1998's Blade got a Super Bowl spot and ended up giving director Guillermo del Toro's career a healthy iinternational boost. A couple months later, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man became the first movie to ever pass $100 million in its opening weekend. 2003 started off with Daredevil, Ang Lee's Hulk was set for that June, and sandwiched between those two, in early May of 2003, came Singer's eagerly anticipated X sequel.

Things kick off in spectacular fashion with an attack on the White House, ending in the near assassination of the President, carried out by the mutant Nightcrawler, who takes down several guards and Secret Service agents by teleporting all around rooms, taking form just long enough to kick an ass before moving on to the next guy. I had read comics with Nightcrawler in them before, but never fully appreciated the character until I saw how he was presented in this film. His powers are awesome onscreen and Alan Cumming delivers an endearing performance in the role.

Professor Charles Xavier and his X-Men are implicated in the attack by Colonel William Stryker (played by cinema's original Hannibal Lecter, Brian Cox), who provides satellite imagery of the jet stored in the base below Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters as proof that the group is a terroristic threat. Approval is given for Stryker to lead a military assault on the school with helicopters full of soldiers. One of the last lines in X1 was Xavier saying, "I feel a great swell of pity for the poor fool who comes to that school looking for trouble." And here it happens.

When Stryker and his men arrive at the school, Wolverine has been left behind to watch over the place while the rest of the X-Men are out handling other business. The heavily armed intruders busting into the place, firing tranquilizer darts into the children, and trying to kill him drives Wolverine into a berserker rage. He rushes through the halls, roaring in anger, using his claws to stab and slash every opponent he encounters. I was so thrilled by this sequence upon my first viewing of it that I experienced a full-on geekout, my heart pounding as I stared up at the screen, awed by the sight of one of my favorite comic book characters being brought to life to tear people up.

First-time film actor Daniel Cudmore also gets to perform some nice heroics during the raid as the imposing metal-skinned mutant Colossus.

Of course, the X-Men had nothing to do with the attack on the White House, and Nightcrawler wasn't even in his right mind when he did it. Stryker himself was behind the attack, he's manipulating situations and characters to carry out his own secret agenda, his ultimate goal being to use Xavier's powers and the mutant-finding machine Cerebro to kill every mutant on the planet. Stryker is such a threat that the X-Men have to form a tenuous alliance with the villainous Magneto and Mystique to try to stop him.

Along the way, the characters deal with several personal side stories - the events of the first film are causing Jean Grey to lose control of her powers, Rogue and Iceman try to work their relationship around the fact that prolonged contact with the power-absorbing Rogue could kill her boyfriend, loose cannon teen Pyro gradually turns to the dark side, the amnesiac Wolverine continues searching for answers about his past... and finds some.

As it turns out, Stryker is the man who encased Wolverine's skeleton in the metal adamantium and wiped out his memory several years before as part of the Weapon X program. Nowadays, Stryker has a Wolverine-esque mutant, Lady Deathstrike, as his right hand woman, setting up another cool Wolverine fight sequence. Both adamantium-clawed, both with fast regenerative healing factors, the two take each other on in a slashy, bloody battle that features one of my favorite camera moves in a superhero movie. Lady Deathstrike runs toward Wolverine, the camera swooping in on their collision, Wolverine meets her with a clawed punch to the gut and the camera swings back in reaction to the impact, then swings back down as Wolvie pushes Deathstrike away.

Lady Deathstrike is played by Kelly Hu, best known to me as the ill-fated Eva in 1989's Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. Also featured in X2, during the White House sequence, is Ken Kirzinger, a stuntman who worked on Jason Takes Manhattan. He stood in for Kane Hodder as Jason Voorhees in a couple moments and plays a diner cook who Jason tosses across a room. This same year, Kirzinger was the main Jason performer in Freddy vs. Jason, which was filmed in Vancouver at the same time as X2, so Bryan Singer visited the set of that movie during some downtime.

X2 (questionably subtitled X-Men United on marketing materials) is a terrific example of a sequel, one of the rares ones that's often considered even better than the first, an assessment that I would agree with. It builds on ideas established in the first, while being bigger and better in every aspect.

There's more action, with bigger setpieces and more polished effects. The story, basically an adaptation of the 1982 graphic novel X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills, is quite good, well written by Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris from a story by David Hayter, Bryan Singer, and Zak Penn.

The plight of the mutants is again tied in to the sorts of oppression, discrimination, and civil rights issues we deal with in the real world, and this time mutant abilities are most obviously an allegory for homosexuality, plainly evident in the scene where Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) comes out as a mutant to his family and his mother responds, "Have you tried not being a mutant?"

The returning actors do fine work in their roles, certainly the perfectly cast Patrick Stewart and Hugh Jackman do not disappoint the second time around. I could understand if Cyclops fans were a bit letdown, as James Marsden did kind of get the shaft in this one - he isn't given much to do, his character taken out of the equation for a large portion of the film. Of the newcomers, in addition to those mentioned, Aaron Stanford does some great work in the role of Pyro.

Even the hair and wigs on Jean and Storm were improved for this movie.

As I left an opening day screening of X2 back in 2003, I was a very satisfied Marvel comics fan, and I still hold the film in high esteem to this day. In my opinion, X-Men and X2 are up there with Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, and a few of the Avengers flicks as some of the best comic book movies ever made.