What I’ve been watching: November Edition
Yellowbeard – I’ve seen it before, but my father wanted to watch it so I sat through it again. It still has its moments but most of it has lost its appeal over the years. Also it’s too long. After the jokes have worn thin this film is carried by the strength of the character definitions – Yellowbeard and El Nebuloso, mostly. I doubt I’ll be watching it again anytime soon.
Green Slime – One of my favorite B-SF movies. Despite the all-white cast you can easily tell this is a Japanese production. The miniatures are well done, the colors are bright, some camera direction oddities common to Japanese monster and SF movies are present, and above all it has a lot of optimism about humanity – Japanese SF movies tend to take it for granted that there will be a united worldwide agency in charge of space matters and that all nations will immediately and instantly band together in the face of an external threat. American movies tend to play up the political hassles of getting foreign powers to play ball despite the common goal. Also American SF movies tend to have more technology dick-waving, such as the countdown pomp and circumstance with dramatic camera angles around a rocket launch. Here it’s just get in the rocket, clear the launch pad and GO already – I like that.
The Cyclops – A beautiful woman faces political opposition and holds together a motley mob of hirelings while searching for her missing husband, only to lose him twice more in the end. This could have been a good tragedy but there seemed to be a piece missing. When she found the missing man, he was unable to communicate and it wasn’t clear if he recognized her or not; the ending would have had more impact if he had.
One-Eyed Monster – It sounded so cheesy I couldn’t pass it up. What could be better than a standard wilderness monster plot with the monster being an ambulatory penis? Ron Jeremy’s penis, at that. It’s an amusing idea for a monster movie spoof, but it comes off a bit limp in the end.
Mountain of the Cannibal God – The first part of this one is remarkably similar to The Cyclops – a strong woman butts heads with local authorities and hires highly defective men to conduct a wilderness search for her missing husband. The stuff that comes at the end of the search is very different though, and it was a nice twist. There’s one bit of direction near the end that threw me – up to this point it seemed like a pretty good and relatively normal production; good talent, good writing, competent camera work and high-quality film stock. Then all of a sudden it turns into porn for a minute or so. Not that I object, but it was a surprise since it was a fair bit more racy than any other silver screen scene I’ve seen.
Skyline – A bunch of Matrix and ID4 reject aliens with advanced lens flare technology invade Earth to steal our brains, because evidently theirs don’t work so well. Lousy effects, bad creature design, terrible premise, a cliche here and there (including a Wilhelm, of course), but at least the ending is fresh. By “fresh”, I of course mean it’s one I haven’t seen in recent memory and is different from the other films that are obvious comparisons for this one. It wasn’t much of a surprise ending, but I liked it because it’s similar to the ending I would have wrote in if I had to finish off this stinker and connect it with a sequel. I also liked the way the camera stayed with the characters all the time, so we weren’t privy to any goings-on that the protagonists were unaware of.
What I’ve been watching
Mirrors 2 – I liked the original better. This one is pretty standard fare – vengeful spirit haunts mirrors and kills people until the mystery is solved. Some rather gruesome death scenes in this one – I thought I was properly desensitized by now but I still found them a bit squicky.
Monsters – Wow, where did this come from and why didn’t I know about it? A pretty good character-driven story in an SF setting. It’s not an action-adventure at all – it’s just about two people trying to get from point A to point B while there’s a slowly developing alien-induced crisis going on. There’s little explanation and no resolution to the alien situation – they’re just part of the setting. I liked this one a lot.
Predators – A worthy sequel to the original, complete with some back-references. If you liked the first one, chances are you’ll like this one too.
The Beast of Hollow Mountain – Cowboys versus monsters isn’t an unheard-of genere, but cowboys versus dinosaurs is a bit more rare. An unusual property of this monster movie is that you don’t see the monster until very near the end, nor does it even make its presence known until about halfway through. It’s a character drama until then, and I was starting to wonder if I was really watching a monster movie – if not for the foreshadowing narration at the beginning, I would have been wondering if the “monster” of the title wasn’t referring to the human villain of the story.
Inception – I liked it a lot. A well-crafted story about a bunch of people who plan something impossible and then take it one step further, while fighting their own failings. Worth a look. I did spot one inconsistency (around the definition of the “kick” and the business with the elevator) and one disappointing loose end (the totem), but those weren’t bad enough to dent a thumbs-up rating.
APEX – This was actually better than I expected. A couple of decent performances and characterizations, and some nicely made props. That’s about all that distinguishes it though.
She-Demons – Let’s see. Escaped Nazi war criminals invent geothermal power and victimize a tribe of Amazons on an uncharted island near the U.S. in order to undo one woman’s volcanic beauty treatment, and are undone by a handful of yacht wreck survivors and the latest in a regular series of American bombing practice runs. Yeah, that about covers it.
Space Amoeba – Gotta love the old Toho SF/monster movies. It’s like every primitive-filled island near Japan has its resident monsters and scheming alien invaders. There’s always a token scientist character along to leap from completely insufficient evidence to totally unjustified conclusions about highly unscientific facts just in time to let everyone know what they’re up against so they can come up with a plan. Another thing I like about these movies is that they have a bit more imagination about the nature of aliens – they don’t have to be humanoid. Kinda surprising given the prevalence of rubber-suit monsters often found in the same flicks. Japanese SF and monster movies prove that a creature doesn’t have to look like a human with makeup on in order to get audience identification.
Piranha (2010 edition) – Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age, but this was actually a bit too gory for me. Or maybe it’s the combination of gore with sex that does this – if not for the monster movie aspect, a good chunk of this one could be mistaken for an updated 80s frat movie, only with even more nudity. All that aside, I’d say this is as worthy as the original version.
Barn of the Naked Dead – You would think with a title like this it would have some nudity and some zombies in it, or possibly even nude zombies, or else be a clever title for something philosophical, right? Well, technically it does have the first two – perhaps a full fifteen seconds of partial nudity and as much as three minutes total screen time for the one token zombie-like creature. The rest of it is about a disturbed young man with mommy and daddy issues treating kidnapped women like animals in a circus. Not my sort of thing, despite what you might think.
The Power – Excellent, excellent movie! Good acting, believable characters, good cinematography and above all a story that keeps you guessing until the end. I had actually seen this before but had forgotten the ending, and it did indeed surprise me again. After seeing as many movies as we all have, it’s easy to think you’ve seen all the standard plot twists and think you have a movie pigeonholed by halfway through, and I thought I knew what the twist would be. I was wrong, and happy to be so – it’s nice to get unjaded every now and then.
Fight Club – This movie did not interest me at all when it came out, but so many people have indicated it’s a must-see that I finally did. Not what I expected at all, and quite entertaining. Much truth is told. I’d definitely recommend this one.
Moar viddies!
Splice – Two unbelievably stupid people have a bio lab to play with and create a monster. That’s never happened before. The effects were good and the relationship between the protagonists and their creation was… novel. I imagine there was supposed to be some sort of moral here about playing with fire, but when the fire is science and the players don’t deserve to be called scientists, it kinda falls flat.
Death Race 2008 – I hate to hate on this too much, since the Corman was involved and the writer of the original movie also wrote this one, and the director claims it can be interpreted as a prequel, which does kinda work. But it was promoted as a remake, and the original is a classic. Comparing this against its predecessor equals disappointing. This one is a straightforward blowing-shit-up-for-revenge action flick, in the tiny political sandbox of an island prison. The original was on a national scale, had characters who weren’t all hardened criminals, and was about corruption on a national scale too. It feels like they wimped out on the political aspect of the story. Maybe I’m too eager to find Americans wimping out when it’s time to acknowledge that national leaders aren’t always the best people around, but that’s what it feels like to me. It worked well in the original movie, and putting it in miniature here results in a vanilla villain we’ve seen too many times before: the corrupt prison warden.
Bloody Pit of Horror – A narcissistic luchador lives in the former castle of the Marquis de Sade and carries on the tradition. A campy-bad sadist flick with really bad dubbed dialogue and unnecessarily drawn-out fight and torture scenes. I’ve never heard such bad sound production – voices echo loudly in many scenes, and the soundtrack record literally skips over and over again. And the “giant spider” that menaces one of the women in one scene was obviously designed by someone who has never seen a real spider.
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus – I wanted to see this when it was in theaters but didn’t get a chance. Gilliam, some Python-like visuals, and a sort of Baron Munchausen atmosphere make for an attractive proposition. It was all right but not really outstanding. I feel I missed some important plot points, like the whole bit about Tony with his whistle at the end – maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention, but I really didn’t get what that was all about.
Caltiki, The Immortal Monster – Racier and gorier than I expected from such an old B&W movie. Also a nice, straightforward classic B-SF plot with decently done creature effects – and for once, not a humanoid monster.
The Lost World – There are at least four versions so I should clarify that this is the 1925 silent version. Same plot as the others, but it’s worth commenting that the stop-motion dinosaur animations were amazingly good – perhaps not as smooth as Harryhausen’s, but more detailed. They even put in breathing animation and the occasional lip and eye animation. Must have been a lot of work. Also, Arthur Conan Doyle himself appeared in the film, though I didn’t know that until I looked at the IMDB entry.
Resident Evil: Afterlife – I probably should have watched some of the preceding movies in order to get more familiar with the ongoing characters. Lacking that, I take it as what it is: an action movie based on a video game. The movie plot is as linear and iterative as your typical zombie video game; a sequence of trials the protagonist must endure to get to the boss fight at the end, to be followed by the setup for the next episode. This is a 3D movie, and the 3D effects were both overblown and half-baked. There were not many scenes where the 3D worked well. Also too many bullet-time scenes, and a lot of cases of set pieces disappearing during camera cuts.
Ba’al: The Storm God – Ba’ah! What could have been a decent action-archaeology flick was marred by poor effects, cliched characters, canned plot devices and pseudoscience.
Mutant – Interesting mashup of zombie holocaust, bumpkin terror and monster-in-the-basement thrills. I wouldn’t say it’s particularly worth watching, but it is an uncommon formula. There is not a single mutant involved, unless you count inbred hicks.
30,000 Leagues Under the Sea – Amazingly bad, in the bad kind of way. Bad acting, bad effects and a very predictable plot. Complete waste of time. The original 20,000 Leagues movie was very well done, but this one is little more than a modern B-movie and is unsatisfying in the way that most modern B-movies are – they fail to even be camp.
The Beast of Yucca Flats – This, on the other hand, was bad in the amusingly good sort of way. I’ve watched a lot of B-movies that were contemporaries of this and many of them pimp a fatalistic we’re-all-doomed nukes-are-evil sort of attitude, but none as weirdly heavy-handed as this. The heavy-handedness comes in the form of the narrator referring to some of the characters as “victims of progress” and so forth (the events of the movie are triggered by several people getting caught in an atom bomb test blast). The weirdness comes in the narration itself – the characters have almost no dialogue in this movie; most of the speech comes from the narrator practically giving a play-by-play of what’s going on. There’s also some amusingly bad writing, in that the film opens with a teaser scene that doesn’t fit anywhere in the plot, and there is at least one major plot point left unresolved at the end in the form of a character who is wrongfully attacked and wounded by the police, goes to get help (leaving his wife and kids behind), and does not appear on screen nor is he mentioned after that.
The She-Beast – A British couple vacationing in Transylvania fall prey to the reincarnation of a local witch, out for revenge for having been given the typical witch treatment hundreds of years earlier. Largely forgettable; this doesn’t really deserve to be called a horror, thriller, adventure, drama or comedy. It’s rather flat. No opportunities are missed to poke fun at the Communists though; the local fuzz are a bunch of Keystone cops, and the citizenry are portrayed as largely dishonest and untrustworthy.
Star Crash – Wow, for a cheesy B-movie SF that tries and fails to rip off Star Wars, the production values on this are actually pretty good. Nicely designed and well-made sets, a good assortment of space ship models, original costumes, score by a somewhat high-profile composer, and decent compositing on good-quality film stock. Also, Christopher Plummer and a young David Hasselhoff! Although some of the overlaid special effects are bad, the real cheese is in the plot and dialogue. For example, the bad guy’s capital ship is shaped like a giant hand and closes into a fist during battle. Also he left a tribe of cavemen and some holographic monsters to guard his secret weapon. Best LOL line: “Scan it with our computer waves.”
The Hideous Sun Demon – I love B-movies, but I also love this kind of movie – a serious science fiction, regardless of production values, that takes a theory and wraps a story around it. In this case it combines the now-discredited theory of recapitulation with the popular trope of radiation causing rapid mutation, and produces a man who starts devolving into a violent lizard when exposed to sunlight. There’s no scientific validity to the idea, and the ending is the tragic “Well, what did you expect?” typical of SF/monster movies of the era, but nevertheless it was a better-told story than most modern SF movies. Good writing and acting, good sound direction, good cinematography and above all, believable characters made this worth watching for me.
Recent viddies
Between reading books and playing games I occasionally get a chance to sneak in some movie watching. I’ve been doing more of this than usual lately, and here are my comments on what I’ve seen.
Barbarian Queen – A pretty thin excuse to get as much female nudity as possible on the screen. Cookie cutter plot: Warlord raids village, survivors (all women in this case) vow revenge and proceed to kick ass until the big showdown with the warlord at the end. Ho hum.
Barbarian Queen 2 – Not a direct sequel, surprisingly. I didn’t notice any characters or settings in common with the first movie. This one is again mostly about getting bare breasts on the screen, but actually attempts to have more of a plot than the first. This time it’s about betrayal and backstabbing in a castle following the death of the king. There’s even some humor and canned tragedy. Also some of the worst swordplay I’ve ever seen.
Time Barbarians – Yes, I had a day of movies with the word “Barbarian” in the title. As you might expect, this one also has boobs out, but the protagonist is a muscular and scantily-clad male this time. As hereditary leader of a tribe of largely incompetent barbarians, he’s supposed to protect them AND a magical trinket entrusted to him by the local sorceress. He fails on all counts, as the villain slaughters his comrades, most of the women and steals the bauble, which he uses to jump himself and a henchman into the future – present-day when the movie was made, of course. The sorceress sends our hero in pursuit and they have a swords versus guns showdown, to the amazement of the local news crew. Incredibly cheesy.
The Unearthly – I’m a big fan of mad-scientist movies, and while this one was based more on character interaction than on action or effects, it was somewhat enjoyable. Unfortunately, like so many movies involving the concept of immortality, it sends the wrong message. The scientist in this case thought he had a way to instill immortality through surgery and artificial organs, but he was experimenting on unwilling abductees. Furthermore, his jealous assistant/lover was secretly sabotaging his experiments, producing monsters and comatose people. A new arrival helps unravel the whole plot and the doctor gets killed by one of his victims. At the end, someone expresses the sentiment that it would be awful if some of the victims actually did end up living forever. Less heavy-handed in its misguided moralizing than many such stories, but still a disappointment.
After Life – This was a new twist on undertaker horror. The story centers on a funeral director who can converse with the dead while he’s preparing them for burial. As the story progresses, contradictory things crop up and it starts to look like he may be drugging and burying live people. The ambiguity is unresolved, which is good, and the idea is interesting, but the ending is rather predictable.
Humanoids from the Deep – I love this sort of movie, but I watched this one in particular in the hope that it might be a movie I’ve been searching for for many years. There were three bits of film that really scared me when I was a kid. Two have been dealt with, and based on the plot outline I was certain this was the third one, but it wasn’t. Oh well, back to searching. Anyway, this is pretty typical Black Lagoon-derived schlock. Fishing village suffers disappearances and mutilations. Villagers turn on scapegoat, but soon discovered that mutated monsters are behind it all. Big showdown with monsters, shocker ending. There’s a mildly interesting tidbit about the production here – female director, which is unusual, but without her knowledge they added a bunch of nudity and sex scenes afterwards to reach the target audience, namely horny teenagers. It worked.
Kick-Ass – I started reading the comic book of the same title when it first hit the shelves, but I dropped it after a few issues. It’s an idea that has been done before, and the execution of this instance just didn’t grab me. Later I saw the trailers for this movie movie and was turned off even more; they made me want to not see it. But I thought I should give it a chance. Now I’ve watched it, and it was pretty darn good. Decent “super”-hero action flick, a bit on the gory side, with an acceptable amount of story for the subject matter. I may have to give the comic a second chance.
Moon – I enjoyed this as a character piece, but it was hugely flawed. It’s basically about a guy working in isolation in a moon base, eventually figuring how how badly he’s been fucked over by his employers. But the nature of that fucking over is the flaw – it’s completely unreasonable that could happen. The “victory” scene at the end loses all its meaning because it’s really hard to believe the core situation could arise in the first place, and the fact that he’s now going to bring it crashing down implies a gigantic net loss for humanity as a result. No agency with the capability to put him in that situation would have put him in that situation without widespread consent, in which case his big reveal at the end would have surprised nobody.
The Wizard – It is truly a crime I haven’t seen this movie until now. This is now my canonical 80s kid-power flick, supplanting such classics as Explorers, Wargames and Flight of the Navigator. Gotta love a 100-minute Nintendo commercial about exploiting underage savants for fun and profit! Also: Powerglove!
Movie review: Shutter Island (spoilers)
In movies revolving around an outsider investigating something at an insane asylum, there are two industry standard plot twists. Either:
- The protagonist is already a patient and will realize it near the end of the movie, or
- Through traumatic experience or foul play, the protagonist will become a mental patient.
Based on the trailer and the first half of the movie, I was pretty sure this one was the second case. But once the lead investigator revealed his origin story to his partner it became pretty obvious it was actually the first case. I had been enjoying it quite a bit, but most of the remainder seemed pretty predictable from then on, with our boy becoming more and more isolated and unhinged as the story went on. I was even disappointed by the big reveal of his turning point tragedy – yeah, sucks to be him, but are people really so fragile that they can become total reality-deniers because of something like that?
The ending introduced a plot twist that surprised me though. Even though the protagonist made what I consider the wrong choice in the end, what he said and the fact that he made the choice was something new in an otherwise cookie-cutter plot.
There are a few spring-loaded cats in this movie – whenever the sound goes dead, you know one is coming. The worst one (during the big reveal flashback) was actually just a sound effect, but it caught me off guard even though I should have expected it. I hate that.
Overall I’ll give it 6 out of 10 on the ‘A’ (ie not-a-B-movie) scale. Entertaining, not a waste of my time, but not outstanding.
