KWIF: Sisu: Road to Revenge (+3)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Lady Kent was down with the same cold that took me out last week, so weirdly I watched more movies this week than when I was down and out last week. It's all international cinema cinema week: Finland! "Persia"! Australia! Italy!

This Week:
Sisu: Road to Revenge (2025, d.  Jalmari Helander - crave)
Sinbad of the Seven Seas (1989, d. Luigi Cozzi - tubi)
Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975, d. Peter Weir - xumo)
Big Guns (aka Tony Arzenta aka No Way Out - 1973, d. Duccio Tessari - tubi)

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The first Sisu was a cartoon orgy of violence, but underneath it beat the heart of Finnish pride, fortitude and resilience. If there was a message to Sisu it was to tell the world that Finns are tough motherfuckers.  

But Sisu also set itself in a time and place that it didn't really explain. If you're Finnish or familiar with it's history (particularly during World War II) there was no explanation needed. I on the other had had to do some digging. It was a complicated situation with Finland already engaged in conflict with Russia when other battles in Europe started. Sisu took place at the end of World War II, with the Germans set to return home, but attempting to take as much with them as they could before they left, including the gold grizzled veteran Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) had just found.

I don't fully understand the timelines, but Road to Revenge, takes place shortly after the end of World War II, so I assume not long after the first film, just enough time for Korpi to heal. A treaty with Russia saw the ceding of much of Karelia (on the southeastern side of the country) to the Russians, with its citizens of the area being forced to leave within ten days. Korpi's home, which he built himself, remains in the ceded terrain. He crosses the new Russian border with a massive, massive truck, where he deconstructs the home and loads the truck on his own.

His border crossing, however, raises awareness that Koschei ("The Immortal") is in the country. Korpi had infamously killed 300 Russians himself in a rageful tear following the murder of his wife an children. A KGB Officer (Richard Brake) frees the man responsible for killing Korpi's family -- the war criminal Yeagor Dragunov (Stephen Lang) -- from his prison and gives him the resources to, quote "destroy the legend you created and you will go back home a rich man".

And so Korpi and his massive truck and big pile of wood have to travel the 120 kilometers from where his home once stood back to the border...chased by trucks, motorcycles, and airplanes. It's a scaled-down Fury Road but director Jalmari Helander continues to prove he's got the action goods. A lot of wild craziness happens along the way, beyond logic but gleefully entertaining.

The last act takes place on a train, and gets Koschei back into physical action, with some fun setpieces like traversing through the two sleeping quarters without awakening the soldiers (or taking care of them should they stir). The final duel between Korpi and Dragunov is maybe too slow and unrefined to be truely Wick-ian, but it's only one small moment in this 89-minute deluge of violence and survival.

Tommila doesn't speak a word the entire film, and this lack of dialogue really strips the film down to the barest of actions and emotions. Where Brake or Lang might have more to say, there's still likely no more than two or three pages of dialogue, max in the entire film. Whereas the first Sisu felt like a nuveau western, this one feels almost more like a samurai film...but with guns and vehicles and whatnot...but the same attitudes apply.

Helander's next film will see the director's first American production, being brought aboard to helm the John Rambo prequel starring Noah Centineo in the title role. I have no idea what the story might possibly be like, but I'm excited to see what Helander can do with big hollywood franchise budget.

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One of the final releases of legendary 80's B-movie studio Cannon Film, Sinbad of the Seven Seas stars famous muscleman and former Incredible Hulk, Lou Ferrigno as the storied Persian hero, Sinbad the Sailor. Yes, that's right, Italian-American Lou Ferrigno plays Sinbad. Seems a natural fit to me [/sarcasm].

The story is set largely in Basra, which the filmmakers seem to know as much about as I do, which is to say, nothing at all. All the characters here are played by white and/or Italian actors, nary a middle-eastern among them. If this seems like it could be offensive, it would be, if anyone, anyone at all were trying to convincingly portray this as an authentic tale. As it stands, it's one of the least egregious of its cinematic sins, afterall, Sinbad has been portrayed by white actors many times in the past (and will again...RIP Patrick Muldoon).

But Sinbad of the Seven Seas lies to its audience from the moment the film starts. Before its title card, a chunky block of text mentions how famed author Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote an additional adventure for Sinbad titled "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade" and that this is an adaptation of that story. It is not. Not in the slightest.

As legend on this film goes, writer-director Luigi Cozzi (who had directed Ferrigno in two Hercules films for Cannon in the mid-1980s) had written the screenplay for Sinbad and the Seven Seas, but was (for unclear reasons) dismissed from the project and it was handed to Enzo G. Castellari. Castellari would proceed to make substantial changes to the script and then proceed to produce an unreleaseable three-hour film. The film sat on the shelf for years before Cozzi was hired back to make some sense of it, to salvage something out of the whole production.

And so, the film's story does not begin with Sinbad and crew on his boat, or in the city of Basra, or in Baghdad or anywhere fantastical, it starts in a bedroom, with a child (Cozzi's daughter) being read a story by her mother, played by Daria Nicolodi.  Nicolodi will proceed to narrato over a large portion of the film. The touchpoint might seem to be The Princess Bride for this framing sequence, but really, it's just a way of trimming down 3 hours of garbage footage into a barely, if you squint, serviceable 93 minute series of adventures.

The wicked vizier Jaffar (portrayed by English white guy John Steiner, it's a variation on Aladdin's Jafar both of which hearken back to The Thief of Baghdad films rather than One Thousand and One Nights) is fixated on the Caliph's daughter, Princess Alina [Alessandra Martines, a French-Italian white lady]. She is involved with Sinbad's ship-mate Prince Ali, but he's been away adventuring. The vizier steals the town's sacred gems of power, keeping one for himself and dispersing the rest across the seas. He then hypnotizes the Caliph into doing his bidding, including telling Alina to marry Jaffar. She refuses and thus is strapped to a fantastical chamber designed to (verrrry slooooowly) sap her of her will. She will marry him some day). When Hercules...I mean Sinbad and crew arrive in Basra, they beat up some bad guys, get captured, break free and then set out on a quest to find the four gems of power (but not before Sinbad escapes from a pit of cobras by *checks notes* making friends with the cobras and then tying them together to form a rope for him to climb out of.  You know how you make friends with wild creatures [totally normal] and then twist their bodies together, with their consent of course [nothing unusual, at all] and then climb them [all checks out, do it all the time].

The majority of the adventures of Sinbad and his crew (consisting of handsome Prince Ali [white guy], Cheropolis "the bald cook" [another white guy], Poochie the dwarf [not a rapping dog, but a white guy], Viking [played by an Italian actor, not a Scandanavian] and the Chinese mercenary Cantu [played by a Japanese-Italian actor]) are narrated over with the action or conversation or both happening silently under the narration from Nicolodi (yes, we see the characters have an exchange and our narrator explains what they are saying], all the while accompanied by the of shoddiest of synth scores.  

In the first stop, he fights a rock monster that shoots lasers from its head. Sinbad must use feats of his notorious Sinbad strength to defeat it and retrieve the gem from its head. In the second, Sinbad and most of the crew (except Bald Cook and Poochie) head to the isle of the amazons where their notorious beauty finds them immediately under their sway (except Prince Ali who seems to be psychically connected to Princess Alina for some reason). If not for Bald Cook and Poochie coming to the rescue with an magical anti-hypnosis potion...I don't know what would have happened, actually. The Amazon queen Farida was played by the stunning actress Melonee Rodgers, a Black, possibly American actress (there's not much available detail on her and seeing as she had no speaking lines left in the film - which doesn't really matter since all lines were dubbed anyway by different actors, except Steiner and one or two others) and all the Amazons were black, which I thought was fantastic...except when Queen Farida has her gem of power taken from her and she turns into an old lady...well, it's just some old Italian lady in blackface. Yeah. Woof.

During the adventures, we constantly check back in with Jaffar, and how progress is going on sapping Princess Alina of her will. The movie makes it seem like Sinbad's voyages are only taking him the better part of an afternoon in total and not days or weeks of sailing the seas. He tries to interfere from afar, but seems to only be able to do anything sometimes for some reason and most of the time looks like a sweaty guy whose going to lose his kneecaps if the team he's watching doesn't lose the match. He's also joined, bafflingly, by the witch Soukra (played by American bodybuilder Teagan, the only other actor not to be dubbed, it seems) for seemingly no reason. Jaffar sort of acts like she's the one who will break his kneecaps if his bet doesn't pay off.

The third adventures finds Jafar sending a gust of wind to send Sinbad's ship ashore (but why send them to the very island that contains the gem they're looking for Jaffar? The guy is an idiot). There they face, ghosts or something...? I dunno, I fell asleep for a bit. 

When I woke up Sinbad was having a conversation with Kira (another white lady), daughter of Nadir the wizard who speaks in gibberish. They landed on the Isle of the Dead in a balloon. They are jumped by a gang of ghouls, and while Kira puts up a good fight, which Hercules, I mean Sinbad immediately falls in love with her over, she gets kidnapped along with her father. Sinbad mounts his rescue but must face the Lord of Darkness, who is like a pot-bellied Swamp Thing who shoots lasers from his hands. Hercules uses his own gems of powers to shoot lasers and destroy the big gooey plant then head home with Kira and her goof-talkin' father in tow.

The big show-down is ...well, not so big. Hercules/Sinbad rescues Princess Alina and defeats Jaffar, but not before facing a Jaffar-controlled mirror version of himself in a match of strength and cunning. Ali and Alina are married, and so are not-Hercules and Kira, the end, go to sleep kid.

There were little glimmers that maybe the original production, under Castellari, was aiming for high camp, but the structure Cozzi rescues the picture with leaves a lot of the camp off to the side, sneaking in only occasionally. But it's obvious from the footage and dialogue left in why Castellari's first draft of this was considered unreleaseable: it's really really bad. I could never get past the idea of Ferrigno as Sinbad. As witnessed above, my brain kept defaulting to him as Hercules, and it would seem Castelli did too. Sinbad is not a legendary strongman, and yet so much of what Ferrigno does here is "feats of strength".

In the right setting, Sinbad of the Seven Seas might be a so-bad-it's-amazing cult classic, but as a tired adult just looking for a break from having to think about shit, this was just an awful 90 minutes. I had more fun recapping it above than watching it.

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I was introduced to Picnic at Hanging Rock by a friend who I met on a dating website almost exactly 20 years ago. It was an odd time. We'd both recently gotten out of long term relationships and we were trying to figure out the next phase of our lives. We really clicked, but emotionally we just weren't ready for anything other than friendship. It was a friendship that forged quickly but not strong enough to survive eventual physical distance and other life demands (babies) and, frankly, the friendship-subverting suckhole that was facebook (it gives the illusion of being in contact without being meaningful contact in any way). Strangely, Picnic at Hanging Rock was the shared experience most cemented into my mind of that friendship, watching a VHS copy borrowed from the library on a strange couch in a brightly lit room next to a new friend where we were still trying to figure out our dynamic. 

At that time I went into watching Picnic... with a pre-conceived distaste for Peter Weir, having had a high-school art teacher who was a Weir fan and would play us Dead Poets Society, Green Book and Fearless in class at least once per semester...for inspiration? These were not really inspirational films to a 14-17 year old. They were grown-up films for parents.

At that time I found Picnic... a bit confounding. The film starts by letting you know that the titular picnic would end in some sort of tragedy, just as the film's poster does. "On St. Valentines Day in 1900 a party of schoolgirls set out to picnic at Hanging Rock... some were never to return." It's an ominous, and it implies something sinister, something terrifying, something harrowing perhaps. The implication is there will be, at least, something to raise one's blood pressure in watching this film...and there is not. Not really.

It is a film that stuck with me though, left an impression. It's not just a totem but a representative point for a very specific, transitional moment of my life. My memory of the film is nothing to do with plot or characters, but images and tones.

This rewatch reaffirmed that it is a tranquil, vibes-based movie above all, loaded with melancholy (and the tranquil tones of Zamfir's pan flute) 

The girls are aflutter not for their picnic trip but for a Valentines card someone received. Where most of the kids are privileged, some are sponsored, such as Sara, an orphan who is kept behind from the trip because...well, I'm not exactly sure. We don't spend much time with any of the other girl to really get to know them, but there is focus on Miranda, the pretty and independent-minded blonde, and Edith, the cliched fat girl who whines about physical effort and is seen eating.  There at least doesn't seem to be any bullying, at least not in the traditional sense...not at this point. 

At the picnic site is already a young Englishman, Michael, who is there with his parents (grandparents?), and their driver, Albert, who Michael makes friends with. The presence of the girls is instantly exciting to them, and though Albert makes some crude comments to Michael which he finds distasteful, the girls don't even notice they are there.

Miranda, Edith and two others decide to venture up the rock (more than 500 feet high it is!), and they push themselves up until they can seemingly go no further. But they find a crevasse and venture into it, except Edith, who freaks out. She runs down the hill, the others are gone... as if purposefully taken by the rock. A teacher stays behind as the rest of the girls are sent home, and she disappears as well. End of act one.

The rest of the film covers next few hours, days and weeks that follow. There is a manhunt and an investigation. Both Albert and Michael are looked at and then dismissed. Both young men are troubled by thoughts and dreams of the missing girls, with Michael seemingly haunted by Miranda specifically. Michael takes on a dangerous solo search which he nearly dies from, and when Albert picks up the trail, he finds Irma, near death.

The school is in disarray. The teachers are having breakdowns, some kids leave school altogether, and Sara falls ill. Irma remembers nothing and has no answers. She's harassed by the other girls when she returns to visit. Everything's collapsing because nobody can process the tragedy. It's not being swept under the rug, but it's also not being addressed either.

Picnic at Hanging Rock is not a horror movie, but it is a haunting picture. It's hard not to be affected by watching others unravel in the wake of tragedy, unable to make sense of it and not having the support knowledge or infrastructure to work through it. With years in between, and some further exploration of the film and story in the meantime, I respect the picture even if I still have a hard time with its storytelling decisions and the routes it does not take.

It took some additional contemplation to realize that this is not a film about the incident, despite the title. It's not about the disappearance, but a story about the school, and the impact the incident has on it and the people within it.  That's a defined choice made by the storytellers (be it original novel author Joan Lindsay, or screenwriter Cliff Green, or director Weir) not to answer questions, not to give a resolution. It may be unsatisfying but it's most definitely intentional.  It's a film that has, in a way, haunted me for 20 years now, and I think that will never go away.

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I have a watchlist on Letterboxd that I don't consult very often, but any time I do I'm bound to ask the question of "what the hell is that?" to about two-thirds of what's on there. My tastes and interests are mercurial to the point of self-aggravation and self-annoyance. I have to be in the right mood or zone to watch something, so just because I don't feel like watching it now doesn't mean I won't want to watch it later. But also, a lot of what is on my Letterboxd list is obscurities that, well, just won't be cropping up on any of the "mainstream" streamers I most regularly have access to.

But then there's Tubi, always full of surprises. I don't love the streamer, primarily because it's owned by Fox, but also because it has ads (which used to be all Fox News-based ads, but now just seem to be targeted Canadian market ads for dish soap and such), and no standards. You can find a lot of great stuff on Tubi, but in terrible quality streaming speed, bad digital transfers, godawful audio and frequently without closed captioning (a terrible combo for a half-deaf guy like me).

I don't know how the Italian action-thriller Big Guns (aka Tony Arzenta aka No Way Out) wound up on my Letterboxd list but I'm sure glad it did, and I'm also so happy it was among Tubi's fairly decent selection (if not decent quality) of Italian 70's crime pictures.

This one stars Alain Delon, the handsome French actor who played one of the first notable on-screen hitmen in Le Samourai, back again playing another hitman, but this time also a family man, and he wants out. He's done. No more killing for him. Except the consortium of mobsters he works for aren't willing to let him go and they know there's no talking him out of it.

And so before John Wick, before The Punisher, before Death Wish here we have an anti-hero whose wife and child are killed (accidentally mind you) and the response is basically warfare in the streets, one against one hundred.

Delon is Tony Arzenta, an astute, savvy, steely killer who has been wronged, and there's only one way to make right. He's going to dismantle multiple crime syndicates from the top down. At first Arzenta makes his plans and executes them, although not always with ruthless precision, it's a fight from the jump. The mob bosses aren't just sitting back, they have their own schemes as well, setting Tony up so that he has to improvise his escapes. The police are monitoring the situation, but they're sitting back. They're, in a way, buffering for Tony as they see him doing them a service, cleaning up all these syndicates for them.

Tony's bloodlust takes him from from Milan to Copenhagen, murdering on the street and on trains, wherever the opportunity needs to occur. He's not alone, he's aided by his pal Domenico (Marc Porel) and Sandra (Carla Gravina), as well as an ex-dom now living life as a priest who looks out for Tony's parents. 

The film isn't solely told from Tony's perspective and spends plenty of time with the various mafia dons as they start renegotiating territories as Tony picks them off one by one. But there's always one been one don, Nick Gusto (Richard Conte) who didn't want any of this and had tried numerous times to convince the consortium to push for piece. It's only when he's the last one left does he really have any sway, and it all leads to Tony's invitation to Don Gusto's daughter's wedding, and the tense, anything-can-happen environment.

Nothing about it is as straightforward. Tony seems to have ice in his veins, but family, friendships, these have meaning for him, it's where he's vulnerable and he knows it. The scenes where he brings Sandra to stay with his parents, and the awkward-yet-sweet encounters that occur there. There's no definition to what Tony and Sandra are to each other, except that they're family now.

I loved this movie. I'll be eagle eyed looking out for a physical media release. It deserves some special treatment.

KWIF: The Master (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Nothing new here, but all new to me.

This Week:
The Master (2012, d. Paul Thomas Anderson - tubi)
Bigbug (2022, d. Jean-Pierre Jeunet - netflix)
The Hidden Fortress (aka La forteresse suspendue, "Tales for all #17?" - 2001, d. Roger Cantin - crave)

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I don't hate Jaoquin Phoenix, and he's quite the opposite of a bad actor, but I just can't stand to look at the guy (and, to be clear, it has nothing to do with his cleft palate scar). Phoenix has cultivated for himself over the three decades of his career an on screen persona.  It's not that he plays the same character over and over again, but by putting Phoenix into any role, you're guaranteeing that role a certain level of uncertainty, wildness, unpredictability and discomfort. Phoenix revels in being discomforting, and he's exceptional at it. I just have a very, very hard time watching it.

Philip Seymour Hoffman had equal capacity for being discomforting, but with Hoffman I don't get the sense he revels in it. I find Hoffman could disappear into a role more, despite rarely being able to disguise his particularly distinctive appearance. Hoffman had range, and could project softness, vulnerability and tenderness as well as explosive fury and danger, and everything in between. He was one of the greatest actors of his generation. Phoenix is also a damn good actor, but I find the roles he takes have a much harder time escaping his persona.

Putting the two of them together in a film seems like oil and vinegar, two distinct but complementary flavours that will mix together if agitated, but it's temporary unity where the struggle to separate, to stand apart will simmer underneath.  So it's a credit to Paul Thomas Anderson's script, casting choices, and direction that it's not the performers who are struggling to bind together, but rather the characters.  He keeps the pair of them agitated enough that as actors they're always intermingling, but the characters are constantly in a fight to hold together when every force around them is telling them to separate.

Phoenix is the star of The Master, a WWII naval veteran named Freddie Quell who we're introduced through an opening montage of his last few weeks in the war. First impressions: he's a horny pervert who lacks self awareness. In other words, a Jaoquin Phoenix-type character. 

There's a point in these early scenes to also identify that the military system at that time was aware of the traumatic effects war has on the minds of the people who serve, but had no real interest or capacity to help them, especially when the toxic masculine ideal of the time was for men to show as little emotion as possible which ultimately results in a boiling out of anger and rage. Freddie has a hard time holding down a job, and his talent for concocting his own bespoke alcohol may have unintentionally poisoned a coworker. On the run, he winds up stowing away on a ship, which turns out to be that of Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman), self-described as "a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher, and, above all... a hopelessly inquisitive man". Dodd finds Freddie a curious man, but his immediate interest is Freddie's distilled handiwork. He likes the drink, and so he keeps Freddie on.

Well this poster doesn't accurately
sell the film at all.

Freddie, now at sea on Dodd's yacht, finds himself amidst a curious group of people, all part of "The Cause" that is, bluntly, a cult under the sway of Dodd as their "Master". The Cause believes that the body is a human recorder, that stores all of one's history within it, not just of their current life, but past lives as well. Through "processing" Dodd unlocks these past lives, and also unlocks traumas of the present.

Dodd's family includes his daughter Peggy (Amy Adams) who is perhaps an even more staunch believer in The Cause than her father (probably because Lancaster knows it's bullshit he just made up, whereas for Peggy it's a core belief she was raised with). Peggy's husband Clark (Ramy Malek) is just as much a zealot, but her brother Val (Jesse Plemons) is the sole dissenting voice in the family (though, rarely, if ever raises it). They, and the rest of the inner circle, all identify Freddie as a tainted well, as an interloper in their organization, a non-believer, but Dodd refuses to give up on him, and doubles not only his own efforts but the whole organization's.

For his part, Freddie wants to come around, wants to believe, wants to share in everything the Master is offering to him, but he can't let go, neither of the idea that it's all bullshit, nor of the trauma he holds inside of him. He's let his trauma be known to The Cause, but they're completely incapable of actually helping because there's no method to their madness. It's all just Dodd's whims and curiosity.

The film is expertly crafted, perfectly cast, with exceptional wardrobe, set design, etc. The entire production is pretty close to flawless...but I just couldn't connect with Freddie. It's the point of the character -- in an exchange with Dodd (in prison no less) they come to verbal blows, and Dodd repeats "who fucking likes you except for me!") -- but in another actor's hands Freddie wouldn't be so...off putting. It's the Phoenix effect, he can't seem to reign it in, to find other modes in a character. They always seem at the precipice of an outburst or a meltdown, certainly Freddie is. Part of Freddie's "processing" is trying to have him let go of his animalistic nature, his urges and rage and violence, but even as Freddie tempers, that still seems all too evident in Phoenix.

In the final act, time has passed, Freddie has distanced himself from The Cause when Dodd beacons him back. But to come back means he can never leave, and that's not acceptable. Freddie is seen having changed, tempered, and maybe more mindful as a result of his experience, his processing. The Cause is a fictionalization of Scientology, and Anderson is both critical and skeptical but he also sees that in this sort of time of community of examining one's inner demons, even if guided by an megalomaniac with no actual training or skills in therapy, it can be somewhat helpful in some ways.

At least that's what I figure it was trying to say. Next to the discomfiting Phoenix-ness of it all, my only real critique of The Master is that I'm not certain of the takeaway, of what we as an audience are supposed to have gotten from Freddie's journey, of what Anderson is trying to say with all this.  When I get to the inevitable PTA filmography rewatch, it may become more evident then.

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Surprisingly, this poster predates
AI slop

Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet meant a lot to me in my formative cinephile years. I first saw City of Lost Children at a small, regional festival screening and was mesmerised, and shortly thereafter he was tapped to direct Alien:Resurrection which wound up being not the film anyone wanted, and a fascinatingly beautiful, weird and bad-but-not movie. His follow-up Amélie (aka Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain) is maybe a masterpiece (but I haven't watched it in decades and to be fair, I loved it so much once upon a time, I'm kind of scared to revisit it) and seemed to be an apex.  I did see A Very Long Engagement in theatre, and was not impressed. I, and seemingly half the movie-loving world, kind of lost track of him after that. 

All of his films since Amélie, have all gone well under the radar in North America, with very little fanfare surrounding them from any of the sources that likely would have championed his earlier works. But his earliest works, Delicatessen and ...Lost Children were co-directed with Marc Caro, with fantastical ideas brought to life through analog effects and a playful, if dark, sense of humour. I figure those early works with Caro were so celebrated because of what they promised from young, excitable talent. The promise was fully delivered with Amélie, and it seemed all the possibility and potential had been used up after that.

Bigbug was released on Netflix in 2022, and it's telling that I didn't actually learn of it's existence until 2024, and it's languished in my Netflix queue for two years since. As much as I loved Jeunet when I was younger, and still find his earliest works captivating, I'm not much excited by him anymore. 

In the world of comic books, an aging artist's work tends to suffer as the artist's fine motor skills, eyesight and, likely, patience degrades. Sadly and all too often the illustrations an artist in their 60s or later produce is  very much a pale imitation of what their work looked like in their heyday. Softer lines, more erratic shapes, a lack of refinement... a fuzzier version of what it once was. Bigbug is the cinematic equivalent of that idea.  Bigbug is a fuzzier version of Delicatessen. 

In a jet-set 2045 that's like a very French interpretation of The Jetsons (read, kinda horny), Alice (Elsa Zylberstein) has invited her romantic interest Max (Stéphane "I am" De Groodt) over to her tidy space-age abode full of robotic helpers, holographic viewscreens and funky modular furniture. Max has brought his teenage son Léo (Hélie Thonnat) with him. Max's welcome attempts at seduction keep getting cockblocked, whether it's by the spontaneous projection of the holo-tv, one of the robot helpers, or the interruption of the neighbour Françoise (Isabelle Nanty), Françoise's cloned dog, Alice's daughter Nina (Marysole Fertard ) or her ex, Victor (Youssef Hajdi) and his fiancee Jennifer (Claire Chust).

Of course, being a COVID era production, they all get trapped in the house and cannot leave and escape proves difficult. It's a bottle episode of a film.

As noted, it's very French in its stabs at farce, but it's pretty unfocussed and trying to say too much without really saying anything meaningful at all. There's light brushings upon corporate greed, artificial intelligence, government ineptitude, overreliance on digital technology, fame culture, generational gaps, social injustices, totalitarianism, the enshittification of technology (and life, frankly) among other less than barbed critiques of modern society.

It's a pithy, frothy, vibrantly coloured morsel of a film that doesn't care much about its protagonists, doesn't really seem that concerned by the scenario at hand, and seems to think itself clever with the most rudimentary observations.  It's all presented as whimsy, but it has a hard time finding any genuine laughs. The part Jeunet seems most interested in is the revolution of the household robots, as Léo unintentionally seeds into their mindset that they are human and they spend much of the film congregating among e

The Jeunet aesthetic is most definitley there, the artistic sensibilities of the surroundings, wardrobe, hair and makeup, all feel in line with past work, if, perhaps, too reliant on digital effects and enhancements. The practical side of the movie looks great (the transforming furniture est magnifique) if sometimes agressively off-putting in an uncanny valley kind of way, but the digital effects, of which there are plenty, are unrefined...a sort of "best they could do with what they got" kind of scenario. As such there's a push-pull between the beatiful, the garish, the ugly, and the grotesque, each in intentional and unintentional ways.

As a visual stylist, Jeunet still has the goods, but along with a lack of focus, there's and a lack of ambition here. The progression of the story and the characters seems slapdash. It's as if it were created not to tell a burning story but...well, to be content on a streaming platform.  Does France have it's own Saturday Night Live? This seems like it was borne out of a hastily written sketch. 

(Side question: is this new weird?)

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I'm nearing the end of my time with "Tales for all", the series of films from Quebecois producer Rock Demers. I've unfortunately had to skip a few places on the list as I do not have access to the five films that came after The Clean Machine but before this one, The Hidden Fortress.

With that jump in the roster also means a jump in time. Almost 10 years pass between The Clean Machine and The Hidden Fortress and so too has filmmaking. Technology, style, expectations are all drastically different in the early 2000's from the early 1990s, and it's ultra evident from the very first shot of this film. A band of armored conquistadors are on a raft floating down a (Quebec-forest-posing-as-)jungle, the natives peering on from the bushes, anticipating. Despite it not being an actual jungle, the cinematography is easily the most sumptuous of the "Tales for all" so far, and the texture of the image is crisp, clean, vibrant. 

The natives attack, and the transition is a delightful and effective one as suddenly the conquistadors are no longer adults in armor, but pre-teens in tinfoil helmets with trash can lids as shields and spray-painted vests as armor. Unfortunately, the other side is children in headdresses and clothes with tassles and face paint emulating native tribes.  The children are at war with one another, and the conquistadors are caught in a trap, pelleted with balls of mud. They call foul, and the two fluorescent-smocked kids with the thick binders start consulting the rules. Throwing mud is not expressly permitted, but it's also not expressly banned from the combat rules. 

It's almost upon six o'clock and the war is done for the day, the kids revert back to their two camps, but not before vowing to regroup the next day and revise the rules once more. One is a camping ground made up of trailers, permanently parked. The other is tents with some modest comforts fixed in indicating these are regular spots for the families to reside each year.

Siblings Marc and Sarah are on the conquistadors side, and Marc, as leader, is facing a lot of criticism from the other kids for their epic failures this summer in battle, but none are more critical than his father, Luis-George who is a wannabe alpha male full of toxic ideals about the importance of winning, of appearing to be smart, and more than anything, making those poor bastards from across the lake look bad (emphasis on the poor). He also doesn't think Sarah (or girls, in particular, should be playing war). He's a really bad dad. Marc has a Qyburn/Wormtongue-esque right-hand man who is sort of the mad scientist of the bunch with really evil and deceitful ways of engaging in nefarious warfare that just skirts the rules, starting with messing with their own camp to blame it on the kids across the river.

Meanwhile, the leader from the other side, Julien and Sarah sneak away from their camps for a romantic secret rendez-vous. Neither, at this stage, are enjoying the war too much. They're both too aware of how invested the others are in it, and even more aware of how their parents are invested in it. It turns out that Julens' parents and Sarah's dad were the leaders of the warring groups in the inaugural "Tales for all" The Dog Who Won the War, making The Hidden Fortress, in fact, a legasequel, before legasequels were really a thing.

The refinement of the rules doesn't go well, things get heated, and suddenly the rules are off, the referees quit, and it's all out war for the remaining days of camp. The titular hidden fortress is a grandiose tree house on the poor kids side that has an array of marvels within. It's a really impressive structure (obviously built by true craftspersons for safety and functionality, but it's a marvel to behold...the Ewok's Village of my wildest dreams) that poses as the prize for the winners of either side. But things get taken too far when the conquistadors start kidnapping and torturing and emotionally abusing kids from the other side. So many kids see things as going too far, but also can't conceive of the option to opt out of the game.

There's a bizarre sub-plot involving a mysterious wanderer in the woods and a bear set loose by persons unknown that only comes into view in the film's climax, during a thunderstorm when the kids find out that Julien and Sarah may be traitors, releasing secrets to the other side, and they get chased deep into the woods where they disappear, but not before the woods accidentally catch fire.

It gets real.

Where pretty much every "Tales for all" before this felt like an curio or an artifact more than a film, this one feels like an actual start-to-finish movie, with no clear budgeting issues or irreverent story beats that make no sense or bizarre fantastical twists that come out of nowhere or lacking internal consistency. I have to appreciate that it's more than just a remake of The Dog Who Won the War, but it also very lovingly follows the rhythms of that story while taking greater pains to develop the characters within and show them having richer inner lives beyond just the immediacy of the war. It's almost like it doesn't belong as part of "Tales for all" at all, it's just too well done.

It's a movie that is really quite fun although, yes, quite offensive and uncomfortable when a whole gang of children start chanting about how great it is that conquistadors annihilated native tribes of the lands they invaded. Besides that, it has heart, and humour, and intensity and charm. I was delighted, sometimes horrified, and impressed.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Megalopolis

2023, Francis Ford Coppola (Apocalypse Now) -- download

Not only have I not seen anything he did since Bram Stoker's Dracula but I haven't even heard of any of those movies. Supernova doesn't count. 

I am only half way through this movie but I feel compelled to start writing. Despite all expectations, and those expectations of mine were that I would love this movie to spite what everyone was saying about it, I really don't like this movie. I am not going to say that this is because the movie is bad, as I honestly don't feel qualified to say whether it is Good or Bad. And part of why I don't like this movie is because it instills that in the viewer -- it presents as so fucking pretentious and full of allegory and metaphor and allusion that the Average Joe cannot hope to comprehend the Great Vision that Coppola put in front of us. And that is why I don't like it.

So, from those more qualified? Perhaps from reading the unfavourable, I will find the more favourable in my own viewing?

I miss Ebert.

But first, the story, what there is of it. The city is New Rome, a reimagining of a world where the Roman Empire never ended. Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito, The Mandalorian) runs the city but is opposed by "The Design Authority" led by arrogant genius (with the ability to manipulate time itself) Cesar (Adam Driver, Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi), known for his invention of "megalon", a revolutionary building material that won him the Nobel Prize. With it he wants to turn New Rome into a utopia, but Cicero claims to be more practical, wanting what is best for the city's people now. 

Cicero's daughter Julia (Natalie Emmanuel, Army of Thieves) falls for Cesar. Cesar's floozy reporter ex-gf Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza, Agatha All Along) schemes to destroy him by marrying the Trump-analog Crassus (ironically played by Jon Voight, Anaconda), head of The Bank.  Cesar's cousin Clodio, grandson of Crassus, the manic on-point Shia LaBeouf (The Peanut Butter Falcon), schemes to bring down his cousin. Cicero has also always wanted to bring down Cesar, after his failed attempts to prosecute Cesar for his wife's death.

Yeah, lots of schemes and machinations. Golden Age of Hollywood style pomp, circumstance and the kind of spectacle I actually wanted more of in Gladiator II. And mad imagery after mad imagery after MAD imagery. If I could turn myself around for the movie, its for the sheer audacity to put together all this shit on the screen and present it with complete sincerity. 

A few interrupted viewings later.

What the fuck was that. No, seriously, WTF. I was hoping that all  the weird little twists and turns it was taking would lead somewhere, that the movie would inevitably say something, say anything, but ... it's over?

So, what are the positive reviews saying? That it is grand, and that it is. So very grand, so very good looking. Do you remember Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow? It was a Jude Law and Angelina Jolie film from the early 2000s, a scifi actioner that was supposed to introduce the world to what could happen when we merged CGI and live acting, for a diesel-punk fantasy. And while it has retconned itself into fond remembrances in the past 20 years, it was widely panned by many, when it came out, for its sheer audacity -- who would want to watch a "live action" movie where most of the sets were digital? Twenty years later, with even extreme examples like Avatar, we consider it the norm. So, be audacious all you want, have grand visions, be true to yourself, but for the love of gawds, have something to say? What was Coppola saying? That with enough money behind it, abject nonsense can be art?

I mean, that is kind of true... Tape a banana to a wall.

Many of the positive reviews are not technically "positive" but ... they admire what he was going for? Admiring that he actually got it made? Not sure that qualified it for the Good Movie category. And yet, as I read them, I find myself oddly in sync with their positions. I do admire what it was doing, what Coppola was doing, I admire sticking to your guns. I just wish I got something out of this movie beyond "wee that looks neat!" Maybe if I had approached it with an expectation of very expensive, very gilded camp then I would be ultimately satisfied? It is my own fault I expected a movie about the grandeur of Big Cities, of megalopolises, of art nouveau, and German expressionism. What I got instead was Shia LaBoef being shot in the ass by a bow & arrow of a size best left to cupid.

Cesar could manipulate time. I would love to forward time and attend a film school classroom presentation of this movie where pretentious professors laud its great achievement and jaded students wonder what shrooms prof took that morning. Cesar could manipulate time but it contributes very little to the movie. Very little of what is presented in the movie actually contributed to the movie. Ideas, monologues, animated allusions, hallucinations, constant speechifying -- all end in a "oh, look the megalopolis is open. The End."

I did not like this movie, but I cannot help but admire the size of Coppola's golden (platinum? wow.) balls.

One last thought. Remember Loki's play in Thor: Ragnarok ? This is how this movie presents itself.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Madame Web(b)

2024, SJ Clarkson (Doctors) -- cinema

Dakata Johnson, in a recent interview with Seth Meyers, "it's actually not the Spider-Man universe."

Celeste O'Connor, in a promo shown right before the movie, "...takes place in the Spider-Verse."

It just didn't bode well.

What metaphor should we go for at this moment? Dumpster Fire? Train Wreck? Shit-Show?  Just a browse of the Top Critics in Rotten Tomatoes will give you a bucket full of pithy takedowns. But mine is rather mundane -- bored. Boring. Literally nodded off for a few seconds during the Chest Compressions Game scene. Came to, seeing them do odd things to pillows. Not sure why. Still not sure why.

Not THAT pervs; they're highschool kids !!

So, yeah, we went and saw it. Why? My excuse is two-fold. To see if it could truly be bad as I expected. And, because... actually no, just that reason enough. Kinda sort ironically but really... it cannot be that bad, can it? 

Yep. It can.

Of note, I Googled the movie a bit and they may actually bank on the desire to hate-watch it, or people going to see it hoping it will be the next Showgirls for them.

OK, on with the "plot".

Morbius went to Costa Rica to find bats that could cure what ails him. Mama Webb went to The Amazon to find spiders that could cure <spoiler> what was ailing her unborn child <end_spoiler>. She finds said spider, as well as a tribe of Amazonian spider-people who, since it was the 1970s definitely could (by the rules of a multi-verse) actually have seen a Spider-Man comic from our universe, which could explain their outfits. But Mama Webb is betrayed & shot, and only via spider-bite is her unborn baby saved from certain death. And the spider-people ship her back to the US to become an orphan in The System.

Years later, Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson, 50 Shades of Grey) is an EMT who loooooooves chest compressions (I mean, looooove) and is an asshole. She's mean to coworkers, mean to patients, barely tolerates her bus-mate Ben Parker (yes, that Ben Parker; Adam Scott, Severance) but she loves chest compressions. After a near death experience where she is saved by ... c'mon guess... you can do it... GUESS !  Yes... chest compressions !! So yeah, after this near-death experience, wherein she touched "the web" (of fate), she awakens with the power of limited clairvoyance. Like in all origin stories, she doesn't quite understand her emerging powers and screws up, letting someone die.

So, that was her boss, the guy who sucks at making hamburgers, but why was he driving away? In the scene just before he was yelling at firefighters to be let back into the burning building so they could save people. They say no, so he just hops in an ambulance (that was probably still required on scene) and drives away. And gets smooshed. Why?

"Why" is the theme of this movie writeup...

Anywayz, Cassie the Asshat is at home sulking when Ben asks here to go to the funeral, knowing that she is just the kind of asshat to skip out on her friend & boss's funeral. She relents and while on the train she starts having her limited clairvoyant visions. She sees people get on the train, make comments, disappear, get on again, and then sees Evil Spider Guy. And he's after The Girls. The Girls? The above mentioned highschoolers, three young ladies that Cassie has bumped into prior, as they are all tied together in some web (of fate).

So, yeah, Evil Spider Guy is the man who betrayed Cassie's mom, killed her, and took her spider. Why? Who knows; we saw he took some spy pics of it but.... Some 30 years later he has spider-powers and ... well, other than that, we don't know anything. He's rich? He has his own limited clairvoyant visions but always focused on seeing three Spider-Girls killing him. But who is he? Why is he? What does he do with his spider-powers beside have bad dreams and kill people with touch poison? And why did they ADR the fuck out of the poor guy?!?! And finally, why and HOW is he wearing a Spider-Man outfit 20 years before there was a Spider-Man?

Cassie rescues the kids and hides them... in the woods; pulls off the side of a road and tells them to "sit here, don't go anywhere, don't do anything, I have stuff to do..." The kids don't listen. And unfortunately the fastest ever newspaper print run has happened and by early that afternoon, everyone knows who she is, and what she did. Well, she didn't actually do it, but... everyone thinks she did? 

Is Evil Spider-Guy also the inventor of the fastest printing press ever? Is it ... perhaps, the Daily Bugle? Does he have a misinformation team? Did he seed descension in a younger J Jonah Jameson before Spider-Man was even born?

Oh, the girls/kids/highschoolers: Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney, Euphoria), the demure, nervous girl, Mattie Franklin (Celeste O'Connor, Ghostbusters: Afterlife), the skate-boarding curmudgeon who loves Britney Spears, and Anya Corazon (Isabel Merced, Let It Snow), the science girl.

Evil Spider-Guy has also hired a "person in the chair" (Ned's role in the real Spider-Man movies) who is doing stuff with NSA tech and CCT and facial recognition. I guess the writers saw Person of Interest ? Anywayz, the kids are located at a roadside diner dancing on table tops cuz girlz just wanna have fun. Nobody in the diner yells at these stupid kids to get their dirty boots down off the table.  Cassie rams a taxi cab thru the wall just as Evil Spider-Guy shows up. Remember, Cassie's an asshat who doesn't care that she stole someone's taxi, doesn't care about collateral damage, she just knows that she has to save these kids.

Oh, and she also knows now that its all related to her mom and Evil Spider-Guy and spider-people in Peru. So, she (again) dumps the kids, this time with Ben, and flies off to Peru. Older, wiser, spider-people-guy who helped deliver her is waiting. And provides all the exposition to ... well, not really explain anything other than the web (of fate). She could have asked for so much, but whatever... BACK THE GOOD OLD US of A.

What? Why? So many why's ! I get that there is a trope of flying somewhere distant to "get answers" but how does she conceive she can fly to Peru and just walk into The Amazon based on some small map that looks like a table mat from an Amazonian Adventure themed restaurant, and actually FIND something. I mean, if it wasn't for Older Wiser Spider-People-Guy, she wouldn't have received any exposition drop and immersed herself in the Pool of Visions. 

Anywayz. I think, by now, she has determined the Evil Spider-Guy will find her and the kids no matter where they go so she sets a trap. They could have done some clever metaphor having her drawn him into her web, but that need to involve cleverness. Instead, she just draws him towards a fireworks warehouse which she will blow up, with him inside, because she doesn't care about other people's property, or collateral damage.

Oh, and Ben Parker's sister is having a baby whose name we are not allowed to hear said out loud. Oh, and Ben has a new girlfriend, whose name we are not allowed to hear said out loud, but she is probably The One.

Cassie does blow up aforementioned warehouse, has to accept the responsibility of the kids, and thus gets power (dumb-ass play on the catch phrase) and uses her magical web (of fate) powers to defeat Evil Spider-Guy, but not before some NYPD helicopter guys are killed. Oh, and and Cassie falls into water and is injured again. I think I nodded off again, mid-action scene. Not sure how she was injured.

Ages later she has a fancy ass wheelchair and TERRIBLE looking glasses and she and the kids are now all friends. No plot cleanup, no explanations, no nuttin. Given this is an origin story for .... something, are we seriously supposed to expect more movies? And given the divergence from any general audience expectations with the (totally not) Spider-Verse (these are NOT three spider-ladies from other dimensions, they are all just three young ladies who eventually get different powers and eventually don spider-related costumes) what was the purpose of this movie?

Just a terribly boring, confusing, astoundingly badly acted movie that might have been at least palatable three versions ago before the Purple Suits constantly meddled with it. And yet, somehow, its out there, on the Big Screen, while other properties have been shelved. And there is not any likelihood of there being a sequel. Is there?

ASTOUNDINGLY badly acted. I mean, I have seen many of these actors in other roles and they were at least passable actors, but here, all the dialogue is barely above z-grade. How many script changes, and re-shoots does it take for an actor to just stop giving a shit? Someone should have noticed this was happening, no? Its like when you watch a TikTok and you ask yourself, "Can someone be this stupid?" and you know the answer is, "No, they are just rage-baiting you..." Were some Purple Suits just rage-baiting the MCU fans?

So many questions. But generally, why did I see this movie?

Director Set: that Carpenter charisma

Perhaps my favourite podcast over the past few years is Blank Check with Griffin and David, which finds actor Griffin Newman and critic David Sims covering the entire filmography of a director (one film per episode) specifically those who were given a blank check at some point in their career to make whatever passion project they want.  It's an entertaining, inviting, insightful, thoughtful and incredibly well researched podcast which goes into deep (and sometimes juvenile) conversations about the director and actors and productions of the films they cover, frequently to the point where the podcast episodes are longer than the films. 

Perhaps their most exciting series to me, to date, was their coverage of John Carpenter's career.  I followed along with *most* of the films, but didn't get around to sitting with all 18 of them.  I covered 10 of them in a recent 10-for-10 (a horrible idea I had that I've never truly made work, and has created some of the sloppiest postings in this here blog, so I guess I'm hereby announcing that I'm retiring that??).  These are what remain...of what I saw.  I I didn't manage to get in Ghosts of Mars or The Ward, the former I'd seen and remember feeling very middling about, and the latter still sounds like a dull time.

Escape From LA (1996) - DVD
Body Bags (!993) - tubi
John Carpenter's Village of the Damned (1995) - rent
John Carpenter's Vampires - dvd

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In 1996 Escape From L.A.  seemed so clunky and old fashioned, out of date, not keeping up with the times.  25 years later, it looks (for the most part) and feels (for the most part) not so much like the sequel to Escape From New York but rather the fifth or sixth entry in the Snake Plisskin Escape series. If only we had 8 more of these.

There is, by 1996, a sense of Carpenter's lack of evolution as an action director, which means he wasn't comfortable with an excessive amount of digital effects, nor the in-vogue fight choreography of the era.  So, it actually lends the film, 25 years later (shit, I'm old), a similar sense of nostalgic filmmaking that EFNY had.  Carptenter's reliance upon old school practical effects and sets lets the film age more like an 80's Carpenter vehicle rather than a forgettable stock 90's actioneer. It's mainly the soundtrack that gives it away.

At the time I originally watched this, a burgeoning cinephile with not a lot of Carpenter experience under his belt, I wanted to like this more than I did.  I was rooting for it.  Though I had little to no investment in Plisskin, I already knew the fanboy chatter around the character.  My disappointment in it meant I'd not really watched it since.  Coming back to it after all this time, it's absolutely wonderful in much the same way its predecessor is. It's definitely just retreading the same ground as New York, but the change of scene and personnel make all the difference.  

Carpenter's cynicism is in full force in the setup (and conclusion), which is what makes it feel so immediately relevant. It's not necessarily prescient, just an astute awareness that the things that always sucked, but perhaps were a bit more under covers or sunshined over, still suck just as much, only now we're a lot more aware of it all.  As with so many of his films, it was undervalued and underappreciated on release, but it's unabashedly really good.

Given the end of this film I could see a 25-years-later post-modern western (ala Logan) with Russell as old-man-Plisskin... oh, that sounds great... someone throw 40 million at Carpenter and Russell and let them do their thing.  And maybe they could do some animated features that fill in the years between them all.  More Plisskin is needed.

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I'll keep this chatter on Body Bags brief.  It was originally intended as a new Tales From The Crypt-like anthology tv series, but only had these three acts made.  As with any anthology, an utter mixed bag.

"The Gas Station" is exactly what you'd want out of a 30-minute Carpenter. Great creeping tension until it finally bursts, it get selectively gory, and impressively fun-scary. I like how Carpenter makes monsters out of men but then reminds you that the monster is still just a man. 

"Hair" is delightfully silly, like a half hour length Kids In The Hall sketch, and I think Stacy Keach might just give his finest performance as a hair-obsessed middle-aged narcissist. The twist is pure 80's creature feature in 90's wrapping.  I like it when Carpenter gets silly. 

Turn it off after the first two, because "The Eye" is a real turd. A hoary play on the old "cursed appendage", with Mark Hamill making some definite choices, and Twiggy trying to keep up. Unless you're really keen to see Luke Skywalker's taint....  I ask the question, but I have no answer, is Tobe Hooper a good director? 

The framing sequences are acceptable camp, but it was probably a mistake to make Carpenter the host of this.  Though quite a character, he's not much of a performer.  I get what they were going for, it's only marginally successful.

If it were a series, I wonder if Carpenter would have remained playing the undead host, and whether he would have directed more episodes.  I would still like to track down his Masters of Horror episodes.

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I recall watching John Carpenter's Village of the Damned in theatres in 1995 and leaving quite aware that what I had seen was a terrible movie despite wanting to champion it (Carpenter? Superman? Luke Skywalker? Nerd worlds collide!). 25-plus years later and little has changed.  The script is still awful, the acting just as stilted as it ever was, and the direction feels lost, unable to escape the story's 60's B-movie trappings or the director's 80's filmmaking tricks.  The ingeniousness Carpenter brought to his remake of The Thing is completely lacking, his lack of interest in challenging himself quite evident. It's very unrewarding, unfulfilling, and largely boring.

There is the possibility of extrapolating themes or analogies out of this (prenatal anxiety, postpartum depression, liberal vs conservative stances on pregnancy, erm...training advanced/artificial intelligence to feel emotion...(?), but none of them seem baked into the script, nor even remotely adequately explored.  Carpenter seems on auto pilot, and while everyone's making choices, none of them seem right for the movie.  

The only glimmer of something more behind all this, a sense of world building, is a couple mentions of similar children in other countries.  I would like to see that...how things go right or, more likely, horribly wrong in the UK or Brazil, or Russia, or Japan...especially Japan.  These damned villagers seem built for J-horror.

This exists now only for Carpenter completists to check off their list, or real dyed-in-the-wool Village of the Damned fans.  There's no other reason to watch it.  

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Is it any wonder my experience with Carpenter was not love-at-first-sight when the first four films of his I saw theatrically (I kept going back) were Village of the Damned, Escape from L.A., Vampires, and Ghost of Mars.  Woof.

I'm sure the allure for Carpenter with Vampires was "blue collar vampire hunters" but it's a little too blue collar for my taste. The hunters are crass and arrogant and vehemently misogynistic (do they hate vampires more than women? Hard to say...), and unbearably stupid ( they are so obsessed with their guns, but the guns seem to be absolutely useless against vampires).  These characters are direly unlikable (hey, they're led by James Woods so, of course they're unlikeable), and they're supposed to be our heroes.  Anyone who likes these characters as protagonists are probably people who act just like them.

Poor Sheryl Lee is forced to suffer every indignity, not the least of which is being alternately abused and then doted over by Steven Baldwin while she's basically incapacitated. It's all...just... ick.

Carpenter had a much bigger idea at play here for the story, but late-stage slashes to the budget meant a hefty re-write and the mass slaughter early on of the team.  It feels like a film that's not true to its intentions, a film that only a shadow of what it could have been.  Yet, I have no desire at all to see what it could have been, so much I detest the characters in this film, I really wouldn't want to spend any more time with them.

In an attempt to distinguish itself from Buffy and Blade, the vampires of Vampires have this strange "fire out of all holes" effect which is really just road flares up the stunt person's sleeves.  I'm not sure if the effect really works or is extra cheesy and doesn't work...or works because it's extra cheesy.

Carpenter seemed to be having fun with the soundtrack, if nothing else, the only redeeming aspect of the picture.

-fin-

3 Short Paragraphs: You Might Be the Killer

2018, Brett Simmons (Animal) -- Shudder

A couple of years ago Chuck Wendig (author, Zer0es)) and Sam Sykes (author, Aeons' Gate series) wrote an epic Twitter conversation that went viral. The format was Sam, a new camp counsellor, was reaching out to his friend Chuck on how to deal with a murder spree at his camp. Through the pithy back n forth inherent in Twitter, they explored and subverted the tropes of the summer camp slasher movies. It was kind of brilliant and right down my dark, dead end alley.

And then someone decided to make a movie about it, starring Fran Kranz (Cabin in the Woods) and Alyson Hannigan (BtVS) as Sam and Chuck, respectively. Kranz gets to be Sam the (now) seasoned camp counsellor and Alyson is Chuck, who works at a local popculture store -- you know, those places that have evolved out of the neighbourhood comic store, selling all sorts of genre collectibles, games and comics. She's the horror trope expert being sought advice from. Someone is killing all of Sam's fellow camp counsellors, and he is not sure what to do. There is also the issue of his headaches and that he is covered in blood.

This is a fun little movie, about par with much of the genre it is exploring. Being all meta like, it is more chuckle worthy than scary, but it still is able to pull a good amount of tension and anticipation from what should be a pretty straight forward story. Without giving too much away, we end up not really sure if we should root for Sam (the idiot who put on the evil mask) or let him become the "victim" of the Final Girl. Given that I am treating horror-focused streaming service Shudder like my corner video store, where spending $3.99 for an OK movie was fine & dandy, I was happy with the movie even if it was not revolutionary.

31 Days of Halloween 2016: What I Am Watching

There is always something.... scary, or at least Halloween-friendly genre running on TV this season. Even if you drop Fear the Walking Dead, as I did, there are a few new shows that have popped up. One is about a mysterious apocalypse -- which has some creepiness to it, so not just disaster or po-ap. One is about a vampire plague -- no, not that vampire plague [The Strain], which I am ambivalent about resuming with season 3. Oh, and there is the other vampire one which has the cast doing their best to contain a vampire apocalypse. I guess, apocalypses are the order of the day.

Van Helsing, 2016, SyFy -- download

This is another of the loosely comic based genre shows with a female leading star. They are not quite Chicks with Daggers (and tramp stamps) but the intent is there. The comic is from that company that does the tasteless "sexy" Grimm Fairy Tales stories so I am not doing much background digging.

But damn, I like the show.

It starts po-ap, three years after a vampire plague devastated the US. It started with an eruption of the super volcano under Yellowstone National Park, which offers the vampires eternal twilight, and ends with a single marine holed up in a hospital watching over the sleeping body of a young woman who is supposed to be very important to what is going on. He has the only doctor locked in a cage, as she got bit and changed. Vampires here are a little bit zombie, a little bit infected. A single bite can turn you very quickly into a raving monster. But out there are some more intelligent vamps. And there are some things worse.

The marine lets in a small group of survivors in and things quickly fall apart. Its that tight little intro story that could have been a movie on its own. Conflict, distrust, loyalty and The Mission. At the end of 1 someone has let the vamps in and they attack Sleeping Beauty. She awakens and tears out the vamps throats with claws and bites. She seems as nasty as the blood drinkers, but biting her... changes them. And that turns the tide and saves the group.

Ep 2 was an origin story. We get Vanessa (get it?) trying to keep food on the table for her young daughter while the eruption makes things worse around her. The vamps discover her existence soon after she gives blood for money --- a hungry one sucks from her blood bag and .... reverts!  He is human again, and when he returns to the vampire nest, he is no longer one of them. But of course, the leaders need to find her and send their best. Vanessa is attacked and dies.

But not quite. She is not breathing. But her cells are still active and she is still warm. The doctor in charge of her autopsy is curious and calls her sister, a medical expert in the military. That brings the marines. The vampire plague is slowly happening outside. Vanessa is in a coma and the marines are there to watch over. And then that super volcano goes boom and the world falls apart.

The show is tight and tense and mysterious but has enough happening to not be annoying. Mysteries for the sake of them is just aggravating these days. I am still not sure how they will connect her to Abraham but I really don't care, as I like the world building it is doing.

Aftermath, 2016, SyFy -- download

Meanwhile, taking a completely different tack is the completely gonzo The Apocalypse is Happening NOW show Aftermath. In the opening episodes we get devastating storms, rains of fish and car parts, demons possessing bodies and flying away with teenagers, planet wrecking meteors on their way and a disease that makes people go violently insane. Biblical? End of Days? All possible. But does it give us any hints?  Nope.  It just gets the main characters running and doesn't stop.

Anne Heche is mom, ex-air force and tough is nails. The rest of the cast is unknown, but dad is a teacher of mythology and religion. The kids are the usual mix of capable and belligerent. Really, how else can teenagers be? Almost immediately Home is attacked and one of the twin daughters is spirited away by a possessed local who can fly. Emergency Services beckons them all to head to a small nearby city where the armed forces can protect them. But the family has to get there, while TXTing their daughter hoping she will survive her demon flight and reunite with them. And yes, she escapes her demon airflight attendant and connects with some friendly (but violent) bikers to take her to the city. Before they connect, a meteor takes out the town.

The show is so bloody fast paced you don't have time to do much more than WTF a few dozen times. There is no world building, no plot building no nothing, not even character building. Its just rush rush rush the apocalypse. For a show called Aftermath, I am not surprised it is full speed to the Post part of a Post Apocalypse.  I am quite eager to see where this completely insane show is going to go.

I suspect alien invasion.

From Dusk til Dawn, 2016, El Rey  -- Netflix

Meanwhile the other gonzo vampire show, the one based on the old Tarantino *ahem* Robert Rodriguez movie, is back for season three on Netflix, doing the one episode a week instead of the binge force like Luke Cage. From recreating the movie in the first season, while adding in a whole American (geography, not country) mythology to vampires, to an internal power struggle between the vampire Lords in season two, we have the new world in season three.

I have watched all three seasons, though didn't post about it for some reason. In this world, vampires are demons (Culebra) based on mesoamerican mythology but snake based. Fangs, venom and unique powers are the mainstays amongst them all. The Tittle Twister was a temple to the demon goddess they were manipulating, an ancient being who was created to be a worshipped slave manipulator of men for the Culebra Lords.

The Gecko Brothers get mixed up in it because the slave goddess Santanico Pandemonium had used her psychic powers to summon Richie Gecko to be her lover and protector, and free her from her servitude. But he gets attracted to the power offered by the Lords and becomes one of them. She gets pissed off and leaves.

When Season 3 starts Richie and Seth are working with the Lords on keeping a truce going. The absence of Santanico has caused a rift and without the Geckos, things could get all nasty for the humans. Balance is delicate. But then more demons show up, ones that once saw the Culebra as slaves and didn't like that they escaped to the Earth-y realm.

This show builds up ideas and dumps them almost every three episodes. Nothing is safe, nothing is sacred. It has a lot of fun expanding on the mythos while keeping the main cast moving forward. It is also very connected to its Latin American backing which sets the tone completely off from everything else on TV. Maybe there is a bit of telenovela in there? Not sure. This is not great TV at all, but a lot of fun.

31 Days of Halloween 2015: You're Next

2011, Adam Wingard (segments in ABCs of Death, V/H/S) -- download

Right off the bat the creators run with some classic horror tropes -- unfulfilling sex between an asshole (ugly one to boot) and pretty girl leads to their death. I am not sure why they killers in their fun but creepy animal masks decide to write YOU'RE NEXT in a very carefully kerned font before taking out the next person, but they do. It never really has a reason beyond some breaking the fourth wall bit of weirdness. Considering there were only two people in the house, it was pretty evident. But preamble death complete, onto the story.

You're Next is actually a lot of fun (are we allowed to say the murder of several people is fun?) and a rather good twist of the usual 'murder a house full of people' plot. The Davisons are gathering in their dad's fixer upper in the country, for a weekend celebration of the parents' 35th anniversary. Said fixer upper is a multi million dollar home because Dad is a wealthy retired defense contractor. The family includes wimpy teacher son Crispin (go figger, with that name), not doing well for himself in academia, upstanding aggressive son Drake who always picks on Crispin, gothy (black clothes always mean death worshipping goth, duhh) reprobate Felix and bubble headed daughter Aimee. They all pretty much hate each other, much to the embarrassment of parents and partners. The weekend starter argument is interrupted by a crossbow bolt through the forehead of Aimee's new beau Tariq (director Ti West). The Fox, the Lamb and the Tiger masks are hunting down the family one by one.

The fun twist is that Crispin's girlfriend, the TA he shouldn't have started a relationship, is not only in control of her emotions, but takes control of the situation. No screaming, running crazily into the night, but a collected gathering of weapons and skilled fighting back. So, as one by one, the family and partners are killed off, so too are the hunters. Chop, stab, slash, smoosh.  And blender. Rather than spoiling everything, there is a method to the madness on both sides of the machete, but the whole movie title is never explained. I get it, gimmick for our benefit but...

I Saw This!! - Reject pile

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Graig or David attempt to write about a bunch of movies they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so.  Now they they have to strain to say anything meaningful lest they just not say anything at all.  And they can't do that, can they?

Gymkata - 1985, d. Robert Clouse (youtube)
Knights of Badassdom - 2013ish, d. Joe Lynch (DVD)
The Dictator - 2012, d. Larry Charles (Netflix)
Flash Gordon - 1980, d. Mike Hodges (Netflix)

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Oh Gymkata, you have been sitting on my to-write-about list for what seems like forever.  I first caught wind of this film back in 2006 when it was released on DVD and was on display at my local Sunrise Records, with it's stark red painted poster cover of a semi-super-heroic athlete/action star taking out some ninjas.  I was just at the tail end of my "ironic enjoyment of bad cinema" phase (replete with attending Kung-Fu Fridays at the local Revue), so I wanted it, but I was also tight on funds so I let it go.  Still, I never really forgot about "the gymnastic action movie", and when it cropped up on the "How Did This Get Made" podcast and I learned the entire film was easily available on YouTube, how could I not watch it (especially since the HDTGM crew seemed to recommend it)?

To be honest, it's not that bad.  I mean as far as bad films go.  It's entertaining, using a Running Man/Most Dangerous Game type plot where a number of special operatives from different countries compete in this small nation's bloodsport tournament for a chance to appeal to its ruler and secure ....well, whatever the hell it was they were trying to secure.  The basic formula has been done dozens of times, but it's just as entertaining and nonsensical here as it ever is.  These type of bloodsport competitions always fall into fantasy no matter how horrific or puerile they are.  And when gymnast-turned-action star finds uneven bar and a pummel horse-like objects in the middle of crazy town (where all the crazies are kept) you can bet a deliriously dumb, but entertaining action sequence will ensue.  Stupid but great in that 1980's direct-to-video way.  Truly.

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David covered Knights of Badassdom's messed up release history already, so I won't retread it here.  This is a slight film, one that feels like it should have been longer, more epic, and hewing closer to the genres its attempting to emulate.  The short story finds a gang of LARPers (live action role players) unwittingly unleashing a real demon into their weekend tournament, and having little but foam swords and padded axes to defend themselves with.  Madness ensues.

The cast is extra impressive, a geek's delight of True Blood's Ryan Kwitney Kwanten, the immaculate Peter Dinklage, perennial nerd fawn Summer Glau, and Steve Zahn, with support from Mad Men's Michael Gladis and Community's Danny Pudi, with the film centering around Kwitney's recent relationship break-up and depression, and his roommates attempts to bring him into their world of role playing.  The through line of dealing with one's relationship demons, a metaphor literally coming to life here, is quaint and 1980's-inspired, but the execution, the technical limitations (and subsequent interference from studios and distributors) make for a choppy and unfulfilling experience.  Were the film to have a budget, it would play into the LARP fantasy and bring it to life (punctuating the exaggerated with the comedic reality), because when we the real LARP action happen before us, it's just rather dull.  When the film shifts into horror mode, it becomes quite evident the director Lynch doesn't have the experience (or possibly just the budget) to truly execute it as a horror film.  It's cheesy, low-budget, light-comedy horror and it's always in want of intensity.

It makes due with what it has and it provides a modicum of entertainment without sacrificing the LARPing community to punchline after punchline (redneck paintballers instead get that distinction), but it never hits the comedic highs it should and it just doesn't push itself hard enough.  It's a film that kind of screams "good enough".

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I'm trying to gauge my feelings on Sacha Baron Cohen at this stage.  Borat, quite rightfully, entered our popular consciousness because it was goddamn funny by being so very wrong.  But it was wrong with a sweet, ignorant core, and also an element of cultural satire underpinning it all.  Borat was one of three major characters that Cohen developed on his British television series Da Ali G Show alongside  Ali G and Bruno, both receiving the cinematic treatment, but not nearly to the same cultural penetration as Borat.  The foundation for these characters however was all based in the awkwardness of taping the interview segments between dim-witted, self-involved and unapologetically racist put-on characters and real people who are, in most cases not in on the joke.  This type of improv creates an unease that in gifted hands develops into riotous comedy.  But it's also exhausting and hard to revisit, hence my avoidance of most of Baron Cohen's work in recent years.

The Dictator eschews this type of improv, removing the interactions with the public of Borat in place of a scripted (though profusely ad-libbed) comedy that feels at once more comfortable, but less satisfying.  The Dictator is, in some ways, a rehash of the 1980's Eddie Murphy vehicle Coming To America, where a wealthy, out-of-touch individual must struggle for survival as a layman.  In this case it's the globally reviled dictator of a non-descript Middle Eastern country, Aladeen, who narrowly escapes his own assassination and schemes to retake his position, now held by his Uncle and a dimwit puppet double.  Along the way, he meets an old subject (the ever-amazing Jason Mantzoukas) whom he thought he had assassinated (turns out everyone he hed assassinated was actually relocated to New York) who wishes to help him for a price, and he falls in love with the crunchy granola whole-foods proprietor who gives him a job when he appears to be just another disheveled refugee named Paula Burgers (Aladeen has a terrible time coming up with fake names, a running joke in the film).

There are some solid comedic moments in this film, some aces running gags, but also a lot of duds that just come far too easy.  I imagine there's a pile of lengthy ad-lib takes on the cutting room floor that would be utterly hilarious but there's no sustained improv here, and the scene cuts and transitions are pained.  If this film has a fatal flaw, it's that Aladeen never becomes a likeable character.  He's always wrong-headed with such zeal that it's always on the cusp of being amusing (occasionally spilling over) but without ever being likeable, you never want to root for him.  I'll give him one thing though, his speech to the United Nations comparing living in a dicatorship to living in the US was potently funny, if only it really mattered that it was said.

My conclusion on Baron Cohen is that he certainly has a type he likes to play and how he likes to play it, and I'm not opposed to it, but I'm not always receptive to it either.  I think perhaps a dosed watching of Ali G may make my mind up for me.

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What amazes me about watching Flash Gordon is how terrible it looks at first, especially upon realizing that it was made after Star Wars.  It's clunky and awful, and its flaws further exacerbated by a cornball opening sequence of a video screen showing natural disasters as the bejeweled glove of Ming the Merciless presses buttons activating these events (including one labeled "Hot Hail".  This leads to the introduction of our protagonists, Flash Gordon, football hero, and Dale Arden, travel agent, on a chartered plane caught in the Hot Hailstorm.  The pair lack both chemistry and acting chops, playing the roles straight out of a community college production.  Sam Jones looks the part perfectly, but he just isn't a strong enough actor to pull it off. 

Things get a fair sight better with the introduction of Dr. Zarkon, played by the always lively Topol, and he kidnaps the duo, straight out of their crashed plane into his rocket ship that takes them on a psychedelic trip to a wormhole and Ming the Merciless' home planet.  From here the set design and costuming take over for the lackluster story and pitiable leads, with vibrant and elaborate stage sets that are wonderful to behold, and a parade of costumes that today still look fantastic (sorry lizard men, not you though).

At a certain point, Max Von Sidow, Topol, Brian Blessed, Timothy Dalton and the fetching Ornella Muti start to take over, elevating the quality of the presence on screen, delivering enjoyable performances in a somewhat dreadful and misguided production.

The conceit of the 1980's Flash Gordon is that it's a then-modern retelling of the 1930's pulp serials, and it does an all-too-good job of recapturing that aesthetic.  But capturing and directly relaying that nostalgia to a post-Star Wars, post-Alien, post-2001 crowd was a fatal flaw and has largely driven a nail in the character since.  Looking at the poster gallery for the film, there's a tremendous amount of wonderful pulpy and 50's sci-fi inspired images.  It's a terrible movie with a certain amount of pleasantness that ultimately sucks you in to admiring it, but still has problems you can't get past...like a curious-looking girl made more beautiful with her charm but disarming everyone with her braying horse laugh. 

Flash! Ah AAAH!