Review – Zardoz

Yeah, I could see the world turning out like this after the Hippie Apocalypse. On the other hand, I don’t think John Boorman was really going for post-Armageddon realism here. Instead this is approximately half ham-handed allegory about British class structure and half low-budget sci fi costume epic. Sean Connery (who must have lost a bet or something) stars as Zed, a member of a cruel class of enforcers who murder, rape and enslave the hoi polloi for the sake of growing crops for an effete elite. Our story kicks off when the protagonist sneaks aboard the giant, floating head occupied by one of the overlords and shoots him for no apparent reason. Things go downhill from there. This is one of those movies that’s probably a lot better when you’re stoned. Sober audiences tend to want things like plot and character development. On the other hand, chemical impairment helps one relate to this sort of thing on the level of “whoa, dude, if we had one of those floating heads then we could go float through the Wendy’s drive-thru at 2 a.m. and be all like ‘Give us free french fries! Zardoz commands it!’” I’m not recommending drug use, but then I’m not recommending this movie, either. See if desperate

Review – Mulberry Street

And to think that I saw it. New York City is up to its earlobes in were-rats (yes, you read that right). The things have a certain 28 Days Later quality to them, but otherwise they’re about as scary as you’d expect them to be. The principal problem with this production is that it’s all wind-up and no pitch. Things stay interesting as long as the characters are trying to figure out what’s going on, but once we’ve firmly established that the city has a bad case of were-rats, the movie turns into a tedious parade of “oh no, were-rats! Run away!” We also get “treated” to excessive, pointless animal cruelty toward the end, and of course that’s an automatic deduction on the ratings scale. See if desperate

Review – Nightwatch

The most interesting part of this whole movie was watching Ewan McGregor do his rounds as the night watchman at the morgue. All the rest is one of those pictures that specialize in uncomfortable moments. McGregor’s character – a law student who moonlights at the aforementioned job – is being framed for a series of brutal killings. Who is the real culprit? The obnoxious friend? The creepy doctor? The too-friendly cop? Only time will tell. Well, time and the immense volume of patience it takes to sit through a tiresome parade of awkward social situations punctuated by gut-wrenching, misogynist murders. See if desperate

Review – Into the Wild

Gosh, it’s just so awful to have to grow up well-to-do and get a college education. I can see why that would make a guy want to shuck it all and go live in an abandoned bus in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness. I suppose if I were a 20-something white guy with a case of suburban wanderlust, this might strike me as interesting if not inspirational. As it is, however, I found it off-putting. I suppose it’s supposed to be ironic in the Alanis Morissette sense of the word that a young man this selfish should end up dying as a result of his own isolation. But honestly the only wonder I found in the whole production was that his sojourn in the wilderness didn’t kill him faster than it did. See if desperate

Review – The Invasion

Once again Invasion of the Body Snatchers hits the big screen. This time around Nicole Kidman stars as a psychiatrist who starts to notice more and more strange behavior going on around her. The film-makers decided to get right to the point, exposing the true nature of the invasion right in the first few minutes. That’s understandable, as most audience members are likely to be familiar with the rules of the game from previous incarnations. However, it’s also a terrible shame, because a big part of the fun of this particular sub-genre is watching the characters figure out that their world is being taken over by pods. The budget is big and production values correspondingly high, but overall it’s no better than earlier efforts. Mildly amusing

Review – No Country for Old Men

Though not the worst movie I saw this weekend, this still won’t make the list of the Coen brothers’ finest moments. A trailer-dweller out on a hunting expedition stumbles across the scene of a drug deal gone bad. He steals a case containing $2 million, which turns out to be a mistake. In fairly short order a psychotic hitman – the guy kills people with an air hammer – is on his trail. The rest of the movie is a violent caper flick with a faint hint of Fargo but far too much Cormack McCarthy to leave a good taste in one’s mouth. See if desperate

Review – There Will Be Blood

There will be boredom. This Terrence-Malick-esque production is based on an Upton Sinclair novel about an oil driller corrupted by greed. The protagonist – played with usual hammy aplomb by Daniel Day-Lewis – has little or no character development. He starts out as a selfish jerk and remains so throughout the picture. The only real function to the two-plus-hours of screen time is to find new ways for the man’s greed to make him miserable. In the almost complete absence of a story arc, the parade of misfortune swiftly becomes intolerably tedious. See if desperate

Review – The Eagle

I’ll bet if you watched this back to back with Gladiator and 300 that you’d die of testosterone poisoning, even if you’re a woman. A Roman officer (Channing Tatum) ventures north of Hadrian’s Wall in search of the eagle standard of the vanished Ninth Legion. After a couple of hours of manly manliness, they run out of film. Some of the fight scenes are okay, which is a good thing because the picture doesn’t have much else going for it. Mildly amusing

Review – Never Cry Werewolf

Strike one: Sci Fi Channel “original.” Strike two: blatant “homage” to Fright Night. Fortunately, we never quite get to strike three. Oddly enough, shape-shifters turn out to be a slight improvement over blood-suckers. The folks who made this one also decided to go with a female protagonist, which allowed the main character to play both the hero and the villain’s obsessive love interest. The budget is low, so the effects are imaginative but poorly executed. Overall this isn’t a masterpiece of modern cinema, but it could have been considerably worse. Mildly amusing

Review – The Brave One

Here we have a post-feminist remake of Death Wish. Everything’s okay for a woman (Jodie Foster) who does a radio show about the streets of New York. Too bad she and her fiancé decide to take the dog to Central Park after sunset. After the predictable mugging puts her in the hospital and her boyfriend in the morgue, the slow road to recovery leads to a pistol purchase and inevitably to a series of vigilante slayings. The gender reversal from the standard revenge flick allows the protagonist to have a more emotionally honest reaction to her rage and fear. It also allows romantic tension between the killer and the cop on her tail (Terrence Howard). Otherwise this is a typical specimen. Mildly amusing

Review – Boo

Boo crappy horror movie! Hooray beer! Seriously, I think we’ve officially reached the point where the Halloween-fake-haunted-house-turns-out-to-really-be-haunted thing isn’t even ironic in the Alanis Morissette sense anymore. And this is a particularly stale sample of the sub-genre. The abandoned asylum for the criminally insane provides fodder for a few cheap-yet-entertaining shocks, but there’s only the flimsiest excuse for a plot stringing the scares together. Dee Wallace-Stone puts in an appearance as a spectral nurse who tries to keep the spectral serial killer imprisoned. See if desperate

Review – Raptor

A small town is attacked by one of the flimsiest rubber dinosaurs ever recorded on film. This is a lobotomized reheat of Jurassic Park, fit primarily for the likes of Corben Bernsen (seriously, ditch the hats and come to grips with your male pattern baldness) and Julia Roberts’s brother. Over the years I’ve developed a tolerance for crappy horror movies, so I was willing to grant a bit of leeway on the cheap puppets. But there’s no excuse for a script so bad it could have been written by an especially talentless high school student. Not that even a brilliant script would have been a match for editing so choppy that in some places the production becomes strangely, unintentionally funny. See if desperate

Review – Zoo

Ick ick ick ick ick. This made me want to buy a cleaning disc to scrub my DVD player out. Director Robinson Devor – who evidently has spent way too much time watching Errol Morris movies – serves up a slickly-produced, re-enactment-intensive documentary about zoophiles who have sex with horses. Sadly, Devor and company appear to have missed the point Morris was trying to make with his documentaries about controversial events and people such as Fred Leuchter. Rather than making the subject seem multi-faceted and interesting, all the fancy lighting and laconic pace accomplish here is to boldly accent how disgusting the subjects are. It doesn’t help that the whole thing centers around a man – known within the four corners of the documentary only as Mr. Hands despite the public availability of his actual name – who died of internal injuries resulting from indulging his particular passion. The dead guy and his friends spent time downloading bestiality porn, collecting bestiality movies, and having horse-screwing sex parties at the farm owned by a couple of the guys in the group. Thus they come across solely as perverts, close cousins to child molesters. Though the running time was a brief 76 minutes, it was still far too long to have to spend in the company of such people. Ick. See if desperate

Review – Bugs

This starts out as a Mimic mimic but then segues into an Aliens rip-off. A multi-million-dollar subway system is jeopardized when it turns out to be infested with giant, prehistoric bugs. Sending in a SWAT team doesn’t help matters much, either. Cheap. Stupid. Dull. See if desperate

Review – Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

Well, at least now it’s over. The cast is the same (with the brief addition of Chow Yun Fat). The effects are the same. The budget is huge. The running time is long. But despite strict adherence to the formula, this one falls short. The major problem has to do with the script. The plot is an endless parade of double-crosses, legal manipulations and other complications, and the intrigues swiftly overwhelm character, action, or anything else that might have made this movie interesting to anyone besides lawyers. A little less who’s-back-stabbing-whom and more of the clever quirkiness that made the original so good, and this would have been a more apt conclusion to the trilogy. Mildly amusing

Review – House of the Dead 2

This is a marginal improvement over the first one. The production values are worse, but the script is a little better. Otherwise a change in location – college rather than deserted island – is the only real difference between this one and the original. See if desperate

Review – Vertigo

This movie was a lot creepier than I thought it was going to be. Jimmy Stewart stars as a detective with a fear of heights, a phobia that supplies the cinematographers with plenty of excuses to play around with their zoom lenses. Enter Kim Novak as the apparently-disturbed wife of an old school chum. Just at the two seem to be getting an affair underway, she commits suicide by jumping from a bell tower. Or did she? While wandering the streets, our distraught hero sees a woman who bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Novak. The encounter drives him to a perverse desire to force the woman to dress, look and act exactly like his lost love. The twists and turns – particularly toward the end – left me wondering if Hitchcock was parodying or celebrating his own fetishistic obsession with bottle blondes. After all, one can scarcely help but notice that the grey outfit Stewart forces Novak to wear shows up again five years later on Tippi Hedren in The Birds. Overall this is one of the better entries in the list of movies that leave you with an icky feeling. Mildly amusing

Review – The Walking Dead

Despite a title that suggests George Romero (or perhaps Uwe Boll), this turns out to be an old Boris Karloff picture from 1936. Ah, if only we could return to the golden age when movies actually had to have scripts rather than huge effects budgets. Karloff plays an ex-con who gets framed for the murder of the judge who sent him up. The only two people in the world who know he didn’t do it are a young couple who work for a brilliant scientist. Unfortunately they don’t come forward until it’s too late to save him from the chair. But fear not, the scientist has come up with a way to bring the guy back from the dead. Once he’s back … well, the plot takes more twists than I can really cover here. Of particular note is the set used as the scientist’s lab. It’s got a lot of the spark-emitting doodads, but the room itself is medical-doctor clean and white rather than mad-scientist Transylvanian. I happened across this picture while channel surfing, and I’m glad I stayed to watch. Mildly amusing

Review – Aztec Rex

If you reshot Apocalypto as a Sci Fi Channel movie, this is most likely what you’d end up with. The idea – to the extent there is one – is that in his (fictional) first voyage to the Americas, Cortez and a small band of conquistadors end up in a valley inhabited by a small group of Aztecs who worship a pair of tyrannosaurs. Cortez’s ratty wig notwithstanding, the real star of the show is the special effects, bad even by Sci Fi standards. Indeed, I recorded this in advance based on the assumption that The Soup would whet my appetite to watch it (not a bad guess, as it turned out). Still, I suppose I should be grateful for such video-game-esque CGI. If the monsters were any more realistic, I might have actually felt sorry for them. See if desperate

Review – Rent

Jonathan Larson’s Broadway musical makes it to the big screen, transforming it into something even more cynical and exploitative than it was to begin with. Somewhere deep down this wants to be La Boheme, but what it becomes instead is New York City singing itself a long, tedious love song. The film version is competently performed and assembled. However, that did little to wash the taste of Hair – only with less Vietnam and more AIDS – out of my mouth. See if desperate

Review – C.H.U.D.

They should have called the monsters Cannibalistic Reptilian Underground Dwellers. That would have given the movie a far more apt title. Here we have the disjointed tale of New Yorkers besieged by toxic-waste-spawned bio-horrors from the sewer system. As long as they confine their dining to the subterranean homeless population, the authorities won’t do much. But once they start dragging upstanding citizens off to culinary doom, the cops and the NRC move into action. Overall this plays like Humanoids from the Deep relocated to the big city. Mildly amusing

Review – Brainscan

Normally I’d lead with some kind of “it came from the 80s” remark, but this one actually proved that this kind of picture lingered on at least until 1994. Once again Hollywood schlock-meisters try to get a Freddy Krueger thing going. This time the bad guy goes by The Trickster, and he lives in a video game that bores into the player’s head and creates an ultra-realistic virtual reality where the idea is to kill without being caught. Unfortunately the scariest thing about the bad guy is the terribleness of his punk hairdo appliance. Overall this plays like a violent version of Drop Dead Fred. See if desperate

Review – Cocaine Fiends

This was the third entry in a triple feature of anti-drug movies from the 1930s recently run on Turner Classic Movies. And truth be told, by the time I got to the end they’d all started to blend together. So if I remember this correctly, it’s the tale of a girl living a wholesome life in small-town America until a smooth criminal gets her hooked on “headache powder.” From there it’s off to the big city to become a gangster’s moll and then a cast-aside former moll. Her brother comes to rescue her, but he too succumbs to the deadly lure of devil dust. My favorite part was when one of the urban temptresses was trying to seduce brother hick. She invites him to a snow-party with the snowbirds. “But it isn’t winter,” he protests. “Gosh, you really are dumb,” she replies. Yes he is. But then why should he be any different from anyone or anything else in this movie? Mildly amusing

Review – Marihuana

This one’s even worse than the better-known Reefer Madness. Actually in a way it’s better, because the portrayal of pot-heads is a bit more realistic in this one. It’s still wildly inaccurate, but at least this time around a single puff of the “devil’s weed” isn’t quite enough to turn a person into a rampaging lunatic. Instead, pot is cast as a gateway drug. On the other hand, the production values are so terrible that just watching this movie is a bit like being high. Many of the edits make no sense, and the plot follows little if any particular path. The random structure is so disjointed that it’s like trying to watch a movie after you’ve taken something (a few hits, perhaps) that have slowed your thought processes down to the point that you’re having trouble following what’s going on. Still, the most laughable part of the movie is the “heroine.” Burma (when she’s high does she go by Myanmar?) is transformed from a typical middle-class good girl with a mild case of teen angst into a dope-shooting crime queen who ends up kidnapping her own illegitimate daughter. Mildly amusing

Review – Reefer Madness

All these many years after first hearing about this cult classic, I finally got around to watching it. Eh. Obviously the bulk of this warning about the evils of marijuana is ridiculous. Anyone who’s ever known a pot-head is already aware that they’re generally incapable of much more than sitting on the couch, watching the tube and maybe microwaving a frozen burrito now and then. But apparently back in the 1930s some folks were of the opinion that pot was some kind of combination of LSD, PCP and meth. Its victims become spastic and hyperactive. They hallucinate. Soon their lust for crime and sexual depravity (including ladies who show their slips) knows no bounds. The problem with making up lies about something you don’t like is that it brands you as a liar and makes your opponents seem better by comparison. Mildly amusing

Review – The Deadly Mantis

While I think there might be a good horror story in the combination of monsters and the DEW Line, this isn’t it. A giant bug puppet is unfrozen from the polar ice cap and slowly chews its way south to Washington D.C., surviving multiple attempts to do it in. Though this might not have been so bad back in the 1950s, by 21st century standards the effects are too terrible and the characters too ridiculous for this to be worth much more than a laugh. The sexist treatment of the movie’s only female character is particularly ridiculous. See if desperate

Review – The Blob (1988)

The original was an entertaining movie, and I think it could provide a solid basis for a good sequel or remake. Unfortunately, this ain’t it. The effects are nothing to write home about, though they are better than the 50s version. The monster’s origin as an out-of-control bioweapons experiment wasn’t bad, certainly in keeping with the mid-80s milieu. But the time period that spawned this picture also supplied its downfall: the movie is stuck in the John-Hughes-esque mire of well-scrubbed teenagers who lead quirky little lives. It also doesn’t help that everyone who lives in this world looks like they’re fresh from the set of a Calvin Klein photo shoot (except for the soldiers, who are of course sporting the mandatory paranoid-fantasy bio-suits). If you collect movies about deadly goo from outer space, you’ll want to add this one. Otherwise there isn’t much to recommend it. Mildly amusing

Review – The Call of Cthulhu

Longtime readers of my thoughts on movies already know that I’m not easily impressed and even less so when the picture in question is an adaptation of a story by H.P. Lovecraft. But the folks who made this manage to pull it off. What they’ve done is genuinely innovative: the movie is put together as if it had been made at the time the source story came out. It’s silent and black and white. Further, they’re obviously well-versed in the conventions of the era, borrowing liberally from Haxan, Caligari and other masterpieces of silent horror. The use of models and stop-motion also give it a dream-like, period feel. Sticking to the story and using some of the tale’s actual locations also helped immensely. To date this is the truest and in many ways the best film adaptation of Lovecraft I’ve ever seen. Buy the disc

Review – Cloverfield

The scenes with monsters in them are actually pretty good. Too bad that’s a really small percentage of the total screen time. Part of me wants to applaud the risk taken here. A beast with no back story or logical modus operandi has a lot more scary potential than more conventional horror fare. Unfortunately the picture squanders the first 20 minutes of its less-than-90 total running time establishing the protagonists as vapid, New York yuppies. That might make them sympathetic to the film-makers’ fellow vapid, New York yuppies, but it leaves the rest of the world rooting for the monsters. If only the first quarter hadn’t worked so hard to wear out the movie’s welcome, this would have been a considerably better production. Mildly amusing