Review – The Tomb (2004)

This starts as a cheap Aztec rip-off of The Mummy and goes downhill from there. Normally I’d suggest that this kind of production appeared to be soft-core video porn with the porn cut out, but there may be something else going on. This was shot in Mexico and the Philippines by a crew with mostly-Italian surnames using actors who were pretty clearly speaking Spanish before a Speed-Racer-esque overdub got to them. So perhaps the clunkiness is cultural rather than merely a question of editing. Whatever the cause, however, this is terrible stuff. For example, brief bits of the special effects were “borrowed” without credit from the Indiana Jones movies. Even the disc itself was terrible; it had no menus to speak of, and it showed up on my computer as “logical volume identifier.” As the people who made this clearly didn’t waste much time on it, I see no reason for anyone else to. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Aberration

As a quick taste of the sheer terribleness of this movie, consider the plight of the heroine’s cat. Ten minutes in or so, and I was silently praying that the vicious lizards infesting the woman’s cabin would go ahead and kill the poor thing so I wouldn’t have to keep wondering when it was going to happen (which of course it did). Another taste: once the vicious-lizard plotlines have been fairly well exhausted, an ex-boyfriend appears out of nowhere for no obvious reason other than keeping the story going for the requisite 90 minutes. Indeed, the only redeeming quality in the whole ugly mess was that a woman with short hair actually survived to the end of the picture. Wish I’d skipped it

Genre: Horror

Subgenre: Monster
Date reviewed: 6/29/2008

Review – Archangel

The mystery set-up here is good. Daniel Craig stars as a Russian history professor who gets caught up in the search for secret documents Beria stole from Stalin on his deathbed. So instantly I was curious to know what could possibly be so horrible that a man who openly admitted to slaughtering millions of people would want to hide it? [spoiler alert] Once the mystery is unraveled, however, it turns into a Commie version of The Boys from Brazil. Overall this is a well-put-together piece. The story was entertaining, and I liked some of the location work. This isn’t the best Russian intrigue movie I’ve ever seen, but it’s far from the worst. Mildly amusing

Review – Horrors of War

Horrors. War. But once again the two don’t make as good a combination as they should. Of course it doesn’t help when you start with a budget this low and then shoot a script this bad. Hitler fields zombie storm-troopers in a last-ditch effort to salvage victory in 1944. They’re hard to kill, so we counter-attack with a werewolf, a sergeant who was bitten by a lycanthrope while his squad-mates were raping the monster’s sisters. He’s part of a squad of anti-weird-stuff operatives, sort of a cross between an elite fighting unit and Goober and the Ghost Chasers. Further detraction is supplied by the plotline popping back and forth in the event sequence, which would have made it hard to follow if there’d been much to follow to begin with. Also, the picture features several extended gun battles so poorly staged that they’re boring beyond description. See if desperate

Review – Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)

Of all the Blys who have come and gone over the years, Charles Laughton is still the best. He does arrogant, cruel and British with chilling perfection. Clark Gable is adequate as Christian, and the supporting cast is good as well. Indeed, my only real complaint about this production is that the drama is somewhat cartoonish. Bly starts out bad and gets worse. Subsequent versions have shown that he’s a bit more fun when portrayed in a more historically-accurate light. Otherwise this picture holds its own quite well against later, more sophisticated versions. Mildly amusing

Review – The Unknown Soldier

All these years later, and Germany still hasn’t quite come to grips with World War Two. The controversy here centers around an exhibit documenting the Wehrmacht’s complicity – even active participation – in the Final Solution. To be sure, this must have come as quite a shock to some. The only-the-SS-did-that-sort-of-thing myth spared many a father and grandfather in the eyes of German families. Toward that end, I wish this documentary had spent more time on the documentation of the German army’s direct role in atrocities. I know I griped about Shoah’s excessive obsession with the fine details, but this movie errs in the other direction. In place of footage of neo-Nazis making asses of themselves, the links could have been made more concrete. However, overall this is an interesting portrait of a nation still conflicted over the darker corners of its common heritage. Mildly amusing

Review – Untraceable

The psycho in this piece of shit tortures a kitten to death before the opening credits roll. Pathetic torture porn shot with a big budget is still just pathetic torture porn. Movie makers everywhere are hereby served with notice that I’m not going to sit through this shit anymore. Avoid at all costs

Review – Zombie Night

Oh yes it’s zombie night, and the feeling’s right, oh yes it’s zombie night, oh what a night. Seriously, if a local bar actually had zombie night then we should all dress up like zombies so we could load up on cheap drinks and get so plastered that we could reduce ourselves mentally to the state required to enjoy crap like this. Here we have further proof – which I’m quite sure wasn’t necessary – that in a world where any idiot with a video camera can make a movie, the world soon fills with movies made by idiots with video cameras. This is strictly an idiot-with-a-video-camera version of Night of the Living Dead and/or Dawn of the Dead. And that just boggles my mind. If you’re going to make a movie, why not try something original? What possible point could there be to producing something that only makes the audience wish we’d watched the older, better show? In total fairness, I admit that around an hour and 20 minutes in, my DVD player decided it had had enough. So if some flash of brilliance occurred in the last ten minutes or so, I missed it. But if the last ten were like the first 80, my player did me a favor. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – The Grudge 2

One of my principal gripes about round one was its almost complete lack of plot. Here they seem to be trying to work around the inability to come up with 90 minutes worth of story by breaking the production down into three at best semi-related subplots (though once again the word “plot” is used loosely). All the story lines have in common is the presence of the spooky ghost woman and cat-noise-making ghost kid from the original. Tripling the use of the booga-booga elements should have made the movie better, but instead it just over-exposes them to the point where they lose their power to shock. See if desperate

Review – Iron Man

Yet another classic Marvel comic makes it to the big screen. I actually liked this one better than I thought I was going to. I wasn’t a big fan of the print version; Iron Man always seemed to be teaming up with other heroes, and I preferred the lone wolves. But this movie makes some good points about the military-industrial complex on top of serving up a parade of flashy special effects. Robert Downey doesn’t play intense as well as he used to, but naturally he pulls off the Tony-Stark-party-animal without a hitch. Gwenyth Paltrow looks good with the slightly darker hair color, even though her role doesn’t amount to much. The script is solid and the dialogue reasonably witty. But of course the real star of the show is the suit, which plays its part without a hitch. Mildly amusing

Review – Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

With a title like that, the movie’s likely to suck. And unfortunately it lives up – or should that be down – to expectations. This picture is so deeply dependent on mindless exploitation of its own series conventions that it’s like watching an especially dumb predator trying to eat itself. Before the end credits roll, our hero has discovered that he has a son (sorry if that’s a spoiler, but the presences of Shia LeBoeuf and Karen Allen in the cast list should have been a dead giveaway anyway), survived a nuclear blast by hiding in a refrigerator, reunited a space alien with its head, and been saved from Commie evildoers by an attacking wave of monkeys (the most sickening, implausible rescue operation since the Ewoks). Harrison Ford may be too old for this sort of thing, but he’s a spring chicken compared to the clichés that drive this picture from beginning to end. It isn’t even technically a good picture. The pacing is uneven. The effects are lackluster. And if I notice continuity errors on first viewing, that’s a strong indication that the filmmakers aren’t even trying (and I’ve gotten bored enough to notice where the ketchup bottles are placed on the table). See if desperate

Review – Maxed Out

Bravo to everyone fighting the good fight against the credit insanity inflicting this society. This low-budget documentary makes a lot of excellent points about the dangerously morally bankrupt economy we’ve created for ourselves. The collection companies and credit card corporation executives are clichés on the order of Fagin or Simon Legree. Some of the victims effectively play the role of helpless sufferers, while others seem more as if they used shovels bought on credit to dig their own financial graves. Though overall this is an interesting, informative piece of work, two things would have made it better. First, the filmmakers should have spent more time interviewing their experts about how to avoid being exploited by the system. I didn’t need a full-fledged Dave Ramsey seminar, but at least a little practical advice would have been nice. And second, the title cards were almost completely illegible. Use a font people can read, for cryin’ out loud. Otherwise just keep up the good work. Mildly amusing

Review – Terror

Horrible English ghost crap from the late 70s. A hypnosis trick in an old house sticks a vengeful ghost into a hapless party-goer. My favorite scene was when a crew trying to shoot a porn movie – with the guy’s pants on in a bathtub, no less – is attacked by the set. This case of the scenery chewing the actors was as close as the production ever came to doing anything clever. See if desperate

Review – Land of the Minotaur

Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasance are both totally squandered in this dreadful Greek production. A devil cult led by Cushing sacrifices tight-pants-wearing twenty-somethings to a statue of the Minotaur. The statue itself was the source of at least some interest, in that it looked like it was made of papier-maché yet had blow torches blasting out of its nose. The cult members’ Klan-looking robes also supplied some amusement, at least until we ran out of redneck jokes. Other than that, this is an amateurish, has-the-director-ever-even-seen-a-movie hack job. See if desperate

Review – By Dawn's Early Light

If a real nuclear war was this big a cluster fuck, that’s just one more reason why it’s a good thing we never got around to having one. In this drama the whole mess gets sparked by a mysterious missile attack on a Soviet city, and things go downhill from there. Before the end of the movie, NORAD has been wiped out, the country is being run by the Secretary of the Interior, and just about every officer in the entire military has disobeyed orders in one way or another (ranging from simple incompetence to high treason). Overall this is a made-for-HBO reheat of Fail Safe that came along just in time for the Cold War to end and render the whole thing moot. See if desperate

Review – Shrek the Third

Third verse, same as the first. Or at least same as the second. This time around Shrek is trying to get a teenager to take over the throne of Far Far Away when the land is invaded by blah blah blah. If you liked the first two, odds are you’ll like this one as well. The only real difference I noticed was that the mood was ever so slightly darker in this effort. For example, when Fiona’s father dies, the soundtrack treats us to “Live and Let Die” during the funeral. Frankly, that sort of thing seems inappropriate in what had previously been a strictly-light-hearted kids’ series. Mildly amusing

Review – Music & Lyrics

Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant star in the romantic comedy you’d expect this pair to make. Actually, that’s not completely fair. The plot – aging 80s pop star attempts to get back into the game with the help of a quirky young woman with a gift for lyrics – provides enough script fodder that the story doesn’t get bogged down with romantic rivalries or other unnecessary genre canards. Beyond that, however, this is standard fare. Grant delivers one “witty” quip after another. Barrymore bops back and forth between giggly and neurotic. And of course we get a happy ending. What more can we expect from such an offering? Mildly amusing

Review – Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

After watching the Tim Burton Hollywood version, it was nice to see it done as the Broadway stage production it started out to be. Most of the cast is too old for their roles, a fact brought out by the video close-ups to which a theatre-goer would not be privy. Still, it’s better to have singers with the experience to play their roles rather than youngsters who look the part but can’t act it. This was particularly true of headliner Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Lovett. The sparse sets and extra musical numbers further accent Sondheim’s apparent aspiration to be Brecht, but this is nonetheless an entertaining show on its own or in conjunction with the movie. Mildly amusing

Review – Trapped in the Closet

Imagine the dumbest possible turn a plot could take, and you’ll always know what’s going to happen before it happens in this miserable farce by hip hop “artist” R. Kelly. The musician’s imagination never extends farther than the most prurient, puerile, Springer-esque pseudo-scandals. For example, when he introduces a woman named Bridget, we instantly know that she’s been having sex with a little person. We know this not only because the only place in the kitchen her husband hasn’t searched yet is under the sink but also because her name is Bridget, which rhymes with a term that’s consistent with the taste level throughout this wretched crap. The experience is further marred by bizarre inconsistencies. The narration switches between first and third person. The language is censored in some sections but not in others. In a way it’s a shame that this is such a muddled mess, because the idea of “hip hop opera” has some merit. But boy does this ever not prove the point. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Dudley Do-Right

George of the Jungle relocated to Canada. This one follows the formula from the previous Brendan Fraser cartoon vehicle right down to the inclusion of a Monty Python alum (Eric Idle this time, and at least he doesn’t have to voice an ape). Unfortunately, except for a few gags here and there, this one’s even dumber than the previous one. See if desperate

Review – Haxan

This is one weird movie. It’s silent. It’s Danish. It’s a combination of history lecture, drama, and experimental art piece. Despite all that, however, it’s an oddly effective treatment of the medieval witch hysteria. The bizarre recreations of satanic doings at sabbats alone make this visually radical, especially for the era. This rewards a look, but be careful about what version you watch. The Janus Collection print recreates the tinting, but it also reproduces the random and often mismatched soundtrack from the original screening in Denmark. There’s also a version that sticks to black and white, and William Burroughs reads the narration. Mildly amusing

Review – Body of Evidence

I’m actually sort of impressed by this. Who would have thought it was actually possible to make a movie even crappier than Basic Instinct? True, for all his ham Willem DaFoe can’t out-suck Michael Douglas. But Madonna has Sharon Stone beat hands-down. The pop singer’s wooden delivery is matched only by her willingness to strip at the slightest provocation. Other than the down-turn in talent, this might as well be the Douglas/Stone movie all over again. Sure, it has a new wrinkle or two. This bleached-blonde temptress does it for money, not for pleasure. And a lot of the drama takes place inside a none-too-convincing courtroom. But otherwise it’s strictly leftovers that didn’t microwave particularly well. See if desperate

Review – The Cult of the Suicide Bomber

The suicide bombing of the Beirut Marine Barracks appears to have left a lasting impression on former CIA operative Robert Baer. That’s understandable, of course, though his obsession comes out in odd ways here and there in this documentary. That notwithstanding, this is a solid piece of film-making tracing the problem of suicide bombing in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Israel back to its roots in the Iran-Iraq War. Baer gets access to an impressive array of interview subjects ranging from a high-placed Ayatolah to an Israeli intelligence officer to the families of terrorist-martyr youths. Though not as balanced as it could have been, it was nonetheless more balanced than I expected. Certainly worth a look for anyone who’s interested in the topic. Mildly amusing

Body Snatching 101: Up to our eyeballs in pods

Body snatching isn’t the same business it was 55 years ago.

That’s no surprise. Society isn’t the same place it used to be, so naturally the aliens who invade it have had to adapt a bit over the years. Things that worked well in 1953 are counterproductive  now, and vice versa.

When the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers came out, subtlety was the watchword of the day. Aliens slipped silently into Small Town America, looking to take over before anyone even noticed they were there. They were vulnerable in the light of day, able to replicate our bodies and replace us only if we were dumb enough to fall asleep next to their pods.

This fit McCarthyism to a tee. We needn’t fear large-scale assault from outer space. One way or another, we’d find a way to put a stop to that. The Thing from Another World was easy enough to snuff once we drew it into an ambush. Even the Martians in The War of the Worlds succumbed to a little unintentional biological warfare. In a stand-up fight, nothing beats the U.S. of A. Even our germs kick ass.

What we really needed to worry about was becoming what we feared. The Soviets might never get past the DEW line, but democracy made us vulnerable to Marxism from within. Too much live-and-let-live would soon have us living with monsters from outer space, beasts that thrived on our tolerance. And we knew we couldn’t count on their tolerance in return. If they got a toe-hold – or worse, managed to seize control – they’d forcibly make each of us one of them. Scary stuff.

Fast-forward 25 years. The Commies aren’t gone, but they don’t seem to be our number one concern anymore. In their place, we find ourselves haunted by a more general sense that things are going wrong. We can’t quite put our fingers on it. Our respect for society’s institutions – particularly government and religion – had eroded. In its place, many took up alternative belief systems – cults, if you want to use the pejorative – or turned to pop psychology. In this environment, one can scarcely plead surprise when our friends and neighbors point their fingers at us and make the spooky noise-from-hell. Must have been our engrams showing.

Clearly the time had come for a different kind of invasion. The decades since the first one improved the shock-meisters’ craft a bit. The dog with the human head was a nice touch. And of course there’s the ending. Several years after the first time I saw this go-around, Mrs. Lens wanted to visit the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker amusement park. I declined, fearing (and rightly so, I still believe) that the pointing and hissing would commence the moment we set foot on the property.

The 90s version – like the 90s themselves – didn’t leave much of an impression on me. To the extent that I recall it at all, it registers only as the basic pod-people rules grafted onto a cheap thriller fit for the Sci Fi Channel.

And now the body snatchers are back, and this time they’re serious. They’ve got a big budget and some pricey stars (particularly Nicole Kidman in the lead). And this time around, they’re different.

Some of the differences are purely mechanical. For example, now the invaders are a virus. They don’t need to bother with the complicated process of luring us into sleeping next to pods. A scratch, bite, or even some spit will do the trick. That’s only natural. In the age after AIDS and Richard Preston, everyone’s afraid of infection.

But they aren’t just more virulent this time around. They’re also smarter. They don’t waste time puttering around Smallville. One of the first people they “convert” is the head of the CDC. That puts them in a great position to lie to us about their existence, and things progress naturally from there.

That’s very much in keeping with what we know about the pods who run the country in the real world. Up through the end of the 20th century, we still had enough lingering democracy left to impel the evil assholes in charge to at least pretend not to be evil assholes while dealing with the public. For example, Ronald Reagan – arch-pod of the 1980s – might have been slaughtering AIDS victims by the thousands while blithely giving aid and comfort to our enemies in Iran, but on TV he was everyone’s smilin’ granddad.

But no longer. One of the great failings of the Manchurian Candidate remake was that its plot depended on the need for a sinister corporation to maintain a veil of secrecy over its seizure of the Oval Office. That might have played a decade or two ago, but we’d recently openly elected a ticket that filled the two highest offices of the Executive Branch with corporate executives. Everybody knew it. Nobody seemed to care.

So when the pods in the new “Invasion of” movie do little or nothing to conceal their nature. It’s like they’re riffing on Treehouse of Horror: “Yeah, we’re evil asshole monsters from outer space. What are you going to do about it? Vote Libertarian?” Indeed, the only surprise in the whole picture is that anyone doesn’t want to be a pod. Resistance isn’t in keeping with the go-with-the-flow attitude that prevails in the new millennium. And of course that makes the happy ending all the more implausible.

Review – Hair

Get a job, lousy hippies. Seriously, this musical massively fails at this point in our nation’s history simply because it now needs 21st-century audiences to sympathize with frivolous flower children. The lead hippie (Treat Williams) is particularly nettlesome. Almost all of his lines are arguments of one kind or another. And not good, sensible, productive arguments, either. After awhile, it’s like watching one of those episodes of “Cops” where a belligerent drunk futilely tries to order the police to take the handcuffs off. Over-arty choreography by Twyla Tharp doesn’t exactly help, nor does the 60s-era-liberal-white-person’s take on race relations. This might have had an important message to impart back when it first came out, but now it’s just a tedious relic. See if desperate

Review – The Mask of Fu Manchu

I’m actually a little astonished that this level of racism was considered acceptable even in 1931. Boris Karloff stars as the sinister Asian, with Myrna Loy backing him up as his equally-creepy daughter. Of course the stereotypical portrayal of the “heathen Chinee” is nothing new (nor is it all that out-dated, at least judging by its resurfacing as recently as the Trade Federation mandarins in The Phantom Menace). What makes this stand out from garden-variety bigotry is the constant emphasis on the Asian menace to white, Anglo-American society. Our buddy Fu is after the mask and sword from Genghis Khan’s tomb so he can use them to unite non-occidentals of all stripes (East Asians, Muslims, even Cossacks) behind his push to exterminate white men and steal their women (I’m not making this up or being sarcastic). He even has some black guys in his employ, used when a white captive is in need of a good flogging. I’d like to give this at least one point for exhibiting some fun special effects, but the offense is simply too great. Wish I’d skipped it