Review – Odysseus: Voyage to the Underworld

Yet another classic tale takes a short trip directly to SyFy. Arnold Vosloo heads a no-star cast of mooks stranded on the shores of an island infested with bat-demon-dudes. The evil creatures are in league with Persephone, who is trying to seduce Odysseus so she can … oh, honestly. See if desperate

Free to Be 35 years older

At the outset, I apologize for the fact that this one is hard to read. It was originally configured differently, and Blogger doesn't work well with tables.

Gather ‘round kids, and prepare to journey with me more than a quarter century into the past, back to the days when it still looked like the human race had a future. Yes, once upon a time there were people who were actually dumb enough to believe that things like gender-based bigotry and rampant consumerism could be challenged, maybe even overcome.

We sure showed them, huh?

In 1972 a group of popular performers – actors, singers, even an athlete – got together to produce a record called “Free to Be … You and Me.” Marlo Thomas was the primary creative force behind the project, though she certainly had plenty of big-name help. The result was a collage of songs, poems, dialogues and stories about the importance of accepting ourselves and one another for who we were without regard to social expectations.

In the Free to Be world, girls didn’t have to grow up to be mommies and boys were allowed to have human emotions. People could be happy without buying products to make them so. Greedy, pushy jerks didn’t prosper, and people liked each other.

Needless to say, in retrospect all this optimism seems fairly naïve.

Two years later the record was turned into a TV special. So in honor of that auspicious occasion, I propose a special 35th Anniversary Free to Be Celebration (with media duly converged so it can hit cable, iTunes and its own website all at once). Of course we’ll need to take into account that the world looks a bit different now and rewrite some of the material.

For example: 

 

1972 / 1974		2009
Free to Be … You and Me		Free to Be Me … You Go Screw Yourself
It’s Alright to Cry – Football player Rosey Grier sings about how crying is a normal expression of human emotion.		The Diaper Baby – Some steroid-swilling, overpaid sports star rants about how showboating and taunting are acceptable emotional displays, but anything else should cause a person to be immediately ostracized.
Housework – Carol Channing reads a charming little poem explaining that advertising lies about the ability of consumer goods to make housework fun.		But this has electrolytes – A computer-animated lizard soothingly assures us that our lives will be nothing but sunshine as long as we keep buying crap.
“Ladies First!” – An obnoxious, snooty girl uses the old “ladies first” thing to obtain privileges not available to others. In the end she gets her come-uppance when she’s eaten by tigers.		Front of the Line – An obnoxious, snooty group of kids obtain privileges not available to others – particularly high-cost education they’re too stupid to benefit from – because their parents have lots of money. In the end they don’t get a come-uppance of any kind.
William Wants a Doll – Dad gets upset when William wants a doll to play with. But then Grandma calms him down by explaining that the kid merely wants to explore his normal, heterosexual impulse to learn to care for a child.		Quit Being a Fag, Kid – Dad gets upset when William wants a doll to play with. So he takes him hunting, makes him watch MMA, and teaches him to download hetero porn.
Atalanta – Marlo Thomas and Alan Alda retell an old Greek story about a woman who is *gasp* a talented athlete and *gasp gasp* doesn’t want to get married.		300 – Despite being nearly as muscular, masculine and vicious as their menfolk, women nonetheless embrace their status as second-class citizens. Spartans! Hoo-ah!
Girl Land – Outdated gender stereotypes are represented as an old, crumbling amusement park that’s being shut down.		Empowered Young Woman Land – A new park arises where the old one once stood. It promises exciting new rides that emphasize gender equality and self-actualization. But once you get inside, you notice that the place looks suspiciously like Girl Land with a fresh coat of paint.

Review – The Private Life of Henry VIII

I recorded this because I thought it might be a refreshing change from the Showtime-iness of The Tudors, but it lacked the strength of elements such as script that had to prevail back before the explicitness of made-for-cable series came along. At least the acting is good. Charles Laughton does fine work as Henry, doing his usual craftsmanlike job of laboring through his makeup. However, I was particularly fond of Elsa Lanchester’s brief appearance as Anne of Cleaves, especially her mugging and grimacing act to dissuade the king from consummating the marriage. Overall this wasn’t anyone’s finest hour, but it isn’t a bad handling of the subject particularly for 1933. Mildly amusing

Review – Righteous Kill

Righteous bore is more like it. This production banks a lot on the combined star power of Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro, so much in fact that we don’t get much else. The script is a weak excuse for a string of murders that appear to have been committed by a vengeful cop with a talent for dreadful poetry. As we’re only presented with two viable suspects (guess who), the only “mystery” is whether it’s the obvious one or the other one. Normally I’ve got a soft spot for Punisher-style revenge killing, but this picture is too little of that and too much celebrity actor crap. See if desperate

My eight favorite werewolf movies

After identifying all – or at least eight – of the ways a shape-shifting movie can go wrong, the least I can do is follow up with eight that actually get it right.

As previously noted, I’m a big werewolf fan from way back. When I was a kid I absolutely loved them. I think it was a combination of three factors. For starters, I was afraid of dogs. But more than that, I was enthralled by the notion that something could happen to you (i.e. getting bit by a werewolf) that would transform you into something extraordinary. And finally, I had a copy of Nancy Garden’s delightful, aimed-at-kids book Werewolves, which of course I read over and over again until it literally fell apart.

To this day, I love a good werewolf. Unlike vampires, they’re not obsessed with neurotic sexuality and they’re not confined by an elaborate code of “monster rules.” To be sure, they’re governed by a few basic guidelines (full moons, silver bullets and the like). But for the most part they’re our bestial inner selves breaking free to do what they want.

The following eight movies represent a range of different treatments of the subject with two things in common: they’re all about werewolves, and they’re all quite good. The set is also slightly unrepresentative of genre pictures in general because several of the entries feature strong female characters, something that isn’t present in all werewolf movies but is slightly more prevalent among shape-shifters than in most other types of horror movie.

 

The Wolf Man – Though not the first werewolf movie ever made (Werewolf of London predates it by six years), it’s the first one I ever saw and certainly a classic. Lon Chaney Jr. plays Lawrence Talbot, a goofy American visiting his family’s land in the old country when he gets bit and succumbs to the curse. The real star of the show, however, is Jack Pierce’s makeup, painstakingly applied hair by hair and then edited into a transformation sequence that’s impressive particularly by the standards of the time.

Cat People – As the title clearly indicates, technically this isn’t a werewolf movie. But it is about shape-shifting, and producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur make so many right decisions that this mid-budget masterpiece deserves all the attention it can get. For starters, they cast Simone Simon in the lead. Her eerie combination of cute little fluffy kitten and smokin’ hot Euro-actor is downright disturbing all by itself. But more than that, the picture relies on script, lighting and atmosphere to create some chilling chills. This is the kind of thing that can’t be bought with an unlimited effects budget (though of course four decades later Paul Schrader did a latex-intensive remake that oddly enough turned out to be worth watching despite being an entirely different kind of movie).

The Company of Wolves – Yeah, this one’s too arty by far. The plot meanders. The dialogue is stiff and strange. But under the art house conceits, this is a solid cinematic exploration of the werewolf myth. It takes an outsider, pro-woman, pro-wolf look at shape shifting, throwing in some good effects work along the way.

Wilderness – Of course if you didn’t care for the last entry, you’re really going to hate this one. Here the protagonist turns into an actual wolf, a natural animal rather than a rampaging movie monster. The result is a thoughtful exploration of the interrelationship between our civilized sides and our “state of nature” inclinations.

Ginger Snaps – The nail that the last three pictures on the list tap around gets hit squarely on the head here. Adolescent Ginger’s lycanthropy is tied to her awakening sexuality manifested by the onset of her monthly period. Though this might be too much of a teen-oriented horror picture for some audience members, if you can put up with the Afterschool-Special-gone-wrong aspects you’ll find a decent movie hidden inside.

Wolfen – This is another cheat, because – if it’s not too much of a spoiler – the monsters here are full-time beasts rather than shape-shifters. Still, the antagonists are at least wolf-like objects, and their pursuit of prey on the streets of New York supplies some genuinely scary moments. The supporting cast also includes a few familiar faces.

An American Werewolf in London – This is here at least in part because I know I’ll get email if I don’t include it. In general I don’t care for horror comedy, and this movie is a paragon of that particular combination. Every chilling scene or cool effects shot is swiftly undone by some kind of John Landis goofiness. It deserves a spot on this list for the excellent werewolf stuff, but you’ve gotta wade through a mess of sophomoric humor to get to the good parts.

The Howling – This is the werewolf movie that as a kid I imagined all werewolf movies should be like. Good script. Good direction. Good effects. The type of werewolf that I like best. The old myths and “golden age” Hollywood interpretations get just the modernization (at least for the early 80s) they so richly deserve. Though it spawned a slew of dreadful sequels, the first one’s still a must-view for anyone who loves werewolves.

Review – Scar

Dude, why are you driving that clunker? What happened to the Camaro your dad bought you? I sold to get the money to make a movie. You don’t know anything about making movies. Doesn’t matter, just as long as you’ve got a camera and some other junk. I hope you didn’t sell that car just to get a camera, ‘cause they don’t cost that much. Nah, I had enough left over to hire E.T.’s mom and Martin Sheen’s talentless brother or cousin or whatever he is. Cool. Well, what’s it going to be about? I dunno. Somethin’ about kids that go out in the woods and then they get killed and some stuff. I mean, who cares? Does it really have to be about anything? Guess not. I can’t prove that a conversation like this took place before this movie was made, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – The Green Berets

John Wayne directs and stars in this two-hour-long, inadvertent lesson on why we failed to prevail in Southeast Asia. Though this kind of simple-minded propaganda was popular during World War Two, this new conflict was a different kind of war that called for a different approach both in the field and in movie theaters. These guys don’t even get their uniforms dirty. That kind of thing might have played on the sands of Iwo Jima, but by 1968 it was fairly apparent that the reality on the ground was something else. It was a little nice to see something that wasn’t as whiny as the post-war pictures from both the left and the right. On the other hand, this is just inept. The depiction of combat is unrealistic; if you watch this, count the number of times you catch yourself thinking things like “If you guys bunch up like that, one grenade is going to take you all out” or “I don’t think the sun sets in the east.” The production values are bad. The story is silly, as is a lot of the dialogue. It’s genuinely painful to listen to talented actors Jack Soo and George Takei delivering lines that make them sound like they’re auditioning for a fourth role on the “Tarzan, Tonto and Frankenstein” skit. And the pace is highly uneven, leading to that most unpardonable of sins: the boring action movie. See if desperate

Review – Mississippi Burning

Of all the criticisms leveled at this movie, the one that sticks the hardest is that this is yet another case of Hollywood presenting the struggle for civil rights as a contest between white people. The role of people of color in this movie is to stoically suffer the psychotic cruelty of the Klan until the valiant FBI finally does something about it (so right there you’ve got historical accuracy issues as well). Willem Dafoe and Gene Hackman star as an idealistic, by-the-book fed and his rogue partner. As the racist violence escalates, the good cop becomes more and more inclined to turn the bad cop loose to respond in kind. Thus Act Three is fairly emotionally satisfying, though as usual on the final tote board the good guys took more than they ultimately dished out. The picture sports a solid supporting cast and good production values. Just come prepared to leave angry. Mildly amusing

Review – The Elephant Man

The tragic life of John Merrick has tremendous cinematic potential. Indeed, I recall seeing video of a stage production in which the actor playing The Elephant Man (I think it may have been John Hurt, as it is here) did so without the benefit of special effects makeup, and it still turned out to be fascinating stuff. Here the effect is even more powerful thanks to the recreation of Merrick’s condition. My only big objection to this movie is that every once in awhile – especially in scene transitions – it takes on a certain David-Lynch-iness that detracts from the story. Worth seeing

Review – Tiki

Somebody’s seen the Zuni Warrior Fetish Doll so many times that they actually managed to convince themselves that it could be turned into a feature-length movie. Naïve Amy goes away to college only to fall victim to a group of theatre clique bullies. After a vicious prank puts her in a coma, her aunt arrives from Hawaii with a vengeful fetish in tow. If the production had been made with a bigger budget I would have been less forgiving with it, but for an amateurs-with-a-camera production it wasn’t too terrible. Mildly amusing

Review – New Jack City

If Mario Van Peebles misses a gangster movie cliché anywhere, it’s not for a lack of trying. Though this was a big movie at the time, in retrospect it comes across as a Black, New York reheat of Scarface (scenes from which adorn this picture in several places). The cast – including the likes of Wesley Snipes, Judd Nelson and Ice T – is good without being great. Some of the action sequences are entertaining. Overall, however, this is a “just say no” afterschool special with extra added violence and profanity. Mildly amusing

Review – Johnny Got His Gun

They should name an award for ham-handed preachiness after Dalton Trumbo, with this “directed by and based on his novel” as prime excuse. Timothy Bottoms stars as an unfortunate soldier in World War One who lives on even after getting his arms, legs and face blown off. As he lies in a hospital bed unable to communicate, he reminisces about his family and girlfriend and dreams/hallucinates conversations with Jesus (Donald Sutherland). The gag runs thin in a hurry, repeating anti-war messages over and over until even the dimmest of audience members must be ready to start screaming, “Okay, I get it!” Further, the twist that finally brings the grim tale to a close has a distinct “you could have thought of that earlier” quality. Overall this was better as a Metallica video than as a movie. Mildly amusing

Review – Infestation

This is approximately equal parts apocalyptic giant bug onslaught and Office Space white collar comedy. It isn’t a good mix. A ne’er-do-well office drone emerges from a cocoon to discover that the world has been taken over by huge beetles and their compatriots the huge mosquitoes. Some of the bug effects had some scary potential, but every time they get a spook on the comedy elements intrude. See if desperate

Review – High Anxiety

Mel Brooks takes on Alfred Hitchcock in a parody of several of the latter director’s pictures. Frankly, it isn’t Brooks’s finest moment. For starters, you have to be familiar with Hichcock’s movies to get a lot of the jokes, unlike Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein that are funny on their own in addition to being great send-ups. But more than that, it just isn’t as clever as we’ve come to expect from Brooks. Sure, it has a good line here and there. But overall it’s silly to the verge of dumb. Mildly amusing

Review – Child's Play 2: Chucky's Back

I’ve been watching way too many cheap horror movies. Apparently I’ve become a sucker for pictures with any redeeming value at all. The slightest hint of a script. Any attempt at acting. Even mechanical doll puppets that don’t suck too much. This isn’t as clever as the first one (and that wasn’t exactly a huge hurdle to top), but I expected it to be much more terrible than it was. Mildly amusing

Review – Ghoulies 2

Hey, we’ve got all these crappy little rubber monster puppets lying around from Ghoulies. Why don’t we make a sequel? This time the CLRMPs infest a carnival attraction rather than an old mansion. Otherwise this is strictly reheated leftovers. Every once in a great while one of the puppets will do something vaguely Gremlins-esque, but that’s scarcely worth sitting through the rest of this crap. See if desperate

Review – The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother

Though it was directed by costar Gene Wilder, this silly little picture has a distinct Mel Brooks flavor. My favorite part of the movie was Madeline Kahn’s fine performance, but I’m sure Young Frankenstein fans will cherish the Wilder – Marty Feldman pair-up as well. The story – the famous detective turns a tricky case over to his younger brother Sigerson – is purely goofy, but the script sports a clever line or two. Mildly amusing

Review – Bollywood Hero

Wow, all that hype on the Independent Film Channel, and this was all it was? Seriously, the network put up ad bugs for this thing so big that they actually covered up parts of subtitles in other movies. Don’t get me wrong: this wasn’t a terrible movie. Chris Kattan does a passable job as Chris Kattan, a comedy star lured to India by the promise of a dramatic lead. It works just fine as a garden-variety romantic comedy. It just wasn’t worth all the promotional noise. Mildly amusing

Review – The Reader

Kate Winslett is hands-down the best part of this movie. And I’m not talking about the truly gratuitous amount of nudity she does, either. Instead, I was more impressed with some of the subtleties she managed to work into her character’s appearance and behavior as the plot ping-ponged back and forth in a range of years from the 50s to the 90s. Other than her performance, however, the production was fairly terrible. Though the conversion of the Holocaust into a tragic romance might – might – have worked, here it clearly doesn’t. The characters’ many moral “ambiguities” aren’t borderline cases at all. Instead we get crimes ranging from child molestation to mass murder that are all supposed to be subsumed by a boy’s bittersweet love for an illiterate former concentration camp guard. Though the production values are solid and the female lead’s performance worthy of the Oscar she received, the script largely undoes whatever potential the picture might have had. Mildly amusing

Review – Deadline (2004)

In the last days of his term in office, Illinois Governor George H. Ryan decided to commute the sentences of everyone on the state’s death row. This documentary chronicles some of the hearings leading up to the decision. And as usual with productions of this ilk, we spend a lot of time with the apparently wrongfully convicted, the mentally disabled and the insane. Though some of the talking heads make some excellent points about the nature of capital punishment as practiced in the United States, the almost total absence of counter argument throws the integrity of the case into question. Mildly amusing

Review – Red Mist

Odd title, considering there’s no mist of any color to be found here. Instead, this is a vaguely intriguing story about a group of med school pals who semi-accidentally put a mentally-disturbed acquaintance in a coma to keep him from ratting about their narcotics pilferage. One of the students has an attack of conscience, and she sneaks the guy an experimental cocktail of drugs designed to bring him back. Unfortunately for her and her friends, it leaves him in the coma but allows him to transmigrate, possess people at will, and go on a psychic killing spree of alarming viciousness. The picture takes a few interesting twists and serves up some icky gore here and there, but the joke wears out before the film stock is exhausted. Mildly amusing

Review – Ghost Game

For what I hope – but doubt – will be the last time, a small budget is no excuse for a weak script. The plot here had some potential. Not a lot, but some. A group of friends rent a cabin in the woods, where they discover a game that when played unleashes evil spirits. So the story could have been turned into a combination of Hellraiser and Jumanji. Sadly, the creators of this turkey seem far more interested in sophomoric sexual innuendo. Or to be more precise, they seem to really want to make a porno movie but lack the resources to get the female members of the cast to disrobe. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – House (2008)

For the first half an hour or so, this one had me groaning “not another Texas Chainsaw rip-off.” But then the story took a sudden supernatural turn, and after that I actually got interested. That interest wasn’t entirely rewarded, as it has a meandering middle and a shaggy dog ending. But I’ve seen a lot worse in the mid-budget horror realm. A feuding couple suffers tire damage and ends up at a bed and breakfast that’s literally from hell. Mildly amusing

Review – The Sniper

This movie from 1952 seems a bit ahead of its time. It treats the antagonist’s misogynistic violence first as a sex crime and second as the byproduct of mental illness, the sort of thing that might be stopped before it starts if diagnosed and treated properly. A woman-hating psycho with a rifle stalks the rooftops of San Francisco looking for victims in the streets below. Though some scenes reminded me of Dirty Harry, this is really more the Lipstick Killer than the Zodiac. Though it gets a bit preachy in spots, overall it’s well assembled. If nothing else, the old black and white footage of the city is interesting. Mildly amusing

Review – Hamburger Hill

They could have called this Generic Brand Vietnam War Movie. The guys from the 101st Airborne have to take a hill. They try. They get shot up. They go on leave, get drunk, have sex with prostitutes. Then it’s back to the jungle with them. Friendly fire casualties. Racial tensions. The evil media. Pick your favorite Vietnam War cliché and its probably in here somewhere. Even the actors are generic; other than the ones who ended up famous for doing something else, they’re difficult to tell apart. Though this isn’t the most awful war movie I’ve ever seen, it’s nowhere near as good as Full Metal Jacket or even Platoon. See if desperate

My eight favorite reality shows

To quote one of the characters in John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness, reality isn’t what it used to be. The term “reality show” embraces programs from talent competitions to criminal round-ups, from cooking contests to bug-eating challenges, from celebrity family behind-the-scenes to desperate attempts to find a date for Flavor Flav. Indeed, the category is so broad that it borders on meaningless.

Fortunately, that made it easy to find eight shows that fit the list’s requirements.

Iron Chef – Let there be no mistake: we’re talking about the original Japanese shows, not the American knock-off. The series is an impressive combination of reality show competition and gourmet cooking. In each episode Chairman Kaga invites a top-notch chef into Kitchen Stadium to square off against one of the Iron Chefs in a cook-off based on a theme ingredient.

Anyone who watches the show for awhile will likely develop some affection for her or his favorite chef. Mine is Sakai, Iron Chef French. Amy prefers Chen, Iron Chef Chinese. Throughout its run, the series also sported three different Iron Chefs Japanese and an Iron Chef Italian. Regardless of whom the challenger picks, the cooking techniques used during the battles are always fun to watch. We skip the episodes that feature live ingredients, but otherwise they’re all great.

Project Runway – Yeah, I get that this isn’t really targeted toward heterosexual men. Still, I do get a kick out of it. I even find myself using little “isms” from co-host Tim Gunn (such as the ever-popular “Make it work”) with my students.

I confess I don’t understand high fashion well enough to fully comprehend the criteria by which the designers’ work is judged. Indeed, some of the decisions seem either completely arbitrary or tied more closely to personality clashes between contestants and judges than to the actual quality of the designs. However, this is one of the few places one can turn on TV to see artists at work. Indeed, the artistry and craftsmanship is a lot more entertaining than the petty reality show nonsense tacked on to keep audiences happy.

The Osbournes – This series spawned the whole “inside the private lives of celebrities” reality show concept. And for that it should be soundly condemned. But there’s just something oddly endearing about crappy old rocker Ozzy Osbourne, his manager wife Sharon and their two obnoxious kids. Part of it is the “aw, the Prince of Darkness has a human side” element. But beyond that, the series (particularly the first season) featured some genuinely comic and/or touching moments.

American Idol – This is the 800-pound gorilla on any list of reality shows. Most folks – or at least most folks who watch regularly – have a favorite part of the season. I prefer the auditions when the judges get to be mean to the people who are sure they’re going to be famous just because they want to be, not because they have any talent or skill. Amy prefers “Hollywood week,” when the contestants with at least some chance of winning get winnowed down to the dozen or two who will actually get a chance to try.

Of course the DVR makes the final performances a lot easier to take. If one watches only enough of the song to figure out what it is and then buzzes forward to see what nasty remarks Simon Cowell has to share, an hour of the show can be gulped down in less than ten minutes. Perhaps as it becomes less of a cultural phenomenon we’ll get tired of it and stop watching altogether. But we’ve stuck with it so far.

Cops – Bad boys bad boys, whatcha gonna do? Of all the video rubbernecking experiences, this is one of the first and still one of the best. To be sure, it has its dull spots. I can do without the long chases, and most of the drug stings are fairly run-of-the-mill. On the other hand, life affords us few pleasures greater than the sight of a wife beater suffering some “incidental damage” or other sundry scumbags getting a little come-uppance.

My all-time favorite Cops-related experience was talking to my dad about it shortly after the series premiered. We were watching it at the time, but he declined to give it a look. “If I want to see that kind of crap,” he said, “I can just look out my front window.” It seemed like typical hyperbole at the time. But a couple of weeks later the series aired a show shot in Kansas City, and in one segment the ride-along drove right past my folks’ place. QED.

Inside American Jail – This is like a distilled version of Cops, without the lengthy car chases and other nonsense that detract from the guilty pleasure of watching law enforcement be mean to criminals. Time after time we get belligerent drunks trying to mess with the guards only to find themselves trussed up in restraint chairs. Now that’s entertainment.

The Girls Next Door – As noted in the Hoffman Lens entry on the demise of this series, it’s hard to put a finger on just exactly what the attraction is. But nonetheless, it’s there. What I find particularly interesting about this series is how much better it turned out to be than the girls’ individual projects after splitting up with Hefner. That there was actual chemistry in the trio is the biggest shock of all.

Mythbusters – I don’t care much about the proving or disproving of urban legends. And though it’s frequently easy to note flaws in the logic of the Mythbusters testing schemes, that doesn’t bother me a lot either. Instead, I like to focus on the fun of watching them set up elaborate devices that typically shatter, shoot, burn, detonate or otherwise do in some object or another. In other words, this is “Blowed Up Real Good: The Series” combined with just enough tech nerd gadgetry to keep it cool. The Venn diagram of “Mythbusters viewers” and “Make magazine subscribers” has got to be something close to a single circle, making it an easy fit for me.

Review – Unleashed

If Jet Li hadn’t been in this, I probably would have skipped it. And that would have been a partial shame, because the concept was sort of interesting. Li plays an emotionless fighter who remains completely docile as long as he has a dog collar on. But when his boss the loan shark (Bob Hoskins) takes it off, he turns into an ass-whupping machine. But the “dog” escapes from his master and ends up befriended by a blind piano tuner (Morgan Freeman). The resulting drama is plenty maudlin, but it does feature some well-choreographed fight sequences. Audiences have come to expect no less from Li. Mildly amusing

Review – Pumpkinhead: Blood Feud

It’s the Hatfields and McCoys no less, squared off against each other to disrupt the budding romance between two of their respective young’uns. In other words, this is a half-assed “Pumpkinhead and Juliet.” Lance Henriksen drifts in and out, paying his bills by playing our ol’ buddy Ed. Otherwise this is whatever-verse-we’re-on, same as the first. Mildly amusing

Review – Sightings: Heartland Ghosts

The premise here is simple enough: what if one of those stupid haunted house reality shows ran up against a place that was actually haunted? Sadly, the set-up is about all there is to this. Once the show’s host (Beau Bridges) and his crew set up their cameras in a young couple’s small town home, the ghostly action proceeds apace. So basically this is a cheap repetition of Poltergeist with just a dash of the racial element from the second Candyman movie thrown in for good measure. See if desperate

Review – The Scourge

Okay, kids. Let’s have a discussion about the limitations of body-hopping monsters. The box for this video implied that the evil menace in this thing was some kind of plague that could conceivably wipe out all humanity. As a member of the human race (at least on my good days), I can see the potential scariness in that. But what we get here is a single monster that enters people through their navels, forces them to eat like pigs, and then exits via their mouths into the next victim’s bellybutton. The United States alone has more than 300 million residents. At the rate of one victim per hour, it’ll take this critter nearly 35,000 years to make it through the whole country. I’m not losing any sleep over odds like that. Add a bad script, bad acting and mediocre effects to the un-thrilling premise, and this picture doesn’t have much going for it. See if desperate

Review – The Telling

Playboy models plus video camera plus dreadful horror movie plot equals this. Three lackluster vignettes are strung together with a dumb sorority initiation bracket shot at the Playboy Mansion. The big draw for fans of The Girls Next Door is that this is the movie Bridget Marquardt was talking about making in a couple of the episodes from the series. I’m not sure why anyone else would bother with it. See if desperate

Review – Troll

This is likely to be the cleverest movie Empire Pictures ever made, not that that’s a real high bar to leap. A youth by the now-unlikely name of Harry Potter discovers that his sister has been replaced by a troll bent on turning first their apartment building and then the whole world into a vine-intensive fairyland. Before the drama concludes, Sonny Bono, Gary “Andy from WKRP” Sandy and a vertically-differently-abled professor have all been transformed into rubber monster puppets, Julia Louis-Dreyfus has been transformed into a scantily-clad wood nymph, and June Lockhart has been transformed into Anne Lockhart. Oddly enough, the script and acting weren’t really all that bad. The only show-killers here are the cheap-ass puppets. Mildly amusing

Review – Picnic at Hanging Rock

I’ve griped many times in the past about the horror genre’s almost complete lack of subtlety and nuance. So I feel like a real idiot for making the opposite complaint about this old Peter Weir movie. Nonetheless, this production relies too heavily on eerie atmosphere alone. The story – to the extent that there is one – is about a group of schoolgirls who vanish off the face of the earth at the title event. I loved Weir’s gutsy decision to avoid offering any inkling of an explanation for the disappearance, and some of the subsequent events add fuel to the spooky fire. Unfortunately, just as many later scenes seem to have no direct relevance to the main plot and little particular importance on their own. The final score is approximately one third wonderful horror movie and two thirds intensely boring period drama. And without watching the whole thing carefully you won’t be able to sort one from the other. Mildly amusing

Review – Blown Away

This one’s worth it just for Tommy Lee Jones’s Psycho Killer Dead Crab T.S. Eliot Puppet Theater. Unfortunately, that’s about all it’s worth it for. A retiring expert with the Boston PD bomb squad (Jeff Bridges) is drawn back into the fold when an old terrorist acquaintance (Jones) turns up with revenge on his mind. Though Jones’s frantic over-acting is a sight to behold, the rest of the picture is a run-of-the-mill thriller. Mildly amusing

Review – Defiance

One of the biggest questions posed by the Holocaust is “why didn’t anyone fight back?” After all, if you’re going to be butchered anyway, you might as well take a few Nazis with you. Well, the answer is that many people did fight back. But of all the resistance groups, the Bielskis were one of the few that managed to organize a safe haven for refugees. Of course “safe” in occupied Belorussia was a relative thing, as this drama shows. Tuvia (Daniel Craig) organized the community in the forest while his hot-headed brother Zus (Liev Schreiber) joined the partisans to fight the Germans. The production values are Hollywood standard, and the script and acting likewise don’t particularly stand out. But the story alone is sufficiently fascinating to carry the day. Mildly amusing

Review – Prom Night (1980)

The scariest thing in this whole picture is the Jamie Lee Curtis disco number. Running it a close second is the psycho-killer’s glittery ski mask. A group of bullies accidentally kill one of their little playmates, and six years later someone is out for revenge. Is it the abusive boyfriend? Is it the creepy janitor? Is it anyone we could possibly care about? Even though this is from the early days of the slasher genre formula, it’s still a total formula piece. And though this doesn’t have anything directly to do with the film-makers’ “vision,” I want to mention that the copy of this movie shown on the Chiller channel was the worst example of digital video compression I’ve ever seen. Seriously guys, did you download this thing from Youtube? See if desperate

Review – Sahara (2005)

This action adventure picture sinks swiftly under the weight of its own ridiculousness. Matthew McConaughey stars as a former SEAL turned underwater treasure hunter in search of a Confederate ironclad that somehow managed to show up in western Africa. Before we even hit the midway point, our heroes end up entangled with a WHO doctor (Penelope Cruz) hunting for the source of a mysterious illness, local warlords, creepy billionaires, and no end of other nonsense. I don’t mind a little silliness in an action movie, but this seriously abuses the privilege. Mildly amusing

Review – Solaris

Wow, this one really puts the “space” in “spacey.” George Clooney plays a space psychiatrist dispatched to a station orbiting a planet that appears to be driving people insane. When he gets there, he discovers first that a chunk of the crew is dead, second that the remaining two are mentally unstable, and three that his dead wife is suddenly alive again. The rest of the picture is the planet playing mind tricks and the humans playing tricks back. It’s pretty. It’s not too noisy. But I remember Stanislaw Lem’s novel as better than this. Mildly amusing

Review – Requiem

One of the big differences between the book and movie versions of The Exorcist was that the book was a good deal more ambiguous. Was the girl really possessed, or was she merely suffering from serious psychological problems? In this indie outing, film-makers explore this conundrum using a real German case of a college student who died after months of exorcism. We don’t get any crotch stabbing, head twisting or soup puking here. Instead, this is the sad story of a young woman running into trouble – mental, theological or both – while away from her family and off her meds. You’ll have to read subtitles, but overall it’s worth it. Mildly amusing

Review – Horsemen

Seven gets a Biblical twist (along with teenagers and the Internet, of course) as tortured and mutilated victims start showing up with references to Revelations festooning the crime scenes. Dennis Quaid plays the forensics specialist who must track down the cadre of killers before they can complete the set of four ritualized murders they appear to have in mind. And once again, the psychos whip wildly back and forth between meticulous attention to detail and scatterbrained improvisation. But the biggest disappointment here is that they bet the farm on the mystery element. Now, I’m no great mystery solver, but by halfway through I’d figured out who the mastermind was and how it was going to end. So that’s 45 minutes worth of the movie that I didn’t need to sit through. Mildly amusing

Review – The Haunting in Connecticut

No matter how good a trick is, it isn’t going to carry a whole movie. I suppose what they were going for here was the “true story” thing, so if your “real life” ghosts have a limited bag of tricks, it restricts what your movie can do. This is the tale of a family that moves into a rental house to be closer to the clinic where the eldest son is getting cancer treatments. Turns out the rent is cheap because the place used to be a combination mortuary and séance headquarters. Naturally the place is packed with restless souls trapped by creepy, post-mortem carving rituals. Some of the visuals have impact. But when the same thing gets used over and over again, it wears thin. Further, the whole “true story of a family with financial troubles moves into a house possessed by evil spirits” thing sounds vaguely familiar. Mildly amusing

Review – Coraline

I genuinely enjoyed this movie. Henry Selick – the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas – once again proves his gifts for both storytelling and the technical aspects of stop motion animation. Coraline is bored and frustrated in her family’s new house until she discovers a secret door that leads to an alternate version of her life in which everything is perfect and everyone has buttons for eyes. Needless to say, something’s wrong here. The production is full of pretty, odd little moments that are endearing without being cloying. And though it contains a line or two that will go over most pre-teens’ heads, this isn’t as vulgar as some kids-and-adults-both productions. For some reason – perhaps the voice work by Dakota Fanning – this reminded me of My Neighbor Totoro. That’s a good thing, because both productions do an excellent job of being clever and entertaining while avoiding many of the pitfalls that often ruin animations designed for family audiences. Worth seeing

Review – Watchmen

I should start by admitting that I’m not an uber-fan of the original comic books. I liked them, but I don’t have the kind of obsessive love for them that would make me hate a movie that deviated from them in any way. With that in mind, I thought this was a reasonably good adaptation. Sure, some chunks (such as the weird pirate thing) are gone. And it may help to be familiar with the story and the characters before you watch the movie. But overall this works as a big-budget superhero picture. The flashy special effects and quirky little sub-references here and there make up for at least some of the lost nuance. Don’t expect too much from it (and don’t plan to do anything else with the next two and a half hours of your life) and you should be able to get your money’s worth. Mildly amusing