Review – Blue Velvet

David Lynch’s mainstream work – particularly The Elephant Man and Dune – tends to sport little “Lynchy” moments in which the director’s art school background shows through a bit too strongly. This is a whole movie made of such moments. Even simple, everyday dialogue takes on an odd, hallucinatory quality. Lynch-look-vaguely-alike Kyle McLachlan finds a severed ear in a field. Subsequent events tie him to an innocent girl next door (Laura Dern) and an exotic lounge singer (Isabella Rosselini). And his seamy affair with the singer in turn brings him into unfortunate contact with her nitrous-inhaling psycho boyfriend (Dennis Hopper, in what must be the role he was born to play). Frankly, the plot is an irrelevant detail, consistently taking a back seat to strange visuals, quirky characters and arty editing. See if desperate

Review – Blood of the Vampire

Isn’t there some kind of FTC regulation that says if a movie has “vampire” in the title that there has to be a vampire in the movie? If not, there should be. To be completely fair, the villain in this dreary little English picture is prolonging his life by consuming human blood. But beyond that he’s really more of a mad scientist than a traditional bloodsucker. He performs experiments on the “patients” at the mental hospital where he presides, drafting a wrongfully-imprisoned inmate with medical training to become his unwilling assistant. A mistake, as it turns out, because the assistant’s desire to escape proves to be the undoing of the whole operation. Mildly amusing

Review – Devil's Diary

Two “outsider” teens find an old, blank diary in a graveyard. One of them starts writing her hate fantasies in it, only to discover that they start coming true. The more she uses it, the more goth she becomes. The only difference between this and every other supernatural-teen-revenge movie is that midway through the cheerleaders figure out what’s going on, and one of them steals the diary and starts using it against the outsiders. The new twist was not an improvement. See if desperate

Review – Dead Mary

So what happens if you look into a mirror and repeat “boring crap” three times? Does this movie appear? If so, don’t try it. Honestly, pictures from Candyman to Urban Legends: Bloody Mary have already thoroughly used up this storyline. They try to spice it up by adding a dash of Evil Dead. But nothing can overcome the bitter taste of 20-somethings squabbling with each other first about their petty, stupid problems and then about the evil spirit that’s killing them. See if desperate

Review – Wind Chill

Wow, does this one ever take its sweet time getting underway. Nearly all of the first half of the picture is nothing but set-up: two college students – an attractive woman and a vaguely creepy guy – get stranded in the snow after taking a wrong turn off the highway (when oh when will city folk learn not to leave the main roads?). For a few minutes it gets interesting when they’re menaced by frozen zombies. But then it sank back down under the weight of too many useless, how-will-they-fail-to-escape twists. Though I was glad it never turned into a halfwit-with-a-chainsaw debacle, I would have preferred that it at least turn into something rather than meandering randomly along until the film stock ran out. Mildly amusing

Review – The Greatest Story Ever Told

Or at least one of the longest. The Gospels naturally make for an entertaining, thought-provoking story. But here the telling undoes a lot of the point. Christ’s teachings get screen time here and there, but at the same time we get a lot of extraneous politicking among government and religious officials. I was particularly surprised that a lot of the miracles took place off-screen, described in gossip between the characters rather than actually shown. Further, Good Friday takes up nearly a third of the screen time. With the galaxy of stars they packed into the production, a much more inspirational picture could have been made. Mildly amusing

Review – The House Next Door

The movie is the evil twin of the novel upon which it’s based. Sure, it preserves the core of subtle menace inherent in a house possessed by an amorphous, sourceless evil. But it adds so many Lifetime-Movie-Network-compatible elements that it turns too soapy for my taste. See if desperate