Archive for remake

THE MECHANIC (2011)

Posted in 2011, Action Movies, Cars!, Cinema Knife Fights, Crime Films, Hit Men, Remakes, VIOLENCE! with tags , , , , , , , , , on February 1, 2011 by knifefighter

CINEMA KNIFE FIGHT: THE MECHANIC (2011)
by L.L. Soares and (special guest) John Harvey

(The Scene: The interior of a fancy house. A glittering home entertainment center lines one wall. There is a pristine phonograph on one shelf, and a row of vinyl albums in their sleeves. JOHN D. HARVEY gets up from the couch and goes over to the phonograph. He pulls a vinyl LP off the shelf. It’s Black Flag’s classic album “Slip It In.” LL SOARES enters the room)

JH: Hey, someone’s got good taste. But shouldn’t this be Schubert’s “Trio in E-flat (Opus 100)”?

LS: No, because we don’t play hit men in movies, like Jason Statham. We’re just two aging, bald, surly punks that review movies. And don’t ever touch my stereo again.

JH: Why not? I wasn’t going to break anything.

LS: Because it’s in the script. Besides, like I said, we’ve got a movie to review.

JH: Really? I thought you were going to pay me a load of money to take out Michael Arruda.

LS: No … well, maybe. But it’s funny you bring that up because the movie we’re reviewing today is the new Jason Statham thriller, THE MECHANIC.

JH (opening a can of Guinness): Excellent!

LS: Take a seat and I’ll start this one off.

JH (sitting down): Lead on, MacDuff.

LS: In THE MECHANIC, Jason Statham plays Arthur Bishop, a high-end hit man working for a shady organization. He’s known for doing his kills in elaborate ways that often look like accidents. The movie begins with such a kill – Statham’s Bishop drowns a Brazilian drug lord in his own swimming pool, then escapes without being detected by an army of bodyguards.

JH: Hold on. We should point out that this movie is a remake of Charles Bronson’s 1972 film, also called THE MECHANIC. Maybe not one of Bronson’s absolute best movies, but still pretty good. And this is one of the few times where I’m okay with a remake. The 1972 version has fallen off of most people’s radar screens. So, it’s ripe for a present-day upgrade and I’d like to think that the original version will get some extra attention from modern viewers.

LS: Actually, a big reason why I wanted to review this one with you is because I’m a huge Bronson fan and I wanted to see how the remake stacks up. I didn’t expect much. The trailers for this one made it look like an out-and-out action movie without the cerebral qualities and gravitas of the original film. However, the remake turns out to be just as contemplative and thought-provoking, and sticks much closer to the original film’s plot than I expected.

JH: I agree to a point. I assumed that the writers and director would jettison the vast majority of the original film’s plot. They actually kept the plot relatively faithful to the original, but I think the tone is different in this modern version. Anyway, you were telling us about story in the 2011 version.

LS: Right. Bishop is troubled to find out his next assignment is to kill Harry McKenna (played by the great Donald Sutherland), Arthur’s mentor and friend. Bishop is so troubled that he requests a meeting with the guy in charge, Dean (Tony Goldwyn), to find out what this is all about. Dean informs Bishop that McKenna has double-crossed their clandestine organization and needs to be taken out quickly and cleanly. If Bishop won’t do it, then someone else will.

Bishop agrees to do it.

At McKenna’s funeral, Bishop runs in to Harry’s son, Steve (Ben Foster), who he hasn’t seen in a while. Their relationship is friendly, but there’s an underlying tension, too. Steve was always a disappointment to his father; constantly getting into trouble, always a bit of a hot head, while Bishop was Harry’s confidante and more like a chosen son to him. There’s an obvious sense of jealousy about this on Steve’s part.

Steve knows that his father was involved in some shady business and that Bishop was involved in it, too. His life is going nowhere, so Steve tells Bishop he wants to be part of something. He wants in.

Bishop hesitates, but he’s feeling guilty over having killed a man he thought of as a surrogate father, and also feels that he owes Steve something. So, he begins to train the younger man to be a “mechanic” (an insider’s term for a hit man).

The organization he works for isn’t happy to hear about this, and tries to convince Arthur that taking on an apprentice (especially the son of a previous target) is frowned upon. Bishop responds by doing pretty much what he wants and continues to train the young McKenna.

That’s pretty much the story in a nutshell.

JH: (There’s about six empty cans of Guinness at his feet). So … you’ve got Jameson’s somewhere in this place, right?

LS: What are you trying to do? Get blitzed? I’ve a lot of guns and cool gadgets in this place, but no dialysis machine.

JH: I’m just trying to add a little authenticity. Jameson’s was Steve McKenna’s drink of choice in THE MECHANIC. Apparently, he could polish off pints of the stuff and still kick ass and convince pretty girls to have rough sex in dirty alleys. Which is to say, if you go to see THE MECHANIC, don’t expect a lot of solid logic or realism. While this movie isn’t nearly as over-the-top as Statham’s CRANK films, it’s still not designed to be taken too seriously. So, if you can let go and enjoy a suspense/action film without a lot of connective tissue between the plot points, then THE MECHANIC is right up your alley.

LS: Good point about the Jameson’s. But we’re out. You drank that earlier today, don’t you remember?

JH: Honestly but predictably … no. But the good news is that I always keep a few bottles in the back of the Jetta.

LS (sighs): Statham is always good in movies like this. He’s probably the best action hero we have these days. He has the coolness and physicality to make it believable.

JH: I also like Statham in these roles. I’ll be really disappointed if he goes off and starts making goofy PG-rated family films (I’m looking at you, Dwayne Johnson). Although, I think I preferred Bronson’s take on Arthur Bishop better. Bronson’s Bishop was more cut-throat and emotionally null, while at the same time he had an undertone that was both sad and desperate. Statham’s portrayal is more polished and almost heroic (even though he’s, you know, a paid murderer). Regardless, Statham’s performance here is solid and fun to watch.

LS: I agree about Bronson. There was a kind of cold but sad quality about him that was uniquely his own. I prefer his version of Bishop, but I like Statham well enough here.

In this version, the wild card is Ben Foster as Steve. He actually makes the part very interesting, because he doesn’t play it as just some troubled guy looking for redemption. There’s a reason he was estranged from his father, and we learn this in the first assignment that Bishop lets Steve do by himself. You see, Steve McKenna is a bit of a psycho.

His first assignment is to gain the trust of a rival mechanic named Burke (Jeff Chase) and kill him. The guy is a huge mountain of a man and has a predilection for young guys, so it doesn’t take long for Steve to get friendly with him. But Bishop gives him something to slip into the man’s drink to kill him quietly and cleanly. Instead Steve decides not to do it that way, and lets the man take him back to his house – presumably for sex – and things get pretty bloody.

This scene, which is very intense, makes it clear that Foster’s character is a complete lunatic and he’s probably not to be trusted in a tight situation. But, for some bizarre reason, Statham doesn’t cut him loose. Their relationship gets even closer, and Bishop takes Steve on his next big assignment, to take out a creepy cult leader named Vaughn (John McConnell).

JH: I became so much more interested in this movie when I saw that Ben Foster was in it. He’s one of those supporting actors that deftly steals scenes from A-List actors. Check out 3:10 TO YUMA (2007) if you want proof. To your point, nobody plays an unhinged sociopath like Ben Foster. He brings a real sense of hair-trigger menace to the film. Besides, my least favorite part of the original THE MECHANIC was Jan-Michael Vincent’s performance as Steve McKenna. Sorry, the man’s acting fills me with ‘meh.’ I know he’s probably going to show up flying AIRWOLF (1984) and fire a sidewinder missile up my nether regions, but that’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it. Ben Foster brought a lot to this movie.

LS: Yeah. In the original, Jan-Michael Vincent played a kind of bored, rich hippie who wanted some excitement in his life, which is why he latches on to Bronson’s character. Being solitary most of his life, Bronson seems to relish the chance to teach someone his craft, and to have a close friend finally in a business that doesn’t encourage that. I think Vincent was fine in the original. But Ben Foster takes the character to a completely new level in the remake. He’s much more complex, intense, and unpredictable in his motives. This is simply because Ben Foster could act rings about Jan-Michael Vincent. As for your point about Foster stealing movies away from lead actors, you could argue that Foster’s character outshines Statham’s in this movie, as his is the performance to watch.

The rest of the movie is a cat-and-mouse game, as the organization Bishop works for decides that he has become a liability by taking on this loose cannon of a protégé. And there’s always the chance that Steve could find out the truth about who killed his father.

All in all, I thought this movie worked. Not all of the decisions are completely rational (but that’s okay), especially why Bishop feels the need to keep Steve around, although guilt plays a part, as does (maybe) a kind of attraction. Bishop is not a man who normally has close relationships with anyone. Even the woman we see him spend a night with, who appears to be his girlfriend, turns out to be just a hooker (the hauntingly attractive Mini Arden) playing a part. So, his reasons for latching onto the Steve are complex.

JH: That’s really the weakest component of both versions of this movie. Even in the forgiving plot environment of an action film, I could never fully buy in to the partnership between Bishop and McKenna. It doesn’t cripple the film, but it’s a scratch you can’t quite itch.

LS: I agree. I never fully understood what Statham got from the relationship with Foster. In the original film, there’s a stronger homoerotic tone between Bronson and Jan Michael Vincent. It’s subtle, but it’s there. This aspect isn’t as clear in the remake. Maybe Statham just wanted someone to hang out with after years of being a loner?

Simon West directs the new version, and he does a fine job at the helm (Michael Winner directed the original). I also thought the acting in the new one was very good all around. From the main characters to smaller parts by actors like Donald Sutherland and Tony Goldwyn (both excellent when they’re onscreen).

I also thought the soundtrack was great. Mark Isham did the original score, and just about all of the music used in the movie is very effective.

THE MECHANIC is rated R, and it’s for a reason. The violence is harsh and bloody. These men are not afraid to get their hands dirty to get a job done (although Bishop prefers a “clean kill” if he can do it). There were several times in this movie where I felt a kind of existential chill that reminded me of the feel of the original THE MECHANIC. A 1970s kind of vibe, which is something that appeals to me. It does not hold back on its punches and it isn’t afraid to dabble in the psychology of its characters.

Toward the end, it gets a bit ludicrous, when Foster and Statham take over the streets of New York with a truck and a bus to get revenge on organization boss Dean (where are all the cops?) and there are just a few too many double-crosses and explosions as we hurtle toward the end credits. But despite some leaps of logic that seemed pretty farfetched, the overall movie grabbed me and kept me riveted throughout. I give this one three knives.

So what’s your verdict, John?

JH (listing visibly in his chair while surrounded by piles of Guinness cans and not a few empty Jameson’s bottles): Hokay … so there may be such a thing as a little too much authenticity. Anywho, I think we’re on the same track with this movie. Though, I don’t think that this modern version is as psychological as the 1972 version. And, even though the modern version is more graphically violent, I think that the 1972 movie was more grim and gritty.

But, you know, Statham’s action films tend to be slick, hip, and cool. It’s fun stuff and overall, I liked it and had fun. Though I will point out that the 2011 version of THE MECHANIC makes one major departure from the original towards the end of the movie. This is a spoiler-free review, so I’ll say no more. But this major departure did make me sigh and slump in the chair. Even with that, I’d agree that this is a three-knife movie.

LS: I think I know what you’re referring to. But yeah, the movie left me with a good aftertaste anyway. I had a good time with this one.

Speaking of taste, you owe me a fridge worth of Guinness. I’d take it out of your pay, but we don’t get paid for this. Movie criticism, it turns out, isn’t as lucrative as being paid assassins.

JH (grins sheepishly): Yeah. I’m sort of like an exorcist; I remove all the spirits from the house.

Anyway, wanna listen to that Black Flag record now?

-END-

© Copyright 2011 by L.L. Soares and John D. Harvey
LL Soares gives THE MECHANIC – 3 knives

John Harvey gives THE MECHANIC - 3 knives

Leave A Comment »

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET!

Posted in 2010, Cinema Knife Fights, Lame Remakes, Remakes, Slasher Movies with tags , , , , , , , on May 3, 2010 by knifefighter

CINEMA KNIFE FIGHT: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (2010)
by Michael Arruda and L.L. Soares

(THE SCENE:  a living room with a TV set turned on to static. The camera pans back to reveal L.L. SOARES asleep on a sofa, the remote still in his hands. LS slowly opens his eyes and then screams in horror. Playing now on the TV is a scene from NEW MOON.)

LS:  Who put that on?  (shuts off TV with remote)  Michael must be up to his old tricks again. I’ll fix him. (FREDDY KRUEGER suddenly pops up from behind the sofa)

FREDDY:  Ready for a new nightmare?

LS:  It can’t be any worse than what was just on TV. Wanna pass me a beer?

FREDDY:  Huh?

LS:  Make yourself useful. I’m still groggy from falling asleep.

FREDDY (snickers):  Yes, you’re asleep, and I’m real!

LS:  So’s the beer. How about it, huh?  Toss me one from the cooler?

FREDDY:  Wake up!  Wake up!

LS:  Huh?  (opens his eyes to see MICHAEL ARRUDA standing over him).

MA:  You fell asleep again.

LS:  What did you wake me up for?  I was about to have a beer!

MA:  Really?  That’s not what it sounded like. You were screaming.

LS:  That’s because I dreamt I was watching NEW MOON again.

(MA SHRIEKS!)

LS:  Calm down. It’s okay. It was just a dream.

MA (wiping sweat from his face):  I don’t even want to think about that!  Talk about scary dreams!  Speaking of which, we’re reviewing the new A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET today.

LS:  Yes we are. Wanna start this one?

MA:  Sure. A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (2010) is a remake of the 1984 Wes Craven film of the same name. That film caused a sensation and led to an entire series of movies, as well as a television show, and introduced the world to a new horror movie icon, the relentless, wise-cracking killer in your dreams, Freddy Krueger.

The remake follows the plot of the original rather closely. There are a few changes here and there, most of them minor.

Like the original, the story follows a group of teens who discover they’ve been dreaming about the same person, a scary figure who is trying to kill them in their dreams. In this one, it’s Kris (Katie Cassidy) who realizes this first, when her boyfriend is murdered in an effective pre-credit sequence just after telling her he’d been threatened by someone in his dreams. In the original, the character’s name was Tina. Like Tina, Kris meets an untimely end, as she is killed by Freddy in a gruesome sequence that is pretty much the same scene from the original. If you’ve seen that one, you’ve seen this one.

LS: I have to admit, I was surprised when Kris got killed. I thought she was the main character in this one and figured she’d be around for awhile. They totally got me by surprise.

MA: From here, Nancy (Rooney Mara) takes over, and along with Quentin (Kyle Gallner), she attempts to unravel the mystery of Freddy Krueger. Their investigation leads them to discover the truth behind Freddy’s identity and the reason why he is murdering them in their dreams. What remains a mystery, as it did in the original, is just how it is that Freddy is in their dreams in the first place. When he died, did he make a deal with the devil to come back as a dream demon?  We don’t know, and if I had to wager a guess, I’d say the filmmakers don’t know either.

LS: Yeah, I always wondered that, too. How did he get his powers?

MA: I’ll cut right to the chase. I was largely unimpressed with this new version of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. While it got off to a good start with a scary pre-credit sequence, the rest of the movie pretty much lacked any decent scares. The murder scenes weren’t as creative as the ones in the Wes Craven original or even in some of the sequels. The scariest scene in this version is the murder of Kris, and that’s just a carbon copy of the same scene in the original. It works because the original scene worked.

LS: Yeah, I gotta agree with you about the lack of creativity…..and scares.

MA: Later on, there’s a scene when Nancy is in the bathtub, and it uses the same image from a similar scene in the original, with Freddy’s hand coming out of the water.

LS: Like the shark fin from JAWS!

MA: Now, this is a very memorable image. But again, it’s not original. And that can pretty much be said for the entire movie.

I did think there was a decent attempt this time around to explain things better: to explain that the dreams the teens are having are real and that Freddy is real. And who Freddy was before he died. But still, the answer that is ultimately needed, the “how is this really happening?” bit is not answered.

What was the strongest part of the original movie is the weakest part of this movie, and that is, the character of Freddy Krueger. Now, he looks good in this one, and I’m a big fan of Jackie Earle Haley, and I thought Haley gave Krueger some genuine moments of menace, but as a screen presence, he just didn’t have it here. Robert Englund is sorely missed.

LS: You know, I like Jackie Earle Haley a lot, too. He was great in LITTLE CHILDREN (2006), and was excellent as Rorschach in WATCHMEN (2009). He was even a highlight in this year’s SHUTTER ISLAND. But here, he definitely comes off badly in comparison to Englund’s classic portrayal of the character. They took a big chance getting someone else to play Freddy, and I think it was a big mistake. Englund could easily have continued playing Freddy, and the change does not improve anything.

MA: This new Freddy went to the Michael Myers school of terrorizing. He shows up here and there, and appears out of nowhere when you least expect him, but unlike Robert Englund’s interpretation, he doesn’t run. Englund was unpredictable, and he was fast, and this combination was scary. This new Freddy walks, and he walks, and he walks. Not so scary.

LS: Yeah, he DOES kind of plod along through the movie. And yeah, I wasn’t scared once. And his delivery is so deadpan that even when he’s telling a joke, it’s not funny. Englund could deliver a line with relish! He’d chew the scenery until it was soggy. I miss him!

MA: Also gone are the various transformations Freddy use to go through, whether it be long arms or appearing as different people, none of that occurs in the remake. Freddy’s just kind of there. I was very disappointed with this new Freddy.

LS: Where was the” tongue coming out of the telephone” scene?

MA: The rest of the acting wasn’t bad. I thought Rooney Mara was pretty good as Nancy, and I think she was better than Heather Langencamp in the original, but that’s not saying much. Kyle Gallner was very good as Quentin. We saw Gallner in THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT (2009), and he was good in that, as well. In the original NIGHTMARE it was Johnny Depp playing a similar role, and the two performances were about the same. Katie Cassidy is OK as Kris, but she looked more like a 25 year-old rather than a high school student.

(FREDDY pops up, laughing, while MA’s voice prattles on in the background)

FREDDY: Hah! You fell asleep again. Now I’ve got you.

LS: Dammit, it’s you again. You never did get me that beer.

FREDDY: But I will get you your DEATH!

LS: C’mon. You’re supposed to scare me? You’re laughable. I bet more people are afraid of ME than you!

FREDDY: That’s their problem. I’M YOURS!

LS (pulls out an axe): You’re not going to be much of a problem when you’re chopped  to pieces!

FREDDY: Where did you get that? This is MY world.

LS: This is a friggin dream. I can do ANYTHING here.

(FREDDY squeals like a little girl and runs away and LS chases him, until he is shaken awake).

MA: That’s pretty insulting. Falling asleep when I’m talking.

LS: Sleep? No, no. I was just resting my eyes.

MA:  No, you were sleeping on the job. That kind of behavior can get you fired. (Suddenly points a blow torch at LS’ face.)

LS: What the—?

(It’s now FREDDY holding the blow torch, and with maniacal laughter, he ignites it.)

LS:  Damn!  It’s the old dream-within-a-dream trick!  Come on, Michael, wake me up!

MA:  Are you sleeping?

LS (opens eyes):  Is it really you?

MA:  Of course it’s me. You were sleeping weren’t you?

LS:  No!

MA:  Then what was I talking about?

LS: Okay, Katie Cassidy might have looked too old to be in high school, but she was definitely some nice eye candy! I wish she’d been in the movie longer. And Kyle Gallner has been showing up in a lot of horror movies lately – he’s a very familiar face – and I’m starting to like him a lot. Not only was he in A HAUNTING IN CONNECITCUT – he was also in JENNIFER’S BODY (2009) and the Jack Ketchum adaptation, RED (2008). So I was happy to see him here. He always looks so sad, but it works for him.

As for Rooney Mara, I thought she was okay. Nothing amazing. But you’re right in saying she was better than Heather Langencamp. At least Mara has a personality here.

MA: I guess you were listening.

The screenplay by Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer changed Freddy’s crime from child killer in the original to child molester/mutilator (what he actually did to the children is not clearly defined) in this one, which makes him more of a villain.

LS: You’re right. While I’m pretty sure he was a pedophile in the original as well – they were just too wimpy to spell it out back then – he doesn’t actually kill anyone in this movie until he becomes the dream demon. Or whatever he is.

MA: Director Samuel Bayer offers us nothing fresh and new to separate this movie from the original. The best scenes were those lifted from the original.  I also thought the pacing was dreadfully slow.  At times I thought I was watching A DAYDREAM ON ELM STREET.

LS: Totally. The direction here is pretty boring. Bayer does nothing interesting with the dream sequences, which is a complete letdown. Imagine what someone like Alejandro Jodorowksy (cult director of such surreal classics as EL TOPO (1970) and SANTA SANGRE (1989)) would have done with the dream sequences here! He would have blown our minds. Or David Lynch! Instead, the entire “dreams vs. reality” plotline is a lost opportunity. For me, this is the biggest flaw with the new movie. Total lack of creativity. With dreams, you can do ANYTHING. And Bayer pretty much does NOTHING with it.

MA: I had other problems with the movie as well, in terms of plot. I thought it took the teens an awful long time before they turned to the Internet for help. I would have thought the first thing they would have done would be to do a Google search for “Freddy Krueger,” rather than wasting their time asking their parents about him.

I also thought it silly that Nancy and Quentin discover Freddy’s secret “cave” room so easily, when earlier in the film their parents admit they had never been able to find this room. Yet Nancy and Quentin find it without breaking a sweat. Poor storytelling.

LS: I don’t know – I kind of liked the “secret cave.” I thought it was very creepy and was one of the few times in the movie when a location was effective. The dream world surely wasn’t anything exciting!

MA: And last but not least, the very ending of this film is awful. It’s another of those endings that makes no sense and really diminishes the integrity of the movie.

LS: The original had a very similar ending, so you should have hated that one, too.

MA: I did. This new remake of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET is largely a snorefest. During the film’s 90 minutes, the characters in the movie aren’t the only ones fighting to stay awake.

LS: I liked it better than you did. I thought that the darker tone and the more explicit evilness of Freddy was interesting. But this movie is definitely lacking something. And that something is Robert Englund! His absence here is a real liability. Haley gives it a good try, but his take on the character is pretty boring in comparison.

And I know this movie was in color, but for some reason, looking back on it, it seems like it was black and white – and not in a good, “classic movie” kind of way. It just seemed drained of all color, which is the exact opposite of what you should be doing with a movie about dreams.

MA:  That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about that, but you’re right about the film and its apparent lack of color. Don’t we dream in black and white?  Maybe the filmmakers were on to something here.

LS:  What do you know?  I dream in friggin TECHNICOLOR, man. Dreams give you carte blanche to do ANYTHING you want. And I don’t think any of the Freddy movies take full advantage of this. But it’s not just the lack of good dream scenes. The new NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET seems to be lacking something else. A soul. This movie seems cold and lifeless a lot of the time. I think the teenagers are fleshed out a little more this time around, and Freddy is a lot darker. But it doesn’t really work. The movie is a cold fish.

It’s a quality that several  recent remakes have in common, whether we’re talking about the new version of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (2003) or last year’s FRIDAY THE 13TH remake. It’s like these movies are the products of an assembly line. And all three have another thing in common – they were all produced by Michael Bay. Coincidence?

That said, I don’t think Wes Craven’s original is all that great, either. A lot of people are angry about this remake, mainly because it is screwing around with the franchise. But I don’t think it’s any worse than most of the sequels we got before this. Which is pretty much the same way I felt about the recent FRIDAY THE 13th remake. Like you said in your review of the original A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET – looking back on it before we saw this one – Craven kind of dropped the ball, too. It’s a great idea – a killer who gets you in dreams – but it has NEVER been done with the kind of total balls-to-the-wall surrealism it deserves. A Freddy movie should be a cinematic acid trip! And Craven was just as pedestrian and boring as any other director who’s tackled the character.

Director Samuel Bayer had a chance to improve on the original here. And he blew it. Like in a lot of remakes, he just wasn’t creative enough to do something new and different.

MA: I agree. Moving along, we’re introducing a new Cinema Knife Fight ratings system today. Would you like to do the honors?

LS:  Sure. Everyone else has stars or thumbs, but here on Cinema Knife Fight, we obviously want something different. So we’ve got knife hands. Here’s the spiel:

One Knife Hand means the movie’s a stinker

Two means it’s so-so, or had potential and blew it.

Three means it’s better than average

Four means it’s a great movie, and you should go see it now.

And, on a rare occasion, we may have a five knife movie. If it’s some kind of masterpiece. I don’t expect that to happen too often.

This rating system makes it a little more explicit how much we liked (or didn’t like) a given movie. And besides, it’s a fun new gimmick. Hope you like it.

MA:  And on that note, I give A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 1 Knife.

LS: I’ll be generous and give it two knives. Barely.

(FREDDY pops up again)

FREDDY: One knife? Two knives?  How about five?  (Flashes his hand of metallic blades.)

MA: This time we both fell asleep.

LS: Yeah. You know what that means.

MA: That we can do whatever the hell we want!

(LS and MA pull out butcher knives and chase FREDDY down a long hallway)

MA: See you next time, folks!

-END-

© Copyright 2010 by Michael Arruda and L.L. Soares

*****

Michael Arruda Gives This Movie: 1 knife

.

.

.

.

L.L. Soares Gives This Movie: 2 knives

2 Comments »

THE CRAZIES

Posted in 2010, Cinema Knife Fights, Disaster Films, Remakes, Zombie Movies with tags , , , , , , , , , on March 1, 2010 by knifefighter

CINEMA KNIFE FIGHT:  THE CRAZIES (2010)
by Michael Arruda and L.L. Soares

(MICHAEL ARRUDA and L.L. SOARES are seated on the bleachers of a high school baseball game in small-town America. They are eating hot dogs and chips, and drinking soda).

MA:  This sure beats winter back home!

LS:  I’ll say!  And I don’t even like baseball!  But hot dogs, sunshine, 80-degree weather, it just puts me in the mood to watch a horror movie!

MA (Basking in sunlight): Here’s to the American dream. Baseball, apple pie, and zombies! (They toast their soda cans).

LS:  Here, here!

(A little KID with a mustard mustache is staring at them from the lower bleacher.)

LS: What are you looking at, kid?

KID (Looking directly at LS):  I haven’t figured out yet.

LS:  Why, I oughtta—.

MA:  Later, later. We have a movie to review.

LS:  You’re lucky, kid!

KID:  I’m lucky I don’t look like you!

MA (chuckles):  The kid’s pretty funny.

KID (to MA): I was talking about you, four eyes!

LS (to MA): That kid’s crazy! You were saying— about that movie we’re reviewing?

MA:  Riiight. (To audience)  Okay, we’re here today sitting at this baseball game in small-town America because today’s movie, THE CRAZIES (2010), opens with a key sequence at a baseball game just like this.

Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) and his deputy Russell Clank (Joe Anderson) are taking in a high school baseball game in their small town of Ogden Marsh, population 1260, when one of the townspeople suddenly steps onto the field carrying a shot gun. Sheriff Dutton quickly confronts the man while deputy Russell helps clear the players off the field. Dutton attempts to talk the man into surrendering his weapon, but he won’t cooperate. He simply stares at Dutton with a blank look in his eye before making the move to shoot the sheriff. Dutton shoots first, killing the man in front of the terrified crowd.

LS: The character’s name is Rory Hamill (played by Mike Hickman), and he’s suitably creepy.

MA: This is only the beginning, as soon other townspeople begin to act strangely, and more people die. Following a lead, Dutton and Russell discover the wreckage of a large plane hidden underneath the water in a local pond. They deduce that it’s possible that something on that plane has leaked into the town’s water supply, thus poisoning the townspeople, turning them into murderous zombie-like creatures.

LS: Zombie is the key word here. The original version of THE CRAZIES, from 1973, was directed by legendary filmmaker George A. Romero. It was after his classic NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) and before its terrific sequel, DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978). In fact, it was exactly smack dab in the middle between these two films. While not technically a zombie flick, THE CRAZIES seemed to be a variation on NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, except instead of the walking dead, we have people who are infected with a virus that makes them go insane. However, there is definitely something “zombie-like” going on.

MA: Before Dutton and Russell can do anything about it, the town is overrun by the military, who begin separating townspeople from each other in an attempt to discover who is sick and who isn’t. Dutton is separated from his wife, Dr. Judy Dutton (Radha Mitchell), but once he and Russell escape their captors, they return and rescue her and her young receptionist, Becca (Danielle Panabaker).

What follows is a desperate race to get out of town, to flee from both the military hunting them and the crazies who will mindlessly kill them at a moment’s notice, in scenes reminiscent of the INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS movies (1956, 1978, and more).

LS: That’s the power of Romero’s best movies, as well. His zombies work because they’re monsters who look just like people we love and trust. The same with the new version of THE CRAZIES. And yes, this is definitely a trait they share with the BODY SNATCHERS films as well.

MA: THE CRAZIES is a non-stop rollercoaster ride of a movie that will keep you on the edge of your seat throughout. From the opening sequence at the baseball game, in a scene that is sweating with realism, the movie grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go. For a movie like this, or any horror movie for that matter, the audience has to believe for it to work. From the get-go, THE CRAZIES will have you believing in every far-fetched thing that happens, and it’ll do it with great acting, directing and writing.

LS: I agree. I also feel this is something of a rarity – the remake that actually improves on the original material. I am a hardcore Romero fan, but I always felt that THE CRAZIES was one of Romero’s weakest films. To me, it just seemed too similar to his “Dead” movies to really have a personality of its own. So if someone was going to remake it, this was the perfect opportunity to take a flawed film and improve on it. In most cases, when we see remakes like this, they totally drop the ball. Just look at the crappy remakes of THE FOG (2005) and PROM NIGHT (2008), which made their flawed originals look even better than they were.

MA:  There you go with PROM NIGHT again. I think you secretly like that movie, you mention it so much.

LS:  I mention it so much because I like to point out how crazy you were for listing it among the “Top 10 Best Horror movies of 2008!”

MA:  Hey, it was a weak year. But I will say that I liked the PROM NIGHT remake better than the original, and let’s leave it at that.

(A ZOMBIE-like creature stumbles behind them.)

ZOMBIE:  Did someone say crazy? (Suddenly shoves a dozen hot dogs into his mouth at the same time.)

LS:  That’s the best you can do? In my prime I could put away 20 of those dogs in half the time!

MA:  I don’t need to hear things like that.

LS (To ZOMBIE):  You wannabe zombie!  Anyway, back to THE CRAZIES. In this case, director Breck Eisner riffs on the original material and turns in one helluva good horror movie.

MA: Yes, director Eisner crafts one compelling scene after another. The scene in the farmhouse where one of the townspeople, now a “crazy,” torments his family, is wonderfully done and terribly frightening.

LS: By the way, if the name Eisner sounds familiar, it’s because Breck is the son of former Disney head Michael Eisner.

MA: The image of the huge plane under the water is memorable, as I found it ominous and somehow very frightening.

And then there’s the scene where Judy and Becca are strapped to tables, and they are menaced by the man with a pitchfork. Talk about suspense!

LS: That was the school principal, Ben Sandborn (Larry Cedar) mercilessly forking people!

(WOMAN sitting next to them gasps and gives them a dirty look.)

WOMAN: There’s kids here, for crying out loud!

LS:  I said forking people!  Keep your shirt on!  And I mean that literally, lady. We can only handle one horror show at a time!

MA: ..and then there’s the even better scene in the car wash.

LS: One of my favorites!

MA: It’s been a while since a movie has had as many compelling scenes as this one. It’s a terrific movie.

But my favorite scene of all these involved a knife going through Dutton’s hand. I liked this scene because here we have this extremely graphic scene but it’s also clear that it wasn’t done just for the point of grossing us out. There’s a lot of drama going on here. It’s just really good stuff. Still, it’s not for the squeamish!

LS: There’s a lot of drama, because Eisner and company have given us characters that we actually CARE about. This is one of the keys to great horror – horrible things happening to good people. That scene with Dutton’s hand is terrific. He has to protect his wife, save his own life, and somehow free his hand, that is pinned to the floor, all at the same time.

MA: There were lots of small things that worked, too. The scene in the funeral parlor, where Rory Hamill’s wife slaps Dutton across the face for shooting her husband is particularly painful, though it reminded me of a similar face slapping scene in JAWS (1975), when Chief Brody gets his face slapped.

Speaking of JAWS, when Dutton and Russell approach the mayor and ask him to shut off the town’s water supply, and the mayor replies by saying something to the effect that this town is a farming town, and it needs its water- the water stays on!  I sat there thinking, “Dude, didn’t you see JAWS?”

LS: Yeah, the scene with the mayor reminded me a LOT of JAWS.

MA: Another scene, where a woman tells Dr. Judy Dutton that there’s something “not right” about her husband, was very reminiscent of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. These references aren’t bad things, but rather, serve as nice nods to some of the other great horror movies that have come before it.

LS: Yeah, it does riff on some other great movies.

MA: The screenplay was written by Scott Kosar, who also wrote the screenplays for the remakes of THE AMITYVILLE HORROR (2005) and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (2003), and Ray Wright, and it was well done. It was filled with one memorable scene after another, along with realistic dialogue and fleshed-out characters, who you really care about.

LS: Now this amazes me, because I am not a big fan of either of those other movies. Especially the remake of TEXAS CHAINSAW. I couldn’t care less what anyone did with AMITYVILLE HORROR, but CHAINSAW is a bonafide milestone in horror film history. One of the titans. And I thought the 2003 remake was both unnecessary and pretty much insignificant. This new film, also a remake, is in a whole other league. This time Kosar (along with Wright) turn in a killer screenplay.

MA: I thought both Timothy Olyphant as Sheriff David Dutton and Radha Mitchell as Dr. Judy Dutton stood out as the leads in the movie…

LS: I’m a big fan of both of them. Olyphant was just terrific as Sheriff Seth Bullock on one of my all-time favorite shows, DEADWOOD. And he’s been good in just about everything he’s been in before and since. Radha Mitchell, some of our readers might remember, was in PITCH BLACK (2000) and was also the lead in one of the few good video game-related movies, SILENT HILL (2006). They’re both strong actors and they bring a lot of humanity to their roles here.

MA: ….and I thought Joe Anderson was even better in the supporting role as Deputy Russell Clark. I think his was my favorite performance in the movie.

LS: Anderson was also in THE RUINS, but I didn’t recognize him right away. He was terrific, too. Another great performance. He takes what could have been a throwaway character and really makes you care about him. Especially when you start to wonder if he’s going to get infected or not.

MA: Danielle Panabaker, who we saw recently in the FRIDAY THE 13TH (2009) remake, also stood out as Becca Darling.

LS: Yes, she was very good, too.

MA: Now, the movie is not without flaws. I thought the scene where they meet up with the government agent, and he quickly tells them about the contents on the plane, was forced and obviously done for the benefit of giving the audience exposition. I don’t think a government agent, even with a gun pointed at his head, would speak so freely.

LS: Actually, the government soldiers were one of the only things I didn’t fully understand in this movie. They come to town and gather up the population, then for some weird reason they take off and leave all these people strapped to gurneys in the school. They just leave. And then they appear on and off. I wasn’t sure why they kept coming and going.

MA:  Yeah, that scene where they take off and leave the people strapped to the gurneys, I think they flee because a pick-up truck smashes into the compound, and the soldiers are afraid of the crazies, so they run away. That’s the impression I got. Now, I’m not sure how realistic this would be. You would think there would be some commanding officer telling these guys what to do. So maybe that’s why this scene was left unclear and confusing, because the soldiers’ actions don’t really make sense.

LS:  I also thought it was odd that they were all concerned about isolating the town, and yet they did a lousy job of blocking off the roads leading in and out of Ogden Marsh. There’s a scene where the main characters drive for awhile on the highway, and there are no roadblocks or anything. Eventually, helicopters show up. But they seem to do a sloppy job of cutting the town off from the rest of the world.

That was my only big complaint. The government presence wasn’t always consistent.

MA: There also is considerable time spent on whether Deputy Russell is becoming a crazy or not, and while I liked this as a plot point, I don’t think it was clearly explained why Russell, if he were changing, would take longer to change than anyone else.

I also thought the sequence near the end, when Dutton and his wife attempt to steal a truck, may have been one sequence too many. At that point, I knew where the movie was going, and I just wanted them to get into the truck so we could get to the inevitable conclusion. While the sequence was well done, I thought it slowed the pace a bit.

LS: I don’t know, I liked that scene. Especially Sheriff Dutton’s fistfight with a crazy underneath the truck. That crazy, by the way, was one of a group of redneck hunters who appear early on in the movie and then go on a killing spree once the contamination has begun. I thought they were interesting characters, too, and I wanted to know more about them.

MA:  Yeah, I agree with you about the hunters. I actually thought we were going to see more of them. I thought they were going to be the wild card in the plot, you know, not crazy like the crazies, but just as dangerous, so whose side will they be on? That sort of thing. But the plot didn’t really go there.

Also, while I absolutely loved this movie, I couldn’t help but wonder about the government’s methods here. Their answer seemed to be kill everyone involved, and I wondered, how would far would this go? What are they going to do? Kill the entire population of the country? I thought this logic was flawed and unlike the events in the movie, not very plausible.

But these are minor faults, because the rest of the movie works so well on an emotional level, that you’re not going to care if a few things don’t make sense, especially when most of the film comes off as very believable.

Overall, THE CRAZIES is a relentless horror movie, one that goes for the throat early on and doesn’t let go. By far, it’s the best horror film of 2010, one that every horror fan should get out and see. You’d be crazy not to!

LS: I liked it a lot, too. This has been a good year for remakes so far. I really enjoyed both this one and THE WOLFMAN. Finally, directors who can take an idea and do something interesting with it. Instead of just turning out more crap.

Oh, and make sure to stay during the closing credits. There’s a news bulletin that pops up during the credits that ties up some loose ends.

MA:  That about sums things up from here. We’ll see you next weekend with our review of SORORITY ROW, now showing on cable and DVD.

(To LS)  We can head out now. This game’s pretty much over.

LS:  Oh, there’s a game going on?

(As they leave, they notice the KID with the mustard mustache)

LS: That crazy kid is still staring at us!

MA: Go home kid, our review is over.

(The KID starts to foam at the mouth, and his eyes are wide and scary, like a zombie.)

LS: We don’t have time for this. I wanna go home.

(LS hurls his half-full soda can at the KID’s head, knocking him down)

(The crowd cheers!)

-THE END-

© Copyright 2010 by Michael Arruda and L.L. Soares

2 Comments »

LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (2009)

Posted in 2009, Cinema Knife Fights, Remakes with tags , , , , , , , on January 29, 2010 by knifefighter

CINEMA KNIFE FIGHT: LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (2009)
by Michael Arruda and L.L. Soares

FADE IN

(Close-up of LL SOARES lying down on a table with his head inside a microwave oven. MICHAEL ARRUDA enters the room)

MA: What are you doing?  Cleaning the microwave with your tongue again?

LS: No, I’m— hmm, it does need cleaning—I’m just drying my hair. Can you push the START button for me?

MA: You don’t have any hair. Now stop fooling around so we can review the new remake of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT.

LS (pulls himself out of the microwave and sits up on the table. He pats his head):  I used to have hair.

So Where was I? Ahhh, revenge. One of my favorite themes in horror fiction. And LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT is about nothing if not revenge.

MA:  Well said, Lex Luthor.

LS:  First off a little history lesson. This is actually the third version of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, unless you count Ingmar Bergman’s film VIRGIN SPRING (1960), which supposedly was the inspiration for the first LAST HOUSE, then the movie’s been made four times!

The original LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972) was the debut film of director Wes Craven. The plot is pretty simple. Two girls trying to score some pot before a concert come into the orbit of some escaped convicts who brutally rape and kill them. The convicts then end up at the house of one of the girl’s parents, who find out the truth, and exact their revenge against the evil-doers.

I’m actually a fan of Craven’s original film. Sure, it’s a sleaze/exploitation classic, but it’s also a powerful and disturbing movie.

MA:  I didn’t like Craven’s original film.  While you think it’s a classic, I found it trashy and exploitative.  And I think it’s interesting that our different takes on the original influences how we view the remake. More on that as we continue.

LS:  I’m one of these people who think good horror should actually screw with your head.  I’m all for dopey fun like the FRIDAY THE 13TH movies and stuff like that, but the real good stuff includes films that actually disturb you. Like the original TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974) and more recent fair like JACK KETCHUM’S THE GIRL NEXT DOOR (2007).

MA:  I agree with you on this point.

LS:  Yeah, sure you do.

MA:  I do.  I think there are some horror movies that succeed because they disturb you, and that’s a good thing.  Others succeed without disturbing you.  But there’s a difference in my book between being disturbed and feeling revulsion.  That’s a point where you and I differ.

LS:  The original LAST HOUSE was one of these films that really got under your skin. The lead convict, Krug, as played by the amazing David Hess, was pure evil, with a real penchant for sadism. The girls in the original film weren’t just murdered, they were humiliated and brutalized first, and these scenes lasted a long time, to really make for a very unpleasant experience.

MA:  Which is a major reason why I didn’t like the original movie.

LS:  So by the time the bad guys ended up at the house of their victims’ parents, you hated them enough so that you really relished when they got their comeuppance.

MA:  I felt the same way in the remake, without the long agonizing scene of brutality.

LS:  I have to admit, I’m not a big Wes Craven fan, mostly because of his awful SCREAM films of the 90s.

MA:  The SCREAM films aren’t awful.

LS:  Seriously, they’re complete friggin garbage. And they also ushered in the whole Dawson’s Creek era of horror films, where every single one had to be about stupid kids. Suddenly, adults didn’t have a place in horror stories anymore. Complete casts were comprised of nothing but teenagers and twenty-somethings pretending to be teenagers, thanks to Craven as his SCREAM writer Kevin Williamson. This was actually one of the lowest points ever in the genre, between movies like the SCREAM series and equally lame rip-offs like I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER.

It figures you’d like this trash. With SCREAM, Craven pretty much turned horror movies into a joke, and it was years before they were taken seriously again.

MA:  I think you’re giving Craven way too much credit here.  I don’t think he single-handedly made the horror industry a laughing stock.  The SCREAM films were funny for a reason, because the slasher franchises had gotten so silly over the years it was difficult to take them seriously, so the SCREAM movies poked fun at the clichés and pratfalls these movies had fallen into, and they did so with sharp humor (heh, heh) while remaining scary to boot.

LS: But back in the 1970s, when he was first starting out, Craven actually knew how to make a decent horror film. LAST HOUSE is very effective, as is his second film, THE HILLS HAVE EYES (which also had a decent remake made out of it a few years ago). After that, he pretty much lost his way, although he did create THE NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series and Freddy Krueger.

But early on, he was the man. Needless to say, it didn’t last long.

MA:  Actually, he got better with age. So, take that, Dr. Evil!

LS:  Are you sure you’re not brain damaged? But back to LAST HOUSE. The first time it was remade was in the 2005 film CHAOS, directed by David DeFalco. It may not give credit to the source material, but CHAOS is almost the exact same story. CHAOS is actually a pretty decent remake, too, with Kevin Gage starring as the sadistic  escaped convict Chaos, who is the new version of the original convict Krug. I actually thought that version was pretty decent, and while it wasn’t as intense as the original film, it didn’t hold back on the violence and brutality.

The new version of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT is much less raw, but the basic premise is the same. This time around, John and Emma Collingwood (Tony Goldwyn and Monica Potter), along with their teenage daughter Mari (Sara Paxton), head out to a summer cottage in the middle of the woods for their summer vacation. Not only are they going there to escape their jobs and everyday life, they’re also going  to get away from the grief of losing their son Ben, who died a year earlier.

When Mari borrows the family SUV to go visit her friend Paige (Martha MacIsaac), her parents decide to make the best of their first night in their summer home by having a romantic dinner together.

While Mari is visiting Paige at her job, as a cashier at a liquor store, they meet Justin (Spencer Treat Clark), a shy young man who offers to get them some primo pot if they’ll let him buy cigarettes (he’s not 21 yet, presumably). They agree and go back to his motel room. Things only go downhill from there.

All versions of this film play upon parental fears, which gives the story most of its power. Not only is it about parents whose child goes off on her own and falls prey to violent strangers, but her situation begins when she goes to score drugs (of course, since drugs are clearly evil in this context). While partying with Justin, the girls are surprised by the appearance of Justin’s father Krug (Garret Dillahunt) and his sidekicks Francis (Krug’s brother, played by Aaron Paul) and Krug’s  psychotic girlfriend Sadie (Riki Lindhome). Francis and Sadie have just sprung Krug from police custody (in an opening sequence they kill two cops who were planning to bring Krug in) and they’re all over the newspapers. Krug decides that, now that the girls have seen them, it’s not safe to keep them alive. Of course, he’s not about to kill them off before having a little fun with them first.

A road trip in Mari’s parents’ car goes awry when they have a car crash (when Mari and Paige try to escape). The angry criminals brutalize the girls, leaving them for dead. But with the car totaled and with a storm on the way, they have no choice but to seek shelter at the nearest possible place, which turns out to be the summer home of Emma’s parents. When they learn the truth about their new houseguests, the parents seek bloody revenge against these inhuman bastards.

Part of what made the original film so effective was its low-budget look. It  added a kind of documentary quality to the film that made it seem more realistic, and thus possible.

MA: Which is a fancy way of saying the film looked cheap.

LS:  The acting didn’t hurt either. The entire cast of the original Craven film was very good, especially David Hess as the incredibly creepy, curly-haired psychotic named Krug.

Some people may recognize Garret Dillahunt from his appearances on the HBO show DEADWOOD, where he played two roles (one of which was a wild west serial killer). He’s  a good actor and has his moments here, but he simply is not as intense and just plain scary as Hess was in Craven’s original film.

There’s also a slickness to the new film that wasn’t in the original. This is clearly a Hollywood film. And the more brutal aspects of the original film are absent here. The torture and killing of the girls, for instance, is a scene which lasts much longer in the original. Here, they almost seem in a hurry to get that part over with, and linger much longer on the parents’ revenge in the final act. The infamous fellatio scene from the original film is also absent here. Instead, the big moment of the revenge motif is a scene involving a microwave, which is hinted at in the trailer, and doesn’t disappoint (But for some reason it did seem kind of goofy).

All in all, I think the remake was well done and wasn’t particularly painful to sit through for a real fan of the original like myself. However, the remake, while not awful, does not hold a candle to the original.

But what did you think, Michael?

MA:  I think you hit the nail on the head when you said your reaction was influenced by you being a fan of the original. The same thing happened to me, but in the opposite way. I did not like the original, but— and I can’t believe I’m going to say this— I liked this movie. A lot.

I expected not to like THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. I expected it to be raw, raunchy, and excessively violent, but a funny thing happened while watching this movie. I found myself caring for the characters, and I felt genuine suspense during the latter half of the film, worrying about what might happen to the girl’s parents as they encountered the criminals. Suddenly I realized I was really into this movie.

The main reason I liked this film was that the story really drew me in. I cared about the characters and felt uncomfortable when bad things started to happen.

The original movie really wasn’t on my mind as I watched this version, which allowed me to view this movie with a fresh, open mind. I wasn’t thinking about comparing scenes or knowing in advance what was going to happen. No, I simply watched this film and experienced it as its own movie.

I agree with you about the violence not being as raw in this one, but I think that worked just fine. It wasn’t wimpy, that’s for sure. It contained R-rated violence, but it wasn’t exploitative.  Sure, it was brutal, but— and this is where I’ve criticized other gory movies— it had a purpose. Hear that?  A purpose! It wasn’t mindless gore. We have nasty criminals, real life baddies, not cliché, and if you think these guys aren’t like some real people, just watch the 6:00 news. Sad, but true. They’re not superhuman, like Jason or Michael Myers, which means that when they do real nasty things to two very likeable people, it’s believable and it’s scary.

Sure, the murder/rape scene isn’t as long or as brutal as the one in the original, but it’s still a difficult scene to watch, difficult enough to make its point, which is to give the girl’s parents a justifiable reason to fight back against these guys. It’s certainly not a PG-13 rated scene. I don’t think the movie wimped out on the violence. I think it just didn’t go overboard.

LS: I agree that the rape scene here is pretty intense, although it’s toned down in comparison to the original film and is not as stomach-churning as it was there. The original movie made you despise the bad guys even more, if that’s possible.

MA: I have to admit, I wanted the girl’s parents to get back at these guys. Now, the movie does a very good job of making this possible, which is one of the major reasons I liked it. Normally, I’m not into vengeance/revenge, and in a story like this, I’m thinking, you could call the police!  How about that for an option?  Sounds pretty good to me.

But the movie does a good job taking this option off the table, in a very believable way. Outside is a powerful,  raging thunderstorm. Phone service is out, including their cell phone. When they find their daughter, who has somehow crawled home, danger is imminent. Should the criminals see their daughter, they’re in deep trouble. They also need to get her to the hospital as soon as possible to save her life. There isn’t time to think rationally. They have got to act and act now. So, when they do the things they do, it’s not as if they’ve sat down and planned an elaborate revenge/torture scheme to get back at the bad guys. Most of what they do is in self-defense anyway. If they don’t act, most likely they’re going to be killed. The movie does a good job of giving these people little choice but to fight, and so for those of us who prefer to choose violence as a last resort, these scenes of vengeance work.

LS: You know, one thing I wondered about in both version of LAST HOUSE, was why, if these criminals are so hardcore violent, why are they so well behaved when they go to the parents’ house? They’re in the middle of nowhere, trapped in a storm with a nice (and seemingly harmless) couple, and they suddenly remember their manners? Considering Krug and the gang are still on the run and still psychotic, you’d think that LAST HOUSE would turn into a slaughterhouse at this point.

MA: I thought the acting was all very good. While there wasn’t one performance in particular that stood heads above the others, as a group, the performers all satisfied. I liked Garret Dillahunt as Krug.  When he was on screen, I felt uncomfortable as to what he might be capable of doing at any given moment.

I enjoyed Aaron Paul as Krug’s brother and Riki Lindhome as Sadie, the psycho  girlfriend. And Spencer Treat Clark as Justin, Krug’s son, was especially effective as the one member of the group with a conscience.

LS: Justin’s character is a lot more important to the storyline this time than he was in the previous versions (he was called Junior in the original film). You certainly care about him more, here.

MA:  Sara Paxton was fine as Mari, and she showed the right amount of fear and bravery in her scenes with the criminals.

LS: I’ll go one step further and say that Paxton was the best thing in the whole movie. She was really believable as Mari, a mature, level-headed girl who does her best to deal with a situation that is out of her control. I thought she was really terrific in this movie. It was a brave performance.

MA:  I also really liked Tony Goldwyn and Monica Potter as the parents. The scene where Potter has to pretend to show interest in Krug’s brother is a good one.

LS:  Yep, she’s great, too. Some horror fans might remember that Potter was also in the original SAW back in 2004.

MA:  Better than the acting was the screenplay. As written by Adam Alleca and Carl Ellsworth, it really works. This version of THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT is the kind of movie I’ve been talking about lately, as one that’s been sorely missing in the horror film world:  a truly adult tale of horror that has some depth to it. Is it high art?  Certainly not. Is it my favorite kind of horror movie, one that includes supernatural elements?  Nope. But it is a genuine horror tale that gives reasons for its violence.

I also enjoyed the direction by Dennis Iliadis. I found the murder/rape scene very disturbing. It was not a scene I enjoyed watching, but it set the stage for what was to come later. The scene where Mari is swimming for her life, and she’s being shot at, I thought was extremely suspenseful, as was the scene later when the dad is reaching for the gun by the bed where Krug and Sadie are sleeping.

Like you, I didn’t find the violence in this one too raw, which was perfectly fine for me. Sure, there were a couple of over the top scenes, like the garbage disposal scene and the microwave scene, but these worked for me as well.  The garbage disposal scene would have been a completely different animal had it been instigated by a character like, say Jason or Michael Myers. Had that been the case, it would have just been yet another clichéd horror movie scene. In this case, it’s instigated by two human beings pushed to their limits. There’s a big difference.

And the final microwave scene was so fast it was like an exclamation point, or a knock-out punch. One quick strike and you’re out. I hope dear old dad has a good lawyer, by the way, because the other killings could all be passed off as self-defense, but it might be difficult getting a judge to believe that about the microwave stunt!

(addressing audience) If you find yourself tempted to stay away from this movie, fearing it might be trashy or repulsive, I’m here to tell you otherwise. It’s not. It is violent. It is disturbing. But it’s also a very good movie, much better than the previews make it out to be.

Get out there and see it.

LS:  As usual with most remakes, I didn’t think this one lived up to the original. But I also think that this year has been a really good year for above-average remakes of older films. Better than the dreck we’ve had to sit through in previous years. I enjoyed the remakes of MY BLOODY VALENTINE and (to a lesser degree) FRIDAY THE 13TH, and this one just keeps the ball rolling. However, where those other two remakes were violent, dumb fun, the remake of LAST HOUSE is an effective film in its own right that takes itself seriously, and that works as both a suspenseful crime film as well as a vicious story that spills over into true horror.

You’re right about us coming at this from different ends of the spectrum, but we’re pretty much in agreement here. The remake of LAST HOUSE is a well-made and effective horror film, and worth checking out.

MA:  Yes it is, and it’s better than the remakes of MY BLOODY VALENTINE or FRIDAY THE 13th, two films I didn’t like.

(Behind them, out from the microwave pops a miniature version of LS, except he has hair cut in a bowl haircut. LS hoists the little guy upon his shoulders.)

LS:  Aaah, it’s my clone, Mini Moe!

MA (confused):  Mini Moe?

LS:  “Mini Me” was already taken.

(Mini Moe leans over and pokes two fingers into MA’s eyes. MA cries out and stumbles off camera, followed by a great crash.)

LS:  Thatta boy!  Say good-bye to the people, Mini Moe. (Mini Moe and LS give the finger to the audience as the microwave oven beeps in the background)

FADE OUT.

(Originally published on Fear Zone on 3/15/2009)

© Copyright 2009 by Michael Arruda and L.L. Soares

—–

(Editor’s Note: I totally forgot about “Mini-Moe.” I gotta bring him back sometime ~LS)

Leave A Comment »

FRIDAY THE 13TH (2009)

Posted in 2009, Cinema Knife Fights, Lame Remakes, Remakes with tags , , , , , on January 27, 2010 by knifefighter

CINEMA KNIFE FIGHT:  FRIDAY THE 13TH (2009)
by Michael Arruda and L.L. Soares

FADE IN

(The camera pans a sign that reads CAMP CRYSTAL LAKE, and then we find MICHAEL ARRUDA inside a dilapidated cabin, trying to turn the lights on, but they won’t work)

MA:  Hey, LL?  I don’t mind that you keep wanting to meet in these creepy places, but at least pick a place where they pay their electric bills!  (Strikes a match and lights a candle, engulfing the interior of the cabin with full cheery light) (Looks at camera)  It’s a new guy doing the lighting, but hey, it works for me.

(A closet door swings open and a scary figure pops out, wearing a hockey mask)

MA: Hi LL.

LS (removes mask):  What gave it away?

MA: You know, I think I’m going to go with the Alf T-shirt.

LS: Oh. I knew I should have worn something more menacing.

MA: Speaking of menacing, let’s get to the review of the new FRIDAY THE 13TH remake.   Take it way, Alf.

LS: Okay. Well, first off, the new movie FRIDAY THE 13TH isn’t exactly a remake of the first film in the Jason series from 1980. It’s kind of a condensed remake – or reimagining  – of the first two sequels.

MA:  You know, I just have to butt in here.  I’ve heard that term a lot lately:  “reimagining,” and all I can say is, after watching FRIDAY THE 13TH, if the filmmakers are going to use that term, there’d better be more emphasis placed on the “imagining” part and less on the “re” part, because as it stands now, there ain’t a whole of imagining going on!

At least with the HALLOWEEN (2007) “reimagining” (a film I didn’t like),  there was an attempt to look at the story in a different way, as a strong effort was made to explain the background of Michael Myers.  It was an effort that ultimately failed, as the connection was never made between tragic childhood and supernatural adult killer, but at least the attempt was made.  Here— well, I’ll let you explain the movie, but I’ll just say this at the outset:  I didn’t view this movie as a “reimagining” at all.  I just didn’t see many differences between this movie and those in the original series.

LS:   Okay, so the new film opens with the end of the first movie, where Jason’s mother reveals herself to be the killer of the camp instructors at Camp Crystal Lake, and confronts the final survivor of the group, who then chops off her head with a machete.

We then jump ahead to present day, where a bunch of kids are wandering around the forest, looking for an abandoned pot harvest that will make them rich. As night falls, they pitch their tents not far from the old, abandoned Camp Crystal Lake, and meet grisly ends at the hands of the vengeful Jason.

It seems that Jason didn’t die and that his mother, who killed all those campers back in 1980 because they’d allowed her poor son to drown unattended, went on a killing spree for NOTHING! Not only was he alive, but he watched his mother die, and now has a major problem with anyone who even comes near his home.

MA (yawns):  BORING! (Light bulb goes off above his head)  I’ve got it!  Here’s our maniacal killer’s motivation: he’ll have a major problem with anyone who comes near his home!  Brilliant!  Come on, screenwriters, give the audience some credit.  We do have brains after all.

(A ZOMBIE pops his head up from the rotting floorboards)

ZOMBIE: Braaaaains?

(LS kicks it like a football)

ZOMBIE: Ouch!

MA: We can figure out complex plot points!  Why do horror movies have to be dumbed down so much?

LS:  When we first see Jason in modern-day, he is wearing a sack over his head like he did back in FRIDAY THE 13THPART 2 (1981)—.

MA (jumps in front of LS wearing a sack over his head):  This just in!   There’s been a major “reimagining” concerning characters wearing sacks on their heads.  We’ve had the Scarecrow from the new Batman movies, the Strangers, and now Jason.  Enough with the sacks!  Everyone knows that the REAL new look is  lamp shades!  (Replaces sack on his head with lamp shade, and begins to grunt and swing a machete).

LS (shaking his head):  Are you through?  (MA crashes into wall and falls to the floor).  I’ll take that as a yes.  Where was I?  Sacks.  But about half-way through the movie he puts on a hockey mask instead, like he did in FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 3 (1982). So this is really a bunch of remakes all in one. At the same time, the movie seeks to jump-start the series all over again.

MA:  Did someone say jump-start?  (Lunges as LS with jumper cables.  LS steps aside and MA crashes into wall again.)

LS:  What is it with you today?

MA (sitting on floor):  It’s the “reimagined” me.

LS: I think I like the old you better.

A second group of kids come to the area a few months later (because this Jason is so good at killing, there can’t be just one group!). One of them is a rich kid and he is bringing his dumb-ass friends to his parents’ summer home in the woods. Unfortunately, it’s on the other side of the lake from where Jason dwells, so they’re soon under attack as well.  At the same time, the brother of one of the first batch of kids (the ones who came looking for the pot plants) is in town to find his missing sister, who just happens to be a prisoner in Jason’s basement (which looks a lot like a mine shaft from MY BLOODY VALENTINE). We never really find out why she’s being kept alive. Is it because she has a locket that she found that holds pictures of Jason as a child and his mother? Does he think she’s his mother when she shows him the locket? Or is she being kept as his sex slave? We’re never really sure. And if he thinks she’s his mother for some weird reason (supposedly she looks like the picture in the locket) then why does he keep her chained up in the basement? None of this really makes any sense.

MA (applauding):   Thank you for saying this and saving me the trouble.

LS:  The acting, for the most part, is mediocre. We’ve got a few more television veterans this time around, including Jared Padalecki from the CW show SUPERNATURAL as Clay Miller, the guy who is searching for his lost sister Whitney (Amanda Righetti). Padalecki is brooding and very bland, as always, and strikes me as a very boring hero. I guess some people find him attractive, but seriously, I just don’t see his appeal as an actor at all.  And then there’s Ryan Hansen who played the jerk Dick Casablancas on another former CW show VERONICA MARS. He played a jerk on that show, and plays another one here. I guess he’s just really good at playing jerks! And Richard Burgi (who was on DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES as well as in HOSTEL PART II) plays the local cop, Officer Bracke. I like Burgi, but he really has very little screen time here, and his role is more like an extended cameo.

There are also plenty of other archetypes, such as  the virginal girl, Jenna (Danielle Panabaker), who hangs around with the morons but who befriends the brooding Clay, and is just as boring as he is; rich boy Trent (Travis Van Winkle – what an appropriate name for the actor!);  and a few hot bimbos, Bree (Julianna Guill) and Chelsea (Willa Ford). There are also two nerds, an Asian guy named Chewie (Aaron Yoo) and an African-American guy named Lawrence (Arlen Escarpeta), who just smoke a bong all day and can’t get laid (!). They’re mainly there as comic relief.

MA:  I really enjoyed Aaron Yoo as Chewie.  Though his character wasn’t that original, he made the best of his scenes and had me laughing quite a bit.  Yoo was also in DISTURBIA, and I liked him in that, too.

LS: I forgot about DISTURBIA. I hated that movie. Although Yoo is pretty good here.

But even the characters that are developed a little more than the rest are mostly just here to be fodder for Jason to kill using various sharp instruments. Which brings us to Jason Vorhees himself (played here by Derek Mears). He’s faster and more physical than the old slower, more hulking Jason of previous films, and sometimes that works okay. He’s effective enough as a mostly unstoppable killing machine, but sometimes I found myself missing the slower, more lumbering Jason of the past.

Overall, I liked this movie, even though it was directed by Marcus Nispel, who also gave us the watered down remake of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE in 2003. There is, however, a big difference between CHAINSAW and FRIDAY THE 13TH. The original CHAINSAW from 1974 is a true genre classic, one of the most powerful horror films ever made, and it did not need to be remade. FRIDAY THE 13TH, on the other hand, was meant to cash in on the success of the original HALLOWEEN (1978) from the get-go (not to mention being also “inspired” by Mario Bava’s 1971 classic, BAY OF BLOOD), and so you immediately have much lower expectations for a Jason film. Despite the fact that most of the Jason sequels were pretty awful, I always had a soft spot for the hockey mask-wearing psycho. And I found myself digging this one most of the time.

There are a few points where the new movie is a letdown. The decapitation of Jason’s mother at the beginning was actually done much more gruesomely in the original FRIDAY THE 13TH, and the very final scene of the new movie, which seeks to emulate a dream sequence at the end of the original film, is a total letdown in the scare department (they just totally screw it up). But I won’t reveal what that is, in case there are people out there who have no idea what I’m talking about.

Most horror films these days are not screened for critics beforehand, because they are mostly panned and yet do quite well at the box office even without good reviews. FRIDAY THE 13TH is one of the rare new horror films that were screened beforehand. I notice in my local paper that it got one star, from a critic who admitted that he despises slasher  films, once more showing the bias mainstream critics have against horror films. Well, you won’t get that crap here. I enjoyed the new FRIDAY THE 13TH, and if you’re a Jason fan, you should go see it. It’s not a masterpiece, but it is better than several of the previous sequels in the series.

The new film is also rated R and features not only some nifty gore effects (although they seemed very restrained to me) but also plenty of nudity, which this critic always appreciates. And, by the way, we get some real breasts in this one, as well as some implants, and I’ve got to say, real ones look a hundred times better. And I’d like to give a shout out to Julianna Guill, who plays Bree, for proving this.

So what did you think, Michael?

MA:   Before I weigh in on the movie, I have to say I agree with you about Julianna Guill.  Whoa, baby!  Hands down, her sex scene is the best scene in the movie.  So, if you want to see a good sex scene, I mean, a REALLY good one, check out FRIDAY THE 13TH.  Oh yeah, it’s a horror movie, isn’t it?  Which means you’ll have to sit through all those gruesome murder scenes just to enjoy one erotic scene.  Damn!   And I don’t know about you, but while I liked this scene, that’s not why I went to see the movie.  I went to see it because I like horror movies.

Which ultimately explains why I did not like FRIDAY THE 13TH.  I just don’t find it a very good horror movie.

I actually went into this movie with a very open mind.  I wanted to like it.  I was hoping that this “reimagining” would be a fresh start.  I never liked the original FRIDAY THE 13TH series, so I was psyched that perhaps this could be a new beginning, a fresh start to a new series.  Sadly, it’s about as fresh as that McDonalds’ french fry that’s been resting on the floor of my van for two months!

I was also hoping that maybe this movie would mark the changing of the guard.  I’ve always enjoyed the HALLOWEEN series better than the FRIDAY THE 13th series, and I thought, wouldn’t it be neat if this film was really cool and started a new way-better franchise?  My expectations were sadly way too high.

LS: I hate to say this, but in some ways I actually liked this movie better than Rob Zombie’s remake of HALLOWEEN. I say “hate to say it” because RZ’s movie was a lot more ambitious, but in the long run it failed at what it tried to do. This one isn’t very ambitious at all, but, like that McDonald’s french fry, it seemed satisfying in some no-nutrient junk food kind of way.

MA: You mean, you’d eat that french fry that’s been sitting in my van for two months?  No wonder you liked this movie!

I’ve been poking fun this whole review at the “reimagining” concept, and that’s because when you cut to the chase, the bottom line is there’s nothing new or fresh about this movie.  It’s the same old thing.

LS: I guess I’ve got to agree with you on that point. Although there was one thing new in this movie. We learned that Jason is an expert with a bow and arrow. He even won a trophy in it!

(Suddenly the REAL JASON crashes through a window and impales LS with a harpoon, pinning him to the wall)

MA: (ignores what’s going on) Not that this movie doesn’t look good.  It does.  It has high production values, and I didn’t find the acting all that bad or annoying.  I liked the characters well enough.  But ultimately, what do we have here?  We have a movie where everybody will be killed by Jason in super- violent,  grotesque ways, and not only that, but a movie where we in the audience KNOW that everybody will be killed by Jason in super-violent grotesque ways.  Now I know you can make the argument that this is the formula that works, that people flock to these movies because they like the formula.  While this might be true, I find this particular formula boring and unimaginative, and I find it ludicrous that this movie would use the term “reimagining” since it’s not a reimagining at all.  Reimagining in my mind is what the people behind the new Daniel Craig James Bond films have done. THAT’S reimagining.

LS (Still impaled, and blood dribbles out of his mouth): Y’know what I would have liked? If the Clay Miller role had been played by a black guy, who actually got the girl for a change. Or if a slutty girl got to be the one who survives at the end. That would have been nice. These virginal types might be morally acceptable, but they are friggin boring!

MA (nodding):  I would have to agree with you 100 % on those points.

(JASON press harpoon in deeper and looks confused as to why LS is still talking)

LS: And I hate to say it, but it does seem silly to spend so much money making a Jason movie look good. When it would have been just as effective, or not more so, if it had been a lot grittier. That’s a problem I had with Nispel’s remake of TEXAS CHAINSAW, too. He cleaned it up way too much, and washed away all of the scares in the process.

MA: Then there’s Jason himself.  Can there be a more boring horror movie villain?  He has the depth of a puddle.

(JASON pounces upon MA with a machete)

MA:  I’m sorry, but someone as boring and unimaginative as you just isn’t going to get the satisfaction. (Slams lamp shade onto JASON’s head, and pushes him out of the cabin).

LS: Aww, c’mon. I’ve always liked Jason. Although, I really can’t explain why. It certainly isn’t the quality of the movies he’s in.

MA:  How can you like a guy who just impaled you to a wall?

LS (pulls out harpoon):  No harm done.  See?  Merely a scratch.

MA:  And while I liked the characters, in that they were fun to watch, they weren’t fleshed out at all, and so, did I really care when they were in harm’s way?  Not really.  And that’s too bad because that could have been one way to really raise this movie to another level, by giving us characters who are special in some way, so that when they’re about to die, we feel something other than “oh that was a cool special effect!”

I would agree with you about the gore effects being rather restrained.  While this didn’t hurt the movie in my eyes, it wasn’t enough to help it.

LS: Oh, I thought the restraint was a letdown. When I see a Jason movie, I want wall-to-wall blood.

By the way, you forgot the scariest part of all!

MA: Did I?

LS: Yeah, in the opening credits where it said “In Association with Michael Bay.”

MA :  Oh yeah.

I saw this movie in a packed theater, and before the movie started there was a lot of buzz about FRIDAY THE 13TH, as I heard several conversations where people were talking about the original series (I felt like I was at a FRIDAY THE 13th convention!).  And when the movie ended, people applauded, but I just can’t see this movie appealing to anyone other than fans of the original series.  If you liked the original series or movies like them, you’ll no doubt like FRIDAY THE 13th, but if you’re like me, and like horror movies with more depth, with characters you care about, and with touches of originality that catch you off guard and actually scare you, you’ll find this “reimagining” nothing more than a repetitious replay of things you’ve seen before.  It’s an all too familiar rehash of a series that was pretty awful the first time around.   Unless you’re a diehard fan of the series, don’t bother with this one.  It IS your father’s FRIDAY THE 13th.

LS: The theater I saw it in was packed, too, and the audience seemed to dig it. I liked it, too. I just learned a lesson. Don’t expect much from a FRIDAY THE 13th movie, even if they claim it’s a “reboot.” It’s still just going to be the same old dumb fun.

MA: Or just plain dumb.

LS: Okay, we’re done with the review. Now we can go home. Man, I got some real heartburn all of a sudden.

MA:  I’m not surprised.  That was some harpoon.

FADE OUT


(Originally published on Fear Zone on 2/15/2009)

© Copyright 2009 by Michael Arruda and L.L. Soares

Leave A Comment »

MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3-D

Posted in 2009, 3-D, Cinema Knife Fights, Remakes with tags , , , , , on January 21, 2010 by knifefighter

CINEMA KNIFE FIGHT: MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3-D (2009)
by Michael Arruda and L. L. Soares

FADE IN

(The Scene:  Inside the deep, dark cavern of a dimly lit mine shaft, MICHAEL ARRUDA and L.L. SOARES, wearing miners’ gear, their faces blackened with coal soot, debate the best kind of Valentine’s Day candy.)

MA:  You can’t beat the chocolate-covered jellies.

LS:  Jellies are for wimps.  Nuts, lots of nuts, that’s the way to go.  Something meaty, that you can really sink your teeth into.

VOICE (from off-camera):  Eh-hem.

(MA & LS look embarrassingly at camera).

MA (clearing throat):  We’re on?  (deepening his voice to a macho tone) Yeah, human hearts, that’s the best kind of surprise inside a Valentine’s Day box.

LS (nodding):  Chocolate-covered entrails, that’s the ticket.

MA:  Welcome to another edition of Cinema Knife Fight.  We’re in this mine shaft today to review the new 3-D horror movie, MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3-D.

MY BLOODY VALENTINE-3D is a remake of a 1981 Canadian slasher film that came out during the “HALLOWEEN rip-off” heyday, in which nearly every horror movie of the time featured an insane unstoppable killer who murdered teenagers in gruesomely creative ways, following the success of John Carpenter’s 1978 megahit, HALLOWEEN, the film that introduced Michael Myers to the world, an insane unstoppable killer who murdered teenagers in gruesomely creative ways.

LS: Don’t forget the original FRIDAY THE 13th! It might have started out as one of the rip-offs, but it certainly had as much of an influence on the slasher films to come!

MA: Most of it, bad.  Can’t I forget FRIDAY THE 13TH and its sequels?

I saw the first MY BLOODY VALENTINE during its initial release back in 1981, and at the time I liked it.  I remember finding the killer in the film, dressed in a mining suit and wielding a pick-axe, menacing and scary.

LS: I remember seeing it on cable in the 80s. It was slow and I found it a little boring. But the mining guy looked cool.

MA: The updated movie also features a killer in a miner’s suit with a pick-axe, but for some reason, I didn’t find him all that menacing and scary.

LS: Maybe because you’re an adult now?

MA: Seriously, with his miner’s mask on, the killer marches around breathing deeply and loudly, and you know, whenever he was on screen breathing like that, all I could think of was—.

(Suddenly they hear deep breathing from the back of the mine. DARTH VADER appears.)

MA (pointing):  —him.  I’m sorry, but I don’t think images of Darth Vader were what the filmmakers were aiming for here.

VADER:  You two know the power of the Dark Side! (flashes a thumbs up and exits).

LS (waving):  Seeya, Dad.

MA:  MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3-D begins with a bloodbath, as our crazed killer massacres a multitude of teenagers partying inside the town’s mine.  He is shot and “killed” by the local sheriff (Tom Atkins), setting up the rest of the movie which takes place ten years later.

LS: I actually thought that these early scenes were terrific.

MA:  Yeah, if you’re into fake souped-up gore effects that are about as scary as a cartoon.  These effects disgust, they don’t scare.

LS:  How would you like to sample some authentic gore effects? (lifts pick-axe and waves it menacingly).

The killer, Harry Warden, was one of several miners trapped after a cave-in. He’s the only one who survived. We find out later that the reason he did was because he killed the other guys so they wouldn’t use up his air! Whether Warden went insane during the cave-in, or if he was crazy all along, he is a formidable guy, and a vicious killing machine. When he wakes up from his coma in a hospital and slaughters everyone in his path (we see the aftermath), it’s actually very well done. And the bodies are very gruesomely mutilated. The fact that his movie is so free with its gore was a good sign. Unfortunately, I don’t think anything “ten years later” is as cool as this beginning segment.

MA: Yes, see that’s interesting, the story of Harry Warden.  Too bad the film spends about thirty seconds explaining it.

Anyway, speaking of “ten years later,” that’s when Tom Hanniger (Jensen Ackles) returns to town for the first time since the massacre. He was one of the teenagers who survived the bloodbath.  He looks up his old girlfriend Sarah (Jaime King) who is now married to his former rival Axel Palmer (Kerr Smith) who also happens to be the new sheriff in town.

Soon after Tom arrives, the murders begin again – right around Valentine’s Day, which is the anniversary of the original murders – and since Tom was at the scene of the first murder, he quickly becomes Axel’s prime suspect. Of course, some of the townsfolk believe it’s the ghost of the original killer from ten years before.

LS: Actually, the townspeople of Harmony, West Virginia, have a lot of issues with Tom. Since he’s been gone, his father died, and since he owned the mines they now belong to Tom. With nothing but bad memories of the town, Tom wants to just sell the mines and leave, which angers the townsfolk, since it means many, if not all of them, will be out of work. Which seems pretty relevant in these hard financial times.

MA: Tom vows to investigate the crimes himself, to prove his innocence, and as he does so, he begins to suspect Axel of being the killer, and the mystery deepens.

LS: Y’know, I think the mystery of the killer in VALENTINE is what sets it apart from an inferior remake of an old slasher film like PROM NIGHT – where we know who the killer is right away. The mystery here actually adds a level to the film, and the twist ending – while not the most shocking surprise in the world – at least tries to keep us entertained.

MA: MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3-D is an uneven concoction that mixes a love triangle between the three leads, a somewhat interesting, but flawed, murder mystery, and of course the obligatory horror sequences in which the masked killer murders his victims in every gruesome way possible.

The violence is brutal and bloody, yet phony and fake, and since this is the main focus of the movie, as opposed to the development of its characters and the telling of its story, MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3-D simply did not work for me.

In fact, I did not like MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3-D one bit.  To me, it represents everything that I do not like about bad horror movies.  Gratuitous violence without a decent story or stylish filmmaking, is just not going to cut it for me.  I do not find hearts in candy boxes scary, nor axes driven through people’s skulls.  I find these scenes boring and unimaginative.  I truly wish the horror film genre would abandon this type of base filmmaking.  True classics of the genre, movies that will remain through the years and be watched and re-watched and appreciated, have never taken this route.  Sure, some of them are violent and bloody, but they always give us something more.  Sadly, today, worthwhile horror films like this are few and far between.  And that’s too bad.

The acting here is all fine, and that’s certainly not the problem.  I enjoyed the three leads very much, but their characters weren’t at all that interesting.  I also really enjoyed seeing Tom Atkins on the screen again.  Atkins, as you might remember, appeared in many of John Carpenter’s films from the 1980s, including THE FOG (1980) and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981) among others.  Kevin Tighe is also on hand, a veteran actor, who always delivers a strong performance (if you go way back you’ll find Tighe was a regular on the old TV show EMERGENCY! from the 1970s), but some of his best performances have come in recent years.  Both Tighe and Atkins are very good, but they’re only in supporting roles.

LS:  Yeah, Tighe plays Ben Foley, an old friend of Tom’s father. I thought he looked familiar. As for the twenty-something leads, Kerr Smith (previously seen in movies like FINAL DESTINATION and THE FORSAKEN, as well as tons of TV shows like “Dawson’s Creek”) plays Axel. Jaime King (Goldie in SIN CITY, but whose resume lists mostly television shows, like the current sitcom “Gary Umarried“) plays Axel’s wife Sarah Palmer, Betsy Rue is Axel’s old girlfriend in the beginning part, Irene (whose resume is almost completely stints on television shows) and Tom Hanninger is played  Jensen Ackles, who is currently Dean Winchester on the CW show “Supernatural,”, and also was on “Smallville” for awhile. It’s just funny how almost all of these actors are primarily from television.

MA: The script by Todd Farmer and Zane Smith is fairly entertaining as a mystery, as it goes places where you’re glad it goes, in that the identity of the killer is unknown for most of the movie, but since the mystery isn’t the main focus of the film, it isn’t enough to carry the movie.  Director Patrick Lussier throws in lots of blood and gore but little suspense.

LS: I disagree. I thought the mystery was a main focus of the movie, especially towards the end.

MA: For me to buy that argument, I’d have to see fewer violent effects.

And that’s what this movie is really all about, blood and gore.  It’s not about the acting, or the writing, and it’s certainly not about a story, and that’s too bad, because I love good stories.  No, it’s about blood and gore, and there’s plenty of it in this movie.  So, if that’s you’re thing, you won’t be disappointed.    While I don’t mind blood and gore, I need more than that to like a movie, and sadly, in this film, there isn’t more.

LS: How many times can you say the words “blood and gore”?

Hey we can make a drinking game out of this. Every time Michael says “blood and gore,” drink a shot. I can feel myself getting drunk already.

MA: Even worse, even with all the gratuitous stuff, the film isn’t scary.  How scary is it to see a bloody human heart inside a Valentines Day chocolate box?  It’s actually laughable, when you think about it, and in fact, during most of the killing scenes, the audience was laughing.  I can hear it now:  “This is a movie that doesn’t take itself seriously.”  Why not?  Why couldn’t it?  Why couldn’t it be scary?  It’s a horror film after all, isn’t it?  Or is it a comedy? And if it is a comedy, that’s not what I paid money for.  I don’t go see a horror movie to laugh.

LS: The scenes where the killer kills someone and soon after the body is found with a note written in blood or a candy box with a heart in it, ARE unintentionally funny. How did the killer have the time to do this?  Sounds like pretty intricate surgery to me.

But overall, this movie does take itself seriously, and it doesn’t play like a comedy at all.

MA: The people in the theater with me the other night would disagree.

LS: Audiences always laugh at gory scenes. For some people, it’s a nervous response. That doesn’t mean anything.

MA: I also didn’t see this film in 3-D.  Whatever happened to the days when 3-D films played everywhere?  These days it happens only in “select” theaters.  Rip-off.

LS: That is a rip-off. You should have asked for your money back. Nobody should be allowed to show this movie without the 3D glasses. That’s part of the experience if you’re gonna pay to see it in a theater.

MA: I doubt I would have liked this movie more in 3-D.  It was clearly apparent which shots in the film were meant for 3-D, and I didn’t find myself once snapping my fingers and saying “Damn, I wish I was seeing this in 3-D.”  3-D is a gimmick to sell tickets.  It’s never made a movie a classic on its own.  Seriously, can you think of any 3-D horror flick that you won’t watch unless it’s in 3-D?  Me neither.

LS: Okay, here’s a point where you and I will totally disagree. I saw MY BLOOD VALENTINE in 3D, and it made a BIG difference. I actually found myself digging the whole 3D experience. I’ve seen several 3D movies over the years, and this version of the technology seems to work very well. And the novelty of the effect is worth the ticket price alone (although I did have to pay a few dollars more for my theater ticket – so the glasses are not free). I still think, though, that no horror film so far has used 3D to its full advantage. I could think of several scenes where the gimmick could have been used for much more effective scares, yet it never seemed to go far enough. Maybe they were afraid of giving someone a heart attack if they really delivered on the scares.

MA: So, I take it you liked this one more than I did, which doesn’t surprise me, since you like mindless violence more than I do.

LS: I didn’t think it was that mindless. I didn’t think the story was amazing, but it wasn’t awful either. I’m not a big fan of the original film, and I thought the remake was a big improvement. Which is a real rarity. For once someone took a so-so slasher flick and improved on it. The 3D effects alone – since they’re so good – add a whole new dimension to it. But the acting is good, the story isn’t half bad, and the gore is abundant. What’s not to like?

MA:  Blood and gore.

(LS downs a shot.)

LS:  This movie might not be perfect, but it certainly is a big improvement over the watered down PG-13 horror films that are made to be sanitized and appeal to a younger demographic. There really is something to be said for R-rated horror. I really dug the gore effects and I really want to give a shout out to Betsy Rue, as Irene, who not only delivers a good performance, but who also does so mostly in the nude. This made the movie feel like a real throwback to 80s horror, when actresses weren’t as uptight about nude scenes. The fact that Rue has a prolonged scene at a motel where she even runs around naked outside through the parking lot, really made me respect her contribution to giving this movie a real 80s feel.

MA:  Oh yes, respect is exactly the word I was thinking of regarding this scene (rolls eyes and gags).

LS: In these times, where most mainstream actresses think they’re too good to get naked for a movie, yeah, respect is the right word. Betsy Rue showed she has real guts. And some other nice parts, too.

MA: Here’s a point where you and I REALLY disagree—-.

LS (in disbelief):  You didn’t think she looked good naked?

MA:  Huh?  I’m talking about the PG-13 thing, not Betsy Rue!  She looked fine.

LS:  Good, I was going to say—.

MA:  I didn’t need 3-D glasses to see that effect!  Anyway, I don’t view PG-13 movies as watered down horror.   These days it simply means they’re not going to contain as much blood and gore.

(LS downs another shot, smiles). (Leprechauns and trolls suddenly join in, skipping and dancing around LS and MA)

MA:  Just because an R rated movie will have more gore effects doesn’t mean it’s going to be better.  What I really wish is that a horror film would be rated R because of its story content rather than its visual content.  In other words, a deep, dark, disturbing story that really makes you afraid to go home at night.  Movies like MY BLOODY VALENTINE simply don’t have that effect.   When a movie is rated PG-13, that tells me at least that it’s not going to go for the gross-out, which often leads to a more creative film.

LS: Dude, I think that 90% of the PG-13 movies we see are creatively bankrupt and incredibly lame. They do pander to a younger audience. At least gore and nudity give you something for your money. You’re just a Puritan at heart, aren’t you?

MA:  No, I just think the rating of a film doesn’t determine its quality.  PG-13 doesn’t mean “bad movie.”  However, that being said, there are certainly as many bad PG-13 horror movies as there are bad R-rated ones.

I would have to classify this R-rated movie, MY-BLOODY VALENTINE 3-D, as one of the bad ones.  It’s a bloody mess that is best avoided.

(Trolls and leprechauns shake their heads and gesticulate disapprovingly at MA.  MA stares at LS blankly.)

LS:  You don’t see them, do you?

MA:  See who?

LS:  Never mind.  It’s never stopped me before (downs another drink).

MA: Hey, I didn’t say “blood and gore.”

(LS takes another drink.)

LS: Unlike you, I had a good time, and the 3D technique makes it something different. If this movie becomes a big hit, which I think it will, a big part of that will be because the 3D effects are so good. And I also really enjoyed the fact that this was a real R-rated horror film, not made to pander to children. Between the gore and Betsy Rue’s performance, I really dug this one.

Also, if you sit through the final credits, they take you through a long mine shaft and there is an “extra scene” at the very end. It’s nothing to do with the plot (the miner guy just makes one last appearance), and I’m not even sure if it’s worth sitting around for, but I wanted people to know.

MA:  Ooooh!  Let’s drag out the experience even longer!

LS:  I also thought it was cool that at the very end of the credits, where the filmmakers thank people, one of the names is writer Tom Piccirilli. Yay, Tom!

(Deep breathing behind them causes LL and MA to slowly turn around in fear – to see SLIMER from the GHOSTBUSTERS movies. He giggles and pulls out an inhaler).

SLIMER: What can I say? I’m asthmatic!

FADE OUT


(Originally published on Fear Zone on 1/19/2009)

© Copyright 2009 by Michael Arruda and L.L. Soares

Leave A Comment »

PROM NIGHT (2008)

Posted in 2008, Cinema Knife Fights, Lame Remakes, Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , on December 11, 2009 by knifefighter

Cinema Knife Fight: PROM NIGHT (2008)
By Michael Arruda and L. L. Soares

(Note: this one has been an inside joke for awhile now. This was one of those instances where we had completely different reactions to a movie.  Michael liked it a lot, and I thought it was the worst movie of 2008. I constantly bring this one up to show how Michael has no taste. Here’s where it all began…LS)

(FADE IN)

(SCENE – in black and white: A large white limo with blackened windows pulls up in front of a fancy hotel.  Out pop L.L. SOARES and MICHAEL ARRUDA, both sporting long hair and 70s disco-style tuxedos. They escort their beautiful prom dates from the limo.  MA smiles and reveals shiny silver braces.  LS smiles and picks a human ear from between his teeth.  “Freeze Frame” by the J.Geils Band plays in the background.)

LS (voiceover):  Ah, the high school prom.  What memories!

(Suddenly the film stops and a hole burns through it as it’s eaten by the projector.)

MA:  What a horror show, you mean!  Yep, we were both in high school when the original PROM NIGHT came out, back in 1980.

LS:  But today, in 2008, we’re too old geezers reduced to being chaperones.

(The black and white flashback gives way to color reality, and MA and LS morph into their present day forms, now inside a hotel ballroom converted into a high school prom, with streamers and balloons and a DJ playing music. Strobe lights dance off a mirror ball hanging from the ceiling. Kids are dancing. )

MA: Why don’t you tell everyone about our movie this week.

LS (puts a horn in his ear): What? I can’t hear you over this loud disco music.

MA: Why don’t you tell everyone about PROM NIGHT!

LS: Do I have to? Oh well, I guess that’s why we’re here, huh?

Have you ever sat through a movie and thought about the price of film and how it was being wasted? Well, that’s how I felt sitting through the remake of PROM NIGHT.

To prepare for this film, I checked out the DVD of the original PROM NIGHT from 1980. I’d actually missed it the first time around. This was one of the endless rip-offs that came out after John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN became a hit in 1978, and frankly I avoided these slasher wannabe films as much as I could back then. I mean, it seemed like every holiday and life event got its own slasher in those days.

In the original, there was at least some mystery about who the killer was. It began with four kids playing hide and seek (they call it “Killer”) in an abandoned house and a girl who wants to be a part of the game. Instead of letting her join in, they scare her and “accidentally” force her to fall out of a window. However, someone is watching. Someone who wants revenge six years later, on…Prom Night!. (Cue eerie music)

Then it goes to six years later where Jamie Lee Curtis (still a hot commodity after HALLOWEEN) is the sister of the girl who died, and is going to be crowned prom queen. Before that, though, there’s a lot of disco dancing and a killer in a ski mask starts knocking off the now-teenage kids who were responsible for the little girl’s death in the beginning.

It’s not a great film by any stretch. It’s not even a particularly good film.

MA:  Just say it- the original PROM NIGHT sucked.

LS:  Yep, like I said, it was just a chance to cash in on the popularity of movies like HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13TH. There’s even a deranged (and disfigured) sex offender (who we never really see) who was charged with the girl’s murder and who just escaped from a mental hospital – and who may or may not be the killer on prom night. At least there’s a sense of mystery to it, and there’s somewhat of a surprise at the end, when we find out who the killer is.

There is no mystery in the remake at all.

In the new one, a teacher who has an obsession with a student kills her mother in front of her, is locked up, and escapes six years later. There is no mystery as to who did the killing then and who’s doing the killing now. The only question is how many people he’ll kill, and how long it will take the inept cops to catch him. Oh yeah, and it’s prom night. That’s the entire plot.

The characters are conveniently dumb and constantly make choices that put them in harm’s way. Nothing that happens is done for logic’s sake – it’s done to move this stupid story forward.

Brittany Snow, as the girl the killer is after, is likable enough but she didn’t exactly dazzle me with her acting chops. And Johnathon Schaech, as the psycho, is a one-note character. He’s intense and dangerous-looking all the time, and has no ability to seem normal or blend into a crowd. He sticks out like a sore thumb, and is creepy and crazy right from the start. The fact that nobody’s radar seems to notice that this guy is extremely “off” (especially the cops), just didn’t seem believable.

By the way, Michael, does that guy looks like he belongs here?

(LS points to the dance floor where a large man in farmer jeans, who is covered in blood and holding a butcher knife, is jumping around.)

MA: He’s probably just one of the teachers.

LS: Oh. And this movie has way too many false scares, to the point of absurdity (at one point Brittany Snow turns around and bumps into a lamp, and that’s supposed to make us jump!), no real suspense, and a killer who’s pretty much a cardboard cut-out. In fact all of the characters might as well be made of paper. The only one I felt sorry for was Scott Porter, an actor who is so good in the TV show FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, and who is given nothing to work with here. His character stinks too.

MA:  While I agree with you about the false scares and the cardboard killer, I disagree with the way you dismiss this movie.  I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I actually liked this movie.  Maybe it’s because I’ve seen so many bad low budget horror movies lately, I don’t know, but I found several redeeming qualities about PROM NIGHT, the remake.

LS (pulls out a butterfly net): That’s it. You’ve finally lost your mind.

MA: Well, it’s true that I’ve been sick the past few weeks with a high fever, so I guess brain damage is a possibility.

LS (with a wide grin and holding a hacksaw):  Let’s find out!

MA (darting away from a swinging saw):  I thought the acting was very good.  Unlike you, I liked Brittany Snow’s performance.  Not only her, but all of the actors playing high school students I thought did a really good job.  Their reactions were real, and I appreciated the genuineness of their characters.  There’s a scene where one of the characters reacts to the news that his friend is dead, and he says, “What did you say?” It really conveys the feeling that he can’t believe his friend could be dead.  It’s a true moment that works.

LS: What did you say?

MA:I also enjoyed Idris Elba as police detective Winn, who was on the case.  I thought he delivered an impassioned performance.

LS: Yes, he’s the most impassioned block of wood I’ve ever seen! I must admit though, it’s not Elba’s fault. He’s actually a good actor with better material. He was in HBO’s excellent show THE WIRE. It’s funny how this movie took at least two good actors and sapped them of any talent. It’s almost as if this film was made by pod people.

MA: Well, I think he’s a good actor even without good material, as was the case in this movie.  You can’t say the acting was good in the original film.  The acting in that one was horrible.

LS: I don’t know. I laughed a lot when I was watching the original. The character of Slick, an overweight nerd in a van who actually gets chicks, was pretty entertaining. There’s nobody even slightly interesting here.

MA: I thought the students were all interesting.  Even though I thought the plot boring, I cared enough about the characters so that towards the end, I felt genuine suspense.  This film played more like a crime drama than a horror film, but it was still entertaining.  Had they really wanted to make a terrifying horror film, they should have had the psycho abduct Brittany Snow’s character immediately.  Imagine the terror of being stuck with that lunatic for a time?  Now that would have been scary.

LS: (turns around and bumps into a lamp. Scary music plays) Oops! Are you sure we saw the same movie? Maybe I wandered into the wrong theater. I can’t believe you liked this one!

MA: I find it hard to believe as well, but really, the bottom line for me was that the actors and the director took this dumb and predictable story and they made it believable, and as a result, they made it work.

LS:  The fact that this is a PG-13 movie didn’t help. It’s sanitized for our protection – and obviously dumbed down, too.

MA:  You know, I don’t think a PG-13 rating is necessarily a bad thing for a horror movie.  To me, it gives the filmmaker the opportunity to craft a horror film without excessive blood and gore, which I don’t think is needed for a movie to be scary.  That being said, the gore in PROM NIGHT was exceedingly wimpy, I thought.

LS:  Some kids who were sitting near me in the theater, who looked around 12 years old (no doubt the target audience for these lame PG-13 horror movies) kept saying “that’s stupid” when certain plot points unraveled. Even they could tell how lame this movie was. But don’t go thinking that there’s hope for future generations just yet, because these same kids also clapped at the end of the movie.

MA:  I thought this version of PROM NIGHT presented high school students in a realistic way.  I would expect present day high school students to really enjoy this film.

LS: I hope you’re wrong and they see this for the garbage it is. HANNAH MONTANA is more realistic than this!  You missed THE RUINS last week, but that one had much better acting and more believable characters. After that, PROM NIGHT is pretty laughable. Or it would be, if it wasn’t so boring.

It’s also a totally blown opportunity. If there’s ever a chance to prove yourself as a filmmaker, it’s when you get an awful movie and have the chance to remake it. You’d think that all you can go is up. But director Nelson McCormick totally fumbles the ball here. This movie is worse than the original PROM NIGHT. Quite a feat, actually.

MA:  I completely disagree.  Director Nelson McCormick doesn’t fumble the ball at all.  It was apparent to me that great care was taken in the making of this movie, from the way it looks, to the performances of the actors, to the sincerity and care that went into crafting this story.  Director McCormick should be commended for his efforts.  He took C material and turned it into a B+ movie.  And I think this remake is much, much better than the Jamie Lee Curtis original.  That movie was a forced piece of cinema, as you said, made to take advantage of the slasher craze.  Very little in that film rang true for me.

LS:  I thought the original was so dated and goofy that it  had a campy “so bad it’s good” quality in some scenes. But the remake was just plain BAD.

If this movie spawns a whole new wave of bad slasher movies, it can only hurt the horror genre, just as much as the glut of bad slasher movies in the 1980s made horror into a joke. Movies like this can make a critic feel bad about saying anything negative about movies like Rob Zombie’s remake of HALLOWEEN or even ALIEN VS. PREDATOR. Compared to PROM NIGHT, these movies are masterpieces.

MA:  I don’t think I’d ever call Zombie’s HALLOWEEN a masterpiece.  PROM NIGHT is better.  It doesn’t cheat its audience.

(Uncontrollable laughter from LS)

LS: Hey, I felt cheated! And despite its flaws at least Zombie’s HALLOWEEN had some memorable scenes, even if it fell apart at the end. I’d rather watch the Big Joe Grizzly scene 100 times than be forced to watch PROM NIGHT again.

MA: Don’t get me wrong.  PROM NIGHT is not a great movie.  I would have liked it a helluva lot better had it done a better job at fleshing out its villain.  But it is a good movie, and I recommend it.  In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that in a few years from now, people may be talking about this film as an even better film than I’m giving it credit for.  I think it will age well.

LS:(laughs): We’re not even close to agreeing on this one. I actually felt like my ten dollars had been stolen. I left this movie feeling like a mugging victim, and wondered if I should call the cops. In no universe is this movie worth a full ticket price. Hell, even a rental fee is too much. If I can do anything for the sake of our readers, I’d just like to say, don’t waste your time on this crap. Watch something else. If you’re in the mood for a prom-themed horror movie, rent Brian DePalma’s CARRIE. At least that has some genuine scares and real acting. But please, please do not give the people who made this movie your hard- earned money.

MA:  On the contrary, go out and see PROM NIGHT.  Support a film that was obviously made by a team that possessed talent and cared for its subject matter.  Such an effort should be rewarded.

(LS looks at MA and smiles. Then he pukes into the punch bowl).

MA (frowning):  On that note, good night.  Punch, anyone?

(FADE TO BLACK)

—END—

(Originally published on Fear Zone on 4/15/08)

© Copyright 2008 by Michael Arruda and L.L. Soares

1 Comment »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 81 other followers