awcmblog-blog

[awcmblog-blog]

RIP KEN RUSSELL

British director Ken Russell, whose artistically challenging, flamboyant films included Tommy, The Devils, Women in Love and Gothic, passed away at the age of 84. The Los Angeles Times obit appears here.

[awcmblog-blog]

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN, PART 1

Directed by Bill Condon.

With: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Ashley Greene, Peter Facinelli, Sarah Clarke, Gil Birmingham, Billy Burke, Jackson Rathbone, Elisabeth Reaser, Kellan Lutz, Nikki Reed, Anna Kendrick, Michael Welch, Mackenzie Foy. (Summit Entertainment; Wyck Godfrey, Karen Rosenfelt, Stephenie Meyer)

Call it All That Hell Allows, because despite vampires, werewolves and demon babies, Breaking Dawn is really a youth-oriented version of what -- in the 1940s and '50s -- used to be called "women's pictures."  There were a lot of great women's pictures, and some pretty great directors (Preminger, Sirk, Hitchcock, Wilder, etc.) tried their hands at the genre.  What those directors had in common was an eye for detail, because, the theory went, these films were not realistic dramas, but passionate romantic fantasies for their primarily female audiences, and fantasies have to look just right.

Well, movie audiences have gotten younger and quirkier, but that attention to detail and the need for a great director to make it happen has remained the same.  The director of this youthful, semi-ghoulish 2011 women's picture is Bill Condon, who has a great eye for detail and has the added benefit of having been around this gothic block before, with 1996's marvelous Gods and Monsters, itself somewhat indebted to the women's picture framework.

Here, he creates a visual feast to stir the hearts of the target audience, with ominous Freudian dream sequences, a fairytale wedding, a lush tropical hacienda honeymoon, a gorgeous moonlight swim, and enough troubles, angst and melodrama for three handkerchiefs.  Indeed, Condon has taken author & co-producer Stephenie Meyer's notoriously turgid prose and made it sing to the eyes and the thumping heart.

The story picks up on the wedding day of Bella Swan (Stewart), the moody young heroine (who might have been Joan Fontaine or Bette Davis in another time), and Edward Cullen (Pattinson), her brooding undead groom (think Heathcliff with fangs).

It's a beautiful event, despite Bella's obvious anxiety and the usual drama involving Jacob (Lautner) and both vampire and werewolf clans. Everyone seems to be worried about the honeymoon, as Bella wants to make love with Edward while she's still human, which could have fatal consequences.  In Meyer's world (and, indeed, the worlds of both tween girls and those old women's pictures), lust is dangerous and scary, despite its natural allure.

Well, Bella survives her honeymoon on an island paradise near Rio de Janeiro, with only a shattered bedframe and some minor bruising to temper her obviously earth-shattering night of passion. The problem is that she's been impregnated with Edward's child, a vampire baby which might very well destroy her from inside. That's when Bella's 1940s Fontaine turns into a 1950s Susan Hayward, and the tale takes a soapier tone, with the determined mother-to-be battling both Edward and Jacob to keep and deliver her baby, even if it kills her.

Condon handles the more problematic elements of the novel (the sex, the grotesque birth, a grown werewolf falling in love with a baby) with a deft touch and considerable aplomb, well within the PG-13 framework of the series. Particularly well-managed is Bella's wasting away as the rapidly-growing child within sucks away her life essence.  Despite her condition, this is the point of the series where her often milquetoasty character seems the strongest.

Mixed up in all this absorbing angst is a subplot about Jacob's rebellion against his family, who want to kill the baby because of an old treaty between their kind and vampires. It becomes slightly intrusive because it waters down the intensity of the buildup to the traumatic birth and Bella's subsequent health crisis, and is really only there to frame Jacob's "imprinting" on the newborn Renesmee. Still, it's interesting to see Jacob wrestling with his various loyalties and resentments, and Lautner does a nice job with the role.

In the final analysis, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part I is almost everything that series devotees could have hoped, and -- despite a few minor instances of slipshod editing -- looks and flows like the achingly romantic, wide-eyed fever dream it was meant to be.

[awcmblog-blog]

THE LOVED ONES (2009)

Directed by Stuart Byrne.

With: Xavier Samuel, Robin McLeavy, Victoria Thaine, Jessica McNamee, Richard Wilson, John Brumpton. (Ambience; Australia; Mark Lazarus, Michael Boughen).

Now this is a horror movie, and I don't know how it escaped my attention for so long, but The Loved Ones is gripping, skillful and scary, recalling not only the similarly intense Australian horror Wolf Creek, but a particularly warped Oz gender-twist on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Well-cast, intelligently written and ferocious as hell, The Loved Ones earns an immediate nomination to the AWCM Horror Hall of Fame.

Brent (Xavier Samuel) is a good-looking but emotionally disturbed teen who just hasn't been right since the day he swerved his car to avoid a wounded man in the road and hit a tree, killing his father. Despite his brooding and cutting, he still managed a girlfriend in pretty Holly (Victoria Thaine) and a secret admirer in creepy Lola (Robin McLeavy), who goes mental when he turns down her dance invitation.

Turns out that Lola's dad (John Brumpton) is just as creepy as she is, and kidnaps Brent so that his psychotic "Princess" -- whom he admires way too much -- can have a lovely prom. If by "lovely," one means forced urination, tendon-ripping, powerdrill trepanning, and carving drawings into human flesh with a fork. The fun is just beginning for Brent, as he is the latest in a long line of "Princes" kidnapped by the psycho clan, and has his feet pinned to the floor with butcher knives, salt thrown in his open wounds, and even gets to see the cellar, where some of Lola's previous "Princes" exist in a wretched -- and very hungry -- condition.

To counterbalance the unrelieved grue, director Stuart Byrne throws in a genuinely amusing subplot featuring Brent's socially-awkward friend Jamie (Richard Wilson) escorting a traumatized goth girl (Jessica McNamee) to the actual school dance. There, to Jamie's shock (and no small delight), his date's grief over her own brother's disappearance leads her to act out in extremely inappropriate ways, providing some raunchy comic relief.

The look of this film is terrific, and Robin McLeavy makes a monstrously depraved but recognizably human villain (her theme song is the wistful "Not Pretty Enough" by Kasey Chambers). Cinematographer Simon Chapman frames some genuinely haunting imagery -- see the above photo -- and Robert Webb's production design is as pitch-perfect as Bob Burns's in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which seems to have been a big influence.

One particularly noteworthy thing about this film is how deftly it avoids the cries of "that wouldn't happen" which tend to accompany many modern horror films. Note how carefully even minor feats (Brent's climbing in the cellar) are set up earlier (he is an avid rock-climber). Also note how it avoids the single most annoying bugaboo of every horror film with a female villain... the strength difference. Princess Lola is not required to do anything unbelievable here, because she has Daddy to do it for her. I wish all would-be horror directors were required to watch this film and learn from it.

That being said, the usual caveats apply with regard to extreme gore, intense scenes of torture, drug use, and some nudity. But if you were sensitive to such content, you wouldn't be reading this, would you? For everyone else, The Loved Ones should be a welcome surprise, a real, savage horror film with believable characters and genuine talent behind the camera. Happy Halloween.

[awcmblog-blog]

HUMAN CENTIPEDE (FULL SEQUENCE) (2011)

Directed by Tom Six.

With: Laurence R. Harvey, Ashlynn Yennie, Maddie Black, Kandace Caine, Dominic Borelli, Lucas Hansen, Vivien Bridson, Bill Hutchens. (Six Entertainment; Tom Six, Ilona Six)

I don't know whether it's because I watch splatter movies in vivid color all year long, but on Halloween I like to settle down with some nice black & white horror. Whether it's The Thing from Another World or Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, black & white horror always puts me in the Halloween spirit. This year's treat, however, is so vile that it's been banned in Britain and cut to ribbons for its few theatrical showings in the U.S. Because this Halloween, it's time for Human Centipede (Full Sequence).

Laurence R. Harvey stars as Martin, a fat, bug-eyed midget with asthma who works as a security guard at a parking garage. Martin was molested by his late father, lives with an insane mother who wants to kill him, and is absolutely enraptured by Human Centipede (First Sequence). He watches it repeatedly, masturbates to it, and keeps scrapbooks of photos, ad mats and schematics of its "100% medically accurate" methods.

He also has a thing for its star, Ashlynn Yennie (portraying herself), whom he lures to a rented warehouse by pretending she's auditioning for a Quentin Tarantino movie. When Ashlynn arrives, she finds eleven bound victims whom Martin has brutally shot, beaten and kidnapped for what is to be his ultimate dream: his own giant human centipede. Needless to say, she goes to the head of the class.

While its predecessor was a silly, John Waters-level grossout with an over-the-top mad scientist (Dieter Laser channeling Udo Kier) and a particularly piquant central concept, the sequel is grim, dark and pathological in a way which suggests what might happen if David Lynch remade Nekromantik...at least until it falls apart at the end. Even so, it's definitely not a date movie.

Tom Six gets a lot of mileage out of visual references to Eraserhead, A Clockwork Orange, and other classics, and builds up some effective horror in the first hour (the scene where Martin cuts his victims' knee tendons with shears even made me turn away), but it's all somewhat wasted as the set-up to cinema's most horrific poop joke.

It's a shame that Six got too "meta" to keep up the horror, because for most of its running time, the film gives Schramm and I Stand Alone a run for their money as a dark, gory study of psychosis, and Harvey is especially believable as the tortured, monstrous Martin.

But, in the end, it all comes down to force-feeding a 10-person poop train, shooting them up with laxatives, and letting nature take its revolting course. Even as that horrifying sight is unfolding, Six can't resist a visual nod to -- of all films -- Schindler's List. There's also a live giant centipede going somewhere it shouldn't and a nude pregnant woman giving birth in the most appalling circumstances imaginable.

So Human Centipede (Full Sequence) is a mixed bag. It's moody, atmospheric and shocking for an hour, creates more than one impressively horrific tableaux, then delivers the expected goods in a campy, messy style which ends up subverting its own effectiveness. If there is a third installment in this series, I can only hope that Six has gained more confidence in his own skill at the horror genre and won't pull the rug out from under himself again.

[awcmblog-blog]

Update: Cry Baby Lane to air on Halloween

Lost films don't stay lost for long these days, and Cry Baby Lane, which I reviewed back in August, will be airing on TeenNick as part of their "90s Are All That" series. Check local listings.

[awcmblog-blog]

HATCHET II (2010)

Directed by Adam Green.

With: Danielle Harris, Tony Todd, Kane Hodder, Parry Shen, Tom Holland, R.A. Mihailoff, AJ Bowen, Alexis Peters, Ed Ackerman, David Foy, John Carl Buechler, Lloyd Kaufman. (Dark Sky Films; Ariescope Pictures)

If the first Hatchet was a fun, silly throwback to 1980s slasher-horror films, Hatchet II is a more thoughtful revival of the elements which made those films frightening in the first place. Not that it's a thinkpiece. It's a brutal, savage backwoods gorefest with some of the most blood-soaked, viscera-laden murders in many a moon. It's also a hell of a lot of fun, and -- in its showdown between horror icons Tony Todd and Kane Hodder -- answers all those pesky "What if Candyman fought Jason" questions once and for all.

Picking up where the first film left off, the traumatized Marybeth (Danielle Harris of the Halloween sequels) is rescued from the swamps by a one-eyed weirdo (FX master John Buechler) who freaks out and threatens to shoot her when he finds out who her late father was. He does direct her to the New Orleans voodoo shop of Reverend Zombie (Tony Todd of Candyman and the Final Destination series), a greedy conman who is running illegal boat tours into Honey Island Swamp.

Zombie tells Marybeth that her father was involved in Victor Crowley's accidental murder, and promises to take her back into the swamps for revenge with a hunting party, if only she'll bring along her Uncle Bob (Tom Holland, who directed Child's Play and the original Fright Night).  He's also very careful to get the hulking Trent (R.A. Mihailoff from Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3) in the hunting party, and it doesn't take a genius to suspect a set-up.

The payoff, of course, is the actual swamp trip, with the deformed maniac offing everyone in sight in some of the most repulsive ways imaginable, at one point chopping the head off a man while he does his high-school flame doggy style, proving that praying mantises aren't the only animal that keeps going without a head. He then proceeds to literalize the vulgar slang term "axe wound" on the poor fellow's unfortunate date.

Jaws are smashed to pieces, entrails are torn from bodies, heads are bisected on tables, belt-sanders have their way with skulls, chainsaws are used to slice people lengthwise, hatchets to slice people crosswise and shear off faces, and one poor fellow has his entire head julienned by a boat propellor. This all leads to a savage showdown between Crowley and Rev. Zombie (and a spectacular death scene, I won't reveal whose) before Marybeth gets to have some gory revenge of her own.

Although you can't exactly accuse Adam Green of subtlety, he certainly knows how to deliver a payoff, and -- with the caveat that this sort of film is admittedly not for everyone -- it's one of the most entertaining pictures of its type since the original. And Hatchet III is on the way. 

[awcmblog-blog]

R.I.P. DAVID HESS

David Hess, musician and actor, passed away Oct. 8th at age 69 of a heart attack at his home in Tiburon, CA. AWCM readers will know him best for his roles as Krug Stillo in the classic Last House on the Left (Wes Craven; 1972), as Alex in House on the Edge of the Park (Ruggero Deodato; 1980), and as Ferret in Swamp Thing (Craven; 1982).

[awcmblog-blog]

AENIGMA (1987)

Directed by Lucio Fulci.

With: Jared Martin, Lara Naszinski, Ulli Reinthaler, Sophie D'Aulan, Jennifer Naud, Riccardo Acerbi, Kathi Wise, Mijlijana Zirojevic, Dragan Ejelogrlic, Lijlijana Blagojevic, Franciska Spahic, Dusica Zegarac, Zorica Lesic, Zoran Lesic, Rade Colovic.(A.M. Trading Int'l/Sutjeska Film/Walter Bigari; Ettore Spagnuolo, Boro Banjack; Italy/Yugoslavia)

This supernatural thriller from cult director Lucio Fulci (Zombie; The Beyond) is set at St. Mary's College, a Boston girls' school where a young woman named Cathy is tricked in a drive-in theater prank by her schoolmates. Panicked, she runs in front of a car and ends up in a coma at the local hospital. By sheer willpower, Cathy avoids death and takes possession of the beautiful Eva Gordon (Lara Naszinski), a new arrival at the school who is recovering from a nervous breakdown. Using Eva's fragile mind as her vessel, the comatose girl enacts lethal revenge on those whom she blames for her condition.

The school itself is reminiscent of the dance academy in Argento's Suspiria, and the girls are presented in similar viper's-nest fashion. Eva says "Let's get one thing straight -- a successful semester to me means making out with as many cute boys as possible!" She proves it by making a date with Fred, her ex-Marine aerobics instructor, but he doesn't get to keep it. Cathy's mom is a creepy mute maid named Mary, whose eyes glow red and cause Fred to be strangled by his own double, who comes out of a mirror. Soon, Eva starts taking on Cathy's personality.

Meanwhile, a young student named Virginia blames Mary for covering her entire bed with snails, but they're all gone when she drags the headmistress in for a look. That night, they return as Virginia sleeps, covering her nude body in a truly revolting sequence. One crawls in her mouth, and hundreds more soon swarm over her completely, suffocating her. The next day, Eva has some sort of fit and attacks her roommate.

Dr. Anderson (Martin), who just happens to be the neurologist caring for Cathy, comes to the school to examine Eva and becomes both her doctor and her lover. Later, while looking at an artwork painted on a ceiling, Grace (another of the pranksters) is showered with blood and a severed arm. Then she sees a bloody head in a statue's hands, a poisonous snake, and is finally strangled by a living statue. Eva gets nuttier by the minute, and the fact that her mind keeps being taken over by a vengeful maniac doesn't help. There's a fairly intense sex scene in which Eva is taken over by Cathy and begins biting bloody chunks from Anderson's face and chest, finally biting his lip off, but it's only a nightmare.

Eva prepares to leave the school, but Cathy isn't done, driving her to reunite with her mother and knocking off some more kids. Young Kim has a vision of her decapitated boyfriend and runs from room to room finding headless corpses in each bed before a vision of Cathy makes her jump out the window. The guy wakes up and discovers her just as the window slams down, lopping off his head for real. Eva's roommate Jenny (Ulli Reinthaler) goes to see Anderson at the hospital that night, ending up locked in the morgue with a scalpel-wielding Eva/Cathy before Mary saves the day.

Aenigma is rather understated for a Fulci film (remember, this is the guy who brought us the gut-puke scene in The Gates of Hell and Zombie's eye-splinter), although it still contains its share of graphic, visceral set-pieces. The snail sequence, though containing no blood, ranks as one of the more revoltingly effective scenes in the director's oeuvre, and Anderson's love-bite dream is certainly startling. The lengthy stalking and hallucination episodes leading up to Grace's death are skillfully handled, and the acting is serviceable, but overall the film comes up a bit short of the director's best work.

Taking concepts from Richard Franklin's superior Patrick (which were further coarsened by Joe D'Amato in Frankenstein 2000), Fulci seems hamstrung by an underdeveloped script, as well as the encroaching illness which caused him to pull out of Zombie 3 the same year. In all, the general impression is of a very imaginative filmmaker just itching to let his creativity take flight, but being unable -- save for a few standout sequences -- to do so. This is not to say that Aenigma isn't worth watching...it is, and contains some decidedly striking moments, but one wishes it was made in 1980 or so, when Fulci was at his creative peak.

[awcmblog-blog]

AT MIDNIGHT I'LL TAKE YOUR SOUL (1963)

Directed by Jose Mojica Marins.

With: Jose Mojica Marins, Magda Mei, Nivaldo de Lima, Valeria Vasquez, Ilidio Martins Simoes, Arildo Iruam, Gene Carvalho, Vania Rangel, Graveto, Robinson Aielo, Avelino Morais, Antonio Marins, Mario Lima, Euripides Silva, Jose Vilar, Eucaris de Morais. (Geraldo Martins, Ilidio Martins Simoes-Arildo Iruam; Brazil) aka: A Meia-Noite Levarei sua Alma.

This marked the first of Marins' many appearances as Ze do Caixao (or "Coffin Joe"), the Sadean top-hatted gravedigger who specializes in cruelty. Although not as supernatural a figure as he would later become, Ze is plenty cruel in this one, as his efforts to sire a child lead him to kill his barren wife Lenita (Vasquez) with a poisonous spider.

Ze sets his sights on pretty Terezinha (Mei), so he beats her fiance (de Lima) to death with a fireplace poker and drowns him in a bath. Going to Mei's house, he is rejected, so he brutally beats and rapes the grieving woman. Mei hangs herself the next day, vowing to return at midnight to drag Ze's soul to Hell.

Ze does not believe in religion, and flaunts the beliefs of the superstitious locals, eating lamb on Good Friday, walking over graves, and taunting God and the Devil on the Day of the Dead, daring them to prove their existence. At one point, he tears the crown of thorns from a statue of Jesus and grinds it into a man's face.

Naturally, Ze is made to pay for his sins in a terrifying graveyard sequence, but not before he commits more atrocities like poking a doctor's eyes out and cutting a man's fingers off with a broken bottle. As the spooky local gypsy witch foretold, the dead eventually get their revenge, leaving Ze a bloody corpse in Terezinha's crypt.

He would be back, though, nastier and stronger, in This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse. Overall, the first Ze outing is a strong, scary foundation for this effective and truly transgressive horror series.

[awcmblog-blog]

RIOT ON 42ND STREET (1987)

Directed by Tim Kincaid.

With: John Hayden, Frances Raines, Michael Speero, Ron Van Clief, Rick Gianasi, Kate Collins, Jeff Fahey, Carl Fury, Mary Fahey, Zerocks. (New American Cinema; Cynthia De Paula)

If everything gets the eulogy it deserves, Riot on 42nd Street is a suitable threnody for the disrepair into which the Deuce had fallen by 1987.  The stretch of 42nd Street between 6th and 8th Avenues had a long run as America's back-room, where sex shows and all-night exploitation films played to packed, rowdy houses throught the 70s and early 80s and the action never stopped. By the end of the 80s, however, a combination of home video, rising crime and the scourge of hard drugs had reduced the bright and gaudy carnival to a seedy hellhole, choking on its own stench. And there's no better chronicle of its death throes than this cheap, awful action movie.

John Hayden stars as Glenn, who just got out of prison for accidentally killing a pusher and returns to the Deuce to reopen his family's movie theater and nightclub, which they have apparently owned since the days of Flo Ziegfeld.  Things have changed, however, and the street is now run by a sleazy little gangster(Michael Speero) who has allowed his kingdom to turn into a cesspool and wants all his competition dead.  You may remember this basic plot from The Lion King, which is a bit ironic as it was Disney which would eventually renovate the street. The action is awfully staged, the dialogue is ridiculous, there's a terrible comedian (Zerocks), dire original music, and a mysterious narrator who says something stupid every fifteen minutes or so. But the real reason to watch this film is its Deuce flavor. You get to see the Roxy, the Times Square, the Liberty and various other Deuce businesses when they were still open (if clearly on their last legs), posters for perennial sleazefests like Blood Orgy of the She-Devils, and a special appearance by Ron Van Clief, the "Black Dragon." There's also plenty of nudity, gratuitous throwaway roles for Jeff Fahey and Frances Raines, and some fairly startling gore courtesy of MFX maven Ed French. Director Tim Kincaid clearly loves the Deuce and is sorry to see it go, as well he should be. Many of his films played there, from the early gay porn he made under his Joe Gage pseudonym in the 70s to cheapo exploiters like Bad Girls' Dormitory and Breeders made under his own name in the 80s. He photographs the street with love, and, well... if the movie was any better, it wouldn't be as perfect a coda to that era as it is.

[awcmblog-blog]

DRIVE (2011)

Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn.

With: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Oscar Isaac, Christina Hendricks, Ron Perlman, Russ Tamblyn. (FilmDistrict)

I've always loved an old 70s movie called "The Parallax View". In that movie, director Alan J. Pakula creates what, to me, is a sense of dread unmatched by most modern films. Watching the opening scenes of Nicolas Winding Refn's new picture, "Drive", I began to feel that same sense of paranoia, and that's a compliment.  "Drive" is an action picture which recalls what movies USED to be like, when even the ones which meant to get your dick hard on adrenaline still made you think.

You contrast this film to "Killer Elite" (which, like the new "Straw Dogs", just manages to shit on Sam Peckinpah's grave) and you find a reason for hope. In all the dumbed-down, video game junk which passes for big-time moviemaking these days, there is still room for thought. And Nicolas Winding Refn has found it, albeit in a rather holstered form, in this fascinating new action film.

Take the scene, just a few minutes into the film, in which Ryan Gosling's getaway driver makes a calculated decision to speed past an LAPD car. He thinks. And you can see him thinking. I can't overemphasize how amazing that is in modern film.  Compare to "Killer Elite", where Jason Statham -- tied to a chair -- rockets himself over several people, smashes his enemy while simultaneously breaking the chair and freeing himself -- and leaps from a window to safety. He is a video game. And -- with apologies to everyone who fought Roger Ebert on the "video games are/ are not art" controversy -- THAT is the difference.

I don't ever care whether my video game character lives or dies. Just like Jason Statham. He's a sprite, a creation of pixels. Art requires engagement, and I know that some gamers engage with Halo or Mass Effect or what have you, but I'm talking about people who interact with other humans. Statham doesn't cut it. He's Leeroy Jenkins. And so, without belaboring the point, are most of today's action heroes.

Let's just take a pause to compare. In Sam Peckinpah's original "Killer Elite", almost half the film had no action. At all. The hero was recovering from the wounds he suffered in the first action scene. And he knitted, and hurt, and moaned, and cried, and suffered. So by the time he got his sorry ass together for the final scene, we were standing up in our seats cheering him.

Now, Jason Statham can't be wounded. Healing would take too much time out from the action. The Adderall kids would flip to something else. So we get CONSTANT action. What modern action films do is milk the viewer. You have tiny jolts of excitement every few seconds, leading to nothing but more little jolts. Statham never stops. He never gets wounded. He keeps coming and coming.

In movies like the original "Killer Elite" -- not to mention the original "Straw Dogs" -- the action was climactic, orgasmic, in a way that these new films, with their thousand "petits morts" can't touch. The Adderall excitement stream robs us of the real, transcendent climax.

But "Drive" isn't like that. "Drive" is a modern, exciting movie with its roots in real cinema, not video games. Let's get past the fawning stuff first. Yes, it's great to hear David Lynch's composer, Angelo Badalamenti, back in the game again. And, yes, it's great to see "Breaking Bad" star Bryan Cranston, cult icon Ron Perlman, and -- of all people -- Albert Brooks in this crazy '80s retro action film. 

Take away the goofy "Risky Business" title sequence and all the modern, slick, Hollywood neon and you find a film of substance. How bizarre.

Gosling's character makes extra money in LA doing stunt work on Hollywood movies. One moment in this film which I absolutely love is the studio security guard limping over to a driver after a shot. Wonder what his old job was. I don't mean to get all film-school, but to me this is the best picture of the year, so I'm gonna go deep. 

Like the supermarket scene. Gosling sees Carey Mulligan (Winter's Bone). In any other movie, some dramatic nonsense would happen. Here, he goes outside, stands in the wind, and thinks about her. Not in an indie mumblecore way where you don't feel it. In a real, emotional way. But...not a showy way. And that has meaning.

I could go on and on, but I won't since Adderall has already cut the readership into strips. The point is, "Drive" is no BS video game, and no half-assed adrenaline boost. This is a real movie. Kids will see it anyway, like they do all hot action pictures. I'm writing this to the old geezers like me, who think most new movies suck. They do.

This one does not.

See it now.

[awcmblog-blog]

RIP GEORGE KUCHAR

Pioneering underground filmmaker George Kuchar died at the age of 69. His campy, transgressive films inspired filmmakers like John Waters and David Lynch. Read his New York Times obituary here.

[awcmblog-blog]

THE WOLVES OF KROMER (1998)

Directed by Will Gould.

With: James Layton, Lee Williams, Margaret Towner, Rita Davies, Rosemarie Dunham, Kevin Moore, David Prescott, Angahard Rees, Matthew Dean, Leila Lloyd-Evelyn, Alastair Cumming. Narrated by Boy George. (First Run Features/ Discodog Prods.; Charles Lambert)

If Poppy Z. Brite had been a dowdy Englishwoman instead of a Louisiana hipster, I imagine that Lost Souls might have come out a little like The Wolves of Kromer, although not nearly so glaringly obvious. It's unfortunate that this syrupy fable contains a bit too much adult material to really reach its natural audience (pre-teens struggling with their sexuality), because The Wolves of Kromer would be -- in its own charmingly unsubtle, fairytale way -- a suitable parable. It has some good lessons for young people about both bigotry and the ways in which the closet can be a hurtful place not only for the one inhabiting it, but for those who love him. Because it works on such an elementary level, however, it could be a bit of a slog for older viewers.

The film tells the story of Seth (Lee Williams), a pretty runaway who can't decide whether he wants to be a wolf or a man.  In this story, wolves look human except for pointy ears and claws, but wear jeans and fur coats with tails. Seth comes across the sexy, raffish Gabriel (James Layton) in the woods, and is soon seduced by him, although wary of his fickle sexual nature. In a parallel story, two creepy old women are planning to poison a diabetic matron and blame it on the wolves. Gabriel cheats on Seth, so Seth beds the woman's precocious granddaughter Polly (Leila Lloyd-Evelyn) and decides to be a man.

He breaks up with Gabriel, whose life gets even worse when a wolfophobic priest (Kevin Moore) decides to lead the town in a lynch mob after him. Naturally, the priest has a bit of a tail growing under his robe as well, and -- just as naturally -- everyone's lives are ruined, blasted away by the twin demons of bigotry and the closet. But there's a happy ending, as Gabriel and Seth are reunited in Heaven, where they dance to disco music in what I can only guess is an homage to Longtime Companion's beach scene.

There are numerous problems with The Wolves of Kromer aside from how obvious it is.  The main one is that, despite all attempts to open it up with lovely shots of the British countryside, it is obviously bound to a stage play (by producer Charles Lambert) and plays like one all the way through.

Director Will Gould was 22 when he made it, and isn't content with what was a transparent allegory to begin with, so he clubs us over the head with hamfisted touches like having one of the villagers in a KKK outfit and having the priest give the same speech about there being "no wolves in the Garden of Eden" twice.

Also, the scenes in the country house involving the scheming old women go on forever to no good end, and -- as if the whole thing didn't come off like a bad 1970s TV adaptation anyway -- bog down the proceedings immeasurably.

It's really a shame, because The Wolves of Kromer is brimming with good intentions, and, as mentioned previously, would be a great teaching tool for kids if one only excised the interminable scene of Polly's orgasmic moans with Seth. Although it gets an A for effort, and the cast is engaging and tries its best, this eager student still has to sit at the back of the class and think about where it went wrong.

[awcmblog-blog]

SHARK NIGHT 3D (2011)

Directed by David R. Ellis.

With: Sara Paxton, Dustin Milligan, Chris Carmack, Katharine McPhee, Chris Zylka, Alyssa Diaz, Joel David Moore, Singua Walls, Donal Logue, Joshua Leonard, Jimmy Lee Jr., Damon Lipari, Christine Quinn, Kyla Pratt. (Relativity Media/ Incentive - Next Films - Sierra Pictures - Silverwood Films; Chris Briggs, Mike Fleiss, Lynette Howell)

Shark Night 3D is an adorable dead teenager movie.  Adorable not so much for how scary it is, but for how scary it wants to be.  It provides some lovingly-framed shocks, a delectable cast of prime flesh to be rent into pieces, and the requisite nastiness of Wrong Turn-style post-Deliverance redneck horror.  The only real issue is that the sharks -- all 46 of them -- are almost an afterthought.

A group of hot young college students from Tulane University travel to the bayou home of pretty Sara (Sara Paxton), who hasn't been back in three years because of a ridiculous accident in which her boyfriend Dennis (Chris Carmack) almost let her drown and she scarred his face with a boat propellor while trying to survive.

What she and her friends don't know is that Dennis, his disgusting redneck friend Red (Joshua Leonard from The Blair Witch Project) and the town sheriff (Donal Logue) have filled the bayou with sharks in order to film snuff movies for jaded fans of Discovery Channel's Shark Week who want more vivid entertainment.

So you get American Idol's Katharine McPhee forced to strip at gunpoint and licked on the face by Leonard, a brave black athlete (Singua Walls) going Captain Ahab on a shark with a sharpened oar after he loses his arm and the love of his life, and some pretty amazing CGI sharks flying through the air on the premise that if one worked in Deep Blue Sea, three should be even better.

It's not great, but at 78 minutes without the credits it moves quickly enough.  Perhaps too quickly, for some characters (like hunky nude model Chris Zylka from Gregg Araki's Kaboom and the upcoming Piranha 3DD) disappear without a thought and some rather interesting possibilities with the video criminals go frustratingly unexplored. But it's a fun ride, with at least one OMG sequence involving a WaveRunner and some pretty amusing dialogue. You could do worse.

[awcmblog-blog]

FRIGHT NIGHT (2011)

Directed by Craig Gillespie.

With Anton Yelchin, Colin Farrell, Toni Collette, David Tennant, Imogen Poots, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Dave Franco, Chris Sarandon, Lisa Loeb, Sandra Vergara.(Walt Disney - DreamWorks)

Maybe I'm getting soft in my old age, or maybe I haven't matured a bit in the quarter-century since the original Fright Night (1985), but I found this 3-D horror tale of a nervous high school kid and the vampire next door to be fun, scary and involving from start to finish, with only a few minor quibbles.

Anton Yelchin stars as Charley Brewster, a former nerd who is the envy of all his friends because of his surprisingly attractive girlfriend (Imogen Poots).  Becoming cool required Charley to give up his friendship with geeky "Evil" Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), which is a bad thing because Ed is the only one who really knows the truth about Charley's new neighbor, the charming Jerry (Colin Farrell).

Jerry does strange construction work at his new house, and keeps all of his windows blacked out because he supposedly works at night on the Las Vegas strip.  But there are more empty seats in Charley's schoolroom every day, and Jerry seems to be getting suspiciously friendly with Charley's single mom (Toni Collette). When Ed disappears, Charley does some investigating of his own, making some gruesome and horrifying discoveries.

Yelchin and Farrell are quite good here, creating a more intense Charley and a more robustly menacing Jerry than in the original film, but Mintz-Plasse is not as sympathetic as Stephen Geoffreys was in the role of Ed, and is played for more direct laughs without the underlying sadness of the initial conception. While Ed's death in the original brought tears to a few eyes, Mintz-Plasse passes here with a rousing "so what?"

The film's most audacious conceit is the reimagining of the Peter Vincent character, here played to the hilt by David Tennant as a boozy, flamboyantly vulgar Vegas magician who is equal parts Criss Angel and Russell Brand. Some fans of the original may miss Roddy McDowall's interpretation of Vincent as a dissipated horror host, but Tennant gives it his all and becomes quite an entertaining figure as the film progresses, with his museum of ancient vampire-hunting gadgets being a particular treat.

Some films benefit from updating and others do not. In this case, director Craig Gillespie brings an obvious enthusiasm to the material and updates it with a little less humor and a little more gory ferocity to fit changing appetites. The result is a scary, energetic re-working which should please new viewers without alienating the original's fans.  And, oh, yes, speaking of the original's fans, they should keep an eye out for Chris Sarandon -- the first Jerry -- as a very unfortunate motorist.

[awcmblog-blog]

RIP JIMMY SANGSTER

Jimmy Sangster, who wrote many of the great Hammer horror films including The Curse of Frankenstein, Horror of Dracula and the 1959 version of The Mummy, passed away at age 83.  Read his NY Times obit here.

[awcmblog-blog]

CRY BABY LANE (2000; TV)

Directed by Peter Lauer. 

With: Frank Langella, Jase Blankfort, Trey Rogers, Larc Spies, Anne Lange, Marc John Jefferies, Allison Siko, Gary Perez, Bernadette Quigley. (Nickolodeon Movies/Centre Street Prods./Constant Communication; Jerry Kupfer)

On October 28, 2000, the Nickelodeon TV network aired a creepy Halloween movie rated TV Y-7, supposedly suitable for kids and destined to go down in history as perhaps the first great "lost film" of the 21st century. It only aired once, and was never seen again, remembered hazily through the fogs of numerous childhood memories.  Rumors about a haunted production and mysterious deaths soon sprang up, related across the Internet in the modern equivalent of hushed tones around a campfire. Cry Baby Lane soon became the stuff of legend, a real-life version of the apocryphal Candle Cove.

The film tells the story of two young brothers, Andrew (Jase Blankfort) and Carl (Trey Rogers).  They like spooky stories, and are told a good one by the town undertaker (Frank Langella) concerning the fate of conjoined twins -- one good, the other evil -- who were sawed apart and buried in separate graves by a local farmer. 

Naturally, the kids decide to hold a seance to get in touch with the good brother, but mistakenly resurrect the demonic evil twin, leading to all manner of horrific complications as a number of townfolk are possessed by the malefic spirit. In true kiddie-film fashion, it's up to the boys to save the day.

The real reasons for the film's disappearance are rather banal -- it was too scary for kids, parents complained, and the embarrassed network withdrew the film from its schedule, never re-aired it, and refused to release it on DVD. But that didn't stop the discussions and speculation, which cheered me up a great deal.

See, people of my generation had versions of this phenomenon as well, centering around a trio of 1970s TV-movies (Bad Ronald, Trilogy of Terror, and the currently-rebooted Don't Be Afraid of the Dark) which gave all of us nightmares. It's nice to know that today's horror-hardened youths have one of those as well in Cry Baby Lane.

Recently, new rumors have sprung up of a high-quality copy about to surface (from Reddit, of all places), and the excitement over Cry Baby Lane has begun again. Here's hoping it resurfaces soon, because Halloween is just around the corner, and there's a whole new generation waiting to be traumatized.