Chawz (2009)

JUNE 30, 2011

GENRE: COMEDIC, PREDATOR

SOURCE: DVD (SCREENER)

Well, you can’t really accuse Chawz of “ripping off” Jaws, because they’re pretty upfront with its influence (though the original title is Chaw or Chawu; I guess they tossed a Z on to really hammer it in). Tae-Woong Eom’s hero is pretty much a younger version of Martin Brody, a small town cop tagging along with experts as they hunt down a monster even though you know it will ultimately come down to him vs. the monster. They even have a more or less direct remake of the “I think we captured the wrong one” scene, right down to cutting the mistakenly captured animal to see if any of his human victims were in the stomach, not yet digested.

But the movie pays homage to a variety of flicks, and thus it’s not so much a “Jaws with a boar” movie as a sort of smorgasbord of geek faves, not unlike Doomsday or Attack The Block. Eom’s character arc takes as much from Hot Fuzz (Pegg’s character) as Brody, as he is relocated to a quiet “crimeless” town after getting into trouble in the city for being too good at his job, and the goofy police squad antics in the middle of what is kind of a grim story reminded me of The Untold Story, albeit without chopsticks. Hell they even take a page from Beowulf at one point, with the boar rampaging around a tavern during a celebration, seeking to get back its baby (so it’s Jaws 3 too!).

Luckily, the movie’s focus on humor over actual horror keeps the lifts from being annoying. I doubt director Jeong-won Shin would deny any of his influences if asked about them – he’s clearly just out to make a fun film that pays homage to films he digs, and as long as you’re on board with the humor, you should have fun too. There’s just enough giant boar action to satisfy monster movie fans, and the blend of CGI and puppet (I think?) is far more successful than most modern films of the genre.

However, if the humor doesn’t work for you, then you should steer far clear. I chuckled and smiled a lot, but the movie’s 122 minute length is nearly unforgivable at times. There are a pair of female characters in the movie that serve no purpose whatsoever – one a crazy local who wants to be a mother to a child that’s not hers, and the other Eom’s mother, also rather insane. Cutting one or both of them out entirely wouldn’t really effect the story in the slightest, and would singlehandedly get the movie down to a more manageable 105 minutes or so. And many other scenes could use trimming; there’s a bit near the end where the heroes are using a railcar to escape the rampaging boar, which is exciting and fun at first but feels like it runs twice the length it should. Then again, maybe I’m just sensitive after having suffered through Transformers 3, where every single scene in the movie either should have been cut in half or cut entirely.

But what made it work for me was the likable characters. In another reference of a sort, it’s kind of like a Lake Placid (or pretty much any Michael Crichton adventure) team, with a hunter, a cop, a state official, a wildlife expert, and a badass ultimately joining up to hunt down the monster, each with their own motives (“Study it!” “A hunting challenge!” “Protect the town!”, etc), But unlike most films with this setup, all of them are likable and get along. One of the better joke scenes involves the wildlife expert wanting to film everything for a documentary, and she doesn’t catch a crucial discovery on camera, so she asks them to “do it again”. You’d expect one of them to be like “I don’t have time for this nonsense”, but they all happily oblige, ridiculously overacting for the camera and seemingly have a grand ole time. And this has another perk – it’s actually kind of hard to tell which of the others will die. You know how in Jaws you can pretty much guess that Quint will die, Brody will live, and then Hooper is the only wild card? Well this has at least three such wild cards, and the only guy I thought for sure would get killed ended up being sidelined for most of the boar action. So you end up with a movie like Tremors, where it’s not about whittling down the cast but making everyone well-rounded and likable enough that you want them to live. As with Jaws, the body count ends up being pretty low, but there’s a lot of near-miss action to enjoy (which Jaws didn’t really have besides Hooper in the cage).

Oddly, the Korean film was shot mostly in the outskirts of San Francisco (there are even a few American characters speaking English; it’s actually kind of jarring to hear something you comprehend after 30-40 minutes of a foreign language), so I am kind of bummed I watched the film on a screener instead of a real DVD, as I’d probably enjoy watching the making of that’s on the release disc. Our productions are always going around the world to shoot, but it’s much less often that foreign productions come to the US – guess they don’t have very good woods in Korea. The DVD also has some deleted scenes, thus putting an end to my internal debate over whether or not the movie even had an editor.

Oh but I kid Chawz! It may be a little rough around the edges, and Shin may need a producer that can rein him in a bit (though, excessive as it may be, the “turn to camera and smile” end credits were awesome), but at least it’s a coherent movie without any ghosts whatsoever, which makes it a true anomaly for K-horror.

What say you?

Getting acquainted with ... Elizabeth Taylor

This is the fifth in a monthly series designed to help me expand my library of older films, in the form of watching three films by a film personality I think I need to get to know better. I should ALERT you now that there may be SPOILERS.

Okay, so I'm a couple months late for the "Liz Taylor Appreciation Piece" on my blog. But that's because when she died, I would have had little to appreciate. In fact, it was reading a piece about her career that caused me to realize I hadn't seen many of her films -- that caused me to line her up as my choice for June. (Besides, I'd been getting acquainted with men for the first four months of this series, and I desperately needed a woman).

I guess you wouldn't exactly call her a prolific actress, and she quit at an age when she would have still been viable for awhile longer. But the fact remains that she was an icon, yet I had still only seen two films in which Elizabeth Taylor appeared: Cleopatra and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Both to honor her and as a legitimate pursuit of cinematic knowledge, I decided I should broaden my number of Taylor films from two to five.

The only problem is, watching three films by a movie personality and then trying to examine overarching themes in a month-end piece is a bit easier to do with a director than an actor or actress. After starting with James Cagney in February, I then proceeded to Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Alejandro Jodorowsky, each directors who had definite interests they kept returning to. I didn't realize this with Cagney, but I did with Taylor -- actors tend to play a more passive role in the process of making films, and it's not always possible to extrapolate similarities between their roles. Sometimes, three separate films are just three separate films.

Such was my experience with Taylor. But that doesn't mean I won't or can't write about her. She was, after all, an icon, undeniably talented in front of the camera, and beautiful even from when she was 12.

National Velvet (1944, Clarence Brown). Watched: Tuesday, June 14th

Which, conveniently, is where we start with Taylor. National Velvet was one of those movie titles I'd always heard, but didn't know anything about until recently. In fact, not until reading that piece after Taylor's death did I even know it was about horses.

I did know it starred Mickey Rooney in addition to Taylor, but I didn't have any idea that I would also meet a young Angela Lansbury in the movie. Her role as the older sister to Taylor's Velvet Brown is brief, but memorable for anyone who got acquainted with Lansbury much later in her career (Murder, She Wrote was about the time she came on my own radar). She seems impossibly tall in this movie.

But let's not let the erstwhile Jessica Fletcher steal the spotlight from Taylor, who truly shines. Taylor was 12 when the movie was released, meaning she was probably 11 or younger during filming. And she certainly does command the screen. As this is considered her star-making performance, it shouldn't be any great surprise that I found her captivating, especially with the benefit of hindsight. What did surprise me a little was how many of the horse-riding stunts she appeared to be doing herself. In fact, falling off a horse in this film contributed to back problems she had later in life.

The film itself is about a young girl's desire to win England's Grand National horse race with her horse, called The Pie, short for Pirate. In this instance, Hollywood doesn't do a great job making us think all these people are British, however. For one, a disconcerting number of the characters have no British accent to speak of. Isn't that the first rule about setting films in England, especially when you shoot them in California?

The greatest impression the film made on me was not Taylor, nor Rooney (who reminded me of Dana Carvey's impressions of him on Saturday Night Live), nor Lansbury, but Anne Revere, who plays Velvet's mother with a mixture of benevolence, wisdom and slyness that I won't soon forget. The characterization ran rather contrary to what I expected of a movie made in 1944, where you'd think the patriarch might receive more of the positive character traits. Instead, he's a bit of a buffoon, and Revere is grace and intelligence incarnate. Something about Revere seems so familiar to me that I have a rather hard time believe I've only seen her in a single other movie, Gentlemen's Agreement. And while I did see that movie for the first time within the past five years, it did not make a particular impression on me.

The other big takeaway from National Velvet is the climactic racing scene, which some critics have called the greatest horse racing scene ever captured on film, and I'd be hard-pressed to disagree. Especially for the time in which it was shot, with its significant technical limitations, the sequence is crackling with tension and life. It also seamlessly incorporates a number of wipeouts that seem like they should have injured either the horse or the rider, but presumably did not. No, it's not Taylor -- whose Velvet disguises herself as a man in order to ride The Pie in the race -- on the horse during these sequences, but the close-ups with her in them are also executed unobtrusively. With its grand scale and complicated staging, this sequence had to have influenced the chariot races in Ben-Hur a full 15 years later.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958, Richard Brooks). Watched: Thursday, June 16th

Fourteen years later brings us to our next Taylor movie, by which point she has matured into a full-fledged ingenue. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was of course also familiar to me, both as a movie and as a Tennessee Williams play, but I'd gotten to this point in my life without seeing any version of it. Time to change that.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof disappointed me a bit out of the gate, for a very simple reason: the title makes its way into the dialogue not ten minutes into the movie. I admit, from having seen clips of the film, that I knew the words "cat on a hot tin roof" were spoken by Taylor in the dialogue -- they would almost have to be, wouldn't they? But I always assumed they would come during some climactic part of the narrative, when we'd sat with the characters for the majority of the play, and the simile (she says she feels like a cat on a hot tin roof, so it's a simile, not a metaphor) would have this kind of cathartic impact on us, make us understand the character in a way we hadn't previously. Coming so soon in the story, there's no way it can have that effect, and I couldn't help but be disheartened by that. Williams should have chosen a line in the third act for the name of his play.

However, I did soon get into the story and the characters, which involve a drunken ex-athlete (Paul Newman), his possibly unfaithful wife (Taylor), his obnoxious brother (Jack Carson) and sister-in-law (Madeleine Sherwood) who continually churn out babies, his "Big Momma" (Judith Anderson) and his "Big Daddy" (Burl Ives), who may or may not be dying of cancer. This big dysfunctional bunch meets in the psychologically close confines of a sprawling Mississippi mansion, where they yell at each other over perceived and real slights over the course of 107 minutes.

That's an oversimplification, and is not actually meant to be a slight to this film. More, I mean it to be that I was surprised at the level of real, visceral anger and barely contained violence that was present in this film. Not that 1958 was such a genteel time for the movies, just that I found Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to be more sexually frank than I was expecting, and more scandalous as well. I guess I have this idea that a Williams play -- since they all seem to deal in some way or another with scandals and betrayals among families in the steamy south -- would be safe for the stage, but might need to be toned down a bit for the movies. The consistent honesty of emotion, the brutal refusal to pull punches (emotionally) but nearly come to blows (physically) ... it left me feeling I was witnessing a truly modern entity, when I might have been inclined to consider the 1950s a time when the movies were just trying to make us happy. (Like I say, this is a vast oversimplification of that era, but I have to be honest when I tell you what impressions I may have carried into the viewing experience.)

One thing I will say is that Cat on a Hot Tin Roof does not serve particularly well as a showcase for Taylor in a month devoted to examining her films. Although she is probably the name most associated with this movie -- she's the centerpiece on the poster -- she is only the third most important character, as Williams' play is really a showdown between Brick Pollitt (Newman) and his Big Daddy (Ives). Taylor's Maggie actually disappears for stretches of the film, as much as one can disappear while still in the same house as the rest of the characters. It's Newman's first really famous film in a movie career that began four years earlier, and he sure announces himself as a heavyweight, surly and quick-tempered and oozing magnetism. Meanwhile, the actual heavyweight, Ives, is an actor I don't think I've ever seen outside of possibly his most famous role in a considerably more benign context -- he of course voices the snowman narrator in the Rankin-Bass TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Having been fully aware of Newman's dramatic capabilities, I was therefore considerably more surprised to see just how much Ives can bring it. He's a gargantuan presence who lives up terrifically to the name Big Daddy and the role of the rich paterfamilias who's full of contempt. The one-on-one scenes between these two actors, which make up the bulk of the film's most memorable moments, are scintillating tutorials on acting.

When she is on screen, which is probably more than I'm giving her credit for, Taylor is certainly a captivating presence as well. I really noted how director Richard Brooks made use of her sexuality, as he lingers on a scene of her removing her stockings early on, bringing her status as a budding sex symbol to the fore. National Velvet didn't require much range from the actress, since she was just an adolescent, but Roof demonstrates the chops we'd see in future performances in which she really dominates, such as Virgina Woolf.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof also made me really think about the contrasting narrative possibilities of a play and a movie. Because most plays are limited by the logistics of set design, they involve a lot of talking about events that may have happened elsewhere, rather than showing them. This film in particular seems to be a great example of that, as the event against which most of the characters are defining themselves -- the suicide of Brick's friend Skipper -- is never dramatized, occurring off-screen at an earlier time. If Cat on a Hot Tin Roof had been conceived as a screenplay rather than a play, it's very likely that Skipper would have been played by an actor and there would have been some kind of flashback to the fateful night in which various characters think they made some crucial error that led to him killing himself. Instead, the event is discussed in the dialogue only. Without being much of a Williams scholar myself, I think this might be a common element in his other plays: conflicts deriving from events that have to be told to the audience, rather than shown. While that runs contrary to the main guiding principles of cinema, I found it to be quaint in a way I enjoyed. With only one shooting location for this film, it's stripped of distractions and can focus only on the acting and on the depth of the characters' emotions. Which are two pretty damn good reasons why we go to the movies.

The Taming of the Shrew (1967, Franco Zeffirelli). Watched: Tuesday, June 28th.

The Taming of the Shrew was not my first choice for my third Taylor film. In fact, it was not even my second choice. But Netflix was being a fickle mistress, perhaps in part because other people were also watching Taylor's films in the wake of her death.

My first choice had actually been Butterfield 8, for which Taylor won the first of her two Oscars, only two years after Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. However, Netflix listed this film as having a "Very Long Wait." Not a short wait or a long wait, but a "very long wait," meaning way past the end of June. So I shifted my attentions to 1951's A Place in the Sun, which, to remain in chronological order, I would have watched before Roof. Frustratingly, the same length wait was listed for this film as well. I knew of Shrew as Shakespeare's classic more than I knew of it as an Elizabeth Taylor classic, but opted for it as the best of the remaining options I hadn't seen. Besides, I'd never seen Shrew at all, and as a lover of Shakespeare, I felt like that was something I needed to correct.

(Only after Shrew was already on its way did I see the "Very Long Wait" notation disappear from next to Butterfield 8. Shucks. Then again, looking today, I see that it's back, so maybe I only imagined that it disappeared in the first place. Also, I just now noticed she was in Giant. Seeing that would have also allowed me to see the only James Dean movie I haven't seen.)

Anyway, maybe there was a reason I hadn't seen any dramatic performance of The Taming of the Shrew before now. I have always considered myself a lover of Shakespeare, and took a class devoted entirely to his tragedies in college. However, I have always disliked his comedies. It all started when I saw A Midsummer Night's Dream and thought it was ridiculously frivolous. My opinion didn't improve with Much Ado About Nothing, although I find that title incredibly accurate. If I had to choose one Shakespearean comedy as my reluctant favorite, it would probably be Twelfth Night. But I try to avoid them in general.

The Taming of the Shrew reminded me why. Given how sober and somber his tragedies are, I find it endlessly frustrating how much Shakespeare showed himself to be the polar opposite in his comedies, populating them with loud, boorish, drunken fools. In fact, it seems that each comedy has at least one and usually several characters whose role is, literally, The Fool, whether it's Puck in Midsummer or Feste in Twelfth Night. I'm sure there's one in Much Ado About Nothing, but I've only seen that once (as opposed to at least twice for the others), so the characters don't leap immediately to mind.

I found almost everyone to be the fool in Shrew, starting with Richard Burton as Petruchio and continuing on to almost everyone he comes into contact with -- most problematically, Taylor's Katharina. But my first impression of the film was the following: "Hey, this is the plot from 10 Things I Hate About You!" I'm kidding of course, as 10 Things is a modern-day update of Shrew, a fact I knew at the time I saw it. In the intervening decade, I'd forgotten which play 10 Things was updating. But I actually think I might have liked 10 Things better than this film/play -- and I didn't really like it very much at all.

The reason is simple: 10 Things is a battle of the sexes fought with equivalent artillery on both sides, as a movie made with modern gender politics in mind must be. Shrew is not. In fact, Shrew is unforgivably misogynistic. I was aghast at how few times Katharina scores against Petruchio. She's a one-dimensional harpie who is tamed, as the title promises, but a lot more quickly than I imagined she would be. She's subjected to numerous humiliations, most notably when her horse falls into a puddle and Petruchio leaves her to walk back to his castle, some number of miles, through the snow. He then denies her food, drink and warmth, which she direly needs. Through this process she turns into a doting wife who does everything her husband tells her. The end.

Really, it's almost that bad.

I couldn't believe it. I was in shock. I know that Shakespeare's plays are often considered to be sexist in one way or another, but usually, they make up for it with astute observations about the human condition or brilliant turns of phrase that have become some of the classic lines in English literature. Not so here. The Taming of the Shrew has the usual farcical mistaken identity elements that I hate in most of Shakespeare's comedies, which occasionally are clever despite their trying frivolity. But they aren't particularly clever here, and the fault is compounded by a significant lack of smart observations and brilliant language. In fact, The Taming of the Shrew may now be my least favorite of Shakespeare's plays.

I also found it oddly out of balance. As you know if you saw 10 Things I Hate About You, the crux of this play is that a father won't allow his younger daughter Bianca, a beauty who is sought by many suitors, to marry until his older daughter, the shrew, is married off first. This leads to considerable scheming and many of the mistaken identity stuff alluded to above. But I thought I remember the Bianca plot in 10 Things being only slightly less important than the Petruchio-Katharina plot. In the actual version of the play, it's frequently an afterthought, with most of the time being frittered away on the gross dynamics of the relationship between the reprehensible lout and his shrew. (Petruchio actually seems much more shrewish than Katharina -- her main fault seems to be that she likes to throw temper tantrums.) Not only that, but the problem of marrying her off is resolved fairly early in the narrative, leaving a lot more time for the taming process, during which the play becomes unforgivably sexist. The coup de grace is when Katharina ends the play with a speech -- a genuine speech, not a ruse with hidden agenda -- in which she extols the virtues of obedience to one's husband, whom she sees as her lord. Has Petruchio earned this? I think not.

Okay, I don't want to say too much more about this movie/play. However, I will finish with a couple things:

1) I was interested to see that Franco Zeffirelli was the director. Zeffirelli also directed the Mel Gibson Hamlet from 1990, and probably the most famous screen version of Romeo and Juliet (which I haven't seen) from 1968. He was probably cinema's most regular Shakespeare interpreter before Kenneth Branagh came along, so I was interested to see his work in Shrew. I found it generally undistinguished and very broad, although of course that is also dictated by the material.

2) Taylor herself. Thought she deserved a mention. She's pretty feisty at times and is certainly very watchable. She's also pretty sexy as she is required to show plenty of cleavage here and there. However, I found myself thinking that she was already starting to seem a bit matronly in this movie, even in her still-young mid-thirties. Perhaps that's just a relative observation based on seeing her on screen this month in films where she was significantly younger, but it took me by surprise.

3) I read after the fact that Burton and Taylor shot this film when their marriage was already on the rocks, rather publicly. In retrospect, it's interesting to see how that adds extra fire to their on-screen conflict. However, the film may be more interesting as an insight into their personal lives than it is as a work of art in its own right.

Okay, for not thinking I had very much to say about Elizabeth Taylor, I ended up writing quite a lot about these three films.

Next month: Back to directors, and back to films with a very definite theme connecting them.

The Violent Kind (2011)

"The Shitty Kind."

The Butcher Brothers. The Brothers Strause. McG... Is there a filmmaker(s) out there with a pretentious name that can actually make a decent movie? I'll give the Butcher Brothers credit for The Hamiltons, which was decent, but other than that, the answer is no. You shouldn't be able to make up a nickname or special moniker for yourself, until you've, oh I don't know, earned the right?

The Violent Kind opens with a clothed sex scene and a drug deal gone wrong, and a avant-garde credit sequence. Woo! It's really about group of bikers that couldn't make the SAMCRO cut if their lives depended on it, and their crazy adventures at a birthday party. They walk around, talk, stare at girls, and mean mug for about 20 minutes, until Tiffany Shepis gets possessed by...aliens, I think... and tries to kill a guy for fingering her. She also climbs on the ceiling, and acts all possessed.

Up to this point, the movie isn't all that bad (though dull,), but the Butcher Brothers have an ace up their sleeve: ghostly greasers.

Yep, a gang of ghost greasers shows up, lead by Giovanni Ribisi's less talented brother, and proceed to listen to crappy oldies and act all 50's style. And Talk. Talk, talk, talk. From here on out, there's something about aliens (?) and an event that will change the world, and we're not really sure what happens.

The main problem here is that this movie thinks itself clever, and spends most of its running time showing us, the audience, just how clever it is. Over, and over, and over again. There's a good flick here somewhere, but it's buried underneath so much quirky and lame shit that it ceases to matter at about the halfway point.

There are some things about this movie that are interesting, though they never full amount to much. Here they are.

The chicks, man. This movie had some pretty hot chicks.

Tiffany Shepis. It's always fun to watch her act slutty.

This Scene. I was like, "WTF?!?"

The possession stuff was mildly interesting, until we realized it was all a ruse.

That sky. It was pretty bad ass.

This shit, whatever it was, was kinda cool lookin.

Everything else was a mess. The story was confused and vague, the acting was over the top and annoying, the CGI blood sucked, and most of it made little sense. It's obvious that the movie was meant to be equal parts disturbing, clever, and deeply original, but in the end what it ends up being is frustrating and tedious. I blame Rob Zombie; Everyone wants to make their own Devil's Rejects, but none seem to be able to.


John Locke speaks the truth.

Slumber Party Massacre III (1990)

JUNE 29, 2011

GENRE: SLASHER

SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

I had heard that Slumber Party Massacre III was more like the original, which is true for the first half or so, which feels like a remake at times (again with the guys playing pranks to worm their way into the party!). But as the film goes it gets kind of dark, with a pseudo-rape, a surprise/sort of unnecessary kill near the end, and a killer who is more of an angry jerk than a creepy stalker (or a singing rockabilly dude).

Not that I minded this in theory, but it’s a little awkward when the movie starts off with goofy sight gags and the usual silly, borderline parody approach to slasher movies that the previous two films explored, and then dips into what feels more like a takeoff on the Richard Speck case, as the killer makes his presence known to the girls when most of them are still alive, terrorizing them in the house that they can’t seem to escape. Plus, unlike the rather quiet (silly) nature of Russ Thorn, he’s constantly yelling profanities and throwing the girls around, which isn’t as fun.

He has a drill though, just like his predecessors – in fact it’s pretty much the only tie to the others that I can find in this one. It takes place in the same sort of vague Los Angeles neighborhood as the original (and first 10 minutes or so of the 2nd), but Courtney and Valerie aren’t mentioned and there doesn’t seem to be any legend in the town of the bad things that happen to girls when they have slumber parties in this part of town. Also, it’s actually kind of a whodunit at first, with a few red herrings and kill scenes where we don’t see anything but the murderer’s hands (later he dons a creepy mask; sadly they drop this idea not too long after that). Also, it’s sort of a half-assed approach to a whodunit, as his identity is revealed somewhat unceremoniously long before the film concludes. Still, it was fun while it lasted.

The body count also seems to be higher than the others (especially if you go with the theory that II was all in her head), with a couple rather anonymous victims and more girls to boot (more guys too, actually). And while the drill may be getting a bit old, there are still a few new gags with it, such as when a girl grabs it while it’s turned off and then he revs it and chews the shit out of her hands. He also employs other weapons besides the drill; one girl is electrocuted with a vibrator (one that plugs into the wall, for some reason), and he takes out another guy with the stake part of a “For Sale” sign.

But of course all of them are still symbolic of the penis (the vibrator obviously much more blatantly so), and speaking of his phallic weaponry, as with the others this was written/directed by women. However the guys are slightly less obnoxious this time around, making it feel a bit less “feminist” (using the term very loosely here). It’s also unintentionally anti-environment, as none of the movie would have happened if one girl hadn’t gone back to the beach and picked up some trash that they had left behind after their volleyball game (as she drops her address book in the process, which the killer finds).

It’s also anti-police, with the cop they call refusing to believe that they are in any trouble. Hilariously, his partner is sort of taken aback by his behavior, and thus offers to check in on the girls “in an hour or so” when he gets off his shift. I love that – he’s pissed that his partner won’t do his job but still doesn’t really think it’s worth dropping everything to investigate. It’s the opposite of the girls’ responsibility; perhaps I wasn’t the only one to notice that the girls were total slobs in the previous film – there’s a lengthy “subplot” about one of them dropping a slice of pizza on the carpet, and not only do three of them sit around trying to clean it, but the others watch them clean as if the entire night’s enjoyment depended on them getting it cleaned. I’m sure it’s supposed to be irony (as the place will be covered in blood later) but it’s ridiculous to see a bunch of teenagers sitting around looking at someone apply Resolve instead of dancing or fucking or whatever.

As with the other films, a commentary with the director and a couple of the cast mates is included, once again moderated by the guy who runs the website. Look, I’m certainly not one to complain about moderators, but after three movies this guy has really gotten on my nerves; constantly asking the directors to acknowledge their continuity errors and correcting their fuzzy memories on cast members’ whereabouts (and HE’S wrong on one of them, when they discuss Marta Kober he goes on and on about how she’s been missing for years, even though she did a convention in New Jersey the year before this DVD was released). I mean, obviously he’s an expert, so why not just let him do his own commentary and let these other folks have one to themselves? It’s also annoying how they are recorded, with the movie on mute for them but not for us. So at times we hear them try to remember what is going on in the movie, who is saying what, etc, even though we can hear it perfectly well. And once again there are long gaps of silence at times, which I assume means another person got edited out? But it’s a decent enough track when they’re talking; I particularly like how they explain that some necessary reshoots (movie was too short and too not-nude for some of the producers) introduced plot holes – not something you hear too often on a commentary.

Likewise, there’s also a 15 minute interview piece featuring whoever they could find/get (the director and I think maybe four of the actors), which inexplicably has a credit sequence that runs longer than the one on the actual film (and unlike the other two, doesn’t have outtake interviews running along with it). But it has Brandi Burkett, who is one of the prettiest girls in the series and still looks terrific. Obviously I have about 20 minutes’ worth of nostalgia for the film instead of 20 years, but it’s always a disappointment when an actress you were smitten with as a young lad turns out so ghastly; indeed, Ms. Kober (who was Sandra in Friday Part 2 - she's the one who got speared on the bed) now resembles one of those folks you see panhandling on freeway exits (as does Violet, the 80s chick from Friday 5). So it’s nice to see when one of them is still all together and hasn’t let bad plastic surgery or what appears to be a drug-filled lifestyle ruin their appearance (which, for an actress, more or less means their life).

Interestingly, this film actually played theatrically and did quite well, grossing well over a million bucks despite only playing on 80 or so screens. However the DVD is full-frame, because I guess that was the only way to get it with all the uncut footage (I assume it was wider for theaters, anyway?). At any rate, it's a shame that these sort of movies would never get real theatrical play anymore - it's rare I get to see a new slasher movie with a theatrical crowd, and thus I am jealous of the folks who were able to go buy a ticket for Slumber Party Massacre 3 back in 1990 at the same time movies like Ghost and Presumed Innocent were cleaning up at the multiplexes, and didn't have to pretty much rely on midnight revival screenings to get that experience.

Now, the question is – do I seek out Cheerleader Massacre, the unofficial “fourth” film in the series? It’s from Jim Wynorski but does NOT have killer robots in a mall, so I have little faith in its potential to be any good.

What say you?

Wake Wood (2011)

JUNE 28, 2011

GENRE: KILLER KID, SUPERNATURAL

SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

I hope I’m not spoiling anything by tagging Wake Wood as a killer kid movie, but I mean, the lifts from Pet Sematary are so blatant at times it might as well just be a remake, so I don’t think anyone with even passing familiarity to that story will be surprised when our resurrected little girl starts taking out a few townsfolk toward the end of the second act. Oddly, it’s actually kind of a shame it goes down that route, as the movie was much better/more interesting without that stuff, but alas.

Even with its blunders its still the best of the new Hammer films, all the more impressive when you consider it’s been on the shelf for two years (it was shot in 2008!). Let Me In was technically a good movie, but it was a too-close copy of a film that was released only a year or so before, and the less said about The Resident, the better. But this one has a bit of that old Hammer feel, with an isolated European town populated with creepy folks, a gloomy atmosphere, etc. Only the largely terrible score and sub-par digital photography give a modern feel to this otherwise old-school morality tale.

Oh, and the digital blood. It’s kind of funny; the blood in a lot of the older films has that weird melted pink crayon look to it, and now it looks artificial in a completely different way. It’s not a particularly gory film (though gorier than I was expecting), so it’s not too damaging, but still, I think it’s time we give CGI blood splatter a rest until they can get it right. I watched the new Transformers movie today (a boring and incomprehensible waste of time for the most part), and it amazes me that they can have a giant robot laying waste to Chicago and it looks flawless, but they still can’t manage to get a little blood geyser looking right. And really, it’s not too hard to set up a squib or condom filled with Karo syrup, so for the life of me I cannot understand why so many filmmakers go down that road when it never looks good.

Anyway, the movie plays better as a sad drama than a horror flick, which is fine by me. The movie wastes no time in setting the grieving parent plot in motion, and that could have caused a problem if the actors weren’t up to the task, but Aiden Gillen and Eva Birthistle sell their grief fairly well even though we never got to see much of them in “happier times”. I also liked that they didn’t waste too much time explaining how the townsfolk came across this dead-raising ability, or what their little abacus thing was for, or any of that stuff that doesn’t really matter. The more you explain a somewhat ridiculous plot like this, the harder it will be to focus on the characters, so by keeping it simple they end up with a far more effective tale, with a tragedy at its core that actually works.

But as I mentioned, the killer kid stuff doesn’t really gel with the rest. Basically, their ritual works most of the time, but the person they bring back has to have been dead for less than a year. If it’s more, then they come back “wrong”, and that’s what happens here (Gillen lies about how long she has been dead). However it doesn’t quite work the same as in Pet, where the folks ALWAYS came back murderous, and right away to boot. So while the moral of that story was “When someone dies, they should stay that way”, the moral here is, I guess, “Don’t lie to creepy cult types about when your loved one died, because it screws up their success rate”. It’s actually scarier when the “rules” are broken, such as when they venture outside of the town border and the girl starts to bleed from all over (sort of like what happened to an uninvited Abby in Let Me In, actually), and I think the movie might have even been more effective if the focus was more on the “play by the rules” angle than her apparent soulless return.

This also would have given Timothy Spall a bit more to do. If this was a 70s film, his role would be played by Christopher Lee or someone like that (indeed, it feels a bit at times like Wicker Man, especially during the crazy “parade” scene early on), but they would also give him some juicy stuff to do in the 3rd act. Spall is sort of phased out as the movie goes along, never really becoming a full blown villain (or a surprise hero), which is a shame as I was hoping to see him get to cut loose a bit.

And I had initially suspected his performance was trimmed a bit in editing, but there’s nothing much of note to his character in the deleted scenes collection, which runs about 17 minutes but includes an extended version of the “resurrection” scene so there’s really less than 10 minutes of excised material. Most of it is worthless, and all presented without context (one bit is literally just a shot of Gillen tending to a horse at some point), rendering it a rather worthless way to spend 15 minutes, especially when neither David Keating or Brendan McCarthy (the director and screenwriter, respectively) appear to explain why it was cut in the first place. But that’s the only extra of note besides the trailer, in which you will learn that the film was cropped from 1.78:1 to 2.39:1 for the feature presentation, as the trailer shows more information at the top and bottom of the frame. Perhaps the filmmakers wanted it shown in the wider aspect ratio, but I did notice a few shots in the film that were noticeably cramped (plus a few others that seemed stretched, like when their car breaks down and they pull to the side of the road) so I dunno. This is why you include the filmmakers on your DVDs!

At any rate, it’s a sign that the new Hammer might actually work out after all, and I hope Woman In Black (another remake!) is another worthy addition to their legacy. Not sure why it was delayed for so long, but don’t let that fool you – Wake Wood is worth a look, and does the Hammer name proud.

What say you?

A loose interpretation of Wednesday

I got an email yesterday from movietickets.com telling me to "be among the first to be transformed."

(I may actually be transformed, but I refuse to be "among the first.")

The email was to tell me that "midnight comes early" at AMC theaters, which are showing Transformers: Dark of the Moon tonight at 9 p.m.

It's become common for theaters to show midnight showings of new releases, even the ones that aren't that big a deal. In fact, I remember when the last Twilight movie came out, there were showings at some theaters starting every five minutes from midnight to 1 a.m. After that I think they did the decent thing and told everyone else to wait until the matinee showing later that afternoon. Though it's not unprecedented for movies to screen throughout the night, which is I think what happened when The Phantom Menace came out 12 years ago.

But the one governing rule used to be that you at least had to wait until the clock struck midnight to start showing the movie, so it was technically the correct release date. Well, not anymore. AMC theaters -- at least in Los Angeles but probably elsewhere -- is getting a three-hour head start on the movie's official June 29th release date. Anticipating the huge rush of fanboys who care a huge amount about the scintillating mythology of Michael Bay's mechanical monstrosities? (Note the sarcasm.)

The whole thing reminds me a little bit of the increasingly earlier opening times for retail stores on Black Friday. Back in the day, businesses trying to sell Christmas presents on the day after Thanksgiving used to wow us by opening their doors at 7 a.m., a good two hours before they normally would. Then it became 6 a.m. Then 5 a.m. Then 4 a.m. And then at that point they may have just skipped the really wee hours and jumped all the way back to midnight.

The Wednesday release date is already a head start on Friday, and the midnight show is already a head start on the Wednesday matinee. Now a 9 p.m. show? For Transformers 4, someone will have to push the envelope further and start the show at 8 p.m. (Though it occurs to me that perhaps the 9 p.m. time was chosen because it's technically midnight on the East Coast, though that logic is flimsy at best.) The really funny thing is that the June 29th release date itself seems to be a recent phenomenon, as I couldn't find a single poster on google images that displayed the June 29th release date. The one here, and all others, listed it as July 1st.

Sigh ... yeah, I might be seeing this movie. In the theater. In IMAX. I know, I know.

A friend of mine, with whom I saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (also in IMAX), recently treated me to a night at the Hollywood Bowl. My friends and I don't usually treat each other to such extravagant outings, but this was an exception -- when he invited me, I told him I had the interest in going to Star Wars in Concert, but not the money. I thought that would be the end of the discussion, but he called my bluff and offered to pay for my ticket. So I accepted, thinking I'd pay him for at least half of it. When he refused my money, telling me instead I could treat the next time we went to the movies, I hatched the plan to see the third Transformers with him in IMAX -- IMAX being closer in price (if only by a few bucks) to the Hollywood Bowl ticket than a regular movie.

At a recent birthday drinks, however, he hedged, negating that part of him that didn't care about the mass hatred of Michael Bay and just wanted to witness a spectacle. So we may see something different. (Rise of the Planet of the Apes, perhaps.)

You'd think I'd breathe a sigh of relief, that I didn't have to sit through the third Michael Bay suckfest in the theater, but what can I say. They've done a pretty good job with this trailer, and I was secretly happy to have an excuse to see this movie based on the obligation to repay my friend's favor -- which saved me the embarrassment of having to actually choose to see the movie of my own free will.

We'll see what happens. At least I know that I will not be among the first, and certainly not on the day before the movie is actually released.

Slumber Party Massacre II (1987)

JUNE 27, 2011

GENRE: COMEDIC, SLASHER

SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

Even though I was bored for half of the running time, I suspect Slumber Party Massacre II is a movie designed for big crowd/theatrical viewing, not by yourself at home. I laughed and shouted “YES” on a few occasions, but I am willing to bet that if I was at the New Bev or whatever, I’d be laughing throughout and cheering at the movie’s rampant ridiculousness far more often. I mean, Christ, the killer has a drill on his guitar, and he actually stops and SINGS in between two of the kills (also most of his dialogue consists of song lyrics). This movie cannot be contained on a television screen!

But it's also one that takes forever to start killing people. The movie is only 75 minutes long but it’s not until around the 50 minute mark or so that we have our first real kill. Until then, all (brief) action comes courtesy of our heroine Courtney (the young sister from the first film, albeit played by a different actress here) “seeing things”, which I guess are premonitions of what is eventually to come. She also has some flashbacks to the first film, nearly all of which she wasn’t present for because then it would be even more obvious that it’s a new actress (Wings goddess Crystal Bernard, for the record). Her older sister Valerie also returns (also a new actress), but doesn’t appear much because she has gone crazy due to the previous Massacre and is now locked in a mental institute. Granted, the change of actresses hurts a bit (especially when you consider the actress who originally played Valerie killed herself due to her stalled career – according to the commentary track on SPM2, they didn’t even bother TRYING to get her to come back to play the role she originated), but I was actually kind of surprised that the sequel had this much of a connection to the original.

Especially when you consider that the only thing I knew about the movie was that it was a new killer and was a borderline musical. Since the tone was totally different I just assumed it was an unrelated ripoff that they slapped the title on after production had completed, so this tie was a nice surprise. And it makes the change in killer even more of a ballsy move – the movie was released in 1987, when Freddy was reviving the “horror hero” genre, so for them to create a new killer instead of bringing back Russ Thorn wasn’t probably the best move financially, but I appreciate the attempt at doing something new.

Seeing the first film isn’t a necessity, however. This one brings you up to speed and again, the change in tone/actress would probably be less of a distraction to newcomers. Newbies can enjoy the movie’s wacky musical numbers (our protagonists are the members of a fairly decent 80s girl band), and be less annoyed by the horny male characters, who are EXACT COPIES of the guys in the original, complete with a window watching scene. Once was enough with this particular subplot, though I like that one of them was wholly enraptured by a dirty novel – there are four hot girls nearby, prone to naked pillow fights and what not, but he sits there and READS bland descriptions of sexual activity in a yellowed paperback. OK, dude.

And while he may not be as creepy/hilarious as Thorn, The Driller-Killer is a wonderfully stupid/awesome killer. He looks like a slightly gothed out reject from an amateur production of Grease, and you gotta love that they bring back the drill motif and combine it (however illogical it may be) with his guitar. I just wish they had a drill fight at the end; the movie inexplicably ditches the house setting and has our last two girls run into a construction site, which I thought only existed to set up such a scenario (or at least some sort of power tool clash), but she just burns him. Way to somehow make me scoff at a man being immolated, movie.

He’s not the only weird thing about the movie. The girls have particularly odd diets, such as when they make a feast out of corn dogs and champagne (together at last, I guess?), and one of Courtney’s visions inexplicably involves her friend growing this weird tumor on the side of her face which then explodes pus all over her. There’s also a lengthy sing-along in a car in the first few minutes, which would have been OK if the song wasn’t basically the same two lyrics over and over. And part of the plot involves the girls going to one of their father’s brand new condo for the weekend, but they totally trash the place (one just pours champagne all over the floor), so wouldn’t it have made more sense to say it was a place they were getting rid of and thus didn’t care what condition they left it in?

As the original, the film was directed by a female, which is incredibly rare for a slasher. Deborah Brock took over from Amy Jones, and also wrote the script, a necessity since Roger Corman hired her to direct the film in a hurry because he already sold it overseas based on the title. Thus it lacks the original’s alluring schizo charm (as it was written as a parody but filmed straight, or vice versa depending on who you talk to), because it’s a singular vision, but at least it’s a little more obvious that you’re not supposed to be taking it seriously. But the fact that all of the males are either morons or murderers is kind of off-putting; it’s not like the male written/directed slasher films make all of their females sluts and idiots. Would it have killed her to make ONE relatively normal guy? Even the protagonist’s boyfriend is kind of creepy, though that could be due to the strange “looking directly into camera” shots that were obviously an influence on (fellow Corman protégé) Jonathan Demme for Silence Of The Lambs.

Brock provides a commentary along with one of the producers and the fan site guy who was on the first one. It’s not a particularly good track; there are too many long gaps of silence and the moderator’s attempts at getting them to discuss some of the production’s more curious aspects (such as the actress replacement) result in one word answers more often than not. The few good tidbits have already been transcribed into IMDb trivia, so unless this is your favorite movie I’d say skip it. There’s a collection of interviews (on the other disc with SPM1) that’s a far better use of your time, though like with the first film there are a ton of absentees; I can see why Crystal Bernard wouldn’t want to bother, but no Atanas Ilitch? They should have spared no expense and moved heaven and earth to find him!

What say you?

P.S. Part 3 is on this disc too, so look for my review of that in the next couple days!

Mother's Day (2011)

"Like the old adage says: 'Someone else's home is where the crazy bitch's heart is'... That's it, right?"

It's about time that Hollywood remade a horror flicked that kinda sucked and could actually benefit from a re-telling.

The original mother's day was a Troma Film about a creepy old mom and her two sons who end up raping and terrorizing some dumb, unsuspecting girls in the woods. I say that because in the 70's/80's, most female victims in these films were just morons, which really was the point of it all. Many love the old Troma craziness of decades gone by, us included, but let's be honest, most Troma flicks were more camp than quality, and while that was an awesome thing, remaking some of that schlock isn't the worst idea we've heard.

He froze in place at the sight of Lloyd Kaufman's ghost, wondering if he had somehow shamed it. Deciding that he hadn't, he commenced with the stabbing.
The remake approaches things from a different angle, and actually has more than the average rape-revenge story going on for it. On the run from the police, a family of criminals return to their family home to hole up and plan their big getaway. If course the new residents are having a party when they arrive, and everything goes to hell. Gun violence, knife violence, pool ball violence... the hell is definitely a gory and wet one.

Rebecca De Mornay plays crazy really well, and she's great here as the schizo mother who uses her kids to satisfy her sadistic whims. There's actually some depth to her performance, which was a nice change of pace for this type of movie; she wasn't all crazy. There was a tender and loving side to her too. She even had an odd code that she lived by, and as long as you followed her code, you might not have to die painfully.

Of course, most of the morons in the film refused to follow her code, and died painfully.
That's the nature of the beast though, isn't it? No one really uses their brains in these flicks, and if they did, they'd be pretty boring to sit through. Mother's Day wasn't boring. In fact, it was pretty tension filled and bloody, and managed to keep us at full attention for the entire running time. The hot chicks helped things along too, although not much of the movie was very sexy. Unless you find disturbing things sexy, then it was. Creep.

"Kiss the dolly where it pees... NOW!"
The supporting cast was pretty solid as well, with some of them even turning in great performances. Chief among the "greats" was Patrick John Flueger as murderous brother Ike Koffin. He's not pure evil, and he makes us actually feel for him at certain points, despite his nasty actions. Warren Cole and Deborah Ann Woll were equally as compelling as the other Koffin kids, and it was great to watch them all do their thing. Jamie King, as ever, played the harrowed heroine to a T.

It was also great to see AJ Cook and Alexa Vega show up in very small, but entertaining supporting roles.

That's it, pretend it's a dick.

We were not fans of Darren Lynn Bousman's Repo: The Genetic Opera, and his Saw sequels were what they were, which really didn't do much for us either way. Here though, Bousman gives us a smart and edgy glimpse into the fabric of a deranged family, and he pulls it off very well. He has a feel for this kind of stuff, and in our humble opinion, this might be his best work to date. More like this please, Darren.


B+ Mother's Day is not only a great remake of a campy 80's cult classic, but it's a solid, well made horror film capable of standing on its own. It delivers the goods not only viscerally, but thematically as well, and manages to be entertaining and exciting throughout. It could have lost an extra character or two, as keeping track of so many and their "stories" was a bit jarring, but that's a minor complaint. If you like a good old fashioned home invasion flick, then pick up a copy of this one asap.

What's that you say? the pictures of the movie's hot hicks are missing? Never fear, just glance below for your eye candy... creeps.

The Girls of Mother's Day (2011)

Here's a sampling of the carnal goods display in Mother's Day. Ironically enough, it will be mostly fathers enjoying this post.


Still no Deborah Ann Woll... I guess that's because she'll be getting her own hottie post soon!

Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark (2010)

JUNE 26, 2011

GENRE: MONSTER, REMAKE

SOURCE: THEATRICAL (FESTIVAL SCREENING)

They took our cell phones away before Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark, which made me regret getting to the theater early so I could get a good seat (I was in the “spillover” theater, which had a lot of empty seats – could have arrived late and been OK) as I had nothing to entertain me while I waited for the movie to start. But it’s probably for the best, because I probably would have just gone into the little aisle on the side of the theater (where no one can see you but you can still see the screen) and started checking Twitter/email while keeping one eye on the flick. Not that it was a terrible film by any means, but it just failed to engage me in any way, and never actually required my full attention - yet the lack of anything else to do ensured that I gave it anyway.

The biggest problem for me was the fact that the movie relied on scaring an audience with two things that almost never really scare me: CGI monsters and kids in danger. The monsters looked terrific, sure, but I never found them the least bit terrifying, especially when they started talking on camera. Creepy whispers coming through the vents – sure, works great. A little walking CGI rat going “We want YOUUUUU!” just makes me laugh, though it was not the intention. They also appear far too frequently in scenes that accomplish nothing besides spooking a character, so they run into the same problem as the Nightmare On Elm Street remake, where the villain loses not only his mystique but also his ability to appear threatening long before the film concludes, because he keeps popping out, seemingly with the intent to cause harm, and then fails to do so.

As for kids in danger, that’s how the movie really lost my interest. There’s a bit where a handyman is working close to the grate where the little things are hiding, and that’s actually suspenseful/scary, because I don’t know for sure that this guy is going to be OK. The little girl, on the other hand? R rating or not, little Sally won’t get more than a scratch on her throughout the entire movie, yet I’d estimate 90% of the movies scares involve the things harassing her, which loses its novelty before the movie is even halfway over. They NEVER go after the live-in housekeeper, any of the anonymous construction guys, Pearce’s business associates, etc – you know, people who might actually get killed, and it’s not until the climax that they ever put her father (Guy Pearce, as welcome as always) and stepmom (Katie Holmes, returning to the horror genre after a long break) in any real harm, but by then it was a bit too late to get me on board. It’d be like if the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park never tried to eat anyone besides Lex. It’s worth noting that the original had no little girl from what I understand (haven’t seen it), with the monsters terrorizing what would be the Holmes character here.

It doesn’t help that there’s no mystery to the movie whatsoever. It could have been kind of fun to wonder if the little girl was just crazy or if there really were little creatures in the walls, but they tell us right off the bat that it’s the latter. Yet Pearce spends the entire movie not even entertaining the notion that she could be telling the truth, which more or less requires him to act like an idiot for most of the runtime. You thought the dad in Orphan was a dolt? At one point the little girl (who looks exactly like Katie Holmes, a casting blunder since their lack of a real family tie is a huge part of the story) manages to squish one of the damn things and cut off its arm, but the plot point is just dropped because it would require Pearce to spring into action instead of continuing to play a guy who just thinks his daughter is having issues.

This also results in a number of wholly useless scenes, such as when a shrink comes over to talk to Sally. Again, we know she’s not crazy, so why waste time having a shrink try to find out what her problem is? And not for nothing, but having the wife of Mr. Scientology in a movie in which shrinks are presented as worthless boobs is slightly off-putting. There’s also a lengthy bit where Pearce has a bunch of business associates over for dinner, with Sally running around with her flash-bulb equipped camera (the light scares the creatures off, of course) and trying to keep the things from causing too much chaos – it’s like a slightly less comical version of the scene from Chamber of Secrets where Harry is trying to stop Dobby from dropping a cake on Vernon’s boss, and also serves little to no narrative function. It’s a decent enough setpiece, sure, but it seems like the sort of extraneous thing a studio would put back in for the DVD and inspire arguments over whether or not it should have been left in the movie, like the motion detector gun sequence in Aliens. But either way, no one would miss it if it was gone.

And that was my issue: the movie wasn’t really interested in telling an interesting story (the origin of the creatures, or even their aversion to light, isn’t explained), only providing scares – and I wasn’t finding it scary. The best jolt scare in the movie is given away in the trailer, and they’re all pretty much the same: the monsters either knock something over or turn off the lights, and then rampage around like less humorous Gremlins until an adult enters the room and they all manage to hide again before being spotted. Plus I didn’t even get what the hell they were taking so long for; we are told that they need a human body to sustain them for a number of years, but if that’s the case why don’t they just kill someone? Why all of the fucking around, tearing up Holmes’ clothes and such? We can see them wield weapons, and they can get out of their grates/walls easily enough, so why not just slit someone’s throat in their sleep and be done with it? It’d be one thing if they needed Sally to be a certain age before they take her and were just screwing around to amuse themselves while they waited, or some sort of nonsense along those lines, but if there were any “rules” to their mission they weren’t explained.

Speaking of sub-par storytelling, let’s discuss its biggest hurdle – the R rating. Producer/co-writer Guillermo Del Toro came out before the movie (as did Ms. Holmes, BC’s dream girl for years thanks to Dawson’s Creek and also much taller than I ever realized) and expressed his disappointment with the rating, saying it was intended to be PG-13 due to the lack of gore or torture (yet someone gets their teeth smashed out 5 minutes in), but they ended up getting an R basically for “scariness”. So I know that will keep out the kids who will identify/feel scared for the little girl, and suspect it will mislead the adults into thinking that their R rated Del Toro film will be a little more intelligent than it is. But again, almost everyone I talked to after (fellow writers my age or older) enjoyed it, so what the hell do I know?

I can agree with my pals on one thing though - it looks and sounds terrific. The house deserves to have a dozen horror movies set inside of it, and the CGI creatures blend terrifically with the live action. The animated opening title sequence is probably the most captivating part of the movie, which is of course not a good thing, but hey – at least it’s not just text over black. Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders’ score evokes other horror/fantasy fare like Coraline, and thankfully never gets too overbearing. And again, the sound design on the creatures when they are sticking to whispering through the vents works like gangbusters, and will make for a great demo option for home theater enthusiasts who want to show off their surround sound.

But ultimately I just expect more from the talent involved on the story side of things (co-writer Matthew Robbins also wrote the far more interesting (but studio mangled) Mimic, and Spielberg’s Sugarland Express), and without being able to feel scared for the character placed in most of the danger, it didn’t work as a thrill ride either. I don’t do scores, but if I did I’d give it like a 5/10 – not good enough to really enjoy but not particularly bad either. It was just there, looking nice but leaving no impact.

They had some excellent empanadas at the after party though. I will defend those to the death.

What say you?