NoWo600Wo: Week 2 of modern horror with a CW actor vs. older, better horror
Week 2 of the ongoing Friday night series at my house: Crappy newer horror movie starring a current or former actors from the CW network vs. an older and surprisingly good horror/slasher film. I don’t know if I would call this a “series” in all honestly, just two weeks of coincidences.
Boogeyman (2005)
This was the second outing of Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert’s Ghost House Pictures after the wildly successful and fairly entertaining remake of The Grudge in late 2004. Boogeyman is the opposite of entertaining however. If anything, it’s proof that perhaps that Eric Kripke’s talent has improved over the past 4 or 5 years. He co-wrote Boogeyman and is the creator and frequent collaborator on Supernatural, a series that has gotten better over time. The Kripke motif’s displayed in Boogeyman are that the main character drives a classic car and has a doomed girlfriend named Jessica. Boogeyman is a dull film that uses flashy and stylish camera tricks just to wake you out of your boredom. The tale is pretty basic: a man (Barry Watson, formerly of 7th Heaven) who is haunted by a Boogeyman that apparently killed his father when he was 8 and tore apart his family returns to his still-haunted house after his mother’s death. There is no tension to be found in this movie, so it is really hard to care what happens. The final battle is so distractingly CGI and tips it’s hat so much to the final battle of Evil Dead 2 that all it makes you think is “You know what’s a good movie? Evil Dead 2.”
The House on Sorority Row (1983)
Out of the three slasher films I’ve seen that takes place in a sorority house, The House on Sorority Row ranks a solid #2 after the original Black Christmas. Sorority House Massacre would be third. The House on Sorority Row almost seems like a sequel to Black Christmas, since the killer also is hidden and resides in the attic of a house full of doomed sorority sisters. While the killer remains shrouded in mystery for much of the film, unlike Black Christmas, he is revealed at one point. A group of graduating sorority sisters decides to throw a party in their house, disobeying their troubled house mother. A prank on the housemother goes horribly awry, and the girls don’t particularly have fun at their party as a result. What’s kind of interesting about this movie is that the obvious final girl, Kate, has a blind date pursuing her thoughout the entire film, but she obviously doesn’t care about him because she has other, more important things on her mind, (like why her friends are disappearing), and there is no romantic angle to the story. He ends up drunk and sitting in his car, which is humorously realistic. Seriously, the romantic angle between Laurie Strode and that cute EMT guy who slips in a puddle of blood in Halloween 2 was more pursued (and abruptly dropped) than the story of Kate and the blind date.
Fun fact: Bad girl Vicki is played by soap opera stalwart Eileen Davidson.
Fun fact #2: The housemother in the upcoming remake will be played by Carrie Fisher. Even if I don’t totally see Carrie Fisher as a housemother type, she will likely be the best part of the movie.
NoWo600Wo: C is for Crap filmed in Richmond, C is for (good) Canadian Horror
Cry_Wolf
The inherent problem with using a technological or internet fad in a film is that sooner rather than later usually, it becomes obsolete. Cry_Wolf is a film where at only 4 years old, you look at it now and laugh at the use of AOL IM, candy bar cell phones, and possibly the first version of the T-Mobile Sidekick phone – the only piece of technology that is still relevant. I seriously think 2005 was the last year I used AOL IM. This isn’t the only problem with Cry_Wolf however. When your cast of characters basically consists of spoiled, overprivileged prep school kids who are all jerks of various levels and are just minimally conceived, it’s hard to care. I imagine the pitch for this movie was “a modern telling of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” meets The Usual Suspects meets Heathers.” The filmmakers received a $1 million grant from Chrysler to make the film after winning a short film contest (and you can understand now why car companies are in trouble). The only reasons why this movie was watched in my household was 1) it was filmed in Richmond, at the University of Richmond, Union PSCE, and St. Joseph’s campus’ – all schools that look way nicer than the university I attend and my sister and I work for, despite UofR and my university being somewhat competitive in certain areas. Although one scene I recognized as being filmed in the dingy stacks of the Main location of the Richmond Public Library, where at the time, was where they hid their tiny DVD collection; and 2) Jared Padalecki, playing a Senator’s son from Texas, whom, despite being from Texas himself, J. Pads does not sport a Texan accent in this film. I’m pretty sure only crappy movies are filmed in Richmond, although we occasionally get pretty good TV shows and mini-series filmed here, such as HBO’s John Adams series. Most of the movie was spent with my boyfriend, sister, and I asking questions such as, “Do you think Jared Padalecki went to Ellwood Thompson’s or Ipanema when he was here?” and “Where do you think Jon Bon Jovi went to when he was here?” Despite getting the “Unrated” DVD copy, there really isn’t much gore or any nudity, so there isn’t much reason for your typical horror fan to rent this. It is just a gutless film altogether, no pun intended. I’m assuming it was aimed towards teenagers, but seriously, teenagers deserve decent movies too.
Cry_Wolf is somewhat similar to another horror movie that came out around that time called Stay Alive, which was based in RPG video games, and featuring Frankie Muniz, Milo Ventimiglia, and Angelina Jolie’s brother. I feel bad saying that Stay Alive is actually the more entertaining movie and still fairly relevant.
I hate underscores, by the way.
It’s unfortunate that the poster is cooler than the movie.
Curtains
All About Eve meets Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor meets a giallo film. An aging, but still pretty Method actress pretends to be insane to be put into a psychiatric institution to research a part, and the director has her full support. But after awhile, the actress does become a teensy bit unhinged, and the director abandons her in the institution and chooses to recast the part. She breaks out of the institution and invites herself over to his weekend casting session at his house with six younger actresses, and the younger actresses begin to die one by one, just as the director is bedding almost each actress. There is a post-modern twist to this in that Samantha Eggar (from Cronenberg’s The Brood) is playing an aging actress named Samantha, and the director in the movie is named Jonathan Stryker, who is the director of Curtains (the director in the movie is played by an actor though…confused yet?). Despite Samantha being set up as the protagonist and lead suspect of the film, she is missing from this movie for long periods of time, I guess partly to lay more suspicion on her. So it is hard to know who to root for when there is no clear protagonist or villain really, other than Stryker. The film does have a good twist ending, and is really well-paced. It’s also somewhat known for the mask of the killer being pretty scary and how one woman is chased on ice skates.
I still find it interesting that Canadian horror films in the late 1970s and early 1980s primarily featured adults in the casts. Not adults portraying teenagers, such as the case with American horror films.
And yeah, I’m not going to make a habit of using “pitches” to describe movies.
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood
(Slacking off from writing a research paper edition).
Oh, I had high hopes for this one for some strange reason, I’ve heard that this is considered the best of the series. It is the first Friday the 13th with Kane Hodder as Jason, the main character is a girl with both psychic and telekinesis powers. I don’t know if I can correctly make this statement without having seen Part V again (I saw Part V about 10-12 years ago), but Part VII is where the series may have completely jumped the shark.
Is Jason simply territorial, just a teen killing machine, or a killing machine in general? I know I said in my last post that I should stop trying to figure out a reasonable mythology for this series, or find any rhyme or reason in general. I may still be at odds with what the Jason reputation or representation in pop culture for these past 29 years has been. This film series is only a year older than I am, so I’ve been hearing about since the third grade at least. Is Part VI where he just becomes a full-on killing machine and the body counts just keep going further and further up with each subsequent film? He kills two perfectly nice girls, as well as at least a half-dozen adults, and seems to threaten small children in Part VI. Part VII is no different in that regard, except I swear there were more, mostly unlikeable teenage characters than usual that were only there to be killed, including 4 characters who never even got to the main setting, and were killed within 3 minutes of their introduction. This film has the infamous sleeping bag murder, reused to humourous effect in Jason X, and used with an even more brutal effect in the Friday the 13th “re-imagining” that came out almost 3 months ago.
SERIOUS SPOILERS IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH.
I think what I can’t get over, besides the fact that this movie was pretty boring and had the original film’s slow-as-molasses pace, is that Jason kills the main character’s mother. Maybe he didn’t know she was the girl’s mother, maybe it doesn’t matter because as of Part VI, he is a killing machine. The framing device however, was a major logical plothole to me. The girl’s father drowns, and is left in Crystal Lake for at least 7 years? And when he rises out of the lake to take Jason back at the end, his body is fairly intact? Even when Jason rose out of the water, he was pretty busted looking, even more so for a fellow who has been killed at least 3 times in the series at this point. They had the devices back then to be able to skim bodies of water for well, bodies, and the father did not drown that far out into the lake (he practically was about 10 feet away from the shore, if that), so why was he left there? I just feel as though that was lazier storytelling than usual from the series. I probably should not have expected much because it was directed by the same guy who made the first Troll movie.
I will admit though the Jason unmasking in this movie is pretty cool and scary looking.
Fun Fact: the main character’s jerk of a doctor is played by Terry Kiser a.k.a. Bernie of Weekend at Bernie’s.
I will be going ahead and making a Friday the 13th tag. I will not be viewing Part VII: Jason Takes Manhattan this weekend because I’m trying to finish a lot of semester-end school work. The only break I’m getting this weekend is to watch the Rifftrax version of Twilight.
NoWo600Wo: Good. Bad. Ugly. Etcetera.
Last weekend I learned that there is something scarier than the concept of unkillable Nazi zombies.
Good
Outpost
Outpost features the scariest historical zombies since the conquistadors in Lucio Fulci’s Zombie. A man working for the C.I.A (I think) hires a group of mercenaries to take him to a currently war-torn area in Eastern Europe because he is on the hunt for something the Nazis left behind. The mercenaries believe he is just hunting for gold, but he is actually searching for a machine that controls time and energy, a project similar to what Einstein was working on before he abandoned it because of the nuclear bomb. A group of Nazi ghost/golems/zombies are protecting the place and start picking off people one by one in really gross ways. Outpost is somehat similar to a John Carpenter film, except that I think if anything, we get to know the characters in Outpost even less. Which is possibly the film’s only flaw.
Bad
Airborne
This is a movie that got played a lot on TBS when I was a teenager. One of it’s taglines is “the first rock n’ roll rollerblading movie”, although if you check out the poster, it has at least three taglines. It is a super cheesy movie that has never been released on DVD , but somehow Netflix Autoplay has it (you think it would be since a young Jack Black and Seth Green are in it and companies like to cash in on that sort of celebrity, but my boyf reckons there are some song rights issues). Given the fact that just about everything in this movie seems super-dated to the early 1990s doesn’t help the cheesy factor. It’s your standard teenage movie about overcoming the odds, or bullies, or being a California extreme sports kid who spouts surfer dude and Buddhist philosophies in strange non-sequiturs that is forced to move to Cincinatti. This is one of the few teenage films where the hero is rightfully mocked by his new classmates. Our hero’s name is Mitchell Goosen, which isn’t a very surfer dude name. He is dull and can only speak of waves. His cousin, played by a very awkward and not-cute-yet Seth Green is a kid still trying to figure out his identity, as noted by the fashion montage to “I’m Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred at one point in the movie. I felt extremely embarrassed for Seth Green throughout this entire movie. Jack Black is one of the bullies, and you get to see that he’s been doing his hyper persona for a good 16 years now, although he is actually kind of funny in Airborne. Anyway, Mitchell teams up with his bullies at the end to help defeat the bullies from the prep school in some downhill rollerblading race. Seriously, all this film was missing was serious class issue overtones and that speech from Wet Hot American Summer about defeating the evil “other” team from the other camp. Directed by Rob Bowman from The X-Files. Seriously.
(I would have posted videos of both the Seth Green fashion montage and the speech from WHAS, but Youtube has removed the fashion montage due to song rights, and I can’t find anything other than 10 minute clips of WHAS).
Ugly
The Room
Meet your new worst movie ever that is scarier than unkillable Nazi zombies. I don’t even know where to begin with this. The Room is a drama that tries hard to be a Tennessee Williams-type play but fails on a massive level. Although this movie was apparently made in 2003, the clothes and the look of the entire movie screams “early-mid 1990s Cinemax/Skinemax movie!” Presumably due to budget constraints (I’m not sure I’d consider $6 million budget constraints though), Tommy Wiseau writes, directs, produces, and stars in this movie as Johnny, a well-to-do banker and relatively nice guy with an accent of undeterminable origin who is being cheated on by his girlfriend/fiancee of 7 years, Lisa. Due to budget constraints, I’m sure the entire cast was found from a Craigslist post. There are a few gratuitous, overlong sex scenes. The first one happens within the first 5 minutes of the film and caused my uterus to shrivel up and die. The soundtrack for the film sounds like Color Me Badd, and Johnny pulls out a cassette recorder at some point, so this kind of proves that Mr. Wiseau’s points of reference ceased to exist around 1993. Despite all this and the rampant misogynistic overtones of the entire film, it is highly entertaining and good for a laugh. Just a warning again though: consider whether or not you want to become celibate before watching though. The sex scenes are that gross.
Etcetera
His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th
Eh, I liked the documentary on the Jason X DVD better. But I guess this is good if you want to see more interviews with the cast members of the series rather than horror critics and historians
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives
Hey, I finally found a Friday the 13th movie other than Jason X to like! This one had likeable characters, and jokes that actually worked. The only things I did not get however was that Jason went after two female characters who were basically good people and good camp counselors, he tended to terrorize children in this one, and he walked at a really brisk pace (but he’s Jason, so he’s constantly a monster-man with purpose). I’m slowly working my way through the series, and none of the video stores had Part V, so we jumped ahead to Part VI.
I should probably recognize that trying to piece together a reasonable mythology for the Friday the 13th movies is not a good idea. This isn’t Lost, Supernatural, or Harry Potter.
NoWo600Wo: …
It’s towards the end of the semester, so I should try to get in my monthly post before the next month of my life becomes devoted to writing a research paper on the character of Wemmick in Dickens’ Great Expectations and preparing for finals. Due to the film history class I’m taking this semester, my “10 Most Recently Viewed Films” list to the right has been a bit bipolar: Classic depressing-ending films mixed with mostly terrible horror films or horror film sequels, and a few modern comedies.
This Enzo G. Castellari crime thriller starring Franco Nero can be considered a slightly more realistic version of what happens when a mere mortal decides to become a vigilante. Despite being fairly well-off it looks like, he is not Batman. He’s not even Rorschach. After being kidnapped during a robbery and brutally beaten, Nero’s character finds that the police are of no help apprehending the men who attacked him. After failing to find the men on his own, he blackmails another thief into finding the men for him, so he can have the police arrest them. Hiring the thief is by far perhaps the smartest thing Nero’s character does in the entire movie. He is a normal man, so he makes several, mostly naive, mistakes throughout the film. He doesn’t even start to carry a gun until before the final showdown, and this is a film full of several mini-showdowns. This movie is steeped into what was going on in Italy at the time, where the police were either in with the criminals or just simply no help to the common citizen. It has an amazing soundtrack that my boyfriend and I have been trying to hunt down ever since. This is probably the only movie in this post that I will highly recommend.
Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III
Is the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series the only one where none of the sequels ever even come close to surpassing the original? Not even Viggo Mortensen could save this mess (starting the handsome-crazy chain of the Leatherface family which will be given to Matthew McConaghey in the fourth movie), although I guess Ken Foree came kind of close by being the only intelligent person in the movie. Which also begs the question: if Ken Foree can manage to get into the next Friday the 13th movie and the Nightmare on Elm Street re-make, will he have been in pretty much every major horror movie franchise ever? Re-boot wise anyway. A largely dull and pointless movie, the only way it possibly works with the original is the soundtrack, and the fact that most of the deaths are not shown on screen completely. Although I get the feeling that the latter was due to the backlash against horror movies in the late 80s/early 90s.
I tried y’all, I really did. This time around, I found it mostly boring until the end, and even parts of the end were paced like molasses. All it did was confirm that 1) Most of the deaths were not shown in the original, 2) The deaths were usually not lingered over for too long, unlike the remake, and 3) I guess starting a strip Monopoly game, but then balancing that triply with the wholesomeness of wearing a frumpy nightgown, writing a letter, then reading in bed will still get you killed. Huh.
I can see why this one is a fan favorite. It’s better paced, and has a smarter heroine, and still has some freshness to it. It also didn’t go for the obvious “kill as many people as possible” plot by sending about 3/4 of the camp counselors away for the night in town. I wasn’t on the edge of my seat for this movie, not one bit, but I think I can respect it.
