Three Films Make A Post: Don't let the holidays eat you alive

Black Friday (2021): This horror comedy by Casey Tebo about an alien parasite type of zombie outbreak in a giant toyshop recommends itself with a lot of nice gooey effects (and a truly adorably bad looking kaiju), fun and snarky performances by Devon Sawa, Ivana Baquero, Bruce Campbell, and the rest of the cast. The script is more competent and effective than great, but its practical realization is fast and fun enough to make this a properly entertaining ninety minutes in the tradition of your favourite pieces of fun horror from the 80s or 90s.

Which does make for a nice change from all the ghost movies about demons as well as all those earnest and slow horror movies about grief.

The Shadow Side aka La Parte Oscura (2020): Speaking of demons and an entertaining time (though it’s not even an hour here), this quarantine zoom conference POV horror movie from Argentina as directed by Max Coronel features the former as well as the latter.

The film is just as long as it needs and should be. It quickly and highly efficiently establishes characters and situation and then goes through a series of escalating and equally efficient horror set pieces, generally staged and shot as nicely as its production circumstances allow. Clara Kovacic makes a fine main characters/victim of your usual evil occult powers, and the rest of the cast is doing exactly what (and as much of it) as they need to.

Mad God (2021): Unlike these other two films, film Tippett’s insanely creative and capital-W weird feature-length stop motion animation isn’t efficient or simple yet effective genre work. Instead, this is a deeply strange trip into aesthetic netherworlds that feel intensely personal, lacking in explanation, plot, and character to make room for incredible, and sometimes deeply disturbing, visual worldbuilding.

I’ve honestly never seen anything quite like it, and certainly not in a shape that actually manages to keep up aesthetic thrills and intensity for nearly ninety minutes like this does.

Three Films Make A Post: THE END WAS NEAR. THEY KICKED ITS ASS.

Mindwarp (1992): I know I shouldn’t expect anything beyond fan service in form of KNB gore that often feels shoe-horned in for no good reason, horror fan favs Bruce Campbell and Angus Scrimm, and some moments that aim for taboo breaking but fall flat because they’re as pointless as a reality show from a Fangoria production. However, there’s just no excuse for this particular piece of crap to include all these things and be boring, surely. The script’s just terrible – and I mean terrible for the standards of a low budget post-apocalypse movie with added gore – moving at a snail’s pace and containing little that’s surprising or as freaky as the film pretends it to be. Director Steve Barnett does his work with all the panache and style of a full garbage can, Campbell and Scrimm get paid, and I had myself a nice little nap.

The Light at the Edge of the World (1971): Where Barnett's film is just crap, Kevin Billington’s very free adaptation of a Jules Verne novel is something of an intriguing mess. Sometimes, it’s a psychologically tense cat and mouse game between Kirk Douglas and Yul Brunner that makes excellent use of the (Catalonian?) piece of rock it has been shot on; sometimes, it’s a decent adventure movie; at other times again, it shows the same ruthless, pessimist spirit I love about early 70s horror. A few scenes later, it’s suddenly a meandering mess that just doesn’t seem to know what point it is trying to make about people in general or its characters, just pushing stuff in front of its audience without discernible rhyme or reason. The good parts do make this one very much worth watching, though.

Shame the Devil (2013): If you always dreamed of watching a British movie partially “inspired” by the Saw films with a bit more of the standard serial killer thriller thrown in, this one’s clearly your fault. I have to say, though, this thing does give me a new appreciation for the Saws, for while the entries in that particular franchise are as implausible as all get out, pretty tacky and directed with all the wrong fashionable direction tics, they do at least hang together as actual movies and do their best to make their implausibilities work in the context of their narratives. Shame the Devil, on the other hand, has some of the worst writing I’ve ever encountered, with dialogue that’s at once stilted and unnatural, dumb and lacking in flow, everyone talking at each other in non sequiturs. The plot is obvious, badly paced, full of ill used clichés and just plain disinteresting. The writing is so bad and hangs together so little, I can’t bring myself to actually criticize the actors for the way they stumble through their scenes, for it’s pretty damn clear that there’s nothing to work with in the script. Paul Tanter’s direction sure as hell doesn’t provide anything for them to hang their performances on. It’s just a dreadful mess of a movie, as far from being entertainingly bad as it is from being competent filmmaking.

In short: Waxwork II: Lost in Time (1992)

The zombie hand that survived the first part’s finale murders the step father of survivor Sarah (now played by Monika Schnarre). Because the police doesn’t believe in killer hands or physical evidence, she soon finds herself on trial for murder. Mark (still Zach Galligan), survivor number two, has the brilliant idea of looking through the stuff of Sir Wilfred (Patrick Macnee returning as a film projection and later as a raven) for anything that might help her out. There, they find a time compass thingie that opens up time portals that’ll lead them into a crap version of Frankenstein, a really crap version of Alien(s), a slightly less crap because it features Bruce Campbell doing Bruce Campbell version of The Haunting, and an abominable sword and sorcery filmlet.

During the course of their adventures, Mark’ll turn out to be a Time Warrior chosen by god, whereas Sarah is only there to be rescued again and again. Oh Lord.

Ugh, after the barrel of fun that was the first film, you’d think the same writer/director would get up to something equally entertaining in the sequel, but where the first film was an enthusiastic, fast, and charming homage to horror films, film number two uses its even looser narrative structure (which is to say, it doesn’t really have one) to churn out a series of inferior short versions of beloved classics with added slapstick and some shit about Zach Galligan being chosen by God (I assume the Christian one, because I’m pretty sure most other godhoods would be somewhat embarrassed). Turns out all that stuff with set-up, characters, and so on and so forth the films this one rips-off instead of quotes tend to have is somewhat important to make an audience care about what happens in a movie; Waxwork doesn’t have time for nonsense of this sort, because it needs to set up a David Carradine cameo, and really couldn’t care less about actually hanging together as a film. It’s also pretty damn boring by virtue of showing a lot of stuff, none of which is interesting or in any form involving.

Because Hickox makes no attempt at involving his audience emotionally (well, or intellectually), the whole thing feels pointless throughout, like a never ending attempt to show off that its director has seen quite a few movies. Ironically, the resulting film mostly suggests he hasn’t actually understood what’s good about them. So, it’s very much a film like what certain critics (the ones who are wrong) pretend Quentin Tarantino is doing.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,comedy,anthony hickox,zach galligan,monika schnarre,bruce campbell

Moontrap (1989)

Aging NASA astronaut Jason Grant (Walter Koenig) and his younger wise-cracking sidekick Ray Tanner (Bruce Campbell) are doing the usual space truck tours that are what a lot of people born too late actually now know as the only kind of spaceflight they ever saw. Though at least the two don’t have to work for commercial operators who can’t even get a supply rocket up into orbit. They stumble (or however you call that in space) on something rather spectacular: the wreck of an ancient space craft, complete with a dead human body that’ll turn out to be 14.000 years old, and a strange egg-like metal thing, Jason picks up.

Back on Earth, NASA determines the ship’s point of origin was on the moon. While the boys and the NASA scientists are still attempting to convince a government big wig that this is not an elaborate hoax they’ve cooked up to get funding, and that they should probably take a look at the place the ship came from (which would also grant Jason his old dream of setting foot on the moon), the egg shaped thing turns out to be a nasty little machine that turns itself into a large, lumbering killer robot via judiciously applied metal pieces and body parts. That moon expedition just might be even more important than everyone expected. If you’re into the whole “survival of the species” thing, that is.

I still remember I was pretty bored by it when I first watched Robert Dyke’s Moontrap as a kid, despite the lovely casting of the main heroes and the film’s cheap but fine killer robots. Today, I’m rather more fond of the film, even though some of its flaws are undeniable.

There’s for one the at times surprisingly sluggish pace of proceedings in a film where on paper a lot of stuff is happening; the problem is that Dyke’s direction is very dry, presenting a good eye for shooting cheap special effects so they don’t look quite as cheap but nearly completely missing a sense for drama and tension. Then there’s the lack of depth or thought put into the script, leading to things like a complete lack of explanation as to what the killer robots actually want. Okay, they use humans as spare parts, but why are they stranded on the moon, and why does it take them 14.000 years to build a spacecraft to get from the Moon to Earth?, and so on. And don’t even get me started on the character of Mera (Leigh Lombardi) whose why and wherefore in the film opens up dozens of questions the film doesn’t even seem to ponder asking. Now, I’m not expecting too many believable answers from my pulp science fiction, but I’d really rather prefer it to put a bit of effort into the film’s supposed female main character beyond using her as an opportunity to shove in another pair of naked breasts and threaten us with a Walter Koenig sex scene.

Yet still, Moontrap does have an undeniable charm, even though I’m not completely able to explain it. Perhaps it’s the visible love put into the film’s not very probable robots and past future tech? Or perhaps the general lived-in feel of the film’s universe, and its willingness to let that collide with pure pulp SF? Or it might just be I’m a sucker for cheap SF movies with groovy death scenes that don’t really manage to project how existentially horrifying some of its basic ideas actually are?

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,sf,horror,robert dyke,walter koenig,bruce campbell,leigh lombardi