Final Girl (2015): Now this, ladies and gentlemen, is the best example of the problem with being consciously weird when you don’t actually have the imagination for it I’ve seen in quite a while. What is supposed to be strange only ever feels stilted and campy; what’s supposed to be dark and deep only ever turns out to be cheap and stylized for no reason. Sure, the film’s pretty to look at in its “oh, I wish I were David Lynch” kind of way, but there’s nothing at all behind the stylish pictures, and the style itself is too derivative and too pretentious to carry any meaning. Watching the film mostly left me with one big question, and not the generally interesting “what does it all mean?” or even just “what the fuck?”, but the tired old “what’s the point?”. The film sure doesn’t know, and I can’t say I found myself even caring.
The Monster Squad (1987): Fred Dekker’s much beloved movie about a bunch of kids fighting against Dracula who is getting back the band of monsters together leaves me a bit cold. Sure, I do get the film’s enthusiasm for the classic Universal monster canon, I appreciate the care the film takes with its details, and I sure as hell am not going to be too much against a kiddie monster movie that features an elderly KZ survivor in an important role (though I sure would appreciate if the film had bothered to cast someone for the role who actually speaks German instead of the ungrammatical mispronounced gobbledygook the script uses). However, I also find the film’s action not very exciting, the emotional parts too sentimental without actually working for my tears, and honestly never found myself caring about the kids (or the early turned to the side of goodness Frankenstein monster as tear-jerked by Tom Noonan). Or maybe I’m just allergic to nostalgia.
Tuno negro (2001): To dislike this Spanish slasher movie with some promising bits of giallo thrown in the mix, you don’t need to be allergic to anything but to dithering films that don’t know for what tone they are going nor are well enough directed to get away with the rapid tonal shifts. Part of the film’s problem I’d lay on it having two directors in Pedro L. Barbero and Vicente J. Martín who don’t seem to have come to an agreement of what film they were actually making, nor on how to realize it. So bits and pieces of 90s psychopath thriller, giallo, erotic thriller, and conspiracy movie are thrown all over the place without either script or direction being able to connect them. On the positive side, there are two or three good ideas among the dross, and the film’s use of the university of Salamanca and Spanish minstrels/serenade singers certainly does give the film at least interesting local colour beyond the usual slasher style.
Now, if it only did something more interesting with it.
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