Return to Cabin by the Lake (2001): Because apparently
nobody in the early 00’s could get enough of Judd Nelson mugging idiotically
through a nonsense plot that tries to excuse its stupidity by calling itself a
comedy, the world suffered this sequel to Po-Chih Leong’s TV movie Cabin by
the Lake. The film’s still plotted for an audience of fools, the jokes are
the sort of smug “ain’t Hollywood horrible” jokes that must have had a beard in
the 1930s already, and Nelson’s performance as serial
killer/screenwriter/director is so broad, no bridge could cross it. Though you
gotta give some respect to screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick when an early,
completely insufferable, victim of Nelson’s Stanley goes by his own name; I
accept the apology.
The Droving (2020): This piece of British indie folk horror
about a soldier/torturer (Daniel Oldroyd) searching for the killer of his sister
(Amy Tyger) as directed by George Popov is fortunately not trying to be funny.
It’s a bit of a frustrating film, though, the sort of affair that’s clearly made
with talent and love but doesn’t come together quite well enough. The film
certainly has an eye for moody (and pretty) landscape shots very useful for folk
horror, and its script has a clear idea of the intersection between its
folkloric idea and the inner life of its main character. The acting’s good too.
The problem is the pacing: scenes, as is so often the case in indie
productions, tend to go on longer than they should be – sometimes clearly aiming
for suspense but not quite being able to sustain it long enough, other times
going slightly overboard with an attempt to deepen the character and his
flashback relation to his sister. Of course, these are the kinds of flaws that
come from a willingness to take risks and show the right kind of ambition, so
it’s difficult to be too unhappy with the film.
She Never Died (2019): Speaking of indie movies with
ambition, Audrey Cummings’s peculiar mix of grungy proto-superhero elements and
horror, with a smidgen of 80s buddy comedy certainly is that, also. Canadian and
city-based, this also shows an understanding of creating mood via landscape, or
rather cityscape. Otherwise, there’s little connecting it with any of the other
films in this post. It’s one of those films that have a peculiar and personal
vibe, as if you were watching someone’s very individual favourite bits of
different genres put together to form one movie. As is typical for this sort of
affair, this isn’t always as effective as it could be on a dramatic level, but
still features nice effects, fun performances by lead Olunike Adeliyi as our
superpowered cannibal heroine with a secret and various Canadian character
actors like Peter MacNeill and Noah Denby, and a visible love for the city as
the true place to set one’s grubby vigilantism in.
The only truly off-putting element here is the sudden excursion into the
biblical in the final ten minutes or so, promising a sequel I suspect will never
come instead of finishing the film properly.
Showing posts with label judd nelson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label judd nelson. Show all posts
Saturday, June 13, 2020
Tuesday, April 14, 2020
In short: Cabin by the Lake (2000)
Screenwriter Stanley Caldwell (Judd Nelson) is taking his research very
seriously indeed. To wit, tasked with writing about a serial killer who drowns
women and creates a – pretty tacky looking – underwater garden out of their
corpses, he has started kidnapping young women in LA, holding them imprisoned in
the lake side hut he lives in, and indeed eventually drowns and tackily gardens
them.
Things have been going well for Stanley until now, for Boone (Michael Weatherly), the only policeman in the area who is ever doing anything at all, is a pretty idiot, and people seem to think Judd Nelson’s eye bugging and grimacing is totally normal. The situation changes when Stanley’s newest victim, Kimberley Parsons (Daniella Evangelista), turns out to be rather tough to drown. She survives his attempt at killing her without him noticing (and despite suffering from hydrophobia), and makes her way to the local police. But how can an idiot like Boone catch a serial killer? Calling in actual cops would be right out, so he and Kimberley enlist a local troupe of special effects people to create a fake Kimberley corpse with a camera eye to catch the killer in the act of gardening.
And that’s obviously where Davis Stephens’s script for Po-Chih Leong’s USA Network TV movie loses it completely, stumbling from one stupid idea to the next, shifting tone without rhyme or reason and ending on a deeply unsatisfying climax that even feels the need to have Kimberley re-caught by Stanley to come up with anything dramatic at all.
It’s a bit of a shame, too, for there’s material for either a dark satire about classic Hollywood personality types and their closeness to serial killers in the movie, or for a tight horror thriller about a woman who grows into her own fighting off a serial killer. The film’s problem is that it seems unable to decide which one of these movies it wants to be, and clearly doesn’t find a tone to connect these rather different impulses. So it presents wild mood swings between broad black comedy, TV thriller, and something that’s probably meant to be darkly poetic horror, as if the viewer were zapping around between very different channels.
Things have been going well for Stanley until now, for Boone (Michael Weatherly), the only policeman in the area who is ever doing anything at all, is a pretty idiot, and people seem to think Judd Nelson’s eye bugging and grimacing is totally normal. The situation changes when Stanley’s newest victim, Kimberley Parsons (Daniella Evangelista), turns out to be rather tough to drown. She survives his attempt at killing her without him noticing (and despite suffering from hydrophobia), and makes her way to the local police. But how can an idiot like Boone catch a serial killer? Calling in actual cops would be right out, so he and Kimberley enlist a local troupe of special effects people to create a fake Kimberley corpse with a camera eye to catch the killer in the act of gardening.
And that’s obviously where Davis Stephens’s script for Po-Chih Leong’s USA Network TV movie loses it completely, stumbling from one stupid idea to the next, shifting tone without rhyme or reason and ending on a deeply unsatisfying climax that even feels the need to have Kimberley re-caught by Stanley to come up with anything dramatic at all.
It’s a bit of a shame, too, for there’s material for either a dark satire about classic Hollywood personality types and their closeness to serial killers in the movie, or for a tight horror thriller about a woman who grows into her own fighting off a serial killer. The film’s problem is that it seems unable to decide which one of these movies it wants to be, and clearly doesn’t find a tone to connect these rather different impulses. So it presents wild mood swings between broad black comedy, TV thriller, and something that’s probably meant to be darkly poetic horror, as if the viewer were zapping around between very different channels.
Friday, August 9, 2019
Past Misdeeds: The Black Hole (2006)
Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more
glorious Exploder
Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for
the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here
in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.
Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.
That most dangerous of all scientific endeavours, Quantum acceleration experiments, as taken on in a certainly highly scientific establishment in St. Louis goes rather wrong, opening a black hole in the fabric of space-time, as these things tend to. The black hole quite impolitely starts eating up the surrounding matter, growing in curious stops and starts in the progress, and threatening to eat up the whole planet rather sooner than later.
Because only one of the three initial scientists of the project, Dr (I assume) Shannon Muir (Kristy Swanson) has survived the film's first five minutes, the military under the surprisingly competent and sane General Stryker (David Selby) calls in former project member Eric Bryce (Judd Nelson), who brings with him the aftershocks of a bad divorce, moon eyes between him and Shannon, ridiculous mad scientist hair, and a chip on his shoulder because he was right all along. As if closing up a black hole weren't problem enough for two more or less sexy scientists, an energy creature has slipped out of the black hole, eating electricity (and people) and feeding the black hole in the process. Shannon and Eric are doing their best to resolve the situation before the increasingly humongous black hole eats all of the landmarks of St. Louis, and eventually find out the creature's - and therefore the black hole's - central weakness, which at least is neither salt nor the power of love this time around.
It's just too bad that their government would really rather resolve the problem in more traditionally American ways, by dropping an H-bomb on their problem and the remaining citizens of St. Louis, despite our heroic experts telling them this would only make matters worse. Consequently our heroes have not just one but two races against time to win. Fortunately, the film provides a bombing mad general to Stryker's sane one, so the latter is free to actually be helpful.
People who are wrong will tell you that Tibor Takács's The Black Hole (produced by Nu Image for our friends at the - then - SciFi Channel) is a stupid piece of nonsense when in truth it's a film that provides a whole lot of fun based on a silly yet clever idea of the kind it's not difficult to imagine to find in an episode of the classic Outer Limits.
As everyone who isn't wrong knows, Takács in his incarnation as direct-to-DVD and direct-to-TV director is pretty excellent at squeezing fun films out of sometimes (okay, most of the time) doubtful scripts and tiny budgets, and his The Black Hole is absolutely no exception. The film is perfectly paced, hitting the disaster movie and semi-monster movie beats at just the right moments, never stopping for too long along the way to let the audience think too much about the (im)probabilities of what's going on.
Sure, if you're the kind of person who can't help but bemoan curious scientific ideas, the bizarre lack of scientific staff in US government during a scientific catastrophe [this was evidently written some time ago], and call them "plot holes", you won't have any fun with this, and even Takács won't be able to distract you from actively avoiding fun, but then, why are you watching a film about a black hole opening up in Missouri in the first place?
For the rest of us, the film at the very least shows a degree of coherence. That is to say, if you accept The Black Hole's sometimes (okay, always) bizarre assumptions about the nature of reality, it proceeds logically enough from them to create a diverting SF pulp movie plot that provides Takács with ample opportunity to show soldiers vaporized, and parts of St. Louis eaten by a black hole. Which, surely, is all we can ever ask of a film called The Black Hole. To make up for a tight budget, Takács shows most of the major destruction through the eyes of shaky TV footage happening on screens with dubious resolutions, a cost-conscious decision that works beautifully - thanks to good timing much better than in other SyFy movies trying the same trick.
Added to the film's entertaining pulp trappings are some rather sarcastic nods in the direction of political crisis management - particularly in a scene of the US president and his aides writing a bathetic speech about the nuclear destruction of St. Louis before the fact intercut with our scientist heroes' attempts to actually do something to save the the city and the world. It's also difficult to miss the fact that the least effectual (and most destructive) ideas to solve all problems come courtesy of "Homeland Security", which can hardly be a coincidence in a US film made after hurricane Katrina.
In the less real world, SyFy experts will be astonished that the catastrophe is only normalizing the relationship between Eric and his ex-wife and daughter, instead of bringing the grown-ups back together as is annoying tradition and stupid rule in these films, nor does Shannon sacrifice herself to protect Eric's family or something of that sort. Why, you might even think the film argues moving on after a divorce is a good thing! I am quite conscious that all I’m getting a clichéd romance instead of the cliché divorce regression here, but then, this isn't something too typical for a SyFy movie. Perhaps Takács made The Black Hole too early in the cycle for the Rule of Un-Divorce to have already been in effect?
Given these achievements and minor surprises of and in The Black Hole, I'll end this with the traditional phrase that could end half of my SyFy Channel Original write-ups: what's not to like!?
Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.
That most dangerous of all scientific endeavours, Quantum acceleration experiments, as taken on in a certainly highly scientific establishment in St. Louis goes rather wrong, opening a black hole in the fabric of space-time, as these things tend to. The black hole quite impolitely starts eating up the surrounding matter, growing in curious stops and starts in the progress, and threatening to eat up the whole planet rather sooner than later.
Because only one of the three initial scientists of the project, Dr (I assume) Shannon Muir (Kristy Swanson) has survived the film's first five minutes, the military under the surprisingly competent and sane General Stryker (David Selby) calls in former project member Eric Bryce (Judd Nelson), who brings with him the aftershocks of a bad divorce, moon eyes between him and Shannon, ridiculous mad scientist hair, and a chip on his shoulder because he was right all along. As if closing up a black hole weren't problem enough for two more or less sexy scientists, an energy creature has slipped out of the black hole, eating electricity (and people) and feeding the black hole in the process. Shannon and Eric are doing their best to resolve the situation before the increasingly humongous black hole eats all of the landmarks of St. Louis, and eventually find out the creature's - and therefore the black hole's - central weakness, which at least is neither salt nor the power of love this time around.
It's just too bad that their government would really rather resolve the problem in more traditionally American ways, by dropping an H-bomb on their problem and the remaining citizens of St. Louis, despite our heroic experts telling them this would only make matters worse. Consequently our heroes have not just one but two races against time to win. Fortunately, the film provides a bombing mad general to Stryker's sane one, so the latter is free to actually be helpful.
People who are wrong will tell you that Tibor Takács's The Black Hole (produced by Nu Image for our friends at the - then - SciFi Channel) is a stupid piece of nonsense when in truth it's a film that provides a whole lot of fun based on a silly yet clever idea of the kind it's not difficult to imagine to find in an episode of the classic Outer Limits.
As everyone who isn't wrong knows, Takács in his incarnation as direct-to-DVD and direct-to-TV director is pretty excellent at squeezing fun films out of sometimes (okay, most of the time) doubtful scripts and tiny budgets, and his The Black Hole is absolutely no exception. The film is perfectly paced, hitting the disaster movie and semi-monster movie beats at just the right moments, never stopping for too long along the way to let the audience think too much about the (im)probabilities of what's going on.
Sure, if you're the kind of person who can't help but bemoan curious scientific ideas, the bizarre lack of scientific staff in US government during a scientific catastrophe [this was evidently written some time ago], and call them "plot holes", you won't have any fun with this, and even Takács won't be able to distract you from actively avoiding fun, but then, why are you watching a film about a black hole opening up in Missouri in the first place?
For the rest of us, the film at the very least shows a degree of coherence. That is to say, if you accept The Black Hole's sometimes (okay, always) bizarre assumptions about the nature of reality, it proceeds logically enough from them to create a diverting SF pulp movie plot that provides Takács with ample opportunity to show soldiers vaporized, and parts of St. Louis eaten by a black hole. Which, surely, is all we can ever ask of a film called The Black Hole. To make up for a tight budget, Takács shows most of the major destruction through the eyes of shaky TV footage happening on screens with dubious resolutions, a cost-conscious decision that works beautifully - thanks to good timing much better than in other SyFy movies trying the same trick.
Added to the film's entertaining pulp trappings are some rather sarcastic nods in the direction of political crisis management - particularly in a scene of the US president and his aides writing a bathetic speech about the nuclear destruction of St. Louis before the fact intercut with our scientist heroes' attempts to actually do something to save the the city and the world. It's also difficult to miss the fact that the least effectual (and most destructive) ideas to solve all problems come courtesy of "Homeland Security", which can hardly be a coincidence in a US film made after hurricane Katrina.
In the less real world, SyFy experts will be astonished that the catastrophe is only normalizing the relationship between Eric and his ex-wife and daughter, instead of bringing the grown-ups back together as is annoying tradition and stupid rule in these films, nor does Shannon sacrifice herself to protect Eric's family or something of that sort. Why, you might even think the film argues moving on after a divorce is a good thing! I am quite conscious that all I’m getting a clichéd romance instead of the cliché divorce regression here, but then, this isn't something too typical for a SyFy movie. Perhaps Takács made The Black Hole too early in the cycle for the Rule of Un-Divorce to have already been in effect?
Given these achievements and minor surprises of and in The Black Hole, I'll end this with the traditional phrase that could end half of my SyFy Channel Original write-ups: what's not to like!?
Friday, October 18, 2013
On Exploder Button: SyFy vs. The Mynd: The Black Hole (2006)
"Conan, what is best in life?"
"Watching a movie directed by Tibor Takács in which a black hole threatens St. Louis and a horrifyingly haired Judd Nelson and an underused Kristy Swanson are trying to save the world!"
Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,reviews,syfy vs the mynd,tibor takács,kristy swanson,judd nelson,david selby,sf,disaster,other places
Saturday, October 12, 2013
Three Films Make A Post: Don't Forget You're Lunch
Lost Voyage (2001): Ah, the early years of SyFy/Sci Fi movies, when there wasn't a little ecosystem of companies producing movies just for the Channel, and they mostly just bought independent productions that would otherwise have landed somewhere on the farthest shelves of video stores (remember those?).
Christian McIntire's film is one of the better outings of that era, telling its conventional story about a ghost ship in the Bermuda Triangle and the fools entering it for news, redemption, or salvage with the bare minimum of mood you can hope for.
It also features Judd Nelson as a parapsychologist making surprised bug eyes at everything and Lance Henriksen being perfectly wonderful, as is his wont. There's little else to say about this one. It's the sort of thing you can watch and feel mildly entertained by, and that's about all it aspires to as well as all it is good for.
Death Race (2008): I was all up and ready to hate Paul W.S. Anderson's remake of the much superior Death Race 2000 but once I had accepted that this is a much less politically interesting, less funny, and less imaginative film, and took it as the more normal kind of cheesy low budget action fodder it was meant to be, I started to enjoy myself quite a bit. There are some nice supporting performances, particularly Joan Allen's version of the "evil woman in a business suite" cliché, Jason Statham is as dependable for this kind of role as expected, and the writing, even though (or because) it is steeped in cheese and stupid conspiracy theories, does provide a nice forward moving piece of nonsense.
Ironically, the film's weakest point are the car racing scenes, which, though exciting in a videogame-y way, use way too much shaky-cam, random zooming, and quick editing. It's always a bit of a shame when you can't actually see the stunt work that presumably goes on. Still, I had a lot of fun with this one, and at least Anderson didn't show any of the races in backwards slow-motion.
Dark Angel aka I Come In Peace (1990): Speaking of films that are dumb but fun, this Dolph Lundgren vehicle directed by Craig R. Baxley during the height of the horror that is that buddy cop genre comes to mind. Dolph is of course the rule-breaking cop (who in these films are always right, because fuck cops who respect the law), while Brian Benben gives an uptight FBI agent. Together they fight crime in form of an alien drug dealer harvesting endorphin, and killing people with a flying CD despite owning an explodo gun, and in form of the FBI trying to harvest an alien.
It's worthwhile in that typical late 80s/early 90s US action cheese way, with many an explosion, decent stunts, and one-liners and "quips" always trying to out-stupid the earlier ones. The film's a lot like a hamburger, really: dumb, fattening, and a sign of all kinds of cultural deficits, but also pretty satisfying before it kills your digestion.
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