Three Films Make A Post: An Avalanche of Thrills!

Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase (2019): This is not really a film made with my age bracket in mind at all, but as a family movie that drags a well-worn pop culture character into contemporary times and social mores without going the route of deconstruction, grimdarkness or irony, Katt Shea’s film does fall into my areas of interest. The film is not just highly effective at this but charming as hell, the sort of family film even the childless like me would totally watch with their imaginary demon children and can enjoy without. It’s also excellently paced, silly when it needs to be silly, earnest when it needs to be that, clever and even mildly subversive in an unassuming way that’s easy to miss if you blink too often. Sophia Lillis makes a fantastic contemporary version of Nancy Drew too, projecting just the right mixture of self-assurance, rebellious streak, intelligence, humour and family love a modernized version of the character needs.

10 Things I Hate About You (1999): While it is not quite on its level, Nancy Drew would probably make a great double feature with what may very well be the best teen comedy/teen romance of the second half of the 90s, as directed by Gil Junger and written by the sometimes unassumingly brilliant writing team of Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith. As everybody probably knows, this gives Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” a bit of an update for the late 90s teen set, making nearly all the right decisions about what to keep and what to discard of old Bill for its time and audience, adding some Old Hollywood flow to the dialogue (which always endears a romantic comedy to me), and then proceeds to charm the pants off of anyone watching with a heart and a brain.

The thing this and Nancy Drew share is an unwillingness to pretend a teen audience is dumb, so while it does a very crowd pleasing kind of dance, it also contains subtleties and complexities and isn’t afraid to show and use them, very much in the spirit of Shakespeare, the godfather of great commercial art if ever there was one. That Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger work fantastically together hardly needs mentioning.

Vibes (1988): But why not end this entry on a let-down, namely Ken Kwapis’s sad attempt at doing a romance/adventure movie clearly meant to be in the spirit of Romancing the Stone but with added psychic powers. Jeff Goldblum, Cyndi Lauper (who would have been ordered to drop the accent by any half-competent filmmaker) and Peter Falk do their best with what they are given, but there’s only so much anyone can do with a comedy script whose jokes aren’t funny, nor a romance that doesn’t know how to be romantic.


Particularly when the not terribly funny nor romantic script is then adapted with all the style and panache of a kitchen table (that’s the least stylish and panach-y thing coming to my mind right now, and it’s still funnier than most of the jokes in here), bogged down by leaden pacing and finally killed by a disturbing lack of imagination.

Three Films Make A Post: SURGING SPECTACLE! ...of Savagery and Sex!

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987): On one hand, I’m perfectly fine with Bruce Pittman’s sequel to okay Canadian slasher Prom Night having nothing whatsoever to do with the first one – where the hell should it have gone from there, after all – on the other hand, the resulting mix of possession horror and Freddy Krueger style (at times barely one step ahead of ripping off whole scenes completely) supernatural slasher never gels into an actual movie. Instead, we get a bunch of unfulfilled promises (you could make a perfectly great film about guilt and punishment as spiced up by religion out of the material), some good scenery-chewing by Michael Ironside and Wendy Lyon once she’s possessed, and the usual bunch of murder scenes that have not much of a thematic connection (would it really kill this sort of film to have a killer with a theme and then go through with it instead of having people randomly explode through their computer and other random crap?), and barely cohere into something like an actual plot.

Starship Troopers 3: Marauders (2008): The second Star Ship Troopers sequel, this time around directed by series screenwriter Edward Neumeier, is a pretty tedious way for the series to go out. It clearly wants to connect the satirical aspirations of the first film with the B-movie thrills of the second one, but it’s even less successful with the former than the original film and sabotages the latter ambition by insisting on the former. It’s also godawfully paced, spending an astounding amount of time on things with no bearing on its actual narrative whatsoever. The whole first hour is paced and feels very much like the prologue to the actual film; the rest isn’t nearly exciting enough to make up for that failing.

Dance of the Damned (1989): Katt Shea’s late eighties neon indie vampire movie is a bit of a frustrating experience. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this attempt to use an awkward date night (at least he seems to think it’s a date despite his early announcement to kill her at exactly 6am) between a vampire (Cyril O’Reilly) and a stripper (Starr Andreeff) to talk about broken lives but for every moment that’s emotionally resonant, for every good idea, there are two moments of 80s vampire movie pompousness, lines of dialogue that are trying oh so very hard but never achieving, and some horribly ill-advised contact lenses. Worse, what for large parts of its running time amounts to a two person play only has one good performance in Andreeff’s (who going by what she’s doing here would have deserved to go on to much better things than she actually did), with O’Reilly mostly letting his luscious 80s locks, those contact lenses and not a lot more doing his work, which just isn’t enough.

This is still a very interesting film, mind you, just not one that actually succeeds at what