Color of the Night (1994)

Somehow, the erotic thriller wave of the early 90s even enabled the creation this particular movie, in which psychoanalyst(!) Bruce Willis flees to Los Angeles after a patient traumatized him into red/green colour-blindness by throwing herself through – the film says out of, but she’s going right through the closed thing – his office window, only to get dragged into a series of murders surrounding the hilariously dysfunctional therapy group of his soon to be dead frenemy Scott Bakula (heightening the improbable psychoanalyst stakes quite a bit). Also, he starts an affair with a very young lady (Jane March) he’d recognize from somewhere if he and everyone else in the movie didn’t apparently also suffer from face blindness. Hilarity and a complicated and pretty damn bizarre plot ensue, while director Richard Rush – whose epically long director’s cut is the way to go with this one – overdirects the hell out of the barely comprehensible screenplay by Billy Ray and Matthew Chapman, which treats as a revelation things the film has already shown to the audience ninety minutes earlier.

There’s really no connection to anything amounting to actual psychoanalysis, group therapy or human psychology here, and thus enables a cast filled with beloved character actors - Lance Henriksen! Brad Dourif! Lesley Ann Warren! Eriq La Salle! Rubén Blades! and so on! – to absolutely let loose with every single bit of actorly business they choose to use, because Rush is clearly a “yes, and” and a “yes, yes, yes” kind of guy when presented with any idea anyone could come up with. Plus, if we cast Willis often enough as a psychologist, analyst, etc, people will just have to believe it, right?

At the time, critics mostly focussed on the nonsense – without recognizing its function as beautiful nonsense, of course - and on Willis’s shlong (which makes something of a surprise appearance), but really, this is such a generous and serious attempt at making sweet, sweet love to the aesthetics of the giallo by way of Brian DePalma it seems nearly beside the point that it isn’t actually all that good of a movie.

Past Misdeeds: Choke Canyon (1986)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Rogue physicist Dr. David Lowell (Stephen Collins) is convinced he is going to be able to develop a clean, infinite source of energy out of sound waves. To prove that particularly interesting theory, he has set up a lab with awesome blinking doodads in a beautiful choke canyon. There, he’s waiting for the passing of Halley’s Comet because he’ll need to somehow use the comet’s soundwaves for his experiment. Or something – the film’s rather vague about its ridiculous nonsense science, so we’ll just have to take it at its word. Alas, Lowell has leased the canyon from the evil nuclear energy corp of one John Pilgrim (Nicholas Pryor), and Pilgrim really needs the place to illegally dump a huge ball full of nuclear waste there. You’d think the film would rather go for an “evil nuclear energy corp wants to destroy progressive green science” plot but that’s not happening.

First Pilgrim’s people – mid-level henchman-managed by Lance Henriksen himself - try to buy David out, which he of course declines, for the time and place for his experiment isn’t optional (oh, please, don’t ask me why). Then they come back to rough him up, shoot up his lab with submachine guns and probably think this should frighten him into submission. Yet this only manages to make our hero even more determined, if now without a lab. To correct that, Lowell gets on his (non-metaphorical) horse, blows up parts of the facility (or as we know it, a couple of sheds) supposed to house the illegal nuclear waste and tries to blackmail Pilgrim into buying a new lab for him.

From there, things escalate further quickly: Pilgrim calls in The Captain (Bo Svenson), a man with “methods” as well as a flying circus job when he isn’t working as a heavy for an evil corporation. His day job will be important for the film’s biggest set piece later. Lowell puts The Captain in a barrel; The Captain brings a mortar. Finally, Lowell kidnaps Pilgrim’s daughter Vanessa (Janet Julian) – who will of course change sides soon enough because what’s hotter than a little kidnapping, right? – and threatens to blow her up(!) which actually gets him his new laboratory, but certainly no peace. So the film will just have to culminate in a big chase scene between The Captain’s air carnival biplane and Lowell and Janet in a helicopter carrying a big ball of nuclear waste beneath them, followed by a tiny little punch up. The practice of physics is clearly more physically demanding than our teachers let on.

Yes, all of these things really happen in Chuck Bail’s Choke Canyon, and the film truly is as bonkers as this makes it sound. Fascinatingly, despite making no darn sense at all and being the sort of family-friendly action film where automatic weapons, mortar and nuclear waste are applied in various violent ways without anybody ever actually getting hurt, the film doesn’t seem to be meant as an action comedy. It does play most of this awesome and inspired nonsense as straight as you can, which of course does make it much funnier than it otherwise would be, as well as even more bonkers.

Speaking of bonkers, among the awesome elements I didn’t mention when talking about the film’s plot (such as it is) is Lowell’s dress sense, which turns him into more of a cowboy scientist than a rogue scientist, what with his long coat, the appropriate cowboy hat, as well as a disturbingly close relation with his Bollywood approved anipals, a horse and a goat. For the record, I have not the faintest idea why the man has a goat in his lab, but he has, and he clearly loves it very much. In this context, the rather wrong love story between our hero and Janet looks comparatively healthy. After all, Choke Canyon teaches us, what’s a bit of kidnapping and threatening to blow someone up among hot young things?

Then there’s the final fist fight between Lowell and The Captain, a scene that isn’t satisfied with just showing two guys beating each other to a pulp but also finds Lowell having to shout computations between punches, because of course The Captain comes for his revenge exactly in time for the big experiment. An experiment which for its part generates much pulsing of Lowell’s doodads (and probably his equipment too), a cheap light show, and the scientific revelation that Lowell’s theory works, “if only for a moment”. Well, he’ll have time enough to iron out any wrinkles in his computations, given his need for Halley’s Comet.

Now, all of this awesome, inspired nonsense doesn’t really sound like the kind of thing US low budget film makers are usually up to, nor feels much like it when you’re watching it. I’d really rather call this a nominally American movie, for while director Bail (a veteran of stunt work, as well as a bit of acting) certainly is American, and this was visibly shot in Utah, the film’s producer and co-writer is Greek exploitation film impresario Ovidio G. Assonitis (working for a company with a decidedly Dutch sounding name), one of the other co-writers is Sheila Goldberg, who was responsible for the dubbing scripts of various Italian genre films, and the final writer is the glorious genius we know as director, writer and all-purpose provider of the bizarre Alfonso Brescia, which is about as European exploitation style as any writing team can get. No effort is made by anyone to write (if “write” is what you do to produce a script like this) anything in a more American style.

As a fan of Brescia’s peculiar sensibilities in particular I’m not complaining, mind you, preferring the man’s combination of the shamelessly bizarre with the outright silly played seriously to most other approaches to scriptwriting I can imagine; particularly since Brescia-style madness seldom is boring.


The great joy about Choke Canyon though is how the Italian writing approach and the mildly off acting (probably caused by the actors’ confusion about what the hell it is that’s going on in the script) collide with the not terribly cheap looking, and generally impressive shots of the desert and rock landscapes, and Bail’s very accomplished version of the classically – by 1986 probably rather old-fashioned to a contemporary audience - American way of shooting stunts and action, mixing approaches to low budget filmmaking that don’t mix all that often, providing the best of both worlds for precious one and a half hours.

Past Misdeeds: Hard Target (1993)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

When Nat Binder (Yancy Butler) comes to New Orleans looking for her long-time estranged, now missing, father, she doesn’t expect to find out he was homeless. She certainly didn’t suspect he has become the victim of one of the hunts for the ever popular Most Dangerous Game non-American (possibly even European!) bad guys Emil Fouchon (Lance Henriksen) and Pik van Cleaf (Arnold Vosloo) hold for their rich perverted clients. Their particular shtick is that the hunt’s designated prey consists exclusively of former military personnel who have fallen on hard times; don’t worry though, they’re certainly not going to play fair when helping their clientele getting their victim.

Given how little Fouchon and his cronies care for human life (or a sensible way to keep their hunts secret, now that I think about it), Nat would probably have a rather short life too, if she didn’t fall in early with former special forces super Cajun Chance Boudreaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme, whose accent is totally not Belgian, no sir), a man quite able to turn the tables on these particular hunters. Well, he was born on the Bayou, etc.

Oh, I still remember how cranky I was in the 90s when John Woo’s move to Hollywood turned out the way that it did, with the director seemingly trading downwards in every aspect of filmmaking, and quickly turning all his stylistic idiosyncrasies into mere tics and shtick. Now, more than twenty years later, it has become quite a bit easier to look at the resulting films with a more fair eye, and to possibly even enjoy them.

Sure, the part where Woo’s films were now seemingly crapping doves without any good reason (turns out when you overuse a metaphor this much, it ends up signifying nothing whatsoever) is still there, but when I start to let myself be dissuaded by a handful of random dove appearances, I really should stop watching the kind of films I do. But then, Woo’s particular style of dance-like ultra-violence and slow motion melodrama always was and is a thing teetering on the border of self-parody, as directorial styles following the dogma that style is substance (which I am wont to believe in too) inevitably must be; it’s a question of individual taste where awesome stylized gun opera starts and where silly nonsense begins, or if there’s indeed any difference between them that matters.

Re-watching Hard Target after a decade or so, I realized how close the film actually is to Woo’s Hong Kong work, or rather, how much those films traded in the same kind of silliness and excess. I also realized I’m now very much willing to just go with the sort of world where doves teleport in at the slightest provocation, where crossbow bolts inevitably fly around in slow motion, where gun hands are positioned in the most improbable ways, and where things explode or catch fire for the slightest of reasons, even when the film these things happen in was made in the USA. In fact, I’m at a point in my always regressing taste where I find stuff like this absolutely lovely, and wouldn’t have the film any other way. Particularly when these tasty morsels come with an added dose of kitschy (but not necessarily untrue) poverty porn, the (completely true) insight that all rich people are evil while the poor have dignity and interesting haircuts, as well as a scene where Wilford Brimley rides in with bow and arrow like a particularly absurd version of the cavalry, and shoots as if he were trying our for the role of Old Man Hawkeye. Indeed, that’s all included in the film – even the Brimley stuff that somehow didn’t manage to give 17-year old me, who took these things far more seriously in exactly the wrong way than I do now, a hernia when I watched it way back when in 1993. The resulting film is indeed pretty darn great.

This does – of course – have a lot to do with some other things Woo still was perfectly capable of when he went to the US. Namely, shooting damn great, tight yet overblown (or is it the other way around) action sequences that never bog down in self indulgence so much they are ever anything less than riveting. Woo has an eye for the set piece, a heart for the melodramatic impact of the physical action, for turning a potentially clichéd shoot-out into something memorable by just the right choice of scenery and props, and a – one suspects intrinsic – knowledge of just the appropriate rhythms between camera movement, the bodies of his stunt actors and actors, and editing. There’s absolutely nothing that isn’t great about the action here.

Woo even finds it in his heart to indulge his star’s greatest weakness, and let’s JCVD do That Kick again, and again, and again. It seems to have been an excellent way to get the man to relax in front of the camera too – at least Van Damme does some of his better acting work in this stage of his career here. Why, even his one-liner delivery is for once spot on and even charming. The rest of the cast (except for Yancy Butler who has very pretty eyes and exclusively acts by widening them and letting her mouth pop open and shut randomly) is rather great too, with Henriksen giving one of his patented villain performances with great gusto, and Vosloo working as the perfect foil, while Brimford is appropriately absurd (that’s a compliment), and everybody else dies quite enthusiastically.


So, I’m sorry to add another failure to the list, past me, but you were wrong again. Hard Target is pretty damn great.

Three Films Make A Post: Pull over, park, and pray.

AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004): Having said quite a few nasty words about Predator 2, I’m of course now turning around to praise, if mildly, Paul W.S. Anderson’s Alien/Predator crossover movie. But then, this film does feature a simple method to bring Aliens and Predators together that makes enough sense for a SF/action/horror movie, has Lance Henriksen being Lane Henriksen, and seems to be perfectly alright with being a cheap and cheerful monster movie with a couple of iconic monsters. The first part of the film is a bit slow – this is one of those films where the doomed character showing family photos needs to do it three times so it sticks even with the slowest audience member, because him getting chest-bursted is apparently not enough to make us care – but once Anderson gets going, the film turns into a series of fun, not always totally dumb action set pieces of the type the director is often rather good at.

One Crazy Summer (1986): I’m not really into random style comedies, but I do tend to make an exception for the films of Savage Steve Holland (or, you know, two or three of them). Mostly, I believe, because here the randomness isn’t so much based on a lack of discipline but on an imagination too great to be constrained by silly things like discipline or proper movie structures. And hey, if it’s good enough for young John Cusack, who am I to naysay?


The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011): David Fincher’s version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a perfect example of the pointlessness of Hollywood adaptations of pretty contemporary movies (well series, if you want to be anal about it) from other countries. It’s not at all the fact that this is a bad movie – the cast, particularly Rooney Mara, is certainly great, and one of Fincher’s underused strengths is his ability to depict investigations in a visually interesting but also meaningful manner – but the film doesn’t really add anything important or of interest at all to what was already there in the original. Why remake a thing (or re-adapt a book) when you don’t actually have anything new or different to say about it? On a commercial level, I get it – audiences can’t abide looking at all those foreigner with their terrible foreigner faces (I am being sarcastic, you easily offended). But what’s someone like Fincher getting out of it, who can choose projects that are actually, you know interesting?

In short: Big Legend (2018)

Former soldier and action hero name owner Tyler Laird (Kevin Makely) has the brilliant idea to propose to his long-suffering girlfriend Natalie (Summer Spiro) in a patch of the deep dark woods that’s completely off the grid. As it usually goes with such deep dark woods far from civilization in horror films, the place is home to a large shaggy hominid. It’ll come as no surprise to anyone but the characters in the film that the thing drags Natalie off, leaving Tyler to have a bit of a nervous breakdown.

A year later, Tyler is released from the mental institution he was apparently put in because he didn’t believe Natalie – whose corpse was never found – died in a bear attack. After a pep talk from his mum (Adrienne Barbeau), Tyler goes off to the woods again, trying to find out what really happened to Natalie.

Just because the SyFy Channel doesn’t pay for non-ironic monster movies anymore doesn’t mean people are going to stop making them. Case in point is Jason Lee’s Big Legend, a film that keeps perfectly in the spirit of SyFy by lacking any kind of originality, yet eventually shows enough of the right spirit to charm me at least a little.

The first half of the film is pretty rough, the plot taking its dear time to get to the fun stuff while not showing much aptitude for the serious parts of its plot on the way. I had a feeling of the film dragging its feet to get the Barbeau and Amanda Wyss cameos in instead of cutting from its hero’s trauma in the woods right to his return. Makely is neither terribly convincing as a man deeply in love nor as one traumatized by a horrible experience, but once the survivalist action starts, he turns into a fun presence, which is all I ask from the lead in this sort of thing.

Lee certainly makes good use of the patch of woods this was shot in, making our protagonist’s – and his sidekick’s played by Todd A. Robinson – isolation believable enough. The film is also rather convincing at presenting the survivalist aspects of the tale without feeling the need to detail every attempt at finding food, getting the feel of these sequences right instead of losing itself in details. Its treatment of its monster is fine too, showing just enough of the creature and what it gets up to, and certainly turning it into a very convincing threat to Tyler; their final fight – while limited in its dimension - certainly feels like a proper climax.


Being the kind of viewer that I am, perhaps a wee bit tired of sudden useless plot twists, I still found myself pleasantly surprised by the film’s very sudden decision to end on the set up for another movie (with more than a minute of Lance Henriksen, one hopes), doing the Marvel thing B-movie style.

Mom and Dad (2017)

The Ryans are probably your typical movie white suburban family. Looking pretty rich to someone like me, they are still a friendly bubble of neuroses: father Brent (Nicolas Cage) is deep in the throes of a male midlife crisis with added existential dread, mother Kendall (Selma Blair) has the version of it allowed to women, while teenage daughter Carly (Anne Winters) and younger son Josh (Zackary Arthur) show all the symptoms of their respective ages. But hey, these people do seem to love each other even when they are making their lives about as much worse as they make them better.

Alas, a mysterious syndrome possibly caused by alien invaders or terrorists hits the USA (like so many American films about apocalyptic events, Mom and Dad never bothers to even acknowledge the existence of the larger part of the world), and soon all that precious parental love all parents apparently carry turns into murderous, insane rage. The Ryan kids and Carly’s boyfriend Damon (Robert T. Cunningham) - who will spend much of the film battered and unconscious only to repeatedly pop up to save everyone’s bacon and then get knocked down again in what I’m not too sure is actually supposed to be a running gag – will have a hell of a time surviving the day.

Mom and Dad’s director and writer is Brian Taylor, one half of Neveldine/Taylor, so nobody should go into this one expecting an ultra-serious film about generational gaps expressed through bloody violence. Instead, it’s mix of not exactly subtle, sardonic suburban satire, some mild splatstick, with a smidgen of disturbing moments that can turn grotesque and darkly funny at a moments notice, and an occasional sense of creepiness mostly based on the elder Ryans still acting like a suburban couple even when they are attempting to murder their children. They are very bourgeois child murderers, is what I’m saying.

The film does have a handful of serious scenes among the carnage, and the scenes of Cage and Blair running around shouting wildly, moments that handle the emptiness of these oh so unhappy rich people and their lives rather delicately, and to my great surprise – given Taylor’s general predilections for not having a single human being in his movies - effectively. While he’s playing crazy in the patented Cage style I rather love, the actor does also have some quiet moments he handles with equal effectiveness to suggest that Brent really was pretty close to murdering his family even before whatever happened to suburbia happened. Blair’s performance is more subtle, suggesting more complexity to Kendall than to Cage’s character, while avoiding getting drowned out by Crazy Cage; she’s also great in her creepy moments, selling the emotional horror involved.

It is interesting to for once watch a film that reverses the more typical evil kid trope, which of course allows a different kind of critique of the suburban US lifestyle by actually keeping the usual family power dynamics.


While all this doesn’t quite add up to a film I outright love – that would need a greater shift away from the blunt satire to the emotional horrors of the story – Mom and Dad is a highly enjoyable, sometimes disturbing, often very funny, piece that runs along sprightly and looks stylish without being overstyled while giving a fine showcase for Blair’s and Cage’s talents. Plus, there’s a fun appearance by the great Lance Henriksen as Nicolas Cage’s father, a casting decision so brilliant, I want to hug the people responsible for it.

Daylight’s End (2016)

About three years ago, a (of course mysterious) plague struck the world, turning large parts of the population into rage zombie/vampire things that run around more or less mindlessly screaming, drink blood and dissolve when hit by too much sunlight. Now, we’re in Post-Apocalyptica again, the vampires and mindless raiders bothering the few enclaves of civilized humanity.

Rourke (Johnny Strong), our hero of the day, traumatized by the death of his wife at the start of the plague, is roaming the USA in his car, hunting vampires; he’s apparently good enough at it to have made it from New York to Texas. In the god-forsaken ruins of a small town, Rourke saves a woman named Sam (Chelsea Edmundson) from rape and murder by marauders. Sam is now – after the marauders slaughtered her friends – the sole member of an expedition sent out by a group of survivors lead by ex-policeman Frank (Lance Henriksen) holed up in Dallas. Sam and her friends were tasked with finding a cargo plane for the group large enough to get them all to Baja where there’s supposed to be a survivalist enclave. They did even manage to find a plane before the marauders attacked. She convinces the gruff and grumpy Rourke to get her to Dallas.

Once there, things should be easy enough, and not involve various brave/suicidal last stands to hold back any vampire hordes.

Obviously, William Kaufman’s Daylight’s End is mostly a recombination of various elements of zombie post-apocalypse movies, Mad Max style post-apocalypses, and the kind of action Kaufman and leading man (and composer of the movie’s score) Johnny Strong have teamed up for repeatedly, so originality isn’t really a concern. We all know the character types, we know the plot beats, and we know at least in loose terms how things will turn out for everyone.

In this case, however, that doesn’t mean the resulting film isn’t worth watching. Kaufman does manage to get a surprising amount of spectacle out of a clearly minor budget, the action is staged well, and the film flows surprisingly well even though large parts of it reveal it as a corridor runner, that is to say, a film that largely consists of people running up and down various ugly corridors while shooting and sometimes screaming, which isn’t generally a promise of fun. Indeed, the final third of the film does probably contain ten minutes or so too many of this particular stuff, but for most of the running time, Kaufman make all the running back and forth exciting via the magic of effective staging and editing that does its level best to not get things bogged down. There are a good handful of moments in the film that I found genuinely exciting, but just as importantly, Kaufman avoids any scenes that are boring.

Why, even Rourke’s mandatory trauma, and the scenes of minor – Kaufman’s characters generally have a feel of the sort of hard-bitten professionals Howard Hawks loved so much - in-fighting between the survivors make sense and never overstay their welcome. The script (by Chad Law) tends to underplay the possible melodrama, which makes perfect sense for a group of people who have survived for quite this long – if they’ve not gone insane fighting the zombie vampires, they’re probably too numb by now to have screaming matches for longer than five minutes. Characters are archetypes but drawn in short, sharp strokes and as a whole acted well (or at least well enough). There’s certainly never any of the awkwardness in speech or movement from the living you often encounter in low budget zombie apocalypse films. Plus, it’s nice to see a movie that seems to know Lance Henriksen is a treasure.


While this doesn’t add up to a deeply memorable film, or something new in its sub-genre, Daylight’s End’s general air of craftsmanship certainly makes it worth one’s time.

Pumpkinhead (1988)

Ed Harley (Lance Henriksen) owns the local store somewhere in the Appalachians. As he’s widowed, he’s taking care of his little son Billy (Matthew Hurley in that rare thing – a child performance that is neither annoying nor showy) too. And, seeing as Billy and Ed seem to be about the only people in the area who are washing regularly, he’s doing a bang-up job.

Unfortunately, this being a horror film and not a quiet little drama about the struggles of a single parent in a difficult environment, tragedy soon strikes when a group of teenagers – friends and siblings whose characters and actors never impressed me enough to be worth mentioning their names here – arrives at the store for some sort of weekend outing and some dirt bike riding. While Ed’s out getting some feed from home, first Billy’s dog runs dangerously into the path of the dirt bikes, then Billy runs after him. Despite at least some of the kids going after the boy one of the bikes hits him, leaving him hurt, perhaps dead. Then ensues a mixture of panic, desperation, cowardice and stupidity: the party actually responsible for the dead races off, most of the others take off in search of a phone to call an ambulance (which I’m sure would arrive in some hours), leaving one pitiable guy behind with the boy without anyone even having made much of an attempt at first aid.

When Ed returns, finding his son badly hurt – it’s really questionable if anything could have been done for him even if our protagonists hadn’t acted quite this dumb – and the only kid left there stammering something about an accident, he is as enraged as he is crushed. After carrying his son off and realizing he’s dead, Ed comes to the decision that the people responsible for the death of his son need to pay. There’s a legend about something that could avenge Ed’s son, though at the price of Ed’s soul. That something is more than just a legend to Ed. He knows it really exists because he saw it when he was a child (I hope the ghost in my grandma’s bedroom wasn’t real too).

He’ll just have to find the local witch, the awkwardly – and not terribly appetizingly – named Haggis (Florence Schauffler in a bad case of age make-up), go through a horrifying folkloric ritual that somehow connects Ed to a corpse he first has to dig out of a pumpkin-adorned grave and turns the corpse into something particularly terrible, the local bogeyman known as Pumpkinhead.

While Ed is out, driven to make a bad business even worse, the kids are having some troubles with each other – most of them want to act as grown-ups, call the authorities and/or an ambulance but our main culprit is too afraid of the consequences. So he bullies, cajoles, threatens and finally even locks in some of the others. All of which won’t help even the tiniest bit once Pumpkinhead comes a-knockin’; even worse, the thing really isn’t interested in individual culpability and will kill guilty and comparatively innocent alike. The film hammers that fact home very early on in the process by making the least culpable of them all the creature’s second victim.

Ironically, the only thing that might save any of the kids is Ed Harley, for Ed’s mental connection to Pumpkinhead shows him everything the creature does in cruel detail. And Ed, a good and kind man at heart, quickly realizes that what he has unleashed, and what is a part of him isn’t justice, and not even vengeance, but actual evil.

Pumpkinhead is the only feature film directed by effects guru Stan Winston, probably because the film wasn’t too well-loved at the time and not terribly successful commercially. It is certainly not a perfect film, but there’s a lot of ambition here to turn out more than just a by the numbers kill revue, and quite a bit of that ambition works out fine for the film. There is one particularly obvious problems here, of course: the scenes where the movie-teenaged characters go at each others’ throats aren’t terribly well written, in part certainly because we really don’t know all that much about them – the film needs and does take its time to acquaint us with Ed and Billy and can’t put the same effort into these guys too or it would be a two and a half hour epic that would never get going at all – but in part because writers Mark Patrick Carducci and Gary Gerani don’t to pull off the difficult feat of using broad strokes characterisation to make the kids much more than functions of the plot. Once Pumpkinhead cuts loose, this becomes less of a problem, because most audiences will root for the people running from an indestructible force and not the force.

The film’s attempts at evoking the Appalachians as a place are a mixed bag (at least as seen from Germany). It’s a curious mixture of backwoods horror clichés and moments of greater authenticity (that is, moments that feel genuinely human). At the very least, it provides an actual sense of place beyond the generic “Backwoods, USA”, even if it is of a place that doesn’t exist outside of the movie in quite this way. From time to time, Pumpkinhead even does something really cool with a character, like letting members of the more yokel-like family clan we encounter act like actual human beings, which is not a thing that happens in a lot of horror films.

What works unquestioningly is the part of the film that uses made-up folkloric aspects. Pumpkinhead uses bits and pieces of actual folk magic in combination with stuff it has made up in an elegant and clever fashion, turning a central creature that could be desperately silly into something that feels like an actual legend, complete with its own nursery rhyme (well, poem that inspired the film, really) and details that have just the right feel. All of which, come to think of it, should surely nominate Pumpkinhead as folk horror.

Speaking of Pumpkinhead the creature, Winston isn’t the kind of special effects man turned director who makes a film that’s just special effects and lets this part of his efforts get in the way of the movie as a whole. In fact, for a lot of the creature’s attacks, we mostly see blue light, a raging autumn storm, and its hands or other single body parts, in a way sharing the experience of the characters it generally kills from above and from behind. This again emphasises the creatures identity as a thing of tale and song and not your usual mindless thing slaughtering teenagers (even if it does exactly that).

Winston’s direction is generally a fine achievement, basking the early scenes in sunlight that increasingly makes way for some very 80s blue hues, deeper woods, and places dominated by decay, as a whole emphasising mood over the killings. That doesn’t mean these aren’t there too – the film is just as bloody as it needs to be, no more, no less, avoiding the gratuitous throughout.

And of course, there’s also a particularly good performance by Henriksen, who first gives us a really likeable guy who loves his son and does his best for him, and then portrays various phases of sadness, anger, and desperate understanding, climaxing in desperate attempts to take back his curse. Thematically, his arc is mirrored by other characters here, too, who all do stupid things with terrible consequences they couldn’t or wouldn’t acknowledge but in the end try to do better: the kid who actually killed Billy eventually tries to turn things around not out of fear for his life but because he’s actually trying to take the responsibility for his actions, and the local teen – generally portrayed as stand-offish - who showed Ed the way to Haggis tries to help the last survivors of the teens because he understands that his enabling of Ed also makes him partially guilty for what is happening to them.

I find Pumpkinhead’s concept of external evil interesting too, or rather, I find it very interesting that it is one of the few (non-religious, for the movie goes out of its way to show that religious symbols have no power about Pumpkinhead at all) horror films that have a clear concept of what their external evil is actually about: perverting the most human feelings of love and sorrow so that they become tainted, tainting the people feeling them too.


Which is rather heady stuff for a film that’s supposedly mostly about pumpkinheaded thing murdering teens, and really makes this one more special than one might assume going in.

On ExB: Choke Canyon (1986)

If you’re one of those people sceptical about the value of international understanding and cultural intermingling, this film will change your mind. Americans, Greeks and Italians came together to create whatever the hell Choke Canyon is supposed to be. It’s bold, it’s (kinda) beautiful, and I have no idea what anyone involved in it was thinking.

Read further praise in my column on the glorious Exploder Button, currently hanging from a helicopter near you.

In short: The Horror Show (1989)

Even after he has been fried in a particularly intense electric chair session, evil-bad record-winning serial killer Max Jenke (Brion James chewing the scenery of not only this film but also of at least two films next to it in a video store) is still making trouble for his arresting detective Lucas McCarthy (Lance Henriksen only chewing one and a half films and valorously attempting to add some dignity to the proceedings) beyond having traumatized him for life.

You see, it’s not just a moral and societal failure to murder people on the electric chair, it’s also tactically unsound, as parapsychologist (or whatever he’s supposed to be) Peter Campbell (Thom Bray) will explain later, because people like Jenke’ll only step over into “the other realm” when killed this way. Which in this case means that Jenke isn’t just haunting McCarthy’s dreams anymore (though he has that dream demon thing down pat like that other guy with a somewhat German looking name) but has moved into the cellar of his family home, from where he makes the man’s – and his family’s – life a living hell.

The Horror Show must have been a pretty troubled production – one of the scriptwriters uses the old Alan Smithee nom de plume, and original director David Blyth was fired some time into the production and replaced by James Isaac, the future director of Jason X. So it’s not much of a surprise the resulting film isn’t very good at being anything like a suspenseful, exciting, or coherent movie. It seems cruel to even begin to list all of its failings, really.

Fortunately for my mood in this year’s pre-Halloween celebrations (we don’t want to repeat the sickening horrors of last year’s slasher sequel marathon, after all), the film is also a cheese-fest of the highest order I found absolutely impossible not to enjoy. This is, after all, a movie where you’d be drunk after ten minutes if you started a drinking game based on the number of times our potty-mouthed supernatural serial killer says “fuck”, whose hero is arrested under suspicion of having cut in half his daughter’s boyfriend with a meat cleaver while the guy was waiting in the cellar for said daughter and some nookie - the true killer of course being James who spends a few minutes talking with Dedee Pfeiffers voice to convince the boy to undress for reasons of some choice male half nudity – and one that features a scene where its villain spends some time as a talking poultry roast, among other absurd, sometimes gory stuff the film doesn’t seem to be embarrassed about at all.

It’s not exactly the sort of thing you’d want to watch sober (this, mind you, comes from a guy who isn’t much of a drinker), or with somebody you want to convince of the intellectual value of horror, but if you’re in for what just might be the stupidest supernatural slasher film not called Freddy’s Dead – a film this one beats by a mile by virtue of being so damn entertaining – this one’s for you (and me).

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,james isaac,david blyth,lance henriksen,brion james

In short: Harbinger Down (2015)

I’d really, really love to heap praise upon the film film made by the practical effects studio booted out of that floundering The Thing re-make/re-boot/whatever that went to Kickstarter to make a practical effects-based movie in the spirit of Carpenter’s original. Alas, it’s much too bad for that, and it really looks to be much more in the spirit of Italian rip-offs of The Thing, just realized without any of that spark of insanity that in their best moments made these films watchable and worthwhile despite things like bad acting, ridiculous scripts, and so on and so forth.

Harbinger Down does keep the bad acting – with the obvious exception of Lance Henriksen (who’d really deserve to be cast in a decent movie or ten in his old age again) and Camille Balsamo, who is merely mediocre – the thespians involved unable (and perhaps even not competent enough) to give life to the idiotic and mostly highly annoying one-note characters the script gives them to play.

Even apart from the non-characters, Harbinger Down’s script is the sort of catastrophe area that wouldn’t cut it as a SyFy Channel Original (nope, not even one of the bad ones), with no actual plot, no suspense, no theme, and certainly no emotional involvement ever threatening to appear. In other words – the film contains not a single constituting element of the movies it is claiming to be in the spirit of apart from some body horror special effects.

Though, quite ironically in a film selling itself on them, the practical effects aren’t much to write home about either. They’re not original in their conception, they’re not well-filmed (which fits the rest of Alec Gillis’s direction and its lack of visual imagination and flair perfectly), and there aren’t even all that many of them.

Take all this together, and you end up with just another sub-par monster movie, perhaps one a bit more boring than most. Which, given that we live at a point in time where we get one of these at least once a week, isn’t doing Harbinger Down or the poor people inflicting this stuff on themselves (my Mum always says self-pity is okay when you come by it the honest way, like watching a crappy movie) any favours.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,sf,alec gillis,lance henriksen,camille balsamo

In short: Stung (2015)

Caterer Julie (Jessica Cook) and her employee and friend Paul (Matt O’Leary) are working a rich people’s garden party. There’s not really much to get excited about in the job, apart from watching the friendly alcoholic mayor (Lance Henriksen) get drunk in a chipper manner, or see the rich neurotic son (Clifton Collins Jr.) be rich and neurotic, giving Paul ample time to pine for Julie (unrequitedly).

Alas – or fortunately, depending on one’s viewing tastes – the party is attacked by icky killer wasps. Worse (or even better), their stung victims quickly pop open and give birth to really damn big icky killer wasps. Soon, there’s not much of the party left, and the few survivors (obviously including Julie and Paul, because how else would the two ever get together?) are barricading themselves in the manor house. Obviously, the wasps aren’t going to let things stand there.

So, what do you have to do to get a genre film made in Germany (or the other predominantly German language countries, for that matter), particularly when said genre isn’t “shitty comedy”? The public film support funds don’t want genre, the critics look down on it, kickstarting films is pretty difficult unless you’ve got additional sources, and who wants to stay on the semi-amateur backyard circuit forever? Honestly, the minor wave of German horror (etc) films made during the last few years is a bit of a wonder, suggesting a degree of perseverance from the side of the filmmakers I can’t help but admire.

Stung’s director Benni Diez apparently solved the conundrum of how to scratch enough money together by going the time-honoured way of getting a US source, and an American cast, resulting in a film that attempts to emulate one of your better US monster movies, despite being shot in Berlin with a German language crew behind the camera. Of course, given my usual love for the local and the specific, the resulting genericness of the setting is a bit of a disappointment; on the other hand, Lance Henriksen. Lance Henriksen in a very good and charming mood, and with more scenes than I expected him to have, even.

Otherwise, this is a competent, if not completely slick, bit of horror hokum featuring a neat (though not always convincing) combination of practical and digital effects (which always seems like the best way to go for me), some pleasantly icky moments of body horror, some funny jokes, some less funny ones – all wrapped up in a package of decent pacing and a total lack of depth, like a really good SyFy Channel Original. Please keep in mind that this description is not an insult coming from, for I do appreciate a ninety minute genre piece that just wants to entertain its audience for a bit. Particularly when it is like Stung and actually achieves what it sets out to do. I at least had quite a bit of harmless, riskless fun with the film.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,american movies,in short,horror,comedy,benni diez,jessica cook,lance henriksen,matt o'leary

On ExB: Universal Van Damme: Hard Target (1993)

I know, I know, I’ve said, written and thought some rude things about John Woo’s American phase but now that I’ve settled into zen-like middle-age, maaaan, I’m so relaxed I’m willing to revise this kind of opinion.

So listen to my aged wisdom and click on through to this week’s column over on Exploder Button, where I’ll go deeper into that time when John Woo met Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,action,john woo,jean-claude van damme,lance henriksen,arnold vosloo,yancy butler

In short: Hollows Grove (2014)

It would be pretty easy to dismiss Craig Efros’s Hollows Grove as just another piece of POV horror about one of these fake ghost hunting reality shows for once encountering the actual supernatural, one of the more improbable sub-genres in existence. As a matter of fact, originality isn’t he film’s forte, nor is it the drawing of interesting or at least easy to empathize with characters: the people we encounter are an incredibly annoying group of asshats and jokers, so I spent the the film’s first half hoping for their fast and painful demise.

On the other hand, if you don’t get too distracted by the characters’ general hatefulness and look at what’s actually going on around them, you will not just see a good choice in cameos in Mykelti Williamson and the always lovely Lance Henriksen but perhaps appreciate Hollow Grove’s general level of competence when it comes to filmmaking basics like decent blocking, effective pacing, and so on. Now, this might sound like damning with faint praise, but I’d argue that keeping your film clear and competent while still selling it as something at best semi-professionally shot is not an easy thing to do. A lot of pretty ugly POV horror movie support my argument here.

There are also a final twenty minutes – the point when the characters have realized they are trapped, out of their depth and probably doomed – that go from competent to actually good, with some creatively imagined character deaths, and at least two and a half fright scenes that were actually more than just a little effective, with one clichéd yet inspired bonus moment happening after the credits. It’s not enough to get me raving about a film, but certainly more than enough to convince the hardened horror movie fan he didn’t waste his time watching it.

Basically, this is – not stylistically, mind you – a lot like many SyFy original movies: a pleasant enough time when you want to watch something undemanding, and clearly putting effort into being enjoyable for its target audience, which just happens to include me.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,craig efros,lance henriksen

In short: Excessive Force (1993)

Generic cop on the edge Terry McCain (Thomas Ian Griffith) and his partners Frankie (Tony Todd), and guy who dies too early for me to actually write down his name (Mister X) follow Terry’s vendetta against mob boss Sal DiMarco (Burt Young) into a drug deal between some of DiMarco’s men and members of the Irish mob, provoking the devolution from deal into shoot-out. Thanks to McCain’s use of torture on a suspect afterwards, DiMarco escapes another court indictment, leaving Terry quite angry and without shouldering any of the responsibility for something that is absolutely his fault all the way, of course. What only DiMarco and his men know is that three million dollars went missing during the bust, and DiMarco quickly pegs the cops as the responsible party.

Soon, the quite three-million-dollar-less Terry is the only of the three cops alive, and finds himself framed for murder and hunted by cops and gangsters alike. Why, you could think there’s some sort of conspiracy is going on.

Excessive Force’s excessively generic action movie title actually hides a generic cop movie featuring and written by lead Thomas Ian Griffith himself. The script for the whole affair is so bland, obvious and been-there, done-that clichéd even an actor could write it, so excitement, interesting ideas or even just somewhat involving execution of tired old ideas is right out. If anyone goes into this looking for even the tiniest bit of interesting characterization, she’ll be quite out of look, and neither Griffith’s script nor Jon Hess’s competent yet bland direction have much to add to the experience, particularly since neither the action scenes nor the dialogue are delivered with any sort of flair.

The latter is particularly sad in a film with such a fine cast of character actors that doesn’t just include Todd and Young but also features James Earl Jones and house favourite Lance Henriksen. Unfortunately, that’s Jones and and Henriksen phoning it in, Young biting the bullet very early on, and Todd only featuring in a few scenes, so we spend most of our time with Thomas Ian Griffith being as boring and obvious as his script, and Charlotte Lewis being pretty. Even though I do approve of Mother Nature’s work on Miss Lewis, that’s really not enough to keep me awake during a film.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,jon hess,thomas ian griffith,lance henriksen,james earl jones,tony todd,charlotte lewis,action,crime

SyFy vs. The Mynd: In the Spider's Web (2007)

Because bullet points are the best thing ever, even better than Power Point presentations, I'll bullet all the points (I'm doing this right, right?) that make this SyFy movie about people walking back and forth through the jungle until the plot progresses to them going back and forth through a cave (oh, and spiders) an entertaining thing to watch. There will be spoilers concerning the fate of some characters, so if you like to complain about that sort of thing, don't read on, please.

• India is beautiful! It also looks a lot like Thailand, and like a sound stage.
• Consequently, India is also filled with Thai people dressed in pretend-Indian garb. I blame the confusing influence of elephants on the producers' brains.
• There are also elephants in the movie.
• One of two Indians actually played by an Indian actors is a pudgy, semi-comic relief cop played by Sohrab Ardeshir. In a rather surprising turn, he also shows a degree of competence and survives the movie.
• Speaking of unexpected survivals: the film's black character (as played by Lisa Livingstone) survives too! And that despite not being the heroine (that job goes to Emma Catherwood).
• It's also rather surprising (after this, I'm all out of thing I was surprised by in the film, though) that one of the characters you wouldn't expect to find that sort of end does suffer a rather 70s horror downer kind of fate that seems rather incongruous with the tone of general good-natured idiocy the film demonstrates elsewhere.
• Lance Henriksen eats spiders. Lance Henriksen has an unexplained claw hand. Lance Henriksen is called "Dr. Lecorpus". Plus, Lance Henriksen.
• There are three kinds of spiders in this world: real ones, those made of rubber, and those made via digital magic by people who don't know how spiders look. All three of them are in the movie.
• This is not a film satisfied just featuring a particularly unconvincing spider cult led by Lance Henriksen doing its work in the jungles of India. So this is also a film featuring a particularly unconvincing illegal organ harvesting operation led by Lance Henriksen.
• Said organ harvesting operation uses spider venom and spider webs and what looks a lot like old heating equipment.
• Speaking of spider webs, spider webs can also be used to dampen one's fall, or as bridges. They are also the vines of the cave world.
• Lance Henriksen's disfigured brother (for some reason, wee CGI spiders seem to live in the hole where one of his eyes should be) wears a sack made out of spider web over his head. Because why not, right?
• In the Spider's Web contains one of the most embarrassing evil cult rituals I've ever seen. Seriously, I can't help but imagine director Terry Winsor directing some bored Thai bit players to "go nuts, kinda" and then just filming the result, while Henriksen uses all his enormous powers of professionalism not to laugh.
• The ritual is then followed by one of the most embarrassing daring escapes I've ever seen. It is very inspiring for us couch potatoes, because we too could escape daringly if that's all the effort it takes.

Ladies and gentlemen, bullet points!

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,in short,syfy vs the mynd,horror,lance henriksen,emma catherwood,terry winsor

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.

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,american movies,american tv,horror,sf,action,christian mcintire,lance henriksen,judd nelson,paul w.s. anderson,jason statham,joan allen,craig r. baxley,dolph lundgren

In short: Felony (1994)

A D.E.A. raid on a supposed drug house in New Orleans goes horribly wrong, and a good dozen of cops is blasted to high heaven by chewing-gum fan Cooper (David Warner) and his well-armed goons. Cooper is a rogue CIA operative who, together with his boss Taft (Lance Henriksen), has gone into the drug business to acquire enough money to free some operatives imprisoned in some unnamed South American country.

Unfortunately for Cooper and Taft, Cooper's rather impolitic slaughter has been filmed by TV reporter Bill Knight (Jeffrey Combs) and his Vietnam vet hippie buddy Robby (Patrick J. Gallagher). Bill, clearly not the brightest bulb in any chandelier, decides to not give the resulting video tape to the cops investigating the affair, Detectives Kincade (Leo Rossi) and Duke (Charles Napier).

This turns out to be something of a mistake, and soon enough the cops, Cooper and Taft and their men, as well as Cowboy spy "mediator" Donovan (Joe Don Baker) are all after Bill, some of them with rather murderous intent, others with more ambiguous ideas. Bill's only help is nurse Laura Bryant (Ashley Laurence), because we really needed at least one female character on our hero's side (otherwise, there's only Taft's evil girlfriend played by Corinna Everson to represent half of the human population), plus hey, it's Ashley Laurence.

But will that be enough for Bill to survive various shoot-outs, car-chases and double-crosses?

Ah, post Action International David A. Prior films are always something of a wonder to behold. Prior, once an utter weirdo director, had at this point in his career learned so much about the art of filmmaking he was perfectly able to just make a straightforward and cheap little action movie of the type that can never completely deny its cheapness but works so hard making the most out of what it's got it's impossible not to be at least a bit charmed by it.

That alone would be enough to recommend Prior's movies of this period (and really, most of his even cheaper Action International work too). However, it doesn't seem to have been enough for Prior himself, so Felony and its brethren not only feature the affordable amount of action but also scripts which are ever so slightly - or sometimes completely - skewed into the direction of the outré and the weird.

The script of Felony is full of Prior's typical curious mixture of just plain silliness (just try to make sense of what happened in Felony once the last act plot twists have made a mockery of sense and sensibility) and ironic self-consciousness that should really result in the sort of self-ironic winking nonsense I can't stand at all. In Prior's weirdness-experienced hands, though, what should be annoying turns charming with many a scene that is just as funny as it is fun.

Of course, given the low budget movie heaven that is Felony's cast, it's not a complete surprise that even the silliest line in the script is delivered either with scenery-chewing relish or just the right amount of self-consciousness. Everyone involved, from Combs over Laurence to Warner and Henriksen, obviously knows that much of the plot is utter nonsense and their characters aren't actually characters, yet still delves into the whole affair with a palpable sense of fun, projecting none of the bored "just cashing a cheque here, buddy" feelings you sometimes encounter in film's of Felony's price class.

As I always like to say about Prior movies: what's not to like?

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,action,thriller,jeffrey combs,ashley laurence,leo rossi,charles napier,david warner,joe don baker,lance henriksen,david a. prior

In short: Survival Quest (1988)

A group of all age groups and genders (Dermot Mulroney, Catherine Keener, Tracy Lind, Ben Hammer, Dominic Hoffman and Paul Provenza) that'd surely qualify for a disaster movie, flies out into the wilderness to learn some valuable lessons about themselves via survival training under the tutelage of laid back and sensitive wilderness expert Hank (Lance Henriksen). There's many a teachable moment about the joys of collectivism and treating one's peers with respect.

Unfortunately, the rather more paramilitary survivalist training course exclusively for older teenage boys of mercenary Jake (Mark Rolston) has come to the same area. Jake's full of bizarre talk of being a predator (I'd like to see Jake tell that to an actual predator) and every man having to stand for himself. Do you think there's a political allegory hidden somewhere in the movie?

Curiously, if you teach kids the value of being psychopaths, they may just start acting the part, and things turn violent. Eventually, Hank and Jake are believed dead by their respective groups, and the psycho kids begin hunting our peaceful collective.

Don Coscarelli's Survival Quest will probably always be the Coscarelli movie I like least (unless you count the attempt to steal money from his fans known as Phantasm IV as a movie, which I don't). This doesn't mean, however, that Survival Quest is a bad movie, it's just that its flaws are of exactly the kind I'm able to overlook least.

I'm never a fan of allegories at the best of time, and Coscarelli makes his film's political allegory even harder to bear though the total lack of subtlety of its presentation. Ideologically speaking, I'm on the director's side, and approve of any attempt to make a survival film which posits people don't and won't have to turn into monsters in any dangerous situation, it's just that I really wish he'd not try and hit me over the head with it as much as he does (and, you know, doesn't let the film still end with the good guys blowing up the bad guys).

This aspect of Survival Quest is further weakened by the weak characterization. I'd really rather believe that Hank's wilderness teachings and the communal work with others are a catalyst for the characters finding inner strengths they didn't know about and changing for the better, but in practice, everyone starts out as an underwritten cliché and ends as a slightly different underwritten cliché, their moments of change lacking in dramatic impact.

It is a bit of a shame, because Survival Quest's functioning parts are something to cheer for. I like how comparatively quotidian the actual wilderness survival problems our heroes have to cope with before the chase movie part begins are, providing what comes later with a basic believability the characters never have on their own.

Daryn Okada's wilderness photography is rather beautiful, again without attempting to be stunningly, dramatically beautiful, but just showing what's there without a grand gesture.

Last but not least, there's a very fine performance by the great Lance Henriksen who provides his - again pretty underwritten - Hank with charisma and a force of personality that nearly make the quick effect of his training course in social responsibility believable (and most certainly makes Rolston's one-note Jake look like even more of a jerk), and manages to make a character who might come over as quite patronizing in the way he is written sympathetically paternal.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,adventure,don coscarelli,lance henriksen,mark rolston

Three Films Make A Post: LEAVE THE CHILDREN HOME! ...and if YOU are SQUEAMISH STAY HOME WITH THEM!!!!!!!

Neues vom Hexer aka Again the Ringer (1965): Alfred Vohrer's sequel to his own Der Hexer is a decidedly middling part of the Rialto Wallace adaptation cycle. It features a few of Vohrer's trademark sight gags and moments of fourth wall demolition, a fun bad guy henchman turn by Klaus Kinski, and Drache, Rütting, Schürenberg and Arent in their usual roles, as well as a slightly insane soundtrack by Peter Thomas, but the film never feels as fun as it should do. For my tastes there's just a bit too much normal mystery tedium and too little of the pulp thrills I've come to expect from the Wallace films, leading to a film that is too well done to be completely unsatisfying yet too often trades in the anything goes feel of my favourite Vohrer movies for standard German mystery fare. For once, the German movie going public must have agreed with me, for the sequel Again the Ringer (and wasn't he called the Wizard in the English language version of the first movie?) sets up in its final scene never was made for lack of success.

One Point O aka Paranoia: 1.0 (2004): This is a pretty fantastic little (as in: obviously low budget yet just as obviously knowing how to cope) SF film in the classical mindfuck style that heavily echoes Dick in its un-real circling around questions of reality, identity and ownership of said identity. Directors/writers Jeff Renfroe and Marteinn Thorsson update the whole thing with a bit of nanotech-virus SF-science, but mostly, they let their design sense (seldom has a brown apartment building in a sideways future seemed more appropriate) and the peculiar rhythm of their film drag the viewer into an emotional place where the Weird and the surreal collide. There's also some fine acting (and fine acting's a difficult thing in a film going for the Weird this intensely) by Jeremy Sisto and Deborah Kara Unger - both no strangers to strangeness on screen - and smallish appearances by the great Udo Kier and the great Lance Henriksen to praise.

The Soul of a Monster (1944): Well, it sure is nice to see that Val Lewton's productions for RKO were regarded highly enough by executives in other studios to imitate them, like director Will Jason set out to do here for Columbia. Alas, as it goes with imitations, whoever was mainly responsible for The Soul did not actually understand how and why the Lewton productions worked so well, replacing ambiguity with cloying Christian moralizing and characters with flat clichés. While the photography is moody and beautiful, it's badly served by a script that doesn't really seem to know how to tell its story effectively, and direction that tries to take up all the outward appearances of the Lewton style without showing the necessary sense of timing and depth of meaning necessary to make that style work. I'd blame Jesus, but then the film makes it quite clear I'm not allowed to.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,american movies,in short,krimi,sf,horror,klaus kinski,heinz drache,barbara rütting,siegfried schürenberg,eddi arent,alfred vohrer,jeff renfroe,marteinn thorsson,jeremy sisto,deborah kara unger,lance henriksen,udo kier,will jason