This Week in Rixflix #19 : August 18-24, 2017

OK, let's get this ship righted... I have missed a few weeks in-between my last supposedly weekly installment of this series and this post. I am not going to go into the hows and whys, apart from saying that I, for the last week of July and the beginning of this month, decided to concentrate full-time on the TCM online course on Alfred Hitchcock in order to complete everything before the course's expiration date (August 5th). That's my excuse for the first couple of weeks I missed for This Week in Rixflix; the rest is my own concern. 

But complete the TCM course I did, and not only that (as I posted on Facebook a while back), between July 6th and August 10th – a span of 36 days – I watched 42 of the 56 feature-length films that Hitchcock directed in his lifetime. Twelve of those movies (about half of them silent features) were first-time views for me, of which I will speak more on The Cinema 4 Pylon in coming weeks. (If you think this isn't going to turn into a couple editions of my All or Nothing series, you'd better rethink your position...) Most amazingly to me, in that group of 42 films, I never got around to watching some of my favorite selections of The Master, such as Psycho, North by Northwest, The Birds, To Catch a Thief, The Wrong Man, and my #1 Hitchcock film overall, Strangers on a Train. So now I have decided to casually play catch up with the rest of the films, so I can say that I have watched as much of his available oeuvre as I could within the same year. The Birds was the first film in that follow-up, and I plan on relaxing with NxNW this coming weekend, if not more. 

I just couldn't stop at 42, you know...

The Numbers: 

This week's feature film count: 21; 15 first-time viewings and 6 repeats.
Highest-rated feature-length film: The Birds (1963) – 9/9
Lowest-rated feature-length film: Toxic Shark (2017) – 4/9
Average films per day in August so far: 2.4167
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 2.97
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 254

And, to finish off the course, here is the list of the 42 Hitchcock films that I watched from July 6, 2017 to August 10, 2017. I have lined them up chronologically by release year (but not necessarily in order of release) so you can get a quick snapshot of the breadth of the man's career. The list covers 49 years of the man's work, extending from the silent era all the way up to Family Plot in 1976, the only Hitchcock film I saw in a theatre within the same year of its release:

1927
Downhill (1st time)
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
The Ring (1st time)

1928
Champagne (1st time)
The Farmer's Wife (1st time)

1929
Blackmail
The Manxman (1st time)

1930
Murder!

1931
Mary
Number Seventeen (1st time)
The Skin Game (1st time)

1932
Rich and Strange (1st time)

1934
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Waltzes from Vienna [Strauss' Great Waltz] (1st time)

1935
The 39 Steps

1936
Sabotage
Secret Agent

1937
Young and Innocent (1st time)

1938
The Lady Vanishes

1939
Jamaica Inn

1940
Foreign Correspondent
Rebecca

1941
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Suspicion

1942
Saboteur

1943
Shadow of a Doubt

1944
Lifeboat

1945
Spellbound

1946
Notorious

1947
The Paradine Case

1948
Rope

1950
Stage Fright

1953
I Confess (1st time)

1954
Dial M for Murder
Rear Window

1955
The Trouble with Harry

1956
The Man Who Knew Too Much

1958
Vertigo

1964
Marnie

1966
Torn Curtain

1972
Frenzy

1976
Family Plot


This Week's Reviews:

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016) Dir.: Edward Zwick – I would ask "Did we need another Jack Reacher film?" but then I would have to also ask "Did we need the first Jack Reacher film?" No, and no, would be my hard answers. This is not Tom Cruise hate, because as my wife will tell you, he is my boyfriend. Or at least she loves to say that because I seemingly have no qualms about going to the theatre to see the latest Mission: Impossible installment or the latest big-budget sci-fi or action flick featuring him in the lead. (There is a huge story behind all of this Cruise discussion between my wife and myself, only some of which I have made clear on Facebook; maybe in the near future.) Despite my dislike for his weird religious cult (sorry, but until their practices are more open to the public, that's what they are), I think Cruise is just fine as an action star, and even a pretty good actor in the right role. (And he is dead on hilarious in Tropic Thunder...)

So, I do see nearly everything that Cruise puts out eventually, though I don't necessarily see many of them in theatres apart from the hugest blockbusters. And then there are these Jack Reacher films, based on an extremely popular series of books that I cannot (and possibly never will) ever fathom. Of course, people I knew made a lot of jokes when the first movie came out about "Jack Reach-around," and other people told me how fantastic the books are but that Cruise was the completely wrong choice for the titular role. Part of this attitude is pretty easy to understand: Cruise is very nearly a foot shorter than the six-foot-five Reacher in the books, and at least 75-80 pounds lighter. And I totally understand that if you read the books and envision this Paul Bunyan of a man battling against the world, and then you go to the movies and see what amounts to a pipsqueak – a very muscular pipsqueak, but a pipsqueak nonetheless, I can understand your disappointment. I am not going to rip on the books only to say, "Not interested" because from the plots of the two films that I have seen, they would not be my thing at all. It doesn't matter who is in the role. Seems more like a thing for people who enjoy JAG or NCIS. I liked the first film a little bit more, which surprises me, because this sequel has Cobie Smulders in it, whom I like in everything. (Sometimes, she is the best part of that "everything," but you know what I am saying...) I just found myself mired in a pool of general annoyance at the absolutely incoherent and unbelievable plot line – especially the parts involving a girl who may or may not be Reacher's daughter – which itself has found praise in its book version.

So that's the split line between me and the book-reading world right now. (OK, there are actually a great many places where I am divided against the rest of the book-reading world, but this is the one under discussion right now.) I am not going to hold forth further until the day that I, out of sheer desperation in an airport somewhere, decide to actually read a Jack Reacher novel. Perhaps I will get swept up in Lee Child's prose and find a way to buy into this world of a brooding drifter who gets caught up in conspiracy after conspiracy against him; perhaps I won't. For now, I will just say that I am not fond of the movie series, but apparently, neither are many fans of the books. On this, we can at least currently agree. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

Blair Witch (2016) Dir.: Adam Wingard – Why? I am a horror movie fan of longstanding, but even I did not want to see another iteration of The Blair Witch Project come around at all. Do I still like the original film? Well, I did when it came out even though many people of my acquaintance claimed they got sick from the whirling handheld camerawork or just thought the movie was a dumb idea and poorly acted. I thought the original film was pretty spooky, was a clever way to transfuse some new blood into what at that point was a fairly stale horror environment (in my opinion, though I am sure you can always find others who professed the same at the time), and yes, was amateurishly acted and produced but with a huge amount of chutzpah. That chutzpah got its creators, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, a ton of box office and critical buzz, and even put them on the cover of Time, and that was pretty remarkable at the, ahem, time. I saw it a couple of times in the theatre in 1999, bought the DVD, and watched it twice more trying to convince people they should also "at least see it" before badmouthing it. Then I saw Joe Berlinger's cranked out sequel in 2000 on DVD instead of the theatres because of poor word of mouth, though I did watch the phony documentary promoting the second film at the time it appeared on TV. At that point, I then promptly set the Blair Witch story aside, possibly even to shut it away forever. I just no longer cared. Stand me in the corner.

It's 18 years later, and there is a whole new generation of suckers, er, young millennial horror fans out there that may not even know that The Blair Witch Project was ever even a thing. The found footage device that served as the original film's gimmick is now done practically everyday on YouTube and other sites, and there have been innumerable feature films since released in the style (the bulk of them in the horror genre), many of them quite successful. While The Blair Witch Project was nowhere near the first such film to use found footage, it was certainly one of the biggest in terms of the cultural impact it had almost immediately. I am also pretty sure that someone more knowledgable on the entire subject than I probably has connected all the dots between TBWP and the Creepypasta phenomena that we must suffer through today.

If there were a chance for a remake/sequel (because, come on, the new film really serves as both) of TBWP to be pulled off even halfway decently, I would think that director Adam Wingard would be in the list of those who could do it. A hugely prolific talent, Wingard tends to work mainly in horror, but also has a foot in the supposed "mumblecore" genre (a term that I hate). While I did just finish watching his new Netflix version of Death Note and was mildly disappointed in the result (possibly more on that film next week), WIngard has, in recent years, directed two of my favorite recent horror films – You're Next and The Guest – and I am also excited about his involvement in the eventual production of Godzilla vs. Kong (to be released in 2020). As for the movie at hand, I will say that he is the perfect pick for someone to replicate the look and feel of the original film, which is what Blair Witch tries and mostly succeeds at artistically. The film builds up some decent atmosphere, and the house they find (c'mon, you know they have to find her house eventually) is a good deal more extensive and the action there more explicitly detailed than in the original. While I never agreed with those who ripped into the amateurish acting, I will say that the cast in the new film are all most likely professionals (hey, the girl with the purple hair plays Arthur's sister Dot in the new Tick series on Amazon), but the downside to that is the original amateur feel is what I liked in the first film. The people in this film, girls included, all seem to have boners over having as many cameras as possible on them.

Now about those cameras... For me, not being a video game player of any real account, when the film starts revving up and looking more like a first person shooter being attacked, I kind of tuned out of the whole thing. I also felt, despite being told how everybody had body cameras and whatnot filming the affair that some of the angles still did not make sense to me. I am certain someone out there will protest that the angles all made sense – "You're forgetting about the crotch cam she crammed in her shorts, dude!" – but to me, that is always an annoyance in found footage films. (The only thing more annoying is when someone doesn't just drop the goddamned camera and just fucking run for it...) Me? I don't care if I saw film footage of my long lost sister (Heather Donahue, the girl from the first film) in window of the house where the evil witch supposedly lives (the premise of this film), I'm not going out in those stupid woods. I don't even believe in the supernatural at all, but if I found evidence, however sparse, that my sister is where many people are rumored to have gone missing over the years, I will hire every private detective in the book to go do the dirty work. When they don't come back, well, gather everything you have and bring it to the cops. Fuck those woods. As for the film, I am not going to tell it screw off, but I have seen it, and now I have seen two Wingard films in two weeks that have left me mostly cold. Not what i was expecting from someone that I thought had caught fire. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

Dude Bro Party Massacre III (2015) Dir.: Tomm Jacobsen, Michael Rousselet and Jon Salmon – I completely stumbled upon this film by absolute accident, and then I spent a couple of wild hours early that morning reveling in sick, gory effects and an almost completely unrestrained comic sensibility. I laughed so much that I couldn't believe it, and then I had to keep stopping the video so that my brain could catch up with the flurries of rapid fire gags and insults via a great many replays of scenes. The third in a series of films that don't really exist, Dude Bro Party Massacre III operates somewhere in the vicinity of South Park as far as humor goes, and if that is not your cup of tea, please move it along, because we won't be friends. As I said, this is supposed to be Part III of a series, and the first two non-existent films are recounted at the very beginning, much in the style of the Friday the 13th series. But the film is far more than a mere slasher parody; it acts like a lost VHS tape of a film that would have disappeared altogether if some über-geek hadn't plopped a tape into his deck and captured the thing for his own collection. (It seems an impossibility that anything could disappear like that, but there are still some obscure films from the '80s that I have on tape that I have yet to see on DVD.)

I don't know which channel that makes its hay by selling advertising would have shown this film uncut back then, but we get flashes of fake advertisements intermittently throughout Dude Bro III that, even at a mere second or two are pretty entertaining. (The feeling is that the taper paused the tape at each commercial break and then started it again at the end of the break.) In one ad is Matt Oswalt, brother of Patton Oswalt, and that is more than mere coincidence, because Patton shows up in a supporting role (as a favor) in the main plot of the film (as the sheriff). We also get a brief flash, most surprisingly, of Larry King – yes, that Larry King – in another intentional cameo. The people behind the film are a comedy troupe called 5-Second Films, who are pretty well known on the interwebs for their long-running site of the same name. I have been to the site off and on over the past decade, but it had been long enough (certainly more than five seconds) that I was completely unaware they had sprung this film upon the world. I think that I may have enjoyed it even more the way that I did discover it, rifling through archive.org that morning. (Yes, I found it because someone posted it illegally; no, I did not download it for myself.) This one will definitely get added to my collection once I start buying discs off Amazon again, but if they don't put this out as a collector's item on VHS, I would be really upset. A must watch for me again (and again) in the very, very near future. It may become a perennial. – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Last Girl Standing (2015) Dir.: Benjamin R. Moody – Longtime followers of this site might recall that over the past couple of years, I reviewed two different titles based around the popular slasher movie concept of the last survivor who fights the villain/monster to the death known as the "final girl". I hated one of those films, that being Final Girl (with Abigail Breslin) but loved the other one, the far more intentionally comedic and dimension-warping The Final Girls (with Taissa Farmiga, Vera's little sis). Of course, just like slasher films themselves, those two films weren't going to be the only films that would dabble with the fringe concept outside of the normal run of slasher films. At the same time as those other films were released in 2015 came Last Girl Standing (though I have only discovered its existence recently), yet another variation on the final girl trope. While I still feel The Final Girls is the most fun and accomplished of the three films, but Last Girl Standing has plenty of spunk – and loads of great gruesome gore – of its own.

Just like Dude Bro Party Massacre III, this film is technically a sequel to a movie that does not exist. The difference in tone is one of awareness. Dude Bro is completely aware of its existence as a winking and more than nudging comedy in a completely ridiculous film universe; it never allows for reality to step into it in any way, not even in its fake commercial breaks. Not so with Last Girl Standing, where its heroine, Camryn (an excellent Akasha Villalobos), is the lone survivor of a horrific attack on herself and her fellow campers by a serial killer known as The Hunter. That set-up may be a basic one for a slasher scenario, but for Camryn, the horror is all too real. This film is no tongue-in-cheek affair; Camryn has PTSD from what occurred, and it is affecting her life from every possible angle. She shuts herself down from the world and hides behind the counter and clothes at the dry cleaning establishment that has hired, where the owners have special rules where she doesn't interact with customers. Camryn is haunted by constant flashbacks of The Hunter, to the point where she starts confusing reality and what both she and we first think are hallucinations. Or is she being stalked by someone posing as The Hunter, the killer she herself dispatched by hand? Or is The Hunter really back in her life? And then stuff starts to get really weird, and bodies start piling up...

Last Girl Standing is a bare bones production, filmed in Austin, Texas with a mostly local cast and crew. (Villalobos' husband plays her love interest; that's how tight-knit the work is.) This is not to say that there isn't production value on display in the film, especially in relation to the rather extensive gore effects, all practical and mostly terrific. Don't be fooled either... the film looks and feels like an earnest drama (which it is) that takes a deeper look into a stock slasher character than we normally get to see, but it doesn't, to paraphrase Mr. Creosote, skimp on the pâté. And yet, for much of its running time, it is not a normal genre film either, though it does take a turn deep in the second half where it goes full bore towards its grim conclusion. I was more than pleasantly surprised by the film, though it certainly has some areas with which I found fault. Since I first watched the film, I wavered a bit in my feelings for it, and felt I was a bit stingy in my initial response when I added it to my film diary on Letterboxd. But after thinking about it for over a week and also watching a big chunk of the film a second time to get the mood back, I finally settled on 6/9.

The Big Sick (2017) Dir.: Michael Showalter – You know, sometimes you just need The Big Sick to clean out your system. I love the summer movie season. I love the middle months of the year where giant action blockbusters all try to outdo each other for the weekly box office take. And you will never hear me cry about there being too many superhero movies, because they are exactly the movies I wanted to see when I was a kid but were rarely made because the effects just weren't there. But even I long for the occasional break from BIF! POW! WHAM! KA-BOOM! and that is where The Big Sick came to our rescue today.

Jen and I had been planning to see if for a good while now – pretty much since its creators hit the talk show circuit – but just hadn't made it. The Big Sick is a marvelous comedy-drama about the beginnings of the real life relationship between comedian Kumail Nanjiani and his wife, writer and producer Emily V. Gordon. They meet cute, they fall in love, they break up, and then he ends up having to sign as her husband (even though they weren't married then) to induce a coma to possibly save her life. It's quite funny and adorable, but becomes almost entirely a drama for a long chunk of the film as he not only juggles possibly losing the women he loves, but also dealing with her initially surly parents and with his own family, who want him in an arranged marriage with someone else from Pakistan. Kudos to Michael Showalter, Nanjiani, Gordon, and Judd Apatow for bringing this story to the big screen. It's a pretty satisfying, small film, and I hope it gets some recognition come awards season. – TC4P Rating: 8/9

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016) Dir.: Mike Flanagan – A while back, my pal Aaron mentioned to me via Facebook Messenger that the Ouija sequel was, in his words, "surprisingly enjoyable". We had been discussing numerous other items of worth (to us, at least) and so I rather passed by his statement without comment. I hadn't the inclination to watch the sequel, as I had leapt on the first film, mostly out of loyalty to Olivia (Bates Motel) Cooke, and found it severely lacking apart from her participation. And so I wandered for weeks after that, secure in the knowledge that I would probably avoid the sequel for a good while, but Aaron's words kind of nagged at me. Our viewing tastes are fairly similar, and even when we don't agree on a project, we still are able to see what it is the other one found intriguing in a film. Seeing the film pop up on Cinemax one evening, I recorded Ouija: Origin of Evil and when I started watching it the next day, I found the opening of the film a lot of fun and pretty captivating. As the film rolled on, I continued to enjoy what I was seeing, and it was only in perhaps the final half hour that I finally wearied of the story they were telling me, which was that of the fate of a family that occupied a house visited by the characters in the original film. There was also the use of an effect that I am not especially fond of in films today, something I will refer to as the "Black Hole Sun effect" (after the Soundgarden video) that really takes me out of nearly any film that employs it (which, today, is a lot of horror films).

Still, even after tiring of the story and that stupid effect, I felt the film was pretty taut and sharply directed, and a damn sight better than the original. About halfway through, I decided that I needed to look up the director and found out it was Mike Flanagan, who had already delivered the truly excellent Hush a couple years ago as well as the really spooky mind-bender, Oculus. (I also liked, but not to the same degree, Absentia, from 2011.) It seems, with the recent loss of Romero and even more recent loss (this past weekend) of Tobe Hooper, that perhaps there are some openings in the ol' Masters of Horror lineup. It might be a little premature, but might I offer up Flanagan's name to the list? II feel like Wingard will eventually hit that list as well with a couple more solid films.) Flanagan has an adaptation of Stephen King's Gerald Game, in the works as a major release, so maybe his time has come. We shall see. – TC4P Rating: 6/9

Until next time,

Drooling Over Gravy (but Please Mind the Gags)

Gravy (2015)
Dir.: James Roday
TC4P Rating: 6/9

When Jen and I were finally ready* to move past the December loss of the second of our beloved pair of rat terriers last year, one rescue cat already had an in with us. A friend of Jen's mom was fostering a cat in Denver named Muffin, who was born to a feral mother who had figured out pretty early that her kitten was an indoor cat. We had known about her months earlier before we were ready, but when the time came in April to finally take the next step, Muffin was still up for the taking. She still needed her "forever home," as they say in rescue pet vernacular, though I prefer to be more realistic and call it an "8-14 year home".

After setting up a transport system through the Underground Railroad Rescued Kitty Network, which included our meeting a transfer agent at the airport in Las Vegas, we finally got our Muffin. Except we really couldn't call her Muffin. Cats don't know their name most of the time anyway, but Muffin? Ew... The problem wasn't that it was too cutesy; it just wasn't our cutesy. And we preferred to use a name that we decided upon, even if it was still cute. Her name briefly changed to Blueberry Muffin, and then in no time at all, to just The Blueberry.

If you are a fan of the show Psych, then you know the name. The Blueberry was the tiny Toyota Whatever that co-lead character Burton "Gus" Guster (played by Dulé Hill) drove throughout most of the run of Psych from 2006 through 2014. It belonged to the pharmaceutical company for whom Gus served as a customer rep, and Shawn Spencer (the other lead played by James Roday) and Gus would use the car mostly to investigate crimes for their psychic detective agency, obtain obscene amounts of fast food, or both.

We came to Psych a little late, a couple of years into its run. We were on the USA Network to watch our boy Bruce Campbell on Burn Notice, and there was this weird other show about a fake psychic bouncing around the fringes whenever we watched the spy show. Every once in a while, one or both of us would watch an episode. Or a pair of episodes. Or a mini-marathon of episodes. The show was catching on with us, even if it was subtle at first. I still remember a conversation where one of us said, "It's OK... kinda funny." And then -- overnight it seems -- it became really funny to us both. We were all in from that point. Psych became a permanent part of our schedule and it became rather common to find a day we both had off where we would rather just stay in bed watching Psych for eight hours than step outside for a breath of fresh air. The wacky antics of Shawn and Gus had taken over our lives.

And then it is seven years later and we are renaming a cat after a car in a TV show about a fake psychic detective and his pill-slinging best friend. Our cat doesn't seem to respond to the name The Blueberry any better than if I said "kitty" or "doormat" to her, but she is the right cat at the right time, and our lives are better for her intrusion into them.

But I came here to talk about a new film named Gravy.

It has been well over a year since Psych aired its last new episode. There are talks of possible TV movies reuniting the cast (or at least the two main characters), and everything ever created by the show is readily available on streaming, download or DVD. We have much of it. Reruns show sporadically on a couple of cable channels as well, and we catch them when we run into them. But Psych -- new Psych, that is -- for the foreseeable future is out of our lives. We had to move on to other shows, other pastimes, other distractions.

And so too did the cast and crew of Psych. Most noticeably missing from our routine is the relaxed, brotherly (sometimes a little too close) gab between stars Roday and Hill, and my immediate question was going to be whether they would do another project together. Such attempts can be dangerous, especially when actors have become pretty well-known as a team on a successful project. Such attempts can destroy legacies, and rarely work out for the better. But I, like many people, not only didn't want to see an end to the adventures of Shawn and Gus (though admittedly, the last season was pretty up and down in quality), we want to believe that Roday and Hill are a team. We want to believe they are best pals in real life and do everything together.

Taking that out of the equation, the real question is "What next?" Actors move on to new roles; so too must our star pals. There are few actors, like Campbell, that I do follow through every single iteration of their careers. Was I going to follow the stars of Psych to their next stop? Would it be like David Duchovny, where following him over to Californication was a no-brainer? (There would at least be ample amounts of nudity and swearing on the show.) Or would it be like Kelsey Grammer, where even the slightest whiff of Patricia Heaton on Back to You sent me packing right away?

And here now we come to Gravy, a film that has just come out on disc via Scream Factory after limited theatrical showings early in October. After wondering what Roday and company might do next, the answer it appears is this, a very bloody, quite violent horror-comedy that has no intention of tricking you for even a second, apart from some casting, that it might be a comfy fit within Psych's somewhat limited range of light comic sensibility. In fact, just from its opening sequence, and the setting up of its plot, Gravy is more intent on showing that as a director/co-writer, Roday is capable of journeying far beyond what he showed with already established characters on Psych (he directed eight episodes and had a hand in writing sixteen episodes of the show through its run). And Gravy, despite some clumpy moments, did help establish that impression with me.

The film takes place (primarily) on Halloween at a small Mexican eatery and bar west of nowhere. The restaurant's crew is casually cleaning up after what has been a busy but festive evening, and most of the characters are dressed in the Halloween costumes in which they served their shift. Bartender Kerry (Sutton Foster) is a quarterback princess, itty bitty diva waitress Cricket (Molly Ephraim) is a beauty contestant, and busboy Hector (Gabriel Luna) is a boxer. Big changes are on the way for the staff. Security guard/bouncer Winketta (Gabourey Sidibe) is about to graduate school in a week, and Kerry is just about to leave to start a new career as a paramedic. Boss Chuy (Paul Rodriguez in an effective cameo role) wants the staff to gather to celebrate before they close for the night. It seems to be just another closing on just another night for everyone concerned.

Enter the cannibals. Brothers Anson (Michael Weston) and Stef (Jimmi Simpson), along with Stef's batshit insane girlfriend Mimi (Lily Cole) have been sizing up the place (making special note that the restaurant has no windows), and before anyone can catch their breath, they have the doors welded shut, the mouthy French chef Yannick (a wonderfully caustic Lothaire Bluteau) chained at the neck in the kitchen, and the rest of the staff tied to chairs and forced to play games to keep them from being turned into the next course. Anson and Stef are gourmands with a taste for human flesh, and spend each Halloween capturing a small assortment of people, and then torture and devour them until they are completely stuffed.

It is not the sort of premise you would expect from one of the driving creative forces behind Psych, and especially not his first big project after the show was put to bed. Yes, Psych did have many gruesome murders and occasional serial killer plotlines that went beyond the show's usual light tone and the regular slapstick antics involving Shawn and Gus. And some of their most popular episodes were the Halloween-oriented episodes where they would tackle hoary cliches of the horror genre. (These same episodes, despite the mystery solving, would often have Shawn and Gus running around in the dark screaming like little girls.)

But I had no idea what to expect from Roday in Gravy, and he truly sticks to his guns. The dialogue and situations are definitely funny, but he and co-writer Todd Harthan (himself a writer and producer on Psych) have done themselves proud in keeping the horror the most important element here. Once you have settled in to the cast, which is also made up of many performers who appeared on Roday's show (Foster, Simpson, Weston, Kate Rogal, and Ethan Sandler) and therefore makes you anticipate that you will get more of the same, the violence between the characters as they fight for survival can be more than a little shocking. Thankfully, Roday keeps a steady tone throughout the manic proceedings (and it gets truly crazy in the second half). He also shows a nice touch for counterpoint using follow-up shots and soundtrack cues. (The inclusion out of nowhere of the children's song Farm Animal Friends early on is a special favorite moment for me.)

For the most part, the cast is up to the task as well. Jimmi Simpson, a favorite of Psych fans for his portrayal of the memorably named and tragic Mary Lightly (though he comes back for a swell song in the musical episode), is having a field day as Stef, and imparts both control freak leadership and villainy in equal amounts. Michael Weston, another Psych cult hero, carries the film on a wave of non-stop babble as the brother who is more than a tad jealous of his brother's girl. His pairing up with Sutton Foster, the multi-Tony Award winning actress, throughout the film is nicely underplayed and never goes for the obvious notes. There is a silly wraparound cameo part for Sarah Silverman (wearing a bunny costume) that seems to be bigger given her prominence on the DVD cover, but that is obviously to help sell the film. 

My one gripe (and it is a minor one) is the commitment to the gore implied in the premise. While there are a few body parts displayed in the film, the intention of the villains to have dishes creatively named after each of their victims is given short shrift, and largely gets forgotten. The film is bloody, bloody, bloody, but it is not very gory. Practically every room and character gets soaked in the red stuff, but the film becomes more focused on the multiple fight scenes or bickering between the characters, and less on delivering the promise that a cannibal orgy on Halloween night bodes. If there is a failing in Gravy, it is on this promise. And especially so since the title of the film itself is food-based. Yes, the big night in Big Night turns out to be a twist on that which is anticipated at the start of the film, but the chefs still deliver an amazing meal. Maybe Anson and Stef should have gotten a little more help for Yannick in the kitchen so we could get more than just a couple of dishes out of their endeavors.

It is hard to say how I am going to feel about Gravy in a couple of years. I just watched it for a second time this afternoon, and there are indications that I am going to grow to like it even more over the coming years. However, the small errors were more glaring this go-around too, so who knows? Minor annoyances can turn into big, unavoidable itches after a while. And I haven't even shown the film to Jen yet, my partner in all things Psych (and otherwise). Jen is not a horror movie fan for even a second, though she will watch one if there is something interesting to it or has been so critically acclaimed that she can't avoid it. (She loves The Silence of the Lambs, for instance, but approaches it as more of a mystery film than a horror film. And she adores the Evil Dead films.) I bought the Blu-ray of Gravy, and was going to spring it on her right away, but then decided to give it a shot myself first. It may be a touch too bloody for her tastes, but she can make the decision to watch it on her own.

Oh, and those Psych pals, Roday and Hill? They show up onscreen in Gravy as well for a cameo turn, but it is very brief (and kind of funny). They don't show up in The Blueberry, but they make it to the party all the same. And so their first big project after their long-running hit show is together as a team after all, which is just what a Psych fan would want. Whether my wife ends up wading through the oceans of gravy in Gravy and seeing our old pals in it is up to her.

*[Note: We will never be ready.]

Finally Meeting the Final Girls of My Dreams...

The Final Girls (2015)
Dir: Todd Strauss-Schulson
TC4P Rating: 7/9

Getting exactly what you want from a movie is both infectious and dangerous. Infectious, because it brightens the rest of your day (and even week), you get so excited because you want to share that feeling with everyone you meet, and you now can't imagine life without that film being a part of it. (How did I ever cope beforehand?) And dangerous, because you now want every film you see in the same genre to meet those same expectations. This would all be very nice, but unless you are someone who is either daft or just too easy to please about everything, it is a truly Herculean task.

The Final Girls is not a great work of art. It won't win or even get nominated for any major awards (not even a leg lamp). It will not change mankind or bring about world peace. But The Final Girls did give me precisely what I was looking for in an presumed horror-comedy based around the increasingly popular and ironic notion of the "final girl," the last, would-be distaff victim of a slasher film who rises above everything to come out victorious (in most cases) against the film's monstrous killer.

Last week, I posted a review of another film (the first originally announced for production as it were) that was released this year (after being shelved for a while) called Final Girl. That film was an absolute disappointment in relation to the excitement I felt when I first heard a film with that title was being made. Underneath that frosting of eagerness, Final Girl turned out to taste of nothing but regret. [You can read my review here.] Worst of all, it had essentially purloined that phrase to have it rejigged into something that had nothing to do with the style of film from which the term sprang to ironic life.

But enough about the lesser film. Here we have The Final Girls, from director Todd Strauss-Schulson, whose resume, when first surveyed, doesn't appear to hold much promise. The biggest film (or mark against him, depending on your opinion of it) to date was A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas, which I enjoyed far more than the second film in the series, though not even close to as much as the first. Other than that, while Strauss-Schulson has many shorts, videos and TV episodes listed in his filmography, I have not seen a single one of them. So, I really didn't have a solid grasp of his capabilities going into this film.

As for the screenwriters, Joshua John Miller and M.A. Fortin, there was only one other writing credit on their collective resume, and that was a short film from last year called Dawn. Nominated at the Sundance Film Festival for the Short Film Grand Jury Prize, Dawn is a decent first effort by novice director Rose McGowan (yes, that Rose McGowan, who is now set to helm her feature film debut, The Pines), but its screenplay is fairly obvious and doesn't betray the sense of humor at large throughout The Final Girls.

In settling down for a viewing, what I was hoping for, after seeing the other film, was a project that embraced the concept of "the final girl" properly. Beyond that were faint wishes that the makers would have some fun with the concept, and not churn out just another sour slasher film that only winked mildly at its audience. As it turns out, The Final Girls doesn't even know how to wink mildly. It walks up, sticks its eye as close to yours as it can, tilts its head as it winks its eye as blatantly as possible, opens its eye up again, smiles a broad, shit-eating grin, and then jabs you in the ribs with a sharp elbow to make sure you received the joke efficiently.

This is not to say the film doesn't have its subtleties. It actually thrives on them. The story is set up sweetly but tragically as we meet Max (played by Taissa Farmiga, Vera's half-as-young little sister) and her mother, Amanda Cartwright (a radiantly wistful Malin Akerman). Amanda is a former scream queen from the late '80s who has never been able to shake the typecasting wrought by her appearance in Camp Bloodbath, a very Friday the 13th-type slasher that has gone on to cult status. Rejected at yet another audition because of her past, a frantic Amanda doesn't pay attention to the road as she goads Max into lip-syncing to her favorite song, Bette Davis Eyes, and when Max accidentally drops coffee on Amanda's 8x10s, the car is sideswiped and sent rolling to Amanda's death.

Three years later, Max hasn't recovered emotionally from her mother's demise, but she is still susceptible to other people getting her to take part in things she really shouldn't. Her friends, the hippieish Gertie (Arrested Development's Alia Shawkat) and the purposefully bitchy Vicki (of The Vampire Diaries and DeGrassi, neither of which I have ever seen), meet her at a midnight movie showing of Camp Bloodbath, for which he has been talked into making an appearance in honor of her late mother by hipster geek Duncan (Thomas Middleditch). Max also meets the super hunky Chris (Alexander Ludwig, who coincidentally happened to play the main fratboy villain in Final Girl), with whom Max will sort of bond on their adventure (their certain romance is an underplayed aspect of the screenplay).

Via the interference of some utter jerks smoking and drinking during the screening, a fire breaks out in the movie theatre. With the exits blocked by screaming Camp Bloodbath fans, Max picks up a machete, the primary weapon of the film's villain, Billy, which has been dropped by an erstwhile fan in the audience. She uses the machete to cut open the movie screen to make an escape, and her friends follow her...

...into Camp Bloodbath the film. What we have in The Final Girls is a variation of what many will say is The Purple Rose of Cairo, but I would prefer to point out Buster Keaton's seminal Sherlock Jr. (1924), one of my favorite films where Buster is a projectionist who falls asleep in his booth and dreams himself not just into the movie, but also in entering the film through the screen from the stage in the movie theatre, where he has to deal initially with the scenery changing constantly around him. Soon enough, he becomes the main character in the film.

Time is not the same inside the film Camp Bloodbath, and the five real life people now have to learn how to play by the rules of the slasher movie they are in, where even the hint of sexual contact gets you killed, and scenes play in a loop if you don't go along with the plot correctly. There are plenty of jokes made at the expense of (and big laughs pulled from) the stereotypical characters found in your average slasher film, and the characters act largely in the preprogrammed manner in which you expect. They do stupid things, and there are terrifying results for that stupid behavior. 

The movie gets a lot of mileage out of scenes where the lost group continually meets the same VW bus every 92 minutes exactly (the running time of the film) or where teen vixen Tina (portrayed to a perky T [and A] by Angela Trimbur) needs to be tied up in a life preserver and oven mitts to keep her from popping her top off and thus invite serial killer Billy to attack again. Comedian Adam Devine does his intentionally annoying best as the would-be hunk of the film within the film, who is made up almost entirely of testosterone, and who can't even breathe without making a sexual reference (even though he doesn't really need to breathe at all). Especially effective is the use of how a flashback works inside the film within the film, which may come in handy later for the protagonists (or maybe not sometimes).

Behind the laughs though, something else pulses at the center of The Final Girls. The appearance of these five "other counsellors" in Camp Bloodbath (the actual camp, not the film, as the characters within are at first unaware they exist only inside a movie) has flustered them somewhat, and has at least one of them -- Nancy (also Akerman), the "sweet but shy girl with a guitar" who is Max's mother's character in Camp Bloodbath -- pondering her fate. Doomed to sleep with Kurt, and thereby die at the hand of Billy, over and over again, Nancy begins to bond with Max, who -- as she was in real life -- is still fiercely protective of her mother.

While the more jaded of you out there might see this component as unnecessary sappiness, the scenes between Max and the film version of her mother are what gives real heart to The Final Girls. Without this vital element, the film could just come off as another heartless spoof of horror films. In a film set up as a parody of low art, Farmiga and Akerman impart their characters with enough real feeling, that ultimately makes The Final Girls a comic meditation on loss and how to move forward from it. There are just a lot of broad laughs along the way to cushion you.

Finding Decent Horror Left and Right... What's Your Problem?

The refrain that I hear from people all the time is "Why aren't there any good horror films anymore?" "There are too many remakes!" and "There are too many sequels!" run a close tie for second in reasons why people get out of the horror genre, at least in my encounters with those who persist in maintaining they are horror fans.

When I hear such statements (and the second and third ones are valid arguments), I take it to mean one thing: The questioners really aren't looking around very hard. It could also mean they are only paying lip service to being a horror fan, but I usually feel like the average person doesn't try really hard in considering such things in the first place. There are scores of horror films released each and every year, as have been for ages, and the bulk of the lot are not remakes or sequels. Yes, the quality varies greatly, like in any movie genre, as do the sizes of their budgets. And like any other type of movie, high budget doesn't necessarily equal high quality, and vice versa. What might be the biggest killer for fans of the genre are the obvious ripoffs of bigger, possibly better, and/or more popular films.

Here's the real catch for me with that "Why aren't there any good horror films anymore?" question. Every so often, I find myself thinking the same thing, especially if I have taken an extended break from my usual movie-watching crunch (for the last few years, I have averaged over two films a day). More than any other type of film, my first thoughts when returning to the fold is "I need to find a good horror film."

And I, like many of my fellow horror fans, find them all the time. We usually don't have to look too far to find something to give the junkie their fix. But we would prefer that it were quality junk. I think, for many of us, our souls get crushed a little every time Michael Bay announces he has purchased the rights to remake something with his mindless style. Or every time some fake "found footage" series puts out its umpteenth film in the cycle. (This is not to discount the fact that I have actually enjoyed some of the films in these examples, against my better judgment or over my usual objections.)

I thought that I would look at Flickchart the other day to see what horror films I had ranked the highest over the past few years. I have ranked over 11,600 films to date on that platform, and have really enjoyed using their Charts feature to find films that I still need to watch in various genres or, to use my recent postings about Christopher Lee as a big example, finding out which films from a particular actor, actress or director I am delinquent in seeing. [If you want to play along at home, you can check out my Flickchart profile here: http://www.flickchart.com/Cinema4Pylon.]

My Top 15 Horror Films for this decade are:

1. The Babadook (2014) Dir: Jennifer Kent
2. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010) Dir: Eli Craig
3. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) Dir: Ana Lily Amirpour
4. Attack the Block (2011) Dir: Joe Cornish
5. The Cabin in the Woods (2012) Dir: Drew Goddard
6. Witching & Bitching [Las brujas de Zugarramurdi] (2013) Dir: Álex de la Iglesia
7. Berberian Sound Studio (2012) Dir: Peter Strickland
8. Spring (2014) Dir: Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead
9. It Follows (2014) Dir: David Robert Mitchell
10. You're Next (2011) Dir: Adam Wingard
11. What We Do in the Shadows (2014) Dir: Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi
12. Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) Dir: Jim Jarmusch
13. White God [Fehér isten] (2014) Dir: Kornél Mundruczó
14. The Editor (2014) Dir: Adam Brooks and Matthew Kennedy 
15. The Final Girls (2015) Dir: Todd Strauss Schulson [Note: review posting here tomorrow.]

No good horror-related films in recent years, you still say? I beg to differ. I feel that this is a truly solid list for just over half a decade, and there are some others in that time frame that came really close to my Top 15. As you can see, no remakes or sequels are in the bunch, though I am not opposed to some being in here. I just didn't like any that have come out thus far this decade as much as I like the films here. 

The American remake of Let the Right One In, Let Me In, which I thought would be a groundbreaking film if only that superior original version didn't already exist (and so loudly and recently too, is in my #24 slot for the 2010s. If you study the numbers of the chart in relation to my full list of films, it is actually not that many degrees away being in the Top 15. The thing about Flickchart when you use it is that you rank all of the films in your full list (or in smaller lists against each other), so the rankings can be very fluid if you do it a lot. (Man, that sounded kind of dirty...) One day, I might decide that I like Let Me In a lot more than other films just above it, and then my whole list changes dramatically.

Another trend worth noticing is that there are no repeated directors in the Top 15. It's almost like creating a top-notch horror film has become a one-and-done deal. Are we long past the days when the genre's mainstream was ruled by a few true Masters of Horror? I don't think so. I think Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, a filmmaking duo, have some promise in going even further beyond what I have liked from them so far. There are always going to be people who want to be known as a Master of Horror (Ben Wheatley seems to be making a run at it; Eli Roth has the talent but squanders it on fratboy excess), but to return us to the halcyon days, or so we perceive it, of Romero, Carpenter, Landis, Dante, Hooper, etc.? It remains to be seen.

For comparison, since we are dealing in double the years, here is my Top 30 list for the first decade of the 21st century, 2000-2009:

1. Shaun of the Dead (2004) Dir: Edgar Wright
2. Let the Right One In (2008) Dir: Tomas Alfredson
3. The Descent (2005) Dir: Neil Marshall
4. Death Proof (2007) Dir: Quentin Tarantino
5. 28 Days Later (2002) Dir: Danny Boyle
6. Grindhouse (2007) Dir: Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino
7. Thirst (2009) Dir: Chan-wook Park
8. The Devil's Backbone (2001) Dir: Guillermo del Toro
9. Bubba Ho-tep (2002) Dir: Don Coscarelli
10. Trick 'r Treat (2008) Dir: Michael Dougherty
11. Splinter (2008) Dir: Toby Wilkins
12. Ju-on: The Grudge (2002) Dir: Takashi Shimizu
13. The Orphanage (2007) Dir: Juan Antonio Bayona
14. May (2002) Dir: Lucky McKee
15. Frailty (2002) Dir: Bill Paxton
16. Pulse (2001) Dir: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
17. The Devil's Rejects (2005) Dir: Rob Zombie
18. Antichrist (2009) Dir: Lars von Trier
19. Three... Extremes (2004) Dir: Fruit Chan, Takashi Miike, and Chan-wook Park
20. The Loved Ones (2009) Dir: Sean Byrne
21. Ginger Snaps (2000) Dir: John Fawcett
22. Slither (2006) Dir: James Gunn
23. Black Sheep (2007) Dir: Jonathan King
24. Cloverfield (2008) Dir: Matt Reeves
25. The Host (2006) Dir: Joon-ho Bong
26. High Tension [Haute Tension] (2003) Dir: Alexandre Aja
27. One Missed Call (2003) Dir: Takashi Miike
28. Splice (2009) Dir: Vincenzo Natali
29. The Mist (2007) Dir: Frank Darabont
30. Dawn of the Dead (2004) Dir: Zack Snyder

This time, because the list is twice the length, one big remake is in the #30 slot on the list, Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, which has lost a lot of steam with me since it first came out, though I still like it a lot. For horror purists who don't like their horror-comedies mixed in with what they would consider true horror, I'm sorry, but I don't play that way. I prefer use the term "horror-related" to cover my bets. I prefer to keep the range more open, though I did skip one film on my Flickchart list (Bela Tarr's stunning The Werckmeister Harmonies) off of my final accounting because, while it has horrific, hypnotic moments, it is not generally considered to be a horror film). 

One is at the mercy on Flickchart at the genres its small staff have decided to use, and sometimes a film you might generally consider to be horror might actually be sitting somewhere else. In making these two lists, I did not research it deeply enough to combine other subgenres -- such as "monster film," "ghost film" or "haunted house" -- to see if everything was caught. Perhaps I will do so in the near future and amend these lists.

Once again, there is not a lot of repeat business on this second list for directing names. Except in one major case. There are some who might grouse seeing that both Death Proof and the double-feature program of which it served as the second half, Grindhouse, are on here. I thought about leaving Grindhouse off for exactly the reason that it looked like I am doubling down. My reason for keeping it is that the solo Death Proof is a longer cut of the same film, while the Grindhouse program contains other items, such as the delicious set of fake horror movie trailers in the center, that make it a totally separate experience. even if I don't like the Robert Rodriguez half of the production enough for it to make this list on its own.

There are my lists, for better or worse, and I stand by them. For now. Because we are talking about Flickchart here, and the thing about Flickchart is that things can change fast on there. All you have to do is keep ranking. Just today, I saw the new Del Toro epic, Crimson Peak, and while I am still organizing my thoughts and notes on it, I did greatly enjoy the film and I am fairly certain that once a short period of ranking has occurred, that it will probably rest comfortably in my Top 15 for the 2010s.

And since I don't directly recommend films for people anymore, unless they fall into a very small group of about six people (none of them my wife), then you will have to use these lists as guidance if you are looking for me to help you find one of those decent horror films that don't seem to come out anymore. 

Just don't whine about it to me later, because I accept no responsibility for your lack of taste.

Whatever It Is That You Do In the Shadows, Count Me In!

What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
Dir: Jemaine Clement & Taika Waititi
TC4P Rating: 8/9

I, like anyone else, complain a lot when films get it wrong. The perception of the slightest mistake or presumed laxity on the part of the filmmakers jolts a film downward in our estimation; several such errors, and we write the film off as if it never existed, or at least, never should have existed.

But what can we do when a film gets it right? Apart from praising it to the high heavens, what is there for the discerning film fan (that poses as a critic, but really isn't) to do? If you gush too much about a movie, your opinion becomes suspect, especially to those who are just passing by and don't know the full breadth of your choices and dislikes, of your plusses and pans. If you don't impart to your readership (small though it may be) your feelings regarding that work of art precisely, you may feel as though you failed in leading others to see a film that you believe is worthy of the attention of the masses, let alone fellow discerning film fans.

Let me make this clear. My precise feeling about the "vampires in New Zealand" mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows is that they get it almost exactly right. "It" encompasses many things. 

First, tone: on target -- playfully comic but with just the right notes of gruesomeness from the start -- and while the film builds a little bit in tension owing to revelations involving several characters, directors/writers Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi (who also play two of the main vampire characters) manage to keep the tone consistent straight through to the fun ending.

Second, the film embraces New Zealand as the setting. Rather than just portraying the dark alleyways of a random urban setting in which to allow the film's vampires to operate and keeping its actual location mostly hidden, What We Do lets you know where it is at all times. There is not the slightest doubt these vampires are the undead residents of the country's thriving capital city, Wellington. How such a group of vampires maintain their bloodlust over so long in a city that does not exactly have the largest populace is not really answered here, but it isn't really necessary given that the vampires and other denizens are equally prone to clumsy disaster as the regular humans in the film. The weaklings in both herds probably have the same rate of catastrophic loss.

Third, casting that works across the board. Clement is spot on as the most "Dracula"-type vampire in the "family," an 800-plus-year-old former count who is brooding in looks but is also considerate and politic when he needs to be (even, surprisingly, with humans), and who rather acts as the surrogate father to the group, if not the outright leader. Deacon, played well by Jonathan Brugh, is much younger ("only" 183) and is decidedly more brutish in his actions and emotions, and acts as the testosterone-addled idiot brother of the house. Jackie Van Beek plays Deacon's human slave, also named Jackie, and she gets a wonderful story arc showing her struggle against Deacon's refusal to finally "turn her". Rhys Darby, the cheeky manager from Clement's Flight of the Conchords HBO show, deserves special mention as the dedicated leader of a rival pack of werewolves with whom the vampires have to contend off and on throughout the picture. Best of all, co-director Waititi is endlessly cute, charming, and klutzily violent as the 379-year-old Viago, who continues to dress like the prissy dandy he was in his youth (and has horrible epithets hissed at him because of it). Despite his undead status, Viago is filled with innocent excitement and is thrilled with anticipation over every encounter, and Waititi's enthusiasm in the role is highly winning.

Fourth, Petyr. I don't know much about the actor underneath the Nosferatu makeup for the character of the 8,000-year-old vampire whom Viago locks in a closet inside the house except for his name -- Ben Fransham -- and that he also appeared in 30 Days of Night as a vampire, and has a small role in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures. All I truly know is that I love the inclusion of the Petyr character in the film. Petyr's existence gives more dimension to the vampire myth, showing that perhaps the race has evolved and grown with the times. Petyr is practically pure animal in his actions and desires. He is too dangerous to let loose for too long, and even the other vampires fear him, but are somehow able to keep him contained, and thus, are rather protective of him.

Finally, well-staged hijinks. Whether they are plotting out their next kills, failing hilariously (and often bloodily) in some of those kills, throwing an awkward party for humans (with gleefully sick and ill-timed jokes) at their ramshackle home, getting turned away from the best nightclubs but always insisting they are properly invited in, hurling half-assed insults at the pack of werewolves, or just allowing their ineptness to get the best of them in any social situation, What We Do in the Shadows kept me laughing straight through the picture. 

Higher profile pictures with far more experienced pedigrees have not made me laugh so much, especially in the past year. I was only halfway through What We Do, and I was watching all by myself, and I caught myself muttering, "Dammit, I love this movie." Yes, that has happened before, and generally, the film would fall apart for me after that. Not so here. Certainly, I could nitpick about a couple of minor points in the film, but they are rather inconsequential to the general excellence of the film. 

Let me be precise again. I believe this may be the best comedy I have seen in the last couple of years. (Believe me, it takes a lot for me to lose it lately.) That it also fulfills my horror quota heightens my recommendation. What you choose to do with all of my gushing is up to you.