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,

This Week in Rixflix #17: June 30 – July 6, 2017

As far as I can see, the real problem with TCM's online course this summer is timing. They have secured two days a week throughout July on their network in order to showcase just over 40 films directed by Alfred Hitchcock, but they started the online course that corresponds with the films well over a week ahead (in June instead) of the first night's viewing. Unfortunately, the course started out diving right into Hitch's numerous silent features, movies with which even longtime aficionados of either classic film or Alfred Hitchcock may not have much experience. I fall into both categories and I have only seen The Lodger (1927) from his silent days. Well, until this week, when I snuck in an iPad viewing of his boxing romance, The Ring, while visiting my father up in Idaho (where I am currently).

I had planned to dive right into the Hitchcock course from the start, and while I read through the materials thoroughly more than once, games come up in the course where they ask questions using images from films I have yet to see because they haven't aired yet. Yes, I can take things over and over again as much as I want to get the score I wish, but it is a matter of pride that I do things right from the beginning. The first night of TCM's airings of Hitch's silents and early sound films wouldn't happen until July 5th – when I would already be in Idaho – and so I decided that I would use my time up here to work on the module for the silent part of the course on either my iPad or iPhone. Now, it has turned out that using the Canvas app to do the online course is pretty damn tedious and more than a little annoying. Also, TCM only about half selection of the evening's eight aired films up on their Watch TCM app, so I can't even see everything I would rather see before taking the first week's exam.

As a result of all of these problems, I have decided on the following plan: 1) watch the films I can on the Watch TCM app in my remaining days in Idaho, 2) watch the other films (that I don't already own) on my DVR when I get home, 3) don't do anything with the course until I get home, where I can use my computer and not have to worry about a creaky, unreliable app, and 4) make sure everything is watched before preceding with the testing. I may have to cram most of my work into a couple of weeks, but I think it will go smoothly.

The Numbers: 

This week's feature-length film count: 18; 15 first-time viewings and 3 repeats.
Highest-rated feature-length films: Loving (2016) and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) – 8/9
Lowest-rated feature-length film: The Sand [aka Blood Sand] (2015) – 3/9
Average films per day in June: 3.1667
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 3.03
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 205

The Reviews:

Secret in Their Eyes (2015) Dir.: Billy Ray – I filed this one in my entirely too massive folder titled Completely Unnecessary Remakes, the contents of which billow out of the confines of my head's filing cabinet like a mushroom cloud looming above a South Pacific atoll. I am sure it must have seemed like a can't lose proposition to do an American remake of the 2009 Argentinian thriller, El secreto de sus ojos, which took the Best Foreign Film Oscar at the 2010 ceremony. They lined up Chiwetel Ejiofor, Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, Alfred Molina, Dean Norris and Michael Kelly to beef up their cast dramatically, and then took a rather complicated, non-linear story structure spanning a quarter of a century and, surprisingly, only made it slightly less confusing by dropping the element of a novel within the film telling part of the story and cutting down the story gap to just a mere 13 years. But even with that cast and that nod towards not dumbing something down for an American audience, they still gave us no real, compelling reason to make us want to watch the new version over the original, itself only six years old at the time of this film's release and completely available on the DVD and cable markets. And the performances and direction are just fine in the American version, but only hardcore subtitle haters would prefer this over the first one. The original has an extra layer of depth to it with the element of one of the characters using a novel to tell the story, and the Argentine locations add even more mystery to the proceedings. Here, the American version is just another serial killer story that takes place in Los Angeles and New York, and then they had to somehow tie it to 9/11 as well. I'm over it. I want to watch the original again. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

Deepwater Horizon (2016) Dir.: Peter Berg – I really did not want to see this film when I saw the trailer the first forty dozen times in theatres and on TV. The overly cute scenes between Mark Wahlberg and his family just kind of set off my "too saccharine" alarms, but there was something else bothering me. I knew Peter Berg was directing, and while I still like him just fine from his acting days (the highly underrated Late for Dinner, a film that I outright LOVE) and for directing at least four films that I really enjoyed (Very Bad Things, The Rundown, Friday Night Lights, and Hancock), I had a sense that there might be the slight possibility that he would go easy on the oil companies involved in this issue. He is fairly outspoken on a variety of topics, and though he is known to lean left politically, many of his films tend to be quite patriotic, which has also gotten him a conservative fanbase. And he also takes some odd stances on things on social media that garner some controversy, so I thought the chance was there I might not enjoy the tone of this picture. And with the star being Mark Wahlberg, the man who disdains political talk from celebrities but has walked right into playing golf with Donald Trump in years past, I thought the potential that they might wander smack into a scenario that goes too light on BP and Transocean might be valid.

I needn't have worried. Right now, I am just mad that I didn't see this film on a big screen, because it would have wowed my socks right off my feet. Berg conveys such a slowly tightening and eventually crushing sense of suspense to this terrible disaster upon nature and our oceans that I am kicking myself that I didn't pay closer attention to everything related to the film on its release. Wahlberg himself is spot on as the rig tech who finds himself in the middle of an increasingly dangerous situation, as are Kurt Russell as the rig supervisor and John Malkovich as an especially slimy oil company exec who ignores necessary testing early on and wants operations to continue despite warnings. Also from the trailers, which added to my initial negative reaction, I had a sense that this would turn into just another action thriller, where Marky Mark would rip off his sleeves and save everybody on the oil rig. Again, if I had just trusted that they were going more towards telling the story as accurate as possible (by Hollywood standards) then I needn't have worried. Yes, there is action aplenty and Wahlberg does have to do some rescuing, but it is consistent with the tone of the picture and it never turns into a John McClane-style film. I look back now and realize my initial reactions were a bit flip, and hadn't taken into account that there was a very real loss of life on the Deepwater Horizon and that Berg would care more about honoring their deaths than in amping up the action quotient to sell movie tickets. That's on me for not thinking more seriously about this at the top. In the end, I really enjoyed this tough as nails film. This rating for Deepwater Horizon may go up after the next time I watch it. – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Bang Bang Baby (2014) Dir.: Jeffrey St. Jules – Sometimes nothing is more painful than watching someone try to intentionally create a cult classic. And if you are going to take a shot at using the most obvious gimmick to shortcut your project to this status – making your sci-fi/monster film a musical – then there really needs to be something special at the core of your story. Director Jeffrey St. Jules has a great assist in the lead role from actress Jane Levy, who really does have an Emma Stone thing going at times, though not all the time. (In some shots, she really reminds me of classic noir actress Jane Greer.) As a skirt-wearing auto mechanic living in an idealized late '50s/early '60s setting who is only able to escape her humdrum small town existence via her dreams to became a singing star, Levy is quite engaging and deftly juggles both the more comedic and dramatic moments in the script equally well. As the father who consistently gets in her way, all-star character actor Peter Stormare is perhaps miscast but I think that he brings his usual pro reliability to his role, and even gets his own country-flavored song, which surprised the hell out of me. (I didn't say it was any good, but the scene is funny.) 

The film itself has many humorous moments, but there is another darker level to this film that lends the film a quality which takes it out of the normal horror-comedy range (besides the musical element). Levy's character is not the simple, goody two-shoes character you expect from the way the film opens. She drinks like a fish when she is sad, she relies a bit too much on a fantasy life built around her romance with an Elvis-like pop idol, and endures abuse and rape from an obsessive creep in her town. Meanwhile, unspecified medical experiments are taking place in the town that is turning much of the populace (and the local wildlife) into mutated freaks. The more horrific elements of the story are pretty much tamped down until late in the film, and while they never go quite as far as I'd like, their impact is felt pretty hard when they finally appear. Having the villain grow a second mouth in his neck so he trades off lines in his big song with himself is a pretty neat idea, and the scene featuring townsfolk gathering to down "suicide drinks" en masse is heavy stuff for a musical. The film itself has a thick edge of surreality to the proceedings, so that it becomes hard to tell which of the heroine's lives is the fantasy and which is the reality. Or if either (or any) of them are at all. 

I run hot and cold with the musical score, which I feel plays it too safe and low-key much of the time. I kept waiting for one of the earlier numbers to really kick it into high gear. Even the title song, which occurs at the halfway mark of the film and is an uptempo song with a big dance break and wacky sound effects, looks too much like a rehearsal done at half-speed and never really takes off like I wish it would. (It should be the big, goofy, joyous center of this film.) I could not help the feeling that the storytellers never really commit to the notion of a full musical. There are several scenes that could have benefited from being told in song instead, and would have livened the film immensely, but St. Jules settles for more exposition via dialogue in its place. Still, there is an overall weirdness that I find quite compelling and whatever doesn't work in the film is outweighed by the things that do. And I really like a couple of the lines from the score, such as "So, marry me; there's worse things you can do/In a quarantined town of freaks, choices are few." Who hasn't thought that about their own hometown? – TC4P Rating: 5/9

American Anarchist (2016) Dir.: Charlie Siskel – I remember reading portions of The Anarchist Cookbook back in the '80s and getting a good laugh from it. We carried the books at the chain of bookstores in Alaska for whom I worked for two decades, and they were mostly kept under the front counter to keep them out of the hands of juvenile delinquents. We knew the Cookbook had bits about making homemade explosives in it, but really, I remember placing it in my mind alongside the Foxfire series and the Carlos Castaneda books and other alternative/hippie/folk culture stuff we carried in those days. (All of that stuff sold like crazy too...) I remember thinking back then that The Anarchist Cookbook was just a funny book that talked about smoking banana peels to get a minor high and other goofy junk like that. I remember reading the section with home bomb-making and thinking “Who would really take the time to do this?” It just seemed too complicated and, frankly, dangerous. Believing it would be used by homegrown terrorists to do harm against the general populace was unthinkable to me at the time, even though I had friends who delighted in using small explosives to blow up toilets at school. 

All that has changed. If you put something stupid on YouTube, scores of absolute dopes will try to replicate or even outdo that something stupid. (As I heard recently on the news, stupidity is quite catching... and yes, it was about you know who and his goons.) If you put out a book that tells readers how to build simple bombs and grenades and any number of other things that could help you in waging a revolution against a government or protecting yourself and your family against armed insurgents, some of those readers will apparently make real, definite use out those instructions. Documentarian Charlie Siskel – the nephew of the late film critic Gene Siskel – has built American Anarchist around his interviews with William Powell, a professor who was only 19 years of age when he wrote The Anarchist Cookbook in 1970. He spent the last 47 years of his life hiding from his legacy (he died this year in March), living in a deep state of denial over what his book brought to the fore in our society. Siskel doesn't mince words and goes after Powell (and his wife) hard, giving him opportunity after opportunity to explain his actions and outright apologize for them as well. Powell mostly tries to evade Siskel's traps, and gets very angry a couple of times over the filmmaker's persistence on this one question. In some ways, the film does get a tad one-note with this repetitive stance, but in telling us the story surrounding the infamous book and its creator, Charlie Siskel has given us a fascinating look into the power of words to do real harm; sometimes, even murder. – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Haunted Until Only Quite Recently: The Slight Return of “Poltergeist”

Of all the films released in theatres in 1982 during the year of my 18th birthday, the one of which I am most ashamed of not seeing at that time is the original Tobe Hooper/Steven Spielberg version of Poltergeist. I have made up for it in spades since then. A viewing of Poltergeist is a pretty regular affair for me, whether by throwing in a disc, catching ⅔ of it on television by accident or, as I jumped at each chance to do it, seeing it four different times on actual movie screens both large and small over the years since its release.

But the first time I saw it, the following year, I was in an entirely comfortable setting, in a room full of my (still) closest friends at my pal Tony’s parents' house, during one of our regular movie marathon festivals that actually meant something back in the time when no one really owned very many prerecorded videocassettes personally. Let me explain… in the early '80s, while each of our homes had a VCR or two, the homeownership market for prerecorded VHS (and Beta) tapes was really just for techno-geeks who wanted to pay anywhere from $50 to well over $100 for an individual tape so they could play them while showing off their nascent home video theatres and sound systems.

For a movie marathon party for regular, non-wealthy kids just out of high school to work at the time, you had to rely on two things: 1) videotapes of things you recorded off television and cable, and 2) video rental stores. You could buy used videotapes at your local video store at the time, but they usually had beat up boxes, had pictures that were possibly quite jumpy, and often had one or two spots where you weren’t sure whether the tape was going to go all wonky inside the machine. You couldn’t walk into a store at that time and just buy a fresh, brand spanking new copy of Poltergeist to take home. The store owners would not have a huge display of $19.95 copies of the latest film released onto tape by Hollywood. This would happen soon enough, but not in 1982-1983.

Pricing of videotapes was largely set by the design of the rental market. If you wanted to own a new personal copy of a film, you could purchase it, but it was going to be at the price that the store paid for a copy (if you knew an avenue through which you could get it at the wholesale cost), but more than likely, if you really wanted a copy, you were going to be paying an even greater mark-up on that cost. Thus, not a lot of people wanted to pay well over $100 for a mere videotape (though the price I remember being quoted most of the time was $99.95). But, I digress…

We were basically poor kids, only a couple of us had regular jobs, most of the gang were going to college, and so money was tight. But we each had a video store membership. You could generally only rent (depending on the store) anywhere from 1-3 videotapes at a time in those days (two was the average, it seems). So, to pull off any sort of marathon, we each needed to pitch in. We were determined to hit as many genres as possible: comedy, thriller, action, sci-fi… even porn (the XXX film at this particular video marathon would be The Erotic Adventures of Candy). And while only a couple of us were full-on ragin' horror fans, most everyone in the gang liked ghost movies, and so Poltergeist stood up for the horror genre.

I am not sure how the original Poltergeist escaped a visit from me upon its theatrical release. I do remember the television commercials, which in retrospect, were pretty damned effective, in much the same way that the film continues to be. I know that I had wanted to see it, but just didn’t. It might have something to do with the fact it was released a week apart from Spielberg’s own E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, so maybe in those pre-employment, cash-poor days (in June 1982, I was still dependent on allowance), I opted for seeing a film directed by Mr. Spielberg rather than one simply produced and written by him. [Note: I am most definitely not a member of the “Spielberg actually directed Poltergeist” cabal.]

And so, there I was in a room full of my nearest and dearest pals, in the early days of the video revolution, watching movie after movie through a long Saturday afternoon and evening (which would eventually turn into a Sunday morning tableaux showing most of our crowd passed out and barely cognizant that someone was still changing tapes on the VCR). In the middle of the showing of films was Poltergeist. And I was watching it with vested interest. And I was... levitating?

That is the only word I can possibly use to describe the feeling from that evening. I don’t know if it was because I was kneeling through much of the film with my legs underneath me (in a way I couldn’t possibly sit now with the middle-aged knee problems), but it is likely I just couldn’t feel them any longer as I sat on the floor of Tony’s parents’ living room getting sucked into an otherworldly realm. Or was it the thrill I was receiving from the early Spielbergian chutzpah, before he came to rely too much on giving the audience what they expected, and was instead doing what he thought was exhilarating or entertaining? Or maybe I still thought the supernatural might be a real thing, and got caught up in the fervor with my friends. Or maybe I was just in the mood for a good time.

Whatever it was, I remember feeling as if I was squarely pitched about three to four inches above the carpet of the living room, and with every spook popping out of a closet or every tree branch grabbing a kid’s leg or every clown with an evil leer not being under the bed when expected (or every bra-less JoBeth Williams), I seemed to move about a quarter inch upward. The only other film where I can recall being so out of body was when I fought back urination for the last 133 minutes of the 153-minute Empire of the Sun (hey, maybe it is a Spielberg thing), digging my legs farther and farther underneath my theatre seat with all my might in order to not break my movie code, never mind my bladder. [Kids, when saddled with a ridiculous set of rules that do not allow you to leave a movie theatre during the running of a film for any reason short of natural disaster, always plan what you are drinking, and when you are drinking it, while preparing to see a film of any great length. At least Lawrence of Arabia -- which I have seen in a theatre six times -- has an intermission break…]

Apart from Dominique Dunne’s murder late in 1982, which made national news, the supposed “curse” of the film was really not a part of common film lore at the time we watched the film, as most of the elements that make up the curse had not occurred yet. But the film had so much up its sleeve that was, at the time, so unthinkable and out of left field, that the added threat of a curse was unnecessary. Even though Poltergeist is one of the few films that can truly be described with the title of being a “rollercoaster thrill ride,” I don’t remember coming back down to the floor for the run of it, possibly due to the ramped up anticipation of the next jolt of excitement. A steak crawling across a kitchen counter, a little girl conversing with people inside the television, someone’s face falling off in the mirror, coffins popping up in the front yard, skeletons in the swimming pool, a house folding in on itself, a rope going through a wall and coming out from the ceiling in another room, a giant closet vagina… a one-stop shop of fun and absurdity, but done with knowledge of how to get under one’s skin with the right amount of creepiness.

It would be the first of many, many viewings of Poltergeist for me, and it has stood (along with The Changeling, The Uninvited, The Haunting, The Innocents, The Legend of Hell House... I won't name them all, but perhaps a couple of others… oh, yeah… The Others) as one of the few haunted house/haunting movies that really worked for me. And because the film, at least as I see it, took the genre perhaps to the height of what could be done with such material at a summer movie, blockbuster level, I never considered the notion that someone would have the cojones to remake it over thirty years later. Well, having balls made out of brass doesn’t mean you aren’t a stupid idiot… it just means you have brass balls.

J.C. and the Second Coming of "The Fog", Pt. 2

I don't really have much in the way of rules regarding remakes. Some people despise them outright; some people are ambivalent when confronted with them; some people love them. It is my belief that most people have no idea whether or not the rehashed warmed-over film that they are watching was ever another movie in the first place. (I also believe, and I have seen a goodly amount of evidence to support this, that a large segment of the moviegoers in any theatre have no concept at all of what movie they are even going to see, even up to mere minutes before their ticket is bought. Why would they know whether or not a movie was a remake?)

I have a proposal about remakes that I wish were a rule, or at the very least something that would be tried more often since The Powers That Be insist on churning them out of the Drawing-A-Blank Factory: remaking not film classics or those of the established filmic canon (Psycho), nor beloved (or feared) cult classics (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), nor remaking classic stories over again every generation (The Three Musketeers), but remaking instead films of unfulfilled potential or sub-standard quality. Instead of trying to reconfigure The Red Shoes from the ballet stage into the modern dance/pop world and plugging a Britney or Kelly-type into it, remake instead a film which never quite reached its potential. Remake instead a film which might have been a terrific movie if only it had one or two more elements to put it over the top. Perhaps the film had a swell script but the wrong actors; maybe it had the right actors but a script that wasn't zingy enough to sell it to the audience; perhaps the budget was too small or the director too narrow-sighted to bring the vision in the script to life; or perhaps the script would have worked better in this location instead of that one or in a different time period.

Of course, no one wants to take a huge bomb and take the chance of recreating the fizzle. But there are plenty of films of middling nature that did relatively well at the box office for one reason or another that I would sooner have Hollywood take another crack at than ruin the memory of a great and established classic. Maybe, just maybe, there is a near-gem of a film sitting in Hollywood's past that with a little bit of elbow grease and slight revision can make it in today's market. Call it the Take 2 Scenario.

A perfect example for this experiment would have been The Fog.

As I related in Part 1, John Carpenter's The Fog (1980) is one of those near-miss films. I alternately like and am disappointed by it. It comes on like thunder but then the lightning never hits you, and you finish the film wondering about the rainstorm that just missed your drought-ravaged field. I want to love this movie like I love Carpenter's Halloween or The Thing or Big Trouble in Little China, but it is just missing that certain something. Certainly this movie could live anew were it to be remade with a slightly larger budget and a minorly appended script that made use of the extra breathing room and allowed the movie to flesh out just enough to make the film a great ghost movie?

Well... they remade it...and I wish that I could tell you the experiment was a success and that the Monster is Alive! It's Alive!

But I can't...

It's not just that the film is bad per se: there are already a dozen horror films released to theatres this year that are of equal or lesser value. The Fog has the usual decent-to-great production values with which most of the crop of generic PG-13 teen-wrangling "scary movies" seem to be studio-blessed these days. So, it looks good. This version might have that tad of an extra budget that Carpenter needed to get the little engine over the "classic" hill: while the original cost around $1 million, this new one ran up the also rather generic cost these days of $18 million. How that translates with 25 years of inflation I'm not sure, but it still should come out with the new Fog quite ahead in terms of budget.

No, the main problem is that they took an initially underwhelming and disappointing story and then it just got even more underwhelming, though not necessarily more disappointing since one could not go into this venture expecting that much. Part of this could be due to the competent but bland touch of director Rupert Wainwright, who, despite having previous horror film experience on his resume (Stigmata), has yet to make one that is either good or that doesn't reek of his MTV past. (The man directed the M.C. Hammer movie, which may prove to be his closest venture towards creating a horror classic.) Just because you have been given the opportunity to direct multiple horror pictures doesn't mean that you are good at it. Most likely, it means that you are a studio drone who is just barely adequate enough at your job that a studio will throw you another picture every year or so. Much of the blame could be placed on Carpenter and Debra Hill's original evocative but thin story. I personally think it's a terrific set-up for a horror picture, but the script was lacking a final punch the first time they aired it out and that it needed just the smallest revisions in plot to blow it out. And the finale in this version doesn't really work, and while there are revisions to the plot, they seem to have built up the Tom Welling and Maggie Grace characters, simultaneously taking away from the DJ character played by Selma Blair. This, of course, means that the blah actors take center stage while the fun one is stuck in quicksand.

Outside of Blair, who always brings something fresh and gonzo to even the smallest of roles (and that pretty much describes the bulk of the roles in which she gets stuck), there is not much to recommend in the acting department. Tom Welling is no Superman on the big screen, so perhaps there was some wisdom in the decision to go with another actor in that upcoming project (though the jury will be out on that decision until next year). Maggie Grace goes from her ensemble comfort on "Lost, where she rarely has to break out of her pretty little pout, to the lead role here of Elizabeth (previously portrayed by Jamie Lee Curtis) and to say that she stretches in the role would impart the mistaken image of her actually being Mr. Fantastic, because I believe that is the only way that she could ever stretch in any role. There is a blankness to her mall-rat features that is both infuriating and strangely compelling, but only in ways that take you out of thinking about the movie in which you are seeing her "act." There is a small amount more to this character than mere ingenue, and she blows it.

My main problem with the film is the character of the fog itself (and it is a character). I'm fairly certain that Carpenter created most of his fog onset (along with resorting to aerial photography and presumably, stock footage), not overwhelmingly relying on the rather simplistic approach (at least, nowadays) of creating it with computers. Perhaps they thought this would help The Fog come more alive, like the haunted entity that it is meant to represent, but like the majority of computer-generated characters, while there are some nice moments, the overall effect is one of cheesiness. Though not half as cheesy as, say, the Living Flood in The Mummy Returns, or any effect in any Stephen Sommers film for that matter. (It is sad to say that his most believable creations were in Deep Rising.)

John Carpenter, who holds a producer's credit (along with a shared one with the late Ms. Hill for the story) should have directed this movie in its second incarnation. Instead of resting on his laurels as a Master of Horror (and there are people out there who regard the initial version of The Fog a masterpiece, but then again, I know someone who loves Can't Stop the Music, and in a completely unironic fashion to boot. So there's no accounting for taste or wisdom), it would have been nice to see him take another crack at his script with the added budget and more advanced effects, sort of like Hitchcock when he took another crack at his own The Man Who Knew Too Much. Whether it is an artistic up-or-downturn is not the point. It just would have been a more interesting thing to view than this: just another middling "horror" effort to add to the pile of recently failed theatrical flotsam.

Stay out of The Fog...