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,

The Halloween Pez Reunion 2016

I think everyone that is supposed to be here is here...

Anthology Schmanthology: Fun Size Horror: Volume One (2015)

Fun Size Horror: Volume One (2015)
Various directors (20 short films)

I often have a hard time tackling anthology films. It is difficult for me to accept shifting directorial styles within what is supposed to be thought of as a conceptually bound set of films. This is especially true if there is a really strong short up front that makes me wish that the more substandard ones that follow didn't take the earlier film as an example. This is a ridiculous thought, of course, because these films are not (in the vast majority of cases) churned out on an assembly line, nor can quality – and especially an instant classic – be triggered automatically whenever one wishes. Even the greatest directors have their small (and sometimes major) misfires.

In recent years, the anthology flick has made a strong comeback with titles like The ABCs of Death and V/H/S becoming quite popular amongst the horror aficionados. None of the titles have really captured my attention thoroughly, but I chalk this up more to the hit-or-miss nature of these affairs than anything else. It's just the way things go. If you take any famous anthology series, such as The Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents, while there may have been a very high bar set for excellence in the series overall, every once in a while, you ran across an episode that was only so-so. This is true of most television series, but in a weekly series where the characters recur each episode, you can gloss over a dud episode a little easier than an anthology. In an anthology, each new film starts from square one and works forward, and usually has little or no connection to previous stories. It has to stand on its own, but it is still going to be identified with that which preceded it in the collection.

It is for this reason that I had to adopt a new strategy when watching anthologies. I couldn't just watch them straight through and let the entire piece wash over me, because in most cases, none of the films really have anything to do with the others. There might be an overarching theme that the producers draped over the proceedings to make it look as it there were a common theme, but I have to watch them as individual short films and judge them that way. It is much the same way that I watch collections of cartoons. It's not the collection that is important, but the individual films.

And so it shall be with the first volume of Fun Size Horror, a creepy little anthology that came out last year and which is playing currently on platforms like Hulu and Amazon for the Halloween season. No really big names in this, though favorites of mine like Lance Reddick and John Ennis do show up briefly, Fun Size Horror takes its name to heart, delivering chunks of dark devilry each no more than a few short minutes in length. Enough time to take a good, bloody bite and move on to the next one.

To stay true to my word, I am going to assign each short piece a temporary rating based on how it came off for me independent of the others. Then I will average out the ratings, and modify the result (only slightly) based on how all of the shorts played together as a collection. It might not seem fair since they don't seem designed to play off each other (and they aren't), but Fun Size Horror was released as a collection, so the final rating will be in how it played that way.

There are twenty shorts in this 85-minute feature:

When They Say You're Alone 
Dir.: Grant Olin
Rating: 6/9
Kind of a pretentious start, though I know these weren't planned to go in a certain order. This one certainly hits the "creepy" factor, as it would be hard for any of us to fall asleep if we knew for certain that things like this might occur when we were at our most vulnerable. I like director Grant Olin's (who did the animated opening for the collection as well) use of time lapse and the lack of any dialogue, and those strange sticky flowers are a nice detail. A nice way to tell a story with the briefest of information but still squeeze every inch out of the visuals. Very simple but effective.

Knock Knock
Dir.: Anthony Lund
Rating: 5/9
An asthmatic kid attempts to do battle with a monster in his closet but loses his sword on the way. This one is really built around its final shot, which is fine, I guess, but leaves the clip a little dull and a little standard. So much more could have been done with this and it left me pretty cold. Not bad, and fairly well shot... just generic.

Happy Birthday
Dir.: Erin Stegeman
Rating: 6/9
I am kind of wrestling with this one in my head. It's solid "sick" humor of the sort in which E.C. Comics specialized and its nice to see it practiced in these politically correct times. However, the "sick" punchline involves puppies, which does make Mr. Animal Rescue me a tad squeamish, so consider this a warning if you don't want to see such a joke taken a little too far. (Don't worry... as far as I know no actual puppies were harmed, but I would not be all that upset if I found out if a certain overly precocious child actor got really horrid nightmares from the experience.) There are a couple of dialogue lines and details in the party that do not ring true given the outcome, so it almost ruins the party for me upon reflection. It should be acknowledged, however, that they do go for the comically gruesome in this one, and I do appreciate that. (By the way, the dog that plays the "puppy" is almost a dead ringer for my beloved dog Trouble when I was a kid.)

Entity
Dir.: Matthew May
Rating: 4/9
A guy helps two girls move into a new place, but the lights are out. For whatever reason, they end up looking in the attic with flashlights and find a creepy doll. Soon, they hear a thump, and then weird stuff starts happening in quick order. The three actors actually aren't bad, and almost make you want to settle into a longer story with them, but then it is over before it even started. As for the scary stuff... move on, please. That aspect is not even worth further mentioning except to say it is thoroughly bland, though in line with current tastes. Tastes that are not mine at all, I'm afraid.

Bad Eggs
Dir.: Max Isaacson
Rating: 6/9
A very silly sight gag that kind of works, especially in the payoff of what comes out of where. Señor Wences-type humor taken to the Lovecraftian level (but, you know, without the ventriloquist in sight, thereby making it mere puppetry). It feels the sort of thing that might have shown up in something like Spike and Mike's back in the '80s if it had just been animated instead. Very slight and sophomoric, but I rather wish that I had thought of it.

The Screaming
Dir.: Dick Grunert
Rating: 5/9
I really hate the final shot on this one, but I am having a hard time discerning just why. I just know that I don't like it. Until then, this mostly dialogue-free quickie is based around the notion of a "chain" horror, that quickly seems to cascade closer and closer to the person perceiving a certain sound but trying to understand the possible (?) growing terror. It's an interesting concept that I wish were handled better in its closing.

Persephone
Dir.: Lisa J. Dooley
Rating: 6/9
On a personal level, I was instantly on a protective edge with this short because the title is also the name given by two of my friends to their recently born daughter. Strange how we react that way to something as simple as a name. And I haven't even met the baby yet. Outside of that, this is a mostly successful short that follows the efforts of a young woman to free herself of a coffin. She's not the Bride in Kill Bill, but she still has to figure a way out. But will it be enough if she does? A decent payoff and acting in this one.

Voice
Dir.: Mali Elfman
Rating: 3/9
Either this one is a clever spoof of a community theatre acting workshop or it's actually a short play developed in a community theatre acting workshop that was put onto film that never should have been. I am going with the latter scenario. Awful acting from the beginning took me straight out of the only barely interesting premise. I mean, really subpar "I don't know what to do with my hands" acting. This is a shame, because the director is the daughter of Danny Elfman (she also has a small role in Persephone and is a producer on other shorts), and one of the actresses is Diva Zappa. Because of these factors, I gave Voice another shot – and yet another shot – and it still came up short for me. Ugh. Easily my least favorite of the lot.

Somebody's Watching You
Dir.: Ben Rekhi
Rating: 4/9
A reality show with murderous consequences, from which we are always about fourteen seconds away in real life anyway. I was willing to go along with this for a little bit, however staid the idea already is to me. The forced drama does ring true to what we expect from such shows, but that doesn't mean that I want to see it replicated onscreen. Didn't want to see such phoniness the first time, why do I need to see someone double down on it in an even falser version? Drama, drama, drama, drama, drama... splat. Done.

Trust
Dir.: Jerry Pyle
Rating: 6/9
I was loving this short for the first five-sixths of it, and thought it was well shot and the reactions of the two actors to each other were divine. It was, to this point, the first time in the film where I was genuinely thinking that someone was on the way to a great short... but then the final gag failed me. It didn't kill the film, because I knew that was exactly where the film was meant to go from the start. I just wish it had cleverness to match the wit of the rest of the short to that point. A really nice try, though the final gag knocked my rating down a peg.

The Lover
Dir.: Anisa Qureshi
Rating: 7/9
And then The Lover showed up next and showed 'em how its done. Probably the best composed cinematography of the lot thus far. A much better showcase for Mali Elfman, who is extremely effective and believable here as the spurned girlfriend who slightly self-destructively seeks to clear her life of all traces of her former lover. A really evocative character piece with a great ending.

The Creepy Fucking Kid in Apartment B
Dir.: Eric Pereira
Rating: 7/9
For the truly fun and original, turn to this one. The little psychic kid hanging around next door is indeed creepy, but not so creepy as what he portends. This is the first one that got a genuine "aha" moment out of me, though I wish the ultimate payoff were handled a little more deftly. It's another example of what used to be called "sick" humor, but the less said about the details, the better for your enjoyment.

A Dog and His Boy
Dir.: Zeke Pinheiro
Rating: 5/9
When I saw the title, I immediately thought of Harlan Ellison's controversial short story (and its subsequent cult classic film) A Boy and His Dog. My first guess was that Mr. Pinheiro had not read Harlan Ellison, given that this short is similar in ultimate outcome, albeit without the post-apocalyptic trappings. Then my second guess is that Mr. Pinheiro was at least made aware of Ellison and his litigious tendencies, and so transposed the title elements thusly. But this film is not about Ellison at all. It's a tribute to an entirely different source, one that I won't reveal here. Does it work? Well, I have some serious problems with the hows and whys of what occurs late in the film, and how even the location plays into those hows and whys. On the tribute and black humor levels, it almost works. But not quite.

Quad
Dir.: Ali Presley Paras
Rating: 6/9
No, it's not about a slasher in a wheelchair who has a murderous mind-meld with his helper dog Rottweiler. Four characters and four camera angles. You would think four different POV, but you would be wrong... almost. A pretty inventive short, based around three friends watching a slasher flick – and a secretive love triangle to boot – while something is wandering about the house around them. Because I have been rewatching The Wild, Wild West series recently, the images of the split screens constantly changing and sometimes combining reminded me of that show's graphics for going to and coming back from commercials. A packed little film that is actually a nice addition to the slasher canon. I don't know if it would work as a longer film, but for an experiment, it's pretty cool.

Let Me Go
Dir.: Glen Murakami
Rating: 6/9
This one gets the Super Overly Arty award for this movie. Gorgeously shot, though the effect comes off suited more for a Chanel No. 5 ad than an horror anthology. I almost wish that this dialogue-free piece were done fully as a silent film of the old school, because some of its imagery is entirely suited to the style. It's a lovely piece, but it is as ethereal as its ghostly female lead, and wisps away from the mind in direct contrast to how she doesn't depart from the mind of her former lover.

Mother
Dir.: Zeke Pinheiro
Rating: 7/9
Ooh, boy... I like this one. So, if you were expecting a baby, and the ultrasound revealed a whole bunch of spiders inside you instead, how do you think you would act? And what do you think would happen to your mate? That's what I thought. Very quick and very different, but the creepiest film in the entire bunch, especially if my wife were to have watched it (which she never would). Nice job, Mr. Pinheiro. (Don't worry, he's going to show up one more time here.)

Evil Voices Lie
Dir.: Grant Olin
Rating: 5/9
Someone watches a videotape of a man being interviewed who had been the captive of a famous serial killer. But something strange is happening during the tape. A very odd piece, and I honestly don't have much of an opinion on it. The film almost seems like it is a clip out of a longer piece, which may be its intent, but I don't really have an angle on this one. I may have to watch it again.

Paramnesia
Dir.: Michael May
Rating: 5/9
This one is far more ambitious but also more pretentious than director May's other short (Entity), and it is nicely shot for the most part. Once again, though, stiff acting undoes some of its effect, and there is just not enough here overall to really intrigue me.  

Bitter
Dir.: Ned Ehrbar
Rating: 6/9
A comedy short that at first seems like it has a nice reference to Richard Bachman (i.e. Stephen King) when one character seems to mockingly curse another much larger character with the word "Thinner" at the very beginning of the film. Then we discover it is a battle of two witches who each use single (or near single) word curses ending in "-er" at each other: the title word "bitter," "liver," "Hitler," with generally comic results in most cases. My favorite is "The Millers" and then the other character discovers to her horror that her entire DVR is now filled with nothing but recordings of the movie "The Millers". (I guess somebody had it in for that film; I still haven't seen it, but I like the joke.) Very light but a nice tonic after so much darkness.

Mr. Hendrix
Dir.: Zeke Pinheiro
Rating: 5/9
Another monster in the closet tale, this time with a scared kid who enlists his parents to check out the fiend. When the kid mentions that the boogeyman goes by the name Mr. Hendrix, this triggers bad memories for the father, who encounter the boogeyman in his youth. For me, this short is enhanced briefly by the presence of John Ennis (from Mr. Show) who plays the father's dad in a flashback, and the acting is solid throughout, even by the kid. But it is just too predictable a riff on previous work with the boogeyman character, including Stephen King's.

The Collection
Dir.: Josh C. Waller
Rating: 7/9
The director of Raze (the female fighting film, which I thought was a solid drive-in-style film, starring Zoe Bell) helms this short, which features Fringe's Lance Reddick as a professional photographer who has an agenda that goes beyond being merely sleazy. It turns out he has an antique camera that takes a "special kind of picture"... but what type of picture would that be? That's what innocent models with their eyes wide shut are for, silly... As far as a polished, finished piece goes, this one is aces.

And don't forget to sit through the credits...

Overall TC4P Rating: 6/9
The twenty films averaged out to 5.3 for me overall, but in discarding the films that I rated as "5", which is my middle rating, it turns out I enjoyed more of these films (11 films rated as "6" or "7") than I actively disliked (only 3 films rated as "3" or "4"). I am greatly surprised by this, as I honestly expected to dislike and even outright hate more of them. As a viewing experience, I have to rate this film a small success, and bump its rating up to a "6" overall, which is "good" on my personal ratings chart. I hope that Volume Two, which I will be reviewing in the coming weeks, will turn out so well.

RTJ

Recently Rated Movies: The Bridges of Tortured Accents

Seventh Son (2014)
Dir.: Sergei Bodrov
TC4P: 4/9

Up until a very few years ago, I was pretty much down for any fantasy film that came my way. The cast didn't matter, the special effects didn't matter, the fact that a film perhaps had a budget that was far too low for what it was trying to accomplish could only endear it to me more... and story? Who cares if it didn't make a lick of sense in the real world. All I needed was a dragon, assorted monsters, a wizard or a witch or two, some swashbuckling action, and some damsels in distress. And if the damsels in distress turned out to be the ones doing the swashbuckling, even better. (Sorry, guys... based on aesthetics alone, tough women are infinitely more interesting to watch than sweaty, nasty men.) 

Then digital happened. Then CGI happened. The ability to expand the size of battles and monster fights and all manner of wizardry happened. Films starting looking more and more gray-bluish and turd-brownish the more CGI was used. This didn't effect just fantasy films, but also science-fiction, historical epics, and war films. Every film, despite the disparate story elements and genres, all started looking the same to me, to the point where going to see a simple, two-person drama with bare bones camerawork (which once was anathema to me) seemed to be a reasonable antidote. And with the sameness, and of course, the success of giant franchises that ensured that knockoffs would hit us left and right, came the curse of too many films. We became inundated with movie after movie that all looked like the exact movie we saw the week before, in the same way that I right now can't tell the film version of The Giver from The Maze Runner from Divergent from The Hunger Games.

When I first saw the trailer for Seventh Son in a theatre, I was understandably confused. I had been for many years a fan of Orson Scott Card (and people, it is OK to still enjoy a person's writing even if you don't agree with his personal/political stance on some things). Apart from the Ender's Game series, I really loved The Tales of Alvin Maker series (though admittedly, I have not read the most recent two books in the currently six-book line). But here was the trailer for a film named Seventh Son, which is the title of the very first book in the Alvin Maker series, and yes, here onscreen is, like that book, a young apprentice who is the seventh son of a seventh son. But then dragons and witches and monsters show up in the trailer, and in my head, I start thinking that Hollywood has really screwed up this time. That's not the book I remember. Isn't it supposed to be in an alternate timeline of America? Where are the Native Americans? I scanned the very quick credits card that flashed at the end of the trailer and saw no sign of Card's name, and realized it was a totally different property. And since the trailer didn't look that interesting, there would be no need for me to see it until video.

And see it on video, I have. Years ago, I would have loved Seventh Son. It has Julianne Moore as a truly evil witch with little remorse, and that is OK with me, because I will watch her in anything. The film has a multitude of dragons and monsters, and that too is still OK with me, because I am at heart purely a monster guy. The monster effects here run hot and cold with me; every time that I was wowed by a particular effect, the next one would be a letdown. But there is one huge lizard-monster that slathers and slobbers effectively, so that sat well with me. Seventh Son also has Olivia Williams, and she kind of falls into the same camp as Moore for me, but she is sorely underused (as she often is). The film tries to go far too big given how thin its story is, which I guess would be to allow for more action from its male lead, Jeff Bridges, as an aging knight -- actually a "spook" in the parlance of this film -- who battles witches for a living but who long ago was involved in a tragically romantic way with Moore's sorceress. And this is where I really ran into trouble with Seventh Son.

Since I first saw Bridges in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot in the 1970s, ol' Jeff has been one of my consistently favorite actors. For a long time, I felt he was highly underrated and misused in Hollywood; suddenly, after over 30 years in the biz, the massive cult success of The Big Lebowski solidified him in the minds of the public forever, and then his Oscar win for Crazy Heart (after four previous nominations) just added to his legend. Since then, apart from True Grit (which was a smart choice and earned another Oscar nod), I feel he has gotten sloppy in the usual way of actors who have finally won an Oscar and then don't seem to try as hard. (R.I.P.D. anyone?) Then again, Jeff always did have a strange way of picking projects throughout his career.

And here in Seventh Son, taking on an action-heavy role, it seems that Bridges may have gotten too far out of his element. Thrust into a fairy-tale setting without a definite period -- I suppose we could define it mockingly as "medieval timeless" -- it is still noticeably European in look and feel, with most of the characters speaking with British accents. Not known for his Shakespeare, Bridges makes an odd attempt at his own style of accent, that doesn't seek to replicate the inflection of a certain people as much as he instead growl-shouts most of his lines in the hopes of landing somewhere near an accent that seems to fit in with the rest of the cast. And he is wildly inconsistent with it. 

Despite this, the more tender moments in the script (though there are few of them) are his better ones, where the growl-shout is turned down to a mere growl-mumble -- which could be Rooster Cogburn in armor for all we care -- and he is allowed to communicate more through close-ups with his considerable gift at charismatic expression. Overall though, it is a performance that I wouldn't be surprised gained a Razzie nomination this year (it came out theatrically in February 2015), and as much as it pains me, I would have to agree with the selection if they did. I can often admire actors who try things they never would normally try, but it seems that Ol' Jeff bit off more than he could chew here. (Strangely, he actually underplays in many instances, so the scenery is at least safe.)

There is considerable talent behind the camera: director Sergei Bodrov (Mongol), three-time Oscar winning production designer Dante Ferretti, composer Marco Beltrami, and co-writer Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things), and apart from Ferretti's work, it is all for naught. Especially galling is Beltrami's score, which is just far too over-the-top at every second of the film, and you wished for a defter touch in every scene. Combined with that wash of overall mediocre special effects work, and Seventh Son makes you wonder if is actually the work of a bunch of fourth sons of third son-of-a-bitches.

RTJ