Tag: movie

I dunno why I only watched E01 when it came out, catching up now. And mostly it's fine. Sometimes excellent, but suffers from Netflix Wants Eight Episodes Syndrome, where it could be a good 90-120 minute movie instead.

It's very very blatantly Harry Potterage. The spooky old castle school Nevermore, with secret passages, four cliques (Fangs, Claws, Scales, and Stoners, but also shapeshifters & psychics like Weds). The "Normie" (ruder but less obscure than Muggle) town where they sneak off for forbidden beverages (coffee instead of butterbeer), tho you rarely see them drink. There's places it's shot-for-shot ripping off Chris Columbus, but to be fair Columbus ripped off Tim Burton.

Like HP, you never see the supposed students in class, except rarely in Herbology, er, "Care of Carnivorous Plants". Which is Morticia's thing, it's odd to see it as a whole course here.

Composer Danny Elfman & producer Tim Burton are somewhat more restrained than usual, it's gothy but not goofy like his later stuff. I'm disappointed and surprised the episode in a circus (inexplicably present decades after touring circuses ended) didn't get all surreal and have chases thru halls of mirrors and dark rides while camera tricks simulate hallucination! THIS IS YOUR MOMENT, and you just miss it entirely.

Writing & direction are all over the place. Some eps are gothic mystery, very Poe-like. Some have gruesome action scenes, very nice. Others are wacky school hijinks like discovering the secret clubhouse. The psychiatrist visits are '60s sitcom trash, with a few wisecracks by Wednesday. In the last 4 eps, repeatedly: Wednesday barges into a room, makes accusations or demands, they turn out to be false or stupid, proven in the next scene or so. Sometimes she's assaulted with no fighting back. I expect more caution, forethought, and actual violence (not just threats) from an Addams.

Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) is 20 playing 16, and she's fine at it, very cute. Fits her ancestry by way of Gomez. She's maybe a little too stiff, classic Weds was sweet like arsenic, not bitter like cyanide. But awkward teenage serial killer years. Gotta love 'em.

Thing is fantastic. He's clearly the best actor on the show, and the real hero. They give good long closeups of his scars and stitches. He's never looked so alive. Just perfect.

I'm shocked to see myself write this, but Fred Armison as Uncle Fester was actually good. I loathe Fred, he's a black hole where humor goes to be sucked out of the Universe, he's grating, whiny, and hideously ugly in a way only a truly rotten Human monster could ever be… And the Fester makeup and writing, and his delivery, were… Not Jackie Coogan good, but acceptable. How. What dark rituals were enacted to make Fred act, for once in his fucking miserable object lesson of a life‽

Some actor casting…

Would-be boyfriend Tyler (Hunter Doohan) is 28 playing, uh, 30? He's creepy in the way Matthew Lillard was in Scream, and this (and his ability to never be useful in an emergency) is why I pegged him early as the monster.

Enid & Xavier (ludicrously pronounced "Eks-ave-ee-er" rather than "havv-iyeh" or "szav-iyeh" like cultured people do) are played by young-looking 21-ish kids, but many other "students" are in late-20s and it shows.

Luis Guzman is adequate at the romance with Morticia, clearly dotes on Weds, but he's ugly, unsuave, physically unfit to be sword-duelling Gomez Addams, and is 20 years older than Catherine Zeta-Jones even tho supposedly they were students together. John Astin & Raul Julia were the ideal any Gomez should aspire to. There's a million Mexican telenovela actors who could do this role better.

★★★½☆ So uneven I don't respect it, but I watched and so should you.

I thought I'd make it thru the entire series, but really three were at my dosage for the day. Still have H20, Resurrection, and End. I will get back to those, obviously everything up thru Nightmare Before Christmas time is still Halloween.

• **Halloween I-II: Previously.
• **Halloween III: Season of the Witch: Even more previously.

• Halloween 4: Return of Michael Myers (1988): "Jesus ain't got nothin' to do with this place. This is where society dumps its worst nightmares. (continues recapping 1-2) Welcome to Hell!" Thanks, strangely informative security guard Jones. Mikey yet again breaks out of the asylum during a transfer on a stormy night, after a decade of sedation and doing nothing, he can punch a hole in a man's skull with his thumb. Laurie (JLC having better things to do) offscreen has a daughter Jamie (not Lee Curtis) and then dies. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) is back and having a great time! Despite the "burn" latex on his face & hands.

So most of the film is split as in 2 with Loomis pursuing Mikey, and Mikey pursuing a little moppet; she's cute but utterly ineffectual. Mob of grade-school bullies taunt her with "Jamie's an orphan!"; real bastard kids are more creatively evil. I do like the blatant horror tropes, flashbacks of Laurie to little Mikey, the psychopomp, crazy old preacher who talks about hunting apocalypse. New cop is surprisingly competent and ready to help, without a lot of "oh no I don't believe you". Town drunks & rednecks instantly form a posse/angry mob. But then Mikey's able to massacre multiple locations & critical infrastructure without any planning. I must say, the "guy cheats on girl so they must both die" bit, the new girl is much much hotter than Jamie's stepsister.

Best kill: The cheating girl. The setup is an offscreen kill but you think for a second Mikey's gonna shoot… nope! The rest are pretty lame.

And the chilling finale, looping back to the first film!

Like the first film, they shot it during spring, and here it's even more obvious, green lawns & Utah shrubbery instead of Midwest autumn leaves. Utterly implausible location/time. Soundtrack is lame, lite muzak imitation of Carpenter's score without the overwhelming electronic noise, but not played often, just stingers. Maybe the scariest thing in this film was, my overhead light started flickering & went out during the dark house sequence. Woo-eee-ooo.

★★☆☆☆ Adds nothing to the world.

• Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989): Recap of previous film, then a hobo in a shack with a parrot finds Mikey. Sir, Haddonfield, IL would be way too cold for a parrot to survive. Jamie is now a loonie after trying to murder her mom under Mikey's psychic control, and sees his visions… But she can't speak! Later this is dropped with no explanation. Loomis is histrionic, but has a moment of trying to talk to Mikey, with typical results.

Right off, this is gonna be a struggle. There's comic horn beeping when the cops (one is Troy Evans, more recently "Barrel" in Bosch) are in the scene. Kill off the recurring characters (stepparents are never seen, stepsister dies in minutes, "Tina" takes her place), bring in some bimbos too dumb to be valley girls on coke, imitation Fonzie, another dumb child for Jamie to sacrifice to Mikey.

Mikey is here played by a smaller actor (Don Shanks) in football pads, and he looks pathetic in shots where you can see him clearly. The same actor plays the "Man in Black" with really sweet boots that cost half the budget, but he does nothing.

The murder altar here is super out of character, more like something Jason would do. There's an impossible touching moment and unburned face.

Other than a few very short stingers, I don't even recall hearing music.

★☆☆☆☆ May be the least interesting slasher flick in history.

• Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995): Well this is a train wreck, but trying to build a cosmology instead of the random crap of the last movie. Most of a decade was wasted trying to get a script, Tarantino and others passed it around. I'm shocked anything gets made by Hollywood. I'm watching the standard version, there's also a "Producer's Cut" with a lot more magic conspiracy stuff? Hrmn.

Crazy Jamie is now 15 (but played by 20-year-old J.C. Brandy), held prisoner, impregnated, gives birth to a baby; by the Thorn Cult, the Men in Black seen previously with the ᚦ (thorn rune) on everything. Hot librarian Kara (Marianne Hagan), her son Danny being turned into another Mikey by the cult, and bad parents/victims now live in the old Strode house. Bad choices! Laurie's old babysitting brat Tommy (Paul Stephen Rudd) is now an online Mikey conspiracy theorist. Loomis (very old Donald Pleasence with no more burn latex) lives alone in the woods because that's a good idea. But soon Jamie manages to get the band back together by prank-calling the only radio station anyone listens to.

You know what I love about Haddonfield? Their commitment to Halloween, street parties and screaming at the handful of helpless cops, even tho every few years there's a giant bloody massacre. These people love to party. They love the sacrifice and tradition.

One perfect shot: Creepy landlady telling little Danny about Samhain, then Kara about babysitting little Mikey Myers… lightning flashes… and you can see Mikey standing outside thru the window. Good job!

A few of the kills are very gruesome, maybe even too much so, just gore & splatter bags exploding. Others are completely G-rated. Kara gets strangled and has no finger marks on her neck, often there's just a splash of blood, sometimes there's no blood on weapons. Mikey rarely poses the corpses, but a couple times they're set as traps/funhouse props, like the good old days.

Lot of running around Smith's Grove asylum, now a combination hospital/prison/medieval bedlam, and being played with by the Men in Black. Remember you don't have to outrun Mikey, you just have to outrun the slower person he's going to kill. Party members in the asylum come and go, they really don't know how to keep together.

Again barely has any music, except stingers, and a short piece when Mikey's stalking. Alan Howarth from Halloween II did a soundtrack, which was largely cut in editing, and there's a few hillbilly rock songs.

Credits:

In Memory of DONALD PLEASENCE

★★★½☆ Very flawed, half-assed, confused movie, covered in the viscera of a better movie that could've been. But watchable. This has been the high point of today, for sure.

• Ginger Snaps:

Warning: Dogs die in this movie. So do people, but dogs are more sympathetic.

In a shitty suburb somewhere in Canada, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) & Ginger (Katherine Isabelle) Fitzgerald are the cutest goth sisters, in love with death and horror, staging death scenes like Chainsaw & Dave from Summer School, but with less mercy. They play a game "DOA" of ideal death staging for mean girls they hate… real or filmed. Sam the drug dealer (Kris Lemche) in his panel van (gardening/tree management, good cover for a pot grower, ha ha) is a bit cliché, but has the obvious 3rd party member look.

Dad is completely useless, and rarely present. Mom is surprisingly cool, even offers an extreme solution to what she thinks is going on. But parents, awful kids at school, school counsellors, janitors, etc. are completely useless compared to the sisters.

The problem with a movie about SFX fans is if there's "real" gore or monsters, how do you show the difference? The corpses and monster look like talented but somewhat amateur Tom Savini or Rick Baker fans made them. The monster is filmed in the shakiest of shaky cams, so it doesn't have to be American Werewolf in London or even The Howling good, but if you pause or just have fast image memory, it's kind of too obviously staged.

The girls reaction to the attack and several changes happening to Ginger are the important part, tho. It's a film about female troubles first, the monster second. Ginger turns all hot and witchy, white stripes going thru her hair, the dumb boy obvious prey. Sam and Brig hang out plotting how to hunt lycanthropes:

Let's not panic here. For one, that thing on the road,
my van did a pretty good job on it,
without the benefit of silver bullets.
So, let's just forget the Hollywood rules.
There's gotta be a cure, right?
Otherwise there'd be a hell of a lot more of them.

And Ginger:

I get this ache, and
I thought it was for sex,
but it's to tear everything into fucking pieces.

Ginger gets worse and hotter, even the little tail is cute. But fucked. In wolf form she has six teats! For a chicks-empowerment movie, it does actually a lot of pinup posing of pre-monster Ginger.

I love how the suburban house has a giant maze of unfinished walls in the basement, almost like a sound stage filled with the cheapest building material.

The movie hits a climax and then just ends, rolls over and says "done" like a shitty teenage fuck. Which is why there's a sequel.

★★★★☆

• Ginger Snaps Back:

Brigitte is on the run, sometimes hallucinating her dead sister Ginger. And yet she uses her real name for her library card, Canadians are just that polite & orderly. A big, male werewolf is stalking her. She's shooting up with monkshood extract, and it's keeping the change at bay but not for long. And found like this, she's treated like a junkie and shoved in a semi-abandoned mental institution, played here by a real abandoned mental institution. She has maybe a month before she goes like Ginger?

The other people are annoying. Child named Ghost (Tatiana Maslany) dresses like a normie, but says spooky Emily the Strange type crap, crawls thru air ducts like Newt, immediately connects hints and badly painted comics to figure out "WEREWOLF" (where, wolf?) Asshole abusive orderly (Brendan Fletcher, scumbag/not-quite-heavy in every Canadian B-series ever) offers drugs/poison for whoring; pretty clearly you should not employ young men to control young women. Alice (Janet Kidder, somewhat upscale Canadian fill-in parts actress) as therapist, can put a guy's eyes out with her rockets, claims to be an ex-junkie who's done everything but looks way too fresh & professional for that.

Ghost eventually leads Brigitte into a dark outer world, the monster returns, running & screaming. Hmn. I've been assuming Ghost is like 12, but Tatiana Maslany is 19 in this, and the character drives a car. But then, Emily Perkins was 23 in the first one playing 15, is now 27 playing… 17? Best not to think about it, but Ghost makes it an issue at all times.

Ghost's hell-house & booby traps are the worst, only accidental victims. Of course, it's a big bad wolf attacking grandma's house thru the woods. And he's gonna huff and puff, or maybe get inside… some other way. But Ghost is no innocent Little Red Riding Hood, and Brigitte, Jeremy, & Alice aren't the Huntsmen.

I guess I like the ending, but a lot of the middle is tedious, obvious chase scene crap, minimal speaking cast unlike the first one, stock horror movie instead of a drama that happens to have monsters.

The new monster suit looks better, it sustains some longer shots. There's more Canadian alt-rock, the end song by Joydrop especially made me laugh.

★★★½☆

• Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning

An origin story nobody asked for. The sisters are back in 19th C (but C-average history student research) Canada, wandering around the woods (oh, cheapest of Z-movie sets) for no reason, to a fort where they seem awful paranoid of outsiders.

Either I'm very tired after 3 movies, or this is a very dull, formulaic film. They have occasional gunfights against the monsters outside, there's no mystery or even suspense. Couple wandering around Colonial Williamsburg type set and pretending to see monsters. The doctor's leeches turn weird & mutant if used on an infected, ripped off from The Thing.

There's a new bullshit mythology that personally killing the one who infected you, cures your infection. Obviously nonsense, as we know from the first/good film, it's a scientific infection not magic. Indian Hunter (Nathaniel Arcand, given no character name) claims white men brought the Wendigo along with other plagues, which is unlikely since the Algonquin myth predates the invasion of North America, is widespread northwest of them too, and isn't bestial, but a hungry giant.

The hunter's magic cave is lit with like $200 (CDN$300) of candles from Bed Bath & Beyond, doing drugs tells you what you should do, but of course the Fitz girls never do anything right.

The monster suits except the main one are pretty bad, and they don't do anything except growl and get killed, no fast attacks like in the previous movies.

What I think of when watching this is Ravenous (1999), which has a slightly similar premise, but the characters are fun, especially the antagonist, the mythology is creative and more authentic to Wendigo myths, the story suspenseful and morbidly fun. Everything this isn't.

No animals or werewolves were harmed in the production of this film.

★★☆☆☆

Another animated toy movie by Tim Burton. Seen it a couple times.

So a bland, personality-free, impoverished, moon-faced, aristocrat girl Victoria (as in "think of England", played by Emily Watson) is to marry a whiny, nervous fishmonger's son Victor (played by Johnny Depp), overly managed by their awful parents.

Sidebar: Depp used to be a fun junkie, at least at a distance, but with his repetitive creepy roles, his creepy relationships with younger women, the creepy details of his Amb-r H--rd marriage… I really don't want much more exposure to him. He's probably not quite Future Harvey Weinstein/Phil Spector/keeping bits of girls in bottles material like Leo DiCaprio is, but he grosses me out. Terrible people can make perfectly adequate actors, but too far and I only see that.

After making ill-advised vows in a forest to what is very obviously a charred skeleton, Emily (Helena Bonham Carter) rises and takes him to a magic wonderland/horrific underworld. She's lovely, fun, charming, only a little bit rotted and maggoty. AND he gets his dog back. Really any guy should be so lucky.

Weirdly, the surface world is Victorian era, but rendered in very close to monochrome, but the underworld is basically 1930s New Orleans, with jazz songs and brighter colors.

Victor's a cad, a jerk, a bore, who doesn't appreciate anything good in life, and just wants a bowl of gruel and the dullest girl produced by the dullest race on Earth. I really have no sympathy for Victoria, and I don't think Emily should either, because she's just so dull.

So Lord Barkis (Richard E. Grant) shows up and lurks around, vaguely someone connected but nobody bothers to figure out who he is, and there's no other guests so you'd think they'd really focus on him. Nope. Until he turns out to be… related to Emily's backstory. But he makes no sense. If he's a thief & lady-killer, there's no money to be gained from Victoria, did he just do no research? Serial killers (as opposed to spree killers) usually obsessively study their victims first.

When Victor finally does agree to die and join the hot (but grave-cold) girl, it's out of character. Everyone in the underworld is excited, but I don't believe it possible of him.

The dead returning to the overworld is great, that's what the film should mostly be, instead of a short screamy parade. Girls dissolving into a swarm of moths don't make any sense in the cosmology shown so far; you seem to stay dead and just keep rotting away down below.

Victor & Victoria are going to have a dull, miserable life, still totally owned & controlled by their parents, nothing at all has changed except she knows he cheats with dead girls.

Such cute character designs, and Emily's great, but the plot and loser living couple all but ruin it. Danny Elfman manages to do some out-of-character music, but mostly it's Batman/Edward Scissorhands soundtrack all over again.

★★★★☆ I guess but I'm always disappointed by it.

Back in the '90s, young goth industrial Mark watched this once a week or two, just as background angry music vibes, often before doing a radio show or DJ set. "Palm-slam the VHS in and do all the moves" as it were. Now I have a DVD which is almost too good, I dunno what I'd do with 4K Bluray, since the film to me is that dark, blurry vibe. There's terrible sequels & TV shows, and an upcoming whitewashed honkie sequel, which everyone involved with should die of shame. I'm only going to talk about the first one (and the original James O'Barr comic? Maybe sometime.)

Set on October 30th, "Devil's Night" in the film's world, I thought about waiting but I've got something else scheduled. And I need something a little more serious after the last few.

Eric (Brandon Lee) & Shelley are way too cute and nice, by now they'd be all cottagecore, Nightmare Before Xmas their favorite film, farmhouse and antique shop decorated with Hallmark® & pumpkins. But at this time, the returned Eric is all dark rage. Sarah the little girl and Darla the slut mom are kind of pointless, but it gives Eric someone to talk to in a few scenes. I hate Sarah's voiceovers.

His first kill, Tin Tin, is messy, no fighting skill but superior strength & speed, putting his knives back in him. His preying on the pawnbroker is a show of invulnerability, and cold rage. He's figuring out what he is and why.

"At least he didn't do that walking against the wind crap, I hate that."

Ernie Hudson as beat cop, occasional giant walking armory. I just wish he could do one Winston Zeddemore line.

Second kill of Funboy is all taunting and jokes and ironic killing with his own implements. Actually the first 3 are, arsonist T-Bird burned into his ride, but the last two (and all the thugs) stop being ironic.

"This is the really real world, there ain't no comin' back!"

Joyride with T-Bird, for once a bad guy recognizes that he's in a horror movie and not the monster this time. Eric's crow graffiti got more elaborate each time, after this he wouldn't have time to draw these out before the cops arrive, even as slow and useless as they are in the city.

• ♫ You things things things of the flesh! ♫ The Crow soundtrack

Boardroom meeting has a lot of Batman (1989) vibes. "Gentlemen!" in the same tone as painted-up Joker. Gang of disposable thugs. Invincible hero in black. But all the specific sides are backwards.

"I'm not Skank, that's Skank right there. Skank's dead!" "THAT'S RIGHT."

Final church duel, with an almost mortal Eric and Top Dollar, and creepy sister thinking she can use the crow's magic. Very Highlander, actually, I always expect lightning and Queen music here.

And then a gun with blanks, not checked for safety, shot Brandon Lee dead on set. They finished the missing scenes with the stunt double & bad CGI face swap.

"You didn't say goodbye. And you're never coming back."

★★★★★