hold onto yr genre

Early (French) horror, 1895-1896

2011-12-09T10:45:00.000-05:00

Le squelette joyeux, Lumiere Brothers, 1895
I still can't tell if this is an early example of stop motion or just decent editing.

Le Manoir du diable (The House of the Devil), Georges Melies, 1896
I am writing about both of these films a little bit in my paper on Jean Rollin. What I can't figure out with this film is whether or not it may be the first vampire film. I've read some articles that say that this film is based more on Faust. I consider it a haunted house film with a sorcerer. But the sorceror can change into a bat...so I don't know. Thoughts?

Notes on Shulie (1997/2000?)...

2011-12-07T10:30:00.000-05:00

Dir. Elizabeth Subrin || 1997/2000 (?) || USA

I am in the process of making up the viewing and work for my Experimental Film class this past quarter. It was the only class I had to completely stop attending because the films tended to cause relapses with bad headaches and nausea. Since my professor tended to show films that were actual film prints, some of the films I will never be able to see. So she gave me an alternate list of sorts for anything that was not on VHS or DVD. Shulie was one of the alternate films. In this class, I have tended to enjoy the films made by women or LGBT people more than the other films. Looking at my journals I had/have to keep for this class as apart of the coursework, I occasionally made or make the correlation between some experimental films and my old medium of zines. When I made, read, and distributed zines I tended to prefer ones made by women and LGBT people. Both mediums tend to be done as art for art's sake, and not to make money...although some experimental film makers like Kenneth Anger wanted to be mainstream and never totally got there. Not too different from some people in zines, although those people tend to be frowned upon, if not downright shunned. Both have their own distribution networks or similar set-ups. Another theme of my journal entries tended to be varying levels of indifference towards the films, which is basically my attitude towards zines for the past five or six years to the point where I rarely read them now. I owe a lot to (post-riot grrrl) zines for helping me develop critical thinking skills, but it's those same skills that kind of make me unable to read zines much now.

Anyway...

[SPOILERS AHEAD...although you can probably only find this film at university libraries...which are open to the public, I might add]

Shulie is an odd film. Its set-up is that it is a found-footage documentary on feminist Shulamith Firestone that was shot in Chicago in the late 1960s while Firestone was about to receive her BFA in painting. This hearkens back to the idea that a lot of women's creative work has to be found or re-discovered, which was a big part of the second wave feminist movement that Firestone was a part of. In turn, at least in literature and sometimes in art, this allowed more women to become a part of the canon. This film may also be pointing out that this needs to be done with Firestone...which while I have heard of her occasionally, I admit to have never read her work. After watching this film, I would like to, but her most famous book is out of print and used copies on Amazon cost anywhere from $35-500.

But eventually, the found footage concept has some holes poked into it. When Firestone is being asked about being apart of the "Now" (NOW? Is this a play on words/later organizations, perhaps?) generation, and she gives an indifferent answer about how she only occasionally stops by protests; there are shots of people in the park putting on facepaint and they look somewhat modern and a bit crust punk-y. Subrin then has a shot of a kid playing basketball in a very modern Chicago Bulls jersey. I am not totally sure what this scene is supposed to convey. Firestone never speaks of feeling alienated from the protests in the film, so I am not sure if this a commentary on the romanticizing of the 1960s that went on in the 1990s or what. I cannot think of or remember much of what people would protest in the 1990s except the WTO...but then again, I was a teenager in the 1990s.

Another issue as that time goes on, you notice how charmingly, then oddly self-aware Firestone is. Like any young person, she kind of hates where she currently lives. She speaks early in the documentary about wanting to move to NYC to live with the other outcasts. She speaks of art school making her more inarticulate at the age of 22 than she was at the age of 18 (I strangely feel the same way about grad school). But there edges of radicalism that likely became more pronounced when she published The Dialectics of Sex at the age of 25. So perhaps this is an attempt to make her more human and relatable, since there is this tendency in feminism to mistakenly think that the more popular or famous feminists are not really human or to treat them as if we own them (not too different from any fandom really). I had an English professor who freaked out when Gloria Steinem got married. Ten years ago, people were more freaked out that Kathleen Hanna* of Bikini Kill/Le Tigre** was dating a Beastie Boy because the Beastie Boys second album was sexist. But anyway, self-awareness was a 1990s thing, no?

Then there is the scene where Firestone's artwork is critiqued by a group of her (male) professors. There is something odd and uncomfortable about this scene, and it hearkens back to the scene earlier in the film where Firestone explains her current inarticulateness. Part of me wants to claim that this scene is over the top, but perhaps it is not, given the time period. Another part of me is sympathetic to Firestone in this scene just because well, similar scenes are in my future as a grad student.

And then there's the twist...that this entire film was a recreation of that documentary. I still have not decided how I feel about this. Subrin does a remarkable job with making much of the film look like it was shot in Chicago circa the late 1960s (all hail the Super 8!), and if it was on purpose, gradually pulling the curtain behind the fact that it was a recreation. It is only in the last 15-20 minutes of this 37-minute film that the issues start to pop up. But I am still trying to work out this "twist"...

* Kathleen Hanna is given a shout out in the credits of this film.
** Sadie Benning, ex-Le Tigre band member, makes experimental films as well and worked on this film. I consider her the Matt Sharp of Le Tigre, since the band suffered on a few levels after she left, including music-wise.

What I've been watching lately in four sentences or less

2011-12-05T10:45:00.000-05:00

The Fall of the House of Usher (1929 || Dir. Jean Epstein || France)
Not nearly as surrealist as some would have you believe.

Blood and Roses (1960 || Dir. Roger Vadim || France)
A slightly more heteronormative-incestuous take on Carmilla, but still interesting.

Au Hasard Balthazar (1966 || Dir. Robert Bresson || France)
Poor donkey.

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011 || Dir. Joe Johnston || USA)
The most watchable and fun out of the Marvel Studios films released this year. No daddy issues ('sup, Thor?), and it doesn't take itself too seriously ('sup, X-Men: First Class?). It honestly has Cap jumping a ramp on a motorcycle, away from an exploding Nazi camp. Cap runs away from explosions quite a few times in the film, so it almost cancels out the terrible creepiness of the first 30 minutes consisting of Chris Evans being made to appear shorter and skinnier through CGI.

The Awful Dr. Orloff (1962 || Dir. Jess Franco ||France-Spain)
Jess Franco's first film, a slightly sleazier retread on Eyes without a Face. It's not a very entertaining retread and the era it takes place in is indeterminable.

The Spirits of the Dead (1968 || Dirs. Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, Federico Fellini || France-Italy)
European artsy-sleazy takes on Poe stories with pretty people? Bet you didn't know Fellini could do head decapitations, did you? I would like to frame most of the shots in Fellini's segment "Toby Dammit" and put it on my wall because that man could do Technicolor. The anthology is pretty good, although Malle's story isn't that great except for being able to look at Alain Delon and a brunette Brigitte Bardot.

Faceless (1987 || Dir. Jess Franco || France-Spain)
Another retread of Eyes without a Face by Jess Franco, this one being better, if a bit repetitive and drawn out. There are nods to The Awful Dr. Orloff.

Flyboys (2006 || Dir. Tony Bill || USA)
A dull movie that takes itself too seriously, despite what the trailer would have you believe sometimes (i.e., guy running away from explosion on top of a zeppelin). I fast-forwarded through much of the last hour and was a better person for doing that. Someone should have told James Franco that there were no frosted hair tips during World War I.

Punisher: War Zone (2008 || Dir. Lexi Alexander || USA)
The most comic book out of all comic book movies - the colors, the over-the-top violence and characters (complete with bad NYC accents for the villains), the cinematography - all comic book. Sometimes the film drags a little, but then there's another insane set piece.

Don't Open 'Till Christmas (1984 || Dir. Edmund Purdom || UK)
I watched this because the guy who played the dean in Pieces stars and directed this movie. I guess if the idea of a serial killer killing people in Santa suits sounds good, check it out. Otherwise, I can't recommend it because that's really all the film is: killing Santas and some police procedural - it's as if the movie was being written as it was filmed. This movie makes Silent Night, Deadly Night look profound.

Burnt Offerings (1976 || Dir. Dan Curtis || USA)
Many of the daytime scenes were very washed out looking and I am not totally sure why. It's perhaps better than most haunted house movies, if a little slow sometimes (this is a high compliment from me, considering that I've never been one for haunted house films). The ending is quite good and dark.

C.H.U.D. (1984 || Dir. Douglas Cheek || USA)
Not a terribly bonkers horror film, but it has a good "future stars" cast, good special effects, and it fits in well with other early 1980s gritty NYC horror films.

Children of the Corn (1984 || Dir. Fritz Kiersch || USA)
While I haven't read the short story since I was probably 12, this is not a good movie. It's like a moralistic, somewhat dull, and ballsless version of Who Could Kill a Child?. The film also has this bizarre dichotomy of the two good, non-cult children being cute, while the majority of the children in the cult are either awkward-looking or ugly.

The Bride Wore Black (1968 || Dir. Francois Truffaut || France)
Bet you didn't know that Truffaut did semi-Hitchcockian revenge films, did you? This is not a bloody film, but quite clever.

(Lazy) Feminist Horror Friday: The Shrine (2010)

2011-12-02T12:30:00.000-05:00

Dir. Jon Knautz || 2010 || Canada

I came across The Shrine on Netflix Watch Instantly a couple of weeks ago. I added it to my queue based on the cover and decided to watch it last night because it has a fairly short running time and I needed something to watch somewhat half-assedly while I fixed some issues with a knitting project. I thought that The Shrine would be another Hostel retread with stupid Americans getting into dangerous situations with dangerous people in Europe. The film touts itself as such for much of the first hour, but with more mystery and slightly less torture. But the film takes a turn in the final half-hour and becomes something completely different and unexpected. And despite how quickly the situation in the film changes and is resolved, the change works!

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

What is hard to parse out however is the behavior of the characters in the film, and whether or not the filmmakers are taking a moralistic tone. If they are, it seems to be in a half-assed or lazy manner (much like my watching it and this review). The Shrine seems to be going for a gender role reversal, but it is debatable how well it works. On the surface, it seems to be saying, "stupid women and their need to have successful careers." The female lead, Carmen (Cindy Sampson), is a struggling journalist, apparently dealing with being somewhat blacklisted after writing an article on some unnamed controversial subject. Her boyfriend, a photographer named Marcus (Aaron Ashmore) is upset that she always brings her work home and pays more attention to her Blackberry than to him. He does not seem to begrudge her for wanting a career, just that he wishes that she would be present for their time together. Fair enough. But Marcus still agrees to go with Carmen and her intern Sarah on a lark assignment Carmen has cooked up. Carmen fails to win Marcus over on the idea that it will be a vacation for them at least. Carmen betrays her boss' assignment of doing an article on the disappearance of bees in Oklahoma (this seems to be a dig at the idea of global warming and disappearing bee colonies...which is important), and instead pursues her idea of an article on the disappearance of an American backpacker in a small Polish village. The backpacker is not the first mysterious disappearance in this village. Of course, Carmen, Marcus, and Sarah come across unfriendly locals. The two women go into the strange fog in the woods that the backpacker wrote about in his journal. They encounter a statue similar to the Pazazu statue from The Exorcist. Once they get out of the fog, the film turns into a capture-escape situation with the locals.

Throughout the film, Marcus is the one who hangs back, tells them they need to get out of the town before it's too late, and is generally the downer. For that, he is rewarded the rare role of "Final Boy." Much like Juno in The Descent, Carmen is the one who pushes things, takes risks, puts everyone in danger, and eventually suffers for it. The risk is displayed as equal opportunity (meaning even slackerly backpacking men have gone into the fog and have been killed for it too). But since this is Carmen and Marcus' story, this fact is easy to bypass for the final scene. Although it is implied early on that it is men who have disappeared from this town, not women. The final scene is a showdown between a possessed Carmen and the local men. Apparently when people go into the fog in the woods and encounter the Pazazu statue, they slowly become possessed by evil. Some of the priests and men of the village have taken it upon themselves to protect the world from this evil by killing anyone who enters and exits the fog. Usually, they kill the possessed person before they transform. But this time, Marcus was able to save Carmen from the killing cave. They flee to a house where Marcus holds the parents hostage until their English-speaking child gives them the keys to their car. Carmen becomes possessed, then kills the entire family. The priests arrive and she fights them, killing a few and maiming others. Nonetheless, she is dispatched with the reluctant help of Marcus. Is there a need to do the math on this? (Possessed)(Career) woman kills a family and is in turn killed by priests. Then the film ends!

There are two ways of looking at this film. One is that I appreciate the turn that the film takes. It is different and different enough that I can almost forgive the holes and rough scenes with green screen due to its low budget. But The Shrine mashes up its three types of horror well, even if that mash up is sudden. It is your average DJ whereas something like American Horror Story is almost Girl Talk. And the film is another Canadian horror film that features adults in danger instead of teens. The other is the surface story that is not so great when you closely look at it. I feel quite divided about it just because it is not a terribly nuanced gender role reversal, it is more of a total gender role reversal where it is almost impossible to support or even like the characters. There are molecules of humans within the characters, but the film is too short to stray off course of sensitive, supportive boyfriend and career woman girlfriend character types.

What I have been watching lately: Jean Rollin, Red State, The Walking Dead, American Horror Story...

2011-11-20T22:30:00.000-05:00

I should be working on papers right now, although I took an extension on them for Winter Break because of intermittent severe headaches and vision problems leftover from my concussion in October. I have no control over when they happen, and unfortunately they keep happening when I want or need to write or do research. My papers, as I predicted in October, are on Jean Rollin, classical French film theory, and I also have one on Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon that I have been sitting on, unfinished, since the day before my concussion. I have been on a French film and surrealist bender this quarter. I have been watching a lot of Jean Rollin's films this year and this past month. While my paper will only be focusing on The Rape of the Vampire and The Night of the Hunted (one of his three "zombie" films), I have still been watching anything of his that interests me or that I can get my hands on. The only one of his films that I cannot recommend at any level is Zombie Lake, which oddly enough, is his fairly straight zombie picture...I say "fairly straight" because it does have a story line where one of the Nazi zombies has reunited with his pre-teen daughter...although the Nazis were assassinated during of course, World War II by the villagers, and the film seems to take place in 1980, which makes no sense if the daughter is ten years old. Zombie Lake was also one of Rollin's lowest budgeted pictures, and that's saying something if you have ever seen any of his movies or read much on his films. It is one of the few Rollin pictures where you can tell that it seemed impossible to make the most of what little money there was.

Yeah, I don't know either. At least the Italians made their zombies look all arts & craftsy, what with the papier mache faces.

I think I discovered Rollin at a good point, considering for the past couple of years or so, I have been quite bored with horror at times. While Rollin has his obsessions that anyone will notice if they watch enough of his films, including how entrenched he is in surrealism well after its time as an art movement was over; I like how unconventional his films are. His endings are rarely happy and even if certain films end relatively well for the characters, there is still a sense of melancholia or even a looming sense of death.

Speaking of unconventional horror films, I watched Red State last weekend. I am not a Kevin Smith megafan. I liked his movies when I was a teenager, but now I tend to see every other one if it sounds kind of interesting. Red State is not a perfect film - it is not subtle in its message, it's final message is kind of mixed, Melissa Leo's acting was over the top, and the opening scene at the high school bugs me to no end because that is not how a public school teacher acts in any era; but it is unconventional. It is almost like Full Metal Jacket how abruptly it switches gears, tone, and the characters we follow. Who we expect to live just based on horror conventions, likeability, or even logic is defied. The only other good thing I can say about the film is that John Goodman is awesome in it. I have missed seeing John Goodman in movies.

I have been watching a lot of bad TV this past week since last Monday night I had the worst headache I have had since hitting my head. My doctor says it is okay if I watch stupid things. So I was bedridden for a couple of days watching nothing but the second season of The Walking Dead so far and whatever episodes of American Horror Story I could find on Hulu.

I was not a total fan of the first season of The Walking Dead. I maintain that the first episode was wonderful. But if I have to remain diplomatic at some level, I will say that the even numbered episodes were terrible, while the odd ones were better. Other than Rick being Sherriff Exposition for the first five minutes of the second season premiere, the first episode of this season was pretty good. Unfortunately, it has become tedious and like a spinning tire*. I look forward to this week's episode if it means opening up the zombie barn and maybe losing a few more characters. The series likes to project things, then take several episodes, if perhaps another season to get to the issue and/or resolve it. Lori's pregnancy for example. What is being projected this year from the main characters and secondary or even tertiary characters is Rick's leadership, the issue of neglect, and the idea of splitting up the group. Shane and Andrea, obviously. Daryl in last week's episode (and Daryl truly needs to ditch the group, even if it means taking boring old Carol), and in the second episode, T-Dog, even if he reneges on the idea later. What I find weird about T-Dog's "fever" thoughts is that he is right - he, Dale, and sometimes even Glenn are sidelined because of their age (Dale) and races (T-Dog and Glenn). Women on this show are sidelined altogether. The Walking Dead is not exactly Lost, where we learn about each character every week. Granted, Lost was not a perfect show either and harped on the Jack-Kate-Sawyer love triangle for several seasons, but at least each character got his or her individual episodes! And maybe The Walking Dead is going in that direction a bit this season, where we followed Shane and his adventure to get medical supplies to help Carl, and last week's episode with Daryl in the woods, but it was too little and did not establish much beyond what we already knew: Shane is likely deranged, and Daryl is a badass...and oh, he's not as racist as his brother Merle because he has saved T-Dog at least three times by now**. I think they fired last season's writers and replaced them with even worse writers. But yeah, the group will at least temporarily disband before the season is over. And maybe Lori will finally tell Rick about her pregnancy and/or her time with Shane, and maybe The Walking Dead will finally have a Maury Povich-based episode. And I guess Daryl better watch it since characters played by noted indie character actors do not live forever on this show, as this season has shown yet again.

We know that Shane is crazy because of the shaved head, vacant stare, mouth agape, and furrowed brow.

American Horror Story is at least fun-bad and thoroughly entertaining. It is truly the most batshit live-action television show I have ever seen. The pregnant wife eats a brain like it's no thing! There is a teenage boy stuck in 1994 who frequently speaks of Kurt Cobain (just Kurt Cobain, never Nirvana), Quentin Tarantino, Al Pacino, and Robert DeNiro; and the depressed neo-Blossom Russo-dressed teenage daughter of the family nevernever asks him his opinion on the more recent and terrible movies Pacino and DeNiro have been in! I have never been one for haunted house stories, but American Horror Story takes your average haunted house story and amps it up several times over and then combines it with at least one other horror story or trope every week, usually more than one! It is hard to say if there is a bigger meaning to this show, I doubt it even knows. The classmate who told me about this show said it was Ryan Murphy's gay revenge on America. We keep discovering the lives of the previous inhabitants who are now ghosts of the house. There is the drunk surgeon-turned-abortionist-turned-mad scientist and his wife, two nursing students (one overweight, one marked as Latino), a gay couple, a woman who was raped, the pregnant mistress maybe, the male redheaded twins...but we also have the people from the home invasion episode, and rubber man who may or may not be a ghost. I mean, I guess redheads have been persecuted throughout society. Some people believe that everyone on this show is a ghost! We will eventually find out that the house was built on an Native American burial ground, because why not?

American Horror Story is also fun because most episodes feature at least one "hey, it's that guy!/lady!" moment.

Rubber Man, Rubber Man. Does whatever a rubber can...except not.

* Yesterday, I read this post at the TCM Movie Morlocks blog that discusses how bloodthirsty zombie movie fans and movie characters are these days. I would not say that I am a bloodthirsty zombie fan or that the characters on The Walking Dead are bloodthirsty (although that is another inconsistency, especially with Rick). I would like The Walking Dead to be a watchable show that like in the first episode, does consider that the zombies were people once. Overall, I would like a good story and some characters I could care about and who are maybe more thoughtful or intelligent. The only thing The Walking Dead has been somewhat good at displaying is the tried-and-true story method of humans being just as dangerous to humans as zombies are, if not more so.

** 2011 seems to be the year of the (good) redneck in horror. I finally saw Tucker and Dale vs. Evil a couple of weeks ago because it surprisingly came to the indie theater in town (I guess because it takes place in West Virginia, and I live about 40 minutes away from the West Virginia state line now). I was worried that it would not meet my expectations because I have been anticipating this movie for almost two years, but I also had no idea what the film was about past the trailer. It was a good, fun movie that was surprisingly sweet and had some interesting twists to the story and characters. And yes, the film was quite gory at times. So there are surprises out there every once in awhile.

On hiatus until at least December

2011-10-15T13:25:00.000-04:00

This blog is on hiatus until December for the following reasons:

1. Grad school
2. I suffered a mild concussion 2 weeks ago. On top of having trouble keeping up with schoolwork (and my doctor telling me that I should not even be watching movies or reading, which I have to do as a Film Studies student), another side effect is that I am having trouble writing and expressing ideas and thoughts well. This is not conducive to blogging or having two long papers due at the end of the quarter, so the papers take precedence. Give it up for the papers on Jean Rollin and probably some classical French film theory!

I am trying to keep the "Past 10 Films Watched" sidebar active, and I am still tweeting sometimes, but the account is private now. I am open to adding new people, just say "hello" or something if I do not recognize you at first. If you look at the handful of blogs I link to, they are almost all doing something in honor of October.

The only other thing I have to add is that you can continue to ignore the existence of Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, unless you really like that guy from Burn Notice that isn't Bruce Campbell. There was no Book of Shadows, or any books at all, and the Blair Witch supposedly has some bitchin' video editing skills. What a regrettable amalgamation of late 1990s horror trends (found footage, supernatural, twist endings, and post-modernism).

Films Watched 08/28/11-09/03/11

2011-09-10T09:28:00.000-04:00

Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story
Dir. Jeffrey Schwarz || 2007 || USA

A neat and informative little documentary about the life of William Castle, director and producer most known for horror films like The House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler and (producing) Rosemary's Baby. The film discusses Castle's childhood as an orphan and eventual sideshow performer, where he learned promotion tactics he would later put to use to promote his theatre work (occasionally with Orson Welles) and his more well-known films. The documentary also discusses Castle's few thwarted attempts to be taken more seriously: he bought the rights for the book that would eventually be The Lady From Shanghai, which was snatched from him and given to Orson Welles to direct; Castle also bought the rights to Rosemary's Baby only to fight with the studio over his directing it. Castle was charmed enough when meeting Roman Polanski that he was okay with the film being handed over to him to direct. There is also one of Castle's final films with mime Marcel Marceau. Because the documentary is co-produced by one of Castle's daughters, the film does cast him in a very loving light, but it does not seem suspect because Castle seemed to be a likeable person.

The Long, Hot Summer
Dir. Martin Ritt || 1958 || USA

A film like The Long, Hot Summer should not be a slog to get through, but it is. A combination of two William Faulkner short stories ("Barn Burning" being one of them, the other I do not know), the film is bogged down by subplots, daddy issues to better show off Anthony Franciosa's Method acting skills, and an overlong "will they or won't they" romantic plot between Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Newman and Woodward's chemistry was so palpable that their plot just became annoying. Given the time period this film was made in, the film could only dance around the idea so much that the fellow that Woodward's character wanted to marry was gay. And while "Barn Burning" does concern daddy issues, that's not Anthony Franciosa's storyline, but Newman's. I am not sure the heavy handed issues involved with Franciosa's character belong in this movie, even if the "oh, Southerners can be such colorful characters" sentiment is at a bare minimum for a movie that takes place in Mississippi. The funnest moment in the film is when Angela Lansbury and Orson Welles are playing around and drinking beer on the porch while watching Paul Newman's character auction off horses. There is just a silly simplicity to it that is not filled with tension or fronts about needing to have any overwrought drama just because that sort of thing was popular in this time period.

Little Otik
Dir. Jan Svankmajer || 2001 || Czech Republic

Little Otik, based on a folktale, concerns a modern married couple who are both sterile, but desperately want a baby. Like the folktale, the husband pulls a tree root from the ground that resembles a baby. In the film, when the husband does it, he gives the tree root to his wife as a joke. But the wife's case of baby rabies is so bad that she immediately does consider the root her child and plots to fake a pregnancy for appearance's sake just so they can eventually bring the root baby back to their apartment in the city while making frequent visits to the cabin in the country where the root baby is kept. Once they do bring the root baby to the city, terrible things begin to happen as in the folktale. Svankmajer is known as being an animator, and Otik and a few other things are animated, but the majority of the film is live action. While it is not to be considered a horror movie per se, it is creepy, funny, and sad.

Crossroads
Dir. Walter Hill || 1986 || USA

Crossroads is known as the film where Ralph Macchio gets into a guitar battle with Steve Vai for the soul of an elderly bluesman who once sold his soul to the devil. It is a good road movie, Jami Gertz does not grate on my nerves for once, Joe Morton kind of plays a bad guy for once, and the guitar battle is cool. I am sure when Crossroads is re-made, Steve Vai will be replaced by John Mayer and I will puke.

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
Dir. Peter Greenaway || 1989 || UK

While this can be an unsettling film to watch, I have the notion that the only reason it is NC-17 is because of male full frontal nudity and light cannibalism (oh, and the opening scene involving feces). The film is shot somewhat like a stage play, but it dollies in a fluid motion from one room or space to another, with costumes that are somewhat color coded (and designed by Jean Paul Gaultier) and it is also a somewhat painterly film. I would understand if this film influenced Julie Taymor in some way for her adaptation of Titus Andronicus. It is a great film to just look at, because that is mostly what I did for at least the first half hour because it was hard to watch Michael Gambon's character (the thief) just berate his wife (Helen Mirren) and his lackeys, and restaurant employees for so long.

Dreamscape
Dir. Joseph Ruben || 1984 || USA

When Inception was released last year, various blogs posted on how either Inception ripped off a old Scrooge McDuck comic or how Inception ripped off Dreamscape. Dreamscape is primarily about using psychics to get into the dreams of people who are having sleeping problems that involve terrible nightmares or night terrors so that they may be helped. Noble enough cause, but a secret government agency also wants to use the same psychics to work as assassins based on the idea that if you die in a dream, you also die in real life. Dreamscape gets the concept of dreams better than Inception does, especially when the protagonist, Alex (Dennis Quaid) helps a little boy who is having bad nightmares as well as at the end of the film. It also has a half-man, half-cobra, so Dreamscape wins; even if the stop-motion animation for the half-man, half-cobra is a little rough. I do not know why the cover of the DVD makes it look as though it is an Indiana Jones rip-off.

The Expendables
Dir. Sylvester Stallone || 2010 || USA

The most shocking thing about The Expendables is that I am pretty sure 25% of the film is devoted to or talking about the troubles with women the men on the team have. It is as if Stallone and his co-writer went on a recent Judd Apatow movie binge. It is a fun action movie and it is fun to see the new and old action heroes together, but it does drag in some parts. Stallone seems to like casting female Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel alums in his newer films (this time it is Charisma Carpenter as Jason Statham's on-off girlfriend; in Rambo it was Julie Benz as Rambo's daughter), as well as CGI blood and fire. And while the film tries to nudge at it a bit, I appreciate Stallone's sense not to give his character a romantic interest who is at least half his age. Stallone has sort of placed himself as a father figure in these films. Frankly, that was also one of the few things I liked about Hobo with a Shotgun as well; that Rutger Hauer's character was more of a father figure to Abby, the prostitute character and not a potential love interest.

Timecrimes
Dir. Nacho Vigalondo || 2007 || Spain

Timecrimes is an interesting film that takes a very basic approach to time travel while trying to confront a few paradoxes about time travel and traveling back in time for even just a short amount. As odd as this may sound, at a micro level the film deals with the consequences of an average middle-aged man becoming a time traveler and trying to fix a tragedy that his time travel caused. Both the man and the young scientist who turned the machine on too early are so inept about what to do or how to approach the situation that the man is left to his own devices for the worst possible outcomes, both devised and inadvertent. While the man is able to piece things together, he does not know how to actually fix things.

Krull
Dir. Peter Yates || 1983 || UK

I do not know what to make of Krull because I am not into fantasy films much and I am not a 10-year-old boy. Krull seems to be based on the premise "What do 10-year-old boys in 1983 like? Star Wars and quest movies! Both have princes and princesses!" Krull looks very much like a medieval-type quest film, but there are light effects coming out of the swords during fight scenes and it takes place in space on a medieval-looking planet. There are some cool special effects, sets, a puppy at one point, and a young Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane; but the quest is very long and that makes the movie hard to sit through.

Flesh for Frankenstein & Blood for Dracula (a.k.a. Andy Warhol's Frankenstein & Andy Warhol's Dracula) (1974)

2011-09-05T10:56:00.000-04:00

Dir. Paul Morrissey || 1974 || US-Italy-France & Italy-France

It is advisable to watch Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula back-to-back if possible. It is how they were made and both have the same main three actors (Udo Kier, Joe Dallesandro, Arno Juerging) in similar roles - Kier as Dr. Frankenstein, then Dracula; Dallesandro as the proletariat servant-gigolo, and Juerging as Frankenstein and Dracula's assistants. Although the films appear to take place in different time periods, they also seem to be similar in atmosphere...and that atmosphere is bizarre, trashy, and campy. These are not adaptations to watch if you are looking for faithful adaptations of Frankenstein or Dracula. Both of these films seem to take place in some realm either before or after those stories, or almost a netherworld just outside of the original stories. It is a world that takes some adjustment because while it is laughable in Frankenstein that an actor with an Italian accent and Joe Dallesandro with his heavy New York accent are supposed to be lifelong friends who grew up together in some European countryside; by the time you get to Dracula you just kind of have to accept that Dallesandro is going to stick out like a sore thumb. Udo Kier takes some adjusting as well, although he fits into these films easier than Dallesandro, especially Dracula. For at least the first half-hour of Frankenstein, I could not shake the notion that Tommy Wiseau has been fooling us all along and is just doing a very extended impersonation of a young Udo Kier in Frankenstein. Except Udo Kier actually seems to be mentally present in his scenes, and not in space like Wiseau.

While Flesh for Frankenstein ends on a note similar to Twitch of the Death Nerve, I find Blood for Dracula more interesting and prefer it a little more. In Blood for Dracula, Dracula and his assistant have traveled to the Italian countryside so that Dracula can find a bride, preferably a virgin. They take up with a family with four beautiful daughters who have fallen on hard times due to their father's gambling problems. They are able to keep their villa, but the daughters must do the farming. They only keep one servant - a handyman played by Dallesandro of course. And of course the mother is insistent on allowing Dracula and his assistant to stay with them, although almost all of the daughters find him to be creepy and too sickly to marry. The family has two virginal daughters who are actually virgins; and two wild daughters who lie about being virgins, because they have both been having sex with the handyman, and apparently with each other. The wild daughters are steadfast about their lying, even when Dracula tries to insist that he does not mind if they are not virgins and that it is just something his family insists on. Dracula finds himself poisoned as soon as he tries to drink the blood of the two wilder daughters.

What I find interesting about Blood for Dracula is that the daughters' situation or prospects is beset on all sides. Dallesandro's Socialist handyman character insists that the aristocracy is dying and perhaps the girls should learn how to work; which is not a terrible idea, except for the fact that Dallesandro's character is a rampant misogynist and a rapist. Blood for Dracula takes place in the early 20th Century, not the 19th, so it is a bit odd that there is the insistence of keeping up appearances with the mother, although it is often remarked that the family has not had visitors in years. If that is the case, then there is no need to worry about shocking society if the daughters do not marry an aristocrat or a wealthy man. The other side to this is that other than perhaps the youngest daughter, the daughters seem to be settled into the idea that they should marry up (just up, not middle or down or even for love really) and that there are no other options because that is how they were raised. The father (played by director Vittorio de Sica) leaves the film early on for London, leaving the mother and daughters to fend for themselves (i.e., remain willfully ignorant of how dangerous Dracula is). Only the handyman catches on to Dracula's nature which leads to the gory and over-the-top fight sequence at the end of the film. And Dracula is not a romantic hero, he is a conservative traditionalist and a rapist as well considering that he attacks the daughters often in mid-conversation. While one could find the end of Blood for Dracula a bit more hopeful than the ending to Flesh for Frankenstein (or see it as the Socialist/proletariat killing off one more crumbling aristocrat), I do not believe that the survivors are much better off with the handyman. The film seems to be more concerned with the Socialist argument with just a bit of subtext thrown in to acknowledge the changing times, but it does not appear that it wants to give the female characters in the film too much choice in the matter.

And this is just creepy.

(I am not commenting much on the hand that Andy Warhol had in making these movies, because it seems as if it was in name only; besides the presence of Joe Dallesandro, who was one of his people. If one was expecting a set of films with pop-art sensibilities, they would be somewhat surprised that both films were shot in neutral tones. I guess better to see the eventual blood, gore, and Udo Kier's blue eyes with.)

Whither this blog

2011-09-03T16:27:00.001-04:00

To use wacky fonts or to not use wacky fonts...please don't use wacky fonts.

I have been wondering what to do with this blog now that I will be officially starting grad school for Film Studies this week. I was told during orientation yesterday that I should write for an hour a day about film to start preparing myself to write my thesis my second year. While I watch a lot of movies lately for lack of anything else to do, I still have not been inspired to write often. Also, starting with this past week, I will be occasionally contributing posts on comics and graphic novels at my friend Rob's blog, Panel Patter.

My professors wanting me to write for an hour a day about film does not necessarily mean that I will be posting everyday on this blog now. I just do not see myself being able to keep up with that momentum, and it has already been proven that I cannot even keep up with a 3x/week posting schedule for the past 4 or 5 months. I am thinking of adopting something similar to what Brenda does at Pop Culture and Feelings, which is to just do one big post a week about the films I have been watching. If I end up watching a lot of films, maybe two big posts a week, along with the occasional more focused (and longer) post about a single film or two. I am going to try my best to devote a paragraph or two to each film in these posts.

Or, I can just keep a big word document file and type into that everyday.

H Double Feature: Hamlet (2009) & Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)

2011-08-24T11:00:00.000-04:00

Hamlet
Dir. Gregory Doran || 2009 || UK/BBC production

Around the time this filmed-for-TV production of the Royal Shakespeare Company's staging of Hamlet came out, io9 published a picture of the scene where Hamlet sneaks up behind and nearly kills Claudius as he is praying in the chapel. The picture was notable because Hamlet was played by David Tennant from Doctor Who and Claudius was played by Patrick Stewart, as well as the light reflecting from Hamlet's dagger made it look as though he was about to kill Claudius with Doctor Who's Sonic Screwdriver. I slogged through this 3-hour long adaptation more or less waiting for this scene and was kind of disappointed because in motion, yep, it's a dagger. It's not that this production of Hamlet is bad - there are some interesting choices made - there are elements of "found footage" as this is a modern-dress adaptation and there are security cameras scattered throughout Elsinore, and towards the end Hamlet speaks into a Super 8 camera he carries with him; and Patrick Stewart is given dual roles as Claudius and Hamlet's father. The adaptation at times seems to be confused as to how modern it should be, especially when it comes to weaponry. Guns are used once or twice, but poison, daggers, swords, and rapiers remain for the final act.

What made me lose interest altogether is that David Tennant as Hamlet becomes progressively Doctor Who-ier as the film wears on. The crazy between Hamlet and Ophelia is amped up to 11 in this production. Hamlet is supposed to be crazy like a fox - at least half-feigning how mentally ill he actually is just so he is not seen as a threat to the throne, and Tennant does that well for most of the film. It's just when he steps over that line into over-the-top wackiness that irks me. I also think that this is a really stupid t-shirt for Hamlet to wear, and it lowered my opinion of this adaptation even more:

Was Threadless or ThinkGeek out of Hamlet parody shirts that year? You don't stick a shirt like that on Hamlet or a skinny thing like David Tennant, who normally looks pretty damn good in a t-shirt and jeans. You shouldn't stick this shirt on anybody really. The argument could be made that the t-shirt is supposed to signify how Hamlet wants to feel inside, which is big and heroic because he is plotting to avenge his father's death...but it's still a stupid t-shirt.

Patrick Stewart is good at least, but this is not the mindblowing Doctor Who versus Captain Picard/Professor X nerdsplosion that one would hope for.

Hobo with a Shotgun
Dir. Jason Eisener || 2011 || Canada

I wanted to watch something stupid and exciting after being somewhat disappointed with Hamlet, only to also be disappointed by Hobo with a Shotgun. Sure, I was expecting something kitschy as a grindhouse throwback and over-the-top, but Hobo with a Shotgun makes Machete look subtle. It's one of those films where the joke wears thin quickly - it wore out for me before the hobo even acquired the shotgun! Yes, there is such a thing as being too over-the-top, too gory; and worst of all, too self-aware. Rutger Hauer carries the film well and is one of the few people in the film playing it straight, along with perhaps the young actress who plays Abby, the "hooker with a heart of gold". It's easier to buy a universe where a small town is ultraviolent and corrupt if the villains play things straight and semi-believable. The actors who played the villains seemed to know that the title of the film is something out of a internet meme, and therefore played their characters as broad as possible. It's very rare when the *winkwinknudgenudge* approach works, even in films that are inherently absurd, and it didn't work this time.

(This is probably the only time ever where Hamlet and Hobo with a Shotgun will be on the same page. The overall theme of this post: amping up everything to 11 doesn't always work).

My New Favorite Bad Movie: Revenge of the Living Dead Girls (1987)

2011-08-17T14:00:00.009-04:00

Dir. Peter B. Harsone || 1987 || France

(Spoilers ahead, because this is one of those bad movies where spoilers may actually motivate some people to watch it).

Revenge of the Living Dead Girls is perhaps my new favorite bad movie. I have been watching some Jean Rollin films on Netflix Watch Instantly this summer, and RotLDG is likely just a trashier retread of his films (also lacking the atmosphere and melancholy that are in Rollin's films), with perhaps only a vague knowledge of how film zombies typically work. Granted, European zombies have always been a little different. The zombies in Italy's Nightmare City and Burial Ground: Nights of Terror work together to terrorize and catch their human prey, sometimes even using tools and weapons. A running theme through the Rollin films I have watched so far and RotLDG is that the dead were brought back to life via toxic spills, so there is the element of environmentalism to these films. RotLDG is part corporate espionage thriller, part zombie film, and part revenge movie that is almost constantly on the verge of turning into a softcore porn.

The version on Netflix Watch Instantly claims that it is the "Special Uncut Edition", which cannot be true. The film only clocks in at 73 minutes and the last 5-10 minutes of the film are extremely rushed and haphazardly put together; introducing not only Catholic priests who believe the zombie girls are the work of the devil, but random townspeople who are out to destroy the three zombie girls. There are disparities to how the zombie girls look (the main one has full makeup that covers her hands, while the sidekicks do not seem to warrant the full treatment and have living human hands), disparities to how they move (slow, then fast) - and such disparities are not limited to just the three zombie girls. The humans in the film seem to suffer from intelligence and motivation issues that vary at any given moment. In one of the weirder scenes of the film, our supposed human hero who is a chemist that works for the corporation, arrives to the house of his boss because he is having an affair with his wife. Little does he know that the zombie girls just dispatched her (for the zombies seem to run on the old adage, "I'll kill your family, then you"). Our chemist, not realizing anything is wrong, proceeds to drink one glass of champagne, gives a short monologue that seems to revolve around the fantasy that he and the boss' middle-aged wife are newlyweds and she's a virgin (it includes the line "I'm going to caress my expert hands all over your virgin body")...and he fucks the main zombie girl. For the rest of the film, he only has a vague notion of what may have happened and it's apparently not that big of a deal. A messed up hand that's becoming infected? No big deal! Your cute, but dumb wife manages to miscarry her near full-term pregnancy and/or the fetus and uterus turns itself inside-out? Crazy and disgusting; but since this comes in the last 5-10 minutes of the film, this is also no big deal. I know everyone has different tolerance levels for alcohol of any sort, but one glass of champagne typically does not lead to necrophilia.

It is sometimes easy to forget as an American just how good the Europeans are with making trashy films. Revenge of the Living Dead Girls does suffer from some pacing issues, which are basically most of the corporate espionage parts. The gorier and trashier parts (such as the zombie girls having a murderous lesbian sex scene with the prostitute in the film) are somewhat sprinkled throughout the film almost as an afterthought, as if the filmmakers and editors knew that the audience would get bored. Since I cannot find even a solid page on Wikipedia on this film, it is hard to tell if there are other versions of this film out there and if this is one of the many European horror films that were cut up several times in the 1980s and have several different edits to please whatever restrictions a particular country may have against gore, violence, necrophilia, hinted male rape and lesbian zombie group sex/rape onto a female human. I would be interested in hearing any information anyone may have on this movie. I do believe that there has to be a slightly better version of this film out there (and yes, the ending is somewhat bananas in the scheme of film zombies and what they can do).

George Romero did not in fact invent swimming and/or pool zombies. The odd and kind of cool thing about this scene is that the main zombie (the middle one) keeps splashing her hand in the water either as a sign of impatience, to signal the other two zombies as to when to attack, or to just see if the humans would hear. It is at least a sign that someone was trying.

Music Monday: Similar opening drumbeats

2011-08-15T14:00:00.004-04:00

There are a series of videos on Youtube of Bikini Kill performing "Carnival" live, dating from 1991 at the IPU and onward. I don't know if they've been found and uploaded recently for that Bikini Kill Archiving Project online. Most of them have awful sound quality with most of Kathleen Hanna's vocals drowned out, or other instruments drowned out by other instruments. This was the only live video I could find where the sound was decent, but you can tell by 1994 that at the very least, Hanna was tired of reciting the spoken introduction to the song. I'm not sure why she felt the need to really.

Likewise, this is also the only decent live performance I could find of this Jarvis Cocker song, obviously filmed for TV.

I'll win that Motley Crue mirror, if it fucking kills me!

New RSS feed

2011-07-25T18:05:00.000-04:00

holdontoyrgenre.com has a new-new RSS feed, and yes, this one works.
So if you're not already receiving updates via this feed, the new feed address is here. Please update your RSS readers!

I have drafted a new post on my new favorite bad movie. If I'm lucky, it may go up before I move next week. If not, it'll go up after my move sometime.

Music Monday: Sam Rockwell: Dancing Machine

2011-07-11T14:34:00.001-04:00

Another Youtube compilation video of Sam Rockwell dancing, this time with some of the usual, but also A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which I forgot about because let's face it, it was a pretty mediocre movie), more Charlie's Angels, Matchstick Men, and that movie he made with Mischa Barton when Mischa Barton was a child. This video is set to James Brown, thereby making it superior to the video I posted last year, which used MC Hammer.

If there is not already a website database of movies with Sam Rockwell in them with a checkbox or chart that designates whether or not he dances in them, maybe someone should create one. Hell, maybe I'll do it.

Feminist Horror Friday (sort of): (Film) books, check 'em ouuuuuuuuut!

2011-07-08T15:00:00.000-04:00

(Admin. notes:
1. Sorry about the blog suddenly disappearing for a week or two. I blog so little now that I'm not used to Blogger's new layout (in draft mode anyway), and when I was trying to add my new Gmail address as admin a few weeks ago, I somehow managed to let my finger slip and make this blog viewable by invitation only. I only discovered this mistake this past week while I was trying to figure out why a post I made the last week of June had not appeared on my Google Reader. A reader brought it to my attention, but I still had a messed up RSS feed and it had to be changed a bit, which I think is working okay now? If not, please update with the new RSS feed.

2. Blogging burnout has been compounded by having my parked car involved in a hit & run on Memorial Day. I battled with Geico for a month with daily phone calls before things were settled, but since I can't and don't plan on replacing the car for my move to Ohio for graduate school, blogging will still be intermittent at best because it's taking me 1.5 hours to get home from work every afternoon [it involves shuttlebuses and walking 1.5 miles back to my apartment because Richmond's bus system is wonky - and this isn't fun to do in humid Virginia weather or in the case of this past Wednesday, torrential downpours]. Also making my blogging schedule intermittent is the fact that I am moving to Ohio in less than a month, so I'm still working on packing and planning around that.)

Here are some of the film books I was reading a month or so ago. Other than the Jonathan Lethem book, I felt the need to start out with some classics and basics

Feminist Film Theorists (Routeledge Critical Thinkers Series) - Shohini Chaudhuri
I think the number one thing I learned from this book is of the divide in early feminist film criticism that was American (sociological) versus British (psychological). And for the most part, this book puts forth the more psychological theorists. It's a minor fact, but it sort of explains why I do not absorb the psychological aspects too well. I was very close to minoring in sociology during various points in college as well. This book is mostly good as a starting point, but not much else.

Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the Films of the Stalker Cycle - Vera Dika
This was released roughly a year before Carol Clover's Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Clover's book is more in-depth. Dika has some fleeting good ideas and it's not too bogged down with psychological theories; but it's a basic book that monotonously outlines the monotony of slasher/stalker films by discussing the plots of about a dozen films; in particular the Jamie Lee Curtis ouevre. Dika's jumping off point is Psycho, but from there she goes straight to Halloween, while only giving passing and brief references to Peeping Tom and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. My problem with this book and Clover's book is that it skips over Black Christmas. I do not know the history of Black Christmas past what Wikipedia tells us, and it wasn't a film I remember seeing around often in video stores when I was a kid and teenager. Was Black Christmas that obscure? Did Dika ignore it because it was Canadian or because it had an experienced cast in John Saxon, Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea; a post-Sisters, pre-Superman Margot Kidder, and a pre-SCTV Andrea Martin? Peeping Tom, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Black Christmas do not completely fit in the checklist of plot occurrences that Dika outlines for the films she discusses in this book, but neither does Psycho. By and large, The Burning seems to be more obscure than Black Christmas, yet that film receives a section in this book.

Other issues I had with this book: the frequent misspellings and typos. She misspells Steven Spielberg's name quite often. It was also hard to tell whether or not Dika was approaching these films from a feminist POV (and then a feminist POV as to whether or not slasher films can be feminist). And the way she used a Freudian binary system to declare characters as valued or devalued did not sit well with me. It's not a terrible book, but it has some issues that made me twitch.

Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film - Carol J. Clover
I have read this book twice now and in regards to the first book I reviewed in this post, I am perhaps still finding trouble absorbing most of the psychological criticism in this book. The only thing I feel as if I better absorbed this time around was the chapter on possession films and the chapter on the sort of meta horror films that concern viewing horror films (Peeping Tom, Demons). I did check out a lot of the films mentioned since having first read this book in 2006, like the oft-mentioned Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and I Spit on Your Grave. In fact, I checked out so many of these films that I could parse out some of Clover's mistakes (wrong dates, the implication that Motel Hell was inspired by Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 when Motel Hell was released six years before that sequel - also TCM2 is a terrible movie and I don't understand why anyone would want to write at length about it). I can't get too mad at Clover about them though, because for one thing, she's an expert in something like Nordic history. Film is not her primary academic interest, although the dates thing bugs me a bit because most VHS boxes back in the day did have dates on them, and it's not that hard to figure out dates from the roman numerals on copyrights at the end of films. And again, nary a word on Black Christmas, although at least Clover does cover Peeping Tom extensively. Also, for better or for worse, I can't shake off the fact that it is acknowledged by Clover herself in the Afterword that the writer of Slumber Party Massacre 3 changed the story significantly after reading the first chapter of her book, which was released in an academic journal in 1987; making for that film's ugly and brutal third act three years later.

Proof of my marginalia in Men, Women, and Chainsaws.

Deep Focus #1: A Novel Approach to Cinema: They Live - Jonathan Lethem

They Live is the first book in a new series of books published by Soft Skull press that allows fiction writers to discuss their favorite films. I haven't read any other books in the series yet, so I don't know if all the other writers take the same approach as Lethem. Lethem writes about John Carpenter's They Live on a almost shot-by-shot or scene-by-scene basis, each with a timecode reference. Some scenes receive only a paragraph of discussion, others receive up to four pages. It took me awhile to get used to this approach as I was sort of expecting something akin to the short books the British Film Institute publishes on films (although it is mostly film critics and academics who write those) that are long essays or treatises on a certain film. But after getting used to Lethem's approach, I found that he does have some interesting things to say about They Live, especially in connection to the art of Jenny Holzer and Shepard Fairey.

Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)

2011-06-27T15:41:00.001-04:00

Dir. Tod Williams || 2010 || USA

There are a couple of ways to look at the Paranormal Activity series thus far. One is to see it as a tragic tale of a cursed family. Katie and Kristi are not only cursed by a demon potentially released by a distant relative*, they are also cursed to date and marry men who are douchey by the dumptruck load. Men who are more dazzled by and attentive to their newfangled gadgets rather than their partners or children who are trying to show them that something is wrong, even when they demonstrate it by playing back videos from their new house gadgets. It takes the possession story trope of men = logical creatures, women = open and feeling creatures into bleak territory. Poor Katie is betrayed twice by the end of the second film by the men in her life, but for some reason one cannot feel 100% sorry for her. The overwhelming douchey-ness of the men in these films (including the teenage stepdaughter's boyfriend in the pre-sequel) pretty much outnumbers any interesting or good aspects, or any nice feelings you want to have for the women in these films. But here's to the future of Katie as an avenging demon, may the Paranormal Activity series wear out its welcome even more.

The second way to look at the Paranormal Activity series so far is that in all actuality, these are boring films. It's easy to play the films' game as a veritable supernatural Where's Waldo? that only pays off in the last 10-20 minutes of the films. Katie's keys are on the floor (are you sure they don't have a cat?)! Is that a chandelier shaking? Oh look, the baby's mobile is turning on it's own! These are all mixed in with shots where nothing happens overnight. And in Paranormal Activity 2, it's the case of the pool cleaning machine that finds its way in and out of the pool in what seems to be several times a night. That incident is finally given lip service halfway through the film, but never are we told why when the nanny is waving burning sage throughout the house, why in one shot there is a cutting board with food on it in the kitchen; then in another shot the cutting board and food are gone; then it's back again. Was the demon hungry, then not hungry, then decided that it was hungry afterall? Perhaps these films are just an elaborate prank in the vein of Pee-Wee Herman's or Ash in Army of Darkness' "Made ya look!"

*Somehow the teenage stepdaughter puts it together in Paranormal Activity 2 in an eleventh hour of exposition that Katie and Kristi's great-grandmother must have made a deal with a demon to have wealth in exchange for the first male born...so how does the demon know that Kristi will give birth to a male child one day? Is the demon psychic? Can it time travel? Is the demon Rumplestiltskin? How is it that it takes four generations in one family bloodline to finally give birth to a male? Is the third film going to concern Katie and Kristi's mom (who is muttered about in Paranormal Activity 2)? Is it going to be a road movie with Katie and baby Hunter?

Notes on what I've been watching lately, Part 2

2011-05-19T16:26:00.001-04:00

The funny thing about being on some sort of blogging hiatus is that I get more requests via e-mail now to promote or review some sort of film, music, book, or website. I don't have a policy on promoting or taking things to review on the blog. If I like something or at least find it interesting, I'll promote it and post it on the blog (and the only time I've done this, I have noted that it was sent to me via e-mail, so I'm ethical about it). I haven't accepted books or films to review yet, simply because I haven't found any requests interesting enough. My having an English Literature degree that specialized in 19th Century Literature does not necessarily mean that I want to read and review Jane El Chupacabra, where a lonely English orphan-turned-governess Jane Eyre comes across a migrating El Chupacabra at the already goth-y and quite foggy Thornfield (yes, El Chupacabra can mostly be found in the Southern hemisphere, but has decided to migrate northward to England because it has more goats or something, or maybe it came with Bertha Mason...this book does not actually exist, but I'm sure it will soon). The other funny thing about these e-mails is if these people knew how very few people read this blog, they wouldn't bother.

I'm still on this reading jag as of late, and I read about 2-4 books a week now lately. This is partly out of the fact that I know that for the next 2 years starting in the fall, I will probably only be reading film theory and criticism. The flipside to that is that I'm getting a head start on that, partly out of already having early symptoms of "impostor syndrome", something that grad students suffer from. Maybe I will post on some of the film books I've been reading in the next week or so. My attempts to also catch up on classics and foreign films is also a side effect of the impostor syndrome, although I think that's lessening as of late, as I have had two or three Truffaut films on my "to watch" list for 2-3 weeks now. And I like Truffaut, I really do. Jules et Jim is one of my favorite movies. Just don't ask me to watch Godard. Any updates on what I'm reading and watching can mostly be found on my Twitter page, if anyone is interested. I have a Facebook page, I just don't like or post on Facebook much.

Scant watching notes:

Brick (2005) - A film that had also been sitting on my watch list for weeks, and a film that I ended up kind of disappointed by. At least 50-75% of the dialogue is spoken in lingo or slang, and not the Diablo Cody pop culture reference kind either; but as a take on film noirs, it speaks in lingo that even those films never really used. Brick does rely on the Red Harvest-Yojimbo-The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly-Django-type of plot twist at the end (but no samurai swords and gatling guns because this movie stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lukas Haas for chrissakes and I assure you both types of weapons weigh more than they do). The ending is also similar to Lord Love a Duck in that for all the film's stylishness, it's actually kind of a sad movie.

Boob Trauma: Night of the Demons (2009) and The Gore Gore Girls (1972)
Boob trauma, something little discussed and only sometimes used in horror films. Yet, after watching skin and arteries getting slashed, it's my second least favorite thing to watch in horror films. Herschel Gordon Lewis' The Gore Gore Girls features a scene where the killer cuts the nipple off of a victim, and yet it spews milk. It's gross, but kind of funny. It's taken me some years, but I'm starting to get H.G. Lewis' sense of humor and how much of what he made had little relation to how things actually work (i.e., the victim was not pregnant and had not recently given birth, therefore milk shouldn't be coming out of her). The Gore Gore Girls is so over the top that it does veer in to humorous absurdity.

The original Night of the Demons films (at least the first two, since I can barely remember or get ahold of the third) featured boob trauma and the re-make of the first film does as well, doubly so. There is the redux of the scene from the original with the lipstick, and another where a girl gets her breasts clawed off in one fell swoop. I have to admit that I enjoyed the re-make and like it more than the original. It has some good jump scares and special effects, although I think the Angela make-up in the re-make pales to the Angela make-up in the originals. While comparisons can still be made to its similarities to the first two Evil Dead films, I think the re-make deals with it better. The original seemed to be wanting to let you know that it knows about other horror films, with the similarities to Evil Dead and having a character named Romero. The re-make is less nudgenudgewinkwink other than the obvious Linnea Quigley cameo in the first scene of the film, dressed as her character from the original. There are not many other winking moments although other actors in the film have appeared in other horror films (Edward Furlong and Shannon Elizabeth being the most well-known). The re-make has the sense to make the cast adults instead of high schoolers. Angela is not an outcast in this film, but New Orleans' premier underground party promoter, which is good because while Shannon Elizabeth is still very pretty, she can no longer play high schoolers.

This girl was like the sixth lead in the film and gets better demon make-up than Angela.

Michael Fassbender playing villains in heavy makeup: Blood Creek (2009), Jonah Hex (2010)
I keep seeing the previews for X-Men: First Class and wondering if Magneto escaped the Holocaust only to move to Ireland. Because Fassbender is not hiding his half-German-half-Irish accent. His accent has already opened him up to playing Nazis and Irish villains. I think Blood Creek is the first Joel Schumacher movie I can say that I thought was pretty good. It isn't great by any means, but Henry Cavill sure is pretty. It takes place in West Virginia-via-Romania, yet only the actor who plays Henry Cavill and Dominic Purcell's father has something resembling a West Virginian accent. You have to dig the mishmashiness of the film. It features a occult-obsessed Nazi who becomes a half-vampire-half-zombie who can raise the dead and whose goal in life is to drink enough blood to gain a third eye and let Nazis takeover the world. Nevermind that it's taking him decades to do this and he's kind of had to vampzombify a German immigrant family to aid him in finding him victims. I think I like Blood Creek on the basis that it negates the need for another ...of the Dead film, like my much imagined sequel to follow Survival of the Dead with a movie featuring zombie horses, because Blood Creek features zombie horses. It's done! It can't get any better than zombie horses attacking people in a farmhouse! The film has a simultaneous ambiguous twist ending and an opening for a sequel that's probably never going to happen now because this movie went straight-to-DVD and Henry Cavill is going to play Superman soon.

An actual vampire zombie, and a Nazi to boot. Suck it, all I Am Legend film adaptations!

Jonah Hex was a disappointment. I was expecting a bad movie, but a fun-bad movie. Written by Nelvedine and Taylor, the fellows who also wrote and directed the insanely fun-bad Crank films and Gamer, Jonah Hex is based on the DC Comics about a former Confederate soldier with half of his face burnt off that can speak to the dead. The story isn't great, as it is a convoluted revenge tale. There are not a ton of ridiculous "WTF?" moments, like in other Nelvedine/Taylor movies. Most of the fun in the film comes from the actors who pop up. Josh Brolin, Megan Fox, John Malkovich, and Michael Fassbender are on the poster. Aidan Quinn pops up as President Grant, but there's also Will Arnett, Wes Bentley, Tom Wopat, Michael Shannon (supposedly, I never recognized him) and I swear Anton Yelchin; and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as of course, a dead guy. Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays dead guys more than Michael Fassbender, who plays an Irish henchman of Malkovich's in Jonah Hex.

I must admit that I'm starting to forget how to write for a blog and how to use Blogger. It doesn't help that Blogger is getting increasingly wonky. Anyway, a post soon about some film books, maybe.

Music Monday: 'Sup Kenneth Anger?

2011-05-09T17:52:00.001-04:00

I'm not dead (obviously), just still suffering from writer's block.

Notes on what I've been watching lately...

2011-04-18T15:41:00.003-04:00

There are patterns in what I watch sometimes. Sometimes it's intentional, other times, not so much. Here's a rundown of what I've been watching lately.

Films with hip-hop dancers: Breakin', Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, and Fish Tank.
Being fairly new to the Cannon Films oeuvre, I notice that most of the films I've seen from this company tend to deal with race or class discrimination at some level, but being very sunny and happy about it. Only Sylvester Stallone in Over the Top breaks stuff in retaliation of being denied to see his son by his ex-wife's rich relatives.

If I have to diagram the level of dancing in all of these films it would go as follows: Rosie Perez in the opening of Do the Right Thing > Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo > Breakin' > Fish Tank

Then again, I'm of the mind that dancing angrily to Public Enemy is a good thing.

Films with Ice-T in them: Breakin', Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo, Tank Girl
Does Ice-T have an autobiography? Because if so, I would like to read it. I want to know how he got from being a skinny dude rapping in the happy-go-lucky Breakin' movies in increasingly bizarre outfits to "Cop Killer" to kind of parodying his tough and angry image in Tank Girl to actually playing a cop on the infinite seasons of TV's Law and Order: SVU.

Films with Michael Fassbender in them: Angel, Hunger, Fish Tank, Jane Eyre.
Yes, the Fassbender Kool-Aid that's been going around for the past couple of years, I drunk it in the theater when he smiled in the bar scene in Inglorious Basterds. He tends to play men who die (Hunger, Angel, 300, Inglorious Basterds) or cads (Angel, Fish Tank) or men with secrets (Angel, Fish Tank, Jane Eyre). In Angel and Fish Tank, there is practically a choir of angels in the background singing as he makes his first appearance on screen, for he is an actor in his early-mid thirties who actually looks like a man. A man so mind-bogglingly gorgeous and charismatic that it causes young women of all ages to do crazy things no matter if it's the early 20th Century or the early 21st Century. Angel in particular is a bizarre little movie, a satire of period romances that masquerade as empowering films or stories for women and Cinderella stories with plucky and annoying heroines and Byronic love interests. But Byronic for real, not Byronic-lite and redeemable like Rochester in Jane Eyre, although Fassbender plays Rochester as a bipolar man. Fish Tank seems like the cinematic embodiment of Bikini Kill's "Suck My Left One", but with an emphasis on hip-hop.

I'll be tasteful and not include his entrance from Fish Tank, which was already documented shot by shot over at My New Plaid Pants last year.


Pro: He's played by Michael Fassbender. Con: He's a broke creative type and Byronic love interest. Pro: She's played by Romola Garai. Con: She's kind of an insufferable brat.

Bloody: Valhalla Rising, The Machine Girl
The Machine Girl was perhaps 20-30 minutes too long, and was more low-budget than I thought, but it is a fun movie. I don't mind CGI gore so much when it's in a film that revels in how ridiculous it is.

Trippy: Valhalla Rising, Lord Love a Duck
Broken into six parts, with large stretches of film with no dialogue spoken, Valhalla Rising is an odd film to watch if you've had some beer. It's a bit slow, but I never had any idea of where the film was going.

Lord Love a Duck is a black comedy from 1966 starring Roddy McDowall playing a high school senior although he was 38 years old that year. But he looks considerably better than most of the other guys in the film also playing high school and college-aged people, who all have noticeable receding hairlines like proto-Ian Zierings or Leif Garretts circa Cheerleader Camp. I'm fairly certain McDowall had great hair his entire life, since it looks like they spraypainted his hair gray for his role in Fright Night in 1985. Anyway, McDowall plays a teenager who is able to hypnotize Tuesday Weld to learn what she wants from life, and he gives it to her, even if it involves murder (either in an outright or ambiguous fashion). If you ever watched the documentary American Grindhouse, Kim Morgan states that this was a Hollywood version of an early grindhouse film just for the scene where Weld goes shopping with her father for cashmere sweaters. The reason I think this film is a little trippy however, is the brief scene at the beach. Meant to mock beach party films, it looks terribly off as Lord Love a Duck is a black and white film. It's a bit unsettling and slightly sinister, because the scene is clearly filmed on a somewhat stark set. Lord Love a Duck is a satire of teen trends at the time, and the opening sequence is mocking A Hard Days Night, but with just McDowall instead of The Beatles. After much thought when the film was over, I felt sorry for McDowall's character, but I've yet to decide if that's a good or bad thing.

Shots from the cashmere sweater shopping scene.

Powell-Pressburger films: Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes
British women be throwin' themselves off precipices in vivid Technicolor.

Post-Apocalypse: Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Escape from New York
Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome is leaving Netflix Watch Instantly this week, so I felt compelled to finish the trilogy although I barely remember what the second film was about. I enjoyed the beginning of the film, but as Max was banished from Bartertown by Tina Turner, it turned into a whole different movie that lost me. I don't care if Max has a pet monkey, I wanted more Thunderdomin' and less post-apocalyptic Australian Baby-Sitters Club.

I had to watch Escape from New York as a chaser. I tend to only watch Escape from New York every four or five years and therefore I forget much of the supporting cast that isn't Adrienne Barbeau or Isaac Hayes. So I tend to get excited when I see Ernest Borgnine, Lee Van Cleef, Tom Atkins, Harry Dean Stanton, Charles Cyphers, and Donald Pleasance in the credits. What a great fucking movie.

On hiatus? Probably, maybe, I don't know.

2011-04-07T14:23:00.000-04:00

I'm reluctant to make posts like these because it never fails that after going through a period of blogging burnout, something comes along that makes me want to write a post. And I do kind of have something I want to write about, but it's going to involve research. So yeah, this past month has seen tech problems and a bad cold, and I've been more excited about reading books lately than writing about movies. I've been watching movies, just not horror movies. This week has mostly been spent trying to figure out the financial logistics of going to the grad school that I've been accepted into. After that, I may be determining how much crap I'm going to have to get rid of to move to a different state in a few months (if you're in need for a never-used TiVo or episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on VHS, let me know).

Although I doubt many are going to bite at this, feel free to ask about any movies on the "Past 10 Films Viewed" sidebar. I'm probably going to see Jane Eyre tomorrow, since Richmond actually got in a smaller movie I would like to see.

Tank Girl (1995)

2011-04-01T14:03:00.001-04:00

Dir. Rachel Talalay || 1995 || USA

I remember liking Tank Girl as a teen in the 1990s, but looking at it now, it's easy to see what a mess this film is. It's not an odd or even fully enjoyable mess, and it's only occasionally amusing. It can't be chalked up to inexperience or disinterest in the source material, qualities that tend to factor into the better comic book films; because Talalay was an experienced director at this point and did like the material. But by all accounts, there was a lot of studio interference with the film because up until this past decade, very few people knew what to do with comic books or graphic novels as source material. The film is live action, but it also has clips from the comic books and animation sequences.

Most post-apocalyptic films tend to have a timeless quality to them, no matter what decade they were made in. Tank Girl is so 90s it hurts. The situation that the film takes place in is timeless - where a comet hit Earth and it hasn't rained in 11 years, so water is high in demand and only a select few has access to it. But everything else is 90s. Considering that one of the first places I was introduced to Tank Girl was an article in Harper's Bazaar, the fashion magazine (yeah, I read this as a teen, what?), the film is very high on costume changes (IMDB counts 18 for Lori Petty as Tank Girl) and it's all very punk-grunge-pseudo-riot grrrl. Even The Rippers dress in 90s clothing (flannel shirts and t-shirts, one Ripper looks like a half-man-half-kangaroo member of Color Me Badd). It's funny that in the comic's revival in the mid-2000s by IDW Publishing, Tank Girl was drawn as wearing a lot of 1980s power suits because the reasoning was along the lines of "a lot of people still dress like Tank Girl from the 1990s, it's no longer edgy." The soundtrack, supervised by Courtney (Love, Love-Cobain, whatever she's calling herself now) is sort of a mix of good 90s music and music that never made it past that decade, along with some bizarre covers (like Devo covering Soundgarden's cover of Devo's "Girl U Want", or something).

Tank Girl is an overwhelmingly cartoon-y film. And yeah, Tank Girl is a cartoon character even in the comics, but on film it's ridiculous. The film just meanders. The sense of urgency towards saving the little girl that lived with Tank Girl is never there because of all the side missions that are jokes and costume changes. It would almost be a parody if the film could settle on anything whatsoever, other than being a valentine to Tank Girl as a fashion icon of sorts, and occasionally her other positive attributes; like being a good friend or being a loud-mouthed and brave woman.

The one thing that I will give the film is that for much of the film, Tank Girl and Jet Girl (Naomi Watts!) have realistically post-apocalyptic water shortage greasy hair. Do you know how rare that is in post-apocalyptic films? Although Tank Girl's makeup rarely smudges, even when being in a torture chamber for what seems like a couple of days.

Music Monday: Raimifest

2011-03-28T15:19:00.001-04:00

For my Raimifest blogathon entry, I present music videos that are at least partially inspired by Evil Dead 2.

Foo Fighters - "Everlong"
Directed by Michel Gondry, looking at it now, this video seems inspired by Evil Dead 2, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Chaplin and/or Keaton silent comedies.

Queens of the Stone Age - "No One Knows"
Hey, it's Dave Grohl again! This video has some horror-comedy elements, plus, you know, evil and vengeful deer. Unfortunately, it veers into Death Race 2000 territory only to pull back at the last minute. Damn.

I left out "Sugar We're Going Down" by Fallout Boy, which has a deer-boy in the video, because I don't remember too many horror elements in the video and because I couldn't get through 30 seconds of the song while attempting to watch the video again just now. It's just not my thing.

Roller Derby Double Feature: Hell on Wheels (2008) and Whip It (2009)

2011-03-23T14:00:00.001-04:00

Hell on Wheels
Dir. Bob Ray || 2008 || USA

Hell on Wheels is a documentary concerning the travails of the early formation of the Texas Rollerderby Lonestar Rollergirls in the early 2000s and the offshoot league, the Texas Rollergirls. And yes, there is a difference, which this movie painstakingly shows. It's indeed more about the politics and administration of the teams and why there are two separate leagues rather than playing the sport itself, and it proves that it takes a lot just to get any event or organization off the ground at a single city basis. It's like The West Wing, but with more static shots and for Austin roller derby. It's quite possibly the most honest film I have seen about starting and organizing an event with a group of women. Given that the sport does feature sexy outfits and is often violent, the women on the teams acknowledge the line between "sexy and slutty" that the teams have to take to make the sport entertaining; but towards the end, that line becomes very uncomfortable as one league is forced to wrestle in oil at a bar to promote the upcoming game.

The film and sound quality for Hell on Wheels is not the greatest, and I'm pretty sure this film was made for a small budget, with cheap equipment, and took several years to come out. There are subtitles for some of the meetings, not because of dialects, but because of where some of the meetings took place (the patios of restaurants with miniature waterfalls). It's still an interesting film to watch if you have any interest in the sport or the recent history of it. Despite all the drama that goes on in the film, it has a happy ending because both leagues became the inspiration for the formation of other leagues all over the US and the rest of the world.

Whip It
Dir. Drew Barrymore || 2009 || USA

In Whip It, Drew Barrymore makes the conscious choice not to follow the politics of being on a roller derby team or a part of a league and instead focuses on what can make the sport so inspiring and fun. The film is based on a young adult novel of the same name by Shauna Cross, who played roller derby in Austin and Los Angeles. The plot primarily concerns Texas alternateen Bliss leading a double life between becoming a new roller derby player and a beauty pageant contestant, something her Mom has had her do her entire life. It is a coming-of-age tale of sorts and I don't want to give much away because it is a good movie with some positive messages. Drew Barrymore has an eye for talent and what makes a good movie (most of the time, your mileage may vary with the Charlie's Angels films she produced and starred in) and I wish she would do more producing and directing work rather than acting in crummy-looking romantic comedies at this point; although she has a small and funny role as Smashley Simpson, the most accident prone of the roller derby players.

Plus you know, she found Daniel Stern somewhere and cast him to play Bliss' football-obsessed dad. And Andrew Wilson as the team's coach - he's the Zeppo of the Wilson Brothers considering he's the perpetual comic straight man, the least known of the brothers, and at this point, the best looking one. And Barrymore let Alia Shawkat have lines, unlike in The Runaways. This movie has an awesome cast!

(ETA 03/27/11: Yeah, I'm kind of not happy with the second half of this post...between having my laptop crash and having to spend a few days reformatting it and reinstalling programs a couple of weeks ago and a recent illness, I'm not quite up on blogging and writing lately; and now that I've been invited to apply to one more grad school, blogging may be intermittent for the next couple of weeks.)

Smithereens (1982)

2011-03-21T14:00:00.004-04:00

Dir. Susan Seidelman || 1982 || USA

Recently, there have been a few films that have popped up on Netflix Watch Instantly from the 1980s that concern young women trying to become famous via punk music. So far Smithereens has been the only one I have watched (unless you count Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains). The premises of Smithereens and the like films kind of boggle my mind, but I came up in a post-punk, post-Ian Mackaye, post-hardcore, post-riot grrrl world where one is not supposed to get into punk or zines or whatever for fame, money, or even glory really. Punk and its various subcultures now are perhaps overly earnest, naive, and insular; things I'm realizing more and more as I get older and more distanced. I was a year old when this film was released, but it is my understanding that punk was already on the decline by 1982, and that is the world that Smithereens somewhat reflects. It's also one of those New York City films that could never be remade today. This film and The Howling are two films off the top of my head that show how decrepit NYC was 30+ years ago.

Smithereens is about a 19-year-old girl named Wren from the North New Jersey suburbs who comes to NYC to yes, seek fame in punk music. She works in a copy shop where she makes fliers of her face to post around the city. She constantly claims to be busy trying to get bands together, but it never happens. She's rarely seen actually speaking to musicians who might want to be in a band. She's blown off by a band who plays frequently at The Peppermint Lounge. She gets involved with Eric (Richard Hell) a has-been singer from a one-hit wonder band called The Smithereens. From Eric she learns that most of the punks have left NYC for Los Angeles. So she schemes to somehow get enough money to leave with Eric. In the mix is Paul, a cute guy traveling through NYC from Montana who sleeps in his van and eventually wants to settle in New Hampshire. He's enamored of Wren, but she blows him off and generally just toys with him until he gets tired of it, which takes awhile.

Wren is not a sympathetic character. She's manipulative and is basically a bum in both the sense of constantly couch-surfing (or bed-surfing, or van-surfing), borrowing money to the point where even her family refuses to loan her anymore, and being a social climber of sorts. And yeah, people like her do exist in punk and zines. Although she goes as far as acting jealous and fighting other women Eric speak to and ruining "business" Eric is trying to attend to so he can further his own career; you do feel sorry for her sometimes, especially at the end of the film. But despite how unlikeable almost every character in the film is, Smithereens is a interesting and fairly compelling movie. Seidelman gets bonus points for having The Feelies' "The Boy with Perpetual Nervousness" as the main and recurring theme for the film. The Feelies' Bill Million helped with the soundtrack.

PS - I was finding it weird that the film was called Smithereens, after Eric's band, when Eric is a secondary character. But it is perhaps an appropriate title to the film because of the phrase "blown to smithereens", which is what Wren's life is throughout the entire film.

Sherlock Holmes (2010...no, not that one, the other one)

2011-03-18T14:00:00.001-04:00

a.k.a. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes || Dir. Rachel Lee Goldenberg || 2010 || UK & US

Oh, where to begin? To its merit, the 2010 Sherlock Holmes (released direct-to-DVD approximately a month after the 2009 Sherlock Holmes helmed by Guy Ritchie and starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law) is shorter than the Ritchie version (which was too damn long), has a color scheme, and a tiny T-Rex. It's co-produced by The Asylum, makers of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus and other cheap quickie cash-ins like the soon-to-be-released Battle of Los Angeles, a response to the new film starring Aaron Eckhart Battle: Los Angeles. The former stars Kel Mitchell (of the 1990s Nickelodeon show Kenan and Kel) and Nia Peeples, in case you were wondering where they went off to.

To its demerit...while I've seen very few Sherlock Holmes adaptations, I can pretty much trust that this film has the worst Sherlock ever. He's not authoritative, quirky, or awesome. He's a jackass with the wussiest English accent ever in the history of English accents, real or otherwise. He's not even an awesome jackass that you can respect like the two more recent takes of Sherlock by Downey or Benedict Cumberbatch of TV's Sherlock. I kept wanting Watson to dropkick him off of a cliff in retaliation to all of the bullying he suffers from the pipsqueak Holmes. But Watson just kind of quietly scowls at him, not even bringing the disgusted eyerolls like Law or Martin Freeman. At least tiny T-Rex bodyslams Holmes against a wall once, and causes smashed glass to injure his leg. Go, T-Rex, go!

The story and characterization is weak and not exactly canon as far as I can tell having just read Doyle's short stories on Holmes. Watson, forever getting the brunt in this film, is often mistreated and disrespected by Lastrade. Lastrade and Holmes get along better than they do in most stories, and Holmes treats Lastrade better than he does Watson. Mycroft (or not Mycroft?) is given a lower status than he has in most adaptations and was a simple cop before he was injured. In his spare time, Mycroft apparently makes dragon robots, suicide bomber Victorian sexbots, and copper robot suits that resemble Iron Man's.

Much like Dolly Dearest, the film loses any sense of fun or awesomeness when the tiny T-Rex is not around wreaking havoc around London. Tiny T-Rex, like the doll in Dolly Dearest, tends to spring up out of nowhere, mouth agape, and kills brutally. In one scene, it appears that he has eaten the face off of a shopkeeper who resembles Karl Pilkington.

In case you were doubting my claims of a tiny T-Rex, here is the T-Rex springing into frame before it eats the shopkeeper:

So it's not exactly the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, that's for sure.