Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2009

Posted in2000s, 2009, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

Top102009graphicsmall

The last year of any decade is usually a watershed year, and we come to the end of 2009 with a bounty of riches. A year that just a couple of months ago I feared wouldn’t yield ten films from which to choose has, through a flurry of screeners and late-season additions, convinced me of its cinematic legitimacy. Find in the top ten three war films, five films about the state and politics of the modern family, one about a poet, and one about a cop. Discover that each of the first ten has a direct corollary in the next ten (suggesting that there’s a good bit of synchronicity in 2009), and that although women directors remain a novelty, three penetrate the top ten for the first time in my decade of lists. Other threads include a continuation of the last two years’ feelings of disconnection and entropy indulged, the notion that institutions of right are the ones perpetrating the bulk of atrocity, and investigations into the self that mainly fulfill Nietzsche’s maxim of abysses looking into the lookers. It’s a summary list, in a way, of the ’00s.

Paranormal Activity (2009) [2-Disc Digital Copy Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2009, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery

*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Katie Featherston, Michah Sloat, Mark Fredrichs, Ashley Palmer
written and directed by Oren Peli

by Walter Chaw It’s a good try from first-time hyphenate Oren Peli, but it’s ultimately an exercise bereft of satisfying, thoughtful payoffs–a couple of generally effective sequences only that way because they cause one to anticipate that something will come of them. Nothing does. Comparisons to The Blair Witch Project aren’t entirely off base, either, in that Paranormal Activity is about a decade past its sell-by date with a tale of irritating technophilia that would have felt more current in the Y2K Ludditism of 1999 than it did in the resigned technocracy of 2009–explanation in part for why it’s already out of the conversation and never stirred much outrage or controversy when it was causing audiences of teens to collectively fake-shudder the way festival audiences collectively fake-cathect. The new conversation is the one introduced by George Romero’s Diary of the Dead and Matt Reeves’s Cloverfield, where the unnatural instinct isn’t whipping out a digital camera or camera phone, but not. It’s a communal experience if it’s anything, and as far as such things go, there are still midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show floating around out there, aren’t there? Its pleasures aren’t replicable, in other words, and watching it at home reveals it to be little more than a one-trick pony with one brilliant moment that isn’t enough to justify the rest of it.

The Lovely Bones (2009) + The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009)

Posted in2000s, 2009, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Directors: Terry Gilliam, Drama, Fantasy, France, Mystery, New Zealand, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE LOVELY BONES
½*/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the novel by Alice Sebold
directed by Peter Jackson

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS
½*/****
starring Heath Ledger, Christopher Plummer, Verne Troyer, Tom Waits
screenplay by Terry Gilliam & Charles McKeown
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Walter Chaw It’s all a little too Puff, the Magic Dragon, isn’t it. The Lovely Bones finds Peter Jackson regressing into his worst instincts and a newfound squeamishness in a film about, ick, a fourteen-year-old girl’s rape and murder, leaving the most unsavoury details of Alice Sebold’s revered source novel to the golden-lit imagination. (Give this to Precious: it’s exploitation with the decency to titillate.) This isn’t to say the book is worth much of a shit, but to say that it at least has the courage to talk about a rape and a murder where the film only has the mustard to romanticize loss and suggest that 1973 was so long ago the freak next door didn’t raise any flags. It’s also to say that what began its existence as a study of the bonds that hold a family together through the caprice of living has been reduced in its film adaptation to a murder mystery without a mystery, and a supernatural thriller that at every turn reminds of how much better Jackson’s The Frighteners is in dealing with almost the exact same set of themes.

Falling Down (1993) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

Falling Down (1993) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

Posted in1990s, 2009, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Joel Schumacher, Drama, France, Thriller, UK

*/**** Image C+ Sound C+ Extras C-
starring Michael Douglas, Robert Duvall, Barbara Hershey, Tuesday Weld
screenplay by Ebbe Roe Smith
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw Atrociously written by actor Ebbe Roe Smith and atrociously directed (it goes without saying) by Joel Schumacher, it’s also got a really terrible old-person performance by Robert Duvall, who would court Oscar with this exact hand-patting, repeating himself, huffy-giggly shtick at the end of the ’90s with The Apostle. The whole thing is dreadful, rife with an unbearable self-satisfied rattle of social outrage that it’s entirely unwilling to decipher to any useful end. Falling Down is a barely-literate rant, delivered at the top of the proverbial lungs, that suggests not-shockingly that L.A. is the epicentre of immigrant tension, gang violence, racial warfare, and class resentments. It postulates at the centre of this ever-swirling maelstrom crew-cut cipher Bill, known mainly by his vanity plate “D-FENS,” who cracks one day in the middle of a Fellini homage and decides to abandon his car to the fates and walk to the house of his ex-wife (Barbara Hershey) and daughter. They’ve got a restraining order against him, of course, because he’s a nutball. And because we’re talking social satire here, Bill’s been laid off for a month without telling anyone and, man, this recession sure is taking its toll, isn’t it? Over the course of his Swiftian travels, Bill encounters a Korean grocer charging too much at his mini-mart; Hispanic gang-bangers who try to kill him in a drive-by; a white supremacist NRA nut (Frederic Forrest, who, like Duvall, used to be better than this) running an army surplus store; and a little black kid who knows how to use a bazooka.

The Young Victoria (2009) + Antichrist (2009)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Denmark, Directors: Lars von Trier, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Horror, Italy, Poland, Romance, Sweden, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE YOUNG VICTORIA
**/****
starring Emily Blunt, Rupert Friend, Paul Bettany, Miranda Richardson
screenplay by Julian Fellowes
directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

ANTICHRIST
****/****
starring Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg
written and directed by Lars von Trier

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. As the beginning of an emotional history for Queen Victoria, Jean-Marc Vallée’s The Young Victoria makes for an interesting bookend to John Madden’s Mrs. Brown. A lavish, romantic depiction of the monarch’s courtship with future husband Prince Albert (Rupert Friend), it’s the very definition of a quotidian costume drama, skirting over the major issues of the early years of Victoria’s reign to speak in broader terms about her idealism, the problems presented to her by her youth, and the manipulation of her affections by courtly politics. It’s something like the older sister to Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette: less hip, but still in love with its naivety, its evergreen youth. It says something to me that in 2009, there’s a film about Queen Victoria that’s less interested in the stuffiness for which the Monarch is probably most popularly known than in her liberalism, her progressive attitude towards the humanism inspired by first the Colonies, then the French Revolution, then Britain’s own Reform Act, enacted just five years before her coronation. An early film churned up in the wake of the optimism engendered by an Obama presidency? It’s tempting to read it as such, not simply because you do hope this administration is better than the last, but also because, as the decade of the aughts draws a curtain on nine years of increasing outer and inner dark, there’s at least the faint hope for some cloudbusting in the cinema, too.

The Blind Side (2009)

Posted in2000s, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw, Quinton Aaron, Kathy Bates
screenplay by John Lee Hancock, based on the book by Michael Lewis
directed by John Lee Hancock

by Walter Chaw Just in time for Christmas, professional schmaltz peddler John Lee Hancock updates Richard Pryor’s The Toy by giving another privileged white brat a black man he can fuck with, call his victories his own, and keep in the guest room. This Michael Oher–as played sub-vocally by gentle, Lenny-ian giant Quinton Aaron–is not only the Super Duper Magic Negro who heals a household of rich shitkickers (“Shoot! We done gots a Black Man living with us ‘fore we ever even MET a Democrat! Hoot!”–forgetting that wealthy southern landowners have a long tradition of keeping black people on their grounds without commensurately progressive attitudes), but is the passive, mute object around which every single person who likes The Blind Side convinces themselves they aren’t racist for the liking of it. If this movie doesn’t piss you off, if it doesn’t make you nauseated with its dangerous smugness, you’re part of the problem.

Terminator: Salvation (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Terminator: Salvation (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2009, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Germany, Italy, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

Terminator Salvation
*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Bryce Dallas Howard, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by John D. Brancato & Michael Ferris
directed by McG

by Walter Chaw The movie pretends that it’s about discovering that which separates humans from machines–an idea of “functional equivalence,” if you will, that Duncan Jones does a much better job with in his zero-budget Moon than McG does with in his small-country-GDP-budget Terminator Salvation. But what it’s really about is blowing shit up real good for two hours. A tanker blows, a gas station blows, a field of satellite towers blows, a hole blows, and, accordingly, the movie blows. The real secret for success that the human freedom fighters of 2018, led by saviour guy John Connor (Christian Bale), should search for is the one that allows the evil Skynet robots to distinguish man-made fires in the desert that it should examine from those it should leave alone. What they discover instead is a “kill code” they can play on their futuristic boom boxes that “turns off” the machines hunting the people remaining after a nuclear holocaust has left the planet completely habitable for the hundreds of huddled masses tuning their transistor radios to fireside chats with Connor. (But not the types of fires the robots are interested in–see, the robots are only drawn to fires that humans set as ambush traps (and Guns N’ Roses (you wouldn’t understand)).)

Orphan (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

Orphan (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, France, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Vera Farmiga, Peter Sarsgaard, Isabelle Fuhrman, CCH Pounder
screenplay by David Leslie Johnson
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Walter Chaw Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan is a cheap, schlocky, shameless kid-peril flick with an unlikely–cowardly, even–twist and standard resolution. But I’ll be damned if it isn’t, despite all that, almost worth it just for its nastiness. Alas, in the end, it’s not nasty enough. Without a thought in its head, without much understanding of how to earn legitimate frights without maiming (or threatening to maim) adorable children, it joins this year’s similarly lost zombie girl-baby flick Grace among end-of-a-cycle, misogynistic shots at the Bad Seed genre. It’s the kind of film that’s more interesting for the fact of its relationship to other bad-seed flicks post-9/11 (e.g., Japanese redux The Ring and little-seen creeper Soft For Digging) than for anything it does itself. Interesting, too, that it’s a relatively big-budget, mainstream picture starring a couple of extremely appealing actors (Peter Sarsgaard as John and Vera Farmiga as his wife, erm, Kate) as the patsies who adopt the titular hellchild, a Russian immigrant named Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), from one of those autumnal orphanages run by nuns like cuddly Sister Abigail (CCH Pounder). Unfortunately, it’s loaded with–there’s that word again–cheap jump scares that, at least half the time, are so self-aware as to be parodies of themselves. Post-modernism it ain’t, though–post-modernism is smart.

Snatch (2000) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Snatch (2000) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, DVD, UK

***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A
BD – Image C Sound A Extras A
starring Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Farina, Brad Pitt, Rade Sherbedgia
written and directed by Guy Ritchie

by Walter Chaw Guy Ritchie’s sophomore effort Snatch opens with a hyperkinetic homage to the first violent robbery of Ringo Lam’s City on Fire and continues by aping the slick mod-cool of the British gangster films of the late-’60s and early-’70s. It is a bizarre beast that borrows, steals, re-invents, and winks knowingly when its hand is caught in the imagistic cookie jar. Guy Ritchie laughs at your erudition. He’s in it for the money shots–a new champion of the gangster drama as pornography: ultimately empty but undeniably efficient.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)

Posted in2000s, 2009, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, Vampire, Werewolf, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Dakota Fanning
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by Chris Weitz

by Walter Chaw Let’s play a Mad Libs game with Chris Weitz’s appalling The Twilight Saga: New Moon (hereafter New Moon) and, by so doing, avoid talking about how a new moon is actually the absence of a moon in the sky, or how moon cycles remind me of menstruation, which would be a terrible thing to happen to heroine Bella (Kristen Stewart) around her boyfriend Ed (Robert Pattinson). Let’s replace every time they say “do it”–and by that they mean “bite me and make me a member of the walking undead”–with “fuck” and see if this whole Twilight atrocity still appears the benign thing for your daughters to gobble up whole. When Bella implores Ed to fuck her after she graduates from high school, for instance, and Ed says that he won’t fuck her until she turns twenty-one and they can get married…well, listen, this is a fairytale without any teeth, meaning it’s a really, really dangerous fairytale. More, it’s illiterate, invasive, moronic proselytizing from some Mormon housewife’s blinkered belief system. Unconvinced? Consider that it’s stated early on in this instalment of the saga that the reason Ed doesn’t want to turn Bella into a vampire–oops, I mean, fuck her–is that he’s afraid he’ll damn her soul to eternal hellfire.

Up (2009) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Up (2009) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2000s, 2009, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Pixar

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras N/A
screenplay by Bob Peterson
directed by Pete Docter

by Walter Chaw There’s still something breathless about Up, but I wonder if the Pixar formula isn’t starting to show its seams now in its second decade of producing masterpieces–if there’s a lack of freshness here in its familiarly exhilarated, cozily excited spaces. None of that fatigue is in evidence in the film’s miraculous, wordless prologue, however: destined to compete with the opening-credits sequence of Watchmen as the single best stretch in any film this year, it establishes character, motivation, story of place, and sense of time without leaving a dry eye in the house. Shame the picture also peaks in these first ten minutes. It reminds of the wordless bit describing Jessie’s abandonment in Toy Story 2, or the entire first half of WALL·E, and it suggests that Pixar is unparalleled in exploiting the possibilities for visual storytelling in its cavernous digital medium. The comparison of WALL·E to Chaplin is on point: When Pixar trusts the expressiveness of its mainframe and the beautiful, liquid clarity of its animation techniques, I don’t know that there’s ever been a better “silent” filmmaking collective. In their roster, it’s arguable that they’ve only really faltered twice: once with the tedious Seven Samurai redux A Bug’s Life, and again with the noxious redneck-baiting Cars. And while Up is nowhere near that bottom, it finds itself somewhere in the middle thanks to the peculiar ceiling to its invention (an entire Lost World and all you got is a giant bird and a talking dog?) and sentimentality that edges from sweet to mawkish. There are one too many cutaways to a dead wife’s portrait and one too many winsome sighs as a plan made in childhood looms tantalizingly near.

The Prisoner: The Complete Series (1967-1968) – Blu-ray Disc

The Prisoner: The Complete Series (1967-1968) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1960s, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Mystery, Prison, Sci-Fi, Television, UK

Image A Sound A- Extras B
“Arrival,” “The Chimes of Big Ben,” “A, B, and C,” “Free for All,” “The Schizoid Man,” “The General,” “Many Happy Returns,” “Dance of the Dead,” “Checkmate,” “Hammer into Anvil,” “It’s Your Funeral,” “A Change of Mind,” “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling,” “Living in Harmony,” “The Girl Who Was Death,” “Once Upon a Time,” “Fall Out”

by Walter Chaw The closest television came to true surrealism until the inception of “Twin Peaks”, Patrick McGoohan’s remarkable, landmark brainchild “The Prisoner” is the headwaters for a dizzying array of modern genre confections. It’s audacious in its ironclad refusal to provide the happy ending; in its determination to bugger expectation with every complex set-up and sadistic resolution, the show effectively honours the surrealist manifesto of defeating classification. The fact of it is the function of it–the delight of it being that the series functions as a tonal sequel to Antonioni’s Blowup, using the disappearance of that film’s photog protag as the launching point for its hero’s imprisonment in his Welsh oubliette. Colourfully, quintessentially mod, it even looks the part, after all, acting in 1967 as prescient post-modern (po-Mod?) commentary on the elasticity of this genre model (Bond films in particular, the lead in said franchise McGoohan was offered, er, once upon a time) as allegory for the plastic-fantastic of a progressively absurd world. In its setting of a small town, isolated and beset by what seems a common psychosis, find a connection to Robin Hardy and Anthony Schaffer’s claustrophobic The Wicker Man (1973), John Frankenheimer’s similar-feeling Seconds (1966), and, yes, Godard’s structuralist textbook Alphaville. Of all the ways to approach “The Prisoner”, in fact, the most fulsome–if also potentially the most obscure–is that, like Alphaville, it establishes itself as a structuralist (as in Claude Levi-Strauss) exercise while predicting through its execution the post-structuralism/deconstructionism (and eventually surrealism) of, say, a Jacques Derrida.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) + The Road (2009)

Posted in2000s, 2009, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

FANTASTIC MR. FOX
**/****
animated; screenplay by Wes Anderson & Noah Baumbach, based on the book by Roald Dahl
directed by Wes Anderson

THE ROAD
*½/****
starring Viggo Mortensen, Guy Pearce, Robert Duvall, Charlize Theron
screenplay by Joe Penhall, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy
directed by John Hillcoat

by Walter Chaw There’s nothing much going on in Wes Anderson’s stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox–which is a terrible shock, because there’s generally so much going on in Anderson’s and Dahl’s respective canons. With Anderson’s every attempt to infuse this piffle with his brand of Salinger-esque autumnal, familial melancholy registering as ever-so-slightly desperate, it strikes particularly pale in such close proximity to Spike Jonze’s magnificent Where the Wild Things Are. Missing is the vein of emotionality that runs rich in Anderson’s best films, the idiosyncrasies of his misfit family groups somehow rendered ordinary transplanted into foxes and opossums. I wonder if it isn’t something to do with the idea that “cute” animation as a genre and not a medium has “quirk” as its bread and butter. More to the point, it probably has something to do with the fact that for all those charges of “pretentious” Anderson has collected over the course of a career, when you pile all of his pathos into a film that seems mainly interested in being adorable, they’re actually deserved.

North by Northwest (1959) – DVD|North by Northwest (1959) [50th Anniversary Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

North by Northwest (1959) – DVD|North by Northwest (1959) [50th Anniversary Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1950s, 2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, DVD, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, Mystery

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound B Extras A
BD – Image A+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Jessie Royce Landis
screenplay by Ernest Lehman
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is Alfred Hitchcock’s most mercurial anti-hero, the soup bone reduction of the Master’s wrong-man theme. An advertising executive so at ease with changing his identity at the fall of a hammer, he has, by film’s end, become/done all of the things he’s wrongfully accused of being/doing at the beginning of the film. Indeed, Hitchcock would never again mine the idea of the wrong man with this kind of heat–veering off as he did into a more metaphysical kind of guilt transference à la Vertigo with The Birds, Psycho, and Marnie. As North by Northwest opens, Thornhill gives his regards to a night porter’s wife (“We’re not talkin’!”), steals a cab from a Good Samaritan, and instructs his secretary to send a neglected lover a box of gold-wrapped candy because “she’ll think she’s eating money.” He’s a charmer–and he’s as oily, despicable, and fast-talking as almost every one of Grant’s romantic comedy heroes. Hitch undermines and exploits Grant for the fourth and final time here as a guy we love until we stop for a second to catch our breath and take stock of the myriad ways in which we’ve been bribed, glad-handed, misled, and led-on.

H.P. Lovecraft’s From Beyond (1986) [Unrated Director’s Cut] + Blood and Black Lace (1964) [Unslashed Collectors’ Edition] – DVDs

H.P. Lovecraft’s From Beyond (1986) [Unrated Director’s Cut] + Blood and Black Lace (1964) [Unslashed Collectors’ Edition] – DVDs

Posted in****/****, 1960s, 1980s, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, FFC Must-Own, France, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, West Germany

From Beyond
**½/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras B
starring Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ken Foree, Ted Sorel
screenplay by Dennis Paoli
directed by Stuart Gordon

FFC Must-OwnSei donne per l’assassino
****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A+
starring Cameron Mitchell, Eva Bartok, Thomas Reiner, Mary Arden
screenplay by Giuseppe Barilla, Marcel Fonda, Marcello Fondato and Mario Bava
directed by Mario Bava

by Walter Chaw Stuart Gordon’s follow-up to his flat-awesome Re-Animator reunites that film’s Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton with source material by H.P. Lovecraft for From Beyond1, a nominal splatter classic that lacks the energy and cohesiveness of Re-Animator, even as it establishes Gordon as a director with a recognizable, distinctive vision. A picture that arrived concurrently with Clive Barker’s “The Hellbound Heart” (the source material for Hellraiser), it’s useful as a means by which Lovecraft’s and Barker’s fiction can be paired against one another as complementary halves of a symbolist, grue-soaked whole. With the latter’s cenobites, his most enduring contribution to popular culture2, consider that Barker’s vision of an alternate, infernal reality shimmering just beneath the surface of the mundane has its roots in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos–a dimension of Elder Gods lurking behind the doors of perception. Lovecraft and Barker give description to the indescribable, name to the nameless. They are in pursuit of the sublime, and their quest underscores the idea that any such chase is, at its heart, inevitably a spiritual one.

The Cell 2 (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Tessie Santiago, Chris Bruno, Frank Whaley
screenplay by Lawrence Silverstein & Alex Barder and Erik Klein and Rob Rinow
directed by Tim Iacofano

by Walter Chaw Blaringly shot on digital video so that the whole of this shitstorm looks like someone’s bat mitzvah, The Cell 2‘s only reason for existing appears to be to clarify just how underestimated is Tarsem’s original The Cell. This dtv trainwreck substitutes Jennifer Lopez with another Latina, Tessie Santiago, seemingly because the producers thought it the best way to soften the blow of the realization that this is an otherwise-unfilmable script retrofitted to launch a franchise. Santiago, a kind of Eva Longoria/Sandra Bullock hybrid, is Maya, the requisite “seer” in another serial-killer intrigue full to bursting with macho exchanges between the men and hysterical exchanges between Maya and anyone else. Tortured by not having thwarted Jigsaw-like murderer The Cusp three years prior, she’s brought back on the case not merely because she’s a psychic or something, but also because she was The Cusp’s only fish that got away, thus giving her unique, erm, insight? Who knows? The Cusp’s MO, see, is to repeatedly kill and revive his victims, which actually explains both Frank Whaley’s appearance in this thing and what happens to his career by being in it. Irony. They should’ve called it “The Cell 2: Poor Frank Whaley.”

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, DVD, Horror, Italy, Spain, Zombie

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie
***/****
DVD – Image B Sound C+ Extras B
BD – Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Ray Lovelock, Christine Galbo, Arthur Kennedy
screenplay by Sandro Continenza & Marcello Coscia
directed by Jorge Grau

by Walter Chaw Without having to squint much, you could see the hero of Jorge Grau’s The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, art-dealing Easy Rider hippie George (Ray Lovelock), trying to deliver the airplane propeller his spiritual brother, David Hemmings’ mod-photog from Blowup, buys in tribute to form over function midway through Antonioni’s counterculture classic. Instead, George is trying to deliver the sister of the fatal fertility juju from Arthur Penn’s Night Moves through titular Manchester into the green countryside on the back of his too-cool motorcycle. He’s thwarted initially by the bumper of maiden fair Edna (Cristina Galbo), then by the hungry undead stalking the countryside in search of meaty sociological metaphors, then by an ossified Scotland Yard dick (Arthur Kennedy). Luckily, there’s plenty of allegorical beef for everyone, as Grau paints a vivid picture of Mod Madness in steady, deteriorating orbit around the entropy and hedonism of the time–sprinkling it liberally with a disdain for dictatorships Grau no doubt nursed whilst working under the heel of Francisco Franco’s regime.

Night of the Creeps (1986) [Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray Disc

Night of the Creeps (1986) [Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Zombie

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Jason Lively, Steve Marshall, Jill Whitlow, Tom Atkins
written and directed by Fred Dekker

by Walter Chaw A childhood favourite, Fred Dekker’s Night of the Creeps generally underscores the danger of revisiting childhood favourites with a jaundiced eye; this and his sophomore feature, The Monster Squad, show that Dekker was rejected from the USC and UCLA film schools for a reason. I realize it’s all supposed to be a cozy, funny-scary homage to the terribleness of low-budget B-movies as a genre unto themselves, but the picture is terribly edited and disastrously paced–the very things that effectively kill both comedy and horror. Unconvinced? The first misstep might be its choice to leave a charming, 1950s-set black-and-white prologue in favour of a faux-Hughesian ’80s fandango that, like most of the era’s mainstream teen dramas not made by John Hughes, lacks an ear for how we actually talked, and insight into how we actually felt. In any case, it’s hopelessly incongruous to go from Ozzie & Harriet to leg-warmers and Wall of Voodoo, resulting in something that isn’t a spoof of bad filmmaking so much as an example of it. Night of the Creeps joins The Goonies for me as one of those cult classics I just can’t wrap my head around. I remember sort of loving it when I was twelve, meaning only that twelve-year-olds are idiots.

The Hills Have Eyes (1977) – DVD + Wrong Turn (2003) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

The Hills Have Eyes (1977) – DVD + Wrong Turn (2003) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2000s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, DVD, Germany, Horror, Thriller

THE HILLS HAVE EYES
***/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Susan Lanier, Robert Houston, Martin Speer, Dee Wallace-Stone
written and directed by Wes Craven

by Walter Chaw Released the same year as Star Wars, Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes boasts of its own Luke Skywalker in the character of a blue-eyed towhead named Bobby (Bobby Houston) who, at an unwelcome call to adventure, finds himself embarked against the forces of evil with a patchwork band of heroes out of their depth. Chewbacca subbed by a ridiculously Rin Tin Tin German Shepherd hermaphrodite (sometimes a girl, sometimes a boy, always a hero), The Hills Have Eyes is Craven’s zero-budget follow-up to his astonishingly unpleasant (and influential) exploitation version of The Virgin Spring, The Last House on the Left. A rough, raw, often amateurish take on the Sawney Beane cannibal family legend, the piece derives its power from the canny paralleling of its antagonistic families and its use of archetype and mythology in the telling of what is essentially a caste horror picture.

Trick ‘r Treat (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Trick ‘r Treat (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Horror

*½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B-
starring Dylan Baker, Rochelle Aytes, Anna Paquin, Brian Cox
written and directed by Michael Dougherty

by Walter Chaw Less a portmanteau than a Tarantino time-shift/overlap, Trick ‘r Treat is a handsomely-mounted bit of fluff that dribbles out like the Cat’s Eye redux for which no one was clamouring, with more than a few images borrowed from other Stephen King errata such as Creepshow and Pet Sematary. Michael Dougherty’s hyphenate debut, it, a lot like co-writer-on-X2 Dan Harris’s own first feature, Imaginary Heroes, has a pedigree and the benefit of the doubt in its corner but washes out as something that needed to marinate longer to reach the full flower of any potential. The buzz surrounding Trick ‘r Treat, though, in particular the Internet outrage over the studio’s alleged mishandling of it, is peculiarly deafening and–as with most buzz around most projects falsely promised theatrical distribution–in large part hysterical and unjustified.