Predator (1987) [Ultimate Hunter Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Predator (1987) [Ultimate Hunter Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1980s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mexico, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi

****/**** Image C Sound A Extras B+
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, Bill Duke
screenplay by Jim Thomas & John Thomas
directed by John McTiernan

by Walter Chaw Appearing the same year as Stanley Kubrick’s great, enigmatic, dangerous Full Metal Jacket, the brilliant neo-noir of Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, John Hughes’s devastating Planes, Trains & Automobiles, and what many feel is the quintessential film of the 1980s, Wall Street, John McTiernan’s Predator is, in plain truth, one of the two real quintessential films of the decade, a distinction it shares with Back to the Future–pictures, both, that initially appear to toe the Reagan era’s line of worship at the altar of Eisenhower’s mythological Americana only to reveal that lost wars cannot, in fact, be re-fought and that the Good Old Days were always a little violent and randy. It’s a film, this Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle all of oiled musculature and technological fetishism, of unusual kinetic power and intelligence, one that sets out to sate the popular audience’s hunger for such entertainments in the age of the modern blockbuster before leaving its hero battered, broken, frightened, alone. Its kinship is to movies from the period like Aliens and, yes, Rambo: First Blood Part II–films that understand that when Shane rode away at the end, he was probably just looking for a place to die.

The White Ribbon (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2009, 2010, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Germany, Horror, Palme d'Or Winner

Whiteribboncap

Das weisse Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte
***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Christian Friedel, Leonie Benesch, Ulrich Tukur, Ursina Lardi
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Bryant Frazer The origins of evil–an alluring subject for writers and filmmakers, perhaps even more so than for psychologists and historians, who are limited by the facts of any given case. They become psychological archeologists, looking for the broken artifacts of a damaged mind that indicate why this person or that chose to inflict great pain and suffering by picking up a knife, a gun, or the blunt force of an entire nation’s army. Artists who imagine or investigate evil deeds, on the other hand, have the refuge of the poet. They may root in the filth of amorality and sociopathy, seeking dark messages there, but what they eventually create is the product of humanism–an effort to understand and shed light on tragedies in motion, on the present-day injustices that can lead to future wickedness and despair.

Legion (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Fantasy, Horror

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Paul Bettany, Lucas Black, Tyrese Gibson, Dennis Quaid
screenplay by Peter Schink and Scott Stewart
directed by Scott Stewart

by Walter Chaw I actually don’t mind a portrayal of God that’s more in line with Milton’s: voyeuristic, sadistic, inscrutable, unmerciful, absent. I prefer it, truth be told. The problem with Legion is that it plunks this high-minded, utterly humanistic idea in the middle of garbage the likes of which the world outside of SyFy original flicks has never known. Bad doesn’t begin to describe it–“futile” is closer to the truth, as ex-ILM geek Scott Stewart does his best to make a complete hash of one possible apocalypse, departing from “Revelations” to find an angry God, “sick of all the bullshit,” divinely possessing a posse of Los Angelinos so that they may lay zombie siege to a dusty roadside diner populated by a collection of spam-in-a-cabin archetypes. Take grizzled diner owner Bob (Dennis Quaid), for instance, a longtime ex-smoker who still keeps a lighter named “hope” in his breast pocket because, as anyone who’s ever seen a movie knows, he’s going to have to use it at some point to ignite a propane tank in a moment of selfless sacrifice. It’s one of several martyrdoms in a film that’s fairly relentless about the great unknowable nature of this Christian God. He’s pissed, no question, and no amount of brotherly grace will make Him un-pissed.

Splice (2010)

Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Ian Pugh, Canada, Drama, France, Horror, Mexico, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***/****
starring Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, Delphine Chanéac, David Hewlett
screenplay by Vincenzo Natali & Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor
directed by Vincenzo Natali

by Ian Pugh Vincenzo Natali’s Splice unavoidably lives in the shadow of countless sci-fi/horror properties that came before it–stories that have already taught us, as Splice teaches us, that tragedies occur when Man dabbles in God’s domain. But dismiss the film as cliché at your own peril. While it provides numerous shocks to the system, the traumas themselves take a backseat to the horror of their implications and, moreover, what those tragedies say about the risks and ambitions of daily life. Indeed, while the movie consciously seeks to fashion a cautionary tale out of the stock phrase “What’s the worst that could happen?” its ultimate goal is to tell that tale as a domestic drama.

Vampyres (1974) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2010, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Horror, Spain, UK, Vampire

a.k.a. Vampyre Orgy, Daughters of Dracula
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Marianne Morris, Anulka, Murray Brown, Brian Deacon
screenplay by Diane Daubeney
directed by José Ramón Larraz

by Bryant Frazer SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. One of the hallmarks of Eurohorror is brightly-lit sex scenes. Rather than reveal nudity in chiaroscuro, or in the kind of colour-gelled Hollywood glow meant to suggest candlelight or moonlight, cinematographers working in this mode step right up and wash light over their actresses to ensure that no detail is lost in shadow. This tableau looks a little strange from a contemporary vantage–off the top of my head, I don’t think anybody but Paul Verhoeven and maybe the mumblecore crew shoots sex scenes so plainly these days–but it’s a stylistic disconnect and a marker of a sense of time and place that makes these films a conduit for nostalgia among cinephiles of a certain age. José Ramón Larraz, a Barcelona-born director working in England, doesn’t let Vampyres out of the gate before staging a bedroom scene involving two young, completely naked women. The sleepy brunette Fran (Marianne Morris) and the pale blonde Miriam (Anulka, a former PLAYBOY centrefold) are rolling around in bed before a killer in a top hat arrives in silhouette and fills their nubile bodies with bullets. (Were the title not Vampyres, you’d be forgiven for assuming the film had just announced itself as a giallo.) With that violent flourish, the opening credits begin.

Pontypool (2009) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2009, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Canada, DVD, Horror, Thriller, Zombie

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle, Georgina Reilly
screenplay by Tony Burgess, based on his novel Pontypool Changes Everything
directed by Bruce McDonald

by Jefferson Robbins Few things give me the willies like the sublimation of self. The idea that my essential me-ness could someday drain away and be lost–to injury, dementia, what have you–makes me shudder. At the extreme, there’s the fear that some invading force, a me supplanted by a not-me, might subjugate my personality. Little wonder that Brian O’Blivion’s monologue in Videodrome about communicating with his own brain cancer, or almost any mind-control scenario scripted for comics by Grant Morrison, can set me cringing.

The House of the Devil (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

The House of the Devil (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

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

***½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Jocelin Donahue, Tom Noonan, Mary Woronov, Dee Wallace
written and directed by Ti West

by Walter Chaw Her hair’s a little longer, but she’s a dead ringer for Karen Allen from Starman (with a touch of Brooke Adams from Invasion of the Body Snatchers thrown in), this girl dancing to The Fixx‘s classic “One Thing Leads to Another,” Walkman clapped to her ears, in a creepy house in the middle of nowhere. Samantha (Jocelin Donahue, a real find) is there because she answered one of those tear-away babysitting ads posted outside her dorm, and who cares if it’s not really a kid the guy, Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan), wants her to look after but instead a demented old mother-in-law socked away in the attic*–he’s giving her four hundred bucks so he and his wife (Mary Woronov) can enjoy the lunar eclipse. I know what you’re thinking, but Ti West’s gorgeous ode to ’80s exploitation shockers comes off as more than mere pomo exercise or homage; The House of the Devil is a lovingly crafted little gem that owes as much to Roman Polanski’s paranoia trilogy and Bob Clark’s Black Christmas. (Come to think of it, Donahue also bears a resemblance to Margot Kidder around the time of the latter and DePalma’s Sisters.) Smarter than hell about its sources, it employs all of them to a full seventy minutes of unbearable tension capped by twenty minutes of payoff. It’s the same ratio of foreplay-to-climax as Rosemary’s Baby, and lo, The House of the Devil would play wonderfully on a double-bill with the same.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Wes Craven

½*/****
starring Jackie Earle Haley, Kyle Gallner, Rooney Mara, Katie Cassidy
screenplay by Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer
directed by Samuel Bayer

by Walter Chaw Listen, I like remakes. I think that for the same reason no one complains about a new production of “Hamlet”, no one should complain about the umpteenth iteration of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I like the new Dawn of the Dead better than the original, the new The Manchurian Candidate almost as much; I’m not trying to start an argument, I’m simply saying that I don’t hate the new A Nightmare on Elm Street on principle. I hate the new A Nightmare on Elm Street because it really sucks. Samuel Bayer’s ridiculously amateurish take on the franchise earns the only nod it deserves by going all the way with the loathsomeness of its Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley). Otherwise, it’s strictly jump-scare theatre, a geek leaping from the bushes, clashing cymbals, in the very imitation of a jack-in-the-box for ninety soul-sucking minutes. For what it’s worth, it drags its claw along the text of the Wes Craven original pretty faithfully, down to recreating a few of the kills and resurrecting the iconic body-bag sequence, all to drastically diminished returns. To say the movie’s not scary in the slightest is both a surprise and not at all a surprise. But it is a shame, considering that Craven’s oneiric A Nightmare on Elm Street is an inventive, nasty little low-budget chiller with enough of a thought in its head to germinate a beloved franchise and a proud member of the bogey pantheon.

TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Sci-Fi Adventures – DVD

Posted in1950s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Drama, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, UK

THEM! (1954)
***/**** Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon, James Arness
screenplay by Ted Sherdeman
directed by Gordon Douglas

THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway, Kenneth Tobey
screenplay by Lou Morheim and Fred Freiberger, suggested by the story “The Fog Horn” by Ray Bradbury
directed by Eugène Lourié

WORLD WITHOUT END (1956)
**½/**** Image A Sound B-
starring Hugh Marlowe, Nancy Gates, Rod Taylor
written and directed by Edwards Bernds

SATELLITE IN THE SKY (1956)
*/**** Image C Sound B
starring Kieron Moore, Lois Maxwell, Donald Wolfit
screenplay by John Mather, J.T. McIntosh and Edith Dell
directed by Paul Dickson

tcmscifithem-1733871by Jefferson Robbins We’re all mutants now. Those of us who weren’t literally irradiated by the Atomic Age still carry its glowing cultural DNA. As we’ve built better ways to destroy ourselves, we’ve also spurred the creators of our science-fiction to imagine life in newer Waste Lands. Their work assumes that no matter how we survive each new apocalypse, our circumstances will be quite changed. The upshot of our atom-splitting folly would be not sloughed skin or violent cancer but marvels and wonders, which would then seek our destruction on their own terms.

The Wolfman (2010)

Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller, Werewolf

***/****
starring Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, Hugo Weaving
screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self
directed by Joe Johnston

by Walter Chaw Gloriously, exuberantly awful, Joe Johnston’s tone-perfect, imperfect-perfect update of Universal’s horror legacy begs at any moment for grieving Gwen (Emily Blunt) to cry out, “He. Vas. My. BOYfriend!” It’s easily the funniest movie I’ve seen in what seems forever–a comedy of imitation that clarifies, if anything, the extent to which our condescension to films from the ’40s allows us to enjoy the Universal monster movies without irony. Not so lucky is this product of the post-modern era in which absolutely the only way to enjoy the film in any defensible way is to profess a deep knowledge and affection for the works of James Whale, Lon Chaney, and all the boys at the old studio who found themselves, not long into their run, making movie-mashups and Abbott & Costello vehicles. At the least, this redux demonstrates some respect for its source material, from its retro effects (credited to ace werewolf guy Rick Baker) to its joyful inability to assemble anything like a coherent narrative from the various bits and pieces Johnston and company have thrown into a bucket and then onto the screen. Consider the transition from a bloody, fountain-side flashback of dead mommy to prodigal son Lawrence (Benicio Del Toro) descending a few steps into a mysterious torture chamber beneath some kind of estate-bound cemetery, where his dad (Anthony Hopkins), eyes glowing mysteriously, advises that the beast “will out.” It’s really just a collection of non-sequiturs, of scenes that don’t fit together in a landscape with no scale (Lawrence takes a full month to walk sixteen miles from London to his house and still manages to beat his carriage-riding pursuers there), strung together willy-nilly by Oedipal suggestions the film is clearly incapable, and uninterested, in exploring. The Wolfman is a big, giant, dumb movie made with such breathtaking stupidity that it actually ends with a “wolf-out” battle royale like the one in Mike Nichols’s Wolf–the difference being that The Wolfman doesn’t appear to take itself the tiniest bit seriously.

The Crazies (2010)

Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, United Arab Emirates

***½/****
starring Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell, Joe Anderson, Danielle Panabaker
screenplay by Scott Kosar and Ray Wright
directed by Breck Eisner

by Walter Chaw A military plane transporting a biological agent designed to destabilize civilian populations is headed for incineration when it crash-lands in tiny Ogden Marsh, IA, causing a few of the local yokels to start acting on all the urges that the veneer of civilization holds in check. A father kills his wife and son, a school principal dispatches a few of his students, a coroner begins stitching up the living, and Sheriff Dutton (Timothy Olyphant, good as sheriffs) is left to consider that for as naughty as these actions are, they’re not so out of character for the people he protects. (It takes a while for him to deadpan that they might be in a little bit of trouble.) The Crazies plays with the thought that there’s not only not much of a line separating acceptable behaviour from homicidal, there’s also not much of a line between the infected townspeople and the military choppered in to contain them. In a good film’s best moment, Dutton and his deputy capture a young soldier (Joe Reegan) and allow him a few minutes to be afraid and to enact a moment of grace that, if you think about it later, facilitates the complete destruction of another, larger urban population. A lot like the mordant epilogue of the also-fantastic 28 Weeks Later (another film that deals with the problem of occupation armies and the suppression of insurgencies), the ultimate source of trouble here is the heroic, quintessentially American desire to survive no matter the cost to the greater good.

The Crazies (1973) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Directors: George A. Romero, Horror, Satire, Sci-Fi, Thriller

*/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Lane Carroll, W.G. McMillan, Harold Wayne Jones, Lloyd Hollar
screenplay by Paul McCollough & George A. Romero
directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw It’s tough for a dyed-in-the-wool George Romero apologist to observe that a film of Romero’s in good repute is an amateurish, exploitative piece of shit that banks heavily on the afterglow of his seminal Night of the Living Dead. The Crazies, his third movie in the wake of that masterpiece, finds itself ripping off the last half-hour of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers–in lurid colour with a cast of atrocious actors in high-’70s, porn-ugly wardrobe and appearance–in its tale of how you shouldn’t trust anyone over 30, so keep on truckin’, man, steal this book, and if it feels good, do it. Its tragedy is airless and ineffectual, played as it is as this instantly (and hopelessly) dated relic of the flower-power generation that already had its epitaph with Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider four years prior. While its philosophy is tired and childish (a product of reading HIGH TIMES rather than an actual newspaper), it’s also dreadfully paced, with the lion’s share of time given over to exhausted harangues about how the government doesn’t really care about the little guy and how absolute power corrupts absolutely. Never mind the greater good here, as The Crazies is so fervently incomprehensible in its hippie politics that the threat of real contamination for the rest of the country/world should one of our erstwhile heroes escape into the general population forces the audience to ally its sympathies with the jack-booted thugs. Besides, there’s already a problem of identification in the film when its ostensible villains, dressed in contamination suits to save on the extras budget, are clearly just underpaid civil servants who most definitely do not deserve to be slaughtered by the yokel populace–crazy or not.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) – DVD

Posted in1960s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Drama, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, UK

***/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Peter Cushing, Veronica Carlson, Freddie Jones, Simon Ward
screenplay by Bert Batt
directed by Terence Fisher

by Jefferson Robbins I’ve wondered for a long time why I love the Hammer Film takes on the Universal monsters. I discovered them in my youth, so there’s the nostalgia thing; and they typically involve stuff a young man loves: disfigurement, cleavage, viscera, cleavage, death. But the communion is somehow deeper than that. Guillermo del Toro describes his youthful exposure to creature features in the language of a Catholic embracing Jesus: “At a certain age, I accepted monsters in my heart.” Yeah.

Sundance ’10: 7 Days

Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Alex Jackson, Canada, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Sundance, Thriller
Les 7 jours du talion**/****starring Rémy Girard, Claude Legault, Fanny Mallette, Martin Dubreuilscreenplay by Patrick Senecaldirected by Daniel Grou by Alex Jackson Perhaps one of the more overtly sadomasochistic entries in the torture-porn genre, French-Canadian Daniel Grou's 7 Days seems to be seething at the bit to get to the good stuff. When Jasmine (Rose-Marie Coallier), the eight-year-old daughter of surgeon Bruno Hamell (Claude Legault), is raped and murdered, he decides to kidnap, torture, and kill the man responsible and then turn himself in. Hamell catches the killer, a day labourer named Anthony Lemaire (Martin Dubreuil) who has been implicated…

Hardware (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Dylan McDermott, Stacey Travis, John Lynch, Iggy Pop
written and directed by Richard Stanley

by Walter Chaw Hardware tries hard, it really does. Enfant terrible South African director Richard Stanley has built an entire cult of personality around how hard Hardware and its brother in theme and feel, Dust Devil, try–how, therefore, it’s subsequently been impossible for him to get another project off the ground. But, a lot like Terry Gilliam, whose films Stanley’s own resemble quite a bit, truth be told, at a certain point all that misdirected, aimless mess–all that excess and pretension, that empty production-design artiness–amounts to exactly what it should: frustration and failure and people figuring out this stuff is a bad investment. Hardware is a sometimes eye-catching mess of derivative ideas and badly executed dialogue, haloed ’round with this patina of high-falutin’ ideas it’s not fully capable of honouring–and hollow outrage it’s not able to justify. Seems the pretext for the movie’s atrocities has to do with Government’s desire to thin its own herd because…because it’s the post-apocalypse and, um, the government is evil, of course. Shut up. Try to pay attention.

The Last Man on Earth (1964) – DVD

The Last Man on Earth (1964) – DVD

Posted in1960s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Italy, Sci-Fi, Vampire, Zombie

***/**** Image B- Sound C Extras D
starring Vincent Price, Franca Bettoia, Emma Danieli, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart
screenplay by Logan Swanson & William F. Leicster, based on the novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
directed by Sidney Salkow

by Walter Chaw If the execution of The Last Man on Earth, Sidney Salkow’s adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, is sometimes clunky, the ideas contained therein seem prescient at least, profound at best. Disowned by Matheson and oft derided as slow-moving, it’s actually an exceptional film in an exceptional year for film, a beautiful, occasionally stunning piece about loneliness and alienation. I wouldn’t call it a metaphor, but as a bleak emotional landscape–Eliot’s “The Wasteland” committed to genre schlock–it boasts of an intimidating gravity. Take the scene where titular plague survivor Dr. Morgan (Vincent Price) refuses to turn over his freshly dead wife (Emma Danieli) to an army crematorium crew, endeavouring instead to bury her in the woods. His act of love is rewarded that night with her undead corpse paying him a visit. Yes, the pacing is off, leaving the shock of a shambling loved one to be milked properly in four years’ time by George Romero and his Night of the Living Dead, yet the duration of the attack by itself underscores the horror and revulsion of the dearly departed now up and walking. Veteran television director Salkow isn’t very good, it’s true, but DP Franco Delli Colli (Strip Nude For Your Killer), on one of his first films, provides beautiful, empty tableaux littered with car husks and burning pits fed with the corpses of the baddies Morgan stakes in the daytime.

Daybreakers (2010)

Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Australia, Authors: Ian Pugh, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, Vampire

**/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Claudia Carvan, Sam Neill
written and directed by The Spierig Brothers

by Ian Pugh The Spierig Brothers’ Daybreakers is a juicy genre exercise waiting to happen, and maybe it would have happened if the film weren’t tangled up in hamfisted allegory. What sets this vampire flick apart is not its high-pitched screed against capitalism (the system’s fulla bloodsuckers, I tells ya!), but the fact that its staked vampires explode into a bloody mess. Its most beautiful sights are certainly not rooted in the dawning of a new day, but in Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe spontaneously bursting into flames for one reason or another. This is not what you’d call a dry film, yet I can’t help thinking that a little more ichor would have been for the better. Funny how that works, actually: the Spierigs’ last film, Undead, was a splatterfest in desperate need of a point; here, they finally have a point, and all you want to see is the next exploding vampire. (Where the two pictures are most alike is that they’re both shot through a series of increasingly obnoxious pastel filters.) It’ll take another film to determine whether the Brothers have anything worthwhile to say, but the lingering suspicion is that they simply lack the creative instincts of their beloved Sam Raimi–that vital ability to discern the profound from the fatuous.

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 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.

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.