Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster (1965) – DVD

December 6, 2006Posted in****/****, 1960s, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi

****/**** Image B- Sound C+
starring Marilyn Hanold, Jim Karen, Lou Cutell, Nancy Marshall
screenplay by R.H.W. Dillard, George Garrett and John Rodenbeck
directed by Robert Gaffney

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Now, I think we're allowed to define these terms for ourselves (fans of exploitation movies being a friendly and decidedly unpretentious bunch), but the way I see it, there's a sharp difference in style between B-movies and Z-movies. B-movies are your creature features. Their narratives are actually quite strongly defined and they tend to produce a rather primitive but potent and genuine emotional reaction from the audience. You can picture yourself seeing these films at a drive-in double feature or maybe a Saturday matinee. In contrast, Z-movies are all jumbled noise. The audience does not exactly have an emotional reaction to Z-movies, they just watch them in a sort of dissociated daze. You could never imagine seeing Z-movies at an actual movie theatre or drive-in. The only place where they could possibly play is on a local unaffiliated television station at three in the morning.

Henry II: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1998) + Tales from the Crypt Presents Ritual (2002)

November 1, 2006Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Horror, Thriller, ZERO STARS, Zombie

Henry Part 2
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Part 2
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound D Extras D
starring Neil Giuntoli, Rich Komenich, Kate Walsh, Carri Levinson
written and directed by Chuck Parello

RITUAL
*½/**** Image B Sound B-
starring Jennifer Grey, Craig Sheffer, Daniel Lapaine, Kristen Wilson
screenplay by Rob Cohen and Avi Nesher, based on the screenplay for I Walked with a Zombie by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray
directed by Avi Nesher

by Walter Chaw John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is that rare exploitation film that at once transcends and wallows in the ugly strictures of its sub-genre. A commentary on itself by dint of its honesty and intelligence, it lives and dies by the irony that despite the extremes to which it goes in its imagining and depiction of atrocity, it succeeds mainly through the quality of its reserve. It's maybe the first realistic-seeming film about a serial killer in that any prurient satisfaction one derives from the events depicted therein one suspects is entirely due to the angle of twist to one's own shadow. It's both a personality and an endurance test–and at the end of it we're left feeling as though we've witnessed some kind of emotional documentary about the psychic toll of murder on the societal organism. At its heart, it's an experiment in collectivism where the individual is tested against the insurgent: the body politic challenged to cohere against an anarchist. The power of Henry is that it engenders something like hope–an almost naïve belief that the humanity represented by the audience will identify with the dregs of society because said dregs, likable in no other way, are being preyed upon by something other than human. And humans, no matter how irredeemable, are still the "home team," as it were.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) [2-Disc Ultimate Edition] – DVD

October 30, 2006Posted in****/****, 1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow
screenplay by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper
directed by Tobe Hooper

Texaschainsaw1974cap

Mustownby Walter Chaw If we start from the position that Sally (Marilyn Burns) is burdened from the get-go by two misfit monsters, then we can look at Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as not only a keen autopsy of a particular moment in our country's history (circa 1974), but also a profoundly sensitive look at social prejudices and the toll said prejudices take on the human social organism. More than the typical rise-of-the-bumpkins horror conceit, it is, along with John Boorman's Deliverance from two years earlier, the classic example of a film that isn't about what it's ostensibly about. Look at the assiduous reduction of wheelchair-bound outcast Franklin (Paul A. Partain), a character who remains for the efforts of Hooper and Partain (apparently so irritating in real life that his cohorts were relieved by his on-screen demise) one of the most unapologetically irritating and pathetic figures in film and find noteworthy not that a handicapped person is allowed to be a self-pitying asshole, but that we're not let off the hook (as it were) for our own prejudices. Franklin is an anchor–and we're glad that he's dead, too.

Ren & Stimpy: The Lost Episodes (2003) – DVD

October 26, 2006Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Television

Image A Sound A Extras A-
"Naked Beach Frenzy," "Stimpy's Pregnant," "Altruists," "Ren Seeks Help," "Fire Dogs, Part 2," "Onward and Upward"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There are, believe it or not, those who miss the days of the Production Code as a tool for making writers try harder to suggest things instead of spelling them out. I never really bought into the argument, but it seems almost sensible to me now that I've seen Ren and Stimpy unleashed and uncensored. To be sure, no loyalist can be without the six adventures contained on Paramount's new-to-DVD "Ren & Stimpy: The Lost Episodes" (only half of which ever reached the airwaves, under the banner "Ren & Stimpy 'Adult Party Cartoon'"), whose scripts were suppressed by Nickelodeon for being too raunchy for kids; and when they're on, they take the formula out of the cage of decency so that it might run around free and unfettered. Alas, the introduction of naked women and actual foul language somehow dampens the charm of the Nickelodeon run. The thrill of "Ren & Stimpy" lies in its childish, anal-stage irresponsibility, with its suppression of the sexual in favour of the scatological–to say nothing of the florid insults ("You bloated sack of protoplasm!") with which mere expletives can't possibly compete.

Slither (2006) – DVD

October 23, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Nathan Fillion, Elizabeth Banks, Michael Rooker, Gregg Henry
written and directed by James Gunn

Slithercapby Walter Chaw Paying tribute to his Lloyd Kaufman roots with a shot in which The Toxic Avenger is on TV in the background, James Gunn's Slither is more in line with the hipster revisionism of his screenplay for Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead. Postmodernism its point, then, drying up the musty cellars somewhat of the films it riffs on, Slither misses when it does only because it has little resonance beyond the basic Cronenbergian sexual-parasites thing and the shopworn idea that Americans are voracious, disgusting, ignorant swine. (In truth, the one moment that really bugs me is a fairly demented rape sequence (involving more infant-menace than anything in the new The Hills Have Eyes) and its played-for-giggles fallout.) In place of useful sociology, it does for redneck archetypes what Shaun of the Dead did for workaday slobs, poking fun at the thin line between slack-jawed yokels (initiating deer season with a barn-busting hoedown) and beef-craving, slug-brained zombies (recalling that NASCAR now boasts its own brand of meat). The biggest surprise is that Gunn appears to have seen and liked Night of the Creeps, and that, like that film, Slither does what it does without sacrificing too much of its good-natured, self-deprecating sense of humour along the way.

Marie Antoinette (2006) + Tideland (2006)

October 19, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Canada, Coming of Age, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Directors: Terry Gilliam, Drama, France, Horror, Japan, Theatrical, UK

MARIE ANTOINETTE
**½/****
starring Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis, Rip Torn
screenplay by Sofia Coppola, based on the novel Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser
directed by Sofia Coppola

TIDELAND
***½/****
starring Jodelle Ferland, Jeff Bridges, Brendan Fletcher, Jennifer Tilly
screenplay by Terry Gilliam & Tony Grisoni, based on the novel by Mitch Cullin
directed by Terry Gilliam

Marietidelandby Walter Chaw In going from The Virgin Suicides to Lost in Translation to Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola appears to be charting the arc of her own soft, unstructured dive into the morass of melancholia and regret, discovering her voice along the way in the bell tones of Kirsten Dunst, who plays a fourteen-year-old in The Virgin Suicides and, at the start of Coppola's latest film, a fourteen-year-old again, the Austrian Archduchess Marie Antoinette. Coppola's "Fast Times at Palais Versailles" opens with Marie loping through her Austrian palace, just another sleepy, stupid girl with a tiny dog, one poised to have the fate of two countries riding on her ability to produce a male offspring. Betrothed to nebbish French King Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), she's put into a French court ruled by gossip and bloodline (in one of the film's few literal moments, Marie offers that her waking ritual attended by what seems the entire family plot is "ridiculous") and, while crowned with the mantle of governance, thrust into the role of most popular girl in school, sprung fully-grown as the captain of the football team's best girl. It's impossible for me to not see something of Coppola's own premature coronation as the emotional centre of her father's own royal court, the third Godfather film–and to see in the intense media scrutiny afforded her in the wake of that fiasco the source of all these films about lost youth and the pain of hard choices made on her behalf. Marie Antoinette isn't a historical film so much as it's a dress-up picture; and like most any work of honesty, it's autobiographical (as indicated by its selection of '80s punk-influenced pop) and intensely vulnerable–at least for most of its first hour.

Feast (2006) [Unrated] + The Woods (2006) – DVDs

October 9, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, DVD, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

FEAST
**/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Balthazar Getty, Henry Rollins, Navi Rawat, Clu Gulager
screenplay by Patrick Melton & Marcus Dunstan
directed by John Gulager

THE WOODS
***½/**** Image A Sound A+
starring Agnes Bruckner, Patricia Clarkson, Rachel Nichols, Bruce Campbell
screenplay by David Ross
directed by Lucky McKee

by Walter Chaw I’m surprised that more great films aren’t shuttled to the direct-to-video twilight zone, seeing as how mainstream taste-makers, particularly in regards to genre pictures, seem primarily invested in churning out the same pre-masticated gruel. At the very least, prefab garbage like School for Scoundrels might as well have been dumped on the home market without a ripple in the fabric of daily life. (Something like Liliana Cavani’s Ripley’s Game, on the other hand, deserved a theatrical release: Disguised as a dtv unload, it’s the best thriller in years.) Between their low budgets, how they perform without bankable leads, and how they pretty much guarantee a healthy return on their investments, it’s almost inexplicable that horror movies get exiled to Blockbuster as often as they do. You can learn a lot about a people from the mythologies they construct to frighten and warn, although because horror films are bankable product (and always were), they fall prey to the same venal, filthy lucre-inspired pitfalls of formula drudgery. Still, I like to refer to them as the “indicator species” of our cultural swamp in that they’re not only ugly, dirty, bottom-feeding, what have you, but also the first species of entertainment to reflect the elements polluting the spirit of this exact moment in our social history. If you can find the pulse of it, a horror movie will tell you a lot about that quickening in your own chest when you watch the evening news.

Three… Extremes (2005) + Hellbent (2005) – DVDs

September 26, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Hong Kong, Horror, Japan, South Korea, Thriller

THREE… EXTREMES
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
DUMPLINGS-The Hong Kong Extreme: starring Miriam Yeung, Bai Ling
screenplay by Lilian Lee
directed by Fruit Chan
CUT-The Korean Extreme: starring Lee Byung-Hun, Lim Won-Hee
written and directed by Park Chanwook
BOX-The Japan Extreme: starring Kyoko Hasegawa,Atsuro Watabe
screenplay by Haruko Fukushima
directed by Takashi Miike

HELLBENT
***½/**** Image C- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Dylan Fergus, Bryan Kirkwood, Hank Harris, Andrew Levitas
written and directed by Paul Etheredge-Ouzts

Threeextremescapby Walter Chaw My favourite working cinematographer is Harris Savides. His collaborations with Gus Van Sant and his contribution to Jonathan Glazer's Birth demonstrate to me an agility with aspect ratio and rhythm that's particularly pleasing to my own ways of seeing. A close second, though, is Christopher Doyle, the great Australian cinematographer who teams almost exclusively with Asian directors (most notably on the bulk of Wong Kar Wai's visually arresting filmography, Zhang Yimou's Hero, and Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe)–his stuff indicative of a kind of lyrical, ritualistic devouring that matches the best of the Asian sensibility in pace and narrative. Doyle joins an elite crowd (Greg Toland, James Wong Howe, Raoul Coutard, Sven Nykvist, Vilmos Zsigmond, Conrad Hall, and a select few others) of cinematographers worthy of the auteur label: a certain mood, a certain style, haunts every frame on which he works with a distinct, unmistakable bouquet. He's an interesting choice, then, as the only constant of an anthology film, Three… Extremes, a sequel in structure to an Asian portmanteau from a couple years back, featuring, again, three different frontline Asian directors, each enlisted to provide a horror-based short film.

TIFF ’06: The Last Winter

September 18, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Horror, Iceland, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF
***/****starring Ron Perlman, James Le Gros, Connie Britton, Zachary Gilfordscreenplay by Larry Fessenden & Robert Leaverdirected by Larry Fessenden by Bill Chambers Larry Fessenden has always been an artist and a consummate professional, but there's a newfound commercial glaze to The Last Winter--however ironic its use of widescreen--that makes one feel somehow less inclined to coddle it. An ambiguous statement, I know; I guess what I'm saying is that if I have any reservations about the piece (and I had fewer about Wendigo and Habit), I don't really fear seeming anti-intellectual in voicing them. Fessenden's own private The Thing, The Last…

Eaten Alive (1977) [Special Edition] – DVD

September 18, 2006Posted in1970s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, Horror

a.k.a.  Death Trap, Legend of the Bayou, Murder on the Bayou, Starlight Slaughter, Horror Hotel, Horror Hotel Massacre
**½/**** Image C+* Sound B Extras B+
starring Neville Brand, Mel Ferrer, Carolyn Jones, Marilyn Burns
screenplay by Alvin L. Fast, Kim Henkel and Mardi Rustam
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Alex Jackson The disparity between the reputation of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and that of everything he made thereafter had been eating away at me ever since I polished off his 1977 follow-up, Eaten Alive. You see, Eaten Alive seemed to me to be very much the same movie as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, only instead of a maniac with a chainsaw and a sledgehammer, it had a maniac with a sickle and a man-eating crocodile. Why exactly is it that critics and audiences alike consider The Texas Chain Saw Massacre canonical, a masterpiece of the genre, while Eaten Alive floundered in relative obscurity until being referenced in a Quentin Tarantino film?

The Protector (2005) + The Covenant (2006)

September 13, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Fantasy, France, Hong Kong, Horror, Thailand, Thriller

Tom yum goong
***/****
starring Tony Jaa, Petchtai Wongkamlao, Bongkoj Khongmalai, Xing Jing
screenplay by Kongdej Jaturanrasamee & Napalee & Piyaros Thongdee and Joe Wannapin
directed by Prachya Pinkaew

THE COVENANT
½*/****
starring Steven Strait, Sebastian Stan, Laura Ramsey, Taylor Kitsch
screenplay by J.S. Cardone
directed by Renny Harlin

by Walter Chaw Tony Jaa is a bad motherfucker. There's a moment in his latest export The Protector where it appears as though he's killed someone with his penis (lo, how I would love to avoid that epitaph), and in the meantime, he dispatches foes with the heedless joy of obvious predecessor Jackie Chan (who has a cameo in the film shot so ineptly that it suggests a Jackie Chan impersonator smeared with Vaseline). Alas, there's a plot (something about the kidnapping of two elephants, one of which is turned into a gaudy tchotcke in an evil dragon lady's den of inequity), too, told through a lot of howlingly incompetent narrative chunks you could seemingly rearrange in any order with no tangible disruption of sense. (The Butchers Weinstein may of course be partly to blame.) The film is easily the funniest, most exhilaratingly ridiculous picture in a year in which Snakes on a Plane aspired to the same camp/cult heights, and it does it the only way that you can: by being deadly serious.

TIFF ’06: The Host

September 10, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, South Korea, TIFF
Gue-mool***½/****starring Song Kang-ho, Byun Hee-bong, Park Hae-il, Bae Doo-na, Ko Ah-sungscreenplay by Bong Joon-ho, Hah Joon-won, Baek Chul-hyundirected by Bong Joon-ho by Bill Chambers I knew I would love The Host as soon as I realized that the man in the surgical scrubs was none other than national treasure Scott Wilson, who, in his most heinous role since In Cold Blood (or maybe Shiloh), observes dust on the jars of formaldehyde in the morgue of a South Korean military base and bullies a reluctant attendant into disposing of them by dumping their contents down the sink. It's not merely that I…

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971) – DVD

August 29, 2006Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Zohra Lampert, Barton Heyman, Kevin O'Connor, Gretchen Corbett
screenplay by Norman Jonas and Ralph Rose
directed by John Hancock

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Let's Scare Jessica to Death is a sort of journeyman-hack remake of Repulsion: the fantasy-into-reality element is there without Polanski's jolting surrealism, while genre trappings are introduced to keep everybody from wondering what the hell they're watching. Strangely, the concoction successfully keeps you doing just that. Anchored by Zohra Lampert's convincing performance in the title role, the film manages to make its modest borrowings seem quaint and pleasant in a campfire-story way. Director John Hancock's craftsmanship prevents the whole thing from collapsing, and the gimmicky script, by Hancock and Lee Kalcheim (both writing under pseudonyms), has enough juicy plums to string you along for the next one. It isn't exactly good, but it's surprisingly watchable–if not always credible.

2001 Maniacs (2006) – DVD

August 16, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Horror

*½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Robert Englund, Lin Shaye, Giuseppe Andrews, Travis Tritt
screenplay by Chris Kobin and Tim Sullivan
directed by Tim Sullivan

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Carol Clover has a lot to answer for. Prior to the advent of her Men, Women, and Chain Saws, slasher films were unambiguously misogynist, and hillbilly horror was unambiguously anti-South. Now the converse is stridently true, failing to take into account the infinitesimal cross-identifications that make both readings possible. 2001 Maniacs is interesting as a film that simultaneously mocks and sympathizes with ruthless killers from the destroyed South–it at once punishes and identifies with its Yankee victims, thwarting a straight-ahead reading. Its genre is rather like Daniel Auteuil in Caché: aware that there might be some crime in the past, but unable to deal with it once confronted with it. Alas, 2001 Maniacs is not interesting on any other level. The film is an 87-minute issue of FANGORIA, complete with bad puns and hard-R violence and distended by some smarmy shots at the characters who might be expected to want revenge.

Scary Movie 4 (2006) [Unrated & Uncensored] – DVD

August 14, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Satire

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Anna Faris, Regina Hall, Craig Bierko, Bill Pullman
screenplay by Craig Mazin & Jim Abrahams & Pat Proft
directed by David Zucker

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The problem with Scary Movie 4 isn't that the jokes are cheap–indeed, we'd be disappointed if they weren't. No, the problem is that the film has no real point-of-view beyond a) black people are funny; b) gay people are funny; c) lascivious black women are hilarious; and d) recent horror movies fit together (however uneasily). The torrent of hit-or-miss gags is perhaps par for the course, but these bits aren't held together by some overarching idea or sensibility–there's no satire of current horror titles, just a parade titles and the lazy ethnic/sexual/bathroom humour that is this sort of movie's bread and butter. Which probably won't mean squat to the people who've made the series a cash cow, but anyone looking for genuine comedy (as opposed to listless shtick) is advised to look elsewhere.

Equinox [The Criterion Collection] – DVD

August 13, 2006Posted in1960s, 1970s, Action, Adventure, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, The Criterion Collection

THE EQUINOX …A JOURNEY INTO THE SUPERNATURAL (1967)
***½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A+
starring Skip Shimer, Barbara Hewitt, Frank Boers, Jr., Robin Snider
screenplay by Mark Thomas McGee
directed by Mark Thomas McGee & Dennis Muren

EQUINOX (1970)
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A+
starring Edward Connell, Barbara Hewitt, Frank Boers jr., Robin Christopher
written and directed by Jack Woods

Equinoxcapby Walter Chaw Four teens on a double-date venture into the hills around California in search of an old, dotty professor only to learn that the crazy old bat's unleashed the spawn of Hell with a book written by the devil. When producer Jack Harris bought The Equinox …A Journey Into the Supernatural (hereafter The Equinox) and hired B-hack Jack Woods to partially rewrite and reshoot it three years after its completion, he would insert a new character in evil, unibrowed park ranger Asmodeus (Woods), thus imposing a weird element of pervy grope cinema while handily washing away in a wave of lowbrow mediocrity most of what makes The Equinox so exceptional. Comparing the two versions (the revamp's title streamlined to Equinox) is an example of the difference between gifted amateurs pursuing a passion and slick exploitation artists applying their own interpretations (this time the burgeoning drive-in market) of where they might grab the quickest buck. For The Equinox to endure as an underground classic despite its co-optation is something like The Magnificent Ambersons maintaining its masterpiece status despite the non-existence of Welles's original cut. It's quite a relief, in other words, that Dennis Muren's The Equinox has survived for comparison's sake.

The Descent (2005)

August 8, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, Saskia Mulder
written and directed by Neil Marshall

by Walter Chaw Beginning in the same way as countless other genre pictures (the city folks go to a cabin and have boring, perfunctory, character-defining chatter), Neil Marshall’s often-terrifying, often-brilliant The Descent subsequently manages to describe for long stretches a complicated, Jungian labyrinth of regret and shadow-projections and doubling through dank explorations of a vaginal, womb-like metaphor for the subconscious. There’s a moment where our avatar, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), emerges from a gore bath and stands reborn into the very avenging feminist totem of Carrie post-prom: it’s just one of three “births” Sarah endures (four if you count a dream sequence in a hospital early on), the last of which stands in tribute to the final sting of Carrie. It’s possible, in fact, to split the film into quarters according to its recurrent motifs of gestation-into-discharge following penetration.

The Wicker Man (2006)

August 6, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Esoterica, Germany, Horror, Mexico, Mystery, Nicolas Cage, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Ellen Burstyn, Kate Beahan, Frances Conroy
screenplay by Neil LaBute, based on the screenplay by Anthony Shaffer
directed by Neil LaBute

Wickerman2006by Walter Chaw You mark off certain literary flourishes in Neil LaBute's remake of Robin Hardy's classic The Wicker Man, and then you can't help but note that beneath the pagan matriarchy that is its villain and the hangdog cop (Nicolas Cage) that is its dullard hero, the film is just the auteur's latest unnecessarily reductive gender deconstruction. It's another major disappointment from the man who put humanity on the spit in In the Company of Men and–to a lesser, if no less affecting, degree–Your Friends and Neighbors. This redux hates women and, more, it hates femininity–typical LaBute, you could fairly offer, especially after Possession and The Shape of Things; The Wicker Man demonstrates again that LaBute is one of the brightest, most well-read American directors working–and that he's become incapable of focusing his smarts on a target other than the cruel and essentially alien nature of women. Hitchcock's films are arguably as obsessed, but his "wrong men" were hardly free of complicity in the construction of their own downfalls. Fatal to the production, then, is the introduction of an unsullied male hero–a literal martyr this time instead of the figurative types of LaBute's last couple pictures: a man of action (no milquetoast intellectuals here) struggling against a rising tide of castrating, hippie harpies.

Monster House (2006)

July 20, 2006Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Horror, Mystery, Spielberg, Theatrical

***/****
screenplay by Dan Harmon & Rob Schrab and Pamela Pettler
directed by Gil Kenan

Monsterhouseby Walter Chaw There's a lightness to the heroes of Monster House, as well as a certain callous insouciance in the way the film handles itself as a metaphor for puberty, but the effects for the titular monster and the care with which it sketches the human monster living inside it make the picture fascinating. When it's humming, above and below, the contraption identifies the malady of adolescence as loneliness, as becoming an outcast caste of one ("This is why we sit by ourselves at lunch"), if in mind only. It knows the sudden, emboldening rush of recognizing a girl's charms, and it sees in friendship the bonds and courage that time hasn't yet had the chance to disdain. None of this is surprising, particularly, especially since its executive producers are Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg–who, between them, have fashioned some of our finest monuments to the cult of childhood. But then Monster House throws a curveball and makes its bad guys…tragic. And not just tragic but unbearably tragic–tragic enough that they become ennobled through their tragedy; by the end of the film, with its surprising declaration of "freedom," what could have been a trite affirmation of the ironic swap of the fears of childhood for the anxieties of the teenage years is transformed into a more ecumenical discussion about how life is sacrifice and love is sometimes unrequited, and about loyalty to causes in which we believe and the people in whom we invest ourselves.

Magic (1978) – DVD

July 10, 2006Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Romance

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Anthony Hopkins, Ann-Margret, Burgess Meredith, Ed Lauter
screenplay by William Goldman, based on his novel
directed by Richard Attenborough

  Magiccap

by Walter Chaw I've never been able to contextualize Richard Attenborough's Magic in any meaningful way. I think the best William Goldman pulp novels (Control, The Princess Bride, Marathon Man, Tinsel) defy categorization and emerge as artifacts out of time and genre. The homosexual twists, the sexualized fairytales, the exploding breast implants, the first-person narration taken from "Fats's Diary" of Magic, his thriller about a mad artist engaged in that hard-to-contextualize discipline of ventriloquism…