House of 1000 Corpses (2003) + Waxwork/Waxwork II: Lost in Time [Double Feature] – DVD

HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon, Karen Black
written and directed by Rob Zombie

WAXWORK (1988)
*/**** Image D Sound D
starring Zach Galligan, Deborah Foreman, Michelle Johnson, Dana Ashbrook
written and directed by Anthony Hickox

WAXWORK II: LOST IN TIME (1991)
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C
starring Zach Galligan, Alexander Godunov, Monika Schnarre
written and directed by Anthony Hickox

by Walter Chaw Curiously, compulsively watchable in a grindhouse exploitation sort of way, neo-glam shock-rocker Rob Zombie follows in Twisted Sister Dee Snider’s capering footsteps with a derivative flick that mainly goes a long way towards demonstrating how hard it is to make a coherent movie. More Richard Donner’s The Goonies than Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, House of 1000 Corpses is a shoestring series of hyperactive camera movements and disjointed images culled from what seems too many films to count, from Bloodsucking Freaks to Near Dark to Maniac to The Serpent and the Rainbow to Halloween to Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 and so on, with no reason except to demonstrate how many horror movies Zombie has seen. The only thing missing from the picture–besides actual dread–is a helpful annotation so that youngsters intrigued can check out the real deal.

Ghoulies (1985)/Ghoulies II (1988) [Double Feature] + Troll (1988)/Troll 2 (1990) [Double Feature] – DVDs

GHOULIES
*/**** Image B Sound A-
starring Peter Liapis, Lisa Pelikan, Michael Des Barres, Jack Nance
screenplay by Luca Bercovici and Jefery Levy
directed by Luca Bercovici

GHOULIES II
*½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Damon Martin, Royal Dano, Phil Fondacaro, J. Downing
screenplay by Charlie Dolan and Dennis Paoli
directed by Albert Band

TROLL
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Noah Hathaway, Michael Moriarty, Shelley Hack, Jenny Beck
screenplay by Albert Band
directed by John Buechler

TROLL 2
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound C
starring Michael Stephenson, Connie McFarland, George Hardy, Margo Prey
written and directed by Drago Lloyd

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover What's the only thing worse than a DVD of a bad '80s monster movie? A DVD with two of them. That's the conclusion I've reached after subjecting myself to some warmed-over chillers recently unleashed on disc–detritus from or inspired by the defunct B-mill Empire Pictures that only Forrest J. Ackerman could love. I'd like to say that they're enjoyably tacky nostalgia items for those old enough to barely remember them, but the truth is that they skimp on the crass goods that make a good bad movie: attempting to find a broader audience through a PG-13 rating, they lack the sex and violence that a true exploitation film would deliver, and the films are so cheap that the remaining attraction of monster effects are by necessity curtailed. What's left are scripts and direction at best enervating and at worst maddening.

28 Days Later (2002) [Widescreen Special Edition] – DVD

28 Days Later…
**½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras A
starring Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson, Christopher Eccleston
screenplay by Alex Garland
directed by Danny Boyle

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover 28 Days Later… is a film that shoots for resonance but is too shortsighted to hit the target. Its tale of an England beset by rage-crazed zombies is clearly a metaphor for something–but what? Timing rules out certain international disasters (9/11 happened as the film was shooting), and a certain opacity of intent clouds the entire film, making you reach out for something that you're never sure is really there. There are compensatory pleasures (a general creepiness, one smashing performance), but the film lacks something beyond its grasp, leaving you with an adequate, reasonably entertaining picture, and nothing more.

Underworld (2003)

*½/****
starring Kate Beckinsale, Scott Speedman, Shane Brolly, Michael Sheen
screenplay by Danny McBride
directed by Len Wiseman

Underworldby Walter Chaw Appearing to be based on two White Wolf role-playing games–"Vampire: The Masquerade" and "Werewolf: The Apocalypse"–introduced a while back (and indeed, the games company is suing Sony, Screen Gems, and Lakeshore for copyright infringement, citing no fewer than sixty points of unique similarity), Len Wiseman's Underworld may prove to be less "Romeo and Juliet" than much ado about nothing. The picture looks fantastic, Kate Beckinsale and Scott Speedman look fantastic, and that's pretty much all there is recommend about the piece, which is so boring, lifeless, and humourless that White Wolf would do well to distance itself from the thing toot sweet. This is gravid filmmaking at its worst, indulging in its twin cults' puerile wish-fulfillment fantasies with a sexless lust: the life of an immortal rock star in period garb thirsting for the blood of bullies for the one, of a raging man-beast thirsting for the blood of bullies for the other. In between are tons of rip-offs of everything from The Crow to The Matrix to the leather fetish and arms of Blade to the sweaty bodice-ripping of Anne Rice to the Alien3 wall-crawling monster views of David Fincher. Wiseman, in his hyphenate debut (he co-concocted the story), has scored big with a real-life engagement to the ethereally beautiful–and undernourished and anaemic–Kate Beckinsale, enough to take the sting out of the blah of Underworld, I'd surmise. And why not? Many would fail worse for less, but as a writer and director he proves himself to be a pretty good set designer.

Dreamcatcher (2003) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Morgan Freeman, Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Damian Lewis
screenplay by William Goldman and Lawrence Kasdan, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Lawrence Kasdan

by Walter Chaw As stupid as stupid can be, Lawrence Kasdan’s splashy comeback on the backs of two writers who haven’t really been any good for about 40 years between them (Stephen King and William Goldman) is riddled with knee-slapping plot inconsistencies and the sort of dunderheaded conveniences that reek equally of desperation and a lack of respect for the audience. Based on the first King novel written after the author was smeared across a Maine highway by a man who would later kill himself in a trailer, the book is a fine short story trapped in the body of a 600-page book. Hopelessly protracted, after the first 200 pages, the novel becomes a pathetic exercise in chronic self-reference: the malady of a successful author who’s begun to lose the line between reality and his cult of personality. King has become a writer interested in writing love letters to his fanbase and smug gruel for everyone else.

TIFF ’03: Undead

½*/****starring Felicity Mason, Mungo McKay, Rob Jenkins, Lisa Cunninghamwritten and directed by Peter Spierig & Michael Spierig by Bill Chambers For novice directors, even genre can become an irresistible new toy. So it is with the Spierig Brothers' Undead, an Australian film that liberally applies CG but more detrimentally cribs from every and any horror flick that fanboys ever extolled; those mouth-breathing types who post talkback at AICN have never been this condescended to, yet I fear that Undead's pandering will sail over their heads and lead to a misguided appreciation of the film as a one-stop shop for all…

Cabin Boy: FFC Interviews Eli Roth

ErothinterviewtitleSeptember 14, 2003|Debuting with a splash at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival, Eli Roth’s zero-budgeted Cabin Fever sparked a bidding war won by Lions Gate Entertainment to the tune of $3.5M. A throwback to the Spam-in-a-cabin flicks of the early 1980s, the picture, for all its references and debts to films like The Evil Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and John Carpenter’s The Thing, bears the unmistakable mark of a young Joe Dante: equal parts Roger Corman and cartoons. Cabin Fever is energetic and puerile, best when it apes Dante’s energy and sense of humour, worst when it takes on Dante’s occasional sloppiness and lack of cohesion. It’s dedicated, in either case, to providing a nostalgic glut of gratuitous nudity and gore while offering something I’ve been missing for a while now: a special-effects movie reliant on Karo syrup, KY jelly, and imagination uncorrupted by the perfect lines of a mainframe. That there is the possibility for a deeper analysis of the picture, centring on menstrual anxieties and banning rituals, is almost beside the point when the picture boasts of a scene involving a lady Bic, a bathtub, and a girl infected by a flesh-eating virus.

TIFF ’03: Gozu

Yakuza Horror Theater: Gozu***½/****starring Hideki Sone, Sho Aikawa, Kimika Yoshino, Keiko Tomitascreenplay by Sakichi Sotodirected by Takashi Miike by Bill Chambers I've sat here staring at a flashing cursor, wondering what to write about Takashi Miike's Gozu--a picture whose spirit harks back to the David Lynch of Eraserhead--that could persuade you to see it: Though Gozu begs a viewing, any description likely to pique one's interest would force you to pre-emptively pass moral judgment on a film that a) explicitly requests to be taken as a joke, and b) is too fecund to truly offend. Gozu begins with the over-the-top…

Burnt Offerings (1976) – DVD

**/**** Image C+ Sound D+ Extras C
starring Karen Black, Oliver Reed, Burgess Meredith, Eileen Heckart
screenplay by William F. Nolan and Dan Curtis, based on the novel by Robert Marasco
directed by Dan Curtis

by Walter Chaw Plodding, ugly, moribund, Burnt Offerings is bolstered by a few great campy turns from a game cast that includes Oliver Reed, Karen Black, and Bette Davis in a performance that runs counter to the self-loathing roles of her Baby Jane/Sweet Charlotte days. Finding its way to the DVD format just a couple of weeks before another haunted house flick (Cold Creek Manor) debuts on the big screen, veteran television director Dan Curtis's horror quickie is one of those comfortable relics that doesn't scare so much as mildly chill, offering countless opportunities to shout at the screen without any sort of discernible payoff–until the end, that is, but even that shocker of a conclusion has been telegraphed since at least the midway point of the first act, muffling its surprise.

The Ωmega Man (1971) – DVD

The Omega Man
*/**** Image A- Sound B Extras D

starring Charlton Heston, Anthony Zerbe, Rosalind Cash
screenplay by John William Corrington and Joyce H. Corrington, based on the novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
directed by Boris Sagal

by Walter Chaw Its dialogue and score at constant war with the tickle of poignancy threatening to justify The Ωmega Man‘s cult status, Boris Sagal’s at times astonishingly awful adaptation of Richard Matheson’s classic short novel I Am Legend is some kind of weird hippie elegy spiced with a few disturbing religious images and a lot of casual racism. The idea that Matheson’s vampires are now black-hooded (monastic and judicial) albino mutants living in an abandoned civic building, representative of not a new order but the oppressive old, is too clearly a lament for the doom of the flower-power generation. Frankly, the image of broken-down hippies trying to plant seeds in blasted earth in the middle of Easy Rider said it all with more elegance and brevity.

Mondays in the Sun (2002); Freaky Friday (2003); The Eye (2002)

Los Lunes al sol
**/****
starring Javier Bardem, Luis Tosar, José Ángel Egido, Nieve de Medina
screenplay by Fernando León de Aranda, Ignacio del Moral
directed by Fernando León de Aranda

FREAKY FRIDAY
**/****
starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, Harold Gould, Mark Harmon
screenplay by Heather Hach and Leslie Dixon, based on the novel by Mary Rodgers
directed by Mark S. Waters

Jian gui
*½/****
starring Angelica Lee, Lawrence Chou, Chutcha Rujinanon, Yut Lai So
screenplay by Jo Jo Yuet-chun Hui, Oxide Pang & Danny Pang
directed by Oxide Pang & Danny Pang

Mondaysfreakyeyeby Walter Chaw Fernando León de Aranda's Mondays in the Sun is probably best described as a Spanish version of Fred Schepisi's Last Orders: a journal of a depressed nation's aging gentry, ferrying one of their own on to the great symbolic hereafter. It aspires to the sort of myth of Vittorio Di Sica's neo-realism, portraying the plight of the dispossessed working class in its unadorned splendour, succeeding by the end only to be a repetitive tattoo around the threadbare theme of men defined by work and destroyed by obsolescence. A castration melodrama in several anecdotal horizontal movements, Mondays in the Sun loses steam and tests patience by making its one point to exhaustion. A scene where the great Javier Bardem rails at the fable of the grasshopper and the ants ("This is bunk! It has no sympathy for someone who is born a grasshopper instead of an ant!") says almost all there is to say about the film, while a lingering close-up of Bardem's battered mug in all its injured brute eloquence is, by itself again, enough.

Final Destination 2 (2003) [infinifilm] – DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Ali Larter, A.J. Cook, Michael Landes, Terrence ‘T.C.’ Carson
screenplay by J. Mackye Gruber & Eric Bress
directed by David Richard Ellis 

by Walter Chaw Earning some marks for a gratuitous tit shot and a few graphic kills, the mystical gorefest Final Destination 2 is an unusually mordant excuse to knock off a few good-looking caricatures. Philosophically speaking, it develops its mythology with a series of rules so Byzantine that rather than spend a surplus of time trying to unravel what’s going on, it’s best just to settle comfortably into the realization that the ones we’ve marked for death are, in fact, marked by Death in the film. The most interesting thing about the picture, in fact, is that it is self-reflexive for genre fans, who’ve made it something of a matter of course to pick out the heroine and the meat bags from the rest of the cattle. In our way, we become the avatars of the Grim Reaper, laying our bony fingers on each inevitable victim in turn. The audience, in a very direct way, becomes that invisible cold wind that announces the arrival of doom–Final Destination 2 is almost interactive.

Dracula II: Ascension (2003) – DVD

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Jason Scott Lee, Jason London, Craig Sheffer, Stephen Billington
screenplay by Joel Soisson & Patrick Lussier
directed by Patrick Lussier

by Walter Chaw As far as direct-to-video sequels to awful franchise films go, Patrick Lussier’s ponderously dubbed Wes Craven Presents Dracula II: Ascension (hereafter Dracula II) is better than Hellraiser 3 and Children of the Corn V, but really just a vampire knock-off of Suicide Kings, of all things. After tackling the mummy mythos in Russell Mulcahy’s dreadful Tale of the Mummy, poor Jason Scott Lee takes on the vampire canon, assuming the Van Helsing role of self-flagellating holy vamp hunter Uffizi, all decked-out in priestly black and doing his Bruce Lee berserker song-and-dance, this time armed to the nines with obscure weaponry. A shame that the film spends so much of its time watching a suddenly Aryan Dracula (Stephen Billington, Gerard Butler apparently not available) tied to a table between banks of ultraviolet lights while mumbling dreamy phrases in a Count Chocula accent, as the potential is there for a campy cheap-o action/gore piece.

May (2003) – DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Angela Bettis, Jeremy Sisto, Anna Faris, James Duval
written and directed by Lucky McKee

by Walter Chaw Lucky McKee takes a look at the end of the world and it comes half-blinded before a student version of Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day and a poster-shrine to Dario Argento’s Opera. The apocalypse in May is the end of cinema, a self-consuming contemplation of itself as the product of genre, and so its touchstones are films that consider the horror of unnatural progeny, inappropriate consumption, and, of course, the literariness of “Frankenstein”‘s exhumation and reconstitution tropes. When May (Angela Bettis) pleads at the picture’s conclusion to be seen, more than the plaintive cry of a child molded by fear into something strange, it’s an understanding that the life of cinema is like the span of any beast: naivety into optimism into cynicism into contemplation into, finally, a breed of facile irony fed by the mordancy of existence at its extremity.

Tsui Hark’s Vampire Hunters (2003)

The Era of Vampires
*/****
starring Chan Kwok Kwan, Ken Chang, Suet Lam, Michael Chow Man-Kin
screenplay by Tsui Hark
directed by Wellson Chin

by Walter Chaw An incomprehensible bit of garbage produced and written by legendary Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark, Vampire Hunters juggles at least three plots and drops each of them repeatedly and egregiously. Its lore is confused and its heroes are unremarkable but for the unusual degree to which they’re inept and disinteresting. The promise inherent in a chop-socky wuxia opus concerning a quintet of fearless vampire hunters and a cadre of zombies is almost infinite, making the abject failure of the piece something almost awe-inspiring. Though it’s tempting to blame director Wellson Chin’s propensity to stage fight scenes in unrelieved murk, the real culprit of the piece may be a bad guy who looks and moves a lot like a mannequin on a string. William Castle, eat your heart out.

Film Freak Central Does Film Forward

MadstonefilmforwardlogoMay 13th, 2003|An interesting move from an interesting company, Madstone Theaters is releasing six undistributed films, each for a one-week alternating run called "Film Forward". The first thought that comes to mind is that undistributed films are most likely that way for a reason. There's an old Tinsel Town axiom that applies to most of the stuff that winds up shelved for a lengthy period of time (View from the Top, A Man Apart, The Weight of Water): studios often don't know when something's good, but they almost always know when something's bad. The idea of "Film Forward" should be appealing, at least intellectually, for the movie-savvy audience that Madstone is trying to cultivate; the question with currency is, as it always is, whether self-confessed movie snobs will put their money where their mouths are.

The Mothman Prophecies (2002) [Special Edition] – DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Will Patton, Debra Messing
screenplay by Richard Hatem, based on the novel by John A. Keel
directed by Mark Pellington

by Walter Chaw Inviting comparisons to “The X-Files” (comparisons the series made inevitable by setting several of its episodes in rural West Virginia and making mention of the “Mothman” in an excellent fifth season episode called “Detour”), Mark Pellington’s The Mothman Prophecies has a peculiarly muted quality to it that suggests the entire piece is best seen as shrouded in a caul. Allied with that idea, The Mothman Prophecies is about knowing certain things of the future and exorcising the past, about accepting that there are things in life that can’t be prevented. It’s got heady messages for a film based on a cultish bit of crypto-zoology reportage by John Keel (documenting eerie events in Point Pleasant, WV that stretched thirteen months from November 15, 1966 to December 15, 1967), and ultimately the relatively lightweight genre bedrock of the piece is not strong enough to support its broad philosophizing.

Darkwolf (2003) – DVD

Dark Wolf
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C
starring Samaire Armstrong, Ryan Alosio, Andrea Bogart, Jaime Bergman
screenplay by Geoffrey Alan Holliday
directed by Richard Friedman

by Walter Chaw Something to do with hybrid werewolves and full-breed werewolves and how one hybrid biker werewolf is interested in mating with the last full-bred matriarch bitch in order to preserve the line of the pure-blood werewolves, the direct-to-video DarkWolf at least has the decency to open in a strip club and continue into a fairly decent gore set-piece before launching into its incomprehensible lore. Tied to the creatures of the id-horror subgenre (the best example of which is probably Neil Jordan’s psychosexual A Company of Wolves), a recent glut of lycanthropic fare (Ginger Snaps, Dog Soldiers) holds a curious candle to the idea that, despite Arab belief to the contrary, Western civilization seems to be regressing into a puritanical sexual hysteria that proves fertile ground for horror films about the cycle of sexual repression/aggression. It’s possible, also, that guys (and dolls) in fur suits are just cool again.

Darkness Falls (2003) [Special Edition] – DVD

**/**** Image B- Sound A Extras B-
starring Chaney Kley, Emma Caulfield, Joshua Anderson, Andrew Bayly
screenplay by John Fasano and James Vanderbilt and Joe Harris
directed by Jonathan Liebesman

by Walter Chaw Two years removed from Victor Salva’s Jeepers Creepers (and on the eve of a sequel to that film), Darkness Falls whets cult appetites by being nearly a scene-for-scene recreation of that film’s inferior second half. Essentially a series of “I don’t believe your story–hey, why did the lights go out?” scenarios and unearned jump scares, the picture opens with a nice fairytale prologue and a nifty “12 years ago” introduction that hints at the promise of a murderous Tooth Fairy. As soon as the action jumps to the present day with a warbling youngster, her hot sister, and our troubled hero, however, any pretense of a creepy, coherent mythology flies out the window as the flick devolves into an inexorable killer flick amped-up to “11.”

Ghost Ship (2002) – DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Julianna Margulies, Desmond Harrington, Isaiah Washington, Gabriel Byrne
screenplay by Mark Hanlon and John Pogue
directed by Steve Beck

by Bill Chambers Ghost Ship is better than its director Steve Beck’s previous film for Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver’s “Dark Castle,” the repugnant Thir13en Ghosts–but we’re talking incrementally. Somewhere in between the two pictures, Beck learned that even though the AVID editing machine makes an infinite number of cuts possible, he shouldn’t take that as a dare, and in Ghost Ship, he embraces the démodé in a way that he ironically didn’t in Thir13en Ghosts, the one of them that’s a remake. Ghost Ship opens with large, dissolving titles drawn in pink cursive script that would be at home in a Fifties movie with Vic Damone on the soundtrack. It’s a striking touch (if not entirely appropriate for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre aboard a sinking, possessed ocean liner), and it precedes a dazzling, disgusting prologue wherein the passengers on the deck of the Antonia Graza are slaughtered like so much cattle.