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.

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

Posted in2000s, 2009, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Cameron Diaz, James Marsden, Frank Langella, James Rebhorn
screenplay by Richard Kelly, based on the short story “Button, Button” by Richard Matheson
directed by Richard Kelly

by Walter Chaw As if to dispel any whisper of a doubt after Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales that whatever ephemeral magic was captured in his Donnie Darko was completely accidental, along comes Kelly’s third film as writer-director, The Box. I don’t know yet whether it’s the worst film of the year, but I will say that next to it Alex Proyas’s similar disaster Knowing seems like a goddamn masterpiece. It’s excruciatingly written, for starters, with the all-timer coming when vanilla paterfamilias Arthur (James Marsden), fresh from a 2001 light tunnel, says to vanilla materfamilias Norma (Cameron Diaz) first that “it’s beyond words,” then, a few dozen words later, that it’s “neither here, nor there…but somewhere in between” and that it’s a place “where despair is not the governor of the human soul.” It was around this time that I bore down like a Civil War soldier getting a limb sawed off and watched as The Box magically made its 115-minute running time feel like a day spent undergoing oral surgery. It’s that bad. Badly edited, too, as the awful script (based on a pretty good Richard Matheson short story)–which already jumps around haphazardly between cheap, moronic comparisons of itself to Sartre’s No Exit and egregious exposition that makes M. Night Shyamalan’s leisurely verbal masturbations look like Mamet by comparison–is matched by bizarre jump-cuts and senseless, arrhythmic pacing. Despite how long it feels, it’s over before it really begins.

Lost: The Complete First Season (2004-2005) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

Image A- Sound A+ Extras B+
"Pilot," "Tabula Rasa," "Walkabout," "White Rabbit," "House of the Rising Sun," "The Moth," "Confidence Man," "Solitary," "Raised by Another," "All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues," "Whatever the Case May Be," "Hearts and Minds," "Special," "Homecoming," "Outlaws," "…In Translation," "Numbers," "Deus Ex Machina," "Do No Harm," "The Greater Good," "Born to Run," "Exodus"

by Walter Chaw From the two-part pilot, I gotta tell you, I don't trust it. I like the gore, I like the United Colors of Benetton centrefold models as castaway chic, I love Terry O'Quinn and invisible dinosaurs… What I don't like so much is this sinking feeling that "Lost" is a throw-it-all-at-the-wall creation cashing in on post-9/11 discomfort and zeitgeist Ludditism that was genuinely surprised to be asked to hang around for six years. Meaning I have my doubts that any of this cool-ass shit has been remotely plotted out to provide for a commensurately cool-ass resolution–especially since it's not on HBO and therefore not privy to HBO's seemingly bottomless roster of brilliant short-form, long-term dramatists.

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.

Surrogates (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

Surrogates (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2009, 2010, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Bruce Willis, Radha Mitchell, Rosamund Pike, Ving Rhames
screenplay by John Brancato & Michael Ferris, based on the graphic novel by Robert Vendetti and Brett Weldele
directed by Jonathan Mostow

by Ian Pugh Fittingly, Surrogates is a patchwork substitute for any number of recent films that informed it. (All things considered, the ’05-’06 comic series from which the movie spawned may be the least of its sources.) Just look at its pedigree. Given that it’s about the schism between mortal man and unstoppable machine, it’s the second Terminator film for both director Jonathan Mostow (after Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines) and star Bruce Willis (after Live Free or Die Hard), the third for screenwriters Michael Ferris and John Brancato (after T3 and Terminator Salvation), and perhaps the six-thousandth for 2009 alone–the latest in a long line of pictures that put the human soul behind the wheel of an automaton. Willis’s Tom Greer is prescribed the usual problems–dead son, distant wife (Rosamund Pike)–of a rough-and-tumble movie cop, and from there, Surrogates cribs WALL·E‘s missive about the dangers of excessive comfort and The Dark Knight‘s casual nihilism in exploring the weakness of flesh-and-blood. Almost exclusively cobbled together from recent trends in American cinema, there’s no denying its overfamiliarity–every twist and turn the movie has to offer is obvious at least forty-five minutes in advance. But as potentially the last straight action flick of the decade, Surrogates‘ derivative nature manages the improbable: it compacts the zeitgeist into a neat little package.

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.

Moon (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2009, 2010, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Sam Rockwell, Dominique McElligott, Rosie Shaw, Kevin Spacey
screenplay by Nathan Parker
directed by Duncan Jones

by Bryant Frazer Paying homage to the science-fiction films of his youth, where space-base bulkheads and otherworldly landscapes were more likely to be styrofoam than CG, story writer and director Duncan Jones’s debut feature, Moon, is a surprisingly effective–even moving–story of isolation and alienation on the lunar surface. It’s one of those science-fiction movies made on a spartan budget that gives it a special kind of low-key tension. The closest forebear I can think of offhand is Shane Carruth’s time-travel drama Primer, which had a bargain-basement aesthetic that only amplified the general air of desperation and dehumanization. Moon, with its carefully-designed sets and frugally-executed visual-effects work, is a much more expensive proposition than Primer, but still dirt-cheap by multiplex standards. Moon may not be the best science-fiction film of 2009, yet it feels the most personal, its loving, handmade quality smoothing rough patches in the storytelling and landing the film’s essential emotional blow.

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.

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)).)

The Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call: New Orleans (2009); Planet 51 (2009); Me and Orson Welles (2009)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2009, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Richard Linklater, Directors: Werner Herzog, Drama, Family, Nicolas Cage, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

THE BAD LIEUTENANT – PORT OF CALL: NEW ORLEANS
****/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer, Alvin “Xzibit” Joiner
screenplay by William Finkelstein, based on the film by Abel Ferrara
directed by Werner Herzog

PLANET 51
*/****
screenplay by Joe Stillman
directed by Jorge Blanco, Javier Abad & Marcos Martinez

ME AND ORSON WELLES
**/****
starring Claire Danes, Zac Efron, Christian McKay, Zoë Kazan
screenplay by Holly Gent Palmo & Vincent Palmo, based on the book by Robert Kaplow
directed by Richard Linklater

by Ian Pugh Playing against his sadistic instincts, police sergeant Terrence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) saves a man from drowning in a flooded prison during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, earning him not only a promotion to lieutenant but also a debilitating spinal injury. A subsequent addiction to prescription painkillers inevitably leads McDonagh to harder drugs and casual abuses of his newfound power as he attempts to solve the murder of a Senegalese drug dealer and his family. Trading Abel Ferrara’s sulphuric New York for a no-less-hellish Louisiana noir, Werner Herzog’s in-name-only remake of Bad Lieutenant is a work of delirious madness. That should come as no surprise from the man who’s spent the last forty years cataloguing human obsession, but I don’t think I’d ever really understood the method behind it until The Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call: New Orleans (hereafter Bad Lieutenant 2). Madness is about possibility, and what better complement to that philosophy than Nicolas Cage, an actor who–at his best, like Herzog–apparently regards the conventions and boundaries of his craft as simple suggestions that must be defied? A quick look at what they’re capable of accomplishing together and you’re a little surprised they haven’t teamed up before. As McDonagh, Cage projects the dangerous unpredictability of Kinski* and the sympathetic brutality of Bruno S.: you don’t fear him, exactly, but you’re afraid of what he might become; you don’t feel sorry for him, but you lament what he could have been. (“I’ll kill ‘im,” he says at one point, the frightening indifference in his voice leaving uncertain if–or how–he plans to act on that idle threat.) Halfway through the film, after the stakes in play are thoroughly established, Cage/McDonagh suddenly adopts a muted, cotton-mouthed accent. Why?

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.

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.”

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.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula/Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [Collector’s Box Set] – DVD|Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) + Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) – Blu-ray Discs

Bram Stoker’s Dracula/Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [Collector’s Box Set] – DVD|Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) + Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) – Blu-ray Discs

Posted in1990s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Japan, Robert De Niro, Romance, Sci-Fi, UK, Vampire

BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA
Dracula
**/****
DVD – Image B Sound B+
BD – Image C Sound A Extras A+
starring Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves
screenplay by James V. Hart
directed by Francis Ford Coppola

MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN
**½/****
DVD – Image D Sound B+
BD – Image B+ Sound B
starring Robert De Niro, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hulce, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Steph Lady and Frank Darabont
directed by Kenneth Branagh

by Walter Chaw The first thirty minutes of Francis Ford Coppola’s retelling of the Dracula legend are dazzling and assured: a self-consciously cinematic, fulsome display of technique and loud emotions–expressionism writ large against lurid backdrops and red, backlit shadow plays. It seems impossible that Coppola could keep this up for the duration of the picture, could see to fruition the kind of viable update/continuation of Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari that the Akira Kurosawa film he helped produce, Kagemusha, with its sanguineous, medieval battlegrounds painted with heavy brushes, aspired to be. And sure enough, what begins as a clarion call settles into a somewhat familiar period costume drama spiced up now and again with racy sequences nonetheless sobered by the memory of the delirious hedonism of that opening, wherein we get Dracula’s backstory as a hero of a holy war, repulsing Muslim invaders in Romania, turning to blasphemy when the vengeful Turks fool his wife Elisabeta (Winona Ryder) into believing that her beloved has died on the battlefield, and gleefully chewing artificial scenery with toothy relish.

Zombieland (2009)

Posted in2000s, 2009, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Zombie

½*/****
starring Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin
screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick
directed by Ruben Fleischer 

by Walter Chaw Bad by every measurable, objective standard, Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland is a shining, sterling example of what happens when a bunch of idiots get together with their asshole high-concept and proceed to make an abominable hash of it. It’s a conversation halfwits have: what would happen if you married the teen romance with the zombie flick? The problem being that Fleischer and writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick don’t have much of a grasp on what it is about teen romances and zombie flicks that are interesting in the first place. It’s the right choice, casting the poor man’s Michael Cera, Jesse Eisenberg, in his second “-land” movie of the year (after the fantastic coming-of-age flick Adventureland); it’s entirely the wrong choice to have Eisenberg provide film-long voiceover narration that takes the piss–without the benefit of wit or trenchant observation–out of zombie flicks before dropping him in the middle of that old familiar wistful love intrigue. The object of his desire is a fellow survivor of an apocalyptic zombie plague, Wichita (Emma Stone, deee-lish), who is travelling with little sis Little Rock (Abigail Breslin). Ohio (Eisenberg), meanwhile, has hooked up with Woody Harrelson’s redneck-with-a-heart-of-gold Tallahassee–yes, if these characters are actually named after the places from which they hail, they have some ‘splainin’ to do. Our four ragamuffin protags proceed through the long middle of the movie with no zombies in sight, alone with reams of smug, moronic, self-satisfied dialogue that has as the basis of every punchline how much of a virgin pussy is Ohio, and how much of an inbred thug is Tallahassee.

9 (2009)

Posted in2000s, 2009, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Luxembourg, Mystery, Russia, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**/****
screenplay by Pamela Pettler
directed by Shane Acker

by Walter Chaw There’s something missing from Shane Acker’s 9, and I’m having a hard time putting my finger on it. I think it’s that for as much as I like my nihilism, there’s a flavour to this year’s variety of Apocalypse that suggests to me the only thing left to win is the Wasteland. There’s no moral stake in scrambling for scraps, just this Pyrrhic duty to compete, lust fast-cooling on the proverbial sheets, damp and rumpled as they are from a lot of impotent thrusting. So 9 exists in an Industrial Revolution Steamboy alternate universe, ended when an evil fascist dictator creates, with the help of a scientist (Alan Oppenheimer–weird, non?), a sentient machine capable of building other machines to do its bidding. Imagined as a weapon of peace, no surprise that it turns on Man and apparently kills all living creatures, blots out the sun, and spends its time hunting down little burlap rag dolls animated with the scientist’s–wait for it–soul. It’s the second Terminator film of the summer, in other words, as well as the second to mention the idea of horcruxes after Harry Potter 6. Accordingly, it’s a pretty empty, if visually startling, picture. Based on a celebrated, Oscar-nominated short, 9 hasn’t made the transition to feature-length with much of an emotional, or intellectual, payload to justify its extended runtime. The best comparison is to Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, alas: the seed of something left fallow.

Adventureland (2009) + Alien Trespass (2009)|Adventureland (2009) – Blu-ray + Digital Copy

Adventureland (2009) + Alien Trespass (2009)|Adventureland (2009) – Blu-ray + Digital Copy

Posted in2000s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Horror, Romance, Satire, Sci-Fi, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller

ADVENTURELAND
***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Jake Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Martin Starr, Margarita Levieva
written and directed by Greg Mottola

ALIEN TRESPASS
***/****
starring Eric McCormack, Jenni Baird, Robert Patrick, Dan Lauria
screenplay by Steven P. Fisher
directed by R. W. Goodwin

by Ian Pugh In everyone’s life, there’s a summer of ’42, but of course it was never as wonderful as you remember. Although Greg Mottola’s Adventureland is set in 1987, that’s almost incidental–it really takes place in that hazy cloud known as “the past,” full of fly-by-night jobs rife with fraud and deceit, fairweather friends who sock you in the crotch, and, of course, the music that brings to mind painful experiences perhaps best left forgotten. (Funny to think that this might be the ideological inverse of another great 2009 film about memory, The Uninvited: unhealthily obsessive instead of unhealthily in denial.) The key to understanding the film, I think, lies in Falco‘s New Wave anthem “Rock Me Amadeus,” here serving as an inescapable nightmare at the titular amusement park, where it’s pumped through the sound system ad nauseam (“Can you give me an ice pick that I can just jam into my ears?”). But then the romantic confusion driving the plot unravels in a series of betrayals, and that same song becomes a damning elegy. Seems strange that the director of Superbad, an instant classic of maturity-through-childishness and nostalgia-without-precedent, should deliver something so angry and contradictory for a follow-up. Perhaps it is strange–but Adventureland is also a more honest, more personal, and, most importantly, more mature film than Superbad.

District 9 (2009)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2009, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, South Africa, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope, Nathalie Boltt, Sylvaine Strike
screenplay by Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell
directed by Neill Blomkamp

by Walter Chaw An unlikely marriage of Alien Nation and David Cronenberg’s The Fly, Neill Blomkamp’s remarkable District 9 is that occasional genre picture that’s both topical and so good it made my stomach knot. Set in South Africa, it opens by rejecting the Eurocentrism of most science-fiction pictures. Here, the little green men don’t hover over the Lincoln Memorial or the Eiffel Tower, but rather Johannesburg, where the malnourished, crustacean-like denizens (they’re called, derogatorily, “prawns”) of a giant mothership are quickly relegated to a barbed-wire enclosed slum, the titular “District 9.” Its parallel to Alien Nation is obvious, down to that film’s equation of aliens with Chinese immigrants in San Francisco; these are the “bestial” blacks of Afrikaner nightmares: physically powerful, engaged in illicit activities, and blamed for every casualty outside their heavily-segregated “district.” But where Alien Nation identified the threat to that immigrant community as an insidious ghost of its traditional past (an opium allegory? How 18th-century), District 9 satirizes the numbing effect of cable news networks, as well as the dangers faced by any outcast culture trying to eke out subsistence existences on the fringes of majority society. In a very real way, District 9 is a film about not only the corrosive potential of grossly overfed public perception, but also the immigration debate that rages on worldwide.

Starman (1984) – Blu-ray Disc

Starman (1984) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2009, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Carpenter, Romance, Sci-Fi

***½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Jeff Bridges, Karen Allen, Charles Martin Smith, Richard Jaeckel
screenplay by Bruce A. Evans & Raynold Gideon
directed by John Carpenter

by Bryant Frazer Strange as it may sound, back in the early-1980s this gentle yet seriously weird fantasy about a woman who drives a socially-challenged clone of her dead husband across the U.S. (so he can rendezvous with his spaceship) was actually considered a safe commercial bet for the embattled director John Carpenter. Carpenter was always an avowed fan of traditional Hollywood entertainments, and he claimed to be attracted to making Starman as a contemporary version of It Happened One Night, Frank Capra’s prototypical screwball comedy about an antagonistic couple who learn to love one another on the road. It seemed like an unlikely gearshift for Carpenter, who had recently remade The Thing from Another World as a tense, supremely chilling, and truly horrific metaphor for paranoia. But for the man who had his ass handed to him when that masterpiece had the bad luck to open not only in a moviegoing environment that had turned hostile to horror, but also directly opposite the ripely sentimental box-office juggernaut E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Starman represented something else. It wasn’t merely an opportunity for Carpenter to helm a fundamentally good-natured, optimistic science-fiction film–it was possibly a chance to rehabilitate his career.