B Plus Movies

Roger Ebert, undoubtedly one of the most influential movie critics of my lifetime, was ragged on for reviewing a movie of which he watched only 8 minutes. Now while it’s said one never has a second chance to make a first impression, seeing less than 10% doesn’t usually constitute a proper basis to judge its merits, even if you have seen every movie since the invention of celluloid. Ebert went back, watched the film and apologized for cheating on his first try, basically I think to maintain his cred as a reliable critic.

This is why I usually don’t review movies I’ve not sat entirely through… until today. This friday’s blog gets you a three for one sale, the length of each review corresponding to about how much time I spent watching it.

First up is Strangeland, a film made by Dee Snider, former lead of the band Twisted Sister and hair metal DJ of 2009. I’d been interested in seeing this film, but only caught the last half. The story centers around a sadistic madman calling himself Captain Howdy who likes to play BDSM games with people but isn’t necessarily big on getting their consent first. According to the media I saw about it before hand, it starts with a young girl (the daughter of a cop) meeting the Captain online and getting sucked into his world.

Where I picked it up Howdy had gotten caught, incarcerated, determined to be insane and then released after he forgoes the Captain Howdy persona for his more mild mannered real name. The normal folk of the town can’t stand the thought of leaving him alone which inadvertently brings Howdy back to the surface and starts another string of violence, peircing and seeking after the teen girl from the half of the movie I didn’t see. Her father, the police officer, must once again leap to action and save his little girl from the tattooed and pierced monster that is Captain Howdy.

Dee Snider plays the  villian of Strangeland and does it well. Captain Howdy is genuinely creepy, threatening and believably threatening with just a touch of visionary madman, enough to make you think he’s kinda cool if he wasn’t raping girls and poking people with long needles. On the other hand, the movie makes use two contradictory cliches, marring its edgy, avante garde nature, namely that 1)People into bondage and peircings are always bad and 2)the freaks are always persecuted by the rednecky straights. Both cliches are presented in such a blatant, over the top fashion that you take them for granted (partially due to the excellent talents of Robert Englund) and it’s only until later that your preconceptions have been prayed up.

Strangeland, despite its flaws, gets a B+ from me. Go Dee Snider. Next.

The Devil’s Rejects is the sequel to the 70’s horror homage House of 1000 Corpses. Rockstar/Producer/Director Rob Zombie put this retro, ready-for-grindhouse movie onto screens at a time when I was already becoming bored with torture porn like Saw and Hostel, not because they’d lost their bite, but because watching people be savaged for two hours just seemed less enjoyable than other things people might do on film.

Picking up where it’s predecessor left off, The Devil’s Recjects starts with a family we met in House of 1000 Corpses of sadistic rednecks who have killed enough hapless teenagers to finally bring down upon them a fanatical cop who wants to see them dead more than he wants to see them arrested. Many of the family are caught or killed in the first few minutes of the film, leaving three to hit the road and go on the run.

Featuring Sid Haig (B movie god), Bill Mosely (also of B+ Movie Repo: The Genetic Opera) and Sheri Moon-Zombie (Rob’s wife), The Devil’s Rejects has some intense and believable performances. It also has just enough gore to remind you of the first movie and enough gun play to distinguish itself from it’s origins. The movie attempts to blur the line between the heroes and the villians of the piece, but when one of your main characters has a thing for cutting off people’s faces and wearing them, such lines are less likely to be blurry and much more likely to simply denote the people in the movie we despise from the people we simply dislike.

I only saw the first half, up until the point where the audience is supposed to start relating to the murderous trio and while I’m told the finale is kind of touching, I don’t think I’ll be missing out by not going back for the rest of it.

Rob Zombie did succeed though, in making the grade of movie he wanted. This is one reason the half watched The Devil’s Rejects earns a B from me.

And finally…

I caught about fifteen minutes of Never Cry Werewolf on the Sci-Fi channel one night. It was enough to make me convinced that whoever green-lit a remake of Fright Night with Kevin Sorbo as the most notable actor and a werewolf instead of a vampire as the villian might not have been completely in the wrong, but whoever then let them take this concept and make a poorly acted, poorly shot and poorly scripted monster movie afterwords should be tied up with leg warmers and pelted with Rubik’s cubes for assaulting one of my teenage favorites.

Never Cry Werewolf gets a D from me, not sinking any lower because I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt that the majority of the movie that I didn’t see contains something of redeeming value.

Any of these you think would have gotten a better rating if I’d watched the whole thing? Feel free to comment below.

Some of my best movie experiences have come from being up at 3am, flipping channels and just happening to land on the first few minutes of a movie not deemed worthy of a prime time spot. Abandoning all hope of a reasonable amount of sleep, I surrender myself to serenidpity and curiosity and let myself sink into the mind of a b movie director. Often, this has resulted in me looking at my friends the next day, my eyes red and held open by force of will, explaning how they simply had to track down the story that was worth sacrificing rest.

On the other hand, some experiences don’t result in the same enthusasim. With that in mind, I’d like to talk about 2006’s Gangs of the Dead.

Gangs of the Dead (known as Last Rites before its DVD Release) falls somewhere between Dawn of the Dead and Resivoir Dogs in its storyline: Two groups of LA gang members show up at the same time to buy drugs from the same guy. This deal also happens to be a sting operation, with law enforcement listening in and preparing to make some arrests. Alas, nothing is to go as planned.

You see, the movie opens with a group of homeless people listening to a street preacher. Bible in hand, the street preacher talks about a metor shower the world is to witness that night (calling it God’s feces) and prays for a miricle to show his people that all the wrongs in the world are going to be set right. The miricle comes in the form of a preview of the metor shower which streaks through the sky, lands on the homeless people and turns them into infectious, cannibalistic zombies.

So when the word is given to make the bust, the cops are confronted with rotting hordes of the undead and have to join their would-be perpetrators in an effort not to get eaten. Tensions rise as racial barriers, gang barriers and plain old stupidity begin to lower the life expectancy of everyone involved. Along the way, we are introduced to the literally named Dick Weatherman (who is both a weatherman and a complete… well you get the idea) and a few of the gang bangers family. We also are invited to wonder (for the three seconds it takes us to figure it out) who narc is that brought the cops to the apocalypse in the first place.

Gangs of the Dead has the seeds of an interesting film, hinting that it might be able to tie in a message about the self destructive nature of gang life and bigotry. It also hints at being suspenseful. The sad fact is that it fails to do any of this.

The pacing of the movie drags after about the first twenty minutes. The characters are inexcusibly dumb, forgetting where people are and what resources they have such that their deaths seem inevitable. The script makes an attempt to get us interested in one or two of the characters only to, in the end, kill them all off and focus on the snitch (you’ll know) and one of the side characters who is introduced as a street tough teen but becomes more and more infantile as the story goes on.

The best I can say is that the movie could have made more mistakes than it did. There is humor mixed included that doesn’t turn it all into a farce. The initial set up of the film sets a creepy and tense tone, even if that’s latter killed by the movie dragging on. The gore is used to good effect, though it is concentrated in two or three scenes and at one point it’s obvious that the entrails one zombie is chewing on are ramen noodles. And I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge actors Noel G. (who played in Bruce Almighty) and Reggie Bannister (veteran of the Phantasm series) who did very respectable jobs.

But in the end, this movie took the seeds of brilliance in it’s concept and fertelized them with salt. You get the feel that more could have been done with this movie but that somewhere, someone either didn’t have the clarity of vision to see it through or that they ran out of money and just used everything they shot to make the film.

The invention of the DVR has removed the need to stay up and watch one of those chance cinematic gems I started talking about. And I’m glad, because if I’d actually stayed up to see this one to the end, I’d have wanted to sue the studio for my lost z’s. A set of poor choices dotted with occasional gems of good horror, Gangs of the Dead, aka Last Rites gets a very round D from B+ Movies.

Sometimes, the ingredients don’t predict the soup that they make. You can take cheddar cheese, peanut butter, broccoli, flounder, cherries, and chicken broth and no matter how much you like them individually, the result of their mixture is probably not anything you’d like to consume. Sometimes, even taking a tried and true recipe (like say, lasanga) and tossing in an extra ingredient for variety (like say, squid ink) does nothing to improve it and everything to bring it down.

Sadly, the same can be said for some movies and specifically about The Crow: Wicked Prayer.

I gushed over The Crow on Monday and talked about it’s base premise, repeated in each of it’s sequels: A man is wronged and his loved ones dealt with by cruel men. The grave cannot hold his sorrow, so it spits him back forth with a black bird to guide him. His mission is simple: set the balances straight and gain revenge, but those who upset the balances in the first place have no problem making that a hard task.

The fact that three attempts have been made to recapture the raw power and pathos of the first is a testament to how well this formula works.  The Crow: Wicked Prayer promised, from it’s earliest rumors, to be faithful to this vision without simply re-doing the first one.  I had high hopes for this movie.

The cast includes Edward Furlong (of Terminator 2 and Detroit Rock City), Tara Reid (of American Pie and gossip magazines), David Boreanaz (of Angel and Bones) and even a cameo by Dennis Hopper (of…. do I have to tell you who Dennis Hopper is?). Furlong plays Jimmy Cuervo, an ex con trying to walk the straight and narrow. Boreanaz plays a Satanist who wants to sire the AntiChrist with the help of Reid and his three companions who have styled themselves after the four horseman of the apocalyse. To do this, the group tracks down Jimmy and takes his heart and his would-be fiance’s eyes.

Now the stage is set and we can begin the path of revenge. Unfortunately, this is where it all takes a bad turn.

The Crow: Wicked Prayer took passionate, dedicated actors,  well written dialogue and an engaging plot and somehow still missed the mark. Furlong’s character, post-mortem, is supposed to come across as out of sync and darkly alluring, but instead he just looks off balance and drugged. Boreanez does well as a villian up until he gets the power of Satan and his acting becomes a parody of past performances. Dennis Hopper didn’t just phone in his performance, he called collect to do it. The script developed plot holes that it doesn’t even bother to try to justify. They fall back on cliches, reinforcing that if you’re part of an ethnic minority group you must know all of your culture’s arcane rituals.

I don’t know if the movie got rushed at some point, if the editors were off their meds or if the director just wasn’t watching the playbacks but this movie squandered it’s potential. What could have been a solid reboot and an answer to the prayers of J. O’Barr’s fans was  reduced to a suggestion of what it could have been.

So not only seeing what it could have been on it’s own but knowing the standard The Crow: Wicked Prayer had to live up to, I can give it no better than a D in my scale. If you’re a fan of the series already, then check it out. If not, know that there are better movies based upon J. O’Barr’s The Crow. Unfortunately, unless the proposed reboot turns out to suck, there aren’t any that are worse.

Well, except for the movie Phoenix Rising. But that one was a porno.

There are very few tricks that any recent vampire flick hasn’t ripped off from another film about the beautiful and damned. When film makers try for something original, it usually either produces truly worthy cinema or it collapes into a dark red Caro syrupy mess. This also counts when you try to shuffle together ideas from other movies, hoping that the resulting mosaic will come across as a new and distinct idea unto itself.

Example, and today’s review: The Thirst.

I picked this movie up for something like $2 at a movie store’s going-out-of-business sale. The Thirst intrigued me because it was comparing itself to B+ Movie Near Dark . It played on my loyalty to Joss Whedon by casting three Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel actors: Adam Baldwin, Clare Kramer plus Tom Lenk. Plus, for crying out loud, it was $2.

As the opening credits rolled, I was a little skeptical I’d find any entertainment in this movie. But within the first seven minutes of the movie, we get to see two nude scenes, a profanity filled Narcotics Anonymous meeting, a hooker get killed with a lamp, and are reminded that the body contains about 15 gallons of blood, all of which is stored at high pressure. These details were enough to convince me to give the rest of the movie a chance.

By the end, I at least didn’t feel overcharged. Borrowing bits from both vampire flicks and drug movies, it kept showing me moments that just interesting enough that I’d hope they were going somewhere. Unfortunately, they alternated this with scenes full of people I didn’t care about that were paced so my finger would be hovering over the fast forward button just before they’d interest me again.

The plot revolves around two ex-junkies who end up tangled with a family of blood-sucking fiends. About half-way through the movie, the pair decide they want out and try to deal with the need for blood like a drug addiction. In the end, they have to decide if they are going to go along with the murderous crew (who feeds by taking out whole nightclubs of people at a time) or try to save themselves and maybe just a few others.

The film has the seeds of an interesting story which get choked in a pot of bad acting and inexplicable plot holes. The whole film feels rushed, such that the actors are mostly stereotypes rather than fleshed out characters. The head bad guy, a vampire named Darius and played by Law and Order actor Jeremy Sisto, switches between a bad Eastern European accent and a bad Southern accent for no apparent reason. The hero of the film comes across first as whiny, then as a jerk and only in the last third of the film seems to have much of any depth or any quality which makes you want to relate to him. The heroine of the picture is an enjoyable character and is portrayed well, but we get so little of her that we never really make a connection. We’re dealing with vampires that are supposed be hundreds of years old who get pretty soundly messed up by people who’ve been vampires for two days.

Admittedly, I wasn’t expecting Shakespeare or even The Lost Boys out of this movie and with that in mind it was watchable. The Thirst comes across as a project in which someone was trying to make a good picture, but not always the same person in every scene. I don’t regret watching it, but it’s not high on my “must recommend” or “watch again lists”.

The Thirst gets a D from me. Though if I were giving extra points for boob shots, it’d probably get at least a C.

Walking out of a movie store one day, I pass by the $5 bin and find a gently used copy of this:

My heart went pitter pat. I had to have it. I mean look at it… the red hair, the huge gun the upside down pentacle. I couldn’t understand how they could insult this movie by selling it for a single digit price.

Then I watched it.

The first thing that caught me was that it wasn’t an American made movie. That in and of itself is no big deal, but I was surprised by it’s country of origin: France. Usually when I think “French Film”, I don’t think of horror/action. This wasn’t a point against it, just unexpected.

From the moment you push play, the movie requires you to take a big leap of faith. The main character, Mallory, is the head of a Vatican sanctioned team of monster hunters. The other members consist of an inspector, a pre pubescent telepath and a seven foot tall, purple haired explosives expert that works in a PVC one piece accented with thigh high leather boots. They travel in a pink hearse. Later in the film, we’re introduced to Mallory’s former husband, an undead creature of some sort that she killed on their wedding night, still in her white dress, and who is still bound to her, compelled to answer her questions (apparently by the force of postmortem sexual tension).

In another film, I think this ensemble would work well. There are a number of japanese films that just kind of plop shapeshifters and tentacled things into your lap and expect you to act as if it’s all normal. The problem comes not in the incredulous nature of the characters, but in a flaw that’s killed more than one movie: the film can’t decide if it’s going to take itself seriously.

We’re encouraged to accept Mallory and her crew as badasses that can shop at Hot Topic because their the Vatican’s best and therefore can make their own rules. For crying out loud, Mallory wears a pair of fingerless leather gloves that have on the right knuckles “Fuck” and on the left “Evil”. But when it comes time for action, the movie flounders,  feeling like a parody of it’s own concept, going from dark and sinister to a campy romp like unto Buffy the Vampire Slayer, except without the compelling drama, special effects or character development.

I don’t mean Buffy the series. I mean the movie.

One minute, it’s comedy. The next, it’s horror. Then it’s wire-fu. The whole time, it kind of sucks.

This isn’t to say it doesn’t have at least one or two redeaming qualities. The actress who plays the title character, Olivia Bonamy, attempts to put real heart, angst and passion into her performance.  The other actors attempts are passable if not fun, but the direction and pacing of the film dull what might otherwise be the bright points of the movie.

I would say watch this only if you’re already a fan of marginal yet stylish cinema. It’s not a complete waste of time, but only just. Using the B+ Movies totally scientific yet faith based ratings system, I give this one a D.

And not just because they run over a black cat with no more explanation than, “You can never be to careful.”