Tag Archives: movies

March 16, 2013 · 11:46 pm

Saturday Night Movie Review: Nazis at the Center of the Earth

As I mentioned last week, I’m going to start reviewing movies that I believe are perfect to watch while drinking beer and hanging out with friends. Or, if you’re me, drinking a warm bloody mary while you’re by yourself. They’re the movies that are so bad they’re funny, over-the-top violence and acting so wooden you could build a table out of it.

All the movies I review will be readily available online, either through Netflix Instant or Amazon Prime or one of the many other (legal) streaming sites.

This week: Nazis at the Center of the Earth

Now, I have a couple of criteria when it comes to movies of this caliber. They must be delightfully, whimsically stupid. There must be plenty of opportunities where everyone can jump in and throw out a random one liner.

For example, right off the bat, the title of this movie is ripe with stupid and then the plot just keeps delivering.

We follow the tale of a group of intrepid arctic scientists who stumble across a secret, underground Nazi base: by accidentally drilling into it.They start to drill into the ice, the drill screeches to a halt and they brush an inch of snow off of a giant swastika. Because when you’re trying to get a core sample using extremely expensive equipment, you don’t test the ground in any way, shape or form to make sure you’re not drilling into solid rock or a Nazi bunker.

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As the movie progresses it turns out that the Nazis have a sinister plan (which is not surprising, given the whole “being Nazis thing”) and they kidnap the entire team, dragging them into their subterranean layer where it is revealed that they are also zombies.

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To recap: The villains in this movies are Nazi zombies that live in a underground military base under the Antarctic led by an immortal Doctor Mengele. Oh, and Jake Busey is a scientist, which is humorous in and of itself since the only other thing I’ve ever seen him play is a psychopath who eats a baseball bat in Identity. All in all, you have the perfect recipe for one of the stupidest movies to slither onto the screen since Troll 2.

But here comes the problem. About halfway through the movie, things get nasty. It gets mean spirited and unpleasant and vicious in a way that stops being funny and more makes you feel like you participated in something that you did not want to participate in. It stops being fun to watch and turns into something you’d turn off and walk away from.

Which is a shame, because this is the same movie with a terrible CGI UFO…

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…and that’s not even the stupidest thing you will come across in this movie. That would be terrible CGI robot Hitler.

But I can’t 100% recommend this movie unless you’re the kind of person that found Human Centipede funny. Otherwise, you’ll get to that middle bit and completely shut-down.

If you’re looking for something fun all the way through, avoid this. I can see too many people getting to the shower scene and reaching for the remote in a hurry.

I give this Five “Are you really trying to sell Jake Busey as a scientist?”s and Two Squinchy Gut Roilers.

I’m also a little disappointed that I misrolled two times in a row and I’ve only done this segment twice. Next week, I guarantee that I’ll find you something awesome to watch.

Guaranteed.

-D-

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September 29, 2012 · 10:14 pm

Our Monsters (Entry VII)

Through the years, you can see the evolution of our fears. In the 30′s and 40′s, there were vampires, werewolves and mummies. The old world monsters, the creatures we brought over in wooden sailing ships. They were beasts that had been haunting the imagination for centuries.

By the 50′s and 60′s, we had outgrown them and moved on to Atomic Horrors and Aliens. We feared what our science had wrought. Giant ants and nuclear monsters. Creatures that had mutated and grown out of control. Creatures from the edge of the galaxy that had come thousands of light years to do us wrong.

In the late 60′s and 70′s, things had changed once again. We were scared of the occult and Satanism. We viewed ourselves as a morally bankrupt culture that was on the verge of moral collapse. The End of Days was upon us. Likewise, there was the rise of the Slasher. He was human, for the most part, and stalked Suburbia. He wielded a knife (or machete or chainsaw or something else pointy) and cut hard and deep.

But by the 80′s, horror had changed its tone, yet again. The Slasher ruled supreme, but he was not the real star. He was the vehicle for the gore. Gooey red stuff splashed across the screen in great gouts. Vicious murders and violent slashings, arms, limbs and eyeballs everywhere.

And, by the 90′s, we had grown jaded. We were cynical and looked upon Jason and Freddy the same way a teenager would look at his chldhod fears of the boogeyman. Scream defined our views of the cinematic world.

And now, we live in the aftermath. We don’t watch horror movies to be scared anymore. We watch them for the violence, the gore, the torture. Hostel and Saw are the new rulers. Or…they were. Their day seems to be fading, to be replaced by…what? The found-movie genre? Japanese horror knock-offs?

What is to come?

I don’t know.

And it’s exciting.

-D-

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· 9:04 pm

Cabin in the Woods: Worst Horror Movie Ever (Entry VI)

As a horror movie, Cabin in the Woods is pretty terrible. It’s hilarious, well-acted and my favorite movie to come out this year, but it’s a terrible horror movie.

It’s similar to Scream in a lot of ways. There’s a lot of winking and nodding at the audience, but where Scream decided to be scary, Cabin in the Woods went down a different trail.

I like to think of the two movies as two sides of the same coin: a reverent acknowledgement of horror movies. Scream was constrained, somewhat, by the fact that it was still trying to be terrifying and grounded in a real world. Cabin in the Woods just laughed and away it went. There were nods and smiles to Evil Dead and Hellraiser and The Ring and every slasher movie ever made. It was a movie that felt like it was made by people who knew and loved the genre and weren’t afraid to make fun of it along the way.

They stripped horror bare and showed us what it really was: it’s our fears and our nightmares imprinted on celluloid. When we go to the movies and watch them to be afraid, we’re not just trying to be entertained. We’re trying to exorcise the demons from a time when we were lost and afraid in the woods and we didn’t know what terrors the shadows could hold.

That is the beauty of horror. It lets us be afraid in a safe place, a warm place, with other people and friends.

And Cabin in the Woods is a hurrah to that. It has us look at those celluloid monsters and peels back at the shadows and lets us laugh at our fears.

In no way is Cabin in the Woods scary, which it makes it a terrible horror movie, but it’s of the same spirit and gives us the backbone we need to look into the darkness and just…laugh.

-D-

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July 20, 2012 · 11:33 pm

Movie Review: Dark Knight Rises

If you didn’t see my earlier entry, let me recap here:

I really love the Batman movies. The ones by Christopher Nolan. I’ve been watching them repeatedly since Batman Begins came out seven years ago. I’ve obsessed over them and in no gentle way.

Partly this has to do with the fact that I grew up with the best cartoon Batman ever and partly it has to do with the general awesomeness of what Nolan accomplished with all three movies.

With the newest movie, Nolan has tied it all up, neat and tight. From beginning to end it’s a thoroughly satisfying narrative. He has managed to tell a story with all three movies in a way few directors could (Peter Jackson cheated by doing all three at once and using a single unified source. George Lucas uses plot holes to shore up a cliched story-arc.) They’re not perfect. I will not defend them to the death. There are gaps in logic and weird puns and stumbling lines and some oddly terrible actors hiding amidst stellar performances.

Speaking of which, Anne Hathaway surprised me. I’ve never had much of an opinion about her or her acting, but she took a character I could care less about and made me care. She was funny and bad-ass and stole almost every scene she was in.

But then, in general, The Dark Knight Rises  manages to hit all the right notes. And here and there, they hearken back to the two earlier movies without hitting the audience with a sledgehammer. There are mirrored lines and motivations and scenes that vibrate along those sympathetic wave lengths that make you turn to the person next to you and say, “Remember from Batman Begins when that thing with the thing happened?”

And at the end, satisfaction, because it feels like this was how it was always going to end.  It doesn’t feel contrived or forced. It’s a natural outcome of events as dictated by the actions of the characters.

And it was the best ending for a series I’ve been following for seven years.

Godspeed Batman.

-D-

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· 2:37 pm

The Dark Knight Rises: Prepping

Ever since Batman Begins, I’ve been a little crazy for Batman. I read all the news. Got excited about the casting. Debated the merits of Katie Holmes and how she was going to ruin it.

When The Dark Knight was announced, I nearly exploded from joy. The Joker! Maggie Gyllenhaal! Two-Face! More Batman!

I became certain that I would die before it came out, that I would miss what was surely going to be the best movie ever.

And, now very soon, the third and last movie in the trilogy is coming out and I’m going to be there, front row center. Not literally. Those would be terrible seats.

This time, I have to be there at the  start to see the end. Expect a review tonight or tomorrow.

And expect it to specked with my tears.

-D-

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July 7, 2012 · 11:26 pm

Movie Review: Antichrist (Part 2)

I finished watching Antichrist and, as promised, here’s the second and last part of my review.

After I finished watching it, I needed a hug. It’s an emotionally draining movie; filled with disturbing images and grotesque elements. It depicted vile things and at the end, I wasn’t entirely sure what I had seen. I don’t think I’ll ever watch it again and I doubt I’ll ever be able to recommend it to anyone.

In spite of that and because of that, I’m more than willing to say that this is one of the best horror movies to be made in the last fifteen years. It went to the very limited of my comfort zones and stayed there for the duration of the movie. At no point was I ever relaxed or settling back down. It ratcheted up the tension and kept it here and didn’t allow for a moment of respite.

It’s  moments like this that I long for when I watch horror movies. I want to be uncomfortable. I want to be on edge. I want to be swept up in a tide of relentless energy.

It’s movies like Antichrist that give me hope that the genre will not be completely lost in a sea of senseless sequels and gratuitous violence. There is hope that people can go to the movies and experience true fear. Because if we cannot be scared in a theater, that leaves us precious few options.

-D-

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July 6, 2012 · 9:47 pm

Movie Review: Antichrist (Part 1)

It is very rare that a movie scares me anymore. I’m not bragging. It just means I’ve seen too many scary movies. I know how it’s going to end. I know which characters are going to die at which points. I know where the monster will appear and what its name is. It’s all about knowing the tropes and the cliches and the very nature of the genre.

And as I’ve stated many times, fear is about not knowing. It’s about being surprised. It’s about not knowing what’s around the corner.

What’s great, truly great, about modern movies is there are no restrictions. Back in ye olden days, the good guys one, the bad guys died. Some secondary characters bit the dust, but you knew Bruce Strongchin and Betty Blondhairs would be ok in the end. As time went on and 70′s horror lost its sense of right and wrong, the hero stopped being safe. Movies started being shocking again. This was especially true in all those thousands of cult and Satan movies.

Movies could show more and more violence, so they showed more and more violence. And we got inured to violence and shock and horror and yawn. Horror has so much freedom now. It can go places and show things and tell stories that it couldn’t have told in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. So what does it do with this freedom?

Torture porn and the human centipede. Modern horror makers, for the most part, seem to feel the necessity to top themselves in an unwinnable attempt to be the most shocking and forget that the best way to scare is to show less and draw out the tension on a razor’s edge.

All this is leading to Antichrist. I’m not done watching it. I got so excited and so bursting with nervous energy that I had to stop in the middle and start writing about it. It made me uneasy. It made me scared and upset and worried and freaked out and oh, there’s no jump scares and there’s no psycho in the woods; it’s all just upsetting imagery and freaky visuals and a tight script and two actors falling deeper and deeper into madness inducing fear.

This is what the freedom allows. It’s not about being able to show every aspect of a decapitation from every angle in excruciating slow motion. It’s about being able to upset the audience. It’s about making people uncomfortable. That’s what good horror does. It’s uncomfortable and uneasy and it makes you squirm and when it’s done you let out that tension in one shaky release of breath.

I have to get back to my movie.

Part 2 tomorrow.

-D-

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June 30, 2012 · 11:29 pm

Horror on a Budget

I talk a lot about horror as an art form. I rail against poorly made horror movies and I talk endlessly about what horror needs to do as a genre in order to regain its ability to actually frighten people.

All of that doesn’t change the fact that I really like shitty horror movies.

I don’t know why. I’ve tried to think of reasons for it; explanations for my love of truly awful movies.

They’re…comforting, intrinsically. You know what they’re going to do and how they’re going to do it. I know their ins and outs and I know what their plot is before they do. They make me laugh, though they don’t mean to. And sometimes, very rarely, they actually have the power to shock me.

It’s because they’re not bound by any rules or standards. Characters appear and disappear for no reason. And terrible, truly terrible things will happen, in all senses of the word, because the filmmakers are completely and utterly unbound by any concept of what should or shouldn’t be in a movie.

And that, in and of itself, is extremely refreshing.

It doesn’t change the fact that these movies are shockingly bad and inexcusably awful, but it at least gives me a way to defend my love for them all.

-D-

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June 9, 2012 · 12:44 am

Movie Review: Prometheus

When I was younger, I was absolutely obsessed with the Aliens movies. Well, correction: I was obsessed with Alien and Aliens. The other two movies were of such questionable quality that I’d rather pretend that they never happened.

It was one of the first bits of horror I watched growing up and it had a deep and affecting impact on what I consider scary. The alien in these movies is not something to be reasoned with. It’s not evil. It’s just a very well-designed killing machine; incapable of remorse or mercy. It has no back-story, no motivation, no explanation; it does what it does and the protagonist has no recourse but to simply deal with it. It’s shadowy and elusive and brutal.

So when I heard about Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s prequel to Alien, I was concerned. The Alien creature lost a lot of its mystique because of mindless and pointless repetition. The boogeyman is not scary when it’s dragged into the light, kicking and screaming. In the latter sequels, the Alien is put onto the dissection table and pointlessly and needlessly over-analyzed. There was no more fear; it just became a part of pop culture, something that used to scare us.

And now, Scott was once again returning to the well. Except, instead of revisiting the alien and telling that same damn story all over again with a pointless origin story, he showed another aspect to the story. Instead of a direct prequel, he created a story that took place in the same universe and, while it does shed some light on the story in Alien, it is not directly about those later movies.

And in some ways, this is the best kind of prequel. It’s not like the Star Wars prequels, where Lucas shoehorns in pointless contrivances just to work in familiar characters and uses needless and tedious exposition to elaborate on parts of the back story that no-one cares about. Scott attempts to tell a new story that just happens to take place in the Alien universe. By the time it was over, I had re-examined the events in Alien and re-contextualized them, but in a way that didn’t cheapen or lessen the fear or impact of that movie.

Even better, he avoids explaining everything fully. By the time the movie is done, you’re still left wondering and that, I believe, is for the best. For horror, it’s always better if the audience is guessing at the end, at least just a little bit. There should be an element of doubt and curiosity. It is the unknown that people, in general, fear the most. And by leaving questions unanswered at the end of Prometheus, Scott has left a lot unknown. He fleshes out the universe without taking anything away from the fear and the unknown terrors of the original movie.

And so while Prometheus is not a great movie, it is a great prequel. It has its problems and its “the hell?” moments, but it doesn’t detract from its predecessors.

If you’re a fan of the series, check it out.

-D

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May 31, 2012 · 7:13 pm

Laugh or Die: Entry IV

Comedy and Horror have a lot in common. Both are about building tension until the audience can’t take it any more and react in one of two ways: they either laugh or scream.

With this in mind, one might think that it’s easy to combine the two. Historically, it’s happened. Scream, Army of Darkness, Return of the Living Dead, Fargo; these are all movies with strong thriller or horror elements but that also managed to be funny. But these are exceptions to the rule. For every, genuinely funny and creepy horror movie, there are countless movies out there that have failed at both.

For example, in recent years there were two prime horror comedies: Dylan Dog: Dead of Night and The Cabin in the Woods. One of them was an abysmal failure and the other was a great commentary on the horror genre.

Dylan Dog was based on the fantastic Italian horror comic about a detective who investigated supernatural crimes. It was a surreal comic, where the humor was based on truly bizarre situations. It was brilliant and I recommend it heartily to people who enjoy weird. The movie, on the other hand, resorted to cheap gags, when it could be bothered to do anything beyond boring. It would not, or could not, take any risks, which is key for a movie to be either scary or funny. If there is no tension, then there’s nothing. You’re not scared and you’re not laughing.

With either genre, you can’t shy away from tension; you can’t steer clear of things that make people uncomfortable. It is that discomfort that makes either genre successful. Which is why The Cabin in the Woods is a better movie. Rather than watering down the horror, they embrace it. Every bit of true, awful nightmare makes the humor that much funnier. You laugh to relieve the tension.

The Cabin in the Woods is an exercise in the balance between tension and release, why Dylan Dog: Dead of Night is a perfect example of the writer and the director playing it too safe and killing any chance of the audience laughing or screaming.

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