Monday, October 31, 2016

Census Bloodbath: And then it just ends, with her and Falkor flying off into the sunset—it was weird


October's end draws near—and so once again it's time to pull the old switcheroo with Brennan Klein, the finest human being I know not related to me by blood or sexual intercourse!  And so shall it ever be: while Brennan reviews three wonderful Cardboard Science classics over at Popcorn Culture, handpicked by yours truly for their moral uprightness and fine craftsmanship, we intend to wallow in whatever sleaze and gore that Brennan's deemed fit for me to review, in the form of three entries from Brennan's centerpiece feature, the increasingly-complete encyclopedia of the 1980s' slasher phenomenon that he calls Census Bloodbath.  But we take our duties seriously here, and, as usual, I'm having a blast.

I, MADMAN

1989
Directed by Tibor Takacs
Written by David Chaskin
With Jenny Wright (Virginia), Clayton Rohner (Richard), Stephanie Hodge (Mona), and Randall William Cook (Dr. Alan Kessler/Malcolm Brand)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Sunday, October 30, 2016

Census Bloodbath: Hit me, hit me, hit me, hit me with those laser beeeeeams


October's end draws near—and so once again it's time to pull the old switcheroo with Brennan Klein, the finest human being I know not related to me by blood or sexual intercourse!  And so shall it ever be: while Brennan reviews three wonderful Cardboard Science classics over at Popcorn Culture, handpicked by yours truly for their moral uprightness and fine craftsmanship, we intend to wallow in whatever sleaze and gore that Brennan's deemed fit for me to review, in the form of three entries from Brennan's centerpiece feature, the increasingly-complete encyclopedia of the 1980s' slasher phenomenon that he calls Census Bloodbath.  But we take our duties seriously here, and, as usual, I'm having a blast.

CHOPPING MALL

1986
Directed by Jim Wynorski
Written by Steve Mitchell and Jim Wynorski
With Kelli Maroney (Alison Parks), Tony O'Dell (Ferdy Meisel), Karrie Emerson (Linda Stanton), Russell Todd (Rick Stanton), Barbara Crampton (Suzie Lynn), Nick Segal (Greg Williams), John Terlesky (Mike Brennan), Suzee Slater (Leslie Todd), Paul Bartel (Paul Bland), Mary Woronov (Mary Bland), and Dick Miller (Walter Paisley)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Saturday, October 29, 2016

Census Bloodbath: A dangerous method


October's end draws near—and so once again it's time to pull the old switcheroo with Brennan Klein, the finest human being I know not related to me by blood or sexual intercourse!  And so shall it ever be: while Brennan reviews three wonderful Cardboard Science classics over at Popcorn Culture, handpicked by yours truly for their moral uprightness and fine craftsmanship, we intend to wallow in whatever sleaze and gore that Brennan's deemed fit for me to review, in the form of three entries from Brennan's centerpiece feature, the increasingly-complete encyclopedia of the 1980s' slasher phenomenon that he calls Census Bloodbath.  But we take our duties seriously here, and, as usual, I'm having a blast.

THE INITIATION

1984
Directed by Larry Stewart
Written by Charles Pratt, Jr.
With Daphne Zuniga (Kelly Fairchild), Marilyn Kagan (Marcia), Hunter Tylo (Alison), Paula Knowles (Beth), James Read (Peter Adams), Joy Jones (Heidi), Frances Peterson (Megan), Robert Dowdell (Jason Randall), Clu Galager (Dwight Fairchild), and Vera Miles (Frances Fairchild)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Joe Dante, part VI: It's a town full of losers, and we're pulling out of here to win


EXPLORERS

If Joe Dante ever did make a masterpiece, you're looking at it.  What it does right, it does better than any other film of its kind, and what it does wrong is still hypnotically fascinating.  You know, like a car crash, only one with a lot of allegorical portent to go along with all the twisted metal and ruined lives.

1985
Directed by Joe Dante
Written by Eric Luke
With Ethan Hawke (Benjamin Crandall), River Phoenix (Wolfgang Mueller), Jason Presson (Darren Woods), James Cromwell (Mr. Mueller), Dick Miller (Charlie Drake), Amanda Peterson (Lori Swenson), Leslie Rickert (Neek), and Robert Picardo (Wak)

Spoiler alert: severe

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Joe Dante, part V: After all, the only thing that any 21 year old man, who already owns one dog and lives in his family's attic, could ever want for Christmas is a surprise high-maintenance pet


GREMLINS

It's a rollicking good time, that much is for certain.  But indefeasible greatness wasn't in the cards for Dante this time around, even if you'd never know it from Gremlins' enduring reputation, its endless imitators, or its enormous box office success.  No, I suppose I'm definitely in the minority camp on this one.  And that's just for liking it—rather than loving the living shit out of it, as any boy born in the 1980s is required by federal law to do.

1984
Directed by Joe Dante
Written by Chris Columbus
With Zach Galligan (Billy Peltzer), Phoebe Cates (Kate Beringer), Hoyt Axton (Rand Peltzer), Frances Lee McCain (Lynn Peltzer), Corey Feldman (Pete Fountaine), Dick Miller (Murray Fetterman), Howie Mandell (Gizmo), and Frank Welker (Stripe)

Spoiler alert: high

Thursday, October 20, 2016

Cimmerian Week, part II: "And I suppose nothing hurts you." "Only pain!"


CONAN THE DESTROYER

Even though there are still things to love about this watered-down sequel, it's one damned hard comedown.

1984
Directed by Richard Fleischer
Written by Gerry Conway, Roy Thomas, and Stanley Mann
With Arnold Schwarzenegger (Conan), Tracey Walter (Malak), Mako Iwamatsu (Akiro the Wizard), Grace Jones (Zula), Olivia d'Abo (Princess Jehnna), Wilt Chamberlain (Bombaata), Pat Roach (Toth-Amon), Sarah Douglas (Queen Taramis), and Andre Rene Roussimoff (Dagoth)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Sunday, October 16, 2016

Reviews from gulag: Tom and the Holograms

2016 keeps rolling along, despite our best efforts!  Here's three more for the pyre: The Birth of a Nation, De Palma, and A Hologram For the King.

THE BIRTH OF A NATION (Nate Parker, 2016)
In the early 19th century, Nat Turner (Nate Parker) is born on a slave plantation in Virginia.  He grows up, and comes to seize ahold of a grandiose, annihilating vision of racial justice: the eradication of the slaveholding class of the American South.  With a band of followers, he pursues his dream to its foregone conclusion, namely his own execution, but in the process he manages to shock the system he despised, and his name and his fame (or, perhaps, his infamy) live on.

Probably the single best thing about The Birth of a Nation—and I've got to warn you, this is pretty unfortunate—is still just its title.  That title is the cleverest fucking thing, but when it's also the cleverest thing Nate Parker ever gets up to here, it really must register as an estimable pity that it didn't get to be the title for a much better movie—one that, you know, actually managed to earn the subversive force of it.

Instead, Nation turns out to be Nate Parker's one man show: a somewhat aimless, even somewhat artless exercise in building in his own brand.  Perhaps needless to say, that doesn't really do the material much justice, social or otherwise.  It is certainly insufficient to overcome one's feeling that Parker himself is a very bad person, and this goes double when something like one-third of Parker's movie is devoted to a slavery-was-an-American-rape-camp narrative, giving Nation the same extraordinarily bitter flavor of a picture like (for example) Polanski's Repulsion—wherein your response is unavoidably conditioned by your extrinsic knowledge that the man bringing you this tale is, himself, far too deeply compromised to have the moral right to tell it.  (Shucks.  And after I promised myself I wouldn't mention any of that business, too.)

The fundamental problem with Nation isn't just that it was helmed by Nate Parker, the Bad Man, however.  For one thing, there are more people involved in a movie than just its director, even if there are somewhat fewer in this case than there usually would be, once you take Parker's position as Nation's writer-director-producer-star-and-scenarist into account.

But even then, let's be crystal clear: the fact that Parker is the star of his own movie is definitely a problem, and not for any external reason on this count, either.  Rather, it's because whatever acting prowess the man might possess—I rather enjoyed his supporting turn in Beyond the Lights—it has very obviously not been honed to the level it needs to be at for this particular role.  Thus does Parker provide his presumably-complicated hero, a man decried by many as an actual madperson, with roughly one single note per any given scene throughout the picture; and, because Parker evidently lacks much in the way of imagination, that note is almost permanently set to "theatrically angry at the world," except in the scenes where that note is "noble martyr"; and, of course, there is a smattering other scenes, wherein there aren't any notes to speak of at all.  Finally, there is always a certain lack of the heavenly fire you'd hope for, even in the notes Parker gets right.

So, seriously, I can't even tell anymore: should I be annoyed that the best performance in Nation comes either from noted white boy Armie Hammer, as Turner's master who thinks himself kind, or from Roger Guenveur Smith, as the Turner plantation's senior house negro who thinks himself wise?  You know, as opposed to the deeply, deeply backgrounded ensemble of abused and desperate field slaves, not to mention the film's protagonist?

The point is, whatever cosmetic indications of hubris that Nation no doubt displays—e.g., the filmmaker's name showing up in the credits roughly eighty times, and that's before you even get to the smaller print—the most glaring overreach of all is when he decided that Nate Parker was the man destined to portray Nat Turner.  (And this was clearly meant to be.  I mean, gosh, they share the same Christian name and everything.)

But, as I was saying: the fundamental problem with Nation isn't Parker, the Bad Man, it's Parker, the Mediocre Director.  He has no solid idea what his film ought to be, and it inevitably becomes something of a slurry (probably not intentionally), sometimes a very gripping slurry based on the content alone.  However, it just as often invites comparisons that it cannot easily survive: very unfortunately, Nation spends almost all of its two hour runtime laboring in the shadow of its immediate predecessor in bondage, McQueen's grim, methodical portrait of a human being being broken, 12 Years a Slave; and then, once Turner's rebellion has (finally) arrived, it leaves McQueen's shadow only to cross over into the penumbra of the other big slavery movie of recent years—namely, Tarantino's unhinged, borderline-pornographic historical revenge fantasy, Django Unchained.

Well, in the end, Nation splits the difference between those two extraordinarily different movies, and that's just no place for any film to be, unless "resolutely middle-of-the-road" was, in fact, always Parker's goal.  Indeed, Nation escapes a serious competition with Tarantino's picture solely because it appears to have no opinion to share about the Nat Turner Rebellion in the first place, except that a rebellion of some sort was justified, which is not necessarily something anyone needs a movie to tell them.

Therefore it cannot simply be a joyous explosion of rage, leavened with tragedy thanks to our foreknowledge that Turner's rebellion shall not succeed; nor can it be a troubled examination of the wisdom and morality of what Turner actually did (namely, annihilate families, including children—though, interestingly, not always!).  In fact, once Nation arrives at the Rebellion itself, it starts to come perilously close to refusing to function on the level of basic storytelling, presenting the events of Turner's 48-hour war as a rushed-through montage that keeps getting more and more elliptical as it goes on—and never to much of any cognizable purpose, either.  It is a baffling choice; and, ultimately, the story of the Rebellion shatters entirely in the editing room.  It is something of a surprise, given that the rest of the film has been nothing much more than a sturdy progression of things-that-happened; it is not much of a surprise, however, that in very short order Parker's quotidian direction reasserts itself, and Turner gets his Braveheart finale.

The result, sadly, is a film that is possibly already a little too long for the mere thing that it winds up being—a competent but never compelling biography (and not a terribly accurate one, if I'm not mistaken)—and which is also vastly too short for what that written-in-blood title advertises it as—namely, an epic historical fiction that actually has something subversive and edgy to say about race, either then or now.

So why does Nation not grapple more forcefully with its questions of tactics and morality?  Indeed, why does it do so precious little with what it does have?  Is it because it is, effectively, Oscarsploitation, assuming itself to be important because of its subject matter, rather than on its merits?  Possibly so.  Another explanation presents itself, however.  That's because it's Parker's very first feature length film as a director—and first-time directors don't typically cut their teeth on politically-charged prestige films about difficult characters for a good reason.  Parker acquits himself well enough behind the camera—he certainly has a halfway-decent eye for the tableau, if not for how to place them within a sequence to make them truly land—but he has no idea what to focus on.  Thus we get furtive glimpses of Turner's visions, when the full Ken Russell Freakout might have sold us on Turner's unerring certainty that he was on a bona fide mission from God.  We get all the ugly interstitial scenes of slavery we could want, in order to give us all the old time holocaustal catharsis we could need, but Parker tends to shy away from letting his film truly absorb the violence inherent in his scenario.  And we get the vague sensation that Parker is setting up Turner as the man who fired the first shots in the great war of liberation to come, yet, somewhat curiously—given the climate of 2016—there is not a whole lot of suggestion that this was a struggle that concluded without the fullest possible satisfaction.

Even so, the most redemptively cinematic moment in Nation's whole two hour span is its very final image: a match-dissolve from a black child to a black man, wearing the Union blue thirty years down the line.  It is the littlest bit trite—though it is perhaps somewhat less trite, when you know precisely who is growing up to be whom.  Either way, it does have a legitimate power to it—the kind of power the rest of the movie doesn't actually seem that interested in wielding.

But even then, if that's where this is all heading—"isn't it nice that the Civil War happened?" (and, yes, it was!)—then what we have is just about the safest movie about Nat Turner a man could possibly make.  And, sure, a pretty decent one, at that.

So, if I have regrettably done very little but complain about the thing, it's only because the substantial good that Nation offers is just not very interesting to talk about.  That's because—let's say it again—it's so fucking safe: from the way it redacts its chosen subject matter, to the way Parker services his vision of a bloody rebellion, even to the way that it characterizes Turner's breaking point.  It is scarcely good enough to be safe, I'm afraid, and in its essential tidiness, you almost wish it were a grasping, stupid, ambitious mess, instead of being safe and just okay.  Given its cool reception, I wouldn't be surprised if Parker himself wishes that, too.

Score:  6/10

Thursday, October 13, 2016

Cimmerian Week, part I: The riddle of steel


CONAN THE BARBARIAN

Blessed with a director, a composer, and a team of designers all operating at the very height of their powers—and blessed further by a cast with all the right skills to pull this story off—Conan the Barbarian set fire to the box office back in '82, and it's no mystery why.

1982
Directed by John Milius
Written by Oliver Stone and John Milius
With Arnold Schwarzenegger (Conan), Sandahl Bergman (Valeria), Gerry Lopez (Subotai), Mako Iwamatsu (The Wizard of the Mounds), William Smith (Conan's Father), Nadiuska (Conan's Mother), Max von Sydow (King Osric), Valerie Quenessen (Osric's Daughter, The Princess), Sven-Ole Thorsen (Thorgrim), Ben Davidson (Rexor), and James Earl Jones (Thulsa Doom)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Joe Dante, part IV: Altered beast


THE HOWLING

Hey, one out of three ain't bad!

1981
Directed by Joe Dante
Written by Jack Conrad, Terence H. Winkless, and John Sayles (based on the novel by Gary Brandner)
With Dee Wallace (Karen White), Christopher Stone (Bill Neill), Terry Fisher (Belinda Balaski), Chris Halloran (Dennis Dugan), Dick Miller (Walter Paisley), Patrick Macnee (Dr. George Wagner), Elizabeth Brooks (Marsha Quist), and Robert Picardo (Eddie Quist)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Sunday, October 2, 2016

Joe Dante, part III: The music that expresses the culture, the refinement, and the polite grace of the present day


ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL

Gabba gabba hey.

1979
Directed by Allan Arkush and Joe Dante
Written by Richard Whitley, Russ Dvonch, Joseph McBride, Allan Arkush, and Joe Dante
With P.J. Soles (Riff Randall), Dey Young (Kate Rambeau), Vince Van Patten (Tom Roberts), Clint Howard (Eaglebauer), Paul Bartel (Mr. McGree), The Ramones (The Ramones), Lynn Farrell (Angel Dust), Dick Miller (The Police Chief), Loren Lester (Fritz Hansel), Daniel Davies (Fritz Gretel), and Mary Woronov (Prinicipal Evelyn Togar)

Spoiler alert: mild