There [still won't] be blood

MORTAL KOMBAT: ANNIHILATION

1997

Directed by John R. Leonetti

Written by Lawrence Kasanoff, Joshua Wexler, John Tobias, Brent Friedman, and Bryan Zabel (based on the video game Mortal Kombat 3 by Ed Boon and John Tobias)

Spoilers: moderate

Cardboard Science: But the film is a saddening bore

THE ANGRY RED PLANET

1959

Directed by Ib Melchior

Written by Sid Pink and Ib Melchior

Spoilers: moderate

Disney's Challengers: Put it in a flower pot and you'll see what you shall see

THUMBELINA

1994

Written and directed by Don Bluth (based on the story "Tommelise" by Hans Christian Andersen)

Spoilers: moderate

Cardboard Science: A million years of evolution with one bomb

DAY THE WORLD ENDED

1955

Directed by Roger Corman

Written by Lou Russof

Spoilers: moderate

Walt Disney, part LXIX: You were just as dim-witted the first time you were here, you called it "Wonderland," as I recall

ALICE IN WONDERLAND

2010

Directed by Tim Burton

Written by Linda Woolverton

Spoilers: moderate

Friday Week: Say hi to mommy in hell

FRIDAY THE 13th

2009

Directed by Marcus Nispel

Written by Mark Wheaton, Damian Shannon, and Mark Swift

Spoilers: high

Friday Week: Trapped by dark waters, there is no escape—nor do we want it

 

FRIDAY THE 13th PART VIII: JASON TAKES MANHATTAN

1989

Written and directed by Rob Hedden

Spoiler alert: moderate

Note: though based on a fresh watch, this is a re-edited-more-than-I'd-have-liked version of an earlier review written in connection with my annual Halloween-time crossover with Brennan Klein (rarely these days of Popcorn Culture, more commonly of Alternate Ending).  My hopes were to barely change it.  My hopes were dashed, given that significant stretches would have been redundant with things we've already covered in previous entries (particularly my grand unified theories of Friday the 13th criticism), while a lot was simply performative whining that only makes sense in the context of Brennan having control over the programming.  The original will, of course, remain, and it has a lot of neat slasher flick errata insofar as the crossover concept demands I ape the format of Brennan's impiously encyclopedic Census Bloodbath series of 80s slasher film reviews, which I obviously recommend.

Douglas Howser–Reanimator

DEADLY FRIEND

1986

Directed by Wes Craven

Written by Bruce Joel Rubin (based on the novel Friend by Diana Henstell)

Spoilers: moderate

Daddy, daddy, where'd you get them stilts?

LONGLEGS

2024

Written and directed by Osgood Perkins

Spoilers: moderate to high

If a young man came to me today with similar credentials there's no way I'd hire him

FIVE GUNS WEST

1955

Directed by Roger Corman

Written by R. Wright Campbell

Spoilers: moderate

Reviews from gulag: The red [door/car/nosed reindeer]

As we continue our clean-up of 2023 with a series of reviews for movies that may or may not have deserved their own entries, we arrive upon Insidious: The Red Door, annoyingly both the fourth and the second sequel to James Wan's 2011 horror superhit, Insidious, picking up the Lambert Saga ten years after Wan finished it in Insidious: Chapter 2 for no obvious reason besides giving perennial supporting-actor champion Patrick Wilson his first crack at directing; Ferrari, Michael Mann's biopic of Enzo Ferrari that, hypothetically, appeals to Mann's historic strengths as a filmmaker or should at least offer some good racing scenes; and Silent Night, John Woo's pun-titled, Christmas-themed experimental action film.  As the title up top indicates, there is indeed something meaningfully red in all three of these movies, but the actual secret theme of these graybles is that they all involve a director I respect a great deal, even if it's for reasons besides directing, nevertheless proving a disappointment.

INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR

I've suggested in the past that the Insidious franchise, prior to Insidious: The Red Door, is not good, and, having recently reacquainted myself with them (or become acquainted with some of them in the first place), I'm happy to recant that, albeit with faint praise; it's a horror franchise with the agreeable distinction of improving steadily throughout all of its first three entries, going from a low 7/10 for the first Insidious all the way to a medium-high 7/10 for 2015's Insidious: Chapter 3.  This was unlikely to continue apace and it did stumble, rather hard, with its fourth entry, 2018's Insidious: The Last Key, which at least had a few strong novelties to offset the feeling that the franchise had clearly exhausted most of its best moves already.  (The first three all had the benefit of being directed by one or the other of its creators, James Wan or Leigh Whannell, which makes more of a difference than you might be ready to guess, given how formulaic the scares and stories are.  Meanwhile, The Last Key was at least written by Whannell, which didn't save it, but it felt of a piece with its three predecessors.)  Other than The Last Key not being good, however, the worst thing about those first four films is that Chapter 3 took the unusual step of being a prequel focused upon Lin Shaye's paranormal investigator and spirit medium, Elise Rainier.  Obviously, insofar as Elise was almost objectively the single best element of the franchise, its focus on her was not the bad part; that's the "prequel" part, where Whannell blinked and took his franchise back in time to give Elise a new story, despite having already ended Chapter 2 with an inordinately strong sequel hook, for while that film concluded the "central" story of the Lambert family on a satisfying and happy note, it also promised Further adventures (ha, ha) with Elise and her sidekicks, irrespective of the fact that Elise had been dead for an entire movie by this point.  I mean, it's a franchise entirely about ghosts and the metaphysical dark mirror of the real world where ghosts hang out after they die; this was not some insuperable challenge.  The worst thing about the worst thing, meanwhile, is simply that, flying in the face of all logic, Whannell's prequel was still named "chapter 3."  This had to be awfully irritating when development began on Insidious: The Red Door, which finally does offer a chronologically-third Insidious movie, as well as another (and presumably the final) chapter in the story of Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson) and Dalton Lambert (Ty Simpkins), father and son astral projectors whose unique talents had tended to get them into trouble.

Reviews from gulag: Vampires suck

It's that time again, when we face the necessity of getting fast and somewhat dirty as we dispose of the detritus of the previous year.  For our first batch of titles, we have a convenient theme in 2023's major vampire films: The Last Voyage of the Demeter, which is the Dracula-on-a-boat adventure it says it is, adapting Chapter 7 of Bram Stoker's novel; El Conde, the new Pablo Larraín film, of all things, which deploys the curious conceit of wondering what it would be like if Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet had actually been a vampire who never died; and Renfield, which, like Demeter, looks to the beginning of things with Stoker for its inspiration, and wonders what it would be like if Dracula and Renfield survived long enough for Renfield to read self-help books and decide to rebel against his toxic boss, while also giving Universal Pictures an opportunity to do something/anything with its Dracula IP, still good for a few more years.  You would never, ever guess which one of these is not a piece of shit.

Note: I will be spoiling The Last Voyage of the Demeter, a little.  I guess I kind of spoil El Conde, but only if you're unrealistically ignorant of late 20th century history.

THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER

Of course, if I warn you that I'm spoiling The Last Voyage of the Demeter, have I not already spoiled The Last Voyage of the Demeter?  But then, if it's even meaningful to ask "guess who survives the Demeter?", the project has already failed in the first place.  Look, The Last Voyage of the Demeter ends not with extinction, but a fucking sequel hook.  This insane unwillingness to fully embrace the fatalistic nihilism that ought to be burned right into this weird sidequel's bones was always going to be its biggest problem; yet, with this treatment, I'm not entirely sure that if it had done so it still could have managed to have clawed its way up to an adequate movie—I just wouldn't have totally despised it. I felt a deep sense of pessimism about its chances sweep over me within the first seconds, which outline the basic scenario in its introductory text—the Demeter wrecked on the English coast (this is, uh, not the most faithful adaptation in any respect), the captain's (Liam Cunningham's) log found—and then wrench you right out of the story it's telling, by announcing right in the midst of its text narration that it's "based on the novel Dracula," which is almost correct, in that Dracula offers itself as a curated archive of documents that are real in its universe, but are only a novel in ours.  A few seconds after that, it shows us exactly what it just told us, I suppose so you'd know that superfluousness was going to be a major element of this movie.  I don't think anything in the movie ever gets wonkier than this first minute, at least, but the screenplay does frequently flirt with similar malapropism, notably when a character asks if everyone has been "struck dumb," meaning "stupid," even though "dumb" has never meant "stupid" when you put "struck" in front of it (and it would be exceedingly hip and with-it for this Russian to use "dumb" for "stupid" in his mostly-fluent British English in 1897 anyway, so it's not "character embroidery").  There's also a line where a Romanian claims that Dracula's castle is older than any of them, which, from context, is supposed to be impressive for some reason.

He was like Superman for Metropolis or the Flash for Central City, just maybe not as good

BLUE BEETLE

2023

Directed by Ángel Manuel Soto

Written by Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer

Spoilers: moderate

Reviews from gulag: 2022's junk drawer, part 3

So on the eve of the Oscars, we're still cleaning up 2022, which I suppose isn't that new here at Kinemalogue, and of course halfway through March there's still a fair amount left from the previous year that I want to see.  It's entirely possible I won't be "done" with the year, then (though one is never done with a year, like, what does that mean, I'm never going to watch any other movie from 2022?), until April, which is of course a bother because newfangled release patterns means that these days we're already starting the new year in earnest by late winter, and there's already very important stuff I'm missing in theaters (Creed III, for example).  Yeah, I say this, as if I actually felt like leaving my house.  But whatever, here's a mess of semi-mini, semi-new reviews that shall at least begin to close the loop on 2022: Utama, The Woman King, The Menu, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, and Women Talking.

UTAMA

It kind of makes sense that, prior to this feature debut, Alejandro Loayza Grisi's been a cinematographer, and not an especially veteran cinematographer, at that, with his biggest deal being Planeta Bolivia, what looks like a tolerably cool travelogue documentary miniseries.  It explains several things about the movie.  One of them is, unfortunately, why Utama isn't edited very well.  It's not, like, edited terribly or anything, but it's full of images just bonking into one another.  For instance, we will eventually arrive upon a very long shot of our protagonist, Virginio (Jose Calcina), a Quechua llama herder and potato farmer living in the Bolivian Qullaw highlands; we see him cresting a roadside from long down the road, and this swings 90 degrees and several thousand feet to bonk into a very close axial shot of his face.  Grisi may also be a cinematographer who was never asked the question "where is the horizon in this painting?", though a one-clause aesthetic philosophy is for the birds anyhow.  "Being a TV documentary cinematographer" probably also explains Utama's extremely "nature doc" videography, which can be distractingly (sometimes unpleasantly) smooth, though, to Grisi's great credit, it's color graded for naturalism, and despite the overriding goal being a sort of poetic realism erring on the side of just plain realism, no doubt a well-attested mode in Latin American film though what Utama makes me think of is early Fifth Generation Chinese cinema, he even manages some rather interestingly narratively-weighted lighting set-ups inside the family cabin.

The Encyclopedia Brown: An Early Clarence Brown Compendium

In which we file away The Blue Bird (1918), The Last of the Mohicans (1920), "The Light of Faith" (1922), The Signal Tower (1924), Smouldering Fires (1925), The Goose Woman (1925), The Eagle (1925), and Kiki (1926), plus—talkie bonus!—Navy Blues (1929)

One should not have to "discover" Clarence Brown, but that's the way it is in the year 2022, and the way it has been since, probably, the mid-1950s, when he retired on his own terms to go live on a ranch for the next three decades.  Maybe the word "discover" does too much: he's only as obscure as any Old Hollywood studio man, but such a person can get pretty obscure, after all, because it sometimes feels like so much of the fullness and flavor of Old Hollywood's legacy was lost to the grimly-streamlined Boomer cinematic canon, which became the dull, conformist framework for communicating and teaching film history for the next sixty years.  In any case, discovery is what it felt like to me, when I noticed over the course of about a year that the guy who did The Rains Came was the guy who did The Yearling was the guy who did Flesh and the Devil and I said, "okay, show me" when National Velvet made its rounds on HBOMax and I saw that this, too, was Brown, leading to the statistically-startling and hugely-tantalizing realization that I had seen four Brown movies at more-or-less random but had also seen four masterpieces.

And then, as I do, I got really enthusiastic and burned through Brown's 1941-1947 stretch for no reason but I felt like it, since "what I feel like" is the long and short of my critical ethos here, and as I've gotten a better grasp of the director, it turns out that for whatever reason that stretch in the third decade of his career saw Brown hit not only his stride (just great movie after great movie in the middle of that decade) but also many of his highest peaks, which means that were I to, say, decide upon a more systematic overview of his career, it would be almost guaranteed to be a bit of a let-down.  After all, nobody, not nobody—at least not nobody who had to do what Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer told him to once or twice or three times a year, whether he wanted to do it or not—was likely to have managed to keep that level of superlative quality up.  That's something that his tossed-off second film of 1941, They Met In Bombay, indicates powerfully, despite coming in between Come Live With Me and The Human Comedy.  That's just the business—even beyond the studio system, you should expect even the greatest filmmakers to have fallow periods and the occasional dud—but you know, Brown's late 1920s and 1930s aren't wastelands either.  They absolutely have some peaks of their own, and not just a few, either.

Cardboard Science: Size queen

ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN

1958

Directed by Nathan Hertz Juran

Written by Mark Hanna

Spoilers: moderate

What a disaster: God went down with the Titanic

S.O.S. TITANIC

1979

Directed by William Hale

Written by James Costigan

Spoilers: N/A

They want us up in their gray space pushing their WTF buttons

THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS

2021

Directed by Lana Wachowski

Written by David Mitchell, Aleksandar Hemon, and Lana Wachowski

Spoilers: severe

Spins a multiverse, any size, doesn't matter if he dies, there's always some other Spider-Man

SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME

2021

Directed by Jon Watts

Written by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers

Spoilers: severe

American Gothic Week: Poe boys

THE TERROR

1963

Directed by Roger Corman with Francis Ford Coppola, Dennis Jakob, Jack Hill, and Jack Nicholson

Written by nobody till after it was over, and credited to Leo Gordon and Jack Hill

Spoilers: moderate