Father knows best

THE DESPERATE HOURS

1955

Directed by William Wyler

Written by Joseph Hayes and Jay Dratler (based on the play by Joseph Hayes)

Spoiler alert: mild

I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords

PHASE IV

A steady, meticulous dive into all-out evolutionary struggle, Saul Bass's Phase IV is in the running for best "evil bug" movie of all time, which sounds like a low bar, and is, but I do truly mean it in the most complimentary way I could.

1974

Directed by Saul Bass

Written by Mayo Simon

With Michael Murphy (James Lesko), Lynne Frederick (Kendra Eldridge), and Nigel Davenport (Dr. Ernest Hubbs)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Because nothing spells "quality" like "Kickstarter"

THE VOID

A nothing of a horror movie that happens to feature some technically-proficient practical effects, which apparently means we have to love it.  Well, I don't.  You can do whatever you want.

2017

Written and directed by Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski

With Aaron Poole (Daniel Carter), Kathleen Munroe (Allison Fraser), Ellen Wong (Kim), Stephanie Belding (Beverly), Grace Munro (Maggie), James Millington (Ben), Daniel Fathers (The Dad), Mik Byskov (The Son), Evan Stern (James), and Kenneth Walsh (Dr. Richard Powell)

Spoiler alert: mild

Census Bloodbath: The drill is his penis

THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE

1982

Directed by Amy Holden Jones

Written by Rita Mae Brown

With Michelle Michaels (Trish), Debra Deliso (Kim), Andree Honore (Jackie), Gina Smika (Diane), Robin Still (Val), Jennifer Meyers (Courtney), Brinke Stevens (Linda), Joseph Alan Johnson (Neil), David Millbern (Jeff), Jim Boyce (John), Rigg Kennedy (Mr. Contant), Pamela Roylance (Coach Rachel), and Michael Villella (Russ Thorn)

Spoiler alert: high

Alien Week, part II: The starship troopers

ALIENS

The great JC (the other one; no, the other other one) brings this franchise to its highest possible point.

1986

Written and directed by James Cameron

With Sigourney Weaver (Ellen Ripley), Michael Biehn (Cpl. Dwayne Hicks), Carrie Henn (Newt), Lance Henriksen (Bishop), Jenette Goldstein (Pvt. Vasquez), Bill Paxton (Pvt. Hudson), and Paul Reiser (Carter Burke)

Spoiler alert: get away from her, you bitch

I'm not even ovulating, you idiot

DON'T BREATHE

Close to ideal for what it aims to be, most of the issues that Don't Breathe has comes from writing itself into a corner, then writing itself out with a sticky keyboard.  And let's call them issues, because "problems" might overstate the matter, simply because this movie's so nuts, and I'm terribly loath to condemn a preposterous thriller like this just for going nuts.  As for the rest of it, outside of one or two annoying characters and a yawning gap or two in its premise—hey, did you not see those two words, "preposterous thriller"?—but other than that, well.  It's damn near unimpeachable.

2016

Directed by Fede Alvarez

Written by Rodo Sayagues and Fede Alvarez

With Jane Levy (Rocky), Dylan Minnette (Alex), Daniel Zovatto (Money), and Stephen Lang (The Blind Man)

Spoiler alert: moderate? high?

Reviews from gulag: 2016 almost got away from me, but I was too quick for it

I've been catching up on things I missed while they were in theaters: today, we're looking at Zootopia, Embrace of the Serpent, Eye in the Sky, and Green Room.

ZOOTOPIA (Byron Howard and Rich Moore, 2016)

In a weird world where animals are people, but still kind of like animals, a young rabbit from the sticks named Judy Hops (Ginnifer Goodwin) resolves to become the first bunny police officer in the big city of Zootopia.  Her dreams are realized, but only in the most humiliatingly limited way possible, until she stumbles upon a conspiracy that threatens to break her animal society apart.  With the help of a vulpine confidence trickster and jerkass named Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), Officer Hops follows her enemies' traces into a labyrinth of despair.  And also into a Godfather reference joke, which is, in its own way, likewise a labyrinth of despair.

Seriously: if you cut out the fucking Godfather reference joke, which is an idea that might have even been rejected by DreamWorks (or at least cut down to a length where you don't want to annihilate your whole family and then turn the gun on yourself), Zootopia is a fantastic film, even a great one.  And if it had the supreme courage to be bleak, like its most obvious influences had a real tendency to be, then it would be able to stand like a titan amongst Disney's greatest masterpieces, as a reflection of the fallen, unfair world all of us out here in audienceland actually have the misfortune of living in.  (Imagine, if you will, that the film just cuts to black, with Hops back on her family farm, about twenty-five minutes before it grinds its gears into a stupid dance party instead.)  Of course, to expect such courage out of corporate family entertainment like this would have been a deeply idiotic thing to do—if it needs to be explicitly said, I did not—and so that's why I don't hold it against Zootopia very strongly that when it circles back to the city, it's not just for some closure, but also for a somewhat tacked-on resolution that won't break your heart.

I'll try to be far briefer than usual, for Zootopia is likely the most talked-about Disney film since good old Frozen, thanks to its engagement with the contentious (but, to my mind, mostly common-sensical) progressive politics of our age; the short version is that Zootopia uses funny animals to allude to all the nasty racial (and gender) disparities that still cleave our own dumbassed animal society in twain.

It's both a smart decision on the film's part, and (I can imagine) a somewhat disappointing one to some viewers, that within Zootopia's multitudes there's just no feasible way at all to map any of those real-life disparities onto these fictional characters in anything like a real, logically consistent, one-to-one manner.  Instead, whatever injustice the film's referring to in any given moment, with one character, is going to apply to another character pretty soon, and you're like, "Wait, I thought that guy was supposed to be white."  Personally, though, I'm going to go absolutely all in on "smart decision": it's a dangerous game to start applying animal characteristics to human ethnicities, and that's why most of the movies that actually do that were made before V-E Day.  Your best case scenario: you end up with something like Maus, a comic book wherein its author, Art Spiegelman, is compelled to break away from the story he's telling about his dad's unlikely Auschwitz survival, in order to explain that he's just now realized that his central visual metaphor makes virtually no sense and has been collapsing in upon itself this entire time.

Anyway, Zootopia's animals are animals—mammals, to be a lot more precise—and while the plot itself may hinge upon their being biologically different from another in a few key ways, the production design and animation embrace these differences with their respective whole hearts.  One of the film's greatest pleasures is in the exploration of a bizarre and wonderful world, where a whole lot of mammals of radically different sizes and functional capabilities have come to live together for no good God damned reason.  Thus is Zootopia is veritable feast for thine eyes—not endlessly inventive, but thrillingly inventive indeed, when it really wants to be.

Better yet, a lot of the animal jokes that necessarily arise out of this situation are, against all expectation, actually pretty funny.  (In fact, a lot of Zootopia's plain old jokes are pretty funny, too—most of them are delivered as sarcastic asides by Jason Bateman's dickhead fox in a role that, ingeniously, does not require Bateman to project a brand of physical charisma he doesn't really possess, because the animators can do that for him.  Meanwhile, Bateman's vocal talent effortlessly provides all the character's requisite half-credible half-sleaze, along with the more subtle emotions that he has to shade into his interactions with Ginnifer Goodwin's admirably straightforward performance as an admirably straightforward rabbit cop.  Now, obviously: Bateman was never going to be quite good enough to redeem the name "Nick Wilde," but nobody would be, because "Nick Wilde" is the name you come up with if your character was a man with a half-decade career in VHS-era porn still ahead of him, before he became a born-again Christian; whereas it is emphatically not the name you would ever come up with if your character was a Goddamned fox, because that would just be a little too on-the-nose and dumb, do you not agree?)

But, seriously, I must say this: there's a scene with sloths—let me just get it out there, okay, it's a joke about the sloths that run the DMV.  Here we essentially take a break from that dour race fable entirely—I mean, speaking frankly, it slams into the film at nothing less than a 90-degree angle to its actual message, considering that, essentially, the joke is that this one particular animal species is effectively unable to properly function—but I've got to be real with you here.  The gag's infinitely funnier than it has the slightest right to be, especially when it is neither more nor is it less than the joke you already told yourself in your head, when you heard the premise was "DMV sloths."  But maybe it's funny because the joke actually isn't "DMV sloths," it's "Christ on the cross, this bit is five minutes long already, and we're still not done with it yet!"  It's like those jokes on Family Guy where the point is that they're insanely repetitious and terrifyingly annoying, except, for reasons I can't begin to explain even to myself, it worked for me.  At any rate, it worked a whole lot better than that fucking Godfather parody—which goes on even longer than the sloths, if you can possibly believe it.

Score:  8/10

John Carpenter, part XXVII: Hey, it's not quite the absolute end of the world—but we're getting there!

CIGARETTE BURNS (Masters of Horror, season 1, episode 8)

Carpenter returns to meta-horror—and, in the process, proves that sometimes you really can't go home again.

2005

Directed by John Carpenter

Written by Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan

With Norman Reedus (Kirby Sweetman), Udo Kier (Bellinger), and Gwynyth Walsh (Katja)

PRO-LIFE (Masters of Horror, season 2, episode 5)

Carpenter takes on a politically-charged siege film, winds up with boneheaded supernatural horror, and you have to ask, "How the heck did that happen?"

2006

Directed by John Carpenter

Written by Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan

With Caitlin Wachs (Angelique Burcell), Mark Feuerstein (Dr. Alex O'Shea), Emmanuelle Vaugier (Kim), Bill Dow (Dr. Kiefer), and Ron Perlman (Dwayne Burcell)

Spoiler alert: moderate

John Carpenter, part XXVI: Death metal

GHOSTS OF MARS

Carpenter enters the 21st century with Ghosts of Mars, a picture that squanders an awful lot of imagination, and a not inconsiderable amount of narrative elegance, with a hoary scenario filled up with mostly-lousy action, and its predictable and justified failure nearly drove JC from filmmaking altogether.

2002
Directed by John Carpenter

Written by Larry Sulkis and John Carpenter

With Natasha Henstridge (Lt. Melanie Ballard), Ice Cube (Desolation Williams), Pam Grier (Cmdr. Helena Braddock), Jason Statham (Sgt. Jericho), Clea Duvall (Bashira Kincaid), Liam Waite (Michael Descanso), Joanna Cassidy (Dr. Whitlock), and Richard Cetrone (Big Daddy Mars)

Spoiler alert: moderate

John Carpenter, part XVI: Party like it's the year one nine nine nine

PRINCE OF DARKNESS

If only all movies about the Devil could be made with this much obvious joy.

1987

Written and directed by John Carpenter

With Victor Wong (Prof. Birack), Donald Pleasence (Father Loomis), Jameson Parker (Brian), Dennis Dun (Walter), Lisa Blount (Catherine), Anne Marie Howard (Susan), Ann Yen (Lisa), Jesse Lawrence Ferguson (Calder), Dirk Blocker (Mullins), Ken Wright (Lomax), Robert Grasmere (Frank), Thom Bray (Etchison), Peter Jason (Dr. Paul Leahy), Joanna Merlin (The Bag Lady) Alice Cooper (The Street Schizo), and Susan Blanchard (Kelly, and latterly Satan, Son of the Anti-God)

Spoiler alert: moderate

John Carpenter, part IX: That damned thing that Earth wouldn't own is dripping, dripping in the Cosmos House tonight

THE THING

Perhaps the best practical effects in horror meet the most sustained paranoia in horror, and the result is an abiding nihilism that, somehow, is a hell of a lot of fun to watch.  We arrive now at John Carpenter's very first outright masterpiece.

1982

Directed by John Carpenter

Written by Bill Lancaster (based on the story by John W. Campbell)

With Kurt Russell (McReady), Wilford Brimley (Dr. Blair), Keith David (Childs), T.K. Carter (Nauls), Richard Dysart (Dr. Copper), David Clennon (Palmer), Charles Hallahan (Norris), Peter Maloney (Bennings), Richard Masur (Clark), Donald Moffat (Cmdr. Bennings), Joel Polis (Fuchs), Thomas G. Waites (Windows), Norbert Weisser (The Norwegian), Larry Franco (The Norwegian Passenger), and Jed the Dog (The Thing)

Spoiler alert: moderate

John Carpenter, part II: SUPPOR YOUR LOC POLIC

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13

Abstract art, a vague politicizing impulse, and lo-fi action all converge in John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, and I mean that in a highly complimentary way.

1976

Written and directed by John Carpenter

With Austin Stoker (Lt. Ethan Bishop), Darwin Joston (Napoleon Wilson), Laurie Zimmer (Leigh), Tony Burton (Wells), Charles Cyphers (Officer Starker), Gilbert De Le Pena (the Chicano Warlord), Frank Doubleday (the White Warlord), James Johnson (the Black Warlord), and Al Nakuichi (the Oriental Warlord)

Spoiler alert: high

Anybody in the mood for strawberry daquiris?

YOU'RE NEXT

Class warrior classic.

2013
Directed by Adam Wingard
Written by Simon Barrett
With Sharni Vinson (Erin), AJ Bowen (Crispian), Nicholas Tucci (Felix), Wendy Glenn (Zee), Joe Swanberg (Drake), Margaret Laney (Kelly), Amy Seimetz (Aimee), Ti West (Tariq), Rob Moran (Paul), Barbara Cramton (Aubrey), Simon Barrett (Tiger Mask), Lane Hughes (Fox Mask) Steve Buscemi L.C. Holt (Lamb Mask)

Spoiler alert: moderate

They forgot to binge first

 The Mad Max retrospective continues soon, and as part of an effort to get reviews of newer movies out quickly, Man of Steel early tomorrow.

For now, catching up on last week's technical hit:

THE PURGE

 2013

Written and directed by James DeMonaco

With Ethan Hawke (James Sandin), Lena Headey (Mary Sandin), Lena Headey’s extremely lovely asymmetrical bob haircut (itself), Max Burkholder (Charlie Sandin), Adelaide Kane (Zoey Sandin), Rhys Wakefield (Polite Stranger), and a plot device with four lines (Plot Device With Four Lines)

Spoiler alert: mild

In the year 2022, control of the United States government has been seized by a group of radicals, whose philosophy combines elements of intense religiosity, fascism, and anarchism. At some point, they changed their name to the New Founding Fathers.