a sense of joy and then a panic

Oh, and while I'm at it: Godzilla --

-- was not as good as Cloverfield or Pacific Rim.  By a long-shot, in my opinion.  The trailer is a lot better than the movie - there's an apocalyptic solemnity in the trailer that's quite convincing, but lacking in the movie, which feels like a throwback to the 1990s' style of fluffy blockbuster without any of the humor or star power.  I really didn't understand what was going on with the plot, even though I suspect it was very simple - the movie rushed through its clumsily-delivered explanations.

The audience didn't take it too seriously either - everyone could not help laughing when Ken Watanabe ominously intoned, "Gojira," and everyone clapped for Godzilla's power move kill shot at the end.  It was the kind of movie that had L. suggesting that Godzilla should have just gone ahead and done a little salute at the end.  It was corny.

What I love about Pacific Rim is that it's scary, and it builds its world extremely well.  I bought the world of Pacific Rim as a world in which these gigantic monsters keep popping up and destroying cities, for years and years on end, and humanity has more or less altered to live with it.  The indie movie Monsters is the best example of this sort of creativity, but Pacific Rim has a bold, neon, all-in shamelessness in its world-building that I loved.  (Also, Raleigh and Mako ugh I can't)  I mean, for God's sake, the entire Ron Perlman character. Godzilla has none of that. Godzilla is bland - camo-toned and humorless and flat.

And what I love about Cloverfield is its sincere, hysterical emotion.  You hate those stupid yuppies but damn if they don't seem like real people.  Damn if this doesn't seem like what would actually fucking happen if you were living in New York City and a monster attacked.  What struck me about Godzilla was how utterly calm everyone seemed to be.  The military, the civilians - it was almost like people had to be reminded to run, to scream, to act scared.  Bryan Cranston was the only person who seemed to be articulating his emotions, and as a result actually looked a little out-of-place.

In other words, Godzilla didn't seem to believe in itself.  Which is too bad.

I will say, though, I would love to watch a giant monster movie compilation set to Iggy Azalea's "Change Your Life" ("pop out your past life and I'll renovate your future/ yeah I love your hustle baby, just let me add a little bit of muscle, baby").  Seriously, something like this set to "Change Your Life"?  Would be amazing.

I'm watching Tooth And Nail, which is one of those After Dark Horrorfest attempting-to-be-indie horror movies.  It's a post-apocalyptic cannibals vs. non-cannibals movie, and it isn't very good or original, except for this: I am totally rooting for the cannibals. 

Q.  Do I fail by default?

All I really have to say is... where the hell has FARGO been all my life?  

I watched this on the plane going to China.  This is the clip where I was like, "OMG, it's Nebraska."  Except of course it's not, and it's not our accent, but whatever.


The whole movie is on YouTube, so seriously, no one has an excuse not to watch this beauty.  It's already vaulted into my top ten.  If I'm not careful my entire top ten will compose of Coen Brothers movies and Apocalypse Now.

I've managed to recently watch quite a few movies that I should have seen long before.  Like, The Matrix.  There are some really neat ideas tucked in here, and great music that I already own.  But damn if Keanu Reeves is not a horrible actor.  I wasn't blown away.  Especially by the climactic events.  This was sort of - worldbuilding = A, plot = C.  I fell asleep watching The Matrix Reloaded, but not before getting creeped out by their future human city.  Another movie I fell asleep watching was The Informant.  Really I watched the first 1/3 and then woke up for the last fifteen minutes.  Which seemed interesting, really, and I want to try to watch it again, but the dialogue was so quiet and I couldn't hear it on the plane.  Don't ask why I could hear everything on Fargo. 

I also watched the entirety of The Shining (Stanley Kubrick) for the first time.  I'm a Nicholson fan, and a Shining fan, so it's not like this could really go wrong.  It's not as scary as the book, and I admit some changed details annoyed me, but uh, I had to look away during Room 217.  That was not good, and it went on way too long for comfort.  I hadn't known much about Insomnia, but I clicked on it because I saw Christopher Nolan and "land of the midnight sun."  It's one of those cops going crazy movies, and it's actually pretty good.  Mostly because Alaska makes for such an intense setting, and it's filmed with aplomb.  Get Carter - Stallone the financial adjuster goes home to the Seattle burbs to find out who killed his brother - is pretty entertaining for the first 2/3 of the movie, all this off-beat humorous violence and stuff.  Then it turns into a rape-secondary-revenge movie and gets all somber and icky.  Still, not bad for a let's-be-criminals movie. 

The Legend of Drunken Master/ Drunken Master II is some seriously good shit, better than the first.  I know some people aren't into kung fu attempts at comedy, but I was literally laughing like 80% of the movie (I mean, you know me).  Anita Mui is just fucking fantastic in it - she plays Jackie Chan's stepmother.  Oh yeah and Jackie Chan.  Basically I wanted to join their family.  And yes, I know - I watched the dubbed version.  My only other language choice was French!  Thanks, Netflix!  I can't recommend Bloodsport, though: '80s Van Damme movie about an underground world fighting tournament.  Yeah, you hear world fighting tournament and you're like, oh man, it's gonna be awesome!  Not really.  More like land o' cliches with no entertainment in sight.

I watched a few of Showtime's Masters of Horror pieces.  They're not very good, in general.  That Damned Thing is under an hour but probably the best, about a monster in a small town in Texas.  The acting is reasonable for a TV movie and the plot feels... I don't know, genuine in some way?  I don't want to totally recommend Dreams in the Witch House, a modern adaptation of the Lovecraft story, but for you horror junkies, it may be worth a view.  It's not only creepy in a fun way but it's highly amusing as well, kind of like a good Tales From The Crypt.  Nightmare Man, about an evil African fertility mask, is very very bad - laughably bad.  Valerie on the Stairs, about a haunted writer's colony, is even worse because you can't even laugh at it.

So many religious horror movies!  I lost interest in The Prophecy pretty much immediately.  Requiem, on the other hand, is a really interesting movie if you want to know the true story behind the "true story" behind The Exorcism of Emily Rose.  As in, this is what really happened to the girl - epilepsy and intense religious pressure, from within and without.  Depressing movie, but good, with a very retro/antique feel (set in the '70s in rural Germany).  On a similar note, we've got The Woods, a sort of B-movie-trying-to-be-A-movie-or-is-it-really-trying? about a girls' boarding school with a supposed history of witchcraft, and oh, the evil woods.  If you're into that sort of thing, it's not bad.  I can't say it's worth watching though.  Picnic on Hanging Rock is a far superior treatment of the Witchy Boarding School idea.  Hell House, the original Jesus Camp, is a less scathing, more personal documentary about fundamentalist Christians trying to save America - by building "haunted houses" to scare people out of being gay or having abortions.  It really gets in the heads/motives of the organizers, though, with interesting results.  Not a movie, but I also watched an episode of this BBC show Apparitions - about a Catholic priest who exorcises demons in modern London - and quite enjoyed it, particularly the emotional honesty of the characters portrayed.  Plus I'm a sucker for the whole ambiguously "good" versus "evil" fight over some guy's eternal soul thing.  Apparently British people didn't like it, because it got canceled.  C'est la vie.

Oh yeah, and I watched Shutter Island.  I never felt like it was a real movie.  The acting made it seem more like a community theater production.  Like, way below the caliber I expect from all these guys involved, including Scorcese.  A couple unnerving shots, and I will admit the last 20% of the movie felt like a step up from all that came before - ironic given the plot - and of course, gratuitously scary asylum is gratuitously scary.  I'm not going to rec it though.  I have very mixed feelings.  Like disappointment matched with bewilderment.

I recently watched Right At Your Door and Blindness.  The first is about dirty bombs going off in Los Angeles.  The second is about people in some unnamed first-world city mysteriously going blind.  They're both told from the bottom-up perspective of the civilian victims of these plagues, and they both involve issues of quarantine.  That is, the government tells civilians what to do, civilians demand information, government tells civilians what to do louder.  And "what to do" = stay in some confined space for God knows how long.

The actual Quarantine movie had a lot of this too.  Quarantine and Right At Your Door are pretty similar, however.  The governments are both identifiably American and they behave predictably, rationally - they sequester the infected area, send in people in HazMat suits to collect samples in order to figure out what's wrong, and try to keep communication as open as possible.  Of course, people respond to this by screaming their heads off, but what the hell else is the government supposed to do?  It's quarantine.  I always side with the government in movies like this - I just want to tell the hysterical people to calm the fuck down and worry about the zombies/toxic dust, because the government is doing all it can outside and can't help you inside.  The government in RAYD are actually pretty nice, considering a cloud of toxic dust is spreading over the entire American Southwest.  They also turn out to be giving everybody kind of bad advice, but they're trying to act on the information they have.  The government in Quarantine is a little meaner, and when infected people try to escape despite warnings, they're shot.  IMO this is overkill, and it's more likely they'd be shot with tranquilizer darts.  Still, not totally crazy considering these people are in and of themselves deadly weapons. 

Right At Your Door is told entirely from the perspective of the hysterical civilians, so it's essentially a panic movie, except for brief moments of tenderness (like a woman dying in the toxic air listening to her voicemail full of concerned friends and family).  There's a lot of terrible driving and people screaming at each other without listening to each other and conversations like, "I went to the hospital but I couldn't get in!"  "Go round the back before they see you!"  "There were so many people there!"  "GO ROUND THE BACK NOW" "oh my God what is happening to us" "GOOO ROOOOUUND THE BAAACK" and so it's a pretty fatiguing movie that doesn't do anything we haven't seen a million times before.  

The government in Blindness, however, behaves in a way that no first-world government would.  They drop all the blind people in what's essentially a prison block, telling them to find themselves a ward and a bed (THEY ARE BLIND) and then randomly drop boxes of food in the yard, telling them that distribution is "your responsibility" (THEY ARE BLIND).  There's no healthcare, no sanitary conditions (in other words, total quarantine fail), and no effort to examine these blind people because nobody wants to touch them (THERE ARE HAZMAT SUITS IN USE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE MOVIE.  WHERE HAVE THEY GONE?).  So of course the prison block devolves into a Hobbesian horror show, and Gael Garcia Bernal hoards all the food because he's the only one with a gun.  I'm not going to get into the incredibly pessimistic approach this movie takes toward the behavior of people in crisis situations, but I am going to say that I could not believe a first-world government would do this.  It's about as likely as selling death-row inmates to a TV show that puts them on an island to kill each other for a live audience.  Sorry, but no.  I know you hate the government, but no.  I would buy some overwhelmed third-world governments dumping everybody with a contagious disease in a prison block and not knowing what else to do - I still don't buy the existence of "wards" (why not single prison cells, and have someone shove food in through a slot?) or the air drops of food boxes (they're freakin' BLIND).  I get that this is supposed to be an exaggeration, or even a black comedy (the music gives it a sort of nasty Clockwork Orange vibe - the movie that fucked me up for life), but in the context of a cosmopolitan ultra-city where even the hookers speed around in taxi cabs, this is just too ridiculous to be taken seriously.  If the government truly did not know how blindness was spread or how to cure it, and had no prison cells or hospital rooms to spare, it's more likely that they would just shoot all the blind people and kill the infection dead. 


I also thought Garcia Bernal's evil deeds were a little too well-organized given the guy has just suddenly gone blind.  They say it's a disease that defies bureaucracy (which is why the government is useless) and yet bureaucracy is exactly what takes place in prison.  But that's just opening a whole big ass can of worms - the good doctor's wife can see, and she does freakin' nothing to take advantage of this once the food-hoarding and gang-rapes start.  She's just like, yes, I will suffer with you.  WTF.  Too much female martyrdom and male cowardice/evil.  Why is everybody in the evil Ward 3 male anyway?  The fact that everybody in all the wards just agrees to Garcia Bernal's demands because he - A BLIND MAN - has a gun (how the hell'd he get that through security?  for that matter, why were these people allowed to take their purses into quarantine?)... Ok, I said I wouldn't get into the behavior of people in crisis situations, so I'll stop. 

If you want to watch a movie about people in the government being wicked in ways that have happened time and time again the world over, watch Death and The Maiden.  If you want to watch a prison horror opera, watch Oz (man I miss Oz).  Blindness is a red herring.

I only recently discovered The Sisters Of Mercy ("This Corrosion" was on a rock collection thinga-ma-jig, and I was like, oh, ok, goth choir!) and oh God, they are awesome.  This video for Temple of Love (1992) reminds me of the video for Swans' Love Of Life.  Ok, well, Love Of Life is a lot creepier (and supposedly "Luciferian"! - watch that one at your own risk!).


Sorry in advance, Lindsey. 

This kind of thing always makes me feel bad for not liking The Crow.  I feel like it's my duty to like The Crow.  And it's not that I dislike The Crow, I just can't take it seriously (also, Ebert said The Crow was better than all of Bruce Lee's movies, which I find really hard to believe, but I'm more forgiving of martial arts movies in general I suppose). 

Still, I've actually seen all the sequels on SciFi.  Boy, they are repetitive.  3 out of 4 concern dead boyfriends who come back to life to avenge dead girlfriends.  That is terrible, people.  SAW and Halloween are less formulaic.  The last one is hilarious because Tara Reid is in it.  Oh, and David Boreanaz.  They're both evil Satanists, speaking of being "Luciferian."  LOL. 

ETA: Extra LOL to the still-shot of the YouTube video being Ringu-ish!

Sherlock Holmes has pretty much convinced me that steampunk is just not for me.  And apparently this is mild steampunk. 

As for the technicalities of the movie - trying very hard to be clever and stylish.  There are light-hearted, pseudo-witty moments.  The planning-out-fight-moves-and-then-doing-them thing got old like soooo fast.  And don't get me started on all the slow motion stuff.  Why people continue to artsify the shit out of fight scenes, I don't know.  Time spent on that could have been spent on making the plot less of a poorly-explained migraine.  Then they had to spend like 20 minutes at the end setting up the sequel (this is TOO LONG in a franchise movie; I was afraid Dr. Moriarty was actually going to fucking appear and I'd be in the theater for another hour), after whizzing through the conclusion of the first (current!) movie.  And LOL to the people that are all "oh, it's so homo-erotic!" Meh.  Not something that's going to stick with me. 

Never read the original, though, so I'm not a fan of the series to begin with (for the longest time I thought Sherlock Holmes was involved in the Dr. Livingstone in Africa thing - British people all kind of blurred together when I was a kid).   And I did have a strong margarita beforehand, so my mental faculties may have been impaired.

Also, Rachel McAdams cannot act, sorry.  There was a time when I mixed her up with Amy Adams and believe me, I make that mistake no more.  Amy Adams needs to GTFO of the movies she's always in but at least she can act.

When I first watched War of the Worlds - midnight showing (2005) - I wasn't too fond of it. I didn't like that all the main characters somehow miraculously survived, in spite of the world totally going to shit. It's very Hobbesian, which I don't enjoy. I thought the ending was too convenient (obviously I need to write to H. G. Wells about that one).

Watching it again now, after having seen 2012, I feel bad. Because despite having pretty much the same cast of characters (deadbeat dad, older son, younger daughter, ex-wife, ex-wife's new husband - latter two not really involved in War of the Worlds) and the same basic situation (mass destruction), War of the Worlds is a much better movie. It's better-acted, better-written, better-directed. Tom Cruise is a way better actor than John Cusack. Dakota Fanning is a way better actress than, fuck, anybody in 2012. As nauseating as Hobbesian situations are, Roland Emmerich's better-angels-of-our-nature transcendentalism is more annoying and less realistic. If War of the Worlds is a manufactured blockbuster (which it is - Spielberg, after all), then 2012 is as manufactured, as artificial and plastic, as an amusement park ride.

So, sorry, War of the Worlds. I gave you a bad rap. I still think your ending is a pathetic 180-degree emotional cop-out. I completely agree with this review by Rebecca Murray:

Unfortunately the movie’s 117 minutes long and those last 17 minutes are just plain horrible. Spielberg delivers a dark, sinister sci-fi story and then screws the whole thing up with an ending that doesn’t fit. In fact, the ending’s so out of place it almost ruins the whole experience. You’ve got to wonder if the ending that’s included in the theatrical release is the only ending that was shot. It actually feels like an alternate ending that was tacked on when a test audience vetoed what Spielberg really wanted to show us. If this was in fact Spielberg’s first and only choice for the ending, then jeers for not sticking with the tone of the film through its entirety.

But, you know, other than that.

So, I went to the midnight last night. Wasn't my idea, but I enjoy midnight showings (except for the tight-asses that want everybody to be quiet so they don't miss a line in the oh so majestic movie). And here's the thing about the Twilight movies: I don't dislike them.

I know that's scandalous. This doesn't apply to the books, I should add. Never read them, don't want to try. I suspect what I like about the movies would not be present in the books. But I went to the first one as a joke, just to laugh at it, and I actually ended up enjoying it somewhat. I wonder if I would like it more if I was still in high school (or better yet, middle school).

A. New Moon: Demographics

Most of the people at the midnight showing fit a certain type: the tween-girl Hot Topic shopper (when I was a tween-girl, I should add, I found Hot Topic too scary and edgy, though appealing). They're not cheerleaders. They're too "intense." They dye their hair. They under-achieve. They all showed up to New Moon wearing horrific overstretched Twilight shirts, and they sit with a couple friends, probably the only friends they have, and drown in the wish fulfillment of this movie. People make fun of them, but people have probably been making fun of them their whole lives, so they're used to it. Twilight is a franchise for them, and part of me wants to say that that's great, because everybody else ignores them. They don't have any other franchises. Gossip Girl is not for them. Harry Potter has too wide of an appeal, and Harry Potter is pretty damn hegemonic anyway. A lot of movies pander to outcast boys (Zombieland being the latest I've seen), because outcast boys can grow up to be smart or secretly cool, but outcast girls have no value in society, and they don't get movie-candy. Except for Twilight. Both of my friends who unabashedly like Twilight were loser-outcasts in high school. So was I.

B. New Moon: Aesthetics

Gloomy and angsty is the vibe Twilight goes for. It's the only teen franchise that does, really. And I'm all about that shit. Bella, the heroine, mopes 24/7. She also screams in her sleep and drives a beat-up truck and slouches. She walks awkwardly, arms crossed over her stomach. She doesn't do a lot of smiling - laughs are even rarer. Her eyes never quite seem to be totally open. And because she's played by Kristen Stewart and this is a movie about wish fulfillment, she's pretty, but not jaw-droppingly so. She isn't sunny, that's for sure. Her make-up's done to make her eyes look sunken in and her face unhealthily pallid.

The landscape - a gorgeous, misty, rustic town in the Northwest U.S. - is equally morose. The sea thrashes violently, the beach consists of hard pebbles. The roads are all hair-pin curves surrounded by dense woods filled with monsters. Honestly, I would go to these movies just to see Forks, because it's one of the richest movie landscapes I've ever seen, and definitely somewhere I wouldn't mind living.

Then of course there's all the brooding. Vampire boy broods, Bella broods, werewolf boy broods. The only one that doesn't brood is my favorite character, Bella's long-suffering, clueless cop father, Charlie. Charlie (played by Billy Burke) is just a great character - essentially, a single dad who doesn't know what to do with a moody teenaged girl, but he sure tries his damn best. Back to the teenagers: there's a lot of dramatic talk about not being able to live without so-and-so, and suicide, and not talking and not eating, and running away. But teenagers - especially this subset of teenagers - are dramatic and they do talk that way. The franchise becomes laughable when it actually takes this teenaged angst seriously - but let me make a distinction here.

1. Bella's vampire boyfriend, Edward Cullen, decides that he's a danger to her and moves away. Bella goes into a very deep depression. This part of the movie is pitch-perfect. I've read a lot of complaints that Bella is pathetic and a "bad role model" for going into this depression, but seriously, I've had friends react to break-ups like this. It's not unrealistic and quite frankly it's a very honest portrayal of something that a lot of teen movies ignore. And as someone who was clinically depressed for a few of my tween-years, I found it encouraging that a movie can be honest about depression in teens. Then Bella starts hanging out with werewolf boy, Jacob, and things look up, sort of. But Jacob wants to be more than friends and Bella is just using him as a crutch; when Jacob pulls away to join the werewolf brotherhood, Bella freaks out. Is it selfish of her? Sure. Is it realistic? Absolutely. So this isn't what I mean by the movie taking teenaged angst too seriously.

2. What I mean is the ultimate plot of New Moon, which is a slipshod version of Romeo and Juliet: Edward jumps to the conclusion that Bella is dead, and then goes off to Italy to kill himself in dramatic fashion. Bella has to go and stop him. This leads to a confrontation with the vampire aristocracy and basically, the teenaged doldrums turn into something much larger and more consequential than they really are. Thankfully they don't involve saving the world, but it's still far too extreme. Edward (who is 109) tells Bella that leaving her is the hardest thing he's done in a hundred years. Seriously? Geez. The only good part about this plot line is that you get to see Dakota Fanning as an evil preteen vampire, a la Kirsten Dunst in Interview with the Vampire. Hopefully they won't share a career trajectory, because Fanning makes a good baddie.

On a couple other basic movie-review notes, the acting is shit except for Dakota Fanning and Billy Burke and to some extent (when the material gives her something to actually do), Kristen Stewart. The non-romantic dialogue is passable, but the romantic dialogue is total tripe. The pacing is poor. The narrative arc is non-existent, as is the tension. The only things the movie succeeds at are song choice (but not musical score), and landscape. But we all knew these weren't going to win any Oscars.

C. New Moon: Social Implications

The biggest problem that I have with the Twilight series: Edward and his vampire family. Bella is believable as a human girl, and Jacob is believable as a werewolf boy - by which I mean, their actions and reactions ring true. But the Cullens are these opaque monoliths. They literally look corpse-white, all have extremely vacant, stony expressions, and when they say cheerful words to Bella it's just creepy as all fuck. They certainly don't act like hundreds-of-years-old, wise-but-jaded vampires (I'll give it to Anne Rice that she makes a convincing vampire of this type). Edward is totally unreadable, and the things he says are unbelievable. I hate the Cullens. They're unattractive and snobbish. Edward looks like a cross between Edward Scissorhands and The Crow, except in chest-revealing, expensive clothes. The werewolves, by contrast, are clannish but relaxed and homey. They're clearly flesh and blood, vivacious, adventurous. Bella's healthier with Jacob than she is with Edward. I could believe that all of this is done consciously, because vampires are supposed to be undead and icy and soulless. Except the movies make it obvious from the get-go that we (the audience of Bellas) are all supposed to swoon over Edward. We're supposed to want to become a vampire, like Bella does. And I'm like, why?

The worst part of the entire franchise, in my opinion, is what it contributes to race and class issues. Here's what I haven't said: the werewolves are all Indians. The Cullens, and 99% of the other vampires (there's one evil black vampire) are white. The werewolves are, as follows, also poor. They do things like drop out of school and fall in with "bad crowds." The only example of domestic violence here is attributed to the werewolf clan. The vampires, by contrast, are extremely fucking loaded, zipping around in expensive sports cars - Bella knows that one of them is at her house because she recognizes the fancy straight-from-a-car-commercial car - and living in a huge glass mansion, something out of the special Aspen edition of Home & Garden. They're also, you know, wise beyond belief and have refined, classical European tastes. They can do a bunch of fancy tricks like flying and Matrix acrobats and memorizing Shakespeare, while the werewolves are pretty much just very strong, as Bella remarks over and over. Like they're "on steroids." All this is made painfully obvious when Jacob and Alice, Edward's sister, confront each other at Bella's house. There's Jacob, in his (sort of) ratty clothes, and then there's Alice, in her very expensive-looking white coat and professionally-rendered hair and make-up. She tells Bella that she'll come back to talk, "once you put the dog out."

Yet we're all supposed to conclude, at movie's end, that the werewolves are well-meaning but crass (and perhaps violent?), while the vampires are cool and sexy and everything-you'd-ever-want-to-be-and-more. Incidentally, Bella's awesome dad fits right in withe the werewolves, personality-wise and socio-economically, meaning to join the vampires Bella also has to cut off her own family. This is where Twilight becomes shameful and nasty. The vampires are the plasticized, photo-shopped, megamillionaire celebrities - or, if you'd like, the cold carcass of capitalism - that we as the masses are all supposed to fellate, while the werewolves and humans are all the real, normal people (like friends and neighbors and family) that we're all supposed to trample in our hurry to dote upon the vampires.

And that's shitty and stupid and has nothing at all to do with being an angsty teenager.

I saw the following 3 movies in theaters over the past week.  Blame Christina, not me.  Obviously, I recommend none. 

THE STEPFATHER

Five-Word Summary:  Single mom marries family annihilator.
Take-Home Lesson: Remarriage is EVIL. 
Laughability: 5
Sex: Underage
Violence: 1

LAW-ABIDING CITIZEN

Five-Word Summary: Grieving dad destroys justice system.
Take-Home Lesson: The justice system is EVIL.  Real men KILL.
Laughability: 3
Sex: Rape
Violence: 4

SAW VI

Five-Word Summary: Dead psychologist's torture campaign continues.
Take-Home Lesson: Health insurance companies are EVIL.
Laughability: 4
Sex: None
Violence: 6

I managed to see three - yes, THREE - horror movies last Sunday.  It was a crazy day.  And now I shall write belated, sloppy reviews of them. 

1.  The Burrowers:  I rented this from Netflix on pgtremblay's recommendation.  And it was sitting on the microwave unwatched when my mom said, "I'm going to start putting dates on how long you can not watch these..." (it wasn't disinterest!  but sports have been intense lately, and that tends to put a damper on watching DVDs) so I put it in.  The Burrowers sets itself apart from a lot of horror in a few ways: a) an Old West setting (specifically, the Dakotas in... um... the 1800s), and b) quite an artistic little camera.  Moody looks through the grass, sensitive and subtle flashbacks.  All very nice.  And when the monsters first show up - it's "burrowers" killing and kidnapping settlers, not Indians - they are very creepy.  They've got an unusual hunting style and an interesting ecological history, and they've got people pretty much outsmarted.  The melancholy, brooding-in-the-wilderness tone persists until the final act, when the filmmakers remembered they were making an action-horror movie and went all SciFi Saturdays on me.  Suddenly this clever little gem is making two big mistakes: a) showing the monster full-on when the movie did not have Jurassic Park's budget, and b) making the monsters VERY easy to kill.  That said, this is an atypical horror movie - it is very unkind to its characters (especially the sympathetic ones).   I actually felt it was so nasty to these people that the ending felt abrupt and unsatisfying.  I know, I know.  I usually reward bleakness in horror movies.  Maybe the risk/reward ratio in this one was too high; or maybe the characters were well-developed and real enough that I felt bad for them being sloughed off by the narrative for no apparent reason.

2.  Sorority Row:  I went to see this with friends later that afternoon.  I had very low expectations for this one.  But you know, it surprised me.  I mean, the acting was pretty bad.  There was, of course, gratuitous sorority-related near-porn.  I found the initial set-up - sorority sisters trick another sister's ex into thinking his roofies killed the sister, while the prank's still on he kills her for real, they dump body down a mine shaft - damn ridiculous.  The murderer, who runs around silently in a hood, is pretty generic and stale.  But the sisters are actually pretty entertaining - a nice blend of bitchy and justified - and aren't nearly as annoying as you would assume they'd be.  In order to explain what made this movie so different, however, I must supply spoilers - sorry.  The killer isn't a victim.  The killer isn't out to revenge some wrong.  All the bad guys here are male.  We've got: a) the original guy who killed his girlfriend - the fact that he thought she was already dead makes his stabbing her through the chest even more psychotic, b) the snotty and artificial senator's son, who berates and cheats on and hits his girlfriend (who finally realizes it's not worth marrying into this family), and c) the valedictorian and main character's boyfriend, who's the real killer.  He's just trying to keep his girlfriend away from her trashy sisters, and is furious when she chooses "her girlfriends" over him.  I won't say this is a feminist tract, because you know, it's not - but I do appreciate the Hos Before Bros gesture (so to speak), and the fact that all the "psycho killers on the loose" here are the people with all the privilege. 

3.  Clive Barker's Book of Blood:  Apparently this is a movie-that-never-found-a-home that eventually got aired by SyFy, based off "The Book of Blood" in Volume 1 of Books of Blood, and some other "postscript" story in Volume 6.  I haven't read the second story, so suffice it to say I was totally confused by the fact that this movie - which should have been a 30 minute Tales From The Crypt episode - was 2 HOURS LONG.  They dragged the first story out to about 90 minutes, embellishing wildly and adding unnecessary subplots and taking away scenes they didn't want to try and film, and then added another 30 minutes that looked like pure overkill.  Apparently the extra 30 minutes is truly based off of "On Jerusalem Street (a postscript)."  I kind of can't believe Clive Barker wrote this unnecessary addendum to the first story, but I guess I can't fault the movie producers for that one.  The thing is, I don't think even "The Book of Blood" is THAT great of a story.  It's about how this one house is a big intersection of the dead, so it's filled with ghosts, and the ghosts are all about telling their stories - on whatever surface they have.  It all just feels kind of pointless and even contrived.  Clive Barker's opening for the whole volume is way better: "we are all books of blood... whenever we're opened, we're red."  That's all you need.  You don't need two hours.  You especially don't need two hours of weak characterization and painfully slow and laughable ghosts (a park fountain of blood, with blood ghosts a la The Invisible Man dancing ring around the rosy?  really?).