Lucid Dreams and Saturn Skies The Life and Writing of Andrew Kincaid

Category Archives: Movie Reviews

Twenty Years Later, and Jurassic Park STILL Holds Up!

April 23, 2013 12:25 pm / 2 Comments /

Jurassic_Park_posterMany of us saw Jurassic Park as kids. Myself, I saw it on VHS probably five or six times, and several more times on television. I was fascinated by dinosaurs (so, a pretty typical little boy in that way) and it was amazing to see them live and kicking on my TV screen. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to see it in the theaters when I was younger, and I don’t own a copy on DVD. Needless to say, it’s been years since I last watched it, probably ten or fifteen at least.

So, when I heard Jurassic Park was going back to the big screen in 3D, I got excited. Not about the 3D — I could take it or leave it, and I’ll personally be glad when the fad is over, mainly because theaters will no longer be able to tack on an extra $2 or so for a gimmick that makes little or no difference in the viewing experience. Yeah, Avatar looked pretty good in full 3D glory, but most  movies shot in 3D are pretty ‘meh’, if I may use the term.

…but I digress. Sort of. The fact is that the 3D treatment didn’t add much to Jurassic Park, in my opinion. But it also didn’t take anything away, which is what is really important. The movie looked as good today as it looked twenty years ago. It isn’t often you can say that about a film, especially with all the advances in visual technology over the last ten years or so. But Jurassic Park‘s unique mix of animatronics and CGI (yes, they had CGI in 1993) has stood the test of time. The dinosaurs, particularly the raptors, looked fluid and life-like. If anything, I found JP preferable to many modern movies, who rely too heavily on CGI effects in my humble opinion.

I almost feel like it’s silly to do a review of Jurassic Park, since it’s widely considered a classic. However, some folks were skeptical about it being in 3D, so I feel the urge to explain that it doesn’t really harm the movie at all. Except for a couple of moments where it is a little distracting, you barely notice. So, if you’re a fan of the movie, or have never seen it, go out and give it a watch on the big screen. You won’t regret it.

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Thirty Years Later, and Nobody Learned Not to Open the Necronomicon: A Review of Evil Dead (2013)

April 9, 2013 11:24 am / 2 Comments /
Evil Dead poster, from IMDB.com. You can see the hype =P

Evil Dead poster, from IMDB.com. You can see the hype =P

I will admit it — the red band trailer has had me excited for Evil Dead for months now. Now, normally I don’t get excited about much of anything, especially a modern horror flick and ESPECIALLY a remake. but my normal guardedness fell away for some reason with Evil Dead. I really like the original trilogy (I own all three), and frankly I haven’t seen a decent horror flick in the theater for a long time.

And that was what Evil Dead shaped up to be — a decent horror flick. It really doesn’t live up to the legacy of the original Evil Dead, but that’s how it is with remakes most of the time. It was a pretty solid movie, I thought. It was very well shot, and the sound effects were done very well. It had some downright creepy scenes, and I thought it did a good job ratcheting up the tension overall.

However, despite its technical proficiency, there was something missing. Despite having a bigger budget, better special effects, and the benefit of modern film technology, it wasn’t as creepy or fun as the original. Some of it had to do with the protagonist, and the fact that he was as dense as granite. Word to the wise: when people are carving their face off with broken glass, it probably isn’t because of a virus, especially if your hippie-looking (stupidly) read from a mysterious, flesh bound book only a couple hours ago. Some of it had to do with the contrived nature of the set up — for example, I’m certified to teach high school, but nowhere in the process did they teach me to read ancient Sumerian.
Not that I would read it to myself, out loud, when the book CLEARLY SAYS NOT TO!

See, that’s what bothered me the most, I think. The original is 32 years old and shot on a quarter million dollar budget, yet the writing is tighter and it is overall a much creepier movie. I mean, look at how they got around the pretty ridiculous scene I mentioned above — in the original, they find the Necronomicon in the basement beside a recorder containing the notes of an archeologist who is studying it. They play a section of the recorder where the archeologist reads an incantation from the book out loud, and thus accidentally summon the demons that torment them that night. Much more elegant, and it has a creep-factor bonus, since a fairly innocuous action brought about horrific consequences.

It isn’t really fair to compare a remake to the original. On the other hand, Evil Dead has been remade before — Evil Dead 2 was basically a remake, despite being billed as a sequel, and many regard it as better than the original. So perhaps it is a fair comparison. Don’t get the wrong impression though — I did like the Evil Dead remake. It was gory, creepy, and generally fun to watch in a theater full of squawking teenagers. But it doesn’t hold a candle to the original.

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The Good, the Bad, and the Awesomely Bad

January 22, 2013 10:11 am / 7 Comments /
Proof that a B-movie isn't necessarily a bad movie.

Proof that a B-movie isn’t necessarily a bad movie.

Last night (I’m writing this on Sunday–yay for working ahead!) I watched a movie that was so indescribably bad that there are no words.  It was so tremendously awful, I’m pretty sure I felt reality warp in the face of its complete craptitude.  It is bad on a metaphysical level.  The movie was Birdemic: Shock and Terror, and it was awesome.

Now the love of really, really bad movies is a peculiar thing to people not initiated into the ranks.  So let me try to explain what exactly “Awesomely Bad” movies are and why I love them so much.  Now a lot of this is subjective of course–what I think is good or bad and what you think is good or bad differ widely according to taste.  But there are some generalizations you can make.  First, you have Good movies.  They’re generally well constructed, tell a coherent story, and provide some kind of meaning.  Lincoln, which came out a few months ago, is generally considered a “good” movie.  Then there are Bad movies, which are, well, bad.  Poorly constructed, nonsensical story, and generally leave you feeling like you wasted an hour and a half you’ll never get back.  Battlefield: Earth was generally panned for being a bad movie, by way of example.  (Note:  B-movies aren’t necessarily bad.  The designation more refers to the budget and talent involved than the quality of the movie itself.  That being said, oftentimes B-movies fall into the Bad or Awesomely Bad category).

Then you have the Awesomely Bad movie.  These movies are usually objectively bad.  They’re usually poorly constructed, made on little to no budget, and feature acting talent your local community theater wouldn’t even  hire to mop its floors.  Generally, they’re horror movies.  Something about the horror genre lends itself to producing spectacularly bad movies (probably because horror and comedy are kissing cousins).  But Awesomely Bad movies have a little something else that push them into an almost transcendental status, that warps the “good/bad continuum” rather like how a large object (or in this case a giant steaming pile of crap) warps the space/time continuum.

What is that little something?  It is hard to classify.  It goes well beyond goofy dialog, horrible acting, and terrible story telling.  It is something more than having a really goofy looking monster (although that helps).  It seems to me that what makes the difference between Bad and Awesomely Bad is the attitude of the director and the cast.  Awesomely Bad movies are done completely in earnest.  The directors have a story they want to tell, and a message they want to send.  They BELIEVE in what they are doing.  The problem is that they are just simply awful at it, and what they thought was amazing turns out to be just that, in an entirely different way than they intended.

Hopefully that all  makes some sort of sense.  It’s something that has to be experienced to be believed.  So go to Netflix (finding awful movies is so much easier now thanks to Netflix!) and load Troll 2 or Birdemic: Shock and Terror on your Instant Queue.  Invite friends over, and make an evening of it.  You can all sit in awe together of how tremendously bad, yet awesome a movie can be.

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Comic Book Science is Right for Once! (Sort of)–A Quasi Review of The Amazing Spider-Man

July 9, 2012 4:07 pm / 1 Comment /

The Amazing Spider-Man theatrical posterAfter watching Prometheus, I couldn’t resist rambling about some of the scientific failings of the movie.  Since I enjoyed putting the “biology” part of my Bachelors of Science to use, I decided to do the same for The Amazing Spider-Man.

But before the science, it’s time for a mini-review.  The Amazing Spider-Man is a reboot of the Spider-Man trilogy, which ended on a weak note with Spider-Man 3.  Unlike the reboot of the Batman or James Bond series, Spider-Man wasn’t exactly gritty.  Certainly it was darker thematically than its predecessors, but not quite so dark as to qualify for the term “gritty”.  On a similar note, The Amazing Spider-Man didn’t bring anything new to the table in terms of plot either.  Minus the mention of Peter’s parents, the focus on cross-species genetics as the cause of Spidey’s, and the Lizard’s mutations (and that the Lizard is the antagonist rather than the Green Goblin), it doesn’t differ a ton from Tobey McGuire’s Spider-Man.  The differences are more superficial, rather than what you’d expect from an ground up reboot.  For a more thorough (and spoiler-free!) review, check out my friend Amanda Rudd’s post “They Finally Got It Right: A Review of the Amazing Spider-Man”.

That being said, I found this an entertaining movie and I am looking forward to future sequels.  What I especially thought was interesting was how cross-species genetics was cited as the cause for Spidey’s powers.  It certainly makes more sense that a bite from a genetically modified spider would result in profound mutations in its victim, rather than the bite of a radioactive spider from the original comics.  That doesn’t answer the question of exactly how those unique properties were transferred to Parker, but hey it’s a movie, right?

You might be surprised to learn that cross-species genetics is not merely the stuff of comic books, but it’s a very real and very vital part of modern biology and modern pharmaceuticals.  While we can’t make giant lizard men or man-spiders, we can make glow in the dark kittens.

On a more practical note, cross species genetics have been saving lives for decades now.  Known as recombinant DNA technology, these are a set of techniques that allow scientists to manipulate DNA, the code containing the recipe for all life.  DNA is a funny thing–it can make all of the weird and wonderful shapes we see in nature, but on a basic level it’s all the same thing.  My DNA is the same chemically speaking as yours, and both of ours are the same as a spiders.  What differs is the DNA sequence–it is the sequence that determines what goes where at what time, be it in a spider, lizard, or a human.

Heeere kitty, kitty, kitty! From Gawker.com

Since DNA is universal across all (Earth) life, and it’s only the sequence that matters in terms of what is expressed, it stands to reason you could mix DNA sequences from one species into the DNA of another and potentially get the foreign DNA expressed.  Really, that’s what they were talking about in a basic sense in The Amazing Spider-Man.  People have been doing just that sort of thing for decades now, although with less city destroying and more life saving results.

That’s twice now that I’ve said that s0-called cross-species genetics can save lives.  You might be wondering what I mean by that, since in the movie that was the whole rationale behind their research as well.  We haven’t progressed to the point where we can use these technologies to jab you with a needle and force your arm to grow back, but we can use recombinant DNA technology to produce a variety of life saving chemicals, most famously insulin.

It used to be that insulin was taken from animals like cows and pigs, but this wasn’t a very efficient means of harvesting the stuff in sufficient quantities.  In the 1970′s, using recombinant DNA technology, researchers were able to splice the gene for human insulin production into E. Coli bacteria (yes, that E. Coli…it’s a useful lab organism, what can I say?).  These new strains of bacteria happily did what bacteria do, all the while pumping out live-saving insulin for the diabetics of the world.  Similar techniques are used to make everything from Hepatitis B vaccines to blood clotting factors.

While recombinant DNA technology has saved thousands and thousands of lives over the years, there is a dark side.  Similar techniques can be used to produce genetically modified organisms (GMOs) which include those adorable kittens up there, but they’re more famous for their role in agriculture.  There is a lot of worry about GMO crops out there these days, that somehow they could be harmful to consumers.  I’m not certain about that, but their income on the environment when they begin to spread on their own is certainly a cause for concern.  The jury is still out.

What we can be certain of is that movie and comic book science have both gotten better over the years.  I don’t expect my movies to be scientifically accurate in any way shape or form, but it is always nice when it happens.  In this case, the writers took a very real and very beneficial technology and used it to drive the plot behind an entertaining piece of cinema.  You can’t go wrong with that :)

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The Curse of Bigfoot

June 18, 2012 7:49 pm / 6 Comments /
Curse of Bigfoot is a 1978 movie about a group of high school students who unleash an inhuman monster from a crypt.

…seriously. You need to see this movie. I mean…come on! Look at the poster!

I sit here literally at a loss for words.  Last night I watched a movie so tremendously, horrifically, hilariously bad that they don’t make an -ly word strong enough to describe the mind-melting horrible awesomeness of it.  The moving I’m talking about is called Curse of Bigfoot, and it is a tour de force of B-movie horror at its finest.

A bit of background about how I came across this little gem.  My dad lent me a horror collection called Pure Terror, which contains fifty “classic” horror movies.  Such masterpieces as The Manster (panned as one of the worst movies ever made–I’ve yet to see it) and Track of the Moonbeast (which was victimized in a great episode of MST3K) are represented in the collection’s line up.   It sat on my TV stand for about three days before I finally decided to give it a look.  I saw Curse of Bigfoot on the back cover and my crappy movie sense started tingling.  Somehow, I knew that movie would be a rare treat and boy howdy I was not disappointed.

Curse of Bigfoot is…well, it’s sort of hard to say what it’s about because the thing is a mishmash. That’s because really it is an amalgamation of two movies.  Curse began life as Teenagers Battle the Thing in 1958.  Near as I can tell, Teenagers Battle the Thing never saw the light of day until 1978 (or maybe 1972…or 1974; I’ve seen three different release years) when the director  slapped on an extra thirty odd minutes of footage and called it Curse of Bigfoot.

An image of the monster from Curse of Bigfoot

Witness the glorious stupidity of…Bigfoot? Whatever the hell that thing is supposed to be, at any rate.

As you might guess, this Frankenstein of a movie involves teenagers.  But more on that in a second.  This is literally the only monster movie I’ve seen that reveals the titular beastie in the first ten minutes. And holy God is it hilarious!  It’s a guy in a gorilla suit with a paper mache mask made to vaguely resemble The Wolfman.  You can even see the eye holes.  I’m not kidding you one bit.  I have pictures!

The thirty odd minutes of footage added twenty years after the original (boy that’s weird to say) are a bunch of inarticulate nonsense that have little to do with the actual movie.  There’s a scene where a monster that looks suspiciously like the titular Bigfoot stalks a woman.  Mind you, the scene was done in broad daylight but it’s clear from the dialog that it was supposed to take place at night.  This scene though is a clip from a movie being shown in a high school, a class devoted entirely to mythological monsters apparently.  There’s talk about their guest speaker, who is coming to speak to them about Bigfoot, before another long clip that looks like an instructional film about the lumber industry cut with clips of a guy in a bad Bigfoot costume stalking a couple of loggers.  Finally, the speaker appears and tells the story of his encounter with Bigfoot.  In one of the greatest lines of the movie, the guest speaker describes how one of the young ladies with him on this expedition is now nothing more than a catatonic vegetable.

That’s right.  This movie doesn’t get to the ACTUAL movie until half an hour in, but boy is the wait worth it.  We’re treated to the worst acting and special effects this side of Troll 2.  The guest speaker is a former science teacher who, when he and his group encountered Bigfoot, was a part of an archeological dig (for some reason) that consisted of himself, an archeologist, and a gaggle of teenagers.

Another shot of Bigfoot from Curse of Bigfoot

…this is just endlessly hilarious.

The group eventually (I’m fast-forwarding a bit because there is a LOT of scene padding) discovers a mysterious crypt that contains a mummy encased in clay.  Being the wonderful archeologists they were, the group decides to gank the mummy from its resting place and stuff it into a shed, where it is revealed that the clay enclosed a horrify(ingly bad looking) monster!

The monster goes on what has to be the lamest rampage in B-movie history–I think it killed maybe one person and then at the thrilling climax of the film it just sort of stands there and lets the teenagers douse it with gasoline.

…sorry if I spoiled it for you.  As if you can spoil a movie as rotten as this.  Anyway, Curse of Bigfoot has to be seen to be believed.  It hits you like a freight train of awesome-badness.  If you’re like me and you like really, really lame movies you’ll want to do yourself a favor and give this one a look.  You’ll be glad you did.

How about you? Have you ever seen a movie so bad it was nearly a religious experience?  What’s the best/worst movie you’ve ever seen?


Posted in: Monsters & Mythology, Movie Reviews, Our Weird World, Reviews / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A Prometheus Inspired Ramble on the Origins of Life (Oh, and There’s a Movie Review in There Too)

June 14, 2012 4:27 pm / 8 Comments /
Prometheus, a prequel to Alien directed by Ridley Scott

“They went looking for our beginning. What they found could be our end”

Normally I don’t do reviews of new movies.  And, strictly speaking, this isn’t going to be a review.  The first part will be, but the second part will be me rambling about science stuff brought to mind by said movie.  Prometheus was billed as a psuedo-sequel to Alien.  Being a fan of Alien, I knew that when Prometheus came into theaters I would go to see it.  I wasn’t particularly optimistic as to how good it would be, and so I was pleasantly surprised when the movie sucked me in and didn’t let me go until the end of its run time.  Prometheus is a hauntingly beautiful and deeply engrossing film, showing off stark awe-inspiring visuals of a dead world.  The characters are fully realized and come to life on screen…

I could go on, but I won’t belabor the point.  My friend Amanda Rudd did an in depth review of the movie over on her blog, and she did a better job of it than I could.  No, instead I want to focus on the one quibble I had with the film.  Prometheus raises a lot of profound questions about life, religion, and the origins of humanity.  When the movie begins, we see a freakishly muscled humanoid alone on a barren, rocky world.  He watches a ship take off in the distance before taking a sip of some nasty tar-looking substance that starts to break him apart on a molecular level.  The nameless alien tumbles into the river where even his DNA breaks into pieces.  It’s never said with any certainty, but presumably this is the moment Earth is seeded with life.

You read that right.  Prometheus rewrites human history by introducing the concept that life was seeded by a species of alien beings called The Engineers.  The action of the movie centers around the crew of the ship Prometheus, who have been dispatched to an alien moon whose coordinates were found in ancient cave paintings and carvings the world over in order to ascertain whether The Engineers in fact exist and to see if any still live.  Those among other things–you’ll have to see the movie to find out the rest.

There is a scene near the beginning when the crew of Prometheus are brought out of hibernation and briefed on their mission.  And here comes the point when I got annoyed.  You see, there was a biologist among the crew.  It’s a smart thing to bring a biologist along to an alien world where you suspect there to be life since, after all, life is their forte.  However, this biologist was not a particularly good one.  When Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, played by the lovely Noomi Rapace, mentions the idea that The Engineers seeded the Earth with life, the biologist exclaims that such an idea would “overturn 300 years of Darwinism”.

In retrospect, that statement surprises me because of the intelligent manner in which Prometheus handles the many questions it raises (but never answers).  The biologist’s exclamation shows a very fundamental misunderstanding of both evolutionary theory and how scientific theories in general work, things any decent biologist should understand (but maybe not a script writer, although they should have done better research).

Charles Darwin, author of “On the Origin of Species”. His theory of evolution by natural selection revolutionized the science of biology and changed how people saw themselves in relation to the natural world.

The theory of evolution explains the diversity of life on Earth.  It’s a fairly complex theory, but on a basic level it’s pretty simple.  One of my favorite ways to define it is as follows: “the change in the frequency of alleles [expressed genes] over time”.  Basically, in a given population certain members of the species carry an array of genes that enhance their chances of survival.  Those more likely to survive can pass their favorable genes on to the next generation, and so on and so forth.  That’s a gross oversimplification, but for our purposes it will suffice because it points out the point I want to make.  Namely, evolutionary theory doesn’t comment at all on the origins of life!  It explains how the diversity we see in the biological world came to be, but it doesn’t explain how it started.

On the surface that may seem odd, but a quick look at the scientific use of the word theory should clear any confusion.  I did an entire post on this topic before, so I’ll be brief.  A scientific theory, in a basic sense, explains how something in nature works.  This is different from a fact, which is something that is consistently observed and held to be true.  Evolution has been observed in nature, established from fossil, morphological, and genetic evidence among other things.  It is a fact.  The theory of evolution explains how evolution works.  That is the nature of a scientific theory.

Now, one facet of a theory is that it has a range of validity.  As I said above, the theory of evolution explains the diversity of life, not its origins.  Evolutionary theory’s range of validity begins only after life begins, when there is something there for natural selection and other selective pressures to act upon.  In order to explain the origins of life, another theory is needed.  Currently, the big contender for the theory to explain the origins of life on Earth is called abiogenesis, which is a big fancy word that means that life came from non-life.  For the moment though, nobody is quite sure specifically how this process occurred, but the evidence is gaining and I imagine in our lifetime we will see DNA created from raw molecular materials.

But Prometheus doesn’t touch on abiogenesis.  Instead, it touches on an alternate hypothetical scenario by which life came to be on Earth called panspermia, specifically directed panspermia.  Panspermia means essentially that life came to Earth from somewhere else, probably by hitching  a ride on a comet or meteorite.  Directed panspermia is the idea that an alien species seeded Earth with the rudiments of life and then let evolution take its course, which is the premise behind Prometheus.  However, such an idea does not overturn Darwinism (I don’t like that word but we’ll go with it), although it is a fascinating thing to think about.  Who knows?  Maybe Prometheus is prescient and we will come to discover that all of us are really the descendents of beings from the sky.

Did you get a chance to see Prometheus?  What did yo think of it if you did?  How would it impact you if it turned out that life on our planet was seeded by an alien species? 


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A Horror Review Two-fer–The Human Centipede I and II

June 11, 2012 8:57 am / 8 Comments /
The Human Centipede, directed by Tom Six

“Their flesh is his fantasy”

Those who have read my blog for awhile now know that I have a distaste for the torture porn sub-genre–in my experience, most of them are little more than plot-less excuses to sling a bunch of gore and body parts at a camera array.  Like the exploitation films of the seventies onward, they’re all style and no substance but with one difference; namely, they trade style for something akin to blunt force trauma.  While exploitation films could be goofy fun, the cinematic equivalent of a Twinkie, torture porn often lacks the wink and nod toward the audience and instead focuses on showing the inner workings of the human anatomy as explicitly as possible.

…in light of that last sentence I should once again define torture porn.  It’s not actual pornography, but rather it is called torture porn because it features explicit displays of violence and torture.  Think movies like Saw (which is actually quite a good film…the later ones not so much) and Hostel (never seen it).  I’ve touched on the topic before in my review of the abominable film Philosophy of a Knife.

With all of that in mind, you’ll understand why I put off seeing The Human Centipede for as long as I did.  This is one of those movies that people talk about in whispers, a movie that teenagers at sleep overs challenge each other to sit through without gagging.  That sort of thing.  Being that I tend to at least half pay attention to what goes on in the horror genre, I knew the entire premise of the movie: a German surgeon grafts three hapless tourists together end to end forming the titular Human Centipede.  Certainly a disgusting thing, considering the mechanics of their shared digestion, but I didn’t see how it was a concept that could carry an entire movie.  Plus, I’d heard that it was an abominably bad film from reviewers and a few people I knew who had seen it.

Still, the damned thing kept popping up on Netflix until my curiosity got the better of me and I finally watched it.  I knew The Human Centipede would be bad, but I couldn’t have expected it to be anywhere near as bad as it was.  There was no plot to speak of, just a bunch of stuff happening to pad out the length of the movie to an agonizing hour and a half.  When the Human Centipede was finally revealed, it really didn’t live up to the build up.  Maybe for people first seeing the movie, but not two or three years after it was made.  Plus, it didn’t help that the director couldn’t be bothered to develop his characters.  Had he done so, their plight would have been more disturbing.  Don’t get me wrong–the entire concept is disturbing.  But the movie lacks any kind of impact other than the gag factor because there is not any character development.  Rather than actual people, the victims of the mad doctor’s surgery are little more than the cinematic equivalent of cardboard cut outs.

That lack of character development led to one of the two things I found surprising about The Human Centipede.  The first was that the movie was boring.  Oh my good Lord was it boring!  Forty-five minutes in I felt like I’d been sitting there for two hours.  Both the lack of plot and the lack of any sort of characterization sucked any tension out of what could have been quite an intense movie.  Only one scene made me feel tense, and that was the crawling chase scene where the lead guy of the Human Centipede, a random Japanese guy, disabled the mad doctor and led an escape attempt.

“100% medically INaccurate”

The other bit that surprised me was the amount of restraint the director showed when it came to gore.  There was surprisingly little of it, despite the premise of the film.  That might have been a disappointment for the gore-hounds out there, but I was impressed.  But that feeling quickly dissipated when I decided to subject myself to The Human Centipede 2, where Tom Six more than made up for the lack.

You might ask me why I watched the second movie if I didn’t like the first.  I’m not sure I have an answer for that, other than that I’m a glutton for punishment.  If the first Human Centipede was terrible, the second was absolutely abysmal.  HC2 featured a bug-eyed recluse obsessed with the original The Human Centipede.  That’s right–HC2 takes place in the “real” world, where apparently someone liked The Human Centipede enough to try and reenact it.

…it only gets worse from there.  You might be asking how that’s possible, but believe me it is.  I’m not even sure what to say about HC2, other than that it is completely disgusting, stupid, and reprehensible.  The amount of gore in the movie isn’t quite cartoonish, but it is nearly so.  While HC1 tried to build tension and strike you with the horror of the scenario its characters found itself in, HC2 dropped all pretenses and became pure torture porn.  But it’s all filmed in black and white, so it’s artsy (that’s how that works, right?).  I think Tom Six attempted to top himself with HC2, and he certainly did but not how he intended.  He proved that you could make a movie even more boring, stupid, and offensive than The Human Centipede.  No mean feat, that.

Do you ever find yourself watching a movie you know is going to be awful in spite of yourself?  Have you seen either of these movies, and if so what did you think?


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The Allure of B-Movies

June 6, 2012 10:08 am / 11 Comments /
Poster art from the 1954 B-movie classic, THEM!

I also like the posters from the old days. They’re fun!

Ah…B-movies.  I enjoy cheesy old sci-fi/horror movies from the fifties and sixties, especially the black and white ones.  Those are my favorite types of B-movies, and I think the most iconic of the bunch although the genre is alive and well in the 21st century.  If you want proof, just flip to SyFy on Saturday nights at nine and you’ll see what I mean.

Even so, the B-movies from fifty or sixty years ago are in a league of their own.  They have an innocent charm that modern B-movies often lack.  There was no CGI back in those days, and often these movies were made on a shoestring budget, but the cheesy special effects were part of the fun.  Often B-movies followed a set formula.  Typically they involved an incident of science gone wrong–most often the culprit was radiation of some sort, but it could also be the work of a mad scientist–that resulted in some freakish monster (usually a guy in a rubber suit).  The protagonists turn to conservative forces such as the military and police, or toward science to find the solution to the problem.  I use the word “science” loosely here, because by today’s standards the science they played with was laughable.  Another subset of the genre involved an alien invasion, which would once again be thwarted by conservative forces or by science.

Writers and directors back in the day took the formula I just described above and had all sorts of fun with it.  THEM! is a perfect example of the genre; in fact, it’s often cited as the textbook example of the B-movie genre.  The movie is about ants that become enormous as a result of radioactive fallout from nuclear testing out in Nevada.  These giant ants spread all over the world and establish colonies, and (naturally) it’s up to the U.S. Army and some scientists to clear the matter up.  It sounds silly, but seriously give THEM! a watch sometime when you can–it’s actually a pretty good movie.

Night of the Living Dead is also a B-movie modeled on a formula similar to the one I outlined above, but it’s noticeably darker and really helped to give birth to the modern horror movie (for better or worse).  NOTLD featured ghouls–the word zombie was never used in the movie itself–who were raised from the dead ostensibly by strange radiation from a Venus probe.  These ghouls were shown on film eating people.  And it’s hard to spoil a fifty year old movie, but suffice it to say the ending was NOT in line with the typical B-movie up to that point.  George Romero turned the B-movie formula on its head while simultaneously remaining faithful to the tradition–no small feat, that.  Night of the Living Dead is another example of a B-movie that, when you get beyond the cheap special effects and bad acting, was in the end a pretty good movie (one of my all time favorites, actually).

And that right there is why I like B-movies.  When you get beyond the goofy premises and hokey special effects and look deeply at the movie, they often tell pretty good stories.  They couldn’t rely on special effects like today’s movies–don’t get me wrong though, modern B-movies are great fun but they often rely too heavily on gore and SFX for my taste–so instead they had to attempt to tell a decent story.  That, and the actors actually had to act, while no doubt biting back laughter at the goofy looking dude in the rubber suit.  Granted, many B-movies were lousy in the story and acting departments both, but they at least made up for it with unintentional hilarity (Plan 9 From Outer Space comes to mind).

Zombies from George Romero's B-movie classic, Night of the Living Dead

Zombies. This picture has gotten a lot of mileage on this blog, I’ve noticed =P.

Those aren’t the only reasons I like B-movies.  Sometimes I get tired of the cynicism of our age, an attitude that leaks into our cinematic culture, as it must.  In terms of horror, that translates into nihilistic plots, gore, and copious amounts of sex.  There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but sometimes I get sick of it.  I want to interrupt myself at this point to say that I was brought up in a socially conservative household and live in a conservative area and while I do not subscribe to all of those beliefs now, their influence is still there.  So for me, it is a breath of fresh air to watch an old time movie where the most gore you might see is a bit of chocolate sauce smeared on someone’s shirt, that ends on a note of optimism rather than cynicism (NOTLD is an exception to all of this, of course).

The saying goes that “they don’t make’em like they used to”.  True to some extent.  While horror and movies in general have become objectively better in many ways than their predecessors from the old days, nothing can replace the fun and charm of the old time B-movies.

What are your cinematic guilty pleasures?  Do you like the B monster movies from the fifties and sixties, or do they bore you to tears?


Posted in: Life & Writing, Monsters & Mythology, Movie Reviews, Our Weird World, Reviews / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Car (1977)

May 28, 2012 2:59 pm / 2 Comments /
The Car was a 1977 horror/thriller starring James Brolin about a killer, driverless car terrorizing a small town in the Southwest

“Is it a phantom, demon, or the devil himself?”

Historically, I only review movies that I enjoy, for the obvious reason that if the movie is truly bad (and not good bad or fun bad), I don’t finish it.  The last truly awful movie I reviewed was Philosophy of a Knife, mostly because it was downright offensive and I couldn’t contain my aggravation.

The Car is not a truly awful movie, and it is not offensive in any way shape or form.  It is the story of a demonic (maybe) car that haunts a small town in the American Southwest, killing anyone who comes close to it by running them over or, in a couple of instances, running them off a bridge.  It is up to the local sheriff, played by James Brolin, to try and stop the titular car’s rampage.

Now, this is a goofy premise for certain, and it’s one that probably sounds familiar.  Stephen King’s Christine is basically the same story, although Christine is possessed by a demon while the reason for the vehicular manslaughter in The Car is never revealed.  As far as I know it isn’t, anyway.  I didn’t stick around to see; the movie was only about halfway finished and it felt like I’d been sitting there for hours on end, a sure sign that I was watching a lousy movie.

That gets to the heart of the matter.  When I sat down to watch The Car, I expected goofy fun akin to Christine.  What I found instead was boredom.  The movie was just plain boring!  It dragged and dragged, to the point where I thought the ending was coming at about the midpoint of the movie.  When I checked the time, I thought there was no way they could pad out the next forty odd minutes and make them interesting in the least.  It was about that time that I clicked “Back to Browsing” and watched another episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent instead.

But then B-movies are a mixed bag.  Some are so bad they’re good, some are at least goofy enough to be entertaining, and others stink like roadkill in the hot summer sun.  I wouldn’t say The Car stunk to high heaven, but it wasn’t good by any means.  I’d give this one a skip if I were you.


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Red State (2011)

May 14, 2012 12:09 pm / 1 Comment /
Red State was a horror movie directed by Kevin Smith in 2011, that features a group of religous fanatics similar to Westboro Baptist who despise homosexuals.

“Love Thy Neighbor”

Netflix has broadened my horizons in terms of horror movies.  It has put hundreds, if not thousands, of them at my fingertips for only about $8 a month.  As a result, I’ve watched many movies I wouldn’t normally watch (and my trips to the local video store have trickled to a stop, something I feel kind of bad about since I know the people who own it).  Red State is one such movie; my friends and I watched it on a lark a few months ago, and last night I decided to give it a re-watch.

Red State is sort of a hybrid movie; not quite horror, but not fully a thriller, with hints of an action movie sprinkled throughout.  The story follows three horny teenagers looking to get their rocks off in small town America.  The three go out one night in pursuit of a fling with a woman one of them met on a casual sex site online.  What should have been a stupid teenage adventure turns horrific when the woman, who turns out to be a middle aged member of an extreme fundamentalist church called Five Points Trinity Church, drugs the boys.  The three are taken to the church’s compound, where the bulk of the movie unfolds.

The social commentary aspect of Red State is not subtle in the least.  The head of Five Points Trinity Church is Abin Cooper, an angry and charismatic fire and brimstone preacher who rails against the evils of modern America, especially homosexuality.  His flock seemed to mostly consist of his family, including several young grandchildren.  His flock protest military funerals, and in the beginning of the film they’re seen protesting the funeral of a homosexual teen who was recently murdered.

All of this may sound familiar if you’ve kept track of the news in the last ten years or so; Five Points Trinity is a pretty unsubtle nod to the real life crazies in Westboro Baptist, headed by Fred Phelps.  The Five Pointers go one step further, though; while Phelps and his ilk call for God to smite America for its sins, Abin Cooper’s group takes divine justice into their own hands.  The recently murdered teen?  You guessed it; Cooper’s group was responsible.  Another murder of a homosexual man is graphically depicted soon after the teenagers are captured and let me tell ya, it’s disturbing (although, during the commission of the crime there is a fairly humorous moment when one church member cautions another not to get any of the man’s saliva on him else he catch “the gay”.  I can’t help but feel that some people genuinely believe that).

After the murder, Red State takes a turn toward action movie territory, when the ATF performs a (botched) raid on The Five Pointer’s compound, after one member shot a sheriff’s deputy.  This is were the movie becomes weird(er), as John Goodman of all people shows up as an ATF agent heading up the raid.  While the church is despicable, the government doesn’t come off much better as the situation quickly devolves into something similar to Waco.  There is a great twist toward the end of the movie; I won’t give it away, but I would say it’s certainly ironic and I remember laughing later when everything came out.

Red State was, at least in my opinion, a good movie.  It certainly had its flaws; I almost would have rather seen the movie stick with the teens attempting to escape the church, more like a The Texas Chainsaw Massacre type scenario, rather than turn to the action flick that it became.  Be that as it may, the movie ends better than the original planned ending, where the honest to God, Biblical Armageddon began.  I think the movie would have been better served had it been a straight horror flick, as I said in TCM style.  But that wasn’t the director’s vision, and you have to respect what Kevin Smith managed to accomplish, despite the movie’s obvious problems.


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