The music video for Kim Carnes’s Voyeur is another music video that was initially banned from MTV and other music shows because it was considered to be too suggestive. The video features Kim Carnes watching and being watched in a red light district.
This video was directed by Russell Mulcahy, who perhaps did more than anyone to perfect the early music video aesthetic.
Enjoy!
Having left the X-Men after the death of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), Logan (Hugh Jackman) is now living as a hermit in the Canadian wilderness. He is haunted by dreams of his past and visions of Jean. (In the X-Men comic books, Scott Summers was the one who went off to live as a hermit and was haunted by memories of Jean, but since Scott was killed off in X-Men: The Last Stand, Logan was the one who got this story and the visions of lingerie-clad Jean, despite never having been in a truly romantic relationship with her.) Logan is drawn out of hiding by Yukio (Rila Fukushima), a mutant who can predict when people are going to die. Yukio works for Ichiro Yashida (Haruhiko Yamanouchi), a Japanese industrialist who first met Logan during World War II. Logan saved Yashida’s life when Nagasaki was bombed.
Logan and Yukio return to Japan, where Logan discovers that Yashida is on the verge of death. Yashida and Dr. Green (Svetlana Khodchenkova) have apparently developed a way to transfer Logan’s self-healing powers to Yashida, but Logan refuses to cooperate, explaining that immortality is a curse. When Yashida dies, Logan finds himself at war with the Yakuza and also without his power of self-regeneration.
The Wolverine isn’t bad. Even though Logan is no longer as interesting a character as he was when he made his first film appearance in X-Men, the film features some of the best action sequences to be found in the entire X-Men franchise. The extended fight sequence that takes place on top of a bullet train is especially exciting, and it holds up even when you watch it a second time. Unlike the previous X-Men film, The Wolverine makes good use of its characters. The Silver Samurai may be a lesser villain in the comic books, but in this movie, he was one of the few opponents who seem able to match Logan’s combat skills. For the most part, the movie respects the lore of the comic books without getting bogged down in mythology.
Wolverine finally makes peace with himself at the end of this movie. Of course, as soon as he does, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart show up with a new mission for him. A hero’s work is never done.
Ryan and Emily Fleege (played by Chris J. Murray and Brit Shaw) have just moved into a new home with their six-year-old daughter, Leila (Ivy George). They are being visited by both Ryan’s brother, Mike (Dan Gill), and Emily’s best friend, Skyler (Olivia Dudley). While cleaning out the garage, Mike and Ryan come across an old video camera and several VHS tapes featuring young Katie and Kristi from the previous Paranormal Activity films. It turns out that their house has been built over the remains of Katie and Kristi’s old house and that the old video camera can pick up and record traces of ghosts and evil spirits.
That last bit is exactly why this installment of Paranormal Activity doesn’t work. The previous films were scary because the characters could hear and sometimes feel the spirits but they couldn’t actually see them. That always left open the possibility that they were just imagining things. In this one, everyone can actually see the evidence of the house being haunted but they still don’t leave! This is the first Paranormal Activity to make heavy use of CGI, which goes against the whole idea of the films being found footage.
The other problem is that, six films in, the Paranormal Activity series finally fell victim to its own increasingly complex mythology. The first two films worked because they kept things simple. Things started to get more complicated during the third film. By the time Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension was released, the story had grown to include a coven of witches, a family curse, a demon named Toby, and now a camera that can film otherwise invisible spirits. The more elements that are added, the harder it is to ignore the holes in the plot and illogical actions of the characters.
I would have ended things with the second film, but I also would have lost out on all the money made by the third, fourth, and fifth films. Even this installment, which was the weakest box office performer of all of the films, still made a profit. That shows how much I know.
Frontier is from Dead Can Dance’s self-titled debut album. This is the sound that largely defined goth in the 80s.
Enjoy!
Decades before he joins the X-Men, James “Logan” Howlett (Hugh Jackman) is just another mutant with retractable claws and a super-healing ability that essentially makes him immortal. With his half-brother Victor Creed (Liev Schreiber), Logan fights in wars throughout the centuries. When both Logan and Creed (who share Logan’s healing abilities) survive being executed by a firing squad, they are recruited by William Stryker (Danny Huston) to serve as members of Team X. Eventually, Logan tires of being an assassin and goes off on his own. However, both Stryker and Creed have plans for him and all the other mutants that they’ve captured or killed over the years. Several familiar characters appear—Scott Summers (Tim Pocock), Gambit (Taylor Kitsch), and the Blob (Kevin Durand) amongst others—but none of them have much of the personality that made them popular to comic book readers. (Just imagine including Gambit in an X-Men film but not Rogue.) Those who made it to the end of the film were given a Patrick Stewart cameo, albeit one that used CGI to de-age Stewart and make him look like an automaton.
With the majority of the X-Men either dead or cured at the end of X-Men: The Last Stand, it only made sense to spin Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine off into his own series of films. Unfortunately, 20th Century Fox didn’t understand that the thing that made Wolverine so interesting as a character was that his past was shrouded in mystery. Their first Wolverine film revealed his origin and it turned out to be not that interesting. X2 had been filled with so many hints about Wolverine’s past that the origin story didn’t feel as if it was telling us anything that we hadn’t already figured out. Even the many fight scenes between Sabretooth and Wolverine felt dull because it was established that both of them were essentially immortal and impervious to pain.
Today, this movie is mostly remembered for featuring the first appearance of Wade Wilson, the mercenary who will eventually become Deadpool. There’s very little of Deadpool to be found in this film’s version of Wilson. He tells a few jokes before getting his lips sewn shut. Imagine introducing a character who is affectionately known as “the merc with a mouth” and then rendering him silent for the majority of the movie. In Deadpool 2, there’s a scene where Deadpool goes back in time and kills this earlier version of Wade Wilson (or Weapon XI as he’s called here). The audience I saw the film with cheered.
After a burglary, Kristi (Sprague Grayden) and her husband Daniel Rey (Brian Boland) install security cameras throughout their house. The cameras capture footage of Daniel firing the maid (Vivis Colombetti) for burning sage to ward off “evil spirits” and a visit from Kristi’s sister, Katie (Katie Featherston). They also capture doors opening and closing by themselves, a dog barking at nothing, and a possessed Kristi ominously staring at her newborn son, Hunter.
Paranormal Activity 2 begins a few weeks before the start of the first Paranormal Activity. By the end, the two movies have caught up with each other and the audience learns what Katie did after she killed Micah. The film also reveals what specifically led to the spirit going after Katie in the first place. (Daniel, you idiot.)
Considering that the sequel repeats the found-footage format and recreates many of the same scares from the first film, it’s surprising just how well it works. The stakes are a little bigger here, in that it’s established that the evil spirit is after baby Hunter. In the first film, nobody cared about Micah, but in this film we actually do care about Kristi, the baby, and Kristi’s stepdaughter, Ali (Molly Ephraim). We don’t care about Daniel because he’s a jerk. Kristi and Katie appear to have really bad judgment when it comes to picking a mate.
Lisa has already done an excellent job reviewing the third, fourth, and fifth films in this series. So I’ll be jumping forward to the sixth film tomorrow.
The world is vampire
For a period of time in the 90s, you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing that. It was one of the original memes, thanks to both the song and the video that was made to promote it. The video, which was inspired by photographs of a Brazilian gold mine, was filmed in a quarry near Simi Valley. While the extras dressed like miners and were meant to represent the Biblical lepers who asked Jesus to heal them, the band goes for a glam rock look. It pays to be in the band.
This video was directed by Samuel Bayer, who has done music videos for everyone who is anyone.
Enjoy!
Just as the world seems to be finally on the verge of accepting mutants, industrialist Warren Worthington II (Michael Murphy) announces that he has developed a shot that will suppress the X-gene, therefore “curing” mutants of their mutation. Magneto (Ian McKellen), Mystique (Rebecca Romijn), and a host of other mutants break out of prison to try to stop Worthington from offering up his cure. Meanwhile, at Charles Xavier’s school, Rogue (Anna Paquin) wonders if maybe she should take the shot and become a “normal” person.
Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Logan (Hugh Jackman) have an even bigger concern than Magneto and the cure. Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), thought to have died at the end of the previous movie, has returned but has given in to her dark side, the so-called Phoenix. She’s already destroyed Scott (James Marsden), and it doesn’t take her long to disintegrate Professor X. Can Logan and the Beast (Kelsey Grammer) rally what’s left of the X-Men to defeat both Magneto and the Dark Phoenix?
I can still remember seeing X-Men: The Last Stand on the day that it was first released. As an X-Men fan, I was excited to see how the Dark Phoenix storyline would be adapted for the big screen. It’s difficult to put into words how disappointed I was when Jean killed Scott. That one scene told me that X-Men: The Last Stand was not going to do the story justice. In the comic books, Jean and Scott’s relationship was the heart of the X-Men. When Jean became the Dark Phoenix, she proved herself capable of destroying an entire planet, but she couldn’t bring herself to kill Scott. She chose to destroy herself rather than him. (Marvel being Marvel, Jean was resurrected a few years later.) The X-Men films never really knew what to do with the characters of Scott and Jean. They weren’t as flamboyant as Logan or even Rogue, but fans of the comic knew who Scott and Jean were and understood their importance to the series, and having Jean destroy Scott showed that, unlike the previous two films, the third X-Men film was not being made for the fans.
A large part of the problem was that director Brett Ratner didn’t seem to be interested in the characters. X-Men: The Last Stand is a collection of action scenes with none of the small character moments that made the first two films memorable. Kelsey Grammer is a welcome addition to the cast as the Beast. (The Beast always was basically Frasier Crane with blue fur.) Otherwise, this is the most forgettable of all the X-Men films.
Even though the Dark Phoenix saga is one of the key X-Men storylines, it’s never really been given its due onscreen. A second attempt to tell the story, in Dark Phoenix, also failed to capture the drama and emotion of Jean’s transformation. The X-Men are now officially a part of the MCU, so I imagine the story will probably be told again. Maybe the third time will be the charm.
Katie (played by Katie Featherston) believes that an evil spirit has been following her ever since she was a child. Her boyfriend, a day trader named Micah (played by Micah Sloat), decides to set up cameras all over the house so that he can record any strange things that happen. A psychic (Mark Friedrichs) tells Micah that this is a really bad idea because the demon is intent on tormenting Katie and that it gets off on creating negative energy. Micah doesn’t listen because he’s dumb.
Reading Lisa Marie’s review of The Blair Witch Project reminded me of the other great found-footage horror phenomenon of our lifetime, Paranormal Activity. The whole movie is made up of “found footage” that was recorded on the stationary cameras set up around the house. Because the cameras were all supposed to be sitting on tripods or other surfaces, this eliminated the question of “Why would anyone still be filming at this point?” It gave the first Paranormal Activity film a plausibility that, in my opinion, The Blair Witch Project lost the minute Heather and Michael decided not to turn off the camera and just make a run for it. It also helped that night vision is automatically creepy. Though there have been far too many sequels, the first Paranormal Activity shows what you can do with loud noises, dark rooms, and lots of atmosphere.
Of course, most of my friends had the same reaction to Paranormal Activity. They wonder how someone like Micah could have ever hooked up with someone as hot as Katie in the first place. Paranormal Activity briefly gave hope to dorky guys everywhere, or at least it did as long as you ignored what happened to Micah at the end of the movie. I have yet to meet anyone who watched Paranormal Activity and felt bad for Micah. There’s a lot of sympathy for Katie, but everyone seems to agree that Micah brought it all on himself.
Paranormal Activity has inspired six sequels, with a seventh scheduled to come out in 2027.
A cemetery, an atomic wasteland, a chainsaw, a preacher with a bunch of mutant worshippers, it doesn’t get more 80s gothic than this.
Director Richard Stanley directed several gothic music videos but he’s best-known for his feature films, including The Colour From Outer Space, Hardware and Dust Devil. (In many ways, the video for Preacher Man feels like a dry run for both Hardware and Dust Devil.) He was also the original director of the infamous The Island of Dr. Moreau until his conflicts with both the studios and actors Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer led to him being replaced by John Frankenheimer.
Enjoy!
