I should start things off with a confession. This is actually not the first time that I’ve shared Manos: The Hands of Fate here on the Shattered Lens. I previously shared it on both October 8th of 2013 and October 15th of 2015 and, both times, I even used the exact same picture of Torgo.
However, Manos proved to be such a popular choice that I simply had to post it again. As I pointed out two years ago, Manos has a reputation for being one of the worst films ever made. And, honestly, who am I to disagree? However, it’s also a film that is so bad that it simply has to be seen.
By the way, everyone who watches Manos ends up making fun of Torgo, who was played by John Reynolds. What they may not know is that Reynolds committed suicide shortly after filming on Manos wrapped. So, as tempting at it may be to ridicule poor Mr. Reynolds’s performance, save your barbs for Torgo and leave John Reynolds alone.
Glass, as you may remember, came out in January and was one of the first big cinematic disappointments of the 2019. People were certainly excited about it before the film was released. Glass was a sequel to not only Split but also Unbreakable. James McAvoy, Samuel L. Jackson, and Bruce Willis would all be returning to the roles that they played in those original films. Glass was viewed as being the film that would establish whether director M. Night Shyamalan was truly back after the critical and commercial success of Split or if he was going to return to being the kinda hacky director who we all remembered from the mid to late-aughts.
Actually, it can probably be argued that, as a director, M. Night Shyamalan managed to go from being slightly overrated to being wildly underrated. Even his worse films aren’t exactly terrible. Even the incredibly silly The Happening had a few effective scenes. Shyamalan wasn’t a bad director as much as he was a director who, at times, seemed to be way too convinced of his own cleverness. The Shyamalan twist became both his trademark and his curse. I can still remember an entire theater audibly groaning during The Village, not because the twist was necessarily bad as much as just because it was so expected. Was Shyamalan capable of making a film that didn’t end with a gimmicky twist? Interestingly, for most of its running time, Split seemed like a straight forward story about a psychotic man with multiple personalities. It was only at the last minute, when Bruce Willis showed up in that bar, the people realized that Split had a Shyamalan twist.
Glass has a few twists of its own, most of them dealing with how Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy) became the killer known as The Beast. It’s all connected to Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), who is also the supervillain named Mr. Glass. Kevin, Elijah, and David Dunn (Bruce Willis) all end up in a mental asylum together. Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) insists that the three of them do not have any super powers and instead, they’re all suffering from a shared delusion. Of course, Dr. Staple has an agenda of her own. It’s not a particularly interesting agenda but then again, who cares, right? I mean, the main reason people are going to watch this movie is so they can watch James McAvoy and Bruce Willis square off against each other, right?
Well, those people are out of luck. The audience may not care about Dr. Staple’s agenda but Shyamalan certainly does and, as a result, McAvoy, Jackson, and Willis often seem to be bystanders in their own film. When the long-promised confrontations between our three main characters finally do occur, it all leads to a finale that leaves a rather sour aftertaste. You can’t help but feel that the characters (and their actors) deserved better. What ultimately happens to David Dunn in Glass feels almost like an extended middle finger to anyone who has ever defended Unbreakable. One gets the feeling that Shyamalan was so eager to work in one of his trademark surprises that he never stopped to consider whether the film’s storyline was strong enough to support his ambition.
The other problem is that Bruce Willis’s David Dunn and James McAvoy’s The Beast really don’t belong in the same movie together. Willis gives an understated and rather haunted performance as David but McAvoy is so flamboyantly evil as the Beast that it destroys whatever gritty reality Willis had managed to develop. Both McAvoy and Willis give good performances but they appear to be performing in different films. As for Jackson, nobody glowers with the power of Samuel L. Jackson. But, oddly, he never seems to have much to do. Glass may be named after his character but Mr. Glass often feels superfluous to the overall plot.
Glass is ultimately a rather forgettable movie. One gets the feeling that Shyamalan was truly trying to say something profound about heroism and pulp mythology in the final part of the trilogy that began with Unbreakable. But, ultimately, Glass‘s message is too muddled to have much of an effect. In the end, Glass leaves Shyamalan’s ambitions unfulfilled.
At this point, there’s been so many zombie films that I’m a bit burned out on the whole genre. I can still get enthusiastic for zombie films that attempt to put a new spin on the material and I still love the classic zombie films of the past. But, for the most part, new zombie films just leave me bored.
2018’s Day Of The Dead: Bloodline is technically a remake of George Romero’s Day of the Dead but, then again, almost every American zombie film that’s come out over the past twenty or so years has been a remake of something that Romero did earlier. The whole idea of an isolated military compound where soldiers plot to kill zombies (or rotters, as they’re called here) while scientists try to understand and maybe cure them has been done to death. Once again, we’ve got a fascist army guy (Jeff Gum) and, once again, we’ve got a dedicated scientist who doesn’t like taking orders from the military. The scientist is named Zoe (Sophie Skelton). She was a medical student when the zombie apocalypse began. Now, five years later, she’s trying to find a way to end it and blah blah blah, wake me when it’s over.
A good deal of the film centers around Max (Jonathon Schaech). In life, Max was a pervy stalker who was so obsessed with Zoe that he craved her name into his arm. In death, he’s a rotter who has retained some of his personality and bits of memory. For instance, he’s still obsessed with Zoe and spends a lot of time saying, “You are mine, you are mine….” However, Max’s blood potentially holds the cure for the zombie plague. And, to be honest, that’s kind of an interesting premise. In life, Max was the worst that humanity had to offer. In death, he might hold the secret for saving the world. Even as a rotter, he remains obsessed with Zoe and Zoe has to decide whether or not to destroy the man who tried to rape her or to keep him functional for the good of the world.
But …. eh. I mean, it’s intriguing but the film doesn’t really do much with it. It just becomes another zombie movie with a bunch of hardass soldiers and some scientists who don’t understand why the soldiers keep shooting everything. Who cares? We’ve already seen all of this in a hundred other movies, not to mention on shows like The Walking Dead. Neither the script nor the characters in this film are interesting enough to really justify seeing it again.
It’s same old song and dance. In the 60s, a hippie named Sid (Joey Belladonna) is accidentally killed during a hazing gone wrong. In the 90s, during another fraternity hazing, Sid (now played by Will Kempe, who, the same year that Pledge Night was released, played Rick Von Slonecker in Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, a film that about as different from Pledge Night as a apple is from a banana) emerges from a toilet and kills everyone almost everyone at the frat house. His name is now Acid Sid now and he has more one-liners than Freddy Krueger. “That’s for Spiro Agnew!” he says as he dispatches one victim who probably didn’t even know who Spiro Agnew was. Other deaths include death by castration, an egg beater, and, of course, a radio dropped in a bath tub. Pledge Night is interesting in that it does occasionally have a sense of humor about itself. It starts out as a frat comedy and there is actually more time spent on the absurdity of pledges being hazed than on them being killed. Once Sid does arrive, it becomes your standard Nightmare on Elm Street rip-off, albeit one where the majority of the victims are male jocks instead of the usual victims who show up in slasher films. Most of the frat boys are fairly obnoxious so you’ll be on Sid’s side the entire time. The film certainly is.
If Pledge Night gets any attention today, it is probably because of a mix of Metropolitan fans who want to see Rick Von Slonecker kill frat bros and Anthrax fans who have heard that Joey Belladonna is in the movie. Belladonna is only in the movie for a few minutes, just long enough to get submerged in acid as a part of absurdly cruel fraternity prank. Anthrax also provided the film’s forgettable soundtrack.
Pledge Night is a typical 90s college slasher, clearly influenced more by Nightmare on Elm Street than Friday the 13th. If the movie had been made a few years later, it could have taken full advantage of the self-referential style of horror that was introduced to the slasher genre by Scream and Pledge Night probably would have been a better movie. Pledge Night does have a sense of humor about itself and the slasher genre but it often seems to be held back by the requirements of also trying to satisfy what horror fans were expecting to get in 1990. By trying to toe the line between horror and comedy, Pledge Night is never scary enough to work as horror or funny enough to work as comedy.
Louise (Alexandra Pic) and Henriette (Isabelle Teboul) are two orphaned sisters. They’re both blind and, as the nuns at the orphanage explains to Dr. Dennary (Bernard Charnacé), innocent to the ways of the world. When Dr. Dennary adopts them, everyone tells him that he’s made the right choice. Never have there been two sisters as sweet and beatific as Louise and Henriette.
Of course, what neither the nuns nor Dr. Dennary know is that, when the sun goes down, Louise and Henriette’s vision returns. They sneak out of Dennary’s home, exploring the nearby cemeteries and meeting other beings who can only move freely during the night. The sisters tells each other stories of their past and we see memories that seem to suggest that they have been alive for centuries. But, the sisters also often talk about how they can’t remember their past and it’s suggested that their “memories” are just stories that they’ve created to give themselves a history that they don’t otherwise possess.
At times, you wonder if they’re even sisters. Perhaps they’re just two vampires who manged to find each other at some point over the past few centuries. Still, you can never doubt the strength of their bond. When one of them is weak from a lack of blood, the other allows her to drink from her neck. When they find themselves being pursued by angry villagers, they refuse to be separated. Even if it means dying, at least they’ll die together.
Throughout the film, the orphans eagerly await for night to fall so that they can see and sneak out of the house. But, at the same time, they know that their time is limited. When the sun rises, they will again lose their sight. These vampires don’t need to sleep in coffins. In fact, they don’t need to sleep at all. But they need the night to see the world around them.
Unfortunately, Dr. Dennary may be kind-hearted but he’s still not happy about the idea of the two orphans sneaking out of his house during the night. When the sisters go to drastic means to ensure their freedom, they find themselves in even greater danger….
First released in 1997, The Two Orphan Vampires is perhaps my favorite Jean Rollin film. Rollin, himself, once described it was being one of his best films because it was a film that told a story that went beyond his own personal obsessions. That may be true but this is definitely a Jean Rollin film. It’s not just the use of the vampirism or the fact that frequent Rollin co-star Brigitte Lahaie has a cameo. It’s that the film centers not just on the supernatural but also the way that our memories and our fantasies can provide comfort in an uncertain world, which was a favorite Rollin theme. Whether their memories are true or not is not important. What’s important is that the two sisters share them.
In typical Rollin fashion, the movie unfolds at its own deceptively leisurely pace. The imagery is frequently dream-like, with the orphan vampires discovering an underworld of paranormal creatures. The film also reflect Rollin’s love of the old serials, with frequent cliffhangers. By the final third of the movie, you can already guess what’s going to end up happening to the two orphan vampires but I still had tears in my eyes by the time the end credits started to roll up the screen.
For whatever reason, Two Orphan Vampires seems to get a mixed reaction from several Rollin fans, who perhaps are disappointed that it’s considerably less bloody and/or sordid as some of Rollin’s other vampire films. The film is one of Rollin’s more contemplative films and it has more in common with The Night of the Hunted and The Iron Rosethan some of Rollin’s other vampire films. That said, Two Orphan Vampires is my personal favorite of Rollin’s filmography. It’s a film that bring me to tears every time that I watch it.
Last night, I turned over to the Lifetime Movie Channel and I watched Erasing His Dark Past.
Why Was I Watching It?
So, October isn’t even over yet and Lifetime has already decided that they’re going to start with the Christmas movies! That’s right — the next two months are just going to be Christmas cheer on my favorite channel! And listen, I love Christmas. You know that about me. I love any holiday that involves me getting presents! But seriously, it’s too soon for the Christmas movies!
So, instead of watching a Christmas movie last night, I switched over the Lifetime Movie Network and I got caught up with Erasing His Dark Past.
(Don’t worry, everyone! The holiday spirit will possess me soon and I’ll happily be watching every Christmas movie on Lifetime!)
What Was It About?
David (Michael Welch) has a dark past and he needs to erase it! What better way to do that than to disappear after a plane crash?
Everyone thinks that David is dead but his wife, Karen (Lauren Fortier), has her doubts. Those doubts turn out to be justified when she discovers that David had all sorts of weird financial stuff going on. By vanishing (or dying or whatever he did), he’s basically left Karen broke and in a lot of trouble. Was David just bad with money or was it all a part of his criminal scheme?
And could it be that David may have had a ….. second family!?
What Worked?
Micheal Welch did a good job as David, I thought. He came across as being sinister enough to fake his own death and charismatic enough to pull it off.
Fans of the classic film To Kill A Mockingbird will want to keep an eye out for Scout herself, Mary Badham, playing a sympathetic bank employee.
What Did Not Work?
There have been several Lifetime films about husbands faking their own death and running off to their second family. In fact, it’s become a bit of cliche that you should never trust a husband in a Lifetime film. Unfortunately, as a result, there was really no shock in discovering that David wasn’t actually dead. We knew it was going to happen as soon as he first appeared. To a certain extent, their predictability is one of the things that make Lifetime films enjoyable but still, it was a little bit to easy to see the direction in which Erasing His Dark Past was heading.
“Oh my God! Just like me!” Moments
This was one of those rare films where there really weren’t any “Oh my God! Just like me!” moments. I’ve never been married so I’ve never had to deal with a husband faking his own death and running off with all of my money. I guess I should consider myself lucky in that regard.
There are a lot of vampires and other cursed beings wandering through the 1994 film adaptation of Interview With A Vampire but Claudia (Kisten Dunst) is the only one for whom I have any sympathy.
Louis (Brad Pitt) may be the main character and the vampire giving the interview but it’s hard to have much sympathy for him. He’s just such a whiny little bitch. The Louisiana aristocrat is transformed into a vampire in 1791 and basically spends the next 200 years complaining about it. You want to have sympathy for him but sometimes, you just have to accept stuff and move on. It doesn’t help that Brad Pitt, who has always given his best performances when cast as men of action, is somewhat miscast as the effete and self-loathing Louis.
Lestat (Tom Cruise) may be the most charismatic of the vampires but he’s never exactly sympathetic. He turns Louis into a vampire and then spends years following him across Louisiana and Europe. Lestat is decadence personified and he never whines and, as a result, he’s far more enjoyable to spend time with than Louis. Cruise is as perfectly cast as Lestat as Pitt was miscat as Louis. Lestat is a star and Tom Cruise has always been one of the few true movie stars around. That said, Lestat is still far too self-indulgent and thoughtlessly self-destructive to really be a sympathetic character. Instead, he’s like Lord Byron, destroying happy families but at least writing a poem about it afterwards.
Armand (Antonio Banderas) runs the Théâtre des Vampires in Paris and he becomes Louis’s companion for a time. Louis is charismatic because he’s played by Antonio Banderas but, ultimately, he proves to be a rather ineffectual leader. Armand puts on a good show but, in the end, that’s all he has to offer. He’s a bit shallow, despite all of the theatrics.
Santiago (Stephen Rea) isn’t sympathetic at all but at least he really seems to get into being evil. Good for him!
And then there’s Daniel Malloy (Christian Slater), the journalist who conducts the interview with Louis. In the film, Malloy starts out as a cynic, the type of writer who theatrically pours himself a glass of whiskey before dramatically turning to his typewriter. All he needs is a fedora with a press pass tucked into the headband. It’s difficult to take him seriously.
But then there’s Claudia. Poor Claudia. In the book, Claudia was only five years old when she was turned into a vampire. In the movie, she’s played by 12 year-old Kirsten Dunst and it’s left ambiguous as to how young Claudia actually was when Lestat turned her into a vampire, though it’s still made clear that was too young to be cursed without her consent. Claudia becomes Lestat and Louis’s companion. Louis treats her like the daughter that he will never have. Lestart treats her like an apprentice, teaching her how to kill. Claudia grows up but is forever trapped in the body of a child. It’s impossible not to feel sorry for Claudia, who never asked to become a vampire, who indeed was just turned so that Lestat could use her as a pawn to keep control of Louis. Claudia spends a good deal of the movie in a rage and who can blame her?
Interview With A Vampire is a messy and uneven film. Brad Pitt is miscast and the whole film is oddly paced, with the New Orleans scenes taking too long and the Paris scenes going by almost too quickly. At the same time, Tom Cruise brings the proper joie de mort to the role of Lestat and Claudia and her fate will simply break your heart. Interview With The Vampire is not the best vampire movie that I’ve ever seen but it definitely has its pleasures.
Raymond (Dean Stockwell) has just escaped from a mental hospital and he has only one thing on his mind. Raymond wants revenge. Having looked over the past events of his life, Raymond has figured out that things started to go downhill for him when he failed a test in high school. He blames his failure on his old teacher, Mary Bloomquist (Jane Wyman).
At the same time that Raymond is escaping, Mary is planning her retirement. She’s decided that she no longer wants to teach. The job just doesn’t seem worth it anymore. But Raymond has other ideas. Raymond wants her to give him the same test that he failed ten years before. And this time, Raymond wants her to pass him or else.
The Failing of Raymond is a made-for-TV movie from 1971 and it features a good performance from Jane Wyman and a great one from Dean Stockwell. The film ultimately hinges on one question. Did Raymond really fail that test or did Mary fail Raymond?
Since there’s been like 200 Puppet Master films made over the past 30 years — goddamn, 30 years of killer puppets! — I figured that maybe I should finally sit down and actually watch one of them. I decided to go with the original film that started the entire franchise, 1989’s Puppet Master!
So, basically, this is a movie about little puppets that kill full-sized people. Obviously, there’s a bit more to the plot but let’s be honest. No one who watches this movie is going to be watching it for the specifics of the plot. They’re going to be watching it because they want to see tiny puppets go on a rampage. I have to say that the puppets themselves are pretty cute. I mean, they’re murderous and a little bit pervy but they’re still really cute. I understand that all of the puppets have their own specific names but, while watching the film, I just made up names of my own.
For instance, there’s Hooky, who has a hook for one hand and a knife for the other and looks like he should be the lead singer of an aging Prog Rock band. And then there’s Drilly, who has a drill on his head. He can be really dangerous, especially if you’re stupid enough to crawl around on the floor and just stay there, on all fours, while he’s running straight at you. I mean, if you just stood up, you probably wouldn’t get that badly injured but …. well, what do I know, right? And then there’s Leechy, who is a female puppet who spits up leeches. What’s interesting is that she never runs out of leeches but I have to wonder, if you have that many leeches, why not just send them out on their own instead of stuffing them all into some poor little puppet? I felt bad for Leechy. She seemed kinda sad. And then there’s Handy, who has big hands and Facey, who can assume several different facial expressions at once. They’re all really adorable, to be honest.
Anyway, Puppet Master is about a bunch of psychics who all spend the night in a California hotel that was once home to the “last alchemist,” Andre Toulon (William Hickey). Toulon had the power to bring inanimate creatures — like puppets! — too life but, when the Nazi spies were closes in on him, Toulon killed himself. Many years later, a psychic named Neil Gallagher (Jimmie F. Skaggs) discovered Toulon’s hiding place in the hotel but then shot himself as well. So now, Neil’s former colleagues are all trying to get Toulon’s power for themselves. Or something. As I said, following the plot is not always easy. The main appeal here is watching the cute puppets do really bad things.
That said, who knew that a group of psychics and witches would prove to be so stupid? I mean, you would think that — when all of you are having constant premonitions of death and destruction — you would be smart enough to take extra precautions or maybe just leave the hotel all together. For instance, Dana (Irene Miracle) casts a protection spell over someone else but not on herself. Meanwhile, Frank (Matt Roe) and Clarissa (Kathryn O’Reilly) make the rookie mistake of having sex in a horror film while our nominal hero, Alex (Paul Le Mat, looking like he’s trying to figure out how he went from American Graffitito this), wanders around in a daze.
And yet, watching the film, I could see why it became so popular. The puppets are memorable and well-designed and the backstory, with Toulon and all the rest, is actually pretty interesting. Puppet Master is one of those films that defines “stupid but fun.” No wonder the puppets came back!
Interior designer Jana Mercer (Brigitte Bako) is haunted by the night that her entire family was murdered by serial killer, Calvin Hawks (Larry Drake). Even though Calvin was captured and imprisoned, she still fears that someday he’ll get out. Calvin, meanwhile, feels that he and Jana have a special bond because he decided to allow her to live. From his prison cell, he follows her life via the internet. He even sends her messages, which doesn’t do much for her state of mind. Finally, a former neighbor of hers invites her to return to her old neighborhood so that she can confront her fears. However, after serving 20 years in prison, Calvin has been released for good behavior. As a part of his parole, he is not allowed to go anywhere near Jana or any of the scenes of his crimes. Soon after getting released, Calvin decides to violate his probation. A serial killer violating probation? Who would have guessed?
Paranoia raises a few questions. What type of prison would allow a serial killer to have a laptop in his cell and access to the internet, let alone send out messages unsupervised? What type of legal system would sentence a serial killer to only 20 years in prison? Why wouldn’t the authorities make any effort to let Jana, as the sole survivor of Calvin’s crimes, know that Calvin is about to be released from prison? Why would Jana, a recluse who says she is incapable of trusting people, be so quick to accept an invitation to go to the country with someone that she barely knows? It makes no sense but the movie still somehow maintains enough suspense to work.
The best thing about Paranoia are the performances of Brigitte Bako and Larry Drake. Bako, who was one of the best of the 90s direct-to-video stars, brings some needed sass to the role of Jana while Larry Drake was a B-movie veteran who always made a good villain. Larry Brand, who also did Overexposed and The Drifter, wrote and directed Paranoia and, just as he did in those two previous films, Brand includes a lot of pop cultural references. It’s not every day that you see a direct-to-video B-movie that includes an inside joke about The Dick Van Dyke Show. Brand and his cast bring some unexpected style to the nonsensical story.
Watching Paranoia today, it’s hard not to get nostalgic. With a plot that hinges on email almost as much as the plot of Sleepless in Seattle, it’s a 90s film, through and through. They don’t make them like this anymore.
Through the Shattered Lens 