This October, I’m going to be doing something a little bit different with my contribution to 4 Shots From 4 Films. I’m going to be taking a little chronological tour of the history of horror cinema, moving from decade to decade.
Today, we continue with the 70s!
4 Shots From 4 Films
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, dir by Tobe Hooper)
Jaws (1975, dir by Steven Spielberg)
Carrie (1976, dir by Brian DePalma)
The Omen (1976, dir by Richard Donner)
A lot of people are saying that 2013 was a great year for movies. And I guess it was. An unusually large number of memorable films were released last year.
However, by that same token, a huge number of truly terrible films were released in 2013 as well. With that in mind, here are my personal picks for the 16 worst films of 2013. Why 16? Because Lisa doesn’t do odd numbers, that’s why.
16) Carrie
15) Getaway
14) After Earth
13) Broken City
11) See Girl Run
10) Would You Rather
7) Movie 43
6) Disconnect
5) A Dark Truth
4) Freeloaders
3) Unhung Hero
And finally, my pick for the worst film of 2013…
1) Man of Steel
It’s only been recently that I’ve come to realize that Man Of Steel was the worst film of 2013. When I first saw it, I thought it was bombastic and rather silly but I also thought it was just another mediocre action film. However, the more that I’ve thought about the film, the more I’ve come to realize that Man of Steel truly represents everything that I dislike about mainstream film. Beyond the fact that it took itself way too seriously, Man of Steel spent millions of dollars to celebrate the destruction of a major city but couldn’t find five minutes to devote to character development or memorable dialogue. Two years ago, a lot of people disagreed with me when I announced that Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch was one of the best films of 2011. I wonder how those same people feel about Man of Steel.
Tomorrow, I’ll continue my look back at the year that was with my 10 favorite songs of 2013.
(You can see my picks for the worst films of 2010, 2011, and 2012 by clicking on the links in this sentence.)
“We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.” — Stephen King
Last week we saw the release of the Carrie remake starring Chloe Grace Moretz and directed by Kimberly Peirce. This got me to thinking that of all the writers I grew up reading it was Stephen King whose novels, novellas and short stories made for easy film adaptations. His stories may be supernatural, horror scifi or dark fantasy but they all share that common denominator of having some basis in the real world.
They’re stories of how the real world and it’s seemingly normal inhabitants will react to something just beyond the norm, the pale and the real. In one story we pretty much have a Peyton Place-like setting having to deal with a arrival of a Dracula-like figure. On another we see the isolated work of hotel sitting during the winter turn into something both supernatural and a look into the mind of someone cracking under the pressure of issues both personal and professional.
With all the Stephen King film adaptations since the original Carrie I know I have seen them all and can honestly say that I’ve become an expert on the topic. So, here’s what amounts to what I think would be my top 10 best and bottom 5 worst film/tv adaptations from Stephen King stories.
Top Ten
1. 
2. 
3. 
4. 
5. 
6. 
7. 
8. 
9. 
10. 
Bottom Five
1. 
2. 
3. 
4. 
5. 
Let me preface this review by saying one thing : Lou Reed died today, so not much else matters.
Seriously — in a world dominated by poseurs and phonies, Lou was the read deal. Avant garde before there was avant garde, glam before there was glam, punk before there was punk, new wave before there was new wave — Lou stayed six steps ahead of all trends by simply not giving a flying fuck about any of them and staying true to himself. Plus, he was quintessential New York in a way that just can’t be faked. In many ways, he was a mirror to the Big Apple’s other favorite creative son, Woody Allen — Woody’s world is one of stuffy academia, anally rententive dinner parties, emotionally distant family patriarchs and matriarchs, and lifeless and pretentious gallery openings, while Lou’s world wasn’t just the streets but the gutters : strung-out drag queens who will give head to strangers to earn enough for their next heroin fix; two-bit hustlers looking for a gullible mark from out of town; desperate AIDS patients freezing in the cold because they lost their homes, families, and jobs; kids fresh from the Port Authority bus terminal looking to hit it big but willing to do anything to get by in the meantime while secretly knowing from the outset that their dreams are never gonna come true.
In short, the kind of people Woody Allen tells stories about are outnumbered by the kind of people Lou Reed told stories about by a factor of about 1,000 to 1, but the rarified elites from planet Woody love to glamorize and pine for the kind of lives that folks on Planet Lou lived — unless, of course, they had to spend one night on the streets, outside the safe confines of their luxury condos, at which point their romanticized notions of life among the “unwashed” would dissipate in a hurry. They know that, of course, so they just “take a walk on the wild side” comfortably by purchasing framed photographs and paintings by down-and-out artists who may or may not become “the next big thing” but are, they know, quite likely living hand-to-mouth existences right now and probably always will.
Burroughs. Warhol. Basquiat. Reed. Our connection to that New York as it was is fading rapidly, isn’t it? Disney has cleaned up 42nd Street. The grindhouses are gone. Harlem has been Clintonized. And another link to the past was severed today, irrevocably. New York’s got class now, but it ain’t got soul. Characters like Alan Alda’s blowhard from Woody’s Crimes And Misdemeanors have won. Poverty and desperation are more widespread than ever, but they’re inside, keeping their mouths shut. And one of the last honest voices that chronicled the lives of the poor and desperate with no pretense, no bullshit, and no flinching is silent forevermore. Iggy Pop’s doing car commercials now, for Christ’s sake, and Debbie harry’s touring the casino circuit — all is lost.
And on that note, let’s talk about this new Carrie remake, shall we?
Competence shouldn’t be a dirty word, all things considered, but when it’s all a movie has going for it, is that really saying very much? Director Kimberly Peirce doesn’t really do anything new with Stephen King’s horror classic apart from giving the unfortunate title character a more lurid backstory, but it’s not like she’s done anything actively bad here, either. The story proceeds more or less along the lines of the original (and along the lines of the made-for-cable remake starring Angela Bettis), so hey — it’s a decent little horror tale, we all know that. Likewise, Chloe Grace Moretz turns in a respectable enough performance in the lead role, Julianne Moore takes a completely different tack with the elder White than did Piper Laurie but it really works, and among the supporting cast Gabriella Wilde deserves special mention for her nice turn as the well-enough-meaning-but-hopelessly-misguided Sue Snell.
Still — where’s the soul? Like the new, cleaned-up Manhattan, Carrie circa 2013 is an exercise in mere presentation, with no substance beneath it whatsoever. DePalma’s dramatics are nowhere to be found here, nor his shocks. This is a movie that knows we already know the story and proceeds accordingly. “Just don’t fuck things up” seems to be all the more that Peirce and company were aiming for here, and as a result that’s all we get — a movie that gets in, does the job, and gets out.
Little touches like having Carrie make her prom dress herself make sense, but serve no real purpose in terms of broadening our understanding of the character or her situation, much less get us to go so far as to re-evaluate either — and adding camera phones to the infamous shower scene at the beginning don’t so much as “modernize” the proceedings as they draw attention to the fact that elements are being tacked on her for the sake of — well, nothing, I suppose.
So — we come back to competence again. Lou Reed wasn’t a “good singer” in any conventional sense of the term, but man, he was in there. He lived and breathed the kind of life he wrote songs about. He brought the same kind of immediacy to his work that Brian DePalma brought to Carrie in 1976. And that’s what’s missing here in Perice’s cold, clinical, by-the-numbers remake. That doesn’t make this new version a bad one, I guess, as I said — but it does make it a pointless one. This has all been done before, and been done a whole lot better, so — why bother?
But again — none of this matters all that much. Lou Reed died today. I’m wasting your time — and mine — by talking about anything other than that.
Over at my “main” site — http://trashfilmguru.wordpress.com , for those who don’t know, don’t care, either, or both — I’ve been doing what every other goddamn movie blog in the universe does in the month of October: namely, review a bunch of random horror flicks. But come on — you didn’t think I was just gonna sit back and let Lisa Marie, Arleigh, Leonard Wilson, and everybody else have all the fun here on TTSL, did you?
Nah. I just had to muscle in and opine on a few macabre movie delights on these digital “pages” before the month was out, as well. And I might as well start with the one everybody’s talking about right now, Carrie, the 1976 classic directed, in his inimitable style, by Brain DePalma, based on the runaway best-seller by Stephen King, and starring Sissy Spacek as quite likely the most hapless horror heroine in history.
This film is significant for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that it was the first King “property” to be adapted for the big screen, thus announcing the arrival of a major new player on the scene who would go on, of course, to have a veritable industry of celluloid “translations” of his work sprout up over the ensuing decades, some of which were clearly — oh, wait, people these days are talking about a different Carrie altogether? One that just came out last week?
Well, I saw that one, too, but fuck it — I feel like reviewing this one first.
Let’s backtrack to that “horror’s most hapless heroine” claim for a minute, shall we? It might sound like a bold claim, but I swear it’s true — think about it for a minute : poor Carrie White starts the movie by having her first period in the shower at school, she thinks she’s dying because her religious whack-job of a mom is too chickenshit to tell her about menstruation, she gets teased mercilessly by all the girls who witness her uncomfortable (to say the least) entry into womanhood, she has no friends to speak of, she’s stuck with a bunch of telekinetic powers that she doesn’t understand or know how to effectively control, she’s the butt of every cruel joke her classmates play, she has to listen to her idiot mother blather nonsense 24/7, she gets invited to the prom as by the most popular kid in school strictly as an act of misguided charity, and then, just when she’s granted one moment of respite from the nonstop parade of tragedy that comprises her existence when she’s crowned world’s most unlikely prom queen, she gets a bucket full of pig blood dumped all over her, freaks out and kills everybody with her “mind powers,” and goes home from the best/worst night of her life to find that mommie dearest has decided to kill her in Jesus’ name.
Talk about a gal who just can’t catch a break.
Sure, it all seems a bit over the top — okay, it all is a bit over the top — but DePalma pulls out all the stops to draw you into this sordid little world of revival tent-reject parents (Piper Laurie), evil high school bitches (Nancy Allen), pussy-whipped wannabe-tough guys (John Travolta), well-meaning but ultimately ineffectual teachers (Betty Buckley), semi-guilt-ridden classmates (Amy Irving), jocks with out of control white-guy ‘fros (William Katt), and grounds the whole heady mixture in a turn-for-the-ages performance by Spacek that really makes you feel for the poor kid even — maybe especially — when she finally snaps. His always-stylish-and-inventive use of sound, split screen, and slow-burn tension keep you pretty well fixated on the proceedings throughout, and all in all you’ve just gotta say this still holds up as a pretty impressive cinematic achievement.
Of course, King hit on a fairly inventive little gimmick from the outset here — plenty of horror stories, fairy tales, fables, and probably even nursery rhymes are little more than thinly-disguised metaphors for the onset of puberty and the scary transition from childhood into the ‘adult” world, but here he just dispensed with the pretense and doubled-down by ripping the mask off and piling the real, actual, non-metaphorical point on top of the , as we say in modern parlance, “genre trappings,” and as a result ended up penning a scary story for the ages.
Classic visuals — you know, like the one reproduced directly above — hammer the point home in memorable fashion, to be sure, and what Carrie lacks in subtlety it definitely makes up for in sheer, shock-ya-senseless power. Audiences went wild for this flick back in ’76, and while that might not be saying much because they also went apeshit for every cheesy “patriotic” bicentennial gimmick, knick-knack, gee-gaw, and useless item of “home decor” that came out that year, in this case they were absolutely right — this is a nifty little barnburner of a movie that has aged as well as any wine you care to mention.
Carrie is aviailable on DVD and Blu-Ray from MGM, and it’s also currently playing on Netflix’s instant streaming queue, where it can be found under no less than three category headers — “horror,” “Halloween favorites,” and “cult movies.” So go check it out already — or check it out again already, as the case may be — and we’ll talk about that other movie with the same title next time around.
High School can be a rough time. Growing up, we always had Freshman Day, where bullies spent the first Friday of the new semester terrorizing the newbies. I spent at least one of those years either writing in the Library for lunch or on the run between classes until a poem/love letter I wrote on behalf of a member of the Varsity Football team left me in their good graces and under their protection. Needed to tell your girl she was the best thing since Ham & Pineapple pizza, but in an eloquent way? Go ask that geek in the back row of English reading Christine with the big round glasses. Oh, the joys of High School. I can’t even imagine how intense bullying can get today with all of the social media we have. It’s easy to imagine what you could do to protect yourself if you could be as cool as Nightcrawler and make yourself teleport, fight off your foes like Batman or best of all, Force Choke the crap out of someone like Darth Vader.
In that sense, the story of Carrie is still kind of cool, and mildly disturbing.
There was a point in Stephen King’s life where Carrie almost never happened. It was because of his wife, Tabitha that the story was ever finished and that the parts focused on women and their “monthlies” (as members of my family would say) were written the way they were. Carrie got King his foot in the door and set him for other releases like The Shining, Christine and Salem’s Lot. I think next to The Shining, it might be his most remade film.
I’m not sure if there’s anyone who never saw Brian De Palma’s Carrie from 1978 with Sissy Spacek. If not, Kimberly Peirce’s version is not bad at all as an introduction to the story. It actually has at least one element from the book that was never featured in the original film (though part of me does wish that it contained the newspaper format – something like John Larroquette’s narration for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Carrie is simply the tale of a young girl in high school who discovers she has telekinetic powers. Eventually, she gets pushed and loses it, unleashing her abilities against anyone in her way. No version of the story has ever gone into detail on how she got them outside of the puberty angle – they’re just there.
Peirce’s version moves just as well as De Palma’s, which is interesting because supposedly they happen to be friends. The main differences lie in DePalma’s choice of nudity versus Peirce’s lack of it, and DePalma’s lack of blood (a sign of the times) compared to Peirce’s extended usage of it. Other than that, it’s roughly the same film, any closer and you’d end up with Gus Van Sant’s shot for shot version of Psycho. Half of me wonders why it needed to be remade (again), the other half says, “You know what, it wasn’t half bad.” There’s nothing essentially wrong with Carrie, but it’s really hard to talk about the Peirce Carrie Film without going back to the DePalma one.
First, Carrie’s biggest strength by far comes in it’s casting. As the leads, both Chloe Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore are great in their roles – almost better than the film deserves. Granted, it’s kind of difficult to imagine anyone messing up something as simple as this. When it comes to young horror starlets, the first two names that come to my mind are Silent Hill’s Jodele Ferland and The Hunger Games’ Isabelle Fuhrman, both of which I thought would be interesting fits here. If Katharine Isabelle was just a little younger, that would have worked too. However, I forgot that Moretz had both The Amityville Horror and Let Me In under her belt (and we won’t speak of Dark Shadows – That wasn’t horror. That wasn’t even comedy. I can’t even identify what that was). Her role as Carrie is somewhat similar to Let Me In, being more reserved here than the Kick Ass films and with good reason.
Moore’s version of Margaret White spends some time self harming herself, which was a little eerie and reminded me of Paul Bettany’s character in The DaVinci Code, punishing themselves for their sins. She’s good here, but after coming off winning an Emmy for playing Sarah Palin in “Game Change”, she looks like she’s underused here. It’s like having an actor play a superhero after becoming a great director and winning tons of accolades. A job is a job, and Moore does a great one here given what she has to work with.
The supporting cast was interesting. I didn’t expect to like Judy Greer’s gym teacher as much as I did, and Ansel Angort’s Tommy Ross was good. I hope that this film leads to bigger and better roles for him. A surprise was Chronicle’s Alex Russell as Billy Nolan, the character originally played by John Travolta. He pulls off a villain well. Portia Doubleday’s version of Kris Hargensen may actually be better than Nancy Allen was, though this could also be in part due to the way the story is written.
So, on with the plot. Carrie White (Moretz) is a reclusive loner, living with her overprotective mother (Moore). In the school shower, she has her period for the first time and not realizing what’s occurring to her (and having never been told just what to expect), naturally panics. This leads to an all out humiliation by her peers that’s even recorded. Carrie later learns about her abilities, while her nemesis, Kris is kicked from the prom and vows to take her vengeance against Carrie. Some of the main sequences are actually expanded upon, which I thought were actually good.
I think the only problem I had with Carrie was the technique used for the Telekinesis. It almost seems a little CGI heavy, but when I think about it, I’m not sure how else they could have pulled off much of what they did here without it. Additionally, Moretz’s version of Carrie uses her hands a lot, which almost makes it seems like she’s either dancing or is trying to conjure up something. It’s not a terribly bad thing and you may actually get used to it after she does it once or twice. Part of me kept expecting her to scream “Unlimited Power!” at one point but it was just a minor “Wow, that’s kind of weird.” Reaction, at least for me.
Carrie’s not really meant for little kids. Anyone who’s a fan of Moretz by way of Diary of a Wimpy Kid might not be ready to handle Carrie, but if you’ve followed any of the Kick Ass films, Carrie’s actually lighter than those. Overall, it’s one of the better remakes out there and a very short film (I’m writing this while watching the Nightmare on Elm Street remake, so I like to think I have a good basis of comparison). If you never saw the original, it might be worth a try. If you don’t wish to spend the money for the ticket, you can always watch one of the other versions and wait for this to come out on Blu-Ray.
It’s in the end of the month and you know what that means!
It’s time to combine two of my favorite things: a poll and a list of film titles.
Which four films are you most looking forward to seeing in October? Let us know by voting below. You can vote up to four times and, as always, write-ins are accepted!
Happy voting!
We finally have the first trailer in the upcoming horror remake Carrie starring Chloe Grace Moretz and directed by Boys Don’t Cry filmmaker Kimberly Peirce.
When news came out that the classic Brian De Palma film adaptation of the Stephen King novel was being remade there wasn’t much of a positive reaction to the news. The usual grumbling about another horror remake being put into production and how Hollywood was running out of ideas was heard throughout the blog land. Then more details surface of who would play the title role which was made famous in the original film by Sissy Spacek. When it was announced that Chlie Grace Moretz would take on the Carrie role then grumbling subsided somewhat.
While there will always be detractors of the film even while it’s still in production the word coming out that the film will not be a straight out remake of the film but more of a faithful adaptation of the novel has made me cautiously optimistic. The fact that the last horror remake Moretz was involved in turned out quite well (Let Me In) is another reason to hope. Plus, Peirce as the director should help put the focus of the film’s narrative on where King originally intended it to be and that’s the social divide between the popular kids in the dangerous world of high school who end up bullying the weaker outcasts.
The teaser trailer gives a hint at how the film looks to follow the novel more than the De Palma film by showing the town in flames and not just the school. Carrie is set for a March 15, 2013 release date.
Tamara was a good entertaining horror/teenage angst movie in the same vein as De Palma’s Carrie and pretty much most of the teenage revenge/slasher flicks of the late 70’s and early 80’s. Such horror films involved the high school jocks and popular cliques getting their comeuppance by way of the nerdy student who has had enough. This time around the nerd in question is one Tamara whose shy, bookish and frumpy nature makes her an easy mark for every other kid in school.
Newcomer and extremely hot Jenna Dewan plays the title role and she does a very good job pulling off the dual personality role the film requires from her. The first half of the film has Dewan as very believable as the mousy and nerdy student whose low self-esteem adds to keeping her ostracized from the rest of the student population. It doesn’t help that she begins to misread one of her teacher’s (played by Matthew Marsden) attempts to help her as some sort of loving attention she so craves. There’s a small bit of a bright side to her daily existence in the form Chloe (played by Katie Stuart), she of the popular girl with a heart-of-gold role. Tamara’s life soon turns for the worst as her attempts to show her love for her helpful teacher gets rebuffed and her published article about drug-use in athletics puts her in the crosshairs of a couple of jocks with much to lose.
Typical of such teenage revenge horror films, the cruel jocks and popular kids concoct a plan to humiliate and embarrass Tamara, but just like those past films their plans backfire and the target of their plans gets killed during the the prank. The filmmaker really don’t add something new to this tried and tested formula. Instead of calling for the authorities to report the accidental death of their schoolmate, the kids decide, through the bullying by the alpha-male in the group, to bury Tamra instead and forget anything ever happened. This plan probably would’ve worked if Tamara wasn’t dabbling in witchcraft as ostracized teenagers are wont to do. Tamara’s spell prior to the prank to spellbind her teacher backfires as its activated by the spilling of her blood and to the surprise of the students who did her harm she returns alive, healthy and completely different the start of the new school week.
To say that Tamara returns utterly different in more ways than one would be an understatement. Ms. Dewan does a vampy, sometimes campy, job portraying the new and improved Tamara. Dewan goes from nerdy, plain-jane Tamara to ultra-sexy, barely there skirt wearing teen seductress whose touch does more than seduce those she has targeted for revenge. Jenna Dewan as the reborn Tamara steams up the screen with her overt sexuality and she practically saves the film from just being an ok, by-the-numbers horror film. Tamara was Ms. Dewan’s film from beginning to end and she does a very good job of keeping the story interesting even if it meant just being on the screen.
This film doesn’t break new ground in the realm of teen horror. In fact, it’s a mish-mash of alot of past teen horror flicks of the past that one could see the many influences in its story. Tamara was part Carrie, Black Christmas, The Craft and, more recently, Diablo Cody’s Jennifer’s Body. The direction was adequate at best and that’s really all one could hope for in a genre film like Tamara. What makes this film entertaining and worth watching was the joy of discovering the new scream queen talent in Jenna Dewan. Tamara might not be a great horror film, but Ms. Dewan sure more than tries to make it more than it’s B-movie pedigree.
Since it’s the holiday season, I’m going to do a bonus-sized, two-part edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation Film Trailers this week. So, assuming that I’m not upset by who wins the Amazing Race and that Julia Stiles survives tonight’s episode of Dexter, I’ll put together and post part two sometime later tonight. And if I am upset, expect to see it sometime Monday.
Anyway, here’s the first part of our special, pre-holiday edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation Trailers. Just a quick note, three of these films are apparently not available on DVD or even on VHS! To be honest, I imagine their trailers are probably a lot more fun than the actual movie.
1) Wicked Wicked
What is Anomorphic Duovision? Well, I did some research last night and I’ll explain it all after the trailer.
Duovision, it turns out, is a fancy way of saying, “Split screen.” Like you remember in 24 whenever Keifer Sutherland would start purring in that sexy voice of his, “Dammit! CHLOE!” and Chloe would go, “Get off my ass, Bauer!” Well, more often than not, that was shown in Anomoprhic Duovision. Brian DePalma also used it in Carrie when Sissy Spacek sets the prom on fire. In other words, none of that would have been possible if not for Wicked Wicked. Apparently, in Wicked Wicked, one half of the screen featured Tiffany Bolling singing and the detective guy investigating and the other half featured the killer doing his thing.
2) Dr. Minx
I give this trailer mad props for resisting the temptation to be all like, “And she makes house calls…”
3) Zaat
Believe it or not, this is not, as I originally assumed, a parody trailer. I did actual research (yes, believe it or not, I do try to verify these things) and I discovered that this was a real movie from 1972 and apparently, it made a lot of money playing the drive-in circuit (a.k.a. the grindhouses of the South).
4) Angel, Angel, Down We Go
From 1969 — His name is Bogart Peter Stuyvesant and he’s hot!
This little “shocker” from 1970 was directed by Andy Milligan, who was infamous for making movies that were so bad that they often ended up being effective despite themselves.
I’ve never actually seen this film but I’ve certainly heard about it. It has a reputation for being one of the worst horror films but I have to admit, I think the trailer has an oddly dream-like power. A Night To Dismember was the last film to be directed by Doris Wishman, who — when she first started making early “nudie” flicks (the best known of which was the Nude on the Moon) in the 50s — was one of the first women to ever actually direct a theatrically released film. After her husband died, Doris’s films changed from being rather innocent and campy stories about dorky guys trying to discreetly ogle nude women to being dark and puritanical tales of the sexually active being punished. A Night To Dismember was her final film and its troubled production has become legendary. I found it on DVD once and nearly bought it but, at the last minute, put it down and bought a copy of Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To instead. The next week, when I went back to buy A Night To Dismember, I discovered that the store had been shut down and permanently closed the day after I made my last purchase. That’s just freaking typical, isn’t it?
