Amazing Spider-Man 2 wasn’t the only trailer released this week. There was also the trailer for Nurse 3D, which appears to be a remake of The Roommate — except this time, they’re nurses, it’s in 3D, and the trailer’s broad hints of lesbian menace would seem to suggest that Nurse 3D comes from a parallel universe where Blue Is The Warmest Color was never made.
He’s back….
For today’s entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia, we take a look at one of my favorites of the old school British horror films, 1970’s Scream and Scream Again.
Taking place in the near future, Scream and Scream Again follows three seemingly unconnected stories.
In the first — and, to me, the most disturbing — story, an unnamed London man collapses while out jogging. When he wakes up, he finds himself in a hospital. He is tended to by a nurse who refuses to speak to him. Whenever he falls asleep, his limbs are surgically removed one-by-one. While we never learn much about the man, his scenes are perhaps the most difficult to watch. Everything from the starkness of the hospital to the nurse’s lack of concern and empathy for her patient contributes towards making these some of the most genuinely nightmarish scenes that I’ve ever seen.
While the unnamed jogger is being slowly taken apart, the London police are far more interested in solving the “Vampire Killer” case. Keith (Michael Gothard) is a serial killer who picks up young women in nightclubs and then drinks their blood. When, after an exciting chase, the police finally do catch him, they attempt to handcuff Keith to a car bumper. Keith responds by ripping off his own hand and running into the night. The investigation into Keith eventually leads to an eminent scientist named Dr. Browning (Vincent Price). However, Fremont (Christopher Lee), the head of the British secret service, orders the police to drop the case because Browning is apparently doing very important work for the government.
Meanwhile, in an unnamed country in Eastern Europe, secret police officer Konratz (Marshall Jones) ruthlessly climbs his way to the top of the service by murdering his superiors (including Peter Cushing). When a British spy is captured in his country, Konratz contacts Fremont and offers to exchange the spy for all the information that Scotland Yard has gathered about the Vampire Killer case…
Perhaps the best way to describe Scream and Scream Again would be “joyfully chaotic.” The film’s three separate storylines do all come together during the final ten minutes and the film’s climax does make a lot more sense than it really has any right to but, up until that moment, a lot of the pleasure from Scream and Scream Again comes from seeing just how many different plots and subplots director Gordon Hessler can juggle in one film without losing the audience. Fortunately, Scream and Scream Again is a wonderfully entertaining horror/sci-fi/conspiracy hybrid, one that remains compulsively watchable despite the fact that it often doesn’t make much sense.
Of course, one of the main reasons to see Scream and Scream Again is because it features three icons of horror cinema. Unfortunately, Cushing isn’t on-screen long enough to make much of an impression while Lee basically just has an extended cameo. Vincent Price doesn’t show up until fairly late into the film but once he does, he wastes no time in making an impression. Even by the standard of Vincent Price, his performance in this film is a bit over-the-top.
But you know what?
It’s exactly the performance that this film needs. The film itself is so joyfully chaotic and disjointed that Price fits right in. The triumph of Scream and Scream Again is that it creates (and makes us believe in) a world where it only makes sense that the final solution would lie with Vincent Price.
Finally, Scream and Scream Again serves as a wonderful time capsule for those of us who may be fascinated by the swinging 60s and 70s but, as a result of being born a few decades too late, will never get a chance to experience them firsthand. For us, Scream and Scream Again will always be worth it for the scenes of Keith getting his mod on at a London discotheque.
Scream and Scream Again is a film that everyone should see at least once in their life. Just don’t go jogging afterwards…
Other Entries In The 44 Days of Paranoia
For today’s entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia, I want to take a quick look at a very good movie from the year 2000 that not many seem to know about, Cheaters.
During my senior year of high school, I always wore a short skirt on any day that I had a test in my algebra class.
Why?
Because I was a cheater.
Back when I was still a student, I always struggled when it came to my math classes. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do the work as much as it was that the work just bored me. Whenever my teacher was talking about square roots and x+y and all the rest, I was usually busy daydreaming about anything other than what I was supposed to be learning.
Fortunately, my sister Erin had been one year ahead of me in high school and had saved all of her old tests and quizzes. Since we both had the same algebra teacher, I started using her old tests as a study guide. It quickly became obvious that our teacher was simply reusing the same tests from year-to-year. While the order of the problems might occasionally change, the solutions remained the same.
Every test day, I would wear a skirt and, right before class, I would write the answers on my thigh. If the teacher walked by my desk while I was taking the test, I would just pull down on my skirt. Fortunately, the teacher was a male so even if he did suspect that I was cheating, it’s not like he could tell me to lift up my skirt or, for that matter, even get caught trying to look down at my legs.
And that’s how I managed to pass algebra without ever paying attention to anything that was said in class. I know that I should probably feel guilty about cheating but, to be honest, I don’t. If I had it to do all over again, I would do the exact same thing.
Perhaps that’s why I related to the character of Jolie Fitch in Cheaters.
Jolie (played by Jena Malone) is a junior at Chicago’s Steinmetz High. Jolie is one of the only students at Steinmetz to be more interested in academics than athletics. She also idolizes English teacher Jerry Plecki (Jeff Daniels). When Steinmetz’s buffoonish principal (Paul Sorvino) forces Jerry to take the unwanted job of coaching the school’s Academic Decathlon team, Jolie volunteers to help Plecki recruit an unlikely team of misfits and outsiders.
At the regional competition, the Steinmetz team just barely qualifies to move onto the state competition. However, no one on the team feels that they have a shot at beating the team from the far wealthier Whitney Young Magnet High School. As quickly becomes obvious, Whitney Young specifically goes out of their way to recruit the smartest students they can find and, as a result, they have won the state competition for five years straight.
Angered over the smugly elitist attitude of Whitney Young’s coach, Plecki obsessively pushes his team to study and prepare. However, with the state competition quickly approaching, the Steinmetz Team comes into possession of a copy of the test for the state finals. Obsessed with defeating Whitney Young, Plecki suggests that the students cheat. After being pressured by both Plecki and Jolie, the rest of the team agrees to do so.
When Steinmetz subsequently wins state, the Whitney Young coach immediately demands an investigation into how Steinmetz could have possibly made such a dramatic improvement in just the period of a few months.
However, the rest of Chicago is charmed by the story of how the Steinmetz team came out of nowhere to win and Plecki and his students become celebrities. However, when one spiteful student threatens to reveal the secret, both Plecki and his team are forced to scramble to cover up their cheating and prevent the truth from being exposed.
Cheaters is based on a true story, though I can’t tell you for sure how closely the filmmakers stuck to the facts of the case. (If you look at the film’s imdb page, you’ll find a lot of negative comments left by a lot of angry students from Whitney Young). However, what I can say is that Cheaters felt true. By that, I mean that Cheaters captured both the importance of competition in high school and the fact that, when you’re a teenager, everything is a drama and, as a result, it’s a lot easier to justify things that, as an adult, you would refuse to ever consider.
When I was high school, I was involved with both the Drama Club and Speech and Debate and watching Cheaters brought back a lot of memories. Cheaters gets all of the small details right — everything from the combination of exhaustion and exhilaration that comes from competing at an all-day tournament to the awkward attempts of “mature” adults to understand why winning is so important when you’re in high school.
Cheaters is also blessed with some excellent performances. As Whitney Young’s smug coach, Robert Joy is properly loathsome. Paul Sorvino brings some much-needed comic relief to the film and the scene where he awkwardly dances to the theme from Rocky is priceless.
The film, however, is truly dominated by Jena Malone and Jeff Daniels. As the film’s nominal protagonists, Malone and Daniels both give wonderfully nuanced performances. When the film starts, you find yourself rooting for both of them because not only are they likable performers but their characters seem so sincere in their desire to win. However, as the film progresses, we start to see the small chinks in their armor. We see how obsessed Jolie is with protecting Plecki. Meanwhile, Plecki goes from being an almost idealized teacher to being something of a megalomaniac. By the end of the film, we realize that we know far less about Jerry Plecki then we thought we did. Jeff Daniels gives a performance that forces us to draw our own conclusions about Plecki and his motivations.
Some people might question reviewing a film like Cheaters in a series about conspiracy-themed films. However, though it may not be as obvious as with a film like Three Days Of The Condor or JFK, Cheaters is a conspiracy film. Beyond the conspiracy to win the Academic Decathlon by cheating, Cheaters is about the much more subtle conspiracy that will always cause students who go to schools like Steinmetz to be viewed as being less important than the students at a school like Whitney Young. Cheaters is a film about a conspiracy, the conspiracy of cultural and economic elitism.
It’s a conspiracy that, Cheaters suggests, leaves many people with only two options: surrender or cheat.
Other entries in the 44 Days Of Paranoia:
For today’s entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia, we’re taking a look at Barry Levinson’s 1997 political satire, Wag The Dog.
Wag the Dog opens with a White House in crisis. With two weeks to go until the Presidential election, it’s been discovered that the incumbent President has had a brief dalliance with a girl scout. Up until the scandal became public, the President was enjoying at 17 point lead in the polls. Now, that lead is about to evaporate unless something can be done to keep the American public from thinking about the President’s personal life.
Significantly, the President himself never appears on-screen. We never learn his position on the issues. We never hear about anything he’s done during his first term. We don’t even know what political party he belongs to. (However, his opponent is played by Craig T. Nelson so I’m going to assume that the President is a Democrat. Because, seriously, it’s hard for me to imagine Nelson being anything other than a Republican…) The President remains a shadowy and insubstantial figure who, in the end, represents nothing.
Instead of getting to know the President, we instead spend the film with the aides who have to clean up after his mess. One of those aides, Winifred Ames (Anne Heche), calls in a legendary (and rather sinister) political PR man, Conrad Bean (Robert De Niro). Conrad announces that the only way to save the campaign is to distract the American public with a quick and totally fake war with Albania. Why Albania? According to Conrad, Albania has a sinister name and nobody knows anything about it.
To help create this fake war, Conrad recruits Hollywood film producer, Stanley Motts (a hilariously manic Dustin Hoffman). Much as Conrad is a legend in politics, Stanley is a legend in Hollywood. Stanley enthusiastically jumps into the project of creating a fake war of Albania, manufacturing everything from fake war footage to patriotic songs to anything else necessary to rally the American public. Denis Leary shows up as a mysterious figure known as the Fad King and schemes how to make war with Albania the latest trend. Willie Nelson sings a song to stir the spirit of every patriotic American. A very young Kirsten Dunst is recruited to play a terrified orphan in staged Albanian atrocity footage. A shell-shocked vet (Woody Harrelson) is cast as the Albanian War’s first hero. Stanley greets every problem with an enthusiastic exclamation of, “This is nothing!”
Along the way, a rather odd friendship develops between the secretive Conrad and the overly verbose Stanley. However, when Stanley, who often laments that he’s never won an Oscar, starts to complain about the fact that he’s never going to get any recognition for his “greatest production,” Conrad finds himself forced to reconsider their relationship.
Wag the Dog was first released in 1997 and, thanks to David Mamet’s darkly comedic script and Barry Levinson’s brisk direction, the film feels incredibly prophetic. Indeed, all the film needs is for someone to mention making the war a trending topic and it would be impossible to tell that it was made 16 years ago. Wag the Dog accomplishes the best thing that any political satire can hope to accomplish: it makes you question everything. Whenever one watches a news report triumphantly bragging about the latest done strike, it’s hard not to feel that Stanley Motts would approve.
Other entries in the 44 Days Of Paranoia:
I am not a huge Star Wars fan.
Don’t get me wrong. I respect the fact that the movies are important to a lot of my close friends and fellow movie bloggers. My boyfriend loves the first three Star Wars films and I’ve told him that if he ever wants me to wear a gold bikini and a chain around my neck, I’ll do it. It’s just that, on a personal level, the Star Wars films don’t do much for me. When people mention Star Wars, I usually think about how I fell asleep 10 minutes into Attack of the Clones and then when my date woke me up at the end of the movie, my bra had mysteriously been undone.
That said, I still knew that when I started my series of Christmas Past posts, I would have to post something about The Star Wars Holiday Special. The Holiday Special aired way back in 1978 and it was apparently such a disaster that George Lucas has spent the past 3 and a half decades trying to convince people that it doesn’t exist.
Perhaps that’s why, when I did a search for the Holiday Special on YouTube, I came across a lot of videos that had been either taken down or had their audio tracks removed.
However, I was able to find a 15 minutes video from a YouTube user who goes by the name of StarWarsFan1975. The Star Wars Holiday Special Retrospective features some background material on the Holiday Special and some of the special’s more bizarre moments.
Enjoy!
The Gotham Awards were awarded earlier tonight. Here are the winners:
X = Winner
BEST PICTURE
“12 Years a Slave”
“Ain’t Them Bodies Saints”
“Before Midnight”
X – “Inside Llewyn Davis”
“Upstream Color”
BEST ACTOR
Chiwetel Ejiofor in “12 Years a Slave”
Oscar Isaac in “Inside Llewyn Davis”
X – Matthew McConaughey in “Dallas Buyers Club”
Robert Redford in “All Is Lost”
Isaiah Washington in “Blue Caprice”
BEST ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett in “Blue Jasmine”
Scarlett Johansson in “Don Jon”
X – Brie Larson in “Short Term 12”
Amy Seimetz in “Upstream Color”
Shailene Woodley in “The Spectacular Now”
BEST BREAKTHROUGH ACTOR
Dane DeHaan in Kill Your Darlings
Kathryn Hahn in Afternoon Delight
X – Michael B. Jordan in “Fruitvale Station”
Lupita Nyong’o in “12 Years a Slave”
Robin Weigert in “Concussion”
BEST BREAKTHROUGH DIRECTOR
X – Ryan Coogler for “Fruitvale Station”
Adam Leon for “Gimme the Loot”
Alexandre Moors for “Blue Caprice”
Stacie Passon for “Concussion”
Amy Seimetz for “Sun Don’t Shine”
BEST DOCUMENTARY
X – “The Act of Killing”
“The Crash Reel”
“First Cousin Once Removed”
“Let the Fire Burn”
“Our Nixon”
The Gothams themselves are not considered to be that strong of a precursor to the Oscars. However, 12 Years A Slave has been so widely perceived as being such a lock for Best Picture that any time it loses to another film, it’s going to be noticed.
For today’s entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia, I want to take a look at the underrated horror/sci-fi/paranoia film, God Told Me To.
This film was first released in 1976. At the time of that initial theatrical run, the film was called God Told Me To Kill. That title proved to be rather controversial and the film was promptly pulled from circulation and then re-released under the new title of Demon. However, since Demon was such a painfully generic title, the name change didn’t do much to help the movie at the box office and, again, it was yanked from circulation and the title was changed for a third time. Under the name God Told Me To, the film was once again re-released.
Not surprisingly, given this chaotic release history, God Told Me To never quite got the attention that it deserved. Over the years, the film has developed a cult following among those (like me) who have discovered the film on DVD or Blu-ray. But God Told Me To still remains something of an unknown film.
In God Told Me To, Tony LoBianco gives an excellent performance as Peter Nicholas, a tough New York police detective and devout Catholic. As the film starts, Nicolas is burned out on his job. He’s separated from his mentally unstable wife (played by Sandy Dennis) but can’t bring himself to divorce her and marry his girlfriend (Deborah Raffin) because it would go against his religious beliefs.
Nicholas finds himself investigating a serious of seemingly random murders that all have two things in common. First, the murderers are all “average” people, the types who would you never expect to commit such terrible crimes. Secondly, when captured, each murderer dismisses his crimes by explaining, “God told me to.” As Nicholas investigates, he discovers that every murderer can be linked with a mysterious figure named Bernard Phillips (played the late, great Richard Lynch).
Nicholas’ investigation leads him to discover that Phillips was the product of a virgin birth, causing Nicholas to both question his own religious faith and to wonder wither or not Phillips is just another crazy cult leader or if he might be God himself…
And that’s about all I can tell you without running the risk of totally spoiling the film. Let’s just say that God Told Me To is one of those films where nothing is quite as it seems. Since the film establishes early on that literally anyone could be a potential killer, the viewer is forced to watch every character who wanders through the scene, looking for any hint that he or she is about to snap. This is a film that keeps you off-balance and, unlike a lot of horror films, it features a twist that’s both plausible and unexpected.
God Told Me To was directed by Larry Cohen, an exploitation veteran who has been responsible for some of the most thought-provoking B-movies in cinematic history. Like many of Cohen’s films, God Told Me To is something of a mess but it’s a fascinating mess. Both Peter Nicholas and Bernard Phillips prove to be fascinating characters and, during the film’s final third, Cohen takes both of them in unexpected directions.
God Told Me To is one of those films that every fan of horror and cult cinema should see at least once. If you haven’t seen it, now is the perfect time for you to discover it for yourself.
Other entries in the 44 Days Of Paranoia:
Today’s entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia is a low-budget British film called Flying Blind. Made in 2012, Flying Blind got a limited release in the U.S. earlier this year and is currently showing up on cable.
Flying Blind tells the story of Frankie (Helen McCrory), an aerospace engineer who designs drones for the British military. She also lectures at Bristol University and this is where she meets the much younger Kahil (Najib Oudghiri). Despite the difference in their ages, Frankie and Kahil start an affair. As Frankie becomes more and more obsessed with her younger lover, she also starts to realize that there’s a lot about his background that he seems reluctant to share with her. Frankie’s prejudiced father (Kenneth Cranham) immediately distrusts Kahil. When MI5 contacts Frankie and tells her that Kahil is “a person of interest,” she starts to do her own investigation into his background. Is Kahil a terrorist or is he just a victim of a paranoid society? The answer, to be honest, is not that much of a surprise.
I really wanted to like Flying Blind because it was obviously made with the best of intentions. It was also made for only £345,000 and we always want to support low-budget, independent films that attempt to tell intelligent stories about intelligent people. Unfortunately, this idealistic desire can sometimes lead people like me to make excuses for films that just aren’t that good. When I look at some of the positive reviews that have been posted online, it’s hard not to feel like there’s a lot of people making excuses for Flying Blind.
The truth of the matter is that Flying Blind takes an interesting premise and then explores it in the least interesting, most predictable way possible. For a film that’s attempting to say something about paranoia and ambiguity, it leaves very little doubt about who is in the right and who is in the wrong. Perhaps the film’s biggest problem is that Helen McCrory and Najib Oudghiri have next to no chemistry. Their relationship never feels genuine and, while I applaud the film’s attempt to portray a mature sexual relationship, the sex scenes themselves are rather awkward. It’s easy to understand why everyone in the film is so quick to assume that Oudghiri must be using McCrory because they never make sense as a couple.
Flying Blind tells an important story. It just doesn’t tell it very well.
Other entries in the 44 Days Of Paranoia:
Happy Holidays!
Some are celebrating Christmas.
Some are celebrating Hanukkah.
Some are celebrating Kwanzaa.
Some people are celebrating nothing and won’t shut up about it.
For me personally, this is my favorite time of year. Admittedly, a lot of it is because I love getting presents. But even beyond that, there’s always been something special about the holiday season.
Last October, for Halloween, we shared some old horror-themed television episodes and short films from the past and the reaction we got was pretty good. So, why not do the same for the month of December? From tonight until the end of 2013, I will be sharing a visions of Christmas past. I hope you enjoy them!
Let’s start things out with this short, silent adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. First released in 1910, this may very well be the very first film adaptation of the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge. It was directed by J. Searle Dawley, who, that same year, also directed the first film adaptation of Frankenstein. The same actor who played Frankenstein’s Monster in that film, Charles Ogle, shows up here as Bob Cratchit. Scrooge is played by Marc McDermott.
As for the film itself, it’s obviously a very condensed telling of Dickens’ famous tale but the special effects are rather impressive for 1910. Even better, there’s no Tiny Tim. Seriously, Tiny Tim always annoyed me.
Enjoy!
