This trailer has been out for nearly a month now so I’m a little late in sharing it. However, after having watched this trailer play before every single movie that I’ve seen since the month of October, I have to say that there is no film that I am more looking forward to seeing than American Hustle.
(You can check out the first trailer for American Hustle here.)
Happy Halloween!
Watching Night of the Living Dead is a bit of a Halloween tradition here at the Shattered Lens.
Check out Arleigh’s review here and enjoy the film!
So, guess what?
Originally, we were going to feature an Italian film called Dawn of the Mummy today. It’s the world’s only zombie/mummy hybrid and you guys would have loved it! Or maybe not. I have to admit that I don’t really love it. It’s actually a pretty bad movie but, at the same time, how many times do you get to see a movie that features both a mummy and zombies?
However, last night, the YouTube account that was hosting Dawn of the Mummy was deleted.
AGCK!
So, instead of showing you Dawn of the Mummy, we’re going to show you the original Little Shop of Horrors. It’s true that we featured Little Shop last Halloween but, oh well. It’s a fun little movie, especially when you consider that Roger Corman filmed it in 3 days. Jack Nicholson gets all the attention for playing a masochistic dental patient but I think the best performance is given by flower-eating Dick Miller.
From 1960, enjoy the original (non-musical) Little Shop of Horrors!
(However, speaking of the musical, I was in a community theater production of Little Shop of Horrors when I was 19. I so should have been cast as Audrey but instead, I was just a member of the “ensemble.” Bleh! Anyway, our director showed us the original Little Shop of Horrors and I was the only member of the cast to understand that Corman’s film was superior to the musical version. That said, I still tear up whenever I hear “Somewhere that’s green.”)
Katniss Everdeen is back! Here’s the final trailer for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and, it’s nice to say, this one is full of details that seem to have been included specifically for those of us who have read the book. The film itself will be released on November 22nd.
Here’s our first glimpse of X-Men: Days of Future Past. While there’s all sorts of things that I could say about this preview — mostly along the lines of how much I’m looking forward to seeing Michael Fassbender, Hugh Jackman, and James McAvoy all gathered together on the same screen — I think the trailer can certainly speak for itself.
With only two days left to go until we reach Halloween, now seems like the perfect time to watch a classic Vincent Price haunted house film. I’m talking, of course, about the original House On Haunted Hill.
Released in 1959, House On Haunted Hill tells the story of how an eccentric millionaire (played by Vincent Price, of course) rented out a “haunted” mansion for a party. invited over five guests, and offered each of them $10,000 on the condition that they manage to spend the entire night in the house. Along for the ride is Price’s unhappy wife (Carol Ohmart) and the house’s wonderfully neurotic caretaker (played by Elisha Cook, Jr, who played a lot of neurotic caretakers over the course of his long career).
House on Haunted Hill remains one of the classic B-movies. This is largely because of Price’s wonderfully over-the-top lead performance and William Castle’s equally over-the-top direction.
Back in 1959, theaters were equipped so that a plastic skeleton would appear to fly over the heads of the audience during some of the film’s more shocking moments. So, grab yourself a skeleton, take a seat, and enjoy House on Haunted Hill!
Sometimes even a movie with very little to recommend for it still has — well, something to recommend for it. Such is the case with this year’s direct-to-video, shot-on-HD indie horror effort Self Storage, a largely pathetic, unmemorable, boringly amoral (more on that before we’re through) piece of — uhhmm, work —- written and directed by, and starring, the supremely untalented Tom DeNucci.
Shot in Rhode Island, this is one of those flicks that’s pretty hard to see having much of an audience beyond the friends and immediate family of anyone involved in its production, being that every single character in it’s a complete douchebag, the blood n’ guts are both fairly tame and poorly realized, and its somewhat inventive premise is buried under layer upon layer of incompetent execution.
First, the particulars of the plot : go-nowhere pothead Jake (the aforementioned DeNucci) works as a security guard at a mini-storage facility. His friends, a half-assed assemblage of walking caricatures (the slut, the hot chick, the good girl, the horn-dog guy who gets a lot of pussy, the two other horn dog guys who get no pussy and are hopeless porn addicts) want to party at his workplace one night and figure it should be no sweat because Jake actually lives on the premises, as well. He says no at first, then says yes when he learns that his asshole boss (Eric Roberts) and flunky right-hand man (Micheal Berryman, whose name might not ring a bell to anyone but die-hard horror fans, but who even most casual viewers will recognize instantly thanks to The Hills Have Eyes, The Devil’s Rejects, and too many other flicks to mention — in short, he’s the tall, bald, weird-lookin’ dude) have cut some kind of shady deal with a local black marketeer (Jonathan Silverman — -speaking of supremely untalented), and intend to shut the place down the next day when they’re good and rich and fire their deadbeat part-timer’s ass in a heartbeat.
So — the party’s on, but everyone but Jake and his sweetheart get killed because the “big deal” that’s going down is a massive sale of kidnapped coeds for the purportedly thriving underground body parts and organs trade. Jake accidentally melts the folks who have already been kidnapped in an acid shower — long story — and finds that he and his dickhead friends have been tapped as replacements.
Yeah, I know — it sounds kinda creepy/interesting yet hopelessly stupid at the same time. Rest assured, dear reader, that the “hopelessly stupid” part of the equation wins the day in a hurry and you’ll be hoping against hope for everyone — even (and maybe especially) our purported “hero ” — to get killed both gruesomely and quickly. Unfortunately, things take a long time to get going, and aren’t very interesting once they do. DeNucci’s film is that rarest of things, then — a story about people you’re aching to see get murdered that bores you so fucking much that you don’t even end up caring how, when, or even if they die — you want ’em too, sure, but actively giving a damn is just too much effort.
So what about that whole “dully amoral” thing, then? Well, Jake ends up pocketing the take for his dead pals’ organs in the end, and rides off into the sunset with his ladyfriend, and I guess the two live happily ever after on the gruesome loot they’ve procured on the deceased bodies of their friends. Could be shocking, I suppose, if handled correctly, but it’s such a garbled mess that you honestly wonder if DeNucci even considered the ethical implications of his tasteless finale or if he just wrapped things up quickly because he didn’t know what the hell else to do at that point. The end result? It all falls pretty flat — just like the preceding 90-or-so minutes.
Still, as I mentioned at the outset, Self Storage has at least one thing going for it — Eric Roberts, who’s clearly in the “anything for a buck” phase of his career at this point. I don’t know about you, but if my script called for a psychotic cheeseball Viet Nam vet who owns a mini-storage business and trades in impromptu homemade (and fatal) surgery on the side, he’d be the first guy I’d call. And he certainly doesn’t disappoint here, hamming it up with the kind of overstated, fourth-wall-busting relish that makes his turn as the villainous Master in 1996’s Doctor Who TV movie look subtle by comparison. He’s a lot of fun to watch, and is clearly pushing the envelope of what he can get away with simply because he knows his chickenshit kid director doesn’t have the balls to step in and tell him to at least try to play it straight. I have a weird kind of respect for anyone willing to piss in his boss’s face so brazenly, and so I tip my hat to Mr. Roberts for clearly communicating with his outrageous performance exactly what he thinks of this steaming pile of dogshit he’s working on. Thanks for the money, ya snot-nosed little punk, now shut up, get the fuck out of my way, and let me do what I do best.
Beyond that, though, this is a movie with less than nothing going for it. Don’t waste your time and/or money picking it up on Blu-Ray or DVD, to be sure — and if you absolutely must watch it in spite of my dire warnings, then catch it on Netflix’s instant streaming queue, like I did. But honestly — you’re just better off leaving the whole thing alone and just trusting me when I say that Roberts is a blast to watch, but Self Storage is in no way worth sitting through just to see him ooze sleaze and disrespect for his (temporary) employers unless you’re really bored, stoned, or both.
Only four more days to go until Halloween so what better time to feature one the greatest horror films of all time, 1922’s Haxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages?
Directed by the Danish director Benjamin Christensen, Haxan is a quasi-documentary that, over the course of four separate sections, documents the history of witchcraft and superstition in Europe. Along with making a potent case that religion and superstition are largely the same thing, Haxan is best known for dramatizing various old folk tales. Though the film was made in 1922, its images of lustful devils and dark magic remain powerful to this day.
Enjoy Haxan!
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.
(I originally posted a version of this review over at HorrorCritic.Com. I’m sharing it here because I think it makes a nice companion piece to both Ryan’s review of the original Carrie and Leonard’s review of the remake.)
Lately, the 1999 horror sequel The Rage: Carrie 2 has been showing up fairly frequently on Encore and I have spent many an insomnia-filled night watching a wild-eyed Rachel use her brain to kill every high school football player on the planet. It seemed like every time I came across Carrie 2, the film was already halfway over. For some reason, I always seemed to find the movie at the exact moment that Rachel was using a stack of CDs to decapitate some of the most obnoxious jocks to ever crawl out from underneath a cinematic rock. However, once I managed to catch Carrie 2 from the start, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it’s actually a pretty good film and that — surprise! surprise! — it has a lot more than just bloody ,mayhem on its mind.
In Carrie 2, Rachel (well-played by Emily Bergl) is the half-sister of the original Carrie White. Like her sister, she can move things with her mind and, again much like Carrie, Rachel goes to a high school that is totally and completely dominated by jocks.
However, these are not just your typical high school football players. No, this is the most dangerous collection of clean-cut young sociopaths to be gathered in one place since the beer garden scene from Cabaret. With the exception of sensitive Jesse (played by Jason London, who is so handsome in this film that he looks like he belongs on the cover of a book), the entire football team is obsessed with seducing every virgin at the school. When Emily’s friend Lisa (played by Mena Suvari) is deflowered and then rejected by moronic jock Eric (Zachary Ty Bryan — yes, the oldest Home Improvement kid), she ends up killing herself in a scene that is surprisingly effective because of both Suvari’s sensitive performance and the fact that she was named Lisa.
Seriously, folks, be nice to the Lisas in your life.
Anyway, Rachel soon starts to investigate the circumstances behind Lisa’s suicide and this leads to the jocks hatching a ludicrously complex scheme to silence her. Much as in the first Carrie, it involves humiliating Rachel at the biggest party of the year and, just as in the first film, the end result is Rachel killing a lot of people.
I’m like a lot of filmgoers and horror fans in that I have gotten burned by so many bad sequels to classic movies that, as soon as I see a number in a title, warning flags go up. I tend to watch these films with the expectation that they’re going to both cheapen the original and not bring anything new to the table. However, Carrie 2, while hardly a perfect film, is an exception to the rule. No, it’s nowhere close to being as good as the original Carrie but, when taken on its own term, it’s an effective and entertaining movie.
Along with the strong performances from the entire cast (seriously, you will hate Zachary Ty Bryan’s character so much by the end of this movie), Carrie 2 is well-directed by veteran genre director Katt Shea. Wisely, Shea does not attempt to recreate the original film (despite the similarities in plot) but instead, she brings a unique, feminist perspective to the story. Under Shea’s direction, Emily Bergl makes Rachel into a strong, independent character. She may be victimized but — unlike Sissy Spacek in the original — she is never a victim.
There’s a lot of scenes that stick in my mind from Carrie 2. The film’s final massacre is outrageous and over-the-top and it’s all the more effective because of it. (It also features death by shattered lenses and I have to admit that this myopic reviewer always cringes whenever she sees that scene.) However, to me, Carrie 2 is most disturbing when it explores the pathology behind the film’s doomed football team. One need only watch the scene where the entire team gets their heads shaved, transforming them from being individuals into a mass of virtually indistinguishable teammates, to understand that Katt Shea was looking to accomplish more here than just making a run-of-the-mill horror sequel.
And, to a large extent, she succeeded.
