Today’s scene that I love comes from Ed Wood’s classic plea for world peace, Plan 9 From Outer Space.
Tag Archives: Film
What Lisa Marie and the Snarkalecs Watched Last Night #78: Battledogs (dir by Alexander Yellen)
On Saturday night, the Snarkalecs and I watched the SyFy original movie, Battledogs. (Also watching was a mentally unstable moron from Buffalo, NY named Michael Conklin. But more about him later…)
Why Were We Watching It?
Because we’re snarkalecs and that’s what snarkalecs do.
What Was It About?
Donna Voorhees (Ariana Richards) is a nature photographers who visits our friend to the north and gets bitten by a Canadian lycanthrope. When she returns to New York, she ends up transforming into a werewolf herself and manages to kill nearly everyone at JFK Airport. Everyone that she doesn’t kill is infected with the werewolf virus.
Donna and the rest of the infected are captured by the military. Under the watch of the sinister Lt. Gen. Monning (Dennis Haysbert), the infected are doped up with tranquilizers and left to aimlessly wander around a prison. With the help of a sympathetic major (Craig Sheffer) and a scientist (Kate Vernon), Donna and the rest of the infected escape the prison and soon New York is overrun by werewolves.
Meanwhile, the U.S. President (Bill Duke) spends a lot of time sitting out in the middle of Central Park and looking depressed…
What Worked?
Battledogs was produced by the Asylum. As soon as I saw the words “The Asylum Presents…” at the beginning of the opening credits, I knew that Battledogs was going to be a lot of fun.
Battledogs was surprisingly well-cast. While Craig Sheffer made for a dull hero, Dennis Haysbert was a great villain. Admittedly, he was one of those villains who spent the whole movie talking about his plans as opposed to actually carrying them out but, fortunately. Haysbert has a great voice. Haysbert turned Lt. Gen. Monning into a genuinely menacing character.
The scenes in which the tranquilized infected wander about in a daze had a nicely surreal feel to them. While watching them, I actually compared them to a similar scene from Jean Rollin’s Night of the Hunted. That’s probably going a bit too far but still, they were handled very well.
On a final note, Bill Duke plays perhaps the most ineffectual president in the history of ineffectual presidents. Speaking as someone who has little faith in governmental authority, I found Duke’s performance to be the most realistic part of the film.
What Did Not Work?
Oh, I suppose there are things I could complain about. I could point out that the film may have been set in New York but it was obviously (and I do mean obviously) filmed in Canada. (Actually, no, it was not! As Mike Conklin so politely points out in the comments below, Battledogs was filmed in Buffalo and yes, a look at the imdb does confirm that this film — despite seeming very Canadian, was indeed filmed in New York. I apologize for the careless error. — LMB) There were also a few plot holes that I could talk about if I felt like being nit-picky.
But you know what?
There is nobody worse than someone who would actually get nit-picky about an Asylum film. Asylum Films are made for audiences who have a sense of humor and their “flaws” are ultimately a very intentional part of the fun. The Asylum makes fast-paced, unpretentious films for people who want to be entertained for 90 minutes. You know what you’re going to get when you see “The Asylum” name and, unlike most major studio films, Asylum films can be counted on to deliver exactly what they promise. This film promised battle dogs and it delivered.
Therefore, the entire film worked.
“Oh my God! Just like me!” Moments
To be honest, despite featuring not one but two female leads, Battledogs was a pretty masculine film. The emphasis was definitely on people either shooting guns or beating each other up. That’s not necessarily a criticism because, if New York was overrun by werewolves, I imagine there was be a certain amount of societal breakdown. However, the fact of the matter is that I’m scared of guns and the only fights I’ve ever been in have involved a lot of hair-pulling and little else. As a result, there really weren’t any “Oh my God! Just like me!” moments in Battledogs.
That said, Ariana Richards’ character reminded me of my sister, the Dazzling Erin, because they’re both talented photographers.
Lessons Learned
Apparently, the best way to avoid being killed in a nuclear blast is to jump into the Hudson River right when the bomb goes off. In today’s unpredictable world, that’s a good thing to know.
Everyone Else Is Talking About The “Evil Dead” Remake, So I Guess I Will, Too
Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat — first-time director Fede Alvarez’s new remake/”reimagining” of Sam Raimi’s 1981 classic The Evil Dead (this time going out minus the article at the beginning of the title, so it’s just Evil Dead, thank you very much) is not, as its ad poster claims, “the most terrifying film you will ever experience.” That’s actually a gutsier tag line than it sounds on first reading, since it’s essentially promising that not only is this flick scarier than anything you’ve already seen, it’s scarier than anything else you’re ever going to see for the rest of your life. It can’t live up to that, period — and truth be told, it’s not even very scary at all.
Which isn’t to say that it’s bad or anything. In many key respects — eschewing CGI for “real” special effects, not even trying to cast somebody new in the role of Ash since absolutely anyone would suffer in comparison to Bruce Campbell (who, along with Raimi, is on board as at least an air-quote producer on this one) — Alvarez and his cohorts (including, it pains me to say, co-screenwriter Diablo Cody, who I was fairly certain was going to fuck things up here in some way, shape, or form but, pleasingly, doesn’t) get a lot of what they’re trying to do here right. The film is gory beyond belief, moves at nearly the same breakneck pace as its ’81 template, there’s a sublimely wrong tree-rape (yes, you read that correctly) scene, the script provides a believably updated reason for why our five protagonists are getting together in a remote cabin in the woods — that looks very much like the original, might I add — in the first place ( I won’t spell it out too specifically but it gives new meaning to the old “withdrawal’s a bitch” cliche), and the performances are, on the whole, fairly solid.
They’ve also wisely chosen not to mess with the whole “haunted book inked in human blood and bound in human skin that releases untold evil onto the world” premise, so points all around for not only not messing with what worked in the original, but also for not trying to catch lightning in a bottle twice by hewing too closely to it. Alvarez seems to have gone into this one knowing what he should and shouldn’t play around with, and that puts him a step ahead of your average horror remake director.
Here’s the rub, though — whenever you’re trying to update the look and feel of a $375,000 production on a budget of $14 million, something’s bound to get lost in translation, and no matter how hard it tries, Evil Dead circa 2013 just can’t capture the grittiness, the grime, the immediacy and, dare I say it, the heart of its progenitor. Alvarez is definitely going for an old-school approach here, and I commend him for that, but it’s still (and obviously) not old-school in actuality. Once you poke beneath the paper-thin surface, it becomes fairly obvious that any successes the new film has are more or less of the cosmetic and superficial variety. It looks good, sure — but it still feels kinda wrong, even though it’s doing its level best to cover that up by, again to its credit, not giving you too much time to think.
I mentioned before that I by and large liked the cast — Shiloh Fernandez, Lou Taylor Pucci, Jessica Lucas, Elizabeth Blackmore and, especially, Jane Levy as our doomed (or is she?) central “heroine,” Mia — all do a nice job. But none of them especially stand out, either, which isn’t too bad a mini-metaphor for the movie itself as a whole — it’s thoroughly competent in terms of its execution, but there’s not much extra “spark” to the proceedings. Alvarez seems to understand the essential ingredients for making a solid, respectful, won’t-piss-you-off updating of a classic, but he’s got some way to go before he can create a genuine classic from whole cloth himself.
In some respects, there’s really not a whole lot he can do about that — The Evil Dead was shot in a remote Tennessee cabin while Evil Dead constructed its own location in New Zealand that set out to ape the look and feel of middle-of-nowhere USA as best it can — but that’s just endemic of the greater problem at work here, namely that this is a story that just plain not only doesn’t need a so-called “upgrade,” but literally can’t survive one with its celluloid soul intact. I give Alvarez all the kudos in the world for trying, and for at least understanding the surface elements of what made the original the undeniable classic that it’s rightly hailed as, but so much of what made Raimi’s flick the singular triumph that it was can never be duplicated. Hence, I guess, why I just referred to it as a “singular” work. In short, while we’re still talking about the first one some 32 years after its release, I’ll be damn surprised if people are talking about this remake very much even a year from now.
Still — they did what they could here, I suppose. I had an exchange with a couple of friends on facebook earlier today about the endless stream of remakes in general that we’re forced to navigate, and it made me realize that at some unspecified, silently-arrived-at point, I went from going into these things thinking “I hope they get it right this time” to “dear God I hope they don’t fuck this one up.” It’s a subtle shift, sure, but it certainly speaks volumes about the general performance of the studios’ big-budget-remake machine. I’m pleased to say that Alvarez et. al. don’t fuck this one up (and whatever you do, hang around until the credits are over — you’re guaranteed to leave with a smile on your face even if you don’t actually like the film at all), but it is what it is. The Evil Dead 1981 was a product of blood, sweat, tears, determination, and — weird as it may sound — love, put together by folks who didn’t always know what they were doing but were always giving it more than their best effort. Evil Dead 2013 is, for all its attempts to duplicate the trappings of its predecessor, a professionally-executed Hollywood production. You tell me which is gonna be better.
Hell — tell me which has to be.
A Few Thoughts On The Passing of Roger Ebert
Film critic Roger Ebert passed away today. He was 70 years old.
For a lot of people, Roger Ebert was American film criticism. They waited to hear his opinion of every new film and that opinion was often cited as if it was gospel. I think most people are like me in that they couldn’t tell you when they first heard the name “Roger Ebert” or when they first learned he was a film critic. Instead, he was one of those pop cultural figures whose existence we took for granted. Just as there would always be movies, there would always be a review from Roger Ebert.
I have to admit that it was rare that I ever agreed with Ebert’s opinion. I once posted a comment to that effect over on the AwardsDaily website and I ended up getting yelled at by the site administrators. I really shouldn’t have been surprised by the reaction. Ebert was (and is) a hero and an inspiration to a whole generation of film bloggers and online critics but very few of them seem to understand what made Ebert a great critic.
Roger Ebert was a great critic not because he was opinionated but because — unlike so many other self-proclaimed film critics — he sincerely loved film and that love came through in his reviews. When Roger Ebert was critical, it wasn’t because he was trying to show how clever or sardonic he could be. Instead, it was because he understood what film was truly capable of achieving.
(Incidentally, when you see certain pompous and self-important online film critics promoting themselves as the logical heir to the legacy of Roger Ebert, remind them that Roger not only wrote the script for Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls but that he was also never ashamed to admit it and that it was a pretty good screenplay to boot! Film snobs may have embraced Ebert but Ebert rarely embraced them.)
As I said, I often did not agree with Roger Ebert. He was rarely a friend to the horror genre and he was critical of a lot of films I loved and he gave positive reviews to a lot of films I hated (like Rod Lurie’s Straw Dogs, for example). I usually tuned him out whenever he started going on about politics. Within an hour of his death, the political ghouls over on twitter were already quoting him, not about the films that he loved but, instead, on his views about President Obama, as if the only thing that mattered was that they had lost a vote in the next election. Politics are temporary. Films are forever.
However, the great thing about Roger Ebert was that you didn’t have to agree with him in order to enjoy and respect him as a film critic. Ebert was opinionated but he was rarely shrill. Unlike a lot of the critics who claim to have been inspired by him, Ebert didn’t talk down to readers. Ebert may have been the most prominent film critic in America but he never stopped writing like a guy who just happened to love movies. In a world where every critic with a web site is currently bragging about how powerful she believes herself to be, this humility made Ebert a pleasure to read. He was a witty and knowledgeable writer and his brave battle with cancer was both heart-breaking and inspiring.
With the passing of Roger Ebert, the world has lost a man who truly loved films.
A lot of the current wave of self-proclaimed film critics and award divas could learn a lot from his example.
Roger Ebert, R.I.P.
Happy Easter!
Happy Easter from the Shattered Lens!
And what better way to celebrate Easter but by watching a few clips from the 1972 killer rabbit film, Night of the Lepus?
Trailer: Before Midnight
Yay! Finally, a movie trailer that doesn’t feature anything blowing up…
Trailer: White House Down
This film appears to be tailor-made for those film goers who want to sit through a left-wing version of Olympus Has Fallen. Whereas Olympus featured the White House being attacked by an international threat, White House Down features the White House being attacked by American insurgents.
White House Down was directed by one of my least favorite directors, Roland Emmerich. However, there’s also a chance that Channing Tatum might take his shirt off at some point during this film so I’ll probably end up seeing it.
Personally, I just hope the film starts with Derek Jacobi desperately jumping out of a cab and running into a theater so he can challenge everything we’ve ever believed about national security.
Any Takers For “Spring Breakers” ?
So, we’ve finally discovered what it takes for Harmony Korine to go mainstream — a couple of established stars, a little T&A, and hey! — he’s in the club. Hell, he can even manage to get himself invited onto Letterman outta the deal — although apparently he can’t stick around for long. Still, the fact remains — long (hell, decades) after you’d given up on the very notion it would ever happen, Hollywood has opened its doors to the guy who gave us Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy, and Trash Humpers. And truth be told, he didn’t have to dumb down his sensibilities all that much in the process.
Okay, yeah — Spring Breakers is full of Girls Gone Wild-type footage of hot young flesh parading around in bikinis (or less), muscle-heads partying in jock straps, beer bongs being poured on impossibly tight stomachs, impromptu lesbian make-out sessions, yadda yadda yadda. But it’s piled on so thick and so repetitiously that there’s no way Korine can possibly be engaging in anything but parody of the Bacchanalian subculture he’s depicting. The film never takes itself too seriously, even when it ventures into some pretty dark territory, and it seems to me that our guy Harmony is sending a none-too-sly message to the Tinseltown suits who previously wouldn’t have touched his work with a 50-foot pole : “this is what you want? Okay. But we’re doing it my way.”
And frankly, that “way” hasn’t changed much — the ultra-naturalistic hand-held camerawork, hallucinatory pacing and editing, and free-from improvisation (as usual, the story per se here doesn’t seem to follow any set “script” as you or I understand the term and appears mostly to consist of the actors getting into character and then ad-libbing from there) of his earlier efforts remains, and the end result is more akin to a series of “found footage” snippets pieced together pretty haphazardly than anything else. The setting may be different this time around, but the basic Korine modus operandi is essentially the same.
In short, if you’ve been following this guy’s career over the course of the pas couple of decades, you’ll only think you’re getting into something different with Spring Breakers, but by the time Ellie Goulding’s “Lights” plays over the end credits, there’s no doubt that this work fits in very comfortably with the rest of his directorial oeuvre. Think Trash Humpers in bikinis, or Gummo with “hotties” rather than genetic rejects, and you won’t be too far off thSo, here’s the deal — four friends (Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson and Korine’s wife, Rachel) at a piece of shit college in piece of shit Kentucky are bored out of their minds and want to go down to St. Pete to live it up over Spring Break. There’s just one problem — they don’t have enough money. In order to alleviate that situation, three of them (Gomez’s character — named, appropriately enough, Faith — a devoutly religious young woman most of the time sits it out) decide to pull a heist at a local fast-food chicken stand using those purportedly realistic-looking squirt guns the cops are always telling us fooled ’em whenever they shoot some poor kid who was holding one dead. They get away with it and head down for a week of sun, fun, sex, booze, and drugs — but they don’t get away with that, because they’re busted at a party that gets out of hand. Don’t fret too much, though, friends, as they aren’t forced to cool their heels in jail for very long. A local dope dealer/wannabe-rapper who goes by the handle of Alien (James Franco, doing his best impression of Gary Oldman in True Romance , just substitute hip-hop for reggae) takes a liking to them when he sees them in court and bails ’em out en masse. Does he have ulterior motives? Of course, and watching him use pimp-like “turning out” psychological manipulation on the ladies in order to seduce them into into being hench-women in his pot-selling-and-armed-robbery enterprise (his only other “employees” are two identical twin brothers that Korine taps from the low end of that gene pool he’s always wading in ) is both creepy and cool at the same time.
That being said, Alien’s not a one-dimensional character (even though most of the girls, frankly, are) and he does seem to develop a genuine emotional bond with his new recruits. Faith doesn’t fall for his shtick and hops a bus home, but the rest are in. And that, of course, is where the troubles really begin.
Korine follows a pretty delicate balancing act the rest of the way — he eschews standard “don’t aim higher than your station in life or it’ll end in tears” morality-play-style sermonizing even though the material could be played that way pretty easily, while simultaneously upping the ante on the over-the-top-ness of it all in a manner so sly that you almost don’t even notice that it’s happening. The ladies get Alien to fellate a gun silencer and it feels perfectly natural, fer cryin’ out loud! But what the hell, they all appeared before the judge in nothing but their bikinis a few short scenes ago, so anything goes here, right?
The final shoot-’em-up at the end, at which point another of the former-foursome has made her way northward after taking a bullet in the arm, does in fact strain credulity a bit, but by then the ethos of the film —in short, presenting the blatantly absurd in the most free-form, unforced manner possible — is so firmly established that, even if you don’t exactly buy it, you don’t mind it. The flick’s firing on all its admittedly warped cylinders, and your choices are either go with the flow or pull your hair out. Since I don’t have all that much hair left, the decision is a pretty simple one.
I suppose, at the end of the day, there will be those who go into this thing for no other reason than to see three-and four-way sex or former “Disney Girls” gone bad. If that’s your thing, fair enough — but I have to warn you, if that’s what put your butt in the seat, you’re destined to head for the exits scratching your head, even though the film delivers everything you want to see in even more ample proportion than you’d probably been expecting. The rest of us? We’ll have thoroughly enjoyed a movie that’s never as stupid as it pretends to be.
Trailer: The Wolverine
To be honest, I don’t really know much about the X-Men or Wolverine. (I enjoyed X-Men: First Class but that was mostly because of the presence of Michael Fassbender.)
However, I do know that a lot of people (especially my boyfriend) are really excited about this new trailer for The Wolverine.
All I know is that I hope Hugh Jackman sings at some point.
“Alienator” : Fred Olen Ray Gives “The Terminator” A Sex Change
Give Fred Olen Ray credit — the guy’s a survivor. While his name has never been attached to a genuine B-movie classic — although Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers definitely has its fans — he’s found a way to remain, if not exactly relevant, at least employed for decades now and has , according to official IMDB totals, written 56 films, produced 80, starred in 143, and directed a staggering 128! Granted, directing 128 movies isn’t nearly as difficult as it sounds when most have two-or three-day production schedules, but still —
Anyway, Fred seems to be settling comfortably into the tail end of his career now helming SyFy network made-for-TV numbers and “Skinemax” fare such as Busty Housewives Of Beverly Hills, but back in the late ’80s/early ’90s the straight-to-video market was wide open territory for low-budget mavens such as himself and he was more than willing to help blaze the magnetic tape trail once the celluloid one he’d been treading previously dried and crinkled up with the demise of the drive-ins and downtown exploitation houses that had helped put food on his table (and we’ll get back to gastronomic analogies at the end of this review, just you wait and see!). A true visionary never gives up, he just gives it his best in another venue, right?
Unfortunately, even Fred’s best was never all that great, and the movie in our proverbial crosshairs today, 1990’s Alienator is far from his best indeed, although you’d never know it based on its drop-dead awesome premise, to wit : a supposedly evil intergalactic criminal genius/madman named Kol (Ross Hagen) is about to be executed on a distant spaceship-prison thingie but , of course, manages to affect a semi-daring escape in a shuttle that eventually crash-lands in a forest on Earth. There he makes friendly with a park ranger (who’s got the park ranger-iest name you’ll ever come across), Ward Armstrong (John Phillip Law) and a bunch of annoying teenagers, but little do Kol and his new-found comrades suspect that the spaceship commander (named, simply, “Commander,” and played by Jan-Michael “anything for a buck” Vincent) from whose deadly clutches he managed to free himself has sent a Terminator-esque super-tracker after him, the ultra-deadly — and titular — Alienator herself!
Yes, I said herself — the Alienator, you see, is played by a female ( I think, at any rate, although it wouldn’t surprise me if she had some chromosomal issues going on, and I wouldn’t bet on her ability to pass an Olympic-style genetic screening test) bodybuilder who went by the snappy one-word name of Teagan at this, the apex (such as it was) of her career. She’s basically a cyborg — or maybe android, I never could tell the the difference — chick in a metal bikini who is damn hard to kill and displays, as you’d expect, the emotional range and affect of, say, a walnut. A single-minded killing machine with what appears for all intents and purposes to be a giant pair of binoculars on her boobs, arms that are thicker than my legs, and legs that are thicker than the trunk of the tree in my backyard. Are you afraid yet? You should be — but not so much of the Alienator her(him? it?)self as the unfortunate movie that bears her name.
I know, I know — you read about it on paper (or, as the case may be, your computer screen) and think to yourself “my God, how can you go wrong here?,” but trust me, friends, you can — this flick is a drag. All the actors play it disarmingly straight when by all rights they should be hamming things up, the pacing is dull as toasted rye, and the special effects aren’t good enough to be — well, good — but aren’t bad enough to be hysterical. In short, it’s all an exercise in sleepwalking, “get-it-in-the-can”-style movie-making, and can barely hold your interest despite the fact that by all rights it sure should given its appealingly blatant absurdity.
Still, if you’re in the (entirely advisable under most circumstances) habit of ignoring me, you can check it out for yourself as Alienator came out last week on DVD from Shout! Factory as part of their new “4 Action-Packed Movie Marathon” two-disc set where it shares billing with another early-90s DTV number from Ray, the Heather Thomas (yeah, I forgot about her, too) “starring” vehicle Cyclone, as well as the pretty-decent-all-things-considered Gary Busey revenge flick Eye Of The Tiger and fan favorite Cannon actioner Exterminator 2. The technical specs for Alienator are as follows : digitally remastered (and darn good) widescreen transfer, remastered mono sound, and no extras. Which is fine, really, especially since this package retails on Amazon for eight bucks.
Look, we might as well be honest here —odds are that if you’re gonna get this thing it’s for Exterminator 2 (I know that’s why I picked it up) so anything else is literally (okay, metaphorically — told you we’d get back to that) just gravy, but ya know, sometimes turkey (or beef, or chicken, or whatever) tastes better plain, and Alienator is a cinematic condiment you can definitely skip and still get more than your money’s worth out of the main entree on offer here.
Which is kind of a shame, really, because it sure sounded good on the menu.
