Dancer, Texas Pop. 81 is a 1998 film about a small town in West Texas that only has a population of 81 citizens. Just from my own experience of telling people about how much I happen to like this movie, I get the feeling that only 81 people may have actually seen it. But no matter! Regardless of how many people have actually seen it, Dancer, Texas is one of my favorite films about my home state.
Dancer starts out with a scene that is so quintessentially Texan that it might as well appear next to Texas in the dictionary. Four teenagers — all of whom are scheduled to soon graduate from high school — sit out in the middle of the highway. The road seems to stretch on forever. The land around them is empty. If you’ve ever been to West Texas, you know what type of land I’m talking about. It’s the type of land where you feel like you can see forever. In the far distance, we see a pair of headlights.
“Car’s comin'” one of them drawls, knowing that they’ve got at least another 15 minutes before that car ever gets anywhere near the tiny town of Dancer, Texas.
These four teenage boys make up 80% of the graduating class of Dancer’s high school and all four of them are planning on leaving town and heading for Los Angeles. Keller (Breckin Meyer) is their leader, the big dreamer who can’t wait to get out of the state. Terrell Lee (Peter Facinelli) is the son of the only rich man in town and he’s being pressured by his mother to stay in Dancer and to learn the oil business. John (Eddie Mills) is the simplest of the four and also the most reluctant about leaving. He simply wants to be a farmer and he can’t understand why his taciturn father refuses to say anything to keep him from leaving town. And finally, there’s Squirrel (Ethan Embry), who is the weird one. Every group needs a weird one and Squirrel is weird even by the usual standards of small town oddness.
Not much happens in Dancer, Texas. That goes for both the film and the town. Over the course of two days, all four of the boys are forced to decide whether they really want to leave or if they actually want to stay. Adding an extra poignancy to their decision is the fact that there literally is no chance that life in Dancer is ever going to change. Dancer is as it has always been and always will be. Deciding to stay means staying forever. And, as the film shows, that’s okay for some people and terrible for others.
I really like Dancer, Texas. Yes, it does move at its own deliberate pace and yes, a few scenes do tend to get a bit too obvious in their sentimentality (just to name two of the complaints that I saw from some commenters over at the imdb). Meyer, Facinelli, and Mills all give such wonderfully natural performances that it makes you all the more aware that Embry seems a bit out-of-place. But, ultimately, none of that matters. Dancer, Texas is one of the most honest and sincere films that I’ve ever seen and it’s a film that does my home state proud.
Have you ever wanted to see Jon Stewart get stabbed in the eye with a hypodermic needle?
If you answered yes, then 1998’s The Faculty might be the film for you!
The Faculty takes a look at what happens when a new alien species happens to turn up outside of a painfully normal high school in Ohio. By painfully normal, I mean that Herrington High School is just as messed up as you would expect a suburban high school to be. The teachers are all underpaid and resentful of their principal (Bebe Neuwrith). Prof. Furlong (Jon Stewart) is the overqualified science teacher who will perhaps be a little too excited about the chance to examine a new alien species. Coach Willis (Robert Patrick) is the emotionally shut off coach of the school’s losing football team. Mrs. Olson (Piper Laurie) is the drama teacher who struggles to promote creativity in a school that’s more interested in blind conformity. Miss Burke (Famke Janssen) is the teacher who cares too much. And, finally, there’s Nurse Harper (Salma Hayek), who looks a lot like Salma Hayek.
And, as typical as the teachers may be, the students are even more so. We get to know a few and they all neatly fit into the expected stereotypes. Casey (Elijah Wood) is the nerdy outcast who is regularly picked on by … well, by everyone. Deliliah (Jordana Brewster) is the status-obsessed head cheerleader who has just broken up with her boyfriend, Stan (Shawn Hatosy), because he quit the football team. Zeke (Josh Hartnett) is the school rebel, the kid who is repeating his senior year and who sells synthetic drugs out of the trunk of his car. Stokes (Clea DuVall) is an intentional outcast who pretends to be a lesbian and has a crush on Stan. And finally, there’s Marybeth (Laura Harris), a new transfer student who speaks with a Southern accent.
These students would seem to have nothing in common but they’re going to have to work together because the entire faculty of Herrington High has been taken over by aliens! Fortunately, the aliens are vulnerable to Zeke’s drugs, which is something that is learned after Jon Stewart takes a hypodermic to the eye…
When one looks over the top Texas filmmakers (director like Terrence Malick, Richard Linklater, Mike Judge, and David Gorden Green), Robert Rodriguez often comes across as being both the most likable and the least interesting. Like his frequent collaborator Quentin Tarantino, Rodriguez fills his movies with references and homages to other films but, unlike Tarantino, there rarely seems to be much going on behind all of those references. However, Rodriguez’s referential style works well in The Faculty because, along with acting as an homage to both Invasion of the Body Snatchers and John Carpenter’s The Thing, The Faculty also manages to tap into a universal truth.
Teachers are weird!
Or, at least, they seem weird when you’re a student. Now that I’m out of high school, I can look back and see that my teachers were actually pretty normal. They were people who did their jobs and, as much as I like to think that I was everyone’s all-time favorite, I’m sure that there have been other brilliant, asthmatic, redheaded, aspiring ballerinas who have sat in their class. My teachers spent a lot of time talking about things that I may not have been interested in but that wasn’t because they were obsessed with talking to me about algebra or chemistry or anything like that. They were just doing their job, just like everyone else does.
But, seriously, when you’re a student, it’s easy to believe that your teachers have been possessed by an alien life form.
Probably the best thing about The Faculty is the fact that the aliens cause the teachers to act in ways that are the exact opposite of their usual personalities. For most of the teachers, this means that they turn into homicidal lunatics. But, in the case of Coach Willis, this actually leads to him not only becoming a happy, well-adjusted human being but it also turns him into a good coach. Suddenly, Willis is getting emotional about the games, his team loves him, and he even gets a win!
But, as far as simple-minded teen sex comedies, are concerned, it’s not that bad.
Brad Kimble (Will Friedle) is a nice but dorky high school student who, for years, has had a crush on an unattainable cheerleader, Brooke (Marley Shelton). When Brad is invited over to Brooke’s house to tutor her in biology, he arrives just after Brooke has had a fight with her jock boyfriend, Kyle (Eric Balfour sans facial hair). Soon, Brooke and Brad are making out. Brooke asks Brad if he has a condom. Of course, if Brad did have a condom, there wouldn’t be a movie. The rest of the movie deals with Brad’s attempt to not only find a condom in California and but to also get back to Brooke.
(Apparently, in the 1990s, there was some sort of sudden condom shortage in California. That’s all that I can guess after having seen Trojan War.)
Of course, that’s not as easy as it sounds. Brad’s car (actually, it’s his dad’s car) gets stolen. Brad ends up having a run in with a crazy homeless man (David Patrick Kelly) who — in a rather obvious shout out to Better Off Dead — wants two dollars. Brad gets chased by a crazy dog. Brad has to deal with a cameo appearance by a crazy Kathy Griffin. Brad runs into a crazy bus driver (played by Anthony Michael Hall). Brad ends up being pursued by a crazy police officer (Lee Majors). And since the film itself is a bit of an unacknowledged remake of Some Kind of Wonderful, Brad is also pursued by his not crazy best friend, Leah (Jennifer Love Hewitt, who I’ve always liked because we’re both Texas girls and I share her struggle). Leah is in love with Brad and Brad is in love with Leah. He’s just not smart enough to realize it.
And indeed, that’s the key to understanding the plot of Trojan War. Brad is just not that smart. This is one of those films where the great majority of Brad’s problems could have been avoided if Brad just wasn’t a moron. Fortunately, Brad is played by Will Friedle who was always the best part of Boy Meets World and who displays the unique ability to make stupidity cute. Friedle is so likable as Brad that you’re willing to forgive the film for a lot.
That doesn’t mean that Trojan War is necessarily a good movie. It’s likable but it’s never really good. For every joke that works, there’s one that doesn’t. I could have really done without the extended sequence where Brad gets lost over on the bad side of town and the movie suddenly trots out every negative Latino stereotype imaginable. But, when the movie just concentrates on Will Friedle and Jennifer Love Hewitt, it’s likable enough to waste 90 minutes on.
If nothing else, it’s certainly more entertaining than most movies that made less than 400 dollars at the box office.
By their very nature, teen films tend to get dated very quickly. Fashions, music, and cultural references — all of these serve to make a film popular when it’s first released and occasionally laughable just a few years later. Take 1995’s Clueless for instance. Watching it now, it’s impossible not to get a little snarky when Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone) refers to a hot guy as being a “Baldwin.” When heard today, it’s hard not to wonder if Cher is thinking of beefy rageaholic Alec or ultra-religious realty TV mainstay Stephen. (Personally, I prefer to think that she was thinking of Adam Baldwin.)
Clueless is one of those films that I always remember watching on TV and loving when I was little but, whenever I watch it now, I always find myself feeling slightly disappointed in it. It’s never quite as good as I remember and, with each viewing, I’m just a little bit more aware that, while both were very well-cast in their respect roles, Alicia Silverstone and Stacey Dash weren’t exactly the most versatile actresses of their generation. There’s a reason why Dash is now a political commentator and Silverstone is best known for that video of her spitting food into her baby’s mouth. As well, watching the film now, it’s hard not to think about how the talented Brittany Murphy would tragically pass away 14 years after its initial release.
And yet, I can’t help it. I still enjoy Clueless. I could spend hours nitpicking it apart and pointing out what parts of it don’t quite work as well as they should but ultimately, Clueless is a fun movie that features and celebrates three strong female characters, which is more than you can say for most teen films.
Directed and written by Amy Heckerling (who earlier directed the classicFast Times At Ridgemont High), Clueless is based (quite directly) on Jane Austen’s Emma. In this version, Emma is Cher, the spoiled 16 year-old daughter of a lawyer (played, very well, by Dan Hedaya), who lives in Beverly Hills and who is happy being superficial, vain, and popular. In fact, the only person who ever criticizes Cher is her stepbrother, Josh (Paul Rudd), who is studying to be an environmental lawyer and is visiting during a break from college.
When Cher plays matchmaker and deftly manages to pair up two of her teachers (played by Wallace Shawn and Twink Caplan), she realizes that she enjoys helping people. (Though, it must be said, the only reason she helped her two teachers wass because they were both taking out the misery of being single on her…) So, Cher and her best friend Dionne (Stacey Dash) decide to help another student, new girl Tai (Brittany Murphy), become popular. After giving Tai a makeover, forbidding her to date skater Travis (Breckin Meyer, who is adorable), and trying to set Tai up with rich snob Elton (Jeremy Sisto), Cher is shocked to discover that Tai has become so popular that she is now challenging Cher’s social status. Even worse, Tai decides that she has a crush on Josh right around the same time that Cher realizes the same thing.
Plus, Cher still has to pass her driving test…
As I said before, Clueless is hardly a perfect film but it is a very likable movie. Director Amy Heckerling creates such a vivid and colorful alternate teenage universe and the script is full of so many quotable lines that you can forgive the fact that the story sometimes runs the risk of getting almost as superficial of Cher. It may never be quite as good as I remembered it being but Clueless is still an entertaining and fun movie.
First released in 1993, Dazed and Confused is a classic Texas film. Taking place in 1976 and following a large and varied group of characters over the course of the last day of school, Dazed and Confused is like American Graffiti with a lot more weed. In many ways, it’s a plotless film, though things do happen. The students of Lee High School survive one final day of school before the start of summer. (Interestingly enough, most of the characters here are incoming seniors and freshman, as opposed to the confused graduates who usually show up in films like this. This may lower the stakes — none of the students are worrying about whether or not to go to college or anything like that — but it also gives the film a fun and laid back vibe.) The incoming freshman are all hazed by the incoming seniors. For the girls, this means being covered in ketchup and mustard and being forced to ask the seniors to marry them. For the boys, the hazing is a lot more violent and disturbing as they are chased through the streets by paddle-wielding jocks. A party is planned and then abruptly canceled when the kegs of beer are delivered before the parents leave town. Another party is held out in the woods. A high school quarterback tries to decide whether or not to sign an anti-drug pledge.
No, not much happens but then again, plot is overrated. Dazed and Confused is not about plot. It’s about capturing a specific time and place and showing how different individuals define themselves within their environment. It’s one of the best high school films ever made, perhaps the best.
Why do I so love Dazed and Confused? Let me count the ways.
First off, it’s a true Texas film. This isn’t just because it was directed by Texas’s greatest filmmaker, Richard Linklater. It was also filmed in Texas, it’s full of Texas actors, and, as a native Texan, I can tell you that it’s one of the few films that gets my homestate right. Even though the film takes place long before I was even born, there were still so many details that I recognized as being unique to Texas today. I guess the more things change, the more they remain the same.
Perhaps the most Texas scene in the entire film was when quarterback Randy Floyd (Jason London) was talking to the old couple at the minor league baseball game. Both the old man’s obsessive interest in the high school football team (“We’re countin’ on you boys next year…”) and Randy’s patiently polite answers, were, to me, the epitome of Texas. And, of course, we can’t forget the store clerk advising the pregnant woman to eat a lot of “green things” while selling her a pack of cigarettes and the guy who reacts to the destruction of his mailbox by running around with a gun. I suspect I might live a few blocks away from both of those guys.
But, beyond that, just the entire film’s laid back atmosphere epitomized everything that I love about my state.
Secondly, Dazed and Confused is an amateur historian’s dream! Richard Linklater went to high school in the 70s and he recreates the decade with a lot of obvious care and love. (It’s also somewhat obvious that both the characters of Randy and incoming freshman Mitch (Wiley Wiggins) are meant to be autobiographical.) Now, me, I’ve always been obsessive about history and I’ve always somewhat regretted that I was born long after the 70s ended. Dazed and Confused is probably about as close as someone like me will ever get to having a time machine.
I’m also something a political history junkie so how excited was I to see that, during one scene, all of the candidates for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination were listed on a bulletin board. How many other movies have featured a reference to the Fred Harris presidential campaign? Admittedly, I know nothing about that campaign. I just think it’s neat that somebody with as common a name as Fred Harris once ran for President.
Finally, if you look really carefully, you’ll notice that Lee High School is located right next to a movie theater that, according to its marquee, is showing Family Plot, Alfred Hitchcock’s final film. Just imagine the fun that I could have had going to Lee High. I could have skipped school and gone to a movie!
Third, this film has a great soundtrack! The low rider gets a little higher … hey, I think there’s a double meaning there…
But, really, the main reason I love this film is because I love great ensemble work and Dazed and Confused has a wonderful cast. Some members of the cast went on to become famous and some did not, but all of them give great performances. In fact, the entire cast is so great that it’s difficult to know who to single out so I’m just going to name a few of my favorites.
First off, there’s the jocks. Some of them, like Jason London’s Randy “Pink” Floyd are surprisingly sensitive. Some of them, like Don Dawson (Sasha Jenson), remind me of the type of guys that I, despite my better judgment, would have totally been crushing on back in high school. And then the others are just scary, running around with their cars full of beer and obsessively paddling freshman. Benny (Cole Hauser), for instance, really does seem like he has some issues. (Perhaps it’s because he lives in Texas but still has such a strong Boston accent…)
However, the scariest of the jocks is, without a doubt, Fred O’Bannion (Ben Affleck). A complete and total moron who has actually managed to fail his senior year, (“He’s a joke,” says Randy, “but he’s not a bad guy to have blocking for you…”) O’Bannion is such a total idiot that, not only is it fun to see him eventually get humiliated, but it’s even more fun to watch him and think, “That’s Ben Affleck!” And, it must be said, Affleck is totally convincing playing a complete and total dumbass. That’s not meant to be an insult, by the way. Future multiple-Oscar winner Affleck does a really good job.
And then there’s the three self-styled intellectuals, Tony (Anthony Rapp), Mike (Adam Goldberg), and red-headed Cynthia (Marissa Ribisi), who spend the whole day driving around and discussing what it all means. These are actually three of my favorite characters in the entire film, just because I’ve known (and, I must admit, loved) the type. Plus, Cynthia has red hair and we redheads have to stay united!
There’s the two incoming freshman who get to spend a night hanging out with the older kids — Mitch (Wiley Wiggins) and Sabrina (Christin Hinojosa). Mitch is adorable while Sabrina gets to ask Tony to marry her. Of course, Sabrina is covered in ketchup, mustard, and flour at the time. (“She probably looks really good once you get all the shit off her,” Mike offers.)
And, of course, you can’t forget Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey). In many ways, Wooderson is a truly creepy character. He’s the older guy who still hangs out with the high school kids. When he asks Mitch what the incoming freshman girls look like, you get the disturbing feeling that he’s not joking. (“I get older but they stay the same age,” Wooderson says about his underage girlfriends, “yes, they do.”) And yet McConaughey gives such a charismatic performance that Wooderson becomes the heart and soul of the entire film. In the end, you’re happy that Randy has a friend like Wooderson.
And there’s so many other characters that I love. There’s the hilarious stoner Slater (Rory Cochrane). There’s Mitch’s older sister, Jodi (Michelle Burke), who is the type of cool older sister that I would have liked to have been if I actually had a brother and wasn’t the youngest of four. There’s Randy’s girlfriend, Simone (Joey Lauren Adams) and Don’s occasional girlfriend, Shavonne (Deena Martin) who, at one point, refers to Don as being “Mr. Premature Ejaculation.” Even the characters that you’re supposed to hate are so well-played and so well-written that it’s a pleasure to see them. Parker Posey is hilarious as head mean girl Darla. In the role of car-obsessed Clint, Nicky Katt is dangerously hot — even if he does eventually end up kicking Mike’s ass. (“You wouldn’t say I got my ass kicked, would you?” Mike says. Sorry, sweetie, you did. But everyone watching the movie totally loved you!)
(And let’s not forget that future Oscar winner Renee Zellweger shows up for a split-second, walking past Wooderson during his “that’s why I love high school girls” monologue.)
Dazed and Confused is a great film. If you haven’t seen it, see it. And if you have seen it, see it again.
Along with my current series of 80 Back to School reviews (48 down, 32 to go!), another one of my long time goals has been to watch and review every single film to ever be nominated for the best picture. So, imagine how happy I was to discover that by watching the 1992 film Scent of a Woman, I could make progress towards completing two goals at once! Not only was Scent of A Woman nominated for best picture of the year (losing to Unforgiven) but it also features a major subplot about life and discipline at an exclusive New England prep school! Even better, it’s been showing up on Showtime fairly regularly for the past month or so.
“Wow,” I thought as my boyfriend and I sat down to watch this movie, “could life get any easier? Or better?”
And then we watched the film.
You know how occasionally you watch a film just because you’ve heard that it was nominated (or perhaps even won) an Oscar or because it has an oddly high rating over at the imdb or maybe because someone said, “Roger Ebert loved this film so, if you don’t watch and love it, that means that, by that standard of the current online film community, you really don’t love movies?” And then you watch the movie and you’re just like, “What the Hell?”
Well, that was kind of my reaction to Scent of a Woman.
Look, the film’s not all bad. It has a few good performances. It looks great. It’s certainly better than Gigli, the film that director Martin Brest is perhaps best remembered for. It features a great scene where Al Pacino (playing a blind man) dances the tango with a woman that he’s just met. (Then again, I have a notorious weakness for dance scenes…) It’s not so much that the film is bad as much as it’s just that the movie itself is not particularly good.
Charlie Simms (Chris O’Donnell) is a scholarship student at an exclusive prep school in Massachusetts. Much like Brendan Fraser in School Ties, 1992’s other prep school melodrama, Charlie is a poor kid attending the school on a scholarship. While his rich friends prepare to go home for the Thanksgiving weekend, Charlie knows that there’s no way that he can afford to fly back to Oregon. In order to raise the money so that he can at least go back home for Christmas (how poor is this kid’s family!?), Charlie gets a temporary job for the weekend. His job? To look after Lt. Col. Frank Slade (Al Pacino), who is blind and yells a lot.
Anyway, as you can probably guess, Frank convinces Charlie to drive him to New York and they have all of the adventures that usually happen whenever a naive teenager spends the weekend with a suicidal blind man. Frank bellows a lot and tells about how, through his sense of smell, he can always tell when there’s a beautiful woman nearby. Frank also yells a lot. Did I already mention that? Because, seriously, he yells a lot.
Charlie has other problems than just Frank. It seems that a rather mild prank was pulled on the headmaster (James Rebhorn) of Charlie’s school. As a result, a bucket of paint was poured down on both the headmaster and his new car! Now, the headmaster is looking for those responsible. He just needs two witnesses. He’s already gotten one student to confess. And now, he’s blackmailing Charlie with a letter of recommendation to Harvard. All Charlie has to do is name names and his future is set…
Will Charlie name names and sacrifice his honor just to get into a college that could assure him a great life? Or will Frank convince Charlie that honor is the only thing that matters? And finally, will the film end with a big hearing in front of the entire school in which the headmaster attempts to badger Charlie, just to be interrupted by a sudden appearance from bellowing Frank Slade?
Will it!?
You can probably already guess and, since we have a no spoiler policy here at the Lens, I’ll just assume that you guessed right. (Or you could just look at the picture at the top of this review…)
The prep school subplot pretty much just adds to the film’s already excessive running time. But it is interesting to watch because the other student — the one who names names — is played by a very young Philip Seymour Hoffman. (Or as he’s credited here, Philip S. Hoffman.) This was one of Hoffman’s first screen roles and he gives a memorable performance as an unlikable character. If you were to have seen Scent of a Woman in 1992, you would not have guessed that Philip Seymour Hoffman would eventually be an Oscar winner but you would know that he was a very talented character actor.
Otherwise, Scent of a Woman is a fairly forgettable movie. If I hadn’t known ahead of time that it was nominated for best picture, I never would have been able to guess. I’m not enough of an expert to be able to name every good 1992 film that was not nominated to make room for Scent of a Woman but I imagine that when that year’s Oscar nominations were announced, there were quite a few people left scratching their heads.
Can you figure out which one grew up to be Philip Seymour Hoffman?
And what better way to kick off the 90s than by taking a look at a film from 1992 that very few people seem to have ever heard of?
School Ties takes place in the 1950s, which of course means that everyone dresses like either James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause or Troy Donaue in A Summer Place. It also means that the soundtrack is full of the same songs that tend to turn up in every film about the 1950s. David Greene (Brendan Fraser) is a working-class teen from Pennsylvania* who wins a football scholarship to attend an exclusive prep school in Massachusetts. At first, David struggles to fit in. Not only are all of his classmates rich but they’re also extremely anti-Semitic. However, David wins them over by playing hard on the football field and hiding the fact that he’s Jewish. However, when the jealous Charlie Dillon (Matt Damon) discovers that David is a Jew, he reveals his secret and David is forced to confront his prejudiced classmates.
School Ties is one of those extremely well-intentioned films that’s never quite as good as you might hope. With the exception of David and Charlie, the characters are all pretty thinly drawn and there’s more than a few subplots that really don’t really work. For instance, Zeljko Ivanek shows up playing a sadistic French teacher who harasses one of Fraser’s friends (played by Andrew Lowery) and, as I watched Ivanek drive Lowery to the point of a nervous breakdown over proper verb conjugation, it occurred to me that I knew Ivanek was evil as soon as he showed up wearing his little bow tie and his beret. (It’s also interesting how French teachers are always evil in films like this.)
That said, the message of School Ties is still a timely one. On the surface, the message of “Don’t be an intolerant, prejudiced prick,” might seem pretty simplistic and self-explanatory. However, every day we’re confronted with evidence that there are still people out there who don’t understand this simple concept. As such, it’s a message that can stand being repeated a few times.
(Seriously, don’t be an intolerant, prejudiced prick.)
When seen today, School Ties is mostly interesting for who appears in it. For instance, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Cole Hauser all show up here, 5 years before they would all co-star in Good Will Hunting.One of the anti-Semitic students is played by Anthony Rapp who, a year later, would appear with Affleck and Hauser in Dazed and Confused. Fraser’s sympathetic roommate is played by Chris O’Donnell. As for Brendan Fraser himself, it’s a bit odd to see him playing such a dramatic role but he’s convincing and believable as a football player. It’s a good-looking cast and yes, you better believe that there’s a fight scene that takes place in a shower. If you’ve ever wanted to see Brendan Fraser and Matt Damon wrestling each other while naked — well, this is the film to see.
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* Interestingly enough, David’s family lives in Scranton, Pennsylvania so I guess David could very well have gone to elementary school with Joe Biden and he may have family working at Dunder-Mifflin.
I was recently lucky enough to get a chance to see a perfectly creepy haunted house movie called A House Is Not A Home. A House Is Not A Home is one of those films that I have wanted to see ever since I first heard about it last year. I have to admit that, usually, whenever I find myself looking forward to a movie, I sometimes dread actually watching it. There’s nothing worse than being disappointed by a film that fails to live up to your initial expectations. That’s why I’m happy to report that A House Is Not A Home not only lived up to those expectations but exceeded them.
A House Is Not A Home begins with a close-up of a bloodied hand. An obviously unstable man (played, with a truly unsettling intensity, by Richard Greico) calls 911 and tells the operator that “they’re all dead” and it’s all his fault. He then hangs up and, after shouting, “Take me!”, disappears into a bright white light. It’s an effective scene, largely because it’s played totally straight. You look at Greico and you have no doubt that something terrible truly has just happened and that not only was he responsible but he’s going to also be responsible for a lot more before the film reaches its conclusion. It’s the perfect way to open up a haunted house scene, one that hints at the promise that the film itself will soon fulfill.
Sometime after the man had vanished, the house is up for sale. Architect Ben (Gerald Webb) and his wife Linda (Diahnna Nicole Baker) are given a tour of the house by a real estate agent named Paul (Bill Cobbs). When we first see Paul, he seems like a nice old man. He’s friendly, he’s always smiling, and he comes across like he could probably sell snow in Canada. But, it quickly becomes obvious that there’s something a little bit off about Paul. By the time he finishes showing the house, you start to realize that his friendly smile seems to be more of a self-satisfied smirk.
Regardless, Ben and Linda buy the house and, along with their two teenagers, Ashley and Alex (Aurora Perrineau and Melvin Gregg), move in. From the minute that they unpack, strange things start to happen. Ashley is woken up in the middle of the night by mysterious laughter and, regardless of how many times she tries to move them, the same scary-looking dolls keep showing up on her dresser. (Seriously, those dolls were creepy!) Alex feels as if he’s being watched wherever he goes. Linda, a recovering alcoholic, starts to drink again and her attempts to give piano lessons are made difficult by the fact that the piano occasionally attacks her students. And Ben suddenly finds himself having nightmares and deliberately cutting himself so that the blood can hynotically drip down onto the kitchen table.
Even more frightening? The man from the first scene in the film keeps popping up, standing in the corner and watching.
Yes, obviously the house is haunted and eventually, even Ben is forced to admit it. The family is forced to call in a voodoo priest, who attempts to exorcise the house. (The priest is played by Eddie Steeples, who may be best known for playing the comedic Crabman on My Name Is Earl but who actually gives a nicely intense and creepy performance here. Just check out his eyes!) If you’re a fan of the horror genre, then you’ve probably seen a lot of haunted house exorcisms but, even if it might seem like a familiar development, the exorcism scenes in A House Is Not A Home are really well-done. If nothing else, they’re distinguished by the fact that the exorcist isn’t the typical quirky medium or self-doubting Catholic priest that most movies offer up. For once, we’re given an exorcism that’s interesting to watch…
But does the exorcism work? Well — does an exorcism ever work in a haunted house film? You’ll have to watch to find out.
A House Is Not A Home is an effectively creepy movie, one that uses its low-budget to its advantage. Director Christopher Ray allows the camera to creep through the house, snaking its way through empty passages while the soundtrack is full of the sounds of restless spirits. The end result is a film that, as opposed to relying on predictable CGI for its scares, instead creates a palpable sense of doom and dread.
The film is well-acted by the entire cast, with Bill Cobbs especially giving a wonderfully sinister performance. (I wish I could tell you about his final appearance in the movie without it acting as a spoiler but seriously, it’s a wonderfully acted scene.) In the role of Ben is Gerald Webb, who will be a familiar face to anyone who regularly watches the SyFy Channel. Webb (who also earned a bit of pop cultural immortality by serving as casting director for both Sharknados) has appeared in several beloved Asylum films as characters who inevitably always seem to end up getting killed. It was nice, in A House Is Not A Home, to get to see Webb play a leading role and prove that he’s capable of a lot more than just a good death scene. He gives an effective, sympathetic performance here. In fact, the entire family does. One reason that the film works as well as it does is because you believe that these four characters actually are a family. You care about what happens to them and, as a result, the horror is all the more effective.
Finally, two final notes about A House Is Not A Home. At its best, the film — with its emphasis on atmosphere and its scenes of the characters discovering that the house exists on its own plane of surreal logic — can compared favorably to the works of Italian horror director Lucio Fulci. I don’t know if that was intentional or not. But it’s definitely a good thing!
Secondly, and perhaps a little sadly, A House Is Not A Home is one of the few “serious” films that I’ve seen recently that featured an almost entirely African-American cast. That’s really saying something when you consider that I literally watch hundreds of films a year. At a time when mainstream filmmaking (and the horror genre in particular) still seems to be struggling to break free from racial stereotyping, A House Is Not A Home is definitely a step in the right direction.
Beyond the Grave is an intriguingly enigmatic film about the end of the world.
Why was the world ended? To the film’s credit, this is left intentionally vague. Some characters mention that the “Seven Gateways of Hell” have been opened. (Just the term “Seven Gateways of Hell” pays wonderful homage to Lucio Fulci’s horror classics, The Beyond and City of the Living Dead.) At one point, we spy some graffiti reading, “Beware the Walking Dude,” which, of course, brings to mind the apocalyptic fiction of Stephen King. Occasionally, small groups of “returners” are seen aimlessly wandering up and down empty highways. Are they zombies or are they something else? Occasionally, on the radio, a disembodied voice is heard over a car radio. “This is the end of the world,” the voice says, “If you are listening to this, it is already too late.”
One thing that quickly becomes obvious is that there’s very few “normal” people left alive. One of these is a mysterious and enigmatic man known as the Officer (Rafael Tombini). The Officer, who carries both a sword and a gun that carries only one bullet, drives a police car over the deserted landscape and dispenses his own form of justice. Who he works for or if there’s any sort of controlling legal authority left in this world is another issue that the film leads intriguingly vague.
(I appreciated the fact that the film — much like Romero’s original Dead films and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road — only hinted at what had causes it’s world-changing cataclysm. When it comes to end of the world, there should never be any simple answers.)
The Officer is hunting a demonic force known as the Dark Rider and, as he explains, it’s a search that he began before the world even ended. (And, indeed, we saw in a brief flashback that the Dark Rider existed even when there was still civilization.) Throughout the film, the Dark Rider jumps from body to body, all the while uttering, “What is near me, shall become mine.”
Working with two teenagers, the Officer searches the Dark Rider, taking time to only briefly rest at a compound. When, about 42 minutes into the film, the Officer finally tracks the Rider down, something totally unexpected happens, something that forces the audience to reconsider everything that they had previously assumed about how the film was going to work. I’m not going to tell you what happens. That’s something you should discover for yourself.
Beyond the Grave is a visually stunning hybrid of a film. It’s a western, a zombie movie, a postapocalyptic action film, and a philosophical rumination of man’s place in the universe, all wrapped up in one! Director Davi de Oliveira Pinheiro gets the most out of the film’s bleak locations and Rafael Tombini gives an excellent lead performance as the enigmatic Officer. Beyond the Grave is an intriguing film, both for the questions it answers and for the ones that it leaves unanswered. It’s a film that any horror fan should see and will appreciate.
Well, it had to happen. We have finally reached the end of the 80s with this Back to School series of reviews. The 80s are often considered to be the “Golden Age of Teen Films,” largely due to the efforts of director-writer-producer John Hughes. In films like The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Hughes skillfully mixed teen comedy with teen drama and the end results were some of the best-remembered and most influential films ever made. At the same time, it’s also can’t be denied that, even as he was dealing with real issues of class differences and sexuality, Hughes also tended to idealize his teenage protagonists. They were often cast as noble savages, struggling to survive in a world that was exclusively run by cynical and judgmental adults. In The Breakfast Club, Ally Sheedy says that when you grow up, your heart dies. That, more than anything, defines the way that most of the great teen films of the 80s tended to view the world.
By the end of the 80s, John Hughes had stopped making films about high school and teenagers and so, it is perhaps appropriate that the final Back to School review of the 80s should be for a 1989 film that often time seems to be taking place on a totally different plant from the films of John Hughes. If Hughes told us that your heart dies when you grow up, Heathers would seem to suggest that most people’s hearts were never alive to begin with.
Heathers takes place at Westerburg High, a school full of student so rich that their mascot is a Rottweiler. Westerburg is run by a clique of three mean girls, all of whom are named Heather. Heather Chandler (Kim Walker) is their leader. Cheerleader Heather McNamara (Lisanne Falk) is weak-willed and insecure. And finally, Heather Duke (Shannen Doherty) is the smartest of the Heathers. She’s also bulimic. Now, there is a fourth member of the ruling clique but she’s a bit of an anomaly because she’s neither mean nor named Heather. Instead, her name is Veronica (Winona Ryder) and she is valued for her ability to forge signatures.
Since joining the Heathers, Veronica has drifted away from old friends like Betty Finn (Renee Estevez). And though Veronica quickly realizes that she doesn’t really belong with the Heathers, she doesn’t know how she can break free without also destroying her reputation of Westerburg. Then, she meets J.D. (Christian Slater), a prototypical rebel with a cause. J.D. is not only an outsider at Westerburg but he’s proud of it. Soon, he and Veronica are a couple and J.D. is pulling Veronica into his plans to destroy the social hierarchy of Westerburg High.
When a practical joke arranged by J.D. and Veronica leads to the accidental death of Heather Chandler, J.D. convinces Veronica to forge a suicide note. As a result, Heather Chandler is canonized by the same students that she previously terrorized. However, J.D. is not done killing. With each new death (and with each forged suicide note), a new social hierarchy starts to form at Westerburg until, eventually, J.D. comes up with a plan that owes a bit to the end of Massacre at Central High…
Heathers is a darker than dark comedy and one that I imagine probably could not be made today. (To be honest, I’m a little bit surprised that it could be made in 1989.) Seriously, a comedy where one of the main plot points is that students become more popular after everyone has been fooled into thinking they committed suicide? (Not to mention a scene where a grieving father shouts, “I love my dead gay son!”) People would get so offended if this film was made today but you know what? They would be totally missing the point. The film isn’t making fun of suicide as much as it’s exposing the hypocrisy of a society that only seems to care about people after they die. To me, the most important scenes aren’t the ones where people react to the fake suicides. Instead, the heart of Heathers‘s dark vision is to be found in the scene where a true outcast like Martha Dunnstock (Carrie Lynn) fails in her attempt to commit suicide and is ridiculed by the same students and teachers who were previously patting themselves on the back at Heather Chandler’s funeral.
Heathers is dark but it’s also a genuinely funny film, filled with great lines and performances. (“Fuck me gently with a chainsaw,” is my personal favorite.) It’s a film that still carries quite a satiric bite and a perfect film with which to end the 80s.
