You may remember, from previous horrorthons, that I like to end each day in October by sharing a classic example of televised horror. Over the previous two years, I shared several episodes of The Twilight Zone and everyone seemed to enjoy them. I know I certainly did.
Unfortunately, I can’t do that anymore.
All of the episodes of the Twilight Zone that were on YouTube have been taken down. Copyright infringement, they say. And, unfortunately, Hulu is no longer allowing people to watch The Twilight Zone for free. I can still embed Hulu videos on this site but unless you’re a subscriber, you wouldn’t be able to watch them.
Which sucks, by the way! Seriously, I was soooooo mad when I discovered what had happened…
However, fear not! While I may not be able to share any Twilight Zone episodes this October, it turns out that every episode of HBO’s Tales From The Crypt has been uploaded to YouTube! And what could be more appropriate for Halloween than a little trip to the crypt?
So, with all that in mind, here’s the fourth episode of Tales From The Crypt. It’s called Only Sin Deep and it originally aired on June 14th, 1989. It tells the story of a prostitute named Sylvia Vane (played by Lea Thompson) who agrees to sell her beauty for $10,000 and the chance to marry a rich man. Sylvia doesn’t take the deal seriously. You won’t be surprised to learn that was a mistake. Only Sin Deep is an entertaining little morality tale. Don’t mess with karma.
(As well, I’m going to assume that the name Sylvia Vane is meant to be an homage to the name of Angela Lansbury’s character in The Picture of Dorian Gray.)
Only Sin Deep was directed by Howard Deutch, who also directed Lea Thompson in Some Kind of Wonderful. (And, of course, he also married her.) It was written by Fred Dekker, who directed the classic Night of the Creeps.
And yes, the story is introduced by the infamous Cryptkeeper.
The name inspires a lot of reactions. Some people will tell you that Dario Argento is one of the greatest directors of all time. Some people regularly cite him as being a prime example of an artist who hit his peak too early and who has spent the latter part of his career imitating his previous successes. Some people will tell you that his films are dangerous. He’s one of those directors whose films always seem to end up getting banned in certain communities. Other cineastes will always praise him as a superior stylist whose influence is still felt to this very day. Argento’s films have inspired thousands of horror filmmakers. His films have also inspired a countless number of viewers to fall in love with horror. Without the influence of Argento the horror genre would be not only less interesting but less profitable as well.
Myself, I’m a huge Argento fan. Yes, I do love Suspiria but then again, everyone love Suspiria. I have also made it a point to track down and watch the forgotten and/or critically reviled Argento films, like Trauma and The Phantom of the Opera. My love of Argento is so strong that I usually even find myself enjoying his less acclaimed work as much as his acknowledged triumphs. He is one of the masters of horror, a true maestro of Italian art. For the longest time, I’ve been meaning to watch and review all 21 of Argento’s cinematic thrillers. (Sadly, his one non-thriller, The Four Days, is notoriously difficult to see.) With this being October, I figured why not now?
Dario Argento made his directorial debut in 1970 with The Bird With The Crystal Plumage. Before directing his first movie, Argento had been a film critic and a screenwriter. (Among other credits, he is listed as being one of the writers of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West. Interestingly enough, his co-writer was another future director, Bernardo Bertolucci.) With his very first film as a director, Argento established himself as a master of both suspense and horror.
I have seen some reviews that have identified The Bird With The Crystal Plumage as being the first giallo film. That’s not at all true. If anything, the credit for directing the first giallo should probably go to Mario Bava (who directed The Girl Who Knew Too Much in 1964) and some students of Italian cinema would even disagree with that. However, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage undoubtedly did a lot to popularize the genre outside of Italy.
The film tells the story of Sam (Tony Musante) and his girlfriend, Julia (Suzy Kendall). Sam is a writer and he’s living in Rome. Argento is not traditionally known as an actor’s director but Musante and Kendall are both remarkably sympathetic in their roles and they seem to have a very real chemistry when they’re both on-screen together. You actually do care about them as a couple and you find yourself hoping that nothing bad happens to them. One thing that I liked was that their tiny apartment looked like it was someplace where a couple actually would live, love, and try to solve a murder. Looking at Sam and Julia in that apartment (which is decorated with a picture of Albert Einstein and a poster reading “Black Power!”), you get the feeling that they have an existence outside of what you’re seeing during the film’s 94 minute running time. They feel real.
Reportedly, Tony Musante and Argento did not have a great working relationship. (Mustante was a character actor who wanted to talk about motivation. Argento was more concerned with the technical aspects of shooting the film.) Mustante may have been miserable but that actually works for his character. When we first meet Sam, he’s frustrated because he’s suffering from writer’s block. He’s so frustrated that he’s on the verge of moving back to the United States. Sam’s frustration feels real and if that’s because Musante happened to be frustrated while shooting the film, so be it. Whatever works.
One night, Sam goes for a walk and witnesses a stabbing in an art gallery. Monica Ranieri (Eva Renzi) survives but it appears that her assailant has managed to escape. The police suspect that Sam might be more than just a witness so they confiscate his passport. Until the attacker is caught, Sam is stuck in Rome.
There’s a serial killer terrorizing Rome and both Sam and the police suspect that Monica nearly became the killer’s latest victim. Some of the film’s most unnerving sequences are shot from the point-of-view of the killer, a technique that both leaves the killer’s identity a secret and also makes the audience complicit in the murders. It’s as if Argento the film critic is daring the audience to consider why they’re watching what Argento the director is doing.
(And the murders in The Bird With The Crystal Plumage are brutal, even by the standards of Italian cinema. The first murder that we actually witness — which is usually referred to as being “the panty murder,” for reasons that I’m not going to freak myself out by describing — is pure and total nightmare fuel.)
Everything that you might expect to find in a giallo is present in The Bird With The Crystal Plumage. It may not have been the first but it’s definitely one of the prototypes for what the genre is usually considered to be. Graphic violence, sexual perversion, point-of-view shots, a constantly roaming camera, a dramatic musical score, a killer who wears black gloves and carries a razor, a witness who has to prove his innocence, and a solution that’s revealed only when Sam reexamines what he thinks he saw; it’s all here.
What distinguishes The Bird With The Crystal Plumage is the style with which Argento tells his story. Dario was 30 years old when he directed The Bird With The Crystal Plumage and there’s an infectious enthusiasm to the way he frames the mayhem. Like many film critics directing their first film, Argento fills his debut with homages to earlier films. You can tell he’s having a lot of fun while discovering just how far he can go without losing his audience.
46 years after it was first released, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage holds up surprisingly well. It’s a nightmarish but compulsively watchable thrill ride and it remains one of Argento’s best.
Hello and welcome to the start of TSL’s annual October horrorthon! All through the month of October, our focus will be on horror. We will be sharing reviews and thoughts on some of the best (and worst) horror films ever made! I have to admit that this is my favorite time of the year. I love horror … like all good people!
I want to start things off by taking a look at a film from 1945. The Picture of Dorian Gray is based on the famous novel by Oscar Wilde (a novel that some people think was inspired by the Jack the Ripper murders). Dorian Gray (played by Hurd Hatfield) is a young and handsome aristocrat who lives in 19th century London. When we first meet him, Dorian is intelligent, kind and virtuous. He’s also more than a little boring. He is the bland face of the establishment, a man destined to be celebrated for his position in society and largely forgotten after his death.
Dorian is posing for a painting that’s being done by his friend, an artist named Basil Hallward (Lowell Gilmore). One day, Lord Henry Wotton (George Sanders) stops by the studio while Basil is painting Dorian. Lord Henry is everything that Dorian Gray is not. He’s a worldly and cynical man and he is very proud to live a life devoted to complete and total hedonistic pleasure. He immediately sets out to corrupt Dorian and it turns out to be a lot easier than he was expecting. Henry convinces Dorian that he can have everything that he wants as long as he’s young and handsome. Dorian announces that he wishes the painting could age instead of him…
Now, here’s where the film takes a huge departure from Wilde’s novel. In the novel, the painting ages while Dorian stay young. No specific reason is given. Instead, it’s just something that happens. In the film, it turns out that Basil owns an ancient Egyptian statue and that the statue has mystical powers. Dorian makes his wish in front of the statue and that’s why the painting starts to age. Personally, I think the bit with the Egyptian statue is unnecessary and a little bit silly. To me, the story is a lot more effective if the painting starts to age without an explanation. The filmmakers obviously disagreed.
But no matter! In the end, the Egyptian statue isn’t that important. What is important that, freed from getting old or physically suffering for his actions, Dorian transforms into a different person. Soon, he’s even more hedonistic than Lord Henry. When he breaks the heart of a tragic singer named Sybil Vane (Angela Lansbury, in a poignant and Oscar-nominated performance), Dorian sees that the painting is now cruelly smirking while his own face remains innocent and untouched. When Dorian eventually commits a murder to keep his secret from getting out, the blood appears on the painting’s hands while his own remain clean.
And the years pass. Dorian finds himself both being hunted by Sybil’s brother (Richard Fraser) and falling in love with the niece (Donna Reed) of a man that he earlier murdered. Dorian never ages but his portrait becomes more and more twisted. What’s particularly interesting is that we see little of Dorian’s evil actions. Instead, we watch and listen as other characters whisper about the horrific things that he’s done. Physically, Dorian remains an innocent and young aristocrat. But all we have to do is look at the picture and we can see what a monster Dorian has become…
The Picture of Dorian Gray is an absolutely gorgeous film, one that is full of elaborate sets that are often cast in shadow. (It’s interesting to note that the more corrupt Dorian becomes, the darker and more shadowy his estate becomes.) The film is in black-and-white, with the exception of three scenes in which the portrait is revealed in all of its Technicolor glory. If that sounds like a gimmick … well, it is. But it’s an amazingly effective gimmick.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a classic exercise in psychological horror. See it the next chance you get!
Hi there and welcome to October! This is our favorite time of the year here at the Shattered Lens because October is horror month. For the past three years, we have celebrated every October by reviewing and showing some of our favorite horror movies, shows, books, and music. That’s a tradition that I’m looking forward to helping to continue this year.
Let’s start things off by watching the 1953 sci-fi “classic,” Robot Monster!
Yes, Robot Monster is the movie where a gorilla wearing a diving helmet terrorizes that last surviving humans on Earth. It also features some oddly placed dinosaur stock footage. But, that being said … Robot Monster is a lot of fun. There are few movies that have truly earned the “so bad that it’s good” label and Robot Monster is one of them.
Add to that, watching Robot Monster in October is kinda of a tradition in these parts!
Welcome to The Most Wonderful Time of the Year!!! It’s October- Horror Month!!! I will be reviewing many great and terrible films for your reading pleasure. My advice to you Gentle Readers: decorate your house, turn the lights down low, read my posts, like them, retweet them, tell your friends and family about them BECAUSE if you don’t demons will get you! Here we go!!!
I am watching a man have extreme explosive diarrhea and cough up furballs, when I think, some poor asshole paid to see this.
Escape From Tomorrow is a quasi horror film about a man on vacation with his family to Disneyworld and things go absurdly weird and boring. It’s black and white, which gives it a good eerie feel. It is, in fact, filmed entirely at Disney World and Disney Land. My expectations were raised- too bad for me.
The dad is fired in the first scene over the phone right before he takes his family to tour Disney World. Upon entering the monorail to the park, the dad ogles and passively stalks two girls. One of the ladies he ogles is Annet Mahendru – “Nina” – from The Americans and the other is a REALLY young lady. He ogles them both on the monorail, in line, and pretty much all over the park. His stalking is the only part of the movie that is moderately creepy and scary. At so many points in the show I thought, Dude, your children are right there! Gross!
They arrive at the most wonderful place on Earth to find people coughing. The dad goes on rides and hallucinates. You expect it to get scary and it fizzles out like a damp sparkler. Eventually the mom and dad go to different parts of the park and the Dad is left to stalk the two girls again, but he gets distracted and blacks out and wakes having sex with a woman who looks a lot like a sexy version of the wicked witch in Snow White – It’s weird. The story gets rapidly off the rails and you have to grab at plot points like wet tissue paper. There’s a “Cat Flu, a ridiculous scene inside of Epcot, and redneck in scooter; it’s truly nonsensical and dull. SNORE.
This is why the film fails to do anything but disappoint: he had done it- Randy Moore got into Disney and did pure guerilla filmmaking. However, he forgot to have one thing: a story. OOPS!!! Maybe he left the story at Universal Studios?! I hear the shark can really startle you on the tram! From written accounts, Moore was so worried that he would be sued, he edited the film in South Korea. What a waste of cash! Disney realized quickly what I did- the film sucks and isn’t worth the paper to file suit in Court.
There was ONE and ONLY one part of the film that was compelling. The dad had a drinking problem. He does drink …. A LOT, but the movie strays from that interesting plot point to go off on some boring surreal tangent. If the movie got away from the surreal bullshit and focused on the dad ruining his family and himself at Disney because of alcoholism, it would have been the most moving story about drinking since Leaving Las Vegas. Moore, however, squandered that great opportunity and will either learn from this mistake or go into Real Estate.
He did manage to film in Disney without anyone giving a shit, which is novel and a bit impressive. Also, I have to be stingy with my “As” and “Fs”. Therefore, I give
Remember that old game where you would go up to a stranger’s house, ring the doorbell, and then run off? It’s one of those simple games that really shouldn’t be that much fun and yet, strangely, it is. The thrill of the game really doesn’t come from the fact that you’re making someone open the front door for no good reason. Instead, the thrill comes from seeing if you can run away before that door opens.
You Can’t Escape, the latest short film from Rubbish Rebel Media, opens with a child (Rayce Zatye) walking through an apparently suburban neighborhood and doing just that. He runs up to houses, he rings the doorbell, and then he runs off. As he does this, we can’t help but notice that the neighborhood appears to be deserted. Where are all the other people? Does anyone ever actually answer their door? From the way that the film is directed, we get the feeling that someone may be watching the child but who?
And when the child returns to his own house … well, I won’t spoil the film. Let’s just say that it concludes with a surreal bang.
You Can’t Escape lasts just a little over 2 minutes and the end leaves us with just as many questions as answers. That’s okay, though. The key to horror is the fact that not all questions have easy answers. Director Renner Zatye emphasizes atmosphere and, despite the film’s short length, he captures several uneasy images. The scenes of Racye Zatye walking through that deserted neighborhood are undeniably creepy. A scene where the child walks by several trees especially made me nervous. This is one of those films that asks you to consider what could be hiding behind those trees and whether or not you’re ever as safe as you think.
You Can’t Escape should be getting a release in a few months so be sure to keep an eye out for it!
(For the past three weeks, Lisa Marie has been in the process of reviewing 56 back to school films! She’s promised the rest of the TSL staff that this project will finally wrap up by the end of today, so that she can devote her time to helping to prepare the site for its annual October horrorthon! Will she make it or will she fail, lose her administrator privileges, and end up writing listicles for Buzzfeed? Keep reading the site to find out!)
Well, here we are! It’s taken nearly four weeks but we have reached the conclusion of Back to School Part II! I started this series by taking a look at Teenage Devil Dolls. Along the way, I’ve reviewed everything from Andy Warhol’s Vinyl, A Clockwork Orange, Animal House, and Can’t Hardly Wait to Hollywood Highand Keith. I’ve even found an excuse to review fourdifferentDegrassifilms! I’ve had a lot of fun but, with October approaching, I’m happy to be finishing up this series of reviews so that I can concentrate on the TSL’s annual horrorthon!
So, without further ado, let’s take a look at Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!
Everbody Wants Some!! generated a small flurry of excitement when it was first released back in March. Not only was it Linklater’s first narrative film since the critically acclaimed Boyhood but it was also advertised as being a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused. Like Dazed and Confused, Everybody Wants Some!! was a period piece that would follow an ensemble of Texas teenagers over the course of one long weekend, the big difference being that Everybody Wants Some!! would take place in 1980 (as opposed to 1976) and it would deal with college freshmen (instead of high school juniors). There were even a few articles that pointed out that several of the actors in Everybody Wants Some!! physically resembled some of the actors in Dazed and Confused.
(Seriously, Glen Powell looks like he could be Matthew McConaughey’s younger brother.)
The film was well-reviewed by critics, even though few of the reviews were as rapturous as the reviews that greeted previous Linklater films like Boyhood and Before Midnight. As for the audience reaction … well, Everybody Wants Some!! was not exactly embraced by audiences. I saw it at the Alamo Drafthouse and the theater was nearly deserted. (Considering that the Alamo’s audience prides itself on embracing independent film, a near-empty theater for a showing of a Linklater film is not a good sign.) The few people in the theater seemed to feel that the film went on for too long and that it needed a stronger plot. That’s a complaint that I’ve heard a lot of people make against Everybody Wants Some!!
It’s not a complaint that I agree with. Those who complained that Everybody Wants Some!! was essentially plotless obviously haven’t seen many Richard Linklater films. Though Linklater has made his share of commercial films, his more personal work — like Everybody Wants Some!! — is often plotless. That’s actually one the keys to Linklater’s aesthetic. He’s more interested in recreating a specific time and place and observing how different characters react to their environment than he is in telling conventional stories. A film like Everybody Wants Some!! is less about telling a story with a definite beginning and end and more about capturing a very specific experience.
And, on that level, the film definitely succeeds. Watching Everybody Wants Some!!, you literally do feel as if you’ve stepped into a time machine and you’ve been transported to the past. Jake (Blake Jenner), a college freshman who is attending fictional Southeast Texas College on a scholarship, may be the main character but, ultimately, he’s not that important. More important is seeing how people lived, interacted, and thought in 1980. Everybody Wants Some!! is a time capsule film.
(Apparently, it’s a bit of an autobiographical film as well. Cinema snobs like me tend to forget that, before he became a filmmaker, Linklater was a jock who, like Jake, attended college on a baseball scholarship. As much as we may not want to admit it, not all artistic geniuses spent high school writing angsty poetry about eating disorders. Some of them played sports.)
Everybody Wants Some!! follows Jake and his fellow baseball players over the course of the weekend before classes begin. One night, they end up in a redneck bar. Another night, they end up at a punk club. They go to a drama department party. They practice baseball. They all drink. Some of them smoke weed. Some of them get laid. And, at the end of the weekend, two of them sit down in their first class of the semester and promptly fall asleep.
One problem that I did have with Everybody Wants Some!! is that, as good as job as it does of creating a time and place, it didn’t necessarily convince me that it was a time in which I would want to live in. As I stated earlier, Everybody Wants Some!! was promoted as being a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused. However, Dazed and Confused featured a greater variety of characters. Practically everyone of note in Everybody Wants Some!! is a member of the school’s baseball team. True, some of them are smarter than others. Some of them smoke weed. Some of them are ultra religious. But, ultimately, they’re all jocks and they’re all frat boys. How much you enjoy hanging out with these characters will depend on how much tolerance you have for jocks, frat boys, and their hyper-masculine rituals. Whenever I’ve seen Dazed and Confused, I’ve thought to myself that if I had been alive and in high school in 1976, I would have wanted to be friends with at least a few of the characters. On the other hand, if I had been alive and in college in 1980, I would have gone out of my way to avoid that baseball team.
(And, as a result, I probably would have missed a chance to meet Richard Linklater! There’s a lesson to be learned there.)
Ultimately, though, Everybody Wants Some!! succeeds because, even if the characters aren’t particularly likable, the film itself does capture the feeling and the excitement of having your entire future ahead of you. Admittedly, there’s a hint of melancholy running through the film. One character is revealed to be a 30-something imposter who regularly uses a false identity to enroll in different colleges because he loves to play baseball but he knows that he’ll never succeed in the major leagues. Throughout the film, there are hints that none of these baseball players are ever going to be as successful as they are during that one particular weekend. But, ultimately, the film tells us that the future doesn’t matter. What matters is that, for that one weekend, they had their entire future ahead of them and it seemed like anything was possible.
Everybody Wants Some!! may not be Linklater’s best but it definitely deserves to be seen!
(And that concludes Back to School! Thank you everyone for reading! Love you!)
(For the past three weeks, Lisa Marie has been in the process of reviewing 56 back to school films! She’s promised the rest of the TSL staff that this project will finally wrap up by the end of today, so that she can devote her time to helping to prepare the site for its annual October horrorthon! Will she make it or will she fail, lose her administrator privileges, and end up writing listicles for Buzzfeed? Keep reading the site to find out!)
When I was going to college, I was actually encouraged by quite a few people to join a sorority but I never did. What can I say? I fancied myself as being an artist and an intellectual. I had no interest in conformity and, to me, that’s what sororities and fraternities represented. Why would I want to waste my time with that when I could spend my time writing poems about death? (Add to that, why go through all the trouble of joining a sorority when I knew I could get into all the good parties, regardless of whether I was a member of one or not?)
Seriously!
So, I made my decision to never get involved in any of that and I think I probably made the right choice for me. But occasionally, I’ll see a film on Lifetime that will make me change my mind. It seems that every year, there’s a few dozen Lifetime movies that are about something strange happening in a sorority. In the world of Lifetime, sororities are full of dark secrets, constant melodrama, and, more often than not, a murder or two. Lifetime makes sorority life look … well, if not exactly fun, at least entertaining!
Consider for instance, the film Sorority Nightmare! Sorority Nightmare aired on July 21st and, in the best Lifetime tradition, it totally lives up to its name. All you need to know about Sorority Nightmare is right there in the title. It deals with a sorority and, oh my God, is this place ever a nightmare! (According to the imdb, the film’s non-Lifetime title is Twisted Sisters. That’s a good title because these sorority sisters sure are twisted!)
As the start of the film, first-year college student Sarah (Sierra McCormick) is a lot like me. She’s an intellectual, a free thinker. She’s not really interested in being a part of a sorority. She’d rather hang out with her snarky roommate, Jodi (Sarah Kapner). Add to that, Sarah still blames herself for the death of her older sister, Jill. Jill was driving Sarah home after Sarah got too drunk at a party. When Jill attempted to pose for a selfie while driving, she ended up crashing the car and dying in the process. Sarah survived but, for obvious reasons, she’s no longer interested in getting drunk at parties.
But, her mother was a member of Psi Kappa and she insists that Sarah actually check the place out. And since Sarah is a legacy, she’s asked to pledge. Even though it means losing whatever credibility she may have with Jodi, Sarah decides to join.
It quickly turns out that Psi Kappa is more of a cult than a sorority. The cult is led by Daisy (Cassidy Gifford), who is friendly, perky, intense, and more than a little frightening. Daisy not only decides that Sarah is her new best friend but she also suggests that maybe Sarah shouldn’t have any other friends. When Daisy isn’t trying to control everyone’s lives, she busy popping what she says are breath mints but are actually “diet pills.”
OH MY GOD, DAISY’S A SPEED FREAK!
Anyway, Sorority Nightmare pretty much plays out exactly how you would expect it to but that doesn’t matter. As played by Cassidy Gifford, Daisy is literally a force of nature. She’s a nonstop tornado of manipulation and malicousness and it’s a lot of fun to watch. Sorority Nightmare is one of those wonderfully over the top Lifetime films where it’s obvious that the cast and the crew is in on the joke. Sit back, don’t worry, and enjoy the melodrama!
(For the past three weeks, Lisa Marie has been in the process of reviewing 56 back to school films! She’s promised the rest of the TSL staff that this project will finally wrap up by the end of today, so that she can devote her time to helping to prepare the site for its annual October horrorthon! Will she make it or will she fail, lose her administrator privileges, and end up writing listicles for Buzzfeed? Keep reading the site to find out!)
How many times can the same thing keep happening to the same people?
That’s a question that you may be tempted to ask yourself while watching Neighbors 2. Neighbors 2 is, of course, a sequel to the original Neighbors. In the first film, Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne played Mac and Kelly Radner, a married couple who are struggling to deal with the fact that, as new parents, they are now officially adults. When a crazy and wild fraternity moves in next door to them and refuses to tone down their partying ways, Mac and Kelly are forced to take matters into their own hands. Occasionally hilarious mayhem ensues.
In Neighbors 2, Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne again play Mac and Kelly Radner, a married couple who are struggling to deal with the fact that, as parents who are awaiting the arrival of their 2nd child, they are now officially adults and may have to finally move into a more family friendly house in the suburbs. When a crazy and wild fraternity sorority moves in next door to them and refuses to tone down their partying ways, Mac and Kelly are forced to take matters into their own hands. Occasionally hilarious mayhem ensues.
Yeah, it’s all pretty familiar. Not only are many of the same jokes from the first film repeated but they’re often repeated at that exact same spot in which they originally appeared. To the film’s credit, it does occasionally acknowledge that it’s repeating itself, though it never quite reaches the self-aware heights of something like 22 Jump Street. Even Zac Efron returns and, again, he is initially the Radner’s enemy before eventually becoming their ally.
That said, the familiarity is not necessarily a bad thing. Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne both know how to get laughs, even when they’re telling the same joke that they told a year ago. Zac Efron tends to try too hard whenever he has a dramatic role (like in The Paperboy, for instance) but he’s got a real talent for comedy.
Ultimately, though, the best thing that saves Neighbors 2 from just being a forgettable comedy sequel is the sorority. As opposed to the first film’s creepy fraternity, the sorority in Neighbors 2 is partying for a cause greater than just hedonism. Shelby (Chloe Grace Moretz, finally getting to have fun in a movie) starts her independent sorority in response to being told that official sororities are not allowed to throw parties and, instead, can only attend misogynistic frat parties. When Shelby and her sorority buy the house, it’s not just to make trouble. It’s because they need a place where they can have a good time without feeling that they’re in constant danger from drunk and perverted frat boys. A subtext of empowerment through partying runs through Neighbors 2 and it elevates the entire film.
Neighbors 2 is an entertaining film, even if it never leaves as much of an impression as you may hope. (I have to admit that, whenever I try to list all the films that I’ve seen this year, Neighbors 2 is one of those that I often have to struggle to remember.) That said, it’s not a terrible way to spend 97 minutes and it’ll make you laugh. And, ultimately, that really is the most important thing when it comes to comedy.
As for the question of how often can the same thing happen to the same person…
Well, I guess we’ll have to wait for Neighbors 3 to get our answer!
For the past three weeks, Lisa Marie has been in the process of reviewing 56 back to school films! She’s promised the rest of the TSL staff that this project will finally wrap up by the end of today, so that she can devote her time to helping to prepare the site for its annual October horrorthon! Will she make it or will she fail, lose her administrator privileges, and end up writing listicles for Buzzfeed? Keep reading the site to find out!)
Oh Hell yeah!
Eric Roberts is back as Dr. Beck and, once again, he’s obsessed with a teenage girl! Believe it or not, this is a good thing because this obsession leads to Dr. Beck spending a lot of time sitting in a car that’s parked in front of Amy’s (Claire Backwelder) high school. By doing so, Dr. Beck justifies my decision to include the 2016 Lifetime film Stalked By My Doctor: The Return in my series of Back to School reviews.
Thank you, Dr. Beck!
As you may remember from last year’s Stalked By My Doctor, Dr. Beck is a neurotic doctor who has an unfortunate tendency to get obsessed with his patients. At the end of the first movie, the good doctor narrowly escaped the police and was last seen flashing a somewhat nervous smile.
At the start of The Return, we find Dr. Beck now living in Mexico. He’s done a pretty good job of avoiding arrest and has a successful career going as a beach bum but he has yet to find true love. However, it seems like that might change when, one day, he spots a teenage girl drowning in the ocean. Dr. Beck not only saves Amy from drowning but he also literally brings her back to life. Seriously, my wonderful readers, be sure to learn CPR.
(Then again, I’m not sure that I’ve ever learned CPR. I guess I should. We can’t always depend on a crazy fugitive doctor to be around.)
Both Amy and her overprotective mom, Linda (Hilary Greer), are thankful and now, Dr. Beck is now obsessed all over again. In fact, he’s so obsessed that he even risks capture by returning to the United States. Under the pretense of merely wanting to check up on his patient, Beck starts to stalk Amy. Taking a lesson from Nabokov’s Lolita, Beck starts to go out with the neurotic Linda. By marrying Linda, Dr. Beck hopes that he can get to Amy.
All together now: Ewwwwwww! Bad doctor!
Amy and her boyfriend (Mark Grossman) eventually grow suspicious of Dr. Beck. They even recruit Amy’s Uncle Roger (Christopher Crabb) to investigate the good doctor. However, Linda refuses to hear a word against him. That’s not surprising, considering that she’s just agreed to marry him…
Stalked By My Doctor: The Return is a deliberately over-the-top melodrama, one that has more in common with the snarky satire of A Deadly Adoption than the previous Stalked By My Doctor. Sprinkled throughout the film are several scenes in which Dr. Beck has conversations with the voices in his head and, as you can probably guess, Eric Roberts plays the Hell out of these scenes. In fact, Roberts is a force of nature in this film, keeping a straight face while ripping through his overwrought dialogue and only stopping occasionally to wink at the camera, almost as if Dr. Beck realizes that he’s just a character in a Lifetime movie. Roberts is obviously having a blast in the role and his demented joy is somewhat infectious. After imagining that he’s killed a dining companion, a blood-covered Roberts says, “Check please,” and his delivery of that one-liner is absolutely brilliant.
Stalked By My Doctor: The Return is a blast of over the top, Eric Roberts-inspired lunacy.
