Here’s my issue with The Host: what I saw, I really liked and what I heard, I did not. The Host is pretty much about a gigantic fish-monster … thing spawned by scientists dumping toxic chemicals into a river that makes with the roaring and the rampaging one fine day. The survivors start coming down with a virus (or do they?) as one family struggles to find a member that they thought was dead – but really isn’t.
Since I was knocking together bookcases, I put The Host on the dubbed version since I was trying to multi-task. It’s really never a good sign when one of the voice actors does an impression of Officer Barbrady from South Park for a cop voice. I think that I missed out on a lot by not reading the subtitles and listening to the normal voices, but what I saw I liked. It’s fun and a little frenzied, if at times sorta forced.
Although…fish monster? Really?
A bunch of women go spelunking only to discover uncharted horrors!
So, things I have learned from The Descent:
Don’t ever go spelunking in caves;
If you do, bring extra knives, maybe a gun;
If you spot some creepy, blind cave dwellers – run, don’t ask them for directions;
DO NOT GO SPELUNKING WITH ANYONE NAMED JUNO;
The Descent 2 shouldn’t even be in existence if we’re going with the “real” ending here;
Be prepared if you are in a group stranded in an extreme situation that strikes you as the kind of place Bear Grylls would explore on camera for one or more of your friends to go batshit insane.
I think the worst part of The Descent isn’t the creepy crawlers; the film would’ve worked properly and efficiently if they hadn’t been included, with all respect. The extreme sense of claustrophobia and of being hopelessly lost is frightening enough. The breakdown between the members of the group and how they react to such a situation is even more frightening. The crawlers, actually, are just the icing on the cake, so to speak.
It’s that classic tale of boy meets girl, unless you count the girl being a crack science reporter and the boy being a semi-mad genius obsessed with teleportation.
Seth Brundle is a researcher working on how to make teleportation work. Veronica Quaife scents a story in Seth Brundle; she follows him back to his lab and he shows her these nifty two telepods he’s been working on. After some arguing, the two agree that Veronica can hang around and cover one of the greatest scientific achievements ever. It soon becomes more than that, though, and Seth and Veronica’s communication problems soon cause Seth to get drunk and make a very, very bad decision.
I’d say that accidentally teleporting yourself with a common housefly is a very large problem, especially when you combine with the fly at a molecular level with a human to create Brundlefly. Ick.
David Cronenberg remade the fly from a hokey ’50’s sci-fi flick (come on, the scientist’s head was practically pasted onto a fly’s body) into a much more modern retelling of the horrors that can be achieved through science and arguably what it means to be human. While it’s gory, sure, Cronenberg never uses violence for violence’s sake (Rob Zombie, we’ll get to you later); instead, he uses it when necessary. … And let’s face it, Goldblum’s transformation into the fully realized Brundlefly, with his half-fly, half-human body and all the changes he has to make to get there, is going to be gory no matter what
Creepiest moment: Has got to be, hands down, Brundle’s collection of body parts that have fallen off which he stores in his medicine cabinet. Yuck. Either that or Goldblum’s semi-deranged rant about taking a dip in the plasma pool.
Scariest moment: I can never, ever, ever hear about someone having a baby without picturing Geena Davis giving birth to a glo-worm.
Imagine that thing, sans the cutesy face and nightcap. OH, THE HORROR OF IT ALL.
I loveThe Fly. It’s got a lot of moments of genuine horror and suspense, as well as one of the weirdest performances Goldblum has done. It’s definitely not one of the weirdest movies David Cronenberg has done (Oh! David, let’s be BFF just for The Brood!) but I think, one of the best. It’s a good fright flick that’s watchable just for the scares or if you want, for the ethical and moral questions it raises.
Visually speaking, Dracula is a feast. It’s beautifully lit and bathed in an aura of Victorian sensibilities drenched in crimson and black. It has some stunning old-school sequences like in the beginning, where a beautiful opening montage explains how Dracula came to be a vampire. The costumes are gorgeous; the sets are immaculate.
It’s too bad someone didn’t foist the same care upon the story. What starts out as a feast becomes some sort of sugary confection, like eating a really long-lasting Starburst or something.
For all its pretty trappings, Dracula is threadbare as a movie. We’re all familiar with the plot so I won’t rehash it here, but Dracula rests on Gary Oldman’s shoulders. He does a remarkable job of injecting some measure of humanity and sympathy into a devilish beast, so snaps for you, Gary. Anthony Hopkins shows up as Van Helsing to basically do a crazy old man jig all the way through the movie – watch Dracula and tell me he doesn’t look half-drunk. No, it’s the appalling mix of Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder that finally does the movie in. Bless him, Keanu’s out of his depth in this one. I’m pretty sure everyone knew it too; I don’t get the sense he’s helped any by direction or editing in the slightest. A cringe-inducing attempt at an English accent sinks his already abysmal performance. I adore Keanu, as we’ve previously established, but to watch Keanu try and play a naive man addled and terrified by Dracula is to feel embarrassment for him.
Winona Ryder has small moments of clarity, but Mina Harker is so braindead I’m not sure what Ryder could do except stand around and look pretty and/or horrified. Since Mina is supposed to be the reincarnation of Dracula’s long dead wife, you have to wonder if Dracula loves her in spite of the fact that she’s a dim bulb or because of it. Either way, my God, she gets tiresome quickly.
Much like in life, pretty can only carry you so far. While Dracula starts out entertaining and moving, it loses steam in such a rapid fashion it leaves the viewer sucking on sugar for the next interminable hours.
Yea, verily, it’s like the cinematic equivalent of a damn Everlasting Gobstopper: it feels like it’s never going to end. And when it does, blessedly, you’re struck with the feeling that such a visually inspiring piece of film should at least have an equally moving story to match.
As they say: no dice here. … And it’s a shame. But I enjoy watching it if only for all the neat visuals and beautiful sets.
A guilty pleasure? Oh, sure. Not one of Coppola’s finest cinematic achievements, though.
Watching Johnny Mnemonic is akin to watching a train wreck in the sense that the train goes off the rails, flips twelve or thirteen times and then explodes in a massive conflagration akin to the sum total of all explosions in Michael Bay flicks. It’s that bad.
Based (and I use that term loosely) on the William Gibson story of the same name, the film takes all the good in Gibson’s story and scratches it out in favor of a Hollywood love story and corporate greed. Johnny Mnemonic bears little resemblance to the story it sprang from, much to the film’s detriment. (More on that later.)
Johnny (Keanu Reeves) is an information courier in the future. Since this is a movie featuring Technologically Advanced Dystopia, Johnny has neural implants that allow him to upload data to his head. He takes a job transporting data from Asia to Newark, New Jersey – insert your own Hell joke here – and manages to massively overload his implants. He has 24 hours to extract the data or his neural implants will enter an advanced state of seepage and kill him. It puts a major crimp in Johnny’s plans that the data he has stuffed in his brain is the cure for a deadly disease that’s infected mass amounts of the world population. An evil corporation named PharmaCom realizes that the cure they were holding will diminish their profits, since curing a disease is cheaper than treating the symptoms. They hire the Yakuza to cut off Johnny’s head. Add in a bodyguard named Jane and Johnny’s adventures around town become the explosive, shoot-y variety.
The movie is gaudy by even the standards of the ’90’s. The visual effects of what the Internet looks like are over the top even in those days, using bright neon colors and geometric shapes. It looks and feels like someone’s interpretation of the Internet through the design aesthetic of Body Glove clothing.
What makes the movie truly memorable is the insane supporting cast it’s got going on. Udo Kier, Dolph Lundgren (as a nutso street preacher!), John Spencer, Ice T (!) and Henry Rollins (!!) are all there. It’s downright bizarre. Lundgren plays a crazy preacher on call for the Yakuza who wields weapons like a cross-knife. No, really. And Rollins, he of the screaming anger and years of tours with punk band Black Flag (and later, Rollins Band and spoken word), plays a doctor named Spider. Ice-T plays the leader of a gang called the Lo-Teks who aren’t low-tech in the slightest.
It’s really Reeves and Dina Meyer as the bodyguard Jane who play their roles with such a serious bent that it’s unintentionally comic. The screenwriting doesn’t help, because let’s face it: Keanu Reeves will never be a world class actor. A great guy, sure, but not a great actor. And the following rant does him no favors at all:
What starts out as a futuristic thriller devolves into complete and total insanity. Somehow, even though both characters are completely devoid of personality, Johnny and Jane fall in love. Henry Rollins sacrifices his life so that Johnny and Jane can escape. (That’s always where the movie lost me, when Dolph Lundgren takes out Henry Rollins. Does. Not. Compute.) Johnny and Jane make their way to Lo-Tek heaven where a Navy-trained dolphin helps Johnny hack his own brain to broadcast the cure for this terrible disease to everyone on the planet.
I repeat:
A NAVY-TRAINED DOLPHIN HELPS JOHNNY HACK HIS OWN BRAIN.
It’s like some sort of Hollywood exec had an acid-trip and watched Discovery Science and came up with this idea. (Jones the Navy-trained dolphin is in the story, but it’s still weird. Weirder, actually, since the dolphin’s addicted to smack, but it makes sense in the context of the actual story.)
The last twenty minutes or so come off as entirely bizarre, too bizarre to be real or imagined, and it doesn’t help that Ice-T is playing Ice-T and Dina Meyer and Keanu Reeves are running around, emoting like blocks of ice, or that you realize the sum total of your investment in this movie rests on whether or not a fucking dolphin can help Johnny out or not.
In the story, Johnny acknowledges that he’s like a “bucket of water” that’s constantly emptied and refilled. He’s tired of that existence, so he goes to Jones to get the data out of his head and instead of sending it out, Johnny, Molly (the Jane character in the story) and Jones sit on it. Instead, Johnny and Jones hack out faint traces of previous jobs Johnny took from his neural implants and blackmail his former clients with the data. Johnny and Molly become Lo-Teks, do whatever they want and upgrade Jones to a better tank and score him some heroin whenever he needs it. I’m not kidding in the slightest. And it makes more sense than what the movie gives us.
Gibson’s story is a bleak and brutal piece of work and while I understand that movies are made all the time that don’t adhere to the original works they stemmed from, Johnny Mnemonic feels drastically incomplete and wrong for not incorporating a lot more of Gibson’s edge to it as well as shearing a lot of the good stuff from the work.
That being said, Mnemonic is a fun relic to watch for the overacting and the gaudy set pieces, the numerous strange and weird actors that pop up in odd places and the general cheesiness of it all. It’s a major Hollywood production that’s cheese-laden and wallows in its own overblown grotesqueries and, if memory serves me correctly, bombed at the box office. It’s a weird movie to watch and it’s quite a bit of fun to laugh at and enjoy in a hideous, post-mortem sense.
However, if there’s anyone out there that unironically enjoys this movie, I do not want to know. Good heavens, let me remain ignorant.
You guys nominated more than I can watch in 24 hours!
So now it’s time to vote on nine selections. You get nine votes for the nine movies I’m going to watch in 24 hours starting on midnight at the 30th and ending on midnight on Halloween. Here’s the movies you guys nominated along with a couple of my own…
On your marks and all that:
Get ’em in soon! Voting ends WEDNESDAY so that I have time to pick these things up.
Is there anything Laurence Fishburne can’t do? He does every genre of film. He was in Apocalypse Now, The Matrix, a Nightmare on Elm Street movie. Hell, he made a forgettable gangster part in the Assault on Precinct 13 remake sharp as hell and interesting as all get out. (I totally forget Gabriel Byrne plays the baddie in this movie because of Laurence’s awesome part.)
Dude is smooth as hell and has one amazing voice. Oh Lord, that voice; I may be in the minority here but I’ve always found him to be so damn attractive. And he was effing Morpheus. Shit, I even rewatch Event Horizon for him.
He’s a fantabulous actor and easy on the eyes. Congrats, Mr. October. (I’m sure that honorary doctorate pales in comparison to this stunning award, right?)
Thanks to the magic of Twitter, I got approval from some readers on this that they were interested in this, so I’m posting it here.
I’ll be doing a blogathon on Halloween of scary movies, and as always, I’m letting you guys do the programming. So you drop what you want in the comments and I’ll do my best to scare it up given that I can order it or already own it. (Night of the Creeps comes out on DVD soon! Woo!)
I might be a little addled from moving (I move to a new apartment on the 29th) but we’ll see how it goes.
So drop what you want in the comments and we’ll keep this open for a week or so, then post the blogathon programming for Halloween.
13 Going on 30 isn’t a favorite of mine, but I can easily see how it could be a guilty pleasure. It’s a fluffy morality tale about getting everything you thought you wanted and realizing it wasn’t worth it.
13 year old Jenna Rink is desperate to fit in with the cool girls at school. Her friend Matty is kind and good to her, but Jenna spurns him and a gift he spent ages making her in favor of impressing the cool girls. After an accident with some “wishing dust”, Jenna wakes up to discover she’s thirty years old and a successful magazine editor at her favorite teenage girl magazine, Poise.
What follows is a serious of slapstick and eighties jokes, since Jenna still acts as if she’s thirteen and is thrilled that she can drink pina coladas legally. She helps liven up the failing magazine while learning that before her thirteen year old self was magically transplanted into the future, grown up Jenna Rink was really a very nasty person.
Her best friend (the lovely and wonderful Judy Greer) is cynical, sharp tongued and mean to the hilt. Jenna wonders what happened to Matty, so she tracks him down and discovers he’s engaged and they’re no longer friends.
13 Going On 30 rests on Jennifer Garner’s wide-eyed charm, which gets her through most of the movie. The whole shebang gets trying toward the end because sitting through an hour plus of learning about how vile Adult Jenna was and how equally vile the best friend is gets tiring and depressing.
I never got the Mark Ruffalo love until I saw this movie because he plays a brokenhearted guy who’s willing to still be friends with Jenna, even if she kicked him around something major.
More than anything, 13 Going on 30 is a lesson wrapped up in the trappings of adult people doing the Thriller dance at parties and quoting Pat Benatar. It’s more than a little cheesy given that it’s lecturing a bit on the values of family and friends over material things and status. Of course Jenna gets to go back through the magic of wishing dust to her thirteen year old self and correct her future self’s mistakes. It slightly irritates me that of all the realizations that Jenna comes to – that her nice apartment and job are not worth the backbiting and bitchery she’s engaged in, that her adult self ignoring her parents is horrific to her – that it is a dude that makes her wish she could take it all back.
Garner, Ruffalo and Greer are really the best parts of the movie, but it’s also a treat to watch for the multiple ’80’s references (although you can fast forward through a creepy scene where Garner has a sleepover with “other” 13 year olds).
It’s a little too fluffy and sugary for my taste; I appreciate fully the fact that someone could find this a guilty pleasure, but I’d rather watch Johnny Mnemonic. (Could that be coming up next?!)
Ah, George Hamilton, King of the Carrot Colored People. (I hear Lindsay Lohan’s a countess.)
Count Dracula (George Hamilton) has been evicted from his castle by a Communist committee bent on turning it into a training facility for Romanian athletes. Dracula relocates to New York, which is no coincidence. He’s finally fallen in love after 700 years with a woman that he’s only seen on the covers of fashion magazines. With a loyal bug-eating manservant named Renfield in tow, he heads to the Big Apple to find the woman of his dreams.
He finds her, sure enough. It turns out that she’s a supermodel named Cindy who has some extra baggage attached in a fiance who – naturally – is a descendent of Van Helsing.
The movie really feels like a Mel Brooks production sans the slapstick, so I guess you could call it Mel Brooks-lite. A lot of the jokes fall flat, but some are actually pretty funny. And while George Hamilton portrays Dracula as a lovelorn guy vastly outof step with the times, it’s really Peter Benjamin as Jeffrey, the fiance who’s also a therapist, who steals the show. The guy has fantastic line delivery and really works a part that could have been fairly lackluster into something quite funny. Jeffrey constantly tries to both win back over the girl he loves and honor his family heritage by slaying Dracula with predictable but comic results – he gets locked up in the nuthouse and arrested. (He spends his time in the psychiatric ward drawing pictures of Dracula in crayon with the title ‘Dracula SUCKS!’)
It shouldn’t be any surprise that Count Dracula overcomes the obstacles, gets the girl and flies off into the night, but he has a few humorous pitfalls before he does. If you watch it, I’d have a healthy sense of no expectations beforehand so that the few bright spots really stand out. It’s also fun with regard to the fact that there’s a large amount of name brand recognition – TWA, Kentucky Fried Chicken, etc. – so there’s a lot of, “Hey, remember when that looked like tht?” Case in point: Remember those old animated Raid commercials? There’s one of those in this movie.
I’m not sure what makes this a guilty pleasure, but it was at least an enjoyable watch.
Imagine that thing, sans the cutesy face and nightcap. OH, THE HORROR OF IT ALL.
1416 and Counting 