That Boy's Got the Devil in Him...A Shit-Ton of Reviews - Originally posted April 12th 2007

Been busy lately. Well, I've been busy writing these reviews anyway. I've got a good 5 of them to post this time around, so you'll be able to spend a couple of (paid, shhh) lunch breaks reading these. Included are reviews of Grindhouse, segment: Planet Terror, The Dreams in the Witch-House, The Roost, The Resurrected, and The Nest.

A few preliminaries before I go into things.

Number one, after having some less than stellar cinematic experiences within the last few weeks, I realized why the bad review has its place in this world: public service. My words of warning will allow you to avoid the same movie-watching mistakes I have made. So in the spirit of 'don't step there, and if you don't believe me believe my boots' I'm presenting not one, but two reviews of not-so-good flicks. Don't worry, I basically stick to my 3 sentence rule, with a little variation, but hey, rules are made to be bent and then re-made, right?

Number two, I saw Grindhouse. Twice. [Editor's Note: that's three times now] And as I've mentioned I'm including a review of Planet Terror, but I've decided not to include my review of Death Proof because after a second viewing and some discussion I don't feel equipped to review it. I don't know too much about the exploitation genre and I hate nothing more than an uneducated reviewer pissing on something because he's got it all out of context. Not that I piss on Death Proof at all, but I figure I'll leave it to someone who knows what Tarantino is going for better than I do to provide an expert opinion. I'll just say I liked Death Proof though I felt it was very slow compared to Planet Terror.

Lastly, Phantasm and Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead hit shelves this week, so watch for my review of the entire Phantasm series very soon.

So without further adieu, here are my reviews:

Title: Grindhouse
Segment 1: Planet Terror
Director: Robert Rodriguez
Year: 2007

Oh man. Oh man. This is definitely one the best things I've seen in a few years. Hands down. I mean, there have been some good films in the last five years, but this kind of movie has not been released in a good while.

I'll save my discussion of the machine gun leg for a bit. That's one of the things that got me in the door, and it was definitely delivered on. The other thing that got me in the door was the promise of gore and a whole lot of it. So the minute the words "special makeup effects by Gregory Nicotero" flashed across the screen, I knew that I was getting my money's worth, and then some. I might go so far as to say this is some of his best work, although I can't seriously claim that I've seen every single film Mr. Nicotero has worked on. I have, however, seen a good lot of them.

The film aging effect was cool, and it did two interesting things. The first is obvious, giving the film an aged, cheap, scratched up look. Made you feel filthy just watching the thing. Even though I was sitting in the immaculate (by some standards) AMC Forum 30 Auditorium Number 17 while watching this the first time, the dirty film effect did make me peer around a few times wondering how much dried semen covered the seats around me. I know that there was a lot of fresh semen on the back of the seat in front of me. Hah!

The other effect the film aging technique had was a little more subtle, but actually more powerful. For me, the dirty, grainy look of the film served to obscure many of the CGI effects and made them look more real. I think part of it was my brain being fooled into thinking the film was older. The other part was purely visual, but it worked. The CGI was a lot harder to spot most of the time, and some effects were more eerily believable than they might have been on a crisp print.

Honestly though, Mr. Rodriguez has outdone himself. The director of such gems as Spy Kids and The Faculty (I poke fun) delivers about as much gross-out over-the-top violence as one film can handle. There's blood, pus, exploding heads, pulsating growths, eyeball mayhem, dripping members, and a whole lotta limb-ripping cannibalism. Not to mention the ubiquitous machine-gun prosthetic. I think you get the idea.

If Kill Bill was a self-referencing homage to martial arts films, with casting decisions built in as references in and of themselves (i.e. you're supposed to know who Sonny Chiba is) then Planet Terror is a self-referencing homage to all the gooey, slimy, gory 1980's creature and zombie flicks. It has the same sort of built in casting references (i.e. you're supposed to know who Michael Biehn and Tom Savini are for the reveals on them to make any sense). The story is pretty typical fare with a little twist, and, of course, done much better than many films toying with the same basic premise. This is helped by the above-mentioned excellent casting choices. As I said you've got the Michael Biehn (of The Terminator and Aliens) and Tom Savini (of both Dawn of the Dead films, From Dusk Till Dawn, special effects guy on quite a few of George Romero's 'Dead' movies). You've got Bruce Willis (for like 10 seconds) and Michael Parks (Earl McGraw in nearly every other Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez movie ever made) and a shit-ton more. It's a cornucopia of b-movie faces.

One of the big set pieces to this film is itself a tribute to 80's horror: Rose McGowan's infamous machine gun leg, which is obviously inspired by Bruce Campbell's chainsaw hand in Evil Dead 2. This brings up kind of a big point I want to make about the difference between typical horror pablum and the cult classics that stand out above them. In your average, forgettable piece of horror tripe, you have your average forgettable human characters that flee and scream and cry and whine through the horrible ordeal they are going through and in the end, either survive by luck or don't make it at all. These characters are generally worse than just 'average' in these films; they are in fact usually just parodies of their prosaic, uninteresting real-life counterparts. This is what usually contributes to the all-around lifelessness of these movies. The characters are worse than flat, they're barely characters. I tend to find it insulting that I'm supposed to identify with these people.

Having so-called 'normal' people deal realistically with the premise of a horror movie (done effectively in The Descent) only works with extremely well-written characters. Your hard-partyin' teen stereotype must be abandoned, at any rate.

In the cult classics, however, there is necessarily an iconic hero (or heroine) that emerges from the ashes (so to speak) of their normal persona, someone who is beyond human, over-the-top, slightly skewed out of reality. Someone who becomes a machine or weapon themselves, or modifies some normal appliance into a barbaric armament to destroy whatever evil they're facing. Ash with his iconic chainsaw hand and double barreled boomstick comes to mind. So does Reggie from Phantasm with his 1970 Hemicuda and 4 barreled shotgun, Lionel with his lawnmower from Dead Alive, Ripley with her flamethrower/pulse rifle from Aliens, George with his motorcycle and samurai sword in Demons, and more recently Marion from Undead with his triple shotgun, and Sara with her homemade four-barreled shotgun in Dead and Breakfast. There is ample evidence to suggest that this plot device, this heroic transformation, has its roots in mythology. But I'm not here to dig into anthropology, I'm merely pointing out that many of the movies, or stories really, that we remember the best have this idea as one of their features.

Honestly, I don't know what Planet Terror will be like with the missing reel restored (you can count on there being an unrated extended DVD release) but without it, you've got pretty much 90 minutes of non-stop action and splatter. Excellent. As of now, I've seen this twice, and will probably see it again. And I haven't done that since I was 11 and saw Jurassic Park six times in the theater.

Title: The Dreams in the Witch-House
Director: Stuart Gordon
Year: 2006

This short film is part of that Masters of Horror series that was on HBO awhile back, which you might have seen at your local DVD retailer. My initial thoughts on seeing it were pretty harsh. I've watched it again, and I have to soften my opinion a bit, but that's not saying a whole heck of a lot.

My three sentences:

This film lacks any real special effects and contains very little patented Stuart Gordon gore, though it succeeds nominally at invoking a Lovecraftian atmosphere. It's worth purchasing if you are a Lovecraft junkie, but be aware that this is a mediocre adaptation and a downright forgettable Stuart Gordon flick. This film actually subtracts a little too much from original story, to the point where it kind of comes off as a stage production of a Lovecraft story, with all the attendant special effects technology that stage productions have…you know, colored lights and wires and such.

I'll reserve one extra sentence for my biggest complaint: Brown Jenkin is DUMB AS HELL. Gordon takes one of the creepiest and most iconic of Lovecraft's creations (one that used to give me nightmares), a bizarre rat with a hairy human face, a demonic witch's familiar, and he makes it into a goddamn Beatrix Potter character!

Anything positive?

Ezra Godden is decent. He's actually believable as a Lovecraftian protagonist, which has generally been pretty difficult for a lot of actors to do. Props to him for that. I hope he can make a career out of it.

All in all, The Dreams in the Witch-House is worth picking up on the cheap, and worth watching as part of a Friday night lineup of Lovecraft flicks, but watch it earlier in the evening and save the heavy hitters for later, because it's definitely one of the weakest recent films of that canon out there.

Title: The Roost
Director: Ti West
Year: 2005

Wow. Included in the special features of this DVD is a short movie called "Prey" billed as 'director Ti West's student film'. I think someone forgot to mention that The Roost is director Ti West's OTHER STUDENT FILM.

Maybe I need to try and watch this again. Maybe I'm slighting The Roost for some very shallow reasons. Maybe I'm just too oversaturated by sick special effects and free-flowing gore to appreciate this film's subtler points.

Maybe not.

Ok, in three sentences:

This movie takes a low budget and chooses unceremoniously to do nothing with it. The plot is beyond trite, and sucks as much life out of the movie's premise (bats that turn people into zombies with a bite) as it can by including the obligatory four hard-partyin' young people on their way to never-mind-it-doesn't-matter-you-can't-force-yourself-to-care-about-these-characters-much-less-their-unconvincing-story-setup-ville. Ok, last sentence, with the upshot: no gore, almost no on-screen violence, a body count that makes Sense and Sensibility look like a snuff film, and an inexcusably student-film-y setting: a goddamn barn in the countryside (obviously somebody knew somebody so they could film there for a few days, in lieu of, you know, a movie set).

Notice how I found a loop-hole around my 3-sentence rule…parenthetical asides and excessive hyphenation?

I guess, if there are positives, the bats were cool. I'm not sure if there was a bat trainer, or if the bats were CGI. Either way, it seems that's where all the budget was spent. The fact that I can't tell the difference is a testament to their effectiveness, but I would say 'director Ti West' definitely blew his wad on the bats and they, because of the pathetic screenplay, don't get to be as much of a tension-generating screen presence as they should have been. Some of the makeup is alright, but makeup is only one aspect of a good zombie flick. There are a whole lot of other things this film doesn't get right, almost too many for this to be anything other than a rent-it-once deal. It's almost too slow to be any fun, either, unless you are going to MST 3K-it.

Skip this fucker. Unless you are a REALLY huge fan of zombies. Then see it once, get mad at it, and go watch Day of the Dead.

Title: The Resurrected
Director: Dan O'Bannon
Year: 1992

Here we have a real lost gem of the early 90's. Wonder why I'd never heard of this movie before just a few months ago. The Resurrected is an excellent Lovecraft adaptation directed by, yes, Dan "Return of the Living Dead-Alien-Lifeforce, Etc Etc Etc" O'Bannon, busiest guy in b-Hollywood. It's based on Lovecraft's short novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and with the exception of a couple of character changes and the modern setting, it's pretty true to the book. I think what sets this adaptation apart from most others is that the changes to the story aren't actually hugely important to the central idea. This film actually does a pretty good job of trying to capture the complex idea Lovecraft was trying to get across, and invoking an atmospheric darkness.

I think the change that worked best was the inclusion of March, the private detective, through whose eyes and narrative we view the action. This detective story angle turns The Resurrected into a Lovecraftian film noir, which works really well in favor of both the film itself and the screenplay. I was surprised at how intelligent, agile, and natural the film was. Usually, even the best Stuart Gordon adaptation has an awkwardness to it, a feeling that the subject matter of the story is being somewhat forced into the form of a screenplay.

None of that here.

The screenplay is fluid, the characters have acceptable depth, and the acting is good for b-standards, and in a few cases, pretty convincing, especially Chris Sarandon's personality change between young Charles Ward and the 17th century wizard, Joseph Curwen. I admit, in all my jaded armor, the first time Curwen makes his appearance, it was pretty damn eerie.

But the other huge factor that this movie got right was the special effects. They were excellent! Some of the best creature, make-up, and stop-motion weirdness you could ask for. There was a surprisingly satisfying amount of goriness and visceral gross out; not too much to overshadow the story, but enough to show these guys wanted Lovecraft's hideous mutations to really breathe and move within the story, and that they wanted the violence to really hit home. I was stoked on this, in a movie that was already good to begin with.

A word on adaptations; I always walk into an adaptation knowing that considerations must be made in the translation between written word and film action. One should not expect a word-for-word, scene-by-scene re-telling of the book. Besides the obvious interventions of screenwriters and directors which always serve to put some spin on a story and alter the voice of the author, one has to consider the dramatic realities of film itself. In this case, the climax to The Resurrected did not occur in the original story. But that doesn't bother me at all. This is a movie; it needs a climax at the end to work. The dramatic climax of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward actually occurs about 3 quarters of the way through and the last quarter of the story consists of Lovecraftian denouement, with HPL deftly tying loose ends and leaving select ends untied. While this works in novel form, this somewhat languorous ending with its rambling resolution and minor piece of suspense at the end would be a total dramatic killer in a movie. So, I wasn't at all upset by the basically cosmetic theatrical alterations that had to be made. I liked this screenplay. It was very well done. This is recommended HIGHLY. My only gripe is the fucking DVD, while priced to sell (I found it for 7 bucks at Circuit City of all places) only comes in full screen. Alas, as I dig up more obscurities from the cinematic mausoleum I'm finding a lot of DVD releases with no special features and full screen the only available format.

Title: The Nest
Director: Terrance H. Winkless
Year: 1988

This thing is billed on the DVD case as part of a series of "Roger Corman Classics". While Corman seems to have had nothing to do with this film himself, someone related to him (I don't really know much of the story there) named Julia Corman produced. So, despite my obvious lack of savvy when it comes to Corman trivia or biographical factoids, the mere name Roger Corman is enough to attract me to a movie. And in this case, my undiscriminating taste served me well. The Nest is an excellent 80's invertebrate-infestation horror flick in the vein of the best of them (Slugs comes to mind). So, reasons to watch? First off, The Nest is about cockroaches! Excellent! That's enough to gross most people out alone. Then we learn that these aren't your average starving hordes of Periplaneta, these are genetically engineered carnivorous roaches! And then we further learn that these spiced up cockroaches have the ability to meld their DNA with whatever they eat, such that their resultant offspring are hybrids of giant Blattoidea and some random vertebrate mammal. I won't give anything away on that front, suffice to say, one of the results of this hybridization should be considered the stuff of cinema legend, and probably won't appeal to cat-lovers.

There is also a nice scene lifted from The Fly complete with all the attendant splatter, with some excellent creature effects, of the gross-out variety I love and expect from great 1980's fare.

Performances are for the most part above-average. Believable characters with believable motivations (no hard-partyin teens!), with the exception of the mad-scientist chick who created the roaches in the first place, who can be a little irritating. Maybe this was deliberate, maybe not, but I can assure you, when she bites it (ironic turn of phrase) it's satisfying to see her die more because it shuts her up than because of how evil she is.

Once again, my only gripe is the full screen presentation. Because of the obscurity of these films, I don't know that many of the "Roger Corman Classics" are available in widescreen, with the positive exception of Humanoids from the Deep, the only release in this series I've been able to track down that boasts digital re-mastering, widescreen format and a bunch of special feature documentaries. Unfortunately the US release is out of print and hard to find. It goes for fifty fucking dollars on Amazon. Not to get any more off topic, but I recently ordered a boot of the European release of Humanoids (called Monster in Europe), which comes in an uncut version (more gore and…uh…mammal stuff) but the original Euro version lacks the special features. The guys who did the boot combined the US and European release into one, so that you get the uncut Euro version of the movie along with the all the US version's special goodies. That's why specialty DVD retailers (FTW) are the best way to go. They love the movies you love, and they put the care into their 'products' that is deserved.

Anyway, to return to The Nest, I picked this up for 5$ as a pre-owned DVD at a Blockbuster Video, so I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at what I got. Certainly this movie should be properly filed under cult status, since it does a handy job of providing ridiculous gross-out, unsophisticated science fiction, and blatant ripping from more prominent movies like The Fly and others. Highly recommended.