Signal Bleed

Triskaidekaphilia: 'The Mystery of the 13th Guest' (1943)

2012-02-13T13:13:00.000-08:00

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

A year ago, I wrote about the forgettable 1932 B-movie The Thirteenth Guest, which despite being essentially worthless was for some reason remade 11 years later, with the same plot-hole-ridden story, the same pathetic comic relief and the same complete lack of suspense. The Mystery of the 13th Guest is somehow even 10 minutes shorter than the extremely brief original, barely qualifying as a feature film at just over an hour. The production values are maybe a bit higher, and the slapstick isn't quite as annoying, but otherwise this movie is just as pointless the second time around.

Once again the plot involves an heiress (Helen Parrish, replacing Ginger Rogers) who's been targeted for murder by members of her greedy family, thanks to an inheritance she's set to receive from her late grandfather (although in the original it was her father). And once again the murders occur inside the grandfather's abandoned old house, with the killer hiding behind the wall and activating a mechanism attached to the telephone that electrocutes his victims. It's not quite as creepy as it was in the original, and the mystery of the long-ago dinner party that supposedly drives the plot is even more nonsensical. The titular mystery is never solved, and appears to be completely irrelevant, since the person who was absent from the dinner party at which the grandfather announced his will (where there were 12 guests and one empty seat) isn't behind the murders and is never revealed.

The acting is passable, and the bumbling detective who was so irritating in the original is slightly toned down here, although the style is still a little too snappy and light for a plot that could have been lifted wholesale from a horror movie. Parrish and Dick Purcell, who plays a private detective investigating the case, don't have the same chemistry as Rogers and Lyle Talbot in the original, but Mystery spreads the focus out a little more, giving a police lieutenant played by Tim Ryan (who also co-wrote the screenplay) nearly as much emphasis, and offering up some amusing scenes for the heiress' despicable relatives. The movie zips along so quickly that the plot details are almost completely lost, and the rushed resolution makes little sense. Maybe somewhere in the original novel by Armitage Trail is a compelling, cohesive mystery, but it can't be found anywhere in either of the two movie versions.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: 'The Dark Horse' (1932)

2012-01-25T14:27:00.000-08:00

The Dark Horse starts out as a moderately promising political satire before getting sidetracked by dumb relationship comedy, but it has one or two sharp moments along the way. Thanks to a ploy by two different factions in the fictional Progressive Party of an unnamed state, a rube named Zachary Hicks unexpectedly finds himself the party's nominee to run for governor. To ensure that this inexperienced dimwit wins the election, the party hires hotshot campaign manager Hal Blake (Warren William), who can smooth-talk anyone into office.

That's a decent setup for satire, and indeed Blake's training of the consistently oblivious Hicks is good for a laugh or two, especially the way he instructs Hicks to answer every question, "Yes, and again, no." But the movie is more interested in Blake's caddish ways, including his romantic promises to fellow campaign worker Kay Russell (Bette Davis) and endeavors to get out of paying alimony to his vindictive ex-wife (Vivenne Osborne). William is a little too good at playing slimy creeps; as he was in the other movie I've seen him in with Davis, Satan Met a Lady, he's more off-putting than funny here, especially when he's trying to maneuver his way out of commitment. The movie isn't cynical enough to be really cutting when it comes to politics, and its portrayal of Blake tries to make him sympathetic and amoral at the same time, which doesn't quite work.

Davis has a fairly sizable part, but Kay is a pretty flat character. She starts out seeming like a savvy political operative (she's the one who suggests the party recruit Blake), but quickly gets relegated to the long-suffering love interest, stuck enduring Blake's schemes and deceptions related to his ex-wife. Davis shines when Kay is portrayed as competent and assertive, but her pining after the creepy Blake is just kind of sad. The protracted climax, involving a potential scandal between Hicks and Blake's ex-wife, is a chore, but there are still enough decent jokes here and there to put The Dark Horse slightly ahead of some of Davis' other early programmers.

'Unsupervised'

2012-01-19T11:22:00.000-08:00

The first episode of Unsupervised is not a particularly auspicious start for FX's new animated comedy, and certainly will look pretty poor in comparison to Archer, which airs right before it. It comes off like an uninspired Beavis & Butt-Head knock-off, with its focus on two aimless teenage losers who try to be cool but fail. Unsupervised's Gary and Joel aren't as stupid as Beavis and Butt-Head, but they're just as pathetic, and their world full of off-kilter friends and neighbors is overly reminiscent of Mike Judge's Highland (as well as the world of the inferior Napoleon Dynamite animated series, which premiered just a few days ago).

The big difference, though, and one that becomes clearer as the show goes on, is that Gary and Joel are relentlessly positive optimists who make friends with virtually everyone they know, including parents, teachers and other authority figures. They have a boundless enthusiasm for life, even if that enthusiasm extends to wanting to get laid and be part of the in crowd. The show's funniest moments (which are admittedly infrequent) come from the contrast between Gary and Joel's absolute certainty that what they are doing is awesome and great for everyone and the reality that they are just acting like complete idiots. No other ostensibly edgy show would have its characters get so genuinely pumped up about going to the dentist, doing laundry or joining the school baseball team.

The problem is that the weird earnestness of the main characters doesn't really fit with the raunchy tone, and their enthusiasm wears as quickly on the audience as it does on the other characters. The jokes also just aren't very funny, failing to take advantage of the characters' unique perspective and instead going for cheap, obvious laughs, which often fail to materialize. At best, this could be a funny show about the contrast between the culture of blind self-confidence and the reality that most people's lives are full of drudgery and disappointment. Co-creator and voice of Joel David Hornsby embodies this idea in an exaggerated, absurd way via his character on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but Unsupervised doesn't have that show's over-the-top excess. It doesn't approach the more low-key sweetness of something like King of the Hill, either (a problem that Napoleon Dynamite shares), so it ends up awkwardly in the middle. Unlike Napoleon, though, it has enough promise and enough jokes that work that it might find the proper balance eventually.

Premieres tonight at 10:30 p.m. on FX.

'Napoleon Dynamite'

2012-01-15T11:40:00.000-08:00

It's hard to pinpoint the saddest thing about Fox's new animated-series version of 2004 cult comedy Napoleon Dynamite. Is it that the network is so clueless about how to expand its Sunday-night animated block that executives think a flash-in-the-pan sensation from eight years ago is going to get audiences excited? Is it that nearly every actor from the movie agreed to come back to offer up a recycled version of their original performance? Is it that filmmaker Jared Hess and star Jon Heder have completely failed at every other project they've attempted and have basically admitted defeat, crawling back to the only thing anyone cares to see them do? Or is it that despite all of that, this is essentially just a generic copy of Fox's other Sunday-night cartoons?

It's all of those things, of course, although the last one is really the most disappointing. Because if you're going to make a show out of Napoleon Dynamite, no matter how ill-advised that may be, you might as well at least try to capture some of what made the movie unique. I haven't seen it since it was first in theaters, but I remember certain parts being pretty funny, and the whole thing having an appealingly ramshackle, homespun feel. It wasn't exactly realistic, but it was a relatable look at the feeling of living in a boring small town and having to find any kind of ridiculous thing to do to keep yourself entertained.

The series keeps the characters and some of their unique quirks, but it's structured like any of the other Fox Sunday-night shows, set in a world full of fantastical absurdity that bears little resemblance to reality. The plots of the first two episodes could be lifted from second-rate latter-day Simpsons episodes, and although Napoleon utters a few of his trademark phrases, his distinctive charm is long gone. The animated version of Napoleon seems even more like an imitation of Beavis and Butt-Head than his live-action counterpart did, and the whole tone of the show is derivative of better animated series. This could have been a gentle look at small-town oddballs along the lines of King of the Hill, but instead it's trying way too hard to fit in with shows that have already been imitated ad nauseam.

Premieres tonight at 8:30 p.m. on Fox.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Friday the 13th Part III' (1982)

2012-01-13T13:13:00.000-08:00

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

There are three Friday the 13ths in 2012, so I should be able to make some decent headway through this increasingly irritating horror series. This third installment is easily the weakest so far, lacking even the cursory efforts of the second film to tie together the Jason Voorhees mythology. Like the Saw series, the Friday the 13th movies were churned out one per year in the early days, and Part III has the rushed feel of a movie whose storyline and characters were secondary to getting production started as soon as possible. Director Steve Miner returns from the second installment, and he even recycles five full minutes from the previous movie as a rather unnecessary prologue, setting up Jason's (obviously failed) demise at the hands of a character that we then never see again (because the actress declined to appear in this movie). It's even more blatant than the dream sequence/recap that opened Part 2.

Then again, those five redundant minutes are more suspenseful than the rest of the movie, which offers up another cast of interchangeable young morons for Jason to chop to bits. Part III takes place starting the day after the second movie, with Jason on the loose and a group of friends headed up to a cabin on Crystal Lake, apparently unaware of the mass murderer still at large. This time there's no connection to the camp or to Jason's mother; he just kills anybody he comes across, for no reason whatsoever, and the movie just counts down until there's only one character left. Miner and writers Martin Kitrosser and Carol Watson try to give the final girl some tenuous connection to Jason, but it's an awkward retcon that doesn't fit in with anything that came before. They also throw in some homages to the first movie, but without any sense of continuity, those are just empty gestures.

Part III is important for its introduction of Jason's trademark hockey mask, and this movie is where he finally becomes recognizable as the familiar pop-culture figure of action figures and lunchboxes. It's also one of the most high-profile examples of the 3D fad of the 1980s, and if you think today's 3D movies are shameless, they've got nothing on this movie, which is filled with characters awkwardly pointing objects at the camera so that they'll poke out at the audience (which is even sillier when viewed in 2D, as it almost always is now). Miner seems so focused on shoehorning in as much 3D as possible that he doesn't even bother to come up with any cool set pieces (although the gore had to be toned down to get an R rating, so maybe there's some entertainingly gruesome stuff missing). Jason has already become superhuman by this point; he kills one character by literally just crushing the guy's skull with his bare hands (and causing an eyeball to pop out in 3D). There's no sense of closure or satisfaction at the end (even though at one point this movie was meant to conclude the series), just a weariness at having finished another run-through of the same material.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: 'Bureau of Missing Persons' (1933)

2012-01-05T14:17:00.000-08:00

Although she gets top billing in Bureau of Missing Persons (a relative rarity for the cheap programmers she churned out for Warner Bros. in the '30s), Bette Davis doesn't show up until about half an hour into the 73-minute movie, and Pat O'Brien is the real star, playing a ridiculously hard-boiled, macho detective at the title agency. He's transferred over from the robbery division and is none too happy about it, but soon he takes a shine to tracking down missing people and getting them to return home, and the episodic movie follows a handful of cases, most of them totally ludicrous. One philandering man, tracked down in his mistress' apartment, is given the chance to be picked up in a neighboring town and branded an amnesiac, all so his family won't know about his affair.

Davis shows up as a woman ostensibly searching for her missing husband, but she's got a dark secret that gets progressively more far-fetched as more is revealed about it. O'Brien's Det. Butch Saunders takes on her case, and immediately sets to seducing her instead of putting in much of an effort to find her supposed missing husband. He's a walking sexual-harassment claim, but everything works out when it's discovered that Davis' Norma never had a husband at all. Plus, Butch's handling of Norma is nothing compared to the way he takes on his gold-digging ex-wife (played amusingly by Glenda Farrell, who was also amusing in the last lame Davis movie I saw, The Big Shakedown); his physical assault on her at the end of the movie is played for goofy comic relief.

The movie is so slapdash overall that the sexism isn't really any worse than the haphazard plotting and indifferent acting. Davis is fairly subdued as Norma, especially in contrast to Farrell's ditziness and O'Brien's hyper-masculinity, but her performance isn't anything special. She gives about as much effort to the part as the movie deserves, which is to say very little at all.

'Jane By Design'

2012-01-03T10:07:00.000-08:00

I think a lot of people still have the image of ABC Family as a wholesome network for tween girls, and, well, that's still probably mostly right, but over the years the network has featured several criminally underrated shows with smart writing, well-rounded characters and charismatic stars. Not a lot of people watched The Middleman or Huge or 10 Things I Hate About You, but they were all entertaining, well-crafted shows that deserved larger audiences (and probably would have found them if they had aired on a different network). I've missed the last few big ABC Family premieres (although I know Switched at Birth has gotten strong reviews, and I'm curious to catch up with it), so I wanted to give the network's new teen drama, Jane By Design, a chance to see if it could live up to the legacy of the best ABC Family programming.

Does it? No, not at all, although star Erica Dasher is charming and could certainly have a bright future on TV, either here or elsewhere. The concept is a total silly contrivance, with Dasher's high school outcast Jane scoring a job as the assistant to a high-powered fashion designer (Andie MacDowell) via a mix-up that requires her to pretend to be an adult (not difficult, since Dasher herself is in her 20s). So for half the day Jane goes to high school, where she is a friendless loser despite being incredibly beautiful and stylish, and then for the rest of the day she deals with the Devil Wears Prada-style office politics at her fashion job. Everything plays out with maximum predictability: Jane has a male best friend who's clearly going to fall in love with her, although she already has the sensitive high school jock and the (somehow not gay) British fashion designer chasing after her. She panics that she won't be able to pull off her impossible work assignments plus keep her grades up, but somehow she does. The second episode even pulls out the whole "main character has to be in two places at once" cliche, which is about the oldest TV plot device around.

Dasher aside, most of the cast is pretty bland (and blandly pretty), and MacDowell somehow manages to play almost all of her scenes via video conference, like her contract stipulated she wouldn't actually interact with any of the other actors. The show has a nice sense of fun, and the smart, independent, creative Jane is a solid female lead, but it's more of a passable time-waster for tweens than the next great unheralded series.

Premieres tonight at 9 p.m. on ABC Family.

My top 10 non-2011 movies of 2011

2011-12-30T11:59:00.000-08:00

Each year for the last few years, I've been compiling an extra top 10 list, a supplement to my main list of my favorite new movies of the year. It's a list of my favorite movies from other years that I saw for the first time this year (check out the lists from 2010, 2009 and 2008). Here are the best movies I saw for the first time in 2011 that were released in previous years.

1. Smiley Face (Gregg Araki, 2007) I don't get stoned, but I love stoner movies, even though most of them are pretty dumb and just good for some cheap laughs. Smiley Face has plenty of laughs, both cheap and otherwise, but it's also just gleefully inventive, strangely profound and wonderfully acted by Anna Faris, who gives her absolute best comedic performance here. It's also a completely human, sympathetic performance. One thing I love about stoner movies is how they marvel at the simple things in life, and Faris pulls that off extremely well here. Even as things spiral out of control for Jane, there's this sense that the world is magical and everything will work out (although it doesn't, really). Far more than I ever thought I would get from a comedy about a slacker who eats too many pot brownies.

2. Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945) I watched this in preparation for writing about Todd Haynes' HBO miniseries version, which I ended up not really liking. Even though Haynes sticks closer to James M. Cain's novel, I preferred Curtiz's movie version that adds in a murder mystery and changes the plot to structure it around a lengthy flashback. It's more self-consciously a film noir, and that works really well for the story, especially in depicting the animosity between Mildred (Joan Crawford) and her reprehensible daughter Veda (Ann Blyth). The heightened style fits their viciousness better, and even though I generally love ambiguous, downbeat endings, I much preferred seeing Veda go off the edge and then get her comeuppance. It's still a tragedy for Mildred in the end, but it's tinged more with nastiness than sadness, and I found that more entertaining.

3. Beeswax (Andrew Bujalski, 2009) After being a little underwhelmed with Bujalski's second film, Mutual Appreciation, I really enjoyed this third effort of his, which features a tiny bit more plot but is still mostly just about aimless young people figuring out their careers and relationships. Tilly and Maggie Hatcher are great as twin sisters who are equally lost in different ways, and I love the matter-of-fact portrayal of disability, which becomes an issue at unexpected moments but is mostly just an unacknowledged, normal thing. Bujalski is a master of depicting realistically uncomfortable interactions; there's one scene here with an employee asking her "laid-back" boss for time off that's an absolute masterpiece of passive-aggressiveness. This movie is full of funny, real, quietly dazzling moments like that, and it once again makes me eager to see what Bujalski does next.

4. Christine (John Carpenter, 1983) I wasn't sure what to expect from a Carpenter adaptation of a middling Stephen King novel, but this turned out to be the most pleasant surprise of the month I spent writing about King movies. I enjoyed it more than the novel; Carpenter's version of the story is more enigmatic and menacing, and he does a great job of making the car into a recognizable force of evil even though it can't speak and doesn't have any facial expressions. The acting is solid, establishing characters to care about before the horrors start unfolding, and Carpenter is at his visually inventive height with the shot composition. It's just a very satisfying, well-crafted horror movie. Read more in my original post.

5. Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978) Malick's new The Tree of Life left me disappointed, but in preparation for a podcast on Malick with Tony Macklin, I watched the only other Malick movie I hadn't already seen, and it reminded me of what I loved about his work and what seemed missing to me in The Tree of Life. Days of Heaven is ethereal and abstract and hushed just like The Tree of Life, but it's grounded in a real story and real characters that can connect to the audience, so that Malick's musing aren't just anchorless pondering. Richard Gere and Brooke Adams are moving as the lovers trying to hold on to their connection in the face of an impossible situation, and having the narration come from Linda Manz's young, naive character gives it a purpose and point of view that The Tree of Life is missing. It's mesmerizing in its style and its visual poetry, certainly, but it's also a wonderfully human, often heartbreaking story.

6. The Baby (Ted Post, 1973) This is one of those random discoveries that turned out to be totally serendipitous; usually deciding to see a movie based on the DVD cover and description is a bad idea. But the promotional copy of this movie that came in the mail caught my eye, and it turned out to be a totally weird and insane horror movie/psychodrama. The title character is a full-grown man who acts and speaks like an infant; it's not entirely clear whether he's mentally challenged or just brutally conditioned by his bitch of a mother. Either way, a social worker takes on his case and gets way too attached, attempting to save him from the clutches of his evil family -- or so it seems until the final twist. Post and screenwriter Abe Polsky take the premise to every extreme possible, including some very messed-up sexuality. It's the kind of out-there exploitation movie that would have been tacked to the bottom of a drive-in bill and totally captivated the few people who actually stuck around to see it.

7. The Rich Are Always With Us (Alfred E. Green, 1932) Last year, I watched 30-plus Bette Davis movies, and my project to see her entire filmography is still ongoing. I saw much fewer Davis movies this year, and by now most of the ones I still haven't seen are forgettable quickies in which Davis plays a small part. So this random offering from TCM was a pleasant surprise, a sharp and sparkling pre-Code comedy with entertaining performances from Davis and Ruth Chatterton as a couple of socialites engaged in various romantic rivalries. It's stylish and silly (sometimes a little too silly) and a lot of fun to watch; a worthwhile gem among Davis' early work. Read more in my original post.

8. City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931) Silent comedies aren't my favorite things to watch, even if I can appreciate the talent and artistry of people like Chaplin and Buster Keaton. But I had a great time seeing this movie accompanied by a full orchestra, at a really cool event put on by the Henderson Symphony Orchestra here in Vegas, featuring a beautiful print of the movie shipped over from France. Chaplin's gentle, endearing comedy has some very well-crafted set pieces and a touching love story, and it made me smile all the way through even though I don't think I ever laughed. It was definitely enhanced by the live soundtrack, which included sound effects and a conductor dressed as Chaplin. It's the kind of all-encompassing, immersive moviegoing experience that we rarely get to have anymore, and I hope the Henderson Symphony Orchestra puts on more events like it in the future. (Check out Leila Navidi's lovely photo gallery from the event, including one picture with me in it.)

9. Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953) Last year, I had an Audrey Hepburn romance at the top of this list, and although I didn't enjoy Roman Holiday quite as much as Breakfast at Tiffany's, I still had a lot of fun with it. It's probably the prototype for a lot of lame romantic comedies and mistaken-identity stories, but it handles the contrivances well, and Hepburn has a lot of energy and genuine emotion as the sheltered princess who wants to cut loose and be an average person. Gregory Peck is nicely world-weary as the cynical journalist who falls in love with her, and the melancholy ending avoids the predictable rom-com result.

10. Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987) I think my appreciation for the original Hellraiser increased over the course of my week watching the entire series, although I still think Hellbound: Hellraiser II is the best of the series (but it isn't eligible for this list since I had already seen it before 2011). As the series got cheaper and more generic, Barker's original personal vision stood out more, with his twisted and strangely alluring combination of sex and death in a horror movie about carnal pleasures more than violence and gore. Hellraiser does some predictable horror-movie stuff, but it also takes a lot of unexpected routes, and its S&M-flavored design sense has become an indelible part of horror iconography. Read more in my original post.

2011 catch-up, part three

2011-12-24T12:57:00.000-08:00

Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey (documentary, dir. Constance Marks)
Maybe I just don't have the same affinity for Elmo that other people do, but I thought this documentary about the puppeteer who performs as Elmo, Kevin Clash, was seriously bland and dull. Clash is clearly a very nice and talented guy, but this movie traces his completely uninteresting journey in a flat, TV-special style, with cheesy music and uninspiring visuals. Other than Clash's fairly humble origins, there's no conflict or adversity to his story; this is a movie about a guy who achieved everything he ever wanted with relative ease. That's great for him and great for the millions who love Elmo, but it makes for a pretty boring movie.

Bill Cunningham New York (documentary, dir. Richard Press)
This is a nice complement to (and improvement upon) Page One: Inside the New York Times, which suffered from a lack of focus and a superficial approach to the interesting personalities it showcased. Cunningham is a Times staffer who didn't appear in Page One, but his story is more affecting and fascinating than anything in that movie. The 80-year-old Cunningham is still vibrantly engaged in his work, photographing fashion in New York from the streets to society parties to runway shows. His enthusiasm and passion infuse the film, which is beautifully joyous. There's a small undercurrent of sadness in Cunningham's relative solitude, his tiny apartment and lack of romantic relationships, but it's overshadowed by the sheer pleasure that Cunningham takes in his work and in sharing the wonder of fashion with others. Press perfectly captures all of that joy and wonder, with Cunningham as his gleeful, endlessly knowledgeable guide. The result is my favorite documentary of the year.

Like Crazy (Anton Yelchin, Felicity Jones, Jennifer Lawrence, dir. Drake Doremus)
It's love story as jeans commercial in this pretty but entirely superficial romance about two cardboard young people who face contrived obstacles to their generic relationship. I've always found Yelchin to be a charisma vacuum, and although Jones can be charming (and is quite lovely), I never really bought into the central relationship. Doremus offers up almost no information about the two young lovers as people, so almost all we know about them is that they're really into each other, and even that is covered mostly in montages (this is a very montage-y movie). Doremus has some visually inventive ways of illustrating the passage of time, and some of the shot composition is gorgeous in a magazine-spread sort of way, but the overall look is more like an ad than an engaging drama. As another critic noted, this is like a romantic comedy with all the comedy taken out.

Poetry (Yun Jeong-hie, Lee Da-wit, Ahn Nae-sang, dir. Lee Chang-dong)
I remember finding Lee's 2002 film Oasis deliberately off-putting and unpleasant, but Poetry has a lot more beauty and dignity, even if Lee can't resist throwing in at least one self-consciously grotesque sex scene. But he has a lot of affection for his main character, a well-meaning older woman who's struggling with the early stages of Alzheimer's while trying to take care of her ungrateful teenage grandson. As her mind is slowly starting to deteriorate, she decides to take a poetry class, and she struggles throughout the movie to compose the first and only poem of her life. That effort is given equal weight as the woman's troubles with her grandson, who's accused of being part of a group of boys whose repeated rapes of a local girl drove her to suicide. Despite the heavy subject matter, Poetry has a sort of sweetness to it, and the woman's determination to create one beautiful work of art before her life ends is touching. It can be a chore at times, especially in the scenes that involve the main character taking care of a disabled elderly man, but Poetry is far more life-affirming than it might at first appear to be.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Assault on Precinct 13' (1976)

2011-12-13T13:13:00.000-08:00

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

I was sort of underwhelmed by John Carpenter's B-movie thriller Assault on Precinct 13 when I first saw it a few years ago, so maybe my diminished expectations helped me to appreciate it more this time around. I still think it suffers from some awkward dialogue and questionable plotting, but it's so tense and claustrophobic that it completely drew me in, and I felt the menace from the implacable gang members surrounding the deserted police station much more palpably than I remember from last time. The performances are mostly just functional, but Austin Stoker captures the sense of decency in the police lieutenant who's determined to hold his ground against the seemingly endless onslaught of gang members, and the weird sexual tension between Darwin Joston as a convicted killer and Laurie Zimmer as the station's surprisingly steely secretary keeps things nicely off balance.

I also like that Carpenter hints at complicated backstories for the lead characters but leaves the details out; it's the lieutenant's "first day" back from something, but we never find out what, and the killer bound for death row keeps promising to reveal the motives behind his crimes, but never does. We get the impression that there's some darkness behind the lieutenant's dedication to duty, or some solid moral code inside the seemingly misunderstood killer, but we never find out why. The bare-bones story doesn't have time for that kind of character development; Carpenter gives us a quick sense of who these people are, and then he throws them right into a terrible situation and watches how they react.

The influences Carpenter took from Rio Bravo (the siege of the law-enforcement stronghold) and Night of the Living Dead (the zombie-like gang members, who never stop coming and almost never speak) work well together to create a sense of dread, and I like the way Carpenter portrays the station's isolation even in the middle of a supposedly teeming city. The shock of seeing a little girl (played by future Real Housewife Kim Richards) getting shot and killed as she tries to buy an ice cream cone felt fresh again even though I knew it was coming, and that feeling of danger and unpredictability is the movie's greatest strength.

2011 catch-up, part two

2011-12-07T14:05:00.000-08:00

Cold Weather (Cris Lankenau, Trieste Kelly Dunn, Raul Castillo, dir. Aaron Katz)
This isn't one of the most acclaimed movies of the year, but I had high hopes for it since I really liked Katz's last feature, Quiet City. Cold Weather isn't as good as Quiet City, but it has a lot of the same ease at depicting relationships among aimless 20-somethings, and the same visual beauty that Katz brought to his depiction of New York City (here applied to Portland). Unlike Quiet City, it also has a fairly involved plot, albeit one that doesn't really get going until almost 40 minutes into the movie. Before then, Katz establishes a trio of engaging characters, including college dropout and wannabe detective Doug (Lankenau). When Doug's ex-girlfriend goes missing, Cold Weather turns into a mystery of sorts, but Katz never loses sight of his character dynamics, and those are always more important (and more entertaining) than figuring out what's going on with Doug's ex. The problem is that Katz actually creates a fairly engrossing mystery, so the abrupt ending, while perfect for a movie about slackers whose lives just kind of trudge on, feels like a bit of a cheat. Cold Weather doesn't have Quiet City's emotional impact, but it keeps me eager to see what Katz does next.

Margin Call (Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Zachary Quinto, Penn Badgley, dir. J.C. Chandor)
Taking on a still-current event like the financial crisis in a narrative film is a tricky proposition, and Chandor does a better job than Oliver Stone did in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps or Curtis Hanson did in Too Big to Fail. Stone's film was too Hollywood flashy, too concerned with being a thriller, while Hanson's often drowned in dry true-life details. Chandor splits the difference, telling a fictionalized story about one unnamed financial firm's role in precipitating the 2008 market crash. There's suspense in the story, set over a single 24-hour period, but it's not overblown, and Chandor works to create characters we can understand and care about, rather than just mouthpieces for a political viewpoint. There's still too much heavy-handed dramatic irony and on-the-nose prophetic dialogue for it to be completely immersive (at one point two characters discuss serious financial matters in an elevator as a maid, literally the average person, stands silently between them), but it's easily the best movie so far about the culture and outlook that led to the stock-market meltdown.

Meek's Cutoff (Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Will Patton, Paul Dano, dir. Kelly Reichardt)
I was one of the few people who was unimpressed with Reichardt's Old Joy, and I never ended up seeing her 2008 follow-up, Wendy and Lucy. I found this movie to be more substantial than Old Joy, although still often frustratingly aloof, with Reichardt doing everything possible to distance the audience from her characters and their circumstances. Instead of identifying with the plight of the 19th-century settlers lost in the Oregon desert, I felt like I was observing them through a telescope (sometimes literally, as Reichardt likes to shoot seemingly important moments from very far away). Although the story could be suspenseful and moving, it's instead clinical and dry (much like the desert), which makes it sometimes impressively austere but just as often simply dull, and it ends by just puttering to a stop. There's real emotion in some of the performances, which is a step forward, although Greenwood perhaps goes too far in his hammy performance as the group's guide, who talks like Foghorn Leghorn and looks like a member of ZZ Top.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Thanapat Saisaymar, Jenjira Pongpas, Sakda Kaewbuadee, dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Honestly, I was a little intimidated at watching this movie, which has been talked up so heavily as an obtuse but moving experience that I was worried I'd just find it baffling. And I did find a lot of it baffling, though some of it is baffling in a beautiful and haunting way, while some of it is far more frustrating. I liked the combination of grounded everyday details (the workings of Boonmee's farm, the management of his illness) with mystical elements (the ghost of Boonmee's wife, his transformed long-lost son) in a magical-realist way that's very reminiscent of the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. When the movie strays from the relaxed, naturalist dynamics of Boonmee and his family members and becomes more of an abstract fable, as when the characters venture into the cave where Boonmee takes his final rest, it's a little harder to grasp. I'm not sure I understood the relevance of the seemingly unrelated segment about the princess having sex with the talking catfish, but it's certainly unlike anything else I've seen in any movie this year, and that's worth something.

2011 catch-up, part one

2011-11-29T12:00:00.000-08:00

With end-of-year list-making and awards-voting rapidly approaching, I'm trying to catch up on some notable movies of 2011 that I missed.

Heartbeats (Monia Chokri, Xavier Dolan, Niels Schneider, dir. Xavier Dolan)
Dolan is a bit of a film-fest wunderkind; he made his acclaimed first feature, I Killed My Mother, at 20, and was only 21 when he wrote, directed, edited, costume-designed and starred in Heartbeats. It's quite self-assured for someone so young, but it's also a little overly enthusiastic, so in love with its own sensual visuals that it sometimes forgets to be about anything. Dolan and Chokri play two friends (one male, one female) who fall for the same guy and engage in a passive-aggressive rivalry for his affections (which he clearly has no intention of giving to either one). The characters are pretty shallow, and the movie sort of celebrates that, shooting them in vibrant colors and lush slow-motion, with wall-to-wall pop songs and classical concertos on the soundtrack. It makes for a luxurious but sometimes frustrating viewing experience; the interludes featuring unrelated characters monologuing about their own romantic troubles are often far more incisive than the movie's main thread, but Dolan does capture a sense of how it feels to be young and pointlessly in love.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (Elizabeth Olsen, Sarah Paulson, John Hawkes, dir. Sean Durkin)
I've been reading and hearing about this movie since it played Sundance back in January, so it was probably inevitable that I wouldn't be blown away when finally seeing it. But even if I wasn't wowed to the degree I might have been if I had experienced the movie without any hype, I was still substantially impressed, both with Olsen's acclaimed performance and with Durkin's filmmaking. This is an impeccably written, directed, shot and edited film, creating a mounting sense of disorientation and unease perfectly in line with its title character, who's physically escaped from a cult but clearly hasn't freed herself mentally from the group's influence. I like the unsettling ambiguity, although sometimes things are so vague that it's hard to figure out what Durkin is going for. But the confusion helps to align the audience with Martha's distressed mental state, and Durkin keeps you on edge all the way through the end.

Point Blank (Gilles Lellouche, Roschdy Zem, Elena Anaya, dir. Fred Cavaye)
This is the kind of movie that would star Gerard Butler and get dismissive reviews if it were made in the U.S., but because it's French it has an air of respectability that seems to have blinded some to the fact that it's just another ludicrous thriller with giant plot holes and no character development. Cavaye was behind the French movie that was remade in the U.S. as The Next Three Days, and Point Blank is similarly melodramatic and manipulative, with the main character's pregnant wife constantly in peril. There are a number of really contrived fake-outs, and while some of the chase scenes are exciting, the whole thing is completely hollow and forgettable. I expect a Hollywood remake shortly.

Win Win (Paul Giamatti, Alex Shaffer, Amy Ryan, dir. Tom McCarthy)
I liked McCarthy's first movie, 2003's The Station Agent, but despite their acclaim his next two haven't really impressed me. I thought The Visitor was predictable and preachy, and Win Win has the same problems, presenting a low-key version of a familiar inspirational story, about a troubled guy who learns what's important in life thanks to his relationship with a wayward kid. It's clear that Giamatti's lawyer/wrestling coach is going to take in his elderly client's teenage grandson, and it's clear that the kid's going to be a star wrestler. McCarthy's approach lacks broad sentimental moments, but it also keeps things so subdued that it lacks all passion and excitement. It's too restrained to be rousing, and too obvious to be challenging.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'The Woman on Pier 13' (1949)

2011-11-13T13:13:00.000-08:00

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

It's kind of hilarious to watch this ridiculous piece of Red Scare propaganda, until you realize how seriously some people took the material. Supposedly producer Howard Hughes offered this project (originally titled I Married a Communist, until the studio changed the title to The Woman on Pier 13 thanks to poor audience response) to directors as a test of their patriotism, and he was turned down an appropriate 13 times before finally finding someone (British director Robert Stevenson, who went on to make family classics like Old Yeller, Mary Poppins and The Absent-Minded Professor) to take it on. Those various other filmmakers were right to pass on Hughes' offer, since Pier 13 is a laughable piece of hysterics that envisions the American Communist party as a group of thugs who are essentially interchangeable with any other 1940s movie gangsters.

The stolid Robert Ryan plays a San Francisco shipping executive who's changed his name to escape his shameful past as a Communist Party member, but here the Commies are like the mob: Just when you thought you were out, they pull you back in. Janis Carter is pretty entertaining as the Commie femme fatale, who returns to help blackmail Ryan's Brad Collins (or Frank Johnson the Commie) into sabotaging labor negotiations at the San Francisco pier (hence the retooled title, I guess, even though no pier numbers are ever mentioned). Carter's Christine Norman also seduces Brad's brother-in-law for good measure, providing an important lesson about avoiding hot Commie seductresses who will indoctrinate you with sex (or something).

The whole thing resolves in a lame shoot-out, with the Commies getting what's coming to them, of course (although not before a series of overwrought murders). Thanks to Carter and a few hammy thugs, Pier 13 could be an okay second-rate noir, but the noxious politics really push it over the edge and make it sort of uncomfortable to watch. It's not quite inept enough to be obviously comical along the lines of something like Reefer Madness, and although reviewers at the time dismissed it as obvious propaganda, some audiences presumably took the message at face value. The actors do their best to imbue the absurd material with some semblance of reality, but it's pretty much a lost cause. Thankfully, the movie's hoped-for witch hunt became a lost cause, too.

Hell Week: 'Hellraiser: Hellworld' (2005)

2011-10-31T13:57:00.000-07:00

Yes, you read that right: Hellraiser: Hellworld, the eighth installment in the series and the last to feature Doug Bradley as Pinhead, was released the same year as Hellraiser: Deader; the two came out on DVD just three months apart in 2005, and were filmed back to back. It's strange, then, that they share no characters (other than Pinhead, of course) or thematic concerns, and the only real continuity between the two is that both were obviously shot in Romania, although Hellworld awkwardly takes place in the U.S. Director Rick Bota did a semi-decent job of creating a dark, subdued atmosphere for Deader and Hellseeker, but Hellworld is pure cheese, a lame slasher movie dressed up with Hellraiser connections that turn out to be almost entirely specious.

Hellworld starts out seeming like it's going to engage with the series mythology far more than the other post-Bloodline installments, giving it a bit of a meta twist along the lines of Wes Craven's New Nightmare. Although it doesn't take place in the "real" world where Pinhead is a movie character, Hellworld does feature the Hellraiser mythology as something people are generally aware of; the main characters play an online game called Hellworld that features Cenobites and the puzzle box as key elements, and they discuss the concepts of the series openly (this is the first movie since Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth to feature someone actually saying the word "Pinhead"). But that turns out to be window dressing for a rote slasher movie, as those characters (all vapid, pretty teenagers) get invited to a Hellworld party at a creepy, secluded mansion overseen by a mysterious host (Lance Henriksen, seriously phoning it in, sometimes literally) and started getting killed one by one.

We don't even get to see anyone playing Hellworld for more than a few seconds (possibly because there wasn't a budget to create a virtual-reality world), so I'm not sure what the point of the party is; it's a video-game party at which no one plays any video games. Anyway, Henriksen's creepy host has sinister motives for wanting to off all the annoying characters (although they don't really make much sense), and Pinhead's brief appearances are explained away as hallucinations, so he's not even responsible for any of the carnage (although he shows up at the very end to give the villain his comeuppance). Henriksen's performance is incredibly lazy, and the teens are pretty much interchangeable. After a bit of creativity (even if seriously compromised) in Hellseeker and Deader, Hellworld is a step backward into generic horror nonsense, and a sad way for Bradley to end his tenure as Pinhead.

Hell Week: 'Hellraiser: Deader' (2005)

2011-10-30T13:22:00.000-07:00

With its seventh installment, Hellraiser: Deader, the Hellraiser franchise reaches the "starring Kari Wuhrer" phase of its straight-to-video existence, surely a notable low point. The former MTV VJ and star of Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time (which I totally saw in theaters) unconvincingly plays a hardened, chain-smoking journalist for an "edgy" London newspaper, who specializes in stories like the firsthand account of a crack den that she's working on as the movie opens. Wuhrer's Amy Klein gets a hot tip from her editor about a sort of death cult in Bucharest, whose creepy leader has people kill themselves and then seemingly brings them back to life. Amy heads to Romania to investigate, and she's quickly caught up in the cult's madness, which vaguely connects to the puzzle box and Pinhead.

Based on an unrelated horror script that was rewritten to fit into the Hellraiser franchise, Deader continues the psychological-thriller approach of the previous two sequels, again focusing on one main character's descent into a personal hell. Amy's situation isn't quite the same as the circumstances faced by the main characters in Inferno and Hellseeker, and the cult angle and foreign setting give it more active momentum, but tonally it follows the same template (it helps that director Rick Bota was also behind Hellseeker). The problem is that Wuhrer is clearly out of her depth with the serious material, and the plot itself doesn't really make sense. The ability to resurrect the dead has never been a part of the series mythology, and it's never clear how cult leader Winter (Paul Rhys) has acquired this ability, or why Pinhead's so mad about it.

The movie's final act picks up on some ideas from Bloodline but never clarifies them enough to be meaningful. Winter is posited as a descendant of Lemarchand, the original designer of the puzzle box, although it's sort of tossed off in a couple of lines by Pinhead and never fully explored. And there's no real reason other than throwing a bone to fans for Winter to have any relation to Lemarchand, since what he does has never been a function of the box or its makers. In the end Pinhead just does his standard thing and shoots hooks into everybody, dismembers them and calls it a day. Amy doesn't actually defeat him, but she seemingly avoids his grasp, although even that is left unclear. As he did in Hellseeker, Bota brings a welcome stylistic restraint to the movie, and there are even a few creepy moments. But those occasional effective scares don't mean much amid the nonsensical plotting and indifferent acting.

Hell Week: 'Hellraiser: Hellseeker' (2002)

2011-10-29T14:33:00.000-07:00

After the completely unrelated story of Hellraiser: Inferno, the franchise brings back Ashley Laurence as Kirsty for the first time since Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth for the sixth installment, Hellraiser: Hellseeker. But despite having a more substantial role than her brief cameo in Hell on Earth, Laurence isn't exactly as prominent as her second billing in the opening credits would attest; Kirsty dies (or appears to die) in the first five minutes of the movie, and up until the climax she appears only in brief flashbacks, as the real main character is her grieving, tortured husband Trevor (Dean Winters). Like Inferno, Hellseeker is essentially about one man's descent into his own personal hell, aided by Pinhead and the Cenobites, although it's more restrained and modulated (at least for a Hellraiser movie), with a much better lead performance.

While Craig Sheffer overacted every moment of his character's anguish in Inferno, Winters plays things a little more internally, emphasizing the confusion and helplessness that Trevor feels after recovering from a car crash that seems to have killed his wife. Trevor experiences painful headaches and what appear to be hallucinations, which include flashbacks to his troubled marriage to Kirsty and the discovery of a certain familiar puzzle box. The women in his life are constantly seducing him and then turning violent (or becoming victims of his violence against them), and the cops are hounding him with suspicions that he deliberately killed Kirsty in the accident. He can never tell what's real and what isn't, which gets a little tedious and repetitive after a while since it's impossible to piece together an actual story (I've never seen a movie with so many scenes of a character waking up suddenly from a nightmare).

Although Winters does a decent job of making Trevor both sympathetic and sort of slimy (something Sheffer was never able to do in Inferno), the confusion and mental torture get old pretty quickly, and Pinhead's periodic appearances (more than in Inferno, but still pretty minimal) aren't enough to carry it along. It's fairly obvious early on that the movie is doing a riff on the whole "he was dead the whole time" device, and the only question is how and why Trevor got that way. Just as the movie seems to have entirely wasted Laurence on a role that could have been a completely different character with no relation to the franchise (there's a brief mention of Kirsty having an inheritance from her late father and uncle, but that's about it), the ending ties together Kirsty and Pinhead's history with Trevor's fate in a way that is almost sort of satisfying. Hellseeker is too drawn-out and dull to be a worthy successor to the early Hellraiser movies, but as a second-rate follow-up, it at least makes a semi-respectable showing.

Hell Week: 'Hellraiser: Inferno' (2000)

2011-10-28T13:54:00.000-07:00

The Hellraiser series enters its straight-to-video phase with a classic straight-to-video move: Basically tacking the series title and imagery onto a completely unrelated story. Pinhead appears for maybe three minutes of Hellraiser: Inferno, in contrast to his dominant roles in the third and fourth movies, and the whole mythology is barely mentioned and could easily be replaced without changing anything about the movie. For some fans, this seems to be a plus, and I agree that Pinhead had gotten cartoonish over his last two appearances. If he had shown up to add menace and atmosphere to an otherwise effective and unsettling horror story (as he did in the first two movies), then his relative absence would have been forgivable.

But the way that director and co-writer Scott Derrickson (who later went on to make the underrated The Exorcism of Emily Rose and the not-at-all-underrated The Day the Earth Stood Still remake) either ignores or dismisses the majority of the series' distinctive elements indicates a lack of interest in what makes something a Hellraiser movie and not just some generic, cheap thriller. Inferno is absolutely a generic, cheap thriller, a bad movie with or without its Hellraiser elements. Doug Bradley returns as Pinhead and tones down the camp of Hell on Earth and Bloodline for his handful of scenes, and he is effectively evil. But the rest of the acting in the movie is pretty terrible, especially from lead Craig Sheffer, who plays a sleazy Denver police detective.

Sheffer's Det. Thorne is a pretty big douchebag: He cheats on his wife with prostitutes, snorts cocaine constantly, thinks nothing of blackmailing his upstanding partner (Nicholas Turturro, doing what he can) and beats up informants for information. Sheffer's manic performance makes the guy even more nasty, as his constant sneer and raised eyebrows make him look like he's always leering at something or someone. After discovering the puzzle box (the one familiar element that gets any real screen time) at a crime scene, Thorne finds himself haunted by disturbing visions and pursued by a mysterious killer and criminal mastermind known as the Engineer. As Thorne tries to track down the Engineer, he occasionally encounters a few cool new Cenobites (including a modified, torso-only version of the chatterer from the first two movies) but barely ever runs into Pinhead until the very end of the movie.

Derrickson throws in all sorts of surreal, nonsensical touches, including a roadside bar that is inexplicably full of old-timey cowboys playing poker and a psychiatrist/priest (James Remar) who gives Thorne the worst advice ever. Thorne is so creepy that you kind of just want Pinhead to rip off his flesh already, and thus the movie has no sympathetic or interesting characters. It goes light on the gore and apparently has a slight Christian subtext, which is the biggest possible inversion of Clive Barker's vision. The annoying twist ending tries to say something deep about the way that we construct our own hells, or something (I guess this is the spiritual message), but it succeeds only in making the previous 90 minutes seem even more pointless. Inferno is a terrible thriller, a terrible horror movie and a terrible continuation of the Hellraiser series, a thoroughly inauspicious start to the franchise's post-Barker years.

Hell Week: 'Hellraiser: Bloodline' (1996)

2011-10-27T12:43:00.000-07:00

Setting a trend that would later be followed by horror-movie villains Jason Voorhees and the leprechaun, Hellraiser: Bloodline sends Pinhead to the final frontier, where no one can hear you scream. Yes, it takes place (partially) in outer space, about 130 years in the future aboard a dingy-looking space station. The future sequence is used mainly as a framing device, though, at least until the movie's climax, setting up an era-spanning tale with segments taking place in 18th-century France and modern-day New York City. While Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth expanded on Pinhead's back story, Bloodline is all about exploring the background of the puzzle box, created by a French master toymaker in the 1700s.

Bruce Ramsay plays three different generations of Lemarchands/Merchants, all without much impact. The scenes set in the past are the silliest, with florid period dialogue and actors who look uncomfortable in their old-fashioned costumes (future comedy star Adam Scott is especially awkward as a depraved nobleman). Once Lemarchand creates the box, it's used to conjure forth a demon from hell, but not Pinhead (surprisingly). Instead it's Angelique (Valentina Vargas), who inhabits the body of a beautiful young woman and is at first bonded to Scott's snotty aristocrat. In 1996, Angelique ditches her beau (after disemboweling him, of course) and sets out to find Lemarchand's descendant John Merchant, an architect who designed the puzzle box-themed building seen briefly in the stinger at the end of Hell on Earth.

The contemporary segment is the longest, with Pinhead showing up after being called forth by Angelique, and sort of taking over the proceedings. Although Bloodline ditches the slasher-movie template of Hell on Earth, Doug Bradley still chews plenty of scenery as the one-dimensionally evil Pinhead, and I honestly preferred the more insidious and seductive Angelique as the villain (she's more in line with Frank and Julia from the first two movies). Vargas is the best thing about the movie, and it's too bad that she gets sidelined and turned into another anonymous Cenobite to stand behind Pinhead in the final segment. John is kind of an ineffectual hero, although that's partially the point, as he has to leave Pinhead undefeated for his future descendant Paul Merchant to destroy in space.

The resolution of John's 1996 battle against Pinhead is unclear, but obviously the demon lived to fight another day, because he shows up in 2127 on the space station for Paul's realization of what I guess could be called the antidote to the original puzzle box, which sends Pinhead back to hell, or whatever. Once again written by Peter Atkins, Bloodline doesn't make any more sense than the last two movies, although it at least has much grander ambitions than Hell on Earth, and is consequently more enjoyable. Special-effects artist Kevin Yagher, in his directorial debut, clashed with producers and had his name taken off the film, and allegedly his version of the movie is much more coherent, although it holds back on Pinhead's debut much longer (presumably including more of the silly 18th-century stuff).

Joe Chappelle, who had his own disputes with producers on a horror sequel (Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers) the year before, came on board for studio-mandated reshoots, and apparently much of the original script was never even filmed. Other than an extremely abrupt ending, though, the movie doesn't seem any more incoherent than the last installment, so I wonder if the fan-constructed versions of Yagher's director's cut are actually an improvement in any way. This is the only movie I've ever seen that's actually credited to Alan Smithee, a red flag right at the beginning that it's going to be a disaster. The surprise is that it's only a partial disaster, but that didn't matter; Bloodline was the final Hellraiser movie to be released in theaters.

Hell Week: 'Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth' (1992)

2011-10-26T13:01:00.000-07:00

Despite the involvement of Clive Barker as executive producer and a screenplay by Hellbound: Hellraiser II screenwriter Peter Atkins, Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth marks the franchise's transition into generic bullshit slasher-movie territory, with Pinhead as a lame Freddy Krueger-style villain instead of the mysterious, menacing enigma he was in the first two movies. Even with the bit of back story parceled out in Hellbound, Pinhead still stood outside and above humanity, only enforcing the ill-advised bargains made by the selfish, deviant human characters. Frank and Julia, not Pinhead, were the villains in the first two movies, and Pinhead's motivation was to possess their souls and delight in their flesh, not to go out and slaughter a bunch of people. But here his motives are as pedestrian as any psycho killer's: He just wants to kill people indiscriminately.

Hell on Earth also pretty much abandons the original characters; Ashley Laurence, credited with "special appearance by," shows up for a cameo in a video of Kirsty ranting about the puzzle box at the mental institution, but there's no indication of what has become of her since then. Instead the main character is bland TV reporter Joey Summerskill (Terry Farrell), who accidentally stumbles on Pinhead's plan to escape from hell and come to Earth for the aforementioned slaughter. Never mind that he's never wanted to do that before, or that the rules of his existence seem to have changed, or that all the other Cenobites have disappeared. It's just annoying Joey against Pinhead, aided by the Cenobite's alter ego Elliott Spencer (also played by Doug Bradley), who was revealed in the prologue to Hellbound.

Somehow Spencer and Pinhead have become separated, and Spencer needs to trap Pinhead in some limbo dimension in order to bring him back to hell. Whatever. The plot to Hellbound didn't make a lot of sense either, but it at least had striking visuals and creative set pieces and interesting characters. This movie has none of that. Pinhead gets way more lines, but he just turns into a hammy monster spouting stupid one-liners (he also gets called "Pinhead" for the first time, when Joey is taunting him). The movie is full of gimmicky kills reminiscent of cheesy horror B-movies, including a DJ killed by razor-sharp CDs. Some of the victims then become Pinhead's new Cenobites, with laughable powers derived from their silly deaths.

No matter how ridiculous it all gets, there's almost no sense of camp or fun, even from Bradley, who does seem to relish getting a bigger part. Farrell is terrible as the heroine, delivering her lines flatly and never once exhibiting the fortitude that would be required to take on the forces of hell. The movie's conception of underground nightclub culture is of course absurd (dig the young Paula Marshall as an uncomfortable-looking goth girl!), and the supporting characters are all broad stereotypes. Hell on Earth is a victim of the franchise's success, with a higher profile forcing the filmmakers to iron out the sexual kinks and cater to a more mainstream horror audience, thus losing what made the series interesting in the first place.

Hell Week: 'Hellbound: Hellraiser II' (1988)

2011-10-25T15:07:00.000-07:00

Rushed into production quickly on the heels of the success of the original Hellraiser, Hellbound: Hellraiser II suffers from some narrative confusion (blamed mainly on Andrew Robinson's refusal to reprise his role as Larry Cotton), but it also has a striking visual style and some truly gruesome set pieces, and its comparatively larger budget allows for Clive Barker's twisted visions to come to life more effectively. Barker steps back here, credited only with the screen story and as executive producer, but his stamp is still all over the themes and look of the movie, albeit smoothed out a bit from the S&M-focused original. Robinson isn't back, but Ashley Laurence (as Kirsty) and Clare Higgins (as Julia) both are, despite Julia's having been killed in the last movie. That's not really a big stumbling block for this series, since the border between the afterlife and the realm of the living is pretty easily breached.

Kirsty begins the movie where so many final survivors of horror movies find themselves in sequels: in a mental institution. This particular establishment is run by the twisted and sadistic Dr. Channard (Kenneth Cranham), who just so happens to be obsessed with Cenobites and the puzzle box and all that stuff. He manages to resurrect Julia in much the same manner that Julia resurrected Frank in the first movie, and Kirsty breaks out of the hospital to stop them. She's also determined to rescue her father from hell, but that particular storyline just sort of disappears at some point, since Robinson decided not to appear in the movie. Instead Kirsty teams up with a fellow mental patient who's a puzzle-solving genius and follows Julia and Channard into hell itself.

Pretty much the entire second half of the movie takes place in hell, which allows director Tony Randel (an editor on the first movie) all sorts of creative license, and he puts together an impressively disorienting and nasty landscape, influenced strongly by the mind-bending artwork of M.C. Escher. Thanks to Pinhead's rising popularity, the Cenobites get a much larger role here, and the movie opens with a prologue hinting at Pinhead's origins. Julia also evolves from a whiny codependent into a deviously evil villain, and Higgins does a much better job with the role this time around. She's a more interesting antagonist than Pinhead (who's credited with that name for the first time, although never referred to that way onscreen), and her team-up with Channard is wonderfully nasty.

That pairing allows for the film's most significant dose of deviant sexuality, but it's not quite as twisted as the Julia/Frank dynamic in the original. The Cenobites are also presented more as unwitting victims who've been transformed into monsters than as pleasure/pain-seeking hedonists, and while that works for the more conventional horror-movie vibe, it loses a little of Barker's unique perspective. With its expanded scope, larger budget and more intense scares, Hellbound is a better movie overall than the original, and a more effective horror film. But Hellraiser still stands out for Barker's personal connection, which only gets more diluted as the series wears on.

Hell Week: 'Hellraiser' (1987)

2011-10-24T14:29:00.000-07:00

In the week leading up to Halloween last year, I wrote about all eight movies in the original Halloween series, and this year I'm taking on another iconic horror franchise that fell on hard times, Clive Barker's Hellraiser series. The ninth movie in the series just came out on DVD last week (check out my review here), and now I'm looking back on the original eight. It's sort of fascinating to realize that this cheap, bottom-of-the-barrel horror series evolved from what is essentially a very personal art film by writer-director Barker (who based the first movie on his novella The Hellbound Heart). Hellraiser was Barker's first feature as a director, and it definitely shows signs of its low budget and Barker's inexperience. But it also has a disturbing intensity that transcends its limitations and a creative, demented design sense for its horrors that's reflective of Barker's background as a painter.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks here is the acting, which is almost universally awkward. Andrew Robinson, who was a great, underrated recurring player on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine for years, seems uncomfortable as the bland, smarmy Larry Cotton, who moves with his brittle wife Julia (Clare Higgins) into his creepy old family home. Julia is meant to be cold and distant, but Higgins plays her as aloof and alienated even when she's in the throes of passion with Larry's brother Frank, a sleazy lowlife who's managed to open a portal to hell thanks to a mysterious puzzle box (which would become one of the series' central elements). From that portal spew forth the Cenobites, sadistic creatures who torture and pleasure anyone who calls them via the box.

Despite the dominance of Pinhead (Doug Bradley) as the iconic figure of the series, its version of Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger, the Cenobites aren't really the villains here, and Pinhead isn't all that prominent (he's credited only as "lead Cenobite," and has just a handful of lines). Frank, who escapes from hell and must replenish his flesh via the blood of the living, is the main bad guy, using Julia's sexual obsession with him to procure victims for his resurrection. Barker's always incorporated themes of sexual deviance into his work, and the Cenobites' promises to provide both pain and pleasure to their summoners make them like the world's most extreme BDSM practitioners. People seek out these sadistic hell demons because they totally get off on it.

But this is still a mainstream horror movie, so wholesome niceness prevails, as Larry's daughter Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) takes on Frank and the Cenobites and banishes them back to hell. Although Laurence is the best actor in the movie, Kirsty's kind of a boring character compared to the depraved Frank and Julia, who gleefully mix sex and violence in their volatile couplings. The psychosexual aspects of Barker's world got stripped out as the series progressed into generic horror nonsense, but Hellraiser shows an intriguing embrace of the dark side of sexuality, even if the craftsmanship is often lacking.

Triskaidekaphilia: '13 Frightened Girls'

2011-10-13T13:13:00.000-07:00

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

William Castle is best known for his gimmicky B-horror pictures like House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler and 13 Ghosts (an inevitable future subject for this feature), but the prolific filmmaker worked in a number of genres, churning out whatever cheap quickies he thought could reach impressionable moviegoers. His 1963 film 13 Frightened Girls is clearly aimed at a younger audience than his horror movies, but it's just as hokey and ridiculous. In a grating performance, Kathy Dunn plays bratty teenager Candy, the daughter of an American diplomat in London. On break from her posh boarding school (whose students are all the daughters of international diplomats), Candy finds herself caught up in a nonsensical web of intrigue when she decides to become an amateur spy. Her clumsy antics set off a frenzy among the international espionage community, attracting the unwanted attention of some dangerous Chinese spies.

Despite a climax that puts Candy in danger of getting killed by the Chinese, Girls is goofy and innocuous, with a Disney-movie feel and a childish understanding of the workings of the spy world. Candy is loud and obnoxious and completely conspicuous, yet somehow no one picks up on her devious spy tactics until the very end of the movie. Dunn plays the character with an irritating mix of brattiness and sultriness, so that her "seduction" scenes with young secret agents come off as gross and inappropriate, and her obsession with her father's middle-aged co-worker (including a scene in which she essentially throws herself at him) is uncomfortably off-putting. The adult actors kind of muddle through their moronic scenes as best they can, but the teenage performers (including Lynne Sue Moon as Candy's Chinese best friend) are universally terrible.

Of course, a bunch of them came from one of Castle's gimmicks, in which he launched a contest to find the most beautiful girls from various countries to play the diplomats' children. He even shot different versions of the movie's opening scene (in which Candy is inexplicably thrilled at the prospect of driving the school's bus) showcasing actresses from different countries to cater to international markets. The eye-catching title is a gimmick, too, since it has nothing to do with the story (there are 15 girls at the school, not 13, and only Candy is ever really frightened) but sounds quite exciting. The trailers on the DVD advertise the movie under an earlier title (The Candy Web) that's more accurate but less titillating. Attention-grabbing gimmickry backed up by mediocre filmmaking was Castle's stock in trade, and 13 Frightened Girls is a perfect example of it.

'The Horrors of Stephen King'

2011-10-03T11:15:00.000-07:00

Even as his novels have become increasingly hit-or-miss, one thing Stephen King has remained good at is being an advocate for the horror genre. He's articulated his love for horror in his nonfiction books Danse Macabre and On Writing, and would regularly promote examples of the genre (including stuff dismissed by critics and fans) in his now-defunct Entertainment Weekly column. So he's on solid ground for the new Turner Classic Movies special The Horrors of Stephen King, which features King talking about his favorite horror movies and why he likes them. It's a more superficial take than what King offered in Danse Macabre, which makes sense for TV, although some of the segments seem like little more than King naming a movie while we watch a clip from it.

The best parts of the special feature King talking about the movies that scared him as a child or influenced his work, when you can see his real passion shine through. He's less convincing when talking about subgenres outside his main area of expertise (the treatment of Japanese horror films is especially shallow) or pretty much anything made after the 1980s. Director Laurent Bouzereau also gives King a relatively short time to talk about the movies based on his own work, which should probably either have been expanded to its own special or left out altogether. As it is, King barely gets going on that subject before Bouzereau moves on to another. Horror fans probably won't discover anything new here, but King's enthusiasm is, as always, infectious, and TCM could probably do better to just hire him to introduce horror classics, like the ghoulish version of Robert Osborne. That way he'd get to fully share his passions; here, what we get is mostly a bullet-pointed list.

Premieres tonight at 8 p.m. on Turner Classic Movies.

DC's New 52

2011-10-02T23:08:00.000-07:00

DC has been going all-out to push its universe-wide relaunch/reboot/re-whatever, including sending the first issues of every single one of its 52 new/relaunched titles to the mainstream press. So although I had been considering picking up just a handful of new DC titles that caught my eye, I found myself with a stack of all 52. I ended up reading 15 of them, including the ones that I was already interested in and a few others that have been getting the most buzz, and I may end up getting through the rest at some point in the future. For now, the ones I'm looking to continue reading are pretty much the same as the ones I had been interested in from the start, although if I had more time and money I might give a few other series a little more time to impress me.

I don't read a whole lot of superhero comics anymore, so it takes a lot to win me over on a played-out corporate icon like Superman or Batman, especially since those characters always end up dragged into giant crossovers or tossed from one creative team to another. Already writer/artist George Perez has stepped down from Superman, which he's leaving after the sixth issue. Not that his debut impressed me much: It's a serviceable old-school Superman story with somewhat awkward and superficial references to modern technology, and its biggest status quo change is that Clark Kent and Lois Lane are no longer romantically linked. Perez has a nice old-school density to his storytelling, both in the art (which Jesus Merino pencils and inks over Perez's breakdowns) and in the text, which is much more extensive than in typical modern superhero comics. But it's in service of a ho-hum story that doesn't entice me back for another month.

Grant Morrison's take on Superman in Action Comics is also old-school in a way, hearkening back to Superman's Golden Age roots as a populist hero taking on corruption, a little more of a loose-cannon vigilante. Morrison's explorations of classic superhero tropes don't really grab my attention (I'm probably the only person who was unimpressed with All-Star Superman), and his take on Superman strikes me as a little off-balance while not really adding anything new to the character. Ultimately it's a slightly skewed take on a familiar set-up, and while it's more intriguing than Perez's vision, it still doesn't grab me enough to stick around for a second issue.

I was more impressed with the Batman family books that I tried, especially J.H. Williams III's Batwoman, which I had already been planning to get following Williams' run on the character with writer Greg Rucka in Detective Comics two years ago. This book has also been in the works since then, which means that the creators have had more time to develop and produce it, and hopefully Williams will be able to complete each issue without having any fill-ins (aside from artist Amy Reeder, who's already scheduled to alternate arcs with Williams). There also isn't any kind of relaunch here -- the story continues directly from Williams and Rucka's work on Detective, with Williams taking over as co-writer (along with W. Haden Blackman) in addition to his art duties. Still, the first issue catches readers up well, and the art (the main draw for me) is still phenomenal, with Williams depicting haunting suspense, fluid action and personal drama equally skillfully. I'm mainly on board for the amazing visuals, but I do like Kate Kane as a character, and I'm curious to see where Williams and Blackman take the story.

I thought that Batman by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo and Batgirl by Gail Simone and Ardian Syaf were also solid superhero comics, although I doubt I'll be following either one any further. I like Snyder, but his Batman is still basically the same character doing the same things, even if the first issue does set up a pretty intriguing cliffhanger. And Simone does a decent job with a crappy assignment, taking Barbara Gordon out of her wheelchair as Oracle and returning her to action as Batgirl. Given how angry fans have been about the switch (not without reason), it's smart and a little brave of Simone to tackle the transition as part of her story, rather than pretending it never happened. Still, one book about a female Bat-themed vigilante is probably enough for me, and I'm going with Batwoman.

Outside of the big names, I liked some of the scrappier, lower-tier titles, which are what I tend to follow more consistently anyway. I never read Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning's original Resurrection Man series in the '90s, but I like their solid, character-driven superhero work on Marvel books like Guardians of the Galaxy and Heroes for Hire, and the new Resurrection Man is in that same vein, setting up an interesting underdog hero, some menacing villains and a decent cliffhanger (although I'm a little concerned that it seems to connect to Justice League Dark, which I found muddled and unimpressive). Similarly unpretentious and fun were Paul Cornell's two books, Stormwatch and Demon Knights, both team books with oddball assortments of characters. The mystical themes of Demon Knights remind me a little of Cornell's underappreciated work on Marvel's Captain Britain and MI13, and Stormwatch does a nice job of balancing Warren Ellis' twisted sensibilities from his work on that series (and The Authority) with a more mainstream DC feel.

Justice League Dark didn't work for me, but two other Vertigo imports, Animal Man and Swamp Thing, definitely did. Swamp Thing is a little more in line with writer Scott Snyder's horror sensibilities (from American Vampire and Severed) than Batman is, and like Cornell in Stormwatch he nicely balances the character's off-kilter past with a firm grounding back in the DC superhero universe. Jeff Lemire does the same with Animal Man, much better than his goofy Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E. There are some genuinely creepy moments in both books, thanks to great work from artists Yanick Paquette (on Swamp Thing) and Travel Foreman (on Animal Man). Along with Batwoman, those two are probably the books that impressed me most (although maybe I'll discover more as I work my way through the rest of the pile). I just hope that DC can keep these creative teams together long enough to tell complete stories, because that kind of turnover is the surest way to lose the renewed interest they've garnered from me.

'Pan Am'

2011-09-25T11:12:00.000-07:00

As I said when I wrote about The Playboy Club last week, Pan Am is easily the better of the two shows that attempt to capture the style and feel of the early 1960s via an iconic brand. While Playboy sometimes feels like an advertisement for its subject, Pan Am has the advantage of showcasing a brand that no longer exists, so the promotional needs are nonexistent. And while Playboy seems desperate to replicate the gravitas of Mad Men, whose success is clearly the inspiration for both shows, Pan Am takes the opposite route, creating a slick, sunny world that's less about the burdens of changing times and more about their exciting opportunities. It's refreshingly female-driven, too, and it portrays women who are grappling with changing gender roles without feeling the need to constantly congratulate itself for its own supposed progressive values.

Kelli Garner is winning as main character Kate, who's forging a new, independent path for herself while being stuck looking after her fragile little sister Laura (Margot Robbie), who's followed Kate into the business of being a Pan Am stewardess. The pilot's subplot about Kate being recruited as an undercover CIA operative is a bit of stumbling block, but it's integrated far better than the crime elements on Playboy, and never seems like it's going to overwhelm the storylines for the other characters. I was especially intrigued by Christina Ricci's Maggie, a free-spirited bohemian who switches gears for her role as a ladylike stewardess. That kind of dichotomy is what the era is all about, and Pan Am manages to illustrate it without needing to awkwardly proclaim its themes.

The same goes for the portrayal of the airline's treatment of women, although there is a bit of history in the pilot involving Cuba that comes off as a little clumsily shoehorned in. The male characters also get shorted on development in the first episode, but that mostly points to future potential rather than shortcomings. I liked Pan Am a whole lot more than I expected I would given its Mad Men-ripoff origins, and I hope it can continue to distinguish itself as its own kind of sexy, stylish show.

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on ABC.

'Revenge'

2011-09-21T11:01:00.000-07:00

Like The CW's Ringer (whose second episode this week was a gloriously awful trainwreck of ridiculousness), Revenge is an unabashed soap opera loaded with nasty rich people and crazy plot twists, and it sets up a limited premise that seems unlikely to sustain a long-running series. Also like Ringer, it's frequently totally stupid, but generally in a fun, campy way. Emily VanCamp seems more confident as the lead of a show like this than Sarah Michelle Gellar is on Ringer; maybe it's all that time she spent on Brothers & Sisters falling in love with the dude she once thought was her long-lost brother.

Whatever it is, she successfully pulls off the vengeful woman who infiltrates an ultra-rich Hamptons community to right the wrongs that were done to her late father. She's so devious that she literally uses angry red marker to cross off each of her vanquished enemies in a group photo. That of course speaks to the limitations of the premise, but for now it's a lot of fun watching her pretend to be a naive young socialite while secretly plotting the downfalls of everyone around her. Madeleine Stowe is enjoyably evil as the queen bee of the rich-bitch social circle, and there are enough juicy side plots introduced to keep things going if the central storyline falters. Creator Mike Kelley was behind the enjoyably soapy Swingtown (which very few people watched), and while Revenge lacks that show's stabs at social relevance, it looks like it will contain at least as much bed-hopping and backstabbing.

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on ABC.

'Unforgettable'

2011-09-20T10:24:00.000-07:00

I don't have a lot of patience for crime procedurals, especially the grim, plodding variety that dominates CBS' schedule, but adding some ridiculous gimmick doesn't make them more appealing. Unforgettable is the opposite of its title, a totally generic crime-solving show that only makes an impression via its ludicrous central plot idea, that former police detective Carrie Wells (Poppy Montgomery) has perfect memory of everything she's ever seen and experienced -- except the day that her sister was murdered (dum-DUM!).

Now, hyperthymesia is a real thing (made famous recently by actress Marilu Henner), but I'm pretty sure it doesn't work the way the show portrays it. People with the condition can recall every detail of events that they personally experienced in their own lives, but I don't think they can literally go back over events in their minds and spot objects and occurrences that they didn't even notice the first time. That's what Carrie does in this show, and it basically turns her into a superhero, so that all the other characters just stand around and gawk while she solves the case by remembering stuff really hard.

Also, the pilot features Carrie solving a crime to which she was a witness, so there's lots of stuff for her to remember. I'm not sure how the show is going to place her in a position to remember other future crimes, but the premise is likely to limit what kinds of stories can be told (either that or it'll just fade into the background). The little flashes of memory that Carrie gets about her sister's long-ago murder aren't enough to build an enticing long-term storyline, so all that we have to go on are the mediocre cases. That's just not enough, especially with so many other procedurals out there. Montgomery is charming and tries her best, but Unforgettable is best forgotten.

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on CBS.

'The Playboy Club'

2011-09-19T10:22:00.000-07:00

Pretty much everything written about The Playboy Club has focused on its similarities to ABC's Pan Am, and the comparison doesn't do the former show any favors. Both are clearly inspired by the success of AMC's Mad Men, working hard to capture that show's sense of the style and allure of the early 1960s. But while Pan Am ditches the somber, thoughtful tone of Mad Men in favor of something sleek, glossy and fun, Playboy tries hard to manufacture seriousness with an overwrought crime storyline and some clumsy stabs at social commentary. The show can't pull off either element, and the historical references are awkwardly grafted onto the soapy storylines.

The narration from Hugh Hefner (which isn't set to last beyond the pilot) makes the show seem like one long advertisement, and it goes way overboard in touting Playboy as a progressive, forward-thinking brand. Instead of projecting an air of effortless cool, the show comes off as desperate, from Eddie Cibrian's faux-Don Draper performance (he even mimics Jon Hamm's vocal cadences) to the obvious, pseudo-shocking twists of the murder/mob storyline.

The crime stuff dwarfs everything else so effectively that it seems like the show is a crime drama set around the Playboy Club, rather than a Playboy Club drama featuring a crime element. Every plot thread is misguided and mishandled, and even though star Amber Heard has plenty of charisma, she can't hold this mess together. If you want your snazzy early-'60s fix, wait for Mad Men to come back next year, or just wait a week and watch Pan Am instead.

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on NBC.

'The Secret Circle'

2011-09-15T10:44:00.000-07:00

I wasn't particularly impressed with the first episode of The Vampire Diaries and never bothered watching beyond that, but I've read that it's become entertainingly nutso as time has gone on, and I'm kind of curious to give it another chance. Maybe the same thing will happen with The Secret Circle, which, like Diaries, is based on a book series by L.J. Smith and is executive-produced by Kevin Williamson. Also like Diaries, it starts off with a fairly ho-hum pilot that adds familiar supernatural elements to familiar teen-drama elements in a not very exciting way. The supernatural beings here are witches, not vampires, but otherwise the tone is very similar, including the small-town setting, the central love triangle and the ancient battle between good and evil.

I liked star Britt Robertson on the underrated Life Unexpected (which kind of fell apart in its second season), and I like her here as well, playing the outsider who's unaware of her magical heritage. The rest of the cast makes less of an impression, although Phoebe Tonkin's bitchy bad girl has the potential to become an entertaining adversary. The ominous reveals toward the end of the episode didn't really draw me in, and there's little here to suggest an original or clever take on your standard witchery (or teen angst). If Williamson and company take this show in a crazy, over-the-top direction, maybe it'll turn out to be a worthwhile companion for Diaries (which precedes it) and by next season I'll be feeling like I should catch up with it, but I'm not going to keep watching just on the chance of that happening.

Premieres tonight at 9 p.m. on The CW.

Triskaidekaphilia: '13 Assassins'

2011-09-13T13:13:00.000-07:00

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

Takashi Miike is one of the most prolific working directors, but I'd only seen one of his films (1999's Audition) before watching the recent 13 Assassins, a remake of the 1963 martial-arts movie of the same name. Although he's taken on a wide range of genres, Miike is still best known in the U.S. for his use of brutal, graphic violence in movies like Audition, and while Assassins isn't horrific, it is very nasty and violent during its climactic 45-minute battle sequence. Miike is less interested in intricately choreographed fight scenes than he is in the visceral, ugly clashing of bodies and weapons that happens in battle, and nothing here would be mistaken for the balletic beauty of the majority of modern martial-arts movies that garner attention in the U.S.

The story here is split up into two parts, with the first half of the movie a mostly measured if grim drama about a group of 13 samurai coming together to take down a sadistic and power-hungry lord who is poised to ascend to a position of power. Since he's related to the reigning shogun, the only way to ensure he won't rise to prominence is to assassinate him, so these 13 determined men take on a suicide mission in the name of protecting their countrymen. The building of the team is portrayed methodically and a little slowly, and many of the samurai were a little tough for me to tell apart (they do all have basically the same haircut and wardrobe). A few characters stand out, though, and Miike gives the ringleader Shinzaemon as well as Shinzaemon's nephew distinctive personalities. Villain Naritsugu also makes a notable impression, proving himself every bit the amoral sadist that his enemies claim him to be.

Although there's one particularly nasty scene featuring a woman whose arms and legs have been cut off by Naritsugu, the first half of the movie is relatively calm. But once the group comes together and entrenches itself in a small roadside town to wait for Naritsugu and his retinue, Miike switches gears, delivering a nonstop bloody battle that's worthy of any big-budget war movie. The assassins rely as much on explosives, traps and falling debris as they do on their hand-to-hand combat skills, and Miike does an impressive job of staging the large-scale assault that this small group prepares to deal with an entire battalion. Despite the efforts of the movie's first half, most of the samurai remain interchangeable cannon fodder, but Miike manages to wring some emotion out of their inevitable deaths, and by the time the movie is down to just the characters we recognize and care about, there is a palpable sense of weariness. This is a movie about a group of righteous warriors taking down an evil man, but when the final survivor stumbles through the wreckage, it's hard to imagine any of it as a victory. So many martial-arts movies these days are concerned with colorful robes and graceful movements; in 13 Assassins, Miike brings it all back to blood and guts.

'Ringer'

2011-09-13T09:46:00.000-07:00

I have a weakness for prime-time soaps, so I can forgive a lot of cheesiness and ridiculous plotting if a show hooks me with memorable characters, juicy twists and a pulpy sense of fun. I'm the guy who watched nearly the entire original run of Melrose Place, after all, and I'm still following and (mostly) enjoying Gossip Girl. Ringer is undoubtedly silly, and like this season's other unabashed soap opera, ABC's Revenge, it has a limited premise that seems like it will be difficult to stretch out over multiple seasons. But the pilot hits all the right notes, driven by Sarah Michelle Gellar's hammy lead performance as a pair of twin sisters who each harbor their own dark secrets. The scenes in which hardscrabble recovering addict/former stripper and prostitute (she's an overachiever!) Bridget and icy socialite Siobhan interact look seriously awkward, and I hope that the show's main hook (in which Bridget assumes Siobhan's identity after Siobhan appears to have committed suicide) will keep the two characters from having to interact onscreen too often.

Special-effects constraints aside, the rest of the episode is entertainingly trashy, with the confused Bridget trying to navigate the details of Siobhan's messy world, including a distant husband (Ioan Gruffudd), a secret lover, a bitchy teenage stepdaughter and a life of attending benefits and choosing interior-design elements. Oh, and someone seems to want Siobhan dead just about as bad as some other someone wants Bridget dead, which was the reason for the whole switcheroo in the first place. It put me in mind of Bette Davis' two movies in which she played her own twin, Dead Ringer and A Stolen Life, both of which involve one sister taking over the other sister's life (one even involves a similar boating incident as the one in this show). Gellar is no Bette Davis, but she has fun with her dual role and isn't afraid to play up the characters' nastiness. Ringer could easily fall apart under the weight of its own labored plotting (I didn't even get to Nestor Carbonell as an FBI agent hot on Bridget's trail), but for now it's worth watching if you, like me, have a fondness for soapy stories about catty, devious schemers and the people who love (and betray) them.

Premieres tonight at 9 p.m. on The CW.

'Wishful Drinking'

2011-09-12T13:59:00.000-07:00

Given how much Carrie Fisher has been through in her life, I guess I expected her one-woman stage show Wishful Drinking, recorded last year for an HBO special, to be more detailed and revealing, instead of the entertaining but disappointingly glib routine she delivers. It's not that Fisher is reluctant to share the details of her life -- on the contrary, she almost gleefully lays out the dysfunctional relationships of her parents, singer Eddie Fisher and actress Debbie Reynolds, illustrating their various marriages and affairs with an amusing oversized chart she dubs "Hollywood Inbreeding 101." But Fisher's own feelings (other than bemusement) about these no doubt traumatic scandals and tragedies are obscured by her reliance on corny jokes and silly gimmicks.

Of course, the whole point of the show is for Fisher to find humor in her difficult life, and some of it is indeed quite funny. But the value of laughing at your misfortunes is in finding a new way to understand them, and so much of Wishful Drinking glides past understanding in favor of a few more easy laughs. Fisher frequently references dark, troubling episodes in her life, including her mother's multiple financial ruins and Fisher's own stints in rehab and mental-health facilities, but she then pulls back from illuminating how or why she ended up in those situations, or what enabled her to cope. This is especially true of Fisher's substance-abuse problems, which, despite the title, get little attention in comparison to her parents' romantic escapades.

Maybe it's because Fisher has already covered this ground fictionally in several of her novels, but the straight-up truth has a value that no fictionalized account, no matter how close to reality, can replicate. Given how self-aware Fisher is about her parents' psychological hang-ups, and even about her own romantic relationships, it's disappointing that she holds back on what for many could be the most fascinating and insightful part of the show. There's also a book version of the story, which may feature more and better detail (although it's still on the short side at under 200 pages), but audiences shouldn't have to look to other sources to get a full understanding of what Fisher is portraying here. There's a definite value in hearing it in Fisher's own voice, with the way she commands the stage and cleverly deploys visual aids. A lot of Wishful Drinking is hilarious and heartbreaking, which makes it even more frustrating when Fisher walks offstage after 75 minutes, having barely scratched the surface of what she has to offer.

Available on DVD September 13.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: 'The Big Shakedown' (1934)

2011-09-06T13:56:00.000-07:00

As I get down to fewer and fewer Bette Davis movies that I have yet to see, more and more of them are concentrated in the early-to-mid-1930s, a period in which Davis was under contract to Warner Bros. and churning out a quick succession of B-movies while working to make a name for herself. That means that Davis' parts in these movies are often not very substantial, and the movies themselves are usually forgettable and sloppy. There are occasional pleasant surprises (like 1932's The Rich Are Always With Us), but The Big Shakedown is not one of them. It's a rather ludicrous melodrama about gangsters making counterfeit pharmaceuticals, and the devastating effect this has on the absurdly naive pharmacist (Charles Farrell) who helps create the products.

Davis plays the pharmacist's wife, a sunny and optimistic woman with very little personality and the reason that he risks breaking the law to make some extra money. Both of them value the simpler time of the friendly corner drugstore, but the mob has other ideas, and the ambitious gangster played by Ricardo Cortez wants to build an empire off of ersatz toothpaste. It's all fun and games until the pharmacist is charged with creating knock-off medications that are harder to concoct than toothpaste, and he's forced to turn out defective products to meet the demands of his overseers (who shockingly decline to let him leave his position when he asks politely). Of course these medications turn out to be the only thing that can save his unborn child, thus teaching him the consequences of his criminal ways, etc.

Although there is some fun pre-Code nastiness here (the gangster gets his comeuppance by being dumped into a vat of acid), The Big Shakedown is resolutely square and dull, with a bland lead performance from Farrell. Davis has a few cheeky moments with the drugstore's goofy customers, but mostly she just has to stand around and look either concerned or proud. Glenda Farrell has a much sassier, Davis-like role as the gangster's moll, although it's a pretty small part. The movie barrels through its moronic plot in a little over an hour, and the actors just stand around and try not to get run over.

Triskaidekaphilia: '13 Months of Sunshine'

2011-08-13T13:13:00.000-07:00

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

It's amazing what you can find while poking around Amazon's VOD offerings. 13 Months of Sunshine played a handful of small film festivals in 2008 and 2009 without making much of an impact, but thanks to Amazon, it's available to watch for anyone with an internet connection (and $2.99), and can be purchased on DVD as well, even though the movie's official site seems to have expired, and its Facebook page hasn't been updated in years. Orphaned films live on in the cloud, for people like me to randomly stumble upon.

Anyway, as much as the availability of 13 Months may be indicative of some new movie-distribution paradigm, its actual content is much less revolutionary. It's clearly a labor of love for writer-director Yehdego Abeselom, depicting life among the Ethiopian immigrant community in Los Angeles. This is certainly not a demographic that's typically represented in movies, even on the micro-indie scale, so it's interesting to get a glimpse into a sort of invisible subculture. Or at least it would be, if this movie offered up anything distinct from the typical rom-com narrative, with a few devices from the struggling-immigrant genre. The plot features main character Solomon (Sammy Amare) agreeing to a sham marriage with Hanna (Tsion Fikreselassie) so she can get her green card, and of course they eventually fall in love despite just being together for the sake of convenience.

The movie takes forever getting there, though, and the subplots about Solomon wanting to open his own coffee shop and Hanna becoming a model are tedious and awkward, the model storyline especially showing the strains of the limited budget. The acting ranges from passable to painful, but it's definitely hampered by the looping of practically all of the dialogue, which makes it sound extra stilted and false. One thing that Abeselom does well is show how casually the characters switch between Amharic and English as they're talking to each other, in a way that shows how the community has become integrated into American life while also remaining separate. A few more touches like that would have helped 13 Months seem more insightful, instead of just another generic indie dramedy with questionable production values.

Shark Week 2: 'Jaws 2' (1978)

2011-08-06T14:38:00.000-07:00

By the time it reached its fourth installment in 1987, the Jaws franchise was basically a joke, but in 1978 it was still pretty respectable, coming off of Steven Spielberg's acclaimed and hugely successful 1975 original. Spielberg even briefly considered returning to direct the sequel, although that duty eventually fell to Jeannot Szwarc, who came in to replace original director John D. Hancock. Despite a lot of production troubles, including Hancock's firing, numerous rewrites and Roy Scheider's apparent reluctance to star in the movie (which he did only out of a contractual obligation), Jaws 2 ended up about as good as you could expect such a redundant sequel to be. It's repetitive and unnecessary, but it's not entirely bad. Shark-attack movies have been living in the shadow of Jaws since 1975, and the same is true for Jaws 2.

It also rehashes the plot of Jaws in many ways, with a giant great white shark terrorizing the resort town of Amity Island, and the town's chief of police, Martin Brody (Scheider), sounding the oft-ignored alarm. Once again local officials refuse to take the threat seriously, and once again Brody has to take it upon himself to defeat the shark. That redundancy reduces the suspense, and you can sense a bit of Scheider's annoyance in his performance, although he does convey Brody's desperation at being stuck in the same damn situation all over again. Szwarc, too, is stuck in a no-win situation when it comes to the shark, since he can't really hold off on showing it the way Spielberg did (everyone in the audience knows what it looks like by now), but the more he does show it, the sillier it appears. Szwarc opts to give the shark plenty of screen time, as well as a badass scar from attacking a boat early in the movie, and it's certainly more of a proactive, vengeful villain (which of course makes no sense). There's a brief reference to the possibility of the original shark having somehow communicated with the new shark, which is quickly dismissed, but this one clearly has it out for the residents of Amity Island.

In addition to Brody and his wife (Lorraine Gary, also returning from the original), Jaws 2 spends a lot of time focused on a group of interchangeable teenagers, including Brody's son Mike, who serve as shark fodder. In its emphasis on teen antics and peril, Jaws 2 sort of resembles a slasher film, right down to the teens who get attacked just after deciding to have sex. The slasher aspect could have been a fun angle, but it isn't fully developed, and it has to share time with Brody's brooding and the self-serving maneuvers of the town leaders. For the first half of the movie, in which Brody grows increasingly paranoid about attacks that he attributes to the shark without conclusive evidence, I was imagining a more offbeat take that would have involved no shark attacks at all, just Brody going increasingly insane as he insists that a shark is terrorizing the town, except it's all in his mind.

Sadly, this is just a by-the-number shark-attack movie instead, although the climax, which puts Brody's kids in peril, is sort of exciting, and Szwarc and the various screenwriters at least find a new and interesting way to kill the shark that doesn't duplicate the ending of the first movie. Given that this mediocre film is regarded as the best of the Jaws sequels, it's probably better for me to stop here and not move on to the later installments.

Shark Week 2: 'The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl' (2005)

2011-08-05T11:02:00.000-07:00

Robert Rodriguez's filmmaking career is oddly schizophrenic; his movies are almost all either hyper-stylized violent pulp fantasies (Sin City, Planet Terror, Machete, etc.) or candy-coated, ultra-wholesome kids' movies (the Spy Kids series, Shorts, etc.) with essentially nothing in between (The Faculty is the closest middle ground). The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl (which was originally released in 3D) falls squarely into Rodriguez's kid-focused mode, with a story based on the dreams and ideas of his then-7-year-old son Racer Max. It's cute that Rodriguez wants to include his entire family in his moviemaking endeavors, and it's admirable that he creates his movies in such a self-contained way, shooting at his own studio in Texas and serving multiple positions in the crew himself.

But both approaches yield poor results: The story very much seems like it was concocted by a child, with a complete lack of coherence or direction, a half-formed message and a bunch of overbearing, one-note characters. And Rodriguez's filmmaking efficiency leads to ugly, bargain-basement special effects, terrible performances and no sense of pacing or modulation. It's not as grating or haphazard as Rodriguez's next family movie, 2009's Shorts (which is pretty much unbearable to watch), but it comes close. The message here is about not being afraid to let your imagination run wild, but in this case I think maybe Rodriguez should have confined his son's ideas to coloring books.

And what about the sharks? There's actually a semi-amusing prologue about the origin of Sharkboy (Twilight's Taylor Lautner, proving that he was an awful actor even at 13), who accompanied his marine biologist dad at a research station until a storm blew it apart, and Sharkboy was found and raised by crappily animated CGI talking sharks. Somehow this led to his acquiring shark-related powers, plus a really stupid-looking shark-themed outfit. That's about it for the actual sharks until the climax of the movie, when Sharkboy fulfills his destiny (?) and becomes king of the ocean, rallying his army of hideous CGI sharks to help defeat villain Mr. Electricity (George Lopez, nearly as bad as the child actors).

As for the rest of the plot, it involves lame preteen Max (Cayden Boyd) teaming up with the title characters to save Planet Drool by learning to believe in the power of dreams, or some bullshit. Again, it doesn't really make sense, and it seems like the plot heads off in a completely different direction every 10 minutes or so. The effects are not only poorly rendered but also sloppily designed, and the movie's entire visual sense is garish and exhausting. Add in the awkward, shrill acting and the repetitive positivity, and this is clearly a kid's project only a father could love.

Shark Week 2: 'Sharktopus' (2010)

2011-08-04T13:43:00.000-07:00

There have been so many low-budget shark-attack movies at this point that their creators have to do something really different to stand out from the pack. Thus you get something like Sharktopus, an insanely stupid idea that nevertheless captures the pop-culture zeitgeist for two minutes precisely because of its insane stupidity. Sharktopus comes from two proud traditions of B-movie schlock: It's produced by low-budget legend Roger Corman, and it was created for Syfy, which despite its fancy name change is still in the business of churning out awesomely awful horror/sci-fi TV-movies on a regular basis. What makes Sharktopus stand out from dozens of other terrible Syfy productions? Other than its title, pretty much nothing. It's sloppily constructed, with terrible acting, atrocious special effects and a thin plot that strains to fill 90 minutes. Like a lot of micro-sensations that generate interest online, its entire appeal is in its title and maybe the trailer; watching the movie is essentially redundant.

But I watched it anyway, and it wasn't a horrible experience. Corman has decades of accumulated knowledge in how to package this stuff so it goes down easy, and even abiding by basic-cable standards, he knows how to throw in plenty of scantily clad hot women (the movie takes place mostly at a resort in Puerto Vallarta) and evenly space out the gory moments, plus add the requisite comic relief. All of that stuff is there, just in kind of a watered-down form. Obviously the women have to remain clothed, the violence is pretty tame (although there is plenty of blood), and the comic relief is mild. I did enjoy Ralph Garman as a snarky radio DJ who scoffs at the existence of Sharktopus (naturally right before getting devoured by the half-shark/half-octopus creature), and there's some camp value in the obviously clueless way the actors react to being attacked by a post-production special effect they can't see.

That's pretty minimal entertainment for a 90-minute movie, though, and it's spread thin enough that the rest of the time is filled with boredom, including repetitive exposition and scenes of irrelevant characters who are never seen again. Eric Roberts is the only semi-respectable actor in the movie, and most of the time he looks like he's just biding his time until he can head back to his trailer. Even the way he wears his sunglasses halfway down his face looks condescending. He plays the head of the scientific organization that has gone too far in creating the Sharktopus as a weapon for the military (why does the military want a Sharktopus?), but he spends almost the entire movie on some yacht in an undisclosed location, like he was annoyed at the prospect of sharing too many scenes with the other actors. That kind of half-assed boredom with the material pervades the movie; so many people online were taken with the supposed awesomeness of the concept, but the people making the movie don't seem nearly as impressed.

Shark Week 2: 'Beyond the Reef' (1981)

2011-08-03T12:03:00.000-07:00

Although most of the commentary about Beyond the Reef that I found online (it's never been released on DVD in the U.S., but can be watched in its entirety on YouTube) was about how people saw it as kids and had nostalgic feelings for it, it didn't really strike me as a movie made for kids. There's a deadly shark attack within a couple of minutes of the movie starting, and a few more later on. I'm pretty sure I saw a bare breast at one point, too. I suppose it's reassuring, though, that the parents of the '80s weren't so uptight about what their kids watched, and didn't let some partial nudity and deadly violence get in the way of letting youngsters see this lame-ass movie.

It's definitely the kind of movie that only seems good in nostalgic hindsight: The acting is terrible, the frequently dubbed dialogue is clumsy, the plot makes very little sense, and the life lessons are seriously muddled. At the same time, it's cute and upbeat, and the scenery (of Bora Bora) is beautiful. Most impressively, the filmmakers get a tiger shark to behave like a puppy, as main character Tikoyo befriends a baby shark right after its mother is killed following the attack at the beginning of the movie. As a kid, island native Tikoyo saves Polynesian-American girl Diana from a shark attack, then befriends Diana and spends time with her as he teaches his shark to be a loyal pet.

A decade later, the grown-up Diana (Maren Jensen, best known as Athena on the original Battlestar Galactica) returns from studying in America to find Tikoyo (Dayton Ka'ne) all grown up and palling around with a full-sized tiger shark, which is tame enough to carry humans on its back and splash up at Tikoyo playfully through a trap door in his hut. This is the fun, silly stuff that probably appealed to kids, and it's pretty impressive to watch, to see this creature that movies have conditioned us to believe is so dangerous and see it be not only harmless but also lovable. Director Frank C. Clark seems very aware of the preconceptions about shark movies, and he sometimes will show the shark (named Manidu, and supposedly containing the spirit of its namesake, a wise old mentor for young Tikoyo) in a stereotypical attack-movie shot (filmed from low and behind, with ominous music), only to have it do something adorable instead.

The thing is, though, that Manidu still kills people, but they're all evil developers who want to encroach on the beauty of Tikoyo's little inlet (and also exploit the cache of black pearls he lives right above). So it's like a cute agent of vengeance, and the movie never really reconciles this murderous impulse with the sunny vibe of Diana and Tikoyo's romance or the fish-out-of-water scenes with Diana's clueless (and perpetually horny for island men) American best friend. The villains (led by Diana's brother) are cartoonishly evil, but their defeat is sort of ambiguous and open-ended, and the movie just kind of stops without really resolving the story. It's based very loosely on a novel by Clement Richer (here is a Time Magazine review from 1951), which was also made into a 1964 Italian movie called Tiko and the Shark, and the fact that this is the most notable version of the story demonstrates just how unremarkable the whole thing is.

Shark Week 2: 'Tintorera: Killer Shark' (1977)

2011-08-02T12:30:00.000-07:00

The bargain-basement Mexican sharksploitation movie Tintorera: Killer Shark is just one of many opportunistic '70s Jaws ripoffs, but it achieved infamy for its use of real sea animals being injured and killed in scenes of the main characters hunting for sharks. The transition between bloody underwater slaughter and sleazy sexcapades is rather jarring, although the unseemly tone of the whole thing ties it together. It's not like director Rene Cardona Jr. was interested in some kind of radical verisimilitude, either -- there just wasn't any concern with animal welfare on movie sets in Mexico at the time, and it was a lot cheaper to spear actual animals than mock up fake ones to use. I don't know if indifference or malice would be the sadder motivation.

And all of those animals died in vain, too, bringing about this totally shitty movie. Cardona barely seems interested in shark attacks at all, spending most of his time focused on the sexual exploits of his main characters, American rich guy Steven (Hugo Stiglitz) and his Mexican friend/rival Miguel (Andres Garcia). Steven, wealthy for unspecified reasons, shacks up off the coast of a beautiful Mexican resort town in his fancy yacht, coming ashore to lure hot young women with gross pick-up lines and his ever-present creepy leer. No matter what Steven is doing, Stiglitz always has a look in his eyes like he's on the verge of sexual assault, and whoever dubbed in the English-language dialogue sounds just as sociopathic.

Steven even meets Miguel when they both happen to sleep with the same woman (she's later eaten by the shark, although neither of her paramours knows or cares), and they bond over their shared womanizing. Eventually they also bond over their enjoyment of shark-hunting, which they engage in even before they know that a killer tiger shark (or "tintorera") is on the loose. This is certainly the most environmentally unfriendly shark-attack movie of all time; in addition to killing sea animals for fun, in one scene Steven throws an empty champagne bottle off the side of his boat into the ocean, and then tosses in the glass, too. You could almost look at this movie as a revenge fantasy from the perspective of the shark, who gets back at these unfeeling murderers who are constantly killing its kin.

Cardona doesn't see it that way, though -- not that he has any sort of message here at all. The movie is just a vehicle for lots of nudity and occasional animal attacks, and a pretty weak one at that. Apparently there's a longer Mexican cut of the film that's 40 minutes longer than the American release I watched, and I can't imagine how there could be 40 more minutes of anything in this movie, unless it's just extended footage of topless girls swimming (which I suppose I could support). The sheer sleaziness can be kind of amusing, although the animal abuse certainly dampens the entertainment value. Better to stay away and not support this sort of thing at all.

Shark Week 2: 'Shark Attack 3: Megalodon' (2002)

2011-08-01T11:50:00.000-07:00

No, I haven't seen Shark Attack or Shark Attack 2, but from what I can tell, neither of those movies has anything to do with Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, aside from featuring sharks attacking (and the original Shark Attack apparently doesn't even feature much of that). And while Shark Attack and Shark Attack 2 are undoubtedly terrible, Megalodon is the one that has built up a reputation as one of the great bad movies of all time, thanks in large part to one particularly infamous line that star John Barrowman (who's gone on to be very successful on Dr. Who, Torchwood and the British stage) will apparently never live down.

But there's more to Megalodon than just Barrowman's Ben Carpenter delivering the world's most awkward come-on. For starters, the movie takes place in Mexico but was shot in Bulgaria, and almost every supporting character is played by a local actor whose dialogue was post-dubbed, giving the movie a very stilted, unnatural feel even with the rare bits of dialogue that aren't horribly written. The "Mexican" resort where the movie takes place is decorated with Mexican flags and pictures of Mexico's then-President Vicente Fox. This seems to be the movie's primary mode of illustrating character backgrounds and roles; the former Navy man who helps the protagonists defeat the megalodon has giant photos of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and a huge U.S. Navy logo on his wall to indicate his patriotism. Even more amusingly, paleontologist Cat Stone (Jenny McShane, who had a completely unrelated role in the original Shark Attack) is introduced with what looks like a picture book about dinosaurs sitting on her desk. That level of knowledge about anything scientific is pretty much standard for this movie, though.

Barrowman plays a resort employee who stumbles on the title creature, a prehistoric giant shark thought to be extinct. He uploads a picture of the shark's tooth to a hilariously rudimentary website, which attracts the attention of the San Diego-based Cat, who shows up hoping to study the creature. Of course, it's far too dangerous to study, and various victims soon succumb to megalodon attacks, while the fat cats who own the resort refuse to shut down the beach. The movie really kicks into hilariously awful mode when Ben and Cat discover that the megalodon they were chasing was just a baby, and the actual giant shark ("the size of a Greyhound bus," Ben says) shows up. Most of the shark scenes are just recycled stock footage, and the supposedly monster-size shark is just the same footage shown in close-up, with various items (boat, inflatable raft, jet ski) superimposed over it and made to look tiny in comparison (the shark swallows all of those things whole).

Barrowman insists that the infamous line was a joke not meant to end up in the final film, but it's hard to tell just how much of the rest of the movie is intended to be funny. It's not quite goofy enough to be a full-on satire, but certainly bits like the guy directly jet-skiing into the horribly green-screened shark's mouth aren't expected to be taken seriously. Given the proliferation of terrible shark-attack B-movies, it takes something special to rise above the pack and into the realms of the great bad movies of all time; whatever that is, Megalodon clearly has it.

Shark Week 2: 'The Deep' (1977)

2011-07-31T15:52:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the massive success of Jaws in 1975, novelist Peter Benchley became a hot commodity, and his second book, The Deep, was made into a movie two years later, with Benchley co-writing the screenplay. The Deep features Benchley trying to branch out from shark attacks into other sorts of undersea thrills, but he's better at creating an implacable, nonverbal menace than he is at putting together an exciting story about human beings. It probably doesn't help that The Deep's journeyman director Peter Yates is no Steven Spielberg. Still, there's some decent stuff in The Deep, primarily in the impressive underwater cinematography, and it features a very attractive Jacqueline Bisset in an essentially see-through wet T-shirt for the first 10 minutes of the movie, which was credited with much of the movie's box office success.

There's very little shark action going on here, though -- far less than I expected when I picked it for this project. Other than a few brief glimpses, the entire shark-related portion of the movie is limited to one scene. Bisset and Nick Nolte play a pair of tourists in Bermuda who stumble on the wreckage of a sunken World War II ship while diving. Amid the more recent debris are artifacts from an 18th-century Spanish royal cargo shipment, and the two amateurs hit up a local history and salvage expert (Robert Shaw, another Jaws connection) to learn about what they've discovered. Unfortunately for them, the WWII ship is full of thousands of vials of morphine that an unscrupulous soldier (Eli Wallach) was smuggling at the time, and a local drug lord (Louis Gossett Jr.) is eager to get his hands on them.

The drug lord tries to sabotage our heroes' efforts to get to the treasure, which is where the sharks come in: At one point his henchmen whip a bunch of sharks into a frenzy by chumming the water above where the divers are working, and there's a sort of swarm of sharks that's menacing at first but doesn't really amount to anything. Far more impressive is the giant moray eel that attacks from out of nowhere and, in the climactic battle, literally bites the drug dealer's head off. There's not much excitement elsewhere in the dull story, which plods along through a rote investigation into the origins of the treasure. The dive sequences, including the wordless eight-minute opening, are impressive, although more for the way they look than for any success at creating suspense. Benchley's career as a Hollywood hitmaker fizzled after The Deep (although he continued writing moderately successful books), and it's not hard to see why.

Shark Week 2: The Revenge

2011-07-31T10:24:00.000-07:00

Back in 2008, the first little theme project I ever did for this blog was Shark Week, in which I wrote about seven shark-related movies over the course of a week coinciding with Discovery's much-loved event of the same name. I picked that theme for a week because I didn't think there was really enough content to sustain for much longer than that, at least not without covering a bunch of redundant shark-attack B-movies that are essentially all the same. Well, three years later I decided it was a theme worth revisiting -- not all shark-attack B-movies are the same, and I found a few that seemed intriguing to write about, along with some other shark-related oddities.

So once again I'm honoring the week about actual sharks with a week about movie sharks, and since last time culminated with Jaws, this time of course will culminate with the slightly less classic Jaws 2. Posting will start later today and go through August 6; in the meantime, check out the pieces from the original Shark Week:

Shark (1969)
She Gods of Shark Reef (1958)
Deep Blue Sea (1999)
Spring Break Shark Attack (2005)
Dark Waters (1993)
Open Water (2003)
Jaws (1975)

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Highway 13'

2011-07-13T13:13:00.000-07:00

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

The 1948 cheapo thriller Highway 13 comes on DVD as part of the Forgotten Noir series, and it seems pretty justifiably forgotten. Barely qualifying as a feature at just an hour long, it's a bare-bones tale of corruption and sabotage marked by clumsy writing, terrible set design and special effects, listless acting and rushed pacing. There's a certain sleazy charm to these anonymous programmers, and occasionally some of them exhibit flashes of real artistry (there's a reason a movie like Detour has become a classic). Highway 13 definitely doesn't fall into that category, though.

It also doesn't really qualify as a noir: It doesn't take place in a city; the action occurs mostly during the day; the hero is never corrupted or even really tested; and while one female character has a single nasty seduction sequence, I wouldn't classify her as a femme fatale. Instead it's just a straight-up crime story, with a trucking company suffering from a series of mysterious accidents along the titular highway in rural California. One of the company's drivers (Robert Lowery) takes it upon himself to figure out what's going on, and ends up suspected of the sabotage himself. The plot twists aren't particularly interesting or surprising, the acting is flat, the characters are one-dimensional (or, in several cases, no-dimensional), and the dialogue is amusingly bad. I laughed every time the head of the trucking company (Michael Whalen) showed up to express concern in the most unenthusiastic manner possible. As the movie starts he seems far more interested in his company's reputation for timeliness than in the fact that his wife was the victim of the latest accident. (Later, when it turns out that he was behind the whole thing and killed his wife on purpose, he's just as affectless and blase.)

Highway 13 barrels ahead so forcefully that you don't have a lot of time to stop and think about how stupid it is, although any time the movie shows a horribly unconvincing "mountain" backdrop or an absurdly explosive truck crash using miniatures, the lack of craftsmanship is immediately apparent. There isn't even a whole lot of titillation to captivate the drive-in audience; just bland innuendo between the hero and his girlfriend, and the aforementioned single seduction scene. Even the camp elements (including a curmudgeonly old diner owner prone to getting pies thrown in his face) are pretty lackluster. This one is likely to stay forgotten.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: 'Waterloo Bridge' (1931)

2011-07-10T15:47:00.000-07:00

Of all the early Bette Davis movies that I record from TCM, most of which feature her in very small roles, Waterloo Bridge caught my eye because it was directed by James Whale, best known for Gothic-style horror movies like Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and The Old Dark House. Waterloo Bridge isn't a horror movie and isn't remotely Gothic, but it does feature Whale's tendency to portray social pariahs sympathetically. In this case that's Myra (Mae Clarke, who went on to play Victor Frankenstein's wife in Whale's Frankenstein), a prostitute in London during World War I. She starts out as a chorus girl (which totally sounds like an early Hollywood euphemism for "prostitute" already), but when work dries up, she's forced to become a streetwalker. Her favorite pick-up spot is the title location, where she meets Roy (Douglass Montgomery), the world's most naive and wholesome soldier. He too is American, fighting with the Canadian military because he just couldn't wait to join the war effort.

Myra agonizes over her relationship with Roy, who is clearly incredibly dim and can't figure out that he's fallen in love with a prostitute. Montgomery is bland and kind of dopey as Roy (which is sort of the point, I guess), but Clarke does a good job as the conflicted but good-hearted Myra, and Whale treats her position very matter-of-factly, as do the other characters who know about it. It's a refreshingly non-melodramatic portrayal of Hollywood's go-to tragic profession, right up until the very end when Myra gets what looks suspiciously like cosmic comeuppance for her harlotry. The pre-Code laxity also provides for a nice scene at the beginning in which Myra and her fellow chorus girls are in various states of undress backstage.

But what about Bette Davis? Yes, she's in this one, too, although to very little effect. She plays Roy's sister, who appears in maybe two or three scenes and exists solely for exposition purposes or to move the plot along. She's perfectly fine, but there's no indication of future star power, and the part could probably have been played by anyone. Davis would later get plenty of chances to play fallen women, and I think she could have done well as Myra here, although Clarke really does quite a good job, especially in contrast to Montgomery's tiresome swooning. Waterloo Bridge was based on a play, and it does seem a little stagebound at times; I think maybe half the movie takes place in Myra's one-room apartment. It was adapted again in 1940 with Vivien Leigh (the most famous version) and in 1956 as Gaby with Leslie Caron. Bette Davis never got the chance to play the lead.

Necessary Roughness

2011-06-29T09:47:00.000-07:00

Last week I was pretty tough on the new USA legal drama Suits, and the network's latest new drama Necessary Roughness gets back to what makes USA shows appealing: It's kind of forgettable and not exactly innovative, but it's likable enough to be able to watch on a casual basis, perfect laundry-folding or dish-washing TV. I doubt I'll deliberately tune in again, but I could watch it randomly a week or a month from now and have a perfectly good time.

It's also a slight change of pace for USA, since it features a psychotherapist rather than a lawyer or cop or doctor as its main character. Callie Thorne plays Dr. Dani, as she's known, who in the first episode is recruited as the therapist for a big-shot loose-cannon football star. She helps him out and is offered the chance to act as the team's go-to therapist, although press materials indicate she'll also start treating other high-profile clients (actors, politicians, etc.). I'm not entirely sure how that will work, since the regular supporting cast is focused around the football team, but since therapists tend to see clients regularly, presumably characters will stick around rather than being a "case of the week."

Thorne is appealing as the somewhat cliched character of the therapist who can't get a handle on her own problems, and the pilot does a good job of balancing the character development with the plot of the week (something that Suits failed to do). Therapy is less obviously results- and process-oriented than medical treatment or legal work, and the show has a tough time showing how exactly Dani helps her client address his problems. But Roughness breezes along amiably enough, and Dani's interactions with her teenage kids, her gambling-addicted mother, her asshole ex-husband (go-to asshole actor Craig Bierko) and her ditzy best friend (Amanda Detmer) are all enjoyable to watch and full of potential. I probably won't be watching Necessary Roughness again anytime soon, but for fans of the kind of show that USA puts out, this is a much safer bet than Suits.

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on USA.

Barney's Version

2011-06-27T14:33:00.000-07:00

I haven't read the Mordecai Richler novel that Barney's Version is based on, but it's not hard to tell that the movie has been condensed from a much larger narrative. The sprawling character study is entertaining and often moving, with a great lead performance from Paul Giamatti, but its various elements often feel disjointed, like there's some connective tissue that got lost in the translation from page to screen. It's no surprise to learn that the novel relies on first-person perspective and a question of narrative reliability, as the aging Barney (suffering from Alzheimer's disease) tells his story (his "version"), while his son offers corrections.

That whole device is missing from the movie, although Barney (Giamatti) still suffers from Alzheimer's disease in the present-day framing sequences. Without the narrative uncertainty, it instead comes off as a little sappy, although the movie avoids overplaying the cliched memory-loss moments too much. The main draw of the story isn't that part, anyway, but the flashbacks to Barney's life as a younger man, first as a vagabond in Italy bumming around with his drug-addict aspiring novelist best friend Boogie (Scott Speedman) and marrying a troubled free spirit (Rachelle Lefevre, underused). Barney then heads back to his native Montreal, where he becomes a TV producer on a trashy soap opera and marries a shrill Jewish stereotype (Minnie Driver). Driver's character (who's never named) is pretty one-dimensional, and Driver's inscrutable accent and hammy mannerisms don't help her develop further.

It takes almost half the movie to get to the heart of Barney's story, his romance with the lovely and compassionate Miriam (Rosamund Pike), the love of his life and mother of his children. The bits with Driver are sometimes funny, thanks mostly to Dustin Hoffman's goofy performance as Barney's uncouth dad, but Barney's relationship with Miriam has real depth and emotion, and the slow demise of their marriage is the movie's most effective and resonant plot point. Pike does a great job of conveying Miriam's allure as well as her intelligence, and she convincingly shows how Miriam could fall for this schlubby older guy. She then just as convincingly shows Miriam's heartbreak as their relationship falls apart. A good hour of the movie is a wonderfully affecting portrait of the arc of a relationship, but it's a little lost amid all the other stuff (including a tacked-on mystery about the possible murder of Boogie). A novel can easily encompass this kind of diversity in taking stock of one man's entire life; the movie struggles to do the same, although it comes out mostly ahead.

Available on DVD June 28.

Suits

2011-06-23T11:34:00.000-07:00

USA shows are not generally known for being edgy, but the first episode of new legal drama Suits deploys basic-cable swear words and a drug-dealing subplot like it's angling to be taken seriously, which only makes its formulaic set-up all the more unimpressive. The extra-long pilot also spends more than half an hour setting up the extremely basic premise, so that the boring case of the week comes off as an afterthought (not that it's really worth any more attention). I imagine that future episodes will focus more on the procedural stories, and there's no indication here that creator Aaron Korsh (who was a writer on the similarly unimpressive ABC legal drama The Deep End) has any innovative or original stories on tap.

The characters that will have to anchor this show around the cases of the week aren't really worth following, either. They're probably supposed to come off as cool and capable, but I just found the two leads to be irritating douchebags. The idea is that Mike (Patrick J. Adams) is some kind of slacker genius with a photographic memory, so he never went to law school but he knows everything about the law. He's been supporting himself by taking the bar exam for people, and has reluctantly agreed to help out his drug-dealer best friend. Then he conveniently (although it takes far too long for the events to fall into place) runs into hotshot corporate lawyer Harvey (Gabriel Macht), who is also conveniently looking for an unconventional maverick like himself to take on as his new associate. Harvey agrees to fabricate some fancy credentials for Mike, and finally we have a show. What should have taken at most 10 minutes takes three times that.

Harvey jerks Mike around and pretends not to care about Mike or their clients, but of course deep down he really does. Mike knows every aspect of the law but can't do practical things like fill out a subpoena form. They're collections of quirks rather than real people, and even welcome faces like Gina Torres and Rick Hoffman in the supporting cast can't make up for the void at the center of the show. USA shows are usually breezy and inoffensive, even if they don't exactly compel you to watch every week, but this one is just insufferable.

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on USA.

Combat Hospital

2011-06-21T10:18:00.000-07:00

Summer on network TV is time for cheap reality shows and Canadian imports, and ABC's Combat Hospital is the latter, another standard-issue TV drama that feels just a tiny bit off thanks to being produced abroad. At least Combat Hospital doesn't try to hide its its foreign origins like another ABC show, Canadian cop drama Rookie Blue. The show takes place at an internationally staffed field hospital in Kandahar, so characters come from a variety of countries that make up the coalition fighting in Afghanistan, including the U.S., the U.K., Australia and, yes, Canada, where main character Dr. Rebecca Gordon (Michelle Borth) hails from.

There's some decent acting talent here, including Elias Koteas as the hospital's head doctor and Deborah Kara Unger as an Australian psychiatrist (although Unger barely shows up in the pilot). But despite the unique setting, most of what happens in the first episode is fairly basic medical-drama stuff, including a useless pregnancy scare (plus scene-setting relationship trauma) for the main character, some vague operating-room suspense, and a character who says "It's nothing" and then later (surprise!) collapses and convulses. The cast also seems strangely underpopulated for a show of this type, which would usually explore the scope of a large medical operation. Here you get the sense that the four main characters are the only doctors in the entire place (although for all I know, that's true of a place like this).

The show is set in 2006 and doesn't seem to be angling for any political commentary; the wartime milieu is mainly just an excuse for heightened urgency in the medical emergencies, and in practice isn't much different from the approach used in the short-lived and little-loved Off the Map. Medical-drama junkies who are desperate for something new to watch will probably find this show tolerable, and performers like Koteas and Unger could bring some depth to it eventually, but for now Combat Hospital is just a generic medical drama with superficially distinctive trappings.

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on ABC.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: Payment on Demand (1951)

2011-06-20T12:33:00.000-07:00

Despite how old-fashioned it seems now, Payment on Demand probably represented a pretty progressive attitude toward divorce in 1951, just in broaching the subject in a straightforward, non-sensationalistic manner. It seems horribly retrograde now, of course, with its harsh judgment of a woman's desire for even a modicum of independence and self-determination, but you can see the wheels of progress turning slowly but surely in the background, in the ways that some characters interact and respond to the news that wealthy businessman David Ramsey (Barry Sullivan) has decided to divorce his wife of many years, Joyce (Bette Davis). Yes, there's the sleazy married guy who hits on Joyce as soon as he learns she's divorced, and yes, there are the patronizing lawyers and private detectives who take advantage of her distress. But there's also a surprisingly sympathetic and nuanced reaction from Joyce's society friends, as well as from her young-adult daughters. You get the impression that by the time the younger Ramseys get around to potential divorces, things will be a whole lot easier for them.

Director and co-writer Curtis Bernhardt sort of stacks the deck against Joyce, though, showing her as a manipulative social climber who pushed her husband to become a high-powered rich executive when he would have preferred a simple rural life. It's an interesting performance from Davis, because Joyce isn't just a conniving villain that Davis can play with maniacal glee; she's a flawed woman who's a bit insensitive and calculating in her efforts to achieve what she believes is best for her and her family. Bernhardt sets up periodic flashbacks throughout the movie, showing the development of Joyce and David's relationship from early bliss to eventual resentment (it's sort of like the 1951 version of Blue Valentine), and Joyce is clearly the bad guy in many of them, but she doesn't do what she does out of malice. Davis plays her more as sad and misguided, and it's a shame that the movie essentially dismisses Joyce's interests and goals, because they are entirely legitimate.

Regardless of Joyce's shortcomings or genuine concerns, of course the movie has to head toward her and David patching things up, although at least it resists tying things up as neatly as, say, a movie made 10 years earlier might have. Bernhardt allows for ambiguity in the flashbacks (which use an interesting theater-style technique of constructing walls out of translucent material that gives everything a sort of artificial feel), and he even gives David's mistress probably the most progressive attitude in the whole film. When she and David are discovered by the P.I. Joyce has hired, he desperately offers to marry her so that she won't have to endure a toxic scandal. But she brushes the idea aside, asserting that her friends and associates won't care that she had an affair with a married (but separated) man. Throughout the scene, lush classical music plays like the swelling score of an old movie, and when the mistress tells David she's through with him, she shuts off the record player in her apartment and abruptly cuts the music. It's a stark and creative way to show the contrast between generational attitudes, and an indication of the sophistication that this movie has in spurts, even if it's a little dull and conservative on the whole.

Triskaidekaphilia: 13 Moons

2011-06-13T13:13:00.000-07:00

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

In the early '90s, Alexandre Rockwell was an important part of the vanguard of new independent filmmakers, along with people like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. He collaborated with those two (as well as Allison Anders) on the 1995 omnibus film Four Rooms, and he won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for his 1992 film In the Soup. It seemed like he had a promising future ahead of him.

But unlike Tarantino or Rodriguez or Kevin Smith, Rockwell was never able to translate his initial acclaim into a lasting career, and he's made films only sporadically since the '90s. By 2002, he still had enough goodwill to assemble a pretty impressive cast for 13 Moons, including Steve Buscemi, Peter Dinklage, Sam Rockwell and Peter Stormare, along with both the filmmaker's ex-wife (Jennifer Beals) and his future wife (Karyn Parsons). There isn't anything impressive about 13 Moons beyond the casting, though, and even the many capable actors in the ensemble turn in some pretty lackluster work. Rockwell shoots on ugly, cheap-looking video, and half the time it looks like the cameraman is running to catch up with actors who've wandered away from the set. The rest of the time the camera sits uncomfortably close to the actors' faces, not in a revealing, well-composed close-up but like an awkward, inept home movie.

The plot involves the tired device of disparate characters coming together over the course of one night, in this case all connected to a bail bondsman (David Proval) whose son is in desperate need of a kidney transplant. The unlikely crew works together to track down an unstable donor (Stormare) who's run off from the hospital, in the process coming to terms with their own personal issues, etc. None of the actors seem to have a handle on who their characters are, and most of them never evolve beyond their initial one-dimensional portrayals. The movie ends with one of the phoniest, most random "moment of clarity" bits I've ever seen, as a yellow hot air balloon flies over the city (via incredibly fake-looking special effects), somehow symbolizing rebirth (or something?) for these damaged people. It's a fittingly nonsensical ending for a movie that can never justify its own existence. I haven't seen any of Rockwell's earlier films, but whatever he had in the '90s, he'd clearly lost it by 2002.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: So Big! (1932)

2011-06-07T11:10:00.000-07:00

This one is kind of a bust on two fronts: On the Bette Davis front, her presence in So Big! is pretty paltry, confined to the last 20 minutes of the movie and just a handful of scenes (I couldn't even find a decent picture of her in it). Plus, it's a pretty unremarkable movie overall, with Barbara Stanwyck giving a fairly colorless performance as a woman who goes from an artistic dreamer to a hardscrabble farmer while trying to give her son the creative life she never had. It rushes through a decades-spanning story in about 80 minutes, with Stanwyck's Selina going from young girl to old woman over the course of the movie. The rushed pacing means that the movie never really pauses long enough to give any of its plot elements enough time to develop. Just when we're getting used to Selina as a young schoolteacher in rural Illinois, she gets married to a taciturn farmer and pops out a kid. And just when we're getting used to Selina as a farmer's wife with a young son, her husband dies and the kid's all grown up.

The whole movie flies by in that way, until Selina's old and gray and her son is a heartless businessman who gave up his ambitions of being an architect. At that point the movie is three-quarters over anyway, and that's when we get a little bit of Bette Davis as a fabulously sassy artist who teases Selina's son Dirk with her sexy allure but pulls back because he's such a boring suit with no passion for anything. Davis, looking delightfully fetching and with a naughty twinkle in her eye, does wonders with the small part, and even our old friend George Brent the wet blanket (in the first of his many collaborations with Davis) shows up about five minutes before the movie ends and provides a bit of a spark.

None of that makes up for the hectic pacing of the rest of the movie, or the abrupt ending, or Stanwyck's listless performance. Edna Ferber's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was adapted for the screen two other times (once before this, and once after). For her sake, I hope those versions were more interesting.

Stephen King Month: The Shining (1980)

2011-05-31T13:06:00.000-07:00

I have to confess that I'm not much of a Stanley Kubrick fan; that's film-critic heresy, but much of Kubrick's work strikes me as too aloof and closed off, and even the movies of his that I like I tend to appreciate more than enjoy. The Shining is a movie of immense technical achievement, but at heart I find it too cold. That kind of detachment is fine for certain stories, but Stephen King's work is almost always driven by emotion, and I think that's a major element lacking in Kubrick's film. At the same time, I was constantly impressed with Kubrick's ability to build tension in a sort of sadistic, dispassionate way, like a kid torturing a bug with magnifying glass. It's difficult to empathize with any of the characters in the movie, but the sense of dread that comes out of the imagery combined with the relentless score of modernist classical music will eat at you over time.

The Shining is also just an amazing movie to look at; it features one of the earliest uses of the Steadicam, and Kubrick's long tracking shots through the cavernous Overlook Hotel are mesmerizing, giving a sense of its enormity as well as its emptiness. The hotel itself was built entirely on soundstages, and it's a monumental achievement in production design. Kubrick's meticulousness comes through in the movie's use of color, the way each corridor and room is dominated by a particular hue, sometimes bold and bright, sometimes muted and pale, but always noticeable and always contributing to the sense of the characters being isolated and overwhelmed.

The characters themselves are another story, though. Despite Kubrick's legendary penchant for dozens of takes, the performances in The Shining don't quite work together, or with the movie's impeccable design sense. Jack Nicholson, as writer Jack Torrance, is plenty intense and scary, but the problem is that he plays Jack as essentially unhinged from the start, even before the Overlook starts to warp his mind. So even the early domestic scenes of Jack and his family, or his interview with the managers of the Overlook for the job of winter caretaker, come off as slightly unsettled and disturbing. While King's story is about Jack's descent into madness and his possession by the evil that resides in the hotel, the movie seems to present Jack as inherently unstable, and thus much of the humanity of the character is lost.

Shelley Duvall is irritatingly hysterical as Jack's wife Wendy, and Danny Lloyd is awkward and flat as their son Danny, although that sometimes contributes to the creepiness of his line readings. It's weird to say that the movie succeeds in spite of its characters, but that's a testament to Kubrick's abilities as a craftsman. It misses the point of King's novel, and it seems to have a misunderstanding of what's truly scary about the story, but it nevertheless manages that feeling of dull anxiety throughout, which is something that few King movies achieve. And of course, telling the story exactly as conceived in the novel isn't the best approach anyway; I may not love this movie, but I wouldn't hesitate to take it over the more literal King-penned TV adaptation from 1997. That one has the whole story, but almost none of the craft.

How far to Castle Rock: Kubrick is definitely not the type for cutesy references to other works, although at one point Jack does mention Portland, Maine.

Stephen King Month: Christine (1983)

2011-05-30T13:51:00.000-07:00

It's weird to see someone else's name as the possessive credit on a Stephen King movie; even the most tangentially connected films often slap King's name above the title as a cheap marketing gimmick. But this is indeed as much "John Carpenter's Christine" as it is "Stephen King's Christine," and Carpenter is one of a handful of directors who seems genuinely interested in putting his own stamp on King's material rather than just serviceably dramatizing it or cashing in on the familiar name. He doesn't bring as bold a vision to the King material as, say, David Cronenberg or Stanley Kubrick, but he does make the movie his own. Of all the King movies that I watched this month and had never seen before, Christine is the only one that actually impressed me.

It fits in well with other early Carpenter horror movies like Halloween and The Fog, setting horrific events among mundane suburban activities, and featuring unassuming average people as the protagonists. And Christine the car, a 1958 Plymouth Fury with some sort of demonic soul, is as unknowable as Michael Myers or the fog itself; none of the "villains" in these movies ever speaks a word. Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Phillips take out some of the back story from King's novel, making Christine more of an enigma, and the movie is scarier when we don't know how or why this car has become evil and taken on a life of its own. Carpenter also does a much better job than King himself did a few years later in Maximum Overdrive of making a driverless vehicle seem malicious and scary.

The humans in the movie are good, too: Keith Gordon is excellent as the nerdy Arnie Cunningham, who becomes obsessed with Christine and turns into a nasty, vindictive loner under her spell. Carpenter ties the car's menace to the period of time in which it was created, adding a masterful, dialogue-free prologue that shows the car's genesis on a Detroit assembly line, and using sunny rock n' roll oldies as signifiers of the moments when Christine is about to get homicidal. And in one of the cleverest touches in the movie, Arnie starts dressing more and more like a '50s greaser as he falls further under the car's influence. King has played with the insidiousness of 1950s culture and style a handful of other times (probably most notably in Sometimes They Come Back), and Carpenter makes it subtle enough to avoid being silly while being obvious enough to convey the change in the character.

John Stockwell is also good as Arnie's more level-headed best friend, and he and Gordon have a nice relaxed chemistry that establishes their friendship before Arnie goes off the deep end (Gordon and Stockwell both later essentially quit acting to become successful directors). The ending comes on a little abruptly, but overall Carpenter maintains an excellent balance of character development and scares, throws in some nice moments of humor (Robert Prosky is amusing as Arnie's curmudgeonly boss) and is always inventive with his camera movements. It may be more unassuming, but I'd put Christine right up there with Carrie and Misery among the very best King movies.

How far to Castle Rock: The book takes place in Pennsylvania, and the movie switches locations to California, but neither one features Castle Rock.

Stephen King Month: The Night Flier (1997)

2011-05-29T12:44:00.000-07:00

Carrying the dubious distinction of being the Stephen King adaptation with the lowest theatrical gross, The Night Flier plays like a mediocre '90s TV show -- perhaps a forgettable episode of The X-Files, or an installment in the syndicated revival of The Outer Limits. The flat direction and straightforward procedural story only take a slight turn for the inventive toward the end, but at that point it's far too late to care about what happens to cynical tabloid journalist Richard Dees (Miguel Ferrer) in his quest to track down the title character, a vampire who travels via single-engine plane.

Ferrer is a solid character actor who knows how to play gruff and off-putting, but he overdoes the tough-guy routine a little as Dees, a veteran reporter who doesn't take kindly to demands from his editor or the fresh-faced young recruit (Julie Entwisle) who wants to muscle in on his story. Dees is meant to be unlikable, but Ferrer and co-writer/director Mark Pavia can't quite make the leap from Dees' early jaded antagonism to his later development of empathy as he witnesses the vampire's horrors. It doesn't help that the pouty Entwisle (playing a character who isn't in King's original short story) adds nothing to the movie other than a way to stretch the plot out and keep Dees from getting to the vampire too quickly. The contrast between her wide-eyed ambition and Dees' burnout is never fully developed.

There are a few creative touches at the movie's climax, including an amusing moment in which Dees sees the vampire pissing blood into a urinal behind him -- only all he sees is the stream of blood, since he's looking in a mirror. And the hallucinations that lead to Dees' downfall are pretty much the only actually creepy moment in the movie. The choice to have the vampire look like some outdated Dracula stereotype (complete with florid cape) makes him seem silly rather than scary, but there isn't enough humor for the movie to play effectively as a black comedy. This movie could have been edited down and aired as an episode of the unimpressive Nightmares & Dreamscapes King anthology TV series, and it would have fit right in.

How far to Castle Rock: The wall of covers at Inside View, the tabloid where Dees works, features a number of headlines with references to King stories, but none to Castle Rock. Dees does track the vampire to an airport in Maine, where an employee tells him that the vampire had just flown in from King's other favorite fictional small town, Derry.

Stephen King Month: Cujo (1983)

2011-05-28T12:10:00.000-07:00

According to Stephen King, he barely remembers writing Cujo because he was drinking so heavily at the time, and I remember the book reading like it was written by someone who didn't know what kind of story he was trying to tell -- although admittedly I don't remember it all that well since it was such a long time ago (I was, however, sober). The movie version of Cujo, directed by Lewis Teague (who went on to also helm Cat's Eye two years later), streamlines King's story a bit, but by cutting out some of the extraneous subplots, it just emphasizes further how little there is to the story. Everyone knows that Cujo is about a rabid dog terrorizing innocent people, but it's a little surprising to watch the movie and see how long it takes for those events to actually occur.

Before we get to Donna (Dee Wallace) and her young son (Danny Pintauro of later Who's the Boss? fame) trapped in a car that won't start while the homicidal Cujo stalks their every move, we have to spend a long (long, long) time with Donna and her husband as they deal with their personal and financial troubles: She's having an affair with a moody carpenter, while he's about to lose a big client at his advertising firm. (Snore.) Building up characters over time can work well in a horror movie, so that when we finally do get to the terror, we care about what happens to these people and understand what makes them tick. But the domestic drama in Cujo is so anemic that all I was doing was counting down the moments until Cujo started tearing into people's flesh, which takes until at least the halfway point of the movie.

There's nothing supernatural going on in this story, and the way that two mundane things (a broken-down car, a rabid dog) can combine to create a horrific situation is portrayed effectively. The scenes of Donna and her son panicking as their options quickly dwindle are intense, and Wallace does a good job of creating empathy for her character (even though she's sort of being punished for her thoughtless affair). There's not enough of a connection between the earlier drama and the later horrors to justify all the time spent at the beginning, though, and the way that Donna's husband (Daniel Hugh-Kelly) symbolically heals their marriage and forgives her by coming to her rescue is a little retrograde and simplistic.

Then there's Cujo itself, which despite some heavy make-up work still looks like a fairly placid St. Bernard. It's easier to make a dog look menacing than it later was for the creators of Graveyard Shift to make rats look menacing, but there are still times when Cujo seems more cuddly than dangerous. I would have preferred a better sense of agony and terror from both the animal and the human characters, rather than a bland soap opera followed by scattered moments of genuine suspense.

How far to Castle Rock: Cujo is one of King's main Castle Rock novels, and the movie takes place there as well, although there's only one brief moment to indicate the setting, and the town as a whole doesn't really play a part in the story.

Stephen King Month: Dolores Claiborne (1995)

2011-05-27T14:38:00.000-07:00

I always thought of Dolores Claiborne as unfairly underrated compared to more well-known "serious" Stephen King movies like The Shawshank Redemption, Stand by Me and The Green Mile, but watching it again this week I noticed a lot more flaws than I remembered. I still think it's unfairly underrated, and I also think it's an interesting kind of departure for King, not going for the inspirational uplift of those other "serious" movies, but also sticking to realism and a fairly grounded story without resorting to supernatural horror. It's a drama with a bit of a thriller in it, but mostly it's a character study of a woman who endured a lifetime of emotional abuse and tried hard not to pass that on to her daughter. And in that sense, it often succeeds quite well.

Kathy Bates brings a steely intensity to her performance as Dolores, a strong woman who mostly keeps her head down and does what she needs to do to get by, except when life pushes her so hard that she has to push back. It's a very different performance from the one Bates gave in Misery, but it's effective in its own less flashy way. Jennifer Jason Leigh is not quite as impressive as Dolores' daughter Selena, who returns to their small Maine island village when her mother is accused of murder. Dolores didn't kill the rich old woman she was taking care of, but she did kill Selena's abusive father (David Strathairn) 18 years before, and the movie switches between the two time periods as we learn what pushed Dolores over the edge.

Director Taylor Hackford navigates the two time periods well, but some of the emotional reveals are a little clunky. Leigh has a long courtroom speech at the end of the movie that lays things out far too neatly, and her relationship with her boss back in New York never feels like it matters. King's not known for writing great female characters, and Selena isn't as fully realized as Dolores. But Dolores is one of King's most interesting protagonists, and Hackford (along with screenwriter Tony Gilroy) mostly keeps her from becoming a stereotypical victim or a stereotypical bitch (even though one of her trademark lines is "Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto"). Selena, however, is a little more the stereotype of the brooding, ungrateful daughter, who left for the big city at the first opportunity. As we learn more about Dolores, we understand the tough choices she had to make, but as we learn more about Selena, she mostly just comes off as more selfish (even if she too was mistreated).

The wrap-up is too tidy, and the grudge held by a detective (Christopher Plummer) against Dolores for getting away with her husband's murder lacks the proper intensity. Still, Bates and Leigh play off each other well in the scenes that find them tearing into each other, and the dark drama offers probably the most realistic approach of any King movie. Not all of it works, but that parts that do deserve a second look from people who may have dismissed this movie as not up to the standards of other prestige King adaptations.

How far to Castle Rock: Accent-wise, this gives Pet Sematary a run for its money as the Maine-iest King movie, but there's no mention of Castle Rock (although Dolores does reference Shawshank Prison).

Stephen King Month: Cat's Eye (1985)

2011-05-26T13:56:00.000-07:00

Released in between the two Creepshow movies, Cat's Eye takes a similar approach of adapting several Stephen King short stories in an anthology format (and has a King-penned screenplay to boot). Unlike the Creepshow movies, it doesn't have a tongue-in-cheek tone or a nostalgic connection to old horror comics; it's pretty much a straight-up rendering of three King stories, connected by a cat who wanders through all three (and plays a major role in the final one). As such, it's a little flat, although the first two stories have a bit of charm to them. James Woods does a good job as the star of "Quitters, Inc.," about a very unorthodox agency to help people quit smoking. He plays a twitchy businessman who gets more than he bargained for when signing up with the company, which uses threats and violence to scare its clients into staying smoke-free. Director Lewis Teague stages one great scene in which Woods imagines cigarettes everywhere at a party, but the story kind of peters out at the end and suffers from too many leaps in logic (why do none of the clients ever call the police?).

The second story, "The Ledge," also loses steam after a little while, but Kenneth McMillan is amusing as the sleazy rich guy who forces his wife's lover (king of bland Robert Hays) to walk around his high-rise apartment building on a tiny ledge. It's a pretty one-note tale, and a little reminiscent of "Something to Tide You Over" from Creepshow, but it has moments of genuine tension and suspense. Unfortunately the movie climaxes with the lamest story of them all, featuring Drew Barrymore at her whiniest and some sort of tiny troll creature that terrorizes her. It isn't scary or darkly humorous like the first two, and it seems designed solely to justify the running cat motif. It's always been tough to find the proper medium to adapt King's short stories, and Cat's Eye doesn't quite get it right.

How far to Castle Rock: This movie is chock full of King references (the cat evades killer car Christine and rabid dog Cujo in the opening scene; The Dead Zone movie plays on a TV; characters read King novels), but none to Castle Rock.

Stephen King Month: The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

2011-05-25T11:02:00.000-07:00

By a certain measurement, The Shawshank Redemption is the greatest movie ever made. If you believe the masses who vote over at the Internet Movie Database, Shawshank tops The Godfather, Schindler's List, all of the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movies and various other classics and fanboy favorites. Of course, IMDb's list is always in flux, but Shawshank steadily maintains a place at or near the top, despite being a box-office failure in 1994 and left out of most academic or critical assessments of the best films (even just American films) of all time.

How did this happen? Part of it seems to come down to the deal that TNT got on the movie, which made it incredibly cheap for the channel to play it far more often than other licensed programs. The studio also flooded the home-video market after Shawshank tanked in theaters, and the movie found a much more receptive audience among people at home. It does sort of sneak up on you, and I can definitely imagine people passing it by on TV one afternoon, curiously stopping to watch a few minutes and getting sucked into the whole thing. Shawshank offers a familiar look at prison life in many ways, but it also turns that downbeat setting into the vehicle for a stirringly inspirational story, one that feels only a little bit manipulative. Unlike writer-director Frank Darabont's second Stephen King adaptation, The Green Mile, Shawshank mostly plays fair with its audience, allowing us to understand exactly how and why Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) and Ellis "Red" Redding (Morgan Freeman) triumphed over a corrupt system out to keep them down.

Of course, Shawshank presents an idealized version of prison life, notwithstanding the occasional beatings. Although Andy is innocent of his wife's murder beyond a shadow of a doubt, everyone else in Shawshank prison presumably committed the crimes they're serving time for, and the movie never bothers to reconcile those violent pasts with the inherently warm and kind personalities of the inmate characters. Only one convict in the entire prison ever treats anyone poorly, and he's the leader of the group known as "the Sisters," violent homosexuals who try and fail to make Andy one of their own. Red qualifies at one point that they're not really homosexuals ("you have to be human first"), but the mild homophobia on display is one of the movie's only sour notes.

Otherwise it's one triumph after another, starting small and moving toward Andy's eventual escape from prison and his reunion with Red on the outside. There are a lot of elements from Shawshank that have since become iconic (Robbins shot from above, his arms outstretched in the rain; "Get busy living or get busy dying"; Freeman's entire narration), and they've stuck with audiences for a reason. Darabont knows how to build emotional moments, and Robbins and Freeman work well together to get just the right kinds of reactions. Robbins plays Andy as quiet but competent, the kind of guy who knows way more than he ever lets on. And although Freeman's character could be a cliche (and has become one in later parodies and imitations), Red almost never feels like a sidekick or plot device. He's friendly but cynical, and his rapport with Andy comes about slowly and naturally. He's as amazed as everyone else when Andy finally escapes, and that disbelief carries over to the audience even if we've seen the movie dozens of times.

Red's demeanor aside, Shawshank is also one of the least cynical movies ever made, and that's not only because it promotes hope and tolerance and the inherent goodness of humanity. It also denies some of the audience instinct for revenge, as Andy declines to exact vengeance on those who wronged him once he gets out of prison. Yes, he arranges for the corrupt prison officials to be indicted (although presumably he didn't plan to have the warden commit suicide), but he never goes after the man who really killed his wife and got away with it, who laughed about Andy's decades in prison for a crime he didn't commit. The cops who wrongfully arrested him, the judge who wrongfully convicted him, the lawyer who improperly defended him -- all are implicitly forgiven as Andy simply heads down to Mexico to start over. Maybe that's the secret of this movie's success -- its message that we are all better people than the worst circumstances in which we may find ourselves, and that we can forgive those who wrong us and start anew, free from any burden of guilt or anger that we may have harbored in our souls.

How far to Castle Rock: Although Shawshank is Maine's most notorious prison, none of the inmates hail from Castle Rock.

Stephen King Month: Needful Things (1993)

2011-05-24T13:43:00.000-07:00

Apparently there is a three-hour cut of Needful Things that director Fraser C. Heston put together for TNT, which includes nearly an hour's worth of deleted scenes but also has been sanitized for television, with profanity and violence toned down. On the IMDb comment boards for this movie, someone notes a bootleg version with the TV cut and the theatrical cut stitched together in order to maximize both R-rated content and additional footage. There's clearly a very obsessive (if also very small) cult around this film, which is strange given that it comes off like a halfway effective adaptation of one of Stephen King's more bloated novels. I found a lot of it to be pretty entertaining, but I definitely wouldn't have wanted it to be an hour longer.

Part of the movie's strength is actually the way that it streamlines King's sprawling story and cuts out a whole bunch of minor characters. A TV miniseries version would have explored every little digression in the novel, but a movie should be more focused and condensed, and that's exactly what happens here. We have the hero (Ed Harris as small-town cop Alan Pangborn), the villain (Max Von Sydow as evil shopkeeper Leland Gaunt), the love interest (Bonnie Bedelia as Alan's fiancee) and a few supporting characters to illustrate the premise. That's all we need, especially since King's novel, which is billed as "the last Castle Rock story," relies heavily on background for character and setting from other books, which the movie doesn't have. Heston and writer W.D. Richter take just enough to tell the story, and throw out the rest (or at least relegate it to the extended cut).

Some of the stuff here is a little awkward, and the movie's climax relies too much on big explosions and a convenient speech that seems to erase all the complicated animosities between characters. Harris is a little bland as the crusading Alan, who seems to have no flaws, but Von Sydow is predictably strong as the devious Gaunt, who uses people's greatest desires to prod them into evil acts. J.T. Walsh hams it up as a paranoid local politician, but his performance works well as a depiction of the descent into complete madness and paranoia. Heston could have gone a little deeper, not by adding extra subplots but by exploring the themes more thoroughly, but his approach is entertaining enough, and the running time is just right.

How far to Castle Rock: As mentioned above, Needful Things is a key Castle Rock novel (although of course it wasn't really King's last Castle Rock story), and the movie takes place there as well. The character of Alan Pangborn was played just a few months earlier by Michael Rooker in The Dark Half, but the movie ignores connections to other King stories (even omitting the major character of Ace Merrill, played by Kiefer Sutherland in Stand By Me).

Stephen King Month: Creepshow 2 (1987)

2011-05-23T14:41:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of basically unrelated sequels to Stephen King movies (the Children of the Corn series, Pet Sematary Two, etc.), but Creepshow 2 is the only King sequel that fits my criteria for this project, since it's based directly on King source material (a few of his short stories). It's also a much more straightforward King adaptation than the first Creepshow, despite nominally sticking to the conceit of mimicking old E.C. comic books. Unlike George A. Romero, who directed the first movie (and wrote this one), sequel director Michael Gornick doesn't try to approximate the look and feel of lurid horror comics with his visual style, sticking instead to a more sedate, basic shooting style (which is a little odd considering that he was Romero's cinematographer on the original). Instead, he puts all of the E.C.-style stuff in the interludes, animated segments that feature a Cryptkeeper-like ghoul introducing the various stories.

Even those bits kind of look like '80s Saturday-morning cartoons, though, and the whole thing just comes off as a little low-rent and second-rate. Even the quantity has been reduced -- only three stories here instead of five, and only two that really pack any punch. "Old Chief Wood'nhead" opens the movie limply, taking way too long to get to its horror conceit (a wooden store Indian that comes to life to avenge the deaths of its owners) and then underplaying the eventual carnage. The concept is pure E.C. cheese, but Gornick doesn't know how to goose it properly, and it ends up awkwardly balanced between camp and seriousness.

The next two stories fare better, and even have moments of genuine creepiness. "The Raft" makes good use of a minimalist monster (basically just a film of slime floating on the top of a lake) but is undone by some truly awful acting, and "The Hitchhiker" has a classic moralizing E.C. premise but stretches itself a little thin. The woman who runs down a hitchhiker and then flees the scene clearly deserves a proper comeuppance, and seeing the man, bloody and beaten, continually in her path is a nice way to torment her. It's a little like an old ghost story given extra trappings, including an opening scene that features the woman visiting a male prostitute, as if King and Romero needed to make her just a little bit more distasteful so that her torment would be easier to accept.

It's too bad that the Creepshow franchise didn't continue (there was a direct-to-video Creepshow 3 in 2007 that involved neither King nor Romero), because the idea was fun and King clearly has affection for the old E.C. style. But even by this second installment, the commitment to the idea seemed to be waning.

How far to Castle Rock: Although the first Creepshow had a couple of Castle Rock references, there aren't any in this edition.

King cameo: He plays a truck driver who stops to help the injured title character in "The Hitchhiker."

Stephen King Month: Maximum Overdrive (1986)

2011-05-22T15:08:00.000-07:00

Usually cited as Exhibit A in the case for why Stephen King should stick to writing books instead of making movies, Maximum Overdrive is really not as awful as it's made out to be. The only movie King ever directed, Overdrive is dumb and clearly a bit of a mess (King has admitted to being coked out of his mind the entire time he was working on the movie, and not really sure what he was doing), but it's also sometimes clever and fun, and if the camp moments had outweighed the plodding action sequences, it might have emerged as a genuine cult classic. Instead, it's merely an intriguing misfire.

Based loosely King's short story Trucks, Overdrive features machines (mainly big-rig trucks) coming to life and menacing human beings, thanks to some sort of cosmic radiation or possibly alien influence from the tail of a comet that is enveloping the Earth and producing cut-rate neon-green special effects in the sky. The movie starts out with a nicely nasty sense of humor, as we see the LED screen outside a bank displaying "Fuck you," and an ATM merely prints the word "asshole" over and over again. King then stages a rather amusing sequence that involves a drawbridge going up without warning, as cars, people and watermelons collide into each other.

These two bits are essentially disconnected from the main story, which takes place at an isolated truck stop where a group of people are hiding out from giant semis that have suddenly become sentient and gone rogue. It's a standard post-apocalypse collection of colorful types, including the stoic hero (Emilio Estevez). King alternates between campy touches (the sort of leader of the trucks is a toy company vehicle with a giant Green Goblin head on the front of it) and boring seriousness, which reaches its low point in the ridiculous romance between Estevez's hero and a drifter played by Laura Harrington. The supposed worldwide revolt of the machines is poorly conceived and full of plot holes (a newscaster advises people to stay from all electrical devices, while presumably broadcasting using a whole range of them), and the solutions to the problem are inconsistent and lazy.

The whole movie is lazy, which is the main problem. King goes for the easy laughs and the easy suspense, and when he's stuck in a corner he just blows stuff up (the movie's entire climax is just explosion after explosion). Overdrive is definitely not the work of a filmmaker in control of his craft, but it's also not so moronic or inept as to be unwatchable. It's a misfire with flashes of potential, and it's kind of too bad that King has bought into the dominant narrative about the movie and will probably never direct again.

How far to Castle Rock: Somewhat surprisingly for a movie over which King had complete control, Overdrive doesn't even take place in Maine; instead it's set in North Carolina.

King cameo: He plays the bank patron getting insulted by an ATM in the opening scene.

Stephen King Month: Children of the Corn (1984)

2011-05-21T14:52:00.000-07:00

Of all the Stephen King movies that Hollywood churned out in the '80s, Children of the Corn is among the least likely to turn into a long-running franchise, but that's exactly what happened: The 1984 original spawned six loosely related sequels and a 2009 made-for-TV remake, and there are rumors of a theatrical remake on the way. So what's the appeal? It's not that this movie is particularly compelling or well-made -- it's serviceable at best, and frequently dull. But the concept of a cult of evil kids is pretty compelling, and it lends itself to various approaches, which is useful when pretty much every new installment features an entirely new setting and cast.

For this version, which makes a number of changes from King's original short story, we have a couple (Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton) getting lost on the back roads of Nebraska and happening on the isolated small town where the kids have banded together in some weird religious cult after having killed all the adults. It takes far too long for the main characters to stumble into danger, and seemingly half the movie is just them wandering through the empty town, and then later running through it as the kids chase them down. The concept is genuinely creepy, though, and director Fritz Kiersch gets a bit of mileage out of the disturbing zealotry of the kids. John Franklin is great as prophet/leader Isaac, who totally had the potential to be the Jason/Freddy of the eventual franchise (instead, he only appeared in one sequel, 1999's Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return, co-written by Franklin himself).

Julie Maddalena is also strong as one of Isaac's main disciples, and she anchors what's probably the best scene in the movie, a ceremony in which a 19-year-old cultist is prepared for facing death by He Who Walks Behind the Rows. Unfortunately, Kiersch spends more time with Courtney Gains as the snotty henchman Malachai, and the climax ditches the kids in favor of a vague monster embodied by really terrible special effects. The movie ends by literally just slapping the words "The End" on the screen in what feels like the middle of a scene, but of course things went on unnecessarily long after that.

How far to Castle Rock: I'm pretty sure they don't grow much corn in Maine, so the movie and story quite sensibly take place in Nebraska.

Stephen King Month: Firestarter (1984)

2011-05-20T13:39:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure Firestarter is the first Stephen King movie I ever saw, although I'm not sure if I ever managed to see the whole thing. I remember watching bits and pieces of it on TV as a kid, but watching it again this week, I definitely noticed a lot of unfamiliar parts. Obviously the TV snippets were enough for me back then, and seeing the whole film hasn't really changed that judgment. Characters on the run from secret government experiments was a popular plot device in the '80s, and the first half of Firestarter is a fairly uninspired chase movie, with seriously crappy acting from David Keith as telepath Andy McGee and Drew Barrymore as his pyrokinetic daughter Charlie. The movie improves a little in its second half, after George C. Scott shows up as a devious and possibly insane government agent, and the action shifts to a secret compound where Andy and Charlie have been imprisoned.

It's still pretty cheesy (especially the awkward, stunt-filled climax), and Keith and Barrymore are still pretty bad, but Scott really digs in to the role of the damaged government agent who's seen too much and has calmly gone off the deep end. The way he cheerily manipulates Charlie and then coldly talks about how he plans to kill her is pretty chilling, and Scott gives it every bit of casual menace it deserves. His character's fate is about as disappointing as everyone else's, but at least he offers up some excitement along the way.

Firestarter was Barrymore's first role after her breakthrough in E.T., and it smacks of producers trying too hard to give her something edgy and impressive. Even though she's become a better actress as she's moved into adulthood, she's still fundamentally sort of cutesy and whiny, and those qualities really drag down her performance here. Charlie is meant to be formidable and intimidating, but even when she's burning down the entire compound and killing dozens of people at the end of the movie, she just looks pouty and cranky. Firestarter is really more sci-fi than horror, but that final sequence should be at least a little unsettling. Instead, Barrymore (along with the second-rate effects) makes it sort of silly. Scott's performance aside, sort of silly is about the best this movie has to offer.

How far to Castle Rock: Andy and Charlie spend the movie's first half on the lam from the government, but they never make it to rural Maine.

Stephen King Month: Misery (1990)

2011-05-19T15:03:00.000-07:00

Rob Reiner and William Goldman are just about the last people you'd expect to team up to make a great horror movie, but Misery is not only one of the very best Stephen King adaptations, but also a truly unsettling and suspenseful piece of filmmaking. It may be Reiner and Goldman's backgrounds in other types of movies that allow them to make Misery so fascinating and disturbing; they're not concerned with goosing the audience or grossing them out, and the horror of the movie comes purely from the dynamic between the two main characters. Kathy Bates deservedly won an Oscar for her performance as obsessed fan Annie Wilkes, but James Caan provides the perfect balance for her as author Paul Sheldon, whose cynicism and pragmatism is a great contrast to Annie's delusions. It's easy to identify with his terror as he slowly realizes just what kind of person has "rescued" him from his car accident, but he's never a helpless or hapless victim.

That straightforward ingenuity works for the character, but it also means that Caan underplays while Bates steals the show as one of the best villains in the whole King canon. One of the scariest things about Annie is how close she is to being just a normal eccentric, the lonely middle-aged lady who buys romance novels at the grocery store and engages in pointless small talk with the clerk, then goes home to her empty house. Her fandom is recognizable, especially 20 years later in the age of J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer, and Bates easily connects that creepy if innocuous obsession to the more deadly variety that consumes Annie. Reading about the kind of vitriol directed by "fans" at people like George R.R. Martin, it's easy to imagine someone taking a fairly small step to where Annie is.

Bates and Reiner both do a great job of showing Annie's escalating grotesquerie; one of the movie's wonderful touches is how often Bates is shot from below, putting the audience in Paul's perspective as she looms over him, taking up his entire field of vision. We're right with him when he finally takes Annie out, but Bates is able to give her enough sadness that we sort of feel bad for her, too. If she maybe got herself some psychiatric meds and had lived in the age of the internet, she'd be semi-stable and spending all her time on Paul Sheldon message boards pillorying her favorite author for killing off her most beloved character. As usual, it's the identifiable human element that makes evil that much more tragic and disquieting.

How far to Castle Rock: Misery takes place in King's second favorite state, Colorado, with no mention of the small Maine town.

Stephen King Month: Pet Sematary (1989)

2011-05-18T15:24:00.000-07:00

I remember being really freaked out by Pet Sematary when I saw it as a kid, finding its combination of dead toddlers and unholy resurrection especially unsettling. So I was wondering how it would hold up all these years later, and while a lot of it is undeniably cheesy (as seems to be consistently the case with screenplays that Stephen King writes himself), plenty of it still is pretty freaky and unsettling, and it's definitely one of the darker King stories around. The lead performance from Dale Midkiff is a little weak, and he has a few moments of anguish that are laughable. But Fred Gwynne is terrific in the supporting role of the folksy neighbor with deadly secrets, and Midkiff's everyman blandness works to his advantage much of the time.

Midkiff plays big-city doctor Louis Creed, who relocates to small-town Maine (of course) with his wife and two young kids, buying a house that happens to be adjacent to the titular burial ground. When Louis' daughter's cat gets hit by a truck while she's out of town, Louis' avuncular neighbor Jud Crandall (Gwynne) shows him a special Native American cemetery (of course) just beyond the regular one for pets, which brings back to life anything buried in its soil. So the cat comes back mean and smelling bad, but that doesn't stop Louis from burying his toddler son Gage there too, when Gage also gets hit by a truck. Pet Sematary works best in the way it plays on natural feelings of parental love and protection and turns them sour, and twists the natural appeal of a cute moppet (Miko Hughes, as Gage, is plenty cute) into something sinister and evil.

The movie's climax is suitably unpleasant and bleak, but some of the steps along the way are a little silly. The ghost of a patient who warns Louis (and later Louis' wife) about the dangers of the cemetery is a lame plot device that overemphasizes what should be left to implication, and Hughes, while cute, has trouble conveying menace once Gage comes back to life (it's no coincidence that a lot of his lines are heard from offscreen). Gwynne makes up for a lot of these missteps, though, perfectly embodying the insidiousness of small-town friendliness that so often lurks beneath the surface of King's stories (he may just have the best Maine accent in any King movie). Director Mary Lambert also does a good job with some of the smaller touches, like the grotesque paintings in Louis' in-laws' house. It wasn't quite enough to freak me out again, but it did draw me in.

How far to Castle Rock: The accents are a dead giveaway that the movie takes place in Maine, although the location is never explicitly mentioned.

King cameo: He plays the minister who officiates at a funeral, and avoids overacting for once.

Stephen King Month: The Green Mile (1999)

2011-05-17T13:03:00.000-07:00

As far as prestige Stephen King projects go, The Green Mile is by far the most excessive. You could think of it as the height of the form -- although The Shawshank Redemption garnered more Oscar nominations (seven, to Mile's four) and has become an enduring classic (it's ranked at the top of IMDb's user rankings at the moment), Mile was a bigger deal right out of the gate. It's still by far the highest-grossing King movie ever made, and it came long enough after Shawshank's reputation had started to grow that it was anointed a success thanks to its pedigree (King, writer-director Frank Darabont, a period piece set in a prison) before even being released. People still love Mile, but to me it feels calcified by all of those expectations and preconditions, ladling on inspiration and meaning so thickly that it becomes suffocating. (I had to break up my recent viewing of the movie over two days just to get through the bloated, three-hour-plus running time.)

Darabont is a solid craftsman who put together an impressive cast, though, so Mile is never exactly unpleasant, just mildly irritating and frequently condescending. Thank goodness for Tom Hanks, who holds everything together as Paul Edgecomb, the head guard on death row in a Louisiana prison in 1935. Paul is compassionate without being syrupy, and that helps since so much of the story is incredibly sentimental. Hanks' measured performance is offset by Michael Clarke Duncan, who got a totally undeserved Oscar nomination for his hammy portrayal of John Coffey, the mentally challenged African-American inmate who touches the lives of all the other characters. Coffey is possibly the most egregious example of the "magical Negro" storytelling trope, and Duncan gives him this exaggerated childlike manner that's just incredibly grating. King tends to rely on these kinds of characters (both magical Negroes and saintly mentally handicapped people) far too often, and Darabont plays up all the most annoying aspects of the character without giving him any depth.

There are a lot of other strong actors elsewhere, though, even in small roles -- David Morse, Barry Pepper and Jeffrey DeMunn as the fellow guards, James Cromwell as the tortured prison warden, Patricia Clarkson as the warden's wife. The other inmates are nearly as cartoonish as John Coffey, though: Michael Jeter does an exaggerated Cajun accent as Eduard "Del" Delacroix, Graham Greene is the stereotypical stoic Native American as Arlen Bitterbuck, and Sam Rockwell goes nuts as the only prisoner on death row who isn't a completely great guy, making up for the meekness of his fellow inmates with over-the-top nasty behavior. I don't necessarily expect realism from King movies, but since Mile presents itself as a serious period piece (albeit with supernatural elements) rather than a fantastical horror movie, the laziness of the characterization is especially frustrating.

It's even more frustrating because it panders to the demands of a Shawshank-loving audience looking for easy uplift, which Mile delivers excessively over the course of its overlong narrative (King's novel was originally published in six monthly installments, which accounts for the protracted, episodic nature of the story). Darabont spends nearly 20 minutes just on the mawkish framing story featuring an elderly Paul in a nursing home, and slathers every significant moment with swelling orchestral music and sweeping camera movements. I wouldn't say that I hate The Green Mile, because it has noble intentions and a level of skill behind it, but it's probably the King movie I find the most laborious to watch.

How far to Castle Rock: Sadly no glimpses of what was going on there during the Depression; the movie sticks to Louisiana.

Stephen King Month: The Dead Zone (1983)

2011-05-16T14:11:00.000-07:00

The Dead Zone achieves something impressive by combining the talents of Stephen King and director David Cronenberg, resulting in one of Cronenberg's most accessible films (and certainly his most mainstream work up to that point) and one of the bleakest adaptations of King's prose. The plot of The Dead Zone is tragic already, with protagonist Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) tormented by the psychic powers he receives after waking from a five-year coma following a car accident. Johnny's path is one of anguish and frustration -- in his inability to help all the people who want his help; in the loss of his former girlfriend to another man during the years he was in a coma; in the certainty he has of future disasters about which no one will believe him. Cronenberg and Walken play up those elements, making Johnny into a haunted figure even in his moments of happiness, and all of the typical small-town quaintness of King's stories is confined to the pre-coma scenes (in which schoolteacher Johnny jokes with his class and rides a rollercoaster with his girlfriend).

The rest of the movie is almost unrelenting darkness. It's not so much horror as it is simple dread, the circumstances of Johnny's life beating him down until the only reasonable option is for him to go out in a blaze of self-sacrificing glory. The pacing of this movie is a little odd, as the most notable plot element (Johnny foreseeing a dark future if firebrand politician Greg Stillson gets elected) barely shows up until two-thirds of the way through the movie, and doesn't really get going until the final 15 minutes. King spends more time in the book building Stillson up, but Cronenberg is more focused on Johnny's desperation, which mostly works to the film's advantage. Some of the Stillson stuff seems like it comes out of nowhere, but when you realize that the movie is less about Johnny stopping a monster and more about his finding closure for what's happened to him, it all fits better.

Walken is as unnerving as he usually is, which works well when Johnny is on edge, but is kind of disconcerting when Johnny is happy and wholesome in the early parts of the movie, or when he has occasional moments of joy. Still, the movie rests so much on Walken's performance, and a big part of the bleakness and dark humor comes from the way he carries himself and delivers his lines. Brooke Adams is a little bland as Johnny's could've-been love interest, but Martin Sheen perfectly embodies Stillson's oiliness, playing a corrupt politician with the same charisma he brought to a scrupulous one years later on The West Wing. If some King movies have a tendency to wallow in sentiment and nostalgia, The Dead Zone is a perfect antidote for that, a cold blast of human misery with just a hint of warmth underneath.

How far to Castle Rock: The Dead Zone is one of King's primary Castle Rock novels, and the movie is set there, too. But Cronenberg moves the town from Maine to New Hampshire, and strips out the typical folksy depictions of the town in favor of a cold, dingy look that works very well for the story.

Stephen King Month: Stand by Me (1986)

2011-05-15T11:29:00.000-07:00

Stand by Me is the first movie to show the more serious, dramatic side of Stephen King's work, although fans of his prose were already familiar with the novellas in Different Seasons (of which The Body, the source material for Stand by Me, is one) and King's Richard Bachman books, all of which show a greater range than the "master of horror" that had been presented to movie audiences. Although it's a bittersweet coming-of-age story, Stand by Me still features a lot of King's favorite themes, including nostalgia, the lifelong bond forged among childhood friends and, of course, the unfortunate town of Castle Rock, where some kid getting hit by a train and having his body rot in the woods is one of the less gruesome occurrences.

That dead kid is the catalyst for the story, which takes place in 1959 and finds a quartet of 12-year-old boys setting out to see the kid's body, after one of them overhears his older brother talking about the body's location. It's a morbid motivation for bonding, but director Rob Reiner balances things out well, keeping the tone light for the most part, and earning the sentimental moments. He eases up on some of the darker turns of King's story, and suffuses the movie with familiar pop music of the time period. The novella may be more about lost innocence (its subtitle is Fall From Innocence) and the cruelty of fate, but the movie focuses on the magic of childhood and the way that it continues to influence people as they become adults.

Reiner's real secret weapon here is his cast, with the four main stars giving some of the best child performances of all time. It's sad that none of them ever went on to greatness -- River Phoenix died young, Corey Feldman descended into drugs and reality TV, Wil Wheaton mostly retired from acting and Jerry O'Connell pursued a solid but undistinguished career. This movie may actually represent the best performances any of them ever gave, beautifully capturing the uncertainty and anguish of that moment between childhood and adolescence, of realizing that the world is a harsh and unforgiving place and even your friends may not be able to help you through it. Phoenix's performance is especially poignant as he reveals the insecurity behind the tough exterior of his character. The bonding among the four feels real and significant, and that's the movie's greatest achievement.

There are other things it doesn't do as well: The antagonists, led by Kiefer Sutherland as the town's head thug, are pretty one-dimensional, and their scenes away from the main characters only paint them as silly stereotypes. And one of the movie's centerpieces is a dramatization of a story told by Gordie (Wheaton), an aspiring writer whose adult self (Richard Dreyfuss) narrates the movie. That silly tale, about a fat kid taking revenge on his tormentors, seems out of place, and since the point of it is to demonstrate Gordie's skill at spinning a story, it's odd to watch it play out rather than hear it.

Even that little bit is reasonably entertaining, though, and the movie remains enjoyable throughout, whether it's portraying meaningful truths about childhood or just having goofy fun with Sutherland's Ace and his goons knocking over mailboxes. The success of Stand by Me paved the way for a whole bunch of prestige King adaptations, which is a bit of a mixed blessing. But the movie itself is lovely and affecting, and an important showcase for King's range.

How far to Castle Rock: As mentioned, the whole movie takes place in Castle Rock, although Reiner moves the town from Maine to Oregon (where the movie was shot). Reiner subsequently named his production company Castle Rock Entertainment.

Stephen King Month: Sleepwalkers (1992)

2011-05-14T15:44:00.000-07:00

Sleepwalkers has the dubious distinction of being Stephen King's only original theatrical screenplay (he wrote a few other original pieces for TV), and it's easily one of the worst King movies ever made, just laughably bad pretty much from start to finish, writing included. It's not all King's fault -- the performances range from inoffensive to dismal (lead actor Brian Krause is especially awful), and the direction from longtime King associate Mick Garris is flat and hokey. The special effects look ridiculous, and the pacing is totally off. Even the concept is silly: Sleepwalkers are vampire-like creatures who feed off the souls (?) of female human virgins, and are vulnerable to cats. So Krause's Charles and his mother Mary (Alice Krige) roll into town, stake out a nice virgin, then let Charles seduce her and suck out her sparkly essence so he can pass it along to his mom.

At least I think that's what's supposed to happen -- it's kind of unclear, but the pair do show up in an Indiana town where Charles enrolls in high school and cozies up to the wholesome Tanya (Madchen Amick). There's a somewhat creepy, atmospheric vibe to the early part of the movie, and the incestuous relationship between Charles and Mary, while a little self-consciously edgy, gives the movie a bit of darkness. That all goes out the window pretty quickly in favor of cheesy one-liners, bumbling cops and invisible cars, and once Charles and Mary morph into their true monster selves, the movie just becomes a complete joke. The saddest part is watching all the cats as they swarm around Charles and Mary in the movie's climax; they look like they are literally being flung at the actors from offscreen. At least their performances have a bit of naturalism to them, which is more than you can say for any of the human performers.

How far to Castle Rock: Although the movie takes place in small-town Indiana, not Maine, the school buses and cop uniforms indicate the setting as Castle County, and one cop mentions bringing in reinforcements from Castle Rock.

King cameo: He gets a couple of lines as the caretaker of the local cemetery; Clive Barker, Tobe Hooper, Joe Dante, John Landis and Mark Hamill all appear in bit parts as well, but even their combined powers can't save this mess.

Triskaidekaphilia: Friday the 13th Part 2

2011-05-13T13:13:00.000-07:00

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

I wrote about the original 1980 Friday the 13th at this time last year, and since it's a year later, plus the 13th actually falls on a Friday this month, it seemed appropriate to return to the franchise and write about the 1981 sequel. In a lot of ways, Friday the 13th Part 2 represents the real launch of the series: It's the first movie to feature Jason Voorhees as the killer, to establish him as a mute, unstoppable brute who slaughters anyone in his path. Jason's still without his iconic hockey mask (which he picks up in the third movie), and his machete is only one of many weapons he uses to slice up a new crop of good-looking, dim-witted camp counselors. But most of the other elements are in place, and this movie serves as sort of a bridge between the limited premise of the original and the never-ending rampage of the later sequels.

Basically, Part 2 rehashes the plot of the first movie: Five years after the Camp Crystal Lake massacre, a new camp sets up shop on the other side of the woods. Jason, who showed up in the final moments of the first movie, is out for revenge for the death of his mother (the first movie's killer), and so he hacks up a bunch of interchangeable characters. There's even less excitement to this movie than there was the first time, and the characters are even more indistinct. There's a lengthy pre-credits sequence featuring Alice (Adrienne King), the final girl from the original film, but rather than building some sort of mythology and continuity around her, the filmmakers just kill her off gratuitously. It would have been better just to leave her out entirely. (Although the entire purpose of her appearance seems to be so that she can have an absurdly detailed dream sequence that recycles footage from the end of the previous movie to remind viewers of what happened.)

The town crazy also returns, but for the most part the focus is on the new characters, which is a precedent followed in all the later Friday the 13th movies (there's no series equivalent of Halloween's Laurie Strode or A Nightmare on Elm Street's Nancy Thompson). Amy Steel's Ginny gets one semi-interesting moment in which she speculates on Jason's psychological make-up, but it's an isolated blip in a movie that is otherwise unconcerned with anything other than a body count. Director Steve Miner, whose later horror credits include the next Friday the 13th as well as Halloween: H20, amps up the gratuitous nudity and lingers on the violence, but none of that compensates for the rudimentary plot and cardboard characters. Jason is mysterious enough here to be sort of creepy (for most of the movie we just see his feet or hands, and eventually he's revealed wearing a ragged white sack over his head), but that doesn't really matter if we don't care about the people he's killing, or why he's doing it.

Stephen King Month: Creepshow (1982)

2011-05-12T12:13:00.000-07:00

I think I first saw Creepshow when I was 10 or 11 years old, and the only thing I remembered about it was Stephen King turning into a plant. Watching it now, especially following so many intense King movies, I was struck by just how goofy it is, even in the segments that are a little more serious. There are five stories (plus a wrap-around sequence) that make up the anthology, inspired by the old E.C. horror comics. Director George A. Romero really captures the E.C. aesthetic, with his grotesque, exaggerated visuals and manic tone, but King's stories don't quite have the same snap. Too many of them just dissipate without the sharp, clever (or at least self-consciously ironic) endings that we associate with E.C. stories, and King's more ambiguous tales of horror don't come across as well in the context of Romero's funhouse style.

The best of the bunch is the final piece, "They're Creeping Up on You!," starring E.G. Marshall as a heartless, germophobic businessman whose apartment is overrun by cockroaches. It has the nasty sense of comeuppance and moral justice that these stories often trade in, plus it's suitably revolting (Romero revels in showing gross close-ups of insects), and Marshall is perfectly maniacal as the evil industrialist. The other stories have their moments -- there's a nice sense of dread to "Something to Tide You Over," although it's sort of hard to take Leslie Nielsen seriously now after all the spoof movies he made later in his career. "The Crate" (one of two segments based on a previously published King short story) seems to be going for straight-up horror, but the ridiculous-looking Yeti-style monster pretty much undermines the legitimate scares. And both of those tales lose steam at the end.

Then there's "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill," Stephen King's most significant acting gig to date. It's clearly meant as total comedy, but King overacts so broadly that it's more painful than funny. His dim hillbilly is a silly caricature anyway, and the movie gets in a few real laughs at his expense (he imagines the local college's "department of meteors" where he can sell the space debris he found in his backyard), but King fails to balance the easy laughs with any kind of subtler comedy. His whole performance is pitched at the same bug-eyed level.

Overall Creepshow is still fun to watch, though, thanks to Romero's visual playfulness. I love the way he tints the whole screen a lurid red or green or blue to represent moments of extreme terror or torment. And he uses split-screens to replicate comic-book panels in a fun, cheeky way. If King had adapted his style more fully to the movie's influences, it might have been a truly inspired homage instead of just a fun time-waster.

How far to Castle Rock: King's Jordy Verrill (who turns into a plant) lives five miles outside Castle Rock, according to a sign at the edge of his property.

Stephen King Month: Apt Pupil (1998)

2011-05-11T12:09:00.000-07:00

Apt Pupil occupies an interesting middle ground between Stephen King's straight-up horror work and his more realistic stories about coming of age and the bonds between men. The novella is in the same collection as The Body (aka Stand By Me) and Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, both of which were made into uplifting, crowd-pleasing movies that became enduring classics. The movie version of Apt Pupil definitely isn't a classic, but it's not because director Bryan Singer screwed anything up; the story is a nasty reversal of King's penchant for nostalgia, as its all-American teenage protagonist doesn't muster the strength to fight unimaginable evil or achieve hard-won maturity through overcoming trauma. Instead, Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro) embraces the evil, even encourages it, and it all takes place in sun-dappled suburbs without a hint of anything supernatural. King is generally too operatic of a storyteller to take on the banality of everyday evil, but here he does just that.

Singer actually tones down some of the extremes of King's story, although in the process he manages to make the ending more disturbing in a certain way. The seemingly perfect Todd (straight A's, good at sports, keeps out of trouble) develops an unhealthy obsession with the Holocaust, and when he figures out that his elderly, reclusive neighbor (Ian McKellen) is actually a former Nazi commander in disguise, he blackmails the guy into telling him stories about wartime atrocities. Todd clearly gets off on hearing about all the terrible things that Kurt Dussander did, and Dussander clearly relishes being able to honestly represent himself for the first time in decades. It's almost weirdly touching, especially when Dussander uses his manipulative abilities to set Todd straight in school.

But of course it's also totally fucked up, and no matter how normal he may seem on the outside, Todd is a complete sociopath, even more dangerous for the way that no one suspects him of anything sinister. Dussander, too, is a nasty piece of work, and his sessions with Todd reawaken a cruelty that he had kept hidden for years and years. Renfro and McKellen are both very good here, playing up the cliches of the inspirational-mentor story while peppering them with glimpses of total sadism. Singer plays up the homoerotic aspects of the pair's relationship, which is disturbing but also sort of distracting, conflating homosexual desire with homicidal impulses, surely not the director's intent. Still, the dynamic between the two is suspenseful and disquieting, and Singer and King never let the audience off the hook by explaining away the characters' motivations via some supernatural force.

As in the novella, though, the story goes on longer than it should, and once Todd and Dussander part for the first time, the movie meanders. (Spoilers ahead.) Since Singer compresses the timeline and takes out the multiple murders of vagrants that Todd and Dussander commit independent of each other, the movie's final third loses some of its visceral power, and it's hard to gauge Todd's development as a character as the movie heads to a close. While King's Todd is unambiguously evil and unafraid to act on it, Singer's Todd is more subtle, eschewing outright murder in favor of threats and intimidation. King takes Todd down at the end of the story, offering a sort of bittersweet comeuppance, but Singer lets him live, hinting that Todd's days of mistreating and abusing people are just beginning. It's a chilling capper to the story, although it can't quite make up for the muddled half-hour or so that precedes it.

How far to Castle Rock: Both book and movie take place in sunny Southern California, an appropriately jarring setting for the tale of dark evil lurking in plain sight.

Stephen King Month: Silver Bullet (1985)

2011-05-10T13:02:00.000-07:00

Stephen King has never been much of a screenwriter. For all his successes as a novelist, and all the successes of movies based on his work, his writing directly for the screen is usually awkward and not particularly cinematic, and when it comes to King TV projects, the more closely involved he is, the worse they tend to turn out. Silver Bullet is a sort of odd film for King to have written himself, since it doesn't seem to be of particular personal importance, and the movie makes plenty of changes from the source novel. The director isn't a close King collaborator/admirer like George Romero or Mick Garris; it's Daniel Attias, who never directed another movie but went on to work on a huge number of TV shows, many of them quite decent. This is a pretty undistinguished debut for him, and it's not surprising that he retreated from features into the more predictable world of TV directing.

The problems do start with King's script, though. He sets the movie in 1976 for no apparent reason other than that he loves nostalgia, and he uses a retrospective voiceover from the older version of young Jane Coslaw (Megan Follows), but the idea of looking back on past events kind of disappears for most of the movie. Much of the action occurs without Jane present, so she couldn't really be telling the story, and the narration is absent for the middle of the movie. While the source novel (Cycle of the Werewolf) is structured like a calendar, with each chapter representing a different month's full moon when a werewolf emerges to terrorize a small town, the timeline in the movie is very confusing, and it's sometimes hard to tell whether days or months have passed. The pacing is lopsided, with a lot of seemingly extraneous build-up to a rushed climax.

The acting is an issue, too; Corey Haim plays Jane's younger brother Marty, who has to convince his sister and eccentric uncle (Gary Busey) that a werewolf is responsible for the attacks. Marty is whiny and ineffectual as a hero, and making him wheelchair-bound just seems like a lame bid for sympathy (and is problematic since Haim has a tough time keeping his legs immobile during certain scenes). Busey is his typically weird self, but the character is too bland to take advantage of his full capabilities. At least Everett McGill is genuinely creepy as the town's suspicious preacher, but he doesn't get enough moments to be full-on evil. And probably most crucially, the werewolf just looks silly, like an awkward guy in a costume, and as soon as it appears onscreen, any potential for scares disappears. I'm sure King had something particular in mind when he took on Silver Bullet as a screenwriting gig, but whatever it was has been lost in this cheesy, generic monster movie.

How far to Castle Rock: The movie takes place in the small town of Tarker's Mill, which seems fairly New England-y, but the state is never mentioned (nor is Castle Rock).

Stephen King Month: Carrie (1976)

2011-05-09T11:21:00.000-07:00

By the early 1980s, Stephen King was such a juggernaut that any movie made from his work was immediately "a Stephen King movie," but in 1976 he was just a guy who'd written one successful novel, and thus Brian De Palma may be the only director who ever made a Stephen King movie without the burden of the author's huge fanbase to deal with. I don't know if that has anything to do with why Carrie is such a great movie, but it certainly feels like De Palma's film from start to finish, even though it adapts King's book pretty faithfully. It's an excellent marriage of material and director, and De Palma knows exactly how to handle every element of the story, creating that nauseating sense of teen isolation just as well as he evokes horror and helplessness during the movie's climax.

Sissy Spacek is just as key to the movie's success, giving one of her best performances as the scared, vulnerable and defiant Carrie White, the sheltered teen girl who discovers her telekinetic powers and takes bittersweet revenge on her heartless classmates. One of the great things about Carrie is that it isn't some sort of crowd-pleasing revenge story -- sure, mean girl Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen) and her thug boyfriend (John Travolta) deserve every bit of their grisly fate, but the other students at Carrie's school range from hapless bystanders to genuinely concerned people, including Sue Snell (Amy Irving) and her amiable boyfriend Tommy Ross (William Katt), who escorts Carrie to the prom. The movie is horrifying because it's tragic -- for Carrie, for her mother, for her fellow students. Instead of being cathartic, the final massacre is unbelievably sad, and that's what makes it powerful.

And De Palma knows how to play on those emotions. Even though I've seen the movie numerous times, I still found myself riveted during the lead-up to Carrie's getting doused in pig's blood at the prom, hoping irrationally that Sue would spot Chris in time and stop the whole thing. The suspense comes not so much from the danger (although even if you're not familiar with the movie, you'll know that Carrie is dangerous when she's angry) but from the extreme empathy, the feeling of wanting Carrie to have her tiny moment of happiness. Spacek does a great job of playing meek and reserved, but she blossoms so beautifully when Carrie stands up for herself and gets dolled up for the prom that your heart goes out to her even as you know what horrors are about to unfold.

De Palma's penchant for long takes and elaborate tracking shots dovetails nicely with the story, casting an unblinking eye on the cruelties of teen life and refusing to look away from Carrie's humiliations. Carrie is my favorite King movie not only because it captures the humanistic spirit of the author's approach to horror, but also because it's a bravura piece of filmmaking on its own, a tense, fevered examination of repression and retribution.

How far to Castle Rock: Although the book takes place (of course) in small-town Maine, the movie was shot in sunny California, and it actually works well for the story, contrasting the laid-back environs with Carrie's draconian home life.

Stephen King Month: The Dark Half (1993)

2011-05-08T13:34:00.000-07:00

When I was in third grade, I attempted to read Stephen King's Misery, which my mom had gotten accidentally from her book-of-the-month club (she's never been into horror), but it proved to be too much for me, and I didn't get very far. Two years later, I picked up The Dark Half, which is the first King book (and possibly the first "adult" novel) I ever finished. So it was a long time ago, and I don't exactly remember all that much about the book, but it obviously it made me want to read more King. I saw George Romero's film version a long time ago as well, probably around the time it first came out on video. I watched it again with only a vague recollection of what the plot was and whether I enjoyed it, and I think the movie comes off pretty well for the most part. It makes me curious to see how the book would hold up for me after all these years, too.

The Dark Half's biggest weakness is its star, Timothy Hutton, who does an okay job as mild-mannered writer Thad Beaumont, but falls short as Thad's evil alter ego George Stark. Stark is Beaumont's pen name, under which he pens violent thrillers in contrast to the genteel literary novels he publishes under his own name. When a sleazy hanger-on threatens to expose Thad's secret, he preempts the guy by coming clean and "killing" his pseudonym. George, however, comes to life and decides he doesn't want to be killed off, and so sets out to eliminate everyone associated with Thad's writing career, ending with Thad's wife and twin children.

Hutton's performance as Thad isn't bad, although he's not exactly compelling as the movie's lead. But Hutton does anguish reasonably well, and his increasing frustration comes off as genuinely felt, if a little soft. The problem is that Hutton's George is far more silly than scary, with a goofy greaser look like he's an extra from Grease, not a psychotic killer. The eventual confrontation between Thad and George thus doesn't seem like an even match (even though the same actor is playing both characters), and the ending is abrupt and unsatisfying. The path there, though, is frequently creepy, and Thad's fear as George closes in on his family is palatable.

The Dark Half is the second King movie from Romero (after 1982's Creepshow; he wrote but didn't direct Creepshow 2), and it's a little outside of the director's typical style, lacking any social commentary and going pretty light on the gore. Maybe this isn't the ideal material for Romero, but he creates a nicely foreboding atmosphere throughout most of the film, and even when certain elements stumble, the overall effect is creepy. It's a worthy complement to King's novel.

How far to Castle Rock: The Dark Half is one of the primary Castle Rock novels, and Romero keeps the setting intact. Michael Rooker plays Castle Rock Sheriff Alan Pangborn, who leads the investigation into the Stark murders; he was played by Ed Harris in Needful Things, which was released just a few months later.

Stephen King Month: Hearts in Atlantis (2001)

2011-05-07T12:52:00.000-07:00

For readers of Stephen King books, the interweaving nature of so many of his stories is a treat, a little bonus for paying attention and remembering details from one book to the next. As King's epic Dark Tower series went on, he started adding more and more of these connections, such that seemingly unrelated novels turned out to have significant connections to the Dark Tower mythology. Sometimes this was just tedious (Insomnia is an absolute slog, for example), but sometimes it gave extra resonance to an already well-crafted story. The problem is that taking what is essentially a piece of a larger story and trying to make it stand on its own as a movie inherently loses something in the process.

That's doubly the case with Hearts in Atlantis, based on one portion of King's 1999 novel of the same name. Atlantis the book is a collection of five interconnected stories, two of which are practically novels on their own, the other three of which are shorter, and as such it doesn't really lend itself to a unified feature-film adaptation (even a miniseries might feel disjointed). The different parts of the book have different tones and styles, but the cumulative effect is a powerful examination of the legacy of the 1960s, and the way that various characters pop in and out of the narrative creates a sense of scope and meaning that isn't accomplished by any one piece alone. Atlantis the movie takes the most substantial section of the book -- the first, "Low Men in Yellow Coats" -- and a tiny bit from the final section and lops off the rest, leaving a sort of prologue with no aftermath. What's worse, "Low Men" is closely tied to the Dark Tower series, and the movie has to cut off that connection as well.

What's left is a lot of unfocused nostalgia without King's pointed social commentary or the bigger picture of his epic fantasy world. Instead it's a slight coming-of-age story about an 11-year-old boy (a young Anton Yelchin) who befriends a strange old man (Anthony Hopkins) living upstairs from him. Although the movie is set in the past, screenwriter William Goldman and director Scott Hicks go light on the period references, and the time period isn't really important to the story. The central idea of King's story is that Hopkins' Ted is being pursued by the titular low men, hunting him on behalf of the Crimson King, who is working to break the bonds that hold the Dark Tower aloft. Ted's unique psychic abilities would allow him to destroy the Tower's supports, but he refuses to cooperate. The young Bobby protects Ted without really understanding the larger ramifications, but his efforts give him a greater purpose and help him grow up.

In the movie, Ted's abilities and pursuers are vaguely defined, although there's briefly a mention of the government's secret projects with psychic soldiers, and it's implied that Ted is somehow a part of that. Watching the movie, I kept adding in the extra connections that I knew were there, even though it's probably been close to a decade since I read the book. Bobby's two best friends, also, turn out to be very important characters in the later parts of the book, but here they get limited screen time, although his budding romance with Carol (Mika Boorem) plays out sweetly. Still, there's a sense of something missing, of a larger theme that's just out of reach. The performances are all fine, but the stakes are always unclear, and the style suggests more meaning than the movie actually has. It's all warm tones and wistful looks as a substitute for real feeling. Plus, the title (which refers to the second section of the book) is rendered irrelevant, even though Goldman and Hicks add some muddled dialogue relating it to childhood. I'm not sure how satisfying this movie could be for people who've never read the book, but for someone who has, it's like watching the first episode of a TV show that never got picked up.

How far to Castle Rock: Shockingly, the small town here is in Connecticut, not Maine.

Stephen King Month: The Mangler (1995)

2011-05-06T13:44:00.000-07:00

Here once again is a case of a Stephen King short story that did not deserve to be a feature film (let alone one that spawned two essentially unrelated sequels). The movie version of The Mangler actually follows the plot of the story fairly closely, although it has to add a lot of extraneous nonsense to make it to feature length, and the already silly story isn't enhanced by the addition of a totally ridiculous mythology. Reading the story, you can just barely imagine the creepiness of a possessed industrial laundry-folding machine, although I remember thinking it was pretty dumb even when I was 13 or 14 or so when I first read it. But watching the events unfold onscreen, with questionable acting and second-rate special effects, there's no avoiding the absurdity. Nothing in The Mangler is scary, although it's campy enough to at least encourage some intentional laughs (there's no way that the line "It folded her like a sheet!" could be taken seriously).

The Mangler is just another step in director Tobe Hooper's long slide into direct-to-video hackery, and there's virtually no sign of the master of terror who made The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 20 years earlier. Hooper ropes in fellow horror icon/shameless sell-out Robert Englund to play the deformed head of the laundry, a character invented for the movie and imbued with evil grotuesquerie as part of a sort of cult that worships the demon that possesses the laundry-folding machine (no, really). Ted Levine matches Englund's hamminess as the police officer who becomes obsessed with defeating the mangler, delivering lines like the aforementioned sheet-folding one with a demented level of commitment.

The campiness carries the movie along for a little while, and Englund is amusing when he's onscreen, which is not as often as his top billing would indicate. But it really overstays its welcome, and the longer Levine spends investigating the incredibly stupid back story, the harder it is to give the movie the benefit of the doubt. Hooper doesn't commit fully enough to the humor to make The Mangler the kind of gory black comedy it could have been, and the horror is pretty feeble. The already thin concept stretches to the breaking point, and then way too far beyond it.

How far to Castle Rock: Although the movie takes place (of course) in small-town Maine, Castle Rock doesn't warrant a mention.

Stephen King Month: Riding the Bullet (2004)

2011-05-05T13:34:00.000-07:00

Mick Garris is one of the go-to guys to direct Stephen King adaptations (he helmed the TV versions of The Stand, The Shining and Desperation, among others), but he doesn't exactly have a sophisticated aesthetic, and you never expect him to bring something exciting or unique to King's work. Riding the Bullet is one of two Garris/King collaborations that made it to theaters (the other is 1992's Sleepwalkers), and it barely made a blip at the box office, opening in a handful of theaters and grossing just over $100,000. This is direct-to-DVD stuff all the way, but it's exactly what you'd expect from Garris, who has a rudimentary charm when he sticks to the basics. Bullet suffers from the same problem as a lot of King short-story adaptations, struggling to make it to feature length when it would have been better served as an episode of Garris' anthology TV series Masters of Horror (or something similar).

The original story was already sort of a gimmick, first published as an ebook in a sort of proof-of-concept test for King's idea that people would buy books online directly from authors for a small fee. It was a huge success but didn't set any sort of precedent, and King never went on to become an ebook kingpin like some speculated when Bullet first came out. Instead the story was just collected with a bunch of others in the next King short-story round-up (Everything's Eventual), and its novelty wore off. Without the gimmickry, it's a passable little ghost story but nothing special, and one in which much of the action is internal, as the narrator struggles with his fear while trapped in a car driven by a dead man.

Garris moves the story from its contemporary setting (in 2000, the year it was released) to 1969 for no good reason, and all it does is allow him to insert some painful cultural references and demonstrate how ineffectively he evokes the past on a limited budget. Garris adds a bunch of back story that mainly just delays the real excitement until more than halfway through the movie, and he transposes the first-person narration into a sort of hallucinated doppelganger of the main character who shows up from time to time to explain what the guy is feeling. None of these changes is an improvement, nor is Garris' penchant for fake-out fantasy sequences and flashbacks that quickly become irritating.

The main action of the story features college student Alan (Jonathan Jackson) hitchhiking home after his mother's had a stroke, and finding himself stuck in a car driven by a demented specter who forces Alan to choose between his mother's life and his own. Garris takes way too long to get around to that part, but the movie briefly comes to life when he does, thanks mostly to David Arquette's typically nutso performance as the apparition. This is the section that works best as a corny but compelling ghost story, but it doesn't last nearly long enough, and Garris blunts its impact with a drawn-out ending and then a clumsy epilogue that attempts to make some sort of comment about the end of the '60s. Certainly King has fetishized that time period plenty in his work, but in one story where it actually isn't a factor, adding it in is just one more example of how Garris needlessly complicates this basic tale.

How far to Castle Rock: Alan's mother tells him that his father died in a car accident on the way home from Castle Rock (the whole movie takes place in Maine, naturally).

Stephen King Month: Thinner (1996)

2011-05-04T11:05:00.000-07:00

Here's another example of a concept that's creepy on the page but mostly silly onscreen: Part of the problem is that it's really difficult to depict a character going from obese to dangerously underweight without using either extensive prosthetics or several different actors, and the make-up in Thinner just isn't up to the task of making star Robert John Burke believably look 300 or 120 pounds. Somewhere in the middle of the movie, when Burke's character weighs about what Burke weighs himself, it looks almost realistic (although even then he's wearing makeup on his face to keep its shape consistent). The rest of the time it's just distracting, and that's a problem when the entire concept of the movie is that the main character is cursed to lose weight until he wastes away.

Burke's gluttonous lawyer Billy isn't a sympathetic character, although he's not really meant to be - he starts the movie by using underhanded tactics to get a mob boss (Joe Mantegna, basically playing Fat Tony from The Simpsons) acquitted on a murder charge, and then he runs over a gypsy woman while his wife is giving him oral sex as he's driving. He then uses his connections to escape all consequences for the woman's death, and is thus cursed by her kin to go on the world's most extreme diet. It's been a while since I read King's novel (originally written under the Richard Bachman pseudonym), but I remember it being one of his darkest, and it definitely has one of the author's most memorable endings (which is saying something for a writer who often doesn't know how to wrap things up). Journeyman horror director Tom Holland (Fright Night, Child's Play) undercuts the horror by making it cartoonish and exaggerated, the pacing is lopsided, and the acting is hammy all around (whoever thought Kari Wuhrer could play a menacing gypsy maiden was severely mistaken).

Plus the bleak ending gets soft-pedaled, although it arrives more intact than I thought it would. Holland and screenwriter Michael McDowell introduce a subplot about Billy suspecting his wife of adultery, so that he comes off less villainous in his final actions. But the darkness is really all the story has going for it, and without that it's a one-note Twilight Zone-style tale stretched to feature length.

How far to Castle Rock: The movie starts in Connecticut and heads all the way up to the Maine coast, but Castle Rock is never mentioned (perhaps because its inclusion in the original novel would have tipped readers off to the King connection).

King cameo: He plays a pharmacist named Dr. Bangor (after King's hometown) in two scenes and even has several lines.

Stephen King Month: The Running Man (1987)

2011-05-03T13:27:00.000-07:00

Even more so than dramas like The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me, which are positioned to bolster the author's reputation as a serious writer, The Running Man stands out as the unlikeliest Stephen King adaptation, a testosterone-fueled action movie featuring none of King's familiar settings or themes. It's based extremely loosely on a novel originally published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman (Bachman is actually the name listed in the movie's credits), and while the source material was clearly sci-fi, it also had a strong undercurrent of dread that's entirely missing from the movie. That's because screenwriter Steven E. de Souza and director Paul Michael Glaser take pretty much only the title and basic concept of King's story, involving a dystopian future where killer game shows are all the rage. King's protagonist was a desperate man in need of medicine for his daughter, and his version of the Running Man show involved contestants fleeing all around the world while hunted by skilled assassins, sending in video tapes of themselves every few days.

From that more low-key scenario, de Souza and Glaser build an over-the-top vision of a show that's one part American Gladiators and one part The Most Dangerous Game, as killers with absurd names and even more absurd outfits hunt convicted felons while crowds of middle-class drones cheer them on. The protagonist goes from a dedicated family man to an ex-cop framed for murder, and since he's played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know exactly who's going to make it out of this game alive. Most of the movie is typical '80s action nonsense, with horrible one-liners and Schwarzenegger's standard wooden acting. There are some token nods to overthrowing the totalitarian government, but the movie's mythology is ill-conceived and full of plot holes. It's basically just an excuse to watch Schwarzenegger eviscerate bad guys and crack jokes.

The one redeeming element of the movie is Richard Dawson as Killian, creator and host of The Running Man TV show. The iconic game-show host deviously plays with his image as a friendly, avuncular presence by showing Killian as ruthless and bloodthirsty behind the scenes even as he smiles and schmoozes with the bland suburbanites in the audience. Dawson clearly has a lot of fun with the performance (one of only a handful of movie roles in his entire career), and the movie gets some decent laughs out of the contrast between the wholesomeness of the game-show structure and the carnage being doled out. That aside, though, this is mostly just for Schwarzenegger fans, and King's influence is virtually nowhere to be found.

How far to Castle Rock: One assumes that in this dystopian future, quaint small towns have been abolished (it's never mentioned).