It: Chapter One (2017)

SEPTEMBER 8, 2017

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Like pretty much everyone in my generation, I have vivid memories of watching the ABC miniseries of Stephen King's It, rewatching the taped broadcast enough to even remember some of the commercials that played during it. Given its length (3+ hours, plus commercial fast-forwarding time) I'm surprised I watched it as often as I did, as I revisited the film on Blu-ray earlier this year and found myself remembering tiny details (like Ben breaking his newly won award when he stumbles out of his limo) as if I had just watched the movie the day before. However, I've only found the time to read the book once, in I think 2004 when I lived in Boston and was making a dent in my backlog of unread novels during my 45-ish minute per way commute, so it wasn't "special" as it is to many of my peers. But in a way I think this was ideal for approaching this long-awaited theatrical adaptation - I have more nostalgia and connection to the flawed miniseries than the novel that is frequently cited as one of King's best, and certainly the favorite of many of his fans*. Thus, it's easier for me to see what this movie "fixed" as opposed to "ruined", which is how I'm sure some people will describe the deviations from the source material.

Now in the wake of The Dark Tower I must assure you that this is, for all intents and purposes, a very faithful adaptation of the "past" parts of the book. Georgie's murder is pretty much recreated to the letter, and every major beat is accounted for - it's just the details that are different. Some of the kids' individual fears have been changed, so Richie is afraid of clowns instead of the Wolfman, and Stan is terrified of a creepy ass painting in his father's office instead of that mummy/corpse thing. I don't think this matters in the long run, but I've had too many conversations over the years with book fans who get angry when a movie adaptation changes a character's hair color or whatever, so they might get angry at these variations. For the rest of us normal people, if you want to see a movie where seven "losers" band together to defeat an unspeakable evil that appears every 27 years, one that manifests itself as their fears but most of the time takes on the form of a clown named Pennywise, you should be pretty happy with the results.

It's funny, I was running a bit late this morning when trying to get to the theater in time and didn't bother inspecting my shirts before grabbing one, and I happened to pull out my Shining shirt - the most polarizing King film due to the fact that it's an unnerving and terrifying piece of entertainment but also makes many (too many, for some) changes from the novel, i.e. great movie, terrible adaptation. But while Kubrick was changing things to fit his own worldview, director Andy Muschietti and a number of screenwriters only change details in order to keep things fresh, while retaining King's overall tone and atmosphere in a manner few of his films have ever quite mustered. I'm talking Frank Darabont levels of "getting it", where you get the idea anything they changed King himself would probably agree was a good idea (as opposed to Shining, where he still seems annoyed by the changes Kubrick made), and if your memories of the book are just as hazy as mine, you probably won't even realize there's much of a difference at all.

Except, of course, the timeframe. The book starts in the present day and frequently cuts back and forth, a format that was retained for the miniseries, but there is no framing device or flash forward or anything of that nature here. If you've never read the book or saw the other movie, you'd have no idea that we're due to meet these kids again in thirty years - which added a lot to the suspense. The movie runs 135 minutes or so, and by the time they enter the sewers to confront It, it's been made clear that they aren't afraid to make some changes, so it's very possible to think that some of them might not survive the battle, allowing for some terror that was impossible in the other versions as we'd always be seeing the present day version REMEMBER these things, as opposed to how they're presented here, which is "now" (now being the summer of 1989). I wouldn't dare spoil whether or not that occurs, but the fact that I was sitting there, for the very first time, worried that Richie would die? That was kind of unexpected, and a big part of why I enjoyed the film - it was these rather simple and innocuous changes that really helped draw me into the movie.

So let's talk about 1989, since that's probably the most noticeable difference. The original book was published in 1986 and the setting was 1957-1958, so the change fits - it's roughly thirty years ago for the audience it's intended for, just as King's book was, making it a perfectly acceptable deviation, allowing folks my age to smile at the (thankfully few) little period details, such as the theater showing Burton's Batman, and kids talking about Michael Jackson without it being an icky thing (this was pre-accusations). My favorite, surprisingly, was a little running gag about Ben being a fan of New Kids on the Block, a secret only Bev knows and keeps to herself, while teasing him about it whenever possible (one pun seemed to go over the heads of everyone else in my audience; not sure if I'm just "old" or if I'm the only one who found it as funny). Usually I groan at these kind of things, but the screenwriters kept it to a minimum and used them for character moments like this, as opposed to just having them reference every single late 80s property they could cram in just for the sake of appeasing folks who get hard reading Ready Player One.

One such reference actually helped hammer home something that was working subconsciously on me. As the summer wears on, Batman and Lethal Weapon 2 are replaced by Nightmare on Elm Street 5 (the theater only shows WB/New Line movies, naturally), and at the sight of this throwaway little detail it fully clicked: this is basically a big budget, "classy" version of a Nightmare sequel, with Pennywise standing in for old-school Freddy, who would talk and maybe make you grin, but wasn't a full blown jokester like he was in the later sequels. Like Freddy, Pennywise uses the kids' individual fears against them, and the big scare setpieces work as standalone slices of terror that will likely warp the minds of anyone who shares similar paranoia (such as blood, corpses, and of course clowns). Indeed, one of my few complaints about the film is that these sequences are often just kind of presented sans setup, like they will just cut to one kid at home or riding their bike right before something scary happens. In the Elm St movies this disconnect made sense - the kids were dreaming, after all (and usually ended up dead at the end), but here it's like they could be re-arranged in the edit without it really mattering, as it takes a while for them to start confessing to one another that they've seen some freaky shit. I wouldn't say it was a crippling flaw or anything, but there was definitely more than one occasion that I wondered how much time had passed since the previous scene or where the character was going in the first place when they encountered It.

Another thing that gave it some unexpected Elm Street flavor was the minimized adult presence. The Elm Street kids often had single parent situations (if we ever met them at all), and here we only get the barest glimpses of any of them besides Eddie's mom and Bev's dad (who is more terrifying than Pennywise, I think). Bill's mom is only seen once in the entire movie, silently playing the piano, and even though Mike's grandfather (instead of his dad, who is now dead - they kind of mix and match Ben and Mike's stories for whatever reason) is played by the only recognizable adult actor in the movie (Steven Williams), we only see him once as well. It makes sense - it's the kids' story after all - but I wish they could have at least spent a little more time with Bill's parents, since the loss of Georgie hangs over his every move (I actually teared up when he explains how it's easier for him to walk into a house where Pennywise might be than it is for him to walk into his own, knowing his little brother won't be there), and yet his parents never seem to care that he's seemingly never home. A quick scene showing that they're so numb to Georgie's death that they don't even notice if Bill is there or not, OR a scene where we see that he has to sneak out or lie about his whereabouts, might have helped a bit. But maybe that's just my overprotective dad shit kicking in, hahaha.

My only other issue was the CGI for a few of Pennywise's other forms. Bill Skarsgård is terrific as the clown and makes the role his own in the same way that Heath Ledger made us forget about Jack Nicholson for two hours, making it all the more disappointing when he appears as a CGI ghoul of some sort (it's an issue that plagued Muschietti's previous film, Mama, where his practical creation got "fixed" by subpar visual FX). Pennywise's... I dunno what you call it, freaky fast shuffling thing (you see it on the trailer where he tramples through the flooded basement) also got a bit tiresome after awhile - he's at his best/scariest when it's simply Skarsgård talking and making expressive faces without really moving much at all, honestly. The film is otherwise gorgeous to look at, for the record - they got Chan-Wook Park's usual DP Chung-hoon Chung to shoot the film, and it not only nails the period look but lets Skarsgård's eyes do the heavy lifting in darker scenes. There is no question that his sewer introduction will cause just as many, if not far more, nightmares as the miniseries did with its own version of the scene.

The kids are all great too, to the extent that I almost wish they could just wait 30 years to shoot the 2nd half with them reprising their roles instead of recasting, likely with familiar faces. Apart from the kid playing Richie (who was in Stranger Things, though I forget which character he played since I never finished it) I didn't recognize any of them and the movie was the better for it. There's a push for Jessica Chastain to play the adult Bev, and while I normally would never argue with hiring Jessica Chastain for anything, I'm just going to see the awesome actress I've loved in a dozen other movies, as opposed to "Beverly Marsh", which is how I see the girl who played her here, as I've never seen her in anything else and she is absolutely wonderful. Ditto for the kid who played Ben, who might be my favorite character and thankfully got plenty of screentime (and encountered the movie's creepiest one-off visual, one of the dead kids from the Easter Egg hunt disaster). I kept expecting familiar faces to pop up as the parents, but apart from the aforementioned Williams I had just as much of a blank slate with them as I did the kids, and I hope they find a way to retain that for the sequel, allowing us to fully believe in the world instead of seeing people we already know from elsewhere. The movie's gonna make something like 90 million dollars this weekend - they clearly do not need big stars to sell tickets, and it'd be cool to see that kind of feel recreated.

But even if they rope in the biggest stars in the world, I'll be there on day one for the followup, since the creative crew is said to be returning and they clearly have a strong handle on the material. It's not a perfect film, but it's a damn good one and one of the best Stephen King movies ever. And before you say "That's a low bar", it really isn't - if you strip out the sequels that weren't using his material, unnecessary redoes (Carrie 2013, anyone?), and anything Mick Garris was involved with, it's actually a pretty solid collection of movies, most of which are just as good as their source material even if things are changed. I mean, it's not like Lawrence Kasdan was the one to make Dreamcatcher as fucking batshit as it is - it's actually a pretty faithful adaptation! And despite more scrutiny given the book's popularity, not to mention the switch in director from someone people really love (Cary Fukunaga, who apparently wanted to have a scene where Henry Bowers molests a sheep) to someone whose sole film was overshadowed by its producer (Guillermo del Toro), had some people worried that this could be a disaster or, at best, another forgettable misfire like last month's Dark Tower. But no - this is gonna terrorize a generation of kids and win over their parents as well, so now the only fear is if the second half can live up to it.

What say you?

*Mine is The Long Walk, which ain't ever getting made into a movie, I suspect.

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The Dark Tower (2017)

AUGUST 3, 2017

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

If there's one benefit to my depressing lack of free time, it's that it leaves next to zero opportunities to revisit even a movie that I love, let alone a book. And so while I consider Stephen King's series of Dark Tower novels to be among my favorites of the form, I've only read them once, over a span from roughly 2001-2005 (and I still haven't gotten around to the 8th entry, The Wind Through The Keyhole). And - as memorably/ridiculously depicted in King's own Dreamcatcher - the more stuff I take in, the more I have to unwittingly purge from my memory, which means keeping recollections of the stuff I watched last month resulted in my memories of those books (especially the first ones) being reduced to almost nothing. Long story short, if the movie version of The Dark Tower left me cold or angry, it wouldn't be because they changed the name of a supporting character or skipped over a subplot, because I can't remember those things anyway - it'd just be because it wasn't a good movie.

...The Dark Tower isn't a good movie.

Let's get the positives out of the way. Idris Elba has been a magnetic screen presence for quite some time now (I never watched The Wire; my introduction was as Hillary Swank's partner in the OK but largely forgettable The Reaping, and even that thankless role was enough to know he was someone to watch) and he was a fantastic choice to play Roland. I mean he's a fantastic choice to play pretty much anyone (a compliment I rarely bestow on an actor; incidentally one of the few others is Ed Harris, who was my dream choice for the character when I first read the book, but obviously that was nearly 20 years ago and now he's probably "too old" for a studio), but his particular skill at commanding your attention is invaluable here, in a movie that races past things like "character development" or even "introductions". Even someone who had never read the books or even heard of Elba before would likely know he was going to save the world the second he appeared on screen, so his casting paid off in multiple ways.

And... well I guess that's it. I mean I guess I can talk more about Elba, like how gets to show off his rarely utilized comedic chops in a few scenes when his character enters "Keystone" (read: our) Earth, being confused that animals "still" talked (off a commercial featuring talking raccoons) and offering a coin to the ER nurse who rattles off his list of ailments. But honestly, no one beyond racist assholes thought Elba would be to blame if the movie didn't work, and it's a waste of typing breath to point out that he's the main reason the movie has any value at all. I wish I could say the same about Dennis Haysbert, who plays Roland's father Steven, but if you've seen the trailer you've already seen a good chunk of his appearance (he's only in that one scene) and the movie doesn't firmly establish that it's his father until Jake says so later, rendering their scene a total misfire unless you know who the character (never introduced by name; someone said he does indeed say "son" at some point but I didn't catch it) is and what significance he has to the storyline. Given that the actors are only 18 years apart in age (and Haysbert has aged well, so they don't even look that far apart), and the character in the books died when Roland was fairly young, I myself wasn't even sure if it was supposed to be his dad or just some friend of his - can't imagine what a newcomer would think.

In fact, that's largely the entire problem with the movie: it bends over backwards to not be impenetrable to newcomers, and yet it still pretty much is, because nothing is clarified or given any weight. It's only my spotty memories of the books that allowed me to keep up at times; for example at one point Matthew McConaughey (as the Man in Black) picks up one of the fabled colored spheres from the books (collectively known as Maerlyn's Rainbow) and uses it, but at no point are their function explained (let alone his quest to obtain them). He just picks one up and does magic-y shit and Joe Moviegoer is, I guess, expected to just assume he has different colored ones because he likes to mix it up a bit. Now, if they have a different concept for the spheres in this version of the story, that's fine - but tell us what that is! I shouldn't have to be filling in blanks myself, especially when they've established how much different this version is from the novels.

Before I go further I should stress that changing things from the novel is not something that angers me, as long as it's done right. As Quint from AintitCool pointed out, if Spielberg made Jaws exactly like the book it would not be the masterpiece film that it is, and I find a number of adaptations flounder the more they try to cram in every single line/character just to appease fans, rather than do what works for a movie. Even if I knew the book inside and out I wouldn't care that they were "remixing" it; if anything I'd be happy about it because it would allow me to be surprised at its developments. The Walking Dead takes the right approach, I think - they use the comics as a very loose road map ("OK, time for Negan to show up") but the specifics all change, allowing comics readers to be surprised when, say, Andrea dies on the show when she was still alive in the comic that was further ahead.

So, again, my issues with the film are not because they changed things - but that I was never sure if the blanks I was filling in still applied. If this version of Man in Black killed Jake's mom and stepdad (his real father is dead and not a business tycoon, another book change), was he still involved in Roland's mother's demise? Could that be something that Roland and Jake bond about? Well who knows, as Roland's mother isn't mentioned - but that's the kind of thing I kept wrestling with throughout the movie, while also wondering if a non-reader could even understand the Man in Black's importance beyond "Well it's Matthew McConaughey and he dresses in black so he must be the villain." The film offers him no real introduction; we first see him in a quick, wordless shot watching some other unexplained events in an opening scene, and his quest to kidnap gifted children to help destroy the titular tower is hastily explained at best. Jake plays zero role in the final battle since he's tied to a chair, so there's no arc or revenge to the whole "dead parents" subplot, beyond (spoiler) making it OK for Jake to stick with Roland at the end instead of going home to his mother. It's not the worst idea to make Jake the central character and let us see the story from his eyes, but doing so robs both Roland and The Man in Black of the time that should be spent explaining who they are, why they are enemies, etc. When they show up, it's really only our attachment to the actors that gives them the weight they deserve.

Another huge problem is that they fail to establish Mid-World as the strange and vast wonder we've come to know from the books, and to a non-reader audience it will just look like some generic post-apocalyptic desert world. The movie is only 95 minutes with credits (so, really probably under 90) and a big chunk is set in New York, so there's not a lot of time spent in Mid-World anyway, but what we see isn't exactly impressive. A decaying amusement park, a little outpost with huts/tents, and one isolated city that reminded me of New Otherton from Lost is pretty much all we see of it, and no one seems to be taken aback when they travel from their native world to the other. Roland has some brief fish out of water moments when he goes to New York, but the Man in Black seems pretty much right at home when he goes there, and Jake has literally no reaction when he goes from Earth to Mid-World. For an epic fantasy, the movie is totally lacking in anything that inspires awe; Roland looking around New York has more gravitas than anything else, and we've seen Times Square a million times.

Frustratingly, the filmmakers skip over all of this stuff, but go out of their way to shoehorn in references to other Stephen King books. For the uninitiated, most of King's books share a universe not unlike the Marvel films, and the Dark Tower series is the backbone of that continuity. So it makes sense that they'd throw in a few nods, but most of them are just completely extraneous and downright insulting when you consider everything from THIS story that got excised. Cujo walking by is a fine little gag, and Jake's sensory powers referred to as "the shine" is acceptable, but why the hell would a 15 year old kid have a toy car (i.e. Christine) in his room? Why would a New York gun shop have a Rita Hayworth poster? I wish I was there when a prop guy was told to make a sign saying "Barlow & Straker's" in a movie that can't bother to include the rose in any meaningful way. Due to studio rights these things aren't going to pop up in sequels (if it gets any, which is doubtful), so I am baffled that they went out of their way to sneak in all of these references instead of focusing on the story they were actually telling.

I realized later that the movie felt like it was on 1.5x speed. It's got all of the elements and beats for a successful story, but it races through them so quickly that nothing really registers. Roland doesn't want Jake around at first, doing the whole "Leave me alone kid, I have a mission and you'll slow me down" kinda thing that we've seen in 80,000 other movies. Watching them bond over the course of the film might not be original, but it would at least be enjoyable... if he wasn't being a father figure like, seven minutes later. He flat out HUGS the kid roughly thirty minutes of screentime after they meet, which might work if those thirty minutes focused only on them and no one else, but in that period we cut to McConaughey a few times (he's in the movie way more than he should be; he actually gets top billing for the crawl), some folks in the town they visit, etc. Ditto for the villainous plan - it's all explained, but in bursts of exposition that fly by so fast you're not sure if they're important or if it's just filler dialogue before the real meat of the conversation begins. At one point I checked my watch not because I was bored, but because I had to verify that the movie really was almost over as it seemed to be based on where the story was headed, because it actually seems to go by faster than the brief runtime already had me prepping for. When it ended my initial feeling was "That's it?", which in some ways is worse than "Jesus what a disaster!" or even "Worst movie ever made!", because at least that would be memorable.

The saddest thing is that I knew it was doomed right from the second it began. Even the most casual fan of the series would probably remember "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed..." as the opening line and sort of rallying cry, and would expect it to be the first line in the movie. Even if they changed everything else, you'd think they'd get that much right. But no, it kicks off with gibberish exposition via text crawl (never a good sign), and the "man in black fled..." line appears later, tossed in at random just to appease fans I guess (I'm not sure if we ever see the Man in Black in the desert at all, let alone fleeing). So I knew right away to drop my fanboy appreciation for the novels and just let the movie take me where it wanted to go for this particular incarnation. Alas, it didn't take me anywhere; it just raced through a bunch of half-assed moments from the books, staged with almost zero energy (you've seen every cool action moment, trust me), and stopped to throw in a King-related Easter Egg every five minutes, most of which are from novels that got turned into far better movies than this. A crushing disappointment no matter how you slice it.

What say you?

P.S. No, it's not horror, but my other site has covered the movie plenty and I hadn't updated for a while, so you get a bonus "non-horror" review. Ironically one of its only decent scenes involves a monster, though.

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The Girl With All The Gifts (2016)

FEBRUARY 25, 2017

GENRE: POST-APOCALYPTIC, ZOMBIE
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

With Walking Dead scoring massive ratings and World War Z more than doubling the gross of the previous highest grossing zombie film, I don't understand why we never got glutted with zombie flicks at the multiplex as we were with found footage movies in the earlier part of this decade or torture-y/hardcore horror in the '00s. And in turn I REALLY don't understand why The Girl With All The Gifts, based on a popular novel and led by three known actors (the horror genre doesn't need stars to be a hit, don't forget), got this nothing release - even here in LA it only played on one (not large) screen, with no marketing even for its accompanying VOD release. In a few years this is going to be one of those titles that gets cited as a winner the way we do for the likes of The Babadook or Hush, while folks have to be convinced the likes of Bye Bye Man actually got wide theatrical releases. It's a broken system, and has been for years, and I don't see it ever improving again; I'm happy I got to see it theatrically, but it's a shame I had to double check someone's geographical location before suggesting they do the same.

Because unlike many of the horror films you have no choice but to see on VOD, there's actually a scope to this film that would be served well on a big screen. It's not the kind of zombie movie where everyone holes up in a "safe zone" that gets overrun - it's about that safe zone being overrun and forcing our group of heroes (five of them) to make their way on foot through their eerily quiet, crumbling city to another safe area some miles away. The zombies are formed by a kind of fungal virus in this particular story, and it affects the world as well as its inhabitants, spawning these giant vines and pods throughout the city. So it's overgrown like many a post-apocalyptic film, but it's not just a cool-looking bit of production design - it's actually a source of the danger, as the pods threaten to burst and send the virus airborne. The zombies themselves are incapacitated by these vine structures, so our heroes stumble across a few that look like that they are victims of Eldon Stammets from Hannibal (and some are in groups, so it's like a cross between his victims and Lawrence Wells' totem), which is both the creepiest thing I've seen in a zombie movie in a while, and also one of the most unique.

So it's kind of funny that this is not a traditional zombie movie. It has a number of the beats of such films, but the zombies kind of stand in spot, swaying back and forth (like grass, keeping with the plant theme), unless they smell a human target. Humans are issued a scent blocker spray that they apply to themselves like bugspray, and that keeps them safe unless they make eye contact - allowing for a nailbiter scene where they make their way past dozens of zombies who are standing in place like mannequins. Sure, it's not much different than Shaun of the Dead's "let's pretend to be zombies and walk right past" bit (other than the lack of humor, obviously), but the zombies just standing there adds a level of uneasiness that sets it apart. Also, even when one zombie is alerted, it's usually isolated, so when one of our heroes accidentally spooks one, it's not like they're done for - they have to silently (and quickly) dispatch the activated one before any others catch on (kind of like in a Metal Gear game when you trigger an alarm but if you kill the closest guard things are fine). It's genius; it allows the sequence to break tension and then get it right back, which, if I've ever seen that before in a zombie movie, I can't recall it at this time.

Speaking of Shaun, it's kind of funny that one of the aforementioned recognizable faces is Paddy Considine, who appears in the other two installments of the so-called Cornetto Trilogy but gets a rare lead role here as one of the three adults who are in charge of the titular "Girl", whose name is Melanie and may be the key to saving the human race. She is one of several children who were infected in the womb but did not become full fledged zombies like the others, but live as a kind of hybrid. Like the regular infected, they have a thirst for flesh and blood (animal will suffice, though human is preferred) and get a bit worked up at the scent of one, but unlike the others they are capable of speech, free thinking, etc. Considine's character is kind of a Capt. Rhodes type who just wants to kill her, but he works with (for? I missed some of the specifics) Caldwell (Glenn Close), who wants to dissect Melanie and the other children in order to find a cure, believing their hybrid state is the key to a vaccine. And then there's Ms. Justineau (Gemma Arterton), who is the childrens' teacher and has taken a particular liking to Melanie. Naturally, she wants to protect her, so you have this odd dynamic where Melanie is being kept alive by the three adults but for different reasons. And naturally, the thing about her that makes them afraid of her eventually proves to be essential to their survival, as she can make her way quickly through the zombies to find supplies or a scout the best route, or sniff her way to find a missing member of their group.

And the cool thing is, I agree with all of them. Considine's character is introduced as an antagonist, but he comes around and bonds with her in his own way, and never really enters full "evil human" mode. Close's character actually inches, er, closer to that territory, as she will seemingly stop at nothing to achieve the "greater good", but since we never see any of the people she's allegedly trying to save (there are only like ten named people in the entire movie; we never see any traditional civilization, even in a flashback), her goal, while noble, is hard to really consider when it means the possible death of the little girl who we've spent the past 90 minutes with - a flesh and blood reality vs. a vague notion. Naturally, not everyone survives this journey, but the script by Mike Carey (adapting his novel) smartly balances out the primary characters so that one is never more or less likely to survive than the others, and gives them enough time for us to really care if and when they are dispatched. Not since Dawn of the Dead have I seen a zombie movie (or show) where I literally did not want ANYONE to die, a relieving feeling that I probably won't experience again for a while.

My only real nag about the entire movie was the ending, which generally works fine but I have a major question about how one character is still alive (to be as vague as possible - the final scene is obviously some time later, so what is ______ drinking/eating?), and Melanie's final action against the zombie fungus seemed a bit abrupt. I later learned that the book had a scene that set up her decision (I can't recall if they said it was filmed and then cut from the film, or just excised to begin with), so I get it now and it smooths over some of that concern, but neither I or they can/should expect everyone to follow up with the novel (or movie news sites) to get that context. Not that the ending was confusing or anything, but it seemed like they rushed through the final moments after pacing the previous 100 so perfectly, so it was a bit of a bummer that they couldn't retain that near-perfect quality. Perhaps book readers can mentally fill in those blanks and not even notice (with Carey writing both, I doubt there are any major changes - just things that the movie didn't have time for), but that's the double edged sword of seeing a movie based on a book - you're always going to partially dampen the surprise of one by experiencing the other first. I tend to watch the movie first before diving into the book, because the book will be fleshed out (it's like a director's cut!), whereas watching the movie after reading will almost always feel like you're getting cliff's notes, but rarely do I feel I SHOULD have read the book first so I'd have a little more understanding of the final moments of the story.

But a few quibbles about the ending is nowhere near enough to take away the fact that this is a great addition to the zombie sub-genre, and is very much undeserving of its unheralded release into the world after some well received festival appearances - including Fantastic Fest, and I'm almost afraid to look up what I saw at the same time I could have been seeing this, as I wasn't exactly in love with many of the movies I saw there this year (update: turns out it was Call of Heroes and The Void; I liked this more than either of them, but I doubt I'd have the chance to see them theatrically, so I guess it evens out). Then again, this way I got to buy a ticket at a regular screening, and do my part to try to convince the money men that movies like this should be championed and given a chance to thrive on the big screen.

What say you?

P.S. I didn't even realize it at the time, but the director was Colm McCarthy, who directed Outcast - a HMAD book selection! Definitely a name to watch and one I won't forget next time.

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Cell (2016)

JULY 10, 2016

GENRE: TECHNOLOGY, ZOMBIE
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

As I've said in the past, I am very much a movie before book guy - I know the book will be better, so I can enjoy both rather than go into a movie and get frustrated with everything that they changed or left out. But there are always exceptions (I do like to read after all, and who knows what will be turned into a movie?), and there's also the occasional... er, occasion where I don't like the book much anyway - the movie might actually be an improvement! Such was my hope for Cell, as I thought it was a terrific idea with a killer first 100 pages or so, but ultimately was left underwhelmed by; Stephen King's tendency to botch his endings was in full effect for that one, and the "Raggedy Man" felt like a poor retread of some of his better villains (Randall Flagg in particular). Could a movie fix the book's problems and turn his story into a killer cell phone signal into one of the better King adaptations?

See, I had heard that King changed the ending, and I knew from a few plot descriptions that they weren't following the book to the letter, so I went in hopeful. It didn't hurt that the cast reunited John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson from 1408, which is not only one of the better modern King films, but also a huge hit (the 2nd highest grossing after Green Mile, in fact - though inflation changes that a bit, of course) - as good of a pedigree you could hope for, even if the movie wasn't being distributed by a major studio or given much of as release (I had to drive 30 miles to see it theatrically in a tiny theater). I figured at worst it'd be an OK zombie movie that couldn't manage to overcome its less than stellar source material - certainly nothing new for the horror genre, and even an OK King movie would be better than a lot of them, right?

Alas, saying it was "OK" is almost overselling it. It's not TERRIBLE, but each act is weaker than the one before it, so what started out as a movie I was enjoying and wondering why it got dumped ended up as a movie I wished I had (like one of the four other audience members) walked out early and saved myself some time. Of course, then I would have denied myself the sight of one of the film's primary actors stumbling around as a zombie, which I assure you is even funnier the 2nd time they show it. Again, King's ending wasn't great, but damned if they didn't actually manage to make it WORSE here, and I can't for the life of me imagine why they thought this would be an improvement - they would have been better off copying his ending directly and chalking it up to respect for the text. Granted, King himself is credited with the screenplay, but so is another writer, and the "and" that separates their credits tells us that they weren't working together. So who knows if this is King's ending or not; Cusack tweeted a while back that both he and King had been cut out of the movie's communication process, so we can assume they aren't thrilled with how it turned out, either.

Back to the credits for a minute. Cusack is listed as an executive producer, which means he either sunk some of his own money into it or helped them find the financing to make it (presumably by attaching himself as a star to secure said financing from foreign territories). Alas, there are like twenty other listed executive producers, so when you couple that with the FIVE production logos at the top (none of them you'll recognize), you can quickly ascertain that this was a "film" only in the technical sense. People complain about big studio blockbusters all the time, but personally I find these movies far more insulting - they're thrown together, shot in generic locales (Atlanta here), and designed only to get sold into the overseas markets based on their "star power". It's something I see a lot in the action genre (pretty much every Bruce Willis movie in the past three years falls into this category - one of which also featured Cusack), but rarely for horror films. It's sad to see Sam Jackson joining this little crew (Nicolas Cage, Tom Jane, and Cuba Gooding Jr are other frequent offenders), so hopefully it's just a momentary lapse of judgment for the actor (who has appeared in plenty of bad movies, yes, but they're of the technically more prestigious variety, like Robocop) and not a sign of a dying career. Silver lining, he seems to be aware he signed up for a dud - I can't recall the last time I saw him so disinterested in a performance. He's usually the only source of energy in a lazy film (again, like Robocop), but here he just kind of says his lines and fades into the background more often than not; a brief bar scene where he drunkenly sings some oldie is the only time he seems like he's invested in the proceedings.

Anyway, like all those action movies I mentioned, it quickly becomes clear that one of the main problems is that they're spending too much of their limited budget on securing "names" instead of actually putting it on the screen, so you get a script that probably needed 30-60m to be shot properly, produced for maybe a tenth or (if I'm being generous) a fifth of that amount. And they blow most of the money that they had for actual on-screen production value in the first ten minutes, when the cell-phone outbreak strikes at an airport (not Boston Common as in the book, but it's a solid change) - we get some good carnage, lots of zombified extras, a plane exploding - good stuff. Lloyd Kaufman even shows up, suggesting that perhaps the loss of original director Eli Roth didn't mean that the gonzo splatter spirit he likely would have brought to the table would be gone with him. Cusack (who survives the outbreak because his cell phone died - he's using a payphone at the time) then makes his way down to the subway where he meets Jackson, and they hole up at his place (along with one of his neighbors, played by Orphan's Isabelle Fuhrman) before heading on foot up north to find his family.

This is the good section of the movie, but even here we see signs that perhaps the production wasn't quite up to the task of telling this apocalyptic story. I can forgive the filming location substitutions; as a Bostonian I knew right away that they weren't really there, but I've seen far worse attempts at passing off [name your overused filming location] as my old home. But it was almost oppressively generic - they call it "Boston Airport" instead of Logan, the subway name was wrong (I forget what it was, but it wasn't MBTA), and they didn't even show a Dunkin Donuts - despite the fact that they also exist in Atlanta! I mean, come on - putting a Dunkin Donuts in the shot is an easier method than on-screen text saying "Boston, Massachusetts" to sell the setting; the only distinct landmark I can recall is the Prudential Center as part of a CGI skyline behind them. Everything just felt completely phony, and it just got worse as the movie wore on, as Cusack repeatedly says the name of the NH town he's heading for, but offering no landmarks or geographical info to let us know how close they were. And considering how big the population of Massachusetts is, I also had trouble with its depiction of a zombie outbreak - when they're in the outskirts I guess it's fine that there weren't a lot around, but even in the streets of Boston when they leave Cusack's place to make their way north seem curiously underpopulated - they only have to sneak past one group of like thirty zombies before pretty much being in the clear.

Of course, even if they encountered swarms of zombies every step of the way it wouldn't matter much, as the trio are all expert marksmen, it seems - Jackson's character says he was in Vietnam to explain his shooting skills, but there is no explanation for how Cusack (who doesn't even know how to load the gun) and Fuhrman never seem to miss even when firing while running. As with the book, as things progress with the (goofy) plot it becomes less about the danger of a zombie attacking them and more about the zombies' hive-mind, drone behavior that has them running in circles, so the movie is not only at its best in the first half hour or so, it's also the only time the characters seem to be in any legitimate danger. The movie offers not one but two scenes where Cusack drives a truck through hundreds of the things (they're sleeping in one of them, to be fair) and neither of them carry any tension at all - the second time the shuffling drones just sort of wait until he passes before continuing their endless circling of a big radio tower. At a certain point I almost wished for the introduction of some evil humans, just to give the movie a bit of pep - it'd be better than another scene of our characters walking through zombie-free, depressingly nondescript fields and groves.

It also doesn't embrace its R-rating for the most part, as if they didn't want to put much effort into cutting it down if they had to make it PG-13. There are a couple of isolated gore gags in the airport scene and Sam gets his F-bomb in as always, but otherwise it's shockingly tame - the dozens of zombies they shoot go down without even as much as a CGI bullet hole, and the rare good guy deaths are fairly bloodless as well (one is off-screen entirely, another just gets whacked over the head). My only theory is that they DID want to make it PG-13 (perhaps that would be the "creative differences" cited for when Roth left the project - seven years ago, for the record) and got an R anyway but didn't bother to fight it? At any rate, you can get far more visceral action on Walking Dead every week (easy to compare it to since they're shot in the same state). That said, don't give me any shit about the "zombie" word or tagging - as with 28 Days Later, they are used in the exact same way and have the same anonymity/numbers as they do in any traditional zombie flick. Unless there's proof that the infection can be reversed and the victim will return to normal, it's a zombie movie for all intents and purposes.

Ultimately, the biggest disappointment with the film is that they failed to modernize the source material to any meaningful degree. Sure, we all had cell phones in 2006 when the book was published, but not "smart" phones (even those with cameras were still relatively new, and they didn't even do video yet), an element that barely plays a part in this 2016 (OK, actually 2014) film. Cusack thinks his son might be safe because he never calls anyone, just uses his phone to text and play games, and that's pretty much the extent of modernizing the concept. Hilariously, the timing for the film's late release couldn't have been better, as I and everyone else in the country was spending a chunk of our weekend staring at our phones while playing Pokemon Go - if the (never explained) cell signal originated in real life over the weekend via a stupid game, it would have wiped out the population in half the time. And for what it's worth, I was more creeped out by seeing a dozen people standing motionless in a park (save for their swipes) than I was for anything during this movie. Even the film's attempts at explaining how it works are half-assed and unresolved - they seem to establish that texting someone won't turn you into a zombie, but what about apps? There was a real opportunity here to dive into the fun sociological potential of the concept (that our phones, meant to connect us to our loved ones, are turning us into mindless zombies), but they are content with just more or less sticking to King's decade old novel, poorly and cheaply. Rarely has a professional horror movie squandered so much potential.

What say you?

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Dark Age (1987)

MARCH 29, 2016

GENRE: PREDATOR
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REVIVAL SCREENING)

When John Jarratt appared in Rogue, I figured it was just Greg McLean recruiting his Wolf Creek star for a bit role, something to amuse fans of that film since he was such a vicious killer in Creek and then in Rogue he was probably the sweetest character in it (he was the guy who wanted to leave his wife's ashes on the river). However, I now realize that while that may have been part of it, it was probably McLean tipping his hand to Dark Age, an Australian killer croc movie that preceded HIS Australian killer croc movie by twenty years. Jarratt (looking a bit like Simon Cowell, right down to the white t-shirt) is the star here, playing a hybrid of Brody and Hooper as he works to stop a giant "Numunwari" from killing any more people.

And in case you weren't sure of the Jaws influence, like that film it offs someone a bit older in the opening scene (a couple of poachers, in fact) before setting its sights on someone smaller - MUCH smaller. Alex Kintner comparatively lived a full and well-rounded life compared to the little toddler that gets munched in the first 15 minutes, and director Arch Nicholson doesn't risk anything crazy like ambiguity or subtlety - we get a shot of the croc's giant mouth crushing the little boy, which was horrifying enough for me but made worse by the audience laughing/cheering it on (it WAS a grindhouse night, so I can't fault them or be high and mighty - two years ago I would have been cheering the loudest). Nicholson then twists the knife, showing the kid's little toy boat floating in the water nearby, now sans its tiny little owner. I mean it wasn't exactly Pet Sematary, but good lord, that one was rough for me (you can see it on Youtube if you like, though it cuts out before the boat "coda").

But in a way, this horrifying (to me) sequence makes the movie's 2nd half even more insane/kind of incredible, as Jarratt joins forces with some local Aborigines to SAVE the baby-eating killing machine, because it's a rare animal and the Aborigines respect it as some sort of god. The plan is to tranquilize it and bring it to an isolated lake where it can eat the fish or whatever and not bother anyone, so the movie switches from Jaws to Free Willy and we kind of go along with it. It's a lot easier to do this when you consider the evil poachers, including one who survives the opening scene attack AND another one later (though he loses his arm that time), as him and his drunken fellow poachers spend the whole movie drinking, shooting every croc they see (and some of these shots seem pretty realistic to me - if they were all puppets/animatronics then the FX team was terrific) and also terrorizing our human heroes for good measure. Without them, you might just think Jarratt is insane and that the creature should be killed, but these guys are all mustache-twirling evil bastards, making it a lot easier to just side with whoever or WHATEVER they're against (it helps that we never meet the family of the little boy who was killed - no slaps in the face from a grieving mother here).

Because of this switcheroo, the movie kind of loses steam as a monster movie and feels like more of an action thriller in its 3rd act, with Jarratt and his Aborigine friends driving a truck with the (tranquilized) croc through some swamps and such, the poachers in pursuit. It's got shootouts, car wrecks, even a goofy bit where they stop to weigh the thing at a highway weigh station (complete with nailbiting suspense as the weigh station employee nearly discovers what they're really hauling). The evil poacher guy finally gets his just desserts in the closing minutes, but otherwise there's probably a solid half hour where it's easy to forget that the movie was once traditional Jaws-y fare. Such genre-swapping isn't uncommon in "Ozploitation" fare, but I certainly didn't expect any of our heroes to get shot to death in this giant crocodile movie.

Then again, by that point the movie had offered a little bit of everything; there's a pretty sizable amount of screentime given to Jarratt and his on/off girlfriend's relationship struggles, with possible infidelity, her housekeeping skills, his workaholic ways, etc. all given their due, to the point where it could have turned into a romantic film just as easily as a Free Willy precursor. The local assholes (there are more than the poachers; Jarratt has a wino buddy who gets chased by a trio of standard punks) give the movie some Mad Max flavor as well, and then the Aborigines offer the genuine Aussie flavor that I don't recall being much of a part of Rogue. And I hope none of this sounds like a complaint - on the contrary, it made the movie quite delightful (seeing as it was part of a double feature with Alligator, it could have looked terrible by comparison if it didn't follow its own playbook), not to mention more engaging - you were never quite sure where it would end up next. At one point Jarratt, the asshole poacher, and about ten other guys go off to look for the best, making me think it might turn into a Dirty Dozen kinda deal where they'd be offed one by one as they try to take it down, but it ends up being a fairly quick sequence where they kill pretty much every croc BUT the one they want. I only point out all of the plot turns for those who might be expecting wall to wall carnage, since the first 15 minutes don't hold back at all - it's just one of the script's many examples of setting up familiar beats only to go off on a different path.

As for the croc itself, it looks pretty great. It's a silent, slower stalker - often floating just high enough to break the surface of the water with its tail scales or maybe the top of its head, and making its fuller appearances count. After just seeing Alligator on the big screen for the first time, I was happy that they didn't go with any miniatures - Alligator is a great goddamn movie (and even better with a crowd), but man those miniature shots are painfully bad at times, so seeing more in a movie that presumably had less money to work with would have been a bit too much to bear. So yeah, he doesn't DO much in a lot of his shots (especially near the end when they're bringing him back to the water - he had woken up by that point but it sure didn't look like it), but when he does I never doubted they were dealing with a real animal. As much as I love Alligator, I can see all the tricks on display (miniatures, forced perspective, etc.) but here, for all I know it was a real giant croc.

All in all, a terrific double feature. It's been a long damn time since I was able to go to the Bev for a Grindhouse night (and I don't think I was able to stay for both movies last time), and I'm not sure if I've ever (yes, EVER) stayed awake throughout both movies in their entirety. Usually I'm fine for the first one but by the 2nd or 3rd reel in the second movie I'm fighting off sleep (and often losing that battle), but I was totally alert throughout, likely a mixture of the high brought on by a big-screen viewing of Alligator (seriously, that movie is infinitely more entertaining and well-written than it has any right to be; I wish John Sayles had stuck around in the horror genre forever) and the coffee I drank in between the two movies that kept me awake until 2 am (I didn't have any in the morning, so my system probably let the caffeine work as intended for a change). But also, I suspect it's because the movies, while seeming very similar on the surface (Jaws wannabes with very similar creatures - to this day I can't tell a croc from a gator at a glance), were textbook examples on how to take a basic story and make it your own. It's always saddened me how similar all those Syfy movies are, because there is clearly a lot of ways you can go about writing/directing the parts in between the giant monster eating people. Look to these films, monster movie makers - Jaws may be the king of such fare, but that's not the only one that can inspire how you make yours.

What say you?

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Pride And Prejudice And Zombies (2016)

FEBRUARY 4, 2016

GENRE: ZOMBIE
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

I wasn't expecting Pride And Prejudice And Zombies to be any good. I can count the number of good PG-13 Screen Gems horror movies on one hand with fingers left over, and I am just not a fan of mash-ups in general - adding things you like into other things you like is fine for ice cream sundaes, but otherwise it's just not appealing to me to see Yoda driving around on the Ecto-1 or whatever other dumb shit people post on the internet. And yet, the script/concept is actually not too bad for the most part - it's not played for laughs (thankfully) and the zombies are surprisingly used sparingly (and more or less utilized as a version of the plague). No, it's actually the flat direction and horrendous editing that does the movie in, leaving it watchable, even fun at times, but rarely as engaging as it could have been.

I debated over whether or not to read up on the original Austen story before seeing the movie, because (brace yourselves) I've never read it, nor have I seen any of the straight adaptations that have sprung up over the years (and given my mash-up opposition it should go without saying I never read Seth Grahame-Smith's novel, either). Ultimately I decided not do any such prep, as I feared knowing the ins and outs of the story would put me in a position of being ahead of its characters but also rolling my eyes at how they kept shoehorning zombies into familiar scenes. Luckily, as it turns out that wasn't even the case anyway - long stretches go by without any undead action, and from what I understand the movie actually reigned in a lot of the book's silliness - ninjas and cannibals apparently played a major part, but there's nothing like that here. There are a few instances where I might have grinned at how they "zombified" one of the Austen book's scenes, like when a character got sick from the rain in the original (and here is injured when her musket backfires as she tries to kill a zombie), but for the most part I think I would have liked the movie less if I knew the source material in any detail (I knew it involved a love triangle and that's about it).

Because really, that stuff was fine, and was certainly more interesting than anything involving zombies. Lily James is as wonderful to watch in fetching period dresses as she is kicking ass, and I've never heard of Sam Riley (Mr. Darcy) before, but his voice alone made me wish I was English, and (I say this meaning no disrespect) it was great to have a regular looking guy as the lead in a Screen Gems horror movie, as they tend to cast the most CW-y looking motherfuckers on the planet for these things (his friend, Mr. Bingley, more than makes up for that "gap", as he looks like he was assembled in a Chace Crawford factory). Their unusual romance was fun to see unfold (as was my realization that Austen's source novel is probably to blame for every "they hate each other then they love each other" narrative in rom-com history), as it was dictated by so many external factors beyond the obligatory "wrong foot" first meeting. Fear not, the "Pride" and "Prejudice" of the title is still very much a factor in the narrative, and despite my initial assumptions, never really got overshadowed by the zombie action.

In fact most of the zombie stuff is front-loaded; we meet Mr. Darcy as he kills one (that POV of a head being twisted off that they used in the trailer), and James and her sisters are introduced only moments before they too get to show off their zombie-killing prowess (their dad, Charles Dance, cares more about their ability to fight than taking on the usual womanly roles of the day - namely getting married and producing heirs). Then they all go to a party and zombies show up there too! It seemed at first like they just took the source story and added "then zombies show up and ruin everything" to every scene, but after the first reel it dips back into a sped up version of Austen's story, with minimal zombie interference until the 3rd act. Most of their appearances in between are fleeting, like when the girls (who look nothing alike, for the record - it's like they went out of their way to find girls who could never conceivably come from the same genes) travel to a neighboring town and come across a downed carriage on the way - its inhabitant is a zombie, they kill her and move on with the romance/social class stuff. This sort of approach does result in one terrific jump moment (even I got legit startled, which almost never happens), but will likely frustrate anyone who showed up hoping for a full blown zombie epic with some period romance stuff thrown in as flavor.

If anything, it's really the other way around, at least until the climax, which leaves Austen behind for a while (unless the Wiki I read skipped over the rescue scene and bridge explosion). At this point it starts feeling more like a period zombie movie, but it's rushed through, and by that point I was far more invested in seeing if Liz would end up with Mr. Darcy anyway. There's some half-baked nonsense about four zombie horsemen that never really pays off (the book has two sequels, so maybe they're hoping there will be a film series - there's certainly a sequel setup in the closing credits), and I like that the zombies talk until they eat brains (at which point they become typical moaning undead), but it doesn't add up to a compelling undead story. Perhaps they felt shoehorned by the original text and trying to stick to it? Whatever the reason, perhaps streamlining some of the original elements (for starters, there are five sisters, but two of them serve no purpose) would have given them more time to flesh out the zombie elements, making them feel a little more organic to the original story that they were aping. I mean, it's a fully developed story to begin with, and the zombies don't seem to be replacing anything in the original narrative (like evil soldiers or something), so adding another story on top of one that they're not doing much to reduce and trying to cram it into 108 minutes doesn't seem like the sanest plan.

And that's what makes it so frustrating, because the movie would actually work really well if director Burr Steers and his editor gave it any life (no zombie puns, damn you). They're smart enough not to overload the movie with action (and in turn, more CGI gore), but nothing ever really excites when it should, and one or both of them seem to actively oppose standard coverage. There are several scenes where it feels like we should be seeing James' reaction to something, only for them to not show her at all (including a major moment with Mr. Darcy near the end), and scenes often come and go with zero finesse or grace. I thought perhaps the movie was way too long and it got hacked up, but there's nothing in the trailer that's missing from the feature, which is the usual sign of such re-editing. But then again, the IMDb trivia talks of a 'long take' sequence that was cut after preview screenings, so obviously there was SOME reworking, which might explain the breathless opening credit sequence, where Dance narrates the history of the zombie plague over an animated scene, all of which feels like a quick way to recap what was probably excised original material featuring the actors. But Steers also can't seem to get a handle on action scenes either; the PG-13 doesn't seem to be a major factor (that startling moment I mention involves a zombie's head being blown apart) and even the one on one fights between humans lack a pulse. It's just all very much on rails, with editing that draws attention to either the movie's hollowed out presentation (there are at least two scenes where a character suddenly appears in a different spot than they were in the previous shot, as if there was a middle to the scene that got hacked out) or the editor/director's incompetence. So you can't help but wonder if the zombie element was even necessary; everyone looks the part and could probably become someone's favorite version of a particular character - but the polarizing "hook" will keep those would-be fans at bay, and then the zombie stuff doesn't really deliver. No one's satisfied!

Wherever the blame should lie, it doesn't change the fact that adding zombies to a Jane Austen story is the least of the movie's problems. It's been in development for ages (Natalie Portman was originally going to star; she gets a producer credit alongside about twenty others) with several directors having come and gone, both inspired (David O. Russell? Lord and Miller?) and "this could have been awesome" (Neil Marshall, David Slade). Instead we get a guy whose last two movies were Zac Efron vehicles (and wrote the classic How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days!), with zero action/horror on his resume, so I have to wonder if Sony just gave up trying to find someone suitable and just grabbed a yes man from a list, knowing that with all the producers involved they needed someone who'd follow directions instead of being all "auteur" about it. So as a result, it's about as good as you'd expect from someone whose last directorial gig was an episode of The New Normal. However, it's better than you'd expect from the one-joke premise, and as Super Bowl counter-programming, I'm not sure there's ever been a more fitting concept than combining horror with a "chick flick". Normally we'd be seeing separate movies offering these things (a standard female-driven movie from one studio, some crappy horror movie from another), so on a fiscal level it's a genius move. Just a shame that it doesn't work as well as it apparently could have. Maybe I'll read the book and see if it improves things. Ninjas are cool, I guess.

What say you?

P.S. Lena Headey's role is so brief that it should have gone unbilled, and true to form, in the one scene she shares with her Game of Thrones dad, Steers can't be bothered to show both of them in the frame at the same time. As for Matt Smith... let's just say my interest in seeing what Doctor Who was about after Lego Dimensions has been greatly reduced. He's only in the movie for like 15 minutes - as a supporting character! - and he drove me insane, so how the hell am I supposed to watch hours of this guy as the hero? And no, it's not because his character shares a name with my son (William Collins), he was annoying me before I even realized that.

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