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Girlfriend from Hell (1989)
About as good as straight to video comedy is going to get
Are you kidding me? 2.5 star average? Perhaps Girlfriend from Hell is receiving ratings from people who only watch full cinematic comedies, perhaps I'm an old crony who still likes his films fun, but I've thought Girlfriend From Hell was great fun since I first saw it in the 90s.
A group of young adults attending a small birthday party are planning to set the debilitatingly shy Maggie up with Carl, a young man so shy he can barely talk without wanting to vomit from nerves. Things take a supernatural turn when the spirit of the devil enters Maggie's body while running from a pursuer, turning her into the life, and death, of the party. It's up to devil chaser to restore Maggie to normal and save her friends, but having the devil inside her for a day might be just what the doctor ordered for Maggie's crippling insecurity...
The Good: Dana Ashbrook and Liane Curtis steal the show. Ashbrook is a criminally underrated actor, made famous by Twin Peaks but really not showing up as often as he should, and rarely gets a chance to be funny like he was here. To me he'll always be Chaser. Liane Curtis, well, I've seen her in pretty much nothing else, maybe Critters 2, but she does a great job here. The soundtrack is great too, with a combination of pop-punk songs and chugging synths so representative of the tail-end of the 80s.
The Bad: The rest of the cast are pretty ho-hum. Other characters aren't fleshed out like Chaser and the devil are, and the majority of the film seems to take place within the same house party. The cartoonishly violent relationship between two supporting characters is hilarious, but the same joke is then transferred to Dana Ashbrook's character and another supporting character, the movie then overuses the same 'man does something perverted, woman responds with cartoon violence' joke lifted straight out of a Japanese anime.
The Straight-To-Video: The camera work, not that I noticed this in my teens, is typical of a straight-to-video film, essentially just pointing at what you need to see, without any particular effort to frame it well or achieve the right dramatic effect. At times it can give the feel of a home video. The special effects, while cheesy, are impressive for something with such a low budget, with appropriately some gory corpses and even a brief "Honey, I Shrunk The Kids" moment using a giant cheese-puff. For a movie about a being chasing the devil herself (HERself) across time and space, it all seems quite small scale, really, with only a few locations in the film. The house, a restaurant, the street, and a short trip to a canyon is about as far as it goes.
Unfortunately, while this used to be a bargain for a cheap VHS, there is no DVD, so I can only recommend it to retro VHS aficionados, Dana Ashbrook fans, or those nostalgic for the original release. If you aren't still rocking the VHS, head to twisted danger dot net where they produce a DVD disk of the film.
The Thing (2011)
Gorgeous monster movie; another great version
I'm surprised there haven't been more than three versions of this one, The Thing From Another World is up there with Dracula and Frankenstein in terms of quality. John Carpenter's 1982 version, however, was so pitch-perfect, and so close to pre-CG special effects perfection, that it seemed like you just couldn't top it! A new take on a classic tale for a new audience is always welcome in my book, though, provided they capture what made the previous version(s) special.
A living 'Thing' from another world, recently excavated in Antartica, assumes human form and lurks amongst others, then splits, contorts and bursts open its human bodies in whatever way necessary to survive. Paranoia spreads, the cast never knowing who among them has been assimilated by this 'Thing'. The Thing acts as a remake for the newcomers, but also as a prequel for people familiar with John Carpenter's version, complete with homages to shots found in that film (even down to the placement of a bloody axe) and a mid-credits sequence leading right into it.
The re-remake has been met with some anger on the internet due to its use of CG, after Carpenter's film wowed people so much with its real-life animatronic effects. The bizarre truth is that the majority of this version's effects shots are actually practical, with a bit of CG to smooth out the edges and to achieve a few of the things practical effects could not, Jurassic Park style. The fact that people have had trouble realising this is testament to just how far both types of effect have come. The 'transformations' here however are less visceral than they were in the 80s version, the bodies change shape and sprout tentacles and teeth without the gushing blood and pus from the 'original' and it gives the entire affair a 'cleaner' feel, where the monster is more of a marvel than a horror. I was also pleased to see that where CG is used here it really is used to its potential, creating some awesomely grotesque and agile creatures which move freely of any rigging or puppetry (and nobody's going to convince me that CG tentacles are any less believable than jerky green-screened stop motion).
In fact, the most notable difference in this version is the pacing. Carpenter's film bided its time, steadily working on the paranoia, only pulling out the glorious effects in a few key scenes, whilst this 'Thing' wastes no time showing off what it can do. For me, the 'original' was too slow in many ways and in contrast I find this one a little too fast, and it almost feels over too soon. The all-male cast of the 'original' weren't the most compelling set of characters, many of them crude stereotypes shoehorned in to further fuel the rage with their testosterone, whilst this version brings in a more diverse group of people - Norwegians, Americans, Englishmen, young and old - and it benefits from it. Whilst you could argue that the heroine character is crammed in and given too much character strength to contrast with Carpenter's sausage-fest, but she's still strong and when wielding a flamethrower and calling the shots at times she almost has an Ellen Ripley vibe to her. It's also nice to learn a bit more about the 'Thing'; as great as the mystery of it all was in the 'original', it's refreshing to get a further look into the kind of world this being may have come from and the kind of technology that brought it here.
Overall, a great monster movie and another great retelling of a classic, but probably better for newcomers than for people with fond memories of the previous version(s). Less tension and more 'BOO!', less revulsion and more awe, this is the 'accessible' version of The Thing.
Son of the Mask (2005)
Not a Jim Carrey classic, but hilarious nonetheless
I just finished this movie and my cheeks hurt from the grinning. Son of the Mask expands on the story of Jim Carrey classic The Mask in a whole different way. A baby is conceived while the father is wearing the titular mask and 9 months later unto the world is born a nightmare child with cartoon god-like powers. On top of this, the pet dog, now jealous of the baby getting all the attention, has gotten its paws on the mask and become a green-faced, revenge-seeking cartoon mutt.
Meanwhile, Loki, the fabled God of mischief (mentioned in the original movie, not featured), has been instructed by his father Odin to retrieve his mask due to the havoc it caused in the first film. Loki is the essence of the Mask and thus can also turn green and do the Jim Carrey routine, coming to a total of four equally bizarre Mask-like characters, though obviously none living up to Jim Carrey.
The father, and hero of the movie is played by Jamie Kennedy, the funny chap who was the film buff in the Scream movies ("Did you put her liver in the mailbox? Because I read that the killer put her liver in the mailbox..."), and he does a good job. Upon donning the mask he becomes the plastic-haired, catsuit-clad, cheesy game show host type (nice to see more different takes on what the mask does to different people) who is amusing though feels a little unnatural compared to the his acting in "Dad form".
Plenty of great CG just like the original, some spectacular visuals and designs, and for a movie so different to it's predecessor and so much more family friendly, it certainly does a good job of recreating the original atmosphere with nice lighting and settings.
So, would I recommend it? If you're a hardcore fan of The Mask in the form of comic book, movie or even cartoon, probably not, because it's not what you will want from a sequel. For slightly more open-minded people looking for some fun and a few smiles of nostalgia from nods to the original, totally. It's a side-splitter, particularly for kids.
There's no obligation to have seen the original; it works as a film on it's own as well as a sequel, so don't worry if you want to entertain your very young kids but don't want to expose them to some of the more "PG" humour of the original. Then perhaps they can check the original out when they're a few years older.
Underrated and great fun. It may not be the "Revenge of the Mask" movie we were promised all those years ago and it's not a masterpiece by any means (what sequel is?) but it's really nice to see a clever and creative sequel/followup to a film whose chances as a franchise we all thought were dead.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
Superb, underrated re-imagining
2010's A Nightmare on Elm Street is a remake/re-imagining of Wes Craven's supernatural slasher classic about a group of teenagers being tormented by badly burned killer Fred Krueger in their dreams. A Nightmare on Elm Street has been taken back to the drawing board, to it's very basic premise, and re-done for 2010.
So what does all that mean, exactly? Well, to put it simply, we're not looking at the same movie with modern day effects here. We're looking at Wes Craven's idea coupled with today's societal concerns.
Fans of the original will remember the intentional ambiguity of Freddy's past, starting off as a child killer who got away with it, killed by angry town folk taking the law into their own hands, and becoming more and more bizarre as the series went on, involving the strange circumstances of his conception, and a lot of religious undertones. This time around, Krueger's past is made a little more clear, and this is what will make or break the movie for a lot of people. Many were upset by Rob Zombie's choice to explore Michael Myers' past in Halloween, as they felt that a mysterious, faceless enigma is scarier than somebody you know everything about.
I beg to differ... The slasher genre has slowly become a parody of itself, especially after the ingenious Scream quite literally stating all of the rules and clichés, and even if we can block out their knowledge of the 'rules', the killer still often becomes the protagonist in our minds as we become more interested in how they will pick off the next dumb, drunk teenager than who will survive.
This is where Freddy's back-story comes in. Once you know what he is, you will hate him, fear him, and most definitely root for the heroes of the picture. A hint - Freddy's back-story is far more disturbing than the original version, and things which Craven may have intended, but never outright said, come to light here.
I will also tell you this - a newcomer to Freddy would probably do better watching this film than a hardcore fan of the original series. Firstly some of the strongest moments in this version are lifted straight out of the original, but more importantly the story is told in a completely different way. Surprisingly, this is not a teenage slasher flick. None of the stereotypes appear here - there's no token black guy, no cheerleader, no geeky do-gooder girl - and there are no house-parties or scenes of characters getting drunk and sleeping with one another. In fact, I don't recall any 'happy' scenes in at all, since we begin the movie with all of the characters already affected by the nightmares, a sombre funeral scene being the backdrop to our character introductions.
This, in the long run, leads the movie into much more of a mystery-horror along the lines of The Ring, where the primary concern of our remaining characters is staying alive and awake long enough to find out the truth about Freddy and possibly shed some light on how to stop him, rather than who is going to die next. On the down side, this does mean we have to spend the first twenty minutes trying to relate to the characters as they get stalked by night and attend funerals by day, and it can be difficult to pick which to try and follow as they are slowly picked off. It pays off though, once the cast has been nicely 'pruned', as the few remaining characters really hold your attention and there are none of the "he just went in there on his own, I can tell he's going to die" moments due to this structure.
So I guess the question on the lips of long-term series fans is "how is Freddy?"... Robert Englund kept the role for such a long time that it does become hard to imagine anybody else clad in the striped sweater and finger-blades, but equally hard to imagine him becoming scary again after how far he dipped into the 'wise-cracker' character Freddy became. When the funny-faced Englund with pizza-face makeup would don sunglasses, a super-villain costume, or a power glove, and make some kind of game show host gag about it, it was easy to forget you were looking at the ghost of a brutal child murderer. If you ask me, the only way to have truly brought back Freddy's terrifying nature from the original movie was to re-cast him and to re-design his make-up, and that's exactly what has been done. Englund has been replaced by Jackie Earle Haley - Rorschach from the brilliant 'Watchmen' - and his make-up is what, in anybody's imagination, a horribly burned man would look like - he's disfigured, skin melting, bits of flesh missing to reveal the bone and tendons beneath, and parts have 'healed over'. He is not nice to look at at all, and it will upset some fans, but will scare newcomers in the same way that Englund did in the 70s. Jackie's acting is, as usual, brilliant, both as burn victim Freddy and as the past Fred Krueger, presenting two completely different sides of the character so well that you almost sympathise with him until later revelations.
'Elm Street recreates a brilliant idea from the 70s in a way that is relevant to 2010 and once again scary and believable.
Showgirls (1995)
Brilliant sleazy cult classic, unpredictable and engaging
The ultimate boys' movie? I'd say so, but then that'd be denying it to any women who like to see powerful female characters who put every sleazy, heartless male character in the film in their place. And then get naked.
If I could sum up Showgirls in one sentence it would be "Not what you expect it to be". From the word go, Showgirls is unpredictable to say the least. There are a number of scenes which will have you attempting to predict an ending which any other movie would have gone for, but rejects the Hollywood templates and tells it's own, surprisingly compelling, story.
That's not to say that it isn't swimming with hard-to-believe moments, most characters in the movie seem to have the mood swings of a person with bipolar disorder - the smallest unfortunate event sends the characters into thrashing emotional convulsions while a little good news sends them into giggling ecstacy. It's not necessarily a bad thing in the unusual, illogical world the film creates, but you will be well aware you're watching one-liner spouting cartoons instead of characters you can believe and relate to. Like many cult classics, though, (RoadHouse comes to mind), within a few scenes you'll be immersed in the world of offbeat, sassily-scripted 80s wise crackers.
Of course, this paragraph is inevitable in this kind of movie, and my apologies to the entire female gender, but the real star of this movie is the large amount of female skin on show, and it most certainly delivers. While I don't believe any actor or actress should be cast for their body, Showgirls never fails to deliver some really stunning female figures. Of course this isn't of importance but it's the film's selling point.
Indeed, contrary to what may be implied by the film's poster (or even the name), Showgirls portrays some strong, powerful and unpredictable women with deep and interesting histories, particularly the protagonist, whose character arc you will not even begin to predict. Nomi (Elizabeth Berkley) takes no prisoners and for once a mainstream film doesn't end in apologies and reunions.
Much like the film's recurring theme, Showgirls gambles. Unfortunately not all gambles pay off and I believe this was completely slated by the mainstream critics, but if you're anything like me, this cult classic hits the jackpot.
Psycho (1998)
Better than a colourization
Perhaps a pointless remake, perhaps not, but certainly better than a colourization. This movie is a 99% word-for-word, shot-for-shot, camera-angle-for-camera-angle, set-for-set remake. You're practically watching the same movie, just in colour with today's actors, fashion etc. with one or two little tweaks.
So, certainly, if the original movie was well scripted, well directed and had a good story, this translates over to the remake. The question is, is there any point in watching it? That depends on you. How familiar are you with the original? If it's one you've seen a few times and enjoyed, it might be worth experiencing it again a little sharper, more colourful and up-to-date. If you're a Hitchcock veteran and love the original, you might be disappointed by the different actors and the fact that the creepy black and white atmosphere is drained from it by default. If you've never seen Psycho, well, this is a great way of experiencing it without having to accommodate for datedness.
While there is some occasional cheapness due to remaking a scene exactly, for example a certain exact remake of a violent scene on a staircase seems a little fake in a 1998 film, Psycho's message makes it through, and it's definitely one to show to your younger siblings (or whoever else) whose minds aren't open enough to watch a black and white movie.
Did anybody really imagine Saul Bass' opening credits to be lime green like that though? Ha ha! Red, if anything!
Pointless? Perhaps. But I certainly believe that it's worth doing what you can to keep something good alive, where restrictions of its time cause it to become dated and less accessible. The original has a better atmosphere (due to the black and white) but the story and suspense make it through just fine.
The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) (2011)
A thousand times better than the original
I didn't like The Human Centipede. As much as I like to see originality in films, THC just didn't do it for me at all - I found the fundamental concept laughable, the tone contradictory (intended to be a dark and shocking film, supported by a cast of pantomime characters and a cartoon villain...) and I just couldn't find it in myself to be frightened by the concept of being surgically forced to 'eat da poo poo'.
The Human Centipede 2, on the other hand... Suffice to say I've never seen a movie director improve and mature so much in such a short period of time. THC2: Full Sequence is a gorgeously creative, unique and original film, cultured and sophisticated to the point that it's almost a shame it has to share a name with its predecessor. The first act has more than a little in common with David Lynch's 'Eraserhead', the dream-like atmosphere serving to help you to distance yourself from the rest of the film's explicit content.
THC2 is a meta-sequel, set outside of the world of its namesake - think Return of the Living Dead, Wes Craven's New Nightmare or Halloween III: Season of the Witch - and revolves around a mute, asthma inhaler wielding sociopath, obsessed with the original film, attempting to recreate its "100% medically accurate" content for real, substituting surgical experience with brute force, a crowbar and staple gun.
Here's the thing - the film is difficult to review as the 'good film checklist' doesn't apply here. THC2 can't be judged on the same scale as your typical movie because of the way it tells its story. For example, the severe lack of character development is one of the film's strongest points; the director wants you to follow one character - the antagonist (or protagonist?) - as he works on his 'project'. I can guarantee you'll find pages of reviews ridiculing the lack of any character development for any of the innocent people who meet their gory fates here, but this and the black & white presentation shift the focus away from 'nasty scary movie' and in the direction of an intriguing art film. You aren't supposed to be fearing for the lives of the innocents, but rather watching in fascination, almost seeing the world through the eyes of the 'villain', to whom these humans are no more than ingredients in his recipe.
I would also expect to see many reviewers claiming this film to be 'the most explicit thing (they've) seen', and while objectionable content is probably more prevalent here than in many (or any) other mainstream movies, I risk repeating myself in stating that this really isn't the focus.
I was as happy as a pig in the brown stuff to have such a stylised, almost Lynch-like film sprung on me in the middle of one of my mates' regular beer & double-feature nights which usually entail brainless horror films, but it wasn't without its share of drawbacks, particularly later on in the film when a pregnant character endures a far-too-predictable and completely implausible sequence of events.
Overall an impressive and ferociously unique film, bound to anger a few prudes. Watch it just to be able to say that you've watched it, and hopefully you will appreciate this surprising leap forward for the post-Hostel gore genre as I did. I can't wait to see what comes next.