From Zombos Closet

Movies (Horror)

The Darkest Hour (2011)

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The_Darkest_Hour_Theatrical_PosterZombos Says: Good

Watching The Darkest Hour reminded me of the 1954 movie, Target Earth. The similarities would be sparsely marauding alien invaders, standardized and blandly irrational and frenzied survivors looking for a way out of a desolate city, and dialog written and delivered with the emotional intensity of one hand clapping.

Unlike Target Earth‘s robots from Venus (actually only one was ever shown menacing the survivors), The Darkest Hour has a few more CGI aliens conveniently rolling around in their protective invisible balls of armor, incinerating anyone in their path. I don’t recall why the robots invaded earth in 1954, but these ball-o-fire aliens of 2011 are plundering our planet for its natural resources in a drill, baby, drill paroxysm of destruction. You could do better for a holiday movie, but you could also do worse.

The alien-vision POV as people are hunted down conveys other-worldliness well enough on a budget, and the actors are only poorly written into their characters, although the stoic militia leader (Gosha Kutsenko) grinds out his “Moscow’s got our back” patriotism badly enough to make you groan. Given more to work with, I’d expect more acting, too.

Two young entrepenuers, Sean and Ben (Emile Hirsch,  Max Minghella) wind up in Moscow after being fleeced by Skyler, a corporate wolf (Joel Kinnaman) who steals their idea for a mobile app that guides travelers to local hotspots of iniquity. So, of course, when survivors are surviving, Sean and Ben find themselves holed up with Skyler. Cue the we-hate-your-guts-but-let’s-get-through-this-first turmoil. Now add two girls, Natalie and Anne (Olivia Thirlby,  Rachael Taylor) the boys run into in one of those hotspots, a resourceful old codger of a scientist who figures out the aliens can be toasted with a homemade microwave gun, some flimflam about a Faraday Cage to support the need for making their way to a nuclear sub waiting for survivors in the harbor–survivors with radios, anyway, who heard the broadcast–and a ragtag militia for comic relief (very little relief) fighting with their wits and whatever else they find will work against the aliens, and you’ve got almost a complete story, give or take some beats; enough to be watchable and guiltily enjoyable (like those Roger Corman Syfy movies).

That’s pretty much it. Chris Gorak directs the action with gusto, but he dozes during downtimes, and lighter moments aren’t deftly handled. Everything else, like the by-the-script bickering, the standard, doing stupid crazy tricks to get yourself killed moments, the not so surprising finding-by-accident ways to avoid the aliens, and a token patriotic ferver that makes Independence Day look like a masterpiece of rousing nationalism in comparison, will keep you waiting for more, which, in the long run, keeps you watching. Go figure.

Fright Night (2011)
A Well Done Stake

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Davidtennant_frightnight
Zombos Says: Good

In this remake of 1985’s Fright Night, Jerry (Colin Farrell) is the vampire living next door to Charlie Brewster (Anton Yelchin). Although he’s Twilight sexy (Chris Sarandon in the original was Disco sexy), Jerry’s still got that nasty shark-toothed over-bite, although when his mouth does its CGI stretch it lacks the drool-dripping, visceral punch of the old-style analog mechanical effect . Surprisingly, Jerry also lacks sexual tension. All he really cares about is his next meal. An isolated housing development gone bust, located on the outskirts of Las Vegas, provides all the takeout he can handle until Charlie realizes why an increasing number of kids aren’t showing up for classes.

This go round, times have changed: Charley’s cool by not being a horror movie-loving geek, and his home is surrounded by desolation and “House For Sale” signs; and Roddy McDowall’s tuned-out horror host turned vampire slayer is upstaged by Tennant’s hip-deep-shallow Peter Vincent, a boozy, profane Las Vegas punk-goth-rock stage magician with Peter Frampton locks, Chris Angel darks, and Mick Jagger thins.

What this updated and glossier version offers is a one-two punch delivered by Farrell and Tennant and no ridiculous sequel–yet–to ignore. (Any Fright Night fan who dares think 1988’s Fright Night Part 2 is remotely worthwhile is persona non grata as far as I’m concerned.) I naturally gravitate toward Tennant, being a Dr. Who fan and all, but here he’s part Doctor-making-a-house-call, a tad much of a sod, and all together shamelessly sixes and sevens throughout. His manic cursing and alcohol-induced distancing keeps it dicey flippant while Farell plays Jerry entirely darkly black-humored, and egotistically nasty-mean: he’s been around for over 400 years, so he’s got attitude.

The revelation for Charlie comes after his outcast former friend Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse)  disappears, leaving surveillance video behind of Jerry, only you don’t see Jerry because vampires–say it with me, faithful ones–don’t cast reflections because they have no souls. When Jerry knows that Charlie knows, the cat and mouse fun begins, and Jerry introduces the simple concept of no home? no invitation needed to enter! limiting Charlie’s defensive strategy when Jerry blows it up. I can tell you Jerry’s a lot more direct in this version. He doesn’t have a lacky servant like the green goo-filled handyman Sarandon had in 1985 to do his dirty work.

An exuberant car chase adds a cameo for Sarandon and more CGI opportunities for mayhem as Charlie works the kinks out of his vampire defense. Vincent offers some advice and his collection of vampire-hunting artifacts, but doesn’t want to get involved for personal reasons, which are made clear later on. There’s a funny–although now standard for hip horror movies–bit involving an eBay-purchased automatic stake-gun, and more humor to be found in the final confrontation beneath Jerry’s abode. He’s a subterranean vampire, so he likes to dig a lot.

I criticized the shock-drop opening in Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, but I’ll go gentler with the one used here as Jerry obliterates an entire family in the blood-spattered opening minutes. It’s confusing until the rest of the movie catches up with it and it’s still a cheap shot I associate more with straight to DVD amateur endeavors. Do some directors really think horror fans need a quick and loosely attached gore-jolt to settle down for the rest of the movie? 

What this new Fright Night lacks is not the talent or the production quality;  it misses the mark on raising the emotional thermometer, the feeling a movie  can roll you over with, like a steamroller, if its story invests you in it. A handful of horror movies do this and, more and more it seems, many are only concerned with the CGI-involved action quotient instead of the needed quality time between it. Remember the attack on Peter Vincent by Evil Ed in 1985? If you haven’t seen it, watch the original Fright Night, then compare that simpler scene to the CGI-effects laden penthouse smackdown in this movie. You tell me which one has more feeling.

Sure, the special effects may be so cool now, Brewster! but back then you had heart. I’d stake my expert opinion on it.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (2011)

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DBAotD
Zombos Says: Good

One criticizes Guillermo del Toro at one’s peril. He’s become a savior to fans of the Cinema Fantastic, the horrific, and the arabesque in movies, wielding his creative sword to smite mainstream naysayers into acquiessence with tales of morose children imperiled by Baroque situations. This is another such tale, although it’s based on the television movie that frightened del Toro and many other genre fans–myself included–when it first aired in 1973.  The criticism I’ll dare to level here is del Torro’s glossier version tries very hard to impress, but never actually does because he builds it on familial relationships overused in horror movies: the displaced, unhappy kid with separated parents and an unwanted stepmom; and he replaces simple, old-fashioned mystery-building with letting the CGI boys run wild. Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is a good monster movie, it’s just not a good scary one.

I’ll lay some of the blame with director Troy Nixey. The opening shock-drop–what I call those brief, jarring scenes often used at the beginning of straight-to-DVD-movies–of Blackwood (Gary McDonald), the house’s first tenant desperately trying to get his missing son back, robs the suspense we needed as Sally (Bailee Madison) pays a forced visit to her architect dad (Guy Pierce) and his live-in, interior designer girlfriend (Katie Holmes). They’re renovating a brooding Gothic mansion surrounded by intimidating formal gardens and filled with dark hallways and subterranean pests. Shades of Arthur Machen’s forestry horrors and startling Pickman’s Model revelations are hinted, but del Toro gives them fan-boy nods instead of plumbing deeper while Nixey’s CGI animators and production designers direct the action out from under him. It all looks fantastic, but doesn’t play fantastic.

Transitioning the original danger of threatened adult (Kim Darby in the televised version) to threatened child–we’re told the underground creatures love to eat children’s teeth after terrorizing them–should have pumped up the quotient for eldritch terror dramatically, but it doesn’t. We all ready know the threat looming after the opening few minutes and must wait for sullen Sally and everyone else to catch up;  except for the laconic groundskeeper (every brooding mansion must have one) Mr. Harris (Jack Thompson). He knows about the nasty buggers waiting behind the ash pit grate in the hidden basement, but damned if he’ll tell anyone before they slice and dice him to a bloody pulp. Which brings me to another pet peeve I have with laconic groundskeepers in horror movies: namely that they’re always laconic when they should be screaming bloody hell warnings, and they always spill the few beans well after the time they really needed to spill them ahead of. You can call it script contrivance, or even crafty planning depending on how it’s used, but its use is often counterproductive, like the shock-drop that reveals much of the mystery before any detection can begin. I will call them cheap shots. I expected more from del Toro.

I also expected less. Suspense gives way to too much CGI conflict between Sally, the adults, and the evil goblins living beneath the mansion: brief scenes of eyes looking through keyholes, being threatened by pointy objects poised to strike from the other side; longer scenes of straight-razor dalliance at ankle level; and an encounter with a toolbox worth of pointy objects aiming through the darkness, capped by close-ups of goblins wreaking havoc, illustrate the story like a fairy tale book’s pictures without embellishing its emotional contextual ambience.  Nixey knits scenes together with little suspense building: the house is creepy dark, got that; the basement’s one of del Toro’s nightmarish wetdreams, got that, too; but so what? More feeling and less seeing would have elevated Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark to scare the bejesus stature.

It’s a shame del Toro wasn’t able to recapture the terror he felt when he  first saw Kim Darby being victimized by the goblins. That sense of terror needed to be here. It isn’t, although it looks like it is.

Final Destination 5
Ode On A Deathly Turn

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Urn

THOU 5th installment of gory loudness,

Thou oft repeated script of messy deaths in time and time again,

Cinema horror fan, who canst thus express

Such bread and butter tales more bloodily than our rhyme:

What bowel-fringed tissue fragments haunt about thy screen

Round loose heads or flopping appendages, or of both,

In air flying or across floors smearing, outside or in?

What victims are these? What maidens quartered thus?

Which death pursues? What struggle to escape when sequels beckon?

What screams and entrails? What wild ecstatic gore?

Seen terminus’s are sweet, but those bleeding reddest

  Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft impalings, gut on;

Not to the sensual eye, but, more endear’d,

Slice to the entrails, tear the eyes, these messy ditties:

Fair youth, beneath the car, thou canst not breath

  Thy song of fear, nor ever can these scenes be fair;

Bold victim, never, never canst thou live,

Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;

You cannot fade, though thou hast not thy stomach nor other bodily parts,

For ever wilt thou die, for Death be not fair!

Ah, happy, happy fans! that cannot shed

  Your quest for gore, nor ever bid the grue adieu;

And, happy dramatist, unwearièd,

For ever piping scripts for ever over and over again;

More happy death! more happy, happy death!

For ever breathing warm, and wet, sopped to overflowing,

For ever panting, and for ever young;

All breathing human misery far above,

That leaves a heart bursting forth, and cloyed over rest,

On burning forehead, a dislodged tongue, or cleaved breast.

Who are these critics coming to the sacrifice?

To what film altar, O mysterious critic,

Lead’st thou that review lowing at the tale,

And all its slimey flanks with gorelands drest?

What nestled town by river or sea-shore,

Or home-built citadel in city or temple,

Is emptied of its victims, this pious morn?

And, nestled town, thy streets for evermore

  Will no longer silent be; and not a soul, to tell

    Why thou’s art’s so desolate, can e’er return,

Till sequel plays havoc once again.

O terror shape! fear attitude! with dread

Of creature men and bosomy maidens overwrought,

With frightful branches thick with the trodden bowels;

  Thou, noisome form! dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold tableau!

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, to kindle other woe, more

  Than ours, a fiend to all, to whom thou say’st,

‘Horror is truth, truth horror,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,

Till the next final destination.

 

by John M. “Keets” Cozzoli

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)
Aliens Home on the Range

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Cowboysandaliens
Zombos Says: Very Good

Three things make Cowboys & Aliens a sure-fire, popcorn-gumption summer movie: Harrison Ford, Daniel Craig, and it shies away from the lackluster graphic novel it’s based on. Grimy tough cowboys, vile aliens, and noble Indians go head on in rousing, mixed-genre action after outlaw Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) wakes up with a Clint Eastwood glare, no memory, and a very useful weapon wrapped around one arm.

Mixed genre meandering between Westerns and science fiction isn’t new: Gene Autry tackled invaders from the underground nation of Murania in 1935’s The Phantom Empire, along with a robot, a few musical interludes, and ray-guns. There aren’t any robots or musical numbers in Cowboys & Aliens, and the time period is Arizona in the 1870s. The invaders come from outer space instead of inner space, although they do bury their mining ship deep to extract gold, and as Ella (Olivia Wilde) says, they look on humans as we would insects. She should know since she’s also an alien (no spoiler here, it’s telegraphed loud and clear the minute she appears). Her race was decimated by these gold-loving, vivisecting monstrosities with their surprise– coming-out-from-where?– appendages. As bug-eyed, mucousy, multi-limbed, naked alien creatures with advanced technology go–this motif is becoming as old as the Western hills–they at least provide a bona fide threat to the townspeople of dusty Absolution, and are more tension-building than the graphic novel’s more cartoony predators.

In his review, Roger Ebert mentions that if you take away the aliens you’d still have a good Western movie. He’s right. At its core, Cowboys & Aliens brings to its rugged terrain the tried and true: the ornery cattleman making his own law; his out of control son bullying townspeople; an honorable sheriff upholding the law though it could get him killed; a struggling, tender footed saloon keeper who doesn’t carry a gun but needs to; the common-sense, steady as a rock preacher (the intimidating Clancy Brown from The Burrowers); and the notorious outlaw regretting his past deeds as soon as he remembers them.  The shaggy dog and worried kid round out this home on the range.

Harrison Ford’s Woodrow Dolarhyde is gruff, civil war weary, and bitter, providing lots of room for potential soul-searching growth, especially with his son Percy (Paul Dano). He and Lonergan lock horns over stolen gold, but a strafing run by marauding spaceships brings everyone quickly and reluctantly together. Percy and townspeople are lassoed by the small ships and whisked away until Lonergan’s weapon activates. A posse is formed to go after one alien that escapes from its downed ship. The trail leads them to an upside down riverboat steamer–far from a body of water– where they spend the night to get out of the rain. The alien attacks, making the posse a lot leaner.

Needing more help, Lonergan seeks out his former gang, but they aren’t happy to see him after he absconded with Dolarhyde’s gold coins from their coach robbery. Another attack by the aliens saves Lonergan but brings in the Apaches, who are uniquely persauded by Ella to provide a medicinal remedy for his amnesia, which brings a heap of guilt and remorse as he remembers, along with the location of the alien mothership he had escaped from. Everyone saddles up for the showdown with the Apaches taking the high ground, the cowboys taking the low ground, and Lonergan heading into the mothership to rescue the townsfolk.

As current horror and science fiction movies would have it, the aliens are tough as rawhide, pug-ugly, much stronger, and they fight hand to hand (they’ve got a lot of them) without using any of their advanced weaponry. Jon Favreau captures enough of the tumbling tumbleweed desolation and the stable of writers (7 plus!) behaved well enough to capture Wild West grit.

I think Louis L’Amour would have liked it, although I personally think adding a Gatling gun alien mow down would have made it a hog killin’ time to the manor born for sure.

Uzumaki (Spiral, 2000)

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Uzumaki_shot2a
Zombos Says: Excellent

As Shuichi’s father says, “One brings forth one’s own uzumaki!” in this dark glimpse into Lovecraftian terror and looming doom.  Uzumaki is director Higuchinsky’s cinematic distillation of in-need-of-therapy Jungi Ito’s three volume, manga-sized descent into madness and chaos. The town of Kurozu-cho is beset by spirals, spinning the lives and minds of the townspeople, and changing them in  ghastly ways.  Higuchinsky captures the grotesque and arabesque images of Ito’s manga by using tightly framed, sharply angled views, tinted  green to accentuate the weirdness. There’s a panoply of bread and butter cinematography used to contrast against the spiral terror: tracking shots, panning shots, close-ups, and hazy, ghostly faces appear and fade. CGI spirals twirling in unexpected places on the screen also appear throughout the movie.

The story begins as flashback, told by Kirie (Eriko Hatsune), a young girl who sees the effects of the curse descending on her small, isolated town by the water. A gust of wind scatters leaves around her, startling her into remembering. Or is she forgetting? The mesmerizing vortex is never-ending, and perhaps Higuchinsky is telling us Kirie is caught in a larger one of time, folding over and over on itself in repetition, trapping her and her town by its endless looping.

Shuichi (Fhi Fan), Kirie’s morose, since-childhood, boyfriend tells her of his fears the town is beset by a curse of spirals. His father (Ren Ohsugi), consumed with thoughts of them, becomes an early victim.  Kirie sees him filming a snail. He ignores her. He begins to ignore everything except the spiral pattern he seeks out. He steals the hair salon’s spiraling sign and devours spiral noodles. A startling transformation, before a more physically terminal one, shows him exerting his own uzumaki by impossibly spiraling his eyes after seeking the pattern is no longer satisfying.

More victims follow as Kirie’s classmates  succumb to physical transformations with some turning into slimy human snails, another girl vainly sports a new hairdo of enormous black spirals imbued with their own life,  and a boy committing suicide splatters at the foot of the school’s spiral staircase. Someone remarks how happy his broken, blood-smeared face looks in death.

Spiraling out of control deaths escalate: first perplexed by Shuichi’s father’s enfatuation with spirals, Kirie’s own father (Taro Suwa), a pottery maker, becomes enthralled with the swirling clay to his detriment;  Shuichi’s mother (Keiko  Takahashi) collapses at the funeral for his father when she sees his face spiraling in the sky against swirling curls of smoke rising from the crematorium. She goes mad and cuts off her hair and fingertips to eliminate looking at anything resembling a spiral; an unwanted suitor for Kirie fatally wraps himself around a moving car’s wheel; and even Shuichi finally succumbs to the twisting madness permeating the sky, the ground, and eventually everyone. Even the tunnel leading into the town becomes useless, twisting on itself so no one can leave or enter.

A news reporter hunts down tantalizing clues for the curse involving serpents, mirrors, and Dragonfly Pond, the possible source of the growing otherworldliness. These hints at the cause for the bedevilment descending on the town ultimately tease but never explain. Various elements from the trilogy are here, but the final revelation of the curse, and its more visually gruesome encounters such as Umbilical Cord ( in volume 2) and The Scar (volume 1) are missing in this evocative Lovecraftian horror. That’s a shame. Uzumaki captures the manga mood of Ito’s spiral horrors so well, to see these additional terrors onscreen would have been like tasting the rich icing on a moist red velvet cake touched with cinnamon: sickeningly sweet but damn satisfying.

TrollHunter (2010) Troll-ble With Giants

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troll hunter posterZombos Says: Very Good

I had two questions in mind after watching Andre Ovredal’s TrollHunter: Why does Hans (Otto Jespersen) work alone, and why can’t American Horror movies take off-the-wall risks like this small budget Norwegian movie more often?

Hans is the laconic troll hunter followed by three students from Volda College. They’re filming a documentary about bear poaching and he’s pointed out by the local hunters who suspect him because he’s a stranger. He tells them to go away, but they persist and follow him at night, deep into the woods. Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), the leader of the trio, makes a joke about meeting inbred pig farmers (but this is not a French Horror movie, so he needn’t worry).

Now comes the refreshingly audacious part: flashes of light and strange roars in the distance, followed by Hans running past them yelling “Troll!” I’m thinking this is going to be silly and it is, terrifyingly so. The troll crashes through the trees he nearly towers over and hunts them. All of the trolls in this movie are big or bigger, slow moving, and look like Jim Henson’s furry Muppets, but uglier and nastier than you’d find on Sesame Street. They are also quick to kill in this mockumentary, especially if they smell Christian blood. Hans isn’t sure about a Muslim’s blood when asked if the trolls hate it, too.

Hans uses UV light to turn the three-headed troll chasing them to stone. Later, the veterinarian he works with explains the biological factors behind that for us, but UV light either makes them explode if they’re young, or turns them into concrete if they’re old. Seriously. It’s this droll seriousness that keeps TrollHunter’s humor from trumping it’s chills, which come each time we meet different trolls,  each getting bigger as we do. Telling Thomas, Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) the cameraman, and Johanna (Johanna Morck)—who holds onto a boom microphone—that he “doesn’t get a night bonus,” Hans finally agrees to let them follow him as he hunts trolls for the Troll Security Service. The TSS, using bear attacks as a cover, is not happy Hans let the secret out.

The funniest images happen when the veterinarian tells Hans she needs a blood sample. The needle he uses is a tad smaller than the one they used in the Amazing Colossal Man, but it’s still big enough to be a clown’s prop. Dressing in what looks like a suit of armor with a big red button on his chest, he carries a bucket filled with a “Christian man’s blood” to attract a troll living under a bridge. There’s a terminal amount of blood in that bucket so I wonder how he got it. After getting chomped on, slammed, and dunked by the annoyed troll, Hans warns Thomas not to touch the button as Thomas helps him up.

Given the this-is-film-footage-found-after-the-fact style of this movie, with the now standard night-vision scenery and budgeted special-effects viewing angles further obscured by shaky-cam, the story hangs onto its Blair Witch quality of suspenseful immediacy at the cost of details, especially when that footage ends abruptly.

Even so, the American remake is already around the corner. We’re always good at taking safe risks after others take the more riskier ones.

Super 8 (2011): The Gang’s All Here

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Super8
Zombos Says: Very Good (but will seem very familiar)

The gang’s all here in J. J. Abrams’ Super 8. You’ll recognize them from The Goonies, The Monster Squad, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial: there’s the fat kid waiting for his lean years; the geeky kid with needed gadgets (explosive ones this time); the love-struck kid dealing with loss; the cute, hip girl everyone likes more than she likes herself; and parents who stay in the background much of the time because this is not their story. What’s different is the monsterkid nostalgia you’ll experience if you’ve ever held an 8mm camera to film backyard horror movies, or dry-brushed Aurora model kits with Testors paints, or just wore dark paisley shirts with big collars, sported mutton chops, and listened to music cassette tapes while cruising.

Charles (Riley Griffiths) is the fat kid who’s directing a zombie movie everyone’s got a part in. He’s secretly got a crush on the cute girl, Alice (Elle Fanning), so arranges for her to drive them to the train station late at night for a shoot. The Dick Smith’s Do-It-Yourself Monster Make-Up Handbook geeky kid, Joe (Joel Courtney), unknowingly mucks it up by falling for Alice, but he does fantastic zombie make-up so Charles can’t lose him. Watch the gang’s finished ‘movie’ during the end credits and you’ll see the same Dick Smithish zombie kid stumbling in different scenes, although he’s killed each time. Getting to the end credits is a Spielbergian adventure seen through Abrams’ eyes and the avocado greens and harvest golds of 1970s melange.

A mysterious late night train surprises the kids during taping, and when it’s driven off the rails, it surprises us. An almost endless shooting gallery of heavy train cars, twisting metal, flaming explosions, and mad dashes through it all flying through the air, thunking down too close, becomes absurd, outrageous, and awesome. The incendiary-prone geeky kid (Ryan Lee) eats it all up with relish. What comes out of one of the train cars is a multi-legged nightmare for the small town and a Hardy Boys mystery for the kids to solve. The adults get in the way without realizing it, but youthful resourcefulness pays off when the military takes over the investigation of the train derailment, and the hunt for the missing living cargo. Of course there’s the essential antagonistic-and-sadistic-career-military-guy-who’s-sinister-agenda-only-makes-things-worse running the investigation (Noah Emmerich).

Charles, taking a page from the Roger Corman school of filming, unperturbed, takes advantage of the army’s investigation and train derailment by including them in his taping. His investigator (Gabriel Basso) conducts an investigation while the military conducts theirs in the backgrounds of his scenes.

The often hopped-up, long-haired, electronics store shlub Charles gives his 8mm film to have developed provides necessary ground transportation in exchange for a date with Charles’ hot sister as the hunt picks up speed for the monster, the really pissed-off something kidnapping townspeople, wrecking property, and driving all the dogs away. It’s unhappy and angry from being locked up for years. Coincidentally, Joe is unhappy and angry because his mom was killed at the steel mill and his dad ignores him. And Joe’s dad is unhappy and angry at Alice’s dad, who was supposed to be working that shift where she died instead. And Alice is unhappy and angry with her dad because he can’t get over his guilt, either, or the loss of her mom. Her dad’s a long haired shlub, too, but he has his moments of redemption. And redemption comes for everyone when it’s needed the most.

Super 8 isn’t a coming of age movie. It’s not really meant to be a nostalgic mind trip, either, though some of us will be reminded of nostalgic things and yearn for them again. It’s even not a Spielberg adventure, but the camera movements and your emotions will remind you of what those adventures were like, except Super 8‘s more up to date in its nostalgic hipness.

It knows what we miss and gives it back for a little while.

Pirates of the Caribbean
On Stranger Tides (2011)

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On_stranger_tides Zombos Says: Good 

“I simply do not buy Penelope Cruz in the role of Blackbeard’s daughter, Angelica,” said Zombos, stretching his long legs and leaning back in his short chair. We had just finished watching Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides at a local theater; in 2D not 3D, since the movie was atmospherically murky enough.

I started crossing my short legs, but in the process tipped over the gigunda-sized popcorn bucket I had barely touched, spilling its contents all over Zombos’ expensive Mezlan Giambis. Those are frightfully expensive shoes by the way. He alternated shaking his feet, but the buttery kernels stuck fast. He grimaced and swung his legs away from me.

He continued. “With her diminutive presence, she hardly holds her own between Ian McShane’s smoldering Blackbeard and Johnny Depp’s conniving, roguish Jack Sparrow. She looks so blow-the-man-down fragile. How can anyone possibly believe she is the daughter of a demonic pirate? Missed the casting boat on that one I dare say.”

“Aye,” I said, “and quite a demonic pirate Blackbeard is. I’ll say this movie careens into darker territory, bordering horror, and shows less of the loaded to the gunwalls playfulness  toning the other movies.”

“Where would you say the horror elements come into play?” asked Zombos, continuing to shake his shoes every now and then. I pretended not to notice.

“The mermaids for one, when they need to get a single tear from one for the Fountain of Youth to work. Vampire-like fangs, frisky evil intent; they’re seductive yet monstrous as they seduce the sailors, then drag them under to drown and devour. It’s a well-choreographed fight. You’ve got Blackbeard using his crew as bait to bring in the mermaids, and when they come it’s every man for himself. Just like in a horror movie.”

I continued. “Then there’s Blackbeard’s quiet but deliberate entrance during the mutiny on his ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, with his hair coils glowing red and smoking at their ends, a stark contrast–his sinister demeanor I mean–against Jack’s grog and looping swagger deportment. Blackbeard’s voodoo powers, his zombiefied men–a nod to the popularity of zombies more than a properly fitting story element–peg him more as supernatural horror threat than did Captain Barbossa’s curse in the first two movies.”

“Yes,” said Zombos, ” waving his cutlass to control the ship’s cordage to entangle his mutinous Jack Tars and stop them, Blackbeard does cut a strikingly horrific figure: evil to be reckoned with or avoided. And seems there is always a prophecy to spur on the wicked: a one-legged man to spell his doom. I wonder how he found it out?

“Geoffrey Rush’s Barbossa is almost as sinister and callous as Blackbeard, a departure from his earlier helm at captaincy,” I added.

“Well,” interjected Zombos, “if you had to cut off your leg to save yourself from Blackbeard, I  suppose you would become quite soured and surly yourself. Superb way to carry a rum bottle, though.”

“True, but since the story’s jury rigged from Tim Power’s On Stranger Tides, I’d guess that’s another  reason for discrepancies in characters from the first three movies and this one. The lower budget keeps it less ambitious in swashbuckle and six pounders, too. Or maybe the tempo is off because Gore Verbinski didn’t direct his pirates this time around.”

“Budget may be another good reason, since it was filmed in Hawaii instead of the Caribbean. Pirates of Hawaii does not sound as imposing, does it,” quipped Zombos, stretching his legs out again. “Given all the computer enhanced scenery, I am not sure location matters all that much anymore.”

“The coach chase through London didn’t seem budget-restricted,” I said.  “Lots of clamor and mayhem.”

“Still, there is plenty of fodder for another go round,” said Zombos.

“Right,” I jumped in. “There’s the voodoo doll of Jack–glad we stayed past the credits to see the teaser with Angelica–the Black Pearl shrunk and pickled in a bottle, along with all the other ships Blackbeard had captured. And the possibility of a merman popping up, given the romantic entanglement between Philip (Sam Claflin) and the fetching mermaid Syrena (Astrid Berges-Frisbey). Enough elements for Jack to sail round the seas again should the Hollywood winds take him.”

“With Kevin McNally as Gibbs by his side I would hope. He personifies the pirate wannabe in all of us even more than Jack,” Zombos summed up.

I crossed my legs the other way. I didn’t see the gigunda-sized Coke I had bought but hardly drank–too many trips to the bathroom with that one–and tipped it over. Zombos almost caught the wave, but managed to scrunch into a ball before it reached his shoes. He slowly unfolded his legs away from me. Again.

“You guys done?” asked a pimply-faced kid holding a carpet whisk almost as thin as he was. He dropped the bucket with determination and began sweeping up the spilled popcorn.

“You may need to swab the deck here,” I told him, pointing to the floor in front of Zombos. ” I spilled some Coke.”

He grimaced at me, too.

Priest (2011)

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Print007 Zombos Says:  Good

I saw Priest and Thor on the same day, but in different theaters. Both used a prologue (backstory preamble) to prep the audience for their stories. My favorite prologue, by the way, is the Sauron battle in Lord of the Rings.

Priest uses an animated one, which, like the one in Jonah Hex , is unnecessary and ill-fitting: the cartoon story transitions poorly to the live action one. I would have preferred being dropped knee-deep in Priest‘s Blade Runner cities, Mad Max wastelands, and Old West outposts without a cartoon explanation. It’s about vampires running rampant. I get that. It’s about the church using the vampire threat to create a controlled and repressed society dominated by Christian faith. I got that, too.

The CGI vampires in Priest are blind, monstrous, and live in hives held together by their slimy body fluids. They look and move like typical video game monsters and have protruding upper and lower fangs much too long. There’s a queen mother for the hive, like Alien, and human familiars—Renfield-like servants to the vampires—who look moribund themselves. People live in large walled cities or Wild West looking  settlements. The cities are all slimy, techno-grunge decay with video-confession kiosks arranged like Porta-Johns on the streets, and the settlements are located in the wastelands outside the cities, a post-apocalyptic landscape with high radioactivity and voracious vampires looking to make a comeback, led by a hybrid super vampire with dreams of gory.

It works in spite of its derivative dialog and posturing because the plot is uncomplicated–a renegade priest risks excommunication by declaring the vampires are back–and the action is straightforward–the priests (and priestesses) trained to be vampire-killers are kick ass at what they do.  What doesn’t work is the 3D because it’s ignored: in daylight the wastelands are bleached white, leaving no contrast for depth, and at night it’s too dark for highlights, which again are needed for depth. Worse, the movie was 2D changed to 3D.

When a homestead is attacked and a girl (Lily Collins) taken by the vampires, Priest (Paul Bettany) defies Monsignor Orelas (Christopher Plummer) and heads to the wasteland, on a rad motorcycle, to kick up some dust. He teams with Sherif Hicks (Cam Gigandet) to find the girl. The monsignor sends priests and a priestess (Maggie Q) after Priest. They ride rad motorcycles, too.

At Mira Sola, a vampire hive Priest still has nightmares over, a tangle with a large hive guardian and a discovery of what the vampires are up to leads to a showdown aboard a fast moving train heading to Cathedral City, where the sun never shines. Motorcycles replace horses, and Black Hat (Karl Urban) fills the role of villain.

Insidious (2010)
Poltergeist On Elm Street

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Insidious Zombos Says: Good

Combining Poltergeist‘s spectre of evil intent poised at the threshold, and Nightmare On Elm Street‘s gloved spiritus emeritus, Insidious provides scares aplenty, making it a perfect first date movie.

The evil intent comes from unwholesome spirits trapped in the Further, a place that’s dark, endless, and appears to be one train stop from Hell. The paranormal investigator who explains the Further takes too much time to do it, and gives us more mumbo jumbo about it, and astral projection, than we really need to know; but getting to this point and moving on from it are what make this popcorn movie from director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell so much fun.

The Lambert family moves into their new home, a dark old house that has a darker, creepier attic. Soon, voices coming from the baby’s monitor, dark shapes moving between rooms, neatly shelved books found scattered on the floor, and banging on the front door in the dead of night make mom Renai (Rose Byrne) fearful the house is haunted. When her son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) cannot wake up, and the loud noises and disturbances escalate, she insists they move.  Her husband Josh (Patrick Wilson) reluctantly agrees.

Their new, new home is brighter and cheerier until those disturbances start up again. Muting colors increases the dread. When the Lamberts are in the older, darker house, it’s still a tad brighter before Dalton falls into his coma-like sleep, then the color fades away. Color returns in their second home until the haunting continues, then it fades. Josh is losing his color, too. He avoids going home, saying he needs to stay late at work, leaving Renai terrorise en solo. Her mother-in-law Lorraine (Barbara Hershey) believes her: Lorraine has seen and spoken to the evil shadow with the red face hovering near Dalton’s bed.  She knows what it wants. She explains why Josh has been avoiding the situation and why there are no photographs of him as a child.

Elise (Lyn Shaye), a psychic investigator and family friend,  is called in. Elise’s two nerdy, geek-squad-style investigators pull out the ghost-hunting gadgetry and start searching for evidence, each trying to top the other with his technical savior faire. When one pulls out a flashlight after the lights go out, the other pulls out a bigger flashlight. Elise sees the red-faced thing hovering around the boy and realizes Dalton, like his father, has out of body experiences–astral projection–and has traveled too far into The Further: a place where spirits and demons dwell. He’s stuck in The Further while they try to take over his body and use it as a bridge to reenter the living world.

It’s hard to tell when Wan is being cheeky or serious, especially when Elise dons a goofy gas mask contraption to enter a trance, but the chills keep coming. I counted four jump scares I jumped at, then stopped counting but didn’t stop jumping. Insidious plays like a William Castle spookfest. One of the pararnormal investigators even has his own makeshift version of Illusion-O to find spirits by looking through different colored filters.

If you insist on eating popcorn while watching this movie make sure it’s not buttered; the people sitting around you will appreciate that. It also helps not to have buttered fingers when you need to reassure your date everything is okay. She (or he) will need lots of reassurance.

Season of the Witch (2010)
A Short Season

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Print001 Zombos Says: Good (in spite of itself)

There is a lot to dislike about Season of the Witch. For one,  the disenchanted knights awol from the Crusades, Felson and Behmen (Ron Perlman and Nicolas Cage), left their acting bleeding on the battlefield. I like Cage and Perlman. They are capable of much better.

Then there is the flippantly modern dialog, which grates against the grittiness of Medieval grime and Black Death Plague. Felson and Behmen might as well have been taxi drivers picking up fares in Wormwood Forest the way they banter. I don’t know when English language contractions first took hold, but given my understanding of the Dark Ages, their speech oft vexed my ears. Not that I expected Shakespearean diction, mind you, but I question director Dominic Sena’s undermining of his historical illusion in this way. Thankfully he didn’t add a thumping rock score.

Print003

For more dislikes I’ll add: the superfluous voice-over ruining the mood of the ending long shot; the Devil’s wimpy voice (both of them, oddly enough), and the dead monks scampering across the walls–so J-Horror yesterday, you know what I mean?–were enough to make me write ill about them.

And so I have.

But Season of the Witch is still a good movie in spite of itself. It just doesn’t try hard enough (aka poor choices made in production). It hurries past its subtexts like the opening montage of battles hurries us through the long years of Crusading in just a few moments, and leaves us accepting it all at face value.

A peaches and cream complexioned young woman (Claire Foy) is accused of witchcraft and blamed for causing the plague. The church desperately needs to transport her to a monastery whose  monks possess the only copy of The Greater Key of Solomon (though I believe it’s referred to as The Book of Solomon in the movie). The book contains the incantation to de-witchify her and stop the plague. Felson and Behmen are coerced into doing the transporting, though they have their doubts she’s a witch and distrust the priest (Stephen Campbell Moore) accompanying them. They also need to pass through gloomy and doomy Wormwood Forest, fraught with perils, to get there.

Now let the terror begin, or the uncertainty of the truth ignite conflict within the group, or the lost faith of both knights rekindle. Although all three of these elements fitfully glimmer they never infect the dramatis personae enough to deepen the drama or tie our emotions to it.

The uninspired and budget-limited computer-generated imagery, and the overly done Elephant Man-styled special effects makeup for plague victims–while attention to basic detail is missing–is a distraction. Look closely at Cardinal D’Ambroise’s (Christopher Lee) forehead covered in large, bubbling cysts. You will see the ambitious rubber piece droop as he talks. Look at everyone speaking and you will see perfect white teeth (except for the Cardinal).

There is a wonderfully gruesome but telling depiction of bloodletting conducted by the plague doctors as they attend to the Cardinal. Bloody rags and bowls of blood are everywhere as the group of beak doctors, dressed in their weird accouterments, go about their useless treatment. There is an energetic, Hammeresque opening teaser involving three accused witches hanged from a bridge. It not only sets up what follows but twists our perception of what we think should follow.

More of the mood, depth, and grain found in these two scenes needed to spread across the rest of the movie.