From Zombos' Closet

That's a Wrap (2023) Needs More Paper and Tape

Zombos Says: Poppycock!

Paul Holstenwall, our neighbor and purveyor extraordinaire of bad movies, had brought along That's a Wrap, which launched at FrightFest recently, to show Zombos and me. It had been a while since we were seated comfortably in the cinematorium to watch horror movies, and well, what the hell, I took a chance. Even knowing that Paul, who long-time readers of Zombos' Closet will recall has questionable taste (see one of Paul's misfires here), rarely brings the good stuff.

It had been a long while since I last reviewed a less than stellar endeavor and with IMDb giving this one a 6.7 rating, I felt somewhat safe. I wasn't. I also now know that IMDb ratings don't rate for much. I guess having an extended family, when you're in the business, can be a big help after all. 

"So," asked Paul, "what did you think?" I looked at him. I looked at Zombos. Both stared at me, one beaming with delight, the other just beaming. Like death ray beaming to be precise. I lifted my Lychee French 75 that Chef Machiavelli had heavy-handed with the gin and gulped it down. I confess I held his hand while he poured the gin. I should have held it longer.

Movie Review: Kids vs Monsters (2015)

Zombos Says: Poor

At 100 minutes, Kids vs Monsters doesn't live up to its title, becoming instead tedious, poorly written, unamusing, and not fetching at all. And you know a movie's bad when I use a word like "fetching" in a review. 

I keep wondering where the 7 plus millions of dollars spent on this (according to IMDb) went. Not even the feckless, irksome cartoon backstories interrupting the less than lively live action (see my comment on "fetching" as it also applies to "feckless") show the expenditure. The two principal sets used--one a monster realm throne room where the rich parents watch their kids being attacked by each monster in turn, and the second, Ms. Gallagher's Reform School, where the kids hang around insulting each other while waiting for each monster to attack them, in turn--show little effort toward original art direction or intentions for originality. 

It's ho-hum from start to finish in spite of having talents like Lance Henriksen, Malcolm McDowell, Richard Moll, and Armand Assante. With the dialog they're given, I'm surprised they didn't roll their eyes more often when delivering each line. The lackluster script ignores the essential character evolution necessary to make this work, and the monsters are laughable in all the wrong ways. Endless talking by McDowell, monotonously delivered, is energy-draining to see and listen to. 

Director Sultan Saeed Al Darmaki and scripter Sarah Daly should have realized they had some monstrous-sized shoes to fill after Monster Squad, Little Monsters, and any number of animated monster movies with kids that have set a baseline for expectations. None of which are met.

The kids include the obnoxious fatty, Bobby (Jesse Camacho), the spoiled beauty queen, Candy (Francesca Eastwood), the depressed goth girl, Molly (Sidney Endicott), the do-good kid, David (Bridger Zadina), the social media girl, Daisy (Anna Akana), and the pugilist, Oliver (Daniel David Stewart). Each of them has disappointed their parents so much, their parents go to Boss Monster (McDowell) to complain and sign a contract with a strong death clause. Boss Monster, who doesn't look like a monster at all, is in charge of all the other monsters that look like monsters in the Monster Realm. We know it's the Monster Realm because McDowell eats up a lot of screen time telling the parents they're in the monster realm. And, of course, we have to listen too.

Henriksen is one of the minions of Boss Monster and assists with more pointless and spiritless dialog in-between McDowell's laborious descriptions of each monster as he introduces them to square off against the kids. One by one. This movie's title is wrong: it isn't kids versus monsters, it's a monster versus a kid. Way too late into the movie do we get any sense of team coordination with the kids actually banding together to fight and protect each other. But that doesn't last long at all and the singular kid versus monster modus operandi resumes. If you're expecting a Monster Squad team up, forget it. This movie doesn't have the nards to make it happen here.

Each prelude to an encounter includes watching a lengthy cartoon backstory for each monster as McDowell explains its life story before we finally cut back to the reform school for live action, or any action at this point. Before that return, however, the parents are also given way too much time to complain and chitchat. And this happens for every encounter. EVERY FREAKING ENCOUNTER.

The monsters are as creatively inspired as the kids. I'm being sarcastic. Among them are Mr. Beet (yes, he's a big beet-headed monster played by Michael Bailey Smith), who punches Oliver to the moon, a Cthulhuish witch who puts the hex on them, for a spell, and a lumberjack Big Foot with a French accent who likes sweets to death. One actually humorous scene has Big Foot in the bathroom as he's interrupted dropping a log. Enjoy it while it lasts. 

In-between the flat back and forth from reform school to monster realm throne room, the fussy Butler (Richard Moll), acts all Lurch-like to provide comedy relief in a comedy.

It doesn't help. After 45 minutes, you'll agree with the person who says "I want more action!"

 A courtesy stream-screener was provided for this review.

Movie Review: Dollface (2014) Not a Pretty Picture

Zombos Says: Awful

Sadly, Breaking Glass Pictures is perpetuating the horror of Tommy Faircloth's Dollface (aka Dorchester's Revenge: The Return of Crinoline Head) by unfettering it from the festival circuit. Which is not a benefit for discerning horror fans. Case in point: cut every scene with Debbie Rochon and you wouldn't notice she's missing (neither would the story); or eliminate the interminable, witless dialog that wastes most of the movie's time and you'd probably ask for it back because, without it, you clearly see the misfire of maybe-it's-a-slasher, maybe-it's-a-parody, or maybe--and this is what I think-- the director and the actors had no clue which direction to take this sequel to Faircloth's Crinoline Head (1995) so they winged it along for an excruciatingly scares-less and humorless ride, botched by all the ad libitum blathering and the monotonous pacing and editing. Whoever the people are who gave this a 7.6 rating on IMDb, and the critics who keep referring to this as a classic 1980s style slasher in tone, they must either be nuts, friends of the director, or want to keep getting screeners.

Dollface is simply not smart enough to be bad, and not good enough to watch, even if, as one blogging critic made note of Faircloth's recommendation, you see it with a buzz on. A full-blown drunken stupor wouldn't help this turkey from getting roasted. The acting? It's passable and hints that, given more hand's on direction and an actual script, would have been much better. The drag queens getting lost while driving to a show and then getting stranded in the woods when their car breaks down? Oh my lord, this was the movie that should have been! Imagine drag queens squared off against a slasher maniac! Or trying to run away in terror wearing high heels! The script would write itself, for heaven's sake.

Instead, we get a little repartee between them, a little teasing screen time with them preening in costume--yes, they're still late and lost in getting to that show-- and then they're quickly sliced and diced off camera. Not much happens in frame anyway, so why bother adding more visual efx gags that require more prep? With the most entertaining characters eliminated, we return to the college ones waiting for their turn at being sliced and diced. With them, you really, really, want them to get killed quickly. 

The one thing director Faircloth gets right is the seemingly endless school daze we experience as Professor Paul Donner (Jason Vail) tells his class about Dorchester Stewart, the little mother's boy (Andrew Wicklum) who cannibalized his mom after she died suddenly. Kids. Go figure. Yes, I'm being sarcastic, but watching this scene will remind you of your own school haze and daze and energy-displacement professors slowing everything down to a crawl. Stewart grows up and turns into the serial killer known as Crinoline Head. The professor relates his experience with the sordid affair. Slowly. And more slowly. With an echo. It's impossible that any college class with a professor like that would be so bright and chipper. And attentive. Another reason why I think the actors are better than what's in the can.

A stream-screener was provided for this review. After this, I'm sure I won't be offered many more of them.

Movie Review: The Grapes of Death (1978) Les Raisins De La Mort

Zombos Says:
Have a glass of wine instead.

Seriously, have a glass or two of wine instead of seeing this movie. French directors (that would be Jean Rollin in this case) often have trouble handling the subtleties of horror and science fiction; namely that there are no subtleties.

Instead of a clean and clear message delivered through visual and visceral tension and terror, they'll pause the camera on a scene until it's threadbare, insist their characters prattle on and on with soul-searching ruminations, and then have them make interminable philosophical arguments about their predicament, stalling everyone in place while the pace unfolding around them screams for celerity and action. Of course, when you get to movies like In My Skin, the scale tips well past the clean and clear measure and goes sailing out the window, but that's another discussion entirely. Just recall Alien: Resurrection and you will get my drift.

Here are my review notes in lieu of a more polished review. This movie is simply not worth more of my time or effort beyond compelling you, with sufficient information, to make your own judgement on whether to watch it or not. But if you watch it your crazy. 

Review Notes for The Grapes of Death:

(Misc. Notes: Interesting, the IMdB lists a 6.2 rating on this. Wonder what their reviewers are smoking. Wait, they even rate 6.3 for Alien: Resurrection. Must be good stuff. Don't forget to mention the poster art comes from drfreex.com).

Opening beat on worker being overcome from pesticide used on wine grapes. Told to suck it up and get back to work. He does. Foreshadowing trouble to come. Next opening beat on two young woman traveling on empty train to countryside. They are friends. They talk a lot. Comment on how freaky it is traveling with no one else aboard (aside from the conductor, I guess). No attendants, either (budget saver). They stop at one village. Silent guy boards train. What's wrong with him? He's leering. Right. He's infected. Silent, now violent, guy kills one girl, goes to sit in the car with the other.

Takes a long time for Elizabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal) to notice he's the silent, leering, crazy type. He starts oozing--what the hell, is that grape juice? Cheesy effects here we come. Great. Finally she gets the message. She runs to find her friend. Finds her mauled to death in the loo (could get fancy here and say train de salle de bains). Elizabeth stops train and runs away.

And keeps running for a long while.

(Note: drawn out sequence here; too much time between  beats. French directors do that a lot. Unless it's about chocolate, food, or sex, they can't handle down time well.) Good cinematography of countryside (or is it good countryside lends itself to photography?)

She enters cottage, sees man and woman by the dinner table, pleads with them to help her, must call the police, etc. She's hysterical, yelling, she needs to phone cops, he pores a glass of wine for her. Woman standing by him is immobile. What's up? Oh, right, the guy has some creepy looking plastic makeup on his--I mean rotting flesh--showing. He's infected, too.

Extreme, and unnecessary, close ups splice back and forth between her face and their's. She's told to calm down and stay, rest awhile. Sure. She heads upstairs to find a comfy bed. Conveniently open door leads to finding a body in a room. She pulls the sheet away, finds woman with throat cut open. Guy's daughter tells Elizabeth he's insane, killed mom. Right. Kind of caught that before she headed upstairs. Erratic beat here. Can we get on with it? Every scene is lingered over too much, ruining the pacing. Were we that obtuse in 1978?

Finally, he acts violently and kills his daughter with a pitchfork. He makes sure to rip open her blouse first to show her ample breasts. Country living I suspect. She was also infected. Interesting. So story point is men and women are infected differently. Also explains why he didn't kill his daughter before then. Only kills her now because she's helping Elizabeth escape?

But then he regrets killing his family. Elizabeth runs for it. To the car. He stops in front of the car and insists she finish him off. She does, after thinking it over. A lot. She rams the dinky car into him. (Note: dinky cars ramming into people is unintentionally funny.) She drives around. Comes across another crazy guy, stops long enough for him to thump his head through her side window again and again and again. Long take closeup of his rubber appliance--I mean weeping sores from his infection. She shoots him dead. (Crap, where'd she pick up the gun(?). It had to be in the farmhouse she drove away from. How'd I miss it? After crashing his head into her side window the dinky car won't start. Sure, that makes sense.

She's on foot again and walking around (no budget for gas?). And walking around a lot (before the next beat kicks in.) Wait, now she's running. Waiting for that damn beat!

A twig snaps, she pulls out her gun, a woman comes stumbling towards her, arms outstretched in front. The woman is blind. Seems okay and not infected. Lucie (Mirella Rancelot) has been going around and around since the morning. Elizabeth and Lucie now stroll toward the village, chatting, arm in arm. They take the long way around.

(Finally, the next beat kicks in. This movie screams "edit me!")

They come across a dead guy, then a lot of dead guys. Lots of time spent walking through the carnage of dead guys. Lucie keeps insisting on knowing what's happened. Elizabeth doesn't tell her. Not sure why. Lucie starts screaming "Luca," looking for him, but then they're walking again.

(Note: I don't think there was this much walking in the Lord of the Rings movies, combined.)

Both women hugging each other now as they walk. Finally, they find Lucie's house. Where's Lucas (Paul Bisciglia)?  If Lucie pores a glass of wine for Elizabeth I'm going to--wait, Lucas shows up, not looking too good. More infected people show up. They're not looking so good, either. Whole village must be wine drinkers. Lucie stumbles off on her own, Elizabeth pulls out her gun and loads it. (Wait. Where'd she get more bullets? Crap! I thought I was paying attention.)

Lucie, now walking, with villagers descending on her. Pretty creepy scene. She keeps calling for Lucas. More close-ups of zombiefied faces. Lucie tells them to go away, thinking they're there to make fun of her. They don't (go away or make fun of her). She starts walking again, through them.

Let's see how long this takes before the next beat kicks in. Rollin's going for a record here, I know it.

Lucas finds her. He's all weird, starts drooling and laughing. And promptly strangles her with a rope as the villagers watch. Lucie's screams don't prompt much urgency from Elizabeth. She does manage to shoot one villager, though, then finds Lucie nailed, topless of course, to a farmhouse door.

Lucas brandishes axe. Really bad special effect of Lucie's fake head being chopped off her blatantly obvious dummy body ensues--in close-ups, and Lucas carries the head around by its long hair. (Note: Wait a mo, when did Romero do The Crazies? Right, 1973. Rollin must have seen it. This whole rabid village thing is a lot like The Crazies in spirit.)

Lucas chases Elizabeth, head in hand. Villagers stagger after them. She runs away. Again. Then she's pulled into a house by a blond bombshell. (Note: It's Brigitte Lahaie the porn actress!) They sit on a couch and chat away. Lahaie pores Elizabeth a drink, too. Can't beat that country hospitality.

And they chat some more.

We are told the house's owners are dead, but she had the key, so the house is hers now. Good foreshadowing as to who may have killed them. Really subtle. Hint, hint. Lahaie says the villagers try to get in every night but they can't (that scenario sounds familiar? --yes, Vincent' Price's The Last Man on Earth). Then she changes clothes so they can go out to find safety. Say what? If the villagers can't get in, they were safe inside weren't they?

And Lahaie's acting pretty weird; enough to connect the dots for us, but Elizabeth remains clueless. I sense more running in her future.

Lahaie tricks Elizabeth and the villagers come around. Wow, didn't see that coming. More close-ups of badly made up infected faces. Lots of prolonged hysterics. Lots of villagers-mingling-around shots to fill time between beats.

La grande femme blonde (as Brigitte "Lahaye" is noted in the credits) soon carries a large torch and holds onto two mean-looking dogs (so what's Rollin implying here?). More annoying closeups fill time until two guys can drive up in their truck with rifles and dynamite. 

Yes! --I mean, of course Rollin has her disrobe to show the two guys she's not infected. How could Rollin not let Lahaye (nee Lahaie) showcase her assets to the fullest?

More running ensues as Elizabeth escapes while the two guys get an eyeful. And more close-ups of faces ogling through their infections wastes camera time. Elizabeth returns with the torch, but not the dogs, gets too close to Lahaye, and they start fighting. The two guys almost shoot her, but realize she's not infected and Lahaye is the crazy one. Lahaye grabs the torch and blows up the truck and herself.

Which leaves us with the two guys and Elizabeth walking. Again.

(Note: mention the really annoyingly inappropriate score to this movie while they walk. A monkey with a zither could do better.)

Daylight. They pause for a long chatty rest. Continue walking, do some climbing, then chat some more about needing a pint of beer, realize they just missed the New Wine Festival (could definitely use the Song of the New Wine from Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man to liven this turkey up), argue over military bases and nuke plants, and politics (I swear to god this is torture to listen to), and who should carry the lone rifle they have. Obviously Elizabeth should, since she can shoot well and produce bullets when needed. And she looked like such a dainty little thing, too. Go figure.

They finally arrive at a farmhouse. One guy makes a phone call while the other plunders the larder and pulls out the food. Ah, French movies. The two guys drink wine (guess they missed the memo about the tainted wine?) and argue a lot, then agree to disagree. She leaves to stagger around outside. She staggers into the barn. Staggers up the barn stairs. Conveniently finds her friend, Lucien (Serge Marquand), hanging out in the barn. Seems a bit abrupt to have him just appear.

He's infected. They talk about it. He created the pesticide that's killing everybody. They talk about that. He's feeling equally guilty and homicidal. She gets closer to her boyfriend and hugs him, infected warts and all. Ah, the French and true love.

The two guys stop arguing and realize Elizabeth had left. They go looking for her. One of them shoots Lucien dead. She then shoots the two guys dead. One last, long, closeup of blood dripping onto her face as the credits roll. My guess is she became infected, too. The end.

Like I said, just open a bottle and have at it. Forget this one, unless you like smelly cheese with your wine.

Movie Review: Jug Face (2013) Toby Jugs Are Scarier

Zombos Says: Fair

Chad Crawford Kinkle’s monotonous pace for his Southern pottery folk art inspired Jug Face makes for an excruciatingly boring movie with—and I’m definitely not in agreement with other critics on this point—no tension whatsoever because of it. Whatever intended or implied subtexts of mysticism and the effects of stagnating religious fealty that may be tucked into this simple, stretched thin, script are lost while we wait for something to happen. Close-ups of the bubbling pit where backwoods families sacrifice each other to maintain their community's health, close-ups of Ada’s (Lauren Ashley Carter) big, brooding eyes, and close-ups of those glossy face-bearing jugs made by Dawai the potter (Sean Bridgers), which herald the next sacrificial victim chosen by the omnipresent pit monster, are comatose as the camera moves around them with much more vitality.

Sustin (Larry Fessenden) is the patriarch who easily and righteously slits the throats of his decreed sacrifices to placate the pit monster, thereby maintaining his closed community's social order and keeping its "well" being intact. Ada upsets the balance when she realizes she’s the next sacrifice and buries the jug with her face on it.

Her incestuous relationship with her brother (Daniel Manche) leaves her pregnant; her unwelcomed arranged marriage to a neighbor’s son (Mathieu Whitman) leads her to deception; and her mother’s crude virginity examination (performed by Sean Young with her usual, limited, cigarette-emotive acting skills) leaves her subservient to the expectations of her community and its rules. Kinkle keeps everything so monotone he never elicits the necessary question we should be feeling to engage our sense of terror: what's the truer evil here, the pit monster or the community that accepts its demands?

There is also the Tinkerbell ghost, smoking all dark and ominously, popping up to explain to Ada that she’s toast, no matter what she tries to do. Perhaps Kinkle was trying to evoke a folk tale's worth of supernatural terror with his apparition's presence, but if you're looking for terror watch Deliverance instead; that movie's atmosphere of other-worldliness and alienation is greatly needed here to make Krinkle's folk art horror concoction upsetting and disagreeable for us.

Much throat-cutting and blood dripping ensues as the pit monster grows angry. Eyes turn cataract-white as the pit monster bubbles up and flexes its annoyance. Hillbilly cult slice-of-life scenes and moonshines distracts us from Ada's predicament. Although they provide necessary contrast to her dire situation, they disengage us from that tension because of Kinkle's even-handedness as he doles out each scene with equal tone. The acting is at the correct pitch, but Kinkle never lets his direction open up to generate fear, or despair, or a smidgen of absurdest eloquence through it. Unlike Dawai's pottery, the story is only half-baked and not fired up to its true horrors of circumstance and entrapment within a stultifying society.

The musical interlude helps redeem the dullness, but it doesn’t last long enough. Jug Face is a 60-minute movie shot in 80 minutes of tedium. It suffers from film festival laissez faire: it wastes time on emotionless visuals and empty character dioramas, and presumes the vacuum it leaves is emotively and intellectually engaging and multi-nuanced. It isn't.

Movie Review: Dead Before Dawn 3D (2012) It Certainly Is

Zombos Says: Why?

Listen to Movie Review

Not often do words like lame, ill-considered, stupid, not funny, and waste of time come to mind when watching a movie, but they did as I watched Dead Before Dawn, a horror-numbedy from Canada that misfires on both key areas: horror and comedy. Some things really shouldn't cross the border and this lacklustre paycheck-maker is one of them. Maybe if you had a few tokes before or during this zombie thriller manqué it would be tolerable, but you better have a BIG bong.

Horus Galloway (Christopher Lloyd) runs The Occult Barn (the Magic Box from Buffy it isn't), which must never close during business hours (it's not explained why), but no patrons ever visit because no one else is ever in the place except for him and the college-aged instigators (they look really REALLY much older) who will eventually upset the most demonish of demons stashed in the fragile urn capped off by a human skull.  That rests on the top shelf of a rickety cabinet in plain site and without any caveat emptor or protection against slippery hands and the bumbling curious reaching for it. You want foreshadowing done with the subtlety of a sledgehammer? There you go. If that wasn't enough, a bad dream shows us how Casper Galloway's (Devon Bostick) father dies just holding it, after he catches Casper not heeding his warning to stay away from it. (Devon Bostick's acting throughout appears to be heavily influenced by excessive toking, by the way. Just saying.)

Here's the setup in a nutshell.

Horus implores Casper to man The Occult Barn's cash register so he can receive his life-time achievement award, in person, from the supernatural occultists’ society. Casper refuses. His mom insists. And after she cuts the crusty ends off his sandwhich just the way he likes, she gets her way and he's off to confront his fear and man the register. His college friends and the requisite make-fun-of-the-nerd frat pack show up. So does Becky (April Mullen), the girl he has a crush on. She wants to see the urn. She gets her way. They drop it.

Let the curse begin.

The one really smart ploy here (and it's the only one in this movie so enjoy it) is how everyone starts adding in their variation of what the curse will cause to happen as Casper tries to warn them of impending doom and to please shut up. Here’s what they wind up with: the "zemons" or zombie demons will cause death by hickies, but French kissing a zemon will make it your slave; and the kicker is that anyone they look at will kill himself or herself and turn into a zemon to attack them.

Rather quickly the zemons start multiplying with inexpensive but competent gory results. It starts with a football player impaling himself with the first down marker; then cheerleaders start dropping each other on purpose; Casper's mom takes a warm bath with a hot toaster, too. Now a zemon, she chases him out onto the street where two hillbillys—yes, that's right, I did say HILLBILLYS—run over her in their car. One jumps out of the car with a shotgun and says not to worry, he's carrying it because they just got back from duck hunting. And yes, that's the height of comedy brilliance achieved in this movie.

I couldn't tell if the actors were following the script or ad libbing, but one thing I can say with certainty: if they were sticking to writer Tim Doiron's script they should have ad libbed instead; but if they were ad libbing, they should have stuck to his script instead.

Horus returns to The Occult Barn in time to brain himself with his own award after they look at him, but before he goes all zemon-like, he manages to, cryptically of course, and with much hamming on wry, hint at how to reverse the spell. Like a Goosebumps episode that was written by 500 babboons locked in a stuffy room with iPads and only one charger, Casper with his rolling pin, Becky with her crossbow, and their freaked-out companions armed with lesser weapons, pile into a Winnebago to find the ingredients needed to seal the demon back up and stop the curse. Winnebagos are all the rage for zombie-related trips after one was used in Diary of the Living Dead.

So many wonderfully terrifying and funny horror movies have crossed the border from Canada: Black Christmas, The Gate, The Changeling, and PontyPool; just to name a few.

This movie isn't one of them. 

Movie Review: The Lone Ranger (2013) No Happy Trails for You Here

Zombos Says: Where have all the heroes gone?

Finally, there's one glorious moment where the Lone Ranger gallops across the town's rooftops on his white horse, Silver, as the rousing William Tell overture kicks in. One moment. It's exciting, thrilling, and fleeting, except for the loud soundtrack, which continues well past its purpose.

I don't understand Hollywood's creative-mangling; its keenness for techno-virtuosity and loud breakage, and deaf ear for a logically plotted and dramatically characterized narrative to carry it. All these sound and fury moments have become repetitious and only pander to audiences gorged on sugar but who have forgotten what sweet really tastes like. How ironic is it that as the movies get BIGGER, they play smaller.

Two misguided moments have Tonto first taking a shovel to John Reid's head for a cheap chuckle--he's the future Lone Ranger, played by Armie Hammer--and then dragging his head through road apples for another kiddie-quality grin. I'm dumbfounded. I don't know why this script etiquette of writing antagonistic relationships between buddy-characters who actually got along swimmingly in their original incarnations  is now always part of Hollywood's re-imagining process. It undermines the intrinsic nature of why the original series works. The abysmal Wild Wild West remake with Will Smith and Kevin Kline is another sad example of this lazy scripting staple. Note to Hollywood: maybe try finding comedy through the characters and not artificially by dumbing them down with rehashed pratfall situations and trumped up relationships in EVERY movie.

By now you should get a good sense of how much I feel this movie fails its promise. I'll go a step further and even say it stinks. I realize "stinks" is not a Pulitzer Prize worthy word for a reviewer to use, but it best sums up the failure of yet another expensive franchise reboot that deserves better than Gore Verbinski's beautifully directed but gaseous, blockbuster-less, movie.

Its failed ideas include another brothel-madame-with-a-quirky-twist--Helena Bonham Carter doing her standard weird woman role accompanied by an ivory leg holding an amazingly accurate shotgun; then there’s a varmint (William Fichtner) who likes to eat people's hearts raw; then there are his evil but comedic henchmen, a la Pirates of the Caribbean, with feminine dress-up habits and especially grimy appearances; and, of course, there’s Johnny Depp's Tonto providing his patented greasepaint antics like wearing a bird cage on his head, or feeding his dead-bird-hat, or speaking to a horse that likes to sit in trees and transcend gravity at opportune moments when that ability is most needed for the action.

And that action isn't bad, just pointless because it’s devoid of any emotional punch when every character is written as fiberboard instead of oak, and consigned to doing familiar shticks in a strikingly colorless frontier. This story is cynical when it needs to be sincere, and Tonto and the Lone Ranger are caricatures when they need to be heroes. The U.S. Cavalry is present to fire off their Gatling Guns. Native Americans are present to be massacred by those guns. The power-hungry railroad tycoon wannabe (Tom Wilkinson) is here to be overbearingly power-hungry, although Wilkinson does have a knack for such dastardly roles.

Perhaps this movie didn't start out poorly? Perhaps the “memos” mori and apparent overhanding rewrites pounded the original story’s whole grain into mush? When John Reid holds up John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government as his bible you get the sense this young and idealistic, newly minted, attorney is in for a letdown, forcing him to become the legendary masked lawman to realize the justice he seeks. The letdown comes, but it’s buried under a ton of screeching metal and loose storylines that don’t fortify his transformation. When Tonto’s bizarre behavior is explained by a compelling backstory, it comes at a time we can’t appreciate it; it’s lost in the loud bangs and rush to blow things up with lots of dynamite.

And the biggest letdown is for us, the fans of the Western and Cowboy genres. That's Western, as in not the Caribbean.

Movie Review: Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013) When a Chainsaw is Not Enough

ZC Rating: Fair

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Here are some of the takeaways for me after seeing Texas Chainsaw 3D: make sure to read important letters left to you by dead relatives before you move into their mansions; don't jump in open caskets in graves in cemeteries you're not familiar with; women went bare tummy, wore tight jeans held up by wide belts, and traveled in VW mystery machines in the 1990s; stay away from meat packing facilities that have been shut for over 20 years and still have electricity and machinery in perfect running order; don't look through your cell phone camera when walking in strange hallways filled with dead things; and finally, don't pay for 3D when 2D sucks just as much.

Now that I've gotten those takeaways off my chest, I do have a few nagging questions after seeing the movie, too. For one, why doesn't the sheriff shoot? For another, why does Heather stay?

There are a lot of things in Texas Chainsaw 3D that irked me; the gore factor is high and palpable (or pulpable, to be more descriptive) without that freakish energy powering up from the drive-in trashy grit and hillbilly inbred insanity the original sparks with.

Another disappointment is how the promises made during the opening scenes highlighting the original's backstory go unfulfilled. A baby girl is taken after the Sawyer family is killed by local vigilantes fed up with all the Sawyer craziness bringing attention to the small town of Newt, Texas. That girl grows up to be emo Heather (Alexandra Daddario), who creates morbid art from bones, likes slicing meat at the supermarket she works at, and dresses for a different time period than this movie's situated in.

Or maybe I'm confused. Is she twenty-something or near-forty-something? What time period does this movie take place in anyway?

The creatively commercial, but ill-advised, use of a cell phone would place everything in the present, but Heather's sexy bare tummy throughout the movie, and the beat-up Scooby Doo-style VW van (it's like 1974 all over again), and the hitchhiker pickup scene (people still pick up total strangers?) are retro-fits to another decade. Doing the math while basing the total on the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre of 1974 starting point, Heather is either nearing 40 but looks smashingly nubile for her age, or she's really in her early twenties and a Dr. Who type time-warp bubble allows a modern and over-priced cell phone to co-exist with her in the 1990s.

It's a wonder they didn't manage to shoehorn in a plot-use for Michelob, with Heather rolling a cold, wet one across her bare stomach while she's meeting up with the family lawyer (Richard Riehle) in the bar; or at any other time since she never wears a shirt completely buttoned or large enough to cover her mid-section.

Oh, right, about Leatherface...time-warping, sexist clothing, and product positioning aside.

Jed (Dan Yeager), who still wears his polyester clothes from the 1970s, hasn't aged at all. Sequels will do that to you. Like the equally ageless Jason in 2009's Friday the 13th reboot, Jed now has a whole bunch of rooms and hallways to tenderize and skewer his victims in. We see the curious and grisly furnishings while an unwise sheriff holds his gun and cell phone prominently in front of him as he walks through the "catacombs" to his doom.

Spoiler? Are you kidding? How long you been watching horror movies?

Jed's den of iniquity lies beneath the southern mansion Heather has inherited, deep in the heart of Newt, Texas; and behind the metal door (amazing how Heather's grandmother made sure she installed another metal door), waiting with meat mallet at the ready, is Leatherface—and a closet full of chainsaws. The best scene showing context and portent has Jed playing like a cowboy holstering up for his showdown with the bad folk that killed his kin. Now we know what happens when you take Leatherface's chainsaw away: he gets another one.

And he wields it with grisly skill, slicing through torsos, ankles, wrists, chests, and various other body parts not moving out of the way fast enough. An extended face-removal with carefully positioned foot-twitching gave me nightmares. Having Leatherface stitch on a new face (which, curiously, looks like any of his older faces) through his cheeks with a large needle—under what I suspect are very unsterile conditions—in closeup, is not very cheerful, either.

Other critics of Texas Chainsaw 3D appear torn between the semi-humanization of Leatherface as he squares off against the bad guys, and the lack of zest he displays in not lopping off limbs during the carnival festivities as he chases Heather up a Ferris Wheel. One critic even derides the tossing of the chainsaw at the sheriff (and into the 3D audience) as laughable, but Jed's got a whole closet full of them, so why not?

As for humanization and restraint, both are in keeping with the character's motivations. As for me, I'm torn over how Heather, after seeing her friends horribly butchered, still considers Jed family, and the sheriff's decision to let the crazy homicidal son of a bitch keep living, and why Dr. Who never show's up to solve the temporal paradox of director John Luessenhop's screwed up timeline.

If Texas Chainsaw 3D is any indication of what we can expect from Hollywood in their treatment (mistreatment?) of classic horror movie reboots, I want to travel back in time myself before it's too late.

In the meantime, watch John Dies at the End instead.

Movie Review: Resident Evil, Retribution (2012) Once More Unto the Breach

Zombos Says: Fair

Zombos was waiting for me to answer him. He'd been away in Europe with the family for most of the summer --the peace and quiet with them gone were my vacation-- and now, with the spirit of Autumn winds soon to rise, he had returned with all his blustery piquance intact. Or maybe it was just too much starch in his collar. My fault.

"I still say it was okay," I reiterated and, ignoring him, continued to write my review. He returned to chewing on his candy corn Oreos and sipping his hot chocolate, making sure to be as noisy as possible just to irritate me.  I focused on my task nonetheless in spite of him.

Speaking of irritation, with five Resident Evil movies bolstering the franchise, I'm surprised each iteration boils down to this: run!, fire guns!, run!, drop-kick!, hustle!, fire bigger guns!, roll!, evade [insert your choice here:  zombies, bad guys, clones, mutants]!, dodge explosions!, run!, walk fast!, run!, say something obvious!, look concerned!, race around in a car!, keep running!, keep firing guns!, and leave off with a boffo ending that promises more than each entry has yet to deliver. Except for maybe next time, since Resident Evil: Retribution leaves off with a boffo ending that squeezes every ounce of CGI mutant mayhem and zombie Armageddon into its dire landscape.

When the ending came I looked at my watch. I couldn't believe the movie had ended. At just under an hour and a half, everything flies by with video game-like music and hustle and bustle, but without the involvement. There are endless fighting rituals with giant axe-wielding mutants, hungry zombies, and clones of people who were characters in the other movie entries. Alice (Milla Jovovich) wields big guns (no metaphor intended: she does wield BIG guns) as always, and she shoots them endlessly as always, and she acts perturbed as always, taking a licking but rebounding as she always does.

And still I find myself coming back for more. Maybe it's my hope the next sequel will break the T-Virus mold and not be homogeneous like its predecessor.

Providing additional eye-candy is Ada Wong (Bingbing Li), who looks and dresses like she's ready to slay, but you will have to watch The Forbidden Kingdom to fully appreciate what she is capable of bringing since it's missing here.

Ada is working for Wesker (Shawn Roberts) as he channels a Max Headroom ambiance in his gloating, floating presence on large monitor screens. Formerly known as Wesker-the-Alice-Hating-Bad-Guy, he's now teaming up with her to save what's left of humanity. (Seeing what's left, I'm not sure why he's going to all the bother.)

Oh, but that's the next movie, sorry, I was getting ahead of myself.

This movie isall about freeing Alice from the nefarious Umbrella Corporation's underwater facility in the Arctic, where they test scenarios of their manufactured virus contagions spreading across populations. There's Tokyo, New York, Moscow, and even suburban-ville, spread out like a super-sized Star Trek: The Next Generation's holodeck.

Paul W. S. Anderson moves Alice across this changing, but recognizable, landscape as she tries to escape it to reach the surface, while a rescue team descends to help her. You know the drill: the rescue team ends up needing rescue by Alice as she takes charge. There's a toss-away submarine-breaking-the-ice-moment--which echoes Ice Station Zebra's climax--but it leads to a drawn out brawl between Alice and a super-charged Rain (Michelle Rodriguez) and Jill (Sienna Guillory). Spot animations highlight broken bones as blows hit home, visual information snippets like you would find in a computer game.

The plot is clever, but everything else is typical Resident Evilmovies' pacing and mayhem. I'm stymied how all this action, noise, and bloodshed doesn't generate the expected tension or intensity it should. There's a definite style to this franchise, but it doesn't hold dramatic weight. The de riguer zombies line up to be knocked down, mutants provide side-tracking annoyances, and the emotional moment when a young girl mistakes Alice for her mother (her mother was an Alice clone) are smoothed over to pave the way for more action which soon numbs our attention given to it.

Anderson's gimmicky opening credit sequence showing the attack on the Arcadia freighter (where the previous movie left us) in slow motion reverse, then normal speed forward, is a good example of why this franchise is always fun to watch but is not yet memorable. Perhaps if he stops playing with the characters and the scenery, and starts playing the game in the next movie, it will be.

Movie Review: Dark Shadows (2012) No Dark, No Shadows

Zombos Says: Fair

Listen to Movie Review

Up until that big letter "M" appears on screen (trust me, you can't miss it), Tim Burton and Seth Grahame-Smith's incarnation of Dark Shadows broods deeply in its Gothic sensibility of ill-considered trysting and vengeful witchcraft. Then it falls apart, leaving Johnny Depp's Barnabus Collins a floundering vampire fish out of suitable waters. With strikingly lifeless humor ("gonzo comedy" Burton? Really?), no serious bedevilment to beguile us, no involving supernatural romance to entrance us, and no fully realized characters to relate to, this amalgam of familial oddities and cobbled scenes such as Barnabus carrying an umbrella and wearing dark sunglasses in the sunlight, Barnabus calling Alice Cooper the ugliest woman he's ever seen, Barnabus showing much more energy for revitalizing his family's fishery business instead of wooing the reincarnation of his lost love, Josette DuPres, for whom he had jumped off a cliff to kill himself after she plunged first, and Barnabus mesmerized by a lava lamp filled with bobbing red wax, well, it all amounts to a perfect example of what "stupid creative license" is all about.

The costumes are pretty, the Collinwood Mansion divine--it has more substance than anyone living in it--and Depp's performance is perfectly primed for chilling connivance, but none of these are knitted into a continuous thread: there is no clever campy humor, no attunement to 1970s grooviness, and no seriously despairing cursed vampire to propel the story's purpose. Burton shows us everything but Grahame-Smith tells us nothing. Whatever Gothic horror romance the original television series had in its rich storylines, none of it shows up here. If you're a fan of the original series, you probably won't like this lackluster interpretation; if you're new to Dark Shadows you won't find enough to understand why the original was so important to horror fans and the genre.  Simply put, nothing is added, but much is taken away. 

And then there's the werewolf.

It pops in at the end with a quick explanation, just to spice up the showdown between Barnabus and Angelique (Eva Green). She's the saucy witch who cursed him back in the 1700s because he refused to love her. She's still around, running the Angel Bay Fishery that put the Collins's out of business. Their battle, the movie's ending, is as well envisioned as the movie's beginning, before that big "M" I mentioned before appears, to lead us into the interminable middle portion of churning indecisiveness, wasting the talents of Jackie Earle Haley as Willie Loomis and Bella Heathcote as Victoria Winters. 

The story has Barnabus accidentally dug up and freed from his iron coffin where Angelique entombed him. He makes his way back to Collinwood Manor, after putting the bite on a vanload of hippies, and finds his former home is now rundown and its inhabitants in the same condition. There's matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Michelle Pfeiffer) who keeps her knitting in a secret room; Dr. Julia Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter), who, although she was hired to treat young David Collins' (Gulliver McGrath) delusion of seeing the ghost of his mother, three years later she's a failure and seems to do nothing but drink a lot and sponge off the Collins clan (so I wonder why she's still at Collinwood); Roger Collins (Jonny Lee Miller), is the ne'er-do-well of the family; and tuned-out, groovin' to the music, is Carolyn Stoddard (Chloe Grave Moretz) who hates her family and wants to move to New York just to spite Elizabeth.

Carolyn's the one Barnabus turns to for advice on how to woo Victoria in such modern times (1972). A centuries old vampire seeking advice from an ill-behaved and spoiled girl isn't very funny. She also gives advice on who Barnabus should have for entertainment at his Grand Ball, the event he wants to throw to flaunt the rebirth of Collinwood to the townspeople of Collinsport. She recommends Alice Cooper. Sure, why not? When you've got nothing in the script that works, Alice Cooper's a sure bet to pad some minutes around. 

The money to refurbish Collinwood to its former glory is revealed by Barnabus the night he returns: stairs underneath the fireplace lead through a mirrored passageway to a treasure room. As Barnabus leads the way carrying a lantern, Elizabeth sees the lantern reflected in the mirrors, but not Barnabus. (A similar scene can be found in Mario Bava's Black Sunday.) Realizing Barnabus is actually who he says he is, Elizabeth keeps his secret. The banter he has with the Collins clan when he shows up at breakfast for the first time is as colorless as his pasty face. Dr. Hoffman sobers up enough to become suspicious and hypnotizes Barnabus to learn the truth. Of course, with Barnabus dressed and looking like Nosferatu, it's not a stretch for them or us.

Ghosts do roam the halls of Collinwood Manor.  If only the spirits of Gothic mystery and romance roamed there as well. But there's no ghost of a chance for that in this movie.

Movie Review: The Raven (2012) Quote This Critic: Nevermore!

Zombos Says: Fair

After the promising opening moments of James McTiegue's The Raven are spent with anxious constables rushing to find slashed bodies in a locked room, and the entrance of Inspector Fields (Luke Evans), who approaches the conundrum like Auguste Dupin, John Cusack's Edgar Allan Poe chews the scenery with his superficial temper tantrums and clumsy gyrations, pulled by contrivance instead of subtextual motivations. For god's sake, didn't Cusack and the writers know Poe was a tortured soul with layers of spiritual complexity? Where's the empty pit of isolation and the breadth of despair he suffered through his boozing and melancholy? Yelling the word "f*ck" is not a suitable drama substitute. If only the real Poe could have lent a hand. I'm sure his dialog would have been richer and more sensible, and his suspense would have been palpable as well as plausible. 

Plausibility is a good place to start since this movie adds little of it to tie its sensational events together. A wonderful premise brimming with potential limps instead from indecisive contextual stability as it purloins stock slasher and serial killer tidbits, piecemeal, without understanding their cumulative effect. It's almost like Saw in gruesomeness scale--the strikingly gory pendulum slice and dice on the rotund Rufus Griswold (John Warnaby)--then restrains its visual assault like Horrors of the Black Museum, then jumps from left to right to be similar to Se7en's broader cat and mouse conceit. Each staged execution of Poe's devilish demises by the villain is handled like a fast-food order without condiments, even if imaginatively far-fetched clues propel Poe and Fields one step closer to finding who that killer is and his motive; both of which appear on script cue out of thin air for the denoument's wrap-up, without any explicit or implied discernment along the way to prepare us for the revelation. It just happens. 

Leading up to this, Poe rants, raves, throws his ego all around, sulks, and looks for his next drink--until his mind clears enough to recognize the clues being left behind; Fields, emotionless, analytical, dissects the problem methodically until he develops brain freeze, allowing Poe's now clear mind to take the lead; the blustery Captain Hamilton (Brendan Gleeson) hates Poe--who wants to marry Hamilton's daughter--until the captain becomes conciliatory and friend to Poe to help solve anothe clue, even though it's Poe's stories that have buried his daughter alive and all of them desperately trying to find her. Hamilton's daughter Emily (Alice Eve) loves Poe, but aside from an out of place allusion about him giving good head, made during an overly long and lifeless romantic interlude, why she would like a destitute, alcoholic, and egotistical ass such as Poe is portrayed is not clear. Her wispy and cold presence in every scene blends into the upholstery much of the time, so unless Poe is infatuated with sitting on her, I'm at a loss to understand the attraction they have. Even when she's clawing at the coffin she's buried in, she's as cold as a corpse already.

Then there are the vexing facts in the case of the uneven interior lighting from scene to scene. We go from moody interiors correctly matched with their dim gaslight and oil lamp sources to spectrums of bright white, impossible to be produced by the lamplight available, sandwiched between a few suitably bleak, mist-shrouded exteriors: a memorable chase under a gray sky and through a foggy, barren, forest brings to mind The Fall of the House of Usher.

Not much else is memorable except for the murder by pendulum. Its intensity is surprising given the duller deliveries of the subsequent murders. I'm not sure if practical effects were united with digital, but watching that enormous blade slice through Griswold's belly, him screaming, it cutting deeper with each notch of its giant gears rolling into place, all that blood and glistening chunks of visceral meat splashing wildly, and the blade finally bisecting Griswold into two lifeless parts as it comes to rest, stuck into the wooden table between them, is breathtakingly disturbing, but oddly out of place here. I wondered how the villain managed to build such an immense, clockwork precise contraption by himself. Poe even remarks he hadn't imagined the counterweight to be so large when he sees it.

I'm torn myself between loving and hating it, given the rest of this movie.

Movie Review: The Ward (2010) Not Sure Which Floor It's On

 

Zombos Says: Fair

All the ingredients are here for a scary ghost story: there's a tragic mystery to solve; people disappearing all around; the doom of being locked in with a malevolent spirit; and the vexing problem that no one believes you. John Carpenter can't seem to put them in the right order to provide suspense or mounting terror in The Ward, a surprisingly dull effort from a director who should know better. Gregory Nicotero's stalking ghost is not scary, only perfunctory, like he was doing a Face Off contest entry. He should know better, too. Amber Heard as Kristen is believable and fiesty, but it's the movie that isn't. As for the other characters, they're window mannequins for dressing the story, but being well worn over, they hold little interest. No one broke a bead of sweat in this movie, onscreen or off, and that's certainly not conducive to good horror drama, especially when it takes place in a mental ward.

It's 1966. Kristen runs through the woods in a slip and sneakers to a farmhouse and sets it ablaze. The police take her to North Bend Psychiatric Hospital. Maybe that's where she escaped from. She suffers from sudden flashbacks  involving a young girl bound in shackles, locked in the basement of a farmhouse, sexually assaulted by a brutish figure. Kristen doesn't seem to have any memory beyond knowing her own name. She's told to take her medications and behave. This isn't One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) or Shock Treatment (1964): the orderlies and Dr. Stringer (Jared Harris) are stern but they really do want to help her with their shock treatments and little pill cup dosages. If you've seen any stuck-in-a-mental-ward movies, you already know all the tricks she pulls to keep from swallowing her pills. Carpenter has seen them, too. He even cracks out the old chestnut of an air-vent big enough for Kristen to shimmy through in one of her escape attempts, the metal grille of which is conveniently fastened by flat-head screws a handy penny can open.

The penny comes from another patient, Zoey (Laura-Leigh), a girl so regressed she acts like a child, sucking her thumb, her hair in ponytails, and clutching a small stuffed animal. The other patients, oddly there are only three more--Iris (Lyndsy Fonseca), Sarah (Danielle Panabaker), and Emily (Mamie Gummer)--are frightened by the ghost of Alice (Jillian Kramer), a former patient now prowling the halls looking to punish them. "Why?" is the driving question that Carpenter's fabricated mental ward with few patients to treat, mostly empty hallways, and with a surprisingly small staff to ignore Kristen's concerns and fears, will eventually be revealed.

Once you get past the shock-drop opening before the credits roll, when Tammy is dispatched during a dark and stormy night by Alice, the remaining actions and terrors build in preposterous leaps and bounds, although the ending provides the explanation for this. Once explained, however, the red herring-ish opening scene becomes contextually improbable (and if I weren't so polite, I'd even say nonsensical.) Clearly its only purpose is a contrived jolt, effective, but meaningless. the explanation confuses more than it clarifies, making the logic-bending events leading up to it even less plausible. I can't really tell you why because that would be a major spoiler; but should you see this movie to the ending, think about Kristen's companions throughout, their physical presence around the ward, the aside deadends each of them reaches when Alice comes calling, then ask yourself how any of it can be pieced together realistically for the story's sake. Any one of Hanna-Barbera's Scooby Doo cartoons make more sense than this script.

As for me, I'm asking why Carpenter insists on repeating past mistakes. His eye's better than this. His story-sense is better than this. When the dramatic opening credits, animated in splintering glass shards reflecting images as they fly through space, trumps the movie itself, I can't fathom how you wouldn't have questions to ask here.