Friday, January 30, 2015

Stanley - 1972

Do you realize this is the second post in a row where I have correctly guessed the year of the movie without looking it up?  Daaaaaaaaaamn I'm good!  I knew this fucker was 1972.  How?  Practice makes perfect.

"Everyone is afraid of snakes.  But everyone is fascinated by them."  That may or may not be the line of dialogue that is Stanley's plot.  Something like that was spoken like 10 minutes ago in this bullfuck of a movie.  But I'm too drunk to rewind it.  This movie is ass-tacular.  That's both ass and spectacular.  But mostly it's just ass.

You take an idea, say, "what are people afraid of?" and then you make a whole movie about it.  If the answer was, say, being killed by animals, you get movies like Day of the Animals, Grizzly, Prophecy, etc.  If the answer was sharks you get Jaws, Deep Blue Sea, Shark, Open Water, etc.  Spiders you get the Kingdom of the Spiders, Giant Spider Invasion, Horrors of Spider Island, etc.  I'm just saying people have exploited the fuck out of this idea.  So then someone said snakes.  And before there was Anaconda, before there was Venom or Vipers or Snakes on a Plane/Train, there was fucking Stanley.  Because you see, Stanley is a snake.  A boring, boring fucking snake.

Some dude who looks vaguely like that Indian who cried in those 70's commercials against littering stars as hippie-go-hug-a-tree, who keeps a pet snake and it kills people and oh god this movie is stupid.  Seriously, Gorehouse Greats, my Amazon dvd set I bought, is starting to look like a mistake.  Be aware, this is my first review written while watching the movie, and the first written while drunk.  So I might be biased.

It's not funny, scary, interesting, well made, well acted, it has no tension or action or intrigue.  It's people saying things as dull and flatly as possible and then badly done scenes of snakes, which are obviously not dangerous, pretending to be dangerous.  It makes me sick.  Someone kill me.

Don't watch Stanley.  Go to the mall, rent a shotgun, and blow your fucking brains out before you watch this movie.  Let a dog rape you before you watch this movie.  Cannibalize yourself before you see Stanley.  Oh just let me die now.

Lemme also go on a rant because I can.  There's this girl, names Susie I think, and she has this line:  "If you want to go to bed with me, you have to say love, not like".  I'm not writing this because I don't understand the want for love.  I'm saying this because WHO the fuck would ever say that dialogue?  Isn't that just inviting yourself to be lied to?  Well, uh, I want sex, so "I love you".  Boom, I get fucked!  Now, I may be "compromising values" but words are just fucking words and if you sleep with any dude who drops the L word (not the TV show) then you are just as much as a slut as the girl who's selling herself.  Just sayin.


Re-review 2/25/15
I finally got around to re-watching Stanley.  What kept popping into my head were thoughts like "could I have actually been right when I wrote my drunk review?"  This movie is truly not very good.  It's mostly the really deadpan, I-have-no-emotions acting of lead character Chris Robinson as Tim Ochopee.  He is so boring to watch.  It's painful.

One of the other things about this movie, is that I'm not scared of snakes.  I guess that may really be why I didn't like this.  It's not threatening to me to see a rattlesnake coiled up hissing at someone.  I just don't care.  Sure, some of the biting scenes were well done.  Sure, the scene where the guy jumps into the pool that has snakes in it was fun.  But still, stupid, and bland.

At 1 hour 45 minutes, it's much too long for what it is, and without checking through each movie in the boxset, it's probably got the longest running time.  15-25 minutes could have definitely been trimmed to make it a quicker, better film.

Might I also point out that the girl I mentioned in my drunk review, who says "You have to say love, not like" sleeps with the guy even though he never says love.  Nice.

The snake deaths are controversial now of course, they are all real, and they are kind of strange to see.  Part of you is convinced that they must've been fake snakes, but they are not fake.  It's insane because you really don't see real killing often, and then when you do see it you realize how convincing and easy it is to fake.  The real kills in this are so easy, so quick, and so anticlimactic that is makes you regret that all the snakes died.

I approached this movie with an open mind and tried to like it more, but I don't.  It's dirty, low, and easy to dislike.  It has no interesting characters, the snake deaths are not fun to watch.  They also do have a fake snake that they use for the multiple face-bites.  It's a very obvious wooden fake snake.  Way to go, guys.

2 viewings, and I still don't like it.  I want to give it one star, also want to give it half a star.  But there is no reason, neither of them would be descriptive enough of how bad this was.  Why would it get half a star?  For the fact that it had a straight-forward plot?  That's not enough.  Movies shouldn't have confusing plots.  Just because I knew what was happening in this movie is not enough to give it credit.  That's why I'm giving it ZERO stars.  Fuck this movie.


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