Willard - 2003

I remember watching the commercials for Willard in high school. It's kinda weird really that I remember it, there were gallons of movies that came out in the time I was "aware of film" and also in my geek phase about it. So why this one?

Maybe it was a temporary horror interest, or maybe it was the apparent oddness of this one coming out. Either way it came and went, wasn't in theaters long, I never saw it.

Directed by X-Files dude Glen Morgan, the film stars Crispin Glover as Willard, a spineless weirdo living with his mom, who has no friends. There's rats in his basement and eventually he befriends them, and discovers they obey him to an extent. What will he do with this power?

Crispin was over-acting, hamming it up big-time as Willard, that's the first thing I noticed. I have to think that led to negative reviews. I'm surprised frankly that this movie didn't flop hugely, and that it still has a 61% rating. Cause this was legit terrible.

I wanted to like this, at least mildly, and the shots and camera work were nice, but it's contrived, clueless, and clonky. R Lee Ermey plays Willard's boss and he's a evil boss stereotype, Willard lives with his old gross mom who's a stereotype, some girl likes Willard for no apparent reason, then there's the rats.

When the best thing you can say about the rats is that "sometimes they're not cgi...?" than you have a real problem.  First of all, they are mostly CG.  Then there's just the fact they don't make sense.  The quantity of rats changes abruptly without reason, and there's the "star rat" Socrates as well as the "bad rat" Ben.  Ben is a CG big ol' rat, who Willard inexplicably hates.  It doesn't make sense plot-wise and there is no reason I could discern other than to breed plot intrigue later down the line.

But since there is no change, and since it's fairly obvious where the film is going, the intrigue fails and instead you have a hour 45 minute film that drags on, with nothing to offer and no real suspense or horror.  Crispin's over-acting seals the deal, makes it so that truly nothing is likable.  I wavered because I didn't want to give it zero stars, but ya know what?!  0 stars.

Black Narcissus - 1947

I sometimes just pick up a film, based on nothing other than the fact it is Criterion Collection, and rent it.  This is not the biggest plug of all time for Criterion, although I do tend to think their stuff is, at the very least, damn fine film.  This is an ongoing project for me, it's how I discovered things like Meantime and...uh...other stuff I forget about right now.

Black Narcissus stars Deborah Kerr, David Farrar, Sabu, and Jean Simmons in the story of colonial English times, when the expansion East meant that explorers and religious people were coming to India, China, and everywhere in between with their "modern religion".  This story follows the nuns released on these missions.

Deborah Kerr, Flora Robson, Jenny Laird, and Kathleen Byron are the nuns in question.  And honestly, I have no idea which one was which.  One of them is made the leader of the group which will be dispatched to the Himalayas to do whatever it is they do there, and she is assigned a group of about 5 nuns to take with her.  One of them is the troublesome Sister Ruth.  But seriously, especially in nun garb, they all look exactly the same and I had no idea who was who 90% of the time.

I guess the prevailing theme here was supposed to be the sexual undertones of the nuns and the main white man there, David Farrar as Mr. Dean.  There are a few scenes of the nuns ogling him, but he is so outrageously comically written and acted I didn't see it.  The other theme of course is isolation and the obstacles faced by the nuns on the mission.  They're all facing hardship and trying to cope with situations out of their control and out of the realms of what they'd expected.

It's kinda boring, it's not that special, I didn't like it too much.  I'll give it 2 stars.

28 Days Later - 2002

I'm going to review everything I recently got from the library... 8 film reviews that are scattered in genre and year. Starting with Dr Giggles.

28 Days Later was a huge deal when it came out. I remember people were talking about the "running zombies" and how innovative that was. It was British, which was different as well.

Danny Boyle was a director I had known for a while, as I loved Trainspotting and I had seen Shallow Grave when I was really young, at a ski resort where some weird ski guy put it on late at night and I watched it, completely terrified.  At this point he had "done no wrong" and I truly don't think he had a even slightly bad film he'd made.

Cillian Murphy stars as a young hospital patient that wakes up to a seemingly abandoned, empty England.  As he wanders the streets, he discovers he's not alone, there are in fact people who are infected with a virus.  A virus, which is only identified as "rage" at one point, which makes them attack anyone not already infected and which makes them completely savage.

It's a fresh new take on the zombie idea, with a lot of small scale concerns taking front stage.  My immediate thought as I watched it is that, this exact (and I mean EXACT) idea would later become two or three individual seasons worth of The Walking Dead.  The whole idea of them finding a well fortified base of soldiers and/or survivors, and then of those guys posing a threat as well...  suffice to say that Walking Dead copied the fuck out of this film.

I remembered the soundtrack to 28 Days being great, and it is.  Minimalistic, strange, eerie, the soundtrack was a big deal then and is a big deal now.  The editing, the acting, the pace, it's all absolute top notch.  This is one of the films that helped "re-launch" zombies into the mainstream now, where they're fuckin everywhere you look.  I give it a 4.5.

The Devil Commands - 1941

Continuing my Boris Karloff DVD set this morning, I chose one at random and watched The Devil Commands.  And whaaaaaat a choice I made?!  (No, not really)

Boris Karloff stars as Dr. Julian Blair, and he's the same mostly good guy with a graying sense of right and wrong as he was in the last movie, The Man They Could Not Hang.  The theme to this entire set, from what I could divine of the plot synopsis I read, seems to be:
Good scientist has a really important, good experiment to run.  Something goes slightly awry, and leads him down a dark path to either peoples deaths or criminal acts.  BUT!  It was for SCIENCE!

This time, Karloff is practicing a way to read people brain patterns, and to possible then interpret that knowledge to understand what people are thinking.  He hooks his wife into the machine and reads her brain pattern shortly before she dies, and then later, he notices her brain pattern is still coming through into the machine after her death.  Does that mean he could talk to the dead?!  With the help of an evil psychic, he'll sure try.

It's all well and good.  Like the last one, it moves fast enough, and it doesn't even have the long trial scenes to slow it down.  It has all the essentials a mad doctor movie needs to have, and the sympathetic feeling for the doctor is there as you know he just wants to do what is right. 

I give it 3.5 stars.

Run Lola Run - 1998

I wish I could remember how and why I ever heard of this film in the first place.  This was, for me, one of those "films that started it all".

The things this movie introduced me to:
1) Independent film
2) foreign film
3) electronic music
4) stylistic, unique visioned films

The list could probably go on, but seriously, this movie was revolutionary.  I remember showing it to tons of friends, I remember owning the soundtrack, I remember being a fan of Tom Tykwer and trying to follow his career.

The film is about Lola, a red haired young woman, who receives a call from her boyfriend in distress, he recently lost $100,000 on the subway and now he only has 20 minutes until the mafia or the collectors or whoever is going to come to get their cash.  Lola springs into action, and the movie follows three attempts of hers to come up with $100,000 in 20 minutes. 

It's all handheld cameras, interesting edits, stylistic choices.  They include animation, magic, insane beat driven electronic music, and many zany character moments.  The characters in this film are really memorable, and each one is fleshed out to an astounding degree.  And the film is just tightly edited, insanely packed with heartbeats and thrills and the unexpected and absurd.

This movie certainly was a bombshell of impact.  The beginning and the extremity of it was a huge influence on action, I specifically was thinking of Crank and other adrenaline pumped over the top action flicks during this.  The style choices were completely alien, but you could see how Quentin Tarantino definitely drew a lot of influence from this.  It's huge in it's influence.

I give it 5 stars, a true classic.

The Man They Could Not Hang - 1939

This is a retro-ass movie I rented on a multi DVD pack, all films with Boris Karloff.  I put this on and much to my delight it was just over an hour!

In this one, Boris Karloff plays Dr. Savaard.  He is a surgeon looking to restore life in recently deceased people.  He can't get a specimen which died in a scientifically beneficial way to go with his research, so he enlists a volunteer who he will kill in a good, sciency way, and then bring that dude back to life.

But, the wife of the volunteer goes to the cops and they all rush to the help of the dead man, and Dr. Savaard gets arrested and put to death for manslaughter.  Of course, Savaard himself is then brought back to life by his assistant, and he goes on a revenge murder spree to get even with the jurors, the judge, and those who wronged him!

This is a fast moving, fun flick.  It being only an hour was a surprise, and it fits in perfectly since I've been watching season 4 of the Twilight Zone, the one that has hour long episodes.  The ending was extremely abrupt, and it felt like they just cut off the last reel of the film, but hey, whatever, I'll take it.

I'd say that I was surprised at how dark it was and how fast paced it was, given the year.  I think 40s and I think talky, bland and boring.  The jury scene was perhaps a bit long, and in a modern remake that would be about 7 minutes and then more time would be spent on the deaths later, but it was interesting enough the first go round to keep me interested in the jury shit.  I give it 3.5 stars.

Dr. Giggles - 1992

I was in a mood for a stupid horror film and I rented Dr. Giggles.  It looked fucking retarded, so I picked it up from the library.  IMDb describes this as Horror, Suspense, Comedy?  Why Comedy?  There was no fucking comedy in this at all.

This is the vision of self aware, as shown first by the year...  And there are tons of stupid puns and one liners.  If you can think of a doctor themed pun, it exists in this film.  Everything from jokes about lab coats to jokes about doctors loving golf.  There's a shit ton of self aware acting by main actor Larry Drake, but it's likable enough and at least it moves fast.

Like I was just saying, the plot does move, and there's enough deaths in it to keep this movie moving.  There is a ton of deaths, there are several that are doctor related with certain tools or tricks and of course, stupid puns.  Dr. Giggles laughs a lot, I guess that's why the movie is called that, although there are zero references to that name in the film.

I'm pretty sure it was a dumb, forgettable B horror film in both intention and delivery.  2.5 stars.

Desert Heat - 1999

Woof.  I guessed 1990.  Maybe because this looked and felt Old, with a capital O bro.  Jean Claude Van Damme foooooool.  I am watching his flicks, in other words.

JCVD is a suicidal ex marine or something who hangs out with his sort of imaginary, sort of real friend played by Danny Trejo.  JCVD gets roped into the drama of a small desert town when he gets robbed at gunpoint and left for dead.  Three local inbred weirdos and their dad make JCVD be out for vengeance and he meets up with a local hot chick at a restaurant, and shit gets all weird.

What else to say about it?  Oh!  There is a scene where JCVD is wearing only underwear and Danny Trejo massages his feet.  I bet some people were regrettably rock hard during that scene.  Ummm, classic JCVD ass shot.  There's a bit of topless nudity.  There is a few cool action scenes I guess.  I was 99% sure Trejo was imaginary the entire time except at one point the bad guys capture him and kill him.  That was weird.

I texted my buddy during it and described it was "nowhere near even the top 20 of the best JCVD films".  It's kinda boring and it is nowhere near as funny as it wants to be at a lot of times.  2 stars.

Update:  I just discovered this is sort of inspired by Kurosawa's Yojimbo, which I could totally see.  Also, this is directed by Rocky and Karate Kid director John G. Alvidsen.  Weird.

Don't Look Now - 1973

Does my "Don't" marathon exist without one of the BEST known films starting with the word Don't?  Arguably, the word Don't doesn't have that many known titles.  This is likely the best known one, although I wouldn't fathom a guess as to what the other known Don't movies are.

Don't Look Now stars Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in a slow burn suspense thriller from director Nicolas Roeg.  I first run into Roeg through his film either 1) Walkabout or 2) Wake in Fright.  I honestly don't remember.  Brief IMDb access tells me it was Walkabout.  He would later be best known for the David Bowie film The Man Who Fell To Earth.

Anywho, in Don't Look Now, Sutherland is working in an old church where he is doing restorations.  This takes place somewhere in Italy I guess, though I don't remember where, or if it ever really said.  In the beginning of the film, Sutherland and Christie have their daughter drown to death and it appears as if Sutherland sort of had a premonition regarding it.  As time goes on, both he and his wife have premonitions about upcoming deaths.

The slow burning aspect of this film means we have plenty of time to sit with Sutherland and Christie, and they do have one of the best sex scenes I have ever seen in a film, period.  As time goes on, there is plenty of odd weirdness and other shit happens.  It's a almost two hour movie, and most of it moves really well.  It moves quickly and there is a lot of cool shit in here.  At some point Sutherland's wife disappears, and he has to hunt for her.

This is a classic horror suspense film, loved by Ebert and making an appearance on the 1001 Movies to See Before You Die.  It's got cult and classic appeal both, but for me, I dunno.  It seemed a bit slow.  Maybe nonsensical.  It seemed a bit unclear what was happening.  I'll give it a 4.