Dressed to Kill - 1980

Further research shows I have not seen most of Brian De Palma's films. The guy just sorta went under the radar, what can I say? I would have seen them though, if I knew they were all this insane!

I have a few trans friends. My "best" friend who is trans is very sensitive about this subject and I can tell this movie would make him extremely mad. But I love it. It's so insanely 80's, and 70's, and everything in between. When I saw Body Double, I thought it was insane and 80's. It had a fucking music video in it for christ sake! But this, this is equally insane!

We begin with intense amounts of nudity as our screen vixen Angeline Dickenson as Kate masturbates in the shower. She gets raped from behind, and wakes to have actual sex with her husband... Okay! Great beginning! She is in an unhappy marriage, fantasizing about other men, going to therapy with therapist Michael Caine, and she has a fleeting encounter with a stranger she meets in a museum. Then, as if this movie needed to get stranger, she is murdered 30 minutes into the movie by a dude in drag, and then we follow Nancy Allen for the rest of the movie...?

This movie was so very demented and strange. It was kind of unlike anything I've seen. The nudity and sexuality are over the top, the acting is bizarre and not all that good, and the themes are wacky as shit. Essentially, there is a trans person who is killing people, and the murdered woman's son Peter teams up with Nancy Allen. They have some strange surrogate mother/sexual relationship and that's weird, but everything with this is weird. There is also a lot of silence, especially in the beginning, and I really liked that. The whole museum encounter and the previous scene were all without dialogue, and shot in strange offbeat methods. It was really cool, and for sure unique.

When the plot gets kicking into gear and we're following Nancy Allen, it tends to drag a tiny bit and the impulsive strangeness disappears for a while, but in the end it comes back for a jampacked and also nonsensical ending. What the fuck was this movie? I am not sure, but I do know I loved it. I might see all of De Palma's films, based on this alone.

The Edge - 1997

What does one say about the 1997 animal attack movie The Edge? I saw this in film study in 2003 or 2004. I'd never seen it before, I don't think I've seen it since.

Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin star in this Lee Tamahori directed thriller. Early on, Anthony Hopkins is a rich know-it-all who is married to a younger wife and has a ton of money. He goes up to Alaska for some reason and they are doing a photo shoot with his wife. They decide to fly out to get an Indian guy for the pictures, and on their way the plane gets hit by birds and crashes in a lake. The two main actors as well as Harold Perrineau survive and soon enough a large Kodiak bear is after them. It kills Harold and now is coming after our two heroes.

This is a fine action adventure survival film. The dialogue is good, written by David Mamet it has a lot of jilted strangeness and you'll hear everyone's character names about 1000 times. Hopkins is Charles, Alec is Bob, and I know that without going to IMDb. There is a nice plotting to the film and it won't weigh you down with dilly-dally. But on the other hand, it's a bit unfocused, parts are predictable, and the whole end part is largely unnecessary.

Bart the bear plays the bear in this, and although Alec Baldwin and others say the bear was really quite docile, the bear is hugely intimidating. Nothing quite like a giant bear staring into your face and roaring. The bear does it's part, the actors do too, and it's a fine movie.

But it's also just that, fine, nothing to write home about, nothing too special. Overall, I'd say an average 2.5

Choke Canyon - 1986

I'm getting ready to donate the VHS soon. All this stupid VHS I bought that I've been collecting, it's all going to go. I'm having VCR trouble, and frankly, I'll probably not replace it. Welcome to 2021 bitch.

Choke Canyon looked like a winner. I mean, check out the VHS box cover art. I love VHS art man!

Stephen Collins stars as a rogue scientist working in the desert on some random world-saving technology I don't remember. His land is being used as a toxic waste dump by some giant corporation who didn't know he lives there and when they find out, they set out to remove him. When their attempt to remove him in a conventional way doesn't work, they try it by force. So we have a second rate action 80's flick and you know? It ain't bad!

Written in part by horror schlockmaster Ovidio G. Assonitis, Choke Canyon moves at a good rate, the stars do well, and it has a generic love interest but she's good! The action is minimal, but once you get to the end, hold the shit on because the plane and helicopter stunts are fucking fantastic and last quite a while. Lance Henrickson is the main villain, and he's dependable as always, and the movie has all the right ingredients when you need them.

Matt opted not to finish it the night we started it, but he's a rank amateur and was falling asleep. I rode this one out no problem. I'll even give it a solid 3.5.

Fritz the Cat - 1972

Fritz the Cat was mentioned by my friend Jason recently and it was free online so I downloaded it for me and my other buddy to watch. I haven't seen this since high school, so who knows what it's like, right?

Fritz the Cat was R. Crumb's cartoon which depicted the titular character being a part of the 60's movement. He drops out of college in the beginning, joins the underground, smokes a lot of weed and fucks a lot of girls, joins the black underground, starts a race riot, and then kinda gets betrayed by it. The plot is secondary though to the weird nothingness, commentary, political idealism, and sexuality ever present in Crumb's cartooning.

What to say, first of all, the movie is super sexual, and funny in that way at least. Sometimes it misses the mark, but overall it is consistently funny and definitely weird. The animation is good, and this was the first Ralph Bakshi film. He wanted to produce something alternative to Disney and this is most definitely alternative.

This is one of those movies you kinda have to see for yourself. It's progressive and a product of it's time, but feels sort of unclear about any point it's trying to make or message it conveys. It feels like it both celebrates and admonishes certain things about the liberal agenda, and it's dated look at black culture must've even been offensive at the time. I know that Blaxploitation was going strong, but still. The film lacks a lot in the way of charm, but it has to be cited as the source for essentially all crazy animation and adult animation ever to come since.

I guess I liked this, but probably not as much as I could have. 3 stars.

Alien Resurrection - 1997

I didn't plan it out that I would review Jean Pierre Jeunet films back to back. I've acually had Resurrection for a while and I finally got around to it when my friend was visiting, because, duh, it's Alien and we are dudes.

My ex-wife owned the Alien Quadrilogy boxset. I remember that thing when it was new. It was like $100, a big ol' fat DVD boxset with all four Alien films, you bought it for the first two and got the second two as a bonus was how most people thought of it. Now me, I never thought Alien 3 was not that bad. People act like Alien 3 is the bad movie. Hey guys, did you confuse Alien 3 with Resurrection? Cause this is way, way fucking worse.

So immediately I can see Jeunet's mark on this film. It's filmed in a whimsical, farcical, comedic style throughout. I began to think about this film from a different angle as I watched it, the angle one could only have if they had just watched City of Lost Children. This has the same weirdness, the same wacky small details. The plot of course is action/adventure/sci fi, but overall this is a movie about characters. Sadly, it is not about the characters we knew from the previous movies, and the new ones this introduces are mere stand-ins who are also undeveloped, but hey, that's the brakes huh?

Ripley is cloned in the beginning of the film and comes out acting a bit off. She is partially a hybrid with the xenomorphs, although if you think that's a cool angle we will see explored, you're dead wrong. Instead we get vague hints at her power and we see her being able to smell if someone is infected with the facehugger egg. She is also somewhat better skilled with fighting and other stuff and she is now largely more sexual, although that's not really explored either. Instead we spend a shitload of time on Ron Perlman, Dominique Pinon, Gary Dourdan, and Winona Ryder as these ragtag group of somewhat misfits/somewhat space marines who are going to go up against the aliens. There is a queen somewhere that Brad Dourif is using her to hatch xenomorphs for unknown reasons, and of course they escape and the chaos begins.

I just don't even know dude. The movie is not scary, and is largely not even supposed to be. The characters are over the top and badly written, hammed up in the acting department, and thin stereotypes to begin with. The action is brief and telegraphed, filled with nonsense unbelievable moments and cliché heroics that you'll hate. The ending pulls out of nowhere a weird alien human hybrid who sees Ripley as it's mother and definitely wants to fuck her, and when that thing comes a calling to be the villain, that fight also doesn't deliver. In short, nothing actually DOES deliver, so at least that is not a surprise.

This is also a case wherein I think we can account a lot of the blame to the director. They wanted someone with a dark unique vision, and I could see why after watching The City of Lost Children, you would think that is Jeunet. I wish they had gotten a prime Alex Proyas instead. This movie was downright terrible, and I don't think I'll ever rewatch it.

The City of Lost Children - 1995

What is the definition, really, of a "childhood movie"? I think you're only as old as you feel, and when I saw this movie in say, 1998, 99, 2000, whenever the shit I saw it, I was still in what I would refer to now as my "childhood". Also, I do like the website and service of Steam because holy shit, did you know there is a video game based on this movie?! WHAT?!

The City of Lost Children was directed by French auteur and weirdo Jean Pierre Jeunet. I just want to go on a tangent here and say Jeunet was another of these directors I saw when I was young that opened my eyes to foreign cinema, independent cinema, and offbeat bizarre-ness. I remember at times telling people Jeunet was my favorite director even. His filmography when I was young was this, Delicatessen, Alien Resurrection and then later Amelie. I didn't see Alien Resurrection for a long time, but I considered this and Deli and Amelie to be three of the best films I'd seen. At the time Amelie came out I was downright convinced that this guy was the next Francis Ford Coppola or something. He was unstoppable.

The City of Lost Children stars Ron Perlman as One, a circus strongman who in the beginning gets his little brother/friend kidnapped by some weirdo mutants. These mutants are mechanically altered servants of Krank, a creation himself, and eccentric searcher of dreams. He cannot experience his own dreams so he tries to watch kids dreams, except the kids are terrified of him so they keep having nightmares. Krank lives with his creations, which are four clones played by Dominique Pinon, a dwarf woman, and a brain in a aquarium that can speak. Yeah, we got a strange movie here.

The actors in this are all doing great parts. There is a large degree of committment from them, and the characters are all sympathetic. There is a unique ability to understand with each of these characters, and they have a dynamic, deep humanity to them. The style is of course the most obvious other thing to mention about this, because there is basically only a few films out there in total that look this good. Michel Gondry, Steve Jonze, Jean Pierre Jeunet, these directors are the ones in the world who have redefined exactly how good a movie can look. Everything looked fucking awesome! The movie looks so good. Highly budgeted for it's time, this was a 18,000,000 dollar budget.

I feel like this is highly regarded, well known cult movie. I wish that Jeunet had kept going after Amelie. When my ex-wife and I went to go see Micmacs in 2009, I remember us both walking out saying "meh" because it was fairly uninteresting. The style was there, but it felt like it was just going through the motions. In the end, Jeunet went into obscurity and I never saw his other film, Spivet. Fuck it, I'll rewatch Micmacs for you, my nonexistent reader. City of Lost Children is a 5.