Misery - 1990

 "Write the review," I thought just now.  Then immediately thought no.  I'll settle for a short one.

Misery is a movie I've always wanted to see, and a Stephen King book I've always wanted to read.  One of these days in the winter of North Idaho, I may read the book.  I haven't read King since my 20s.

James Caan and Kathy Bates star in this adaptation, Kathy Bates won an Oscar for the role of Annie, a avid fan of author James Caan as Paul Sheldon.  Paul Sheldon is a writer trying to break out of a rut, in the beginning he has killed off his most famous character and now he's finished his new book, and he leaves his winter stay in Colorado after the book is done.  He gets in an accident on the way home, only to be rescued and brought home by Annie.  But it turns out Annie is an unstable fanatic with a violent temper.

The thrills are huge in this movie, the pacing is good, and the tension is taught.  There's a lot to say about it, but I'm not really in the mood for details right now.  Blah.  My blog y'all.

I was surprised how good this is, and it is likely the best Stephen King adaptation.  Creepy, fast paced, and never slowed down by psychological bullshit as a lot of them are.  Annie is stern and strictly evil, but still written well enough to be believable.  I give it a 4.

Oxygen - 1999

 The best thing about video rental stores was picking up something, judging it completely by the cover, and renting it.  I know that online you can see a cover, read a synopsis.  Fuck you.  It isn't the same.  I frequent the library because it reminds me of video rental stores...which I sorely, sorely miss.

I picked up Oxygen and raised a skeptical eyebrow at the cover.  This movie looks dumb as sin.  It looks like a made for TV late night basic cable "thriller" and would only be remarkable because it was lucky enough to cast a pre-fame Adrien Brody.  So yeah, I guess I judged it as being most likely bad, and then last night I was in the mood for something maybe leaning towards bad, so I put it on.

In the beginning of Oxygen, we are following tough female detective Madeline in her day at work.  After a particularly rough day, she goes to a mystery house and has a drink with a bizarre man, with a suggestion of something creepy and sexual happening after.  She then gets roped into the newest case:  a high powered man's wife was kidnapped, she's locked in a coffin that's buried somewhere, and they probably only have an hour to solve the case before she runs out of oxygen.

There's a few things I'll say here, such as that this movie clearly is emulating precursors in the genre, The Silence of the Lambs, Seven, The Bone Collector, that type are all the skeletons that this movie is building from.  However, to dismiss it based on that would be a mistake.  Much like The Silence of the Lambs, this is a human story first and a thriller second.  Adrien Brody plays a completely unsympathetic psychopath, and Maura Tierney as the detective is layered and intricate.  The dialogue is good, the tension is good, and there's a lot of "oh shit" moments present in the film.

It's not like Oxygen is rewriting the book on a crime thriller or anything.  But for what it tries to do, it vastly succeeds.  Everything is pulling it's weight, and the acting especially elevates the whole movie.  Hey, casting a future Academy Award winner in the role of the bad guy?  It's a good idea.  Also, this movie pulls no punches.  It's not out to be an audience pleaser, and the end is dark and realistic.  

I don't know how to justify liking this as much as I did.  Perhaps it mainly stems from a vast underestimation of what the movie would be.  I expected some dumb late 90's cop movie with nu metal on the soundtrack and contrived "super-cool" style aspirations.  Through a certain lens, I suppose one could see that present here a bit.  But go in with no expectation, and be pleasantly surprised like I was.

One Million Years B.C. - 1966

 This time when I grabbed the DVD it said Ray Harryhausen right on the front, and I actively made the decision to keep my little unintentional marathon going.  I don't think I'd seen this before, either!

Raquel Welch infamously stars and wears a fur bikini in this mid-60's caveman feature, and it's iconic in the look it created.  Without even thinking I know I've seen this before:

She gets introduced later in the film actually, after our main character Tumak leaves his prehistoric human group in search of something different.  After Tumak leaves, he encounters another group of humans with blond hair, and Raquel Welch is one of their group.  He fights a dinosaur, wins, and eventually leads this group to a conflict with his old group.  That's basically the plot.

I'll briefly state that this movie was really cool and innovative with it's use of no dialogue, save for grunts and some character names, and we have an extremely brief narration telling us what's going on and then we're left in silence the rest of the film. 

The other main thrust of this plot is really the different encounters with creatures.  Harryhausen cleverly interweaves real lizards, crickets, spiders and other stuff alongside the claymation dinosaurs that harass the clan of people.   There's plenty of action sequences, and most of them actually look pretty good overall.  When they create claymation people it stands out the most, but it's still fun as fuck to watch.  

I've always had a soft spot for Harryhausen effects and the way they look.  I'm going to keep this going by seeing what else the library has that have his trademark effects.  I think this is a true classic film, good for hokey laughs as good as it is for a film buff.  4 stars.

Blair Witch - 2016

 "At this point," thought I after finishing Book of Shadows, "I might as well close the loop."

I had seen Blair Witch before, I think, sometime around when it was sort of new probably.  This would have been when I was newly single, breaking up with my wife in 2016 and I probably got pretty drunk and watched this alone in my apartment, pretending not to care about the new status that haunted me:  Single.

Single is a good way to start this review I guess, or at least I'll make it work.  How's this:  There is one single good Blair Witch movie.  Sigh.  This one starts out and the idea is fine enough.  First of all, we return to the found footage look from the original Blair Witch instead of the classic cinematography from Book of Shadows.  A girl is making a documentary for her senior class about her friend who's Heather Donahue's brother.  Heather Donohue was the girl from the first Blair Witch, and she's been missing.  He wants to go investigate, so boom, a group of four friends heads out to the same woods.

The idea is to have another batch of fresh idiot teens for ol' Blairy, and I like that.  The group picks up a tour leader couple, and so now the six of them go out to the woods.   They cross a river and one of them cuts her foot.  We know that's going to be bad.  But what's really bad is that once at the camp site, they go to sleep to have the trademark night noises bother them, and tensions among the four friends and the two others rise while the scares come up.

I will make a short list here about what the problems are:  1 we have too many allusions and follows in the footsteps in the first one - do your own thing!  I heard a great quote once in MST3K once: never put a better movie referenced in your shitty movie.  2 there is never a human moment, once, for anyone in this movie.  Hope you don't like any writing behind your cannon fodder.  3 having the series now use actual supernatural elements in it?  Why would that make it scarier, or better?  4 Having some of the humans be the bad guy at some points?  Again, does that make it scarier or better?

There's more, but those are the ones I think of right off.  There's still some chilling segments, but overall, this feels like just another horror movie.  Generic is another word for that I guess.  It's any movie set in the woods, and since found footage had taken off, it's also any found footage movie.  I will grant there's not a ton of wasted time with annoying shit like in some found footage movies, but still, this movie is garbage for the most part. 

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 - 2000

 Marilyn Manson screams "We're disposable teens" as a helicopter shot flies above the woods.  We intercut with really fake looking blood and guts scenes and weird BDSM inspired "auteur" style shots and... wait, hold on THIS is the sequel to The Blair Witch Project?

I had an inclination that I am willing to test, that this was a pre-existing script they doctored to quickly rush a sequel to Blair Witch into production and capitalize on the craze.  I'm trying to load up Wikipedia to see.  The fact is that this feels like it has all jack shit to do with the original movie, and they threw together some vague "horror movie", sewed in some dialogue about a Blair Witch, and then jammed this into theaters as fast as possible.

Book of Shadows starts with a group of 20-somethings, a group of terrible actors and terrible characters who are capitalizing on the success of The Blair Witch Project movie, leading a tour group in Maryland of various Witch related sites.  They get wasted at a site, pass out, wake up with their site destroyed and video tapes left of the night happenings.  They go home, review the tapes, and discover sinister images that emerge, pointing to various different things.

The tone is horrible.  The everything is horrible?  That's a yes.  I don't know.  There's so much to say negative about this.  Let's try to say something positive.  Um...  it had nudity, once?  

Book of Shadows feels like they took Blair Witch, ran it through a "2000's era film" filter, appealing it towards goths and subcultures and everything else, and then shit it out.  The movie is bad, even by "2000's era film" standards.  I give it a zero.

The Blair Witch Project - 1999

 I truly do wish I remembered better what this was like when I first saw it.  I was 13 when The Blair Witch Project came out, and I remember hearing about it somewhat.  I knew the independent movie theater in town was playing it, I knew it was a big deal, and I didn't really understand why.  I likely saw it in 1999 or 2000 once it was a new release, but I don't remember.

The huge deal this movie presented was because like many things, it was simply the first.  They were the first to do the true found footage thing, and they really presented it as a true authentic "found" footage.  The directors hung posters about the missing actors, they listed them as missing on IMDb, they made a huge campaign over the "reality" of this movie.  So much so that I wonder how it was even possible or legal - such a thing could NOT happen these days.

They were partially in the right place at the right time.  With the infancy of the internet, Blair Witch was certainly helped by their obfuscation of the truth and of their intentions.  People tried to crack this hidden code, they latched onto the mystery presented therein and took to trying to decipher it themselves.  The only other thing I remember that tried this was Cloverfield, with mixed results.  We'd been burned by Blair Witch, the next thing was not also going to pull the wool over our eyes.

However, like I said, right place right time, and people honestly DIDN'T KNOW this was a movie somewhat.  They literally thought this might be real, a venerable psuedo-snuff film which was now free to watch by anyone, and which, also around the turn of the century, felt like a really world changing thing.  

I was aware that they could not put a real thing like this into theaters, even if they wanted to, and yes tender reader, even at the age of 13 did I know this.  But that didn't mean I wasn't interested.  I watched it, and I remember what, exactly...?

Heather, Mike, and Josh are using one color camera and one black and white camera to film a school project.  They are interviewing people about the Blair Witch, a local legend involving seven dead children in a Maryland town.  They head out to the woods to find a cemetery for the kids, only to be increasingly bothered by strange noises at night.  Tensions rise as they experience getting lost, getting no sleep, and getting hungry as what was supposed to be a 1 night trip stretches out into 2, 3, 4 etc.  The sounds at night increase and soon enough this will have to lead to something.

The incredible thing about this movie which really sticks out in a rewatch and the now available behind the scenes information is truly how much of a experiment this movie was.  It was a extreme experiment by the directors and creators in actually scaring their actors, in giving them just enough information or just enough to know what might happen, but not enough so that there is always some reality to what's happening.  It's the perfect marriage between reality TV and scripted TV, something which again right place right time, was not so common that it is trite and lifeless.  

I highly recommend the episode of Unspooled that talks about this film.  I want to say more, but I'll leave it at this:  Certain movies feel to me like a bridge built between the art that is film and what is generally accepted as a movie.  I try to explain this to the people that dislike 2001 A Space Odyssey.  2001 is film, it is using film as a medium to create art.  Most movies are not doing that.  They are making entertainment.  Their goal is not the same.  I feel like similar to 2001, Blair Witch is using film in a different way - it is using it to create something besides a movie.  It's got to be one of the most unique things in that way, something which elevates it to an extremely short list of films which are truly unique for one way or another.  That alone makes it perhaps...a five star film.

Ivan the Terrible - 1944

 Sergei Eisenstein is a well known Russian director, writer and producer who was a progenitor to cinema in general, not just Russian.  He is fairly unknown in the US and cinema doesn't name drop him as much as arguably they should, given his influence.

Ivan the Terrible was a huge deal.  Funded for production by Joseph Stalin, he felt a kinship with Ivan the Terrible and was invested in the making of this movie.  Part 1 went over very well, but part 2 hit problems when Stalin felt he didn't like the depiction of Ivan the Terrible.  It was delayed, and thus the plan of having a part 3 never came to fruition.  

Ivan the Terrible is a biopic of the infamous Russian leader.  A hair over 3 hours, it depicts mostly the way in which Ivan comes to power, with a bit of flashback to his childhood and a bit of his life as a leader.  It features boatloads of historic figures, and is loosely realistic, of course being funded by Stalin some things are skewed to play out in a certain way.  I wonder if these types of movies are the beginning of the producer or the production company stepping in and taking control of the film?  The original idea of a "Production Hell"?

The first thing one will notice about this film is the compelling style, and the amazing light and camera work it has.  Being just a few years after Citizen Kane, it's awesome to see another movie of the same era having some of the same cool style, although obviously way less ambitious and stylized than Kane, Ivan the Terrible has a whole cinematic language of it's own.  The play of light and shadow, the symbolism present in the film, the scene of a crowd bowing down before him - there is a lot of visual poetry in this movie as well.

The movie is a bit hard to follow, for me at least.  I found a similarity with Andrei Rublev here, of it being historical in concept with a lot of players involved, and me being unaware, I forgot who people were or why they were important.  There's this guy and that guy and this woman and that religious figure, and I don't fucking know!  I don't actually know Russian history, and when a scene happens, unless it's painfully obvious, I may miss the subtext of the importance of the scene.  

The theatrical nature of this movie, the big overstated performances help a little bit in establishing what is happening, but overall you may find yourself lost at times.  It's not impossible to follow though, and the rich style and the huge quality of what you are seeing and understanding more than makes up for it.  

Ivan the Terrible is included in some of the worst movies, which I truly do not understand.  It's also on the list of 1001 movies to see before you die, which I do understand.  It's gorgeous, huge, and surprisingly modern in it's entertainment value.  You won't be shocked to the core most likely, but you also won't regret watching this true classic.