Event Horizon - 1997

 Coming of age movies are similar to childhood movies.  No one ever talks about Adulthood movies.  Why is that?  Cause adulthood lasts longer than those two phases?

It's high school.  Little me is hanging out with my buddy Ben.  Ben understands I'm into horror and as well as The Crow and Dark City we watch Event Horizon.  I predictably love it, and then spend approximately 15 years or so without a rewatch.  Then, I watch it at the "mature" and "informed" age of 35, almost 36.  What are my rewatch experiences?

This movie is terrible! Sam Neill and Lawrence Fishburne star is the sci fi horror movie directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, a space movie from the late 90's with awful CGI and some dodgy-ass plot elements.  

The plot revolves around the discovery of a spaceship which has spent seven years drifting through space.  The spaceship has a black hole powered energy drive which looks awesome in a room full of spikes.  Why there's spikes in a room that potentially has no gravity is anyone's guess, but we chug along as it's revealed the crew of the Event Horizon went insane, and now the insanity spreads to our heroes, Sam Neill especially.  That's basically it.

This movie is so dumb.  I mean, I love it, but it is so so dumb.  Plot holes are agape as the black hole drive goes unexplained, the insanity goes unexplained, the character motivations are unclear, and in general, scary things happen "because".  I remember my ex-wife referred to this movie once as "the movie where Sam Neill plays a hot dog" because of how he looks in the latter half.  This movie is almost so bad it's good, but it's maybe a little bit too bad. 

It'll always hold a place in my heart, but yikes.  

Night of the Grizzly - 1966

 Random pick from the library, solely based on the name. 

Night of the Grizzly is an animal attack movie, a genre I have claimed I love, and a genre with precious few movies that belong to it. Seriously even with about 1,000 shark movies, there's not a lot of animal attack films. 

Animal attack by title, but really this is boring dialogue by plot. Some beefcake square-jawed farmer in Georgia is settling below the mountains and hears tell of a grizzly in the area. He deals with locals trying to screw him over and he talks to his woman for about 95 minutes until there's finally a bear confrontation in the last 3 minutes of the movie. 

This movie is boring city, population me. It's slow and poorly written, with nothing else to hook you. All the main characters are flawless and just have to beat a little sense into the bad guys around them. The scenery is nice, and that's one of the only great parts in the movie.

Antlers - 2021

 I'm bumping the blog and I'm reviewing a new horror movie just cause. I'm adding some newness man. It's cool. 

Jesse Plemons, Keri Russell and Graham Greene star in this new horror flick. It starts with a dad and son in a abandoned factory having "something" happen to them. From there, Keri Russell is a formerly alcoholic teacher who notices problems with one of her students, a student who is the son of the man from the beginning, who is now grossly changed.

It's a Wendigo. Maybe I should've said spoilers. But here's the spoiler warning, I have literally looked up the word Wendigo on the library system a few times, and I'm super thrilled to have another Wendigo film exist. Even if this movie isn't good, which, it really isn't. 

Some stuff happens, and overall its extremely average, with nothing that was scary or even thrilling happening. There's a bit of a so bad it's good thing going to this one, and I kinda enjoyed it in that way. And, you know, it's entertaining enough. Fast paced.  2.5 stars. 

The Fly - 1986

 With all my various rewatching of David Cronenberg films recently as well as within the last ten years, I somehow skipped watching The Fly. It's funny, because my ex even owned this on DVD and so in part one of the reasons I never went out of my way to watch this one again is because for 10 years with her, I assumed we'd watch her DVD any day now.  Aaaaany day now.

The Fly stars Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum, directed by aforementioned David Cronenberg, and one revelation I had is how minimal in scope it is.  There's about three characters in this movie, mostly on one set, and mostly the story is told through dialogue.  The latter half has of course a huge amount of effects and makeup, but I think they were able to focus a lot more on that because of the minimal approach everywhere else in the film.

It's a simple enough plot:  Jeff Goldblum meets and romances Geena Davis early on into the film, she's a reporter, he's a scientist who takes her back to his house to show her his invention.  He puts a stocking into a large round pod and pressed some buttons and pretty soon the stocking is teleported to another similar pod.  It's the real deal - teleportation.  She's enamored.  Soon enough, Jeff Goldblum drunkenly teleports himself, but there is one small twist - a fly in the pod with him, unbeknownst to him.  The pod decides to fuse their DNA and his transformation begins.

There's not a ton I remembered about this one, mostly the appearance of Jeff Goldblum, and his self given name Brundlefly.  I remembered some of the effects, but I didn't remember all of them, nor how amazing and particularly disgusting they were.  It's a slow transformation, with about 6 weeks or so passing in the film.  

It's really great, and honestly, I think this is Goldblum's best acting I've ever seen.  As he becomes more of a fly, he develops anger, twitchiness, manic energy, and other bizarre personality shifts.  He's given a firm reality check by Geena Davis, and her scuzzbucket ex-boyfriend is the strange character you didn't know this movie needed, but it sorely did.  

Fantastic in tone and wonderfully brought to screen, this is a gem from Cronenberg that I think is a great film every which way.

Medicine Man - 1992

 Long lost in the sands of time and film is the early 90's Sean Connery drama adventure, dumb fish-out-of-water Medicine Man.  I found it on VHS and watched it in increments in the cabin.

Sean Connery is a brilliant but troubled scientist leading research in the Amazon, and gets a new female assistant, Dr. Rae Crane.  They'll naturally have some conflict and they'll naturally get over it.  She'll witness him doing things that endear her to him, he'll learn not to be so judgy about her emotionally driven decisions as well as her city-girl-ness.  In short, it's a dumb movie you've seen before.  

Research shows this was filmed in the South of the Mexican state of Veracruz, where I recently spent about 10 days last summer when I was in Mexico.  Interesting, and by far the most interesting part of this movie besides the fact that they had more ethnic nudity in this than I've seen in anything for a while.  I forgot about that concept, and I'd have to think that the idea of ethnic nudity is now canceled like everything else by the liberal media.

Perfect Blue - 1997

 Closing loops, closing loops.

Aight, so my brother is in high school and I'm in either high school as well or middle school.  My mom lets us convert our garage into a "dude space" complete with couches, a dart board, TV, VCR, and video game systems.  Life is good.  We have a few friends over at various times and in one of those we watch Akira, in one of those we watch Perfect Blue.

Perfect Blue was the first film by Satoshi Kon, and man was it groundbreaking.  Controversial, huge, defining.  These are all words that we thought of in the late 90s early 2000s when we saw this thing.  It was a few years after Akira and the films of Studio Ghibli.  Later on in life I would get into those films of Ghibli, but for now I watched Perfect Blue, with maybe a Steel Reserve or a Michelob, and I thought, "whoa."

Mima Kirigoe is a pop idol of the three-girl band CHAM.  She is going to leave the group to become an actress, determined to try something new in her life.  At her last concert, we watch as one particularly obsessed fan gets in a fight to defend her after some people throw beer cans at the stage.  This super fan is obsessed with her and we later see that he's created his own website dedicated to her.  A website which somehow knows her innermost secrets and thoughts.  As she gets into acting and is exploited through that art, she begins to unravel and the website seems to take a dark turn.

Perfect Blue was indicative of the time, and overall is a grim psychological film.  It is built upon the fragmentation of reality, and when it all comes down to it, it is really about the fragile precipice which we all walk on.  Rewatching it now, I have to say I felt like it is a little incomplete.  Spoilers I guess.

We see this huge dramatic shift in Mima's character, and we never get a reason why.  We gather she is unhappy about her transition as well as the sexual exploitation she is subjected to, but there is never a single piece of dialogue or justifiable action taken around this.  Rather, she has a little hallucination that appears and disappears randomly, and is also never explained.  She basically takes a deep dive off the insanity pool from minute 20 or so an never recovers, with nary a reason why.

The vulgarity, style and the themes and tone are all amazing, I have problems with the actual story here though is what I'm trying to say.  It feels extremely style over substance, and it also feels like from that same minute I said (Minute 20) we as the audience are excluded from what actually happens in the movie.  What happens in this movie?  There's a few kills, all of which may or may not have happened.  There's the aforementioned exploitation, which may or may not have happened, there's the loss of sanity, which in the end may or may not have happened.  

Perfect Blue was great when I saw it, and it pushed the entire world of anime into a different hemisphere.  It opened up anime for adults instead of kids, this along with Akira really furthered the genre.  It's not bad by any means, but I will say I was surprised at the plot holes and the insane logic leaps one is asked to take while watching this.  Overall, I love this movie and I always will, I'm just sayin, is all, I'm just sayin....

Charade - 1963

 I recently watched and reviewed Stanley Donen's Wait Until Dark, which was so good I immediately went to my library's website to see if they had anything else by him.  This one caught my eye.

Charade has Audrey Hepburn teaming up with Donen again, and this time with Cary Grant as her costar.  Along with those two stars, this film also has George Kennedy, Walter Matthau and James Coburn, with music again my Henry Mancini.  

The pacing and atmosphere in this spy thriller are top notch as early on, Audrey Hepburn as Reggie meets Cary Grant's Peter Joshua in Switzerland.  They flirt, and when she gets home to Paris she discovers her husband has been killed.  She doesn't know much about his as we discover when she talks to a CIA agent, who informs her that her husband had $250,000 and was likely killed by some hitmen after the money.  Hitmen that may now be coming after her.  

Charade is a story of twists and turns, a story of capers and adventure.  Cary Grant isn't who he claims to be, practically no one else is either for that matter.  Bodies of side characters appear later on, there's all sorts of crazy intrigue as one might expect.  

I liked Charade and I'd recommend it, but I do want to point out that the writing in this is really dated.  They comment on the age difference between Hepburn and Grant in the movie, but he's 25 years older than her and she just throws herself at him constantly.  It would be bad writing even without the age gap and without his obvious untrustworthy nature, but given those two things it makes it even worse.

It's not a deal breaker, and Charade is a fun movie that has a great feel and a lot of appeal.

Heathers - 1988

 I've been revisiting some of my childhood movies in this blog, here and there dropping one in whenever I get the feeling to rewatch one of them.  

Heathers is one of the few movies I specifically associate with Idaho, where I live now.  The other movies are Scream, The Pink Panther animated series, and Raise the Red Lantern.  Heathers is the strongest though, as I remember my sister and I watching this so much that once my grandma or grandpa got angry and turned it off, saying we'd watched it too many times.

Heathers is an extremely dark comedy, a high school fantasy of the darkest sort.  Winona Ryder is Veronica, a clinger on to a clique of three popular girls all named Heather.  Veronica is interested in Christian Slater as JD, a punky outsider who gets introduced by pulling a gun on two jocks and shooting blanks at them.  they immediately get busy after meeting, and his true delusional, homicidal, psychotic side begins to show.  After one of the popular Heathers dies at the hands of JD, the two plucky students write a suicide note and it hits and effects the school.

Heathers is a strange rewatch in a post-Columbine, post-spree shootings world.  It depicts in perfect clarity multiple fantasies about killing fellow students, from JD's introduction all the way to killing the popular kids by people dressed in black and trench-coats.  I could see many people pointing to this as a "inspiration" to those students.  In the end, JD wears a oversize black trench coat and has a bomb- I mean, how predictive was that?

They say this is a comedy, but I didn't notice anything that was supposed to be funny.  It's a dark ass movie and it's a savage rewatch, certainly prescient and way ahead of it's time.  I could see this getting into lists of banned films, if we ever go that route again.  I didn't remember most of it, but it's really entertaining and crazy.  

Heathers has aged well, and it's insane that it exists.  I give it 4 stars.

Phenomena - 1985

 You know, when I started this blog now 7 years ago (!) I was starting it in part as an excuse to watch a certain type of film.  I'd always been into the offbeat and unknown, but I had explored it in only certain regions, certain years, and certain genres.  Some of the unexplored were Italian, giallo, grindhouse, and cult.  I got into it and had a brief excursion with Nightmare City and Zombie and a few others, but all in all, I really should be watching more of those types.

I say this because I put on Phenomena last night and I'm like, "Boom!"  Music check acting check pacing check awesome check effects check blood check nudity check fun check, check check check.  It's a fucking wishlist with every single thing crossed off:  you did it, you got it all, you have to- repeat- HAVE TO be happy.

Jennifer Connelly stars, Dario Argento directs this 1980's giallo entry.  It's the end of the era but it's not too late to churn out awesome, and this certainly does that.  We start the movie with an innocent high school girl missing her bus, going on a walk, and getting killed by an unknown assailant.  Than we follow Jennifer Connelly as Jennifer Corvino, daughter of a famous actor who is traveling and staying at a boarding house of all girls.  Donald Pleasence is a Professor of entomology and that's useful because Jennifer has the ability to control insects.  "They like me," she explains.

The movie is extraordinary.  It's got so much going for it.  I want to say more but instead I'll say, I finished this and thought, "what am I doing watching and reviewing shit like the boxsets, shit like SyFy movies?  Watch all of Hitchcock.  Watch all of Argento.  Watch stuff that's actually good."  The essential problem with that?  It's not free online, but hey, we'll figure it out.

The Midnight Meat Train - 2008

 I remember Midnight Meat Train coming out and making some slight waves in the psuedo-cult, psuedo-grindhouse movie fan friends of mine.  Vinnie Jones was big at the time, being in the X-Men movie and the Guy Ritchie films.  And, I did not remember this stars Bradley Cooper.

With that decent cast, joined by Ted Raimi and Brooke Shields, we have a sorta loose story about a serial killer riding and killing on the train system in Los Angeles.  Bradley Cooper is a edgy photographer who is following him in an effort to produce cool visually striking photos.  It's pretty much that simple, Cooper has a girlfriend, there's a few other characters I guess, and Vinnie Jones is the serial killer who specializes in killing with a large hammer thing.

Directed by Ryuhei Kitamura, The Midnight Meat Train certainly has some visual flair, it has a style going for it.  I believe I'd seen his previous films Versus and Alive at this point, and he was making a name for himself with those stylish, fast paced films.  This is also around the time that torture porn was making it's round, and the graphic deaths and kills in this are indicative of that fad.  It's not quite there, but it's going for it and quite bloody.

I don't really know what to say about it.  It is what it is, I suppose, and I didn't love it nor is it bad.  The killer is completely inexplicable, he's given no reason and no development, and that's also with the era.  None of the characters have depth, so you won't notice.  But yeah.  Just a thing.  I give this a 2.5.