When a Stranger Calls - 1979

There can still be firsts in a 6 year old blog. Such as, the first movie reviewed while in El Salvador after watching a movie on a plane.

When a Stranger Calls is well known for two very recognizable things. 1, Have you checked the children, 2, the call is coming from inside the house. Both of these moments happen in the first 20 minutes, though, so what the fuck is the rest of the movie about?

Well, I don't think I'd seen this before and I didn't know the answer to that question. Turns out, an actual dark, layered portrait of a victim and her torturer, including a well written and somewhat well executed portrayal of a serial killer. Color me surprised.

Stranger follows the killer in what is usually a bad move, but because of some cool shots, some good plot turns, and a few excellent dialogue parts, it really works. There's a really remarkable part where the villain escapes and he considers the low chance that would happen. He concludes he must be invisible, invincible, maybe never even have been born. It's a really cool moment where we can see his dysfunction, his beautiful albeit fractured and broken soul.

As Stranger ends, another fun thing is that we have been told the end already, and yet when it happens it is still surprising and shocking. The end is realistic, harsh, and final. Credits roll, and shit, I liked this way more than I expected.

The Towering Inferno - 1974

I remember a while back I watched Airport, Airport 1975, and Earthquake. All classic 1970s disaster movies. I really like disaster movies and they're a lot of fun, and these ones I watched with relish. Now on Amazon, I saw that The Towering Inferno was available.

Paul Newman and Steve McQueen star in The Towering Inferno. It's the classic story of a new huge building being built in San Francisco of all places, and funny enough it's basically exactly where they would build the Salesforce tower later. In the movie, the Tower is monumental, it is the new tallest building in the world, and it's like over 130 stories tall. I honestly don't remember if they ever definitively state how tall the building actually is.

Pretty soon into the ribbon cutting ceremony and the opening of the building, something goes wrong and a fire starts. They have security cameras everywhere, but the fire is in a closet and cannot be seen on the camera system. So the fire is ignored until it's uncontainable, and soon enough all the people in the building are in trouble.

The Towering Inferno was a true epic disaster movie. 2 hours 45 minutes long, this mammoth film showed everything needed to make this have an impact. Multiple setups happen to toss our heroes into danger. There's the scene of Newman dangling children over a precipice once the stairs have gone out, there's people trapped with fire on one side and a several hundred feet drop on the other. There's a scene with a basket carrying people away from one of the top stories of the building, the enormous height below them. There's all of these scenes and more.

The Towering Inferno was a smash success and spawned many disaster movie copycats. Newman and McQueen both deliver good leading man performances, and by the way, look very similar. They sbow up a water tank in the building and I guess that puts out the fire, everyone celebrates and the day is saved. Hooray.

The Day After Tomorrow - 2004

Roland Emmerich burst onto the scene and into everyone's heart in 1996 with Independence Day. It was high budget. It had great stars. It was about aliens. We loved it.

He then destroyed himself with the American Godzilla movie, and whatever came after that. I don't remember exactly, but around 2004 we all thought this was a joke. The Global Warming plot, Jake Gyllenhaal, this movie was a joke. I saw it when it was newly on the new release shelf, laughed it off, never saw it again. Until now.

I revisited A Quiet Place and me and my girl were in the mood for more destruction so we put this on. It's just over 2 hours and it's about a crazy cataclysmic 3-4 days in the warming cycle, and its got early 2000s stupidity all over it. And Jake Gyllenhaal.

This is obviously a sorta joke entry but I enjoyed this enough. It did what it was supposed to do and despite a dumb plot and plot holes I liked it. It felt like it at the time and it does again now that the whole "crisis" ends in like 15 minutes in the movie and seems like everything is basically better immediately and everyone will be fine. Also, I thought, I wonder what a sequel to this would be like?

Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers - 1995

Hold on. If this is what this movie is, what are my memories? I'm going to watch the producers cut also because I remember a lot that was not in this movie.

Mostly it's little things towards the end. I remember a almost sex scene with either Michael and Jamie or Michael and new girl. I remember the end being very different really. This ending is wholly unsatisfying. I also remember Michael possibly dying.

Whatever the case we begin H6 with Jamie Lloyd giving birth and Michael is after her and the baby. He wants the baby and he kills Jamie trying to get it. Then we cut to Haddonfield where grown up Tommy Wallace from the first film is awaiting Michael's return while the Strode family moves into the Myers house. Also, somewhere in this young boy Danny is exhibiting signs of evil...for some reason.

It's well known this had studio interference and it's well known there are many problems with this movie. Halloween 6 was produced by the Weinstein bros and it shows. What's slightly odd, as Gourley and Rust point out, was that this was before reboots and they had to honor the storyline, sorta. Made me wonder, what was the first reboot?

The plot is quite literally illiterate. It's hogwash. Something about a baby and a evil kid and the thorn cult. You know what, the thorn cult could have even worked. Except then when Michael finally is in the same room with the thorn cult, he kills them all! So does Michael even know the man in black? Is there any connection between these guys and Michael? Why did they rescue him? What exactly is their plan? Who the fuck knows.

Paul Rudd is Tommy and he's overacting it a bit, Pleasence is checked out and died during production, Jamie is dispatched unceremoniously after being replaced by a different actress.  Nothing, repeat nothing worked here. It's fun to see all the ideas shooting around and bouncing off each other, but that's about it. 2 stars.

Update 5/25/2021: So I watched the Producers Cut a few days later. Oddly enough, the Producers Cut was the Halloween 6 I grew up with. The bizarre, more cult oriented version must've been the one I was more familiar with because of the strange sexual hijinks in the latter half and the thorn involvement, and the open-endedness of the Michael part which I half remembered.

Halloween 5 and 6 remind me of what I refer to as the "plot episodes" of a TV show. Especially in older serialized TV shows, you'd have the stand-alone episodes, and then you'd have the episodes which would feed into the actual overarching plot of the show. The X-Files and Buffy come to mind, where you'd have monster of the week episodes and then you'd have the plot of the actual show, with Scully's cancer or Buffy's vamp friends. I never particularly liked or cared about the ongoing plot of X-Files, and it feels very similar to these couple movies really, which is to say...

They had no idea what they were doing. They had no idea where this would go, they had no idea what the payoff would be. Their job was singular, season to season or movie to movie. Their job was to answer 1-2 questions, keep it interesting, and ask some new ones. They were touch-and-go, and this movie asks a whole swath of new questions. Gourley and Rust ask some really relevant questions, such as mainly, what would Halloween 7 have looked like if it had actually followed up on these questions instead of rebooting it with H20. Also, side note, I'm really wondering, is Halloween H20 the first true modern reboot? I can't seem to find any really definitive answer on what the first reboot was.

Halloween 6 Producers Cut also spends more time with Jamie Lloyd, and with Donald Pleasence. They didn't kill of Pleasence, and I think it's for sure part of the reason that the series was rebooted instead of sequeled, given his death and all. I think the questions and the answers are interesting, but they also take away from the Myers character a bit and have the thorn cult and the mysticism ramped up a lot.

I also think I was too hard on the first review, and I'm raising it from 2 stars to 3. 

π - 1998

Also known as Pi, and Pi: Faith in Chaos.

Let's take a small trip down memory lane shall we? I was born in 1986 and underwent some sort of bizarre alternative upbringing, while not being extreme in as many ways as one could think of, it is nonetheless strange and formative. As I grew, I was sexually and/or physically assaulted a little bit and develops PTSD and antisocial tendencies. I further grew and things normalized, beginning to disassociate and drift rather aimlessly, seeking a place I belonged. This search ended up bonding me to one of my lifelong escapes: film. Since film touches on all genres abstract and personal, it is inevitable that I found a corner of the film market which appealed to my hurt, alienated sensabilities.

I'm trying to rationalize why this film spoke to me, and I'm disturbed by the fact that this was meaningful to me and was "My favorite film" for many a year. I didn't see this when it was new, in 1998 thank god. But I did see it soon after, perhaps 99, 2000, or whatever. I know I saw it in before Requiem, by perhaps a few years, and that came out in 2000.

Pi begins and we are thrust into the story of Max, the archetypical troubled genius played by Sean Gullette. He's a strange mishmash of trouble, as shown early on. I clocked it, we are less than 10 minutes in when he has his first "attack" and weird paranoid reality break. He is popping some sort of pills, he is referring to strange happenings, he is trying to explain his draw and fascination with mathematics. His character is trying to break some sort of code to predict the stock market. Math can show that there are patterns to nature, there are patterns to humans, and therefore since humans created the market there must be patterns to the market. Right? Right. We follow him as he does this, and it seems like he's basically figured it out, or is at least close.

But then, a computer error apparently happens, it spits out a random 216 digit number, and the circuit boards are fried. Max runs into a Jewish guy named Lenny who is trying to decode the Torah, Max's friend Saul tries to talk sense into Max and refers to a 216 digit number, and in the meantime Wall Street investors are (I guess) interested in Max's ability to predict the stocks. We follow reclusive and troubled Max as his attacks get worse, his grip on reality slips, and all these people surrounding him play their little games to try to get what they want from him...

I mean, let's just say first off what is good and what I originally liked. The music is awesome, and I definitely rushed out to the store to buy the soundtrack. My VHS copy of this movie had a thing that said the soundtrack to the movie could partially be found on Massive Attack's Mezzanine record, or it said it featured a track from that, or something, and I bought and got into Massive Attack because of this movie. The cinematography is a mix between cinema verite at times and completely over the top stylism which wouldn't hit mainstream until a year after this movie with The Matrix. This movie feels post-Matrix, but it was in fact filmed a couple years before. The acting is also really good, for an amateur movie especially. I mean, Sean Gullette isn't rewriting the book or anything, but he is entirely believable and has huge shoes to fill with this densely written of a character.

Now looking back after I watched it this morning, there is such a rush to stuff this movie full of "anything and everything" it feels a little bloated and there are dozens of ideas that never get focused on, explained, given time to have meaning, or rationalized. We give it a bit of a break because it follows a unreliable narrator, and because it's the 90's, but it's a flaw in retrospect.

One of the other major things I found about this, watching it in the modern world, is that it brought me back to a time when computers and the use of them was considered Alternative and/or Counter-Culture. To have knowledge of these things, to lean into them at that time was still cutting edge, and many people hadn't gotten a good computer at this point, so it seemed really crazy to have the main character be this computer genius. It was so Outsider to think about building your own computer, or understanding how they run, or living your life based around them. It's now so common and so required that it's more Outsider to NOT do that.

This and Tetsuo the Iron Man share a lot in common. They both center around people that are deeply immersed in some alternative world, it begins taking over their life, and it changes them. Tetsuo was made 10 years before this and is a lot more graphic, but Pi is more cerebral and philosophical. The plot concerns finding god, or at least meaning, when we get down to it later, and we follow someone who is given information without looking for it and struggles with what to do with that information rather than someone who is taken over by something else.

Pi is aso a deeply disturbing movie. Director Darren Aronofsky puts in crazy sequences, acoustic scree, body horror (another thing learned from Tetsuo), strange sexuality, drug abuse, and religion. This is the whole "anything and everything" approach, which hasn't aged well, but at the time seemed really revolutionary. It certainly predicted a trend, and given the next 10 or so years of cinema, this seems to be one of the movies that began a era. Especially because it's not like this flew under the radar. This was massively successful, launched Academy Award nominated peoples, and if Matthew Libatique doesn't eventually win, I will be surprised.

I wonder where this movie stands for me. I feel like watching this, at the time I did, was really good for me. Much like the internet in the early days, I felt like for once something understood me, and I connected. This movie showed me a broad spectrum of someone experiencing Outsidership, pain, disillusionment, a search for meaning, a brilliant understanding of certain things and a fundamental misunderstanding of others. Those notions all felt extremely familiar to a young, hurt child. I don't know if I'll watch this movie much after today, but it will always be special somehow and represent a time in my life. To be understood by something was meaningful, even drug feeling, and I was stunned by how much I emulated things from this film.

It's not a perfect picture, but it also represents everything good that amateur film can do. For a long time I've expressed that one thing I like no matter what is a "strong artistic statement", and if nothing else, this is certainly that.

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers - 1989

Halloween 5 begins and I see returning Ellie Cornell, Danielle Harris, and Donald Pleasence. I get super excited and slowly, slowly things change. This movie was quite a departure from the fun Part 4.

First of all, Ellie Cornell as Rachel is the first one killed in Halloween 5. She is unceremoniously dispatched like 20 minutes into the movie and NO ONE EVER NOTICES, EVER. Seriously, there is not one piece of dialogue or one person who seems to notice Rachel is gone, instead we turn the focus on bubbly airhead Tina, who is played well by Wendy Kaplan but is so moronic and predictable it feels like a major misstep. Also, Jamie never once notices her own fucking sister is GONE for the ENTIRE movie? We don't see Rachel's body until like 70 minutes in, so almost an hour of the movie goes by with no one caring.

This movie is also the introduction of the Cult of Thorn/Man in Black storyline we'll see in part 6. We see some cool shoes and the mystery man get Michael out of jail in the end, and in this movie it's whatever, I guess we understand he has a collaborator and that is ok with me. What I loved more than that though was the relationship Michael Myers has with Doctor Loomis.

Pleasence turns in a usual slightly overdone insane performance as Loomis, who is less out for Michael's death and moreso on trying to get Jamie to somehow "cure" Michael. That was a giant plothole too, although it is clearly shown Michael and Jamie are linked several times in several ways, that story never goes anywhere and we're never given a clear indication of how they would be linked, what that means, and how Loomis would use Jamie to cure Michael. But anyways, Loomis is so loving to Michael in the latter half of this movie, and it is also shown that Michael perhaps cares for Loomis as well. It is clear Michael listens to him, understands him, maybe even respects him. Michael has several clear chances to kill Loomis and never does, he gashes him with the knife once and pushes Loomis away, but I think it's awesome that Michael sort of seems to not want to kill Loomis.

Danielle Harris is great but first of all unfocused on, second of all she's totally silent for like more than half the movie, supposedly scared silent by the events of Part 4. Then, like I said, Tina is just annoying and she's traditional 80's horror movie fare, wanting to fuck her boyfriend, uncaring about Jamie, typical screamqueen. She does survive, getting stabbed in the shoulder and then promptly vanishing later on in the movie and never being referred to again.

Then the movie ends with the whole Cult business, the thorn guy rescuing Michael after Loomis shot him with tranquilizers and they put him in jail. Since there is no explanation, it's a good ending and we are hooked, but knowing where Halloween 6 goes...ugh I'm not excited. This movie was decent though, and I was also wondering while I watched it, is Halloween the slasher series with the least amount of nudity? I don't remember about Halloween 2, but 3-5 have no nudity and Halloween the original and the remake and...possibly H20...all have no nudity whatsoever. There is a shower scene with Rachel but the opaque shower door covers her body.

I liked this movie okay, but it's not one of the great for me. It's like 3 stars.

Play Misty For Me - 1971

I am still trekking through 70's movies. As the world turns and the virus rages and Idaho spring booms forth in full vibrant color, I am still watching 70's movies.

Clint Eastwood was great in the Dirty Harry series, which I've seen all of except the last one since my library does not have The Dead Pool. So, onto other Eastwood films. I haven't seen most of them after all.

Clint Eastwood looks the part and acts the part better than a lot of actors, ever, period. The guy is handsome as shit, a great actor, has a great body and a great voice. He turns in a performance worthy of admiration in this 70's pot-boiler. First of all, I can recognize the West Coast in five seconds flat. The way the ocean hits and the plants that live there and the majestic trees are so recognizable. This was filmed in Carmel, and it's so much fun to see the area there. I haven't been to Carmel that many times, but this made me miss home.

Clint Eastwood is a DJ at a small jazz station in Carmel, living his life as a playboy and wandering whatever dude. He is trying to get back with his ex while he is receiving calls from a mystery woman at the station asking him to "play Misty for me." He goes to a bar after work where a woman sits, he decides he wants her and takes her to bed that night. Turns out she is the one calling into the station and she has a minor obsession with him from the start, which only expands as the movie continues and she becomes more and more over the top in her demand for them to be together.

Over the top is a good transitional piece to talk about Jessica Walter, who plays the crazy woman Evelyn. It's a product of it's time and it's not as big as it could be, but it also isn't great. She's hit and miss. Sometimes it is also the fault of the writing I guess and I kept wondering first, why doesn't he go to the police and get her ass arrested, and second, why doesn't he fucking smack her? There's a little bit of him complying and going along, I guess plotwise cause he wants to get his dick wet, but it seemed a little insane and badly done sometimes.

Play Misty for Me is well known, got good reviews, was a huge success, launched Clint Eastwood as a now Academy Award winning director. This movie has generally aged well and was most definitely ahead of it's time. It moves really fast, especially for being early 70s! I give it four stars.

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers - 1988

Originally I listened to With Gourley and Rust without revisiting the Halloween series. I rewatched Halloween 2, Rob Zombie's Halloween movies, and Halloween 2018. But I did not rewatch Halloween 3-6 or Resurrection.

I did myself a major disservice. I rewatched Halloween 4 this morning, and man, man man is this better than I remembered. I think I grouped this together in the Halloween 3 and 6 category as a film that was a steep decline in value and in horror. I remembered that Danielle Harris was great, but I also confused this with Halloween 5 and even with 6, put them all together in my mind as an odd mishmash of white masked killer movies.

Halloween 4 picks up with Michael in an institution, being transfered again to somewhere, and Doctor Loomis returns and learns that this is happening too late to do anything about it. It's hilarious that they give him a tiny face scar and they don't explain at all how he survived the explosion which happened in Halloween 2. It's fine, don't ask. Of course when Michael is being transfered he escapes and takes a truck and heads out to Haddonfield. In Haddonfield, he has a relative named Jamie, a young girl who is his niece, Laurie's daughter. Jamie is having nightmares about Michael and soon enough Michael arrives and her nightmares have come to life...

This movie was a lot better than I remembered. First of all, the main girl in the movie Rachel is played by Ellie Cornell and she delivers a great and strong performance almost as good as the original Halloween girl Laurie Strode. She is written with confidence and cool, but is vulnerable as well. She is painted as being firmly on Jamie's side as her adopted sister. Jamie is played by Danielle Harris and is excellent in the film. She is smart, funny, pained, but confident and powerful and unwilling to submit to Michael.

As the movie goes, we have pretty average pacing in the film, and it's got a great balance of kills as well as plot movements. The kills are great and one thing I liked and was surprised by was how little Michael uses his trademark knife to kill people. When he gets to Jamie and Rachel in the last 30 minutes or so, that is a fucking thrillride nearly paralleling the original Halloween. I don't know why they decided not to use the trademark Halloween music more, that's one thing I thought would make it a bit stronger, but it's still a really strong, really fantastic end sequence.

I guess the one thing I'll mention and spoil is the very ending where we got hints that with Michael truly dead now, we were going to switch to Danielle Harris as the new killer. You know, it's a solid idea even if Firday the 13th did it first with Tommy. I don't blame them for not sticking with it, but it would've been interesting. I don't remember how they explain this in Halloween 5, but I also bought that on DVD and it's next, fool!

I thought this was like a 2ish star follow up with murky plot and strange acting. It's not. This is better than Halloween 2 and it's better than most the other sequels I can think of off the top of my head. It got a bit derided of course, but this is a true slasher and a great Halloween film that I now own on DVD. 4 stars.

Blow Out -1981

C'mon, fool! I was only off by one year! Ugh! I struggle!

I'm thoroughly enjoying watching Brian De Palma's filmography right now. Certainly not in order, and with many a movie skipped, who knows how long this will go on and which ones I'll see, but this one at least I'd heard of. And let's see here, did I review Blow Up? No. Apparently not. But I did see that about 2 years ago and it's in my head still.

I did review The Conversation in here, and this movie is certainly Blow Up and The Conversation turned into a more thriller atmosphere, and it need not be 100% original to capture some of the allure of those excellent movies.

John Travolta stars in Blow Out. He is a sound designer by career, working in low budget movies he's not particularly proud of. One day he is out recording the night sounds and he records a car as it drives by. The car blows a tire, crashes into a lake, and there is a young woman trapped in it. Travolta springs into action and saves the girl (Nancy Allen). As he revisits the recordings he made, he discovers the sound of a gun firing right before the tire popped, leading him to think it was a planned assassination. He ruffles the wrong feathers with his investigation, and soon recruits Nancy Allen to help him.

Blow Out was a minor box office disappoint and has since gained a cult following, which I guess a lot of De Palma's films have. To be honest, this one is really out there in terms of feel. I wasn't very sure how to feel about it. I will recognize and say, first and foremost, that it feels later 80's and was certainly very influential. Also, being so close to the 70's it makes sense how it feels a bit slower and more slow-burn oriented. So in other words, it feels progressive but also very old fashioned. It's tonally very strange, and that is the basis for part of my let's just say lackluster enjoyment of it.

I liked Blow Out. I thought the plot and the characters were nicely written. Nancy Allen is not doing a great job I have to say, and her airhead character is a bit annoying, which was the intention, but I think it gets a little "too much" sometimes. John Travolta is similarly one dimensional, but he has grace and charm, something which sadly doesn't show up for me in Allen's performance. Then you have the plot. It's all fine. We get it. Perhaps it could've had a little more tension at times, but it's well done enough.

And I guess that's the hard part, it's all well done enough that I should have nothing to complain about. And yet...I found it a bit lacking. I think a lot of it could be attributed to two things, and here's some spoilers. One, John Lithgow. He is hamming it up and his badly written character is so cartoonish it undercuts the whole film. He wins in the end even though he dies, and Travolta doesn't get to save the girl, which is fucking awesome, but this is the writing and the over-done-ness that Raising Cain had, and it doesn't mesh well with the atmosphere of the rest of the movie for me. Two, the characters are just not strong enough. The Conversation works because Hackman acts and looks the part, he is a sympathetic fish out of water but super identifiable. Travolta is too generic, Allen too braindead, that I felt no draw to them in this story. I want to see where to plot is going, but I have little investment in the plot players.

I don't want to complain too much though, and I think it's at least a four star film in reality even though I'll only give it a 3.5.

Full Moon High - 1981

Various years exist online for this Larry Cohen directed horror comedy. After The Stuff I saw if anything was free on Amazon, and this was the only thing.

Full Moon High stars Adam Arkin as a high school jock and football team player, and early on in the movie he travels to Transylvania and gets bit by a werewolf. He returns home to his home in New Jersey and there "comedy" ensues as shit gets wonky.

This movie was long and bad. I wanted to like this of course, I wanted Larry Cohen to knock it out of the park with lots of comedy, effects, and etc. The whole thing though was not funny, and it's very obvious that they really wanted it to be. They reach for it so many times, and most of the jokes you'll just sorta sit there and maybe think to yourself "really? That's your joke? Really though?"

The movie drags way too slowly, it's too long, and I didn't give a shit. Endless dumb jokes, endless meandering nothingness. It was blah and dull and for a while I was using this movie to help put myself to sleep in the nights.

I guess they can't all be winners.

The Devil's Partner - 1958

I'm writing this review even though I fail to remember what this movie was called, and I'll fill that in later.

This film stars nobody and was a 1962 thriller/horror film. We basically have a mystery guy coming to town after his uncle dies to get the inheritance, and soon as he arrives he's super evil. He starts wooing a local engaged woman and turning her fiancees life upside down, all the while sing a local wino to get the necessary tools for his demonic intention.

This movie is pretty good, and I liked the darkness of it. Whereas a lot of 50's movies stray away from the true darkness which they're entailing, this movie leans into the satanic ritual, the ritual of it is given plenty of screen time, and that's pretty cool in the movie. The darkness of this is pretty good despite the slowness of the movie and it's inherant mind-numbing qualities.

The Devil's Partner is another title I'll quickly comment on, is it more scary that this guy is partners with the devil versus the devil himself? I say thee no. I say, why try to outdo the devil as having this be his partner?

I dunno, it's fine really, and quite ahead of it's time in many many ways.