You know, I love TCM, but they gotta start airing movies on a normal schedule. Because of their insistence of showing movies with start times that a DVR doesn’t understand, I missed the ending of Isle Of The Dead. Luckily, a very specific “plot summary” on IMDb told me what happened, but still, I like to see these things for myself. It’s not “Read The Cliff’s Notes For A Horror Movie A Day”, after all.
Based on the writeup, it seems the ending was just as good as the rest of the movie. Boris Karloff is fantastic as the possibly psychotic Army colonel who declares quarantine for the inhabitants of an island after someone falls victim to the Plague (2nd Plague movie this month, wooo!), and the rest of the cast is quite good too (Jason Robards’ dad is in it!). I particularly liked the woman who was susceptible to fainting spells and has premonitions of being buried alive. She reminded me of one of my aunts. Also she totally kills some folks near the end. Like my aunt.
Like all of the Val Lewton movies, Isle is all atmosphere, but it works better here than usual. Even though it’s about 10 minutes longer than the average Lewton flick, and doesn’t have nearly as much “action”, it flies by, mainly on the strength of the mystery (is it the plague or a murderer?) and the acting. Like The Seventh Victim, the horror elements are relatively toned down, but it’s still compelling.
I also like how thorough the movie’s doctor is when someone dies. First he places a feather under the person’s nose, to see if they laugh or sneeze. When that doesn’t work, he places a mirror under their nostrils to see if their breath fogs the glass. And he does it for a few people! If this guy was around for April Fool’s Day or Catacombs, he could have spared me the rest of those god awful movies.
This one’s up for a remake (as are all Lewton films, part of some weird deal with RKO). Hopefully they find a way to make the plague and the vorvolka (sp? – a mythological demon that the Greeks believe in, at any rate) storylines tied together a bit, as it often seems one is forgotten in favor of the other. And it’s not quite as good as the other Lewton movies I’ve seen lately (except maybe Leopard Man). But still, compared to all of the 30s and 40s nonsense I usually watch (via my budget pack), it’s a masterpiece.
A friend practically forced me to watch Slugs, on the grounds that it was directed by the same guy who directed Pieces, a film apparently no one besides me owns on DVD (Eli Roth kept claiming it was never even made available. I bought it at Best Buy for Christ’s sake!). Needless to say, I was curious to see what else this guy had up his pseudonymous sleeve (his name is Juan Piquer Simón, credited as the more American sounding JP Simon).
While not as batshit insane (and thus awesome) as Pieces, Slugs is still a lot of fun. It’s structured like The Blob or any other old 50s movie, in which a monster is loose and cutting a very random path through a town (of course, starting with a derelict dog owner) while a rogue scientist or two try to figure out a way to stop it and prevent further death/destruction. But being a Simón film, when the monster (thousands of slugs) attacks someone, it is gory as hell and sometimes accompanied by gratuitous nudity. It’s also impressive how much damage the things inadvertently cause. My favorite bit is when just a few slugs inside a guy’s work glove results in the guy chopping off his own hand, knocking over every plant inside his greenhouse, and eventually blowing himself and his wife to smithereens. The entire sequence is like a precursor to the Rube Goldberg-y death scenes in the Final Destination films. Just squish the damn things in your fist, dude!
There is also a hefty dose of what I assume is a Simón tradition: hilariously odd dialogue! After the aforementioned couple is killed, our hero shouts “They were nice people... and I liked them A LOT!” His delivery is beyond the necessary level of anger, to the point where he seems to blame the slugs, the people, his wife, and everyone else in the world for their deaths. I didn’t think anything would top that, but I was so delightfully wrong. In the third act, he tells the zoning commissioner that he is declaring a state of emergency, to which the commissioner guy shouts “You ain’t got the authority to declare happy birthday!” Holy shit, what? And someone else scoffs at the idea of killer slugs by wondering “What’s next? Demented crickets?” (goldmine plot for a film if there ever was one).
Speaking of the commissioner, this movie tops your average real estate horror movie in terms of the boring jobs everyone has. Our lead characters are public health inspectors, sewer management officials, zoning commissioners, real estate barons, land developers... it’s like the cast of a public access town meeting putting a gory, hilarious spin on things.
The movie also has a peculiar hatred of alcohol. Early on, a woman asks her husband if he thought another woman was attractive, and his reply is simply “She DRINKS too much!” The same woman later discusses her growing dependence on the drink after her boyfriend berates her for drinking a bit of wine. And then our resident horny teens have a fight over the guy’s desire to dip into her dad’s scotch. “Why do you have to drink!” she yells. It seems very out of place in a movie that will likely be watched with alcohol 99% of the time. Hell, the only reason I WASN’T drinking was because I watched it at 11 am and had to go to work after (more the latter than the former).
Slugs also has one of my favorite all time screen continuity errors. Our hero and the chief are riding in the chief’s car, and the hero lights a smoke. He then asks if it’s OK to smoke, and the chief says “No”. So the guy throws his cigarette out the window. Then he gets the chief back by claiming that the hard candy he was eating was made from insects. The chief in turn spits the candy out of HIS window. Both occasions are followed by comments about a fine for littering.
...and both windows are completely shut.
I also lost my shit at the film’s climax, in which our heroes unload some sort of chemical into the sewer that will explode when it comes in contact with moisture, such as the slime on the slugs. This is done to save the town, right? Look at the results:
Couldn’t they have just given everyone a big bag of salt?
They also hint at a sequel by showing one of the slugs surviving the explosion. But this is sort of obvious – despite how big the explosion was, you gotta figure a few slugs weren’t even in the sewer at all (all of the people they kill are killed above ground). It’s not like a regular monster movie where the monster dies and that’s that – there are like 20 million of the goddamn things around town! Surely more than just the one survived.
Doesn’t matter. Fun movie. Hopefully it will show at the New Beverly someday so I can raise my beer and salute all of the anti-alcohol characters in an appropriate manner.
Oh, and supposedly it’s based on a book. Why would anyone want to read a book about killer slugs when you can’t see the surprisingly gory aftermath of their unprovoked, random attacks on bit players?
I’m about at the point where not only can I not tell the Asian movies apart, I also can’t tell their respective remakes apart from one another (or the other originals). In short: they really need to stop fucking making any version in any language of a movie where a ghost haunts someone until they are properly buried. Shutter is the latest in a long line of films that are so formulaic and redundant, it’s a wonder they even bother shooting a new movie at all, rather than just release one of the others under a new title.
Like the original, we have a very unlikable “hero” (he broke up with a girl simply because he didn’t want to deal with her problems, and then had his friends rape her while he photographed them), except here this is revealed as a twist, so as to delay our hating the main character for a bit. The fact that the original dared to introduce this only about halfway through or so was pretty much the only original thing about it, so now we’re left with absolutely nothing. Other than the fact that Pacey manages to utter two “Fucks!” in a PG-13 film, there is zero here that can possibly entice an audience unless they have never seen The Ring, The Grudge, Pulse, Dark Water, One Missed Call, The Eye, and/or any of the original versions and/or any of the sequels (either language). And if you’ve seen them ALL (man, when I list them all and realize that... Christ), it can almost be considered rude of Fox to ask someone to pay for the damn thing. The least the studios could have done would be to offer a buy two get one free deal for this year’s 3 remakes, where if you paid for One Missed Call and The Eye, you get Shutter for free.
And yet Shutter is probably the best of the three. Like Moe, it’s still stupid, just not AS stupid as Larry and Curly over there. Keeping the locale out of generic America (though strangely in Japan and not Thailand, like the original) certainly helps, and there IS one sort of effective scare scene (dark apartment with camera flashes being the only light source). Plus it’s shorter, so that’s nice of them.
Still, you can’t take that as a sign of the movie achieving “maybe it’s not all that bad” levels. The flash/light scene might be good, but the subway scene (the scariest part of the original) is completely botched, even worse than Alba’s Eye remake botched its respective elevator scene. They also use completely ludicrous cinematic shortcuts: at one point the lead girl (Rachael Taylor) figures out that the ‘ghost’ in Pacey’s photos is pointing at a certain level of a building. She goes to the building, and instead of spending, I dunno, 12 whole seconds just counting floors to figure out where she needs to go, she looks at a GIANT DIAGRAM of the building, which conveniently shows each floor number in relation to the building’s logo, allowing her to quickly understand it’s the 17th floor she wants. And this is a shame, because director Masayuki Ochiai was the director of Infection (aka Kansen), a movie that a. I really liked and b. would be much better suited for the remake treatment than Shutter, since it wasn’t about another goddamn ghost haunting another goddamn electronic device.
It’s also wildly inconsistent. Throughout the movie they keep seeing/hearing weird things, and yet over an hour into the film, when Pacey sees the ghost in the bedroom and screams, she wakes up and asks “What’s wrong?”, as if by then she couldn’t have just assumed that he once again saw the ghost that had been plaguing the both of them for a week or so.
Speaking of the ghost, when her “plan” is revealed, I almost laughed out loud. “She was trying to HELP me!” says Taylor, when Pacey tells her about his rape photography past. But it’s already been established that the ghost had been there for a while, so why the fuck did the damn thing wait until they were MARRIED to “help” her? Since the girl was long dead, and Taylor didn’t know anything about Pacey’s relationship with her (they are seen dating for quite a while in the flashbacks), you gotta figure there was at LEAST two years in between her death and the wedding that opens the film. And why wait until they got to Japan (the film begins and ends in New York) to make her presence known, when it’s also established that the ghost doesn’t exactly need a passport to get around? Of course, none of these movies make any damn sense, but at least some of them carry a bit of dread and even the occasional scare to make up for it (or keep you from noticing the plot holes at all). When they are going this by the numbers, these things become all the more apparent, and you would THINK that after half a dozen tries, they’d start to get it right, or at least try something different. Sadly, no.
The good news is that the movie didn’t make all that much money this weekend, and will probably sink like a stone. Maybe after another 6 or 7 failures, the studios will start to consider whether or not remaking every goddamn J-horror film ever made is still a financially sound idea. Here’s hoping!
Here she develops some casting ideas should the book be adapted for the big screen:
The day after I received the email asking me to participate in this blog, I received an email from a producer asking if my novel Self Storage had been optioned yet. The timing still makes me smile—it's almost as if the invitation to cast my book ushered in the possibility of a real movie. I know the film world is just as unpredictable and uncertain as the publishing world, if not more so, so who knows if an adaptation will actually come to light, but it's great fun to dream about the potential cast.
The main character of Self Storage is Flan Parker, a young mother who goes to self storage auctions and sells the winnings at yard sales in her family student housing community at the University of California in Riverside. Flan is a searcher, guided by Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," and a bit of a daydreamer. Her life is forever altered when her path collides with Sodaba's, her Afghan neighbor who wears a full burqa. I promised my friend Dewi Faulkner (doesn't she have the greatest name?) the role of Flan if the book were ever to make it to the screen, but in the event that Dewi is unavailable, I can easily picture a couple of other actors as Flan: Maggie Gyllenhaal would bring a wonderful wistfulness to the role, and Mary Lynn Rajskub would capture both Flan's humor and her frustration. As young mothers themselves (in Mary Lynn Rajskub's case, a young mother-to-be), I think they would connect with Flan's heart.
I'd love to see Peter Sarsgaard (Maggie Gyllenhaal's real life partner) as Shae, Flan's stoner husband who should be writing his dissertation but spends the day watching soap operas. Other possibilities would be Ryan Gosling, Brendan Sexton III, maybe Paul Rudd. Someone who can be scruffy and exasperating but charming all at once.
Patricia Clarkson would be perfect as Julia, the artist who Flan tracks down after she finds the word YES inside a self storage box. If Ms. Clarkson's not available, Frances Conroy would be great, too (yes, I do miss Six Feet Under.)
Even though Sodaba is under a burqa the whole time, and we barely hear her voice, I'd love for an Afghan actor such as Parwin Moshtael to play her. I'd also love for an Afghan actor such as Fahim Fazli to play her husband, Raminullah.
I lived in family student housing at UCR when my kids were little, so it would be a treat to see the place immortalized on film, especially since it's slated to be razed in a few years. Plus, if the movie were filmed on location, it would give my daughter, a budding filmmaker, the chance to watch a production in action. If we could shrink her back to her two year old self, she'd be a perfect Nori, but that's probably not possible (even though we're dreaming wildly here)—I'm sure there is an adorable curly headed girl out there ready to step into the role, and a six year old boy with long blond hair ready to play Noodle. I hope I'll get to meet them some day.
Attn: Whoever sent me Carver for review – thanks! I wish I could remember who you were or what site I was supposed to review the movie for, but I don’t even recall receiving the damn thing! I was looking for another movie on my shelf and spied the film nested properly in between Candyman and The Cave. No recollection of it at all. It’s as if the Direct to DVD Fairy entered my home, took careful note of my how I sort my DVDs (an impressive feat, to be sure), and filed it away for me to find at my own leisure.
And I was even more surprised to discover that it wasn’t bad! On a surface level, it’s the umpteenth Saw/Hostel wannabe to come along in the past few years, albeit fused to a standard woods-set slasher, but there are just enough fairly unique touches to warrant giving it a pass.
For starters, our hero is the angriest man in horror movie history. He gets so frustrated at the simplest things, and it delighted me every single time. When his brother mocks him for asking him “how far?” one too many times during their road trip, he launches into a sarcastic, seemingly endless rant about how his brother’s non-answer was “exactly what he was looking for”. Later in the film, he shouts about how much he hates “stupid” wine glasses. There are a couple of other moments like this as well. Man, chill out!
He also has the film’s best line by far. He enters a stall, and the toilet is kind of dirty. He makes a disgusted sigh and opens the adjacent stall, which is ten times WORSE. He retches, and then notices a large pile of poop on the wall. “How do you shit on the wall?!” he asks no one in particular. It’s hilarious.
I should note at this time that the film has a particular fascination with bodily functions, particularly poop. After this sequence, another guy walks into another outhouse that is even MORE disgusting than the one with the wall-shit. The guy shrugs and sits down on the toilet anyway, and then the disgusting bowl is used as a weapon against him a bit later. We are also treated to the sight of a girl puking, and in the film’s most memorable kill, a testicle being plied, which results in blood and whatever the fuck else is inside a testicle to explode over the camera lens. Christ.
See, there are only two types of scenes I can’t handle: seeing someone get their teeth damaged (American History X – holy FUCK) and seeing dudes lose their genitalia. Everything else I am fine with, but if your movie has either one of those two types of scenes, you can guarantee that I’ll be squirming (or even looking away entirely). And since I guess that’s one of the reactions one SHOULD have when watching a horror movie, I guess in that respect the movie is a success.
The movie also has a fantastic soundtrack. And by that I mean there is a really weird and annoying (but ultimately catchy) song that plays throughout the movie. The chorus goes “Turkey in the straw, hee hee haw; Turkey in the hay, hey hee hey!” I defy anyone to watch this movie and not sing along with it by the 6th or 7th time it plays over a kill scene. Apparently, it’s an old ‘traditional’ song, much like your "Goin’ Round The Mountain When She Comes" and such, but for some reason it took a low budget slasher movie that mysteriously appeared on my DVD shelf for me to become aware of it.
It’s also a downer. Our Final Girl blows her goddamn head off, and our would-be hero gets HIS head caved in with a sledgehammer. And yet for some reason, the over the top gore/poop humor actually works well with the rather dark final act. Usually I abhor such things (Cabin Fever lost me on several occasions because of this imbalance) but it didn’t bother me here.
One thing that DID bother me was how poor the direction was. It seems like Captain John Tripod, ASC was the primary cameraman here, and several scenes have confusing and awkward blocking (particularly the scenes inside the bar). I wish writer/director Franklin Guerrero, Jr. had left the direction to someone else, as the lazy camerawork makes the film feel overly inert (DP Ryan Bedell can also be blamed). Ironically, the most frenetic camerawork we see in the film is in the snuff films that the killers are making. And this is a problem, because they seem to have been shot by at LEAST two people, when there should only be one (the hero doesn’t even figure this part of it out until the very end of the film). Things like that I am able to forgive, but other people are more stubborn, which is a shame, because Carver is much better (even at 100 minutes and only a few kills it feels fast paced) than I expected.
The DVD also has more extras than I was expecting. Two commentary tracks? I began listening to one with Guerrero and one of the producers, but he claimed that the track would be dry, technical, and “pretentious”, and that the other one would be more fun. So I switched it. On this track (which is Guerrero again, with a different producer), they get drunk, however they are annoying drunks. If you want to know how to do a REAL drunken commentary, listen to Cannibal: The Musical’s track. That thing is fucking amazing. There are a few tidbits to learn along the way, but someone needs to inform them that mispronouncing words and trying to ‘bring back’ forgotten insults is NOT the stuff of comic gold. There are also deleted scenes and a behind the scenes, nothing you’ll miss.
As much as I love James Gunn for Dawn of the Dead and Slither, I can’t say I really believe him when he says that he never saw Night of the Creeps before he wrote Slither. There are too many similarities to chalk it up to coincidence: the arrival of the parasite, the manner in which they ‘infiltrate’ humans, the way that infected humans look... come on now. He at least read the IMDb synopsis.
Doesn’t matter, because both movies are a blast, and I’m happy to have both. Creeps only has one major problem – the acting of Jason “Worst Rusty Ever” Lively, but it’s not even nearly enough to cripple the film, and you can even pretend it was intentionally bad acting to fit in with the corniness of old 50s movies (his appearance as Rusty confirms that no, he just can’t act worth a shit).
Otherwise this is a perfect B horror-comedy. Tom Atkins is possibly more awesome here than he is in Halloween III, which is saying quite a lot. His default phone greeting (“Thrill me”) is amazing enough for me to use it in real life on occasion (though I often reverse the way Rusty says it, and go“Thrill me, detective” instead. It’s less awkward.). The tagline is of course the stuff of legend (“The good news is....”). There’s another line that I think is just as good, involving a flamethrower. It’s the type of movie you will quote over and over.
It’s also a batshit movie. The first 20 minutes have alien wars, rotted zombies, a science project that requires a bunch of brains to be stored in the cellar, David Paymer running another science experiment in a college lab, a serial killer... holy shit!
The movie also features a guy named Steve Marshall, playing JC, Rusty’s best friend. However, until now I thought he was the guy from Nightmare on Elm St 3 who was in a wheelchair. He’s not. That guy’s name is Ira Heiden. I apologize to both unknown 80s actors.
Like Monster Squad, the movie is essentially over before you know it (the structure is much better though), but it’s fun from start to finish, and it’s a real shame that it’s STILL not on DVD, because there’s probably a lot of kids who have never seen it (even more of a shame when you consider they probably love Slither to death). I’ll scream like a banshee the day Anchor Bay or one of those guys manages to get this one a nice special edition a la Squad, because in my opinion it’s even more deserving of one.
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