Directed by Adam Gierasch, written by Jace Anderson & Adam Gierasch

Source print: Blu-ray from personal collection (recent addition).

Well, what can I say, really, that you probably haven’t already guessed? Night of the Demons is yet another in the studio pantheon of trendy horror remakes that appear to be raking in the cash (why else would they keep making them, and why else would the films’ original producers and directors continue pitching their own projects to studios as potential remake-hits? In this case, the guilty verdict lies on Kevin Tenney, the director of the late-eighties original). Let’s quickly dispense with the pot: group of teens get locked in a house overnight during Halloween where a vengeful demonic spirit infects them one by one. Or in this remake, a group of vengeful spirits. The original material on which this remake is based is also nor really the top-flight in dead teenager horror flicks, in fact, it was pretty damned cheesy. What charm the origin obtained was likely due to the memorable Linnea Quigley, cult 80′s scream queen icon. The nicest thing I can say about Adam Gierasch’s remake is that it’s not all that terrible, and there are a couple of choice kill scenes. It tries to be fun, it really does, and I’d like to give it merits for that but it just gets too who-the-fuck-cares? halfway through. While writers Jace Anderson and Gierasch seem to have an inkling of what would work in a Night of the Demons remake, pulling it off is another story. The attempts at irony fall flat, the attempts at humour are completely lost in the quick-cutting aggressive pace of the whole thing, and the script is just, well… Let’s just say I commend the sweet Monica Keena (star of Freddy vs Jason) for trying to pull the excruciating lines off with some semblance of verisimilitude. The girl should get some sort of medal for that. Shannon Elizabeth, cast in the cult role of “Angela” the Big Bad Demon, also does well with what she’s given, which is like an extended gore version of her breakout American Pie character. The fact that these writers are also present at and contributing to what we can see now as the death of Tobe Hooper’s and Dario Argento’s cinematic careers might also say something – should they rightly be in charge of the new wave of horror now? I don’t know. I should reiterate, despite the tone I can see this little rant has taken, the Night of the Demons remake is not a total waste, it is at least two-thirds kinda-fun, and at least the filmmakers gave Linnea Quigley a proper cameo, and at least there’s a little T&A, and at least they retained the infamous tube-of-lipstick scene, and did it justice, to boot. But with all these demons party-crashing an abandoned frat house on Halloween and the idea that seven college kids couldn’t figure their way out through the back door (or over the gate) is not even the most credibility-stretching premise we’re given. No, the greatest mystery here would be how the hell cutie-pie Monica Keena has the obsessive hots for the junkie-bloated Edward Furlong. And even more mysterious, how the hell did Edward Furlong get to be the best thing in this movie? 

Directed by Seijun Suzuki, written by Susumu Saji

Source print: DVD borrowed from the local library.

Underworld Beauty is now the fourth Seijun Suzuki film I’ve seen, and my second favorite of those four (I don’t know why, but for me, nothing can touch Branded to Kill in all its lunatic awesomeness). Clearly a huge influence on Reservoir Dogs, although Tarantino didn’t quite resort to the gutter plagiarism that he performed on Ringo Lam’s City on Fire, it’s easy to see the heavy influence on both of those latter diamond-heist crime flicks. In turn, Underworld Beauty takes some stylistic inspiration from film noir, specifically The Third Man, but Suzuziki’s plot is nothing short of utterly zany.

Underworld Beauty is an underworld story, about a one-legged Yakuza gangster named Miyamoto who is killed during a hot-diamond exchange, and his art-model sister who gets inadvertently wrapped up in the darkly humourous aftermath as two rival gangsters and her own blundering lover continually attempt to double-crossing each other in order to get the diamonds that lie in the belly of Miyamoto’s corpse (after he’d swallowed them, of course). Although it may sound like it, it’s not actually laugh-out-loud funny, it’s all played straight and wonderfully noir-ish, but the entire plot undoubtedly retains a certain top-quality ridiculousness.

Seijun Suziki’s use of noir photography is pretty groundbreaking here too, we can see dynamic shots that have obviously influenced the likes of DePalma, Scorsese, Tarantino, and his cinematographer Robert Richardson, in a film that was released quite a few years before any of these filmmakers’ professional times.

If anyone is unfamiliar with Seijun Suzuki’s work, Underworld Beauty is a pretty damned place to start, but I can’t help myself – I would still recommend Branded to Kill (loosely remade in the nineties as The Replacement Killers) as slightly more essential cinema, it’s a film that showcases the dynamic range of Suzuki a little more overtly. Not to take anything away from Underworld Beauty, though.

• Directed by Roman Polanski, written by Roman Polanski & Yasmina Reza based on the play by Yasmina Reza.

• Source print: Digital file.

Man, am I a sucker for play-movies. That is, movies based on plays. Glengarry Glen Ross, Deathtrap, Noises Off, Edmond, and Polanski’s own Death and the Maiden come to mind. I love watching people go at each other verbal gusto, cutting each others’ throats with words and razor wit. I find something sinister and humourous about it. Hell, maybe I’m just sadistic, getting my entertainment from watching people fall to screaming pieces in the company of each other.

Polanski’s kick-ass Carnage was definitely no exception; in fact, I think this now qualifies as my favorite film-based-on-a-play that I’ve seen, and I do not make that declaration lightly – I absolutely love Glengarry Glen Ross. To say Carnage was intentionally brilliant, though, would be to undermine the aspect of natural human ironies that occur in life, and in this film, we get to see art imitating life with a dark, sharp wit. However, the brilliance of Carnage lies in how it allows us to see these things between the lines. And yes, the lines are great, too. Even the contrivances of keeping these four character trapped in each other’s company when they should clearly be walking straight out the front door, becomes amusingly multi-layered.

Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly play a married couple who, in the first post-opening-credits scene, are seen tying up a letter outlining how Kate Winslet’s & Christoph Waltz’ son smacked their kid in the face with a stick, causing him to lose two teeth. From this scene we then watch as the four characters remain trapped in the apartment by their own civility and perhaps even underlying masochism, trying to sort through this incident through the undercurrent of bad emotions, bickering, moral high grounds, the mundaneness and breakdown of marriages, and most delicious of all, superiority complexes. Hell is being trapped in a room with four people who can’t stand each other.

I knew that when this film was over (and far too quickly for my liking) that I’d need to sit with it for a day or so to decide whether it had actually ended or not. Of course, it did end, much like Glengarry Glen Ross it appears to end in the middle of things, but really, it hasn’t, what’s needed to be said has been said and the final shot (before the closing credit sequence) is another moment of subtle irony that does end the film with a bit of a snicker. Things will go on.

I keep referring to the credit sequences because it is these brief moments that both wraps up the theme of the film and provides its greatest irony. I was lucky enough to have been watching a digital file so that I could rewind the film back to the beginning for a quick re-watch before heading off to bed.

Like William Friedkin’s post-millennium artistic comeback with his based-on-a-play Bug, Carnage is Polanski’s return to top form, I’ve never seen a one-set film that was so energetic and darkly funny. And, like all good art, it won’t be for everyone. But for people like me (sadistic?) I already can’t wait to see it again.

• Directed by Eli Craig, written by Eli Craig & Morgan Jurgenson

• Source print: Blu-ray from personal collection (recent addition).

When I first got wind of this flick, I knew it wasn’t going to be a run-of-the-mill hillbilly horror flick. What I did think, however, was that it was going to be some hip/clever hillbilly horror comedy in the vein of “Gil’s All-Fright Diner” (and if you don’t know what that is, do yourself a favour and look it up immediately. In any case, I was completely wrong on my pre-judgment, and ironically, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil is a comedy about not judging people. And it’s one of the best flicks I’ve seen in a long time. There is plenty enough gore, but the movie goes for being good-natured instead of aggressively clever, pretentious, or narcissistically self-aware (which I for one have seen plenty of from recent horror films), and that is a real treat. It’s a joy to watch something that’s genuinely inspired, that seems to effortlessly turn the slasher-horror genre on its ear with something worthwhile to say, and in a genuinely funny way. I’m glad I finally ended up leaving my pre-judgments on the side and actually acting on a good friend’s recommendation of this movie.

The film is also exceptionally cast, with relative unknowns (to me, anyway), other than Alan Tudyk as Tucker (he was the pilot from Firefly/Serenity); the college kids out for a weekend camp and our lead hillbillies out fixing up their cabin-in-the-woods all play their parts to a T as everything starts to go horribly wrong for both sides through misunderstandings and misconceptions. It’s a comedy of errors. And while it’s at it, it’s also a pretty slick allegory of right-wing American-style knee-jerk reactionism. Although this horror/comedy might not be for everyone, for those who are looking for a totally original, genuinely good-humoured, awesomely entertaining, pretty darned funny, and yes, bloody romp through the backwoods of Virginia, look no further. I’m still smiling about it, writing this review.

“Terror in the Aisles” (1984)

• Directed by Andrew J. Kuehn.

• Source print: The “Halloween II” Blu-ray, given to me by a friend after opting for the free replacement provided by Universal Studios. They let him keep the old disc. And now it’s mine.

…The funny thing was, in my mind, I had seen it. But as soon as the opening credits rolled on screen, I knew I’d been mistaken. It must’ve been the thought of this clip-driven horror documentary that had tricked me into thinking I’d actually seen this film, not just most of the ones covered within this interesting look at the horror and suspense films from the sixties to the early eighties.

Hosted by Donald Pleasence (Halloween) and Nancy Allen (Dressed to Kill, Carrie), I really enjoyed the fact that they kept referring to these genre pics as “Terrror films”. Sitting in a movie theatre populated by a very eighties stereotypical co-ed horror audience (this is all wraparound footage designed for the feature), Pleasence and Allen take us through a brief history of these movies from Hitchcock to Carpenter to Abel Ferrara, from the more classical horrors of Rosemary’s Baby, The Birds, and The Omen to the exploitive Vice Squad, Ms. 45 and the Friday the 13^th series (though at that point they were only up to part 2). There’s even an insert of Hitchcock talking about shock vs. suspense from an old television interview he’d done. There’s even the inclusion of the minor action/exploitation/sub-horror sub-genre via films like the 80′s Stallone vehicle Nighthawks (though I didn’t see anything on the Bronson serial killer actioneer 10 to Midnight). In its eighty-minute running time, Terror in the Aisles tries its best to leave no stone unturned while keeping us entertained with non-stop barrages of horror and suspense/action clips cut together from dozens of films.

I remember when this flick hit the theatres in 1984, my brother and I had been taken on an outing to a local theatre called The Dolphin that was playing both Terror in the Aisles and The Terminator. I was nine. We saw The Terminator, and I clearly remember wanting to see the other one. I also remember why, after seeing a television trailer for Terror – the one that claimed, “No more waiting for the good parts!” Well, I’m misquoting here, but you get the idea – and the marketers surely had a good idea of their target audience. As a kid, I hated waiting for the good parts! I’d even remembered the arbitrary counter on the VCR (what was that counter, anyway? Feet? Meters? It was different on everyone’s top-loading machine), it had to be at 1550 before the good stuff in The Howling started.

Anyway, this is a fun ride for the nostalgic, but to the uninitiated horror fan or curio seeker it won’t be much good, as none of the rapid-fire succession of clips are identified at all, it’s up to us to remember which films they were from. Of course a lot of us know them all by heart now, but there were still a couple that nagged at me for a day or so, when I frustratingly couldn’t place the original film it was from. Still, can’t, actually. The credits at the end are only a minor help, as well, as they only credit the films in order of production company.

Oh, well. Despite most of the film being pretty darned fun, Terror in the Aisles, truthfully, wavers in its nostalgic enjoyment, at some points in the middle it borders on the doldrums, I assume it was when the film got to a point where I’d seen the clips so often already in their original context. But Terror in the Aisles certainly tries to keep the pace slick, and for the most part, it works. I admit, I had a smile on my face when it was over.

• A film by Vittorio De Sica

• Source print: DVD borrowed from local library.

Considered one of the seminal classics of cinema, this was simply a title that had bot really caught my attention until Arrow Video released it in a new hi-def transfer in the UK. It wouldn’t be until a few weeks after I returned to Vancouver, though, when I happened to come across the Criterion copy of this film and impulsively picked it up.

It’s a story about a man in Italy, a day-labour worker, and filmmaker Vittorio De Sica does an amazing job at setting up the economic and social palate in the first few minutes, as we follow the worker, Ricci, from the masses of out-of-work male labourers waiting to hear that they’ve been chosen for work, so that they may get out of their demoralizing welfare cycle. The job is putting up posters around the city, it’s government work, and it pays well on the condition that you have your own bicycle. Ricci’s bicycle had been pawned for food for his family – wife, son, baby, and so his wife pawns the cotton and linen sheets from their dowry so he can get his bike out of hock. In one of the films’ many memorable shots, Ricci watches through the pawnbrokers’ window as they place the sheets away, yards and yards atop a seemingly endless supply of pawned linens. Like this scene, nearly the entire film speaks volumes without having to say anything too loudly.

On the first day of the new job, Ricci has his bike stolen by a group of professional thieves, and the bulk of the film takes place the following day, the Sunday before Ricci needs to be back at work – where he takes his seven-year-old son along with him as they try to first find the stolen bicycle at the sketchy public markets throughout Rome, and then as they track down the people who were actually responsible for stealing the bike, with Ricci wavering between sheer determination, resolve, and ultimately sheer hopelessness and frustration as his young son has no choice not only to witness, but to get directly involved with. Which is obviously the most profound aspect of Bicycle Thieves, it’s what his son Bruno, played by Enzo Staiola, learns about his father as a person and society as a whole throughout this process. And the root of all evil? Fear and money, of course. While this cinematic exercise is 1940′s neo-realism didn’t manage to tug on the heartstrings as much as it apparently wanted to, it’s none the less a powerful achievement when we watch the last shots of Ricci and Bruno.

The incidents in Tales of The Plumber concern not only our dimension-warping hitman Kodek, but also The Corporation, which is fueled by dozens of other characters set to appear in the forthcoming revenge-thriller eBook titled “One of these Days”.

I hope the novel will be ready for publication by the end of 2012 or early 2013, all I can say is that it’s been written, and now being edited before going into final drafts.

Of course, we’ve now got the “writing on film” weekly blog writings here and we’ll continue to post short fiction as it comes in (or as its written), but I have to say it will be strange not to be visiting The Plumber every Saturday.

(April 16, 2011 – April 14, 2012)

May he Rest In Peace.

Although, likely not.

-Vince

• Directed by Joe Dante & written by Mark L. Smith

• Source print: Blu-ray from friend’s collection.

2-D or 3-D, that is the question…

Now, I love Joe Dante. I really do. I’m not just one of these Howling/Gremlins lovers, either. I love Gremilns 2, The ‘Burbs, and Matinee (a.k.a. Panic on Florida Beach, if you’re from France). I am not, however, a big lover of The Explorers or Small Soldiers, and herein may have lain the problem I had with The Hole… the film falls somewhere in between all of these movies (Gremlins 2 aside). There are some genuinely suspenseful moments in this story of a couple of young brothers (one whom has a fear of clowns, you might see where this was headed) who move to a new town with their single mom and find a bottomless pit in the basement of their new house, along with their teenage neighbor and teen-romance interest Julie, played by cutie-pie Haley Bennett. The entire cast, actually, is made up of relative no-names, aside from 70′s cult actors Bruce Dern and the to-be-expected-in-any-Joe-Dante-flick fellow Corman alum Dick Miller, which I really liked, but the movie itself was like a toybox of a horror movie. We have the standard we-know-they-shouldn’t-take-the-locks-off-the-trap-door setup scene, echoing Dante’s own superior horror/suspense satire The ‘Burbs, before ghosts and ghouls start climbing their way out of the hole in the middle of the night. The story, I have to admit, is actually pretty tight, and the shades of Dante’s Twilight Zone segment got me through what might have otherwise been something of an anti-climax in the movie, but when it was all said and done, all I can say is that I really wanted to like this film. Unfortunately, it felt more like Small Soldiers than Gremlins to me, and didn’t exactly make a mark as Joe Dante’s return to horror and the bizarre, despite his most honest efforts and clear intentions, and achingly, despite some seriously good directorial work. I may, in time, find myself giving this film a second chance, but it’s something I likely won’t feel the need to do for quite a while now, and I wonder if, as time draws on, I’ll even remember to give it a second chance.

To answer the initial cliff-hanging question, I watched the film in 3-D, just as it had been shot, as my good friend was eager to show off his brand new 3-D TV, a gadget which he swore only a year ago would never see the inside of his house. Oh, how we change.

For those of you who have thusfar kept up with Kodek The Hitman (and part-time journalist) and his merry band of friends (The Newspaper Editor, The Mad Scientist, The Bear of Berlin and that crazy Waitress in the Yellow Uniform), you’ll know that these things, mentioned above, are referenced throughout the tales.

Well, here it. is. Chapters 50 and 51 are up. One story left to go, here, in six days. Where does the time go?

• Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos & written by Yorgos Lanthimos & Efthimis Philippou

• Source print: Blu-ray borrowed from a friend.

My friend and resident cinephile thrust this blu-ray into my hands as I was leaving his apartment a couple of weeks ago, and told me, “You might not want to let your wife watch this with you.” Okay, how could I possible not be intrigued after that?

Dogtooth is not a typical film even for surrealists, this is a film that is better left with much unsaid. So herein lies the problem, as I fully intend to talk about it. Well, I’ll try to be as obscure as the first half hour of this film. Which is, far all intents an purposes, verbally surreal. The visuals, in fact, are nicely clean and even mundane as we’re introduced to a family – two strange but playful sisters, 1 brother and their parents, living in an isolated house. The father brings a blindfolded female security guard to the house for the sole purpose of having sex with the son. Soon, the security guard – Christina, who works at the factory the father runs – become interested in more than just perfunctory sex with the son of the family, and begins to explore other options. As this thread progresses, the two sisters continue to play odd games with each other, and then this turns into sexual exploration, and soon, we realize, they are all trapped on this property – with the exception of the father, who drives to work every day and leaves the family in the hands of the none-too-involved mother.

Not only are they seemingly trapped, but the parents are either training their kids to behave in unorthodox ways or just simply screwing with their heads – we’re not exactly sure at first, but when the irony becomes clear, it’s the sort of funny that makes you laugh with trepidation. It is funny, but Dogtooth isn’t so much a traditional American-style comedy (in fact, it’s not that at all) as it is a symbolic satire on both the family unit and society in general – though slightly more disturbing (funny) as it’s told directly through this family unit.

Things spiral out of control as the parents’ lies and head-fucking catches up with them by turning into a string of events they can not control, and then the parents are forced to deal with what can only be described as the simply ridiculous, in order to seal the inevitable cracking of their own ridiculous deceits and secrecy within the family.

A films that acts as social satire I something we’ve seen before, but I can honestly say Dogtooth is probably the most ironic film I’ve ever seen. On a technical note, it’s slow, deliberate, not very cathartic, and all the ridiculousness I’ve mentioned is portrayed in a deliberately mundane way, as families, even dysfunctional ones, tend to operate. I wouldn’t call it brilliant, but I would certainly watch it again, and it holds a place in my film-viewing repertoire as one of the three films now, that has caused me to reflexively shoot my hand over one of my eyes during a brief scene of violence. Would I show this movie to my wife, though? You bet I would. But hell, that’s my wife, I might very well issue the same warning I got to you yourself, or your husband/wife/boyfriend/sister/mother/whoever. I did not find the film offensive in the least, but if you’re not going to laugh inwardly at it you’re likely going to be raising your eyebrows, and as it’s a slow-paced slice of satire and surrealism, I definitely can’t say it’s for everyone.