Think About It Halloween Party: Movie Round-Up!
Here's a quick Halloween Party entry for you guys -- quick, capsule reviews of various spooky movies (all available on DVD except for Slither, which comes out later this month) to help tide you over until the next full Halloween Party article. Hope everyone is enjoying it!
Van Helsing (2004)
Cementing his role as an "action hero," Hugh Jackman starred in this monster movie about a vampire hunter tracking down the lord of the monsters. We've got bloodsuckers, lycanthropes and huge, CGI beasts. My overall impression of this film? It was cheesy, corny and so over the top in points as to be totally ridiculous. And I really liked it. You see, I’ve always felt that there’s something remarkably charming about a good monster movie. Clunky, impossible weapons? Good. Vampires and werewolves wrestling each other? Good. Frankenstein’s monster shouting “And though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death?” Good.
Now I know this will seem odd to those of you who know of my rather public dislike for the movie Underworld. I mean - it had corny dialogue, paper-thin characters and vampires and werewolves wrestling too. Heck, they both even had Kate Beckinsale. So what makes Van Helsing good and Underworld bad? It’s actually pretty simple. Underworld suffered under the delusion that it was a good film. It pretended its dialogue wasn’t cheesy, that its characters weren’t clichéd and vapid, that the romantic subplot wasn’t tacked on, and that the preposterously over-the-top ending wasn’t… well… over the top. Van Helsing, on the other hand, probably had about three times as many “Oh, come on" moments as the other film, but it didn’t take itself seriously. It didn’t aim to be any more than a goofy monster romp and a great popcorn flick, and that’s what I got out of it. As long as a movie knows it’s bad, I can forgive just about anything.
Needful Things (1993)
Based on one of Stephen King's better novels (and the final "Castle Rock" story), Needful Things tells the story of a small town in Maine that is torn apart when a strange little man moves in and opens a secondhand store. No matter what anybody most desires, our shopkeep seems to have it in stock... but he isn't in the market for money. He wants... favors. The way he manipulates people, preying on their desires, makes him a terrifying enemy, and one of King's best.
Like a great many of the DVDs MGM seems to be putting out, this is a fairly empty little disc. As far as special features you get a trailer and... that's it. Not even (at least, in the package I got) the standard insert with the names of the chapter breaks. Pathetic. The movie itself is... just okay. Max Von Sydow turns in a good performance as Leland Gaunt, the chilling shopkeeper who is more than he appears, Ed Harris is pretty much always good and makes for a good cop caught up in circumstances beyond his control. For about the first two-third of the movie, in fact, the story follows the book in a quite satisfying fashion.
For about the first two-thirds.
Hollywood seems so intent on changing the endings of Stephen King's books when they make them into movies, and I have yet to see an improvement. I am in the minority of people who hates Stanley Kubrick's version of "The Shining" because of how he takes a story about redemption and makes it bleak and hopeless. I have almost the opposite complaint here -- the filmmakers took an ending that was satisfyingly dark and made it uncharacteristically upbeat and chipper. It just didn't work.
The movie is mildly entertaining, worth a rental if you're a King fan, certainly worth catching on cable -- but as for the DVD, I can't recommend it.
The Corpse Bride (2005)
Tim Burton returns to the world of stop motion animation with his latest effort, The Corpse Bride. I missed it during its theatrical run, but I managed to see the DVD last week, and I thought it was worth taking a little time to talk about.
Comparisons to Burton’s first stop motion film, The Nightmare Before Christmas, are inevitable, but at the same time, they’re somewhat unfair. Nightmare is a real masterpiece of animation, and it would have been virtually impossible for the new film to measure up. At the time time, The Corpse Bride has some of its own charms nonetheless.
The film is the story of Victor (voiced by Johnny Depp), a young man about to enter into an arranged marriage with Victoria, a woman he’s never met (voiced by Emily Watson). As nerves get the better of him, he rushes off to the woods to rehearse his part in the wedding - and unwittingly marries a dead woman (the voice of Helena Bonham Carter). Victor gets pulled down to the land of the dead, and even “upstairs,” things go insane.
Where this movie works best is visually - the animation is absolutely superb. The construction of the characters is unique and imaginative, and distinctively Burton. The most interesting thing, perhaps, is the contrast between the land of the living and the land of the dead. “Upstairs” is a world of grays, a world of depression and gloom. The underworld, by contrast, is colorful, lively and a lot of fun. This is a world where it’s a lot more fun to be dead than alive.
While the film succeeds visually, it’s not as good on any other level. The story is clever, a the sort of tale you could imagine the Brothers Grimm telling before they became sanitized by Disney, but the solution to the major mystery in the film is really, really easy to solve, even before you know what the mystery is. The voice talents are strong, particularly Emily Watson and Tracy Ullman and Joanna Lumley as the mothers. But we’ve also got Johnny Depp, Christopher Lee, Albert Finney and Helena Bonham Carter - all of them are strong performers, but for film geeks who keep track of such things (such as myself), it starts to feel like Burton just recorded the soundtrack for this one during lunch breaks for Big Fish and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Even the music, by Danny Elfman, doesn’t quite measure up. Elfman’s work on Nightmare is legendary, and he’s composed lots of great scores for other films and television shows as well. The only real standout piece of music in this film, though, is “Remains of the Day” (which tells the story of how the Corpse Bride got to be all dead and stuff). The rest of the film’s songs are rather lackluster, and while the score is fine, there’s nothing particularly memorable about it.
I applaud Burton for continuing to support the stop motion artform, particularly in a day where virtually anybody else would have tried to tell the story with painfully overused computer effects. But this particular project is a bit too dark and scary for younger kids, and not quite clever enough to really be engaging for older viewers. It’s not a bad movie by any means. It’s just not anything special either.
Slither (2006)
Every so often you want a movie that challenges you. That causes you to expand your horizons. That makes you embrace new ways of thinking and push the frontiers of the human spirit. Then there are the movies with alien slugs and exploding zombies. Slither is the latter sort of film, and you know, it’s some of the most fun I’ve had in a movie theater in a very long time.
Written and directed by Jeffrey Gunn (writer of the remake of Dawn of the Dead), this movie stars Nathan Fillion (Serenity) as a small-town police chief who becomes the front line of defense in an invasion. Michael Rooker (Mallrats) is the human chosen as host for the extraterrestrial creature and Elizabeth Banks (The 40-Year-Old Virgin) is his long-suffering wife. When Rooker becomes the unwitting host for the creature from the stars, he goes on a meat-hoarding spree, eventually loosing an avalanche of brain-eating slugs across the populace, turning anyone they manage to infect into zombie-like extensions of the alien’s intellect.
A lot of reviewers have said that Slither is what you’d get from a Troma film with a big budget (and in fact the film even pays homage to that brand of cinema with a brief clip from The Toxic Avenger), and just like Lloyd Kaufman, Jeffrey Gunn creates a wonderfully entertaining movie simply by not taking it too seriously. Alien invasion movies, monster movies, zombie movies… all of them can turn into unintentional laughfests when played straight if the film isn’t up to snuff or takes itself too seriously. It’s not easy to make a really good, scary movie in any of those genres. But it’s arguably even harder to intentionally make a good “bad” movie. You can’t take yourself too seriously, but you can’t go so light as to make everything a joke either.
Gunn manages to nail this very delicate balance. While there are many moments that cause you to laugh at the absurdity of the film, there are also a lot of genuinely funny bits, bits of really good dialogue, really good writing, that elevate this film and make it something that’s a real treat to watch. The performances are great - Fillion’s character is a slightly less daring version of Mal Reynolds from Firefly, but he does it so well you can’t complain. Banks, on the other hand, really gets to stretch her legs with this film - as most viewers will only recognize her as the slutty bookstore girl from The 40-Year-Old Virgin, they’ll see some real acting prowess from her in this film, doing a very different character that manages to just surpass the eye candy stage. Even Rooker’s character has some redeeming qualities - he’s not a good guy even before the aliens get him, but he seems to have a genuine affection for his wife that still plays over to his monstrous form (sometimes in hysterical ways).
Is it a movie for everyone? Absolutely not. It’s got a lot of gore, hideously disgusting monsters, lots of foul language and the most desperately-needed “no animals were harmed during the making of this film” label in recent cinematic history. But man, if you like this sort of thing, you won’t find anything better. It’s a blast.