Category Archives: 00 – Current

“The Final Girls” (2015) REVIEW

October 25, 2015 Doc 4 Comments

I will be the first to admit, I was not originally on board for The Final Girls. There were a lot of things preventing me from being totally sold: the first trailer I saw for it made it look a little cheap and left a lot to be desired; the last horror comedy I’d watched (Cooties) had been an utter letdown; and the final nail in the coffin? I was reading a lot of glowing reviews for The Final Girls from reviewers who I normally disagree with. The odds were majorly stacked against me enjoying it. And I gotta say: my batting average for ‘thinking a movie looks terrible and it actually ends up being terrible’ is almost flawless, so to say I was hesitant to watch The Finals Girls would be an understatement. Alas, I relented in the name of fairness and objectivity, and I fired up the ol’ Apple TV, paid my $6.99, sat back with a beer and just waited for the awfulness wash over me, allowing me to drown a slow, excruciating death.

But goddamn, I was wrong. A man can admit when he was wrong, and I was wrong. I’ll be the first to admit it.

The Final Girls sees Taissa Farmiga as “Max”, a high school student who’s still coping with the premature death of her actress mother a few years earlier. On the anniversary on her death, Max attends a double-feature of her mom’s movies (“Camp Bloodbath” and “Camp Bloodbath 2: Cruel Summer”) at a local revival theater. Also in attendance are her best friend Gertie (Alia Shawkat), her crush Chris (Alexander Ludwig), her crush’s ex-girlfriend Vicki (Nina Dobrev), and her best friend’s geeky film nerd stepbrother Duncan (Thomas Middleditch), who not only put on the film fest but also invited Max along as the special guest.

A fire breaks out in the theater, and the group of friends tries to escape by cutting through the screen to access a backroom exit. However, when they step through the screen they literally step into the movie. From there, the characters have to figure out how to get back to reality while trying to avoid the killer from Camp Bloodbath. Meanwhile, Max tries to spend as much time with the onscreen incarnation of her mom as she possibly can.

There’s a lot of good stock behind The Final Girls: it was co-written by Joshua John Miller (y’know, Homer from Near Dark. Oh, and also, the son of actor Jason Miller), and it co-stars Adam DeVine and Angela Trimbur. Again, the combination of the trailer and the reviews I’d seen really threw me off — I was convinced this was going to be a huge bomb. But it ended up being really clever, quite funny, and really well-acted.

One of the things I really appreciated about the movie was how it played with its meta material. In lesser hands, I could see the possibilities being squandered for lesser, easier jokes, but The Final Girls never let me down in that department: they kept it intelligent and full of witty, enjoyable surprises.

One thing I will say: I was shocked at just how sentimental it was. I’d read many blurbs from people online saying how touching and tearjerking it was (another thing that dissuaded this cold-hearted monster), and man, they weren’t joking. At times, it was almost too sentimental for me (I already told you, I’m a cold-hearted, soulless monster), but I wouldn’t say it was a blight on the movie necessarily.

Another cool part of the movie is how it’s filmed: lots of kinetic camera movement, lots of dutch angles, lots of zooms, lots of swooping. Lots of super vibrant colors, too. Admittedly, the set pieces can be a little distracting at times; I’m convinced only about 3% of this movie took place on location and the rest was filmed in front of a green screen. (Seriously I didn’t notice one shot in the entire movie that didn’t involve some kind of VFX.) While I did appreciate the overall “final” look of the movie (me funny), I can see how others may find it to be a little much.

In the end I was really surprised — pleasantly so — at how much I ended up enjoying The Final Girls. It’s like a modern day Last Action Hero. It’s like a wonderful mash-up of Popcorn, Groundhog Day, Cabin in the Woods, and — believe it or not — Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Okay, my apologies for just naming a bunch of movies there. Horror, comedy, heartwarming drama, clever meta trope-toying film within a film — whatever your thing is, The Final Girls has got you covered, and I highly recommend it.

00 - Current, Reviews

“Goodnight Mommy” REVIEW (2015)

October 13, 2015 Doc Leave a comment

With its haunting and cryptic trailer, its word of mouth hype and extremely limited release, Austrian horror film Goodnight Mommy couldn’t have been presented more tantalizingly if it tried. Miraculously, it wound up playing a small theater not far from me — so I biked over like a giddy schoolkid, grabbed a beer (the theater serves beer, by the way), and took a seat.

The film centers on two brothers, Lukas and Elias, living on a remote plot of land in a sprawling, modern home with their mother, a noted Austrian TV personality. The film begins when the mother returns from a brief stay at a hospital where she has just had some cosmetic surgery done. Puffy, red-eyed, and wrapped in bloody bandages, the mother looks like something from a horror movie, and her behavior upon returning home is less than maternal. Almost immediately the brothers become suspicious that perhaps this actually isn’t their mother after all, and from that point on they do everything in their power to find out who this mysterious stranger really is.

Goodnight Mommy is a very sparse film, one that relies on taking its time to build suspense. Some might call it drawn out or a super slow burn, but it’s a very visual film so it never feels long, necessarily. At times it feels as though it’s simply comprised of a series of disturbing and beautiful images, strung together in order to relay a story — and that makes for a very interesting watch. Even the most innocuous shots — the brothers following a combine harvester and swatting away the dust; the brothers jumping on a trampoline while it hails outside — still seem to be hiding something. It’s all very artfully done and manages to build an incredible sense of unease, despite how innocent it all seems. To me, that’s good filmmaking. I mentioned in one of my last reviews how a lot of time the way a film is shot actually takes precedence over the material contained therein. This is a fine example of that. Yes, the story here is interesting and keeps you guessing — but if it were shot any other way it would lose a lot of its punch.

Now, watching Goodnight Mommy I was immediately reminded of another film — one I won’t name lest I spoil some of the fun (if you insist, though, you can find numerous threads on IMDB that are blatantly titled.) But that unnamed movie and this one merely share an obvious plot point that average reviewers seem to keep getting hung up on. What these viewers appear to be missing is something I found far more interesting: the theme of the imagination of youth. I was reminded of movies like The Reflecting Skin and The Spirit of the Beehive — films where the child leads are so wrapped up in their developing imaginations that it affects their sense of reality. To these kids, their daydream visions are real; To Lukas and Elias, their mother is a monster, no matter how she explains or defends herself — and that’s terrifying. The fact that we’ve all experienced that sort of thing when we were growing up — real monsters under the bed, real monsters in the closet, real monsters — makes it a much more real and jarring watch.

In the end, Goodnight Mommy manages to pay homage to several films — whether knowingly or not — but thankfully they all happen to be wonderful, beautiful, and truly scary movies indeed. I don’t think you’ll find another film this year that will fill you with so much dread and edginess and just flat out fear as Goodnight Mommy. From the moment it starts up until the last scene, it’s nothing but bad vibes and foreboding. This is a do not miss, for sure.

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“Knock Knock” (2015) REVIEW

October 10, 2015 Doc Leave a comment

Eli Roth seems to be making his long overdue comeback in a major way this year, and he’s doing it by tackling ultra specific horror and thriller subgenres. Last month saw the release of The Green Inferno, Roth’s ode to the Italian “cannibal boom” which took horror audiences by the throat from the late-’70s thru the mid-’80s. Now, barely 3 weeks later, he’s back with Knock Knock, a remake of the 1977 horror flick Death Game, which starred Sondra Locke and Colleen Camp (both of whom produced Knock Knock; Camp also has a cameo).

Now, Knock Knock may be Roth’s take on a little-seen exploitation flick, but to me it feels more like the “Yuppies in Danger” subgenre that flooded the early-’90s. Films like The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Single White Female, Pacific Heights, The Crush, Unlawful Entry, Fear, and many more. And how exactly do you put a yuppie in danger? Well, the formula is pretty simple. It goes something like this:

Introduce lead character: a yuppie. Make sure their life is pretty perfect (isn’t it always?)
Introduce outsider who infiltrates yuppie’s life. Outsider should seem harmless enough at first.
Outsider shows true colors and turns yuppie’s life upside down in a dangerous way.
Outsider will make yuppie look like the dangerous/guilty one before attempting to murder them.
Outsider is done away with, yuppie’s life is saved; lots of sweaty hugging of characters, with eyes closed. The end.

That’s it, that’s the formula. A more specific sticking point of the Yuppie in Danger film is infidelity. There has to at least be sexual tension — if not an overt act of adultery — to really shake things up. And so with all that in mind, onto Knock Knock.

Evan (Keanu Reeves) is an architect, happily married and a father of two, who has to spend Father’s Day alone at home working on a project while the wife and kids head out of town on vacation. That night (ominously rainy, of course) he gets a knock (knock) at the door. There stand two young, drenched coed types — Genesis and Bel (Roth’s real life wife Lorena Izzo, and Ana de Armas, respectively.) They’re lost and unable to find the party they were supposed to attend, and now the rain has left them without phones. Evan takes them in, gets them some fresh towels, and even allows them to dry their clothes. That’s when the girls start to snuggle up to Evan. And then…Yuppie in Danger!

Eli Roth has found the perfect “handsome nice guy” in Reeves. From the opening scenes with his wife and kids, to the scenes where the girls start being a little too flirty, Reeves just exudes this genuine niceness — a good, decent guy who you immediately invest in — and it really helps sell the character (and what eventually happens.) The girls are perfectly cast as well. They play crazy in a very realistic, innocent and playful way that really ratchets up the suspense. They’re so gleeful in their insanity, you really don’t know what they’re capable of or what’s going to happen next — and that’s great for building tension.

One of the things I loved most about Knock Knock was the way the girls gain entry to Evan’s home (and essentially, his life): a single, minor, fleeting line spoken by Izzo’s Genesis. When they show up at his doorstep in need of a phone, they immediately run into a snag — neither girl knows their friend’s phone numbers, because who remembers phone numbers anymore? So Genesis asks: “Can we use your computer?” It’s such a wonderfully on point update to a familiar horror trope, one that feels very natural and doesn’t feel like it was shoehorned in.

Of course, the movie isn’t without a few speedbumps (what movie is?) While he’s great at playing the kind, affable good-looking dad type here, Reeves stalls occasionally in the “holy shit, my life is in danger” department. There were a few scenes where his wooden delivery kinda killed the tension. But I’m a sucker for Reeves, baby. He’ll always get a pass from me. I mean, have you seen River’s Edge?

I’d say the biggest flaw with the movie is its sort-of “story with a moral” approach. Going that route leaves a lot of big holes in the 90 minutes leading up to the climax. The aforementioned Yuppies in Danger movies I named all took the simple road: the infiltrator is crazy. No rhyme or reason, no backstory. Perhaps a little bit of motive, but no ultimate plan in the long run. And that’s where Knock Knock stumbles: it tries to give too much meaning to the events instead of letting them retain a little mystery.

One part Poison Ivy and one part Fatal Attraction, Knock Knock plays like a female version of Funny Games — and like all of Roth’s stuff, it’s a fun and entertaining watch. Next up for Roth is his take on the “natural horror” subgenre with the killer sea creature movie, Lake Mead. I’m excited to see where he goes from there. Might I suggest the “killer kid” genre, Eli?

Final things to note:

In the film, Keanu says he is 43. In real life, he’s 51. I find it funny that he looks so damn good for his age, that he had to go lower to make it more believable for his character.
I wonder if Roth was inspired to write this when he wrote the two sleazy female leads in Hostel. This almost feels like it could’ve been a spin-off for those characters.
“It was pizza! It was free-fucking-pizza!” is not only one of the greatest lines ever growled on film, but one that caused a weird emotional stirring inside me. What can I say: when Reeves is on, he’s on.

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“Deathgasm” (2015) REVIEW

October 5, 2015 Doc 2 Comments

Horror and comedy have been partners in crime since Abbott and Costello were being chased around by the Universal Monsters way back in the 1940s. But no decade helped solidify this magical marriage of genres better than the ’80s. A deluge of funny and scary flicks saturated the market and pretty much perfected the art during this time: The Evil Dead, An American Werewolf in London, Gremlins, The Toxic Avenger, The Return of the Living Dead, Night of the Creeps, The Monster Squad, House, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Beetlejuice. And that’s barely a third of them. I mean, just absolutely everywhere. And while Gremlins may have been the only massive blockbuster among the group, there is no doubt in any horror fans mind the importance of all the aforementioned titles to the history of the genre.

When the ’90s rolled around, however, horror comedies were a little harder to come by. And by the ’00s they barely made a blip on anyone’s radar, save for the crud that was the Scary Movie franchise. Sure, there are some hits buried in that first decade — Club Dread, Shaun of the Dead, Slither, Zombieland — but I still only need a hand and a half to count the passible releases from those 10 long years.

The good news is: horror comedies have slowly been making a comeback! Beginning with 2012’s sleeper meta hit The Cabin in the Woods, horror comedies have been steadily gaining traction once again — which brings us to 2015’s Deathgasm, the latest and greatest the genre has to offer.

The movie follows Brodie (Milo Cawthorne), a gawky teenaged metalhead who has to go live with his ultra-conservative aunt and uncle after his mom is institutionalized. He also has to attend a new school where he immediately falls for a flaxen-haired dreamgirl named Medina (Kimberly Crossman). To help integrate himself, he starts a metal band with a few classmates and a local badass, Zakk (James Blake). Meanwhile, he’s continually picked on at home and at school by his cousin David (Nick Hoskins-Smith).

Soon, Brodie and Zakk come into possession of some mysterious sheet music written in Latin, and decide to translate it and have their band cover it. In doing so, they (somewhat) unknowingly open the gates of Hell — turning many people into horrific demons and ultimately summoning the D-man himself (I’m talkin’ about Satan, you sapheads.) Now it’s up to the timid Brodie, his crush Medina, and their motley crew of metalheads to stop the demons.

I’d seen a few mixed reviews from friends online, so I was a little leery about watching it, but let me just say: I loved this movie. It’s the perfect love letter to splatstick flicks like Raimi’s The Evil Dead and Peter Jackson’s Braindead. Plus, it has a cinematic prowess that recalls the techniques of Raimi, and even Edgar Wright: lots of kinetic cuts, lots of fluid edits, and director Jason Lei Howden makes sure that every shot counts. This last part — the way it was shot and edited — may be the most important aspect of all, above the rampant blood and guts. It’s always a terrible idea when horror movies let creative direction take a backseat to whatever story they’re trying to tell, since most horror films rarely have anything new to say. In fact, I’d argue the way a horror film is shot is possibly the most important aspect above anything else. Recent indie faves like It Follows, The Babadook, The Boy, Spring, The Canal — all lauded, yet each story couldn’t be more different from the next. The one thing they have in common? They’re all gorgeously lensed. And that really, really matters.

Ultimately, Deathgasm is just a really fun film that doesn’t take itself — or anything else, for that matter — seriously. The jokes are sharp and they never linger on a punchline too long. Plus: the gore is gore-geous! Split heads, torn limbs, intestines, and blood-puking that makes the cherry pit scene from The Witches of Eastwick look positively tame. I mean, how can you go wrong with a movie about a group of metalheads in corpse paint trying to save their town from demonic hellspawn? You can’t.

Deathgasm is currently on VOD and I say CHECK IT OUT!

00 - Current, Reviews

“The Green Inferno” (2015) REVIEW

September 27, 2015 Doc 2 Comments

In 2012, After 5 long years away from the director’s chair, ‘Splat Pack’ founding father Eli Roth announced he was stepping behind the camera once again to make The Green Inferno, his love letter to the ‘cannibal boom’ — a genre that took over Italian horror and exploitation cinema from the late-’70s to mid-’80s. This sub-genre of horror was known for it’s unrelenting brutality, unflinching violence, and in many instances the actual (and wholly unnecessary) slaughter of animals on film. It was a particularly savage and barbaric brand of horror that even the most dyed-in-the-fur horrorhound had trouble thoroughly enjoying. So who better than Roth, the godfather of “torture porn”, to take the helms and deliver a shocking and offensive kick in the butt that we, the horror moviegoing public, so desperately needed to get us out of the generic paranormal rut we’d found ourselves stuck in since he left the scene?

Alas, the finished film found itself in limbo after its distributor ran into money troubles, and there it waited indefinitely — a release date uncertain…if at all. In the meantime we sat, fidgeting, speculating the grand return of Roth and everything his mythical film had to offer. Enter Jason Blum, the indie horror producer wunderkind who, coincidentally enough, spearheaded the tidal wave of paranormal movies that began in 2007, the same year of Roth’s last release. Blum saved the day, using his Blumhouse Tilt production company to finally secure distribution for The Green Inferno. The cannibalistic gods smiled upon us!

The Green Inferno sees a group of American protestors heading deep into the jungles of the Amazon, trying to protect the tropical land from deforestation. They seem to succeed in halting the developers and celebrate their victory with beers on the plane ride home. Unfortunately, the plane crashes and the survivors soon run afoul of some sadistic savages hiding in the lush foliage. From there, the group of westerners must fight to survive, lest they wanna become the main course.

Now, viewers new to cannibal films will probably watch this movie with hands placed firmly over their eyes, occasionally peeking through the slits in their fingers. But those more familiar with the genre (dare I use the term, “fans”) will notice a few of the more shocking elements associated with the boom missing from this film, notably the real animal slaughter and the requisite rape/sexual assault scenes. Gone, too, are the inventive, stomach-turning death scenes: what horror fan isn’t familiar with the horrifying and iconic imagery of the impaled people from Cannibal Holocaust, or the hooks through the breasts and the castration scene from Cannibal Ferox? There are nods to the impaled bodies in The Green Inferno, as well as references to several other cannibal films sprinkled throughout (in fact, Cool Ass Cinema has a great list of all the movies The Green Inferno references; I highly suggest checking it out), but other than paying homage to the films that inspired it, The Green Inferno really doesn’t offer much in terms of creative and awful ways to die.

In fact, I’d argue there’s not enough violence. The words “Eli Roth directing a cannibal movie” conjures up all sorts of ideas of relentless brutality. But aside from one specific scene (which seems to be the movie’s centerpiece, and to be fair, is exceptionally brutal) most of the violence is fairy tame by today’s standards, or is obscured by fast cuts. Eli Roth said during a recent AMA that the film released to theaters is the original film he created. Apparently, the notoriously scissor-happy MPAA didn’t request any scenes to be cut. I’m amazed at both of those statements, but I’ll take it as gospel. I’ll just say: I wish it had been more violent.

One element that kinda let me down was the handling of the American group who gets attacked by the cannibals. Leading up to its release, all I read was article after article boasting how Roth was taking on “the armchair activists and the social justice warriors.” The Green Inferno was going to take these loudmouth PC college types and stick them in a place they didn’t belong and show them the consequences of being involved in a cause they ultimately truly know nothing about. Since the ultra-PC thing is really hot right now, I was amped to see Roth take this fad on. But aside from only a few painfully predictable bits of dialogue (from both the activists and the anti-activists), there really wasn’t anything that I would consider a jab at the PC crowd. And actually, I even felt bad for the group that got attacked — well, maybe one or two of ’em deserved it! But for the most part, they seemed likable enough.

If I have one gripe, it’s with the two lead cannibals, the ones who’ve been featured prominently throughout the promotional material (y’know, nosering cataract lady and yellow-faced bald dude.) They’re so cartoonish, they look like they should be sitting in the waiting room at the end of Beetlejuice. I kept expecting the bald guy to growl “Kali-maaaaaa!” I get that they’re the lead cannibals and supposed to be scary and ‘savage’, but it coulda been toned down just a bit. The tribe of red-painted cannibals are more subtle and realistic (because they actually are a real tribe) and therefore inherently more scary.

Despite my minor criticisms, I gotta say: it’s an enjoyable flick. I was glad to see it up on the big screen, and it’s a nice respite from the glut of ghost movies we’ve been inundated with the last few years. Roth’s strange sense of humor (think the “Pancakes!” kid from Cabin Fever) occasionally slows the momentum, but hey, that’s kinda his thing — so be prepared for it. In the end, this isn’t a movie you’ll watch and then take to the police, thinking actual crimes were committed, but this is a great starting place for someone interested in the cannibal genre — and if a movie can encourage viewers to seek out the films that inspired it, that’s a win all-around.

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“Cooties” (2015) REVIEW

September 21, 2015 Doc Leave a comment

Cooties is an entirely safe, digestible horror-comedy film (more specifically, “zom-com”) that average, passive intakers of horror and comedy will probably enjoy. You know that guy at work, the one who always tells you about new movies you just gotta see — yet you never agree with? He will probably really like this movie and highly endorse it. After all, it’s got that guy from The Office! And zombie kids — whoo boy!

More discerning viewers will probably walk away from Cooties feeling nothing at all, no reaction that is positive or negative. It’s not that there is anything necessarily wrong with Cooties, but there’s nothing particularly right with it either. My ultimate issue with the film is that they took an amusing idea and what could’ve been a subversive, funny movie about zombie kids trying to kill adults — and ended up going a fairly predictable route.

To be fair, it starts out really strong: we’re in a slaughterhouse watching chickens be plucked, sectioned, and run through an industrial grinder, churning out that familiar pink slime, the one that made the headlines a few years ago. But this pink slime is streaked with green: some sort of infectious bacteria which has the potential to turn kids into blood-thirsty monsters.

From there we cut to a bedroom: a sleeping Elijah Wood is rousted by his mom; it’s the first day of school. Only, Elijah isn’t a student — he’s a substitute teacher. A stalled career in Brooklyn as an author sees him back in his home town of Fort Chicken, Illinois (yes, that’s really the name they chose), living at home with mom and teaching elementary school. There, he reconnects with an old classmate — who is now a teacher, too — as well as a handful of other colorful characters on staff.

That toxic chicken meat we saw a few scenes earlier? It’s now in nugget form and being consumed by a little girl at the school. Soon, she turns into a raging zombie, infecting kids left and right, and bedlam briefly ensues. It’s at this point that movie down shifts into auto-pilot: we go from what could’ve been a prime-era Joe Dante or Fred Dekker flick and ease into something more along the lines of something I could see Kevin James or Josh Gad leading.

Zomcoms have an unfortunate history with being unable to find balance. Usually, the straight forward “this is simply a zombie movie but with humor” films are the ones that achieve the most success, both with major audiences as well as cult collectives: Evil Dead, Return of the Living Dead, Braindead, Shaun of the Dead — hell, any goddamn movie with the word “dead” in the title. The ones that fail are the ones that get too clever, too angle-heavy: Fido, Life After Beth, Warm Bodies. Unfortunately, Cooties falls into this latter category and unsuccessfully thinks the simple premise of “zombie schoolkids” can carry an 88 minute movie.

The funniest characters happen to be the two guys that wrote the movie, Leigh Whannell and Ian Brennan, playing a kooky science teacher and a cocky vice principal, respectively. They feel the most fleshed out and the most unique of the entire cast. And while the always enjoyable Elijah Wood and Alison Pill are well cast as the main leads of the film, everyone else is a one-joke stock character: Rainn Wilson is the macho guy, Nasim Pedrad is the uptight woman, Jack McBrayer is the gay guy. Jorge Garcia is the stoner, and Peter Kwong is the Asian guy. With the exception of Whannell, Wood, Pill, and Wilson, all the other characters barely have a purpose in the movie. They don’t have important dialogue and aren’t necessary to move the plot along or aid in a resolution. They merely exist to perpetuate their one punchline.

In the end, Cooties has a hard time deciding what kind of comedy it wants to go for. I laughed out loud once when, early in the film, Rainn Wilson clotheslines a little girl while running from a horde of zombie kids. But most of the humor is uneven and — worst of all — very safe. Interesting ideas — like today’s kids lack of respect for authority and our culture’s current obsession with knowing where our food comes from — are only briefly touched on and quickly abandoned, and instead more focus is placed upon the Asian janitor who knows kung-fu. Cheap, easy, and safe, if you ask me.

It’s far from terrible. It’s not just anything, really. I don’t know who it’s aimed at, but if you still pay to see Adam Sandler movies in the theater or think Vince Vaughn/Owen Wilson/Jack Black/Ben Stiller are the apex of comedy, then you will probably love this movie. It does have a killer poster, though.