Posts tagged monster movie

The Difference Between Jam & Jelly

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On Friday, I went to see Halloween 2, and while the date went fine, the movie was, sadly, NOT GOOD. I generally like Rob Zombie as a director. I enjoyed House of 1000 Corpses. The Devil’s Rejects showed improvement by leaps and bounds. His ‘Halloween’ remake was, frankly, amazing. Which ultimately makes Halloween 2 all the more disappointing.

First things first–Zombie has a flair for characterization. The seedy, foul-mouthed Hellbilly Deluxe jackasses that inevitably make an appearance are trashily delightful and delightfully trashy. The actors are competent and mostly believable. The ‘tea party’ vision/nightmare was visually stunning.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much more to be delighted about in this film. The entire opening sequence is a ‘gotcha’ dream cop-out. Michael Meyers showed up exactly when you expected him to, unfailingly, so there was nothing innately scary about the attacks*, which essentially reduces them to gore porn. The murders themselves were unerringly gruesome, some of which made even me, the self-crowned Queen of Horror Films cringe. It furthermore seems this time that Zombie has invested Meyers with teleportation abilities, as it is the only reasonable explanation for how he goes from walking past an upstairs window to outside on the front porch in a stealthy attack in a matter of seconds.

The symbolism was overdone to the extreme: if you need to open your film with an explanation of what your symbol means, well, perhaps it isn’t very overtly symbolic. It got to the point where every time I saw a ‘ghostly’ Sherri Moon Zombie bedecked in a flowing white gown, leading a white horse somewhere, it felt like I was watching a Fleetwood Mac video.

Theoretically, this movie is about the ensuing madness and legacy that comes from a shattered family life and I can almost buy it…but not quite.

I would’ve much preferred to see Zombie take the Halloween franchise down the path that Carpenter originally intended–as an anthology series that released a new Halloween-themed storyline yearly, instead of yet again reviving a monster whom you’ve taken great pains to set up as a fragile-minded human, and pushing him into the realm of the supernatural, because no human walks away after having round after round of ammunition pumped into his chest. And if Michael Meyers is NOT human, well, then all of the human psyche symbolism truly devolves into nothing.

*As I wrote this, there was a man I don’t know standing outside my office window attempting to peek in, and that scared me much more than anything in this movie.

Stronger. You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid! :pistolwhip:

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Last night, a group of Scientists of the Future ventured away from their home laboratories and went out to see the ‘Live For Everyone Not On PST’ Rifftrax of the worst movie ever made, Plan 9 From Outer Space. This fine movie stars the unintelligible Tor Johnson, Vampira (who doesn’t speak a word the entire film), and dead Bela Lugosi…undead, undead, undead. No, really. All of the footage of the real Bela Lugosi was shot without any script in mind, and Plan 9 was written to accommodate all the footage they’d shot of Bela in the graveyard in his Dracula costume. When Ed Wood wanted ‘Bela’ to interact with anyone else in the movie, he dressed up his wife’s chiropractor in a cape and made him cover his face with his arm whenever his front side was visible to the camera.

Although it was filmed in black and white, last night the movie was shown colorized, much like the Ted Turner versions of classic films. Now, I will fully admit to owning Plan 9 and watching it more than any one person should EVER view it, but in color it was a completely different animal. In order to incorporate the footage that had already been shot of Bela Lugosi and the stock footage, the movie jumps from night to day to night to day, and in color, those leaps are made much more glaringly obvious. Not that it was subtle in the first place. The police will come screaming down the dirt road to the cemetary in bright sunshine, and when they park the car in the Cemetary of Eternal Darkness, it’s pitch black. One of the female characters was attacked by ‘Bela’ in her home, so she ran outside to the pitch black cemetary. There, she encountered Vampira, screamed, ran out to the road where it was now twilight, and passed out. Bela then swishes his cape at her menacingly in a bright fall afternoon and stalks away, which cuts to the woman being rescued by a cornfed man, ass first, at twilight again. It’s a horrendous bit of genius.

Also particularly awesome is the general who commands his stock footage army of the Korean war from in front of a wrinkly sheet. It’s VERY convincing. And by very, I mean, ‘not at all’.

The RiffTrax crew did a great job, Jonathan Coulton was awesome (as usual), and all in all it was much more fun than a visit to Fort Worth (sorry, Fort Worth).

My friend, you have seen this incident, based on sworn testimony. Can you prove that it didn’t happen? Perhaps, on your way home, someone will pass you in the dark, and you will never know it… for they will be from outer space.

MEGA SHARK vs GIANT OCTOPUS

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Every week, Amy peruses the list of new DVD releases for things to add to her Netflix list. Last week, she called out to me as I was getting ready for work. “Melissa? I think I found a movie for you–Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus.”

My response? “HOLY SHIT WRITE THAT DOWN I WILL BE THERE IN A SECOND”

This is the sort of movie that I tend to have high expectations for and ultimately walk away disappointed. It didn’t help that it starred both Debbie Gibson and Lorenzo Lamas, which assisted in cementing my ‘this will be a glorious trainwreck’ mindset.

 

Now, I have to admit that actually WATCHING the movie, a lot of the time I was bored. In these sorts of creature features, there is never enough creature, and alltogether too much time is devoted to watching characters you don’t give a flip about overact as if their very lives depended on it. It was mildly amusing to watch them do SCIENCE! by pouring colored water into various test tubes and beakers and make either happy faces or overly sad “I am the worst scientist who has ever done science” faces. Did you know that pheremones glow bright green? That’s how Super Scientist Debbie Gibson knew she had done her job properly, and everyone gave her smooches on the cheek to let her know what a good scientist she was.

At one point, they cut away to a scene of a plane struggling in a storm. I rolled my eyes and thought how special it was that they were including plane footage in a movie where the antagonists are all in the motherfucking ocean. Then this, the most amazing scene in the history of cinema, happened.

This is better than when the shark rears up and bites the Golden Gate Bridge in half. This is better than the octopus smacking a low-flying fighter jet out of the sky with one tentacled blow. This is better than Lorenzo Lamas pretending he’s a good actor. THIS IS A MOTHERFUCKING SHARK EATING A MOTHERFUCKING PLANE AT 30,000 FEET.

I laughed so hard, I fell off of my chair. I laughed so hard, Napoleon had a fit. I laughed so hard, Amy came to investigate. I sent gleeful text messages about the quality of the film. I took a shaky cell-phone video of the scene in case it wasn’t already on youtube. I watched it about SIX MORE TIMES.

You’ve already seen the best part of the movie, so I can’t in good conscience recommend it. Scenes where we should have seen the Japanese battling the octopus were cut and substituted with one Japanese dude on a video screen saying “I hope you fared better with the shark than we did with the octopus. It was horrible. Horrible.” What could have been awesome destruction/fight footage was always cut with “We don’t need to see the end of this. Let’s get out of here.” The end battle is lackluster as hell–you could probably imagine a battle between a shark and an octopus that’s more entertaining. Perhaps between rubber bathtub toys, because that’s what these looked like. Scale goes wonky–at one point, the shark is large enough to bite the golden gate bridge in half, but can’t seem to manage to chew through a submarine. These are HUGE animals when they’re crunching through other things, but when they’re together, there’s never anything in the scene for size reference, so they look like 3d stock footage. It’s pretty clear that the directors didn’t know how to handle size, so they changed things as it suited their purpose.

Oh yeah: Also, this is a movie with a message. Global warming releases giant sea monsters as comeuppance for our environmental irresponsibility. You’d bettah believe it!