fresh movie reviews and yum cha daily

dir: Sam Raimi
Is that you, Buffy?
Sam Raimi. Sam Raimi. Where have I heard that name before? Oh, wait, I know. He’s the lesser known brother of Ted Raimi, who dazzled the world with his performance as Joxer the Magnificent in that Xena: Warrior Princess series, and as J. Jonah Jameson’s assistant in the Spider-Man movies. Or maybe it’s that he’s the brother of Ivan Raimi, famous scribe of Spider-Man 3 and actor in the classic Nude Bowling Party?

No, I’m sure I’ve heard of Sam from somewhere else. Wherever it’s from, it seems like he’s decided to enter the family business by directing feature films. For what may be his debut feature for all I know, he’s decided to make a strange little horror-comedy called Drag Me to Hell, which, honestly, shows to me that this Sam Raimi guy might just have what it takes to make a career for himself with these movie shenanigans.

The kid definitely has a future ahead of him. Or maybe a past, I’m not sure. Like most rookies in the business, he’ll probably piss it all away on hookers and cocaine, but maybe he’ll survive and make some more tiny small budget horror films in the future. I think that’s all a guy can hope for, really.

Sure, so Drag Me to Hell is awfully reminiscent of decent classic horror flicks like the Evil Dead movies (whose director I can’t be bothered to look up on the tubes of the internets), but what horror films haven’t cribbed from the classics, eh? The good ones borrow, but the great ones steal.

Considering when it was made, which is just before the economic crisis hit full swing, this movie was oddly prescient in its timeliness, seeing as it centres around the actions of a loans officer at a bank who screws over a crazy old gypsy woman (Lorna Raver), who curses her with one hell of a curse. The irony is that this hideous gypsy woman, who has false teeth that deliberately look like fangs, is a fucking monstrous evil creature. Okay, so it sucks that Christine (Alison Lohman) declined to give her a third extension on her mortgage, and that she did it to convince her boss that she is tough enough to be an assistant manager for a potential promotion, but it’s not like she does anything as evil as, say, cursing someone so that they’re going to be dragged to hell by a demon called a lamia, solely for the crime of offending a vicious gypsy.

dir: Tomas Alfredson
Little girls aren't always made of sugar and spice and all things nice
You would think that the vampire genre has been pretty much tapped out by now. The well went dry right about the time someone decided vampires could be an excellent Mormon stand-in for preaching abstinence and that sunlight, instead of burning them, would make them go all shiny and mirror-ball. How pretty! All Twilight needed further was ponies, and it would have been complete!

The endless permutations, allegorical renderings, highbrow and low trash versions mean that almost each and every possibility has been explored and then some.

So if you’re one of the many who’s heard of this strange little Swedish film and you’re wondering why it made so many critics end-of-year lists last year, and why it’s gotten so much acclaim, you might think it’s because it takes the vampire genre and radically twists it around and makes it all new again, kinda like that surgery they claim can turn women back into virgins. Yeah, as if.

You would be, like I was, surprised to find that Let the Right One In, based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist isn’t really that different. Even in Swedish, even set in the 80s, it’s a recognisable part of the vampire canon of tales and stories. This vampire needs blood, has to avoid sunlight, has to be invited in to a house in order to enter it, and its bite alone can turn its victims vampiric if the vampire neglects to kill those it feeds on.

So nothing radically new there. The difference is in the telling, and in the way we are meant to care not only about the vampire, but the main character, a human boy of only 12 years of age.

dir: Michael Powell
No, I don't think you have a funny accent
1960

Peeping Tom is a first of sorts. It’s not the first flick about a serial killer, nor about voyeurism, nor about the killing of prostitutes.

But it’s one of the first flicks I can think of that has a character study of a sociopath with something of an explanation of how and why he does the things he does. And, oddly enough, it’s a sympathetic portrayal.

It starts with a first person point of view, where we are to understand that the camera is a character itself. He or she, we don’t know yet, approaches an old boiler of a prostitute, who squawks that whatever it is that they’re referring to, it’ll be “two quid”. She leads him up some stairs to a slum like room, and she looks as excited by the prospect of servicing another punter as she does about filling out her next tax return.

But then the scene starts to turn odd, as we realise that the first person perspective, isn’t the person themself, but someone holding a camera as he hired the whore and followed her to her room. When she starts freaking out, we realise that whoever is doing whatever to her is also filming it.

dir: Danny Boyle
Dead London
An amazing film, on a number of levels. The most amazing fact is undeniably the redemption of Danny Boyle and his crew. It’s a touching tale of intellectual rags to riches to rags and then hopefully back to riches. It’s also the kind of story all too common with young ‘cool’ film makers who compete with each other to find new ways of fucking up as their careers progress from the ènfant terrible stage to the illustrious ‘sellout’ stage. Starting off with the low key Shallow Grave, he and his people established themselves as being capable of producing a decent, nasty film with believable characters acting believably nasty towards each other as situations moved from bad to worse.

With Trainspotting these bastards upped the ante substantially, making a film as compelling and, dare I say it, fun as it was repellent. With a soundtrack that became a mainstay on the radio station I listened to and on the stereo at every party, bar and club that I frequented at the time, it was a fiendishly inventive urban nightmare, speaking to the uglier corners of our natures and the natures of people we don’t want to bump into on a Saturday night: it has been continually imitated but seldom matched by a multitude of pretenders in the years that have followed.

Riding on this success Boyle and Co. decided that the word ‘crap’ needed to be redefined. Thus they made A Life Less Ordinary.

dir: Gaspar Noe
Please don't walk through there, please go back.
The film's tagline, one of the first lines of dialogue and the film's final epigram is 'Le temps détruit tout', or 'time destroys everything'. Well, even after watching the film in its entirety, I don't agree. In enduring this film, I think there is greater accuracy in saying that it is not 'everything' that gets destroyed, it is we
the audience. And it is not 'time' per se that does the damage, it's this film and its sadistic director, Gaspar Noe.

dir: James Wan
Is this because of the bad movie reviews I used to do on Recovery?
The day before I had the honour of watching Blade: Trinity. Today I
watched Saw. Tomorrow I should try to find something equally knife
related to watch just to get a hat trick of some variety: Knife in the
Water? The Night of Long Knives, Mack the Knife, er, something with
'spoon' in the title? Anything to maintain the metallic imagery.

Okay well maybe I won't be doing that. What I would also like to do
(but won't, not yet) is watch this film again and see if it's as
enjoyable the second time around. I have to say I was surprised, very
surprised. Pleasantly surprised, not like after a night of heavy
drinking, putting your hand in your pocket looking for your keys and
finding that your fingers are missing. As are your pockets and keys.

Saw is one of those success stories where two young hopefuls put a
script together and shop it around like all the other hopefuls. Except
their script actually gets somewhere, they get funding (miniscule
comparatively, a 1 million dollar budget), they get the press and the
promotion and the film turns out to be a roaring success. Of course the
flick itself is sick, twisted B movie horror trash, but it's decent B
movie horror trash. But you have to admire the way in which these guys,
James Wan and Leigh Whannell got this done.

Also, as I rarely find, you've got to admire a film that succeeds
despite bad acting performances, continual continuity errors and plot
holes you could drive the International Space Station through at a
leisurely pace. What succeeds is the concept, the overall sick concept
to make a pretty disturbing film on a micro budget and genuinely
unsettle an audience. Not in the way that the thought of seeing Barbara
Streisand in a film again is deeply disturbing, but a set up where
there is genuine horror, and scenes where you peak through your
fingers, unsure if you really want to see what happens but unwilling to
miss it.

dir: Scott Derrickson
Some demon keeps stealing my underwear
The makers claim from the outset that the film is based on a true story. The “true” story involves a German woman called Annaleise Michel who died in the 70s, whom her family and a bunch of priests believe was possessed by a bunch of demons.

Not just any demons, but the demons that possessed Hitler, Nero, and also Lucifer, who might have just been along for the ride.

The medical types, being the killjoys that they are, believed her to be an epileptic with schizophrenia. When she died, after nearly a year of malnutrition and weekly exorcisms, the authorities stepped in and charged two priests and the girl’s parents with negligent homicide.

The story is transplanted to the US, her name is changed to Emily Rose, the charge is applied to just the priest, Father Moore (dependable Tom Wilkinson), and the “truth” of the girl’s story is laid out for us, the questioning audience, to work out for ourselves.

That is, at least, what they would have you believe. The story from the outset leaves you in no doubt as to what they want you to believe is the “truth” of the matter. And in case you don’t get it, the signposts put up at the end put it beyond rational doubt.

dir: Darren Lynn Bousman
Two fingers, the classic gesture representing "Up yours, audience."
The question was never “Will it be as good as Saw?” It was more along the lines of “Can they come up with a ending even dumber and more insulting that the first one?”

What Saw had going for it a macabre sense of humour, a diseased looking mise en scene and ‘scary’ dark cinematography, and a sense of menace and cruel irony. It had against it some truly terrible acting and an ending which did the equivalent of throwing up in the audience’s lap when the issue regarding the villain was revealed as having less to do with his identity, and more to do with his location.

Saw II has against it the fact that it is a sequel to a flick that really didn’t deserve to become such a hit in the first place, and one that wasn’t really crying out for a sequel anyway. When a flick is as cheap as Saw was, the overheads are so low that the company picking it up for distribution can afford to promote the hell out of it because they’ve only paid a piddling amount for it in the first place.

dir: Neil Marshall
Oh, there will be blood, lots and lots of blood
Decent horror flicks are few and far between. The Descent is a decent descent into both the earth and the murky depths of the human soul, descending as it does from done-to-death horror staples, but remade in such a way as to make it more than an exercise in repetition.

When you hear a premise like ‘Six women go on a cave expedition that goes horribly wrong”, the first thing you expect, when you’ve seen as many trashy flicks as I have, is that it’ll mostly be about scantily clad women getting their tops wet and/or off, writhing around with each other in between pillow fights, pedicures and giving each other massages and drunken fistings.

Or, it’d be about women banding together to fight off predatory men, strengthen the bonds of sisterhood and to affirm that the Thelmas and Louises are doing it for themselves, or to themselves, or each other, in between teary arguments and lots of chocolate eating.

Neither, fortunately or unfortunately, apply here. This is played as a straight horror flick, with no knowing nods to the audience, and a grim and claustrophobic aesthetic that permeates throughout. It also doesn’t stint on the gore, for those that like their horror gruesome and bloody.

dir: Darren Lynn Bousman
This is what happens when you don't have decent medical insurance
Saw III, which is currently dominating the US box office, might actually be an okay movie. It might even be better a better movie than Saw II, which goes against the Law of Sequels that states as more sequels get made, the quality declines exponentially.

Even if that is the case, it still does not make this a good horror movie.

If horror movies are meant to scare audiences, to instil fear in them, by that standard Saw III is a failure. Because as uncomfortable as it is to watch people being torn apart or tormented by complicated machines, and as disgusting as some of the scenes in this movie are, they are not actually scary. We are not afraid about what is going to happen to most of the people who are introduced into the story only to die a few minutes later. Because they’re not characters, on the most part, they’re just props whose usefulness is soon to end.

In that sense, identifying with any of the characters in these flicks is virtually impossible, which means their ultimate fates are only of mild interest to the audience.

Saw III also goes to extraordinary lengths to tie up loose ends from the earlier movies, even to the extent that a major plot hole identified by many audience members after enduring the first instalment is not only referenced but dealt with.

dir: Jonathan Liebesman
Even R. Lee Ermey being The Man so profoundly doesn't save this pile o' shit
Oh, what a woeful, woeful film. Hopefully it’s an Ending instead of a Beginning. It’s bad enough that they did a remake of the original in the first place, but now, compounding their crime by following the redundant with the plain unnecessary, they’ve gone and prequelled a horror classic. In doing so they’ve so how managed to make it anything but horrific, and substantially less than a classic.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning is not so much an origin story about the origins of the murderous Hewitt clan so much as it is the endpoint of intellectual bankruptcy that serves the interests of greed without an ounce of creativity. The TCM remake made some money, so another flick scraping through the bottom of the barrel just had to be made, even though from watching this crap I can see clearly now that they had no idea what they were doing from start to finish.

dir: John Stockwell
Come to Brazil: You'll lose your heart. And probably your kidneys too.
Bunch of backpackers go to Brazil. Evil locals catch them and harvest some of their organs. The other tourists try to escape.

The end. Is there really a need for any further review? Unfortunately for you, I can’t help myself, so yes, there are acres and acres of more review to plough through.

I can’t really explain how this flick is different from, say, Wolf Creek or any other flick where a bunch of clueless white people are preyed upon by evil dark-skinned locals. I guess the Brazilian setting is different. The motivation of the villains is slightly different. Having Melissa George play an Australian is a bit of a stretch as well.