Date Night: Nightbreed

In which I review a movie that's streamable on Netflix.

In case it wasn't already apparant, I've been on kind of a Clive Barker kick lately.  I watched Nightbreed earlier this week for today's AdapNation, and then again tonight to show Becky what I've been rambling about.  I started reading another novel of his, Weaveworld, and wouldn't be all that surprised if I started rewatching Hellraisers before too long.

There's just something about the man that keeps me coming back for more.  It all has to do with his dark, grotesque, invariably horrific but enchantingly engrossing imagination.  Sure, the scale of it all often outstrips his execution, but that's part of the charm.  He creates worlds that are so utterly unlike anything that have come before them nor any of the pale imitations that will chase after them: worlds that even he can't quite seem to pin down definitively.

In none of his works is this more the case than in Nightbreed: the 1990 slasher that was supposed to be "the Star Wars of horror films."  In it, troubled mechanic Aaron  Boon dreams nightly of Midian - an underground city of monsters where his mortal sins will be forgiven and he will live forever.  When his psychotherapist Dr. Decker convinces of him that he's unknowingly murdered over a dozen  people, he seeks out Midian as his refuge, becoming one of the Nightbreed: the grotesque creatures that dwell there.

Now, I won't pretend for a second that Nightbreed is a good movie, because it patently is not.  Its characters are underdeveloped, its narrative is unfocused and its direction is decidedly subpar.  What it lacks for in execution, however, it makes up with its fascinating portrayal of the deformed, despondent and outcast.  It is an unnerving, often contradictory and yet earnestly spun story of acceptance that no other mind in the world could have come up with.

Nightbreed does have one thing over Barker's other, more celebrated films, however.  It is a visual masterpiece: exerting in its every frame the kind of look that Hellraiser was desperately gunning for and falling just short of.  The Cenobites were so sparingly augmented with nails and wire that they lacked the visceral appeal that they were afforded in later installments.  The only one with any real visual umph was Pinhead himself, and he's easily outclassed by the excessively quilled Shuna Sassi:

It's essenially X-Men by way of The Thing: striking that paradoxical mix of disgust and envy that only monsters can evoke.  Barker made every last cent of his considerably upgraded budget count, using it to create sometimes fascinating, sometimes disturbing but invariably memorable characters with the skillful use of makeup and practical effects.

While the skinned Frank and Julia from the first two Hellraisers often had a dribbley look to them reminiscent of refrigerated sweet and sour sauce, a more modestly envisioned Narcisse lacks this visual defect.  His scalped head retains the membranal sheen of skinlessness without the comical excess of goo.

So while I can't recommend it as a good film, I will recommend it as a morbidly fascinating one.  Fans of Hellraiser or The Thing will find gory delight in the visualizations of the Nightbreed themselves, while fans of X-Men will find a much darker take on a familiar subject.  It's at least worth checking out once for its uniquely monstrous world, just as long as you know the quality of movie that you're getting yourself into.

Rating:  5.5/10

Buy on BluRay:  Probably not.

So what is your favorite movie based on the works of Clive Barker?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Date Night: Daredevil

In which I review a movie that's streamable on Netflix.

So it might have taken a few weeks more to finish up than I originally thought, but I've finally put Marvel's Daredevil to bed.  Marvel's been struggling to "go small" for a few years now, and I think that it's safe to say that with this series they've put to rest any lingering doubts that they're playing second fiddle to DC's television universe.

In the wake of the Battle of New York, two local boys return to Hell's Kitchen to open up a well-intentioned law firm.  Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson want to meaningfully help the people that they grew up with using the law.  Sometimes, however, the law simply isn't enough.  And when that increasingly proves to be the case, Matt Murdock will willingly give into the devil in his heart to save his city.

Daredevil is the rare kind of series that seems to get everything right out of the gate.  While it was always a given that Charlie Cox would at least be good, Elden Henson, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Deborah Ann Woll, Bob Gunton and Toby Leonard Moore were all far better actors than their roles deserved.

How a thirteen episode Netflix series managed to land a heavy-weight like Vincent D'Onofrio I'll never know.  His is hands down the greatest Kingpin in the history of the character.  He takes a pretty conventional antagonist and transforms him into a surprisingly sympathetic tragic figure.  The episode explaining his back story was downright haunting: watching him claw his way out of sleep, while desperately turning toward "Rabbit in a Snowstorm" gives us not merely the villain of the piece, but a fully developed character who's just as interesting and compelling as any of the heroes.

It would be a supreme waste of the character to relegate him solely to the small screen.  Kingpin is as much a Spider-Man villain as he is a Daredevil one, and I for one would love to see him square off against Peter Parker in The Spectacular Spider-Man.  We already know that the plot's going to revolve around Spider-Man's attempts to become an Avenger (and Stark's resistance to the idea), but there still has to be a criminal element to tie everything together.  Why not a local crime lord who so often employed, deployed and created the story's on-the-ground villains?

When you get right down to it, Daredevil is basically a Marvel-branded, working class version of Arrow.  Anybody who likes one of these shows will invariably like the other as well.  At the same time, however, the absence of the melodramatic "lifestyles of the rich and famous" sub plots that so often weighed Arrow down are inherently absent Daredevil.  Furthermore, the Marvel show's characters are far more interesting to watch and its virtual half-season ensures that it gets to the point without having to stretch itself too thin along the way.

I'm also happy to report that when we actually do see Murdock's iconic costume in action, it actually looks a lot better than it did in the set photos that were floating around before the series' premiere.  I'm sure that a lot of that is because of how often the character flips around while fighting, but it really isn't that bad of a costume.  And when you consider that they'll probably revamp it before season two - probably even before The Defenders - you realize that we don't have to deal with it for all that long anyway.

If this is the kind of quality that we can hope to see from the other Marvel Netflix series - Iron Fist, Luke Cage and A.K.A. Jessica Jones - then Marvel has truly come into its own with television.  The company's eye for talent an willingness to let each property be its own thing - the very things that made their movies so great in the first place - continue to prove themselves to be the rule here.  This is a definite must-see.

Rating:  9.5/10

Buy on BluRay:  Yes.  I'm even willing to say that it's worth subscribing to Netflix for a month by itself.

So what did you think of the new Daredevil series?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Date Night: The Sound of Music

In which I review a movie that's streamable on Netflix.

I know that I'm cheating on this, but my back's against a wall at the moment.  It turns out that Becky is a lot more resistant to watching Daredevil than I thought that she would be, meaning that I haven't gotten any further in the series than I was last week.  On top of that, all of my other viewing has been DVD or theater-based lately, meaning that I have little to tap into for this week's Date Night.

But you know what Becky and I did end up seeing earlier tonight?  The Sound of Music.  And while it sadly wasn't on Netflix, it was a Fathom Event, meaning that it was made available all this week at AMCs across the country.  And it was an actual date night that we went on to see it, so the spirit of the thing is there, even if it doesn't measure up to what it's supposed to be.

When the Reverend Mother of an Austrian convent begins harboring doubts about one of her nuns-to-be, she decides to send her out into the world doing God's work in order to give her a better perspective on what she's giving up by taking her vows.  Maria is charged with acting as the governess of seven unruly children whose mother has long since died and whose father is emotionally unequipped to raise them.  Despite her best efforts to the contrary, however, she falls in love with the man and his children.

As a general rule, I've never been a fan of musicals, especially the ones from the 1950s and 60s.  I've always found the singing to be more intrusive to the story than it was intended to be and the invariable dance numbers to be tedious at best.  The fact that they generally adopted a lighter tone and family friendly sensibilities sealed the genre's fate for me.

Despite this, however,  have always loved The Sound of Music, although it wasn't until just now that  understood exactly why that is.  Yes, it's a 3-hour, G-rated musical.  Yes, it hits all of the expected narrative breaks and dance numbers.  And yes, it does feature Julie Andrews of Mary Poppins fame playing what essentially amounts to the Austrian equivalent of that same character.

The difference, however, is two-fold.  While it does have just as many musical numbers as other movies in its genre, it presents them in an entirely a-typical fashion (one that has only in recent years been popularized).  Rather than having the characters break into random song when dialog itself would work just as well, most songs are presented as just that: songs.  They are music lessons, performances put on for other characters or the invocations of nuns and monks.

We aren't asked to suspend disbelief in order to buy the idea of characters singing together with rehearsed perfection.  All we're asked to do is to sit back and watch a group of children showing off what they learned to their father, his fiancee and festival-goers.  The same goes for the obligatory dance numbers.  Rather than having to sit through a non-sensical scene where characters dance long after the song in question has run out of lyrics, it's part of a formalized folk dance at a party: equal parts instruction and plot-advancing patriotism.

The second thing that sets The Sound of Music apart from the up-tempo fluff pieces that I generally can't stand is that it's plot is actually meaty enough without its melodic window dressings.  It's the true account of an upper class family trying to escape the Nazis.  Sure, there's singing and dancing thrown into the mix for good measure, but it's actually a very strong historical drama when left to its own devices, and the family's riveting escape into Switzerland is one of the finest scenes ever committed to film.

Beyond that, it has an absolutely superb cast.  Julie Andrews was a risky choice (her only movie was the then-unfinished Mary Poppins), but she held her own splendidly against the exquisite Christopher Plumber.  What's more, the children - all of the children - were just as good.  When you remember that the bane of any good movie is the strength of the child actors that it's forced to work with, it's an absolute miracle that this movie ever recovered from working with seven of them.

What's more is that there's actually nothing to complain about with the movie.  The musical numbers are absolutely sublime, the cast is resplendent and the writing is top-notch (varying hysterical and heart-felt).  Although it was aimed at the broadest possible audience (as evidence by its G-rating), it dealt with the decidedly adult issues of patriotism, conformity and Nazis.  While the movie is upwards of three hours long, its paced so perfectly that it almost seems to end too soon.

The Sound of Music is unquestionably the greatest Classic Hollywood musical, and easily ranks among the greatest Classic Hollywood movies period.  Fans of the genre, the period or simply quality movies in general will find this cinematic gem to be an absolute gem.

Rating:  8.5/10

Buy on BluRay:  Yes

So what is your favorite musical?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Date Night: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

In which I review a movie that's streamable on Netflix.

This might be turn out to be cheating, but I was up against a wall here.  For the last week, all Becky's wanted to watch has either been Dragonball Z, Dragonball Z movies or Fast and Furious movies.  It was a struggle to get her to watch Daredevil, and even then she hasn't been amenable enough to that series to get me to where I could review that for today yesterday.

So I hadn't seen a movie on Netflix this week and wasn't about to do a half measure by reviewing the first five episodes of Daredevil.  But do you know what I did get her to watch despite herself?  Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.  And although technically just outside of the scope of my recent revisited series, it does fit roughly into place leading up to Age of Ultron.

In the wake of the Battle of New York, the world has become a far more interesting place.  Instead of going to bed thinking that the weirdest thing in the world was a Batman wanna-be in a robotic suit, people know for a fact that their world is populated with gods, monsters and super-powered legends.  Agent Phil Coulson, who survived his supposed death in The Avengers, has assembled a mobile response team to investigate and contain technology that the world simply isn’t ready to deal with yet.  Routine missions and by-the-books protocol are quickly set aside, however, as a mysterious villain known only as The Clairvoyant begins unraveling everything that Coulson has lived – and died – to defend. 

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s premise allows to plumb the depths of science fiction, free to explore technologies that society is simply safer without: gamma radiation, extra-dimensional wormholes, anti-gravity bombs, cybernetic upgrades, Asgardian sorcery and Project Centipede’s next gen super soldiers.  With TV-veteran Joss Whedon’s continued oversight, the show adopted the light-hearted, action-comedy blend and dramatic underpinnings that made The Avengers a billion dollar box-office success, as well as a dynamic cast of distinctly-rendered characters that made Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly household names.

While it has been argued that the series cheapens the MCU by retconning Agent Coulson’s sacrifice into a mere team-building exercise, its playful, back-and-forth development between each week’s episode and the latest Marvel movie greatly broadens the scope of the MCU.  Premiering shortly after the release of Iron Man 3, it immediately dealt with the next phase of Extremis’ development.  Following Thor’s victory over Malaketh, Coulson’s team parses through the Greenwich wreckage for trace bits of alien tech and assists Lady Sif recover an Asgardian fugitive who escaped in the aftermath of the assault on Asgard.

The series gives a broader and more complete timeline of Hydra’s insurgence, only a part of which was the battle above the Triskelion during The Winter Soldier.  Agent Coulson’s attempts to contact Fury are met with constant dead ends and misdirection, which we understand are because Fury has faked his death and has gone underground.  As Coulson’s team attempts to retake a S.H.I.E.L.D. base from Hydra sleeper agents, they begin to understand the scope of the uprising.

Faculty and students are slaughtered at the S.H.I.E.L.D. academies, the assassination of all high-ranking S.H.I.E.L.D. agents (only one of which was Fury) and raids on secure facilities for weapons, artifacts and prisoners acquired over the course of the series.  We watch the United States government label S.H.I.E.L.D. a terrorist organization and understand that Maria Hill defected to Stark Industries not for the steady paycheck, but for its legal team’s protection against government action.

The show's casting is the perfect blend of action-capable muscle with big screen presences and comically understated support.  Clark Gregg is perfect in his role of the soul-searching Agent Coulson.  Iain De Caestecker and Elizabeth Henstridge bring out the emotional cores of Agents Fitz and Simmons, characters who could have otherwise been presented as interchangeable cogs in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s scientific machinations.  Despite her character’s inherent impassivity, Ming-Na Wen’s Agent Melinda May is seething with the subtle rage of a good person who can never seem to find forgiveness from the one person who truly counts: herself.

Chloe Bennet’s search for what happened to her family as Skye  is both more desperate and more earnest than many more-veteran actors have been able to pull off on the big screen.  Brett Dalton shifts easily between Agent Ward of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agent Ward of Hydra: caught between his loyalty to the greater good and to the man that saved him from the worst in himself.

It’s hard to even find any real faults in the show, since everything that I could mention was sorted out in the first quarter of its first season.  While Skye does begin as a counter-point to S.H.I.E.L.D. – a character so obviously beyond the scope of the agency that her primary function seems to be to remind the audience that “normal” people actually exist – she soon finds her place both within the team and as a character.

Although initially bland and out-of-place amongst the myriad of colorful cast members, Agent Ward’s nuanced character quickly becomes apparent when the story allows him to open up to the rest of the team.  Despite sitting sideline in the early episodes to allow Agents Ward and May to command the action scenes, Agents Fitz and Simmons swiftly begin commanding scenes both in and out of the field in their own right.

Although the series doesn't really come into its own until season 2, the first season is a surprisingly strong addition to Marvel's burgeoning cinematic universe.  It allows us access to stories and characters that would be too immaterial for a movie, but far too interesting to be cast aside.  Any fans of Marvel's big screen endeavors, Netflix series or even just "genre" TV as a whole will find something to love in this series.

Rating:  8/10

Buy on BluRay:  Yes, especially for the latter half of the season.

So what is your favorite episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s first season?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Date Night: V/H/S/2

In which I review a movie that's streamable on Netflix.

While I've always loved the idea of found footage horror movies, I've rarely ever been impressed with the execution of them.  There always comes a point when there's no good reason for why the camera is still rolling: a point when every reasonably intelligent person would have gone "screw this, turn the damned thing off and run for it."  Sure, there are bound to be die-hard truthers out there wanting to document what's going on, but not in the kinds of numbers that the protagonists of these kinds of movies put up.

For all of the series' ups and downs, that's always been what the V/H/S franchise had going for it.  By constricting their individual stories into 15-20 minute vignettes, its shtick never had time to wear out its welcome.  What's more is that it actively experimented with different recording methods of its stories.

Some segments would be shot with traditional cameras, yes, but others would be Skype conversations or sex tapes made with hidden spy cameras.  Some even manged to tie in the inherent necessity of filming the events into the narrative itself.

This experimental tradition isn't lost on the second movie of the series.  One segment is recorded on a prosthetic eye: a kind of camera that not only ties into the story in question, but quietly answers the inherent question of why nobody ever thought to turn it off and run.  Another story is recorded in the guise of a documentary, which would naturally require that the camera be rolling until its conclusion.  One particularly inspired sequence shoots a zombie outbreak from the protagonist's helmet-mounted Go Pro.

In addition to this varied and sensible use of found footage, the sequel proves itself in every way to be superior to its predecessor.  The vignettes are better directed, better written, better acted and better shot across the board.  Only one sequence can really be considered a disappointment (during a supernaturally-themed Jonestown-styled massacre), and that's more from trying to include too much than not having enough to work with.

The segments are all far more ambitious than the "just because" mentality that seemed to permeate through the first movie.  They're more than just a haunted house story, or honeymoon stalker or a random encounter with a succubus.  One segment is basically what would happen if high-tech sensory prosthesis turned you into the kid from The Sixth Sense.  Another strikingly tragic story explored what would happen if a zombie momentarilly recognized the monster that it had become.

Although a colossal improvement on the original, V/H/S/2 is not without its share of issues.  While the vignettes feature across the board improvements to quality, some stories ("A Ride in the Park") are inherently better than others ("Safe Haven").  Like the original, the frame story linking the segments together is vastly inferior compared to those stories it links to.

"Slumber Party Alien Abduction" suffers from the confusing visuals that often accompany shakey cam combined running, compounded by the fact that the story itself wasn't especially interesting.  Both "Clinical Trials" and "A Ride in the Park" felt like they could have used some more time to let the story percolate: made all the more disappointing when you consider that simply removing the frame story would have given both segments all the time that they needed to develop.

On the whole, though, V/H/S/2 is a surprisingly capable - if sadly uneven - found footage film that makes some of the best use of its sub genre that I've ever seen.  The stories being told are all solid, even if some are more solid than others.  Fans of the first movie will find everything that they liked about the it is still there while those that left the theater wanting more (like I did) may find something worthwhile despite themselves.

Rating:  7/10

Buy on BluRay:  Probably not

So what was your favorite V/H/S/2 story segment?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Date Night: Friday the 13th

In which I review a movie that's streamable on Netflix.

When I first started getting into horror movies in high school, I marathoned every one of the Friday the 13th movies: not because they were any good, mind you, but because I figured that they had to start getting good at some point.  You don't make it to ten movies (eleven if you count Freddy vs Jason) without at least one good one.  It turns out that you could, and I have long since moved on from trying to make any sense of its perplexing popularity.

That is, until I came across the Cinema Snob's review of the first movie, which piqued my interest enough to revisit the series for the first time in a decade.  And while far from as good of a series as, say, A Nightmare on Elm Street or Halloween, I was surprised to discover just how consistently decent it was on the whole, not to mention being absurdly better than I initially gave it credit for.

Over two decades after Camp Crystal Lake was closed down following the murder of two of its counsellors, a new group of dedicated men and women are renovating the grounds for its highly anticipated reopening.  The problem is, however, that somebody is just as dedicated to preventing that from ever happening, murdering the would-be counsellors in an increasingly brutal fashion before they can open the grounds to campers once again.

Friday the 13th's most endearing feature is probably that it was made in a time before the conventions of the slasher genre was set in stone.  This means that while we do see victims divulging in sex and alcohol - and being summarily punished for it - little else is familiar for genre enthusiasts.  The killer's identity is kept a secret until the climax, there's surprisingly little gore (at least by today's standards) and the killer is actually a woman.  Regardless of how well any of those aspects actually worked, it does make it a unique spectacle in a genre too often marked by stale predictability.

The cast is a more than reasonable assemblage of young talent, including an especially young Kevin Bacon.  Betsy Palmer is also a far better antagonist than this film deserved.  Sure, she lays it on thick at the end, but any more reserved of a performance would have been too listlessly forgettable, and Palmer plays psychotic so well.

In many ways I respect this movie a lot more than I like it, since so much of what it was trying to do - so much of what makes it so unique in retrospect - simply didn't work.  It bends over backwards to keep the killer's identity a secret, leading up to the grand reveal of some woman that we've never seen before.  For as God-awful as Part V of the series was, it actually managed to pull off its murder mystery plot a lot better than the series' first instalment.

Partly assisted by how hellbent the film was to keep Mrs. Vorhees' identity as the killer a secret, the kills really lack the visceral thrill of later slasher films (or even earlier ones, for that matter).  A lot of damage happens just outside of the framing, and is really more a matter of ticking off victims than it is terrifying us with their dispatchments.  And for as iconic a role as he plays, Crazy Ralph - the town doomsayer - is more annoying than he is foreboding.

Upon rewatching it years later, I have roughly the same opinion of Friday the 13th as I did when I first saw it.  It's an alright, somewhat uninspired and historically unique entry to the slasher sub-genre.  It doesn't always work, but it never entirely fails at what it tries to do either.  It even makes for an especially interesting story arc when paired with Parts 2 and 3.

Rating: 5.5/10

Buy on BluRay:  Only if you plan on buying the first three movies in the franchise as a unit.

So which Friday the 13th movie is your favorite?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Date Night: It's Such a Beautiful Day

In which I review a randomly-selected movie from Netflix.

It's been a while since I've done one of these.  Between the big move, working two (and now three) jobs, my weekly Unreality,  articles, the Oscars and the recent deluge of news, new movies and trailers, there's hardly been time for the article series that made me start this darned thing in the first place.  Well it all ends today, as I am redoubling my efforts for Date Night and From the Vault articles: aiming for one of each every week.  So lets get back into the swing of things with It's Such a Beautiful Day: a trilogy of short, animated films re-edited together into a (barely) feature-length production.

Following a series of devastating health and personal problems, Bill struggles to get by in his everyday life.  He goes to the grocery store, watches TV and obsessively sucks blood from a sore in his mouth.  His stream-of-conscious observations on everyday life - like how he always buys the fruit from the back of his grocery store's produce displays because the fruit in the front is crotch-level with the other patrons - are as downcast as they are amusing.  But Bill is going through a profound change that nobody around him is aware of, and he will soon transcend existence as we know it.

I don't know what I was really expecting when we started streaming It's Such a Beautiful Day, but it certainly wasn't this.  Despite what it's animated origins might suggest to the casual moviegoer, this is an art film: not something meant to be taken up as broadly watchable entertainment.  That doesn't make it any better or worse, just something that most people generally won't be interested in seeing (like Enemy or Under the Skin).

For as radically perplexing as the narrative was, however - and despite a jarringly disconnected second act - It's Such a Beautiful Day is one of the most uniquely memorable films that I have ever seen.  Writer / director Don Hertzfeldt presents a character that it as once as foreign and familiar to us as anybody struggling to fit into society without a prescribed role.  His insights are equal parts poignant and hilarious, insights which build upon previous insights and will build up to ones further along in the film, like a compressed version of How I Met Your Mother or Archer.

That being the case, however, the film is astoundingly uneven in pacing and overall entertainment value.  Some parts are absolute gems of comedy or commentary, while other parts seem to exist only to connect those gems to one another within the narrative.  The first third of the film is consistently fantastic; the second third is good, but doesn't connect well to either the preceding or forthcoming segments; and the final third is good, but gets especially weird.

As long as you can look past its faults, It's Such a Beautiful Day is a remarkable film: unique enough that immediately after seeing it I recommended it to nearly a dozen others on that strength alone.  It admittedly doesn't have much rewatchability, but the one experience should prove to be sufficient.  If you have Netflix especially, where it is still streamable, I would definitely recommend that you check it out.

Rating:  7.5/10

Buy it on BluRay:  No

So what's your favorite off-beat animation?  Let me know in the comment section below.

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Date Night: The Last Stand

In which I review a randomly-selected movie on Netflix with Becky.

Of the recent trend of retro-action movies headlined by rapidly aging 80's action stars, The Last Stand is probably the one that I was most looking forward to: a fit and muscular Schwarzenegger  shooting up a small desert town with the reckless abandon of model 800 Terminator, all while quipping about how he feels old.  We've certainly come a long way from the limp and sagging Governator we had to endure in Rise of the Machines.  Between that and the fact that The Sacrament was so surprisingly good, I thought that I could ease back on poking fun of Becky's method of picking out movies.

Sadly, it doesn't look like Becky will get any breaks for picking out Crockzilla.

When cartel boss Gabriel Cortez escapes from federal custody in a Chevrolet Corvette C6 ZR1 at speeds exceeding 200 miles per hour, the FBI race to beat him to the Mexican border.  His plan isn't to make it to a heavily reinforced border crossing that is expecting him well in advance, but to construct a bridge crossing into Mexico where the canyons  are thinnest: just outside of Sommerton Junction, Arizona.  When Sommerton Junction sheriff Ray Owens uncovers the plot, resulting in the death of one of his deputies, nothing will stop him from arresting the men responsible.

The Last Stand is a movie that had everything going from it: a reinvigorated Arnold Schwarzenegger, a universally under-used Forrest Whitaker, up-and-coming female action star Jaime Alexander (Lady Sif from the Thor films and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) and Johnny Knoxville - who is consistently funny despite himself.  It had a suitably 80s set-up, promising fast cars and excessive explosions.  It didn't even look to take itself too seriously, incorporating some self-directed meta-humor concerning the age of its star.

Despite everything it had going into production, however, it never quite seemed to coalesce into a workable film.  While it's never exactly a bad one, it is likewise never near being a good one.  The films parallel plots - investigating a curmudgeonly old farmer's murder and Cortez's desperate bid for the Mexican border - don't really come together the way that you'd hope that they would.  Sheriff Owens' back story seems more necessitated by nostalgia than by the plot and the on-the-ground villain is easily the most forgettable character in the film (and I am including Deputy So-and-So who valiantly died to motivate his coworkers into actually doing their job).

When Cortez actually makes it to Sommerton Junction, the resulting standoff between him and Owens lacks the visceral thrills of the movies that its trying to emulate: merely sloshing through the tired motions of what an action genre climax is supposed to look like.  We get car chases, firefights and explosions - even mid-bridge punchout between Owns and Cortez - but nothing that's actually all that exciting to watch.  Its like director Kim Jee-woon understood what people liked about movies like Die Hard without actually understanding why they liked it in the first place.

When it really comes down to it, you'd probably be better off rewatching Total Recall or Terminator 2 than checking out The Last Stand.  While not quite a waste of time, it does feel like a very "by the numbers" action movie that gives audiences what it thinks that they want, rather than what they actually want.  I sincerely hope that Schwarzenegger's return to the big screen will be defined by better movies than this sub-par production.  In the end , I give the film a decent 4.5 out of 10 and Becky gives it a 6.5.

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Date Night: The Sacrament

In which I review a randomly-selected movie on Netflix with Becky.

Becky apparently picks out what movies to watch the same way that a child does: never mind the plot synopsis nor the creative talent involved, you'll learn everything you need to know from its cover photo and title.  That's how we ended up watching The Sacrament - a 2013 horror film from the same visionary writer-director that produced Cabin Fever 2, the V/H/S segment "Second Honeymoon" and The ABC's of Death segment "M Is for Miscarriage."

When his sister, along with the commune that she became a member of, disappears, independent journalists Patrick, Sam and Jake travel to the seemingly Utopian Eden Parish: where the desperate and destitute have come together under Father's leadership to show the world a better way to live.  But everything is not what it appears to be at Eden Parish.  For every rapturous member of Father's congregation affirming that they would rather die than return to the United States, there's another who skittishly says that they're not allowed to talk to outsiders.  And when they are confronted by a mob of terrified parishioners begging to be taken away from the commune when the three men leave, they realize that they are all in danger.

Despite its lackluster pedigree of creative talent, The Sacrament is every inch the movie that Red State wanted to be.  Both films depict radical Christian sects with frighteningly charismatic leaders commit abhorrent acts of evil in the name of God.   Unlike Red State, however - which was riddled with false starts, rapid tonal shifts and a garbled mess of a script - The Sacrament knew exactly what it wanted to say and spent its entire run-time developing that message.  Its narrative didn't lose focus by trying to introduce First Amendment rights, Second Amendment rights, homosexually-driven hate crimes, ineffective bureaucracies, post-9/11 politics and a corrupt government all too eager to cover up its own misdeeds.  With journalistic sparsity, it concentrated on how religious fervor can entrap and enslave a group of desperate people who find themselves on the outside of mainstream society.

Father, the patriarch of Eden Parish.

Like Red State, the film's greatest strength is in its charismatic antagonist: Father.  Watching the normally bit-player Gene Jones preach about the evils of the world is like watching a revelation on screen.  His dark Southern drawl is absolutely intoxicating, spoken with a sweeping momentum that commands the focus and passions of everyone caught in his presence.  Like Sam, you lose focus on the obvious objections to his compound - which at even a cursory glance includes sleep deprivation, surrender of your passport, donation of your life savings to buy into the parish, drug use and rampant sexual fornication as a means of recruitment - and surrender yourself to the calming embrace of his voice.

Unlike most post-millennial horror films that share its aesthetic, The Sacrament makes intelligent use of its found footage framework.  While most found footage films use it to gloss over budgetary constraints and continue to use it when it no longer makes narrative sense that the cameras would be rolling at that particular point of time, The Sacrament uses it as an organic framework - born of the inherent needs and goals of the film.  We never question why three reporters would be documenting their trip to an isolated religious commune, nor why they would continue to film when the mass suicide and execution of the unfaithful began.  We likewise never question Father when he orders his followers to record the mass suicide, given that it is intended to be a message of faith directed towards a faithless world.  The reporters even have the foresight to abandon their camera when they realize that it's impeding their escape from armed assailants - a decision which uniquely records the whole of the chase scene without breaking the illusion of found footage.

Despite a number of pacing issues and an entire cast of under-developed characters, The Sacrament is a surprisingly well-constructed and entertaining horror film.  Ultimately, the strength of its antagonist, framework and story are enough to carry the film through its ninety-five minute run-time.  I give the film a 7 out of 10 and Becky gives it a 6.

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Date Night: Shadow of the Vampire

In which I review a randomly-selected movie from Netflix with Becky.

It's hard to believe that nearly a month has come and gone since the last Date Night.  But with this installment complete and a second one already waiting in the wings, don't expect such gaps to become the norm.

I have always found silent films to be especially entrancing.  There's a zen simplicity in silence - meaning found solely in the visuals - especially since thunderous explosions and snappy dialog come cheaply these days.  You can't multitask through a silent film: can't tweet or update statuses or surf the net.  It's an unforgiving aesthetic that forces you to either pay absolute attention or become hopelessly lost in the narrative.

Perhaps this is why I was so intrigued by Shadow of the Vampire, a film depicting the creation of one of the greatest silent films ever produced: F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.  Having been unable to secure the film rights to Bram Stoker's Dracula, the production was troubled before it ever truly began.  Deciding to simply change a few superficial details, Murnau pushed ahead with his film regardless.  But it was Max Schreck - the actor chosen to play the iconic Count Orlok - that proved to be film's greatest obstacle.

Max Schreck was a method actor before the practice gained public notoriety.  As I have mentioned before, method actors are a peculiar breed of thespians that entrench themselves in the psychology of their character both on and off the set - supplanting themselves for that of the fiction that they portray on screen.  When filming, there was never a Max Schreck: only Orlok - only the vampire.  He "play[ed] the part of an actor playing the part of a vampire," only appearing in front of the cast and crew in full costume and makeup, only at night, never breaking character during the film's entire production and was only to be addressed by as Orlok.  Understandably, rumors surged on set that Max Schreck actually was a vampire.

Shadow of the Vampire takes those rumors and runs with them, positing that Schreck was, in fact, a vampire that Murnau scouted out for his film's antagonist.  He is never shown eating, only drinking from a decanter of blood, a bottle of schnapps and a decapitated bat.  Although Murnau lists the various companies and productions that Schreck was a part of when introducing him to the rest of the cast, that cover is soon thoroughly disproved.  When Murnau's crew demands to know what he promised Schreck in exchange for appearing in the role, he answers Greta Schroeder, the film's lead actress.  In addition to ripping out his co-star's throat, over the course of filming Schreck hospitalizes one crew member and kills two others.  While filming Nosferatu's climax, Murnau orders the set's shutters to be lifted, using the sunlight to kill Schreck on camera.

Max Schreck was the role that Willem Dafoe was born to play.  He was always an unsettling-looking actor, with a wide Grinch-like grin, massive teeth with prominent canines, buggy eyes, dark lips and a sloping leathery face; combined with Schreck's own exaggerated makeup - ashen flesh, pointed ears, elongated incisors, bald head with wisps of white around his ears, overlong fingers with claw-like nails - it creates a character of unparalleled unease.  Additionally, Dafoe is able to fully embody the stiff, lumbering and altogether unnatural posture and movements of German Expressionism: the film aesthetic that informed Nosferatu's production.

The resulting film is neither a biography of an eccentric actor nor a historical drama depicting an especially troubled production.  Shadow of the Vampire is neither Hitchcock nor Lost in La Mancha.  It is something altogether darker: a revelation in one man's desperate obsession for authenticity and perfection, regardless of the cost that must be paid for it.  It's caught somewhere between John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns and Christopher Nolan's The Prestige: self-destruction as a willful act of creation.

I don't know what exactly I was expecting to see when I sat down to watch Shadow of the Vampire, but this is certainly not it.  It was a mesmerizingly horrific experience, blurring the lines between biography and fiction until the two became hopelessly intermixed.  It is a film that any fan of horror and the early film industry should experience.  Overall, I give the film a 7.5 out of 10 and Becky gives it a 7.

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Date Night: Zodiac

In which I review a randomly-selected movie from Netflix.

I honestly have no idea why I waited so long to watch Zodiac.  I've wanted to see it since it hit theaters in 2007 as the next big film from the director of Fight Club and Se7en.  I didn't watch it in 2008 after Robert Downey Jr. returned to the A-list in Iron Man.  I didn't watch it after blind-buying it in 2009, nor after Mark Ruffalo became a household name in the wake of The Avengers' unprecedented success.  I waited until it was streamable on Netflix, and even then I waited over a year before I sat down to watch it.

Zodiac, based on Robert Graysmith's 1986 novel, opens during the Zodiac Killer's murder spree across 1960's California.  While San Fransisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery's coverage of the murders puts him at odds with homicide detectives Dave Toschi and William Armstrong, anti-social cartoonist Robert Graysmith becomes just as fascinated with the killer's reign of terror as he is horrified by it.  When victims stop piling up in the early 1970's, however, the public loses interest; Paul Avery is fired from the Chronicle, detective Armstrong transfers out of homicide and Detective Toschi moves on to other cases.  Despite the incredulity of the police and the concern of his wife, Robert Graysmith launches his own private investigation into the murders to uncover the identity of the Zodiac.

Rightly praised for its accurate recreation of the investigation surrounding the murders, Zodiac plays out more like a History Channel dramatization than a thriller built around a real-life Hannibal Lecter.  The characters are used less for their dramatic interactions as they are for their reactions to what the unseen antagonist does.  Greysmith's son seems to only be included because of the killer writing to the newspaper that "school children make nice targets.  I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning.  Just shoot out the front tire [and] then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out."  Avery has a wife that briefly speaks from the other end of a telephone and is only mentioned again after she kicks him out of the house (presumably because of Avery's increasingly antagonistic and erratic behavior towards the police investigation).  Toschi's wife exists purely to be annoyed when Graysmith wakes her and her husband up in the middle of the night with another Zodiac theory while Graysmith's wife only seems to exist to steal their kids away to her mother's as Graysmith becomes more and more obsessed with the identity of the Zodiac killer.

Paul Avery (left) and Robert Graysmith (right)

Coming in at over two and one half hours, Zodiac's methodical pacing causes the film to drag where similar films seem to fly by.  The decision to cover the whole of the Zodiac's twisting investigation over three counties and two decades, though admirable, makes for a cumbersome and unwieldy film.  Given how superfluous Graysmith's inclusion is in the first half of the film and how equally superfluous Avery's inclusion is in the second half, the film as a whole would have strongly benefited from cutting one or the other character out entirely: focusing on a single one of their investigations alongside Toschi's.  This would have allowed the film to more thoroughly explore the unfolding drama of the lives of those effected by the murders in a more-efficient 2 hour run-time: more than enough time to explore the details of an unsolved serial killing.

Although well-written, well-acted and well-directed, Zodiac is a film that is far less than the sum of its parts.  Its sole concern with solving the mystery of the killer fails to allow it to delve into the lives of those that he affects: the surviving victims and terrified families worried that their children will be used for target practice on their way to school.  Although ambitious, it's ultimately average.  I give the film a solid 7, while Becky gives it a 6.

The banality of evil: the alleged Zodiac killer.