Screenings in NYC: PRIVATE SCHOOL (1983).

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If you get deep enough into film-fanatic circles, you will find us split into two camps:  The classier kind, who know director Noel Black for his 1968 potboiler PRETTY POISON, with Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins, and those of us who only know him for his 1983 teen sex comedy PRIVATE SCHOOL, starring Phoebe Cates (GREMLINS 2), Matthew Modine (THE DARK KNIGHT RISES), and Betsy Russell (AVENGING ANGEL).

Aw,  Betsy Russell.

As the “bad girl” who tries to lure Matthew Modine away from “good girl”  Phoebe Cates, Betsy Russell made the kind of indelible impression on legions of pre-pubescent moviegoers and VHS hounds that only a handful of voluptuous redheads have ever made in all of cinema history.  To men of a certain generation, Betsy Russell is our Rita Hayworth and her topless horseback ride in PRIVATE SCHOOL is her GILDA moment.  She may not be a household name, but Betsy Russell solidified a generation’s sexual orientations.

Doubtless she also sparked a number of film editing careers, since many budding filmmakers’ first experience cutting footage was our desperate attempts to edit Matthew Modine and that guy who played “Bubba” (Michael Zorek, a kind of failed Seth Rogen prototype) out of the many scenes where an energetic and enthusiastic Betsy Russell appears in varying degrees of undress.  I’ll tell you how much Betsy Russell meant to my budding libido when I first saw it – I could barely be bothered to notice Phoebe Cates in the same movie.  Phoebe Cates!  The Jessica Alba of the 1980s!  There’s maybe no higher compliment.

Now, the rest of PRIVATE SCHOOL is substandard PORKY’S (which itself is fairly substandard ANIMAL HOUSE).  It’s a teen sex comedy so resolutely horny that the sex-ed teacher is played by Sylvia Kristel from the then-notorious French exploitation film EMMANUELLE.  I don’t always recommend Wikipedia entries, but the PRIVATE SCHOOL Wikipedia page is pretty funny, since it boils down the movie strictly to its plot elements and really underlines how stupid most teen sex comedies of the 1980s were.  PRIVATE SCHOOL has a couple actors who went on to bigger things, and a couple who didn’t (life’s not fair, maybe), and it actually has a fairly decent soundtrack (including Harry Nilsson, The Stray Cats, Vanity 6, and… um… Phoebe Cates), and a couple of the gags are genuinely funny, but no one will make the argument that this is some underrated gem.

PRIVATE SCHOOL is clumsy, episodic, generally poorly-acted, and its prevailing attitude towards sex and pretty young girls is strictly of the leering variety, but since it’s the shuttle delivering an atomic red-headed curvaceous payload, it’s difficult not to feel just a little grateful to the movie.  It did, after all, contribute to making some of us the men we are today.  For better or otherwise.

PRIVATE SCHOOL played tonight at 92Y Tribeca in Manhattan, as part of their very fun “Back To School” film series. 

Watch me regret this one in the morning on Twitter:  @jonnyabomb

Screening in NYC: BATTLE ROYALE (2000).

Notorious cult classic Battle Royale has been making a rare repertory appearance on an American screen all week at New York’s own IFC Center.   Despite what you may (or may not) have heard, Battle Royale has never exactly been banned in the United States.   It’s an incredibly controversial work, enough to give the normally hardy and unflappable movie maniac (like yours truly) some hesitation at recommending it to just anyone.   But it’s never been impossible to track down a copy of Battle Royale in America.   It hasn’t always been easy, but there’s always been some form of import DVD floating around.   What is true for sure is that, as Time Out New York noted, Battle Royale “never received a proper theatrical release in the U.S.”, so this is quite literally a unique opportunity to see one of the most elite of cult films.

The film’s director, Kinji Fukusaku, had a prolific career in Japan, spanning forty years.   Battle Royale was his last film.   It was based on a novel by Koushun Takami, which has been compared to both Lord Of The Flies and A Clockwork Orange, and contains several references to Springsteen’s “Born To Run” (!!!).  The story focuses on a speculative Japan of the near future, where social and economic conditions have gotten so dire that the government establishes a yearly competition wherein high school students are selected and flown to a remote island to compete in a literal fight to the death.  This epic fracas is televised as a cultural event which all Japanese rally behind, and in so doing, forgetting their own problems.

If you read that previous paragraph and started thinking of The Hunger Games, trust me, Battle Royale will ruin you for Hunger Games.  As captivating as Suzanne Collins’ young-adult series (first book published in 2008, allegedly with no foreknowledge of Battle Royale) has been to many Americans – I’ve read and enjoyed the first book myself –  it’s hard to imagine that Collins’ more mainstream sensibility could ever have more visceral impact than Takami’s novel (published in 1999) or Fukusaku’s movie (released in 2000).

These Japanese schoolkids, quite frankly, do not fuck around.   Fitted with electronic collars that can and will explode at the whims of their captors, most of these kids go fully medieval, using AK-47s, sniper rifles, shotguns, revolvers, boomerangs, crossbows, machetes, nunchaku, baseball bats, poison, and hammers in their desperate struggle to survive the competition.  As per human/animal nature, some of the kids find they enjoy perpetrating the carnage.   Others fit a more tragic profile.

This material arguably suggests a more sensitive subject to those bred in the United States, considering some of the dramatic flare-ups of violence that have made national news over the past decade.   We can only project how director Gary Ross will approach his upcoming adaptation of The Hunger Games.  It’s well-cast, but is it possible that the finished film will be anything harder than a PG-13?  [NOTE:  I first posted this piece in 2011 and my prediction wasn't far off the mark.]

This much is clear:   As a fimly-established veteran filmmaker in Japan, Fukusaku clearly felt little trepidation towards going all-in on this premise.   Battle Royale as a movie capitalizes and underlines the “ultra” in ULTRA-violence.   It’s stylized and cartoonish, yet also believable and momentous.   The body count in Battle Royale is uncompromising, and unrelenting, yet the film’s presentation treats most of the losses as weighty and hardly comical.   The sweeping orchestral score and intense emotionality of the majority of the performances certainly see to that.   Takeshi Kitano, legend of the modern Japanese cinema, anchors the film with a somewhat arch but generally sober performance as the teacher-turned-gamesmaster who is as close to a mentor as these kids get.

Battle Royale takes a pulpy, unfilmable premise, and turns it into a surprising, surprisingly well-written, ferociously entertaining piece of cinema.   It’s not a thing that anyone who sees it can exactly forget.   It was a massive success in Japan and its cult following here in America is formidable.  I certainly recommend that you try to make the screening tonight, but that theater only seats so many people.   You may have to fight it out for a seat.  Bring the fine familynunchucks.

 

 

For another take, read A.O. Scott’s great piece in the New York Times.

And start up with me on Twitter at:  @jonnyabomb

Overlooked & Underseen: WORLD’S GREATEST DAD (2009).

Now let’s go back to the piece I wrote about World’s Greatest Dad (on 11/20/2009), a movie which I saw as one of the most daring comedies of 2009, and as conclusive proof that you can never entirely write off anyone.  I rewatched the movie this morning and was glad to see that I can stand behind my initial enthusiasm today.

World’s Greatest Dad was written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, who has actually had a very successful TV directing career (on Chappelle’s Show, among others), but will probably always be best known as the annoyingly “Grover voice” comedian from Police Academy 2 and Hot To Trot (the ‘80s movie with John Candy as the voice of a talking horse.)

It stars Robin Williams, the comedian of remarkable energy and career longevity who has been harshly derided for his choice of projects for the past couple of decades.  I have always liked Robin Williams, but it is admittedly impossible to defend the majority of his cinematic output.  For someone who is that talented, there are a lot of shitstains on that resume.

In this movie, Robin plays Lance Clayton, a failed novelist who is stuck teaching poetry at the high school level.  He’s a single parent whose teenage son Kyle is a perverted, mean-spirited little asshole.  When would-be tragedy befalls the Claytons, Lance finds an opportunity to have his words heard on an increasingly larger stage.

I’m keeping the description as vague as I can, but trust me, this movie goes boldly into some dark, dark places.  It’s pitch-black satire that was amazingly prescient for this past summer, in the way that our modern culture’s tendency to sentimentalize the recently departed went into hyperdrive.

(Specifically, World’s Greatest Dad made me think of Michael Jackson and the way the public perception of him went from “creepy, nose-less, possibly kid-fondling freak” to “beloved, prodigiously-talented national icon” in the span of one morning.  Death was Michael’s single greatest career move.)

World’s Greatest Dad is unusual in its eagle-eyed observations of human (mis)behavior, and interestingly enough, as nasty and cruelly funny as it is, there are rare moments of weird and tender sweetness flavored in throughout.  Robin Williams is at his sad-faced best, and Daryl Sabara as his lost little shit deserves tons of credit for being willing to be so unlikable onscreen at such a young age.  Bold performances both.

I’m not at all reluctant to proclaim that Bobcat Goldthwait has a masterly command of comedic tone here; he navigates dangerous thematic terrain without ever losing audience interest or empathy.  Between this and his earlier feature Stay (released as Sleeping Dogs Lie), he’s got something of an auteur career going:  He has an uncanny ability to craft believable story development from shocking and disgusting inciting incidents.

He also has a way with music cues – the climactic double-whammy of “Under Pressure” by Queen & David Bowie and “Tiny Spark” by Brendan Benson provide a bizarrely exuberant backdrop for the thrilling liberation of self-destruction.  In a way I was reminded by the brilliant use of “Where Is My Mind?” by the Pixies at the end of Fight Club – there’s a similar nihilistic optimism at work here.  World’s Greatest Dad, like Stay (which felt like a strong warm-up exercise for the polish of the newer movie), both relish in the freedom that is found through truth-telling, as risky and potentially destructive as it can be.  Sometimes you have to tear it all down to feel truly refreshed.

World’s Greatest Dad is now available on DVD and can be seen on Netflix Instant.  Watch it with your dad.  (I did with mine!  Honestly, it was pretty awkward.)

Find me on Twitter: @jonnyabomb

Screening In NYC: HOUSE (1977).

 

This recently-excavated cult classic is the weekend movie at Landmark Sunshine Cinemas here in New York.  YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS CRAZY GODDAMN MOVIE.  It’s great.  Here’s why:

Hausu (aka House, from 1977) is without a doubt, one of the weirdest fucking movies I’ve ever seen, and goddamn it but that really must be saying something.  It’s strange that standing in the face of this thing has reduced me to profanity, when it’s most certainly the most innocent ultra-violent horror movie that could possibly exist.  If profanity is the last refuge of the man with no wiser words to impart, then consider me speechless.  Here’s a clip:

Am I exaggerating?

Janus Films and The Criterion Collection have excavated this cinematic treasure and unleashed it upon the world in the form of frequent local screenings (including one this weekend, at NYC’s IFC Center) and a wonderful DVD/Blu-Ray package for those who can’t make it out in person.  GREAT crowd movie, though. See it with as many people as you can.

What this is, is the debut feature from Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi, who started out as an experimental filmmaker, transitioned into TV commercials, and then brought both contrasting disciplines brilliantly to bear in this one little-known landmark, which led to a career in features which continues to this day.

Hausu was written as a collaboration between Obayashi and his young daughter, Chigumi, which both makes perfect sense and none at all.  According to the supplemental materials on Criterion’s DVD, legendary Japanese studio Toho wanted Obayashi to make a popular mainstream movie for them, and this is what he did with that dictum.  (Dictum? Damn near killed ‘em!)

Hausu is the story of a group of teenage girls who go to visit the country home of the aunt of one of them.  The house is a mansion on a hill, and it’s haunted and angry, in the most bizarre of senses.  The girls are literally consumed, one by one, and spit out and toyed with in a dizzying escalation of joyous insanity.

Here’s the trailer:

 

In retrospect, it plays exactly like what it is:  the collaboration between a grown man and a young girl.  It feels like the dad made a horror movie, and the little girl went in and recut the thing to her own tastes while he was sleeping it off.  Hausu is chock full of insane, bug-eyed, not-entirely-nonsexual megaviolence, but there’s not anything remotely hateful or misogynistic about it: This is surely history’s most cheerful movie ever to feature dismembered limbs dancing across across the keys of a carnivorous haunted piano.  I mean, what’s the closest comparison?  Evil Dead 2?  Even Evil Dead 2 didn’t have a watermelon wearing a hat, or a killer lampshade, or a disembodied head with an appetite for buttcheeks.

Hausu makes Evil Dead 2 seem as restrained and mannered as one of those BBC Dickens miniseries.  The tone of this movie is like a pre-teen sleepover between giggy girls bouncing off a major sugar high.  It just happens to be a haunted house movie, with many of the conventions which that implies.  It’s a little bit like the G rated version of Sucker Punch and the R rated version of Sucker Punch and a box of Junior Mints all at the same time.  It’s a lot like the Hello Kitty version of The Exorcist.  There is literally not a second movie to resemble this one.  I guess there’s an art in that.

Find me on Twitter: @jonnyabomb

Go See: 21 JUMP STREET (2012).

“Nobody knows anything.” — William Goldman.

21 Jump Street, as you probably know by now, is a movie which gives a comedic treatment to the late-1980s Fox television series, which starred a pre-Tim-Burton Johnny Depp, about young police detectives who go undercover as high school students.  The movie was directed by Phil Lord & Chris Miller (who last directed the kids’ movie Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs) , stars Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum as an odd-couple pair of under-achieving cops, and comes with a well-earned R-rating.

The fact that I went to see this movie at all is a triumph of social media.  I had written 21 Jump Street off.  As a kid I’d seen the Fox TV show the movie was based on, and I liked the idea of seeing it flipped as a comedy premise, but I saw all those trailers way too many times, and wasn’t impressed.  Like those posters above, the trailers focused on the easy, tired jokes.  Like this exchange:

“You have the right to remain… an attorney…” 

“Did you just say “You have the right to remain an attorney?”

I’m so tired of that modern trend, in movie trailers and on all CBS comedies, where one character says something and another character repeats it in disbelief, as if that automatically makes it funnier.  The trailers also make heavy use of the bit where one character is stabbed and calls it “Awesome!” which isn’t all that funny on its own.  Overall, the whole movie had a kind of unappealing washed-out look which made it look visually stale — and even on the other side of it now, I’d still say that the cinematography by Barry Peterson is hardly the most inspired element of the movie. 

But going online in the last two weeks, and seeing a steady trickle of positivity towards the movie turn into a full-on stream, I decided to give 21 Jump Street the courtesy of my ten bucks. 

Something weird happened.  All the stuff I didn’t like in the trailers (besides the photography) totally works in the context of the full movie.  That aforementioned exchange of dialogue comes from a scene where police captain Nick Offerman dresses down Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum’s characters, and. rather than the trailer ruining the scene’s best joke as so often happens, that scene has many more (and much better) jokes than the trailer implies.  The best is the one where Nick Offerman, in his brilliant deadpan, familiar to fans of Parks & Recreation, directly addresses all of your potential misgivings about a comedic re-interpretation of a nearly-forgotten Fox TV show.  It’s so blatantly and boldly self-referential that it somehow addresses the issue head-on and manages to be charming in a way that most self-referential jokes aren’t.

That scene from the trailer where Jonah Hill turns around to find a knife embedded in his back and decides it’s “awesome?”  By the time that happens in the movie, you have gotten to know the character, a  sad sack in high school who, when given the chance to go back as an undercover cop, gets to re-live his high school years with some more confidence.  So the knife beat is a character moment, where realizing how much tougher he’s become and bragging about it tells you something about what this guy is thinking, instead of a throw-away gag using violence as a punchline and having no physical consequence. 

That’s why this movie is better than so many more in its over-populated genre:  It starts with the characters.  It’s not as if these are the most detailed characters ever written – Jonah Hill, as a high school nerd who gets the chance to hang with the popular kids, and Channing Tatum, as the high school cool guy whose inattention to study made him an underachiever but adequately suited for police work — they’re comedic archetypes, but they’re recognizable.  And they’re given more dimension as the movie goes on.  Their friendship is interesting and believable, the emotional center of the story, and it makes the movie more involving than most studio comedies as a result of it.

I’ve liked Jonah Hill since I first wondered “Who was that weird kid in that scene in The 40 Year Old Virgin?”, but as much as he’s been a deft comic performer right from the get-go, he’s also clearly a smart shepherd of material which suit his talents, having shaped this project with screenwriter Michael Bacall (Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World).  It’s pretty stupid that I saw how good Hill was in Moneyball and still underestimated him to the extent that I allowed a couple bum trailers to make me consider skipping this movie.  I would have missed out. 

The script for 21 Jump Street is fun, surprising, and full of jokes — don’t like one? another is right around the corner — and it’s also quite literally a gift to Channing Tatum.  People underestimate Channing Tatum, because he’s man-pretty and comes off as a bit of a meatball, but I’ve never had a problem with the guy.  He’s been good and likable in movies like A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints and Haywire, and if G.I. Joe was terrible, it can’t be blamed on him.  If you click through to that G.I. Joe review you’ll see that I suggested Mark Wahlberg needs to watch his back with this Channing Tatum guy around:  I still think it’s a good comparison — if anything, Channing Tatum seems to have more self-awareness.  As much as I loved The Other Guys, it’s still hard to tell if Wahlberg is fully aware of why he’s so funny.  Channing Tatum, as his recent SNL hosting appearance also shows, has a willingness to play, and when Hill and Bacall’s script to 21 Jump Street serves him up great comedic lobs, he crushes them every time. 

Pretty much everybody’s good in the movie:  Ice Cube, erasing a decade of crap to come back just as funny as he was in the first Friday, Three Kings, and Torque; Rob Riggle in a truly weird supporting performance that initially seems to have little point; all the kids in the high school scenes, particularly the very cute Brie Larson (the aforementioned Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World) and the very funny Dave Franco (Fright Night, James’s family reunions) as a shifty drug dealer; right down to the still-surprising-even-if-you-know-he’s-going-to-do-the-cameo superstar actor.  But with all the enjoyable, game performances in the movie, the best part remains the Hill-Tatum double-team (and what the fuck is with me and the tennis metaphors today?) — these two guys have a brainy/brash chemistry that for some reason reminds me of Chase & Aykroyd in Spies Like Us. 

Maybe that’s a good analogy:  Spies Like Us is a comparatively lesser John Landis comedy, but not everything can be Animal House or Trading Places.   Most comedies aren’t.  Most comedies can’t touch Spies Like Us, let alone Trading Places.  For me to invoke any of these movies at all means I’m paying 21 Jump Street a big compliment, but in the end it comes down to this:  I laughed plenty. 

Go see this movie.  If enough people do, we’ll get a sequel, and once you see it, you’ll agree that, unlike most movies that get sequels these days, this movie has a pair of characters you’d actually like to see again. 

Just feel free to skip the trailers.

P.S.  Couldn’t figure out how to fit this comment in the main review, but seriously, the end credits are fucking amazing.  I don’t know who to compliment — Lord & Miller, the editorial department, Michael Bacall who clearly is a fellow admirer of the gang at Cinefamily — but really, what a great last blast of energy and absurdity you get hit with, just as you’re getting up to leave.  There’s no Academy Award for Best Opening Or Closing Credits, but that only bolsters my suspicion that the Academy Awards aren’t run by anyone who knows half as much about cinema as whoever put the closing credits sequence of 21 Jump Street.

Follow me on Twitter:  @jonnyabomb

From The Archives: OUTLANDER (2008).

Originally published elsewhere.

 

The other day, I found a stack of my old artwork from my high school years. I didn’t remember myself as being the little metalhead that the evidence suggests that I was, but the proof is in the paper. Rock on, little fella! What metalheads and teenaged cartoonists and the producers of Outlander all have in common is a love of monsters and irrationally pretty girls and violence without consequence and bygone eras where hairy armored badasses swung swords at each other.

 

Outlander is a movie I would have loved in high school. Hell, given a $50 million budget, Outlander is a movie I might have MADE in high school.

 

Outlander stars Jim Caviezel (otherwise known as “The Christ”, not to be confused with “The Jesus”) as a space traveler whose ship crash-lands on Earth during the time of the Vikings. His character’s name is Kainan. Kainan’s people are involved in a species war with a breed of aliens known as the Moorwen. One of those aliens is somehow on board Kainan’s ship, and when they arrive in Viking times the alien goes on a murderous rampage. Kainan has to team up with a more primitive society in order to destroy the monster.

 

The movie has, at best, a teenager’s grasp of history – again, this is exactly what my friends and I would have come up with after scanning a few pages of the Viking chapter of our European history textbook. All of the supporting characters are named accordingly (Rothgar, Freya, Wulfric, Gunnar, etc.) and there’s even a character named Boromir, which indicates that someone’s been reading Lord Of The Rings when they were supposed to be catching up on their Norsemen. Also, considering that this is supposed to be Norway, there sure are a lot of different accents on hand – the movietakes pains to explain how Kainan comes to speak the same language as the Vikings, and British accents are par for the course, but no one bothers to explain what the hell the Scottish guy is doing there.

 

The supporting cast features the usual casting archetypes, such as the respected thespian slumming (John Hurt as an aging king), the ingénue who’d clearly rather be doing other movies (Sophia Myles as Princess Leia – I mean, Freya), and a convention favorite doing the rounds (Ron Perlman – you know, that huge low-voiced growly dude who looks like Will Ferrell, if Will Ferrell was a badass.) Both of those guys are good as usual, and Caviezel is good casting too. Sure, I like The Christ. Who doesn’t? The Christ is kind of a badass.

 

While this genre mash-up is one of the most derivative movies I’ve ever seen (the plot is the pitch: Vikings vs. aliens!), at least it makes sure to steal from the best. In the first ten minutes alone, I counted four separate, um, homages to Predator, but since Predator is one of my top ten movies of all time, I can hardly complain. Outlander does manage to have a couple neat ideas and doesn’t always go exactly where you expect it will, although mostly it does.

 

Probably the thing I liked best about the movie was the alien. Once you finally see it up close, it’s a good design, with a couple interesting concepts about it. For someone like me, that’s enough to recommend it. I was entertained, take that as you will. It’s not crap. I’ve certainly seen much worse movies become much more popular. Anybody who likes Viking movies and/or alien movies knows exactly what to do with this thing.

 

Also, not to introduce a big idea at the end of thearticle, but upon reflection, I’m starting to wonder what the casting of the lead character is supposed to mean. Jim Caviezel, best known for starring in The Passion Of The Christ, plays a character who arrives from the heavens to bring light and civilization unto a besieged, skeptical world that needs him. 

 

Is the whole movie supposed to be some kind of allegory for the spread of Christianity?

 

 

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31 FLAVORS OF HORROR #30: THE LOST BOYS (1987).

 

The Lost Boys is one finely-aged wedge of 1980s cheese. I don’t know what experience a first-time viewer would have with it, but for those of us of a certain age, there’s a fondness. For those of us who were high school comic book geeks, it was one of the first times we were represented on screen (by  Corey Haim and Corey Feldman, still a few years away from traumatizing us by, among other confused acts, double-teaming Nicole Eggert from Charles In Charge), and for everyone else, it’s a camp classic – and not just 1980s camp.  Hall-of-fame camp. There’s no other classification that is able to house a movie with dialogue such as  “How are those maggots, Michael?”, “You killed Marco!”, “Death by stereo!” and of course, “Christ!” (Corey Feldman’s single greatest acting achievement.)

The Lost Boys has dual protagonists: young Sam (Corey Haim) and his older brother Michael (Jason Patric, interestingly enough, the son of Exorcist star Jason Miller).  Sam and Michael and their mother (Oscar-winner Dianne Wiest) move in with their eccentric grandfather (Barnard Hughes) in the coastal west-coast town of Santa Clara.  All three newcomers quickly fall in with their own social groups:  Mom meets and starts dating a friendly video store owner (Edward Herrmann).  Michael meets a beautiful, unfortunately-named girl named Star (Jami Gertz), who hangs with a creepy but charismatic dude named David (Kiefer Sutherland), who rolls with a gang of troublemakers.  And Sam meets a pair of comic book store employees named Edgar and Alan Frog (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander), who are convinced that both Mom and Michael’s new friends are hideous bloodsucking vampires.  And they happen to be right.

David and his boys are definitely vampires, trying to recruit Michael to their brood.  Can Sam save his brother?  Does Michael want to be saved?  In a three-way collision of tone, the scenes between Michael and Star are eerily romantic, the scenes with David and co. inducting Michael towards the dark side are pure horror movie, and the scenes with Sam and his buddies, as they try desperately to prove the existence of vampires to Sam’s oblivious mom, are goofily comedic.  I have to admit, I still think it all somehow comes together.  It’s a movie so anxious to please, bursting forward with a little something for everyone, that it can’t help but continue to endear.  I’ll still stop to watch this movie if I happen to see it running on TV.

Time Out New York once called The Lost Boys “the Twilight of its day” but they’re wrong; Despite the tenous Peter Pan connection and the disturbingly dated fashions (Corey Haim dresses exactly like Kristy Swanson did) and the operatically cheesy soundtrack, The Lost Boys at least tries to scare you. This isn’t “vampire romance” — these vampires might have then-stylish mullets and ear jewelry, but they’re nasty S.O.B.’s, and not easily killed.  There are a couple surprisingly lengthy and intense stake-slayings, and the way that the movie withholds the image of the vampires in flight actually kind of succeeds. No doubt it was a practical and budgetary decision, but it helps to force you to imagine a much scarier image. The way-better-than-average cinematography goes a long way in that direction; the film was shot by Michael Chapman, who shot Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. I also think that my man Kiefer is always at his best as a villain, and he certainly goes a long way towards stacking the odds against the heroes in this movie – against an angry fanged Kiefer, what shot can the Coreys possibly have?

 

And now here’s some credence towards my argument that you can almost never entirely write off anyone: Joel Schumacher directed this movie. The film-geek community probably doesn’t like much light to be shone upon this fact, and I can’t blame them, after what Schumacher forced us to endure with his 1997 Batman & Robin.  But he keeps The Lost Boys moving at a brisk pace and he keeps the humor in its right places and he stays out of Chapman’s way when a visually atmospheric moment is working.  The only real Schumacher-ism that comes immediately to mind is the greased-up shirtless saxophone player attacking a microphone like it was a bachelorette party. And that’s pretty damn funny, so who can complain?

 

I can’t call it a personal favorite, but I like The Lost Boys enough to have eye-tested the first direct-to-DVD sequel, The Lost Boys 2: The Tribe. Skip that one. It’s not that it’s bad – it’s maybe worse than bad, since it’s not bad, just serviceable. I don’t remember any character except the lead vampire, who was played by Kiefer’s younger half-brother – I thought he was good, understated and charismatic, but the sad fact remains that there’s already an alpha-vampire in the family. Besides, the sad emo cover version of “Cry Little Sister” just pales.  A third sequel came out last year, but I can’t do it.  It’s too sad.

Some movies are too much of their era to ever be replicated.  The Lost Boys is so much a piece of the 1980s that to separate it from its time is to destroy its appeal.  If you truly love the vampire, you must leave the vampire to its cave, or else it collapses in a pile of dust.

 

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31 FLAVORS OF HORROR #27: NIGHT OF THE COMET (1984).

After Night Of The Creeps, Night Of The Comet is the best “Night Of The” movie of the 1980s.  (There were many.)  These are the kind of movies you hope for, every time you venture off the mainstream path looking for something out of the ordinary.  These are the kind of movie there just plain aren’t enough of, although if there were, I suppose coming across them wouldn’t feel quite as special.

Night Of The Comet is about two sisters, Regina (Catherine Mary Stewart) and Sam (Kelli Maroney, later of Chopping Mall fame).  Regina works at a movie theater where she sometimes hooks up with the dickhead projectionist (Michael Bowen, eventually of Magnolia and Kill Bill).  Sam is younger, so she’s stuck at home with their shitty stepmother on the night when parties are gathering to watch the approach of a rare comet.  Sam is sent to her room, and Regina is holed up in the projection booth, so they’re not outside with everyone else when the comet turns whole cities to zombies and dust.

Let me clarify:  The comet mostly turns everyone to red dust, with a red haze coating the already-considerable haze of L.A. smog.  Those who aren’t turned to dust are turned into zombies, which Regina discovers when her dickhead boyfriend ventures outside in the morning and is immediately killed by one.  The zombie chases Regina out into the alley, where this exchange transpires:

ZOMBIE IN ALLEY: Come here!

REGINA: Come here your ass!

Two things:  Talking zombies, which is something I’ve always wanted to see in a movie like this, and also, what a great female protagonist!  Smart-ass, super-pretty, and unafraid of no zombie.

Regina escapes and finds Sam, hiding out.  They discover, with a reaction somewhat more in stride than horrified, that everyone they know is dead.  Apparently if you were inside during the comet’s approach, you lived.  If you were outside, as most people were, you’re dust.  If you got caught in between, you’re zombified — but not for long; dust is in your future.  Of course, it strains credulity that Regina and Sam would be the only ones who managed to stay inside, but if you go with it, the movie works.  It’s really Dawn Of The Dead, with a much lighter tone and an uber-sarcastic lead girl.

The cool thing about Night Of The Comet is that it isn’t a standard zombie-apocalypse movie.  Where you might expect the typical zombie hordes, here the zombies are very rare.  This movie is even more sparsely-populated than any of the I Am Legend iterations.  Eventually, Sam and Regina meet another survivor, Hector (Robert Beltran), a likable enough guy who helps them arm up before heading out for a while.  Sam and Regina go foraging at the local mall — after Dawn Of The Dead, it was hard to escape that mall — where they encounter another group of zombies and are then captured by a brigade of scientists.  The scientists, led by cult fixture Mary Woronov and Eastwood mainstay Geoffrey Lewis, are fixated on “the burden of civilization.”   Their nominal goal is repopulating the earth, but like any grown-ups in a 1980s teen movie, apocalypse or no, they can’t be trusted.

For me, the movie falls apart, or at least lags, in this final third, as Regina and Sam have to escape the evil scientists.  It would be hard for any movie to maintain the camp energy, eerie setting, and arch dialogue that Night Of The Comet initially established so well, and while some fans will disagree, I don’t feel that the last half hour or so stacks up to what came before it.  I also don’t want to dwell on any criticisms for long, because there’s so much to enjoy with this movie.  It’s fun, silly, highly quotable, and surprisingly convincing, and I have to suspect that it was a partial inspiration for Buffy The Vampire Slayer.  It certainly helped set the precedent for smart, self-aware teen heroines.

 

Night Of The Comet is an underrated, under-remembered cult movie, and a neat accomplishment by its creator, Thom Eberhardt.  It’s a fun genre mash-up with an influential tone.  It has its flaws, but it’s way more fun than many so-called perfect movies.  You’re gonna dig it, if you haven’t already dug.

For an alternate take, check out this piece that recently ran on CHUD.

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31 FLAVORS OF HORROR #22: ATTACK THE BLOCK! (2011).

 

 

One night in 1986, my grandmother woke my sister and I in the middle of the night with an urgency.  I was nine, my sister seven.  Grandma loaded the two of us into the car and drove us to the outskirts of town.  Half-asleep, I watched the deep-dark-blue skies as Halley’s comet zoomed into view.  The last time that celestial object made an appearance to human eyes (in 1910), nobody I’d ever met in my life had been born yet.  The next time Halley’s comet makes a visit (in 2061), I’ll most likely be a preserved brain encased in a robot body.  There’s no guarantee that I’ll see that comet again, but at least I saw it the one time.

My point is, sometimes you have to wake up and make the trip.  I could have slept through the night, without much major disruption to the course of my life.  I kind of wanted to.  But what I have now is a memory I will always remember, a unique thrill imprinted on my mind for as long as I own it.

Yes, I am absolutely comparing Attack The Block to a once-in-a-lifetime event.  Cosmically speaking, it probably doesn’t measure up to a gigantic collection of ice and rock hurtling past the Earth’s orbit.  In the grand scheme, Attack The Block is only an excellent genre movie.  But there is an uncommon soul to this movie, a youthful energy and a joyful, mischievous, anarchic spirit, that makes it an instant time-capsule movie, a major announcement of writer-director Joe Cornish as an important genre voice.  Even if he never makes a movie this good again, he made this one.  I strongly doubt it’s an overstatement to predict that this movie will have a long shelf-life.  Check back with me in 2061.

Attack The Block is by far the best movie I’ve seen so far this year.  If it ain’t I can’t imagine there’s one I’ll like more.  It’s funny, scary, bleak, exciting, and triumphant.  I feel about this movie the way I feel about many of the films of John Carpenter, which if you follow my writing, you’ll recognize as hallowed praise.  At 88 minutes, Attack The Block is lean and mean.  It’s composed like a fierce, scrappy symphony.  There’s not a scene that should be removed or added.  When it ended, I didn’t need it to be any longer, but I did want to watch it again immediately.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let’s do the recap thing:  Attack The Block begins with a pretty young nurse (Jodie Whitaker) heading home to her apartment in a lousy London neighborhood.   When she sees a small gang of hooded teens standing in her way, she moves to cross the street, which you might think marks her as a bigot, since she is white and all but one of the punks are black.  In the first daring reversal in a movie that’s full of them, Sam turns out to be right about these kids, as they proceed to mug her, stealing her meager earnings.  They let her run off, and then the movie shifts perspective (again, for the first of many times), focusing on the gang.  There’s Moses (John Boyega, an immediate star), the gruff, taciturn, baby-Clint of a leader.  There’s Dennis (Franz Drameh), the flashy-dressed hothead.  There’s Biggz (Simon Howard), the walking haircut.  There’s Jerome (Leeon Jones), the bespectacled voice of moderation.  There’s Pest (Alex Ismail), the comic relief.

There’s also Probs and Mayhem, two much younger kids, pipsqueaks who badly want in on the gang, but let’s leave them out of this summary so you can discover them for yourself.  ALL of these young actors are superlative, a major achievement in casting.  They fit their roles perfectly, and Cornish is an ace at corralling their energy.  Between the cast of this movie, Zack Kopplin’s righteous political crusade, and Odd Future’s shanghai-ing of the music industry, 2011 is the year that rambunctious teenagers kicked down the auditorium doors of the grown-up world and proved there’s plenty of hope for the future .

What I love about the kids in Attack The Block, even the iconic Carpenter-esque anti-hero Moses, is that they’re all unrepentant little shits.  This isn’t some coming-of-age story.  There are no Screenwriting 101 character arcs.  There’s no inspirational principal who teaches them to love.  These are raucous little bastards who will knock you down and steal your wallet.  Even as we grow to know and like them more and more over the course of the movie, it’s not as if they change.  The events of this movie represent one night of their lives.  We might come to understand why they are how they are, but it’s not as if they’re unhappy.  Attack The Block appeals directly to the adolescent prankster and anti-authoritarian menace in so many of us, and in fact it’s even a little darker and harsher than that.  That’s why you’ll see more and more comparisons to Season Four of The Wire as this movie gains in prominence.  These are some of the most authentic teenagers seen on screen in a while.

There’s really only one way you could improve upon Season Four of The Wire, and that’s by adding ferocious gorilla-bears from space.  Right after Moses and his boys rob Sam, an alien literally drops out of the sky, wrecking a nearby car.  Moses goes to check it out.  The alien bites him and bounds away.  Now Moses gets pissed.  He and the boys track the alien down and beat it to pulp, keeping the thing as a trophy.  That’s when more capsules start dropping from the sky, and the others of the species come looking for the lost member of the tribe.

This is only the first ten minutes of the movie, by the way.  I’m revealing very little.  Here’s the trailer:

ATTACK THE BLOCK: Trailer.

So now we know that the teens will barricade themselves in the projects they ruled until very recently, being pursued by a voracious pack of teeth with legs.  Attack The Block becomes a siege movie a la Night Of The Living Dead or Assault On Precinct 13, only funnier.  There are nearly-constant laughs in this movie, even in its darkest moments.  And don’t even bother trying to predict it.  It’s steadily surprising, in the most satisfying ways.  It’s an astounding crowd-pleaser of a film.  Attack The Block is expertly edited, by Jonathan Amos, engagingly lit by cinematographer Thomas Townend, and the score by Basement Jaxx and Steven Price is looking to reserve permanent GB on your iPod.  By the final pair of orchestral cues, your adrenaline will be surging, and your night will be that much more alive.  You’ll be charged with the very specific joy of having seen a new favorite movie.

Today in America, Attack The Block landed on DVD and Blu-Ray. Look, you can go pick up this movie or not.  I’ve already got my copy in pocket.  This movie is eight ways a blast and I want to catch that high again.  The only reason it matters to me whether or not you see this thing is because I know you’ll love it too.  I know it.  You love movies.  Who doesn’t?  Well, this is why we go.  We go to movies, hoping every time they’ll be this much fun.  Usually they miss the mark.  Attack The Block hits, on every possible level.  But yeah, you can skip out on it.  You can sleep straight through the night.

Or you can get up and go see the comet.

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31 FLAVORS OF HORROR #19: CARRIE (1976).

For a very long time, Carrie has been a noticeable empty spot on the list of major horror movies I’ve seen.  There’s actually a pretty good reason for it:  Carrie is so entrenched in pop culture by now that it’s one of those movies that everybody knows, with or without seeing it.  If you’re a horror fan, there’s a chance you may not know it as Stephen King’s first novel, but you’d know it as Brian DePalma’s breakthrough mainstream film.  If you don’t know it as Sissy Spacek’s star-making role, you know it as John Travolta’s first major movie role.  If you don’t know about the whole telekinesis aspect, you’ve probably heard about the prom and the pig’s blood.  You don’t need to know who Piper Laurie is to have heard Adam Sandler’s impression of her classic line from Carrie, “They’re all going to laugh at you!“

In short, there aren’t a lot of people who know about movies but aren’t very familiar with this image:

At this point, it can be fairly called iconic.  It’s the climax of the movie, yet there’s no book, documentary, magazine article about horror movies that seems to have neglected revealing this image.  In a way, that’s a dick move — being shown this image kind of ruins a major moment of the movie for those who haven’t seen it.  If you know the scene pictured above is coming, you can’t help but wait for it.  But the spoiler is understandable too — I mean, what better single image encapsulates the history, politics, sexuality, conflict, the impact of the entire horror genre than a pretty girl covered in blood standing in the middle of a blazing inferno?

As I’ve been immersing myself in horror movies this month, I decided it was time to start filling in those gaps, or at least to finally see this movie.  Once I did, I realized that there were still some surprises left on the picked-over craft services table that has been the critical acclaim and endless popular referencing which surrounds Carrie.  And I realized how I had some misconceptions that were ripe to be disproved.  Here are some:

The movie Carrie is about the character of Carrie.

Well, it is, obviously, but also it kind of isn’t.  The story follows Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), a high school girl raised by an insanely religious mother (Piper Laurie).  Carrie is tormented at school by a group of popular girls, ranging from Sue Snell, the nicest (Amy Irving) to Chris Hargesen, the meanest (Nancy Allen), with PJ Soles from Halloween and Stripes falling somewhere in between on the meanness scale.  When Carrie experiences the first blushes of puberty, it coincides with a growing and dangerous telekinetic ability.  Noticing how Carrie is having such a hard time, Sue Snell takes pity on Carrie and has her boyfriend Tommy Ross (William Katt) invite Carrie to the senior prom.  Unwilling to let this go off without a hitch, Chris Hargesen and her own boyfriend Billy Nolan (John Travolta) plot the world’s goriest practical joke.

The movie begins in a strange way, if we’re meant to align our sympathies with Carrie.  It starts in gym class, where Carrie has yet again embarassed herself in the eyes of the other girls during volleyball practice.  Which is standard enough high school stuff, but then that credit sequence happens.

It’s a slow-motion pan through a fogged-up locker room, with Pino Donaggio’s orchestral score playing up the romance of what in other movies would be pretty damn gratuitous, as we see all the pretty girls in the class frolicking with each other, some wrapped in towels, some not at all.  It’s a partial lesson in 1970s grooming practices, is what it is.  I dug up Pauline Kael’s review, where she complimented DePalma for blending “old-movie trash and soft-core pornos to provide ‘heart’ for a thriller.”  That’s definitely true, although the effect of all this youthful beauty is that, by the time the camera arrives at Carrie’s corner of the showers, she seems like all the more of an outcast.  Carrie is alone, huddled in the shower, hands between her legs.  Having seen Prime Cut, I can vouch for the fact that a young, unclothed Sissy Spacek is not at all an off-putting thing, but in Carrie it becomes the first creepy image of the movie — having everything to do with how Carrie sees herself and how the other girls see her.  Carrie is terrified to find blood between her legs (that first blush of puberty), and runs towards the other girls, begging them to help her.  This makes Carrie an outcast not only to her schoolmates, but to the viewer as well!  I can’t speak to how a female audience would interpret this scene, but I think I understand how a male audience is supposed to see it — she killed our buzz.  We were enjoying all that softcore, and then this one weird girl had to go freak out and end the scene.  The first time I saw Carrie, I didn’t get why DePalma would start the movie this way, but now that I think about it, it makes sense.  This is one way to estrange the audience from Carrie, who in any other high school movie would have our sympathies for the volleyball scene alone.  With the locker room scene, we’re told right from the start that there’s something not right with Carrie.

Which explains why, for a movie with her name in the title, Carrie isn’t exactly the point-of-view character.  We care about her, because she’s played by Sissy Spacek, but we’re also creeped out by her, because nearly everyone else in the movie is, including herself.  The story frequently shifts between its principal characters; in other words, Carrie’s not in every scene.  Certainly, the most memorable scenes are the ones in which she does appear, but the script by Lawrence Cohen (based on King’s novel but making digressions with DePalma’s input) has several scenes depicting the actions and conversations of the other characters, most of whom are talking about or plotting against Carrie.

So yes, we do get all the scenes of Carrie being terrorized by her mother (“They’re all going to laugh at you!”) and demonstrating her emerging psychic powers, but we also get scenes that are entirely carried by the rest of the cast, whether it be Sue Snell persuading Tommy Ross to cut Carrie a break and escort her to the prom, or Chris Hargesen and Billy Nolan scheming to ruin it.  Which brings me to my next preconception/misconception…

Travolta is in this movie.

Everybody’s favorite Scientologist is part of it, but not as much as I was led to believe.  He’s definitely in there, but really just serves as Chris Hargesen’s ridiculously-coiffed henchman.  DePalma eventually got great leading man work out of Travolta, in Blow Out, but this was Travolta’s first major movie role, where he’s cast as the pretty boy, actions playing against looks as he takes part in some cruel business.  I was surprised to see that the way Chris and Billy get that pig’s blood is to actually slaughter a pig.  Kind of unexpectedly awful.  Like this hairdo.

Speaking of which, why did no one warn me about what’s going on on top of this dude’s head?

And he’s this movie’s notion of a dreamboat.  No wonder it’s classified as a horror movie.

One more misconception:

Nancy Allen is not a total babe.

This is incorrect.

I’m most familiar with her from Out Of Sight, where she’s portrayed as middle-aged, and Robocop, where she’s dressed this way:

Here’s Nancy Allen in Carrie:

Glad we cleared that one up.

But let’s get back to the horror movie talk.  Here’s something about Carrie which a lot of people seem to think, but I was surprised to find untrue after my first viewing:

The movie is scary.

Not really.  It’s a lot of great things, but scary it is not — to me, anyway.  Maybe that has something to do with the impact of the prom scene being lessened by its familiarity, as I discussed earlier, or maybe it’s because every time Carrie uses her telekinesis, the highly-recognizable violin shrieks from Bernard Herrmann’s score to Psycho play briefly, constantly reminding the viewer [me, at least] that it’s only a movie.  There’s one great jump-scare that I have no intention of ruining, but that ties into another misconception I had about the movie.

The prom scene is the end of Carrie.

It isn’t.  It’s the climax.  There’s a denouement.  Meaning: Other important things happen, even after Carrie burns down her senior prom.  The prom scene is probably remembered as the culmination of the movie because it’s the big extended setpiece, and the moment of collision of all the most disturbing aspects of the movie.  In his recently published (and highly recommended) book Shock Value, Jason Zinoman writes of the moral ambiguity that makes Carrie’s revenge so unsettling.  She doesn’t just wipe out her tormentors  — in fact, Chris Hargesen and Billy Nolan aren’t even in the gym when it burns down — but she actually wipes out scores of innocents, all those faces in the background we never met, along with teachers such as Mr. Fromm (the likable Sydney Lassick from Alligator and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) and Ms. Collins (Betty Buckley), the one teacher who tried hardest to defend Carrie.  Carrie’s vengeance is not righteous.  In fact, her vengeance against Chris and Billy, which is the vengeance we would have most wanted to see, is far more impersonal than what she does in the prom scene.

This is why that prom scene is so indelible.  This is what is so unsettling about the movie.  It’s set up as a conventional story of a high school outsider who has her moment and triumphs over her bullies, but as the audience we never quite root for her the way we should, and her ultimate revenge is way more horrible than we ever wanted.  Carrie isn’t as much viscerally terrifying, spooky or eerie, as it is psychologically unsettling, maddening and unforgettable.  I’d say it more than warrants the high regard which surrounds it.  It’s a classic.

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