You guys know me pretty well at this point, so you can probably guess where I’d stand on the remake without even reading a word from me. It’s relatively simple. If this movie truly wanted me to love it, it would have called up the Jessica Lucas character to take on the role of “the new Ash.”
Since they didn’t, I not only need to start up a new tally for 2013, but I also had to get a little vicious.
Daily Grindhouse would be pretty much my favorite website even if I weren’t writing for them, but since I am, here’s a collection of all my work so far. It’s some of my very best stuff. Enjoy!
Make Daily Grindhouse your daily destination for genre movie news, reviews, and interviews — there’s a ton of truly great content over there, beyond just the parts with my name on ’em.
And follow me on Twitter for updates!: @jonnyabomb
I wrote about the new movie END OF WATCH over at Daily Grindhouse. It’s a good movie, worth a look if you have the nerves for it, and I tried to do it justice.
This collection has been much-requested and a long time coming. To get at the reviews, just click on the movie poster of your choice. And be sure to bookmark this page, because it’s bound to get updated frequently!
For constant news about updates, follow me on Twitter: @jonnyabomb
And we’re back! Ready for round two. Inspired again by my friend-in-movies at Rupert Pupkin Speaks, I’m re-presenting and reshuffling my top fifty movies of all time. “Reshuffling” sounds a little more extreme than what I’ve done here — most of the titles remain the same, and the order isn’t much different. But there’s a fair amount of new blood, and I’ve updated the links to any movies I’ve written about at length (those are bolded in red.)
This list is absolutely subject to change, so keep watching this space, but while you’re at it, don’t forget to keep watching the skies.
Why do we watch movies? It’s a simple question with an entire bookshelf’s worth of answers. There are so many reasons: To cheer up, to laugh, to cry, to get scared, for an ego boost, for an assist in the romantic process, for smartening up, for dumbing down, for an education, for wasting time, for monsters or pretty girls or explosions or a look into a past that doesn’t exist anymore.
And sometimes it’s about the imagery.
I saw Georges Franju’s EYES WITHOUT A FACE only once, almost fifteen years ago, and yet there are several images from the film that have stayed with me. There are movies with dialogue I can recite by heart from start to finish, and then there are movies like this one, which only needed a single viewing to plant root in my consciousness. EYES WITHOUT A FACE is a film that haunts.
The story is centered around a ghostly young woman named Christiane (Edith Scob), who was horribly disfigured in a car accident. Christiane roams the halls of the family mansion wearing a white mask that covers her every feature, besides her eyes. Her father, a wealthy surgeon, is dedicated to reconstructing his daughter’s face, to the point where he abducts and subdues young women in order to attempt elaborate skin graft procedures, swapping their faces onto Christiane’s. The experiments have varying degrees of success, but are never permanent.
The essential theme of the movie is that Christiane is a prisoner of her father, who has lost all humanity in pursuit of his goal and is more concerned with scientific success than his daughter’s comfort and recovery. And despite the disturbing countenance of Christiane, with and without her mask (but mostly with), there is a purity and a strange beauty to her that makes these experiments hardly necessary.
But more than anything, what you’ll remember are the images.
Georges Franju, the director, had a history of non-fiction filmmaking before this, which was his second feature. He made documentaries about factories and veterans’ hospitals (this not long after World War II) and, most pertinently to some of the most squirm-inducing scenes in EYES WITHOUT A FACE, slaughterhouses. The grisly, lengthy face-transplant scenes are shot by Franju with an unblinking eye, almost as if it unfazes him and he expects it not to faze us, his audience, either. That’s filmmaking as character – the evil doctor would look at his subjects that way. These scenes would be upsetting enough here in 2012, after five decades of gore films – just imagine what they would have felt like back in 1960!
Franju has a lyrical eye as well, though – those scenes of Christiane gliding through the darkened corridors of a mansion too large for its occupants, with orchestral accompaniments by Maurice Jarre, are as eerie as any ghost story. These sequences are as simultaneously creepy and pretty as other sequences, most notably the final fate of the doctor, are savage. It’s an indelible juxtaposition, and that’s why this film is so well-remembered despite initial misunderstanding, disinterest, and disgust. Hilariously, according to Wikipedia, EYES WITHOUT A FACE was originally screened in the States on a double-bill with THE MANSTER. Most people in 1960 didn’t know what they had: A true work of cinematic art.
EYES WITHOUT A FACE is also an important film for readers of this site due to the profound influence it has had – the second you see Christiane, you know exactly where John Carpenter got the inspiration for Michael Myers’ mask in HALLOWEEN. Yes, we all know the apocryphal story of how Carpenter’s art director, Tommy Lee Wallace, used a William Shatner mask and melted it down in order to create Myers’ featureless mask, that spooky pale death’s head with only openings over the eyes to indicate the scant humanity within. But the image, see, the image, that’s EYES WITHOUT A FACE. It got into John Carpenter’s head too.
When I first saw EYES WITHOUT A FACE way back when, it wasn’t long after FACE/OFF had come out, and it could be said that the face transplant scenes in that film were also influenced by Franju’s film, but I’m not so sure. John Woo cut away quickly from the face transplants in FACE/OFF (or was forced to by studio test screenings, who knows). EYES WITHOUT A FACE, on the other hand, showed the operations in all their awfulness. Despite my adoration of John Woo, or in fact as a statement of how impressive Franju’s unflinching method is, I have to say that, in this respect at least, FACE/OFF is a pussy next to EYES WITHOUT A FACE.
The Billy Idol song, however, is absolutely a response to this movie. Whether that is a virtue or a travesty is in the ears of the beholder.
Sorry – eyes. I meant eyes.
EYES WITHOUT A FACE is playing at NYC’s Film Forum as part of their “French old Wave” Series. It’s screening on a double-bill with Henri-Georges Clouzot’s DIABOLIQUE, which I haven’t yet seen, but can assume is a far better fit than THE MANSTER.
This beautiful portrait was taken by @SethKushner.
Hollywood legend Ernest Borgnine passed away Sunday, July 8th, 2012. He was 95, which is not young. But anyone who suggests that his age makes the loss much easier would be mistaken. There are people who are irreplaceable, and this was most certainly one. Ernest Borgnine, or Ernie to his fans, had more than sixty years in the movie business — just think of how many stories he must have had left to relay. Though he gave plenty of great interviews over the years, that probably was only a fraction. With Ernest Borgnine goes a unique and eternally ingratiating talent, and a pivotal bridge that spans Old Hollywood, New Hollywood, and the modern age we’re currently living in. For this post I’ve collected a ton of pictures and posters of the many movies I’ve seen Ernest Borgnine in. I will touch on most of these movies (and maybe more) in the longer appreciative piece I am working on, but in the meantime, please enjoy these movie memories of a true original.
Wanted to clue everyone in to a guest post I did for the terrific movie blog Rupert Pupkin Speaks, which has been inviting all kinds of well-travelled movie writers to contribute their lists of favorite quote-unquote “bad” movies. (It’s all subjective, right?)
I think you’ll enjoy this one. I had a lot of fun putting it together. I’m very proud to be featured on another site I enjoy, amongst some fun people. You’ll have to click through to get to the meat of what I wrote, but I wanted to share some posters, still frames, and YouTube clips also, so scroll down for those.
If you know me or have stopped by my site before, you know that this is hardly the end of my voyage into tremendous cinematic badness. It’s only the beginning.
So the publicity for The Expendables 2 is ramping up. I’ve been seeing a new mini-trailer in front of movies at the theater recently, which we should talk about. For one thing, am I the only person who thinks it looks like they majorly skimped on the cinematography budget? Seriously, dude.
Expendables 2 was shot by Shelly Johnson, who made pretty pictures for movies like The Wolfman and Captain America (regardless of what you thought of those movies, I liked the look of them), so the ugliness of these frames is clearly not his fault. Did some less-talented second unit take over for the trailer scene? These are some rapidly-aging screen queens — you have to light them up pretty like you’d do Julia Roberts or Meryl Streep.
Of course, we’ve got bigger problems. For one thing, as my friends at Daily Grindhouse have reported, Expendables 2 will be rated PG-13. Which strikes me as wrong on a few different fronts, but since creative and moral concerns aren’t foremost with this particular franchise, maybe good old American bloodthirst will do? Expect to see as much gore and viscera in this supposedly manly flick as in an average episode of True Blood. And with fewer pairs of titties.
What’s wrong with going full-bore after your core audience? Tyler Perry does it, to great success. So do the people who put together the Darling Companion ad campaign. Better to please your base than to spread your appeal too thin. Expendables movies are supposed to be for guys. It’s not a four-quadrant kind of a deal. That’s why, when you watch the Expendables 2 trailer above, you hear a chorus of male voices asking “Who?” after the name “Hemsworth” comes up. “Hemsworth” is Liam Hemsworth, and nothing against him, but he’s here to bring in the ‘tweens off his role in the Hunger Games franchise. If any guy knows the name Hemsworth, it’s because his brother Chris played Thor (I know of Liam because he was in a very good horror movie called Triangle, but I’m always in the minority). And hey, if you really want girls and women to come to the movie, why not cast an actress anyone’s ever heard of in a prominent role, or even — revolution! — let her join the team? Where’s Charisma Carpenter, from the first movie? How about an Angelina Jolie cameo? Personally, I suggest borrowing Gabrielle Union away from the Tyler Perry juggernaut — she could probably do a cool Pam Grier riff that this franchise badly needs — but again, no one listens to me.
It’s enough to demand a referendum on the varying coolness quotients of the stars of Expendables 2 in anticipation and dread of the new movie, which I did here when I looked at the poster, and have since expanded upon for the sake of this article. So anyway, let’s have a look at the poster again, then take that bitch apart.
There’s a lot going on here. We’re gonna have to go through it all, element by element:
1. Sylvester Stallone:
Again with the beret. I think the beret is Stallone’s way of saying: “I’m taking it back to the glory days, and by that I do not mean First Blood Part 2, but instead Demolition Man.” (Personally I happen to like Demolition Man, but I am not what you would call a highbrow critic.)
Letter Grade: C.
2. Arnold Schwarzenegger:
Nice Gozer The Gozerian hairdo there, bud. Seriously, what’s up with Arnold’s hair? Is the male pattern baldness getting so threatening that the only direction to go was up? This is not a respectful hairstyle befitting the star of Predator. You need to treat the star of Predator with more respect, even if you ARE the star of Predator.
Letter Grade: D.
3. Bruce Willis:
He’s got that look that says, “Not that long ago, I was in real movies. Ah, hell. Fuck it anyways.”
Letter Grade: C+.
4. Jason Statham:
He’s got a beret on too. It’s like he’s got a junior Stallone thing going. He’s the teacher’s pet. The thing about Statham is, even his fans have to agree that he bypassed the Rocky phase entirely for his Demolition Man period. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is up to you.
Letter Grade: C-.
5. Chuck Norris:
I’m sorry, but I still find it impossible to believe that this country ever had a red-bearded action hero. This is a man whose entire fan base is ironic. All this craziness going on around him, and Chuck Norris is still the one who stands out as a cartoon character.
Letter Grade: F.
6. The girl:
Unless that’s Jet Li in drag, no one even bothered to put a name for her on the poster. Let’s be real: These movies aren’t interested in women. Not even as sex objects! We can only imagine that her death prompts one or more of these dudes to seek revenge. And then she is never mentioned again.
Letter Grade: C+.
7. Dolph Lundgren:
Not sure what’s up with the Tilda Swinton haircut, but his presence here is a triumph. He died in the first movie, didn’t he? It’s time to re-assess Dolph Lundgren. He’s too tough to die, in real life and in sub-par movies, he was the best thing about the first Expendables, and he’s arguably our best hope of elevating the sequel.
Letter Grade: A-.
8. Van Damme:
He’s got an expression on his face that’s like, “Yeah, I’m wearing a fur scarf and carrying the skinniest gun on the poster. It’s all right. I’m gonna put this gun down in a second and then you’re gonna get to see me kick some motherfuckers in the ear.”
Letter Grade: B+.
9. Terry Crews:
I just need to point out that the ex-NFL player is, technically speaking, the most interesting and inspired actor in this entire cast. (The only one you could even argue comes close to Crews is Willis, and I would win that argument.)
Letter Grade: A.
In conclusion:
I couldn’t wait to see the first Expendables movie.
Regardless, as a masochist, even after all I’ve expressed here, I still absolutely plan to see the second Expendables movie.
This poster is the perfect representation of all my hopes for it and of all my reservations about it. The new trailer falls more on the latter side of that statement. I’m the masochistic kind of optimist, I guess.
Via one of my very favorite sites, IMP Awards, Here are the new character posters for The Expendables 2, which I believe only serve to confirm my prior rulings. Check them out and see if you agree (and let me know if you don’t):
_________
STALLONE (Beret Sr.)
SCHWARZENEGGER (The Gozerian)
WILLIS (Mr. Apathy)
STATHAM (Beret Jr.)
LI (Exempt From Judgment)
COUTURE (Means “Women’s Clothing” In French)
HEMSWORTH (Most Likely To Get Buggered By One Of These Guys)
YU (Minimum Daily Recommended Amount Of Female)
NORRIS (The Worst One)
CREWS (The Best One)
VAN
LUNDGREN (The Tilda Swinton One)
VAN DAMME (Increased In Awesomeness Due To This Poster)
ADKINS!!! (If You’re Not Completely Thrilled To See Him Here, You Need To Watch More Action Movies)
I probably should be doing about 50 other things at this very moment, but I saw this great top-50 list today and was inspired it to immediately answer it. I made my list very, very quickly, so in plenty of ways it’s the most honest form a list like this could ever arrive in. While the numbering is fairly arbitrary (until the top five, where shit gets definite) and while the contents could easily change as soon as five minutes from now, this is still a fairly good representation of what a top fifty movies list from me should look like. Anyway, let’s hit it. Links where they fit. I eagerly await any and all comments you might make!
Demon's Resume 