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Reviews
The Goat (1921)
Jumping Joseph
Saw this for the first time on UK TV, with good musical accompaniment. The elevator scene is class, especially when he does the going-down thing in the phone booth, and then fiddles with the floor-indicator. The jump through the transom is really impressive, and there's so much more. Apart from all the stuff that's been mentioned before, there's the fight with the man who's been bullying the woman with the dog - it just looks so simple. The only drawback is the plot - he gets mixed up with Dead Eye Dan, who then escapes but doesn't reappear, even when some more gangsters get involved later on. The scene where it looks like he's shooting at the fat inspector is funny, but would have been better if Dead Eye was the one pulling the trigger.
The Big Sleep (1978)
Carmen hasn't sung yet
Winner's version is more faithful to the story than the mess served up in 1946 by Hawkes, Bogart and Bacall. The switch to England is okay - maybe could have done more interesting things with it. Not sure about the switch of era. But both movies fail to use the two major characters in the story: Rusty Regan (who never appears) and Carmen Sternwood, who is pure evil. This version really tries to stick with the structure of Chandler's story, instead of whoring it out to the star names, but nobody has captured the evil and the sense of futility that Chandler wrote about. Marlowe's character dominates the drama, along with whichever actress is chosen for Bacall's original part - but he's just the wise-cracking narrator, an observer, and she's a bit-player! Cast Carmen properly, and then we'll see.
Mission to Mars (2000)
No good
I watched two movies tonight - this one and Carnosaur. Why has it come to this? M2M is based on a dreadful, dreadful screenplay. The opening scene is well played, but the dialogue is hard to take, and no tension is created. The poor guy whose wife died - miserable, miserable, miserable. And rest are all so happy clappy, buddy wuddy, then mopey and sentimental - the video flashback of the dead wife was just awful.
The first mission gets away, and I can take the togetherness and all that. The Giant Face strikes in a tornado of good special effects - but nobody tries to escape. So it's on to the rescue mission, but the only tension is with the ground commander, whose cautiousness is designed solely to allow the ship commander to dismiss his views as Eurobabble (and that's only on the strength of his accent). The ground commander should make a mistake that jeopardises the mission, and the heros should then struggle to overcome it.
The husband and wife stuff had potential, but again no tension. These guys just came across as smug and comfortable, their only difficulty being the external one of the hardships of the mission. If you're going to steal from the Abyss, then bring some of the husband-wife tension with you.
The spacewalk was good and tense, but by that stage I reckoned we weren't going to see much action on Mars, so everything had to be done in space to keep our attention.
On Mars ... Ah, so what? And how many movies has that alien appeared in? The concept was pretty good, but it just got bogged down in weak characterisation, clunky exposition, and action that wasn't central to the intriguing mystery. The people who didn't know what to do when they got to Mars were the writers. But with all that guff about the origins of life, at least I know who to blame for Carnasaur.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Leatherface lives
Pretty good remake. The first ten minutes are excellent - characters well established, and a nice see-through on the suicide's bullet hole. The nasty sheriff is good, and the heroine plays it well throughout. A basic problem is that this - like the original - is full immersion horror, and it's tricky to come up with a believable escape. After a fairly routine chase sequence, they give us an effective deception: the heroine hotwires a vehicle, but not the one you expect. Apart from that, there was a poorly judged scene, where the heroine had the opportunity to pick up the chainsaw, but instead just pummelled Leatherface with her soft little hands. And no nipple-action in the freezer?! And there's no memorable line. So just pretty good. It might have been improved if the rescued kid had turned out to be one of the clan as well - maybe the heroine could have tousled his hair as she drives away, and his little face comes off in her hand ... Junior Leatherface ... and she crashes and dies. Buh-wah-ha-ha!
Shallow Hal (2001)
Loses it halfway through
The set up is good: Hal is shallow, because all he desires in a woman is perfect looks. One day he gets hypnotised, so that all he can see is the inner beauty in people, bypassing their looks. He meets a grossly obese, good natured woman, sees her as a classic beauty, and falls in love with her. When he is de-hypnotised he has to come to terms with his feelings and make a choice.
The prologue in the hospital should have been funnier - instead, the humour is supposed to come from the discrepancy of a minister becoming obsessed on his death bed with sex and beauty, due to morphine - and this is meant to explain the hero's attitude later in life. Much whackier please.
I enjoyed the rest, till about half-way through. The gags and the pace were good, but then it lost its way. I think the rot set in with the ridiculous Irish accent of the girl's father and his misjudged dialogue. You get a perfunctory scene, where the hero succeeds at his job, and the boardroom gives him a round of applause. And the dishonesty of the story begins to nag - how is the hero going to cope with seeing the reality of his lover's body? At this point, there was also confusion about the rules of the hypnosis - the hero also sees the ugliness in the attractive hospital nurse? It was a jarring moment.
The film gets back on track for a moment, when the hero sees a little girl in a burns unit, whom he earlier perceived as all cute and cuddly - now she is disfigured, and it strikes him how shallow it is not to react to her as he had before.
The third act is really tricky - but all we get is sentimental slush. The dishonesty? His lover is grossly obese from self-indulgence, and downright unattractive. But she herself is given no impetus to change. Get on a diet! The acting was good - apart from the hypnotist guy and the two hawaiians. And is it just me, but were a couple of the "ugly" girls actually quite attractive?
My Little Eye (2002)
Scary concept - kitchen sink delivery.
I was really looking forward to this, but Christ almighty, what a disappointment. The film promises a lot, but doesn't deliver a single scare. What it does deliver is patchy tension and a slasher climax. I kept hoping every step of the way, but the pace lagged just enough to let me dwell on the plot holes.
The start is good, with the 5 house inmates cleverly introduced through clips of their audition interviews. And the almost 6 months spent in the house is conveyed through a quick clockwise 1/4 screen split of various scenes. But then we're introduced to the everyday interaction of characters who are already tired of each other. The solution is to introduce an outsider and see what mayhem he can cause. But the 6th character is used just as a plot device, and all that ensues is a seduction scene and suggestions of an off-screen death. The plot is resolved by revealing the least likely character as a psychopath traitor. So what? In the very end the last victim was left alive in a cell - why? For the sequel?
The frequent loss of focus through the webcams is irritating, and the whirring camera-focus noises are done way too much. The night-vision effect, with glinting pupils, is overused; and Emma's gun-toting scene is a continuation of the Silence of the Lambs cellar sequence.
Charlie was sexy - whoopee! Emma was a Mia Farrow look-alike. The male actors didn't register.
Great concept. Just so irritating to have to carp and carp and ... hey, after 2 hours viewing I'm allowed to have a go. Maybe the Japanese will run with this concept and score with truly disturbing scenes.
Hard Candy (2005)
Good set-up, but loses pace
The film starts out with a nice piece of chat-room dialogue on computer screen, and the main characters - 32 yr old male photographer and 14 yr old girl - are introduced in a well-played coffee-house scene. They then head back to his place, and there is some self-conscious flirtation, before the girl brings us to a turning point, with a devilish piece of irony: she declines a drink, because it hasn't been fixed with her own hands, and then fixes him a drink spiked with some drug. He conks out, and wakes up tied to a chair - the ordeal begins.
I stayed with this film for over an hour, past the point of no return - she discovers illegal photos and evidence of his involvement with a missing girl - but found myself getting bored even as the tension was mounting for the castration scene.
The dialogue is good, and well-delivered, but there's far too much of it, as if the screenplay were an adaptation of a stage play. The set-up is good too, but after 20 mins I was uneasy thinking about how the next 90 mins was going to be filled up. And the girl is quite irritating - well-played, but inspiring no sympathy with her clever-clever superiority. It got to the point where I wondered how she could manage to haul the unconscious victim (? the big ISSUE) around the place. It may have been better if the set-up had been played with true eroticism, to give the turning point more emotional effect.
The camerwork is energetic, and the scene where the girl has to subdue the man by smothering him with cellophane works well. The shadows in the girl's eyesockets in the photo-studio belie her innocence.
The Omen (2006)
Good jumps, nice touches
Enjoyed this a lot. There are two effective jump scenes. Mia Farrow is good, playing a sweetly creepy nanny. The kid does fine. Once the hero becomes convinced of his mission in the Etruscan graveyard the pace doesn't let up. Delicious decapitation. The weakest thing about it is the husband-wife relationship - either the dialogue is undercooked (too many longueurs) or the actress didn't get in to it. The touch I liked best was during the garden party: when the first nanny steps up with the noose around her neck she attracts the attention of everyone, including the two puppets in the Punch & Judy show. Postlethwaite is difficult to understand when the rain is lashing down. Don't understand why the bristling alsatian was replaced with rottweilers.
Masters of Horror: Imprint (2006)
spoiler on torture scene
I came across this by accident, and it was all new to me. It's a picaresque kind of story, telling episodes in the life of a Japanese whorehouse in period dress and makeup. There is a deeply cruel torture scene, where a black-toothed madam sticks needles into the fingernails and then gums of the victim, who is then strung up from the ceiling by one leg in an artistic sort of butcher's window pose: it's close to pornographic and one of the most vivid scenes in horror - barely any dialogue. The image of the foetus drifting downriver is creepy, the abortion scene so matter of fact as to be comic, and the editing has a natural feel. Pity about the dull American character and his clunky dialogue - the buggers went and banned it anyway! This is a lesson in editing and imagery: don't tell - show.