Hits & Misses from KFP's First Year

Since making lists is an internet tradition, here is KFP's first - My own listing of the movies I rated highest this year, and the real stinkers.  These are in no particular order so don't assume they're ranked - In fact, just see all of them if you get the chance.

The Best


1.  Come to the Stable - A forgotten, out of print film from 1949 that's one of the best Christmas movies you could ever want to see.  The plot description is, "Two nuns come to the US to build a children's hospital"...and yet it's not hokey, which is a minor miracle unto itself.

2.  Black Christmas - From the sublime to the insane, Bob Clark's 1974 holiday horror masterpiece about a madman killing sorority girls over Christmas break.  Slasher films don't get any better than this.

3.  Joulutarina - A Finnish film that tells the real story of Santa Claus... Thinks Lord of the Rings visuals meets Batman Begins character-building and you start to scratch the surface of this quirky tale of homeless young Nicholas and his curious tradition of gift giving.

4.  Midnight Clear - A low budget indie film about five residents of a small town facing despair and suicide on Christmas eve.  Its best accomplishment is in showing the characters finding hope through random encounters with each other, without descending into cheese.

5.  The Haunting - This 1963 original is the greatest haunted house film ever made, in my opinion.  Hill House had stood for 90 years and might stand for 90 more, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

6.  The Woman in Black - A 1989 spooky British ghost story that's a fave among those of us who love our horror movies tilted toward the creepy.  Watch out for The Scene.

7.  Hausu - This 70's Japanese haunted house film is the closest you'll get to an LSD trip without the drug in question... Colorful, surreal, bizarre, original, and literally like nothing you've ever seen.  This is what you'd get if you put The Partridge Family and The Evil Dead into a blender.

8.  The Ellery Queen TV Series - This 70's mystery series has yet to be topped as a puzzle-solving experiment in interactive TV, in my opinion.  Watch along with Ellery and see if you can spot the clues and solve the case before he does.

9.  Triangle - This one slipped through the cracks for a lot of people, but it was one of the best surprises of the year.  What starts off as a generic slasher film on an ocean liner soon becomes a brain-bending Moebius strip narrative and a great mental exercise.

10.  The Gamers:  Dorkness Rising - Not a lot of comedies on my list, but this was one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time... Providing, of course, that you have a solid background in fantasy role playing games, because otherwise you'll be one lost puppy.  Stick it out through the first 10-15 minutes and you'll LOL for the rest of the evening.

11.  Dial M for Murder - A 50's Hitchcock thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat and then some, and all without anyone dodging gunfire in bullet time.

12.  The Eclipse - I think this was the only film I saw all year that I gave a 10/10 review, though I'll readily acknowledge that it's going to be too quiet and too contemplative for a lot of viewers.  It's a strange mix of genres - Art film, drama, romance, and ghost story.

13.  God Grew Tired of Us  - The only documentary in this list is the harrowing and inspiring story of African refugees coming to live in the US, and their experiences here.  It's an eye-opening look at our own culture and advantages from outside, as seen through the eyes of people who have never had a toilet or a mattress before.


The Wretched

1.  Holiday in Handcuffs/The Santa Trap/Christmas with a Capital C - All three of these were horrifyingly bad, but Christmas with a Capital C is the standout for its eye-popping display of preachiness and in-your-face angry religious people.  This is supposed to convert people to their cause?

2.  The Christmas Box - Hands down, the most venomous review I've written all year, and it deserves every word of it and more.  This movie is like that block of holiday fruitcake you find in the back of your cabinet... from 1999.  Don't even go near it, just pick it up with tongs and flush.

3.  Alone in the Dark - This poor, poor movie...  Beating on it is like beating on Twilight at this point, but it's still startlingly bad, and its one saving grace is the sheer joy of making fun of it.  In that sense, it's a positive triumph compared to the previous two.

Some Mini-Reviews

True to my goal, we've been watching loads of holiday films lately.  While there have been standouts like the last few I've given full reviews, most of them have been absolute shite - Too bland to elicit a reaction, too crap to ever be allowed to air in any other season.  Either that, or they're so hideously offensive that I'm restraining myself from doing a full review, lest it be another mouth-frothing session like my review of The Christmas Box.  Instead of wasting time on these individually, I thought I'd whip together a quickie rundown of some seasonal movies so far...

Holiday in Handcuffs utterly wastes a great title.  It missed all the opportunities to make a cool movie from this concept (Why couldn't it have been the logical sequel to Secretary, anyway?). Astonishingly bad. Like, "Did real people actually write this?"-bad. Lonely crazy artist/waitress girl kidnaps professional-looking guy to force him to pose as her boyfriend for her family's Christmas get-together. Reality is bent out of all proportion trying to explain why anyone with more brainpower than a hamster could not get himself out of this situation. But this being a chick flick, the guy is too much of a gentleman to "Punch her. Take her car keys. Leave. Call the police." Instead, he spends the entire weekend with her duck mouth and constant pouting, while putting on a good show for her insane family.  Can you possibly guess that they fall for each other, for real?  My Rating:  3/10.  Sanity Cost:  -15 points.  I wanted to kill everyone in this movie.

The Santa Trap.  Look at that cover.  Look at it!  Horrendously bad child actors mug for the camera while young daughter sets a household trap for Santa, intending to prove he is real to her doubting brother.  Her family is sad, see, because they've moved from a big city to New Mexico and it's 100 degrees outside on Christmas day, which really ought to be outlawed.  Dick Van Patten plays a god-awful Santa who gets caught by the brat, and then thrown in jail for some mistaken identity shenanigans with a bearded Stacy Keach, who later went home to flog himself for all that coke he did in the 80's that derailed his promising career and landed him in this sort of glop.  The family gets taken hostage, Keach is inept, Santa saves the day, the kids deliver gifts to the children at the local hospital, and perhaps the most brain-rending moment is when they encounter Adrienne Barbeau living homeless with her children and bring her a gift.  But she tells them she doesn't need a gift, because even though she's a lone single mom living in the street and her children are sleeping under cardboard, "It's Christmas Eve and we have love, and that's all we need."  Their consciences thus salved, our well-off family go back to their expensive suburban house and gorge on holiday food and expensive toys.  Hey, you might at least bring the homeless woman a sandwich, huh??  My Rating:  2/10.  Sanity Cost:  -35 points.  I wanted to kill almost everyone in this movie, except for Stacy Keach, who had a few funny lines.

The Netflix streaming poster previews are too small for me to have been able to read the fine print on this one, which is, "Putting Christ back in Christmas".  If I'd known I was getting into an overtly religious movie, I'd have watched something wholesome like "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" instead.  Christmas with a Capitol C is about a homey Alaskan town that is putting out their city hall nativity scene when they are interrupted by the return of the rich guy that went off to the big city, Daniel Baldwin, who spends the whole movie in a black coat driving a really stupid Porsche with his hair oiled back. He is an angry atheist and gets a court order to stop the town hall nativity scene because he wants to ruin Christmas, like all atheists do.   Self righteous rants are triggered from the religious characters on subjects like wishing Happy Holidays ("It's Christmas...MERRY CHRISTMAS! It's the ONLY holiday this month that anyone celebrates! Happy Holidays is liberal doubletalk!").  Yes, people actually deliver, straight-faced, lines like, "98% of America is Christian", "Hanukkah...Right!  Who celebrates that?", and so on.  Our "heroes" go berserk when the town banner is changed from "Merry Christmas" to "Season's Greetings". All this "ruining of Christmas" is done by the angry city atheist because he is lonely, has no family and no one to care for him, and is bitter and full of spite. One character opines, "Why can't these god-haters just leave us in peace?"

Amazingly, throughout the whole film no ones makes the argument of, "Hey, celebrate however you want, just please don't use my tax money to promote one religion over all the others, because we both know Christians would go BERSERK if their town hall sunk tax money into promoting a Muslim holiday."

By the end of the film, the townspeople learn that the angry city atheist is bankrupt, both morally and financially, and all his god-hate comes from the emptiness of his life, so an angelic young girl brings him Christmas cookies and all the townspeople come to his house to goddamn force him to celebrate Christmas like a proper person and in the end he's converted to the wonder of religion. And the Grinch himself carved the roast beast.

Except that the Grinch managed to get across pretty much the exact same message without being obnoxious, preachy, pandering, or making me want to attack the television set.  This movie is everything bad about religion rolled up into a ball, pressed, and steeped in oil of self-righteousness for seven days.  Truly awful.  My Rating:  0/10.  Sanity Cost:  -95 points.  I wanted to kill everyone in this movie, bury them, dig up their corpses, and hit them again with hammers just to be on the safe side.  Especially that bearded guy trying to be the hard right's answer to Robin Williams. 

My Rare Exports DVD can't show up in the mail soon enough...

The Christmas Box

NetFlix N/A
IMDB 7/10
My Rating: 2/10  
Sincerity Factor: 0/10
Treacle Factor: 9/10

A struggling small business owner and his family move in with an elderly heiress seeking paid companions, then get nagged to the brink of insanity about their lifestyle.

(For these Christmas films, I've added a couple of new categories up top.  Sincerity Factor is just that...  Does the movie's holiday message feel sincere or forced, artificial, or commercial?  Treacle Factor is a measure of how syrupy the flick is, useful for those allergic to rosy-cheeked children learning miracles are real.)

I cast around a bit trying to decide what to kick off the holiday movie deluge with, and in the end I picked this simply because I already had a lot of it written.  Be warned that this will be one of the angriest movie reviews I've ever posted here.  I did not just actively dislike this film, I loathed it - I hated its message, its condescending tone, its hateful subtexts, and I came away wanting to hurt it.  This is a movie that I'd love to beat to death in a back alley with a nail-studded baseball bat.  Do NOT watch this. If you find yourself looking for a holiday-themed movie, please go and watch Gremlins instead.  I enjoy some warm & fuzzy holiday movies, the kind that make cool people blech, but holy cochon, this was awful. Dolly Parton's Smoky Mountain Christmas may have been saccharine heartwarming fluff, but at least it had camp, humor, and a positive message. Christmas Box was just.... damn.

How could a movie offend me so?  Me, the guy who will happily watch, "Chainsaw Strippers from Mars"?  Well, let me stress first off that I'm not really a Christmas curmudgeon.  I like the Grinch, the Charlie Brown special, Cosmic Christmas, Miracle on 34th Street, and any number of other holiday faves.  This movie, however, belongs to a class of preachy, overly religious, exclusionary holiday films that make me gag - Watching it is like having an officious churchlady wag her finger in your face for two hours.  So, where to start with this...?

Our hero, played by Richard Thomas (and indeed, the only reason I gave this even 2 points was that the actors were good) is a struggling small business owner trying to keep his family sheltered and fed until his business starts making money.  Anyone who has been in this situation can immediately relate to his difficulties - Stress, constant overwork, not able to spend enough quality time with his family, and the daily fears of failure and destitution.  Unable to make rent money, the family is forced to take shelter in the mansion home of an aging and bitter heiress, to serve as maids and groundskeepers.  Mrs. Parkin is a thoroughly unpleasant character who immediately takes a dislike to Richard, and spends most of the film either chiding him or undermining his efforts to make his business work.  In the end, we discover that she lost a child and is dying, and her displeasure with Richard is due to what she sees as him not having "real values" (ie, not spending more time with his family), and of course not being Christian enough to suit her.  Eventually the cutesy angels come for her and we're supposed to feel sad that this cancerous old bitch is dead, and inspired at the wholesome bonding of the young family.

Inexplicably (to me anyway), it has a 4.5/5 star rating on Amazon and a 7+ rating on IMDB, where loads of reviewers say it is their favorite Christmas film and is the most wonderful holiday film they've ever seen. Things like this really make me believe I belong to an offshoot DNA strand of homo sapien that's just utterly disconnected.

It is a hopelessly Christian film, but not Christian is an inspiring way, like Midnight Clear or Come to the Stable - Instead it's Christian in a cloying, exclusionary way, all images of little girls dressed in white who are supposed to be angels, complete with fluffy wings glued to their backs. The central message is, "Being Christian is the happy pill that absolves you of all responsibility for practical matters, AND makes you special and better than everyone else too."

Let's take this thing apart.  Our hero is finishing up his first struggling year in business. His wife does not work, but stays home to care for their daughter. This makes her so "stressed" that she blames all their problems on her husband.  When the family moves in with the Wicked Witch, the wife immediately bonds with her and feels warm and happy, while the husband is unable to sleep, suffers nervous anxiety, and begins hearing strange noises in the night.

At this point it goes schizo and tries to become a half decent horror movie - The old lady is creepy and treats the husband with contempt, he can't sleep due to the rattling radiator pipes, weird things start happening, he suffers from repeating dreams, and he is continually being drawn to the spooky attic because every time he is alone, he hears an attic music box playing. Unfortunately, instead of proceeding to the, "GET OUT" stage, he just gets more and more frazzled. Seems he's working like mad to get his business on solid ground, and can't spend as much time with his family as he'd want to. He even commits the unpardonable sin of missing his daughter's play. Despite the fact that their stay in Hell House is wearing him out and making him screw up at work, his wife loves it there and has zero sympathy - Instead, she whines at every possible moment about how he isn't taking off work to spend enough quality time with the family. The old lady bangs on about this too, in between delivering imperious commentary on his lack of religious knowledge and promising his daughter he'll do various things with her without consulting him regarding his schedule first.

I will admit total bias here. I KNOW how hard it is to get a business up and going. I know what it's like to have no choice about working seven day weeks and that there are way too many times you want to go relax with your wife, but instead have to sit up doing work. So, I could completely sympathize with the husband. His wife and the old lady, however, looked on this all with the sulky incomprehension of those who have always had money, either by being born into it or by having someone else hand them a paycheck all their life. Alas, the entire movie is slanted such that the "problem" of the movie is that the husband isn't spending enough time with his family, never mind that he's not a wealthy heiress living in an inherited mansion like the crotchety old bat, and forget that all his work is going towards getting them a home of their own OUT of the Overlook.  No, this is everything that Occupy Wall Street is about, in a nutshell - The rich 1%er who believes she has every right to judge the struggling 99%ers, despite never having had to worry about a bill in her life.

Because of this, every time Richard is treated like dirt (often) for being late to his daughter's recital due to work pressure, let's just say my sentiments were not with the wife.... In fact, by the end of the film I was hoping he'd go all Jack Torrance on everyone in sight. The wife thinks it's really neato keen that he keeps having recurring dreams of angels; commentary that always seemed ready to be followed by, "OK, I'm off to my crystal healing class now, have fun at that dreary job, dear."

Eventually they find out that the old bat had a child who died young, and her husband left her. This broken family history is why she's so eager to force the current family into being a warm and cuddly family unit, mainly by berating and harassing the husband to work less... because everyone knows that what a new and struggling business needs most is for its owner to start randomly taking off and showing up late and blowing off appointments. There is some further stuff about the first gift of Christmas being baby Jesus, twinkly fairy lights, angelic children appearing in hospital rooms and so on, but by the end of the movie Emily and I were both so annoyed and pissed off that I'm not even sure what the point was.  No, wait, I got exactly what the point was - Wealthy Christian white people have the innate right to judge others and tell them how they should live their lives, and if you argue with this viewpoint you are a Bad Person who must be corrected.  I won't even get into comparing the "epic tragedy" of Nurse Ratched's lost child to the millions of poor people out there suffering from broken families,  other than to say that it's too bad she ended up a lonely old crone but gee, having a million dollars in the bank probably helps soften the pain a little compared to a single mom trying to scrape by on minimum wage.

Better Christian movies can get across a religious message without mentioning religion, by illustrating how powerful hope and kindness can be. Christmas Box presents religion as a "Get out of hell free" card - You can be a cruel, conniving, vicious bitch but as long as you believe in baby Jebus, the angels will come for you. And trying to support your family by making sure they have groceries and shelter is wrong - "Real" support means blowing off your business responsibilities and spending all your time with them, starving together in a cardboard box somewhere.  (I once heard a TV preacher talking about how he counseled the low income people in his church on their budgets, and always told them to put GOD at the top of their budget, and to give money to the church first, before they paid their bills.  I was left stunned that people did not revolt and drag him screaming off the stage, but then again, some people thought Gordon Gecko was a hero, too...)

All in all, it had a horrible message about responsibility towards family, enough gag-inducing Hallmark moments to put down a rhino, a twisted theme that it's OK for wealthy religious people to lecture the poor on how they live their lives, and the worst angels I have ever seen.

This movie was not just bad, it actively pissed me off and made me want to hit it. It has no redeeming qualities, IMO - Avoid like the plague.  

Alone in the Dark

NetFlix 1.8/5
IMDB 2.3/10
My Rating: 1/10


Christian Slater fights aliens or monsters or something, while Tara Reid does science.  None of this lives up to the poster at left.

"A truly terrible movie, the kind some people call painful, is like an undiscovered country waiting to be explored."     I'm stealing Doctor Markway's line from The Haunting because that's the sort of lure that really bad movies have for me, and usually I come out feeling a lot like Luke did by the end - "It ought to be burned down... and the ground sowed with salt. "

Way back in the early 90's, I was lucky enough to be of the right age and living in the right time during the evolution of the computer game, a drastically different and superior beast to those kiddie home consoles.  Because of this, I got to experience what many call the first official "survival horror" game, Alone in the Dark.  This game was terrific.  Prior to that, PC adventure games had been primarily studious, puzzle-solving affairs like the Sierra adventure games, and while there's nothing bad about that, AITD grabbed me like few games previous.  The early, very crude 3D rendering made characters and monsters alike into surreal creations, and its blend of puzzles, plot, and Lovecraftian beasties leaping after you made it a gripping playing experience.

Unfortunately, the charm of the original did not carry well into the inevitable sequels, and I'm not sure that any of the AITD games in the franchise have ever equaled the first one, despite their monumental increases in graphics quality.  So what the hell does this have to do with a movie?

At some point, legendary maker of bad films Uwe Boll got hold of the rights to do a movie version.  I'm not sure who thought this was a good idea when not even the direct game sequels could stand up to the original, but I'm not in Hollywood.  Or wherever this was filmed. It's a tough movie to review, because to be honest, I'm not at all sure what it was about.  The game starred Edward Carnby as a 30's era private eye investigating a haunted house.  The movie stars Christian Slater as Carnby, doing... Stuff.

He seems to be some sort of trained monster fighter, as best I could tell.  Unfortunately for him, he is paired with co-star Tara Reid, who is theoretically playing a scientist.  And if that isn't natural casting for a certified museum archaeological expert, I don't know what is.

AITD is a very weird film. The sheer clunkiness of the exposition and dialog are hilarious - you can really see the plot gears clanging against each other as they turn.

Delivery guy: "Here, sign for this ANCIENT RELIC OF LOST OETPICA."

Playboy bunny museum director: "Squee! Professor must have FOUND THE LOST CITY OF OEPTICA AND UNCOVERED THE ANCIENT ARTIFACT."

Delivery guy: "Hey, isn't there a CURSE THAT WILL DESTROY THE WORLD IF THE ARTIFACT IS MOVED? I think I saw that on the Discovery Channel."

Playboy bunny museum director: "OH U MEAN THE CURSE OF THE DARK DEMON NARGLETHREP THT WILL CAUSE TEH TWENTY CHOSEN HUMANS WITH ESP TO BECOME ENSLAVED ZOMBIES WHEN TEH CASKET IS OPENED.  SQUEEE!"

Delivery guy: "Wow, your EX BOYFRIEND THE PROFESSIONAL DEMON HUNTER would have loved this IF YOU TWO HAD NOT SPLIT UP FOREVER AFTER THAT HUGE FIGHT. "

And so it goes...

Eventually they give up on even this sort of subtlety and just have Christian Slater directly narrate what's happening in the plot via voice-over. "OK, here I am in the warehouse fighting the monsters that we mentioned fifteen minutes ago. I don't know what's around that corner yet but... Hey, wait, I'm suddenly realizing that the professor has been possessed by the little gem thing that was found back inside that golden box relic that killed all those guys when they opened it during the first six minutes. Bet you thought we forgot about that, huh?"

We were just sitting and watching this, and it was like being repeatedly poked by the director. "Nyah nyah! Am I touching you? Am I touching you?" The plot fit together like it was assembled solely by hammers.   I'm still confused. As near as I can tell, the bad guy found an ancient Aztec temple portal deep underground in North America and built a hospital connected to the gateway, then built an orphanage in the country AND a city junkyard on top of it, somehow connecting downtown Chicago and the green countyside via one room and a few tunnels. Then he put centipedes on the spinal cords of twenty random people for no reason I could decipher, but our hero's centipede sizzled when he was accidentally electrocuted as a child, so he decided to go into a career as a ghostbuster. The bad guy finally found the key to open the underground gate and shipped it back, the secret agency got involved, and then there was some sort of shootout with aliens in the junkyard and they blew up the gate to Mordor with dynamite, only to discover that overnight the entire city of Chicago had been either evacuated by the secret agency or devoured by invisible aliens.

I have NO idea what we just watched. There was a lot of running around and shooting things, and Tara Reid said science-y stuff. (As an aside, I think the Republican candidates this year should start incorporating the word "science-y" into their speeches, because I can totally hear that coming out of Sarah Palin or Bachmann.)

I strongly recommend against watching this, or even trying to watch this.  Having said that, I realize that most of my readers will do exactly what I did when I read the first god-awful reviews of this thing, and rush right out looking for it.  Don't say I didn't warn you.  The biggest tragedy is that this came out 5 years after the end of Mystery Science Theater 3000, because this movie needs the bots in a big way. Bring back Tom Servo!