Purging John Carpenter

Warning - This post is rife with spoilers!

 

I'm a big fan of the Purge movies, and am looking forward to seeing the newest one, Election Day.  When I watched the first film, I remember thinking, "This is the most John Carpenter-like film I've seen of the new John Carpenter wannabes."  I thought the same thing about the even-better sequel.  They carry on Carpenter's great strengths - pounding synth scores and completely batshit-insane, yet brilliantly simple, central concepts.  On reflection, though, I realized it wasn't just the music or the stories that reminded me of Carpenter films... They're actually remarkably step-by-step remakes, with new titles. 

Consider:

Assault on Precinct 13 - A traumatized man seeks shelter inside a fortified station which comes under waves of attacks from subhuman gang members. There is a focus on race relations as the black captain and the white convict must cooperate to survive, gaining mutual respect in the process.

The Purge - A traumatized man seeks shelter inside a fortified home which comes under waves of attacks from subhuman Young Republicans. There is a focus on race relations as the white family must decide whether to sacrifice the black victim to save themselves.  

In neither movie do we learn much of anything about the primary target - He's simply there as a magnet to draw down the wrath of the horde.  Assault gives us a middle-class Average White Guy, who attracts the gang's attention by shooting one of their members in anger over the death of his daughter.  We don't know who he is, why he was there, and he's virtually mute for the rest of the film.  The Purge is even simpler - We're given zip about the main target except that he's a black man of lower social class, and presumably that's all that's needed to make him a target for the rich kid psychopaths.  

 

The interesting thing is the total inversion of the villains. In Assault, it's two working class men defending the middle class against the zombie-like attacks of a subhuman street gang - Characterless, near-mindless killing machines that are invading the safe neighborhoods. In Purge, it's wealthy people with consciences defending the lower class and themselves from the psychotic attacks of... their own young. Assault fears the street gangs consuming the working class, Purge fears the upper class consuming itself and the lower class both.  It's a testament to the times and the decades between the films that there simply is no middle class in the Purge movies.  Everyone is either the wealthy or the working poor or homeless. 

Also diverging are the final messages - Assault is ultimately a much more positive film, despite its grimness.  In Assault, the black guy and the white guy, the hardworking policeman and the "gentleman criminal", come together in understanding and realize that their values are far closer than the creatures they're fighting.  When Bishop insists that Napoleon not be chained, and that they walk out to meet the dawn together, it's a triumphant moment.  The values of hardworking decency have been defended, and even though Napoleon is going back to jail, you understand that the day is won for civilization, for the moment.

Purge is very similar in structure - The black man sides with the white family and in the end, saves those who sheltered him.  The victorious survivors walk out to meet the new day in an almost identical ending scene, except... in Purge-Land, there is no victory.  The chasm between the wealthy family and the poor guy remains, and now the wealthy family realizes the depth of the hate and loathing and jealousy that their own "kind" have for them also.  They've survived the night, but they're living in a nest of people who all want to kill them, just because they're perceived to have a little bit more than the next wealthiest household.  There's no real victory, and only a thin veneer of icy smiles and cocktail parties will cover the seething violence that's being held in check until the next Purge Night.

They make for a fascinating comparison, back to back.  If time and interest permit, look for a follow-up post to this on the virtually identical storylines of The Purge 2: Anarchy and Escape from New York.

Mad Max - Fury Road

NetFlix NA
IMDB 8.2/10
My Rating: 6/10


The internets have been going crazy with gaga reviews of this for some time now, and I finally got to see it last night.  Sadly, I'm going to have to go with the counter opinion.  I thought it was entertaining but overdone, and like way too many modern movies, instead of presenting an absorbing story it just tried to pummel you into submission with constant action, which to me is actually boring when I don't really care much about any of the characters.  Which I didn't, really, because I thought Hardy's Max was a poor substitute for Gibson's, and I also wasn't particularly engaged by the fact that he was the sidekick in his own movie. 

Before I get into specifics, I want to point out that it seems like every review I've read has either been glowing praise about it for its theoretical "feminist narrative", or hostile MRA guys complaining that a chick was the star.  I don't give a shit about either of these political hoophole positions, I just wanted it to be good, but for me it was lacking.   Like, I don't care that Max took a backseat to a woman, but I was annoyed that Max had no arc, no skills, and basically contributed virtually nothing to the movie other than to be a victim and tag-along passenger, all to a secondary character who was not the character I sat down with popcorn to see.  It was like going to a Batman movie and having the whole movie be about Commissioner Gordon instead. 

My #1 complaint was the constant barrage of action.  Stuff happening constantly, all over the screen, and I just tuned out after a while.  Good action films have rhythm like music, with lulls and plot and just normal stuff that makes the action stand out when it happens.  This was all action, and the result was much like the hour long battle in Man of Steel - I just stopped caring much about what was happening because it was constantly "EVERYTHING IS EXPLODING AND EVERYONE IS ALMOST DYING IN ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME!!!"

It's entirely possible my opinion may be influenced because I just recently rewatched the original Mad Max and then Road Warrior, in anticipation of seeing Fury Road. 

Lots of spoilers to follow...

OK, I've often said the original Mad Max was kind of bleh, in that it's a generic revenge story and really only has two great action scenes, at the start and at the end.  On rewatch, though, it's disturbing in a way the sequels aren't.  It's apocalypse-in-progress rather than post-apocalypse, and there's something quite unsettling about the weird combination of society clearly falling apart at the edges, and normal people still trying to carry on normal lives.  Roadside diners are open, garages work normally, families go on vacation, etc, yet at the same time, the bikers are free to maraud and there are No-Go zones within easy reach.  Anyway, it was better than I remembered.  Also, it's all clearly about Max, whose arc IS the narrative.  He's the best driver in the MFP and a happy family man with friends untill things go bad and he becomes a cold-hearted killer.

Road Warrior still has Max as the central guide, and this time his arc goes from being an empty, soulless husk to actually wanting to help out other human beings again. 

The fundamental difference between Gibson's Max and Hardy's Max is that Gibson's has the skills to make him a heroic protagonist.  He suffers a lot of shit but ultimately he's still the best driver on the road, summed up handily in RW when, even mangled and battered and barely standing, he tells Papagello, "I'm the best chance you've got" for driving the rig.

Compare:

Fury Road opens with a traumatized Max being immediately chased down, easily wrecked and captured and victimized.  He spend the first half hour of the movie tied to a bumper, and has no personality at all.

Road Warrior opens with Max being pursued by superior numbers, and using his excellent driving skills ("RE-flexes, that's what you've got!"), he dispatches every car that's after him.  Then, in the same running time, we see that he has a heart (buried) via the wind-up music box, that he's cunning (His encounter with the Gyro Captain), ruthless, very intelligent, and basically an all-around cool character. 

This is better Max:

 

By the point in the running time when Fury Road is still showing us big CG landscapes and vistas and constant action, Road Warrior has given us a relatable hero with a plan, a sense of conscience, and a lot of skill to back it up.  Fury Road's Max was a steering wheel holder, a guy who just got stuck in the middle of someone else's story and clung on for dear life, and didn't bring any particular skills to the story.  RW's Max was a guy with a plan who was the only dude who could help the refinery people, and his determination and stupid-fast driving skill ended up making him an accidental hero.  Like Eastwood's Man with No Name, he's in it for himself, but still gets the good guy job done.

Voila:

Finally, I missed the humor.  RW is actually a fairly funny movie, often unexpectedly so, and yeah it's black humor but it still has laughs.  Particularly the Gyro Captain and the running gag with Max's shotgun:

Bottom line - I did enjoy Fury Road.  I didn't think it was as good as Road Warrior, though, nor was it "the ultimate action movie ever made" as many of the reviews have claimed.  

Pacific Rim

IMDB 7.9/10
My Rating: 7/10

When giant monsters start appearing in the Pacific ocean and destroying cities, humanity must band together and fight back with giant piloted robots. 

I love giant monster movies.  Ever since the days of Godzilla and Ultraman, the kaiju genre has been my thing, so the idea of a big budget, all-original robots vs monsters movie has always been high on my wish list.  And Pacific Rim is clearly a labor of love by a fellow fan of Toho's creations... which is why it pains me to not *quite* be able to give it the glowing review I'd like to.  Nonetheless, it's a marvelous film and thus far is the only summer movie that's actually been able to motivate me to the theater - Man of Steel and Star Trek and Iron Man 3 are more, "Wait for it on DVD" for me, whereas Lone Ranger is strictly, "I'll watch this when I'm forced to on a long plane flight."

In Pacific Rim, giant monsters are attacking the world.  One after another, they are popping out of a dimensional gate under the Pacific and laying waste to civilization.  Humans build giant robos called Jaegers to fight them off, and our hero is a former hotshot Jaeger pilot who inevitably had his fall from grace and now seeks redemption.  That's about all of the plot I can reveal without spoilers, but that's also about all the plot there is - Don't be expecting a complex storyline because, like the classic kaiju pics of old, it's basically, "Giant Robot, Giant Monster, FIGHT!"

Overall, I'd probably give this one a B+  -  It's an A+ for big screen spectacle, a B for cool robots and beasties, a C for characters, an A for homages and wink-wink moments, and a C for action scenes. The action scenes were my biggest complaint. As advertised, they were better than Transformers, yes, but where Transformers got an F for utter failure, Pacific Rim just gets a C because at least 1/3 to 1/2 of the time, it was impossible to tell what the hell was going on. Wall-to-wall CGI, everything is moving, everything has a million moving parts, the camera is flying all over the place, and it's all happening in raging seas at night in the rain. When you could see what was happening, it was totally awesome, and some of the fights kicked ass all over because of how great they looked when there was actual lighting and visual coherence, but others (specifically the opening fight and the big battle in the bay later, AND the climax) were just gibberish overload to me - a screen full of moving pixels that I tuned out of and just ended up waiting until the scene settled down enough to see who had won. In this respect, Pacific Rim was a big step down from last year's Avengers, which also had a metric fuckton of CGI at the end but it was all lit and staged so well that I never once had any problem telling what was happening or visually understanding what I was seeing. When it's completely impossible to follow what's happening on screen, something has been done wrong.

Example - Here is a Godzilla fight at night:

 

You can clearly see what is happening and clearly see what each monster looks like, and have no problem following the action.

By contrast, this is what half the fight scenes in Pacific Rim looked like:

The above is much harder to follow in motion, too. The experience is like - Lots of rain, Lightning. A flash of claw. Something blows up. Splashing everywhere. Brief glimpses of monster parts. That gets me to my other big complaint, which is that you never get to see the monsters for shit. Some of the designs looked cool, but as is the modern way, they're usually way too overdone with too many opening mouth parts and arms and you never, ever are allowed a good look at any of them.

Typical Godzilla movie monster view:

Typical Pacific Rim monster view:

It's all the more frustrating because when they do the action scenes good, they're REALLY good. Some in-city fight scenes are way cool, and when they let you see what's actually happening, there are some great moments and many big fist-pumping, "HOO-RAH!" cheers for the giant robots. It ticks me off because this could have been an A-level movie if they had resisted giving in to "Too much moving CGI shit" overload.

Other negative points are smaller. The ending is the next biggest one, as it's basically a scene-for-scene reshoot of the ending of one of LAST summer's big blockbuster flicks. The two leads are not very interesting. Virtually everyone is a stereotype cliche.

That's all the bad stuff.

NOW, the good stuff is that it's a freaking overwhelming cinematic experience. Despite the visual overload, when it rocks, it ROCKS. It's a big budget giant monster movie and that alone is cause for celebration. The Jaegers are cool and at least somewhat different - Again, the designs are overcomplicated such that we never get a good look at any of them, but at least they are visually distinctive unlike the Transformers. My favorite was the battered, heavy-metal low tech Cherno, a Russian robot piloted by Ivan Drago and Brigitte Nielson.

While the star dude is a charisma-free plank whose job in the movie is to fill screen space while standing around with his shirt off in every possible scene, pretty much everyone around him manages to be likable and interesting. There's Maverick, of course, and Grizzled Veteran. Idris Elba does a terrific job of showing what a great James Bond he would make. Ron Perlman is hilarious in a cameo part. Even normally hideously unlikable Burn Gorman (of Torchwood, otherwise known as Rat-Face) seems to be having fun playing Blimey Codswallop, the most overdone foreign scientist ever. In fact, the two geek scientists were the best part of the movie, IMO - Whenever we went back to them bickering in their lab filled with equation-covered chalkboards, they were always a hoot. They also checkmarked many geek references, including a nod to Buckaroo Banzai. There was a lot of this stuff in the movie and it was always cool - Moves from a Toho kaiju film, a line from War of the Worlds, a name reference here and there, etc. In general, the whole thing showed a huge love of the genre and I commend them for it.

Verdict - I really wish I could give this an unqualified cheer because when it works, it works REALLY WELL. Also, my demerits probably would not make any difference to the videogame generation who are already used to having two million things moving around on the screen, and see that as normal. For myself, the problem was driven home when I later that same evening watched an episode of Wild Wild West about a mad scientist who was creating explosive robot duplicates of the heroes to kill the president. It had a Frankenstein lab, killer robots, a huge fencing scene, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, various fights, etc, and I never once found myself in the situation of tuning out because I couldn't follow what was happening, or just having to twiddle my thumbs and wait until the scene was over so I could see who won. It's the main drag on an otherwise fucking awesome movie.

7/10

Worth seeing in the theater? Yes.
Worth buying on Blu-Ray? Yes.
Worth buying the toys? Definitely yes, if only to see what the monsters actually looked like.

I want a Cherno on my desk to face off with my Baragon.

The Tall Man (2012)

NetFlix 3.5/5
IMDB 5.9/10
My Rating: 7/10

In a depressed and dying mining community, a mysterious figure called "The Tall Man" begins abducting the neighborhood children. When a mother's young son is taken, she plunges headfirst into a deeper mystery.


The Tall Man, like a movie I reviewed earlier, Triangle, is a tough flick to write about.  There's a plot on top of a plot on top of a plot, and my hope is to encourage folks to watch the film without actually spoilering what makes the film so excellent.  And it is excellent, in my opinion - It's clever, very tense, well acted, and well told.  What it is not is a horror film.  I notice on IMDB it has received a number of negative reviews from people disappointed that it wasn't a slasher or a supernatural scare flick, and I think the promotional material I've seen for it does lead one to think that they're in for stabbings and Paula Deen-level terror.  Nope.  It's more a mystery/thriller, the sort of movie I'd recommend to my parents even.  "The Tall Man" is certainly a menacing figure and the child theft theme amps up the tension factor, but it's not a film that leaves a trail of bloody bodies.

What is does have is several great genre actors - The X Files' Cigarette Smoking Man makes an appearance (and when he turns up on YOUR side, you know you're screwed) and it's also lucky to have Stephen McHattie in a small part as the lead investigator.  McHattie has been a favorite of mine ever since I saw him in that most unusual zombie film, Pontypool - One of my personal favorites of the last ten years.  He's a good actor with a great stare... Manic, intense, and with a lot of screen presence that is aided by the fact that he resembles a sort of ambulatory mummy, as if Karloff strolled out of the sarcophagus and threw on a trenchcoat.

So what exactly IS this movie about?  In a small, dying mining town, the children are being abducted by a seemingly magical figure called the Tall Man.  Atmosphere is a big part of the story and the depiction of a crumbling, formerly middle class town, with boarded storefronts and broken windows and even more broken lives, is a familiar sight in these modern times.  Unemployed citizens are everywhere, sitting by roadsides, yelling at their spouses, and generally living dead-end lives in a community that's slowly spiraling into inevitable decay.  The additional sense of doom from having their children literally vanishing adds to the overall despair.  Police seem helpless to solve the crimes or find the kids.  When our heroine, a young mother of a rather odd looking child, interrupts his abduction, the chase is on... and what a chase it is!  The bulk of the film is in constant motion as we follow her through twist after twist.

Be braced for some confusion midstream - Unlike so many movies that are good right up to a disappointing finale, this one can be vexing and seem overly twisty until the final reveal, which makes all the preceding events fall into place for an unnerving and thoughtful conclusion that asks some big questions about society as a whole.  I loved it, personally.  Definitely recommended!

And the bad?  The unfortunate title means that forever after, our Google searches are going to confuse THIS Tall Man for the REAL Tall Man, and as every loyal Phantasm fan knows, the wrath of the Tall Man is not a thing to take lightly...

T.A.G. - The Assassination Game

NetFlix Not Available
DVD Purchase HERE for $8
IMDB 5.8/10
My Rating: 7/10

A campus newspaper reporter is drawn into a college game of TAG by his attraction to one of the players.  Through her, he becomes immersed in the world of play-killers and spies, until the two of them stumble into the path of a deranged murderer stalking the gamers.

Let's rewind to the early 80's, 1982 to be exact.  Back then, one of the raging controversies of the nation was WHAT to do about these satanic, suicide-provoking, heavy metal-infested role-playing games that were becoming so popular.  TV newscasters and sermonizers predictably freaked the fuck out and warned of impending social collapse if your kid was playing tabletop D&D with his buddies in the spare room - Never mind that you'd think it would be a parent's dream-come-true if their teen opted to stay home and do something that didn't involve drinking, drugs, or stoplight racing.  For a period of several years, we were bombarded with continual negative press regarding D&D, with the media seizing on every possible scare story to drum it it into a national issue.  Rona Jaffe's infamous "Mazes and Monsters" was an onerous example.  Today it's rightly considered a laughingstock by the RPG community, and looked back at much as we view Reefer Madness, but at the time people actually took this nonsense seriously.  In fact, I still attribute one of my earliest anti-religious jolts to a sermon I sat through where the preacher was ranting about the "satanic ills" of D&D while waving a copy of the Monster Manual in the air, howling, "There are DEMONS and WITCHES in here!"

Well, yes, but the same is true of Grimm's Fairy Tales, and for the same reason.

I vividly recall looking at the guy and thinking, "If this minister is so utterly, demonstrably clueless about what he considers a driving moral issue, WHY are we sitting here listening to him tell us how to live every Sunday?"  More potently, it was an example of just how stupid one can look if they get exercised about something that they have no understanding of.  I realize this is heavy stuff for a movie review, but it plays into why I enjoyed TAG so much at the time.

Alongside D&D, we also played a lot of Killer, one of the first live-action RPGs, in both high school and college.  Killer involved each player receiving the name of another player, their target, who they then had to stalk and "kill" with a toy gun until there was only one champion left.  As one can imagine, this was a blast.  TAG riffs on this concept with a group of college students cheerfully playing assassins. And while one of the players does go off the deep end, TAG was unusual at the time for portraying the players not as unstable, needy, friendless misfits, but rather as just ordinary kids looking for a little excitement.  This was so refreshing that I loved the movie to death, and it still remains a personal favorite of mine today.

The movie centers around a college newspaper reporter of the cigar-smoking, Chandler-reading, hopelessly romantic variety who has a mysterious encounter with Linda Hamilton, a player in TAG.  Ahh, Linda...

Linda Hamilton has never BEEN more gorgeous than she is in this movie, and she's able to convey a sort of sultry, film noir, femme fatale vibe that is far beyond her years.  She's just another player, a psych major who's looking for a fun time after hours, and our hero joins up with her because A) he is hopelessly smitten, and B) he is looking for a story for his newspaper.  This leads him, and the viewers, into the game world of TAG and we get to meet a lot of wildly varying players and the bizarro gamemaster who runs the show.  Speaking of, he's hilarious and steals his scenes effectively.  Anyone who's ever played a Killer-type game will recognize this guy immediately:

Our other main character is Gersh, the reigning TAG champion, played by Bruce Abbott (Yep, the Re-Animator guy) in his first starring role.  When an attempted shower assassination goes badly for him, our man Gersh goes off the deep end and begins taking his gaming way too seriously... murdering one student player after another and marking them off his "Kill" list until the inevitable face-off with Linda and Bruce.  Thankfully, it isn't played off as another god-awful "Gaming makes you unbalanced" message-movie - It's pretty obvious that Gersh is not all there from the start, and the game simply gives him a method for his madness.  The second half of the film is basically an 80's slasher with guns instead of knives as Gersh kills his way through the cast.

So why do I love it so much?  It was written and directed by genre legend Nick Castle, for starters, and the acting and dialog crackle with unusual energy and spice for a low budget flick.  You'll genuinely  like the characters and no one is there just to be a victim, a bimbo, or a hero.  Also, viewed from today's vantage point, it's a fascinating time capsule of college life before the days of cell phones, internet, and other electronica. Concerts, live action games, hanging around the student activity buildings, smoking cigars in dorm rooms... TAG gives us a microcosmic peek into the world of yesteryear's 20-something. After the college gun crimes of the past ten years, this is one movie that will never, EVER be remade today, so let's appreciate it for what it is - A look at a more innocent time when college students shooting each other was fodder for action-packed escapist adventure instead of the routine evening news.

PS - Special mention must be made of the opening credits sequence.  Most low budget flicks of the time were content with a simple credit roll, but this wasn't enough for Nick Castle and so we get an extended, swanky parody of a Bond opening, complete with rubber dart guns and LOTS of feathered hair (Skip ahead to the 1min, 50sec marker if you want to jump straight to the music):

14 (A Book Review)

My Rating: 7/10

Padlocked doors. Strange light fixtures. Mutant cockroaches.

There are some odd things about Nate’s new apartment. Of course, he has other things on his mind. He hates his job. He has no money in the bank. No girlfriend. No plans for the future. So while his new home isn’t perfect, it’s livable. The rent is low, the property managers are friendly, and the odd little mysteries don’t nag at him too much.

At least, not until he meets Mandy, his neighbor across the hall, and notices something unusual about her apartment. And Xela’s apartment.  And Tim’s.  And Veek’s.

Because every room in this old Los Angeles brownstone has a mystery or two. Mysteries that stretch back over a hundred years. Some of them are in plain sight. Some are behind locked doors. And all together these mysteries could mean the end of Nate and his friends.

Or the end of everything...

I just finished this in audiobook form (I listen to tons of audiobooks during my long days in my woodworking shop). It was loads of fun. It is by Peter Clines, an author whose work I've previously read in "Ex-Heroes", a very straightforward genre mashup of superheroes and zombies (After the zombie apocalypse, the world's masked avenger types round up the survivors in LA and attempt to defend them inside a fortified compound. This was every bit as entertaining and as dumb as it sounds).

14 was a whole different kettle of fish, and it's as hard to review as Triangle was, because I don't want to give away what made it so cool. It's like a combination of Lost and Lovecraft, with a mystery/horror/SF bent.   The hero is a young slacker type who works as a data entry temp and is stuck in that "Waiting for his life to start" phase (Weren't we all, once?  Let's just call it "Age 21-26", eh?), when he finds a new apartment that is too good to be true - Incredibly cheap rent, included utilities, and a nice building. After moving in, however, he begins to notice oddities - The elevator is always in the basement, the building has no power lines going to it, his kitchen light fixture turns any bulb put into it into a black light, and his neighbors are a collection of oddities. Tim is a former book publisher with a skill range from James Bond, there's a young actress who spends her time topless on the roof, and computer nerd Veek is a cranky geekette with an apartment so crammed with high powered PC gear that she could run 4Chan in her spare time.

The book is about the deepening mystery as these disparate characters begin to cooperate, Scooby Doo fashion, to delve into the mysteries and secrets of their strange building.   I went into it expecting either a haunted apartment story or an evil landlord story, and instead got the Phantasm effect - That feeling I had way back when first watching Phantasm, that I was completely expecting the story about a funeral home to be a ghost or vampire movie and instead got weird yellow-blooded aliens and fingers turning into crazy bugs and evil jawas from another dimension. 14 is an ongoing succesion of unexpected twists and discoveries and weirdness that goes from Mystery Gang fun to sanity-shattering, universe-threatening horror. The characters are simple but it's well written and has a lot of clever, natural-sounding dialog. Worth reading.

Another opinion!

Solitary (2009)

NetFlix 3.1/5
IMDB 5.7/10
My Rating: 6.5/10

One day, Sara finds herself unexpectedly stricken with severe agoraphobia and is unable to leave her home.  When her husband goes missing, she is trapped inside her house with only her sister, police detectives, and her doctor to link her to the outside world.  As the mystery of her vanished husband deepens, she begins to unravel.  

Here is the classic "Movie that no one has heard of" - As I write this, it only has one review on IMDB and I don't know a single other person who's seen it, but it's worth seeing.  It is a gripping mixture of some very unbalanced elements - Dull direction, a great lead actress, unconvincing secondary characters, a mediocre TV movie feel, and a genuinely tense and moving story.  In the end, the quality of the story wins out over the film's demerits and I would certainly recommend it to others.  Be prepared to think I'm crazy, though, because this is how you'll react when you start watching this:

• There are no recognizable actors in this.  It looks like a soap opera.  Is this a TV movie?  Do they still make network TV movies?
• Wow, those are some genuinely unconvincing suspense scenes.  I've really never seen the camera come flying up behind someone before, to the tune of a screeching soundtrack.  That KFP guy actually liked this?
• Hmm.  TV movie direction mixed with long quiet bits of tedium, and now something totally unbelievable?  My suspension of disbelief has crawled away and died.  Is this trying to be SF or what?  
• OK, that was creepy.
• Is this Gaslight?  Suddenly I find myself getting wrapped up in this.
• Holy crap, OK, that was very weird indeed.  What the hell is going on here?
• My entire brain is focused on trying to figure out what is happening.
• Scary!  But I think I have it figured out.
• Wow.  I was wrong.  That was excellent.  What a great ending, even with the fairly awful FX.

So, if it sounds like I'm running the movie down regarding its no-budget feel, let me stress that ultimately, the story and your emotional involvement with the main character will overcome its limitations and grab you tight.  By the time it was over, my crying wife had the Kleenexes out - That was how unexpectedly wrapped up we'd gotten in it, after spending the first half hour trying to decide if we should give up and go watch Airport '75 instead.

Our heroine Sara starts off with the perfect life - Happily married to a guy who brings her breakfast in bed and full of wholesome suburban bliss.  One day she goes out for a run and is stricken with agoraphobia, manifested by cheesy "camera zooming up behind her" flourishes that we've seen a million times.  Not wanting her husband to think she's a freak, she keeps this panic attack secret until the day he goes off to work and never returns...  Leaving her literally trapped in her home by her terror of going outside.

The movie starts to get going when she calls police detectives out, and we're also introduced to a troublesome relationship with her sister and one very creepy doctor.  Supposedly this fellow is a specialist in her sort of phobia and he wants to test a new treatment on her.  Considering that this is a doctor who refuses to enter by the front door and who turns up at some very odd hours, it's hard to imagine trusting him with a box of matches, but Sara is forced to rely on him as her link to sanity... and, hopefully, the outside world.

And...  That's all I can really say about the plot.  What I can say is that it draws you in slowly - What starts off feeling stilted and clumsy becomes part of the unfolding narrative, and eventually it does all make sense.  I give the movie great credit for actually tying up its loose ends and providing a genuinely emotional conclusion.  I give it even more credit for keeping me guessing the whole way.  A few folks on Netflix complained that they figured it out, but I had no clue what was happening till the end - It grows into a seriously tangled mystery that could be anything from a straightforward Gaslight-style thriller to a time travel sci fi trip.

And yes, it does span genres...  It's a dab of horror and a lot of thriller and two scoops of mystery.  Think of it as a semi-horror film that you can watch on date night, that your SO will enjoy a lot more than Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.  One moment you're in full "Spot the clues" mode and the next you're tensed up as strange noises start happening in the night.

Another point in its favor is lead actress Amber Jaeger.  She carries the weight of the film and while the other characters are often stilted and distant, she pulls you into her plight even during the times you want to strangle her.  It can't be easy to sell fear when your only indicator is standing at a doorway looking out, but she really convinces as a bright and directed young woman determined to get her husband and her life back, whatever the cost.  This makes it that much harder to watch as the increasing isolation of her predicament takes its toll on her.

My final verdict - Above average and intriguingly different.  Not great, not epic, but gripping and surprising.  Definitely worth seeing, especially given that it's available on Netflix streaming.

Burning Bright

NetFlix 3/5
IMDB 5.8/10
My Rating: 7/10

A young woman and her autistic little brother are trapped in their house with a starved tiger during a hurricane.  Really, do you need more plot than that?

The moral of this story is simple - "Never buy a tiger from Meat Loaf."  And it's an excellent little flick, too... Low budget, small cast, but tightly directed and tense as hell.  Our cast consists of the sleazy scumbag Stepfather, Virtuous Daughter, and autistic Little Brother (Otherwise known as Cinderblock).  Sleazy Stepfather has the sort of "Get Rich Quick" plan common to people who think Truck Nutz are cool - He's going to turn his inherited home and acreage into a safari park, where he will bilk tourists to see tired former circus animals and the usual pit full of alligators.  To this end, he buys a "reject" circus tiger, an animal that proved deadly in the ring and has already jumped a containment wall and killed one showhorse for fun.

Now, you'd think such a beast would inspire respect, but Sleazy Stepfather sagely applies such trailer park animal handling wisdom as, "Ya gotta starve it to show it who's the boss."  Five minutes into the movie, you'll be on the side of the tiger.  Things heat up when Virtuous Daughter interferes with his plans.  She wants to go off to college, but realizes perfectly well that if she leaves her autistic younger brother in the care of Sleazy, he'll be unable to live on a diet of beer and Slim Jims.  Overshadowing all this domestic drama is the impending threat of a coastal hurricane, which the house must be completely boarded against.  And, well...  You can guess the rest.  Humans end up trapped in boarded house during hurricane WITH angry and agitated tiger that hasn't been fed for weeks.

IMDB is slathered with posts from yoofs slagging on the movie's plot.  "Stupidest story evar", blah blah, yadda yadda.  But you know what?  It's tight.  It's simple, pure, and very intense - In fact, it reminds me of a 70's thriller in how laser-focused it is on the enclosed environs.  Like that freaky Zuni fetish doll, the tiger is in the house and everything you do is a reaction to it, and there aren't five hundred stupid sub-plots cluttering up the movie and padding out the run time.  The movie does a marvelous job of pointing up just how much more fearsome a tiger is than virtually any human serial killer or madman.  You can punch Hannibal Lector.  I can look around my study now and see a dozen items that would be lethal weapons against a human, no matter how crazy he may be.  But I can't think of one damn thing in this house that would be effective against a tiger, except to piss it off.  You can't fight it, you can't outrun it, you can't even shoot it because indoor room sizes are so small that even if you DO hit the thing with your pistol, it's still going to slam into you and remove something vital before it goes down.  And perhaps most spookily, it is beautiful:

(The movie opens with William Blake's "Tyger, Tyger, burning bright" poem, which is appropriate)  Like Aussie thriller Black Water (Another killer critter flick I enjoyed), the filmmakers use a real tiger instead of a CGI one.  In fact, the only CGI used in the movie is to split-screen the tiger into a few violent up-close encounters with the actors; otherwise there are no FX, it's all done via clever editing and three very well-trained stunt tigers.  If Syfy had made this, they'd have had a 20' long CGI tiger with drooling jaws and some sort of overdone mutant appearance, but Burning Bright simply gives us a normal tiger, all stripes and pretty kitty looks as it wanders through the house and makes kindling of anything it encounters.

The challenge for our heroine is... Well, what the hell do you DO if there's a tiger in your house and you're trapped indoors?  All windows and doors are covered with screwed-in boards against the storm, so our desperate Laurie Strode has nothing but her wits and her ancestral climbing & hiding abilities to battle the beast with.  And on top of this mismatch, she's also saddled with Cinderblock, her kid brother whose autism constantly makes him a handful and a half as he wanders away, turns on stereos, has panic fits, and generally keeps her on her toes.

It's tense.  Unlike most horror films, it doesn't have a high body count nor much gore , but it delivers excellent edge-of-your-seat excitement as you find yourself thinking right along with the heroine...  What exactly WOULD you do?  I give special props to the lead actress, who delivers a Jamie Lee Curtis-level performance as the savvy daughter trying to stay alive.  In fact, the only real demerit I can give the movie is that you pretty much know how it will end from 10 minutes in, and it doesn't provide any surprises in that regard.  I still give it a big thumbs-up, however, for how well it entertains us on the way to that predictable destination.

FEED YOUR TIGER.

Triangle

NetFlix
IMDB
My Rating: 8/10

A young woman goes on an ocean cruise with friends, only to have their boat wrecked by a mysterious storm.  They believe they are saved when a cruise ship passes by, but investigating the ship proves it to be abandoned... Mostly.

I'll come right out and say this was one of the best movies I saw last year.  It isn't for everyone, though - It requires patience and a lot of mental machinations.  But you won't think that at the start because the plot sounds like half a dozen other "Ghost Ship" movies and when the action kicks in and the group find themselves stalked by a masked killer, it looks like you've simply stumbled into a generic slasher... Sort of a Friday the 13th on the Ghost Titanic.

This is not at all the case, however.

The problem with reviewing it is that I can't say ANYTHING about it - This is a movie review that is not a movie review, beyond saying, "Watch this". Do NOT look it up on IMDB or it will be totally spoilered for you. Also, don't even look up poster images for it. I like the poster above because it is extremely generic yet unsettling, and that's all the advance warning that anyone should have going into this.. Unfortunately, several of the movie's posters that turn up in Google searches totally spoiler the film....duh? Too many clearly show the central dichotomy that drives the concept, leaving no room for surprise.

And alas, that is literally the most that I can describe about this film, beyond saying that it is a marvelous exercise for the brain and that it will leave you wondering and talking about it long afterward as you debate with your friends the various meanings and symbols and interconnections within the story.

I can say this:


It is NOT "Ghost Ship" or any of the other "big empty haunted ship" movies.


If you liked Lost, you will like this.


If you liked Timecrimes, you will LOVE this, but it is NOT the same story. 


If you like movies that make you think, you will like this.


It is not a horror film. It is a mystery/thriller with horror elements. It is also a Chinese puzzle box of a movie. 


There are moments that will provoke an audible, "Oh, shit!" from you.  (One scene in particular created one of the strongest reactions of horror that I've had in a long time, probably since seeing [REC])


**  One addendum - I really found myself quite happy that this movie has no "twist", as shouted in some of the posters and promos. Ever since Shymalyalyan appeared, it's seemed as if Hollywood thinks all horror movies need a twist ending, where you find out the killer is really her brother or whatever. I've gotten very bored with that because twists have become formulaic, which blows the whole idea of the twist in the first place if you're sitting there waiting for the twist. Triangle is just one simple, powerful idea.

And finally, once you've viewed the movie, try this challenge.  Sit down and see if you can create a flowchart of events to explain how her keys got onto the Aeolus...


  Suggested Accompaniment: This is not a drinking movie because you'll need all your wits about you by the time you're at the 3/4 mark.  Pipes are encouraged, however, because we all know that smoking a pipe makes you smarter and thus better equipped to tackle some of the brain-stretching themes encapsulated in this story.

 

Unthinkable

NetFlix
IMDB
My Rating: 7/10  

A good thriller for challenging your brain and morals. That unreadable tagline up there says, "Right and wrong no longer exist" This is a star-filled big budget movie that got yanked from distribution and exiled to direct-to-DVD, probably because its content would absolutely wig the average American out of his freaking mind, given the challenges it asserts to typical "tough guy" talk about terrorism.

In brief - Homegrown US Muslim extremist & family man was formerly a trained Delta Force ranger overseas. He has managed to smuggle in and plant three crude nuclear bombs in three unknown US cities, to be detonated in a few days. Carrie-Anne Moss plays the FBI team leader called in to run the investigation trying to find the bombs, until she is roped into serving as "good cop" to professional CIA interrogator Sam Jackson, a guy so frightening in his methods that the US government won't admit he exists, at least until he's needed. With the threat of nuclear devastation hanging over everyone, Jackson is assigned to torture the bomb locations out of the bad guy.

The entire movie is tense and morally challenging. Someone on IMDB described it as torture porn but it really isn't, not in the Saw/Hostel sense. You see some occasional nasty & shocking bits but mostly it's done in cut-aways, ie, you don't SEE fingers being chopped off with an axe, you cut up to onlookers' horrified eyes. It's a constant seesaw of limits - At the start, Jackson is willing to do anything required to get the info from the prisoner, but is continually reigned in by the other agents. As time runs out, the others become increasingly desperate and find their morals dropping like a drunk cougar's panties, while Jackson becomes gradually more appalled at the actions he's forced to resort to. The focus is on the characters outside the interrogation room and how they adapt their morals to the changing crisis, instead of being all about watching some guy get chopped up.

Good movie, and a good example of how flexible morality can be given the circumstances. 

Suggested Accompaniment: If you even try smoking during this one, you're likely to burn your pipe out.  Probably would go well with a cigar, though, given that it's all about the secret cabals of power brokers determining our fate, and we all know they love cigars.  A glass of Drambuie wouldn't go down ill, either.