Gentlemen Broncos (2009)

This one is going to split viewers - or at least, the small number of viewers who get to see it since it's basically been dumped by the studio.

In each of his three movies, Jared Hess has walked the fine line between making fun of his oddball characters (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre) and empathizing with them and their unusual plights. Many have seen these movies as essentially mean-spirited and exploitative, making fun of these weirdos. Personally, I see Hess as being on the side of the dreamers and outcasts, but also recognizing that comedy comes from pain, and the most acute pain comes from social ostracism. And in each of his movies, Hess has balanced the pain with triumph - Napoleon wows his high schoolmates with his dance performance, Nacho wins the wrestling match, and in this movie Benjamin Purvis finds a way to make his loved ones' dreams come true. These are sweet, gentle-hearted movies that also happen to have a piercing eye for the absurd and aren't afraid of the occasional poop joke.

Anyway, Gentlemen Broncos, which sounds like it could involve gay cowboys eating pudding, is the story of Ben Purvis, a teenage sci-fi writer whose dreams run into two obstacles - absurdly pompous author Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement, featuring the greatest accent on Earth) and a pair of low-budget teenage filmmakers who bastardize Ben's already bizarre story, which involves genital hazards and flying deer that fire missiles and yeast - it's all a bit hard to describe. Suffice to say that for me, Gentlemen Broncos was delightful, and if you don't want to see Sam Rockwell launching himself into the sky through the power of flatulence or Jemaine Clement ponderously explaining how sci-fi names can always be improved through the addition of '-onious' or '-anous', then I don't know what else to tell you. And Mike White as a longhaired creep with an ill snake? And Halley Feiffer getting a hand massage with too much lotion? Freakazoid bliss.

Hess's visual style has been compared to that of Wes Anderson, with an emphasis on centered framings and odd tangential details, but I realized in this movie that the two filmmakers are interested in radically different themes - Hess focusses on people in marginalized, out-of-the-way places, whereas Anderson focusses on people in the most chic and stylish places (who nonetheless are broken and lonely as well). And don't get me wrong, I love Anderson's films, but I absolutely find a huge amount of value in Jared Hess's resolutely anti-glamorous films as well.

8/10

Offerings (1989)

Sometimes it's the little things that stick out in a movie. Offerings is a pretty undistinguished Halloween ripoff from 1989 (way to jump on that slasher bandwagon in a timely way, guys!) and made in Oklahoma. It slavishly follows the Halloween template - weird kid gets locked up, comes back years later to kill a batch of teenagers, there's an expert who tries to track him down, etc. This killer, John Radley, leaves the occasional gift for the final girl, who was his only friend back when he was just a weird kid - an ear on the porch, a nose in a newspaper, and so on. One night all of the teens are watching TV and waiting for a pizza, and when the pizza finally arrives, it's just sitting on the front porch with no deliveryman in sight, and it's not just cheese like they ordered - both pizzas are now sausage pizzas - OR ARE THEY? As one teen says, "It doesn't taste like sausage but it's good."

Of course, later on the sheriff analyzes the pizza (?) and the lab results come back and the kids were all eating human sausage, reinforcing the horror-movie trope that when people eat human flesh and don't know it, it's DELICIOUS.

But here's the thing - I can understand how a killer could carve a fillet or a rough steak out of a human victim, maybe even grind up the meat into human hamburger. But sausage? So John Radley killed somebody, butchered some meat off their body, ground it up, seasoned it, filled it into a casing, cooked it, and then waited around for the teens to order a pizza for his savory cannibalistic topping? It's a weird little detail that obviously none of the filmmakers thought about very hard, and this scenario I invented is actually more amusing than the movie itself - but I wouldn't have invented this scenario without watching Offerings, so thanks to the filmmakers for that.

3/10

October Review

Okay, so being unemployed for 3 weeks out of the month allowed me to watch a total of 38 horror movies, old and new, seen-before and never-seen-before. Yes, that disturbs and alarms me as well. Anyway, here's how they stacked up:

WORST OF THE WORST:
Canvas of Blood (1997)
Mind, Body & Soul (1992)
Danger on Tiki Island (1968)
Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders (1996)

BLAH
Superstition (1982)
The Horror Show (1989)
Final Exam (1981)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
Abby (1974)
Tormented (1960)
Night of the Demon (1980)

OKAY
Trick 'r Treat (2009)
The Burning (1981)
Galaxy of Terror (1981)
Zombieland (2009)
Graduation Day (1981)
Dr. Giggles (1992)
Blacula (1972)
Attack of the Puppet People (1958)
The Man from Deep River (1972)
Shakma (1990)
How to Make a Monster (1958)

GOOD:
At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1964)
Dog Soldiers (2002)
The House by the Cemetery (1981)
Fight For Your Life (1977)
Horrors of Malformed Men (1969)
Paranormal Activity (2009)
Phantasm (1979)
The Seventh Victim (1943)
J.D.'s Revenge (1976)
Dr. Cyclops (1940)
Cannibal Apocalypse (1980)

BEST IN SHOW:
This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (1967)
Black Sabbath (1963)
The Exorcist (1973)
Curse of the Demon (1957)
Island of Lost Souls (1933)

Yeesh. Time to see some art movies or something.

Ruby (1977)

Okay, I haven't actually seen this movie, but I stumbled upon this trailer and isn't it kind of craptacularly awesome?

An Exorcist ripoff with Piper Laurie riding the success of her character from Carrie and featuring all manner of wind-machine hauntings, wheelchair flops, Lesbian romances (?!) and underwater skeletonfights? Yes please.

Ghostbusters (1984)

Typically, a big budget is considered to be the best way to ruin a comedy - Evan Almighty, Land of the Lost, name your own. Ghostbusters is a rarity, a movie that ambitiously seeks to be a whole bunch of different things - raucous comedy, horror film, tentpole adventure movie - and does them all well.

One of the reasons why the movie succeeds so well, for me, is that it clearly takes place in a real world. Even though the movie brings the audience into a world populated not just by ghosts, but ultimately by elder gods out of something written by H.P. Lovecraft, the filmmakers slowly and carefully introduce the different fantastical elements to draw the audience into the fantasy. The production design and cinematography have more in common with the gritty , high-contrast look of a 1970s movie than with the more plastic, shiny tentpole movies that Hollywood would put out later in the decade and up to the preent - basically, the look of this movie is a lot closer to Dog Day Afternoon than Men in Black. So when the Staypuft Marshmallow Man arrives at the movie's climax, it's both ridiculous, but totally embedded into the world of the movie.

As the release of Paranormal Activity shows, spooky things are scarier when they happen in the context of a normal, naturalistic setting. Now, I wouldn't say that Slimer or the other ghosts in this movie are scary for me nowadays, but when I first saw this in theaters at the age of seven, the Library Lady and the Taxi-Driving Ghoul were enough to freak my shit out. And I think it's in no small part because of the naturalistic way the movie presents them.

Of course, this naturalistic production design and cinematography are primarily at the service of letting the comic actors do their thing, and the bulk of the movie is about giving Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver, Rick Moranis, and all the rest weird situations in which to play. Good actors given unusual things to do - what else does a movie need?

In recent times some have found a Reagan '80s pro-business, anti-government regulation subtext in the movie, with the small businessmen of the Ghostbusters contending with the petty bureaucrat played by William Atherton (the go-to slimeball character actor for about a decade). There's a little bit of validity to this argument, but I'd say that primarily the attitude of Ghostbusters is more in the classic American tradition of refusing to kowtow to authority of any kind, be it a government pencil-pusher or a forgotten deity. If the Marx Brothers had ever made a ghost movie, it would probably look something like this.

More than anything, though, this is the Bill Murray show, pretty much refusing to take any given scene seriously, nudging the audience, but never getting obnoxious about it, the way that Jim Carrey or Eddie Murphy can be prone to do. Indeed, there's a touch of pathos to Murray's performance, especially in his scenes with Sigourney Weaver, that would later blossom (if that's the right word) in Murray's movies like Groundhog Day and Rushmore.

9/10

(Presented as part of the Class of '84 Blog-a-thon hosted by This Distracted Globe.)

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)

Well, it's nice to know that the totally misbegotten sequel to a big studio hit has a long tradition behind it. This movie is pretty much a failure on every level except as camp. How does a mega-million-dollar corporation let something like this happen? But if not for bizarre studio choices we wouldn't have Citizen Kane or Inglourious Basterds either, so anyways.

Anyway, while it's a dismal failure as a horror movie, there are some nice redeeming facets. John Boorman is a stronger visual stylist than William Friedkin ever wanted to be, and there are some great images in this movie, from climbing the mountains of Ethiopia to some ridiculous cliff-top monastery to buzzing around on locust-cam (which is awesome) to a weirdly trippy telepathic encounter with the demon Pazuzu in Louise Fletcher's head. And of course, Ennio Morricone does the score, so the movie has that going for it. And John Boorman is definitely more of an outside-the-box thinker than Friedkin or William Peter Blatty, with a more expansive visual and spiritual sense than either of those filmmakers.

But all the visual virtuosity in the world means neither jack nor shit when your story is incomprehensible and dopey. So otherwise, this is the one where Louise Fletcher has a box with flashing lights that allows people to enter each others' thoughts, where a tired-looking Richard Burton hams it up when he's not sitting motionless (there's a nine-minute scene where Burton just sits and watches other characters do things without saying a line or even having a facial reaction), where Linda Blair finds herelf tap-dancing in the middle of the movie for some reason, and where this happens:

(hat tip to Christian Divine.)

And I still don't know which character is supposed to be The Heretic - Blair? Burton? Von Sydow? Pazuzu? Chief? McCloud?

4/10

J.D.'s Revenge (1976)

This played at the New Beverly Tuesday night in a double bill with Blacula, and even though I hadn't heard of this movie before, I think it was the more entertaining of the two. It's a pretty simple set-up: nice guy Glynn Turman gets put into a trance by a Bourbon Street hypnotist and then gets possessed (as will happen) by the ghost of vengeful 1940s gangster J.D. Walker.


The trailer makes it look a lot sillier than it plays in the actual movie - director Arthur Marks allows the possession to sink in gradually over time (just as William Friedkin did in The Exorcist) so the audience isn't plunged too quickly into ludicrosity and zoot suits.

Ultimately, the movie is less about a spooky ghost story than it is about Glynn Turman biting deep into a double role and chewing hard. I can't think of many performances where it's so obvious that the actor is truly relishing the over-the-topness of their character, and Turman's joy in his performance as the totally unrestrained pimptastic J.D. is infectious. His outdated hairdo, not so much, but when he starts going all razor-happy and slashing the husbands of random women he just had sex with? The New Beverly audience ate that up.

Ultimately, J.D.'s Revenge doesn't take its premise very far, just deep enough to be a satisfying b-movie. With a little more effort and psychological character development, this could have been a classic.

7/10

The Exorcist (1973)

Speaking of movies with backlashes, here's another one, although the backlash against this movie is less about commercial hype than it is about political correctness, so let's get this out of the way: yes, The Exorcist is ultimately a movie with a regressive attitude towards gender roles (two priests must do battle against an unruly female) and towards morality (stark medieval good vs. evil).

All that said, The Exorcist still stands for me as one of the all-time great horror movies, simply on the basis of its ability to create tension and scares and on the basis of sheer storytelling. There's hardly a wasted second in William Friedkin's original cut, with a relentless build towards the final showdown between Max Von Sydow and the demon inhabiting Linda Blair; indeed, this movie is a good example of how a focussed, energetic director's work can transcend a mediocre screenplay - just look at the opening sequence, which introduces Max Von Sydow as Father Merrin, a character who will then disappear until the last half hour of the movie. It's a sequence loaded with an overpowering, foreboding mood, but with virtually zero narrative connection, either to the rest of the movie, or really, within itself. But because Friedkin knows what he's doing, the mood and editing propulsiveness carry us through this sequence and into the main body of the movie.

And the performances are almost uniformly great; We all know that Max Von Sydow and Ellen Burstyn are great actors, but where did Jason Miller come from and why wasn't he in more films? And Linda Blair's performance, natural and easy-going as a normal girl, genuinely diabolical when possessed, is easy to attribute to special effects, but has to be seen as one of the best performances by a teenager, ever.

I need to add, however, that the version I watched on Friday night wasn't Friedkin's original director's cut, but the 2000 'special edition' which is basically William Peter Blatty's preferred Producer's Cut, which adds in a bunch of redundantly superimposed demon faces and a dumb 'happy ending' scene at the very end of the movie, among other details. Now, I think William Friedkin has about as much interest in convincing his audience of the existence of demons as Sam Raimi did in Drag Me to Hell; Friedkin's career shows that he's more interested in telling stories for the sake of telling stories. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if Blatty actually believed in his own shaggy dog tale, since pretty much every choice in his cut of the movie makes it more strained and pretentious.

9/10

Paranormal Activity (2009)

When you have a horror movie without stars in it and without a standard premise for a marketing hook, it becomes necessary to market it as "The Scariest Movie of All Time". And then when when people go to see it and it's a perfectly respectable scary movie, but not so scary that everybody watching it has their eyeballs explode in terror and the ushers all quit because the seats are covered in the aftermath of everybody shitting their pants, then a pretty standard backlash ensues. It happened with The Blair Witch Project, and it's happening again now with Paranormal Activity. And it's dumb and pointless.

Yes, Paranormal Activity is another ultra-low-budget, shot-on-home-video film with semi-professional actors, just like Blair Witch, with a tiny scope and scares built up more out of suggestion and mood than anything else. And like Blair Witch, it works. Director Oren Peli slowly and carefully crafts a mood of discomfort in what is supposed to be the most comfortable place of all - the modern middle-class suburban home - and proceeds to demolish any sense of safety through prudent use of sound effects and a smart use of visual space. On its face, a movie like this seems simplistic, but when you look at some of the failures in the genre over the last ten years - Blair Witch 2, Quarantine and, worst of all, Cloverfield (I still haven't seen Rec) - you realize that crafting a mood through camerawork and sound design isn't quite so easy after all. And mood is where a movie like Paranormal Activity lives and dies. And in this case, to this particular movie-goer, it was a success.

Granted, it's a small-scale movie with characters who aren't fully-inhabited literary characters, a la the characters in, say, The Innocents or The Haunting. Nor, however, do they need to be. But they are unique individuals, brought to life by solid (if unspectacular) performances, and rounded out by a dash of subtextual conflict - this is as much a movie about dealing with a douchebag boyfriend as it is about a vengeful demon, and the conflict between the characters is just as important as the conflict with their invisible tormentor (and in some ways, it's the same conflict).

One last note: the ending, which was apparently added well after the movie screened at festivals in 2007 and 2008, is a little dopey. It's appropriately big and climactic, yes, but it's also kind of a lame Hollywood wink at the audience. But I guess it's hard to argue with Steven Spielberg when he's giving notes.

7/10

Pieces (1982)

This scene is pretty much all you need to know about the partially-Spanish-made 1982 slasher Pieces - a college coed has just been murdered, chainsaw-style, in a locker room, and Lynda Day George here has discovered the body.

What I especially like about this moment is the total bewilderment the other actor has on his face - how is he supposed to react to this insane bit of performance? I'm just surprised he isn't cracking up.

Hopefully without sounding pretentious, Pieces is the ne plus ultra of the cheesy '80s slasher movie, a ludicrously-written, horribly-performed, completely gratuitous piece of trash exploitation that is nonetheless totally delightful. It's a movie that opens with a pre-teen murdering his mother with an axe, and ends with (spoiler alert!) a corpse squeezing a guy's crotch from beyond the grave. It's also a movie where this happens:


"My kung fu professor". God bless the schlockmeisters.

6/10