The Unrepentant Cinephile

by Jason Coffman

  Monster Brawl (2011)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 12 June 2012

  When I was a kid, I was really into monsters. I had a friend who was really into WWF wrestling. If Monster Brawl had existed back then, we would probably have watched it a million times. That really tells you about all you need to know about Monster Brawl: if you’re really into monsters and you’re really into the WWF-style theatrics of pro wrestling, you’re almost guaranteed to enjoy Monster Brawl. If you’re a fan of one and not necessarily the other, you may still have some fun here, and it goes without saying that if you hate both monsters and wrestling you should probably just move along and watch something else. There is nothing here for you.

  Opening with Lance Henriksen’s unmistakable voice explaining the setup, Monster Brawl quickly moves into the pre-game show. Dave Foley and Art Hindle star as color commentators Buzz Chambers and “Sasquatch Sid” Tucker, flown in to a cursed graveyard in Michigan for the first annual Monster Brawl. Eight monsters in two divisions– The Creatures and The Undead– battle it out for middleweight titles in each division and one champion heavyweight to rule over them all. Jimmy Hart, a familiar face to WWF/WWE fans, performs the fighter intros and provides commentary between matches as well. The structure of the film is virtually identical to that of an actual wrestling broadcast, with Tales of the Tape breaking down the fighters’ stats and short “origin” stories filling in where commercial breaks usually go.

  The monsters are a mix of the expected (Werewolf, Frankenstein) and the more unusual (Cyclops, “Swamp Gut”). Strangely, almost all of the monsters seem to have been trained in classic pro wrestling moves, as there are plenty of leg locks, jumping from the ropes, and body slams. A good chunk of the film’s run time is made up of fighting, naturally, so fortunately it’s well choreographed and occasionally slapstick. The main problem with Monster Brawl is the simple fact that this is a fine idea for a short film or a series of shorts, but drawn out to feature length the concept starts to wear out its welcome, especially in the final match. And without resorting to spoilers, it’s hard to say that the film even has an ending– clearly, the filmmakers are ready to get Monster Brawl 2 out there as soon as possible.

  There’s really not much to say about Monster Brawl: once you know the concept, you’re either on board on you’re not. The makeup and practical effects are mostly great, and any CGI is kept to an unobtrusive minimum for the most part. The fighting is cartoonish and theatrical, just as it should be. If there’s one thing to be said for Monster Brawl that is both its highest praise and most damning critique, it’s that the movie gives you exactly what you expect, nothing more and nothing less. It’s mindless fun, and that’s all it aspires to be.

  The Moth Diaries (2011)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 28 August 2012

  A film adaptation of a young adult novel about a vampire at a girls’ school must have seemed like a no-brainer proposition for the producers of The Moth Diaries. Indeed, Rachel Klein’s 2003 debut sounds tailor-made for a film adaptation in the post-Twilight market: A nameless narrator, now in her 40s, looks back on the diary she wrote as a 16-year-old girl attending a private girls’ school in the late 1960s. Her close friendship with her best friend is threatened by the appearance of a mysterious student whom the narrator believes to be a vampire. Mary Harron’s adaptation of the novel keeps the basic concept, but jettisons the period for a modern setting, and the results are unfortunately bland.

  Rebecca (Sarah Bolger) is excited to return to Brangwyn, an exclusive girls’ school, after spending the summer with her severely depressed mother (Anne Day-Jones). Rebecca has missed her friends, but particularly her best friend Lucie (Sarah Gadon), with whom she shares a very close friendship that (to outside observers) borders on the romantic. Soon after the girls return to their dorm, Rebecca is asked to help a new student find her way around. This student is Ernessa Bloch (Lily Cole), an imposing but mostly quiet girl that Rebecca finds difficult to be around. Ernessa and Lucie start spending a lot of time with each other, driving a wedge between Rebecca and Lucie. Worse, when strange things begin to happen around the campus, Rebecca comes to suspect Ernessa is not just another student, but a malevolent force preying on Lucie.

  The Moth Diaries has a strong air of a film that had a troubled production, an impression not helped by the fact that it runs just over 80 minutes including its end credits. Characters act strangely or (seemingly) without motivation, and it’s not hard to imagine large swaths of the film’s action have been chopped in the interests of keeping the story moving as briskly as possible. Once things start getting really weird in the last act, the tonal shift is jarring. Instead of steadily ramping up to the crazy stuff, The Moth Diaries seems to just drive into a wall. Additionally, updating the story to modern day was probably not the best idea– the film’s universe is almost entirely contained in the school grounds, which would have made the period setting relatively easy to pull off. Instead, we get to watch the girls play a Garbage song in Rock Band to indicate their carefree early days before Ernessa started her meddling.

  This period setting issue is particularly grating given that Harron makes the film look like a period piece. The film’s muted palette is interesting and perfectly suited to the film’s subject matter, but again it’s somewhat jarring that the film takes place in modern day. The performances are solid, and Lily Cole is particularly effective as the menacing, hypnotic Ernessa. Despite the film’s YA source material, The Moth Diaries lands squarely in the realm of the R-rating, which may explain why it had such an abbreviated theatrical run: it’s difficult to market a film to teenagers that they technically can’t get into without their parents. Unfortunately, the strangest (and most interesting) parts of the film happen much too late, and most of The Moth Diaries is spent wondering how such compelling source material could have ended up as such a dramatically inert film.

  Mother of Tears (2007)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 3 July 2008

  It’s been a long, long wait for horror fans, but Dario Argento has finally completed his “Three Mothers” trilogy, which began with Suspiria and continued with Inferno. Argento is one of the most well-respected horror filmmakers still working today–his first film as director, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, was released in 1970, just two years after his contemporary and sometimes collaborator George Romero released Night of the Living Dead. It seems like an odd coincidence that both Romero and Argento have returned this year with highly anticipated new installments in long-lived film series; the fact that each film is disappointing in its own way is perhaps inevitable.

  Mother of Tears opens with the discovery in an old church cemetery: workers find a body buried outside the walls of the cemetery and buried with a strange box of artifacts. The church sends the box off to Rome to be investigated by Michael Pierce (Adam James), an expert on occult history. Before Michael can get to it, the box is opened by his museum coworkers Giselle (Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni) and Sarah (Asia Argento). In short order, an evil monkey (!) appears along with a woman and three demonic figures who dispatch Giselle and set Sarah off on a course with her mysterious past while Mater Lachrymarum (Moran Atias) gathers all the witches in the world to Rome to begin the new Age of Witches.

  While Suspiria and Inferno were strange and nightmarish, defined by garish colors and surreal set pieces, Mother of Tears jettisons any sense of dreamy atmosphere, instead aiming directly for gory shock. Like Diary of the Dead, Argento seems content to use a sledgehammer where previously he would have wielded a scalpel: Romero’s Diary found the writer/director underestimating his audience for perhaps the first time in his career, constantly returning to the same ideas and phrases to pound his point home. In Mother of Tears, Argento relies mostly on lazy jump-scares and crude (if effective) displays of explicit violence instead of the carefully orchestrated suspense of his best work.

  There are numerous legitimate complaints to lodge against Mother of Tears, not least
its use of some truly awful CG effects (which ratchet up the film’s cheese factor substantially), and the fact that all the witches in the movie look like they were dressed for a 1980s goth-rock video. Additionally, there’s the fact that, like a lot of mid- to late-period Argento films starring Asia, the creepiest scene in the movie is the shower scene where the camera lingers on her nude body. The acting is all over the place, with Asia doing her best to hold it together while the rest of the cast runs the gamut from bored and distracted to insane overacting, and the film’s finale is inarguably silly (which is bad enough) and severely anticlimactic (which is worse).

  Still, Argento fans horror fans in general will find flashes of promise that Mother of Tears could have been something more. There are some brief shots of depraved goings-on in the catacombs of the film’s finale, sadly not explored enough to give anything more than a hint that Argento wanted to stage some images like the ones found in the medieval paintings of the tortures of the damned that run through the opening credits montage. There are a few genuinely shocking moments of sadistic violence, imaginative death scenes that threaten to restore some of the nightmarish tone of the other “Three Mothers” films. Ultimately, Mother of Tears is little more than an especially gruesome late-period Argento film, and still more interesting than almost anything he has done in the last decade.

  Mother’s Day (1980)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 7 September 2012

  Anyone who’s spent much time trolling the depths of low-budget exploitation film history is sure to be familiar with the name “Troma.” The company, founded in the early 1970s, is still a force in independent cinema to this day, recently releasing over a hundred films to be viewed for free on Youtube. However, Troma’s heyday was in the 1980s and 1990s, when they released such video-store hits as their flagship franchise-launcher The Toxic Avenger (1984) and Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D. (1990). Troma made a name for themselves by smartly marketing low-budget product that quickly turned a profit, and one of their early successes that paved the way for The Toxic Avenger was Charles Kaufman’s Mother’s Day, released in 1980 just as the teen slasher craze was ramping up. Now, following their recent “remake” of the film, Anchor Bay has reissued the original Mother’s Day on DVD and Blu-ray.

  Abbey (Nancy Hendrickson), Jackie (Deborah Luce) and Trina (Tiana Pierce) are three college best friends who get together once a year to have a weekend away from it all. For their ten-year anniversary, Jackie decides to take the girls out to a remote lake in a forest called Deep Barons, far from any big city or much of anything else, for that matter. After an opening sequence that introduces us to the girls’ current lives– Abbey takes care of her ranting, bedridden mother in Chicago, Jackie lives in New York and lets her actor boyfriend walk all over her, and Trina lives in Beverly Hills, married to a rich older man– the three meet up, Jackie blindfolds her pals, and they strike out for the Deep Barons. A creepy local warns Jackie and her “lez-been” friends not to go out to Deep Barons, but in typical horror film fashion, they blithely ignore his advice and hit the gravel road.

  Unsurprisingly, Deep Barons is not entirely unoccupied. Living in a house somewhere deep in the forest is Mother (Beatrice Pons) and her two adult sons Ike (Frederick Coffin) and Addley (Michael McCleery). Mother seems to have a problem with anyone else coming into the forest, and has trained her sons to attack anyone they come across and bring them back home to torture them for her amusement. Abbey, Jackie and Trina are discovered after a long day of hiking, swimming and reminiscing, and Ike and Addley manage to drag the women to their home. What follows is more I Spit on Your Grave than Friday the 13th, with Ike and Addley torturing and raping Jackie while her friends try to figure out a way to escape the house and get help.

  Mother’s Day is an odd film. Writer/director Charles Kaufman (brother of Troma co-found Lloyd Kaufman) spends a lot of time with the film’s heroines, which is helpful in building a relationship between the characters and the audience. Unfortunately, he also spends quite a bit of time with Mother and her boys, who use up a lot of screen time yelling (Mother) and acting like disturbed children (the boys). This is probably meant to make the audience feel good about the situation once the tables are turned and the victimized women stand up to these villains, but it’s largely unnecessary. Their behavior is unpleasant enough that any revenge visited upon them is welcome. Kaufman also sneaks in some surprising subtext about the relationships between mothers and sons, and especially mothers and daughters, but to discuss that in much detail would be to spoil some of the film’s most interesting surprises.

  Hitting at about the same time as the wave of early-1980s slasher films and spending a decade on the shelves of video stores everywhere put Mother’s Day in a position of being both an important part of Troma history and an influential film for horror filmmakers who grew up in the 1980s. It’s not quite as outrageous as much of their later work, but Mother’s Day is an interesting look at what Troma was up to before their mop-wielding hero gave the word “Troma” the very specific connotations it retains to this day.

  Mother’s Day (2012)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 8 May 2012

  On paper, a remake of Troma’s 1980 film Mother’s Day seems like both a terrible idea and one that probably would have made a fair amount of money at the height of the Saw era. The fact that the film has missed that particular moment is not really an issue, however, as this version of Mother’s Day is not a strict remake of the original, but instead a sort of hostage thriller that keeps the barest of concepts from the original film (a scary mother and her monstrous, amoral children) and ditches pretty much everything else. Instead of a “teens in the woods” story, this modern Mother’s Day transplants the action to the suburbs, a concept not without merit, but the execution (while grisly) is somewhat unsatisfying.

  Troubled husband and wife Beth and Daniel (Jaime King and Frank Grillo) are having a Friday night house party for several of their friends in their new home, recently acquired after a foreclosure. Daniel has reinforced the basement to act as a tornado shelter, which is good since a vicious storm is set to roll over their neighborhood later that evening. While the partygoers mingle and flirt downstairs, a trio of bank-robbing brothers enters the house to hide out, thinking their mother still lives there. They quickly discover this is not the case, and while Johnny (Matt O’ Leary) bleeds out on a nice new sofa from a serious gunshot wound, hair-trigger Addley (Warren Kole) terrorizes the houseguests and seemingly level-headed Ike (Patrick John Flueger) tries to keep a lid on the situation and contact their mother, Natalie (Rebecca De Mornay).

  Once Natalie arrives along with the boys’ sister Lydia (Deborah Ann Woll), she sets everyone to work and attempts to figure out an escape plan. Daniel is put in charge of making sure everyone in the basement behaves (i.e. doesn’t try to escape), Beth is sent out with Ike to use the friends’ credit cards to get the cash Natalie needs for their contact to get them across the border, and Daniel’s friend George (Shawn Ashmore) is tasked with keeping Johnny alive long enough for the family to make their escape. Tensions mount among the friends in the basement, with Daniel wanting to follow Natalie’s orders and his friend Treshawn (Lyriq Bent) demanding action, convinced Natalie’s word that cooperation will lead to their safe release is a lie.

  For most of its first half, Mother’s Day effectively builds tension with its parallel situations and is best when it exposes the frayed ends of the relationships between the friends and the couples being held captive. Treshawn is itching for a fight, but his girlfriend Gina (Kandyse McClure) agrees with Daniel that cooperation is their best chance of survival. Annette (Briana Evigan) is angry at her ineffective fiance Dave (Tony Nappo) for not doing anything when Addley threatened to rape her if she got out of line. George’s girlfriend Melissa (Jessie Rusu), a single mother, is just terrified and panicked, while Daniel’s work friend Julie (Lisa Marcos) is shell-shocked. Meanwhile, George tries to convince Lydia that her mother is misleading her and Bet
h tries desperately to find a way to escape Ike and find help.

  As the film continues, though, keeping the action going outside the house with Ike and Beth requires more and more elaborate postponing that eventually becomes tiresome. Beth does something wrong/tries to escape, Ike punishes her/captures her, repeat. Finally, writer Scott Milam resorts to having characters make painfully awful decisions that serve to extend the running time and frustrate the audience, but serve little other purpose. A few characters making a couple of decisions based on common sense would probably have shaved half an hour off the film. Once the bad decisions start rolling and the guns start blazing, Mother’s Day finally degenerates into a by-the-numbers thriller, although one with some particularly nasty kills and a couple of small surprises near the end. Still, it’s nearly worth the price of admission for De Mornay’s cold-blooded performance alone, and despite the somewhat disappointing last act, Mother’s Day is still a tense, gruesome thriller that mostly delivers.

  Mum & Dad (2008)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 20 May 2009

  I’ll say this right up front: Steven Sheil’s Mum & Dad is a difficult film to watch. I honestly can’t remember the last time a movie made me cringe when a character was about to open a door, just out of sheer animal horror at what might happen next. It says a lot about Sheil’s talents, though, that I found myself compelled to watch and see it through, even felt a weird responsibility about sticking it out with the film’s heroine. Mum & Dad keeps driving forward relentlessly, with a jet-black sense of humor buried under all the depravity. If you can stand to watch it long enough to dig that deep, that is.