There's this band, see, and they have a show scheduled in a town called Grand Guignol (get it?). Some of the residents of the town don't want them playing there, because they play hard rock music. One concerned citizen tells the city council that, “(Rock musicians) can't play a note unless they eat drugs first!” How did they get a show scheduled in this town? What is the name of the band? Who cares? Eventually, the band is killed by a mock-Texas Chain Saw Massacre family and return from the dead to claim vengeance.
For the first ten minutes or so, chances are you'll be saying to yourself, “What the hell?” over and over again, completely flabbergasted. It's amazing. Not five minutes in, this guy takes pictures of a woman drowning two guys in a lake while a couple of dwarves (one of them horribly misshapen and obviously plastic) run around his legs. I am not making this up. This is the most bizarre movie I have seen in a good long while. Only Peter Jackson's Dead Alive has a more labyrinthine plot, but only because that plot makes sense when you think about it. Plus, the romantic subplot of this film is characterized by lines such as, “You're neat.”
I don't want to talk about much that happens in the film except to say that you will be surprised. I personally guarantee it. Hard Rock Zombies is a classic of terrible American cinema of the mid-1980s. It features hard rock, zombies, and a Nazi plot that comes completely out of nowhere. In fact, if you're not watching and listening very closely, you may miss its entrance into the action of the film entirely.
Hard Rock Zombies is more than highly recommended. It shouldn't even exist. It is a crime against nature. But it's also one of the best terrible movies I have ever seen, mixing inept filmmaking, terrible music, and a seemingly random system of editing that makes long stretches of the film truly surrealistic. Not to be missed at any cost.
The Hitcher (1986)
Rating: 6 Beans
For a long time, I had heard from people that The Hitcher was an excellent, scary movie. Maybe it had been built up too much. Or maybe it just isn't very good. At any rate, The Hitcher seems to me like a film that had a good start on it and fell apart because of typical horror movie character idiocy. Either that, or it's an allegorical film whose symbol-system I haven't figured out. But I doubt that.
C. Thomas Howell (Red Dawn, Soul Man) plays Jim Halsey, a young man driving a car from Chicago to California for a driveaway company. As the film starts, he's on the road and about to fall asleep. To fend off highway hypnosis, he picks up hitchhiker John Ryder (Rutger Hauer, Blade Runner). Before long, this hitchhiker has informed Jim that he killed the last person who gave him a ride and that the same thing is going to happen to Jim.
This is the part that the film does right. It throws the viewer directly into a situation which is not much fun. However, as the film drags on, Jim starts acting incredibly stupid. He pushes Ryder out of the car, but doesn't think to run him over or get to the nearest gas station and call the police. Later, he could have saved himself a lot of trouble by locking himself in a cell in the small town police station he ends up in. As it stands, the police think Jim is a multiple murderer and launch a huge manhunt to find him. He does nothing to change anyone's mind about this. It is terribly frustrating, and after a while I was just waiting for him to die so the idiocy would end.
The film does feature some mildly suspenseful scenes, and Jennifer Jason Leigh does a good job with her brief role. Overall, however, this is not the sort of movie that I would watch more than once. I would imagine it's the sort of movie most people wouldn't watch at all.
Hoodlum (1997)
Rating: 5.5 Beans
Anyone who has seen the ad campaign for Hoodlum knows exactly what to expect: a slick, stylish gangster film with plenty of 1920s set pieces, 1920s slang, and three actors who look born to play the parts they have been given. Laurence Fishburne plays Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, the black gangster who goes up against Dutch Shultz (played by Tim Roth) and Lucky Luciano (Andy Garcia). The film's only problem is that after the word “Hoodlum” disappears from the screen, the best part is over.
Hoodlum isn't so much a bad film as it is a film that should have been a two-night, prime-time miniseries. It looks like one. It sounds like one. And at over two hours, it certainly feels like one. Usually, I'm glad to sit through 2+ hour films; Hoodlum didn't need to be this long. Why? Well...
First off, we get about an hour of setting the story up. There are too many characters. It's not Batman and Robin, mind you, wherein the audience was assaulted by new characters with no life; it's that in Hoodlum, we have characters whose lives become too important to the filmmakers. Do we need that many scenes with Dutch Shultz and his henchmen to show how his black henchman (the always-entertaining Clarence Williams III) is treated like a slave and how Dutch is an insane bastard? No. Tim Roth looks like he's having fun, but he's on-screen way too much.
As the other leading men, Fishburne and Garcia do what they can with their parts. One of the film's strangest plot quirks is that as the story progresses, everyone seems to view Bumpy as a power-hungry madman. The problem? Fishburne plays Johnson with such restraint that there is no real reason for everyone to be freaking out. Every action he takes is logical and necessary in order to protect what is his. And of course, we are treated to more scenes of domestic discontent in Bumpy's life than gunfights (which are absolutely necessary for gangster pictures).
Lucky Luciano, on the other hand, is portrayed as the cool-headed but otherwise stereotypical Italian mafia guy. This is another of the film's crucial problems: it portrays many characters as flat stereotypes in trying to make a statement about how prevalent racism is in America, and how it has been that way since the 20s (something most audience members will undoubtedly already know). Every racial epithet in the book is slung (Bumpy is black, Luciano is Italian, there's an IRISH COP, for God's sake) with the curious exception of anti-Semitic sentiment (Shultz is Jewish). Being beaten over the head with this tired message becomes frustrating after the first hour or so.
Hoodlum is not a terrible movie, but you'd be better off making things up in your head based on the cool video box art and ad campaign.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)
Rating: 10 Beans
There's really not much left to be said about Ron Howard's big-screen, bigger-budget fiasco How the Grinch Stole Christmas (or simply The Grinch, according to all the movie posters). However, it simply cannot be overstated that this is a horrible, horrible movie. It served to remind me why I didn't like Jim Carrey's films until he did The Cable Guy. It would also have reminded me that the best stories don't need to be done up Hollywood-style to be good year after year, but I never forgot that.
Obviously, everyone working on this film did.
Remember in Dr. Seuss' book when The Grinch belched in the face of one of the Whos, and then that Who fell over because the belch stank so badly? No? How about when The Grinch stuck his dog's ass in the Mayor Who's face, and then the Mayor kissed it? No? Okay, last try: Remember when The Grinch stuck his face in between the breasts of the rich lady Who? You don't? Ah, gee...that's no good.
The Grinch seems to be torn in so many different directions that it's no wonder it's such an awful mess. On the one hand, it wants to be a real re-creation of an animated classic. On the other, it wants *desperately* to appeal to adults who have grown up with the story and who now expect some adult in-jokes in their children's entertainment. And finally, Jim Carrey. Honestly, he wouldn't have been bad if he'd been a bit restrained, but The Grinch doesn't seem at all like The Grinch. He seems like Jim Carrey under piles of makeup; in other words, not really like The Grinch at all.
The final product of this all these misguided intentions is a film that is brightly-colored and shrill, loud and often crude, and overbearingly hypocritical. Early on, there's a scene of all the Whos making fools of themselves by buying a lot of stuff and spending too much time focusing on material things. If you left the theater and walked into any toy store, you would be choked by the amount of Grinch me
rchandise on the shelves. Hmm.
There are, every so often, things that actually might shock a surprised chuckle out of the audience, but such moments are few and far between. Most of the film is cheap, loud, and obvious. There's entirely too much “adult” humor (boob jokes, the Whos having a key party, etc.), and the whole thing smacks of over-marketed, hyper-demographicked (new word) trash.
If you're looking for a truly unusual and entertaining Christmas film, seek out Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. It manages to be entertaining for all audiences, while not condescending to anyone. Plus it's imaginative and interesting, two things this film should have been for it to work.
Jack Frost (1996)
Rating: 8.5 Beans
Here's the setup: serial killer Jack Frost (Scott MacDonald) is being driven to his execution in a State Police Execution Transfer Vehicle (which looks suspiciously like a Good Humor truck) when an accident coats him in some sort of acid which makes his DNA fuse with the snow on the ground. Yeah. You read that right.
Soon, we're introduced to the cop who brought Jack down in the first place. Sam is played by Christopher Allport in a role which will no doubt bring him future small-town cop roles in other horrible straight-to-video films. Sam and his family are happy because Jack Frost is finally dead.
Only, see, he isn't dead, because his DNA fused with snow.
Jack Frost features so many bizarre killing scenes that it's hard to keep track of what happened to whom. A kid is decapitated by a sled after being knocked over by Snowman Jack. Then, for no good reason, Jack kills the kid's entire family, along with a few other unlucky souls.
It's all in good fun, though, with Jack spouting the obligatory one-liners after murdering someone (there's one pun which literally had me staggering about the room in disgust). See, it's just a dumb horror movie, but it knows this. The problem? We knew it first because of the stupid happy-to-evil snowman face on the cover of the video box.
This film embodies everything that straight-to-video stands for. It's all here: cheap-looking decapitated heads, shoddy police work, a town which is supposed to be in the middle of winter but, unfortunately, had to be shot on a gorgeous summer’s day. For its last half hour, though, Jack Frost loses its creative camp steam. After the snowman rape scene, it's pretty much over.
The mere fact that I had to use the phrase “snowman rape scene” should clue you in to what this movie's all about. Make sure when you rent it that you aren't alone, though: not that it's scary (at all), but then you might be able to deny having watched it, and that's cheating.
Jack Frost (1998)
Rating: 10 Beans
My first review for Bad Movie Night, lo those many years ago, was for Jack Frost, an awful (and incredibly bizarre) straight-to-video horror movie about a serial killer who is turned into a mutant snowman. When I saw that a new movie was coming out called Jack Frost, I felt obligated to see it. Now, I believe that any film called Jack Frost is going to be the weirdest damn movie I have ever seen, because this one is somehow more bewildering than the first.
Michael Keaton plays Jack Frost, vocalist/harmonica player for The Jack Frost Band. They are horrible. Anyway, it seems that every record label in the United States is after this band, which causes some trouble...family trouble. Eventually, Jack is killed in a car accident on the way to meet his family for Christmas. Luckily, Jack gave his son a magic harmonica so when he plays it Jack will be there. The boy plays the harmonica, and Jack returns as a snowman. Hijinks ensue.
From seeing the previews, I anticipated something out of the ordinary. However, I was not ready for the full effect of Jack Frost. It is Hollywood Manipulative Sentimentalism's finest hour. In attempting to appeal to everyone, the studio responsible for this mess created something beyond their power to control. At one point, a tear runs down Jack Frost's snowman cheek. God help me, I laughed. Out loud. I absolutely could not help it. Meanwhile, the lady two seats to my right cried for the entire running time. I almost felt bad, but then I didn't.
In a lot of ways, Jack Frost is a lot like Armageddon. It has ridiculous amounts of special effects (all done expertly, of course), and a completely predictable storyline which should theoretically guarantee misty eyes all around. But it's so weird that any part of the movie meant to be serious is drowned out in surrealist horror. It's a snowman. And it's scary. Scarier, in fact, than the creature in Jack Frost (1996), because this one is supposed to be Michael Keaton.
I'm not sure what that meant.
At any rate, Jack Frost is worth watching to see how profoundly screwed-up films can be made if someone somewhere sees money to be made. Want to see a bully get hit in the crotch, during a snowboard chase? Check. Want to hear said bully actually say, “Hey, Snow dad is better than no dad?” Check. Want to hear horrible, horrible music (soundtrack featuring the inexplicably popular Hanson)? Check. Jack Frost pretty much has every cliché you'd expect from a film aimed at young teens, but packs them in a framework more subliminally unsettling than Lost Highway. Thusly, I give Jack Frost my highest possible recommendation.
John Carpenter's Vampires (1998)
Rating: 8 Beans
Well, I never thought I'd actually find occasion to use the words “phallocentric” and “misogynistic” in conversation (and certainly not in a review for Bad Movie Night). However, there is no question that these words are needed to fully transmit the horrifying content of this awful, awful film.
One of the first things you see in this film is Daniel Baldwin urinating by the side of a road. This pretty much sets the tone for the entire movie. James Woods plays Jack Crow, the hardest-bitten of the hard-bitten vampire hunters hired by the Catholic Church to kill vampires. Along with Montoya (Baldwin, one of the least believable characters of Latin extraction since Jon Voight in Anaconda) and his group of good-timin' hunters, Crow manages to wipe out an entire “nest.”
Then things turn bad when the bad guy from Karate Kid III (Thomas Ian Griffith) shows up as master vampire Valek. Valek single-handedly kills all of Crow's team and all but one of the whores they were celebrating with. The one who survives is bitten, though, so she's on her way to becoming a vampire. Perhaps the most tragic aspect of this part of the film is that Katrina the prostitute is played by Sheryl Lee (Twin Peaks, Backbeat, Mother Night), who really should be getting better roles than this.
Crow and Montoya (the only member of the team to live) are assigned a new priest to roll with (Tim Guinee) and learn of a mysterious item called the Black Cross which can be used to make all vampires invulnerable to daylight. Crow and Guinee set out on adventures while Montoya keeps Katrina chained to a bed. Eventually, they all meet up for the climactic showdown. Not much action for as long as the movie is...
But on to my opening sentence. Aside from the Baldwin guy peeing by the side of the road, Crow taunts Valek by asking him if his equipment still works (if you catch my meaning) after all these years, and asks Father Adam if he “gets wood” when Crow beats him up and later when Adam gets up in some vampire action. Beside the fact that the stakes can be easily taken as phallic symbols.
And as for the misogyny...oh my. Literally, the only female characters in the film are whores or vampires. None of the vampire women have any lines (beside god-awful screaming noises), and Sheryl Lee spends about half the film naked, chained to a bed and being verbally and physically abused by Montoya. It's more disturbing than Kids.
This film is not without virtues, few as they are. One of the very few genuinely interesting ideas this film brings the vampire genre is the idea that the Catholic Church was instrumental in the creation of the vampire race. Everything else is pretty standard: stakes, sunlight, etc. There are also a few stylish shots and, to be fair, the whole vampires-as-demonic-animals instead of vampires-as-Tom-Cruise thing was nice for a change. So, if you're up for a night of subtle homoerotic undertones and vicious treatment of women, rent this film. All others should steer clear.
A Life Less Ordinary (1997)
; Rating: 4 Beans
Maybe it's the fact that I wanted to see this film so much, and I had to wait until it was released on video. Or maybe it's just that it isn't very good. In any case, A Life Less Ordinary was not the movie I was expecting. I don't think it's the movie anyone was expecting, actually, and I include most of the people involved in its production when I make that statement.
“But wait,” you say, “Isn't this film directed by Danny Boyle from a script by John Hodge, the infamous duo who brought us Trainspotting?” Yes, I say, but it doesn't matter. There are glints of the style used in Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, but they are buried in flashy scenery and shots of Cameron Diaz.
Robert (Ewan McGregor) is a janitor whose job is rendered useless by a new robot. He takes things into his own hands by kidnapping Celine (Cameron Diaz), the head of his corporation's daughter. As it turns out, Celine has been kidnapped before and trains Robert on proper kidnapping technique. This includes violent demands by phone and, eventually, karaoke and bank robbery. But one plot isn't enough for this film.
God has decided that there aren't enough people falling in love, the kind of love that lasts forever. He sends a mandate to his two best agents, O'Reilly (Holly Hunter) and Jackson (Delroy Lindo): If Celine and Robert don't fall in love, O'Reilly and Jackson have to stay on Earth. So they have to make this work by any means necessary. Inexplicably, the two resort to harrowing, violent measures rather quickly, such as having Robert dig his own grave and threatening to shoot him in the head when he is done. Also, various unpleasantries are visited upon O'Reilly, such as being run down by a truck.
So should A Life Less Ordinary have worked? That depends on whether or not the set-up for the film is solid, or if it is just as difficult as it sounds. The film has a few excellent scenes (the “Heaven” scenes in particular), and the cast is great: Holly Hunter (who makes the film worth watching all by herself), Delroy Lindo, Ian Holm, Tony Shaloub, Dan Hedaya, Ian McNeice, Stanley Tucci, the aforementioned Ewan McGregor and Cameron Diaz...so what happened? Everyone looks like they had a good time making this movie, but I didn't have quite as much fun watching it. A Life Less Ordinary is often fun, but mostly it is an interesting exercise in style rather than an entertaining film.
The Unrepentant Cinephile Page 95
