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Undo

September 25, 2009 chimpy Leave a comment

HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION

2002/15/86m

“Evil finds it’s way home.”

A.k.a. Halloween 8

Director: Rick Rosenthal / Writers: Larry Brand & Sean Hood / Cast: Busta Rhymes, Bianca Kajlich, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ryan Merriman, Katee Sackhoff, Sean Patrick Thomas, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Daisy McCrackin, Luke Kirby, Tyra Banks, Brad Loree.

Body Count: 10

Dire-logue: “Great legs Donna, what time do they open?”

If somebody came to you and asked you to write a sequel to a movie where the main character’s head was chopped off at the end, what would you do? This must’ve been a dilemma faced by the screenwriters of this much-maligned follow-up to 1998’s ultra-successful Halloween H20, which raked in enough to make further movies a certainty. So how does Michael get his head back? Easy, he never lost it.

We begin impressively enough with the reintroduction of Jamie Lee’s Laurie Strode, now locked up in an institution with a dissociative disorder after she found out that the man whose head she axed off was in fact a paramedic dressed up in her brother Michael’s boiler suit and mask, his larynx crushed to ensure no speaking. Hmmm, we all say and move on. Michael comes to get Laurie at the asylum and duly does so when her confused state of mind prevents her killing him when she has the chance.

This story arc done n’ dusted, we meet our final girl, Sara, a student at Haddonfield U (!?) who has been roped in by her good-time pals Jen and Rudy to entering a content to explore the Myers house during a Halloween night webcast for Dangertainment, a questionable production company run by Busta Rhymes and Tyra Banks. Well, the characters they play at least…

Rappers in horror films, eh? Several have turned up in the shores of the slasher genre; Snoop Dogg in Bones, LL Cool J in H20. Surprisingly, LL Cool J bypassed any issues of ego and did well in an undemanding role and has gone on to carve out quite an impressive on-screen CV, including techno-slasher flick Mindhunters and techno-shark cheesefest Deep Blue Sea. On the shoulders of Rhymes, however, is the nominal lead and to say he struggles with the task is somewhat of an understatement. Banks, on the other hand, has only what amounts to a cameo in a few scenes.

From Halloween to America’s Next Top Model

Six teens enter the Myers house and begin tooling around, looking at dusty objects, all of which seem a little too obvious and easy to find in a house that, according to the let’s-continue-to-ignore-the-sequels policy, has been empty since the sixties. Never mind the family who inhabited it during Halloween 6. Anyway, they pair off and begin to get killed by Michael, who has been residing in a cave-like dwelling beneath the basement. Unlike the previous film, there’s an abundance of brutal bloodletting here with some grisly final outs for the budding cyber stars.

When only Sara is left, she is aided by a group of teen partiers who are watching the show and communicate with her via web text thingies on a device I’ve never seen before or since. Eventually, she and Busta face off with MM, things wrap (thankfully no rap!) and there’s yer usual ‘he ain’t dead’ ending. For both actually as Busta Rhymes seems to be as invincible as Mike. Oh yeah, there’s that line, the one everyone in the cinema groaned at: “trick or treat…motherfucka!”

Despite how ridiculous Resurrection is – and it’s really, really ridic. – and Rhymes sub-dreadful acting abilities, not to mention the martial arts sequence, there’s still some fun to be found here, all you have to do is look for it. Detach it from the rest of the story, pretend it’s a different film altogether, just a slasher flick in an old house with some webcams and Resurrection becomes quite an entertaining B-flick with some good kills, nice chases and the added touch of the remote guides who try to help Sara escape. There’s some decent casting at the teen level too, unfortunately overshadowed by Rhymes’ top-billing: Sean Patrick Thomas, Katee Sackhoff (pre–BSG) and Thomas Ian Nicholas look like they’re having a laugh, even if they might remove this title from their select filmography in the future.

On the flip side, it’s obvious why it’s the likely most-hated of the Michael films, pre-Zombie remakes, there’s little to no respect for what went before, either in H20 or the mid-sequels. By 2002, the reality-TV based horror was already dated, which is unfortunate as the film was due for a Halloween 2001 release but returned for re-shoots when Miramax considered it too unscary.

Some have suggested that it would have been a good move to have Sara turn out to be Jamie Lloyd, not dead after all. I agree with this, it would have served as a good launching pad for the next film or two. Alas, they chose otherwise and when mainstay producer Moustapha Akkad was killed in 2005, all plans for Halloween 9 were washed away and the remake came to be. Bad times.

Blurbs-of-interest: Rick Rosenthal directed the 1981 Halloween II and made a cameo in Lost After Dark; Ryan Merriman later took the lead in Final Destination 3; Daisy McCrackin was in A Crack in the Floor. If you don’t know what other slasher flicks Jamie Lee Curtis has been in then why are you here?

Reviews

GUTTERBALLS

September 25, 2009 chimpy 4 comments

gutterballs 2008/96m

“Heads will roll bowl.”

Director/Writer: Ryan Nicholson / Cast: Alastair Gamble, Mihola Terzic, Nathan Witte, Wade Gibb, Candice Lewald, Dan Ellis, Jeremy Beland, Trevor Gemma, Nathan Dashwood, Scott Alonzo, Jimmy Blais, Danielle Munro, Stephanie Schlacter, Saraphina Bardeaux.

Body Count: 13

Dire-logue: “Those balls are shitty and used…just like your underwear.”

Sometimes a product seems to garner a word of mouth that doesn’t ring true. Such was the case of Gutterballs last year; such a great, nostalgic slasher flick yadda yadda yadda… My spider senses told me otherwise and, quite smugly, I was proven right when I watched it earlier today. Talk about nauseating…

Within a few minutes, we’re subjected to an extreme close up of a mini-skirt, no-pants-wearing girl’s undercarriage. Graphically. This is accompanied by two groups of people, a quartet of guys who hate the other pack, some girls, a pre-snip transvestite and three other guys (I wasn’t sure who they were), shouting obscenities at each other and no more. Barely a sentence of the following 95 minutes goes by without the word ‘fuck’ in it. I swear like a brickie but have an extensive enough vocab to get through most social situations without having to, something these folks are incapable of.

A fight breaks out that leads to the gang-rape of no-pants, who eventually has a skittle shoved up shown crack. Naturally, she is upset about this and when the entire cast return to the Xcalibur Lanes the next night, they’re locked in and picked off one by one by a psycho with a bag over his head, who favours using sharpened skittles and bowling balls to kill. There’s a grim member-slicing moment for the tranny and a head shoved in a ball polisher before numbers are whittled down to the last couple for the obligatory unmasking and exposition blah, by which time I was both bored and tired.

Gutterballs does try in some areas, there’s a funky sub-disco soundtrack and little reliance of modern technology to aid the victims but it’s all crushed beneath a script so horribly dismal that the actors are given absolutely no range to work with, they’re just antagonistic assholes who can’t utter a profanity-free sentence. It’s odd to see so much male nudity, albeit some prosthetic but the film is just a train wreck of juvenile cliches seemingly designed to make morons laugh at the excesses of gore and skin on parade, glued together with crap dialogue but hearing “the C word” every fifth sentence, wanton homophobia and a plot my three-year-old nephew could’ve written doesn’t do it for me. Spend your rental money on a couple of games at the bowl-o-plex.

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THE CLOWN AT MIDNIGHT

September 20, 2009 chimpy Leave a comment

clownatmidnight 1998/18/86m

“So many victims, so little time.”

Director: Jean Pellerin / Writer: Kenneth J. Hall / Cast: Sarah Lassez, James Duval, Christopher Plummer, Margot Kidder, Tatyana Ali, Melissa Galianos, J.P. Grimard, Ryan Bittle, Liz Crawford.

Body Count: 9

Dire-logue: “Once you go down there I have a feeling we won’t be seeing you again.”

This grandiose slice of cheddar hails from Canada, not famous enough for its quite sterling record when it comes to quality slasher flicks. Sad to say that’s not the case here…

A group of off-the-shelf high schoolers are helping out their drama teacher Margot Kidder (in a role that accounts for all of ten minutes’ screen time) to restore an old opera house that’s been closed since the leading diva was moidered by her jealous lover. “Coincidentally,” one of the group happens to be the daughter of said murder victim and spends most of her time brooding about it.

What this made-for-video combo of Stagefright and Scream 2 comes down to is a cash-in blag on the success of the films it’s aping. This said, there are some fairly decent aspects at play: it’s certainly well produced with some adventurous photography creeping in here and there – along with the boom – but ultimately suffers from exaggerated ‘token’ characters who’re given dreadful lines: “Ashley carries a cellular in her bag,” “Thank God for technology.” They’re all here in full force: the bitchy girl, her jock boyfriend, sassy black girl, misunderstood rebel… Disappointingly, the kooky girl who thinks it’s all paranormal (“spirits don’t hurt people, not in anything I’ve ever read!”) and the gay kid are offed with much prejudice.

Aren’t clowns normally scary?

Then there’s the killer, dressed up in full clown garb as was the killer of Opera Diva Lady in the prologue. But his presence doesn’t stop another character dressing up in exactly the same make-up to frighten Tatyana Ali’s sassy girl. Whatever happened to Tatyana, I wonder? Well here, she goes all Jada Pinkett and dies with an expression appears to cross constipation with childbirth. The fiend’s identity isn’t even worth trying to figure out, it’s so damn obvious. Given the ‘past event trauma’, there’s barely anyone to choose from as a likely suspect. Chalk this one up with the hoards of other video flicks of the late 90s.

Blurbs-of-interest: scribe Hall wrote Terror Night (a.k.a. Bloody Movie); Margot Kidder played Barb in the original, and therefore perfect, Black Christmas; James Duval was in May; Ryan Bittle was in Devil in the Flesh.

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September Face-off: HALLOWEEN 6 vs… Itself!?

September 18, 2009 chimpy 3 comments

October be comin’, October means Halloween, Halloween means Halloween, Halloween means Michael Myers and Michael Myers means sequels galore… As it happens, the sixth instalment, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers was one of the first films in the franchise I saw on cable back in the 90s and I’ve always liked it more than I probably should.

Then there’s The Producer’s Cut, a vividly different take on the story, which was meddled with until the version that was released came about. Some folks say it’s better, some folks say it ain’t, some folks don’t know what the hell you’re on about… Let us compare thy Halloween sixes and see…

HALLOWEEN: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS

1995/18/85m

“Haddonfield is ready to celebrate Halloween… So is Michael Myers!”

A.k.a. Halloween 6; Halloween 666: The Origin of Michael Myers

Director: Joe Chappelle / Writer: Daniel Farrands / Cast: Donald Pleasence, Paul Rudd, Marianne Hagan, Mitchell Ryan, Kim Darby, Bradford English, Keith Bogart, Mariah O’Brien, Leo Geter, J.C. Brandy, Devin Gardner, George P. Wilbur.

Body Count: 14-ish

Dire-logue: “Relax your crack, sweetheart!”

At the end of 1989’s Halloween 5, little Jamie Lloyd – Laurie Strode’s daughter – was taken to Haddonfield Police HQ after escaping from Michael Myers for the 37th time. Michael was residing in a cell until a mystery ‘man in black’ came along and shot up the place, killing a load of cops and releasing Michael. The film ended with Jamie – upon discovering said cop corpses – quivering in fear at the prospect of her never ending sprint in the opposite direction of her psychotic uncle.

Now, Halloween 5 was a sucky one, second only of the originals in its ornate suckiness to the non-slasher Halloween III. Let’s just not comment on the Rob Zombie ‘re-imaginings’ here. The introduction of the Man in Black would’ve been weird and very annoying for long term fans as they had to wait six years for the next sequel. In this time, the franchise had been sold to Miramax and they decided to chuck out a quickie follow-up.

Jamie Lloyd (now played by J.C. Brandy after Danielle Harris walked away, reportedly insulted by the fee Dimension were willing to pay her), gives birth amidst scary druidy folks in the dismal surroundings of a sanitorium. A nurse helps her escape with the baby and Michael gives chase, killing her but not before Jamie took the opportunity to hide her newborn.

In Haddonfield, relatives of the Strode clan are living in the old Myers house, where six-year-old Danny keeps having nightmares about the Man in Black. His struggling single mom Kara is trying to juggle school and her tosser-of-a-dad. To add to her problems, she thinks the guy across the street is perving on her. Not so, said guy is in fact a grown up Tommy Doyle (the kid Jamie Lee was babysitting in t’original) and he’s convinced Michael is heading back to town… Tommy finds Jamie’s baby at the bus station and happens to run into Doc Loomis at a hospital. The good ol’ Doc has been yanked out of retirement by his old cronie Dr Wynn (Ryan). Tommy spouts loads of bollocks about this Thorn Symbol thingy to Kara but even after multiple viewings I couldn’t tell you what it’s about.

Michael returns and begins stalking and killing off the secondary characters while Loomis teams up with Tommy after Kara and her son are kidnapped by the Man in Black’s Druidy followers and events shift to the asylum where we’re privy to an awesome strobelight operating theatre massacre (which is great with the lights out) before the showdown between Loomis and Michael.

HALLOWEEN 6: THE PRODUCER’S CUT

1995/96m

Body Count: 8

Dire-logue: “I tried to tell you in the hospital, I think Michael is under the influence of an evil rune…” – Tommy blames a pebble for two decades of death.

So what of The Producer’s Cut? Well, the first 80 minutes (up to the point where Kara leaps from the second floor window of Tommy’s house) is largely the same, give or take a few scene extensions – we learn Loomis had facial skin graphs – and the fact that Jamie does not die in the barn, but remains in a coma for about half the film until the Man in Black busts a cap in her ass head.

So instead of Tommy and Kara running around the corridors of the asylum with Michael tailing them, we get some sub-Rosemary’s Baby Satantic rituals with people in hooded cloaks and Kara tied to a plinth awaiting sacrifice at the hands of little Danny until she blurts to Michael that he is the father of Jamie’s bub. More running ensues but here with Tommy dressed in one of the stupid cloaks that makes him look like a member of some 80’s sequin-glam-sparkle electro band, but he does some stuff with rune stones and makes Mikey impotent for the moment (“it worked, the power of the runes stopped him.”) It ends with Michael dancing off into the night dressed as the MIB.

Although there’s something a bit familiar about the Druid get-up…

Ah ha!…Agnetha strikes again!!

VICTOR: THE THEATRICAL CUT

So more Thorn, less murder. The body count was dramatically enhanced by the reshoots, apparently at Chappelle’s insistence as he thought Donald Pleasence was ‘boring’. Bet he feels a bit shitty about it now, being that DP died shortly after filming wrapped. Subsequently, the cast were angry with the re-edit but, to give Chappelle his due, the theatrical cut is better. Halloween is a slasher series and The Producer’s Cut turns it into some sort of wannabe Omen offshoot, the final version at least has the sense to keep close to its body count routes.

There’s still much to like in both versions’ slow build, which return to a central Halloweenie theme, lots of pumpkins, trick or treaters, lightning and homages to the original: Kara’s frantic chase from the Myers house to hammer on the door for help across the street and her parents are named John and Debra – awwww. A pre-fame Rudd does well in a role he clearly despised and Hagan makes for a likeable heroine in Kara. It’s a shame that Halloween H20 decided to ‘clear the slate’ on the hard graft parts 4-6 put into the story as it could’ve been interesting to see where they took us next.

Blurbs-of-interest: J.C. Brandy was later in Devil in the Flesh; Leo Geter was in Silent Night, Deadly Night; George P. Wilbur played Myers in Halloween 4; as well as the preceding Michael Halloween films, Donald Pleasence was also in Alone in the Dark and Phenomena. Marianne Hagan won the lead in BreadCrumbs in 2011.

SILO KILLER

September 17, 2009 chimpy Leave a comment

silo1 2002/89m

“It’s harvest time!”

Director/Writer: Bill Koning / Cast: Brandon Malone, Katie Carroll, Carter Hagerman, Jared Conti, Brian Reid, Jamie Morris, Heather Morris, Dana Ratcliff, Sandra Quoos, Richard Kindle.

Body Count: 20

Dire-logue: “You are dumber than a bag of shit.”

Just because The Blair Witch Project raked in a huge profit ratio doesn’t mean any talentless dickheads with camcorders should put their own 90 minutes of shit on to home video for retail. Such is the background of Silo Killer, an antagonistically dreadful gathering of slasher off-cuts that manifests itself in a badly produced, sexist, and even racially ambiguous end product.

After the obligatory murder-of-a-teenage-girl opening, a group of teens (some of whom don’t even seem to know each other) go camping in the dusty plains of Arizona, despite both a dangerous escaped convict on the loose and a recent history of missing and murdered teenagers. They’re each killed off by an axe-wielding nut hiding behind a rubbery Old Father Time mask before the surprisingly blunt twist that is just unexpected enough to save Silo Killer from half-star hell.

Not only is the acting the pits, but the characters themselves are possibly the most annoying group of people ever to grace the screen (especially the guy who ends up with all his limbs cut off). The external photography – which makes up most of the film – has a strong yellow tint to it (possibly piss) and the titular silo barely makes an appearance, which is a pity because watching a 90-minute still of it would be preferable to witnessing any of the thesps shouting their crappy lines. Unbelievably, this had since had a sequel! Ugh.

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