Ten Statements About....EVIL DEAD 2 a.k.a. EVIL DEAD 2: DEAD BY DAWN (1987)

Remember...he's not laughing at you....he's just laughing...

"In 1300 AD they called this man the uh, 'hero from the sky'. He was prophesied to have destroyed the evil."
"He didn't do a very good job...."

1) You know what's brilliant about this film, and something very few people mentions?  This is the first Sam Raimi superhero origin film.  Bruce Campbell's Ash experiences a trauma, rises above it, takes command of his destiny, gains what amounts to super-powers and ends up fulfilling a prophecy.  It even has a 'suiting up' scene to represent Ash's transition into herodom!  The only reason we probably don't realize it's a super-hero film is because it's surrounded by this wacky haunted house/demon horror film!

2) I know there are some people who deride Bruce Campbell as a terrible actor (Hi, Kevin!), but this film really needed his physicality.  There are moments of extreme physical comedy, especially involving That Hand, that I can't envision another actor selling effectively.

3) And speaking of That Hand...I like how this film is blocked out so well that we forget entirely about it not once, but twice, creating these genuine shocks for the audience.  But then...

4) ...we are talking about a film so fast paced that the audience barely has time to breathe, let alone think about any plot holes.  Raimi barrels through the plot so fast that we're swept up in the insanity.  This is one of the few films I can confidently call a thrill ride because it never bothers to give us much of a lull.

A severed possessed hand is giving you the finger.
Your arguments are no longer valid.

5) I get that we're not dealing with Grade A actors in this film.  That being said, I do think that Sarah Berry's Annie doesn't quite work.  Her introduction and expository scenes are amongst the very few things that slows down the film, and she never quite convinces me that she's some archaeologist type.  Truth be told, I'm pretty sure she's only there because a) She's a big screamer and b) she looks a little bit of alright in those knee-high socks.

6) Bless Sam Raimi for insisting on using so much stop-motion animation.  Sure, some of it is kinda hinky (although the worst example--Linda's 'dance'--make up for it in its inventiveness), but it gives the film a distinctive flavor all its own...and as a devotee of Ray Harryhausen, I ate up every second of it.

7) In this world where even the slightest movie plot is stretched out to two hours, I am so glad this film is roughly eighty minutes in length.  It makes the constant barrage of gags and grue last just long enough we don't tire of it.

"Gee, your hair smells...edible!"

8) Boy, given everything that Sam Raimi puts his best friend and his brother through...well, I guess there's a price for loyalty.

9) Supposedly, the whole reworking of Evil Dead 1 in this one's first five or so minutes came from Raimi literally being unable to get the rights to use any original footage.  But all told, I think it works pretty well because the retread takes such a short time, and because Raimi is able to bring to bear on that sequence everything he learned in the intervening years.  And while this reshooting thing doesn't work as well when Raimi does it again in Army Of Darkness (mainly because it's hard to get away from the fact that Linda is being played there by Bridget Fonda), this time it gives us a cue that the story we're about to see may have a different tone and feel to the previous one.

10) And it's that tone that may make it unique--in a way, this is the film that reflects Raimi's sensibilities the truest.  It's got comic-book-y elements, lots of slapstick and lots of outrageous shocks and gore.  Everything that Raimi does in the future can be seen in the entrails of this film.

Overall...a classic little film that shows a great filmmaker in his embryonic stages.  Essential viewing if you're interested in horror or indie filmmaking.

Ten Statements About....INSIDIOUS CHAPTER TWO (2013)

Don’t look now, Barbara Hershey! Don’t look!

“It’s been so long since I felt pain. I forgot how much I enjoyed the sensation. Not as much as I enjoyed inflicting it."

1) This, ladies and gentlemen, is a well-made script for a sequel. It builds on the original, doesn’t contradict it, gives some secondary characters room to shine, and even clarifies some of the hazier concepts from the first film. It works seamlessly as a ‘true’ second chapter to the story and not another adventure hastily tacked on to pull more money out of fans of the first film.

2) Patrick Wilson is really having fun with his part in this. The script by James Wan and Leigh Whammel gives Wilson an opportunity to play the kind of part I don’t think he’s ever had the chance to assay before, and boy does Patrick dig in!

3) I am somewhat surprised at how much time Barbara Hershey gets in this part of the story, given how she was almost incidental to the first film. But then, Wan and Whammel’s creation of that second layer to the story justifies her taking the position as major player. Hell, she’s practically the female lead, which works because...

This is the extent of Rose Byrne's contribution to this film.

4) As much as I love Rose Byrne, her Renai is a bit, well, drippy in this one. There are long stretches where she’s there only to be The Girl School Screamer to be menaced by the evil entity of the piece (which, come to think of it, makes her the inversion of Barbara Hershey’s character in The Entity, which was nowhere near as good as this film). When she finally takes up a pot in the final act to try and brain the bad ghoul, I only thought ‘what took you so long?’

5) Whoever Lindsay Seim is, she’s made the list of Actresses I Need To Watch. In her small turn as the younger version of Lin Shaye’s Elise at the beginning of the film, she does an uncanny approximation of Shaye. I knew exactly who she was the showed up on screen, and she creates a strong continuity between these past scenes and the present ones.

6) Here’s something Wan does that he should teach Producer Oren Peli. Wan manages to incorporate some ‘found footage’ sequences that enhance the film without drawing us out of it. The moments, like when Leigh Whammel’s Specs and Angus Sampson’s Tucker investigate Elise’s Reading Room, are integrated subtlely and add to the atmosphere Wan is trying to achieve.

7) There is an attempt to create a method of reaching the spirits for Steve Coulter’s Carl that is effective, but it doesn’t have the retro-creepiness of Elise’ bizarre gas mask apparatus from the first film.

Boo! I's a ghost! A ghooooost!

8) I love how Wan and Whammel’s script ties up all the loose ends from both this and the original, although I am of two minds as to how effective it is when Shaye’s Elise at one point literally faces the camera and mutters, ‘so that’s what that was all about.’

9) I rather like how Wan has enough faith in us as an audience that he allows some of the apparition appearances to come without fanfare, never drawing attention to itself. Some of the creepiest moments have one of the two ghosts just cross across the background while the actors in the foreground, giving us just enough to doubt what we saw.

10) I like the ultimate evil entity that is the cause of all the trouble, although the mythology behind it may be the one weakness of the plot. If this entity, when it was on earth, was notorious enough to get itself a nickname...why didn’t anyone discover the room with the bodies of its victims until Hershey and company stumbled across it.

Overall...a really, really good follow up to Wan’s really, really good original. Fans will not be disappointed by it, and the way it ties up the Lambert family’s story while opening the door for new stories in this mythology is very satisfying.

I saw this at the Loews Village 7, taking advantage of AMC’s $7.50 matinee-before-noon policy. The trailer package was almost identical to the one I saw when I saw The World’s End save for the extended trailer for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug that made me sad that Peter Jackson is overextending that sliver of a book in the name of branding rather than, you know, doing films that are important to him, and Pompeii, which apparently seeks to Zack Snyder-ize that volcanic disaster. And I still don’t get the appeal of the Ron Burgundy character. At all.

Ten Statements About....THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (1944)

Apparently in the afterlife, you're made to dress as if you were
in the school play....

"You don't know about this woman, my first wife Irena. You don't know what happened to her just because she told lies to herself and believed them."

1) And here we have, yet again, another film that couldn't have been made in the here and now, simply because this film chooses to move forward from the original while violently changing its tone away from a horror and into a family fantasy steeped in psychology and fairy tale mythology. Hell, I wonder how they pulled it off back in 1944.

2) Maybe it was her accent, but after watching this I wonder why Simone Simon didn't have a larger career. She's got this definite charisma that draws your eye, and even though she has a very small part, the scenes she's in she just dominates.

(Update: After hearing the commentary, it turns out Simone Simon didn't have a larger career because she was a nasty, complaining lil' nit....)

3) I love how the script by DeWitt Bodeen (with uncredited assists from producer Val Lewton) seeds the story with a number of fairy-tale analogs that help emphasizes that this story is a fantasy about story telling. Mrs. Farrin's house, in particular, is unapologetically the movie's witch's house...although the script flips the story elements so that it's Elizabeth Russell's Barbara and not old Mrs. Farrin who's the witch....

She may live in a witch house, but this is not the witch...

4) God, do I love Nicholas Musuraca's cinematography. It totally plays to Lewton's sensibilities, and many of the visual compositions--like the sequences where we see how Ann Carter's Amy segues from the real world to the fantasy one occupied by Irena--are breathtaking.

5) Okay, let's get the biggest weakness out of the way...I recognize that Ann Carter's performance as Amy is in keeping with the standard of child actors of the day, and that this breathy, recitation-style of emoting was acceptable back then. But, to be fair, it does not age well, and in the modern age her performance can grate, as can....

6) ...for different reasons, Sir Lancelot as Edward, the Reed's butler/cook. Edward, quite frankly, is ever-present, talks in a pronounced accent and seems to be, well, not very competent in his job. I'd almost assume that Edward is a comic relief character except that he's treated totally seriously--even with respect by the Reeds. It's a weird performance, weirdly written that might have made sense at the time but now makes no sense.

7) It's to the credit of Lewton as a producer that he uses major footage shot from two separate directors....yet the film itself looks seamless, especially when you look at scenes where shots from both Gunther Von Fritsch and Robert Wise are intergrated in the same scene.

The real hero of this production may very well be Nicholas
Musuraca's cinematography....

8) Another thing I don't think they could get away with if they remade this--much like in the original, this film never commits one way or another, leaving it to the audience to decide if what they're watching is just a figment of Amy's imagination or an actual ghost story.

9) Even though this film does carry over many characters from the original, the most intriguing figure has to be Elizabeth Russell's Barbara Farrin. I won't go so far as to say that Russell, who appeared as Irena's countrywoman in the original, was beautiful--but she certainly was striking, and I like how the film may give us visual cues to make us think of Barbara as the real witch in this movie's witch house...yet seems to have a strange bit of sympathy for her, never letting us forget that her madness and extreme actions come out of living as an outcast from her mother's love.

10) I like how this film not only completes Amy's character arc--allowing her to integrate her imaginary life with her real life in a way that makes her a fully functioning person--but Oliver's--allowing him to finally accept what happened to his first wife and making unafraid to discuss her.

Overall...while prolly not what people who saw the original expected, a wonderful and unexpected little psychological fantasy that takes elements of the first story and builds on them to create something unique.

Ten Statements About....THE HOWLING III: THE MARSUPIALS (1987)

I know European women are supposed to be hairy, but
DAAAAAMMMMN!

"What you need is a smoking gun."

"What I need is a werewolf holding a smoking gun."

1) As if it wasn't apparent from such previous entries on his cv as the woman-raping human cicada epic The Beast Within or the super-hero musical parody The Return of Captain Invincible (which features Christopher Lee singing and dancing his way through a bartending chart), Phillipe Mora is not a person who plays by the rules...and Lord, does this film bear this out. Who else would look at this franchise and think, 'this would be perfect for my marsupial spy/romance/satire'....

2) That being said...the opening of the film, which features anthropological footage of a group of aborigines posing before a female werewolf they had just tortured and killed, the black and white slowly fading into full color, is truly disquietingly surreal.

3) While I will admit that female lead Imogen Annesley is very sexy, I was more intrigued by the performance of Dagmar Blahova as the Russian lycanthrope Olga. It's not because she is attractive--she isn't--or that her dialogue is convincingly delivered--it isn't. It's because she has such a weird physicality that she brings to her role, especially when she's in the transitionary state between human and animal, that you can't take your eyes off her. The way she snaps her teeth and contorts her face is far more convincing than the low budget werewolf masks that other people are saddled with.

Boy, some of these at-home pregnancies
go horribly wrong....

4) Boy, if you're going to base your werewolves on a specific species, I can't think of any animal more nightmarish that the Tasmanian Wolf. The way, judging from the film footage shown in the movie, that animal was able to open its toothy mouth so impossibly wide is insane....

5) There is such a demented sense of kitchen-sink-edness to this film, as if somebody is whispering in Mora's ear, 'How about we try this?' This is a film where it seems like the orientation changes every ten minutes, which oddly enough gives it an insane sort of energy that drives it forward. However....

6) The film grinds to a total halt roughly the moment we find out that Max Fairchild's Tylo has called down this legendary werewolf spirit to destroy the military contingent sent out to annihilate the remaining werewolves. The fifteen minutes before the end becomes a meandering, sputtering group of disconnected scenes that shows that no one had an idea how to end this movie. You could easily lop off the last ten minutes and not miss anything significant.

7) And on a related note--it rings false that some twenty years passes in that fifteen minutes, and the fact that the low budget demanded a major plot development is reduced to a big gout of expository dialogue only makes that final act a real soporific.

"Yeah, well...I went native, opened an organic bakery,
joined a commune...the usual...how about you, Bill?"

8) Let's be honest here--the special effects are pretty much uniformly awful. The little marsupial baby in particular is wince-worthy. Luckily, the film is so lunatic in its plotting, fearlessly dropping stupid idea after stupid idea into the pot that you can overlook much of the lame animatronics and rubbery masks.

9) I rather like how this film gleefully has its aboriginal guide character back away very suddenly from the expedition when it realizes this werewolf spirit is on the hunt, advising people how slowly they're going to get et if they don't turn tail and run.

10) I can understand the reasoning behind why a key scene with Barry Otto's Beckmeyer interviewing Thylo suddenly switches from film to videotape, but the abruptness of the changeover and the length at which the video portions go on blunts the impact.

Overall...yes, it's a dumb, dumb movie I cannot possibly defend on many levels. But the severely demented nature of the plotting creates an energy and sense of fun that draws me in every time. If only they truncated that last section...

Ten Statements About....SCREAM 4 (2011)

This should've been the movie called You, Again?

1) That four years Wes Craven took off where he taught school and railed against people cutting him out of the Freddie Kruger remake really did him well--this film (supposedly done so that the Weinstein Brothers wouldn't authorize a remake) can be seen as him giving Platinum Dunes a hearty 'Fuck y'all' for almost two hours, in a very entertaining fashion.

2) The casting director really hit the jackpot in casting Emma Roberts as Sidney's cousin...she looks exactly like Sidney if she was updated for a Caucasian Wankey Network approved remake, and is similar enough in looks to Neve Campbell that you believe they're family.

3) There is a great deal of energy and brightness in Williamson's script that's been sorely lacking in most proto-slashers of the last few years. There's never the sense that the film is on rails, and Williamson cleverly continues to introduce red herring after red herring that occupy our time as the true killer's plan reaches fruition.

"Noooooo, Hayden!  Don't kiss Sam Kinison!"

4) And speaking of energy and brightness...you know, when Hayden Panettiere is allowed to joke and smile and have fun, she's a joy to watch--and when she does stop smiling and having fun, it gives that moment a hell of a lot more impact than four years of her as The Mopey Indestrucible Cheerleader.

5) As with the first two Scream films, the cast is chock full of some surprising good turns by some people you didn't expect to see in a slasher film. And the biggest surprise is how David Arquette seems to have discovered that being an actor doesn't involve mugging and silly voices. Of course, it's a pity that he's the one member of the original trio that doesn't seem to have a character arc....

6) Somehow, I don't think Rory Culkin (who looks like the unholy issue of his brother Macauley and Sam Kinison) and Erik Knudson will get the brief career boost that Jamie Kennedy got all those years ago. Knudson's part, in particular, is so wispy and relies so much on a single trope (he aims to upload his entire high school experience on the internet) that when he hits a punchline gag in the third act, it seems to come out of nowhere--even though it was set up about an hour prior.



Half the cast look into the trunk and find
what's left of Jamie Kennedy's career.



7) Craven spends the entire film trying to make Marley Shelton not look hot. He fails. On the other hand, middle age really seems to agree with Neve Campbell.

8) The ultimate identity of this film's Ghostface, and the explanation for why the murders happen. results in one of the more monstrous villains in Craven's ouevure--all the more so because those motivations sound not only reasonable, but sadly very possible.

9) This film does tackle the 'found footage' genre head-on--although it does so in a way that doesn't embarrassingly ape it like, let's say, Halloween: Resurrection. Similarly, Williamson and Craven take a few moments to give their views on torture porn and other developments in the horror genre since Scream 3....hell, a major plot development turns on the realization halfway through that this Ghostface is enacting not a sequel, but a reboot....



Ahhh, you know you were waiting for the gratuitous
Kristen Bell photo....



10) And since everyone is curious--yes, Kristen Bell is part of the opening set piece...but how she's a part of it (and the beginning of the third act) is the real surprise.

In short...I was extremely surprised at how much I enjoyed this film. Yes, it's Craven taking the modern horror film industry to task for not being creative, but he presents his point with a great deal of cleverness, fun and wit.

This time I took another trip to the Lowes Kips Bay. It's becoming almost depressing how badly the Atlas has degraded when I go to this theater, which is staffed by sunny people, the place looks well kept and everything runs smoothly. I finally got to see my theatrical trailer for Doctor Who Season Six, and while the actual trailers were so-so to annoying, I got my interest piqued by the one for Dylan Dog; given how the last time someone adapted the work of this particular comic book artist we got Cemetery Man, I'm planning on going.

Ten Statements About....THE FINAL DESTINATION (2009)

Da-da-da-da-dafdadadada-da....

1) No Tony Todd or Kristen Cloke in a Final Destination film=a very disappointed Tom

2) As someone who remembers the old-school red/blue 3D process, the Real 3D process was a big improvement...although, quite frankly, it seems to have problems whenever the director decides to pull the background into soft focus.

3) The title sequence, which recreates some of the best kills of the previous three films as x-ray cross sections, was admittedly pretty cool.

4) Okay....is that homeless dude with the chihuahua supposed to be Death? Because I'm not buying it.

5) The thing that made Final Destination--the first one--work was that the script by my faves Glen Morgan and James Wong took the time to fashion real characters as the protaganists, characters who did not easily fall into stock stereotypes. Apparently writer Eric Bress and director David R. Ellis didn't figure that one out.

6) It bothers me that Bress and Ellis went for the simple shock/twist ending instead of going for the more subtle, but much creepier implications of the climatic set piece involving, I kid you not, scenes from The Long Kiss Goodnight

7) We know that the whole 'near-death experience is followed by a shock cut real death' is a hallmark of the series right now--but did you have to do it twice?

8) The people who live in the world of the Final Destination series must be composed of the most shoddy building materials ever and feature the worst Quality Control and Environmental Safety people ever.

9) Thanks to my best friend Derrick Ferguson, I can no longer watch the 'death stalking' set pieces without hearing the Chuck Jones/Looney Tunes 'Dadada-dadadadada' music in the back of my head.

10) Shantel VanSanten may be of the CW School of Acting--literally, since she is one of the stars of One Tree Hill--but as the...well, I'm not sure what she is of Bobby Campo's Nick (she's living with him, but she mentions she's still in school in the first scene), but she certainly looks good in panties and a t-shirt...and that's the closest thing we get to nudity in this flick.

Overall...it's not the worst of the FD flicks--that one goes to Final Destination 2--but it's not exactly, well, good or anything. I'd say wait for it on DVD, but since there's a chance they'll release it in the old red/blue 3D....you make the call.