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The Haunting (1999)
Blech
This version of Shirley Jackson's great haunted-house novel THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE manages to be a terrible horror movie, a terrible movie, a terrible film adaptation, and a terrible remake of the terrific 1963 Robert Wise adaptation. What's truly weird is that the cast would be pretty much perfect for a good adaptation of the Jackson novel. There's enough goofy stupidity to make it worth watching as a bad movie, though.
The Night Strangler (1973)
Strangling in Seattle
The second Kolchak TV movie sees producer Dan Curtis take over as director and Richard Matheson return as screenwriter. The DVD version isn't quite what American audiences saw in 1973 -- 15 extra minutes were filmed for European theatrical release, and that's the version here.
Darren McGavin is a wonder here as in The Night Stalker. His slightly flaky reporter Kolchak, now in Seattle because Las Vegas banished him for, well, saving it from a vampire. Now Seattle will not want his help stopping a series of murders in which some blood, but not all, is withdrawn from the female victims.
Matheson set the story in Seattle to take advantage of the Seattle Underground, an abandoned section of the city from which the so-called Night Strangler appears and then returns to. Curtis cast a lot of familiar genre faces in supporting roles, most notably Grandpa Munster Al Lewis and John Carradine. It's not as good as The Night Stalker, maybe in part because when we finally meet that eponymous monster, he won't stop talking, unlike the silent vampire of the first film. Boy, does he talk!
There are also a few too many wacky comedy moments deflating the tension throughout. I wonder how many of these were added for the theatrical release? Oh, well. This would spawn the short-lived, 20-episode TV series of 1974-75. Notably and weirdly, neither Curtis nor Matheson would be involved with the series, which seems like a pretty stupid decision on the part of CBS. Recommended.
The Night Stalker (1972)
Stalking the NIghtmare
The Night Stalker shocked everyone in 1972 when its first airing became ABC's highest rated original TV movie to that point, with a crazy 54 Share (a typical Super Bowl generally gets a share in the mid-60's). It was produced by genre giant Dan Curtis and written by genre god Richard Matheson, so it had a lot going for it -- not least of which veteran character actor Darren McGavin as a cynical Las Vegas newspaper reporter who finds himself battling a vampire.
The movie originally aired in a 90-minute time slot, so it clocks in at a tense, terse 75 minutes without commercials. McGavin is great, a reluctant, almost noirish hero with a good reason for supplying voice-over narration throughout -- he is talking into a tape recorder, after all.
The battles and physical stunts involving various confrontations with the vampire sometimes border on the crazy: people fly all over the place. In what would become a Kolchak trope, Carl quite realistically slips and falls occasionally while fleeing his supernatural pursuer. But he always gets up. And with the police both unbelieving and seriously incompetent, Kolchak is Las Vegas' only chance to escape becoming Fun Town, U.S.A. for Vampires.
Matheson and Curtis opt to have their vampire speak not at all -- I think a good choice. He's more of a vicious animal than anything else, and Barry Atwater does a fine job of portraying a completely non-charming, non-erotic vampire. The silent route would be used by Curtis in the Jack Palance version of Dracula that he produced, and may have also influenced the decision to make the fairly talkative vampire Barlow in Stephen King's Salem's Lot into the non-talking horror of the first TV-movie version. In all, highly recommended.
Trench 11 (2017)
Enjoyable WWI horror movie
Solid, low-budget Canadian movie set in the closing days of WWI. The Germans have a mysterious, abandoned tunnel complex in the Ardennes forest. British military intelligence wants to know what's in it. But the Americans control the Ardennes and the British lack an experienced 'tunneler.'
Ah, but a Canadian tunneler from Winnipeg is available nearby in France! So, backed by four US infantry, the two British MI officers and the tunneler head off for what will surely will be an easy, carefree mission! Well, no.
The writing is solid throughout, and the direction manages some nice, tense moments of claustrophobic horror. Rossif Sutherland has a nice, offbeat charm as our heroic tunneler. It's a Canadian movie, so don't be surprised if the tunneler comes across better than his British and American counterparts!
The movie is as much or more about the horrors human beings are capable of, so be aware that this isn't THE THING IN A TRENCH. There are non-natural horror elements and scenes of graphic violence, but they work within a broader view of the horrors of humanity and its wars.
Trench 11 (2017)
Enjoyable WWI horror movie
Solid, low-budget Canadian movie set in the closing days of WWI. The Germans have a mysterious, abandoned tunnel complex in the Ardennes forest. British military intelligence wants to know what's in it. But the Americans control the Ardennes and the British lack an experienced 'tunneler.'
Ah, but a Canadian tunneler from Winnipeg is available nearby in France! So, backed by four US infantry, the two British MI officers and the tunneler head off for what will surely will be an easy, carefree mission! Well, no.
The writing is solid throughout, and the direction manages some nice, tense moments of claustrophobic horror. Rossif Sutherland has a nice, offbeat charm as our heroic tunneler. It's a Canadian movie, so don't be surprised if the tunneler comes across better than his British and American counterparts!
The movie is as much or more about the horrors human beings are capable of, so be aware that this isn't THE THING IN A TRENCH. There are non-natural horror elements and scenes of graphic violence, but they work within a broader view of the horrors of humanity and its wars.
Silicon Valley: Fifty-One Percent (2018)
Is this the end?
Virtually all the season's plot lines are tied up in clever and often unexpected ways. As a bonus, this season's Vomit Motif reappears. And maybe Richard creates a hilarious new catchphrase with "Kiss my piss!" Seriously.
The Ides of March (2011)
War Games
I figure George Clooney can just pick up a telephone, call five randomly chosen actors, and sign them to whatever project he's working on by the end of the day. Certainly The Ides of March has an All-Star cast. They've all got something to work with, too, in this smart political thriller.
To a Canadian born and raised in a parliamentary democracy, the Byzantine U.S. federal system will always possess a certain alien charm -- and, frankly, a simmering alien horror. The Ides of March lays out the joys and horrors of this overly moneyed, often paradoxical system of democracy without ever seeming preachy or too laden with politicobabble.
Ryan Gosling plays Stephen Meyers, 30-year-old second-in-command of Governor Mike Morris's campaign to win the Democratic primaries. We follow the campaign during a tumultuous week in Ohio, as deals and double-deals and betrayals and potentially career-ending events swirl in and around the campaign. The dialogue is mostly sharp, the performances lived-in and solid. No one here plays a dummy. And the actors are all up to playing smart.
Gosling shines in playing someone who's both savvy and idealistic. Honouring the audience's intelligence, the final scene leaves it to the viewer to decide how much that idealism has been shattered by the events of the film. It's a quiet, subtle, Oscar-quality performance.
Indeed, there isn't a weak performance in the movie. Clooney is utterly believable as a charismatic candidate promising hope and change; Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti make for crafty and rumpled long-time back-room opponents; even Evan Rachel Wood nails her role as a pretty, connected intern who gets caught up in the undertow of dangerous political depths. Highly recommended.
Withnail and I (1987)
Fine British Trousers
A cult movie that seems now to be embraced by the mainstream, Withnail and I is quirky, funny, and occasionally self-indulgent. Cult movies often are self-indulgent -- that's partially how they become cult movies.
A certain type of person in his or her early 20's is going to discover this film and see so much of himself or herself in it that it will become a signpost for that certain time of life when some people don't entirely know what's coming next, but do know that what's going on now has to end, and soon.
Richard E. Grant's Withnail is a very, very unsuccessful actor in London in his late 20's; Paul McGann's 'I' is a slightly less unsuccessful actor and Withnail's roommate. It's autumn of 1969. They're drunk a lot and stoned a lot. Their apartment is overrun with dirty dishes, rats, and the occasional lovable drug dealer. Withnail cons his uncle Monty (a flaming Richard Griffiths) into giving them the keys to his country cottage. They go off for a restorative weekend in the country.
'I' narrates the film -- writer-director Bruce Robinson based the events on things that happened to him over a five-year span -- with a paranoid, puzzled élan. Withnail, perpetually drunk and perpetually, outlandishly over-sized in speech and gesture, is both frustrating and magnetic. Monty, initially a caricature, grows into a sympathetic character without losing his own out-sized charm. A lot of the humour of the country sequences springs from the utter incompatibility of the two leads with country living -- they might as well be trying to vacation on the moon without spacesuits.
Withnail is the flamboyant, self-destructive, untrustworthy showpiece of the film, while McGann holds down the fort with his befuddled, panic-attack-prone protagonist. To some extent, it's like a Sherlock Holmes movie with no crime.
There's a certain sadness to the end of the film that I imagine a lot of people identify with the end of their college days, and an end to spending huge amounts of time with friends one will soon lose touch with, forever. I can imagine a lot of people hating this film, but those who will like it, will probably end up loving it. Highly recommended.
A Scanner Darkly (2006)
Fever Dream of a Film
Adapter/director Richard Linklater achieved at least three remarkable things with A Scanner Darkly: he created the most faithful movie adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel or short story ever; he created an outstanding science-fiction film; and he maximized the limited acting ability of Keanu Reeves by casting Reeves as a burnt-out case in the midst of a drug-fuelled mental breakdown.
Reeves plays Bob Arctor, a near-future California undercover government narc charged by his superiors with helping win the war against Substance D, a highly addictive illegal substance that rapidly causes irreversible brain damage in those addicted to it, partially by severing the connection between an addict's left and right brain hemispheres.
Arctor is deep undercover, sharing a house with two other addicts and buying Substance D from a third in increasingly difficult-to-supply mass quantities in the hopes of moving up the supply chain. The government knows what the main ingredient of Substance D derives from -- a small, blue-flowered plant -- but it doesn't know who is growing it, refining it, and putting it on the street.
Dick based much of A Scanner Darkly on his own drug experiences of the 1960's and 1970's, experiences which saw him committed to a mental asylum for a time, and experiences which caused him to interact with a large number of doomed and mostly doomed addicts. Indeed, the movie appends a portion of the novel's afterword to the end of the movie -- a roll call of the dead and damaged.
The hyper-colourful, rotoscoped animation Linklater uses here (he first used it in Waking Life) suits the material and the tone of that material -- the movie looks like a fever dream, a pulsating nightmare in which nothing is stable. All the principals deliver outstanding performances, including Reeves, and perhaps most notably Robert Downey Jr., who presents us with a jittery speed freak (Substance D appears to be at least partially an amphetamine) over-bursting with his own paranoid delusions and fantasies.
The title is a play on the Biblical phrase 'Through a glass, darkly': there are scanners in this movie, but they aren't the Cronenberg variety.
Spider (2002)
No Exit
David Cronenberg, bless his soul, likes to go places other filmmakers don't, won't, or can't. In the case of Spider, he heads back into the territory of Dead Ringers, giving us a horror story in which there is no catharsis, no growth, and no hope. It's an astonishingly bleak film.
Ralph Fiennes, complete with hair that was apparently an homage to Samuel Beckett (the playwright, not the Quantum Leaper), plays the titular schizophrenic without the bells and whistles someone like, say, Robert DeNiro might have demanded. There's no showiness, no look-at-me-acting scene of yelling or imploring the audience for empathy. Spider is almost completely mute, and when he does talk, he mumbles incoherently.
Spider's been released from a mental asylum into a halfway house when the movie begins, in a rundown, vaguely 1980's-looking urban England. His nickname comes from a tendency he's had since childhood to weave elaborate webs out of string and pieces of rope. He's a pattern maker. But he's also schizophrenic. The patterns he makes, the viewer needs to remember, may look sound, but they're inherently flawed.
The movie takes us through Spider's reminiscences of his childhood, of what seems to be an ogre-ish and unfaithful father and a saint of a mother. How reliable are Spider's memories? Therein lies the mystery of the movie, inevitable as death. This isn't a movie to enjoy in a normal way -- it's horrifying, and there's no attempt to make Spider warm and cuddly, a Hollywood madman. He's very sick. And schizophrenia doesn't spring from some easily understandable childhood trauma: it's a disease, a cancer of the mind.
I was exhausted by the end of the movie, and that was from watching it in 20-minute increments over several days. But it was a good exhaustion. But this isn't Rain Man or A Beautiful Mind. There are no easy life lessons here, no Nobel Prize, no well-meaning brother who learns valuable things from someone with cognitive difficulties, though there are, even for Spider, flashes of clarity amidst the crushing horror. And the clarity just makes the horror worse.