Filmic Friday 307: Post Oscars Silliness

Ever Wonder What Brad Pitt's First Movie Was?
It Was This One.

So the Oscars are over, Parasite won a bunch (deservedly so), the cast of CATS ripped on the visual effects people (which was not deserved, they did their best and got fired because of overblown expectations), and Brad Pitt won an Oscar for Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood (also deserved).

But what did Mr Prettyboy do in his first movie?

I'll tell ya: not much.

Yes, this is his first roll.
In an 80s/90s slasher.

Cutting Class is a rock stupid movie that thinks it's clever, is full of actors who have better things to be doing with their lives, and is only really of importance because it's the film that launched Brad Pitt's career. The acting is either stilted and wooden or over the top, because apparently the director micromanaged the actors' performances - especially Jill Schoelen's.

Baby Brad in all his adorkable glory.

Jill Schoelen's character is being left alone for the week by her District Attorney father (Martin Mull) as he goes for a brief hunting trip to unwind. She is played hypersexualized but... comes off as a baby instead of a sex kitten. Her boyfriend, Brad Pitt (and boy, that must have been interesting when his career took off, do you think she told people she dated him in a movie once?), just wants to goof off and get drunk and have sex.

Get used to that facial expression, guys.

Really, the cast is what makes this movie. The principal of the school, Mr Dante (you'll notice that's the only name I remember!), is played by Roddy McDowell, who is played as a bizarre lech of a man, but is also one of the only adults to not be killed. Spoilers, someone's killing students and teachers at this disfunctional sex-starved school. It's not Roddy, though.

He's just creepy and weird, that's all.

No, the killings are all done by the Weird Kid (played by Donovan Leitch). They don't hide it, and even the brief moment we're supposed to believe Brad Pitt is the killer doesn't work.

He's a fairly effective killer, though.

Now, usually, in movies where there's killing in a high school, all of the kids look like adults, and that's a problem here, but Donovan? I buy him as a high schooler. He's that creepy intense kid everyone talks about but nobody talks to. It's hard to believe that this school would just... let him back in after he'd killed his dad, but boy, they don't do much to support him.

This could all have been prevented if he'd been given therapy instead of shock treatment...

Anyway, the worst part of this movie has to be Martin Mull, who spends the whole time trying to get help after he's shot with an arrow in the opening scene. It's played for laughs, but it's as unfunny as bad comedy can be.

This part was crap.

But if you're still interested in checking out Cutting Class, go for it! It's not the goriest movie you'll ever see, but it's one of those "European director tries to capture the American high school experience" movies that are so much fun. It's pretty fun to watch, actually.

Except for the Martin Mull bits. Meh.

That'll do it for me, guys!

Happy Violently Beheaded Catholic Saint Day!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Filmic Friday 306: Hereditary

In Which I Have Withstood The Spooks

A couple weeks ago, I watched a real-deal, actual-factual Horror Movie - Hereditary.

Yes, everyone already reviewed this movie.

Yes, everyone mispronounces it as "Heredity".

No, I don't care.

We had a choice between Hereditary and Midsommer, but at the last second, we chose Hereditary, and I'm glad we did.

This is a movie where you really do have to sit through the whole thing to even begin to understand it, because every part of the movie is interdependent, and nothing is random (though a lot is left to chance in the plot, but I'll get to that later...). So yeah, if you're gonna watch this movie, you really do need to watch it, or you run the risk of being confused. You're not stupid - it's a complex film. Maybe a little too complex for its own good...

Hereditary starts off as a movie about mourning and coping with loss. A mother of two has lost her own mother, and she tries burying herself in her work (she's an artist who makes miniatures) to cope with her complicated feelings. Her daughter is a bit odd, but she seems like a weird kid who just does stuff her own way. Her husband is supportive and loving and tries to take care of her and their son, who seems, like most teenagers, wrapped up in his own teenage troubles.

Then things start getting weird.

A desecrated grave, an ill-advised party, a tragedy, and an ill-advised support-group friendship drive this story from the grounded-but-strange to the downright bizarre, and, to be honest, if it weren't for the director informing us of his intentions, I would have no idea whether it was a story of a family becoming horrifically unmoored or a straight-up supernatural thriller, which is a nice headspace to be in, to be honest.

Unfortunately, the director has a very set way you're supposed to interpret the film, which I feel kinda... lessens the impact.

It also feels like two almost completely separate movies that got married halfway through, though that doesn't feel too ungainly. It feels like discovery more than disappointment. See, in the first half there's this rich family drama of people who are bad at coping trying to cope with bad stuff, but then it becomes a really well-shot, unsettling horror movie with some spectacular special effects.

I like that the effects, while gory and well-crafted, aren't used to simply shock everyone. The grisly nature of some effects is upsetting enough that they don't have to linger on the effect itself. The knowledge of what has happened is too dire to ignore.

Really, every part of the movie works well together - the sound design is eerie without being exploitative, the lighting gives the feel of the despair a family would feel on the loss of loved ones, warming only when in the presence of fire, fear, or friends, and the music is effective without being overbearing. When the music is loud, it's behaving as the audience's heartbeat, rising with the tension and action before pulling back. It's nice to have a movie where, even though everyone tends to speak quietly, you can still hear what they're saying.

And then there's the plot.

I'm about to get super spoilery, so if you want to watch the movie, stop reading this review and go watch it, then come back so I can complain about walnuts.

Did you watch it? Do you not care about spoilers? Okay, here we go.

After the grandma has been buried, someone desecrates her grave, which we learn about via a phone call to the dad. The daughter character, Charlie, has a nut allergy and may or may not (absolutely is, according to the director) be the temporary earthly vessel for grandma and her secret cult's favorite demon, Paimon. Yes. This is a secret demon cult movie. No, you don't find out for sure until the last act.

Well, in order to get Paimon out of Charlie and into her brother (who has no idea about any of this), poor Charlie has to die. We are asked, by the end of the movie, to believe that the son is invited to a party where the mom knows there will likely be drinking and/or drugs, but she insists that he take Charlie with her. The mom, at this point, knows nothing about the cult and could reasonably get a babysitter for Charlie (if not just leave her alone, she's old enough to take care of herself, it seems), so this is weird because this party? This party kills Charlie.

See, the son takes Charlie to the party, where for some reason, there are people chopping mountains of walnuts, which Charlie's deathly allergic to. The son does not notice at all and goes to smoke some weed with a girl he likes, urging Charlie to eat the cake which he doesn't know has nuts in it. Charlie, of course, has a reaction and goes to get her brother to take her to the hospital. Instead of calling an ambulance. Ambulances, newsflash, don't give a crap about the presence booze or pot when there's an obvious episode of nut-induced anaphylaxis...

So sonny boy takes Charlie to the car and drives outta there like a bat outta heck. Charlie, meanwhile, is suffocating as her throat closes, so she sticks her head out the window to breathe. There's a sudden deer in the road (a carcass, actually), which causes the son to swerve. Charlie's head is then taken off by a telephone pole.

We are, by the end of this movie, expected to believe that this entire sequence was planned by the cult for the express purpose of freeing Paimon from Charlie's body so they can literally scare the son to death and put Paimon in his body.

This is insane, obviously. Also obvious is the link between all this craziness and mental illness. This could absolutely be a story about a fantastically unfortunate family where they all go crazy one-by-one, but no. Demons.

The jump from "Charlie dies horrifically, but completely by accident" to "A crazy cult of nudist geriatrics wanted a genius demon to come into being through a weird girl and her brother" is a bit too much of a leap, for me, but it's still a really cool movie in spite of the twist.

Overall, I think this movie is incredibly worth watching and  you should check it out.

Really watch it, though, because yeah... that Paimon stuff is hard to follow if you haven't been paying attention the whole time.

I'm proud of myself for only looking away during the decapitations, guys. Yeah, you read that right. There's multiple decapitations. Five, actually. One's a metaphor, though. The four physical decapitations are: Grandma's Corpse, A Dead Pigeon In A Bush, Charlie, and The Mom Via Possession/Piano Wire. The metaphysical decapitation is when the dad is killed - cutting the head from the family.

So yeah, fun, scary, cool movie.

Go watch it!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

PS: I'm late with the blog due to internet outages - we're having an ice storm :|

Filmic Friday 228: Icebreaker (2000)

If ever there was a movie that deserved to be riffed, it's Icebreaker, a Die Hard-style movie set at an actual ski resort. Z and I watched the Rifftrax version, which is a riot, so if you have to watch this alone or just with one or two friends who like riffing but aren't riffers themselves, that's the way to go. If you're in a large crowd of people who like to make fun of movies, this is a prime candidate for getting yourself your own copy and just... hurling comedic abuse at it for 90 minutes.

Bask in its glory.

Have you ever wanted to watch Die Hard at a ski resort with Samwise Gamgee vs Ash from the Evil Dead fighting over Stacy Keach's daughter? No? Too bad. That's this movie. Sean Astin is a ski patrol guy whose girlfriend's dad hates him. Stacy Keach is that dad. But, oh no! While they're supposed to be having dinner and talking about how Astin wants to marry Keach's daughter, Bruce Campbell decides he's holding the whole mountain hostage. For reasons.

Reasons I can't tell you.

Because I couldn't pay attention.

Because I was laughing too hard.

I'll take that burden Mr. Frodo!
I'll take it out back and pump it full of lead!

Seriously, who looked at Sean Astin and thought "yeah, he'd make a great action hero"? He's a total creampuff. Even the "badass" stuff he tries to do in this movie has that kind of adorable edge to it. I mean, he's holding a freaking automatic rifle in this shot and I still think he's precious. I want to pinch his cheeks.

I buy him being a ski patrol guy. I buy him being a medic. I buy him having a difficult, sometimes bloody and/or dangerous job. I even buy him having a cute girlfriend whose daddy is annoyed that she won't date a banker.

I cannot buy him as a legit action hero. Sorry, Sean. You're a lover, not a fighter.

And no, there aren't really meany good pictures of the girlfriend on the internet.
She's a McGuffin. Keach, however, is an actor.

Stacy Keach plays a grumpy rich dad really well, here, even though he kind of looks like a tubby John Cleese and the actress playing his daughter looks nothing like him. He gives off the air of a man who's been to a thousand of these ski resorts and never set foot in the snow - he's there for the steak and whiskey, but you can hold the steak.

The actress playing the daughter is... pretty forgettable, to be honest. Yet another in a long line of short-haired blond babes from the 1990s-2000s. Still, she gets one of the most intentionally funny scenes in the movie, where she's listing Sean Astin's positive characteristics to her father over dinner while the movie cuts from what she says to what's happening to Astin and how he's doing the exact opposite of what she's saying.

But what's the big deal with this movie? It's not just some rom-com - it's an action flick! What's the action?

Well, some derpy bad guys are stealing... I think nuclear materials? And they've crashed the plane carrying said materials onto the mountain. I'm foggy on why Bruce Campbell's bad guy wants the nukes, but he says something about his parents selling their bodies to pharmaceutical companies at one point and never elaborates. There's a video tape, but I'm pretty sure that blows up, so we never find out. Like... this movie makes 0 sense. It's all about Bruce Campbell holding Stacy Keach and the girl hostage while Sean Astin tries to save the day. Badly.

Seriously, who looked at Bruce Campbell and said "bald bad guy with a black coat on a mountain"?
It's hilariously bad.

Bless him, Bruce is trying this whole movie. He's... kinnda mugging though. It's like he can't help but nibble that scenery and ham it up. I wouldn't be surprised if Astin was trying to salvage the movie but Bruce knew it was a stinker, so he just had fun.

There's one last character in this movie I have to tell you about, and that's the Park Ranger guy who finds the downed plane and its murdered pilot. He's... he's basically an Ernest P Worrell type of guy - bright as a black hole but kind and well-meaning. He's a single dad, and he really wants to help, but he's bumbling comic relief in a movie that's basically 100% bumbling comic relief.

via Gfycat


At only 90 minutes long, this ridiculous flick is perfect for a party or a fun night in. Bring the popcorn (and have your vacuum ready for the inevitably popcorn throwing that will occur) and hunker down for a bunch of morons on a mountain with a truly epic conclusion!

Now, Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Filmic Friday 227: Skyscraper

Die Hard is probably my second favorite Christmas movie after Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, so you may understand why I was kind of annoyed that there's a new movie trying to rip off Die Hard. Even more to my dismay, this movie stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who... look. Everyone says he's a nice guy. He's charismatic. He's dynamic. He was a great wrestler. I just... his acting, though. Like, he's funny in Rampage, and I've seen him in other movies where he does an okay job, but... he's no Bruce Willis, is all I'm saying.

Boy oh boy do they want us to believe this will bee like Die Hard...

The Rock is playing a guy who started out as a SWAT dude, but after a horrible (yet morbidly hilarious) incident involving a baddie, some kids, and explosives, he's out of the game.

Also, missing his left leg.

He married the doctor who saved his life (played by  Neve Campbell, who I've missed seeing in movies!), had some kids, and has apparently become some kind of bigshot safety consultant? Regardless, he's in Hong Kong with the wife and kids, living in a ridiculous superstructure called "The Pearl", which he's keeping watch over and reporting on to its owner, a hotshot Chinese billionaire with shady ties to the evil mcbadguys of this movie.

It really is a hilariously ridiculous building.
Complete with holodeck and spinning blades of death...

So The Rock has to go and do some tech stuff, Neve gets basic IT mansplained to her because I guess ace Naval Surgeons don't know how to reboot things? and then he gets handed a McGuffin Tablet that scans his face and gives him way more access than anyone who isn't on the security team should have. Predictably, this is stolen from him because, guess what, one of his old SWAT pals turned on him because he was pretty pissed about getting blown up because The Rock made a bad call.

The stolen tablet is used to shut down the super high-tech fire retardant systems, the bad guys set the building on fire, and Neve and the kids get stuck halfway up the stupid tower of nonsense.

Also, The Rock is wanted by the police for reasons, so he communicates via cellphone.
This comes complete with awful shaky-cam footage of him yakking at them and trying to get them free.

There's a subplot with the Hong Kong police, but that's not important. There's a subplot with a scary Chinese Assassin lady who I can't help but think of as Ada Wong, but this is also unimportant. The only really important plot thread is that Bigshot Billionaire dude double-crossed some Very Bad People, so now a crazy Scandanavian is burning down his big weird building.

Also, the Rock gets captured. More than once.

The Rock has to use his fake leg and his wits to John McLain his way through the Pearl so that he can, initially, try to rescue his family, and then get the files the bad guys want so they won't kill his daughter. Neve and the son escape in a ridiculous elevator scene.

Remember when I mentioned the Holodeck? Yeah, predictably, that's where the thrilling climax occurs.

In this ridiculous baseball on the roof, there are a bunch of LED screens.
This is shown to either reflect you like dozens of bad funhouse mirrors
or to show you an unobstructed all-around view of Hong Kong.
How you make that kind of aerial view of Hong Kong visually uninteresting is a mystery to me, but they managed.

Now, I'm kind of crapping on this movie, but I actually really liked it. I thought Neve was great, and bless her, she's trying to work with The Rock, who is, of course, The Rock throughout. I thought the Chinese actors were great. The child actors were pretty great, too. I thought the focus on The Rock's prosthetic was pretty cool. As far as it being a big, dumb action movie, it's very successful.

That is the intense look of a man who cannot decide whether it's Poontang Pie time
or People's Elbow time.
It's neither. It's get the heck outta Dodge time.

If you're going to watch Skyscraper, definitely do so with company, so you can all look at each other and say "No... that's not what's going to happen, is it? OMG, it totally happened! Yes!" repeatedly while hooting and hollering. This is absolutely a pizza and sugary beverages kind of film, and I think I'd watch it again if it was with friends.

I am a sucker for physically impossible movies with silly premises, after all...

So if you're looking for your next Bad Film Night offering, maybe give Skyscraper a shot? I haven't given away the juicy bits, the hamminess of the actors, or the twists you'll see coming a mile away, so there will be a lot of virgin(ish) territory for you to cover!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Filmic Friday 226: Night Beast

I don't watch much horror, I'll be honest, but when I do... I tend towards rubber monsters more than jump scares or zombies (I really, really hate zombies) or slashers. I'm pretty sensitive to realistic gore, messy dismemberment, and insides becoming outsides.

Yet Night Beast, a Don Dohler movie from the 1980s filmed in (and using a cast of locals from) Maryland, was... pretty fun!

Oh, don't worry. They show the monster in the first ten minutes. I'm spoiling absolutely nothing.

A few points of note: This movie is one of JJ Abrams' first films (yes, that JJ Abrams), almost nobody on the cast was a legit actor (they're pretty much all locals, and it shows), and I'm 99% sure that the guys who did the miniatures for this movie were actually amazing. Seriously, the opening stop-motion was incredible.

And then the weird alien appears and ruins all of their hard work.

So the eponymous Night Beast (despite often appearing during the day...) is hungry after crashlanding in the middle of nowhere, so he decides to go on a killing spree. Our theory is that he uses his instant-disintegration ray by accident more than as a means to evaporate people. The theory is that the blaster is actually what amounts to a space microwave, but he's got it set too high for humans, so he keeps shooting everything in order to recalibrate it. That would explain why, after vaporizing a guy peeing in the woods and his two kids (yeah, it goes there), it ends up tearing people apart with its bare hands for the most part. It got bored fiddling with controls.

Our heroes consist of a kinda skeevy sheriff, his "hot" deputy, a dweeb with a crush on the local gangster's girlfriend, a geriatric doctor, her seemingly doofy assistant (who turns out to be the MVP), and the idiot mayor and his alcoholic assistant/girlfriend, and a man who wants his whiskey dangit. Three of these guys survive. You're probably not going to guess which three. It's stupid.

Yes, they get naked.
No, the image will never, ever leave you.
No matter how nice the boobs are in this movie (and there are nice ones), it doesn't make up for the men.
Yikes.

This movie is in love with its monster. Every chance they have to show the... adequate monster suit, they take, even when it's not a flattering shot or when the story has no reason for the Night Beast to appear.

This is the worst shot.
It's like they had sixty different partial dentures and crammed them in one mouth.
Also, he's suspiciously uniform in coloration...

I was shocked to see this shirt on Google.
I don't know why I was shocked, really.
There are shirts for everything, and this movie did just get a Vinegar Syndrome BluRay release...

I kinda feel like the movie owes us all an apology for the faces we're put through. These are some of the homeliest people I've seen since Howling VII: New Moon Rising - another movie which utilized the locals as inexpensive actors.

That being said, Mary Jane the alcoholic girlfriend was a fairly decent actress, all things considered.
And she was one of the few genuinely attractive human beings in this movie!
And yes, it's implied strongly that she's boinking the moron next to her.
She could do so much better...

One of the calling cards for sci-fi/horror crossovers is that they tend to have fantastic special effects. Night Beast, however, is more in line with Laserblast than with The Fly...

This is the effect.
Aside from some cool stop motion in the beginning, this is it.
When he shoots people, they turn red and vanish, leaving a smear of ash in the shape of a person.
Cool in theory. Dumb in practice.

The last thing I'd like to mention is the shoehorned subplot about Drago, the eeeeeeeevil biker. This Nick Offerman lookalike causes a lot of trouble, but he's mostly just a doofus. I mean, he sucks, don't get me wrong. He's abusive, stupid, drunk, and can't ride a motorcycle to save his life. He even strangles his ex-girlfriend to death just to be a jerk. He's also 100% pointless.

He's got to be a holdover from an even dumber script for a Lifetime-style movie... right?

Seriously, he looks like a slimy Nick Offerman...

But yes, this gradual skid over the center line into the path of an oncoming VW Bug of a movie is a great watch with the right group of friends. If you can get yourself a copy (especially the shockingly well-put-together Vinegar Syndrome copy), then I strongly suggest gathering your comrades, ordering some pizza (though maybe without sausage... you may understand if you watch it), and give it a watch!

If this squeamish dork can watch this movie, you probably can, too. There's a pretty bad special effect near the end involving a guy who was electrocuted with 30000 volts, but I found it more comedic than scary.

I mean, they left the eyeballs in...

Regardless, it's a good time, eminently riffable, and it serves as an excellent tour guide to Maryland...

Go Enjoy Something!
FC