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Superman Returns (2006)

Feb 252006

Superman returns to Earth (thus the title) after a five year absence. While he was away, Lois has had a child and Lex Luthor has gotten out of prison. Luthor’s plan is once again based on real-estate and will kill millions. Superman must stop Luthor as he attempts to reintegrate with society.

So, Superman has been gone for five years on a trip to Krypton, yet the story ignores that. He could have been in Wisconsin writing his novel for all it matters to the film. Instead, the plot is about Lex Luthor wanting to sell real-estate (because that was in Superman I) and the Superman/Lois/some dude love triangle that no one was crying out for.

Superman Returns never had a chance. Director Bryan Singer, who’d had success with the X-Men, didn’t make a film that could stand on it’s own; he made an homage to the old Christopher Reeve movies. This is a big budget fan film. We get scene after scene that either references the earlier films or are directly stolen from them.

Ignoring Superman III and IV, and making a sequel to Superman II was a fine idea. Giving Brandon Routh no chance to make the title character his own was not so good. Routh is good as Routh, but he makes a second rate Reeve. Kate Bosworth is a bland Lois, the beginning of an unfortunate trend in underwritten and poorly performed female love-interests in superhero films (see Nolan’s Batman).

And did they retcon away the out-of-nowhere memory stealing kiss from Superman II? If not, shouldn’t Lois be a bit freaked about having a son by a “man” that she has no recollection of having sex with? Shouldn’t see be thinking about super-roofies?

While it feels too much like Donner’s work in most way, the tone is off. Brandon’s Superman has the goofy Kent bit down, and Spacey’s Lex (and his many sidekicks) are pure comedy, but it’s presented as serious. We get a dark and nasty presentation of pure camp, and the first step toward the dismay and Jesus fixation that would mark Snyder’s take on the character.

Reviews, Superhero Tagged with: Two Reels

Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005)

Dec 232005

The biggest mistake of Revenge of the Sith is making it so self-serious. It wants to be a Shakespeare tragedy, which is odd for a series based on afternoon serials. The second biggest was Hayden Christensen. Granted, the actor never had a chance, But Ewan McGregor managed to elevate his poor dialog while Christensen drags it down from horrendous into a deep, dark pit. He is so relentlessly bad that it is almost some kind of weird victory. How could he have managed this level of ineptitude? No moment with Christensen/Anakin is good, and you can’t escape him. Of all the prequel films, this is the one truly about Anakin, which makes it even worse as his arc is constructed so poorly. Nothing about his character is human. People do not act this way, and his sudden (and it is ridiculously sudden) switch to being a villain comes off as funny. But that’s not the only unintentionally humorous moment. Killing children shouldn’t be a laugh-riot, but there’s no other way to take it.

Does this film have anything? Well, again, it looks good. The music is good. And all the lightsaber battles are nicely choreographed—even if the one that is supposed to be dramatic has that stupid “I’ve got the higher ground” moment.

Reviews, Science Fiction, Space Opera Tagged with: Two Reels

Zathura (2005)

Dec 042005

When their father (Tim Robbins) has to work on a Saturday, peevish brothers Walter (Josh Hutcherson) and Danny (Jonah Bobo) play an old board game that Danny finds in the basement. The game, Zathura, transfers their house to deep space, and each move tosses a new danger at them, including a malfunctioning robot and alien lizards. To get home, they must finish the game.

Based on Chris Van Allsburg’s sequel to his award-winning picture book, Jumanji, Zathura does not claim to be a follow-up to the 1995 Robin Williams-Kirsten Dunst film of the earlier story. That is the first of many mistakes. Giving up the mantel of sequel, Zathura appears as a low budget remake. Again we have a ’50s-style board game that create genre-style dangers on each turn. Again there are the two siblings, the release of a previous player stuck in the game for years, and the destruction of the family house. None of that’s bad, but it is awfully familiar.

Zathura is a claustrophobic, almost stage-bound picture, rarely departing from scenes of conversations within a few rooms of an old house, but when it does is when the movie sings. Although the film is being sold on its emphasis on humanity over special effects, it is the effects that work. A shot of a ringed planet, a clunky robot that flies through the wall of the house to return through another wall, a meteor shower, and an assortment of alien ships, are joyful, old-time space opera material created with modern technology. This is Buck Rogers the way they couldn’t make it years ago.

But when not overwhelming with slick visuals (and booming sound), this is a remarkably drab affair. Walter and Danny are annoying kids who might engender a parents’ love, but no one else’s, and it’s hard to imagine anyone being interested in their sibling rivalry. With so much time spent on smashing you over the head with its message of “be nice to your brother,” it’s clear that Zathura is intended for young boys, but the filmmakers are out of touch with what young boys like. No ten-year-old wants to watch two kids bicker about family issues while being interrupted on rare occasions by a killer robot. He wants to watch the killer robot. Cut ninety percent of the redundant squabbling, and all of Tim Robbins’ so-slow fatherly emotion jags, and put in more jokes and attacking monsters, and you’d have a nice family film.

At the pre-screening I attended, about half the audience was made up of families, and just like the lone adults, the children of those families were silent. The only reactions came from parents, who were excited that a film was telling their kids to behave. Of course the kids were just waiting for the next alien attack.

Reviews, Science Fiction Tagged with: Two Reels

The Maid (2005)

Oct 112005

Hoping to help her destitute family and dying brother, young, innocent, Filipino Rosa (Alessandra De Rossi) has taken a job as a maid in Singapore with the Teo family. They are kind, though Mr. Teo is distant and Mrs. Teo is domineering. Their twenty-year-old son, Ah Soon (Benny Soh) is mentally retarded and likes Rosa a bit too much. It is the seventh month, a time when the locals believe ghosts walk the streets and special precautions must be taken. Rosa doesn’t know the rules, and apparently offends the spirits. Soon, she is seeing ghosts everywhere. What do the ghosts want, and is their any connection to a previous maid who disappeared?

Advertised as Singapore’s first horror film (and I have no reason to doubt it), The Maid shames the old pros and shows that new blood is always desirable. It’s also the most accessible Asian horror film anyone from the Americas or Europe is likely to stumble upon since it doesn’t require any pre-knowledge of the society to get all the nuances. Rosa isn’t any more familiar with Singapore than the average Westerner. The temples, rituals, and dangers are all new to her, and if anything doesn’t fit in with normal behavior, neither she, nor the viewer, recognize that until it is too late. We enter the story with her, and learn as she does.

The Maid has been advertised, and described by critics, as an Eastern take on The Sixth Sense, and that’s at least partly true. Rosa does see dead people, but it isn’t considered weird to do so. When she tells this to the Teos, they don’t doubt her or suggest that she’s psychotic. Instead, they tell her that’s she’s done something to upset the ghosts. Everyone either sees ghosts or accepts their existence. The sidewalks are filled nightly with families burning sacrifices to their ancestors. Seats are left vacant in the front row of the theater for the ghosts, and everyone knows not to turn back if your name is called at night. This is The Sixth Sense if Cole has said, “I see dead people” and Malcolm had replied, “Yeah, who doesn’t. I’m pretty sure my deceased folks are at the show tonight. Now, let’s discover your real problem.”

There are plenty of minor scares and a great deal of tension, all related to isolation. Rosa is alone and helpless in a country she doesn’t understand, with what are to her, bizarre customs. She has no one she can talk to and very few options. The fear isn’t of things that go bump in the night, particularly after we learn that there are things bumping around everywhere and they do little harm, but of being powerless.

Heightening Rosa’s solitude, while making the film easier for English speakers, is language. Her native tongue is Filipino (or Tagalog) while everyone around her speaks a dialect of Chinese. To communicate, they must use a language that no one is at home with: English. About half of the movie is in English; the rest is subtitled.

Western critics, mainly American, have unfairly maligned The Maid, first for being too much like Ju-on, and then for not being enough like it. Connecting the two films is absurd. You might as well compare The Maid to The Seven Samurai, since both have many Asian people and not everyone lives. Before claiming The Maid is derivative of Ju-on, you need to throw up your hands and declare that the Orient is a strange place you don’t understand and all films from there look the same. As for it not being enough like Japan’s champion fright fest, the complaint is that The Maid isn’t as scary. No kidding. The terror in Ju-on comes from an unreasoning, unstoppable force that devours anyone who is unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The much lesser frights here involve being alone and not understanding what is happening.

The Maid is one of the best #-horror films of the last seven years. The acting is flawless, the cinematography bounces between acceptable and beautiful, and the culture is fascinating. The story is one of the strongest in recent ghost movies, and while it isn’t too taxing to figure out the ending, chances are you’ll be too involved with the characters to try. Things do drag in the middle, with a scene too many of sweeping, but the ghosts rev things back up.

The Tartan DVD (which has an irrelevant long-haired ghost picture on the cover) has issues with the aspect ratio. If you have a standard 4×3 TV, you’ll need to change the settings on your player to widescreen or the picture will appear stretched.

Asian, Foreign Language, Ghost Stories, Reviews Tagged with: Four Reels

Ringu 0: Birthday (2005)

Oct 112005

Thirty years before the events of Ringu, and eleven after anything of interest to audiences will happen, Sadako (Yukie Nakama), the evil ghost of the first film, is a meek, twenty-something-year-old who has joined an acting troop in Tokyo. She’s also followed by the visage of her evil self. People of no importance die, and the hyperactive troop all blame Sadako for no good reason. Some have seen the ghostly girl, but since she’s half the size of Sadako, and always has her face covered, there’s zero connection, but oh well, nothing else makes sense so why should that? Sound engineer Tôyama, who likes his women quiet, submissive, and nearly lacking in personality and thought, is naturally attracted to Sadako, and since no one else has ever said anything nice to her, she to him. Thus begins a really drab romance that can’t end well, since we all know that Sadako becomes rather unpleasant in three decades and has to be dead sometime in there.

More than anything else, a sequel should not harm the original. It should not contradict its theme, change plot elements that had carried us along, or alter how characters had been in that first film. It shouldn’t destroy an ending that we struggled with those characters to reach, and it shouldn’t tell us anything that could destroy the mystery that made the first picture haunt our dreams. Is that too much to ask? I’m not even asking for the sequel to make sense, tell an interesting story, or have any reason for existing—just not to mess up what’s already good. As for prequels, that goes double.

Ringu 0: Birthday is a prequel to Ringu, the film that started the J-horror movement and made horror frightening again. That it didn’t need a prequel I take as a given. That this prequel adds nothing was no surprise either. All it accomplishes is to bring Sadako into the light. Now, one of the things that made Ringu so frightening was the enigmatic nature of the ghost. Ringu 0 does its best to kill that, while simultaneously answering no questions. That took talent. It says nothing about Sadako’s mother’s suicide or how she came to curse a video tape. What we get is a story only vaguely related to the one in Ringu and a whole new group of magical powers. Sadako has split in half. Apparently using the transporter from Star Trek, she’s now made up of a good Sadako and an evil Sadako. The bad one’s been kept locked in a room with a TV and injected with drugs to keep her small (hmmm, what drugs would those be?), but she can astral project, which she does a lot so she can appear to walk across rooms ominously.

Still, if taken on its own, it isn’t a complete failure. It’s an improvement over the techno-gibberish-filled Ringu 2, and never made me snicker, which again, is a step in the right direction. The acting isn’t embarrassing and it’s shot as well as your average mid-budget picture. It’s never scary, but it doesn’t attempt to be. It’s hardly a horror movie. It is mainly a drama about a meek girl with a bad past and mental problems and her experiences with a guy who likes her and a whole bunch of mindless folks who hate her. That’s no brilliant drama, but it wouldn’t be bad except for one huge mistake: Sadako. She’s a milquetoast, little bird. She hasn’t got a flicker of life or self-determination. She’s attractive, but that’s it. Perhaps this flies better in Japan since I’ve seen similar characters in Asian films, though mostly in ones made four or five decades ago. If this was 1950, and you make a lot of statements around the house like, “barefoot or pregnant, that’s how I like my women,” then Sadako is your girl. I have no problem with a timid female character, but then I need someone else to hold my emotions. However, everybody else is slime. The reporter (who’s mad at Sadako because her even more reprehensible fiancée died eleven years ago while browbeating Sadako’s mother) and the members of the acting troop are several steps down the evolutionary ladder from the torch wielders marching up the road in Frankenstein. The boyfriend is too slightly written to matter, which leaves Sadako and she makes bunnies look fierce. Why should I care about her survival if she isn’t willing to do anything to aid it. She does stand a lot, looking down. Wow, the excitement.

The story takes place in one of those alternate worlds where no one ever calls the cops. The climax should never have happened because everyone would be in custody or at the station answering questions.

Although Ringu 0: Birthday is a better movie than Ringu 2, more effort should be put into avoiding it. Ringu 2 is too silly to detract from the original film, while Ringu 0 strips away a bit of the magic and leaves nothing in return.

Asian, Foreign Language, Ghost Stories, Reviews Tagged with: One Reel

The Ring Two (2005)

Oct 112005

Hoping to start over after the events of The Ring, Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) has moved to a small town with her son Aidan (David Dorfman), but the videotape that kills in seven days pops up again, killing a local student. Rachel destroys the copy. Aidan is then possessed by the ghost of Samara and Rachel must find a way to free her son and stop Samara permanently.

So, how do you make a sequel that’s the equal to one of the most frightening and original films of recent times? Well, you don’t. What shocked the first time isn’t going to the second. The concept is known, the strangeness is common, and there is nowhere to take the story.

But they made one anyway. They didn’t make a bad film, but one which pales next to its predecessor.

The Ring‘s director, Gore Verbinski, cleverly turned down this project, so the producers brought in Hideo Nakata, the director of the original Japanese Ringu and Ringu 2, apparently forgetting that the direction of Ringu was nothing special. They did understand that Ringu 2 was a dry, technobabble-filled waste of celluloid, so they came up with a new idea for a sequel, keeping only the concept of possession and a scene in a well. And what was that idea? Postpartum depression. Yup. Sound exciting? It isn’t.

The whole killer videotape idea gets tossed aside in the first ten minutes to be replaced by PPD. We get riveting scenes of doctors and friends quizzing Rachael on her mood and if she is really hurting Aidan. Since we know she isn’t, these scenes drag. They also kill the creepy mood the movie is trying so desperately to attain (so desperately that it includes attacking CGI deer, that are….well…it was an attempt). If PPD was going to be the theme, couldn’t it have been kept as a subtext instead of stamping on the story?

What The Ring Two has going for it are high production values, a really eerie ghost (Samara may not be what she was in the first film, be she’s still one bizarre kid), effective music, and Naomi Watts. It is the last which saves the film. Watts can act, which is more noticeable as her material is weaker. She makes Rachael a believable character who suffers and cares, and she brought me into the film. Too bad there isn’t an Oscar for Best Performance in a Poorly Conceived Movie.

While Watts may make The Ring Two a watchable flick, I still suggest you skip it as it sullies The Ring, which you’ll never be able to view again without this one squatting in the back of your brain.

An eighteen minute longer “Unrated Edition” was released on DVD—in this case, “unrated” only refers to not being submitted to the MPAA as there are no additional scenes of violence, blood, or nudity. What it has is seventeen unnecessary minutes, slowing the film down to a crawl. There’s extra setup that we don’t need, extra explanation of things that are obvious, extra development of side characters, and extra moments of Rachel dealing with the abuse charges. It does have a more unsettling version of Samara entering Aidan, which is one of the better moments of the film, but it doesn’t make up for the poor pacing of this cut.

It follows not only The Ring, but also the short, Rings.

Ghost Stories, Reviews Tagged with: Two Reels

Reincarnation {Rinne} (2005)

Oct 112005

Timid actress Nagisa Sugiura gets a lead role in a horror film that reenacts a mass murder. Years ago, a professor obsessed with reincarnation, killed the staff and guests of a hotel, including his own children. Nagisa has visions related to the horrendous event, and soon can’t tell the difference between the movie-shoot and the real killings. She isn’t alone, as others of roughly the same age also have visions of the past, and many of them disappear. Is Nagisa insane, or is she a reincarnated victim, fated, with the others, to repeat their deaths?

Takashi Shimizu (Ju-On 1 & 2, Tomie: Re-birth, Marebito, Ju-On: The Grudge, The Grudge), one of the creators and masters of J-horror takes time away from looting his Ju-On series to create something different, and demonstrates he’s still got it. Reincarnation is a tense, taut, supernatural thriller, that may not reach the heights of his best work, but shows there’s still life in Asian horror.

What hasn’t changed is Shimizu’s distain for linear storytelling. Any scene could be happening now in “reality” or thirty years ago. It could be a dream, a hallucination, a haunting, part of the movie they’re making, or a clip from an old 8mm reel documenting the original murders. Is that confusing? How about that any of those things can influence any of the others? We’ve got a direct connection (I’d say causal connection, but I have no reason to believe that Shimizu accepts causation) between a haunting and an event on the faux set. There’s a dream that finishes in something close to reality days later. Characters can walk from one reality to another, and often do. Don’t try to apply structured logic or a timeline, you’ll only hurt yourself.

After the dizzying plot, Reincarnation is most memorable for its characters. J-horror/K-horror doesn’t have a good record on creating believable or sympathetic personalities. Too often they’re distancing and unknown, which makes it hard to feel for their plight. Not this time. Nagisa is a real person, if a broken one, and I was caught up in her life. I empathized even more with the college student who had been dreaming for years of a strange hotel and unfortunately took this opportunity to find out what it means. Partly this is due to a script that gave the characters just enough to say, and just the right things, to turn them into people. Partly it’s due to camera work that catches the right moments, but a lot of the credit goes to actors, none of whom I’m familiar with.

What Reincarnation isn’t is Ju-On. It’s unsettling, not frightening. It’s thoughtful, not hysterical. There are no fountains of blood (OK, one little fountain) or babies in a sack. It builds slowly to a twenty minute brutal climax that’s thoroughly entertaining but won’t give you nightmares. Don’t expect to be shocked, but instead to be impressed, and you’ll have a good time.

Reincarnation was part of the advertising gimmick: After Dark Horrorfest, 8 Films to Die For. The idea was clever. Take a group of low budget horror films that otherwise wouldn’t get a theatrical release and package them as a horror event. All eight movies would play together for one week only. The commercials, which seemed to play every fifteen minutes on late night cable, promised horror too extreme for normal distribution. These were the most frightening, gore-soaked, shock flicks available anywhere. Of course that wasn’t true. Compared to the average R-rated work, the eight are rather tame. They vary from amateurish and boring to clever and joyfully creepy. Reincarnation is a strange fit. However, I’m pleased that it managed at least a brief stay in a theater on this side of the Pacific.

Asian, Foreign Language, Ghost Stories, Reviews Tagged with: Three Reels

Rings (2005)

Oct 112005

Gen-Y thrill seekers watch a cursed videotape that kills in 7 days, and then see how long they can hold out before having someone else watch a duplicate, thus breaking the curse. Jake (Ryan Merriman), an obnoxious high school student, is drawn in by the college crowd to play this dangerous game, but when the person who is supposed to watch his copy refuses, Jake becomes desperate.

A 16-minute short film that bridges The Ring and The Ring 2, Rings is a creepy vision of where The Ring 2 should have gone. As a comment on current society, Rings is exceptionally dark. The characters range from unpleasant and moronic to deeply unpleasant and nearly brain dead. These are the folks you wish you could avoid all your life, and yet I see them everywhere. If you are misanthropic, this is your film.

The lovely cynicism is diluted by unnecessary quick cuts and a distracting, “guerilla-style” look, but the theme is strong enough to win out and make a watchable short. It is, however, a voyeuristic film. I never felt pulled in as I lacked concern for the characters (since they are such lovely people…). That works for the message, but isn’t the best way to provoke fear.

Rings finds a new angle on the cursed tape, and is the only film in the multinational Ring series worth seeking out after the original Ringu/Ring Virus/The Ring.

Asian, Foreign Language, Ghost Stories, Reviews, Short Films Tagged with: Three Reels

Alien Siege (2005)

Oct 112005

The alien Kulku demand eight million humans or they will destroy the planet. The world governments cave in and the U.S. has a lottery to decide who will be sacrificed. Stephen Chase (Brad Johnson) sets out to save his daughter, who has been selected.

Quick Review: The scene of the destruction of a town looks good and the set up, with the ethical questions for both the aliens who had been noble in the past, and the human governments, had promise. There, I wanted to say something nice about Alien Siege. Done with that.

This is a poorly acted, horribly written, cliché ridden mess. Ignoring what could have been interesting, like how the governments and people react to the alien demand, Alien Siege goes for the action-hero-scientist using his secret ray gun (which he got from Roswell; will these cheap invasion film ever forget about Roswell?). There’s a romance, sort of, that makes no sense, but hey, don’t these movies need a romance? And there is the dramatic saving of the daughter and confrontation with the enemy leader. It’s all been done a hundred times before, and usually better. Poor Carl Weathers has a cameo as a collaborating general who has a good heart; I guess he can’t find real work.

This is the type of film where the hero turns his back on the villain (who he was holding at gun point) just so he can be knocked out.

Aliens, Reviews Tagged with: One Reel

War of the Worlds (2005)

Oct 102005

Unstoppable alien invaders attack Earth in giant tripod war machines. Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), a divorced man and uninvolved father, attempts to keep his two children Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and Rachel (Dakota Fanning), safe, and take them to their mother.

Steven Spielberg sucks all of the meaning out of H.G. Wells’s classic novel, leaving a pointless, special effects non-extravaganza. Gone is not only the social criticism, but also the plot and characters. He does keep the title.

To go with that title he gives us three new, unpleasant characters, but not unpleasant in any kind of interesting way. There’s blue collar dad, Ray, played with a remarkable lack of depth by Cruise. That’s a bit unfair as Cruise is given nothing to work with, but for the bucks he’s paid, I’d hope he could invent some personality. To go with him there’s rebellious son Robbie. He’s stupid. Yup, that’s his single personality trait. He puts all his effort into running straight at the alien war machines. Why? Did I mention he was stupid? Then there is Rachel. She isn’t a character. She’s a combination of unrelated “cute” lines. One moment she speaks like a thirty-year-old pop psychologist, the next she’s a slobbering Margaret O’Brien from Meet Me in Saint Louis, and then a mentally unbalanced college freshman. She’s also Jamie Lee Curtis, finding far too many opportunities to scream. But as she’s a young girl in a Hollywood film, it’s a given that she’s going to get threatened and kidnapped at least twice per act.

Now, to build tension, the audience needs to care about the characters. We have to want them not to get zapped, drained of their blood, or stepped on by a giant mental foot. And Spielberg, who really should know better, appears to believe that everyone’s going to love these folks. He’s put in every heart-tugging, overwrought scene in his arsenal. Of course they don’t even rise to the level of sentimental mush if you hate the people involved. And I do. I just wanted to see one of those war machines turn them into human flakes. If within the first half hour, Ray had been microwaved out of existence when he decided to stick around and watch the earth crack open, and Robbie and Rachel had been trampled, this could have been a bearable film, and I wouldn’t have had to listen to mindless bickering for an hour and a half. Ah, what might have been.

It is even worse in that this is an escape picture. Ray cannot fight the aliens in any way. He’s way out of his league. So, once the tripods start walking, all he can do is run. Period. It is a film about running (and driving and swimming). That makes it doubly important that these are people I want to spend time with.

There are plenty of small-scale failings as well. The aliens have the most moronic attack plan ever put on film. They buried their crafts on Earth millions of years ago, and then just waited for humanity to evolve and build cities so they could show up (in lightning bolts), start the out of date equipment, and destroy us. Is there any sense to that? But as the script is saddled with a conclusion that requires a spacefaring race to have no understanding of the importance of quarantines, it’s silly to worry about all the other myriad nonsensical items. Besides, it is the poor characters, slow pacing, and lack of excitement that sink the film.

This War of the Worlds owes more to 1996’s Independence Day than it does to either its namesake book or the 1953 film (which also paid little attention to the novel). It even duplicates the scene where Will Smith goes outside to find the neighbors looking over the local buildings to see some pretty odd weather. Both films are mind-numbing fodder, customized for two steps below the lowest common denominator. But the makers of Independence Day understood how to construct fun froth, with flawed, unrealistic characters that I could care about.

With so very little of value in the script and acting, some surprisingly drab cinematography, and the raping of an important book, it would seem that War of the Worlds was a fine candidate for my award. But, I have to withhold that purely on the basis of special effects. The film does a poor job of showcasing its immense extraterrestrial walkers, but they are still pretty cool to watch. And I enjoyed the gun that left only shredded cloths blowing in the wind when a person was shot. I didn’t enjoy it enough to ever watch this movie again, but such little things are what separate a miserable film from a crime against humanity.

Aliens, Reviews Tagged with: One Reel

Vampires: The Turning (2005)

Oct 092005

A vacationing kick boxer must rescue his girlfriend from a gang of vampires in Thailand. He finds himself in the middle of a three-way war between the gang, vampire hunters, and a group of vampires trying to rid of the world of their own kind.

Quick Review: Initially, this was set to be a third film in John Carpenter’s Vampires series, but the only similarity left is that all three contain vampires and vampire hunters. How you react to this movie will depend on your expectations. If you are looking for a frightening or gory horror movie, you will be disappointed. If, on the other hand, you want to spend an hour and a half on a mindless martial arts kick boxing movie, this might be the ticket. The action is exciting. It doesn’t offer anything new, but when was the last time a kick boxing movie did?

The cast is filled with beautiful or interesting-looking Asians (or Asian-Americans) with talent a step above what I expect in this kind of film. The weak link is the requisite white guy, Colin Egglesfield. A sub-par actor (as a model, he wasn’t cast for his Shakespearean experience), Egglesfield can be forgiven as he isn’t given much to work with. His character is a kick boxer and that’s all the depth he is given, and since Egglesfield pulls off the fight scenes, what more should I expect? I can’t think of any reason to seek out Vampires: The Turning as it has nothing to make it stand out from the mountain of other low budget martial arts flicks, but if it should pop on your TV, you might want to let it play out. If you’re in the mood for some mindless action, you could do worse.

Reviews, Vampires Tagged with: Two Reels

Dracula III: Legacy (2005)

Oct 092005

Uffizi (Jason Scott Lee), a half vampire and newly ex-priest, and Luke (Jason London) travel to Romania to hunt down Dracula and find Luke’s girlfriend (Diane Neal). They meet Julia Hughes (Alexandra Westcourt), a television reporter, and the three of them battle past hordes of vampires and sidestep rebel forces to reach the count.

Dracula 2000 was a self-contained film that didn’t need a sequel, particularly a direct-to-video sequel (does any film need a direct to video sequel?). If financial matters necessitated a follow-up, then it should have chronicled the adventures of Mary Heller, but Mary Heller: That Girl from the Dracula 2000 Movie isn’t a title that puts butts in seats, so Dracula returned in two films shot back-to-back. Except for the low budget, the two films are oddly dissimilar. Dracula II: Ascension was a lab-bound, watch-the-college-students-die, horror pic. Dracula III: Legacy is a buddy cop film, shot mainly outside, on location in Romania. It has the typical buddy chatter, a lot of action, and exterior shots of beautiful ancient castles. It can’t match the more professional production of Dracula 2000, but it is a significant improvement over its predecessor.

The intended audience, fans of low budget horror films, will find the story old hat. There are no great mysteries or plot twists. It’s just standard travel, fight, travel. The characters are nothing new as well. Luke almost has a personality and is occasionally funny. He’s also stuck repeatedly doing the opposite of what he’s told for no reason than to force the plot along. Julia Hughes is there as a romantic interest. She has no other purpose nor identifiable motivation. The romance doesn’t come naturally from the characters, but exists only because the words “Julia likes Uffizi” could be written in the margins of the script. Uffizi is a generic badass. Jason Scott Lee gives no indication that the ex-priest has any traits outside of his role as vampire killer. But he fights well, and Lee can flex his pecks with the best of them. The vampire carnage isn’t bad, although we seldom get a clear view of what’s going on. Instead, the camera turns to the wall so that we get shots of splatter. Well, tossing red paint on some bricks is cheap to film.

The scenery is where Dracula III: Legacy is better than the typical numbered sequel. Romania is the place to film a vampire movie. The forests and mountains have a slightly sinister look, and the ruins aren’t something you’ll find in the new world. Adding a subplot of civil unrest due to vamps controlling the government was a nice bit of background, but went nowhere.

Rutger Hauer (Blade Runner) takes over the role of Dracula for no conceivable reason. So, each movie gets a new king of the vamps. However, Hauer is hardly in the film, popping in only in the last few minutes to ham it up. If his part reqired more than a day of shooting, they weren’t trying. Too many low budget films are using what little money they have to hire name actors whose career is sliding away. I suppose it makes sense for marketing, but it doesn’t make a better picture. If Hauer’s appearance is brief, Roy Scheider’s, as a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cardinal is ridiculous. He walks in with Lee early in the picture, recites a few quick lines, and then is off to cash his paycheck.

Dracula III: Legacy is strictly for people with at least twenty vampire movies on their shelves (and ones starring Nicolas Cage don’t count). It’s bloody without a great deal of gore, contains nudity but not enough to excite anyone, and has plenty of combat of the moderately exciting variety. Those with low expectations will be satisfied.

Reviews, Vampires Tagged with: Two Reels

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