Dawn of the Dead—Directors Cut (2004)

Mar 022004
 
two reels

A mixed group of survivors, including a policeman (Ving Rhames), a nurse (Sarah Polley), a criminal, a pregnant woman, and three security guards, hole up in a mall as zombies take over the world.

Quick Review: It starts so well.  Ana, the nurse, and her husband waking up to the zombie child was everything I was hoping this film would be.  The initial scenes of the destruction of civilization were excellent as well.  But after that it becomes standard fare.  It vaguely follows the ’78 version’s plot, though I had a hard time caring about any of these people (or keeping them straight when there is a sudden influx of secondary characters).  The nature of the disease has changed (now only the bitten rise), which isn’t a huge problem if you can ignore the existence of the related zombie movies.  It does make me wonder about how the disease spread quite so quickly.  Far more problematic is the stupidity of the characters.  Even if you aren’t quite sure how the disease is spread, if you’ve seen the dead rise and you have reason to believe there is a contagious disease, is it clever to get really close to dead bodies?  The film is reasonably well shot, and there are plenty of well made-up zombies and excellent gore scenes, but the themes and humor of the original is gone.  There is nothing to think about here; it’s just an adventure horror film, and there are plenty of those to choose from.

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 Post-Apocalyptic, Reviews, Zombies Tagged with:

Doom (2005)

Feb 032004
 
three reels

A combination archeological dig and research facility on Mars is quarantined for unknown reasons. A Rapid Response Tactical Squad, lead by Sarge (The Rock) and including John Grimm (Karl Urban), is sent in to save the corporation’s data, retrieve personnel if possible, and take out anything dangerous. Once there, they join with Grimm’s scientist sister (Rosamund Pike), who is charged with downloading the computer data, while they fight off horrible monsters and zombies.

Claiming to be based on the highly successful series of video games, Doom is really another “Bugs in a Can” film in the mold of Aliens. There are multiple powerful monsters, a troop of marines (sorry, that’s RRTS members), and plenty of dark corridors for them to walk through.  Like Aliens, there are a few non-combatants and a lab where the companies dark deeds can be seen.  Naturally, most of the soldiers will get picked off and a lot of monsters will get shot by very loud guns.  We’ve seen this many times before.  The only real change from Aliens comes from ripping off Resident Evil (which is 50% a “Genetically Engineered Zombie Bugs in a Can” movie) and switching the ultimate battle to something easier to film.

And that dooms (get the play on words) this flick to mediocrity. With Aliens already out there as a nearly perfect rendition of this story, why make another?  Since the comparison is so obvious, your film needs to beat James Cameron’s masterpiece in at least one area, and that rarely happens. It doesn’t here. So, most “Bugs in a Can” films are direct-to-video schlock affairs, with unknown actors and has-beens trapped on dim sets that hide the cheap monster effects.

So, compared to those home video projects, Doom is pretty good. The monsters are cooler, the corridors are longer, and the sci-fi toys are zazzier. Of course Doom cost twenty times more, so this isn’t a case of “you get what you pay for.”

Unfortunately, like all those low-budget cousins, Doom is pretty slow for its first half.  Unlike its video game namesake, there’s almost no gunplay and the monsters stick to shadows. This is supposed to be the tension part of the program, but that would require real characters we can care about, and those aren’t here.  What we get are a group of one-quirk soldiers (we need that quirk so we can identify them when they die). So, there’s the melancholy guy, the sleazy guy, the religious guy, the black guy, the sleazy black guy, the Asian guy, the young guy, and The Rock (his quirk is being exactly like he is in all his other movies). That’s all you get to know about any of them, and in several cases that’s too much (after two lines, I was praying for a monster to eat the sleazy guy, whose dialog consists of telling girls that he’d need to strip search them for security reasons). The melancholy guy (that’s Grimm) is even a lead in the picture and yet we’re only given a partial explanation for his pouting.

Eventually, the writers caught on that soldiers separating from each other (because the plot requires it), moving around slowly in the dark, and suddenly dying, isn’t interesting. So the “story” changes. The survivors pick up their guns and we get mindless mayhem (which is a great improvement). The high point is a five minute, first-person perspective shooting spree. It’s exactly like watching someone else play a graphically improved level of the video game. Hey, watching someone else play a game isn’t much fun.  Well, it’s as good as it gets here, and for about four minutes, it’s not bad.  Then it starts to drag.

Still, with an over-used story, by-the-numbers characters, and no theme, there’s fun to be had in the meaningless violence.  The gore is front-and-center, as limbs are torn off and heads are smashed into walls. Gatling guns are common, and The Rock manages to find the game’s legendary “Big Fucking Gun” and blow enormous holes in the ceiling.  Forget that none of it makes sense: that an infection can change a person in a matter of seconds (even adding mass) or take hours depending on when a new monster is needed for the script; that Mars has the same gravity as Earth; that character behavior is disconnected from personality; that skeletons from tens of thousands of years ago are found in perfect condition and sitting up;  that three insane people are left on active military duty (one cuts crosses into his arm if he sins); that they haven’t mapped the human genome forty years in the future (ummmm, isn’t it already done now?) and that the unknown final tenth is where are souls are defined; that Martians came to Earth long ago and became us, and somehow lost their twenty-fourth chromosome. Instead, think only of guys with big guns blasting demonic-looking critters who are busy ripping off heads. Think of gallons of blood. Think of wire being shoved through a hand and an arm being cut off in a door. If that sounds fun, then you’ll find Doom mildly amusing entertainment for a Saturday afternoon.

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Blessed (2004)

Feb 022004
 
one reel

Craig and Samantha Howard (James Purefoy, Heather Graham), desperate for a baby, go to a fertility clinic that artificially inseminates Samantha, adding the blood of The Devil. Businessman and Satanist Earl Sidney (David Hemmings) aids the couple, while Father Carlo (Andy Serkis) attempts to kill the unborn twins to stop a child of Lucifer being born.

Rosemary’s Baby is one of the most overrated genre films; it shocked a generation which wasn’t used to the devil popping up in anything but low-budget affairs. Watching it now, with years of slickly made demonic thrillers to compare it to, it appears as an overly slow, predictable, drab film with very little to say and even less to inspire thought. But it does have an amusing ending which defies old-school expectations, though hardly surprising to anyone who didn’t start with some serious assumptions on how a film about the devil should end. Rosemary’s Baby is a film you suffer through to get to the ending, and how worthwhile the trip is depends on how entertaining those final ten minutes are to you.

Which brings me to Blessed. It is Rosemary’s Baby. It’s set forty years later, has a stalker priest, mentions cloning a lot, and there are twins, but otherwise, it’s Rosemary’s Baby. Well, it has one other change, the ending. The part that made the original enjoyable is missing. So, what we have here is an overly slow, predictable, drab film with very little to say and even less to inspire thought, plus it is lacking a payoff.

It is a chance to see Andy Serkis (the voice and computer capture for Gollum), in a non-digitized form. However, if this is all the onscreen work he can get after the huge success of Lord of the Rings, then he better cling to his digital performances (he wears the motion capture suit again for Peter Jackson’s King Kong).

This is also an opportunity to see Heather Graham play an everyday mother-to-be with little personality. As Graham has demonstrated an ability to play interesting, flamboyant parts, the joy of watching her perform as a tedious woman escapes me.  But then she’s not very good at playing dull. With a twinkle in her eye and an ambiguous smile, it felt like she was prepared to burst out with a colorful, twisted touch of excitement. It never happened.

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X2: X-Men United (2003)

Dec 062003
 
four reels

An assassination attempt on the president by the teleporting mutant Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) gives General William Stryker (Brian Cox) the power he needs to carry out his attack on the X-Men mansion, kidnap Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Cyclops (James Marsden), and set in motion his genocidal plans. Countering him is Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), Storm (Halle Berry) and several young mutants working together with their previous enemies, Magneto (Ian McKellen) and Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos).

X2 is 2000’s X-Men, but better. If X-men had great fight scenes, X2’s are more exciting (The Nightcrawler attack is one of the best action moments ever filmed). If X-Men had interesting and complicated characters, X2 makes them deeper. The themes are more personal, yet larger. The relationships are more emotional. This is very much a sequel, so it loses a bit on originality, but it gains a lot on style.

X2 smartly reduces the importance of the teens, except for one scene, where Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) has to come out as a mutant to his parents. It is THE LGBT moment of the franchise and is moving and painful, but still manages a touch of dark humor. The rest of the time the metaphor leans more toward Jews and the holocaust, which works better when the film goes into action mode.

Again, the story focuses on Wolverine, and again, Hugh Jackman owns the part. Even in the weaker franchise outings, he has always given amazing range to what is a simple character, and this isn’t a weaker outing. Famke Janssen’s Jean Grey is the sentimental heart of the film and Janssen is radiant.

But what really elevates the film is Magneto. X-Men films work best when he—and Mystique—aren’t pure villains. It should be clear by now that his view of how humanity will react to mutants is at least as accurate as Professor X’s. Neither of them are right or wrong, but they have competing philosophies for how an oppressed group should deal with their oppressors. In X-Men, he was painted black, but here it is shades of gray. I was cheering him on as much as Wolverine or Storm. It’s hard to argue against Mystique’s reason for not hiding her differences when she so easily could: “Because we shouldn’t have to.” But the best statement of right and wrong is less dramatic.

Pyro: “So they say you’re the bad guy.”
Magneto: “Is that what they say?”

The man who survived a concentration camp only to see it happening again seems to have the right to smirk at the vague statements of others that he is the villain. And that ambiguity makes X2 much more than a summer action flick.

 Reviews, Superhero

Ju-On: The Grudge (2003)

Oct 122003
 
three reels

A vicious murder curses a house.  Anyone who enters it afterward dies.

I expected Ju-On: The Grudge to be more frightening and visually compelling than its video prequels (see my Ju-On 1 & 2 review).  This was a big screen release with a bigger budget, but it is a sequel, and like most sequels, it just can’t match the excitement and originality of the first.  Starting roughly five years after the events of Ju-On, Ju-On: The Grudge once again presents a series of vignettes, each showing how someone who enters the cursed house dies.  But where the curse is spread from one victim to the next in the first two films, here, it always goes back to the first three ghosts.  Also, the ghosts now attempt to fool their victims, loosing the mindless inevitability I loved in Ju-On.  Additionally, the ghosts are seen too often (the crawling ghost which is so creepy in the first film where it shows up once appears over and over in this one, diluting its impact) and the deaths are far less bloody, producing a less shocking film.

Perhaps someone who hasn’t seen the original films will enjoy this film more than I,  particularly because it acts as if the original crime is a mystery to the audience and reveals it with great fanfare.  If you can’t find those first films, I do recommend renting this one, but if you have the option, see Ju-On 1 & 2 instead.

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

One Missed Call {Chakushin Ari} (2003)

Oct 112003
 
three reels

Yumi Nakamura (Kou Shibasaki) and her friends are having a more or less pleasant evening out (that’s as good as it gets for Yumi, who has never completely recovered from her childhood abuse) when one of Yumi’s friends checks her voice mail to find she’s gotten a call from the future—from herself—indicating the time of her death.  Ignoring the implications, the friend goes about her daily affairs and dies right on time.  Yumi learns that the girl wasn’t the first to die, and it soon becomes clear she won’t be the last.  Apparently, an angry ghost is using cell phone contact lists to choose victims.  Eventually, Yumi’s number turns up, and with the help of a man who’s sister was an earlier victim, she attempts to discover the source of the evil.

After the Ringu films, the One Missed Call series is the most popular in its native country.  It is also the most derivative.  On paper, One Missed Call is Ringu.  Once again, due to a piece of ever-present technology, people are, one-at-a-time, given the bad news that they are going to die in the near future, and they’re given the exact time.  They can’t hide.  Wherever they are at the specified time, a ghost finds them and that’s all she wrote.  A girl, who’s next in line, partners up with a guy who isn’t in direct danger, to uncover what horrible event started the curse.  Naturally, it involves a mistreated girl, and a twist when they realize they’ve got it all wrong.  Yeah, that all sounds familiar.  If it doesn’t, skip this and pick up the superior Ringu.

So, this is a copy, but copies aren’t always a bad thing.  If you re-watch films, you must not mind seeing the same thing again and again.  As far as duplicates go, One Missed Call is a good one.  What it lacks in originality, it makes up in fear.  After Ringu and Ju-On, this is the creepiest J-horror film, at least of the fifty or so I’ve watched.  Sure, the scares are as derivative as the story, but they still work.  Pale, contortionist girls, hands reaching out of nowhere, figures suddenly behind our heroes—the favorite clichés of J-horror are here, and they’ve rarely been used to such exquisite ends.  Things start out tense and work their way to hysteria.  During the fifteen minutes when Yumi is searching an abandoned hospital, you’ll want to keep an annoying friend around to poke you with a sharp stick so you’ll remember to breathe.  If you go to horror flicks to feel that rush of adrenaline, then you’ll be pleased.

On the other hand, if you go for anything approaching sense, you’re not going to be happy.  At the end of Ringu and Ju-On you can piece together most of what happened, and anything still open for interpretation doesn’t contradict what you know.  Not so here.  Once the big mysteries are revealed, the film falls into a goopy tar pit of incoherence.  There is no way to fit it all together.  (It’s a hoot to check out Internet boards where fans trip over themselves trying to explain it all, and rarely do two people come up with the same answers.)  Some of the more problematic items in the script are:

  • We see the ghost kill, and then find out that isn’t the killer ghost at all.  (Did this ghost like to go out for crawls and pretend to kill?)
  • Cell phones don’t have any connection to the ghost (not the real ghost that is, just the red herring ghost).
  • Two important characters might be dead, or might be alive; they might be in their own heaven or doomed.  There’s no way to know.
  • One character might be a reincarnation of another, or is leading a parallel life, or travels in time.  Again, there’s no way to know.  And oops, did I say one character?  Make that four characters.

One Missed Call doesn’t play fair.  Many Asian-horror films say that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, but this film just chucks philosophy.  Three too many twist endings are stuck on, and each is another step toward parody.  But then that could have been the point. Earlier, a low-life TV producer puts a soon-to-be victim on the air along with fake psychics and exorcists and a death clock counting down the seconds; this is a step out of horror and into satire, so perhaps the whole films is meant to be a gag.  The difference with the TV bit is that the joke works.

The failings are significant, but I can’t ignore that this is one hell of a bone-chilling thriller.   It’s a mess, but it’s a scary mess.

It was followed by One Missed Call 2 (2005) and One Missed Call Final (2006).  The story was also made into a ten episode series in 2005 with different characters and events, and even a different ghost; that title is also translated as One Missed Call.  A U.S. version is coming out in 2008.

Prolific Director Takashi Miike has a vast range of genre credits, ranging from blood soaked gangster epics to children’s television shows.  On this side of the Pacific, he’s best known for his shock and gore dramas Audition and Ichi The Killer and among cult fans for the taboo breaking Visitor Q.

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

Silk (2003)

Oct 112003
 
two reels

OK, this will take some time, so try to follow along.  Hashimoto (Yosuke Eguchi) a rogue, crippled  scientist (who really doesn’t like the word “cripple”), and his team have created the Menger Sponge out of human protein.  This device can do just about everything, including suck in any type of energy, trap ghosts, allow the living to see the dead, and generate anti-gravity.  However, the research is considered a failure because they’ve only been able to make microscopic versions.  But Hashimoto has a trick up his sleeve, a single large scale Menger Sponge and an imprisoned boy-ghost.  Hashimoto gets his government masters to give him one more chance as well as the aid of a special cop (Chen Chang), who has super-sight.  The cop comes with substantial baggage as his mother is in a coma.  For reasons that are pitch black but manage to become simply murky at the end, the team + cop study the dead boy and the nearly invisible strands of silk that allow him to stop people’s hearts and connects him to something much more dangerous.

This one is weird even for Asian horror. A science fiction, horror, espionage tale, Silk happily switches gears over and over, without any concern that the transmission has fallen out. There’s the usual long-haired female ghost that reaches out of a soup bowl, and then there’s a car chase and shootout. Sci-Fi technobabel mixes with government spy-speak, and both take a break for a treatise on the meaning of life. This is what psychedelic drugs were made for.

Silk was an expensive movie for Taiwan’s modest film industry, though the budget couldn’t cover the Scientology literature expenses on a Tom Cruise flick. It shows what people can do who aren’t used to insane amounts of dough. It’s a great looking film, with wonderful cinematography, superb acting, and solid, if not overwhelming special effects. If I was a producer in L.A., I fire the crews for my next ten extravaganzas and hire Silk‘s filmmakers to shoot all the movies for the price of one. Well, I’d do that as long as Silk‘s writer/director stuck with directing and kept his more esoteric ideas to himself.

While Silk functions well in most of its genres when considered separately, the whole is a cloud of meaningless giberish. This horror film attempts to supply a logical, rational, and scientific explanation for the supernatural and I can’t recall a film that makes less sense. I question if ghosts and cyclotrons should ever go together, but certainly not when there are also strands of love and hate. How do you measure a “hate strand”?  And even with super-vision, can you really follow such a thread through the streets in a car? (I’m glad ghostly silk sticks to a traffic lane.)

Motivations are more troubling as is the bizarre way Silk defines the scientific community. The government apparently is set up like the mafia. The “Director,” who beats up his underlings when irritated, wants the physical Menger Sponge so he can publish a paper on it and become wealthy. Unless he’s just going to paperclip the object to a blank sheet of paper, I can’t imagine what good it will do him. He has no idea how it works or the concepts behind it.  Plus, the antigravity team got a huge amount of press in flashbacks around the opening credits, so he can hardly claim it was all his idea.  Hashimoto’s hot assistant (Barbie Hsu) must be on strong antidepressants, and they aren’t working. She is so incensed that the cop has joined their group, thinking that this will diffuse her credit (last time I heard Asian scientists work in teams with people from all over the world, just like all other scientists), that she attempts to steal the boy ghost by putting him in her pocket. Ummmm… There’s so many things wrong with that I can’t even list them. Then there’s Tung the cop, who has a mother fixation that isn’t only embarrassing, it’s boring. I can forgive a film for making no sense (though Silk is pushing it), but not for wasting time with tedious faux-drama.

Silk is never frightening, but the ghosts do provide a few creepy moments. Tung trying desperately to avoid a staring contest with the boy ghost is tense enough to get you looking for your blood pressure medicine. The film can’t retain that mood (or any mood), which makes this a good “scary picture” for your friends who can’t handle scary pictures. No one is going to get too scared from a movie that has a ghost slide out through the door of a car when it takes a tight turn.

Silk has a lot going for it, but it tries to be too much, and ends up not being enough of anything.

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

Whispering Corridors 3: Wishing Stairs (2003)

Oct 112003
 
three reels

At a fine-arts girls’ high school, anyone who walks a set of 28 steps and finds a 29th may make a wish, or so says the legend.  Ji-seong (Ji-hyo Song) makes such a wish: that she will be the school’s choice for the ballet competition.  The obvious selectee would have been the beautiful, popular, and talented So-hie (Han-byeol Park), whose love for Ji-seong fits somewhere between best-friends-for-life and lesbian obsession. The wish comes true in the easiest way, with So-hie’s dead body laying in a parking lot.  Hye-ju (An Jo), a troubled fat girl, makes her own wish, that So-hie be brought back, with the result being hauntings and death.

The third in a series of high school girl ghost stories (following Whispering Corridors (1998) and Whispering Corridors 2: Memento Mori (2003)), Wishing Stairs is the first that can be called horror.  It’s also the best of the three, with a quicker pace, stronger characters, and considerably improved production values. It is, however, still frontloaded with far too much “typical lives of high school girls” material, and it adds a new problem: a cartoon character.

I was glad to see the exit of the After School Special tone.  At no time did I feel I was watching a filmstrip made by the PTA on the evils of bullying and on when you need to tell your parents about your teacher’s inappropriate touching.  In place of “girl’s true life adventures” we’ve got The Monkey’s Paw.  Just as in that classic, wishes are made and come true with devastating results.

The story is primarily Ji-seong’s, with a few side-tracks to see Hye-ju’s world.  I would have liked a lot more character development of Ji-seong, but compared to the girls in the previous films, she’s painted by Michelangelo. I had a sense of who she was and why she did the things she did.  More importantly, I felt for her.  So-hie is an enigma, but since she spends most of the movie dead, that’s OK.

Unfortunately, things are not so good with Hye-ju.  An Jo is a slim, attractive girl, so she wears latex fat makeup for the first half, and it never looks real.  But the makeup is subtle next to her wild mannerisms and expressions, which would fit nicely in a comical anime, along with smoke shooting out of her ears and little hearts floating around her head.  To make sure we understand that Hye-ju is unappealing, she repeatedly smears food all over her face.  I got the message.  In a serious film, the theatrics are distracting.  Once Hye-ju becomes possessed (or goes nuts), the broad comic behaviors decrease and the movie strikes a consistent tone.

The legacy of Ringu and Ju-On is easy to see.  The scare-moments (a pale, long haired girl compressed into a space she couldn’t possibly be in, strange twisted movements, etc.) are derived from those earlier movies.  They’re nice, but old hat for fans of the sub-genre.  If you haven’t seen other J-horror/K-horror, they’ll knock you out, though in that case, you should set this flick back in the bin and get yourself a copy of Ringu to see the genre clichés at their finest.

For the only film of the first three to have frightening moments, it is a paradox that Wishing Stairs is the one that can be given a pedestrian interpretation.  Hye-ju is neurotic, socially isolated, and over-dosing on stimulants.  Is she being haunted or has she merely taken the final baby-step into psychosis?  Ji-seong, the only other girl who’s haunted, is racked by grief and guilt.  She’s also under a huge amount of stress and has no one to talk to.  Add in that her supernatural sightings are almost all in nightmares, and it starts to look like this is a story of two girls in need of psychiatric help.

Wishing Stairs is a middle-of-the-road K-horror entry.  Where it stands out is with the stairs.  They really look supernatural.  While the movie as a whole will fade into the crowd, the image of those stairs lingers.

It was followed by Whispering Corridors 4: The Voice (2005).

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

Alien Hunter (2003)

Oct 112003
 
three reels

Ex-SETI cryptologist Julian Rome (James Spader) travels to Antarctica when Grisham (Carl Lewis), the communications officer at a research facility, discovers an object of likely extraterrestrial origin putting out a strong radio signal. Stationed at the lab is Julian’s ex-lover (Janine Eser), and the obnoxious Michael Straub (John Lynch).

Now here is one of those odd films that I can’t figure how it got made or what the intentions of the filmmakers were. It is an amalgamation of many genre films, both better and worse, made on the cheap in Bulgaria, but with surprisingly high production values, top notch special effects, and a name star in James Spader.

After spending a few minutes as Raider of the Lost Ark and Stargate (Spader is once again a nerdy language expert who has been rejected by the scientific community, only this time he’s a lady’s man who is getting the eye from his hot students), Alien Hunter turns into The Thing (either the 1951 or the 1982 version; they both fit). There are a bunch of research scientists stuck in the snow, out of touch with the rest of the world, and holding on to a slowly defrosting alien pod. You know how this has got to turn out… Except it doesn’t. Right when you think the climax is here, it changes to several other films until it stabilizes as what it is at its heart, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

I’d much rather see an original movie, but that doesn’t happen often with Alien films, so I appreciate that they’ve borrowed from a number of films instead of just re-filming Alien as most do.  But they swiped from too many sources, ending up with no consistent tone. The film tries to do too much, never quite having time to do any of them justice. Keeping with a combo Stargate/The Thing/The Andromeda Strain would have resulted in a more fluid and interesting picture, but I doubt the producers would have liked the downbeat ending that would have resulted.

I always like Spader. Even when he’s not at his best, he’s interesting. Here, he’s not at his best, playing it too emotionally low key. Maybe he needed some coffee. But he is still more watchable than 95% of low budget actors.  The rest of the cast is much better than I’ve come to expect in Eastern European-filmed genre movies, except for Eser, who is also too controlled. Her scenes with Spader are like two unplugged toasters. John Lynch plays his cowardly, nasty scientist over-the-top, but he wasn’t given subtle lines so I can’t see any other way he could have done it. The biggest surprise was track star Carl Lewis who has found a new career. He is believable and likable, making me care more about his fate than anyone else’s.

Where things really went wrong is with the title. With an excess of action-horror films titled Alien XXXX, the title Alien Hunter implies that this will be a good yell-at-the-screen, drink-a-beer, see-aliens-eat-people movie, and it’s not. It isn’t action or horror. I’d call it sci-fi suspense. It’s pretty good for what it is, but a disappointment for what most people think it will be.

 Aliens, Reviews Tagged with:

Vampire Vixens (2003)

Oct 092003
 
one reel

Mentally deficient Eugene (Zachary Winston Snygg), a man with an undefined bowel problem, resurrects the vampire Dracool (Tina Krause),  which reinstates the curse on the Van Helsing family, turning Wally Van Helsing (John Paul Fedele) into a near clone of Eugene.  Meanwhile, five women (Misty Mundae, A.J. Khan, Katie Jordan, Darian Caine, Elizabeth Hitchcock), in differing configurations, have lesbian sex that’s completely unrelated to the vampire story.

Another trip into the land of softcore vampire erotica, Vampire Vixens primary effect upon the viewer is to inspire sympathy for writer/director John Bacchus.  He has some unknown brain disease that makes it impossible for him to determine what is sexy and what is funny.  But I am a kindly man, and will help him out: a guy with oversized glasses discussing how he soiled his shorts is not titillating, nor is it humorous.  I suppose some kind of joke could be created about the situation (although I’m happy to say I can’t think of one), but no joke is even attempted here.  Two characters just talk about their loose sphincters.

Vampire Vixens is three films, skillessly clipped together.  The one that will be most interesting to anyone familiar with Seduction Cinema has the charismatic Misty Mundae in a lesbian encounter with Elizabeth Hitchcock, after which Ms Mundae masturbates.  I cannot deny Ms Mundae’s charms (why would I want to?).  There is no illusion that she’s a character in a film; she’s just a lovely, natural girl adlibbing fake, but still erotic, moments in front of a camera.  But no matter how lovely she (and Hitchcock) are, two brief scenes do not make a movie.

The second segment has beautiful A.J. Khan as a corporate executive conducting job interviews that consist of everyone getting naked and sucking on each other’s breasts.  First she “interviews” Katie Jordan, then Darian Caine, then finally both of them together.  Fans of lesbian sex should be pleased with the action, but unfortunately, the girls speak.  The dialog includes many “ums” and “you knows,” and the actresses forget their lines (assuming that any of this was written down before the camera  began rolling).  You may find some amusement in spotting where Khan screws up the name of the company, if mistakes are what you’re looking for in your erotica.  The second encounter is prefaced with a discussion of missing toilet paper, overflowing toilets, tampons, and urine.  I can’t imagine that anyone thought this was clever, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume the girls panicked when the director yelled action and they realized they had nothing to say.

The only section with a plot is an unpleasantly unfunny comedy.  Eugene and Wally try to out-nerd each other with fart jokes as Dracool stands around in a basement.  That’s it.  Dracool is topless most of the time, but there’s nothing sexy going on.  I guess she’s distracted wondering where the other vampire vixens are; the title does imply more than one.  The dialog is what a pair of drunk teenage boys at camp would mumble between burps.  It might be funny to them, but not to anyone else.

As a movie, Vampire Vixens is a failure on every level.  As foreplay, or perhaps something to warm your lonely winter nights, it still has little to offer.  A few minutes of Misty Mundae is worth something, but you’d be better off looking for a film where she’s the star.

For anyone not wanting to miss the series, Vampire Vixens  is the sequel to Vampire Seduction.  With a story so compelling, one film couldn’t tell it all.

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The Vampire Effect (2003)

Oct 092003
 
one reel

A Hong Kong kung fu vampire film where a vampire noble is killing off the princes in order to gain the power to walk in the daylight.  When the sister of a vampire hunter falls for a vampire prince, it is only a matter of time before the hunter, his assistant, and sister will be facing the noble.

The Vampire Effect is frustratingly close to being a good film.  Some movies are good.  Some just suck.  What really irritates me are the ones that should have been good, that could have been worthwhile with just a bit of smart editing.  On the good side, The Vampire Effect is filled with kung fu action and plenty of vampires.  A scene where the two girls take out a small vampire army was as good as the work in Blade.  The main villain is properly evil (though not fleshed out enough) and the FX wizard-type duel is exciting.  Plus, some of the jokes are funny.  But that’s where it falls apart.  Some of the jokes work, but most fail.  It’s as if whenever they couldn’t think of something funny, they just told the actors to make a face or fall down or act like a young teenager.  There are a lot of these “young teenager” moments, which is troubling as the characters involved are in their mid twenties.  Also, while the fight scenes look good, a majority have some overdone, blatant wirework where it doesn’t look like the character did a superhuman move, but rather swung about on an invisible wire.  Oh well, that’s annoying, but not on the level of the twenty year olds acting like they are thirteen.  Jackie Chan puts in an appearance, and is OK, though even he has a rather pathetic wire move.  This film could have been a good (or at least enjoyable) kung fu adventure film with just a bit of editing.  Or it could have been an amusing comedy (with some re-shooting).  But it never decides.  There’s a tragic death that should cause some emotion in the viewer, but as it fits so poorly with the silliness that came before, I was left gawking at the screen.

A longer, non-dubbed version goes by the title The Twin Effect.

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Dracula II: Ascension (2003)

Oct 092003
 
one reel

A researcher (Craig Sheffer) and his students bring Dracula (Stephen Billington) back to “life” in order to use his blood as a cure for just about everything. As they study him, Dracula watches for a way to escape and a vampire-hunting, self-flagellating, priest (Jason Scott Lee) searches for the count.

Quick Review: This strangely titled sequel to Dracula 2000 (shouldn’t it have been called Dracula 2003?) sets stupid people and whining people in a confined, we-don’t-have-enough-money-for-a-decent-sized-set country “house” where they fret a lot but do little. In an action-packed vampire film, I’d like to see some action and maybe a vampire doing something. But Dracula II: Ascension prefers a few fight scenes that last less than a minute and keeps Dracula tied to a table till the last few minutes.

The acting is what I expect in an average low budget monster flick while the cinematography is a bit weaker, which means I need some other reason to watch. An interesting plot or absorbing characters would do the trick, but neither are to be found here. Lee’s martial artist priest seems tacked on, having little to do with the story and little screen time. He appears to be in the movie only so that he can be in the sequel (yup – there’s a Dracula III). Stephen Billington’s take on Dracula is the one entertaining thing is this flotsam.  He has a slightly alien, roguish quality that makes for a good vampire. However, the extreme change in the character from the first film (he was a sensual, sophisticated, dark-haired, Jew in Dracula 2000 while he’s a punkish, blond, Arian here) is rather distracting.  Still, if there had been a bit more of Billington, and a few more scenes like the one where he counts the beans (vampires count quickly), this would be a film worth watching.  But as it is, spend the time on a better film.

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