Plot: It's the same plot as the Chinese folk tale "Yeh-Shen" except it doesn't have a talking fish in it.
I was on the edge of my seat near the end of this new Disney Cinderella movie because I was really hoping they'd divert from Charles Perrault's French version, the one that Disney made sure we all knew and loved, and end this like the Grimm's version--with mutilated feet and and avalanche of boulders. Unfortunately, those Disney people are a bunch of pussies and thought mangled heels would have clashed with the pretty imagery of the rest of the movie. No little girls want to see that glass slipper smeared with step-sister blood, I guess.
I just gave this movie a bonus point because it wasn't a musical. It's the kind of thing you don't really appreciate while watching the movie, but when you've had a couple days to think about it, it makes a huge difference.
The acting's fine but far from the star of the show. Lily James plays Cinderella, and she's cute throughout without being breathtakingly so until the point when she's supposed to be. Her bosom? Appropriate. I like that there's a vulnerability with James, and when the character's being "kind," you just believe it. Richard Madden is the Prince, and his teeth are perfect. Unless they're CGI teeth which I guess is a possibility these days. The two step-sisters are good without being overly comical. There are funny moments in the script, but those funny bits aren't obvious. Bonham Carter's weird face makes for a good Fairy Godmother although her voice kind of sounds like a lot of other narrator voices. Best of all--probably expected--is Cate Blanchett as the step-mother. I don't think that's a particularly difficult role to play. It's an easy sort of malicious, but I wouldn't want to underestimate the job Blanchett does with the character. She makes evil fun, and pretty much every line she has, no matter how nice it might seem on paper, feels vicious.
But the real star of the show would be the luscious visuals and colors. This is the type of movie where there's just so much to look at. You kind of want to sit there and absorb it all--every color, every movement of a dress, every shadow in an attic, every part of the architecture, every bit of nature. And that's easy to do since the story is so familiar. You can ignore the narrative and just focus on looking at things. And those things are stunning. I loved Cinderella's house even though Cate Blanchett did not. The castle's interior was as beautiful as you'd expect it to be, and the gardens were just as beautiful. The ball? Well, the amount of colors and the costumes--this has to win awards for costuming--make it a feast, a dance sequence that makes Disney animated dance sequences like the famous Beauty and the Beast one look like bullshit. This isn't an animated movie, but it's exquisitely drawn like it's one. Even the CGI doesn't get in the way. There are numerous shots of a quartet of mice as well as some lizards and a duck, and although it's the kind of thing you'd figure would completely ruin a movie like this, it didn't. The CGI, even at its most preposterous, was convincing. All fairy tales should look as good as this movie.
As I said, you know the story going on. The additions--more of Cinderella's parents in the exposition, some stuff with the king, more meanness after the ball--fit fine, and there are some nods to the original Disney animated classic that are nice touches.
I had reservations about this one, not because I don't think the original is some untouchable sacred cow or anything, but because it just seemed like a tired idea. But this is a tired story so lovingly retold that Disney's come close to matching the original which would put this in the running for the best version of this fairy tale. If only it had those mangled feet!
Plot: A possibly-schizophrenic teenager escapes death thanks to Harvey, falls in love, and then engages in various shenanigans including lollygagging, whimsy, malarkey, balderdash, gobbledygook, and kerfuffling. Harvey turns out to be a bad influence, he spots bubbles emerging from the rib cages of his family and friends, and he starts reading up on time travel.
I really kind of hate this movie, interesting since I watched it fourteen years ago and thought I liked it. But any movie you need to do this much extensive research to understand and then are completely unsatisfied when you get what might be answers is just not a movie for me. I mean, apparently you need to visit the website that director Richard Kelly created for this and read an imaginary book on time travel philosophy to fully grasp what is going on here, and as a guy who just likes to watching fucking movies, I don't have any interest in making that kind of commitment. I don't like the movie enough to do any of that anyway.
This movie at least ties the record for most Gyllenhaals in one movie.
I like Jake Gyllenhaal, and the guy's been on fire lately. Both he and his sister seem to gravitate toward these interesting, complex roles in these interesting, complex movies. Here, they're not exactly characters with a ton of depth. The boy Gyllenhaal character might fool you into thinking there's depth, but he's more a character constructed of Hollywood craziness cliches. Still, there's an intensity to the performance that makes the character memorable.
Frank, until he takes his costume rabbit head off at least, is a menacing presence, but he sort of becomes less menacing the more you see him. I think the giant rabbit is probably in the movie too much. And I love this bit of dialogue:
Boy Gyllenhaal: Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit?
Frank: Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?
But you know what? That little conversation really has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. Seriously, most of what happens in this movie doesn't have to do with the rest of the movie. Things just kind of happen. There's self-help guru pedophilia, the perils of English teaching, some random movie bullies including a odd Seth "I like your boobs" Rogan. The romance, one of the few things in this movie that does seem to matter, never really gels. Donnie makes decisions that, I guess, tell the audience how deep those feelings are, but there's not much we get to see that makes it feel that way. Nothing resonates because nothing, in the end, really matters all that much.
Drew Barrymore is awful in this, and her character is idiotic. She's a movie teacher, very different from a real teacher. "Sit next to the boy you think is the cutest." What? She's so bad, but she needs to be there to remind me more of E.T. And her "fuuuuuuucccccckkkk" in this is epic.
Donnie Darko's got a little bit of style, an 80's grimy glaze with a soundtrack (Echo and the Bunnymen [Bunny! Get it?], Tears for Fears, Duran Duran, The Church, Joy Division), and, as long as you're willing to pay close enough attention, some neat recurrent details. But unless I'm missing a whole lot--and I will note that I very likely am--it just doesn't add up to much of anything.
Plot: Suburbanites suspect their neighbors are up to no good, and their meddling leads to problems for everybody involved.
I'm wondering if this was inspiration, maybe subliminally, for Tom Waits' song "What's He Building in There?" Here's that song in case you haven't heard it:
Neighbor suspicions are there, of course, but there's also one line from this movie--"He has a right to know."--that almost found it's way into Waits' song. Waits growled, "We have a right to know."
You know who's irritating? Cory Feldman is irritating. It's been 30 years since I first saw that guy on screen, so maybe it's time for me to get past this, but Feldman just has an annoying face. He's in this movie way too much, representing the audience in a way as we voyeuristically spy on these suburbanites spying on their neighbors. I think I would rather have been represented by a quieter character rather than a loud-mouthed kid with a stupid grin.
One thing Tom Hanks does really well is stay out of other actors' ways. He's always had the Everyman quality, and here, he's mostly the perfect straight man with a cast of eccentric characters around him. Hanks is funny enough, but his performance is better because he allows Bruce Dern and Rick Ducommun to stand out. Dern is especially funny, both with the lines his character's given about stapling dog's asses shut or references to Tom Hanks' testicles and some physical comedy. Ducommun's funny, too, at least in the kind of way where you figure he's some Saturday Night Live alumnus whom you've never heard of. But in a good way.
The movie has a little trouble finding a consistent tone. When things are subtle and let the eccentricities and weirdness act on their own, the movie works. When things get a little louder, this seems to lose its focus. The best example is when two of the characters find a femur. Now, this entire scene could be some sort of parody or something on Joe Dante's part, but watching this in 2015, the prolonged screaming and quickly-zooming-in-and-out camerawork just made me roll my eyes.
The 'Burbs isn't a terrible comedy, but there was a lot more that could have been done with the idea. And probably a lot less that should have been done with the idea.
I might have a crush on 1980's Carrie Fisher, by the way. Is that just natural for somebody my age? That's probably a cliche, isn't it? I think I might be having a midlife crisis.
Plot: A mute, one-eyed warrior and a little kid travel with some Crusaders after the former escapes from slavery.
I've only seen Bronson from Nicolas Winding Refn. I loved that one enough to have this on my "To See" list. For several years. It's a unique movie, especially unique as an action fantasy movie. There has to be somewhere around 100 lines of dialogue in the entire movie with the protagonist, played by Mads Mikkelsen who was the bad guy in Casino Royale, not speaking at all. There are stretches of movie where nothing at all seems to be happening, and other scenes start to feel completely redundant. The landscape, although starkly beautiful and haunting, starts to lose its allure after a while. So I'm not sure this is a film that is going to end up being memorable.
It does stun while you're watching though. It's just a different sort of movie experience. There are blood spurts, piked heads, a nifty disemboweling. The soundtrack is abstract, the sort of perfect tones to accompany this sort of plotless journey. It's also very heavy on the sound effects--lots of squelching during violent moments and creakings and shufflings during quieter ones. It makes the hero's lugubriously-paced journey a sonic experience as well as a visual one.
Be warned though--this thing really is sluggishly paced, and despite the violence, I think a lot of people will be bored by something like this. It's one of those one-toned films more about pacing and atmosphere than in telling a good story, the filthy landscape being almost as much of a character as any of the actual characters in this. In fact, the characters are so flat that this feels more like allegory. I'm not schooled on Norse mythology enough to understand any connections made there, and I'm not quite sure what this was saying about any clash between those old beliefs and Christianity. That adds another layer for viewers smarter than I am.
One question for any linguists out there--was the f-word even around in 1,000 AD?
You know what? I type these blog posts on a computer. I guess I can look that up.
Plot: Three friends deal with time travel issues after "a time machine that runs on karaoke and urine" sends them all over the place, leading to a critical choice.
There was a puking child within a minute of the opening credits, opening credits that recalled the swooshing block letters of the 1970's Superman movie. As a sucker for puking children, I was hooked.
Don't let that terrible poster scare you away from checking this out if you have any interest in time travel movies or British comedies. This is wacky, but it's that polite kind of wackiness you'd expect from the English. I guess the best compliment I can give this movie is that it's got a trio of goofballs who I would love to spend more time with. They're losers, but lovable losers, probably not far removed from those Big Bang Theory characters although I've not seen enough of that show to really know. Actually, they're probably not as smart as those characters, so forget I even made that comparison. They're funny though, with their ideas for movies about a a "Ninja Yodeler" and their geeky Star Wars/Star Trek mix-ups. I always wish that movies like this would stay away from very NOW humor; unfortunately, this one targets Paris Hilton and Morrissey, references that aren't going to make any sense in twenty years. Morrissey might not even make sense to a lot of Americans now actually.
Since this is a comedy, the time travel story doesn't really have to make that much sense. I'm fairly positive that it doesn't actually, but the story bursts with creativity and has a lot of fun with time travel motifs and cliches. Astute viewers, or maybe just middle-aged men with too much time on their hands who have watched far too many time-travel movies in the last couple weeks, will pick up nods to time-travel classics. The story keeps you guessing and stays fun even though the conclusion is far from satisfying.
In fact, it's a conclusion that tricks you into thinking you really will get to spend more time with these characters and their time-traveling adventures. Sadly, there aren't plans to continue the story, and the director, Garetch Carrivick, is not longer even alive. Carrivick directed a lot of television series, but this was his only movie.
Plot: An Englishman stranded in the middle of the ocean is picked up and taken to an island where a scientist is creating human and animal hybrids and working on his tan.
This movie is nowhere near as bad as its reputation would have you believe, and almost all of its problems are the result of bad writing rather than anything the actors are doing or the special effects. The movie's nowhere near as good as the 30's incarnation of this H.G. Wells novel, but it's actually kind of fun, at least to a certain point.
I'd never seen this and always wondered if the history of the movie would end up being much more interesting than the movie itself. You've got Brando in the twilight of his career, insisting on having a dwarf he'd befriended in most of his scenes and wearing an ice bucket on his head because he was bored. Of course, Brando was always the professional, so he called his ice bucket a "caloric converter" just to make it fit with the story. You've got all these stories of the actors hating each other nearly as much as they hate how often the script was rewritten. The shooting of this was so trying that David Thewlis refuses to watch the finished product.
Things start well enough with some cool opening credits--microscopic science crap and time-lapse image jumpiness with a powerful score. Then, there's Thewlis's voice, just perfect as he sets the scene. That scene--and remember that I'm sort of a sucker for people-stranded-in-the-middle-of-the-ocean scenes--has three men fighting "savagely" over the last canteen of water, and it sets the stage for this tale of humans and animals and animalistic humans and humanistic animals.
I really like David Thewlis. The guy gave one of the greatest acting performances of all time in Naked, and he's really good here, somehow not getting completely lost in the weirdness that Brando and Val Kilmer bring to that island. There was a moment when I laughed inappropriately after Thewlis meets the family and says, "Look at these people!" Those "people" give him a bewildered look, and Thewlis looks at Majia, the little fellow, and screams, "Look at him!" Majai's expression there was hilarious.
I also laughed when a guy kept saying "Lo-Mai" and then groaning after his friend's death. And, of course, the line "I want to go to dog heaven." You'd think that lines like that would not make it into the film with the amount of rewrites this thing went through.
Nelson de la Rosa is terrific as Brando's little friend, especially during a fantastic piano duet where Maija, wearing an outfit that matches Brando's, plays a piano perched atop another piano. There's no reason for Maija's character to exist, but when Brando wants a dwarf on set with him, you get the guy a dwarf. And the character--half mystery and half Weng Weng--should be the main character in a sequel--The Island of Dr. Moreau 2: Look at Him!
Look at him!
Brando was nominated for a Razzie, and there are stories about how he had to wear an earpiece and have his lines read to him during his scenes, but I actually liked the performance. Sure, he's kind of phoning things in here, but he's still a presence, and the character's fun. I mean, who knew that Dr. Moreau invented velcro? I certainly didn't. And the dude's got his own Popemobile thing where he can move--pastily--around the island. This movie transforms from interesting to kind of awesome once Brando and de la Rosa enter, and it really sinks once Moreau dies. Sadly, after a mysterious, almost surrealist first half, the movie gets confusing and is all downhill after Brando and his ice bucket are gone.
Other observations:
1) "I am Waggdi. . .ha ha ha!" I think Waggdi, might be on the autism spectrum. That's just a weird way to introduce yourself.
2) Ron Perlman plays the "Sayer of the Law" in this. One, that's a stupid name for a character, and somebody like Ron Perlman should be smart enough to refuse to play a character with a name like that. And here's my question about Ron Perlman: Has anybody really seen his real face? I'm working on a theory that he's had a prosthetic head in every single movie he's appeared in.
3) Val Kilmer's performance is so odd. He seems more than a little high. I'm not even sure if his performance is bad or not. It's just odd.
4) The 1st look at the animal/human hybrid things is completely horrifying. Llamas are involved, and I believe it's the creepiest birth seen I've ever seen. And all birth scenes are pretty creepy if you think about it.
5) The costumes/make-up in this is really good, but I got sick of the Hyena-Man. I was tired of hearing him talk, and he had this goofy gait--simultaneously drunk, animalistic, and effeminate.
6) Einsturzende Neubauten found their way into this, but it's not one of their better songs.
7) The CGI in this is a little gross. There's one ape man jumping around, and the effects are about as bad as they can be. 1996 was too early to have ape men jumping around. Just put a bunch of hair on a guy and get a couple trampolines like they did in the Turkish Star Wars movie.
8) I really lost track of what was going on in the last third of this. Thewlis started talking about "God number 1" and stuff, and I couldn't follow it all. Maybe I stopped caring because Hyena-Man was getting on my nerves.
9) Assassimon. What an unfortunate name. I'd hate to have a name with "ass" in it even once. But twice? It would be cool to have a friend who just impulsively jumped around hitting things with a stick though. I guess that's what you can expect from something with "ass" in its name twice. Imagine the ridicule.
10) The boar people listen to Gershwin, one starts humming along, and it's a musical moment that nearly tops the Brando/Dwarf piano duet from earlier.
Here's that piano duet, just in case you want to watch it. Trust me--you do.
11) The gun fight near the end of this movie is ridiculous. Where the hell did all the guns come from? As I said, once Brando leaves this story, the movie kind of loses its mind.
Plot: A college kid who experienced a lot of blackouts while growing up discovers that he can travel back in time through his journal. He does and messes everything up.
"There's one major hole in your story."
Well, there might be a lot of holes in your story, Bress and Gruber. The idea is an intriguing one, so intriguing that it actually makes perfect sense that they'd be remaking the movie ten years after this one came out. And you don't have to look that up. You can trust me on this one.
Here's what they're going to have to fix with this remake:
First, the acting. It's really bad. Ashton Kutcher is like a big awkward wart on somebody's thumb. He can't even eat right in this movie. His best moment is right here:
That's awesome. It's one of the many moments in this that aren't supposed to be funny but wind up making you laugh out loud anyway. I laughed when Lenny, college-aged and chubby, said, "I couldn't cut the rope." I laughed when Kutcher said, "Not again!" I laughed at a lot of scenes with William Lee Scott playing young Tommy, a psychopathic child who burns doggies alive and twists the heads off of his sister's dolls. His funniest moment might have been something that was supposed to be darkly humorous, the scene after he's squirted lighter fluid all over the sack with that dog in it, hits his sister with a board, and then screams, "Look at what you made me do!" I laughed when Melora Walters, the actress with a really annoying voice who plays Ashton Kutcher's mother, gets sick in one of the timelines. And I really laughed when Kutcher, using every ounce of acting talent that the good lord gave him, attempts to cry.
Nothing beats that scene with the granola bar though.
The main problem with this movie isn't the acting, however. It's that everything is just so obvious, just clumsily obvious. Things are almost comically exaggerated. Kids curse, blow things up, smoke, read Hustler, and even listen to heavy metal music. They aren't real troubled children with sociopathic tendencies. They're Hollywood bad kids. In one of the timelines, love-interest Kayleigh winds up living a melancholy existence, but in this type of movie, that just has to consist of her becoming a heavily-scarred and drug-addicted prostitute. There's suicide, prison rape, pedophilia, dead babies, missing arms, absent fathers, broken granola bars. If you ever want to play Trauma Bingo, this might be the movie you should use.
Oh, and there's a psychologist who actually tries to explain Kutcher's behavior with "Maybe he's upset because he doesn't have a dad." Maybe it was the delivery that made that seem so awkward.
You know what else is really awkward here? The attempt to make Ashton Kutcher's character some sort of Christ figure. Like everything else in this movie, it's just a little heavy-handed.
Speaking of hands, I think I know why Ashton Kutcher's hands were gone in one of this movie's timelines--they were embarrassed after seeing the exploding mailbox special effect. Ba dum chhh!
I think I might hate this movie a little more just because it seems that other people like it. Is that fair?
Plot: An alien threat requires Will Smith to pull Tommy Lee Jones out of retirement and restore his memory.
I lost track of what was happening in this movie because I stopped caring. The best thing about this movie is Tommy Lee Jones, both as a post office employee oblivious of his former life and the grumpy Man in Black we knew from the first movie. He plays curmudgeonly as well as anybody, and his lines--with help from his delivery of those lines--are the funniest parts of this unfunny movie. Will Smith brings his usual charisma but just doesn't have a lot to work with here. I enjoy Rip Torn even if his character is a little too Tommy-Lee-Jonesish, and the ubiquitous Patrick Warburton is really the perfect actor to play a bumbling government official. Tony Shalhoub brings back his character from the first movie while David Cross plays, I think, a completely different guy.
I didn't care at all for Lara Flynn Boyle as the tentacled bad gal, Serleena. The tough apathy she plays the character with just feels like a cliche. And I really hated Johnny Knoxville in a dual role. He's annoying as both a big head and a little head, and he really overacts, trying to squeeze every drop of funny out of a script that just doesn't work at all. He's dreadfully bad.
The humor feels a little forced to me. Michael Jackson and Martha Stewart cameos are just odd, a gag about a "Ballchinnian" is just as funny as it is in Movie 43, and a beatbox-off between the Fresh Prince and Biz Markie seems out of place. There's a talking dog, of course, and that character is just as annoying as you think it would be. I enjoyed a line about nearly everybody who works in a post office being an alien, but it seems like an easy target. For a movie this cartoonish--I mean, Will Smith gets thrown all over the place, but nobody ever gets hurts--this really isn't that much fun. Any fun I might have been having was abducted when that stupid dog started singing "I Will Survive" and, about five minutes later, "Who Let the Dogs Out?" It seemed to be a lot of time to waste in a movie that was only about 90 minutes.
A lot of the problem is that the effects are terrible. Rick Baker does some alien work, and a lot of the alien design is creative and cool, but anytime CGI is used, it's pretty much a disaster. Look no further than a giant centipede thing in the subway during a big opening action sequence for proof. I'm fine with filmmakers being ambitious, but watching this subway scene and a lot of the other action sequences in the movie really took me out of the story. I understand it's all supposed to be cartoony anyway, but this stuff didn't even look as good as a cartoon.
I do like that there's a character named Dog Poop. Dog Poop's played by the late Sonny Tipton. I haven't checked any obituaries to see if "played Dog Poop in the popular film Men in Black II" made its way into any of them.
Oh, and I liked some of Danny Elfman's score.
I saw this because I have to watch the sequel for my Time Travel Movie Fest. I hope it's better than this one.
Plot: A man who lost his firefighting father at a young age begins communicating with him on a ham radio and, thanks to his big mouth, manages to screw up a whole bunch of stuff.
This one strives for tears, laying it on really thick with the father/son relationship stuff and a soundtrack like syrup. I really think I would have liked both the movie and its characters a little more if Dennis Quaid's character would have said "Little Chief" or just "Chief" about a hundred times less.
Actually, I did think the characters were likable despite their accents. This is the second time travel movie I've seen recently with Jim Caviezel as he was also in Deja Vu. He's so boyish here, almost like he's modeling his performance off the performance of the little kid who's playing the younger version of his character. Dennis Quaid's accent is thick, almost like a parody, and the character's just too damn heroic. He nearly winds up as an action hero by the end of this thing.
The "time travel" stuff is as implausible as any of these other movies--a magic ham radio and Aurora Borealis?--but it's a cool idea. I like how the story's handled with all these changes in the past having these immediate impacts on John Sullivan's present, but it's a little odd that he retains memories from all versions of his past. Also, some of the touches, including one that involves an arm, don't make a lot of sense. But it all still helps develop its themes although I think those themes would have been stronger if this didn't have such a happy ending. The movie was just a lot more believable when it was dark. By the end, things get wacky, and the climactic moment, although a little predictable since there's something foreshadowed throughout the movie, is still capable of making you slap your forehead. A concluding montage also made me nearly gag. I did like how much of a factor the 1969 World Series was in this.
This movie, by the way, has to break some kind of cinema record for having the most shots of something falling in slow motion. I kept track, and there are 97 different things that fall in slow motion in this movie. Here's a list:
a baseball
a picture
a glass
a can of sardines
car keys
a piece of candy
a bicycle
a Herb Albert record
a knife
a pack of cigarettes
a shoe
an ink pen
a pair of sunglasses
a vibrator
an autograph book
a fireman helmet
rain
two people (from a window)
a slinky
a puppet
a catcher's glove
a baseball bat
papers
toenails (clipped)
a bowl
an iron
leaves
a baseball cap
a ham radio
long underwear
a puppet
a bicycle pump
a saltine
an empty manila folder
an hourglass
a fireman's hose
a snow globe
tweezers
a gun
a fishing pole
Ok, I'm bored with that. Email me if you'd like to see the complete list.
Bad Movie Rating: 2/5 (Amy: 3/5; Fred: 1/5; Josh: 1/5; Libby: 1/5)
Rating: 6/20
Plot: A motorcycle gang bothers people.
Hey, it's John "Bud" Cardos as one of the sadists--Firewater. Who's that? Why, that's the director of our last Bad Movie Club viewing--The Day Time Ended.
There he is! He's not a terrible actor, and plays one of the more likable characters in this movie. I don't think Satan would be all that impressed with the sadistic qualities of these dudes. The tagline on the poster up there claims this is a "rebellion of human garbage," but I never bought it. None of the BMCers but me liked Russ Tamblyn as Anchor, the leader of the gang. I'm always happy to see him though, and that's regardless of whether or not he's wearing a woman's hat. Notorious B-movie director Al Adamson cheaply creates these edgy villains. But just giving a guy an eyepatch isn't going to be enough, especially if there's one member of the gang who can't stop giggling.
The plot of this sucker seems like it was made up as they went along. It's like Adamson found three locations--the middle-of-nowhere, a gas station and diner, and a more hilly middle-of-nowhere--and filmed a bunch of random stuff. There's some grimy 70's-glazed sexual content, but it's really just a tease. There's also some violence, including some terrible fake blood and a death-by-swirly scene which is probably the best thing about the movie; however, this is far from the "most violent film of the decade" as promised on the poster up there.
I don't know. Probably if the best scene in your movie is a swirly, your movie probably isn't very good.
Plot: A religious virgin purchases a puppet with dreadlocks at a thrift store and is shocked when it knocks her out and rapes her. She's sexually awakened, but will she be able to find a man who can satisfy her like her puppet?
Black Devil Doll from Hell is the type of movie that ruins every other movie for you. You watch this, you watch something else, you say to yourself "Well, this isn't Black Devil Doll from Hell," and start wondering why all movies can't have a ventriloquist dummy with a tongue.
This starts with the longest credits ever, just a black screen with cheap-looking ("cheap-ass," the Black Devil Doll from Hell would say) words. The movie doesn't start until the 6 minute and 44 second mark, and that means that this ridiculous song--"I'm Your Nightmare"--also plays for around 6 1/2 minutes. "Nightmares come true," growls the singer. "You better do what your mama told ya, or I"m gonna come and getcha." More ridiculous is that there are female background vocals singing things like "Oh, baby, you've been bad." I'm already confused by the whole thing, and the movie hasn't even started yet.
I'm actually glad that I started this write-up focusing on the music. You would not believe the score this thing has. There's so much "What the hell?" going on with the music, apparently created by director Chester Novell Turner. It's Casio madness, the type of music that would probably clash with any scene in any movie. It's the kind of stuff early home video game companies would have rejected for being too goofy. It's bouncy and clashing when it shouldn't be, and sometimes, it's just this loud screeching noise that makes the dialogue inaudible. There's a scene in the antique shop where a woman relays the story of the Black Demon Doll from Hell, a story in which the word "puppet" is used about 60 times, where I thought the recording was messed up. Surely, I thought, nobody would put that horrible noise in a movie intentionally. I was wrong because Chester Novell Turner would.
You know what kind of movie this is? This is the type of movie where somebody named Randolpj L. Helton is listed in the credits. Now, in a world where somebody would think the score for this movie is a good idea, I guess it's possible that somebody could name a child Randolpj, but I'm willing to be it's a typo.
Let's talk about this Chester Novell Turner character. He directed one other movie, something called Tales from the Quadead Zone. The storyline for that, according to imdb, has the star from this movie reading "two spooky tales to the ghost of her dead son, Bobby." Seriously, that's what it says. I'd describe him as inept, but that seems like an understatement. Instead, it's probably more appropriate to call this outsider art. It's written poorly, but the kind of poorly where you wonder if the Turner was even mentally stable when he penned the thing. The direction makes about as much sense as the story. There's one scene with a phone conversation where the camera just kind of explores the woman's living room. I couldn't tell if the random shots of the living room distracted me from the woman's phone conversation or if the phone conversation distracted me from the objects in the living room. There are also numerous shots of a stuffed bunny that always seems to be completely embarrassed to be there.
The movie's pace is awkward, mostly because Turner doesn't really seem to know where to go with the story. This easily could have been a 15 minute short film without losing anything. Take the scene where the woman gets the puppet home for the first time, for example. She spends some time darkening its arms, really for no reason at all. She talks to it. She sings to it. She lets it see her naked. There's a creepy scene where he watches her shower while sitting on a toilet, a scene with extraneous nudity that made me feel sorry for every single person who's ever been naked. There's a scene a little later where the doll (sorry--puppet) winds up on her dresser, and she puts him back on the toilet. Why you'd want to display your new puppet on the toilet is confusing anyway. The puppet, of course, ends up on the dresser again. And she puts him back and later says, "Let me go check this puppet, see if he's still where I left him." Now, this wackiness takes up about 10 minutes of a movie that is only 77 minutes long.
Seriously, why does she want the puppet on the toilet? Doesn't she ever use the toilet?
The worst example of Turner pacing is in a sex scene that would be notorious if this movie had been seen by more than 10 people. I can't believe how long this sex scene is. It might, as far as I know, be the longest sex scene I've ever seen. And it involves a puppet and a woman. I like sex scenes as much as the next guy, but this is the kind of thing that you just want to end after 15 or so minutes.
And that puppet! Here it is in case the poster up there wasn't enough to give you nightmares.
Of course, that's the puppet in its rightful and natural place--on the toilet. Thanks to very special special effects, the puppet does move. I have no idea how Turner managed that effect, but I believe it involved a small child who was slightly bigger than the puppet. You also should know going in that this puppet has a tongue, a tongue that might be made out of bacon. No, I don't want to spoil anything for you, but I also think it's probably dangerous seeing that tongue without being mentally prepared. Things don't get completely magical until the Black Devil Doll from Hell starts talking though. The voice work is amazing. The closing credits had "?" playing the titular doll, but Keefe L. Turner, Chester's brother, provides the voice. And Keefe gets to say the most poetic things:
"How you like that, bitch?" (After punching the poor woman in the junk, of course.)
"Did you just fart, bitch?"
Other crude statements that involve the word "bitch"
Not that Shirley L. Jones' character is exactly nice. She does call her friend a "wooden-headed bastard," after all. Jones is not exactly a good actress. I'm not sure we can blame her exactly because she's required to do and say things that no human being would actually do or say. She gets one terrific scene where she's dressing up for a night prowling for me--you know, because the puppet awakened her sexually--and she's standing in front of a mirror with these giant sunglasses. You know how much I like my mirror scenes. She says, "That'll work." And then--cue Casio! Her best moment might be when she realizes that Ricky Roach, in his only role as "first lover," can't satisfy her. Watching two master thespians work their magic is just amazing. "Wait a minute, Mama, you mean to tell me you were raped by a puppet?" Roach is playing a guy who would more than likely sleep with anything. During the act itself, he bewilderingly asks, "You can't enjoy this?" before adding, "I sure can!" Her answer is more of that Chester N. Turner poetry:
"You just hurry up and finish and get the hell out of here."
I guess the lesson is that once you go puppet, you can never go back.
A side note: Every time I watch a movie where the microphone picks up the wind, I'm reminded of a movie that I made in high school. And trust me--that's not a good thing.
Oh, boy. What else can I say? There's a cleaning montage with what might be the worst song I've ever heard in my life. There's an extended scene at a club where people are dancing, quite obviously not to the same song that we get to hear. No, we get to hear more of that awesome keyboard music, and there's no club on earth that is going to play that shit. And when she brings that puppet home for a second time? Things turn downright psychotronic. Eyes glow, Jones starts spinning, the fucking bunny becomes animated, and I lose my freaking mind!
This, ladies and gentlemen, is art with some stank on it.
Plot: A time traveler obsessed with Jacqueline Kennedy travels back to November 22, 1963 to save JFK's life. It changes history.
This is an intriguing idea for a movie, but with a made-for-television feel, a needlessly convoluted structure, and long stretches of explanatory dialogue, it just never really gets going and couldn't keep my interest. There was some potential with this idea, but it spends most of its time with a story that's just trying to go too many places, some which don't make a lot of sense. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. both wind up surviving and the Beatles never become the greatest rock band in history, but none of that, or really any of the ramifications of this change in history, are never really explained. This also tackily ventures into JFK's sexual exploits and spends way too much time with subplots involving the time traveler's Jackie obsession and his paintings.
Bruce Campbell plays an Oliver Stone type filmmaker in this, but that's just another character that is underdeveloped. It seems like he's only in the movie to say a few curse words. That, along with some nudity that really didn't seem necessary at all, felt a little awkward to me. No, there's not a Jacqueline Kennedy nude scene. There is, however, a nude Marilyn Monroe lookalike that I probably shouldn't complain about.
I had to rent Timecop from a Family Video. Since it was in the 2 for 1 dollar section, I had to get something else. This was conveniently right next to Timecop, and I figured Bruce Campbell would make it worth the time. Unfortunately, I'm kind of bummed that I spend 50 cents to watch this.
Movies-a-go-go time with this Van Damme classic. That guy's a force to be reckoned with, and before you say, "Yeah, but that was 20 years ago; what's he done lately?", remember that the dude can travel in time. In other words, watch what you say. Anyway, here were my thoughts as I watched Timecop.
Timecop. Ahh, don’t you just love the 1980’s when movies were allowed to have stupid titles like Timecop? Wait, this is 1994? Oh, nevermind. It sure does smell like an 80's movie.
I don’t know what was going on in 1863 in this country, but I dig the styles.
Trenchcoat man with futuristic machine guns has a missing tooth that doesn’t look real. And if he’s from the future like his machine guns, why would he have a missing tooth anyway?
Balloon men in the mall, doing splits. That might be great visual humor.
“Does Anyone Really Know What Time It Is?” muzak. That’s cute. And look--there’s more clocks. And Van Damme’s first line is about not having enough time. This is really shoving the time stuff down our throats.
Get a room, Jean-Claude and wife! This is a mall!
In the 1990’s, thugs had doo-rags and rectangular shades and moved about via inline skates. And the reaction of the old people in the purse-snatching scene is so awesome.
“You know that purse? Doesn’t look good on you.” So we’re flashing one-liners.
Wow! Super Mullet! And now--Super Mullet has vanished!
“I don’t bake cookies for a living.”
Something tells me this picture some random guy took in the mall--you know, because that happens--is going to be important later on.
Why, of course we can include a candlelit sex scene within the first 12 minutes of the movie. Unfortunately, I shot my wad when I saw Super Mullet and had nothing left for Mia Sara’s nipples.
Uh oh! Thugs!
If you’re going to kill, Jean-Claude, you’d better make sure he’s actually dead before running off to have your way with his wife.
And now the house has exploded. And Jean-Claude is forced to show off his emotional range.
You’d think “Shit Happens” would confuse people in 1929, but I wouldn’t know because I’m not a timecop.
At the meeting with the political guys, the black guy said that making money in the past was easy, but this guy seems to have found a complicated way to do things.
“I went ten rounds with John L. Sullivan himself.” You didn’t need to say a word, man. That handlebar mustache did all the talking that was needed.
Ok, why wouldn’t your “fucking cat” exist if somebody wiped out your grandparents? Did your grandparents birth cats or something? That might be weirder than going back in time and becoming your own grandfather.
How does allowing people in the 1920’s to see that futuristic machine gun, Jean-Claude’s wardrobe, and falling people disappearing in midair not create time "ripples"?
By the way--splits!
You can tell from a guy’s beard what his intentions are, can’t you?
Umm...why did they think cars would like that in 2014?
I like Ron Silver, but he’s chewing up the interior of this futuristic car. And he’s also chewing some sort of nut snack, too. Anyway, loads of chewing.
Aha! There’s the picture! And if Jean-Claude can’t go back to save his wife, the “scumbag” isn’t going to get his money? How are those two things even related?
The makers of this sure did nail 2014. These cars. . .the fact that we still wear tie clips. Talking answering machines. Voice-activated televisions.
I still want to know how the poor guy’s house blew up.
Jean-Claude saying his lines from a videotape is definitely not a new idea, but I doubt it’s ever sounded creepier than it has here. Maybe it’s the way Jean-Claude says the word “porch”?
The White Supremacist Party?
You can’t kill Jean-Claude in his sleep a little quieter than this, fellas? Why the growling before you attempt to stab him?
“50,000 volts, motherfucker. Have a nice day.” Splits!
Jean-Claude: “I’m never funny.” This scene must have been recorded before that line he said to the purse snatcher earlier in the movie.
And there’s a naked woman. Randomly.
“Looks like safe sex to me,” says Jean-Claude. And he just said he wasn’t funny?
“Are we gonna blast to the past Yee-haa!” guy. Because every 1980’s movie needs a guy like this. Sorry, 1994.
This new character I never asked for and certainly don’t need was probably told by her director to be “more orgasmic” during her ride in the time travel machine.
“Don’t get sentimental and try to visit yourself.” Yet another masturbation euphemism.
Two Ron Silvers! They'd better find some more nut snacks!
And “Who are you? Are you supposed to be his father?” might be the stupidest line I’ve ever heard.
“Freeze!”
“Agent Walker, do you realize how inappropriate that word is? Do I look frozen to you?”
What?
Ok, Jean-Claude should be dead. Ron Silver even said that all you had to do was point the gun and pull the trigger. Why couldn’t they just do that instead of talking about it for five minutes?
I am having a ton of problems understanding how this scene where Ron Silver goes back in time to meet his future self doesn’t completely mess up the future.
Hey, bad guy! Why don’t you just shoot those highly flammable barrels Jean-Claude is hiding behind?
Guy getting his arm frozen and then kicked off might be the worst special effect I’ve ever seen.
"Have a nice day." That's it? No "freezing" puns or anything. Hell, "Tough break about your arm, buddy" would have been better. Or "So long, Lefty." How does the guy not know the woman who went back in time with Jean-Claude? Her death in the past was in the future of the present. . .nevermind.
I bet this time-warping-in-front-of-a-semi scene was a lot better idea on paper.
Oh, Mia Sara again. I wonder if I’m the only person in this movie who’s watched hoping for a sex scene with her and two Jean-Claude Van Dammes?
"Why didn't you ever kick a guy's arm off, Ferris?"
I think this movie might have plot holes.
Oh, my God! Jean-Claude’s going to drink his wife’s blood.
OK, if Jean-Claude saves his wife’s life here. . .again, nevermind. I don’t want to think about it, especially since Jean-Claude is about to fight Super Mullet!
Why do I have a feeling that Jean-Claude is about to fight himself? A split off!
Jean-Claude’s look at himself: “There’s that guy who’s been saying dirty words to my wife.”
I think Jean-Claude just went back in time so that he could get a second picture.
I’m confused about the pronoun use. “Keep him upstairs.” Wouldn’t you say “Keep ME upstairs” instead? I think I would.
I can’t tell in the dark, but it looks like Super Mullet might be wearing some sort of huge bolo tie.
So what happens if young Van Damme dies here? And if this assassination of Jean-Claude attempt failed the first time, why didn’t they just try again? My head is actually hurting from trying to figure all this out.
Holy hell! Young Jean-Claude is now dead!
Oh, nevermind. He’s back walking around again after taking the bullets in the chest and falling off the roof. No ill effects from that either, apparently.
Silver: “No, you moron. If he were dead, he wouldn’t be here.” Come on, Silver. It’s entirely fair to have questions about what the hell is happening here.
Finally! Super Mullet in action!
12 second until the explosion.
Bunches of lines of dialogue.
10 seconds until the explosion.
A bunch more dialogue.
What the fuck is happening?
Whoa! What happened to the Ron SIlvers there?
It’s possible that timer read a minute and 20 seconds. The movie’s given me a blinding headache, and I am no longer able to tell time. That might be ironic, but I wouldn’t know because somebody who can’t tell time probably doesn’t understand irony.
Jean-Claude’s really confused now because his son is pudgy.
I’m not sure how this would work exactly. How can he have no memory of a son?
Plot: A missing kid returns 8 years later, and NASA takes interest and buys him a Transformers toy because they believe aliens were involved.
I guess we'll call this the first time that I saw Flight of the Navigator. I was 12 when I went to a theater with some friends to see this movie, but I had broken my glasses and couldn't see the screen. I thought the movie sounded fine, but all these 80's E.T./Goonies-inspired movies are always a little too loud. 80's kids enjoyed bombast, I guess. They also liked lots of name-calling in their movies. You know, like dork or scuzz bucket.
Once again, the time travel stuff doesn't make a lot of sense if you think about it even a little bit, but this is an entertaining little slice of Disney sci-fi. I really liked a brief scene with a bunch of goofy Muppet creatures. One's just an eye that screeches "Ai ai ai ai" like it's Charo or something, and Puckmarin reminds me a little of Stitch. I also really liked the flying scenes and the look of the spaceship.
Sleek! The cool materializing steps, the shiny and complex material. This is one cool ship, and those 80's kids were probably jealous of young Joey Cramer for getting to pilot that thing. What happened to Joey Cramer, by the way? Did he become Fred Savage?
Nevermind, I just answered my own question. They look exactly the same. And that's not racist because I am white and only a couple months younger than Cramer/Savage.
Speaking of missing children, where did Albie Whitaker, the weird-looking kid who played Cramer's brother in 1978, go? This was his only performance. He's got more threads on imdb.com than he does items on his filmography. (Both threads are people wondering what happened to him.) I guess it's possible that he didn't get any more roles because he looked like this:
Now that I think about it, I doubt "scuzz bucket" or "dork" were words that anybody used in 1978.
Ok, I looked that one up because I have nothing better to do with my time. Dork, as we know and love it, came into use in the late-60s. In the earlier 60s, it was a vulgar slang term for the penis. I couldn't find any information on scuzz bucket or scuzzbucket.
You know who else is in this movie? Paul Reubens, who voices the robot or whatever the hell it is. At the point where the ship starts laughing with Pee Wee Herman's recognizable chortle, that this starts to wear out its welcome. The flying scenes are still cool, the perspective shots almost looking like a ride at Epcot Center or something, but after a while, you're kind of just ready for the kid to find his way back into 1978. Good ol' Howard Hesseman is also in this, and so is a young Sarah Jessica Parker.
How about all those UFO fake-outs at the beginning of the movie. You get a "Hey! That's a UFO; no, it's only a Frisbee" moment. That's followed closely by a "Look! A UFO! No, wait. It's a blimp" moment. And then there's a "Ok, that's definitely a UFO. Nope--it's a water tower" moment. I'm just going to go ahead and blame Spielberg for that whether that's fair or not.
Here's something I thought about while watching this. When Fred Savage meets Sarah Jessica Parker's character with that crappy robot, we get to see part of a music video by a band called Blancmange. Parker, shocked, asks, "You've never seen a music video before?" Sadly, that could probably apply to kids now, too. Later, there's a little Twisted Sister, and for the second movie in a row, the Beach Boys show up. Once again, it seems as if makers of time travel movies are screwing with me. The score for this is dated but really cool, by the way. Mystery tones and adventure notes, the perfect soundtrack for family space adventures.
You know something else I wondered about? There's a reference in this to the "Pixar Elliptic," and one line borrows Don Rickles' "you hockey puck" insult just like Toy Story. Were the Pixar people fans? Nevermind. Forget I typed that because it's stupid.
In a movie like this, you'd expect to see product placement. And, of course, you do. There are McDonalds mentions, Coke allusions, and another shot at poor Twinkies. What did the Twinkie people do to deserve this treatment in science fiction movies?
This is a fun little movie, but I bet I would have liked it a lot more as a bespectacled 12 year old.
I should not have written blog entries tonight. These are unreadable.
