Recent Viewings, Part 2

[lester1/2jr]

The Video Dead (1987) - After fifty thousand years of seeing this around, I finally watched it. I think I might have thought it was a compilation of horror clips or something? As far as 80's horror comedies go, I'm more of a "Flesh Eating Mothers", "Little Corey Gorey" cheap/ over the top kind of guy, but I did enjoy this. The main character kid was funny and there were some inspired and crazy moments, even if it was a ultimately just a little on the PG 13/ normal-coded side.

Someone delivers an evil TV to a random suburban home and soon zombies are all over the place. There's a cute rich girl love interest and secret zombie knowledge having hillbilly guy who all work together and don't contact any authorities or anything to try and stop the siege. One part I liked was when they cut one of the zombies in half and there are not only guts but mice and stuff in there.

I'll go 4.25/ 5 and would see it again, if not base a cult around it.

[indianasmith]

I've watched 3 movies this last week and haven't posted on any of them, so here goes:

DEATH OF A UNICORN (2025)  Jenna Ortega stars as the acne and angst-ridden daughter of a corporate lawyer who is traveling to the home of a dying CEO so he can take a post on the corporate board.  But then they run over a juvenile unicorn whose blood cures Jenna's chronic acne, and the story just gets weirder from there. . . this one was a wild ride with just the right mix of gore and humor!  4/5

Lee Cronen's THE MUMMY (2026) - This one was a great, gory bit of body horror.  A ten-year-old girl goes missing in Egypt, and eight years later her body is found - sealed inside a 3000-year-old sarcophagus, but somehow still alive. Alive but changed . . . and not in a good way. Physically and mentally, she's become a twisted, evil agent of malice, and her family, as they desperately try to bring back the child they loved, pay the price.  Very well done, some pretty extreme body horror, and a twisty story line make this one a movie worth seeing on the big screen!  5/5

BRING HER BACK (2925)  I had heard this one was excellent, and when I finally got around to watching it I was NOT disappointed. Two step-siblings are sent into foster care after their father suddenly dies.  They are sent to live with a kind foster mother named Laura, who is grieving the death of her own daughter and raising a son who suffers from selective mutism. Very quickly, it becomes clear that the little boy - Ollie - is not what he seems, and that Laura is keeping a mysterious secret in a locked shed in the back yard.  This one is a slow burn but it gets steadily creepier as it goes along, and the last half-hour is downright horrifying. SOLID horror film!  5/5

[FatFreddysCat]

"Jackie Chan's First Strike" (1996)
Jackie Chan followed up "Rumble In The Bronx" with this globe trotting, James Bond style adventure. He's a Hong Kong police officer who travels to the Ukraine and Australia on the trail of a terrorist and some stolen nuclear warheads. The plot quickly turns into a confused, poorly dubbed muddle but the action sequences and stunt work are amazing as usual.

[Rev. Powell]

Rifftrax: Twilight: OK, I can't believe I actually paid to rent "Twilight," but I got the audio commentary for free as a Kickstarter perk, so... yeah, it's as bad as you imagined, maybe even worse. Full of plot holes and continuity errors (though not nearly as much sparkling as I'd heard), and of course you never would have guessed that Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson would eventually go on to become GOOD actors... I blame director Catherine Hardwicke for misdirecting these youngsters. (Anna Kendrick also appears; though playing a teenager, she's 23, so you don't have to feel so pervy for noticing she's hot as hell.) Fortunately, Rifftrax rescues this teen romance mess, having a lot of fun with the awkward pauses. 3.5/5 (Rifftrax version)

[Rev. Powell]

ALL LIGHT, EVERYWHERE (2021): Documentary mixing information on the science of vision, history of cameras, and philosophical reflections on the limitations of human perception with stories about newly developed bodycams and surveillance technologies. Informative and cleverly done, but it remains distressingly theoretical throughout: director Theo Anthony couldn't find a single, specific outrage linked to state surveillance to include? 3.5/5.

[M.10rda]

I really enjoyed VIDEO DEAD back in the day. Very liminal relationship to logic, downbeat w/o being particularly meanspirited, yet also it takes place in sunny suburbia and the picturesque autumnal woods (always a plus in my 80s horror book). I own a VHS copy and would like to revisit it someday, when I somehow dig up a working VCR...

[lester1/2jr]

Video Dead exceeded my expectations.

The Night of the 12th (2022) - I was in the mood for something foreign and dialogue-y, but I could have done a better than this. They tell you right away that this is about an unsolved cold case, so you already know that none of the investigating is going to lead anywhere. What you're left with is the lives of the cops, who aren't very interesting and the tacked on political message about sexism in society, which is obvious.

3/5 It's like watching the first part of a particularly preachy and unrealistic Law and Order 2 part episode and it's almost 2 hours long. The acting was decent and it was somewhat interesting to see small town France, though.

[indianasmith]

DARK RIDE (2006)  A group of college kids are heading to New Orleans for Spring Break when they decide to break into a haunted attraction known as the "Dark Ride," where multiple people were murdered 15 years before - not knowing that the killer has just escaped from a mental institution and is returning to his former haunt.  Pretty predictable but still fun; clever kills and a nice twist at the end, plus the girls are pretty cute. 3.5/5

[FatFreddysCat]

"Fanboys" (2009)
In 1998, four lifelong Star Wars fans embark on a road trip to George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch, in hopes of stealing a rough cut of Episode I: The Phantom Menace in order to see it first. Along the way they encounter cops, pimps, and angry Trekkies, and meet a variety of characters played by actors from the Star Wars saga, like Carrie Fisher and Billy Dee Williams.
A hilarious, heartfelt love letter to Star Wars Fandom and sci-fi nerdism in general. It's a hoot.

[M.10rda]

WITHIN OUR GATES (1919):
The first feature film by early black auteur Oscar Micheaux was thought lost for many decades, then resurfaced in South America w/ most of its visuals intact and all but four of its English intertitles replaced with Spanish translations. It was restored and translated back into English from the Spanish intertitles and from Micheaux's own archival materials, and - either miraculously or as a testament to Micheaux's strengths as a writer and director - WITHIN OUR GATES is more clear, cogent, and compelling than any other feature of its vintage, even in light of its considerable narrative complexity.

The plot essentially focuses on the adventures of Sylvia, a light-skinned African American teacher, as she visits family in the North, pursues financial support for her Southern school for poor black students, gets involved in romantic melodrama and intrigue, meets and helps illuminate the nascent consciences of some white folk, and confronts her own tragic history in the South. If Oscar Michaeux was in a screenwriting workshop, I would probably offer him feedback on clarifying his structure. For instance, Sylvia leaves the North a third of the way through the film, goes back home for a while, then comes back North for the final third of the film, which probably wasn't necessary and could've been simplified with a quick rewrite. But there are also significant narrative digressions - extensive flashbacks from Sylvia and other characters, including flashbacks within flashbacks, and also lengthy sequences that focus on peripheral characters, some of whom Sylvia doesn't even know.     

Eventually I accepted the structural eccentricity of the film, which really was decades ahead of its time. Spike Lee has (perhaps consciously) recreated Micheaux's diffuse storytelling strategy, as have Tarantino, PTA, Altman, etc. But their films are all two-and-three-quarter hours, whereas Micheaux somehow fits a sprawling tapestry into 90 minutes. Not all of it is brilliant or even necessary, but many crucial sequences (specifically the ones that most explicitly depict racist attitudes and crimes against black Americans) are far superior than any other social realist cinema of the silent era. It also goes without saying (though it's been said many times) that WITHIN OUR GATES is a far more realistic document of early reformation-era race relations than BIRTH OF A NATION , including a sobering sequence where Sylvia's family is framed for a white dude's crime and persecuted (at great length and with great vigor) by a mob that's ravenous for any excuse to vent spleen.

The film's strongest and most vivid sequence focuses on an ancillary character - a black reverend praised by a despicable white dowager as the foremost credit to his race. Micheaux cuts for several scenes to that Reverend - played by a black actor, strikingly wearing blackface - as he theatrically panders to and fearmongers his congregation, then kowtows to a pair of moneyed white guys, and then finally suffers a private moment of despair where he admits to himself that he's a charlatan, a hypocrite, and a bane to his community. This sequence ain't subtle (tho how many silent films are?) but it does demonstrate that Micheaux had an incisive understanding of the cosmology of challenges confronting African Americans, beyond obviously just the hatred of white racists. A second example of this is presented later, in the person of a free black man who apparently still aspires to the position of Sam Jackson's zero-sum-gameplaying slave from DJANGO UNCHAINED: the guy in GATES could prevent or resolve the miscarriage of justice against Sylvia's family, but instead he gleefully compounds the tragedy, delighted to protect his own influence even if other African Americans around him suffer and die. Paging Justice Thomas!

WITHIN OUR GATES is kinda' Great on its own merits, but (as befits its historical stature) it also helps me better understand subsequent films. Yes it's overstuffed, which is the same opinion I've held about most of Spike Lee's films. It was Micheaux's first film but also his most ambitious. One suspects therefore that Micheaux was uncertain whether he'd ever get another shot at making a feature and thus wanted to address every last issue that was important to him... and in fact this attitude is one that Lee has confessed to having about nearly every movie he makes, even after four decades. (Black auteurship isn't exactly a protected commodity in American cinema.) Fortunately Micheaux did get to make a lot more movies for another 30 years - but many of those movies were lost and remain lost. From that perspective, it's a blessing that WITHIN OUR GATES has been preserved as an emblem of Micheaux's vision.

Imperfect, but on a silent-era curve, it's a 5/5.