147 - The Divide

    A handful of survivors of a nuclear attack are safe under a building in the super's apartment/fallout shelter.  Tensions rise, and things get violent and nasty.
    I had heard a lot of good things about this one.  The plot is similar to at least one or two episodes of Twilight Zone, but I knew it had a lot more development it could have taken.  I have some mixed feelings about the way this turned out.
    The conflicts between characters aren't too specific.  They just seem to be about power, and less about survival.  The longer things go on, the weirder everything gets.
    But there's an event fairly early in the movie which should have defined the direction of the picture.  While the door has been taped off, a group of armored soldiers make their way into the bunker.  They can't be understood, and they take the youngest girl.  Then there's some conflict, and most of the soldiers get killed off.  One of the survivors takes the armor and weapon from a soldier, and leaves the bunker.  There, he finds a series of plastic tube hallways, leading to some sort of laboratory, where the girl is being experimented on.  After the other soldiers notice that he's not one of them, he runs back to the bunker.  Shortly afterward, the door to the bunker is welded shut from the outside.
    We never get any explanation for the role that these soldiers play.  And that feels like a bit of a cheat.  We got that scene around the 20 minute mark, so I expect that to play a larger role.  Instead, the only plot point that they seem to provide was getting rid of the girl, and sealing the door.  The door could have easily been sealed off - there's a building that collapsed around them.  They shouldn't even be able to open the door.  Getting rid of the girl would be a different problem.
    As I said, none of that stuff was explained.  And that's what doesn't feel right.  I don't think I needed a full explanation, but I needed at least a few more clues.
    I found the violence to be a little off.  My problem was mostly that the characters seemed a little too reluctant to kill one another.  It seemed obvious which characters needed to die, and I would have liked to see a little more insight on the part of the other survivors.

    For the first time, I have something to say about the music.  I kind of liked it.  It was simplistic, and it sounded like something I would make.  But the theme, which opened the movie, and was repeated later, seemed too obviously manipulative.  Other pieces of music were fine.
    I also don't think that the title was right.  I assumed that there would be two distinct camps, but nope, everyone seems to be on their own side.

    Some of the positive things - I like the way it was directed.  Except for a few shots later in the movie (from the ceiling grates) I liked getting the sense of space and enclosure that the movie offered.  The acting was a bit grating at first, but later on things got a little more fun.

146 - For Sale by Owner

    A guy (a preservation architect, according to the back of the box) buys a house in Virginia, which he plans on restoring.  There are implications of historical importance to the house, and some peculiar haunting things that are going on.
    I had a hard time summarizing this, because it's a bad movie.  In fact, it really managed to offend me with the ending.
    The back of the case includes this headline - "A young man's psychological thrill ride to reclaim his own flickering sanity."  I was able to ignore this phrase, in favor of the other blurb on the back, which implied that it was a historical mystery.
    And that's the angle that the movie plays.  For most of the movie, it plays as a vaguely historical mystery, then it starts to include the idea that the house is haunted.  Both of these work out fine, if not a little predictable.  There's a strange tension between the lead and his girlfriend/wife.  While she's pregnant, that isn't a plot point, and it only gets referred to once after the beginning of the movie.  Mostly, they both don't make any sense when they react to each other.  He says that he's tired, and she flips out and says she doesn't want him working on the house anymore.
    They also both get strangely angry with her father, who is also some sort of historian.  I never understood what they were angry about.  Were they worried that he would take credit for the historical significance of their house?
    The supernatural angle of the movie seems strange, like there were two types of movies going on, and this was an effort to make the movie more interesting than just being excited about a potentially important historical discovery.  Then then ending came, and that destroyed everything.
    Leading into the ending, things start getting strange.  The editing gets erratic.  There are strange cuts to shots that seem to be symbolic, but are mostly just puzzling.  Then, once the ending hits, it's the biggest possible cop-out.
    Spoiler time.  It turns out that the main character is mentally ill, and has made up the rest of the movie in his head.
    So this was an excuse to not write an ending for the other story that was being built.

    To be honest, this type of storytelling betrayal only has an impact if you care about the story that was being told.  In this case, I was pretty bored with the movie beforehand.  I was hoping to see it resolve in a traditional way.  Of course, if it did that, I wouldn't have had anything much to say about it.

145 - Creepshow III

    An anthology of horror stories.
    The first two Creepshow movies were a lot of fun.  They were associated with George Romero and Stephen King, who knew how to handle horror material well.  This third movie had been rumored for a long time, and when it happened… everything I read about it was really bad.  So I was surprised when I saw it at the local library.
    The framing device was a bad sign.  The animation was pretty poor, and it seemed to be in bad taste.  Some covered-up being is approached on a neighborhood sidewalk by a happy dog.  Off camera, the being kills the dog, and puts it on a little wagon.  The being is then shown to have opened a hot dog stand, where it is serving the remains of the dog on buns.  No humor to it, unless you consider "hot dog" to be a joke.
    This leads to the first story, Alice.
    Alice is a typically bratty teenage girl, who walks home through her neighborhood, talking on her cell phone, and complaining about stuff.  When she gets home, there's some awkward dialogue, while her father futzes around with a new universal remote.  As buttons on the remote get pushed, Alice goes through a bunch of variations of her family.  First, they're all black except for her.  Then they're all speaking Spanish.  Then no one seems to be able to hear her.  With each iteration, Alice accumulates a variety of strange bloody boils.
    I'm leaving out the ending, in the interest of not having spoilers here.  This story is bad, and it's bad in a lot of different ways.  First, the premise of a remote control that can manipulate reality has been done.  It's been done very well, and it's been done really badly, but it's been done often enough that this seems redundant.  Second, the acting is bad.  Everyone seems to be acting strangely, but it never seems like it was on purpose.  And this acting quality seems to permeate the rest of the movie.  Third, this was not a horror story.  The story seemed to shoehorn some gore into the story in a nonsensical way.  Why does she seem to get these strange patches of gore?  We never know why.  She doesn't even seem to care too much, except for near the end.  Fourth, as a character that we're supposed to dislike, she's not bad enough.  She's as bad as a stereotypical teen girl, but she doesn't stand out.
    The second story, The Radio, was actually a bit better than I expected.  A guy buys a radio from a homeless man.  The radio starts talking to him, giving him instructions, advising him.  This doesn't play as dark as expected.  It's kind of funny to hear the radio give him financial advice, as well as instructions on what he should have to eat.
    The story plays out kind of predictably.  The one thing that bugged me is that the apartment the guy is living in is really strange.  It is clearly a different set from the apartment building that he enters from.

    The third story, Call Girl, focuses on one of the prostitutes we saw hanging around during the second story.  She gets a call to go out to a suburban house for a job.  She kills the client, then finds out that he's a vampire.  I think.  It isn't obvious that he's a vampire, since the appearance is really strange.
At least this story was short.
    The fourth story has a professor inviting two of his prize pupils over in advance of his wedding.  They meet his bride, and think she has to be a robot.  Of course, this leads to the two of them dismembering her, in an effort to find proof.
    There are two big problems with this section.  First, it's played as a comedy, but there's nothing funny about it.  Second, I have a hard time believing that two college graduates would knock someone out, and cut them up (with a hand-held electric drill, no less) in order to prove that they are a robot.  Maybe if the segment were funny, I'd be willing to believe that their decision made sense.
    The fifth story is really strange.  A really bad doctor causes the death of a homeless guy by giving him a hotdog that fell on the ground.  The apparition of this homeless guy haunts the doctor for a few days.  In the meantime, the doctor continues to be a jerk on the job.  He takes a variety of prescription medication, and supplies similar drugs to a party, which is hosted by the vampire from the earlier segment.  This story suffers from two other problems.  The first is that the guy is actually too much of a jerk.  This doesn't happen too often, but he's actually so tastelessly mean and offensive, and he isn't funny.  This makes it so the story is more of a chore to watch than it should be.  The other problem with this segment has to do with the ghost of the homeless guy.  We get to see the ghost produce a hotdog, first by pushing it from his mouth.  Later, the ghost has a stab wound (which makes another kind of nonsense) and the ghost pulls a hotdog from that.
    The movie does make substantial efforts to feel like there are lots of links between the stories.  Unfortunately, none of these links have any meaning.  This reminds me of Trick R Treat, which was anthology-like, but linked those stories masterfully.  Here, it just seems like they recycle the actors and put them into the background of other stories.

    Then the movie ends with a strange capper - the end of the wedding of the professor, and his bride, which he seems to have rebuilt somehow.  There are a few lost limb gags.  We get to see the rabbit from the first story (which also made an appearance during the professor's story.  Of course, that doesn't make any sense, since she wasn't a rabbit yet).

    I'm not a picky horror watcher, as you probably know.   But I actually feel like this movie hurt itself by using the name Creepshow.  By using the name, it implies that this will be similar quality.  Or at least that it will have a similar feel.  The name raised the expectations.  Instead, if this had a different title, an original title, then I wouldn't judge it as harshly.  Sadly, this movie is Creepshow 3, and it's going to continue disappointing horror fans for a long time.

144 - The Cabin in the Woods

    A group of kids go off for a long weekend at a cabin in the woods.  Creepy stuff starts to happen, and the kids fight for their lives against creatures.  Then a bunch of other stuff happens which I can't get into without spoiling the movie.

    As I've said, this will have a lot of stuff that will qualify as spoilers.  But I also temper that statement with the fact that I read a whole lot about this movie before seeing it, and I had no idea how it made any sense.  I read reviews that were more philosophical about the relationship between the audience and horror movies, and other ones that took the movie at face value, and took each plot point as exactly what it was in the context of the movie.  None of these things made the story clear to me.

    The spoiler-heavy version of the movie is that there is a large organization that manipulates events, in order to fulfill a human sacrifice, which prevents the rising of The Ancient Ones.  It is gradually revealed that the cliches of horror movies are the result of the machinations of this organization.
    There are lots of fascinating parallels in this movie.  The viewer can sit in for the role of the directors of the organization, as they react to the actions of their subjects, and when they celebrate seeing things going right.  While we see the scene with the Harbinger from the traditional perspective the first time through, we get a second sequence of him talking, which plays as a joke, but Cathy pointed out that this served to switch the subject of the movie from not being the kids - but being the organization that is the subject of the movie.  Maybe it turns the organization into being victims of the kids?
    The movie is a joy to watch.  The last 20 minutes flies into a sense of chaos that feels so out-of-control that you know these problems can't be undone.
    If anything, I think that the movie might be too clever for its own good.

143 - The Dead Pool

    Harry Callahan investigates a betting game about which celebrities will die.  The primary suspect is a movie director who seems to have picked a string of people who die.
    This was the last of the Dirty Harry movies, and it came out in '88.  And it's a massive stain on the character.
    In the first five minutes, it's clear that something is really wrong.  They set up that Harry's testimony has put a mob boss away.  In retaliation, he's attacked by a group of guys, who run down his car, shoot it up, and so forth.  Harry masterfully defeats them, including two headshots.  Then the last guy drops his gun and runs away.  Harry shoots him in the back, killing him.
    What kind of cop is he supposed to be?  This isn't anything admirable.  It's psychotic!

    There's a massive anti-media message to the movie, which makes it all seem very clunky.  It's easy enough to write scenes depicting the media as vultures, but in this case, those scenes never happen.  It's always just Harry over-reacting to some fairly trivial things.
    He also destroys a camera, which seems especially out of line, since he had barely made any effort to persuade the media to stay back.
    Harry gets partnered with a Chinese guy.  He plays the part as comic relief, giving a punchline to go with every crime scene they investigate.  Then he busts out some martial arts moves once he has an action scene.  Wonderfully PC treatment.

    There are a few highlights to note about this movie.  First, Liam Neeson has a major role in this movie.  He doesn't get too many opportunities to act, other than to behave indigent at being questioned.  We also get Jim Carrey.  Not his earliest role, but it came right between his appearances in Peggy Sue Got Married and Earth Girls Are Easy.  He plays a rocker who is shooting a music video that ties into the film they're working on.  We get to see him introduced lip syncing to Welcome to the Jungle.  This is actually a point I don't understand.  Is he supposed to be Axl Rose?  Why are they using a song as well known as Welcome to the Jungle?  It seems like it would have made better sense to use an original work instead.

    When Callahan goes out on a date with his love interest for this movie, they are attacked by some mob-affiliated thugs.  The date is safe.  Callahan chases down the two gunmen.  He shoots both of them, and kills both, despite the second one not posing any threat.  Wouldn't he like to have proof of who is coming after him?

    There's also one of the strangest chases I've seen.  The villain is using a remote control car, packed with explosives, which he plans to drive under Callahan's car, then explode.  This lead to a bizarre chase, where Callahan is trying to out run a remote control car.  This sequence is funny, but it's hard to tell if it's supposed to be.
    I'm hesitant to point this out, because it seems obvious…. remote control cars have a hard time going very fast or very far, and especially not both.  They also run into all kinds of problems with every obstacle out there.  And the person controlling the remote is also driving a car at the same time, to keep up with the remote.

    There's one more problem with the movie, and it's at the very end.  Callahan has prevented the villain from killing his love interest (who is surprisingly annoying).  He's chased the villain to a pier.  The villain is out of ammo.  Callahan acknowledges this.  Callahan steps out of the fog with a harpoon.  The villain looks frightened.  Callahan fires, pinning the villain to a wall, impaled through his torso.
    This is another instance of Callahan killing when he had no need to.  When killing actually seems to be against his best interest.

    The amount of killing in this movie is distasteful.  It switches Callahan from being compelling and heroic to just being a renegade cop who has a bloodlust.  But the movie still tries to frame him as a hero, and that makes it uncomfortably bad.

142 - Triangle

    A group of people go on a pleasure cruise, and encounter a freak storm, wrecking their boat.  Then, a large cruise ship passes them, which they board.  No one seems to be on board, but things get strange when they find unusual clues, and someone starts to kill them off.
    This is roughly the fourth time I've seen this movie, and it's still fantastic.  Despite being a repeat viewing, somehow there were sections of it that I didn't remember at all.  And I had forgotten many of the details.
    There are a lot of symbols in the movie, some of them acting as foreshadowing, others are just little touches.  I like these, mostly because they are obvious without being forceful.  They just add atmosphere on the first viewing, but on subsequent viewings, they feel like a wink.  And not in a happy way - more like "this character is screwed."
    There are mirrors all around, and we see the main character in several of them.  There's a passage of dialogue, which focuses on this cruise ship's name - The Aeolus.  The wiki article is fairly interesting, since it seems like it would be a reasonable name for a ship, since he's a god of wind, at least in some accounts.  But the movie plays up that he's the father of Sisyphus, which is another important theme.  The main character can be likened to being Sisyphus.  They describe Sisyphus as being condemned to his fate because he tried to cheat death.  This raises another question, if the lead is trying to cheat death.
    While it isn't made obvious at first, by the ending, it's clear that yes, she is.
    Damn, it's a good movie.

    There is a weakness to this movie, and it's in the budget.  Especially seeing this on Blu-ray, it's clear that a lot of the effects shots aren't right.  I don't mind it much, but it is a little distracting.

    Another minor detail I noticed - we see the instruments for the band on the cruise ship.  Near the end, we see a kid from a high school marching band, and he has the same symbol on his drum.  I don't think there's a meaning, but... it makes me wonder why.

141 - The Transporter

    Jason Statham stars as an underworld courier, who follows strict rules in his service.  One of his clients has him transport a live person in a bag.  This starts him on an action-packed adventure.
    I liked Crank a lot.  I wasn't sure what to anticipate with this one.  For some reason, I thought that the movie involved a teleportation device.  I'm not sure where I got that impression from.
    But I'm glad to say - this movie is a lot of fun.  The action is similar to Crank, just not as humor driven.  It still reaches those pitches of being laughable though.  There's still a clear effort to make sure that the violence never gets in the way of the action.  The villains are a bit weak though, since they're both played by actors who really like to ham up stereotypical villainy.  This prevents them from showcasing any really dark traits.
    The comedy relief character is handled very well.  It didn't even occur to me that he was intended to lighten the mood, but he plays the part perfectly.
    I was a little confused about the music choices.  Most of the soundtrack seemed fine, but then there were occasionally pieces that stood out as being out of place.
    Now, the question is if I should see the next two movies.  The first has a 6.7 on IMDB.  The second has a 6.2.  the third has a 5.9.
    I think I like Statham as an action star.  He's a little less talkative than Bruce Willis, and his build is a little more wiry, and less bulked up like Schwarzenegger.
    There are some very fun fight scenes.  Early on, there's a fight between Statham and two guys with axes.  And there's a fantastic fight in a garage, with a whole lot of oil/grease all over everything.  Plus, the movie opens with an excellent car chase, which brought Bourne to mind, even though this one wasn't as serious as that one.

140 - Blood Simple

    A lady leaves her lover, to take things up with one of his employees.  The lover hires someone to kill both of them.  From there, things get more complicated.
    This was the first Cohen Brothers movie, and it shows a lot of where they were going.  But it isn't quite all the way there.  The pacing is slower, and the characters aren't quite as engaging.  There isn't nearly as much humor as there is in many of their other movies.
    As I said, the pacing is slower.  The movie very slowly ramps up, and has a very dreamy quality for a big chunk of the middle.  Then the last 10-15 minutes is really tense.  They have the same sensibilities about violence though.
    I don't think there's any deeper meaning to this movie though.  It's a noir-ish crime story, and it cheats a little bit, by having characters skip explaining things to each other.  I think I had one technical problem, and that's when a gunshot goes through a window, the entry point on the glass seemed awfully low for the perspective we have from the shooter.  The cast is interesting.  There's a young Frances McDormand, who shows up in several other Cohen movies.  And there's Dan Hedaya, who I recognized, but couldn't place.  He played Carla's ex-husband on Cheers!

139 - The Terror Experiment

    A biological agent/zombie gas is let loose in a government building, triggering a lockdown.  Unexposed people on higher floors try to get out of the building before it gets blown up.
    I put this movie on my queue after reading this excellent review on a Blu-ray site.  I suppose it didn't live up to my standards of bad movies.  It was bad…but not nearly as entertaining as it should have been.
    For some reason, the movie doesn't have a sense of the infected being the main threat.  We only get a few sequences with them, and most of the time, the infected just lay around.  During one confrontation, an infected who has been shot, suddenly sits up, and tears some innards out of a soldier that shot her.  This seems like it came out of nowhere, and this level - or type - of violence doesn't appear again.
    There's the guy trying to get to his young daughter, who was in day care on the 4th floor.  Then we get treated to an undeserved romance between him and a female lead.  They don't even kiss during the movie, but the romance is underlined in a few scenes.
    There's very little action.  Most of the movie seems to be people outside the building arguing.
    Oh yeah, and the building is named "Federal Building."
    There are a few disturbing undertones in the movie.  There are several references to 9/11, which don't feel too awkward.  But there's an implication of belief in the 'truther' movement.  That seems to be in poor taste.

138 - Spartacus

    Spartacus grows from being a slave, to being trained as a gladiator, to leading a revolution of slaves, in an effort to escape from the Roman empire.
    Even though this movie was massively successful, and references to it abound, I had never seen it.  It's longer than I'd like, at about 3:15, but it still remains a lot of fun, and a strong example of a type of epic filmmaking no longer used.
    Kubrick directed this in 1960, but it doesn't have most of his stylistic choices.  In fact, it looks much more like similar period pictures from that time - like Ben-Hur, which came out the year before.  Kubrick liked to use longer shots, and while we see some of that in this, it isn't applied the same way.
    What I like seeing are these wide shots, with a lot of the landscape visible, and the huge cast of extras working.  There are plenty of these examples early in the movie, as we see a bunch of slaves working on a mountain.
    The massive cast is impressive.  When the slave/gladiator revolt comes, the battle is handled wonderfully.  It's confusing enough to feel chaotic, but organized enough that you can tell what happens.  Before that event, though, there was a scene I really liked.  There are two gladiator matches.  When the first one starts, we stay with Spartacus, who is waiting in a box along with his opponent.  They don't say anything, and we're left with them getting to hear the sounds of the match that's going on.  Occasionally, Spartacus peaks out through some wood slats to see what's happening.  This is handled perfectly.  We get some good tension, and without the action to focus on, it doesn't seem nearly as glamorous it would otherwise.
    The romance between Spartacus and Varinia is played very nicely.  My one reservation about the storyline is how so many of the scenes between them are played on sets.  Their performances are fine, but I actually find the fakeness of the set to be a bit distracting.
    The ending is sort of tragic, and it seems a little unfulfilling, since the time we spend with Spartacus paints him as even-handed, and a very noble leader.  He seems entirely justified, so we'd like to see him fight back a little more.

137 - Clue

    A group of assorted guests arrive at a mansion, where they discover they have a connection to a blackmail plot, and people start getting killed off.
    I wrote a review of this some time ago for IMDB, which remains one of my highest rated reviews.  Of course, that review doesn't actually explore how fantastic the movie is.
    The plot is incidental, and it only exists to motivate the characters and give them something to do.  There's no mystery for the audience to try to figure out.  We aren't given enough information to reach any conclusions.  Honestly, if we were supposed to try to solve the mystery, it would distract from the quality of the movie, and turn it into the sort of movie like The Sixth Sense - where you can watch it - at best - twice.
    Clue is a comedy, and it's campy and fun, but it's not wildly witty.  Most of the jokes are predictable, and sort of dumb.  But that isn't a bad thing.  Everything in this movie works because of the cast, which is spectacular beyond belief.
    If this movie were cast differently, there's no chance it would be nearly as good as it is.  The only cast members that don't shine are the secondary characters, who exist only to provide a body count - the cook, the policeman, the motorist, the singing telegram.  Even the more important secondary characters - the maid, and Mr. Boddy, are both ably cast.
    But everyone else delivers every line with gusto, and they turn every line into a memorable affair.  The pacing is really fast, and it feels even faster when we get to see everyone breathlessly running around the house during the last quarter.
    I burned out on this movie a bit when I was younger, but I still have a lot of affection for it.  And I've come to appreciate many of the performances even more than I did before.  This time through, Michael McKean's performance is brilliant.

136 - Party Animal

    A southern college student is desperate to get laid.

    I suppose it was eventual that I would hit a pretty fun 80s teen sex comedy.  This is a really strange movie, and something about it feels like a sexual fever dream.  There are often brief interludes that focus on a group of girls, usually doing something vaguely sexy.  But most of this is kept very clean.  There isn't nearly as much nudity as similar movies.
    It's a pretty short movie - official running time is 1:17, but the last five minutes seem to be credits.  The short running time makes the structure even more strange.  It takes until the last 20 minutes for the real plot point to be reached, and then that takes another 10 minutes to come to fruition.  The result is that the movie feels weirdly unbalanced.  Like… nothing happening for 50 minutes.  Then something starts to happen for 10 minutes.  Then things wind down for the next 12 minutes.
    The ending is also comically bleak, but it fits in with the movie pretty well.

    For a movie for this time period - and of this genre, it's really pretty artsy.
    Did I love it?  No, the script and performances weren't enough to bring it up to a classic 80s status, but I did enjoy it much more than I expected.

135 - As Good as It Gets

    A man with a mental condition (never exactly disclosed, but some anti-social behaviors, as well as plenty of OCD) gets involved with a waitress, and his gay neighbor.  His adventures help make him learn how to function a little more normally.
    I first saw this movie on VHS.  It wasn't a compelling summary.  I came back to the movie a few times.  I finally decided to buy this movie on Blu-ray, which was absurd.  It's released through a company called Twilight Time, which puts out very limited runs of movies.  In this case, 3,000 copies.  This is completely dumb.  It also allows them to charge a premium - $30 apiece!  This is a movie that won two Academy Awards, three Golden Globes, and three Satellite Awards.  It was also the second most successful picture of Nicholson's career!
    The script is written by James L. Brooks, who I mostly know from his work on The Simpsons.  It's  a very good script.  Maybe it's a little too good.
    By this, I mean that there are too many moments where how fantastically witty some characters are seems to be highlighted.  And those moments draw me out of the movie.
    Nicholson is the clear star of the movie.  While Helen Hunt also won Best Actress for this, I find her mildly annoying.  I don't know how to explain that, because she comes across realistically, but she also seems like the sort of person I would find annoying in real life.  So I suppose she handled the role perfectly.
    Nicholson's Melvin is wonderful, mostly because he gets most of the good jokes.  He's delightfully cruel, and even when he's being offensive, he seems to be aware of it, but he relies on the shock value of being cruel.
    As I watch it, I also become aware of how much longer the movie is than it needs to be.  I don't think the problem is actually the length, but it's the pacing.  It doesn't feel like the movie jumps around as quickly as I'd like it to, but this is most likely because so much of the movie is focused on the acting.