31 - Harry and the Hendersons

    A Seattle family hits a bigfoot on their way back from a vacation.  Thinking that it's dead, they bring it back home.  When it turns out to be alive, they try to keep it secret, and they bond with it, even as a hunter is tracking the creature down.
    I remembered this being kind of pervasive when it came out.  I had never seen it, probably since no one else in my family was interested in it.  But I figured I should see another 80s staple, so it joined the queue.
    I'm pretty sure this is a comedy, but it doesn't seem like much of one.  There seems to be a lot of humor, but most of it is remarkably dumb.  There's a lot of humor that seems to be mined from the physical comedy of Harry destroying parts of the house.  Punching holes in walls, breaking furniture, eating plants.  This stuff wears thin, and it actually makes the movie drag.  There's a better chance that it would play better to kids, who find the destruction a but more entertaining.  As an adult, I just can't ignore the cost of replacing the basement stairs - or the difficulties presented by having the stairway broken.
    There's a bit of a heart to the movie, but I find it kind of overblown.  The family comes to like Harry a little too easily.  They make some efforts to train him, but they don't seem to understand how to train anything.  They have a dog.  I think training Harry, who seems to be able to imitate people more easily than dogs can, would be incredibly easy.  Harry gives some charming expressions, but he seems more intrusive.  I would expect the family to feel a little more conflicted about his presence.
    The effects are remarkable.  I'm not positive exactly how they did it.  Even though Harry has a very cartoonish appearance and demeanor, he still appears very realistic.  Most of this could be accomplished by a man in a suit, but I'm uncertain how much of the facial work was done by animatronic work, and how much of it was just a spectacular mask.
    I never connected to this movie.  It seemed a little like a knockoff of E.T. or any movie about a badly behaved pet that the family comes to love.

30 - The ABCs of Death

    An anthology of 26 short films that deal with death.
    It's impossible to accurately review this movie, since the quality is all over the place, and there are plenty of foreign directors here, some of which reflect very specific issues in other cultures.
    I discovered this movie because I was curious about what Ti West was up to.  I saw that he was credited for this movie.  It's sad to say that I actually think his short is one of the weakest.
    There were a number of sequences that I can say that I really didn't understand.  Gravity (I'm not sure if I understood it.  If I did, it's not a story.) Ingrown, Orgasm, Removed.  There were ones that were bizarre.  Fart was hilarious, but still completely bizarre.  Hydro-Electric Diffusion was interesting, but impossible to figure out.  And Zetsumetsu was probably the strangest one of all, but I don't know if I can claim to understand what it might be about.
    Then there were a bunch that fell into the mid-range.  Klutz, Unearthed, Speed (which may have been referencing Russ Myer movies) or Nuptials.
    The highlights were Cycle, Dogfight, Exterminate, Libido, Pressure, Quack, and XXL.  Each of these offered something unique.  Libido was fascinating, partly because we never learn any background about how the characters come to be in the situation they're in.  Quack is self-aware, and plays out in a very pleasing way, even after building some tension.  XXL was really interesting, mostly because I identify with the story.  A fat girl is teased on her way home.  After getting home and gorging on food, she takes out a knife, and winds up hacking away at her body until she reaches the appearance she wants.  While I haven't had quite the same desire, when I had a fungal infection that wouldn't stop itching, I kept on thinking how great it would be to just cut off that portion.  Pressure was incredibly dark, mostly because it was entirely believable.
    The nature of this project led to some common characteristics.  First, the movies are use a minimal amount of dialogue.  Second, there's a whole lot of slow motion.  I think that Dogfight was entirely in slow motion, except for the last shot.
    Before watching this, I wasn't sure how I would like it.  I love horror anthologies.  This format seems a little tightly wound though.  With about 5 minutes (shorter than that - 10 minutes was taken up with credits) per story, bad stories would soon be over, but good ones would require some more development.  Instead, this shortness meant that some of these directors weren't up to the task.  They made some stories that don't really qualify as stories.  Still, it's an interesting experiment, and I'm glad to see some of these ideas.

29 - A Fistful of Dollars

    An anonymous man drifts into the town of San Miguel, where two rival gangs are in competition.  The Rojos, and the Baxters.  The man decides to use both gangs against each other to make a little money, and possibly free the town from being in the grip of both gangs.
    Another classic I never had seen before, I was surprised at how little I knew about this movie.  I think the only specific thing was the scene that was shown in Back to the Future II.  I didn't have many strong feelings about it.  I like the story in a certain way.  I mostly liked that the audience is kept in the dark, even as we see exactly how the story plays out from the man's point of view.
    The violence has a strange habit of being comical, since most of the effects work is people seizing up as if they've been shot, but there's a very dark edge to it.  We see two sequences that I would probably qualify as being massacres.
    I have one primary complaint about the movie, and that's the problem of the Baxter gang.  While four of the men from the gang are pestering Eastwood near the beginning, we never get a sense that the gang is actually bad.  In fact, there appears to be a certain amount of legitimacy to their existence.  While Eastwood kills the four that pester him, that seemed to be as a way of starting off his ploy.  It seems a little more unethical to have the Baxters treated this way without a clear sense of evildoing from them.
    Also of note - I really liked the credits sequence.  Some rotoscoped animation, done in a very impressionistic style.

28 - Skyfall

    James Bond deals with his relationship with M, as well as a former agent bent on getting revenge on M.
    I couldn't resist watching the Blu-ray.  I've been keeping up on a forum discussion about this movie, and there's a very vocal minority that seriously hates this movie.  I thought that my impression of it might change.  Instead, it turns out that I like the movie more than I did the first time.  Most of the more interesting relationship elements play in a more nuanced way than I picked up on during my first viewing.
    There were two things that bugged me during the first viewing.  First, the train crash into the underground chamber, and second, using the flashlight as the pair make their way across the field.  When I knew that the train was coming, it didn't bother me.  It seemed more bombastic, but I think it was just a way of winking at the audience, with a message of "this is what you wanted to see."  If it were intended to be a plot point, Bond could have easily been delayed through other means.
    The second point is a little harder to explain.  During the bit with the flashlight, there's a whole lot of fire and dust being kicked up at the house.  During a few shots, it's made clear that the helicopter is making enough of a dust storm that you can't see outside the immediate area.  I wouldn't be surprised if they thought they were safe.
    What bugs me is that the flashlight wasn't completely needed.  I thought of a way it could have worked without the flashlight.  When the house blows up, the fire sweeps through the tunnel.  Silva would have looked away from the explosion, and seen some of the fire poke out from the end of the tunnel.  That would have drawn his attention to the church.  That's much cleaner, without the need for the flashlight.  This is a small point, but it's a moment that seemed to make some people groan.
    Another sequence that I really like is during the inquiry that M is attending.  This plays out very well, and the action is just about the right style.  I really liked seeing Mallory get into the action, as well as take a bullet for M.  This was very effective at giving him a sense of worth, which pays off when he's promoted at the end.

27 - I, Madman

    A bookstore clerk becomes fascinated with some horror novels by a guy named Malcolm Brand.  The villain from those books seems to appear in her normal life, and she winds up being caught up in a series of murders as the killer gathers parts from his victims to sew onto his own head.
    I don't know what I was expecting from this one, but it turned out to be pretty unique, in a strange way.
    This is the first time that I've seen a movie that approximates the feel of Tales From the Darkside.  In fact, this movie is more like that show than Tales From the Darkside: The Movie.  There isn't quite enough plot or development to justify this being a movie, rather than a 45-minute episode.  Maybe it would have made a good X-Files episode.
    Anyway, the killer never gets as much development as he deserves.  And his gimmick - taking elements from different victims and replacing his own visage with them - is actually a fun idea, but I found myself asking questions about it.  When he stole the scalp/hair from one victim, how did he go about sewing it onto his head?  It seems awfully complicated to do by himself.  The ears, a similar problem shows up.  Getting a good view of your ears is a bit tricky.
    The main characters are kind of unimpressive.  The female lead is a strange character.  There's something that seems off about her, but she doesn't seem to have much of a personality.  Most of the story is taken up with a typical plot - "I know what the killer is going to do, but I sound crazy when I describe it, so no one will believe me."
    For a movie that came out in 1989, it seems like it belongs to the early 80s.  The effects are strange, and not especially well done.

26 - Singin' in the Rain

    In the late 20s, Monumental Pictures is forced to move into "talkies" due to the success of The Jazz Singer.  The problem is that the studio has a leading lady whose voice is terrible.
    I'm sure I was shown this movie when I was very young, but it wasn't anything I remembered except for a few shots.  It's good.  It's very good.  It's very entertaining, but I don't think it works as a musical.  The songs aren't especially strong.  Some of them have a nice hook, but the songs are only in place to create an opportunity to dance.  That isn't a terrible thing.  The choreography is a whole lot of fun.
    But what I found more charming was the script.  There's a slightly madcap air that permeates the story sequences.  A quick back-and-forth that was very satisfying.
    The movie does suffer from being overly long, particularly near the end.  There's an extended dance number (Gotta Dance) that doesn't add anything to the overall story, it just treads water for an extra ten minutes or so.
    There's one little element that I found eerily memorable.  There's a montage of musicals/films that happens pretty early on, and one of the elements is a man singing into a bullhorn "Should I reveal exactly how I feel…"  I found that this song is titled Should I, although I'm not finding much else about the background, besides that it was recorded by Sinatra.

25 - Marnie

    Marnie makes her way from job to job, each time ending with a large theft, and re-establishing herself under a new identity.  She is caught by her current employer, played by Sean Connery.  He falls in love with her, and wants to straighten her out.
    One of the Hitchcock titles I never had much interest in.  But it's good.  It's not something I would watch often though.  It moves slowly, but it has a very deliberate feel.  It ramps up so slowly that I found myself much more compelled to keep watching during the last fifteen minutes or so.
    Marnie's behavior is bizarre, and it's hard to take her seriously.  The reveal at the end doesn't comes across as something that explains her behavior entirely, but it goes some distance toward establishing what she has to do to get better.
    Hedren is unusual in this role.  She plays the part in a remarkably mysterious way, staying distant most of the time.  To make things even stranger, Connery seems a little more direct, but he also seems to be distant, and doesn't share much of his plans, or motivations.  It's hard to tell how truthful he is.
    This picture is also shot really poorly.  I don't think I can fault Hitchcock, but the print is just terrible.

24 - Night of the Demons

    Some high school kids get together at an abandoned funeral home for a Halloween party.  Of course, the building has some demons, which possess and kill a bunch of the kids.
    This movie… I can't be sure if I've seen it before or not.  I don't remember some very key scenes, so I lean toward thinking that I haven't seen it.  But I remember something about the outside of the building, and the wall surrounding it.
    At first, I thought the movie was kind of fun.  The script is just ridiculous, with lots of absurd dialogue ("Eat a bowl of fuck!") It's hard to say if this is done intentionally or not.  As the movie goes on, it moves away from using the same sense of humor, and into this effort to approximate Evil Dead 2.  Of course, it does this with less skill, less of a sense of humor, less madcap editing.
    There is one memorable scene, and it involves a bizarre effects shot, and Leanna Quigley.  Weird stuff.

23 - The Last American Virgin

    A few guys have some parties, chase girls, drink, and so forth.  One of them falls in love with a girl who is into another guy.
    Another 80s movie that I can't believe I had never heard of.  It's even weirder, since this has a spectacular soundtrack, and the story is remarkably similar to Fast Times at Ridgemont High.  They both came out the same year.  Some looking into this movie found that it was based on a hit Israeli movie from 1978.
    The movie is an unusual mix of styles.  It's partly a teen sex comedy.  In this regard, it's a little over-the-top, but still a pretty fun picture.  But there's a darker edge to the movie.  In particular, the main plot, dealing with the main character's serious interest in the girl, is alternately sweet and sadly disturbing.  There's also a scene where the characters go to visit a prostitute, which is really distressing.
    I don't like this on the same level as I enjoy Fast Times, but it's probably just because the writing isn't as strong.
    The soundtrack is really pretty impressive.  I love hearing Shake it Up, and it's great to hear Are You Ready for the Sex Girls again.  But for some reason, several songs are used more than once in the movie.  This is actually a little distracting.  Sometimes it can work, but in this context, it seems like they weren't able to afford more music.

22 - The Burning

    A handful of campers decide to play a prank on a the camp caretaker.  It goes bad, and winds up severely burning the man.  After he's reconstructed, he kills a prostitute, then stalks kids at camp.
    I saw that this was going to get a Blu-ray release sometime soon, and I thought I was pretty familiar with camp-based horror from the 80s.  I'm so embarrassed that I had never seen this before.  I think I'd put this on about the same level as the Sleepaway Camp movies.  Less corny, but the camp nostalgia feel that this one has is fantastic.
    And it helps that there are a few familiar faces.  Holly Hunter is in it, although I don't know her.  Notably, Jason Alexander is in here, and Brian Backer, who I know from his excellent performance in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.  And another guy - Brian Matthews - wasn't actually anyone I recognized, but I kept thinking that he looked like Jamie Bamber.
    Since this came out in the early 80s, it actually is more of a 70s-style horror, but it's shot pretty well.  The effects are cheap, but they seem to have actually shot on location, which goes a long way to making this look good.  The killer isn't interesting, but the handling of the story, as well as the kind of realistic way that the kids goof off, is very charming.
    Maybe I'll come back to this.  I mean, I own the Sleepaway Camp movies.  Why wouldn't I own this?

21 - The Man Who Knew Too Much

    A man, his wife, and his young son are on vacation.  A man they meet briefly winds up being killed, and in his dying breath, warns the father of an assassination that will take place.  After his son is kidnapped by the conspirators, the husband and wife embark on a mission to unravel the plot and recover their son.
    Another classic Hitchcock that I never watched.  I remember my brother explaining one of the plot scenes, the gunshot timed to the music.  Interestingly, that seemed almost unimportant.  They spell out the use of that well ahead of time.
    This is a little less dark than some of his other work, and it's less circuitous than North by Northwest was.  It doesn't play out like a mystery, but it does have a bit of tension.  The amount of humor seems a little strange though, since some of it defuses some of the other things that bother people, notably, children in peril.  While a child is being held hostage through much of the movie, he isn't in clear jeopardy most of the time.  If they showed the kid being tied in a chair or something, then the humor would seem disrespectful.
    I did like this, but I also felt like Jimmy Stewart was more hotheaded than he usually would be.  In Vertigo, he's a bit impulsive, but that's part of the point of his character.  In this, he just seems a little crabby.
    And I have to say, the one thing that really bugged me about the movie was Doris Day's singing.  I like the song Que Sera, Sera, but the way that she belts out the word "que" really bothered me.

20 - Cocktail

    A young veteran comes back to civilian life wanting to become a millionaire.  Because of his lack of credentials, he winds up becoming a bartender, and becomes a protege to an older bartender.
    I know this was very successful when it came out.  But it was never a movie that I had any specific knowledge of.  I knew that it had Tom Cruise as a bartender, and that the song Kokomo came from the soundtrack.
    It's a better movie than I was expecting.  It does have some major weaknesses, but the heart of the movie is about the relationship between mentor and protege, as well as their relationships with money, women, and alcohol.  It's easily the most interesting aspect of the movie.  Things tend to get campy and dull when we move away from their relationship, and instead focus on the romance between Tom Cruise and Elizabeth Shue.  These scenes intend to reframe the movie as a romance, and less about the dark life lessons of the mentor.
    The other core problem with the movie is that Tom Cruise's character is bad in nearly every possible way.  He's not malevolent, but he's selfish, and he doesn't grasp when he's doing something wrong, or hurting someone.  They establish early in the movie that he's actually a very charismatic person, and that he can talk his way around a lot of difficulties.  But then, by the end of the movie, he can't explain simple thoughts, or make a reasonably compelling argument.
    But they gave it a happy ending, and I suppose it is a uniquely American type of story, given his incredible fixation on becoming a millionaire.

19 - The Collection

    In this sequel to The Collector (2009), the survivor from the first one helps a team of mercenaries track down The Collector to rescue a girl.
    I remembered watching The Collector, but I keep getting it mixed up with Laid to Rest/Chromeskull.  Both involve masked killers, elaborate, brutal traps, and are based loosely on Halloween/Friday the 13th, and to a lesser extent, Saw.  We don't learn much of anything about the villain's motivations.  This wouldn't be much of an issue, since most horror movies handle that material by letting the audience fill in the blanks by showing some creepy habits.  Here, the problem is that his creepy habits are all over the place.  He's dressing one captive up like a little girl, he's assembling bizarre mutilated mannequins, he removes some body parts.  Some people, he's drugging up and turning into strange manic zombies.  Sometimes it seems like he might be making an effort to assemble a perfect being (a la Frankenstein or May) but sometimes he just seems to want to cut people.
    This movie did start with a sequence at a rave, which I now consider to be one of the tackiest ways of trying to identify with the youth market.  Sometimes, these types of scenes have a place, but this seemed a little silly.  At least this sequence comes to a pretty abrupt closing by killing nearly everyone there.
    The violence, and the traps, are really over the top.  At first, it seemed like it was a little interesting, like it was showing a killer who had a specific plan in mind.  As the movie wears on, it doesn't play as well, only because it starts seeming like too much of a plot convenience.
    They used a very Halloween-like ending, which seemed appropriate.  Unmasking the villain wouldn't work, because we don't have a supporting cast that he can be tied to.
    Still, this was reasonably good for a modern horror movie.  I can't complain.

18 - Premium Rush

    A bike messenger is given an envelope to deliver, but he is waylaid by a crooked cop who is trying to steal it.
    A fun movie, but not especially memorable.  It's a little ridiculous, and not in a way that is entirely endearing.  I have this feeling that it was probably  much stronger script at first, and that it got diluted into something more complicated by the time it was shot.  Some of the subplots seem a little more forced, like his competitive relationship with the black guy.
    What stood out to me was the villain.  He seemed more scary to me than a movie of this caliber should have.  I think I was expecting a level of evilness that was probably more akin to the "evil dean" in a college movie.  This seemed more like a toned down version of Philip Seymour Hoffman's Mission: Impossible 3 villain.
    And the script created a very strange, uneven balance between the hero and the villain.  The hero only has the means of thwarting the villain, but not keeping himself safe from retribution.  This gives the whole movie a tension that isn't very pleasant.  It gets resolved neatly, but it adds to the dark touch that this movie uses, which doesn't feel right for a movie that feels like a live-action cartoon.

17 - Sinister

    A writer and his family move into a house where the prior occupants had been killed in the backyard.  His plan is to write a book about the one person whose body wasn't found - the youngest girl.  After finding some home movies in the attic, he finds that the footage is both of the family having a good time, followed by their murder.  And it seems that there are a handful of other, similar videos.
    I had been looking forward to this, since it seemed to be made in a similar way to Insidious, which I remember liking, and probably should revisit.
    This is a good movie.  It covers some dark material, and while much of it isn't explicit, it's obvious exactly what's happening.  The methods of death are interesting, in that they're mostly unique, but just clever enough that it's clear that some thought went into it.  Do we have a reason why the deaths are this fancy?  Not really, but they do play out well, with some appropriate tension.
    The main story, of the man discovering all of this, is good, but it doesn't reach the same heights reached by The Ring.
    The other thing to watch out for with this movie is that it has a dark ending.  In a certain way, it isn't satisfying, but it seemed like it was coming.  How can you fight a Pagan god?

16 - Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony

    A documentary that focuses on the Brony phenomenon, centered around a handful of specific people, and their trips to assorted My Little Pony conventions.  Hosted by John de Lancie.
    While I never sponsored this documentary, I was aware of it.  And I'm pleased with how it turned out.
    The content is very positive, although it does make reference to cloppers at one point.  What made the movie work was the variety of people the story follows.  We meet a German couple who came together from their mutual interest in MLP.  We meet a musician, a laser-light show person, a guy who lives in North Carolina…
    We get a handful of people who are a little strange, but everyone is treated with respect.  There's a guy with Asbergers who seems like a very likable guy, and he mostly just needs someone to help him gather confidence to deal with certain situations.  Not to sound bad at all.
    The one person that I actually came out of this feeling worse about was a young kid from Maine.  His father seems like a caricature of what a conservative father would be like.  In fact, he reminded me of Fred Willard.  What bothered me about him was how poorly he was handling his relationship with his son.  His son was clearly afraid of him, which isn't a good start.  Then after his father finds out that his son is into this show, and wants to go to a convention, his reaction just reinforces that his son was right to be wary.  They give the person a happy ending, since they include in the credits that he watched an episode, and enjoyed it.  I don't think that's quite enough.  Even his wife seemed kind of subservient to him.
    It was a pleasure to see the German couple get together.
    The one scene that felt a little out of place was the Gala.  It's a nice dance, but the problem is that there weren't enough girls.  So there are a handful of girls dancing with guys, but there are far too many guys hanging around waiting for their chance.
    It's a pleasure to see this movie, and to know that it might eventually persuade some people to understand what's appealing about My Little Pony.

15 - North by Northwest

    An organized crime outfit mistakes an advertising man for a secret agent.  After refusing to believe that he isn't with the FBI, the man tracks both the real FBI agent and the criminals across the country.
    I've heard lots of good things about this movie, but I had an impossible time bringing myself to watch it.  I was aware of the crop duster scene, and the climax on Mount Rushmore.  But this is one of Hitchcock's best films.  It's funny, it's tense, there's no sense of how everything is going to resolve.
    In fact, the only thing I can think of that doesn't work is that it might not stand up to repeated viewings well.  And I think if I had seen this as a kid, I wouldn't have liked it as much.  It doesn't have the emotional resonance that Vertigo had.  There are a few points that are a little too slow, but I believe they were used because of Cary Grant's machismo.
    This is the first time I've seen Cary Grant in a movie, and he's hilarious.  It might be because I'm so familiar with Some Like it Hot that I associate his voice with being… comical.
    I have more reservations about Hitchcock's work as I get older.  I see some of his awkward editing, his issues with focus, and some of the effects he used haven't aged well.  Usually I can ignore these, but they seemed a little more glaring in this picture, especially since there are so many real locations.

14 - Frankenstein

    Dr. Frankenstein assembles a creature from a variety of parts of deceased people.  After mistreating the monster for awhile, the town turns against the creature.
    I didn't like this as much as Dracula, but it still was interesting.  The direction is better, although the pacing is still strange.  It's a much more talk-heavy production.
    I think what bothers me more about the story is how many opportunities they missed.  There doesn't seem to be any contemplation about how they should treat it. 

13 - The Man Who Laughs

    A surgically disfigured boy grows up to become a famous clown, and discovers this royal heritage.
    This was the 1928 version of the story, which seems to have been filmed many times.  It's based on a story by Victor Hugo.  I wish I could say that I got this, but I really didn't.
    The story seemed reasonably straightforward.  My bigger problem was a common issue with silent films - there's so much dialogue that's being spoken, but we're left to our imagination to fill in the blanks.  But there's an obvious political subtext that I have a hard time understanding.  I also have a hard time with some of the broad ideas in the movie.  Like what it is that Gwnplaine actually does in his act.  It seems to be based around the idea of just letting his face be seen.
    I wanted to see this because his appearance influenced the way that the Joker was designed.  I can see this.  But it's not as dark - or dramatic - as it should be.