206 - The Wolf Man

    A man returns to his family home in Wales, where he is bitten by a wolf man, and turns into one himself.
    I've often heard that this is one of the lesser Universal monster movies.  I think it's probably the best of them.  As a monster, the wolf man only represents a loss of control.  This contrasts with most of the other Universal monsters; Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the Mummy, the Creature, and the Phantom.  The main difference with this movie is how much time is devoted to exploring the man who becomes the wolf man.  This is where the difference in these movies is felt.
    We get a lot more character development during the setup.  Larry meets a girl that he's interested in, Gwen, and we see his efforts to woo her.  This is fantastic, partly because of the fun of it, but mostly because it's handled in a way that a modern movie would never attempt.  He's a little creepy, but he keeps on mixing it with a bit of charm.  It's very nice to see this kind of sequence.
    There isn't that much focus on the monster.  In fact, as a monster, he doesn't seem especially wolf-like.  He's mostly just a very hairy guy who stalks around a bit.
    I've watched most of these Universal movies.  I like them, and they're interesting.  But they always drag a bit during the second half.
     I do have to credit Universal with casting very attractive leading ladies.  This Gwen is very cute.

205 - The Skulls

    A man at Yale (although it isn't named) is recruited to join a prestigious secret society.  Shortly afterward, his journalism-major roommate turns up dead.
    What is there to say about this one?  It's not a great movie.  It's a collection of missed opportunities, with some occasionally silly writing, and direction that misses the mark.
    As the story starts off, our lead is established.  He's a nice guy.  But he has no particular traits, outside of his athletic talents.  He has a few friends, but I don't see a genuine connection between them.  If he had been established as an ethical guy, the story might play better.  He joins this society without a second thought, despite providing him with a rulebook, as well as giving the instruction that their rules are to be obeyed over law.  This should be an issue for a guy who plans on being a lawyer.
    The actual meat of the story - the death, the investigation, the ethical dilemma it poses, all of that is a good idea.  Unfortunately, that approach is mostly abandoned, in favor of a conspiracy-theory flavored "they've got people everywhere!"  The story might have been a bit more effective if it were handled as a straight drama, rather than a thriller.
    The direction is strange.  Outdoor shots usually look kind of nice.  Indoor shots are strange.  They use a lot of shadow, but they put a lot of sunlight into the frame.  The light is almost always a bit fuzzy, possibly a little over-exposed.  This gives a dreamy, soft look to most of those shots.  It's a little confusing, like I was getting mixed messages.  There's a sequence at the police station that has some frantic editing and constant Dutch angles.  I know how it's supposed to make me feel, but it wasn't in the vocabulary of the movie until that scene, and that makes it feel a little wrong.
    I wasn't especially happy with it, but I'm glad to have seen it.  I saw the trailer when it came out, and I had always been a little curious.

204 - Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

    Two con artists, one classy and one classless, get into a competition.  They decide on their mark, and compete to extract $50,000 from her.
    This is not my favorite Steve Martin movie.  But it isn't Martin's performance that draws me in.  Michael Caine does a fantastic job.  And beyond that, the script is just fantastic.  It's not flawless - there are a few gags that seem cheap on repeated plays, but there are so many soft jokes that land perfectly, especially with the cast involved.
    This time through, I felt much more drawn to watching Glenn Headly's performance.  It's hard to praise a performance that feels entirely natural, but in this case, she seems so eerily perfect in her part.  Of course, the believability of that role is established by the performances of Martin and Caine, but once she enters the show, she plays it perfectly.
    I was reminded of how well structured There's Something About Mary was.  Every single scene resulted in the audience having a sense that the story was going to turn out completely different from what they thought it was.
    I have one problem with the movie, and I can't quite nail it down.  At some point late in the movie - probably around the time Martin gets into the wheelchair, the pace of the movie slows down.  I can't point to a specific scene that drags things down, but I always get a little restless.

203 - Ghost Dad

    A very busy widower dies in a drowning/car crash, and finds that he's a partially intangible ghost, with a variety of strange abilities.  He tries to use a few days to finish closing a business deal, and hopefully get some life insurance so that his kids will be able to get by once he finishes dying.
    Ghost Dad is a bit of a punchline.  It was regarded as one of the worst movies of 1990.  It's hard to argue with it.  As a more passive viewer, I think I would have been pretty bored with the movie.  As an adult, it held my interest, but it was one of the weirdest movies I've seen.  It's not intentionally weird, like House was.
    What makes this movie so absurdly weird is how it jumps between tones.  One minute, Cosby is having a laugh with his co-workers in the elevator.  The next minute, he's being driven around by a satanist cab-driver with some rear-screen projection.  There's a pretty normal family comedy feel to a bunch of scenes, but suddenly, there will be the scene of Cosby threatening a guy calling his daughter.  There's still some comedy to it, but it's… less than family-friendly.
    The logical leaps in the movie are strange.  It's easy to accept the idea that Cosby would be interested in ensuring that his children are able to survive after his death.  That's an admirable goal, and that should have been the focus.  Instead, Cosby is much more willing to spend his time simply performing his job.  Somehow, despite working his job for something like 15 years, he has no pension, despite the existence of the pension plan.  Most plans involve being partially vested after three years, fully vested in five.  I'm not bothered by this lapse in logic, but it lends to the amount of stretching that this plot needed.
    I found myself wondering what the movie would be like if Cosby weren't in it.  He's not bad or anything, but his performance seems a little too stereotypical Cosby.  It's possible that a different star could bring something else to the movie, that might give it a better fit.

202 - Bad Santa

    A misanthropic drunk works with his partner each year in a Christmas heist.  This year, he starts to find a bit of meaning in his life.
    I remember being surprised at how much I liked this movie the first time I saw it.  Sometime after the second time, I think I realized that I really loved the movie.  It's reached a classic status with me.  Thornton's performance is perfect.  The story reaches some serious depths, and with another actor handling the material, it would be hard to believe.  But Thornton's Willie is so miserable, and so unable to understand anything other than misery, that it becomes believable for a character to act as outrageous as he does.  He has simply hit rock bottom, and has been willing to stay there.
    What stands out on repeat viewings is how evil the people around him are.  They've gotten their acts together, and they're much more careful to avoid attracting attention, but they have far more contempt for everyone.  Willie lashes out at a lot of people, but the script is always careful to make it so that he simply reflects what we're all thinking.  When a kid sits on his lap and says he wants "fraggle stick car," Willie seems to think this is bizarre and silly.  The audience thinks so too, but we would all be too polite to point this out.  He generally doesn't lash out at being picked on, either.  When Marcus berates Willie for his terrible behavior, Willie accepts it, and agrees with it.  Not all the time, but most.  He's very self-aware.
    In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge gets the Christmas spirit by seeing how clearly he's disliked, and how his legacy is not celebrated.  In Bad Santa, Willie takes a step to improving himself by finding that it feels good to help someone less powerful.

201 - Tales From the Script

    A documentary about screenwriting.
    Remarkably, this is one of the least-polished documentaries I've seen.  It's mostly a collection of thematically-edited interviews with a variety of screenwriters.  There isn't much to report.  They provide a few anecdotes about working with the Hollywood system, the effects that writing a successful script has on your career, the effects of a bad script, and so on.  It's a bit of a mixed bag, and much of the movie isn't memorable.  The one story that really stood out was a lady who wrote a draft of BloodRayne, which Uwe Boll used.
    What I took away from this is exactly what I expected.  It can be very difficult to write a script.  Everyone tears it apart, and tries to alter it.  A skilled screenwriter can figure out how to address the changes people want to see in a way that keeps the project together.
    I wish there was more to say.  I didn't mind this, and it kept my interest.  But it doesn't really offer anything interesting to anyone other than aspiring screenwriters.

200 - I Think We're Alone Now

    A documentary following two subjects, both obsessed with Tiffany.  First, a middle-aged man with Asperger's, and second a 30-something intersex female.
    It's strange to think that even lesser celebrities have a fanatical following.  When I think of most artists with a single hit (think Spacehog) I don't consider that they might have some people out there that won't leave them alone.  Because of this, it's easy to think that this documentary would be more about subjects with a peculiar interest - like most documentaries are.  Instead, their fascination with Tiffany almost seems to be irrelevant, compared to the difficulties these people have in general.
    I understand Jeff, the man with Asperger's.  I've known people with his set of behaviors.  I know how difficult it can be for people to be around them for longer stretches of time.  His unflappable enthusiasm and positivity.  It's remarkable, but it's strangely distressing at the same time.  I have a harder time understanding Kelly, the intersex girl.  She's much more conflicted than Jeff is, but it's harder to explain her issues.
    What stands out in this is that Tiffany is remarkably well-mannered about this.  I'm very impressed with her ability to manage these tricky relationships in a way that seems to keep her obsessive fans placated, but without sacrificing her own sanity.
    The one scene that really ties the whole thing together is a brief one near the end, when Jeff reveals that he's now got a new obsession - Alyssa Milano.  Given how much younger Tiffany is than Jeff, that was already a bit awkward.  Alyssa Milano is considerably younger.  It's…much creepier.
    No resolution comes to these characters.  They remain just as focused on Tiffany, although I guess that their lives seem less frantically fixated.
    It's a bit depressing, but it's still a very interesting watch.

199 - Exam

    Eight candidates for a job are taken in for a test.  They are presented with a piece of paper, and a pencil.  The problem is that no one can identify the question they're supposed to answer.  Candidates are eliminated by breaking rules, and tensions rise.
    I'm a big fan of these small-group dramas, even more when they include horror elements.  This one doesn't exactly qualify as horror - it's much more drama-thriller, but it's pleasingly well-written.
    The characters are reasonably well-defined.  Characters have specific limits, and it's nice to see those limits explored.
    I was reminded of another movie, another one with a group of people locked in a room and gradually being eliminated.  I think that one is Killing Room, which I plan on watching next year.  The big difference is that this one has an ending that feels good.  Typically, the person who 'wins' these scenarios either is a jerk, and they get a reward that is worse than losing, or they're the most appropriate winner, and we still feel like the whole process was terribly unethical.
    In this case, the winner is fine.  And we get enough other information to make the entire process seem appropriate.
    The one weakness I can see is that I identified what the question, and answer, was.  I figured this out well before they did.  I expected that they would have figured it out earlier.  Of course, the movie doesn't address the issue of what happens if more than one person has figured it out.
    One technical problem, but it's not terrible.  I noticed a few edits that were awkward.  But for the most part, the movie was solidly well made, and well written.  Good stuff.

198 - Playback

    A student is making a short film about a series of murders that took place fourteen years ago.  As he digs into the story, links to the past become clear, and the murderer takes possession to strike again.
    Until I wrote that summary, i hadn't considered the influence that The Ring had on this story.  The killer's spirit seems to travel through video (or film) into a new host body.
    The logic of the story needs some work.  The host that is holding this spirit seems to be decaying over the course of a few days.  Transferring to a new body seems to be a process that takes some time to set up.  It doesn't seem like it could be maintained.
    The characters are all pretty interchangeable.  I couldn't care less about most of them.
    The good things.  The makeup on the villain is handled pretty well.  The deterioration of his body comes in slowly, and it isn't a focus.  When you first notice it, you aren't sure if you just didn't notice it earlier.
    There is one scene that stood out for the writing, and that's the scene where Christian Slater, playing a cop, is being seduced by a mind-controlled girl.  I actually liked how professional Slater plays that scene.  He doesn't immediately get tricked into revealing his bad behavior.  He attempts to defuse the situation carefully.  I bought it!
    Sadly, this is really the highlight of the movie.  The rest of it was just pretty dull.
    There is an effort made to build a mythology for the story - that the villain is actually the spirit of the devil, passed down from one generation to another, using photographic means.  Normally this would be a direction I like.  Getting some background does help suck me into the picture.  In this case, it seemed more forced than I would have liked.

197 - The Wolverine

    Logan is called to Japan by a man he once saved, who offers him the opportunity to lose his "immortality."  After the man dies, Logan finds himself caught in a  power struggle, protecting the deceased's granddaughter.
    I had put off watching this for a long time.  I wasn't dreading it or anything, I just wasn't excited to see it.
    It seems that my feelings were about right.  It's a good movie.  It's not a great one.  It has some weaknesses, but they aren't easy to specify.  Maybe it was that the villains didn't seem to be solidly defined.  Maybe it was the way that the story seemed a little forced, by separating Logan from his powers for a time.  It could have been that I didn't feel like the romantic angle was worthwhile.
    I wish I could say more about this, but it just didn't seem to matter.

196 - The Brass Teapot

     A struggling couple find themselves in possession of a teapot that dispenses money when the owner(s) are hurt.
    This showed up under comedies on Netflix.  I am impressed.  This is a good movie.  While there are comedic elements to the movie, they gradually phase out in favor of more interesting ideas.
    The premise is really pretty simple, although to keep things interesting, new developments keep making the story interesting.  There are some spoilers here.
    First, it's just physical pain that seems to generate a payout.  Then it turns out that being around other people who go through physical pain can generate a payout.  Then it turns out that emotional pain also can generate a payout.  And by extension, emotional pain of others.  Each of these discoveries influences their behavior.
    The movie addresses one of the obvious weaknesses.  It's very easy to think something like "Oh, well, I would just give myself a little burn each day, and that would keep me well-to-do."  The story addresses this problem in two ways.  First, the payout for any type of pain reduces over time.  Eventually, they find that the little forms of small pain they inflict on themselves is producing singles and five dollar bills rather than the hundred dollar payouts they started with.  The other way is by introducing other people that are aware of the teapot.  A pair of Hasidic Jews whose mother was the previous owner of the teapot.  These two people steal the money that has been saved up.
    It's rare that a Twilight Zone-like plot can be stretched out to this length without suffering from script problems.  It really worked well.  (I believe that the story reminds me of Button, Button, or The Box, a story by Richard Matheson.)

    I've been thinking a lot about scripts, and about how the stories get structured.  Tools that writers use to make the story layered well enough that the audience keeps paying attention, and there are notable developments at regular enough intervals.  I was very happy with this script.  Secondary characters played the parts they needed, and they weren't treated as comedic relief.  The comedy came from the situation, not from unrelated wackiness.  I even looked up the screenwriter, but he doesn't seem to have written anything else.

195 - Scary or Die

    An anthology of five short stories, loosely tied together.
    When I started watching this, I didn't know it was an anthology.  Netflix offers a very misleading description.
    The Crossing opens the movie, with a story of some rednecks driving to the border with plans to kill a few illegal immigrants.  Teujung's Lament deals with a lonely widower who foils a kidnapping attempt.  Re-membered has a man with a dismembered body in his trunk pulled over.  Clowned has a man bitten by a bizarre clown, and he turns into an evil clown himself.  Lover Come Back closes the movie with a slow narration.

    Hmm.  It's not a good anthology.  But despite the weak material, the efforts made to tie the stories together are appreciated.  That was one of the elements that made Trick R Treat so fantastic was the smoothness with which the stories were tied together.  In this case, the longer I watched the movie, the more I was aware of the efforts to draw connections.  Most of them weren't great.
    Personally, none of the segments came off well.  The first one started well, but then it goes directly into a strange zombie scenario.  This is compounded by one of the legitimate border guards remarking that the person they've just shot was a zombie.  What does this mean?  Are zombies something that they expect in this reality?  The second story suffered from a similar problem - a good setup, followed by a poor ending.
    Re-membered was a remarkably dull story.  I'm not too picky about this kind of thing, but the story just raised questions, provided no answers, and left me wondering why they bothered to make a story out of it.
    Clowned is the story they use to sell this anthology.  It's a decent idea, and I think I would be happy with it, except that the direction really kept this from being all it could be.  The tone of the segment kept jumping around, and it was never clear what feeling I was supposed to be getting from it.
    The last story was more of a narration, set over some slow direction.  It's a short bit - less than 10 minutes long.  The segment does accomplish one thing that I liked.  Throughout each of the segments, we saw a lady walking awkwardly in the street.  I assumed this was tying together with the first segment, that she was supposed to be a zombie.  Nope, she's the character in this story.
    Where the movie goes wrong is with the twists to these stories.  Most of them aren't exactly twists, since they're thoroughly predictable.  The one instance where it isn't obvious what's happening is the second story, which used a completely dumb twist.
    I know I rarely use that kind of criticism.  That twist was dumb.

194 - Kill Theory

    A man who pled guilty to cutting his rope while mountain climbing, killing his companions, but saving himself, decides to prove that he only did what others would do.  In order to accomplish this, he forces a group of teens into a situation where only one person must survive the night.
    As I started watching this, I kept feeling like I must have seen this before.  The setup seemed incredibly familiar.  A bunch of horny teens go out to a big, expensive house in the middle of nowhere.  We get to see a gun.  There's a bit of nudity.  Something seemed like it was exactly the same as other movies I've seen.
    This movie does have a few little things to distinguish it.  Mostly, one of the characters is a big, meaty, normal-looking guy.  This is a real pleasure to see.  It's so strange to see this in a movie that there's no clear expectations for the viewer.  I don't know if he shouldn't be trusted, or if he's going to turn out to be the hero.
    The only other remarkable thing is that this does have a downer ending.
    However, this doesn't really matter.  Most of the characters feel interchangeable, even if they do have distinct personalities.  This might be a side effect of the majority of the movie taking place at night, in a dark house, and two female characters that look almost identical to my eye.
    The premise is a little weirdly flawed as well.  The villain has trapped the road on the path off the property.  He's got a sniper riffle.  This would be fine, if the house were a little more isolated.  But it's surrounded by woods, and there are about five or six kids.  Has he laid enough traps to be sure that he could trap all of them?
    It's a bit of shame.  The opening and closing scenes deal with the relationship between the villain and the doctor treating him, and that would have made a much more engaging movie than interchangeable teens turning on each other.

193 - The To Do List

    A rigidly academic girl graduates high school, and decides to spend the Summer accomplishing a variety of sexual acts.
    Several reviews tried to compare this to the American Pie movies.  It's easy to go into it with that impression.  It plays a lot like the modern-era teen sex comedies.  An occasional gross-out bit, some more explicit sexual material.  Goofy supporting cast.  Eugene Levy has been exchanged for a very pro-open communication mother and a repressive father.
    As I watched the movie, I found that I started off being a bit bored and annoyed with it.  The jokes weren't especially funny, and most of the charm came from setting the movie in 1993.  The characters were mostly annoying, and even the brainy lead came across as having less humanity than she should.  Then I went through a phase of feeling like it was… somehow wrong.  In American Pie, the leads share a common goal of just having sex for the first time.  In this case, the lead has a personal checklist of acts that she plans on accomplishing.  Most of the fun of it comes from her not understanding what the acts entail.  But as she goes through a few of these acts, you start to feel a little like this isn't going right.
    (Consider how brutal American Pie would feel if instead of just a broad goal of losing their virginity, the guys had a checklist of all of the acts they were going to try to accomplish, and point values for them.  And maybe they would have some kind of competition between them.  Not a really nice idea.)
    It's because the story shifted from seeming like it was going to be a female positive experience, into seeming more like a male sex fantasy.  There's a considerable amount of time dedicated to this.  Once some people find out about her checklist, they decide that they can use her list as a tool.  This made a lot of the middle act kind of uncomfortable.
    Eventually, the characters get better defined, and her relationships get developed a bit.  This goes a long way to making the movie enjoyable.
    By the end though, I felt like there were some missed opportunities.  Her strange detachment from sex is weirdly off-putting.  That isn't a sexist thing either - I find it just as creepy when guys are detached (which is why Stiffler is such a bastard.  He draws the contrast)
    Maybe the biggest problem that the movie suffers from is a big dose of wacky.  There's far too much walking in on people having sex, or doing sexual things.  In fact, it seems to be pretty consistent throughout the movie.  Something like this doesn't work if there's no tension leading to it, especially since no one seems to remember it.
    The big lesson that the lead learns over the course of the movie is that there is an emotional element to sex.  Really.  It would be one thing if she thought she was above it, and then she figured out that she loved someone.  But nope, she doesn't love anyone, and it turns it into a movie about a robot gaining a tiny understanding into what makes people tick.  It's pretty strange.
    One very minor quibble.  The sister's boyfriend is following Phish for the Summer.  He calls from Las Vegas.  I checked their tour dates, and closest they played to Las Vegas that Summer was at the end of August, and it was in Berkeley, CA.  That's about a nine hour drive.  Most of their shows were on the East coast.
    Oh, and the lead is too attractive for the part.  They try to make her look nerdy by having her wear glasses occasionally.  I hate that cliche.

192 - Ms. 45

     A mute seamstress descends into murderous madness after being raped twice in one day.
    When I first saw the original I Spit On Your Grave, I remember being impressed that the story was actually dark, but that it was very much on the women's side of the story.  That was one of my early exposures to the revenge-horror movie.  I didn't care too much about Last House on the Left, but the sub-genre is still pretty enjoyable.
    Revenge is a difficult motivator to work with.  It's pretty simple; the victim is wronged.  The victim seeks retribution.  But since revenge is typically not a likable trait, it becomes a tricky balancing act, of making the victim continually justified in seeking revenge.
    This movie is so unbalanced that it moves out of the revenge category.
    When Thana is raped, it doesn't play out as an exploitation sequence.  The first rape is remarkably brief, surreal, and it isn't entirely clear what happened.  The second sequence is longer, and it's more clear that she is being raped.  But in neither case is there the obligatory shot of her shirt being ripped open.
    After she kills her attacker, she decides to dismember the corpse and dispose of it slowly.  Her fright at nearly being discovered leads her to kill another man.  She finds that she wants to kill men.  At first they're all guys that seem pretty sleazy.  Gradually though, there seems to be less of a sense that she's targeting these people for their poor behavior.  Instead, she just extends her hunt to just being men in general.
    There's one scene that had me worried, and it happened pretty close to the end of the movie.  Thana wants to take her neighbor's dog for a walk.  She tries - unsuccessfully - to get it hit by a car.  Then she brings it to river, ties the leash to something, then prepares to shoot it.  She leaves a note for her neighbor claiming that the dog ran off chasing another dog, and that she couldn't find it.
    The big finish to this is when Thana dresses as a nun, and goes on a rampage at a Halloween party.  The whole sequence is shown in slow motion, and there's something incredible about it.  Seeing a nun, with lots of lipstick, wielding a gun in slow motion is remarkable.
    The very end shows that she did not kill the dog, that it has found home.

    There are some specific strengths I would like to point out.  First, the music.  Some of the music has a dated feel, being a kind of funk/jazz sort of thing.  But the opening music, and most of the music punctuating murders, is incredible.  It's a bit discordant, but there's something so incredible about how it fits the movie.  Second, the direction alternates between competent and good, and very clever.  I don't think any of it approaches genius level, but it's damn good.  Third, the lead performance is fantastic.  For a character who doesn't say anything, her thoughts are very well conveyed to the audience.
    I can't tell exactly who I would recommend this to.  Horror fans with an open mind?  It's a unique movie, and I can't believe it's taken me this long to find it.

191 - Scenic Route

    Two old friends are on a trip together.  While driving through the desert, their car breaks down, and tempers flare as they try to survive.
    The summary made me a little hesitant, but it had a pretty good rating on Netflix.  It's better than I expected.
    The initial argument that sets things off is handled well.  They have appropriate things to argue about, and it doesn't come across like a desperate effort.  There's nothing worse than sitting through a movie argument and thinking "why are they arguing about this?  No one would think this is worth yelling about."  The characters are drawn reasonably well.  They sound like older friends, with a sense of length to their relationship.
    The one thing that doesn't ring true is the number of times that they miss getting help.  I also don't think that their sense of panic sets in the way that it should.
    This is a hard movie to feel like it's perfect.  It's mostly a two-man show, and those can be remarkably difficult to pull off.  They really did a good job with this.
    The ending is a hard thing to place.  It's intentionally ambiguous, and it didn't bother me at first.  The happy ending is probably a bit better than the sad ending, but I don't feel like the sad ending is particularly bad.

190 - Screamtime

    Another horror anthology.  Again, spoilers apply.
    First story, That's the Way to Do It, deals with an older man who runs a Punch & Judy puppet show.  His wife and step-son are cruel, and want him to stop doing puppet shows.  The puppets return to get revenge for him.
    The second story is Dreamhouse, which has a couple, recently moved into a house, dealing with a variety of strange sounds and creepy visions and such.
    The last one is Do You Believe in Fairies?  A pair of brothers are looking to get some cash to support their hobby, and one of them takes a job being a handyman for a pair of old ladies.  After finding that they keep all their money on hand, they resolve to rob the ladies.
    It's not a quality anthology.  None of the stories are especially great.  Dreamhouse was actually the best story though, because there's a delightful little twist to the story that I really didn't see coming.  The first story is passable, but not interesting.  The last story is really weird.  It's not scary, it just reaches into a very strange place, rather than keeping things a little more understandable.
    What makes this anthology interesting is that the framing device is clearly set in New York, but every story is a British production.  Not just a British production, but the stories - at least the first and last - seem like they're trying to be distinctly British.  The Punch & Judy show is mostly a European thing (although it seems to have been popular in the US for a time).  The last story deals both with fairies and garden gnomes, but of which are much more popular in the UK.
     I also wanted point out some fantastically exploitative box art for this movie. 

189 - The Theatre Bizarre

    An anthology of short horror stories.  I'm breaking this down a little differently, so there may be spoilers in each section.
    In Mother of Toads, a couple in Europe come across an old lady who claims to have a copy of the Necronomicon.  The man visits her place to look into this, and winds up taking part in a strange ritual.  This is clearly the weakest segment.  Little plot, a fair number of muddy looking shots.  Personally though, I liked it.  It moved fast, and it tied into Lovecraft mythos.  Even if the story doesn't go anywhere, it's fun.
    In I Love You, a man wakes up with a cut on his hand, and some blood on him, then finds his girlfriend arriving to break up with him.  It's a story about a confused narrative, and even though the writing is a little ridiculous sometimes, it's a good story.
    Wet Dreams is directed by Tom Savini, who also has a role.  A man has a recurring dream about being castrated and having it served to him.  This was a lot of fun.  It's a series of nested dreams, and it isn't entirely clear whose dreams they are.  At first, I thought that all of the dreams were the wife's, but the husband has information from one of those dreams that implies that at least one of them was his.  Or maybe that section of the dream was a recollection from real life?  Regardless, this story is fun, and Savini indulges his appreciation for gore.
    The Accident is a classy segment.  It's a talk about death, flashing back to a slow-motion recollection of an accident that a mother and daughter saw.  It's hard to write about this one without making it sound less interesting than it is.  It's arguably the most realistic segment in this collection, and there's something nice about that.  It doesn't sensationalize anything, and, if anything, it's probably the most optimistic segment.
    Vision Stains is where things get really strange.  A lady, either homeless or posing at a homeless person, uses a needle to pull some liquid from people's eyes as they die.  Then she injects that liquid into her eye, where she is able to experience the dying person's entire life.  She then writes their stories down.  Lots of disturbing shots of needles and eyes.  The twist is that she decides that she wants to try this process on a fetus.  This break in logic hurts the story.  She plunges a needle into a pregnant woman's belly and pulls some of this liquid.  I thought the liquid had to come from the eye!  If it doesn't, why does she pull it from her victim's eyes?  The reveal is decent.  Still, this segment may have bothered me the most.  As fanciful as some of the other stories are, this one seemed sloppy.
    Then the last segment is Sweets.  This was one of the most bizarre segments.  A couple is breaking up.  At least she is trying to break up, in a very bored way, by spouting every cliche breakup line possible.  He counters each of them.  We are treated to a series of flashbacks, during which they're constantly eating cake, pie, candy, nearly anything sweet.  I don't want to give away the ending, but it's probably the strangest segment.  I wonder if the film would benefit from this story being put elsewhere.

    As you know, I'm not picky about my horror anthologies.  I usually like them, even if they aren't especially great.  This is a far better anthology than I expected.  The cover art, and the look of the film made it look like a movie from the 80s or 90s, rather than 2011.  The effects work seemed to be practical effects all the way through, which I like.
    What sets this anthology apart is how bleak the whole thing is.  All of the stories end on a down note.  Perhaps not entirely a down note.  But there is never a villain who is defeated.  There's death, there's torture, and none of it feels like a good thing.  I admire this.  It's hard to make a commercially viable movie where the bad guys win.

188 - Garage Days

    An Australian rock band goes though a variety of trials in an effort to play for an audience, and hopefully impress a label.
    I had googled "movies about garage bands" in an effort to find if anyone had made a movie even vaguely like the one I'm thinking of writing.  This movie sounded like it might be closer to my imagination than other movies.  It was about an untalented band.
    There's a lot of energy in this movie.  It's wildly paced, and rarely takes a breath to slow down.  This madcap approach is both good and bad.  There are enough poor jokes that aren't terribly funny, but there are enough of them that you don't have time to dwell on ones you don't like.  The direction has a comic-book feel to it, as does the script.  While there are some real-life issues in the movie, there are also plenty of things that just get glossed over.
    Advertising this movie as being about a band that lacks talent is a terrible idea.  We don't get a clue about their talent until the very end.
    This is another thing I don't like, but it may be my personal preference.  I hate movies saving all of the music for the ending.  There's a difference between saving a particular song for the ending, and hiding all of the music until the end.
    Rather than just wishing this is the movie I thought it should be, I should be glad that the movie I want to write is still unwritten.
    The characters have lots of problems.  Maybe the singer doesn't.  He's actually pretty in control compared to the rest of them.  This is nice.  Usually the lead in a sitcom is the dull one, surrounded by a bunch of strange characters.  The relative darkness of the other characters makes the level-headedness of the lead much more appealing.
    The biggest problem that I had with the story is that I couldn't identify with it.  I'm not into drugs, and I don't care for people who are.  I'm not overly focused on sex, and I never had the kind of personal relationship problems that this cast had.  What I could identify with was the love of music, which only came out in the last minute or so.
    Still, it's a fun movie, a bit strange, but fun nonetheless.

187 - Red Dawn

    After North Korea invades the US, a young Marine and his friends run a resistance cell.
    I have never seen the original.  I also don't have a strong incentive to.  The trailer to this movie looked ridiculous, almost like an effort to stir up patriotic fervor.
    In a strange way, the movie is tragic.  The original may have been more aggressively right-wing fantasy, but after the US occupation of Iraq, this version just reflects how terrible taking over another country is.
    The first thing that bothered me about the way the movie was scripted was the issue of time passage.  We get a few montages to cover the training time, but as far as I could tell, they trained over the course of an afternoon, or a few hours.  They waste ammo.  It's only occasionally that we get some hints about how much time has passed, but it never seems to be clear.
    Ambush sequences are inherently exciting.  It's nice to see strategy played out successfully, and that plays nicely.  The movie also ends on a brief high point, a raid on a prison camp.  This is in contrast to most of their raids, which usually seem formulated to just cause chaos.
    I found myself seriously conflicted about this movie.  I liked the premise, but I wound up feeling like I shouldn't be enjoying this.  It reminded me of Tomorrow, When the War Began (which I watched back in 2011, and doesn't have a separate entry) which was a similar idea.  There are a few things that I preferred about that approach.  First, the kids aren't being instructed by a Marine.  This changes the story into a much more patriotic one, rather than creating an equivalency between the military and patriotism.  The other thing is that the invading force remains a mystery for most of the picture, which removes most of the political considerations from the story.
    I'm still finding it hard to explain how conflicted this made me feel.  I don't know how much I could recommend it though.  There's too much shaky-cam, and plenty of sequences set in the dark.