44 - The Horror Show

    A notorious serial killer is finally executed, but somehow transfers his existence into some other reality.  He uses this position to attack the cop that finally captured him.
    This movie is interesting for a whole series of reasons.
    1 - This is credited as the third movie in the House movies.
    2 - Officially, the writing credit is split between Alan Smithee and Les Bohem.
        2a - Les Bohem is the bassist and singer for Gleaming Spires.
        2b - Alan Smithee?  Could it be that bad?
    3 - This movie had the unfortunate problem of sharing a plot - or at least closely resembled - another movie, Wes Craven’s Shocker, and they both came out six months apart.

    I’ve been wanting to see this movie for a long time, but it’s one of these things that I had an impossible time tracking down.  Now that I’ve seen it, it’s actually pretty interesting.  It has some weaknesses, but it plays like an extended Nightmare on Elm Street story.  Dream sequences, fantasy bits, all kinds of weirdness.  This is established early on, by nesting two dreams.  This does two things, and the result is mixed.  First, by framing everything as having the potential to be a dream, the audience is more forgiving of strange acting or awkward lines.  Second, it removes a lot of the tension, by making the audience keep second-guessing how real anything is.
    The villain is pretty two-dimensional.  It’s appropriate for this sort of movie.
    There’s a kind of silly undercurrent to the movie, and it’s nice.  It gives a little more charm to the whole thing, and allows me to overlook some of the oddities, like occasionally cheap makeup effects.
    The strangest thing is how the movie ends.  Everything gets wrapped up.  There’s no open door for a sequel.  There’s a pair of jokes.  The family takes a picture, and then a Gleaming Spires song plays over the credits.  The song doesn’t even seem to fit the tone of the movie.  Very strange.

43 - Mama

    A pair of girls, raised in the wilderness by a spirit, are brought back to civilization.  The spirit that guarded them comes along and haunts.
    I wish I could say better things about this.  It’s a fairly good story, twisting some otherwise common horror elements into something a little more original than most.  But the promise that the movie shows, especially at the beginning, is lost with some muddy direction later.
    I’m not complaining about the direction in itself.  I’m specifically angry about one thing that I’ve been complaining about for years.
    I am sick and tired of seeing movies - horror movies in particular - use incredibly dark environments non-stop.  I don’t mind dark environments; but they have to be balanced out by using shots that aren’t a black mass snaking down a black hallway in the dark.  If I can’t tell what I’m seeing, I couldn’t care less if it’s supposed to scare me.
    This is a bigger issue because I was really impressed with the opening sequence.  Everything up to the credits was very nicely done.  Stark contrast with the snow, nice, tense photography with the car sliding on the road.  Then the movie keeps sliding further and further into an inky mess.
    Ignoring this problem, the movie is kind of nice.  It’s evocative, and it reminds me a lot of Tim Burton’s stuff.  A very fantasy-based look to some of the sets, and the music is very Elfman-like.  At least to my ears.
    I can’t help but think that this is an example of some kind of overreach.  It could have been a much more original, much more pleasing movie with a few hands tempering the production.

42 - North by Northwest

    A case of mistaken identity leads an advertising man to be framed as an undercover FBI agent, then as the murderer of a UN ambassador.
    I'm not sure what brought it out, but I wanted to show this to Cathy.
    This time through, I paid a little more attention to the script than the direction.  The script is a bit mixed, at least by my standards.  The lead comes across as a fun, witty guy.  If he switched up between being more normal and being witty, I probably would have felt like this was a bad idea, but they establish early on that he has an ability to be funny, and they maintain that through most of his scenes.
    The part that felt a little more fake was the Professor, the FBI organizer.  The first scene we have with him, he offers these explanations that give far too much exposition in a way that feels forced.  This makes me wonder if the story would be more effective if we learned later that the agent he's been mistaken for is fake.  If that were revealed at the same time as he learns, that might be a much more potent method.
    I have one main problem with the movie, and it's that it feels padded.  It moves along nicely, and it plays great for a first viewing, but I think it might be more rewarding for repeat viewings with some tighter editing.

41 - +1 (Plus One)

    A freak occurrence involving meteors, a power transformer, and lights results in everyone facing a duplicate of themselves.  This is set against a couple breaking up, and a huge college party.
    I've got this massive interest in duplicates of people.  I've probably talked about it before.  This plot seemed tailor-made for my interests.
    And yet… I come away feeling a little let down.
    The premise is good.  Even the execution is fairly good.  It's the last act that takes some more considerable missteps.  Because of how the story has been set up, the primary plot is not the duplicates.  If anything, that seems to be a secondary story.  The main focus is on the couple breaking up, and the guy making efforts to reconcile.  This is the main mistake in this movie.  A simple breakup story is easy to manipulate, and it gives the lead some motivation to sort things out, in spite of the confusion.  But it's nowhere near as interesting as the duplicates.
    The last act starts off pretty well, with everyone starting to realize their situation, and some different methods of dealing with it.  There's a small bit of dialogue that actually brings some depth to the story.  But the main problem comes when...

Of course, big spoilers….

    The group of duplicates skips forward in time, periodically.  This places them closer and closer to the original people.  Once they catch up, it just triggers a massive fight, with each person fighting their duplicate to be the only person alive.  Only a few people - the main characters - avoid their duplicates and manage to keep from killing.
    Then there's another time shift, and the duplicates are absorbed back into the original.  The implication is that everyone who killed their duplicate now feels both terrible about killing, and feels like they're missing a part of themselves.  Not a bad idea.
    But… this is glossed over very quickly.  And I have a hard time believing that everyone would be so enthusiastically willing to kill their duplicate.  At least there's one person who talks to their counterpart, and seems to really like it.
    The ideas in this movie are really clever, and I'm impressed with how well the script manages a single house location with loads of characters.  It's just a shame that such a clever premise didn't get the execution it deserved.

40 - Transporter 2

    The transporter finds himself trying to protect and save a young boy who has been kidnapped by a villain intent on infecting large number of people with a virus.
    It's not as fun as the first movie.  There was a bit more soul to the first one, with the action ramping up a little more gradually.  With this one, it jumps straight into wild territory, using a female henchman who is just… way over the top.
    To be fair, there was a certain amount of material that was good.  Some of the action sequences were good.  The opening scene was fun.  Even though this has a denser plot than the first one, I felt like it was mostly irrelevant.  The movie is an action-scene delivery system, and the plot seemed superfluous.
    The longer the movie went on, the more I thought that it was an attempt to make another Crank movie.  Kind of a disappointment.

39 - Nightmare Factory

    A documentary about practical effects work in movies.
    I like effects work.  I'm usually pretty impressed with the work I see, and if anything, I'm usually disappointed with CGI effects.  There seems to be a lot more room for error with those.
    I  didn't like this as much as I should have.  I guess it was because it was more of a love letter to the effects house, and not so much focused on the esoteric aspects of making an effect work.  There were a few highlights - I really liked seeing the effort that went into a car crash shot in Death Proof.
    The rest of it… I like their enthusiasm.  They're so in love with the movies they make, it's a little infectious.  I know I come across as being picky about movies.  I'm specific, but usually even the bad movies, I enjoy the time I spend with them.
    Not much to say about it.

38 - The Occupants

    A lady and her husband and young child live in a nice house.  Out of nowhere, they start seeing apparitions of a family, leading to an eventual slaughter.
    There's something very familiar about this movie, but I'm not positive what it is.  Some of it seems very derivative, but then there are some parts that seem surprisingly original.
    It's an okay movie.  The horror is toned down in favor of psychological efforts.  Normally I like that, but the reduced tension really made me have a hard time paying attention.
    The bigger problem is that I shouldn't be able to guess two of the three reveals at the end by the first twenty minutes.  The last reveal had a lot of clues leading up to it.
    I don't mind this.  It's a sign of a tightly woven script.  It's part of what makes movies satisfying.
    There are a few little problems.  The lead descends into madness too quickly.  There's not that much doubt that she's crazy, when that's something I would rather still be wondering about halfway through.  This might be compounded by the actress, who manages to look like she has massive, massive eyes.  Combined with the use of mascara, I found this really distracting.
    By the end though, I was impressed with how complete the ending felt.  It came full circle, and there was a touch of classiness to an otherwise by-the-numbers horror thriller.

37 - Ender's Game

    In the future, young Andrew Ender Wiggin is recruited by the military to be trained in war games, in hopes of being able to defeat an alien force.
    I've read the book, at my wife's request, many years ago.  I remember thinking it was good, but it didn't really speak to me.  I've also been exposed to Orson Scott Card's odd behavior over the years.  He's weirdly right-wing, he seems a bit paranoid, and he's overprotective of his work.  Part of what slowed production of an Ender's Game movie down was that he insisted that they had to get 6-year-olds to play the lead.  Eventually, that softened, and they went with slightly older kids that looked young.
    More impressively, they were able to get Harrison Ford.
    The end result is good, but not great.  The movie has to gloss over most of the development of the book, and it simplifies things in a way that feels far too convenient.  I didn't actually remember too much of the book, but I remembered enough to know that they drastically condensed events throughout the movie, they eliminated some plots, and they actually did something even weirder by adding the roots of a romance.  Things that were much more important in the book - in particular, the game, and the battle room - are reduced to the absolute essential elements.  In the case of the game, there are two scenes that use it.  There should have been a third, placed further along.  That would have developed the idea far enough so it wouldn't be weird when they use it later.
    Surprisingly, I didn't have very strong feelings about the movie itself.

36 - Knights of Badassdom

    A group of LARPers inadvertently summon a succubus during a weekend event.
    Very fun.  But could have been a really good comedy.  There are a few missteps that bring it down a bit.
    There's a crudity to a bit of the humor.  This is typically something I don't mind, but this is an instance where the joke being spelled out actually pulled some of the humor from it.
    I've never LARPed, but I've gotten a sense of what the culture is like from the two documentaries I've seen.  What I've gathered is that most people have a certain sense of insisting on staying in character.  It's not so much a personal thing, as much as it's an act of politeness.  Breaking character hurts everyone's experience.  There are a few moments of breaking character, but most of them are perfectly fine.  What I don't like is the instances where an announcer calls out events in battle, and there are references that definitely count as breaking character.
    The other problem is a bit of a strange one.  The movie is firmly a comedy for most of it.  Once they summon the succubus, a body count starts.  That's okay.  Sometimes, death can be worked into a comedy in a way that lets it play well.  The problem is an event later in the movie.  The succubus is changed into a larger, much more powerful demon.  It kills a lot of people.  It's hard for me to guess, but I'd say about 20 people are slaughtered.  At this point, the movie feels like it changed gears, and changed over to into a horror comedy.  There's still an effort made to turn every death into a gag, but it just doesn't feel right.
    And yet, the movie is actually pretty good fun.  It doesn't seem to judge the LARP community at all.  It pokes some gentle fun, but there's a bit of affection for it as well.
    The ending is a little weak.  It wasn't actually bad, but I think the original song needed some vocal work that was more impressive.  But that's just a nit.

35 - Antisocial

    A group of friends gather for a New Year's Eve party.  Unexpectedly, there's some virus outbreak, and everything goes crazy outside.  Gradually, the attendees fall victim to the virus.
    I was a little optimistic when I started this.  It seemed to be reasonably well shot, technically good, and generally, the level of B-horror quality I like.
    It starts off okay.  The longer it goes, the worse it gets.  To start with, there's an annoying undercurrent of "these social network sites are so annoying."  I get that some people are uncomfortable with sharing certain things online.  That's why you have the choice to do it or not.  There's this bizarre attitude as if there were some requirement or pressure to share yourself completely.  I find this line of thinking almost nonsensical.
    Then, the party starts.  And no one is likable.  We're supposed to like the lead, but she's the one who has been complaining about social networking.  There's a remarkable amount of drinking for a party with five people.
    Things start to get weird - news reports come in of some stuff happening outside, there's a lockdown on campus, and so forth.  This is okay.
    The investigation phase is okay.  They learn about the symptoms of whatever is going around.  Characters start to hallucinate, and there are some fights and death.  That's standard fare, and it's passable.
    But then we reach the point where the movie decides to give an explanation.

    Considerable spoiler.

    It turns out that the social network has been using some subliminal messaging to get people to use the site more.  An update that was rolled out that day had side effects that involved nosebleeds, violence, depression, and eventual death.
    Then we get an explanation, posted by a doctor, explaining how this infection actually causes a tumor to grow (this is hilarious - he refers to it as a 'second brain')  Eventually the tumor causes the skull to erupt.
    And that's where the story goes off the rails.  It takes some time to reach that point.  I can't begin to explain what's wrong with that.  Tumors take more than a day to grow.  A tumor inside the skull will not cause the skull to rupture.  There's plenty of other squishy tissue for it to displace before breaking bone.
    The heroine saves herself at the end by using a power drill to break into her skull and cut out the infected bit.  Awfully convenient.  She seems a little dazed by doing this, but doesn't pass out or do anything except look a little loopy.  Then she walks out on the street, where all of the infected are dead from the ruptured skulls.  We hear a bunch of news reports that make it clear that these dead are not really dead.  Then the people around her all get up, and close in on her.  She poses with an axe, ready for action.  The end.
    Strangely, the end of it did remind me of the end of Resident Evil.
    The plot is awfully similar to The Signal and Pulse.
    It's a good lesson in how far to take a premise.  How much explanation is the right amount.

34 - Top Secret!

    An American rock star gets mixed up in a resistance opposing the East German regime.
    I love this movie.  The Zucker brothers made plenty of classic comedies, and this one gets overlooked most of the time.  I strongly prefer this one over Airplane!, and it's a closer call comparing this to The Naked Gun.  That had Leslie Neilsen offering his comedic skills, but this one feels better.
    There's a lot of absurdity to the humor.  They're very surreal, but they aren't treated as anything unusual.  I guess that's the charm; no one treats the weird things that happen as anything unusual.
    I also find it remarkable that so much effort was put into some very brief gags, things that don't affect the plot at all.  Loads of sight gags.  Some of them are as cheap as a prop, or a sign.  But then there are things like shooing a bunch of bicycles away as if they were horses.  The sound effects are easy.  But they had to somehow put the bikes onto a rail system, and pull them along?  It's a lot of work for a pretty short joke.
    I admire this movie for a few reasons, beyond the humor.  There's a stacking of jokes that is completely remarkable.  I'm not sure how many times I've seen it, but this time, I actually noticed two new jokes.  The other thing that makes this movie work is that there's a solid story backing it.  This has been a problem with modern comedies.  A lot of them will abandon the plot in order to do a long sequence of jokes.

33 - Bowfinger

    Dead-end director Bowfinger finds a script he likes.  He decides to make the movie with a well-knowns star, but without the star's knowledge.
    Man, I love this movie.  I didn't think much of it the first time, but as I got accustomed to it, I've really come to love everything about it.  It's not just the humor, but there's a wonderful heart to the movie.  It's primarily about the magic of the arts, and the calling that people have to work in them.
    I think I've talked about that before.
    This time, I was paying closer attention to the script.  I realized that there was a lot of funny stuff, but it wasn't the line itself, it was usually the delivery or the character reaction.  There are a few lines that stood out as clever jokes, but it's good to know that everything was pretty simple otherwise.
    This makes me feel better about the prospect of writing a comedy.  I think the situation is what matters, not the actual jokes.  The comedy I'm thinking of isn't quite as high-concept as this, but at least I think I've got a possibility.

    Back to this movie, if I have any complaints, I think it's that Heather Graham's plot is too busy.  I like the number of people she goes through, and most of the steps of it are good, but I think there's just a little too much of her story inserted throughout the rest of the movie.  A lot of it is subtle, but it's weirdly distracting.

32 - Dead of Night

    A horror anthology movie.
    This is a noteworthy anthology, since it may be the oldest one I've seen.  It's from 1945, it's a British production, and it's simultaneously clever, and surprisingly dull.
    The problem is that the stories are either far too predictable, or in one case, it doesn't match the tone of the rest of the movie.
    First, there's a "room for one more" story.  Not much to it, and it has some problems - like nowhere near enough tension built.
    Second, there's a Christmas Party story, which involves someone meeting a ghost, then finding out.
    Third is a Haunted Mirror, which is interesting.  It's not quite what I expected, but it's a pretty normal "possessed item turns owner into a reflection of the original owner."
    Fourth, the Golfing Story.  This is really, really weird.  It builds well enough, two golfers interested in the same girl, have their game to settle who gets her… but the tone shifts into a comedy, which seems very out of place.
    Fifth, a Ventriloquist's Dummy story.  Almost exactly what you'd expect.

    These stories are tired and predictable now (for the most part).  Some of these seem almost like stories for children.  But I wonder if this set the mold for these stories.  There's a good chance that these were much more effective when they were first shown.  Many of these stories have been retold as Twilight Zone episodes.
    The one spot where this movie shines is with a circular framing device.  Variations of this have been used in other anthology movies, but this one actually comes full circle.  It's a pleasing surprise.
     The writing hasn't aged well.  Almost all of the conversation seems too witty.

31 - School Spirit

    A college student dies in an accident, and somehow winds up able to exist as a ghost for a day.  As a ghost, he can switch up between being tangible and intangible.
    An 80s teen-sex comedy, this seems like something I would have rented during high school.  But I haven't seen it before!  I found out about it because The Gleaming Spires were credited on the movie.  I'm really glad to have seen it - the Spires play for about 20 minutes of the movie at the end.  And they're doing some of their good, rocking material.
    The movie itself is a disappointment.  The premise is something that should have worked on the same level as Zapped!  Instead, it just seems like they forgot the premise, and ignored it most of the time.
    I was reminded of the way that The Simpsons handles references to 80s teen sex comedies.  Things like School of Hard Knockers or the titles Boner Academy or Teen Sex Wager.  The villain in this is the college president, who is absurdly grumpy.
    It's nice to see this.  It's not very good, but with some better direction and performances, it had much more potential than it achieved.

30 - Right at Your Door

    A series of dirty bombs are detonated in LA.  A man and his wife are separated when this happens, and they deal with the ensuing chaos from their house.
    A fairly cheap movie.  about 90% of the movie takes place in one location.  The story is interesting, mostly because of how bleak it went.  It reminds me of a Twilight Zone episode - The Midnight Sun.
    This is an awkward movie, because it has some considerable weaknesses.  It doesn't feel structured.  It seems like a strong setup, followed by a lengthy middle section where developments seem trivial in light of the setup.  Then there's a decent ending.  While this sounds like a complaint, it's more of an observation.  There's a natural quality to the movie.  There's so much time spent doing little things, and talking in a way that doesn't move the plot forward.  The characters switch up from acting reasonable to unreasonable, and they rationalize bad decisions.
    My understanding is that a dirty bomb actually wouldn't be nearly as disastrous as this movie makes it out to be, but I suppose that probably depends on what went into it.
    So I found the movie to be alternately dull and much more anxiety-inducing.
    It's kind of a shame that we never see the lead play the guitar, even though that's established.

29 - The Tall Man

    A poverty-stricken former mining town slides into decline, and children seem to be kidnapped by a mysterious Tall Man.
    Wow, this movie seemed to change shapes twice.  As it opened, it seemed to be a little more of a supernatural thriller - an strange entity stealing children in a quiet town.  Then it turned into seeming like a slasher-like struggle between a protagonist and a very human Tall Man.  Then it turned into a peculiar investigation drama.
    All the while, the movie seemed to be vague and strangely unfocused.  By the time I reached the end of it, I understood roughly what happened, but I never felt like I understood the motivation.  I had suspicions, but it just seemed like something was missing from the picture.
    The good stuff - the direction is nice, particularly some of the long shots of roads.  There's a nice coloring to the photography, giving an appropriate bleak look.  The interior of the lead's house is great.
    The weirdness of the plot is kind of strange problem.  It actually would be better if it didn't use The Tall Man.  (Or The Slender Man)  This kind of urban legend is easy to build a movie around, and it felt a bit misleading.

     Maybe another problem is that we don't spend any time becoming afraid of the Tall Man.

28 - The Monkey's Paw

    A modestly down-on-his-luck warehouse worker acquires a monkey's paw that grants wishes.  His wishes result in a dead friend being returned to life, and turning into a killer.
    This was a made-for-cable movie.  I don't think I can expect much of it.  It's passable, as far as non-theatrical horror goes.  It's competently made.  It's not much of a script though.
    It's a strange story, because it seems to treat the paw as something else - almost irrelevant.  Most of the movie is taken up with a guy killing a bunch of other characters.  It's hard to feel like that's the paw's doing, even if they try to tie the ideas together.  The result is that this feels like a script of one type, adapted to force in the other element.  My intuition says that this probably started as a slasher about an estranged father losing his mind and wanting to reclaim his family, but then the monkey's paw was inserted.
    I can't point to anything particularly likable in the movie.  The performances are acceptable, given the material.

27 - Thor: The Dark World

    Thor deals with the threat an ancient race of Dark Elves poses to the universe, and specifically, to Jane Foster.
    I didn't have particular feelings about the first Thor movie.  I remember liking Asgard, but the rest of it seemed weirdly dull.  I can't even remember much of the story for the first movie.  But I was pleased with how well they handled his character in the Avengers movie.  That change made me more interested in seeing The Dark World.
    There are a few problems, but they boil down to two things in particular.  First, the villain, the lead Dark Elf, is odd, but somehow doesn't seem as menacing as I expected.  He was more distant than I like my villains to be.  The second problem is more difficult to fix.  I have a hard time caring about Jane Foster.  She should be likable.  She's supposed to be smart, the hero likes her, she's surrounded with a fun supporting cast that she leads… but I find her completely disinteresting.  It might be that she doesn't sell being smart.  She doesn't solve any problems in a clever way, and just mostly looks at equipment and says "this is amazing."
    Despite those weaknesses, I liked this one much more.  Thor is more interesting, Loki slips back into just being a straight trickster.  There's a brief battle sequence early in the movie.  It's daytime, and it's just crowded enough.  I'm really happy to see a battle like this.  It reminds me a little of Willow.  It isn't as packed as the Lord of the Rings movies, and you can see exactly what is happening.
    It's great to see the Collector at the end.  I don't care about the character too much, but I love setting up the Infinity Gems.

26 - Pontypool

    Set almost entirely in a radio station, Grant Mazzy and his producer struggle to deal with a bizarre outbreak of a verbal virus.
    I watched this a few years ago, and I've been looking forward to watching it again.  I'm really glad that Netflix carries this movie, since it's so strange.  It's unlike any other horror movie I've seen, and the strangeness of the concept is fascinating.  It's remarkable to see this movie, because it utilizes certain horror tropes, but it plays out with a completely different approach.  I'd say that about 85% of the movie takes place in the same room., With most of the remainder taking place in adjacent rooms.  It takes time getting started, and the approach to writing is part of what sells the story.  It's luxurious, and it encourages the audience to pay attention to words.
    There's just about no on-screen violence in this movie, but there's a fair amount of violence being described.  The effectiveness of this is remarkable.  It probably doesn't work if the audience hasn't been conditioned to pay attention.
    The premise of this story - the virus transmitted by language, existing in our ability to understand language - is something that is so unusual and non-intuitive that it should never have been able to make a movie.  It's a testament to screenwriting - and filmmaking - that this plot becomes entirely understandable in the context of this movie.
    I wish I could say something more coherent about this movie.
    When you first see Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead, most of the fun comes from thinking about how you would handle yourself in these situations.  This is a similar movie.  The problem is that there doesn't seem to be a safe way out.  It would be very difficult to avoid hearing anything or saying anything in order to stay safe.