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.