44 - P2

    On Christmas Eve, a woman is trapped in her office building, held captive by a crazed security guard.
    I’m always impressed when a movie is able to keep a lack of locations interesting.  The lack of a budget usually means that the script had to have something compelling about it - a message, a clever story, something.  At the very least, it means that there’s a skilled director that feels they can do something with a weak story or script.  Somehow, despite working with mostly one location, this movie actually had too much budget.  We get a flipped car, we get some gore, and we get a few sequences that just showcase a budget, but the story never rises to the occasion.
    It’s a pretty straightforward captive female story.  The villain is prone to fits of rage, but manages to come off normal to other people.  There are a few other people scattered into the story to provide a bit of a body count (they kind of cheat with this, only showing one death, and just showing a dead body for the other.)
    There are two things that make this movie notable, and they both come close to the end, and neither is a real positive trait.  First, the heroine kills a dog.  It’s true that the movie portrays the dog as menacing and dangerous.  I don’t mind the dog as a threat, but I guess I would just like another way of dealing with the dog.  This ties into the other problem…
    The heroine kills the villain.  This isn’t a problem in itself, but the way it’s handled, it is.
    The heroine has incapacitated and handcuffed the villain to a car.  She chooses to light the guy - and the car - on fire.  She was no longer in danger, and she decides to kill him anyway.  This makes her slip out of a sympathetic character and into a jerk.
    After the heroine is captured, she is changed into a dress.  I don’t mind the idea of the villain re-dressing her.  But somehow, the dress doesn’t seem like his idea.  It seems like an idea that the producers had to add a touch of sex appeal to the movie.  Her dress accents her bust incredibly well, and the direction frames the shots so that they’re regularly on display.
    There’s also a very annoying set piece, where she hides in an elevator.  The villain drops a firehose onto the ceiling and turns it on.  This leads to water dripping in, and eventually filling the bottom of the elevator.  I have serious doubts about this.  Then the villain drops the dead body of another person onto the elevator, breaking the ceiling.  Also unlikely.  What makes this sequence even more annoying is that it doesn’t seem to serve any purpose, only to pad time.  No character development.  No real tension.  It calls attention to how silly the premise is.

43 - John Dies at the End

    A guy and his friend have a problem with psychic powers, trans-dimensional demons and bugs, and a possible end to the world.
    I can’t describe this movie, and I shouldn’t try to summarize it.  None of the descriptions I’ve seen have been anywhere near intelligible.  The movie is difficult to like, mostly because it’s easy to spend the first half of it wondering what’s happening.  There’s a recurring sense that something happened that you missed, and that something would explain everything.  I kept on looking up a summary just to make sure that I didn’t miss anything important.
    I’ll say this - the writing is entertaining.  Every scene is clever, unexpected, weird, and wild.  But there’s only so much that I can take of this sort of thing.  The constant weirdness is a problem, and I’ve encountered it in a few other movies before.  Even a staple like Brazil, which revels in weirdness, still has, at the core, a recognizable humanity in the romantic story.  I never feel like any of the characters are human in this movie.
    There’s a certain type of person that this movie is right for.  I know at least one person who would love it.  But the appeal is not broad, and I can imagine most people really disliking it.
    Personally, I respect it.  But I wouldn’t want to return to it.

42 - Ravenous

    During the Mexican-American War, a soldier is reassigned to a remote outpost.  There, he deals with a wendigo - a cannibal that gains in strength as it eats others.
    This is one of the rare horror movies that feels so completely classy, but I haven’t run into anyone who feels the same as I do.  The period elements are really wonderful.  The photography and locations are fantastic.  The music is really remarkable.  It captures a sense of the period, but uses a few modern flourishes that give a sense of wooziness to things.
    I don’t think I’ve ever seen another cannibal movie with a similar premise (the exception might be an episode of Fear Itself, called Skin And Bones) and setting the story in a period really makes things interesting.
    The acting is generally good, although the lead is one of the least interesting characters.  The villain is played by Robert Carlyle, who pulls off some wonderfully crazy stuff leading up to his initial attack.  Jeffrey Jones is charming, of course.
    I read up on the production, and watched a little interview with Jeffery Jones that was on the disc, and it sounds like it was a real mess.  One director was fired, another took over, there were budgetary issues, regular rewrites, and the studio included stuff that the director didn’t want used.  It’s remarkable, because I feel like it’s a really solid movie. 

41 - Psycho Beach Party

    A naive young girl hangs out with a bunch of beach guys, as a killer picks off a few people here and there.  Is it her bizarre split personality?
    I saw this years ago, and it left an impression.  It was one of the stranger movies I’ve seen, but I felt like something was missing, that I wasn’t able to fully appreciate it.  Now that I’m seeing it again… I still can tell that I don’t understand every reference or joke, but I still think it’s completely fascinating.  I don’t think there’s anything else like it.  It’s a campier version of John Waters.  It’s sillier, but also so drenched in sexuality… and not just one type.  The sexuality in the movie is fully fluid, almost like the humor in Strangers With Candy.  It’s kind of disorienting to viewers until they get used to it.
    There is a problem with the movie, and it’s a real shame.  The story actually gets in the way of the movie.  The writing is so clever, but the plot seems shoehorned in.  It’s not a bad plot, but… maybe it’s just that the story feels like it should be more straightforward.
    It’s great to see Lauren Ambrose in something else.  She’s one of the most likable characters in Can’t Hardly Wait, and she’s strangely adorable.
     This was originally a stage play, and I'd be curious to see how the material plays in that context.  The performances are wonderfully campy, and it might be more effective on stage.

40 - Honeymoon

    A newlywed couple takes their honeymoon in a secluded forest-lake area.  Something odd happens, and she starts acting strange.
    This has gotten a lot of good press, and it’s a little unusual.  I’m also impressed that it has a total cast of four people, and two of them have less than five minutes of screen time.  The writing is mostly strong, and the sense of intimacy between the leads is just right.  I found myself a little displeased with the direction that the story takes near the end, but it wasn’t enough to ruin the rest of the movie.  I’m not sure what I was expecting, just… there was more of a sci-fi twist than a horror one.
    A few answers are provided by the ending, but not enough to feel completely satisfying.  I’m not sure what information would have been more complete.
    It did reinforce an important screenwriting tool that I haven’t been able to completely grasp - the idea of giving the audience tiny clues, and forcing them to fill in all the blanks on their own.  It’s a delicate line, giving just enough information without giving too little.
     One of the biggest problems that I can see is that this could have been presented as an episode of the X-Files without much difficulty.

39 - Amityville 3 (Amityville 3D)

    A skeptic buys the Amityville house, and weird stuff starts happening to him and his family.
    This installment was shot in 3-D, and it shaped the entire movie.  There are odd shots tossed in throughout the picture, some of them blatant, like objects pointing at the screen and held there for a few extra moments.  The weirdest ones involve a fly that is clearly an effect.  The funniest one has a very slow-moving frisbee being thrown toward the camera.
    The story is slow and plodding, and seems even less focused than the other Amityville movies I’ve seen.  The house doesn’t seem exactly evil or anything, and the amount of action that takes place outside the house makes things even more aimless.  One of the points of a haunted house story is that the house itself is the villain.  In this movie, it seems like the house isn’t actually evil, it’s an evil fly.  Yes, an evil fly.
    The movie culminates in a fantastic sequence where the house falls down and blows up.  In the meantime, stuff is getting blown around, and people are jumping out of the way of couches and other furniture.  It’s all strangely hilarious, like it takes itself too seriously. 

38 - April Fool's Day

    A bunch of college students go to an island home for a weekend, during which someone seems to be stalking them.
    I can give this movie credit for one thing in particular - it’s a horror movie that no other horror movie would dare to be.  Most of what makes this movie notable is the ending, which I’ll spoil here.  The twist at the end is that no one died - the whole thing is an elaborate prank.
    This does make the whole movie into one of the most TV-friendly horror movies I’ve ever known, and that includes made-for-TV horror movies.  There isn’t much blood or gore, and the stuff that’s there isn’t intense.  There are a good number of goofy pranks, like a chair that tips the sitter backward.
    The real highlight is seeing Tom Wilson in a lighthearted role.