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Vafthrudnir
Reviews
Paura nella città dei morti viventi (1980)
Wee-hee! It's bad!
"When the moon turns red the dead shall rise..." - and apparently the first thing that newly-risen, lifeless corpses do is act for Fulci. And, for that matter, it's the best he deserves. My roommate had this movie sitting around; someone gave it to him because he bought them a beer. Well, at least he didn't over-pay for the movie. A priest hangs himself; a seance; a medium falls over and sees the hanged priest, plus a zombie ripping its way out of the ground. At this point, I'm not sure whether I was blinking more at the crass lack of subtlety or the sheer incoherency of the whole thing, but wait, it redeems itself in just a minute. A cop shows up and begins a random interrogation because the medium died (lucky her, she gets to leave). And here it comes - a burst of flame, accompanied by a monstrous roar, leaps out of the ground for no clear reason - but it immediately sinks back into the ground. And this was when I knew I was in for a treat, because, yes, kids, all they did to get it to sink back down was to play it again, backwards. You even see the abrupt cut when it runs backwards - amateur editing of the worst variety. I think it does it twice, but I must have seen it some fifty times. For about a half-hour I rewound and replayed to watch the flame cut and run backwards again. And again. My appalled eyes simply could not credit the ineptitude. So I watched it over and over, crying hysterically with laughter, until I finally had to call a friend over and enjoy the train-wreck with company. We laughed ourselves hoarse, but even the worst edit-job in the world eventually runs out of humor, so we watched the rest. And yes, it *is* so bad it's a riot, but the rest does not compare to that descending fire. A few days ago, I went back to pop it in again; it was a weekend night, I was pretty drunk and I wanted to laugh at the backwards flame again. To my disappointment, my roommate had gotten rid of it - he traded it to someone else in exchange for a beer. Oh, well; at least he didn't over-pay for the beer.
Cataclysm (1980)
Lousy, yes, but not without charm.
Ah, Cataclysm, The Nightmare Never Ends... a turkey by any other name, Romeo, would gobble just as loudly. And this one's a Thanksgiving feast of epic proportions. It suffers from production values so low you have to go digging in the dirt to find them, from the sound (awful) to picture quality (atrocious) to the acting (Faith Clift saves the rest of the cast; by giving the single worst performance I have ever seen on screen, she almost makes the rest look merely mediocre by comparison). Entire scenes are washed out in a black muddle by some truly godforsaken camera-work, the dialogue is laughable... and so on, runneth the litany of complaints. But, I kinda liked it, and part of the reason I criticize so harshly is to prevent accusations of bad taste. That said, the most startling thing about this movie is that the committed horror fan (you know who you are) will find some truly unsettling moments, some real, honest-to-God creeps. They're few and far between, but they are there, and make the rest of the movie -- let's not say "good", that's a little overboard, but at least *fun*. It's quirky and surreal enough at times to see where a little talent and a vastly reworked script might have resulted in a rare gem. It had the potential to be more Session 9 than Plan 9, and if it failed, it will at least make you nostalgic for the good old days when terrible horror movies had miniscule budgets, rather than unforgivably large ones. (Anyone here see Ghost Ship? My condolences.) Part train wreck and part cubic zirconia in the rough, bad enough to hurt but not without its occasional spark, this is one that every fan of obscure horror needs to hunt down for that late-night viewing with a bag of chips and a six-pack.
Sleepy Hollow (1999)
Astoundingly Overrated
The original review I had planned for this movie was perhaps a little over-harsh, so I'll preface with the good: Sleepy Hollow is a perfectly acceptable beer-and-pizza or sleepover movie, the kind you watch with a good group of people when the mood is light and no-one's really focusing on the movie. The visual elements are beautiful, and it is kinda fun, in parts. But horror, my friends, it is not. I made the mistake of watching it expecting something to shiver at with all the lights off. If this is your intention, send me a personal message and I'll offer you a list of alternate recommendations. (That's a serious offer, by the way. True horror fans deserve better.) Now my complaints, complete with SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS Why bother even making a movie "based" on a classic story if you're not even going to attempt to stay true to the sense, feel, tone, or theme of the original? Listen carefully between the lines of ill-written dialogue and you'll hear the slow churn of Washington Irving rolling over in his grave. I will even accept the Big-City Detective bit, but... Ricci drawing warding-hexes around the bed? Come, now. Not only is there nothing even vaguely like this in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", but it's historical BUNK. I don't care what neo-pagan axe you have to grind, but in the 18th century, "witchcraft" meant selling your soul to the Devil in exchange for diabolical powers; this whole fluffy white-witch goddess-worship "an'-it-harm-none" approach to witchcraft dates back, historically, about as far as the British Invasion. (Parties interested in real old-school pagan practices are referred to James Frazer's "The Golden Bough", if you don't believe me.) This creates such a discordant element thrown into the context of the film that the very framework of the Sleepy Hollow legend is shattered. So we wind up with a totally different story altogether. If that was Burton's idea, I wish he'd warned us in advance. Also, I wish he'd come up with a better story than the rather pedestrian one witnessed here. And he might as well have dropped the Irving pretensions altogether. And, at any rate, the movie isn't scary. Not once. Not at all. The warped tree came close, but was more than counterbalanced by the laughable effect of the Hessian's farce-comedy bellowing. And finally, yes, I too wanted Christina Ricci for Christmas, but God clearly never meant her to be a blonde.
Titanic (1997)
Is it over yet...?
Titanic would have made for a perfectly acceptable hour-and-a-half film. The set design and costuming - all the period details, really - were fantastic, and the plot, albeit formulaic, at least held to Hollywood's general standard of mediocrity, and no worse than that. But where is it written that the length of a movie has to be relatively commeasurate to the vessel on which it is set? What this movie needed was a good editing - preferably by an editor armed with a chainsaw. Instead of settling for a passable 5-star, yea, even enjoyable 6-star historical romance, they shot for the moon - and produced an exercise in tedium and self-indulgence. I find it most noteworthy for the fact that it is the only movie in film history that ever managed to make me root for an iceberg. An unusual sensation, and no mean feat.
The City of the Dead (1960)
Not Perfectly Bad. Light-Years from Great.
A fantastic premise, but executed clumsily. Fans of early '60's horror will appreciate it for its dated charm, and for Christopher Lee, whose performance is the one ray of actual quality to pierce the fog of mediocrity in which the movie, as a whole, is blanketed. (And there's lots of fog - literally, I mean. The movie is awash in fog, overdone enough to kill the atmosphere. I'm not even sure there was a set, just a nuclear-powered fog machine.) There's little to nothing to recommend in the script. The villains talk like, well, like B-movie villains. ("Our Master will be pleased...mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!" Painful.) And, without descending to the level of spoilers, suffice it to say that exactly zero suspense is built; too many cards are played too early, like they're hell-bent on giving everything away, *just* in case you were getting worried that it would become unpredictable. ("Predictability is all part of our evil plans... mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!") And, as some reviewers have noted, Psycho might have been partly based on this movie. So what? Shakespeare based his plays on hack-writing, too. Alfred's allowed. But, like I said, it does have that nostalgic charm about it, and it may be mostly indifferent but it's not actively atrocious. Well, the last five minutes do descend into the level of humorously cheesy, but, that, too, is B-movie charm. I'd recommend buying it on the Diamond Entertainment release, which is not only cheap but comes with Carnival of Souls - which is a *sublime* low-budget horror from the same period. No laughs or tawdriness there. Just nightmares.
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Buffs vs. Afficionados: A Blair Witch Defense
A horror movie with less than an ounce of visible blood, where we never see or even learn beyond doubt what the "killer" is, and no teenage sex-kitten gets naked. That this movie has suffered vociferous opposition hardly surprises me. The simple fact is, it's extremely good, and the horror-movie industry will hardly suffer quality without a fight. Friends, the whole problem is that there are two species of us who watch horror movies. There are horror "buffs", who seek all the wrong things in movies. Gore, nudity, and triteness are the hallmark of the horror buff's tastes. They feel that "horror" comes from making an audience jump, as if the movie-maker's art were as simple as a well-timed M-80 in a quiet classroom, and prize "fun" over shivers. Then there are those other, rarer fans, the true horror "afficionados". We are the audience who, for whatever reason, enjoy being scared. Of a higher stripe than your rank-and-file "buff", we look for a movie to be creepy, disturbing, unsettling. We seek a smarter approach. Not that it must always be subtle; I have little doubt that The Exorcist approaches the top of most "afficionado's" lists. But, friends, there is true horror here, as opposed to your common slasher, which is targeted to audiences possessing the human sensitivity of a tombstone. The Blair Witch is the afficionado's dream. It achieves a level of absolute verisimilitude that makes suspension of disbelief almost *too* easy. By presenting itself as an "artifact", it takes itself out of the Land of Make Believe and intrudes itself (delightfully) into the viewer's world. The much-bemoaned dialogue is unsettling because it's *not* movie-dialogue at all; it's actually the way people in the really-for-real world speak. The piles of stone and strange twists in the trees are never really explained, nor should they be; we don't know what they are, but they appear tantalizingly realistic, mysterious and yet perfectly plausible; you could easily imagine that the whatever-is-out-there might leave signs exactly like that. And those wierd things in the branches do very much seem like they have a kind of wierd internal logic, like they *should* mean something. If it's never revealed, well, that's the magic of tease and misdirection, two of the most powerful weapons in the *real* horror-movie's arsenal. I'll concede, the movie was a fluke, and its gimmick can probably never be reproduced well without lapsing into imitation. But, to my mind, this what seperates "us" from "them". If the Blair Witch scared the livin' bejesus out of you, you have the imaginative engagement necessary for appreciation of the world's finest horror-movies. If not... go rent Freddy vs. Jason, little horror "buff".
In the Woods (1999)
Do bears...?
In order for a movie to be any worse, it would actually have to shoot out of the DVD player and decapitate you as you watched it. Here's what you do, if you're one of those gluttons for punishment who just have to see for yourself: Get your two or three wittiest friends together, with a safe supply of your liquor of choice, and have a ball playing "Mystery Science Theater 3000" with it. And prepare for dialogue spewed out by an Automatic Cliche Machine, delivered by actors on par with the cast of your average third-grade play, embarrassing themselves through a "plot" that only makes sense when it's silly. AND A POSSIBLE SPOILER, AS IF ANYTHING COULD "SPOIL" THIS MOVIE: The monster (one of them, anyway, the main one, I think, except the other was bigger and badder, except that *that* one was kind of good, *except* it killed random people...follow?)is a critter called the Devil-Dog (kudos to originality!). It's really quite charming. Mind you, it's a result of abysmal special effects, but the result is something that looks like a cute and cuddly cross between a badger and a land-sloth. Only those big horns prevent you from wanting to scratch its belly and feed it biscuits. One may think they should sell it in pet-stores -- maybe next to the DREADED CANNIBAL GERBIL-HAMSTER WHATEVERS! (And if you haven't seen the movie, don't even *ask* about those.)