Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)

MAY 30, 2019

GENRE: MONSTER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (4DX SCREENING)

My heart sank a bit when the ticket taker handed me a pair of 3D glasses for Godzilla: King of the Monsters, as I remember the 3D being such a drag on the first film and have gotten even less interested in the format in the five years since. This was a 4DX screening, which has motion seats and wind/water/lighting* effects to immerse you in the film, but my lone previous experience for it was IT, which was not 3D, so I just kind of had it in my head that all the shaking around would make the extra dimension a bit of overkill and thus they didn't bother with it. Thankfully, the conversion was far more successful this time - I wouldn't call it *necessary*, but I never once found myself distracted or annoyed by it, which is an achievement all on its own.

And that applies to the film as a whole: an improvement on the original. I actually liked the 2014 one quite a bit, despite its nothing of a lead character, but I know a lot of folks weren't into the serious approach and reduced monster action, so I worried this one would just be wall-to-wall destruction porn to appease the people who buy large sodas for 9 am screenings. But it's actually a nice balance of the two approaches - it does indeed have more monster action, but not so much that you become numb to it after awhile, and it still offers enough time with the human characters to give you something to connect to. And they've fixed that too - Aaron Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen are MIA and unmentioned, and in their place we have Kyle Chandler and Vera Farmiga, two of the best actors in their age group. Chandler's character is a bit like Johnson's in that he just seems to be good at whatever the scene requires, but somehow it goes down easier when it's someone with more screen charisma.

As for Farmiga, her character has created a device that can mimic the "voice" of the various creatures and keep them calm when necessary, and naturally some nefarious types want the device for their dastardly deeds. She's also Chandler's ex-wife; their marriage fell apart after they lost their young son during the first film's Godzilla attack (shades of Batman vs Superman, throwing Bruce Wayne into Man of Steel's climax to tie the new characters into the first film's events), and their surviving daughter is living with mom but trying to retain her relationship with her dad. Thankfully, it's not a Twister kinda thing where they are forced to reunite because of whatever spectacle is occurring and fall back in love during the process - in fact I think they only have two scenes together throughout the movie, and they're not particularly warm. It's more about how they (and the daughter, played by Millie Brown from Stranger Things) have each dealt with the tragedy - Chandler shuts down and hates the monsters, Farmiga wants to understand them, and the daughter just wants her family back.

The other major new character is an eco-terrorist played by Charles Dance, who I spent some time marveling that it's been 26 years since Last Action Hero and this esteemed actor is still showing up and seemingly having a blast playing villains in summer blockbusters. He believes the monsters should be allowed to run rampant and restore some balance to the world (but not wipe us out entirely; kind of Thanos-y in that regard), so it's a good kind of villain where you can almost see his point if you happened to read the news before you entered the theater. The rest of the humans are fine; a few return from the first film (including Ken Watanabe, yay!) and the others are basically filling out stock characters; the nerdy assistant (Thomas Middleditch), the soldier who seems to be present for every major battle (O'Shea Jackson Jr), the guy who spends the whole movie looking at monitors, giving ETAs and the like, and saying funny things (Bradley Whitford), etc. I couldn't tell you any of their names and in a couple months I won't remember which of them survived, but as they were mostly played by actors I like seeing, and never doing anything particularly stupid, I had no beef with any of them. Again, if it was wall to wall action I'd get bored, so spending a few minutes with these folks in between the fights was hardly an issue for me.

But yes, the fights! As the title suggests there are more monsters this time: Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidora all show up along with G himself, who gets more screentime as well. With most of the humans kind of on his side (or at least, not actively trying to kill him) he spends most of his scenes fighting the bad ones (Rodan and Ghidora) instead of knocking down jet fighters or whatever, and like the first film he only starts crumbling buildings in the finale - but not because the director cut away from it. Gareth Edwards has been replaced by Michael Dougherty (who also co-wrote) and the new director had the good idea to set the first few battles in isolated areas (Antarctica and a couple miles off the coast of Mexico) so that we could get our giant monster action fill without watching buildings get knocked over ad nauseum. So when all four monsters collide for the big action finale, it's also the first time they're doing so in a city (Boston, in fact!), treating us to the destruction we've been waiting for without getting blue balls by cutting away from it just before it happened.

Back to Dougherty, if you are coming into this movie as fan of his as opposed to a Godzilla one, fear not - his mark is intact! For obvious reasons it's more mainstream than Krampus or Trick r Treat, but he works in some dark humor (there's an ejector seat gag that had me laughing for a solid minute) and - yes! - a nod to John Carpenter, as the Antarctic post where one of the monsters was found is known simply as "Outpost 32", making it a neighbor to MacReady and the rest of the guys (he also retains his signature credit font, itself a modified version of Carpenter's usual one). Similar to Krampus, some folks might get restless waiting for the spectacle to start, but as with that film he makes it worth the wait, though to be fair I am *from* Boston so making it the center of all the climactic action may have given me a bit of a bias. Seeing Godzilla fire his iconic atomic breath past the equally iconic CITGO sign made me wish I flew back to watch it at the theater I used to frequent just a ways up from Fenway Park - the crowds there must have gone apeshit.

This is a good a place as any to mention the 4DX presentation, which was terrific and probably added to my overall enjoyment of the movie. For those unfamiliar, the seat shakes and tumbles along with the on-screen action, and environmental effects are also tossed in for good measure. So when Godzilla punches a monster in the water, your seat jolts with the impact as a little mist of water sprays your face and air blasts fly past your ears. It's a gimmick, yes, but an effective one, and I found myself laughing at this or that seat motion more than once. The only downside to it is if you're a snack eater/drinker - if you're caught off guard, you will spill your stuff, so keep both hands on your drink when sipping and a firm grasp on your bag of popcorn to prevent any disasters (I'd also avoid coffee if that's your go-to). There's one moment in particular where a monster makes an appearance out of nowhere, and the 4DX folks take full advantage of the opportunity, with the seat suddenly lurching after a period of stillness - never assume you'll be safe from spillage for a few minutes!

In fact I only have two real complaints about the narrative. One is that, as with the first film, it seems some character moments have been dropped for pacing or whatever. Jackson and Whitford's characters in particular seem to have had their introduction excised, because all of a sudden they're just there, when both are played by actors you'd expect to be given a more fitting debut in the narrative (Charles Dance definitely gets a good one, for the record). Chandler's character also seems particularly attached to Jackson's, another thing that doesn't seem to be properly established before it just IS, where they're risking their own lives to save the other when it seems like they barely knew the other one's name.

The other is that it spends a few too many moments reminding us that this is part of an ongoing "Monsterverse" that includes Skull Island; while Kong doesn't show up properly they do mention him/his home like a dozen times, and at one point stops cold to introduce us to Joe Morton as the grown-up version of Corey Hawkins' character from that film, a scene that is in no way necessary. More obnoxiously, the same scene introduces Ziyi Zhang as the twin sister of her other character (who is part of the main story, playing Watanabe's partner), a "Huh?" type development I assume will pay off in next year's Kong vs Godzilla. Skull Island was at least nice enough to confine the world building stuff to the post-credits, so I wish this one had followed suit or at least reigned it in a bit - it got grating after a while.

Some of my colleagues and friends go all in for the Pacific Rim movies (well, the first one at least) while finding these to be snooze, but I dunno - the Godzillas are just more interesting to me, despite their occasional hiccups. Even though the Pacific Rim films have a better reason to keep cutting to humans (since they control the giant robots that fight the monsters) I have never cared about any of those people or their scenes, something that's not the case here. Would I like it even more if they cut 10-15 minutes of dialogue out and replaced it with another big monster fight in the woods or desert (two unused locales that would also keep collateral damage to a minimum)? Perhaps - but I never found myself waiting for them to show up, either. The original Godzilla films always had plenty of human-only scenes too, so I'm unsure where this criticism comes from. Trust me - two straight hours of monster fighting would get dull after a while, and it's much better to make those scenes count when they appear.

What say you?

*They also do olfactory effects, but as I have no sense of smell I can't vouch for them. Feel free to let me know in the comments what Godzilla smells like.

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Tarantula! (1955)

APRIL 26, 2019

GENRE: MONSTER
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

I frequently daydream about being born in the late '30s or early '40s, so that I'd be the right age to go see the 1950s monster movies (not to mention the revivals of the earlier Universal stuff!) when they were new... and not yet outdone by the stuff I DID grow up with, i.e. the '80s monster movies, some of which were superior versions of those films (i.e. The Thing, The Blob, etc). Because while still enjoyable to a degree, it's hard to really get excited about something like Tarantula! when I'm seeing it for the first time in 2019, 60+ years after it was made. Without the nostalgic factor to give it a boost, I can just take it for what it is: a rather slow paced giant spider movie with not enough destruction to make up for its long buildup.

Ironically, I never expect these older films to be fast paced, but the movie gave me a reason to be optimistic as it kicked off with a deformed man, clearly the result of something gone awry (i.e. the same experiment that would produce our giant spider), staggering around and dropping dead in the first few minutes. "Great!", I thought, figuring that meant our titular "hero" would be along shortly since we were joining a story in progress. But alas that wasn't really the case; another deformed scientist frees the (big but not GIANT) spider about 15 minutes later, and then it takes another 30-35 minutes for it to actually start attacking anything. And it's not even a full-on mayhem fest from that point even though there's less than 30 minutes left - there's quite a bit of yakety yak in between the spider scenes all the way until the bitter end, and we see more people running from the thing on the Blu-ray cover than actually see it in the movie.

Luckily the spider scenes are still fun, and it seems they went for a quality over quantity approach. Sure, the rear projection stuff doesn't always look amazing (especially on Blu-ray) and there's a funny mistake in the mattework that results in the spider's legs disappearing in one shot, but it holds up better than a lot of other FX shots of the era (and even some beyond it). It doesn't hurt that they used an actual spider instead of a scale puppet or something, so even though we are denied much up close and personal interaction with the characters there's still some genuine spectacle to enjoy, especially in the wider shots when the spider is menacing a hillside or something. Since I, like any sane human, have a natural tendency to want to stomp on or run away from a spider when it's in the vicinity, having a real one, as opposed to a fake looking puppet, really helps it play as intended even if the compositing isn't always great.

And director/co-writer Jack Arnold gets some mileage out of the slow transformation of poor Leo G. Carroll (not over a barrel, as I discovered), who is injected with the same serum that made the giant tarantula. But he doesn't become a giant Leo G. - he just turns into the same mutant thing that the guy at the beginning did, and his final form (courtesy of Bud Westmore, aka the guy who stole Millicent Patrick's credit for Creature From The Black Lagoon) is legit kind of unsettling, with a drooped eye and other facial disfigurements (the first victim's symptoms are chalked up to Acromegaly). Since we never saw the other guy normally, it's hard to tell the progression, but Leo starts the movie looking like, well, the guy from the Hitchcock movies and what not, and ends up looking like the Phantom of the Opera mixed with the Elephant Man.

As for the heroes, eh. John Agar is his usual amiable but forgettable self, and while I liked Mara Corday as "Steve" (Stephanie), she doesn't get all that much to do. Her and Agar don't fall in love, so there's something, but you could also remove them from the movie with almost minimal effect. In fact you could do it with *zero* effect when it comes to the climax - they just stand and watch as jet fighters (one piloted by an uncredited Clint Eastwood!) take on the monster. They're not even that close to the battle, so the risk of getting caught in the crossfire is nil - they might as well have just gone home early. My favorite character was probably the sheriff, because he was played by Creature's Nestor Paiva, a guy I always love to watch. He'd reteam with Agar on Revenge of the Creature (his Lucas was the only one who came back from the original) and Mole People, and it's easy to see why Universal kept pairing them up: the two have good chemistry here, starting off kind of antagonistic toward each other but becoming bros by the end.

Besides the trailer the only bonus feature on the Blu-ray is a commentary hosted by Tom Weaver, who also notes that the film pales compared to the likes of Them! and others of the era, though still has its charms. It's an odd track; he is by himself but frequently introduces separately recorded folks to offer their own insight, including someone who explains the history of the film's (mostly recycled) score for ten straight minutes before Weaver returns. It's a good way to get around the dryness that usually accompanies solo tracks, and it has a good mix of "guest stars" (Joe Dante even pops up at one point), and Weaver himself offers up some good info, such as a rundown of Arnold's various lies about the script (which he ultimately took sole credit for in later years, despite the two other credited writer's proven contributions) and how the scientists ended up looking like morons after a scene explaining their motives was deleted.

Without a 3D gimmick or franchise appeal, I'm not sure how this one can really find its place for modern fans. It's very much a product of its time, for better or worse, but there are better options for those who haven't ever seen one of the giant monster flicks of the era. Obviously if you're already a fan then it's an easy recommend - the transfer is terrific and the commentary track has plenty of good information for those who are curious about such things - but if my kid asked to see an ideal entry from this decade, I'd go with Them! or even The Deadly Mantis if I wanted him to have more fun with the experience and not walk away with the dreaded "it's old so it's boring" takeaway. Plus, in my house, Kingdom of the Spiders is the spider horror movie of choice, so it can't win there either. It's fine, just not one of the best of its time and made somewhat irrelevant over the six decades since.

What say you?

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The Meg (2018)

AUGUST 4, 2018

GENRE: MONSTER, PREDATOR
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (PREVIEW SCREENING)

For almost as long as we've had movie websites devoted to rumors and info about upcoming films, The Meg has been in development. It has been kicking around since 1997 at various studios starting with Disney, gone through any number of directors (including Jan de Bont and Eli Roth), and pretty much seemed like a movie that would never actually get made, like The Crow remake. But score one for persistence, as it's finally been made with director Jon "Where the hell is National Treasure 3" Turteltaub and a cast led by Jason Statham, in his first top-billed role for this type of big budget summer blockbuster (the costs are reportedly around $200m, and to think, Sony once refused to let him star in the $40m Ghosts of Mars because he wasn't a big enough draw). But only because the shark is unbilled.

The shark, of course, is the REAL draw here, and it's certainly an impressive sight. Due to the PG-13 rating we aren't always treated to the full view of its carnage, but the VFX wizards have put their full resources (and budget) into making sure it looks good when it makes its big appearances, so that you fully believe Statham could, at any moment, kick it in the face. And unlike the giant shark in Jurassic World and its sequel, it doesn't just pop up for two scenes (that get spoiled in the trailer anyway), there are a number of face-offs between it and Statham's crew throughout the movie, building to the big beach scene where it has a smorgasbord awaiting it. Again, it's PG-13, so don't get TOO excited (Piranha 3D it ain't), but it caused enough damage and racked up enough of a body count to satisfy me.

But to be fair, adventurous fun is the goal here, not blood and guts, and last I checked Jaws didn't have much of that sort of thing either. And unlike most shark movies, the heroes feel somewhat responsible for the thing's wrath of terror, as it was trapped under a layer of (science mumbo-jumbo) in the Mariana Trench, perfectly happy with the other fish that were down there, but then the scientists come along and put a hole in that layer to go explore. The Meg (short for Megalodon) attacks them and breaks through the hole, so it's on them to stop it before it reaches the mainland. Along with Statham (a rescue diver with the obligatory tragic past) there's the researchers who run the underwater station, the rich moron that paid for it all, a computer hacker (because of course there is), a security kinda guy... it's very Crichton-y with regards to its crew, and like the best Crichton novels it's not readily apparent who will live and who will die.

Except, of course, Statham, who has one too many close encounters with the shark that really should have been trusted to another character. The end of the film, when he goes on a potential suicide mission, has the necessary suspense, because maybe they WILL kill off their action icon hero (worth noting that this was in development at Disney around the same time as Armageddon). But early on, when they're just trying to put a tracker on it and things like that, there are two sequences in a row where Statham's pretty much the only one in immediate danger, and it doesn't quite work. Cliff Curtis is introduced as Statham's "old buddy" type and is seemingly the muscle for whatever problems usually arose before they unleashed a prehistoric shark, but for some reason I don't think he ever once goes in the water, which is a waste - he's exactly the kind of actor who could have this kind of glorified cameo role and die first, but also stick around until the climax and maybe get offed there.

But again: FUN! You don't WANT any of these folks to die, because they're all pretty charming and they have a good camaraderie. I wouldn't say I got sad when anyone died, but I never rooted for their demise either. Even the requisite asshole guy, a doctor who thought Statham was crazy when he claimed he saw the giant shark in the first place, has his merits and ultimately makes peace with Statham (it's more satisfying and believable than Dom Toretto forgiving him, at least). And the actors all seem to be fully aware what kind of movie they're in; they're not winking at the camera exactly, but there's a slight twinkle in their eye as they give their occasionally ridiculous dialogue the gravitas it needs - they're all more Sam Neill than Jeff Goldblum, in other words. And Statham gets to use his underutilized comedic chops on occasion, which seems to please him, and he also gets to make cute with the mandatory little kid, reminding me yet again that he's pretty much the only one of these "Expendable" action guys who hasn't made a kiddie flick ye (but keeps dipping his toes in with things like this and the baby sequence in F8).

The 3D is also quite fun, and worth the extra 3 bucks or whatever it is now. The conversion tech has come a long way in the past 8-9 years, so it's largely free of those weird errors that take away from the fun (like when someone's arm seems to grow 10 feet long because the conversion software screwed up), and there are just enough "in your face" gags to make audiences feel they got their money's worth without the movie becoming a chore in 2D (like chunks of Friday the 13th Part 3, which screened in 3D the night before at the same theater - they're doing a festival). Hell I even ducked at one "comin at ya!" moment, and I can't even remember the last time that happened (though to be fair I rarely bother with 3D anymore), and at times I regretted not waiting until this weekend to see the film in "4D", which adds water spray and motion seats to the deal. I know it's August and your summer blockbuster budget is probably depleted, but I assure you this is a movie designed to be engaged with in as silly a manner as possible.

The screening was paired with Jaws 3D, which was just as horribly dull as I thought it was in 2D (I ended up walking out; the old school 3D gives me a bit of a cross-eye and while it was worth it for Jason's hockey mask debut, it most certainly was not to watch a bunch of people walk around at Sea World), and Deep Blue Sea, which didn't need any kind of gimmick to be awesome. I still consider that the alpha and omega of shark movies that are not Jaws, but The Meg stacks up admirably with it, and as long as you can get past the PG-13 aspect (Deep Blue Sea was gloriously R-rated at times) I think if you're a fan of that one you'll have a good time with this. I don't know how well it'll hold up at home by yourself (and most likely in 2D), but with a packed crowd of people laughing and cheering at the right moments (nearly everything Winston Chao says had our audience howling) it's pretty much the last summer movie that will offer up those kind of popcorn thrills. Maybe it wasn't worth twenty years of development, but hey, at least they finally figured it out and made it work. Take THAT, Dark Tower movie!

What say you?

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Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (2018)

JULY 14, 2018

GENRE: ANIMATED, MONSTER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

My son Will turned 4 in May, and a few weeks later we dubbed him old enough to try taking him to a movie (Incredibles 2, for the record). He was mostly perfect - he forgot to use his whisper voice once or twice and got a little restless in the middle when it hit a long stretch without any action, but otherwise I was very impressed with how well he behaved, considering he rarely sits through an entire movie at home. So I felt comfortable taking him to see Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation, since it was about 30 minutes shorter and not as likely to be bogged down with plot (plus, even if it did, it'd be monsters talking instead of boring humans). And as an added bonus, I could finally see one of them without feeling like a creepy weirdo, watching a kids' movie by myself because it qualified enough as "horror" for me to write it up.

Which I guess makes this his first horror movie? He hasn't seen the others, far as I know, but he seemed to enjoy it. He liked Blobby, and was bizarrely fascinated about the Invisible Man - every time he appeared (via floating glasses) Will felt compelled to announce "He's invisible!" to everyone in earshot, prompting another reminder that he had to whisper (luckily some other kids around us were chatty too so it's not like he was the only disruption, but still. MY SON WILL RESPECT THE THEATER!). He told me later that he was scared at one point, but I'm not sure where because he didn't say so at the time, but it was a few days ago and he hasn't reported any nightmares, so woo! If you're worried about your own kids, I would say it's the least "scary" of the trio, thanks in part to the new setting - a sunny cruise ship as opposed to the dark hotel. There's a big squid monster near the end, and an opening chase on a train that's a bit relatively intense, but otherwise it's mostly just Dracula and his pals having fun on the ship and also Drac falling in love with the cruise director. If they can handle the others, they should be more than OK for this one (and if they haven't seen them this would be the easiest to recommend for their first attempt; in fact, it's the first one to not have "scary images" in its MPAA rating).

OK now that the parents guide is done with, what did I think? It was pretty fun; I liked the second one better though, as this took a step back with regards to giving the other monsters anything to do, which was my main issue with the first film. So once again the other guys - Frank, the Wolfman, Invisible Man, etc - are just kind of there for the most part, having very little to do with the main plot and also not getting any significant little subplots of their own. The only exception is Wayne (Steve Buscemi) and his wife, who have like a hundred little werewolf babies and discover the cruise has a daycare (it prompts the best joke for adults in the movie; when the daycare director says they get the kids back at the end of the day, Wayne mutters that it's "better than nothing"). I thought this would prompt a "life lesson" kinda thing about them going off on dates and such only to realize they missed the kids, but no - instead, the villain knocks them out a little while later and they're forgotten for the rest of the film. No one even notices they're gone, and they just kind of reappear at the end unceremoniously. It's like the writers forgot to follow up and didn't bother to fix it.

Speaking of the writers, it's kind of amusing that (in my opinion) the best of the three films - the 2nd one - is the only one that has a writing credit from Adam Sandler. That one DID give the other guys something to do, and had the most laughs, so for all the shit he takes from his critics it's interesting that these films could seemingly benefit from his writing talents. The plot this time around is pretty fun in theory - Van Helsing's granddaughter Ericka wants to live up to her family legacy and kill Dracula (and all the other monsters) but finds herself falling for him. Van Helsing is also around, but he's basically a monster too; a head on a robot thing (his body mangled from so many encounters with Dracula). But there's only so much they can do with just that, and the other subplots either die out like the aforementioned Wayne one, or just aren't all that interesting or funny, such as the ongoing gags concerning Drac's grandson bringing his giant "puppy" on board and passing him off as a monster named Bob.

So it just kind of gets by on the strength of its occasional setpieces, such as when Drac and Ericka have a sort of tango around various booby traps (most of which hit him anyway; he's immortal so it doesn't matter), or when the gang plays volleyball with a ball that can apparently feel pain and fear, screaming the entire time. I also quite liked the flight to the cruise, which was run by Gremlins, in a plane that was falling apart as it flew - can we get a spinoff movie about these things? Director Genndy Tartakovsky doesn't throw in as many sight gags as I seem to remember from the others, though it's still a trip to just let your eyes wander around the frame during the big crowd scenes and enjoy all the various monster designs, and the animation itself continues to improve. I caught some of the first movie on FX or one of those the other day, and it's kind of striking how much the designs have changed over the three films, as they look more cartoonish (in a good way) than their original incarnations. The script may not have been up to snuff, but the animators were bringing their A-game, at least.

Oh, if you're more of a fan of Andy Samberg than Sandler, don't even bother - Johnny is barely in it, and I doubt Samberg took more than 2-3 hours tops to record his lines, most of which come in the climax. Selena Gomez as Dracula's daughter Mavis gets a lot of screentime, but otherwise it's pretty much all just Sandler and Kathryn Hahn (Ericka), with some added occasional fun courtesy of the great Chris Parnell, who plays the fish that staff the cruise ship (he voices all of them). It's kind of a bummer that Sandler has assembled such a great cast (Mel Brooks also returns, for I think three lines) and wastes most of them, but I'm sure the kids won't care much. And there is nary a Rob Schneider or Nick Swardson in sight, so let's take the good with the bad.

But hey, all that matters in the end is if the kids have fun, as there's no law that they need to appeal to the adults (though it would be nice since we're the one buying the tickets and popcorn). I promised myself I wouldn't push my love of horror on my kid like some other parents do, and I'm already seeing signs that he's not naturally inclined to love it anyway (he seemed more into Incredibles, for sure). But if he wants to watch "Daddy movies" I'm glad there's gateway stuff like this that I can get him started with, familiarizing him with the various kinds of monsters and also showing him that they're not always scary. Plus, even if it wasn't up to the relative highs of the 2nd film (or maybe even the first), it held my attention and amused me, which is more than I can say about the likes of Cars or pretty much any Dreamworks movie I've seen, so there's something. And I can still hold out hope for the TV series I wanted it to be in the first place!

What say you?

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Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)

JUNE 22, 2018

GENRE: MONSTER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

One of the movie sites posted an article the other day about the thing that made Jurassic Park so memorable while its sequels all failed to even come close to measuring up: there was no sense of wonder anymore, no reveal to behold. John Hammond didn't tell Alan and Ellie that he had genetically recreated dinosaurs on his island - he let them (and, in turn, us in the audience) discover them with their own two eyes. They can never again make us believe dinosaurs were back like they did in that one glorious scene in the first film, as Alan looks over a landscape straight out of a kid's jigsaw puzzle, with several (herbivorous) dino species walking around and doing their thing. As with the other sequels, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has characters seeing the creatures for the first time and giving it the classic Spielbergian "People looking in awe" shot, but it's not as meaningful to us anymore - we need more than that to win us over with the followups, because these creatures are just as familiar to us as any other animal at this point.

Less familiar is the feeling of walking out of a Jurassic Park sequel and being satisfied, but I'm happy to report that Fallen Kingdom clears the very low bar set by its predecessor, improving on it in most ways and more or less hitting the same territory as Lost World in my book (I have come to discover peoples' rankings of this series vary wildly, so I should just quickly clarify that Lost World is the only sequel I kind of liked, with Jurassic World coming behind it, and I don't like much about JP3 at all). If I gave a shit about its two main characters (Chris Pratt's Owen and Bryce Dallas Howard's Claire, both returning from the first JW) I might elevate it as the unquestionable best sequel, but neither of them are even as interesting as Vince Vaughn's character there, let alone Jeff Goldblum's Malcolm, which handicaps its ability to really pop for me. Malcolm, by the way, returns for his first appearance since that film, though if you've seen trailers you've pretty much seen his entire role as he only appears in two quick scenes (actually the same scene split, I think? Unless he came back to the same room to tell the same people that they're wrong again) delivering a monologue from his chair. Any random asshole from InGen (or whatever they're called now) has about as much screentime, so if he is your main draw to see this I would advise just playing the new video game.

The new characters aren't much better, though I will say that the film as a whole at least has more of a focus this time, and - as long as you buy that they'd return to the island at all - the story and its characters at least make sense from scene to scene. Nothing in this movie is as stupid as in the first film when Claire suddenly remembers that the dinos have trackers *after* they thought the Indominous Rex had escaped from its pen and inadvertently let it out (runnerup dumb moment: the trackers can zap the dinos into submission if they get out of line, but no one bothers to use that fail-safe once they all start eating the guests), and that helps immensely - I never once rolled my eyes or got angry at decisions the movie was making. I mean it's got its fair share of unbelievable moments (Pratt outruns a volcano eruption!) but I got the idea that Colin Trevorrow and his writing partner Derek Connolly were putting more effort into the screenplay this time instead of just jumping around at random to whatever else they thought might look cool.

I did check my watch a few times though; this sucker is LONG (128 minutes, just shy of Lost World's record as longest entry) and I was really starting to feel it during the film's second half, which if you've seen the trailers by now you are probably aware takes place in a big mansion as opposed to the island. This is probably the biggest logic stretch in the movie; unless he was simply a big Resident Evil fan I don't know why the human villain wouldn't just set up a normal lab elsewhere instead of using the one in the basement levels in the mansion where his (non villain) boss lived, but if he did there'd be no other way to get a little kid in there (the boss' granddaughter), so I guess we have to just roll with it or else they would have to, for once, attempt to make one of these movies without a goddamn kid to keep saving. This sequence features more human villains than monsters and far too much time spent on a scene where yet another evil jerk auctions off a few of the dinos they grabbed off the island in the first half, so while it also has some of the best scary moments, it could have really used some tightening.

Speaking of the human baddies (another thing these movies can't seem to get away from, though hilariously the only exception is JP3 which is my least favorite, so maybe they're on to something), the movie hilariously casts Ted Levine as the commando guy in charge of the rescue mission, who tells Chris Pratt that he's got his back and is happy to let him lead the way instead of treating him as some underqualified punk. But it's Ted Levine, so of course he's gonna turn out to be an asshole, and thankfully the movie doesn't waste much more time trying to get us to think otherwise. The same can't be said for the other "surprise" traitor to the cause, as they let him look like a good guy for a half hour or so even though we KNOW he's bad news because he's so nice when introduced. Just once I'd like to see these types of characters introduced as villains to us before they con our heroes, so that we can squirm a bit during those scenes, rather than attempt to trick us - is literally anyone in the audience going to be surprised when the guy starts doing dastardly things? BD Wong's Dr. Wu shows up again too, though in a fairly limited capacity and not really doing anything outright evil, still just trying to make new dinosaurs and getting frustrated whenever he's questioned. Add in Toby Jones as the prickly company man running the auction and all the random goons who work for all of the above and you have a movie with far more human villains than a dinosaur movie should require.

Then again there are more dinos than usual, too. The first film had some more in the background and on displays and such, but ultimately focused on five types: not counting the Triceratops that never moved, we got T Rex, Raptor, Gallimimus, Brontosaurus, and Dilophasaurus. Here there are at least twice that many playing an active role in the proceedings, and they're well balanced - each one gets a kill and/or iconic kind of moment. The obligatory new one is the Indomiraptor, which is a raptor mixed with the Indominous Rex (which itself was made from raptor in the first place, but whatever), taking the size and basic appearance of the former. That's the one you see with the big ass claw hand terrorizing the little girl in the billboards and trailers, and he's a pretty good addition to the mix even if he's pretty much just another raptor. Our lone actual raptor this time is Blue, the one from Jurassic World that Owen trained and will usually not try to kill him when it has a chance. Thankfully it's not a full on "hero" - Owen and the others still have to be super cautious around it and the slightest distraction puts it back in "I'm just gonna kill everything" mode, but it's kind of fun to see the basic building blocks of a buddy movie between a guy and a dinosaur.

The bigger dinos don't get as much screentime, for obvious reasons since the second half takes place in a mansion and thus a T Rex or Brontosaurus couldn't exactly be wandering around. So we see them mainly during the first half's island scenes, including the occasional skirmish between beats while the humans just try to stay out of the way (alas, just like Goldblum, that giant sharkasaurus is barely seen outside of what the trailer showed us). There's a rather sad moment where the humans, having escaped the island and its volcano, watch as a howling brontosaurus (brachiosaurus? I can't tell these things apart) reaches the shore and finds itself with nowhere to run as it's consumed by lava - and if you assume it's the one that sneezed on Lex in the first film, it's an even bigger bummer. Accidental stomping aside, there are a number of these animals that pose no threat to humans, and this entry more than the others really tries to hammer home the idea that it is rather incredible to think about co-existing with them. It's just the raptors and T Rex types that make it an impossible situation, and the movie has a number of moments where it's just their "big dumb animal" ways that get people in trouble. For example, there's a bit where Toby Jones races into an elevator and gets the door shut just in time, and as the dino turns around to find other prey, he whacks the door open button with his tail, so he looks just as surprised as Jones when the door reopens and he gets another shot at eating him. I loved that little bit - it's a cause and effect of its size and being in an environment it was never meant to be in, not an intentional decision of intelligence, and it's the sort of thing we'd have to take into consideration even with an otherwise harmless Albertadromeus (the smallest herbivore species, from what I understand).

Another thing that this movie adds to the mix that was lacking from the previous one: actual direction! JA Bayona gives us a number of terrific visual moments: the aforementioned brontosaurus being consumed by lava is a knockout, as is the first appearance of the big shark (its only real appearance that wasn't spoiled in the ads). He finds ways to pull off smaller moments that will catch your eye as well; my favorite being a closeup of a child's horse toy with the silhouette of a similar shaped dinosaur on the wall behind it (I'm not doing it justice with my clumsy description, but when you see the movie you'll know what I mean). There's also a lengthy single take where Claire and one of the new characters (a tech nerd whose name escapes me) are trapped underwater in a Gyrosphere, showing their desperate attempts to find a way out before they drown - as dinosaurs drown all around them after escaping from the volcano (speaking of which, where the hell was this volcano in the other movies?). The back half of the movie is basically a home invasion film with dinosaurs, so it's got moments that recall the kitchen sequence in the first film, and Bayona knocks this stuff out of the park - it's just a shame nobody had me caring as much as I did about Lex, Tim, Alan, etc. There's a moment where I thought Pratt might actually get killed, but I wasn't really that concerned - it'd be more of a "Well that was ballsy" kind of moment as opposed to one that would genuinely make me sad. But if they killed Sam Neill off in one of these I might actually cry.

Ultimately, the best thing about the movie is that it makes an effort to have its own identity, as opposed to leaning so much on nostalgia like the last one (it even occasionally ribs that one a bit; when Claire is reintroduced, it's with a shot of her feet - NOT in heels this time). It barely even uses the iconic John Williams theme, and we are spared too much of that "hey look it's that mangled thing from the other movie" kind of nonsense that permeated the last movie. On a very basic level the movie is similar to Lost World (heroes go to the island for a rescue mission, deal with a lot of human assholes, then a dino escapes to the mainland), but the lengthy mansion section, larger real world connection (Peter Jason shows up as a senator tasked with deciding whether or not the animals should be spared; Claire works for a Greenpeace-y kind of organization trying to make sure they are preserved, rich assholes from around the world want to buy them for their own individual reasons), and one other plot point I won't spoil here set it apart from that film in ways Jurassic World never managed with regards to the original Jurassic Park. Hopefully, if their next one apes Jurassic Park III, they retain that film's one big strength (it's short) and embrace some of the more unusual ideas that they've been toying with in these newer entries. At this point, having a T Rex suddenly show up to inadvertently save our heroes' lives is kind of a boring moment, but if they stick with the things that weren't already perfected in the others, there's no reason this series can't finally live up to its potential. At least this is a good start in getting us there.

What say you?

P.S. Unless you actually want to read the credits, there's no reason to stick around for the post-credits scene. The end of the film proper (meaning, before the credits) has a number of shots of dinosaurs in various spots, and the post-credits scene is nothing more than another such shot, albeit with a more specific background than the others offer.

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Night Of The Lepus (1972)

JUNE 15, 2018

GENRE: MONSTER
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

I assume availability issues are the main reason that Night of the Lepus was never lampooned on MST3k (it was never released on VHS, and the show was long done by the time it finally hit DVD), having to settle for a Rifftrax episode instead. But in a way I'm kind of glad; if it was on the show I probably would have seen it for the first time that way, and found it hard to give it a chance on its own, as my impression would be "this is a bad movie" as opposed to something I didn't really know much about at all. Sure, the plot sounded goofy, but I could say the same about Frogs and that movie kind of rules, so I gave the killer bunnies the benefit of the doubt.

Well, it's not quite Frogs-level good, but it ain't Manos-level bad, either. It's actually pretty fun and charming as long as you don't expect it to be scary or find its FX to be all that successful. As with most B-movies that employ miniatures, the illusion almost never works, because they always goof up by adding things like water, dirt, or fire in shots that are supposed to make us believe that what we're seeing is much bigger than it is. The problem is that these natural elements have a sort of a standard size to them, so whenever a little splash or water or cloud of dirt sprays across the thing that they're trying to scale (in this case, a rabbit) it just looks like exactly what it is, and my mind goes to "Why is this bunny running around in a model?" instead of "HOLY SHIT THAT BUNNY IS HUGE!" A lot of stock footage is also used, giving the film a minor Ed Wood touch ("Nobody knows what`s causing the explosions, but it`s upsetting all the buffalo!"), which probably didn't help matters.

The split screen/forced perspective shots are far more successful; they still have problems (matte lines and such) but the editor tends not to dwell on them as long as the miniature shots, and we can at least fully grasp the scale since a human will be in the shot too (though the scale seems to change throughout the movie anyway). One shot in particular works fantastically, when a guy crashes his truck and runs out of it on the right side of the screen, with the bunnies coming in from the left. The split line is hard to see and there's no interaction yet (they get him a few seconds later, the poor bastard) so the effect is pretty much flawless until that point, and if they were all on that level I'm sure the movie would have earned a few more good reviews.

Because really, they've pretty much turned everything into horror villains, and when you think about it a rabbit is no less threatening than a cat - they got claws and teeth, they're fast, and if you underestimate one you're a dead man. And to the movie's credit, it's played straight and no one really even laughs (in character) about the threat; they find out about it and kind of spring into action just as quickly as Brody in Jaws or whatever, presumably saving the jokes for later. It's even got a halfway decent explanation for the outbreak - the decrease in coyotes in Arizona has led to the rabbit population getting out of control, which isn't as cute as it sounds (crops being eaten, their holes causing horses to trip, etc.), but no one wants to just kill a bunch of fuzzy wuzzies, so they do something more "humane" - make them sterile via some new experimental drug. But it doesn't work (does a movie serum EVER work?) as it just makes them bigger, and one of the test subjects gets out, gets to the lady bunnies, and we're off to the races.

Like that one shark movie, the director doesn't show off his monster right away; we find a dead body, then a guy gets attacked by an unseen predator, etc. It's a while before we see the giant rabbits, and even after then the movie can be a bit slow at times, favoring occasional isolated attacks of side characters all over town instead of getting everyone together and picking them off one by one like in Tremors or, yes, Frogs. Curiously, almost none of the primary characters are killed or even attacked; the movie racks up a decent body count but it's pretty much all anonymous folks or ones we barely see before their death, like the waitress who sees the bunnies coming and mostly just looks kind of puzzled until they smash through her diner window and gouge her throat. But like I said, the movie's kind of charming and this just adds to it - the script finds a way to make them threatening without bumming us out that this or that fun character had to die in the process.

Plus, everyone's pretty friendly! There are shockingly no human villains of any sort; hell, the plot wouldn't even have happened if not for a cowboy (Rory Calhoun) refusing to kill a bunch of rabbits with poison, only changing his pro-life status after they turn into monsters and kill some of his acquaintances. Everyone gets along, works together, and (spoiler?) has a nice game of football at the end once the threat is over, a little detail that I loved since I figured this was one of those movies that would just cut to credits as soon as the last rabbit was dead. They even tell us that the coyotes are back, so yay! Our cats and little dogs will be safe and the bunnies won't come back to kill us anymore. It's one of the most optimistic horror movies ever, really.

It's also one of the most surprisingly bloody entries of the sub-genre, with gallons of that melted crayon style fake blood tossed around both our human victims and the rabbits themselves. Even a couple of little kids who are killed offscreen get the treatment, so between that and the whole "killer bunny" thing I suspect this movie must have really warped the minds of any younger kids who saw it at a drive-in or perhaps on late night TV. It definitely has SOME semblance of a legacy, as Scream Factory's Blu-ray has not one but two film historian commentaries, allowing you to be a complete expert on the cast and crew's filmographies if you watch them both. The one by Russell Dyball is more irreverent than Lee Gambin's, as he's quicker to note the film's more ridiculous elements, but both men seem to agree that while it's hardly a classic, it's got more merit than its detractors will claim (Dyball even notes how Vincent Canby, of all grouches, kind of came around it, dubbing it one of his favorite bad movies, which is better than just being a bad movie you dismiss outright). The disc also has the trailer, which hides the fact that it's about killer bunnies (unless you knew Latin), reminding me of Of Unknown Origin's bizarre trailer, which looked more like an alien movie than a killer rat one.

I love seeing these old nature run amok movies from the 70s. They're all pretty similar (this one is a LOT like the later Kingdom of the Spiders, right down to the Arizona setting and a Star Trek actor as one of the leads - DeForest Kelley here, sporting a Ron Swanson 'do) and I have a blast watching them every time, even when they keep stopping to let their paycheck cashing cast (Janet Leigh took the movie because it was close enough to home to get a gig and not lose too much time with her daughters) yammer on about what was happening instead of showing more of it. Because for every scene like that, you get one where Leigh fires a rifle at a bunny a few times and then tells the guy it was attacking - without as much as a smirk - "It's OK, the rabbit is gone!" That's just gold, right there.

What say you?

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A Quiet Place (2018)

APRIL 3, 2018

GENRE: MONSTER, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (ADVANCED SCREENING)

The scariest horror movies are usually the simplest - people (including me) may love the Saw sequels, but they're never scary in the slightest, because they're too bogged down in their labyrinthine plots to lull you into being frightened. I'm not sure why so many horror movie writers seem to be ignorant of this, but thankfully, John Krasinski of all people isn't one of them, as his newest film A Quiet Place (his first foray into the genre) is so stripped down to its bare essentials that it practically makes the likes of Halloween and The Strangers seem complicated in comparison. The earth's population has been decimated by monsters that will kill you if you make a sound, and Krasinski is the father of a family trying to survive under those circumstances - that's it. There's no human villain, no team of scientists babbling on, it's just a few days in the lives of these people living out their very quiet life, and how they react when things go astray.

And Krasinski (along with original writers Bryan Woods amd Scott Beck) conveys this without much of an ability to say so, since there are only about a dozen spoken lines in the film. A few newspaper headlines clue us into the monsters' origins (a crashed meteor, not that it matters but I'm sure some joyless twerp would complain otherwise), but the "rules" are laid out in an opening sequence - along with the consequences for breaking them. I liken it to an old arcade game like Pac-Man or Space Invaders - you didn't need tutorials or manuals for those games, as they were simple and quick to grasp just from looking at their basic layout. It's the same thing here; even if you went in blind, it'd only take a few minutes to understand the plot, which is that our heroes need to be very quiet or else they'll die. Communication is carried out through sign language, every action is done gingerly (I never thought I could tense up watching someone try to put a battery down on a counter, but I have now), and you damn well better watch your step to avoid creaky floorboards and the like.

As for the creatures, their design is a mixed bag. They move so fast it's often hard to get a good look at them, but they're kind of like Xenomorph shaped, with heads that unfold like flower petals to reveal their well tuned eardrums (in fact, since they're blind and seemingly can't smell their prey, their heads are basically just giant ears), i.e. kind of generic all purpose modern movie monsters, nothing iconic that you'd instantly recognize ten years later. I couldn't tell if they ever had any practical ones, but I don't think they do, which is a bummer but at least it's high quality CGI and they're used sparingly, plus there's no real "interaction" to speak of - if they're close enough to touch you you're already dead anyway. But it's not free of analog's pleasures - Krasinski and DP Charlotte Bruus Christensen shot on film, and it looks spectacular, in addition to giving it that old-school look the plot itself invoked. If not for an iPod the film could have been set in the 1970s (and to even it out, the song they listen to on it is an oldie: Neil Young's "Harvest Moon"), and I swear it was to give the film that bit of humanity (Krasinski and wife Emily Blunt dance to it, sharing the earbuds) that he didn't just go ahead and make it a period piece.

But look there could be hovercrafts and VR displays on every corner and it wouldn't take away from the main appeal: the movie is scary as all hell. And if you've been reading my nonsense for these past eleven years (Christ...), you should know that's not something I say often. Think of all those great "don't make a sound" kind of scenes in movies (not horror, but the "suspended over the computer" scene from Mission: Impossible would be a good example) as well as every super nerve-wracking monster scene (like when the aliens finally come through the roof in Signs, or the basement scene in War of the Worlds), and string them together/stretch them out for a feature, and that's what you get here. It's also the rare use of LOUD SOUNDS to make a scare that actually makes contextual sense - when someone accidentally knocks something over or steps on a crunchy thing, the sound team cranks up the sound, and for good reason, because every noise might as well be the loudest thing possible, being that the monsters can detect it instantly and move at lightning fast speed to catch you.

Even better, it might be the first horror movie that's cell-phone or talk proof, too. It's not like the film is mute; there's a score and things like wind rustling or water dripping - i.e. rhythmic, natural sounds - don't set them off, but it only takes a few minutes for the film to start affecting your own behavior. I took a sip of my drink and it slurped a bit, so I instantly froze up, and I noticed the lady next to me being oh so cautious as she removed her sweater to put it on the seat next to her. I'm sure there will be assholes ruining it somewhere in the world, but as this was a free radio station screening and I didn't see a single cell light the entire time (and only minimal whispering, though it was a big auditorium so perhaps I just got lucky), there's hope that your crowd will be just as into it and playing along with the whole "shut up or die" approach. The movie only offers spoken dialogue twice; Krasinski and his son talk for a bit behind the masking sound of a waterfall, and the former shares a conversation with his wife in their tiny somewhat soundproof room that they've set up. The rest of the time, any noise you make is liable to get a dirty look from one of your fellow moviegoers, so it's best to follow the rules.

I recently joined Letterboxd, more for my own memory to keep track of what I saw over the year, and thus had to start rating films. I gave this four (out of five), and it woulda been four and a half (fives are reserved for my all time faves) if not for two things. One is, ironically, the score - it's got a lot of that BWAARMMMMMMMM stuff I dislike and it's just kind of generic, so it was intrusive given the whole "quiet" nature of the thing. There's one pretty good cue near the end during a key moment involving the family truck, but otherwise I woulda been happier if Krasinski opted to have no score at all. The other one requires a spoiler about the opening scene, so if you want total blindness skip the rest of this paragraph. For those still here, the opener is a gut-wrenching moment, when a careless action from their youngest son ends his life, and it largely works - but only because the parents inexplicably walk ahead of their two children, one of whom is deaf. I get why Krasinski would want to lead the way, but why Blunt is right behind him instead of her children, who cannot call for help (and in the deaf one's case, hear any danger behind her) is a complete goddamn mystery. I get that they had to hammer home the consequences early on so that we knew just how careful they had to be, but I wish they had figured out a more logical way of presenting it. Still, at least the movie's biggest narrative blunder is at the top instead of the end; I had mostly forgotten about it by the time it was over.

Otherwise, I was totally on board with the film. Sure, if you start thinking about what we don't see you might have questions, like how they were able to establish their routine without making noise to implement it, i.e. stringing up warning lights and setting up radio equipment, and if you've seen the trailer you know that Blunt's character is pregnant, so that raises some possible logic flaws (I satisfied myself by assuming it was an accidental pregnancy and they had neither the knowledge or resolve to terminate it). But 99% of all movies have those kind of issues, and you're kind of missing the point if you try to go beyond what they're showing. It's a scary movie first and foremost, designed to keep you grabbing your armrest or partner's hand for 90 minutes while reminding people like me that you're never above being frightened by what's on screen. I wouldn't be surprised if it grossed over $100m, and I hope it's the start of a new, more Blumhouse-y direction for Platinum Dunes (yep, this deliberately paced, quiet movie was produced by none other than Michael Bay). Plus it's nice to see Paramount getting a win after all their troubles - it's a shame they already blew their chance at doing another Friday the 13th, but that just gives them more incentive to create new ideas like this.

What say you?

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The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)

FEBRUARY 5, 2018

GENRE: MONSTER
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX INSTANT)

It's no secret that a number of franchise movies sprung from original scripts that were rewritten to accommodate an unrelated series. All of the Die Hard sequels (except for the last - and by far the worst - one, oddly enough) began life as other things; for example an original called "Simon Says" bounced around as a would-be sequel to Rapid Fire AND a potential Lethal Weapon 4 before becoming Die Hard With A Vengeance. Dimension has bought spec scripts and turned them into Hellraiser and Children of the Corn entries, with varying results of not-much-success, and when Lionsgate needed a Saw II ASAP after the monster success of the original, they reworked a script called "The Desperate" they were already looking at (with the writer, Darren Bousman, agreeing to do it if they let him direct - a bold gamble that paid off for everyone, since Saw II is the biggest moneymaker of the series). In all those cases, they clearly did a lot of work to make them "fit" (presumably, the original "Simon Says" script did not feature Hans Gruber's brother, for example), but when it comes to The Cloverfield Paradox, originally a script called God Particle, the connections are not only flimsy, but add confusion to a film with enough of its own problems.

Luckily we have 10 Cloverfield Lane to slightly prepare us for the former - that film was completely unrelated until its closing moments, and even then it was a pretty tenuous connection - the monster in the original Cloverfield did not resemble the ones we saw in Lane, suggesting that if they were indeed related, there must be some sort of Mist-level disaster that has unleashed multiple monsters on our planet. The Cloverfield Paradox, which debuted last night on Netflix in an unprecedented manner (more on that soon), more or less explains how this happened via a quick Skype cameo by a conspiracy theorist played by Donal Logue, but does so in a confusing and very vague manner that requires you to fill in the gaps yourself, with the caveat that you might be wrong since there is so little in the film(s) that supports it. Because of the success of the MCU and the Fast and Furious films (particularly when it comes to how Tokyo Drift came to be important), we're getting conditioned to believe that films in a franchise will ultimately "come together" with a big megamix of all the characters it has introduced, but that kind of thinking that will lead you astray if you apply it to this series.

Because (spoiler for the first 10 minutes ahead!) if I'm understanding the point of Logue's monologue correctly, these films (perhaps) all take place in different dimensions, with the common thread being monsters that take advantage of a rift in the universe caused by the actions of the characters in this film. The film's main plot is a Sunshine wannabe thing about a group of international space folk trying to save the planet with a space Macguffin (in this case the "Shepard", some sort of particle accelerator that will give the Earth unlimited energy, somehow), and when they fire up their beam it causes things to go screwy for them - they find themselves suddenly thrown into another dimension. So Logue was right about the catastrophic results, but he also tells us that using this thing will produce side effects, up to and including monsters and "beasts from the sea" being dropped into our world, and not limited to this time but in the past and future as well, so we can assume he was right about that, too. To me, after thinking about it for a bit, I realize he's basically saying to the audience "Stop looking for ways that these make sense as a series of connected films. Every one of them is from another universe, and all future entries will be too, because it allows us to keep taking unrelated scripts and making them into Cloverfield movies without having to worry about a "timeline" or "returning characters" or anything like that."

(The next one is set in World War II, for the record, so.)

Unfortunately, while 10 Cloverfield worked on its own (in fact, it's actually superior to the original), Paradox is kind of a bad movie with or without references to "Slusho" or whatever, and Logue's poorly implemented exposition dump isn't clear enough to differentiate what appears to be direct ties to the first film, which is also confusing viewers to boot. Without spoiling things, a scene near the film's very end features an object from space hurtling toward the Earth, which some people I've talked to believe is the same thing that crashed in the water in the first film (during the home video epilogue). It isn't, but since the ads tout that the film explains where the monster came from, it's easy to see why folks would think it was - and that's something producer JJ Abrams or really anyone else who worked on the film should have realized. Had the movie been good on its own, this sort of thing would be easier to shrug off, I suspect, but since it's such a letdown I think folks are trying to make more out of it than there actually is, to connect it to a film they love and therefore give it more reason for existing.

Sadly, it doesn't seem like Cloverfield-ing the movie was its only issue: someone clearly reworked the opening sequence quite a bit, offering a mostly silent montage (with a baffling number of shots where the actors are clearly speaking dialogue we were originally meant to hear) that shows us that our crew of world-savers have been up there for nearly two years, that their "Shepard" device is not working, and that they are starting to get on each other's nerves. Unfortunately we don't get much in the way of characterization for these people beyond hero Ava Hamilton (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), so when they start fighting there's no reason to choose a side or even care at all, and the wordless montage doesn't exactly fully depict their frustration or cabin fever, rendering it largely useless in the grand scheme of things. We also don't know much about the world they're trying to save; we're told there's an energy crisis and a brimming World War of sorts, but it's all just say-so, and it seems the major drawback to the energy crisis (in the one scene set on Earth before Ava goes into space) is long lines at the gas station. And really, how bad can the energy crisis be if two years later - i.e. when things are presumably even worse - she's able to call her husband from space and talk to him in real time? Wouldn't that require energy/power of some sort? Wouldn't this kind of activity be one of the first thing that they deny people? Let's keep in mind that the energy crisis is so severe before she leaves for space that they steal a power supply to let their kids have a nightlight and it catches fire and kills them. Or let's not, since otherwise it's pretty stupid that both of these things happen in the same universe.

But that's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about: the movie introduces a second universe when it was already having trouble making one believable enough to care about. That said, when the two universes collide the movie actually gets kind of fun for a bit, almost comically (intentionally!) so at times. There's a woman (Elizabeth Debicki) who in another universe is besties with Ava and is part of the crew, who gets fused to the ship during the universe-blending event, giving us a terrific, Cronenberg-y visual, with wires and pipes threaded through her in a way that is perfectly clear she didn't just get impaled on them in an accident. This also leads to her not trusting certain people because in her version they were traitors, and she's also best friends with Ava in her world where in this one she doesn't seem to exist at all (or at least, no one knows her the way she knows them). Also, Chris O'Dowd plays, more or less, Harry Dean Stanton's character from Alien, and is the best part of the movie even before he gets sucked into a wall and loses his arm when he is pulled out. But it's not "ripped off" or anything - he doesn't even feel pain from it, the wound is cauterized (even though someone says "it's like he was born that way", which doesn't match up to the visual, but by this point I already knew it was a bad movie), and a few minutes later they find his arm, moving around on its own like Thing from Addams Family - and it actually helps them solve the next crisis by writing a message, though not before O'Dowd delivers the movie's best line by a mile: "What are you talking about, arm?"

It's this sort of goofy/trippy thing that the movie really could have used more of, because it's such a total failure as a sci-fi film. Everything they do is vaguely defined, and all of the problems that arise (i.e. things that result in the body count rising, sometimes by via self-sacrifice) are only clear because we've seen them in other sci-fi movies (Sunshine, Event Horizon, Passengers...). There are some fun ideas, such as a character using a 3D printer (primarily used to make bagels) to make a gun, and I guess in the future cement putty has a sort of "app" doohickey that helps it spread over the required area, but everything seems like it was reverse engineered from an idea someone had, with no further explanation considered. There are even potentially interesting ideas and subplots that are brought up and never followed through on, like the fact that in Debicki's version of the crew, there was no Tam (Ziyi Zhang). She says this and we the accompanying "dun dun DUNNNN" kind of moment, but that's the beginning AND end of the matter. It never comes up again, except in your mind when you think "Wait, why did they bring that up? And why did they leave it IN, when the movie was clearly re-worked a bit?" All it does is tell us that things were different in their universe, but we already knew that. A friend told me this is to justify Debicki taking Zhang's job later in the movie, but with everyone so ill-defined, who would have questioned it anyway?

The most baffling decision involves their immediate issue after firing the cannon, before the disembodied arm/people in walls stuff comes up: the fact that they might have just wiped out all of human existence. After the event, they look on their navigational equipment and realize they cannot see their Earth, as if it was just gone, and even start trying to wrestle with the fact that they might have just killed 8 billion people while trying to save them. A fascinating idea, no? Too bad the movie almost instantly assures us that it's not the case, cutting back to Ava's husband Michael (Roger Davies) on Earth, a doctor who is en route to the hospital when a colleague texts him to say not to come because it had been destroyed, moments before he finds a little girl in the rubble of some other building that might have been attacked by a Cloverfield monster (THE Cloverfield monster? Couldn't tell you - we only see a shadow). He then does what you or I would do - takes the little girl, spends no time looking for other survivors (some doctor, eh?) and texts his buddy casually asking if he can use his bunker, the way one might ask their neighbor to borrow some flour. For a brief, wonderful second I considered his buddy might be John Goodman's character from 10 Cloverfield, which would have been my kind of hilariously stupid, but nah. His random unseen friend just has a bunker, I guess, and doesn't need to use it for himself despite giant monsters swarming the city.

We cut back to this stuff a few times during the movie, and it's always jarring, but also frustrating as it's vastly more interesting than the bulk of the space sequences (I've described all of the freaky moments already, I assure you. The rest is straight out of the outer space disaster 101 textbook). Davies is a good actor who brings a lot to his underwritten role, and in 30 seconds we know more about the little girl than we ever do about the people in the space station who have far more screentime. I would have liked seeing them in some sort of Last of Us kinda journey as they make their way to reunite her with her parents, but after a couple of scenes they're more or less dropped from the proceedings, letting a quick text message resolve her plight and giving Michael nothing to do until the final scene of the movie, which entertained me because it reminded me of another part 3 with only the thinnest connection to its predecessors (think Tom Atkins). I also kept thinking that it seemed like they were trying to suggest these scenes were occurring parallel to the events in the original film, but as that one took place in 2008 and this one clearly takes place in the future (undefined, but Michael's phone sports a "7G" network), that doesn't work - and even if it did, we'd still be left with the question of why no one in the original Cloverfield seemed to have a problem with an energy crisis, as it would have been ongoing for at least two years by that point.

OK, by now I'm sure a fan of this film (and there are some, and I am happy that they're able to enjoy it) is just itching to point out that I love Armageddon, i.e. the space movie so dumb that NASA uses it to test applicants, tasking them to find everything wrong in it. And yes, I do, but guess what? It has an INTERNAL logic that allows the movie to work for me, which this movie lacks and is thus why it annoyed me so much. For example, people love to harp on Armageddon's concept that "they can't train astronauts to drill for oil in 6 months, but can teach oil drillers to be astronauts in 12 days." On paper, yes, this is probably very stupid (I'm no expert in either field, so I have no idea), but in the movie, they justify it, repeatedly. Bruce Willis and co. are never once required to do anything astronaut-y (Bruce asks if they do and is told they do not, Billy Bob shouts "Can they physically survive the trip, that's all I need to know!", William Fichtner and HIS crew are shown doing all of the repairs and communications stuff, etc, etc.), and then the "world renowned experts on drilling" have more than a few problems "just drilling the hole", finding it difficult despite their years of expertise. In fact one of them is killed simply from a drilling mishap, not because he didn't know how to operate his spacesuit or whatever, so yeah, I think the astronauts who took a few courses in learning how to operate the drill arm (which they didn't even have, since the whole reason Harry was brought in in the first place was to fix it so it could work in space) might not have succeeded in saving the world. Long story short, it was a silly issue given an in-movie explanation for its existence, allowing the non-pedantic to enjoy the film. The movie can do any stupid thing it wants as long as it provides a justification for it - and this movie fails miserably at justifying anything about itself.

Now, if this mess had gone into theaters as originally planned (for April, if memory serves), it would have been screened for critics who would have warned you away, or it would be hidden from critics who would use that as proof that you should probably stay away. But instead, perhaps sensing its inevitable box office failure, Paramount (who can't afford another flop right now) sold it to Netflix, who then used the Super Bowl to turn it into an unprecedented event. If you recall, last year they debuted a teaser for Bright during the big game, but didn't release it until a year later, giving us a full year to wonder what this movie might be. This time, they teased that the film was coming "sooner than you think" and then, at the end of the game, came back to tell us it was available RIGHT NOW! (I was sticking around for This is Us, so I don't know if they really did time it exactly to the end of the game or not) - and keep in mind that as of four hours before, no one even knew what this movie was called or seen a single shot of footage from it. So they bypassed the usual marketing buildup and gave us a big budget sequel (of sorts) "for free", continuing the tradition of "Surprise! Here's the movie!" that the other two films also managed in their own way. A good idea, except this time it almost seems like they did it because they knew they had a stinker and figured the best chance the movie had at being watched was to make everyone feel like they would be the first in the world to do so. I'm sure it worked; Netflix doesn't release stats/numbers on their titles but the movie was being live-tweeted and hashtagged all night and now people have been making jokes about it and/or trying to explain it all day today, so we can assume that more people watched it than the average episode of one of their original series.

So in that respect I don't know if the movie is a "success" or not for them - if we watched it we already had the service, and they don't have commercials, so how does everyone watching the movie at once generate revenue for them? But let's assume somehow it does - do they care that the movie sucks? Furthermore, does Paramount care that it taints the brand they planned to extend with a WWII set entry due in November? And most importantly: why is this one such a mess? Again, it's not just the clunky Cloverfield-ing that does the script in, it's all over the place even within its own internal story - the franchise tie-ins just make it worse. With the filmmakers inadvertently shielded from doing any press for the film (yet) it's hard to tell who is to blame and where things might have gone wrong, but I sure would love to see an earlier cut or hear a candid commentary track from its screenwriters, who presumably wrote something interesting and then lost some things in a retrofitting that didn't even work anyway. The terrific cast and occasional moments where it starts to become something exciting both deserve better than the final product, and audiences deserve an explanation for the film they somewhat got duped into seeing by treating it as some sort of surprise gift. It's the U2 Songs of Innocence album of movies, basically.

What say you?

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Jeepers Creepers 3 (2017)

SEPTEMBER 26, 2017

GENRE: MONSTER, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Much like Cropsey, the Creeper is a cool villain that deserves better vehicles to show what they can do, as Jeepers Creepers 3 continues the series' tradition of being better on paper than in execution, forever trying to recapture the magic of the first film's first act. That 30-35 minute stretch of the original, where it's mostly just the two kids in their car being pursued by the Creeper, is nearly perfect, but the next hour, and its first sequel, are handicapped by weird narrative choices, clunky pacing, and an abundance of characters. For a while, it seems like the 3rd film would stick to what worked about the original and deliver on the promise (to the best of the filmmaker's abilities when working with a lower budget this time around), but alas the usual issues start rearing their ugly head.

All except for one, which I might as well get out of the way now - it's thankfully not as skeevy as the other two, or the director's other films that I've seen. No shirtless boys, no gross metaphors (I'm still somewhat repulsed by JC2's "he can get in through the backdoor!" sequence), etc. An early cut of the film apparently included a brief reference to the heroine being abused by her stepfather (and another character saying something like "Can you blame him?") but thankfully they were excised (the backstory was changed; the stepfather is now said to have disliked the girl, prompting to her to live with her grandmother instead), leaving the film free of anything that would remind you of the filmmaker's abhorrent past. And on that note, as always I will simply remind you that he plead guilty and was imprisoned for a while (unlike some others who deny their crimes and walk free), that many people who have worked with him since have sworn that there was nothing uncomfortable about their production(s), and that he is but one of the many people who worked on the film and deserve to see their hard work recognized. I don't condone what he did, but I'm not going to take it out on, say, Jonathan Breck (the Creeper), either. I matched the cost of my ticket to support the GoFundMe for his victim, who is trying to spread awareness of what happened to him and child abuse as a whole - I urge you to support him as well if you have the means to. It's also worth noting that he volunteers at a workshop for juvenile sex offenders, encouraging them to do as he does and work his issues out through creative means - i.e. going out and actually working on problems, as opposed to just tweeting how much you don't like that they exist.

If you care about the film at all you probably have heard by now that it takes place in between the first two films, which has two benefits for the production: they don't have to make it look like the future of 2024 (now a lot closer than it was when the first two films were released) and they didn't need to bring back Ray Wise and (likely) kill him off in order to explain how the Creeper got away from the makeshift prison he was in when we last saw him in JC2. But I figured it'd take place on some random day in the middle of that 23-day spree, so I was surprised when the film began (after a 1978 prologue that I'll talk about in a bit) right at the end of JC1, with the surviving cops regrouping and trying to figure out what the hell just happened after Darry (Justin Long's character) was taken from their "protection". Only one cast member (besides Breck) really returns, Brandon Smith as Tubbs, the high-strung desk sergeant who spent most of his screentime in the first film just kind of growling and muttering at the psychic lady - but he was the only one of the cops that had a distinct presence so I doubt anyone will notice/care that his fellow officers aren't the same, and it's pretty admirable to do the "immediately picks up" sequel thing for a movie that was made sixteen years later.

As for Gina Phillips as Trish, she's top billed on IMDb, but it's practically a spoiler to announce that she's in the movie at all, since she doesn't appear until the film's closing shot, in an epilogue not unlike JC2's: she's basically waiting around to fight the Creeper when he returns in 2024 (I'm not sure what year her scene takes place in - she has a modern laptop, so I'm guessing it's just some form of "present day". The slow pan up to reveal her face is treated as a major surprise, so I don't know why they announced her return for what's basically a twist cameo (oddly, another sequel coming around soon did the exact same thing with its most famous survivor, but knew better than to put that person on the damn cast list), but hopefully no one was only interested in the movie to see her grand return, as it seems we will have to wait for Jeepers 4 to see what Trish has been up to all these years. Unlike Smith (already an older guy) there's no way Phillips could pass for her 16 years younger self, and thus it was obvious that she wouldn't be in it all that much once the 2001 setting was established, so hopefully the next film finally cuts to the Creeper's next spree so she can take an active role in the proceedings.

Speaking of the timeline, as I mentioned the film opens with a prologue set during a different Creeper spree - 1978's, to be exact. At first I figured it was just a way to get a kill in the movie, but not only does the victim have a role in the main part of the film (as a ghost/hallucination/whatever), but it's also a fun little bit of connective tissue - it's the victim that Darry and Trish talk about in the first film, when she realizes they're on the same road as "that old story". It's a throwaway detail that doesn't mean anything, but it's a nice little nod to the first film that registers as the kind of thing you'd never get in a series that kept changing hands like the Friday the 13ths, where such world building is a total mess due to people coming in without respecting what came before. Using the whole buffalo is always a surefire way to win me over, and I like that it's a little detail that won't bother anyone who doesn't remember or never even saw the original. This is the best way to do a callback, in my opinion - it's fun for the people who'd notice, but doesn't hamper the ability for a newcomer to enjoy it.

Unfortunately, the flipside of the "in between" approach is a major one - you're watching the whole movie knowing that the Creeper won't be killed or even stopped for any meaningful amount of time, as he's up and about in Jeepers Creepers 2. I mean it's not like I ever think Jason or Freddy is truly dead at the end of their films (even in the ones that promise as much), but there will at least be the catharsis of seeing the heroes triumph over them and walk away thinking the nightmare is over forever (and those guys are usually down for some time - Jason was in the bottom of Crystal Lake for at least a decade at one point). It's practically a guarantee from the start that the movie won't offer that, and (spoiler?) it doesn't - I'm still not even sure how to describe the Creeper's final moment in the film, and the heroine never gets any major victory over the damn thing. At one point she uses one of his own weapons against him (a very crowd-pleasing moment, actually) but it barely even phases him - he's after her again moments later, so it's about as much of a victory as Laurie stabbing Michael with the knitting needle.

The other big problem is that the movie is very disjointed. There are basically three separate plotlines going on, two of which would be perfectly enjoyable if fleshed out to their own movie, but hurt by the constant cutting around as they very rarely intersect. One is basically a redux of the original - two teens (potential lovers this time, not siblings) have caught the Creeper's eye, and he's going after them. After the usual setup stuff they find themselves trapped under a car as the Creeper stalks/kills a few people around them, and later the girl is trapped inside the Creeper's trademark "BEATNGU" truck (p.s. we learn that his license plate is a homemade one, killing sixteen years of "Creeper at the DMV" jokes), giving it some claustrophobic flair that recalls the best moments of the first sequel, and here's where the prequel element also pays off somewhat - we're never sure that she's "safe", as she isn't around in the "next" installment, giving the director license to kill her off (not unlike Platinum Dunes' Chainsaw prequel). Their scenes are the best in the film, and mostly why it's overall at least on par with JC2, making me wish that they just stuck to them the whole time - it might come off as a remake of the original with such a limited cast, but at least it would be focused and suspenseful, and a marked improvement over the other followup.

The second storyline revolves around Tubbs and a group of hunters led by Stan Shaw, who is basically just Creighton Duke with a team. These guys have apparently been tracking the Creeper and have professional versions of the truck-mounted weaponry Ray Wise used in the other sequel, but given the low budget there is precious little time devoted to them actually doing action-y things. Worse, those scenes suffer the most from the film's bad CGI - the Creeper himself always looks great, but his weapons look like cartoons in some shots, particularly these Mario Kart-esque bomb-shell things that he shoots from his car and can apparently track their targets. My friend said they looked like the Langoliers from the miniseries, and it's pretty apt - plus the fact that the Creeper now apparently has Thor-like powers over his weapons (at one point he literally has his axe fly from the ground into his hand as if by telekinesis), something I don't recall in the others. His truck is also booby-trapped, which results in a few interesting moments, but again is one of those things that makes me wonder why he didn't use them the day before - the harpoon that can puncture vehicles would have been handy all those times he was chasing Darry and Trish, no?

The third subplot involves Meg Foster, who plays yet another crazy old lady that lives in this town. Her son is the guy who dies in the prologue, and his ghost keeps coming back to tell her to get out of town because the Creeper is coming to get "it" back and kill anyone nearby. After a while we finally learn what "it" is - one of his old hands, which is buried in a pot in her field. When someone touches the hand they will spazz out and see the Creature's origins, I guess? Anyway, it's a subplot that's just as interminable as it is goofy, and it doesn't even have a payoff - the Creeper finally comes across it near the end, but he doesn't need an old hand (he's already grown a new one), so he just crushes it and howls at the moon, as birds drop from the sky around him. I don't know what the point of any of this nonsense is, but I DO know if it was all cut from the film it would barely make a difference, and seems like it's there only to keep the director's tradition of including goofy, unexplained supernatural subplots in his films. As a result, Foster's role is limited to either screaming at a ghost (we occasionally see it from other people's POV, showing her yelling at nothing) or standing around watching people touch the hand or whatever. She's the grandmother of the girl that's trapped in the Creeper's truck, so I kept hoping she'd mount a rescue or something, but alas - the two barely ever interact in the entire film, adding to the disjointed feeling.

But for a movie that was practically willed into existence after a number of false starts over the years, the fact that it's decent is kind of a miracle. The budget is lower but not to the extent that it can't deliver what fans want (in fact, I think we see the Creeper more than ever), and while it eventually loses its luster, it's interesting to see how much of the film is set during broad daylight. With some tighter editing (the director's usual editor Ed Marx, who has cut all of his films dating back to 1999's Rites of Passage, did not return this time) it could have worked fairly well, but the jarring shifts between characters who rarely interact, and the fact that you know the movie is building toward an anticlimax (though there is a nice little twist that ties into JC2) is something the movie never fully overcomes. It's worth a look for series fans, for sure (and you can get another chance on October 4th if you missed this "one time" screening), but don't expect to be converted if you weren't on board with those.

What say you?

P.S. I left his name out on purpose. People are on a witch hunt this time for some reason, and I don't get why since it's not exactly a secret and has been widely known since Powder (before the internet), but I'm not in the mood for a bunch of anonymous assholes to blast me - a father, by the way - for "lining the pockets of a monster" after finding this review by searching for his name (I can't very well leave the name of the movie out, alas). Does me seeing the film mean it's more likely he'll make another film? Maybe. I don't think it means he'll go out and hurt someone else, though, and besides, the kid's mother has said she has no problem with him continuing to work, so I don't see why I should feel any different than her. At any rate, comments are moderated (as they always are for every review) and won't get posted if they're vile, and if you're so offended by me seeing the film I encourage you not to yell at me on social media, which does nothing (except raise more awareness of the film's existence - several people told me they only knew it was playing because of tweets blasting the filmmaker), but instead match my $12.50 ticket price to RAINN or a similar organization, or donate to the GoFundMe I linked above.

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