Countdown (2019)

OCTOBER 31, 2019

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

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday, producers will stop funding horror movies that are based around modern technology of any sort. Anything that revolves around cell phones or video games tends to be lame at best, and they also usually date themselves pretty quickly as they center on tech that is constantly updating. Luckily for Countdown, the concept of an "app" will probably give it a longer shelf life than some others (those Chat Roulette inspired ones will have to be explained to new viewers, I think), but it still falls back on the same tricks as so many of those others, and ends up falling flat in nearly every aspect when it comes to its horror thriller narrative.

The concept itself is fine: a new app tells you when you'll die, and it's disturbingly accurate, giving our hero a real reason to panic when she downloads it and gets told she has less than three days to live. So it's in the same vein as The Ring's "Seven days!" kind of plotting, and the movie offers a handful of supporting character deaths along the way to give it a bit of a pulse, but it unfortunately relies on a James Wan type demon for its scary business, when it would have been more fun to rip off Final Destination and offer Rube Goldberg-ian death traps to get the people offed on time. For example, the first one we see is a girl who is alone in her bathroom when her time is up - at which point some invisible force pulls her up to the ceiling and drops her down on the side of the tub, smashing her skull. Not a bad death on its own, but it's devoid of any drama/thrills when we know exactly when it'll happen and it just... does? Without fanfare or even any setup?

So basically we wait the entire movie to see how our hero Quinn (Elizabeth Lail) gets around it, and it's never particularly engaging either. At least with a slasher movie (even a generic/bad one) there's some element of basic suspense: will they get away from the killer, even momentarily, or is there a second killer out there, etc. But here, it's like the screenwriters wanted to go out of their way to remind you that nothing much exciting was going to happen. Halfway through Quinn and her love interest (due to die a few hours before her) meet up with a priest who is obsessed with demons and the like, and he informs us that if someone were to prove the app wrong (i.e. die *before* their time) everyone would be freed of their death-counter, but don't bother to have any fun with this scenario and let people live recklessly knowing that they can't die as a result. And by giving everyone we care about more or less the same amount of time left to live, there's never any sense of rising pressure - everyone's due to die near the end of our 90 minutes, no sooner, so we wait.

The demon is also pretty goofy looking, and doesn't appear enough to register as an actual villain, so it fails there, too. To pick up some of his slack, we get a human antagonist in the form of Peter Facinelli, a doctor at the hospital where Quinn works as a newly instated registered nurse. It takes all of three or four seconds of his screentime to recognize that he has eyes on Quinn, and sure enough before long he's offering her a #MeToo on a silver platter, cornering her and reminding her that he gave her a recommendation and thus she "owes" him. A timely plot point to be sure, but they even botch this by (spoilers ahead!) having Quinn try to murder him, because his countdown gives him another 50 years to live so if he dies now the app would be proven wrong, and the demon is nothing but a stickler for his own dumb rules I guess.

Now, I have no love whatsoever for guys like Facinelli's character, but does groping her and lying about it (before she can complain he tells HR she's obsessed with him) warrant killing the guy? I can appreciate the basic idea of killing an asshole to save yourself, but I mean, half the movie takes place in a hospital - surely there's some drunk driver who survived a crash that killed a child that might be a better candidate for being murdered? Or hell, maybe explain the situation to him and have him kill himself to make amends? No, they go with the "let's have our hero spend most of the finale trying to murder a man who has no direct bearing on her situation" route. Stupider (spoilers again) still, he just disappears at one point, as the demon basically intervenes to keep her from killing him and winning, so she tries plan B while he is just never seen again. OK, movie. Then again, this spares her from trying to explain why she just killed a man when the hospital HR people already think she's got problems, so that's a win for her.

Interestingly, while it fails miserably as a horror film, it's actually kind of entertaining as a comedy - and I don't mean in the unintentional "bad horror movie" way, either. There are two supporting characters - the aforementioned priest, played by PJ Byrne (an actual Final Destination vet) and a cell phone dealer/repairman played by Tom Segura - who are legitimately hilarious in their combined 15 minutes of the film. When we meet Byrne he's just sitting in the rectory snacking on communion wafers like they're chips, and Segura only agrees to help our heroes because they give him a credit card he can use to impress his Tinder date, a running gag that continues into the credits. I don't know if the actors were just trying to bring life to their material by improvising, or if the writers perhaps realized that it'd be in their best interest to include genuine humor in the proceedings to offset the unintentional laughter their "scare" scenes would receive, but either way these two guys (plus a handful of other moments, including a good bit with a racist conspiracy theorist they're happy to risk getting killed by convincing him to install the app so they can look at the terms of service.

And yeah, that might be the funniest part of the whole movie: part of it revolves around the fact that no one reads the user agreements. Not only does the demon stick by his rules, he also doesn't hide his intentions, laying things out in the endless TOS that everyone just scrolls past and accepts (hell, even when they get the guy to install so they can read them, they still "blah blah blah" part of it). Between that and the humor I almost got the sense that this was a satirical thriller about our obsession with apps that got rewritten into a pretty dumb supernatural horror movie in the Rings/Chain Letter vein, which would explain why the horror element was so half-assed (and why it randomly dipped into Flatliners-esque territory in the final 20 minutes, with our heroes seeing the demon in the form of loved ones whose deaths they blame themselves for). Or maybe the whole thing was just cobbled together quickly to get it into theaters to have something "scary" out for Halloween. Either or.

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Child's Play (2019)

JUNE 23, 2019

GENRE: PUPPET, TECHNOLOGY
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

The original Child's Play series is most notably the only major horror franchise that has been consistently written by the same person (Don Mancini), and yet the films themselves are probably the easiest to tell apart for a casual fan - seven very distinctive movies from one sole voice. Each one has had its own identity thanks to a specific setting (a military academy! Hollywood! A mental institution!) and even tone - some go for scares, others play up the comedy - yet remain consistent in its mythology and characters. So it's ironic that Child's Play, the 2019 remake that is also the first Chucky movie NOT written by Mancini, suffers from a bit of multiple personality disorder, as if they Frankensteined the script (or at least, the edit - more on that soon) from several versions that had vastly different things in mind. In one movie we got all the jarring at-odds storytelling decisions that previously eluded the franchise for thirty years.

Luckily, at least one of those assumed versions was actually an ideal concept for a Child's Play remake, so it's far from a disaster or anything. In fact it's actually pretty OK overall, and will easily freak out impressionable youngsters who are at that age where they no longer want to play with dolls but are intrigued by the wonders of technology, while making the adults perhaps rethink how many of their devices can be listening to everything they say. In one of its best ideas, the new Chucky isn't so much a generic plaything doll, but an attempt at a cutesy Alexa/Echo kind of device that can connect to your other devices and make life easier. The dolls (called Buddi out of the box, but the owner can give it their own distinct name) can turn on your TV, remind you about appointments, arrange for your rideshare, etc. You ever tell your Echo Dot to add milk to your grocery list or something of that benign nature? These folks can do that with their Buddi, with the added bonus of him being a little friend for your kids as opposed to a little hockey puck on the shelf.

So in addition to finding a way to mock the latest craze (the original "Good Guy Doll" was a spoof on Cabbage Patch Kids; this is on companies insisting all of our devices "talk" to each other), it also allows them to age Andy up a bit, giving the character different anxieties about his doll and also having the adults treat him differently when the "No, Chucky did it!" kind of stuff starts happening. Andy here is like 12 or 13 (the original one was about six if memory serves) so he obviously wouldn't be playing with a talking doll anymore, but one that can act as another device might be appealing, especially to one who has trouble making friends and finds his very capable doll to be an easy way to avoid doing the hard work of coming out of his shell (an early scene has his mother asking him to go outside and make friends - he ends up hiding in the hallway playing with his phone instead of even trying).

I also liked that Chucky was not possessed or anything. As a learning device, it is programmed to pick up on things that people say and do and act accordingly - a walk and talking version of your phone remembering how to spell your pet's made up name or how Gmail can guess you might want to reply "OK, no prob" to an email from someone saying they can't make your birthday party. But a disgruntled employee removes all of the safety features, so Chucky can learn how to swear and (thanks to Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2!) kill. And as his only goal in life is to make Andy happy and be his best friend, he sees Andy's happy reaction to the horror movie, and Andy's sad/angry reaction to people like his mom's boyfriend, and - without a soul to inform him he's doing anything wrong - starts offing people who upset his best pal. It's like the Monster drowning that girl because he doesn't understand the difference between play and reality, essentially, as opposed to an actual EVIL DOLL doing these things because he likes to do it.

So all that is well and good, but as the movie goes on, things start going astray - ironically enough - after Chucky makes his first human kill. Mimicking TCM2's scene where Leatherface puts on the guy's face in an attempt to appeal to Stretch, Chucky cuts the victim's face off and attaches it to a watermelon from the patch the guy inexplicably has, and brings it back to Andy's room as a present. Andy then freaks out, calls over his two friends (his "cool" safety feature-free doll has won him a few pals in the building), and then they decide to use some wrapping paper to wrap it up and throw it away. But he's caught with the makeshift gift by his mom, and his impossibly dumb excuse is that it's a gift for the lady down the hall - who is (and he knows this) mother to a cop. Then he has to convince the lady not to open the gift, then he has to get it back - it's like a bad cringe comedy sketch tossed into the middle of a horror movie, and ultimately the head ends up in the garbage chute where it can be found by the cops later anyway, so why they didn't just delete THIS entire sequence is beyond me, as it all it does is eat up ten minutes of screentime that could have been spent on something that the audience might not find the most implausible thing about a killer doll movie.

I emphasize "THIS" because clearly, the movie got reworked some, something I was convinced of BEFORE the end credits rolled and I saw the telltale "additional editor by" credit in the crawl that you only see in movies that got recut by someone at the 11th hour. Certain subplots never really resolve, and other times people seem to be overreacting to things - which is code for "they're actually reacting to something that got cut and we're hoping you will buy that it's this other thing". This happens most notably in a scene that ends the second act, when Andy is fully aware Chucky is doing terrible things but of course no one believes him. He's yelling about it in the Walmart-y department store where his mom works, and in the confusion/chaos one of his friends accidentally hits his head on one of the store shelves - but the next time we see them, they're all acting like he's this total psycho and no one ever wants to see him again, and the kid who whacked his chin seems more sad than in pain. Turns out (per Reddit and also a friend who was at the test screening) that originally Chucky killed that kid's dog and pinned it on Andy, a sequence that was removed and rejiggered, but with its fallout remaining.

Part of Chucky's plan involved using Andy's hearing aid, which fell off in the scuffle and gets a "Uh oh!" kind of closeup so that the audience is absolutely sure to see that Andy lost it. However, now he recovers it in the same scene (part of a reshoot that occurred in April, apparently), making the whole "he lost it" element mean absolutely nothing. In fact, his hearing issue as a whole never seems to play a part in anything, which is another reason that the movie feels cobbled together - there's probably a version where Chucky helped him with his condition when he's still good or used it to his advantage when bad, but he does neither here - there's a very quick scene where he is seemingly talking directly to the device (a "voice in his head" kind of thing) but it lasts all of four seconds. I can't imagine they went to all of that trouble just to have a bit where only Andy can hear Chucky, especially so late in the film. And then when other people do see that Andy is telling the truth, there's never any kind of "Oh shit, he WAS telling the truth" kind of moment from his mom or the cop, or even any disbelief as to what they're seeing - they just quickly accept it, I guess.

And then there's Andy's dad, who is only really mentioned once, when the kid is first showing Chucky his room (including his strange drawings, another thing that seems to be setting something up only for it to never come up again). When flipping through the sketchbook he comes across a picture of his father, and then he shuts the book saying "that's enough for now", but there's no followup. We know his mom (Aubrey Plaza, basically playing her Parks & Rec character) had him early, and Andy's reaction to the boyfriend suggests he's the latest in a string of losers, so this seemed to be suggesting the father wasn't dead but out of the picture by choice. However, later there's a framed picture of him in the living room, which would be a weird thing for Aubrey's character to have around if he was some jerk who left or was left. Again, two or three different narrative paths, all at once.

Things finally pick back up with the climax, though it's sadly over before it fully gets going. See, Chucky is part of the original "Buddi" line, and now the Buddi 2 is coming - with a big midnight opening at the store Andy's mom works. Chucky manages to tap into all of the devices (by the way, they specifically say he can only do this with his fellow Kaslan Industry products, so I guess these guys own more of our lives than Apple because he never once has trouble connecting to anything), such as drones armed with razors and the other Buddi dolls (including a freaky bear one), then locks the doors and sets everything free for maximum chaos. But we see I think two people get killed; despite the doors locking everyone manages to get away, I guess - or they all just died off-screen, which is possible since the movie is noticeably economical with what it shows us (80% or more of the movie takes place in either his apartment or the store; the rare exteriors are quick and tightly framed). With a blank check budget, I'm sure this sequence could have been a halfway point kind of thing, with Chucky's minions wreaking havoc everywhere a la Gremlins, but instead it became the climax, with everything before it needing to be dragged out to get there so that the film would still be a feature length.

(As for why the Buddy 2 is launching AFTER Christmas, as the movie clearly establishes that the holiday season has just passed, I have no idea.)

I'm sure the original cut was better, or at least, more consistent and less "off", but then again there was probably no real way to get around the other issue, which is that the design of the doll sucks. I'm sure that marketing kept them from making their design too unlike the classic Good Guy version, and so they had to find something in between recognizable and original, but what they came up with is just... BAD. Regardless of its usefulness, I can't imagine anyone would ever want one of these things in their home, and the movie blows its chance to own up to it by not having the Kaslan guy note that the Buddi 2 is "less ugly than its predecessor" or anything like that (though they do now come in a variety of hair colors as parents complained the original one was only available as a ginger, one of the movie's better gags). It seems they wanted to get away from the fact that OG Chucky had two faces (impossibly realized, yes) so tried to get one that was "creepy" but also looked like a normal doll, so he wouldn't have to unrealistically switch back and forth, but that's the wrong approach I think - no one ever cared that Chucky could just go back to looking like a plastic doll after coming fully alive, did they?

As for Mark Hamill, he's a good choice - he rarely yells/snarls/laughs so there's a big enough difference between him and Dourif to work, and he thankfully isn't given lots of one-liners (he only has one, really - and it's kind of amazing in context, which I won't spoil here). Back to the "multiple ideas at once" thing, at times it almost feels like they want us to feel bad for Chucky in that same Frankenstein's Monster kind of way, as he simply doesn't understand what he's doing wrong and just wants to make Andy happy, but they never fully commit to it. That said, if they DID make that movie, Hamill would be perfect for it - his earlier line readings do actually generate some pity for the toy. Bear McCreary's score also does some of the heavy lifting - this movie SOUNDS so much better than it LOOKS, basically. The human actors are all whatever; Brian Tyree Henry is probably the bright spot since he gets some good lines and a big crowd-pleasing moment near the end, but he also never feels essential to the movie and could have been excised without it affecting anything.

So it'd make a good double feature with Ma, now that I think about it, as both movies generate a little goodwill that more or less sustains itself for the runtime, and some nasty/mean-spirited moments that I was surprised to see in a major studio release, but also feel like two movies got made and someone cobbled together the most coherent version they could using equal parts from both. Out of spite they should have focused all of their energy on presenting a screenplay that would measure up to the earlier films, if only to prove that Don Mancini doesn't have to be the only one writing these things, but.. they basically proved Don Mancini should be the only one writing these things. Even he doesn't knock it out of the park every time, but the movies are always interesting in their own way, whereas this one was largely going through the motions. I didn't like Seed of Chucky and never even watched in its entirety a second time, but I can still remember big chunks of it 15 years later - I may have enjoyed this more, but won't remember much of it in 15 days. Call me if they decide to release the earlier cut though - I suspect that despite whatever issues it may have had, it's the more consistent and ultimately more interesting movie.

What say you?

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Unfriended: Dark Web (2018)

JULY 20, 2018

GENRE: TECHNOLOGY, THRILLER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

The thing about a gimmick movie is that once the novelty wears off (20 minutes or so, tops) it has to justify not only the gimmick, but the narrative itself. The thing about a SEQUEL to a gimmick movie is that it has to improve on everything just to break even, as it no longer has the novelty going for it. Luckily, Unfriended: Dark Web is up to the task, and as a bonus it's entirely unrelated to the first, so if you haven't seen it you can go in "blind" to this one and get the thrill of seeing the gimmick actually work while seeing a better movie to boot. If you have seen the original, then yeah it's gonna feel a bit like deja vu for a while, but thankfully they hook you in relatively early with its new villain and scenario, while implementing the limitations of the desktop in new ways.

It also avoids one of the problems of the first film, which is that our protagonists were kind of scummy. The usual love triangle crap, the bullying, the constant shit-talking... sure, it's all "normal" stuff but with so much of the movie dwelling on these personal flaws, I can't say I was too broken up about any of them getting offed by the supernatural presence, and it made it very much a "teen" movie. This time they're not only older (read: more tolerable to older audiences), but also a pretty charming and genuinely caring group of friends (old college pals), with no hidden secrets from one another and very little squabbling. When Betty Gabriel (Blumhouse's MVP between this, Upgrade, Purge 3, and of course Get Out) announces she's engaged to Rebecca Rittenhouse's character, everyone is super happy for them and congratulatory - if such a thing happened in the first film they'd be broken up by the end of it, and everyone would talk shit about them in sidebar convos.

And they're all innocent of the crime in question this time around; our protagonist decides to help himself to a laptop that has been left in a lost and found for weeks (so he's kind of a thief, yeah, but 3-4 weeks? They ain't coming back!) and it turns out it belongs to a guy who is deep into the subtitular Dark Web, in this case folks that watch (and pay for) snuff films. So the owner wants the laptop back and threatens to kill the hero's friends (all Skyping for their monthly online game night) if he doesn't. Sure, it's hokey, but under the guise of hacking, it's actually scarier than the first film's all purpose supernatural nonsense, because while I don't think a ghost can take control of my laptop I do believe a hacker could if he wanted to. I don't know enough about hacking to know their limitations, but it all seems plausible enough, at least in theory. At one point the hacker manages to splice together a tape of one of the friends' Vlogs to make it sound like he's threatening to shoot up a mall, prompting the police to come to his house and open fire - it's something that's actually happened more than once (they call it "swatting", and it's had tragic outcomes) but the speed in which the hacker does it, seemingly able to find the exact words he needs from the videos to cut together his message, seems like he has a ghost helping him. So you still gotta suspend some disbelief, but in *general* it's a much more believable threat than the first one, so coupled with the more engaging cast, it makes for an overall better experience.

As for the desktop display (if you're somehow in the dark - the entire movie unfolds on a view of the protagonist's desktop, with Skype, Facebook, etc. giving it its content), it works pretty much the same way, with the hero moving windows around and occasionally (unnaturally) pausing his actions and circling the cursor around things the filmmaker wants to make sure you read/register. Since the plot revolves around snuff videos there's an easy way to break up long talking stretches by having someone play one (though I think if you've seen the trailer you've pretty much seen them all) and new hero Matias isn't as fidgety as the first film's Blaire, so it's less "busy" than the original, as well. And they do a switcheroo of one of my favorite little details in the first, where we see Blaire wrestle with how to say things (and in some cases, not end up saying them at all) by typing and erasing - here we see Matias' girlfriend occasionally starting to type a response (via the little ... animation we're all familiar with by now) only to walk it back.

She's doing that because they're fighting over his inability to commit to learn sign language, as the woman is deaf. He keeps making attempts for her to understand him, such as making an app that converts what he types into video signs, but apparently won't make much effort to learn to read her signs, asking her to type out everything during their Skype convos, in other words cares more about himself being understood than understanding her. This has a few uses in the movie, such as when the hacker attacks her roommate and she is unable to hear it, and also plays a part in one of the film's endings - because there are two, and so far there's no way to tell which one you're getting (I won't spoil details, but one involves a van and the other involves a grave, and I got the van one). With no way to know which one you're getting it's a pretty dumb gimmick, if you ask me, as I can't imagine anyone would want to buy a ticket and sit through the movie again just in case they got the other one, and I fear it will just lead to people wandering in near the film's climax, hoping to see the other one after their other movie got out. Please don't make this a "thing", studios.

Basically, if you've ever considered putting some tape over your laptop's built-in webcam, this is the movie for you. The first one tackled teen suicide and bullying, i.e. real problems, but also ones that maybe not everyone could identify with, which might lessen its ability to unnerve you (plus, again, it was a crafty ghost instead of a living human killer). But everyone's probably had a hacker scare of some sort by now (including me; a few weeks ago I got an email from AMC thanking me for buying five tickets to a movie in Maryland), so the whole "this is how fucked you can be" approach really works well, and once again they use real-world apps and sites as opposed to a totally made up internet like you see in goofy shit like The Net. When the killer calls, they're able to use our familiarity with the Skype and Messenger sounds to their advantage, and maybe give us pause the next time we hear them coming from our own computers. I don't know if I'd ever want to watch it again, but it got the job done as a "cyber thriller" and proved that there could be a running franchise out of this concept so long as they find new plots/characters to revolve around instead of trying to build up some stupid mythology like the Paranormal Activity movies did.

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Class of 1999 (1990)

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

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

Ideally, Class of 1999's Blu-ray release this Tuesday would have been delayed out of respect for the two students who were killed (along with over a dozen others shot) at their high school in Kentucky last week, and then possibly again after today's (thankfully death-free, so far) school shooting in Los Angeles, because that's what used to happen on the then-rare occasions this sort of horrible tragedy occurred. Anything involving students and violence was delayed or altered, sometimes for even months after such an atrocity (remember when Teaching Mrs. Tingle, released five months after Columbine, was Killing Mrs. Tingle?). But that sort of "out of respect..." maneuver is pretty rare these days, because there are so many similar events (the Kentucky incident was the 11th school shooting in the US this year so far, after one month) that they'll never be able to release it without it being "too soon". There is sadly another always around the corner, because it's not like anything will ever change.

Luckily, unlike the "original" Class of 1984 (this movie is considered a sequel, but there's nothing in common besides the general idea of schools being overrun by assholes), there's no way that this film's terrifying vision of the near future will come to pass, since we're nearly twenty years past its setting and we still don't have android teachers at all, let alone ones that murder the unruly kids. School violence is of course still a problem, but whereas 1984 dealt with it in a fairly believable manner (fed up teachers fighting back) this is straight up B-movie cheese, closer to Terminator than the evening news. With these shootings fresh in my mind (if not the minds of the news cycle, too busy dealing with whatever Donny is up to today as if it will matter in the slightest) I was never more thankful to watch a movie that was so utterly ridiculous, because otherwise I'd probably find it too hard to enjoy.

And enjoy it I did! I mean, yeah, I wish there was more killer robot stuff (this ain't a horror movie, by the way - more on that soon), but even though the best of it is confined to the last act - i.e. when their human skin starts getting shredded and they're leaking green goo everywhere - there's never any doubt that they are indeed androids. From the start we see the Terminator/Robocop-y POV shots from our trio of cyberteachers (Pam Grier, Patrick Kilpatrick, and John P. Ryan) that inform us of their non-human status (Kilpatrick also shows off his robot face under his skin for good measure), and they have superhuman strength and all that, so it's not like Alien or whatever that we're supposed to be surprised someone isn't actually human - but the kids don't know that, which is a bit odd since they don't find out for like an hour and we've known all along. In retrospect it might have been fun to try to hide it from us for a bit, if only to be even more weirded out by Ryan's first big scene, as his exaggerated cheering actually puts the movie into horror territory because it's so unnerving. Then again, knowing he's a robot adds tension to an otherwise pretty funny scene where he spanks the bottoms of two of the punk kids in his class, with a swift and mechanical smacking motion (which reminded me of Buzz Lightyear's karate chop action) that I thought was about to malfunction and impale the kid through his ass with the next hard smack.

Ryan's casting is one of the many inspired choices, as he's probably most famous to horror fans as the dad of the mutant baby in the first two It's Alive films, so seeing him tackle a different kind of evil child is of course wonderful. Likewise it's hilarious to see Malcolm "Alex DeLarge" McDowell overseeing a school overrun by modern day droogs, and it's so rare to see Pam Grier as a villain it's hard to remember we're supposed to be on the teenagers' side when she starts beating the shit out of three of them at once in her chemistry class. But the most delightful part isn't really stunt casting per se - it's just the mere sight of Stacy Keach with goofy contacts and some bizarre haircut that's a cross between a buzzcut and a mullet (and dyed snow white for good measure). He's from the "Department of Educational Defense" (heh) and is the guy in charge of implementing the robot teachers in order to bring the school in line, but sadly spends most of the movie just looking at monitors and saying sinister things, with only the contacts suggesting he too is a robot. But (spoiler for 20 year old movie ahead) he's actually just a damn nut I guess, as he bleeds red when he dies as opposed to the green-blooded robots, meaning he was human all along.

As for the teens, they're a pretty generic lot, and unlike Class of 1984 there are no "good" students to be seen with the exception of the main guy's love interest, who is also McDowell's daughter. Otherwise it seems like everyone in the school belongs to one of the two rival gangs (the Razorheads and the Blackhearts), making them not exactly the kind of people you want to root for. The main guy is named Cody and is played by Bradley Gregg, aka Philip from Dream Warriors (the one who dies as a "puppet"), doing some weird Corey Feldman-y kinda shtick that got old fast. But I kind of liked how the plot unfolded, with the teachers staging some of their kills to incite a war between the two gangs, only for Cody to catch on and band together with his rivals (led by James Medina, who was the most charismatic actor of the bunch but unfortunately passed away in the 90s) for an all out assault on the school. This is when the movie really starts earning its placement in a few issues of Fangoria, with the three androids (particularly Kilpatrick) taking a beating but never stopping, and procuring weapons from their limbs - if you ever wanted to see Pam Grier's arm turn into a flamethrower, this is your movie.

It was during these scenes that I was not only having the most fun with the flick (which I want to stress I had never seen before; it seems like the sort of thing that would have been on Cinemax during my formative years but even if I caught a few minutes at one point, I do not remember it) but also lamenting how far the concept of a "B-movie" has fallen. Not only is the script a step or two above what you'd expect from this kind of junk, but director Mark Lester put together a real crew (including DP Mark Irwin, who used to be Cronenberg's go-to cinematographer and went on to shoot a number of Wes Craven's films, including Scream) instead of blowing the meager budget on cameos and other bullshit like today's Asylum/Syfy level crap. The stunts, practical FX, and pyrotechnics are on par with any studio movie, and it's a shame so much of today's stuff can't be bothered to put that kind of effort into things. It's unfair that this will be lumped in with the likes of Sharktopus or whatever by future generations - there's a distinct difference in the quality and presentation that should be noted, and celebrated in turn.

Speaking of celebrating, it's being released by Lionsgate as part of their ongoing Vestron Collector's Series, which is sort of the studio's answer to Scream Factory and the like - giving the royal treatment to less prestigious fare such as this. It's got a commentary by Lester (I didn't bother to listen, having learned my lesson with Firestarter and Class of 1984 - nothing against him, it's just that some folks aren't that interesting/fun to listen to) and some interviews, including one with the FX guys Eric Allard and Rick Stratton, who did a pretty great job I think and reveal that the robot flood was just transmission fluid (and glitter was put in the squibs for when the robots got shot!). All the other titles are more traditionally horror (such as Gothic, which also hit this week - I wrote about that over at BMD since I already reviewed it here), but even IMDB calls this one an "action-horror" movie so I dunno. I got in a brief Twitter skirmish last week after crying foul at people celebrating that a "horror movie" (Shape of Water) got so many Oscar nominations, when it's not a damn horror movie at all (even Del Toro said as much, and last I checked he's not exactly a snob about horror), primarily because I feel trying to claim films like Shape of Water (which I quite loved, for the record) as horror is just as obnoxious as someone saying something like It is a "psychological thriller". Ultimately it doesn't really matter, but I just wanna do my due diligence - this is "of interest" to horror fans because of the makeup work and the horror-friendly label that it's being released on, but please don't be expecting Chopping Mall set in a school.

I really hate that even escapist fun junk like this has to remind me of the real world, since it kind of defeats the purpose of it. The fact that a screenplay like this wouldn't get considered by even the trashiest producers nowadays is incredibly depressing to me, and what's worse is that I don't see the situation changing any time soon. As of next year my son will be going to school and less than two years from now he'll be the same age as the victims of Sandy Hook - and there's literally no reason to think that by then he and his classmates will be any safer than a child in a classroom today (or a movie theater, or a church, or a mall, or...), due to the fact that our government seems to have no interest in exploring better gun control laws. I want him to grow up watching goofy shit like this and having fun with it the entire time - not just when it reaches the point of absurdity and we can temporarily keep our minds off of the real-world parallels drawn up by the first hour. Ideally, someday, we can be just as amused by the "far-fetched" idea of kids walking around their school with guns as we are to see them get burned up by Pam Grier's flamethrower arm. Let's keep hoping.

What say you?

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