Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Friday, September 10, 2021
Friday, August 27, 2021
Friday, October 18, 2019
Past Misdeeds: Bram Stoker’s Burial of the Rats (1995)
Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more
glorious Exploder
Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for
the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here
in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.
Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.
The 19th Century. Young Bram Stoker (Kevin Alber – the less said about his performance the better) is travelling through France with his father (Eduard Plaxin), who isn’t too fond of his son’s plans of becoming a writer. We’re horrified to imagine what the old man would say if he knew Bram’ll actually make things worse and go to the theatre, possibly living a rather bohemian life (for his time and place). Things take a turn for the more exciting when their coach is attacked by three hooded figures. When Bram shoots one of his attackers, the remaining two pack him into a handy sack and take him to their headquarters.
There, it turns out our hero hasn’t been abducted by random robbers but by an all-female krypto-feminist thong wearing cult of women of varying craziness whose major goal in (cult) life is to make men pay for all the evils they committed. And then some. They are led by The Queen (an excellently scenery chewing Adrienne Barbeau), pipe player and commander of an absurdly tiny little horde of flesh-eating rats.
Things would look rather dire for Bram, if not for the fact that one of the Queen’s favourites, Madeleine (Maria Ford, to nobody’s surprise quite underdressed and as always at least passable as an actress), falls in love at first sight with him once his head loses the sack. Our hero’s situation further improves when a plan of Madeleine’s former girlfriend Hope (Olga Kabo, also doing a good bit of scenery chewing) to kill him during the raid on a monastery not just fails, but also quite accidentally finds the Queen learning of and appreciating his literary talents in the aftermath. Why, to have one’s own cult chronicler…
So all would be set for a very special kind of happy end, if not for the evil plans of Hope and the just as evil ways of the French police.
Roger Corman never was one to miss an opportunity for weird international cooperations, particularly when they could bring him more bang for his buck, so it’s not a complete surprise we find him here indulging in one of a handful of co-productions with Russia’s ailing Mosfilm. The project certainly was not a prestigious business for the Russian side, but for Corman - and Burial of the Rats – the Russian involvement brought quite a bit of production value with it. This includes an excellent and often very inappropriate – it’s sounding like it was made for some romantic high budget epic – music score by Tarkovsky regular Eduard Artemev as well as some real talent behind the camera, and much prettier locations than Corman usually could get his hands on at this point in his career.
Of course, Corman being Corman, he used the opportunity offered to have director Dan Golden create this sleazy weird-ass adventure movie with a bit of gothic horror, a smidgen of gore and some comparatively subtle moments of “so that’s how Stoker got his ideas!”. The last, we can probably ascribe to co-writer Somtow Sucharitkul (who had a bit more success as a horror writer than he did as a script writer, even though I’m not a fan). There’s more gratuitous nudity than you can shake a stick at (sorry, Siegmund) - some of it provided via the sort of naked jazz dance all strange female cults love so well be they satanist, feminist, or yuggothian –, moments of puzzling weirdness, and many a scene that I would be tempted to call “swashbuckling” if anyone involved in the film had only known how to actually do swashbuckling action scenes well. On the other hand, there’s a scene where a monk’s nether parts are eaten by rats, so there’s that.
This still being a Corman production before he completely jumped the shark(topus), the Burial of the Rats is silly, awkward, of dubious morals but also still trying to be an actual movie despite all the feminists with swords and thongs, so plot and characterization make a degree of sense – at least in a world where this whole rat women business is appropriate – and the film’s not as anti-feminist as most films of its type would be, though all the gratuitous nudity will still keep most fans of identity politics away.
Why, sleeping with Bram doesn’t seem to impede Madeleine’s ability to think or fence (much), and while every female character here dies the same lame death, and their revolution will not be televised (spoilers, I guess), the film does have way too much fun with showing nearly naked women kill deeply unpleasant men I’d think it pretty impossible to ever imagine it tries to convince you women fighting back is a bad thing, particularly not when these women are fighting authority figures as deeply unsympathetic as those shown here. Because seriously, what film would be sympathetic to rapist monks and purveyors of child prostitution? At worst, and I know some Internet feminists of a very specific type might be annoyed by this sort of thing, the film argues that acting against men as if they were a faceless mass not worthy of individual consideration isn’t any better than men oppressing women in various ways.
Of course, as luck will have it, this is also the ideal position from which to make an exploitation movie about thong-clad 19th century rat women fighting oppression. Go figure. And as luck will also have it, that’s a very enjoyable thing to watch.
Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.
The 19th Century. Young Bram Stoker (Kevin Alber – the less said about his performance the better) is travelling through France with his father (Eduard Plaxin), who isn’t too fond of his son’s plans of becoming a writer. We’re horrified to imagine what the old man would say if he knew Bram’ll actually make things worse and go to the theatre, possibly living a rather bohemian life (for his time and place). Things take a turn for the more exciting when their coach is attacked by three hooded figures. When Bram shoots one of his attackers, the remaining two pack him into a handy sack and take him to their headquarters.
There, it turns out our hero hasn’t been abducted by random robbers but by an all-female krypto-feminist thong wearing cult of women of varying craziness whose major goal in (cult) life is to make men pay for all the evils they committed. And then some. They are led by The Queen (an excellently scenery chewing Adrienne Barbeau), pipe player and commander of an absurdly tiny little horde of flesh-eating rats.
Things would look rather dire for Bram, if not for the fact that one of the Queen’s favourites, Madeleine (Maria Ford, to nobody’s surprise quite underdressed and as always at least passable as an actress), falls in love at first sight with him once his head loses the sack. Our hero’s situation further improves when a plan of Madeleine’s former girlfriend Hope (Olga Kabo, also doing a good bit of scenery chewing) to kill him during the raid on a monastery not just fails, but also quite accidentally finds the Queen learning of and appreciating his literary talents in the aftermath. Why, to have one’s own cult chronicler…
So all would be set for a very special kind of happy end, if not for the evil plans of Hope and the just as evil ways of the French police.
Roger Corman never was one to miss an opportunity for weird international cooperations, particularly when they could bring him more bang for his buck, so it’s not a complete surprise we find him here indulging in one of a handful of co-productions with Russia’s ailing Mosfilm. The project certainly was not a prestigious business for the Russian side, but for Corman - and Burial of the Rats – the Russian involvement brought quite a bit of production value with it. This includes an excellent and often very inappropriate – it’s sounding like it was made for some romantic high budget epic – music score by Tarkovsky regular Eduard Artemev as well as some real talent behind the camera, and much prettier locations than Corman usually could get his hands on at this point in his career.
Of course, Corman being Corman, he used the opportunity offered to have director Dan Golden create this sleazy weird-ass adventure movie with a bit of gothic horror, a smidgen of gore and some comparatively subtle moments of “so that’s how Stoker got his ideas!”. The last, we can probably ascribe to co-writer Somtow Sucharitkul (who had a bit more success as a horror writer than he did as a script writer, even though I’m not a fan). There’s more gratuitous nudity than you can shake a stick at (sorry, Siegmund) - some of it provided via the sort of naked jazz dance all strange female cults love so well be they satanist, feminist, or yuggothian –, moments of puzzling weirdness, and many a scene that I would be tempted to call “swashbuckling” if anyone involved in the film had only known how to actually do swashbuckling action scenes well. On the other hand, there’s a scene where a monk’s nether parts are eaten by rats, so there’s that.
This still being a Corman production before he completely jumped the shark(topus), the Burial of the Rats is silly, awkward, of dubious morals but also still trying to be an actual movie despite all the feminists with swords and thongs, so plot and characterization make a degree of sense – at least in a world where this whole rat women business is appropriate – and the film’s not as anti-feminist as most films of its type would be, though all the gratuitous nudity will still keep most fans of identity politics away.
Why, sleeping with Bram doesn’t seem to impede Madeleine’s ability to think or fence (much), and while every female character here dies the same lame death, and their revolution will not be televised (spoilers, I guess), the film does have way too much fun with showing nearly naked women kill deeply unpleasant men I’d think it pretty impossible to ever imagine it tries to convince you women fighting back is a bad thing, particularly not when these women are fighting authority figures as deeply unsympathetic as those shown here. Because seriously, what film would be sympathetic to rapist monks and purveyors of child prostitution? At worst, and I know some Internet feminists of a very specific type might be annoyed by this sort of thing, the film argues that acting against men as if they were a faceless mass not worthy of individual consideration isn’t any better than men oppressing women in various ways.
Of course, as luck will have it, this is also the ideal position from which to make an exploitation movie about thong-clad 19th century rat women fighting oppression. Go figure. And as luck will also have it, that’s a very enjoyable thing to watch.
Wednesday, September 6, 2017
The Belko Experiment (2016)
The office drones of the US company Belko Industries working in an office
block rather far outside of Bogotá in Colombia are looking forward to another
boring day doing the sort of vaguely defined human resources work whose use the
people actually involved can barely comprehend. Their day begins rather
peculiar, though, for there’s a new, heavily armed troop of guards securing the
place, turning away all non-American employees at the gate for “security
reasons”.
Once the work day has actually started, a voice over the building’s intercom calmly demands of the employees to kill two among their number, or more of them will be killed instead. What sounds like a sick joke becomes rather more disturbing when the building is completely sealed off from the outside by automated metal shutters. And that’s before our protagonists learn that the tracking devices implanted into their necks to dissuade the local gangs from kidnappings are actually explosives built to make a nasty mess out of one’s head.
Not surprisingly, panic and general human shittiness ensues, with people generally tending to one of two factions: one, let’s call them the ones with souls, kinda-sorta lead by Mike Milch (John Gallagher Jr.) want to try and find some way to escape or seek help. The other group, very much dominated by the company’s local ex-military COO Barry (Tony Goldwyn), is set to break into the security guard’s armoury and decide whom to murder to satisfy the disembodied voice very, very quickly. Barry does the expected mumbling about hard choices all men in power begin when it is time to sacrifice others for their interests, so everything is set up for a bit of a massacre, or “just another day at the office”, like we called it in one of my former places of employ.
Watching The Belko Experiment, one might start speculating that its writer James Gunn has developed a bit of a hankering for the more drastic films he made before he started working for Marvel on the (decidedly beloved by me, as well as millions) Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Directed by Australian Greg McLean in his usually efficient and effective manner, The Belko Experiment is a film with an angry, gory streak, full of the kind of black humour I find difficult not to read as a product of frustration with the world and the people inhabiting it right now.
In its bloody, fast and furious way, McLean’s film is really rather fun, as bizarre as that sounds as a description of a film in which nearly eighty people die in exceedingly bloody ways, quite a few of them deftly drawn as human beings by Gunn’s script and a bunch of talented actors. Even the characters that are outright psychopaths or sociopaths (including a memorably intense and brutal performance by John C. McGinley) have reasons – well, excuses, if we’re being honest – for what they do, so there’s a feeling of actual stakes to the action and the carnage.
In spirit, The Belko Experiment reminds me of certain violently satiric and angry movies produced by Roger Corman in the late 70s and early 80s (Death Race 2000 certainly comes to mind), despite its decided lack of camp appeal. There’s a comparable degree of honest anger and frustration under the artfully polished surface, at least, that makes the film more effective than many comparable movies about people locked in somewhere having to play sadistic games, as well as a rather clear-eyed idea of how fascism works in practice.
Once the work day has actually started, a voice over the building’s intercom calmly demands of the employees to kill two among their number, or more of them will be killed instead. What sounds like a sick joke becomes rather more disturbing when the building is completely sealed off from the outside by automated metal shutters. And that’s before our protagonists learn that the tracking devices implanted into their necks to dissuade the local gangs from kidnappings are actually explosives built to make a nasty mess out of one’s head.
Not surprisingly, panic and general human shittiness ensues, with people generally tending to one of two factions: one, let’s call them the ones with souls, kinda-sorta lead by Mike Milch (John Gallagher Jr.) want to try and find some way to escape or seek help. The other group, very much dominated by the company’s local ex-military COO Barry (Tony Goldwyn), is set to break into the security guard’s armoury and decide whom to murder to satisfy the disembodied voice very, very quickly. Barry does the expected mumbling about hard choices all men in power begin when it is time to sacrifice others for their interests, so everything is set up for a bit of a massacre, or “just another day at the office”, like we called it in one of my former places of employ.
Watching The Belko Experiment, one might start speculating that its writer James Gunn has developed a bit of a hankering for the more drastic films he made before he started working for Marvel on the (decidedly beloved by me, as well as millions) Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Directed by Australian Greg McLean in his usually efficient and effective manner, The Belko Experiment is a film with an angry, gory streak, full of the kind of black humour I find difficult not to read as a product of frustration with the world and the people inhabiting it right now.
In its bloody, fast and furious way, McLean’s film is really rather fun, as bizarre as that sounds as a description of a film in which nearly eighty people die in exceedingly bloody ways, quite a few of them deftly drawn as human beings by Gunn’s script and a bunch of talented actors. Even the characters that are outright psychopaths or sociopaths (including a memorably intense and brutal performance by John C. McGinley) have reasons – well, excuses, if we’re being honest – for what they do, so there’s a feeling of actual stakes to the action and the carnage.
In spirit, The Belko Experiment reminds me of certain violently satiric and angry movies produced by Roger Corman in the late 70s and early 80s (Death Race 2000 certainly comes to mind), despite its decided lack of camp appeal. There’s a comparable degree of honest anger and frustration under the artfully polished surface, at least, that makes the film more effective than many comparable movies about people locked in somewhere having to play sadistic games, as well as a rather clear-eyed idea of how fascism works in practice.
Saturday, June 17, 2017
Three Films Make A Post: Fight back or die.
Harry Brown (2009): For a time there, Daniel Barber’s film
about an elderly ex-marine turning vigilante played by Michael Caine, had me
thinking it was trying to say something actually interesting about the rights,
wrongs and consequences of vigilantism but in the end, it all turns out to be
your usual reactionary fantasy about killing the poor and the supposed
inefficiency of the law in doing that, not exactly something I have much of a
taste for when it doesn’t go so over the top I can stop taking it seriously.
This one doesn’t go over the top, but it is also just not terribly great as a
crime thriller. The only truly memorable thing is a performance by Caine that
suggests a load of emotions and ideas that don’t actually seem to be in the
script, Caine showing a touching vulnerability that doesn’t often ring this
true in movies about aging and elderly men of violence.
Gosford Park (2001): Keeping with great old men, this is one of Robert Altman’s final films as a director (and his last truly good one, I believe). Usually, the idea of an American playing with elements of the British country house mystery suggests a bumbling tourist not getting anything about class, but this being Altman, that fear didn’t even come up for me. And rightly so, for Altman uses the form (well, the parts of the form that interest him – this is a film that’s half over before the murder happens, and rightly so) to not just explore the British class system between the wars, or the way it already shows cracks, but is most concerned about the way the lives of people intersect in a society that puts the borders between the rich, the poor, and the working rich particularly high, finding heart-breaking moments that prove a murder to be much less important than basically everything else going on around it. Altman also has time for moments of acerbic whit, nods to popular culture of the age (Ivor Novello is one of the characters, as well as a fictionalized producer of Charlie Chan films), all filled with life by a thoroughly brilliant cast and by his accustomed way with organizing large numbers of characters in an intellectually and emotionally impactful way.
Narc (2002): Joe Carnahan’s neo noirish crime film about a former undercover cop (Jason Patric) who accidentally killed a baby during a wild shoot-out pressed into investigating the murder of another undercover cop, and teaming up with the other undercover’s former friend (Ray Liotta), a man even more damaged and violent – and possibly worse – then himself is certainly not a Robert Altman film in style or thought. Apart from a handful of scenes when Carnahan falls into the worst kind of “hey, look at me! I have a digital editing suite” filmmaking, this is a wonderful film. Heated, grim, and appropriately violent, Narc portrays the characters’ world as a cesspool of cruelty and corruption yet also finds time to give even the most minor drug dealer a human personality, does good by fantastic lead performances and also has a really well-constructed mystery at its heart whose solution plays expertly with the audience expectations of the genre savvy without feeling smug.
Gosford Park (2001): Keeping with great old men, this is one of Robert Altman’s final films as a director (and his last truly good one, I believe). Usually, the idea of an American playing with elements of the British country house mystery suggests a bumbling tourist not getting anything about class, but this being Altman, that fear didn’t even come up for me. And rightly so, for Altman uses the form (well, the parts of the form that interest him – this is a film that’s half over before the murder happens, and rightly so) to not just explore the British class system between the wars, or the way it already shows cracks, but is most concerned about the way the lives of people intersect in a society that puts the borders between the rich, the poor, and the working rich particularly high, finding heart-breaking moments that prove a murder to be much less important than basically everything else going on around it. Altman also has time for moments of acerbic whit, nods to popular culture of the age (Ivor Novello is one of the characters, as well as a fictionalized producer of Charlie Chan films), all filled with life by a thoroughly brilliant cast and by his accustomed way with organizing large numbers of characters in an intellectually and emotionally impactful way.
Narc (2002): Joe Carnahan’s neo noirish crime film about a former undercover cop (Jason Patric) who accidentally killed a baby during a wild shoot-out pressed into investigating the murder of another undercover cop, and teaming up with the other undercover’s former friend (Ray Liotta), a man even more damaged and violent – and possibly worse – then himself is certainly not a Robert Altman film in style or thought. Apart from a handful of scenes when Carnahan falls into the worst kind of “hey, look at me! I have a digital editing suite” filmmaking, this is a wonderful film. Heated, grim, and appropriately violent, Narc portrays the characters’ world as a cesspool of cruelty and corruption yet also finds time to give even the most minor drug dealer a human personality, does good by fantastic lead performances and also has a really well-constructed mystery at its heart whose solution plays expertly with the audience expectations of the genre savvy without feeling smug.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Mondo Macabro
And on said blog, they are presenting us with this:
Lollywood Movie Madness - pt1 from Mondo Macabro on Vimeo.
I am in love.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Friday, July 11, 2008
Dear "professional" American movie reviewers,
could you please kindly stop to conflate bad American remakes of Asian movies and their far superior originals?
It's perfectly alright if you prefer your home brewed pap to more interesting things, but don't judge the quality of these by the quality of your pap.
And by the way, the original Pulse is not about your wireless connection. It's about your loneliness and alienation.
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