Three Films Make A Post: SURGING SPECTACLE! ...of Savagery and Sex!

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987): On one hand, I’m perfectly fine with Bruce Pittman’s sequel to okay Canadian slasher Prom Night having nothing whatsoever to do with the first one – where the hell should it have gone from there, after all – on the other hand, the resulting mix of possession horror and Freddy Krueger style (at times barely one step ahead of ripping off whole scenes completely) supernatural slasher never gels into an actual movie. Instead, we get a bunch of unfulfilled promises (you could make a perfectly great film about guilt and punishment as spiced up by religion out of the material), some good scenery-chewing by Michael Ironside and Wendy Lyon once she’s possessed, and the usual bunch of murder scenes that have not much of a thematic connection (would it really kill this sort of film to have a killer with a theme and then go through with it instead of having people randomly explode through their computer and other random crap?), and barely cohere into something like an actual plot.

Starship Troopers 3: Marauders (2008): The second Star Ship Troopers sequel, this time around directed by series screenwriter Edward Neumeier, is a pretty tedious way for the series to go out. It clearly wants to connect the satirical aspirations of the first film with the B-movie thrills of the second one, but it’s even less successful with the former than the original film and sabotages the latter ambition by insisting on the former. It’s also godawfully paced, spending an astounding amount of time on things with no bearing on its actual narrative whatsoever. The whole first hour is paced and feels very much like the prologue to the actual film; the rest isn’t nearly exciting enough to make up for that failing.

Dance of the Damned (1989): Katt Shea’s late eighties neon indie vampire movie is a bit of a frustrating experience. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this attempt to use an awkward date night (at least he seems to think it’s a date despite his early announcement to kill her at exactly 6am) between a vampire (Cyril O’Reilly) and a stripper (Starr Andreeff) to talk about broken lives but for every moment that’s emotionally resonant, for every good idea, there are two moments of 80s vampire movie pompousness, lines of dialogue that are trying oh so very hard but never achieving, and some horribly ill-advised contact lenses. Worse, what for large parts of its running time amounts to a two person play only has one good performance in Andreeff’s (who going by what she’s doing here would have deserved to go on to much better things than she actually did), with O’Reilly mostly letting his luscious 80s locks, those contact lenses and not a lot more doing his work, which just isn’t enough.

This is still a very interesting film, mind you, just not one that actually succeeds at what

Three Films Make A Post: Don't scare to sit, Don't scream to see, Don't shock if it's.....fierce!

(The) Mark of Cain (1986): This Canadian good twin/batshit twin (Robin Ward) thriller is a pretty neat little low budget thing, directed roughly yet imaginatively by Bruce Pittman whose career mostly took place in the realm of undistinguished TV work. The script is pretty okay, the setting is tight and claustrophobic, and the film's very well worth a watch if you don't expect anything earth-shaking, or crazy, or surprising.

Trance (2013): How much one enjoys Danny Boyle's neo noir Trance will absolutely depend on one's willingness to suspend disbelief when confronted with a film of perfectly convincing style and an acting ensemble (particularly Rosario Dawson, Vincent Cassel and James McAvoy) much better than the over-constructed series of events in the script deserves or needs; really, not since the heights of the giallo have I seen a thriller with more dubious ideas about psychology, hypnotism, and plain logic. Which isn't to say that I hated the film, or even really disliked it. Boyle pastes over the film's problems with such verve I found myself even thinking it to be rather more clever than it actually is when the third act began, a thought I was cured of when what seemed a rather cute deconstruction of the femme fatale archetype in the final, final twist turned out to be just another manipulative movie woman who doesn't care over how many dead bodies she has to step to get what she wants (though what she wants is not money, for a change).

Opstandelsen (2010): Casper Haugegaard's Danish (fast) zombie short (about 49 minutes) movie is a particularly fine example of wonderfully effective horror filmmaking of the kind you can do on a budget if you know what you’re doing. Haugegaard clearly does, so we end up with a low budget zombie movie that hits a lot of expected beats yet does it so competently it seems to be absolutely beside the point to complain you've seen it all before; because you haven't seen it all before quite like this. The film's script is particularly fine, giving the actors exactly the amount of material to work with necessary, without trying to do too much itself, nor leaving the actors out in the rain. Haugegaard even handles the whole "zombies as metaphor" thing well, treating the zombie apocalypse as just another opportunity for members of a highly dysfunctional family to keep eating away at one another even after they are dead.

The result is a bleak, well-paced, effectively gory short film that doesn’t overstay its welcome for one second.

 

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