Warning: this trilogy of crap movies isn’t for the faint of heart!
Dracula 3000 (2004): Not to come over as excessively
negative, but this German/South African co-production directed (in a rather
generous interpretation of the term) by one Darrell Roodt must be one of the
most joylessly bad films ever made. At the very least, it’s one of the most
joylessly bad films I have seen in a long career of trying to find the
entertainment value in things of generally dubious quality. There’s a
theoretically okay enough cheapo cast including Casper van Dien, Tiny Lister and
at least two minutes of Udo Kier, but the combination of Roodt’s clueless yet
boring direction, the industrial building this was shot in nobody even tried to
dress up as space ship interiors, and a script that includes lines like “I wanna
watch my anaconda spit all over your snow white ass” and deems them funny come
together to produce the perfect piece of shit.
To be avoided at all cost.
L’immortel aka 22 Bullets (2010): I’m more
often than not criticizing the films that Luc Besson’s Europacorp crap out for
their blatant stupidity but at least, they don’t have pretensions of artistic
class and do their best to entertain their audience, quite unlike this
particular Europacorp film. Richard Berry’s L’immortel plays out as a
painful attempt at cramming as many gangster movie clichés into nearly two hours
of running time as possible, filming them in an overbearing way that’s so
pseudo-artistic it becomes tackier than anything Olivier Megaton has ever done,
and hoping the audience hasn’t seen the dozens of better movies using these
clichés to much better effect. Poor Jean Reno does his best as our honourable
hero gangster boss (he’s against drugs, saves prostitutes etc) but not even
he can save this particular film.
Repo Men (2010): And yet, the Berry film is still more
watchable than Miguel Sapochnik’s dystopian SF action comedy monstrosity that
takes a perfectly serviceable anti-capitalist idea and turns it into a series of
scenes that are by turns unfunny, puzzling in their use for the film, would-be
transgressive, or painfully generic. As is the custom for films like it, it also
features way too many scenes where it winks into the camera while clapping
itself on the shoulder for how clever and subversive it is, never actually
finding the time to be clever or subversive.
As an action film, it also suffers more than a little from the fact its hero
is the kind of asshole who has no problems with murdering people for money until
his head is on the table, and never demonstrates anything even vaguely
resembling a change of heart. Which is of course unavoidable in a film whose
characters never resemble actual human beings, either.
Showing posts with label casper van dien. Show all posts
Showing posts with label casper van dien. Show all posts
Saturday, January 12, 2019
Friday, October 26, 2018
Past Misdeeds: The Pact (2012)
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 death of her abusive mother brings Nichole (Agnes Bruckner) back to the family home she and her sister Annie (Caity Lotz) thought to have left behind for good. Annie's even less happy with going back than Nichole, and only some fine sisterly pressure convinces her to return at all, and much later than Nichole does.
When Annie arrives "home", Nichole has disappeared into thin air after - as the audience knows - some rather disquieting things happening to her. Annie assumes Nichole, with her history of drug use and disappearing acts, has just fallen back into old habits, leaving her sister alone to deal with a house and a funeral she only thought of going to for her sister's sake, and her cousin Liz (Kathleen Rose Perkins) to take care of her little daughter Eva (Dakota Bright).
But when Annie meets Liz (Kathleen Rose Perkins) and her niece at her mother's funeral, she isn't quite as convinced of Nichole's disappearance having a comparatively harmless explanation anymore. Liz argues Nichole would never have left her daughter alone this way; after all she has turned her life around for her.
Because Annie is more than a bit freaked out about staying at her mother's place alone for another night, she invites Liz and Eva to stay the night with her. After dark, everyone is woken by strange noises, and now it is Liz's turn to disappear while Annie has an encounter with an invisible force that can only be explained by supernatural agency. She barely manages to get out of the house with Eva before whatever happened to Nichole and Liz can happen to her too.
When Annie goes to the police with her story, the part about poltergeist phenomena does not exactly improve her chances for being taken seriously about anything else she says. Only Bill Creek (Casper Van Dien), a cop who knew Nichole - and one suspects also knows something about the family history - is willing to actually listen to her. Creek isn't willing to believe in any of that spooky stuff, but at least, he's still taking Annie seriously enough to help her in the few ways actually in his power. However, if Annie wants to find out where her sister and her cousin went, and what is haunting her mother's house, she will have to do most of the investigating alone, with a messed-up sensitive named Stevie (Haley Hudson) she knows from her high school pointing the way. Annie might just find some terrible family secret hidden nearly in plain sight.
Say what you will about (or against) the last decade in horror movies, but it has - probably via the successes of Japanese cinema in this regard - brought about a minor renaissance in movies about hauntings and ghosts, some of which, like Nicholas McCarthy's The Pact, can stand their ground next to any movie in that particular sub-genre you'd care to mention.
The Pact is a brilliant example of a movie closely concentrated on creating a mood of dread and fear very close to the kind of fears I remember too well from my own childhood. The movie manages to create a feeling of tension even though it isn't a permanent barrage of Completely Shocking Things™. There are some truly shocking and some truly creepy things happening throughout the movie, but there's never the feeling any of them are in the movie because it needs to include a shock every ten minutes. Rather, everything here happens for a reason closely related to the film's plot and the film's mood, two elements as organically entwined as possible.
McCarthy's direction is very stylish (the Internet tells me of Argento but also Val Lewton productions as an influence, and I believe her in this case), yet he never gets too flashy. McCarthy instead opts to put his stylistic abilities exclusively into the service of creating the film's particular brand of tension. For most of the time, the camera glides through the cramped and claustrophobic spaces of Annie's mother's house, looking over Annie's shoulder, lingering on blackness and the place's quotidian and bleak interior until they become threatening in their near normality.
I also love how willing McCarthy (also responsible for the script) is to not outright state a lot of what is going on with his characters and their lives but to subtly show it through details of the interiors they move through and Caity Lotz's body language (insert gushing praise about Lotz's performance here). It's not that the film is vague about anything, The Pact is just not the kind of film feeling the need to spell everything out an attentive audience will understand in other ways.
It's all part of the film's overall spirit of tightness and concentration, virtues it doesn't even leave behind when its plot later on takes a turn towards a somewhat different type of horror film than it initially seemed to be, fortunately without doing the boring "look at this surprising twist!" routine. What could have been flabby and digressive in less capable hands feels organic and logical here.
Finally, it's also worth mentioning - seeing as this is a horror movie - how creepy the film is throughout, how successful The Pact is at combining Annie's struggle with her past (her own childhood fears), the idea that however horrible one's past was, there might always have been something more horrible lurking unseen just a (literally and metaphorically) thin wall apart, and the more general images of childhood fears it conjures up in pictures that seem archetypally effective - and willing to be strange if it suits the film - to me.
That, dear reader, means I was freaked out more than once during the course of The Pact, which is the sort of compliment I can't give many horror films.
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 death of her abusive mother brings Nichole (Agnes Bruckner) back to the family home she and her sister Annie (Caity Lotz) thought to have left behind for good. Annie's even less happy with going back than Nichole, and only some fine sisterly pressure convinces her to return at all, and much later than Nichole does.
When Annie arrives "home", Nichole has disappeared into thin air after - as the audience knows - some rather disquieting things happening to her. Annie assumes Nichole, with her history of drug use and disappearing acts, has just fallen back into old habits, leaving her sister alone to deal with a house and a funeral she only thought of going to for her sister's sake, and her cousin Liz (Kathleen Rose Perkins) to take care of her little daughter Eva (Dakota Bright).
But when Annie meets Liz (Kathleen Rose Perkins) and her niece at her mother's funeral, she isn't quite as convinced of Nichole's disappearance having a comparatively harmless explanation anymore. Liz argues Nichole would never have left her daughter alone this way; after all she has turned her life around for her.
Because Annie is more than a bit freaked out about staying at her mother's place alone for another night, she invites Liz and Eva to stay the night with her. After dark, everyone is woken by strange noises, and now it is Liz's turn to disappear while Annie has an encounter with an invisible force that can only be explained by supernatural agency. She barely manages to get out of the house with Eva before whatever happened to Nichole and Liz can happen to her too.
When Annie goes to the police with her story, the part about poltergeist phenomena does not exactly improve her chances for being taken seriously about anything else she says. Only Bill Creek (Casper Van Dien), a cop who knew Nichole - and one suspects also knows something about the family history - is willing to actually listen to her. Creek isn't willing to believe in any of that spooky stuff, but at least, he's still taking Annie seriously enough to help her in the few ways actually in his power. However, if Annie wants to find out where her sister and her cousin went, and what is haunting her mother's house, she will have to do most of the investigating alone, with a messed-up sensitive named Stevie (Haley Hudson) she knows from her high school pointing the way. Annie might just find some terrible family secret hidden nearly in plain sight.
Say what you will about (or against) the last decade in horror movies, but it has - probably via the successes of Japanese cinema in this regard - brought about a minor renaissance in movies about hauntings and ghosts, some of which, like Nicholas McCarthy's The Pact, can stand their ground next to any movie in that particular sub-genre you'd care to mention.
The Pact is a brilliant example of a movie closely concentrated on creating a mood of dread and fear very close to the kind of fears I remember too well from my own childhood. The movie manages to create a feeling of tension even though it isn't a permanent barrage of Completely Shocking Things™. There are some truly shocking and some truly creepy things happening throughout the movie, but there's never the feeling any of them are in the movie because it needs to include a shock every ten minutes. Rather, everything here happens for a reason closely related to the film's plot and the film's mood, two elements as organically entwined as possible.
McCarthy's direction is very stylish (the Internet tells me of Argento but also Val Lewton productions as an influence, and I believe her in this case), yet he never gets too flashy. McCarthy instead opts to put his stylistic abilities exclusively into the service of creating the film's particular brand of tension. For most of the time, the camera glides through the cramped and claustrophobic spaces of Annie's mother's house, looking over Annie's shoulder, lingering on blackness and the place's quotidian and bleak interior until they become threatening in their near normality.
I also love how willing McCarthy (also responsible for the script) is to not outright state a lot of what is going on with his characters and their lives but to subtly show it through details of the interiors they move through and Caity Lotz's body language (insert gushing praise about Lotz's performance here). It's not that the film is vague about anything, The Pact is just not the kind of film feeling the need to spell everything out an attentive audience will understand in other ways.
It's all part of the film's overall spirit of tightness and concentration, virtues it doesn't even leave behind when its plot later on takes a turn towards a somewhat different type of horror film than it initially seemed to be, fortunately without doing the boring "look at this surprising twist!" routine. What could have been flabby and digressive in less capable hands feels organic and logical here.
Finally, it's also worth mentioning - seeing as this is a horror movie - how creepy the film is throughout, how successful The Pact is at combining Annie's struggle with her past (her own childhood fears), the idea that however horrible one's past was, there might always have been something more horrible lurking unseen just a (literally and metaphorically) thin wall apart, and the more general images of childhood fears it conjures up in pictures that seem archetypally effective - and willing to be strange if it suits the film - to me.
That, dear reader, means I was freaked out more than once during the course of The Pact, which is the sort of compliment I can't give many horror films.
Sunday, June 24, 2018
On the Border (1998)
Warning: I do vaguely discuss some of the film’s plot twists!
A couple of years after an involvement in a bank heist gone wrong, Jake Barnes (Casper Van Dien) is working as a bank guard in a tiny town on the US side of the US/Mexican border. He’s not leading a boring life, though, because he spends his free time having an affair with Rosa (Rochelle Swanson), the wife of his very sweaty boss Ed (Daniel Baldwin). To make matters more interesting, the couple is planning on ripping off the bank in a couple of days, for while there’s usually little worth the risk of robbing it inside, this coming Saturday, there will be a whole load of mafia money locked up in there.
There are – of course – complications. For one, Ed’s gotten the idea Rosa is indeed cheating on him and wants Jake to find out who it is. As it will turn out, Jake and Rosa aren’t the only ones who want that sweet sweet mafia money, either. One Barry Montana (Bryan Brown), probably the guy for whom the phrase “toxic masculinity” was termed, is rather interested in the money too. Barry sics his private slave Kristen (Camilla Overbye Roos) on Jake to seduce him and convince him to partner up for the robbery.
Jake does realize that Kristen’s supposed to be a honey pot, yet he still feels drawn to her, as she seems to be to him. She does, after all, have a probably perfectly true horrible story about her being sold to Barry to tell, and seems to only want to get away from the arsehole and out of the life. Because that’s not trouble enough for one film, Jake’s former partner in the old heist that worked out very badly indeed, a completely crazy person called Sykes (Bentley Mitchum), is lurking around the plot’s edges, trying to get an angle. And here I thought robbing a bank was easy.
Going by the IMDB, Bob Misiorowski’s sleazy, pulpy little neo noir is a TV movie, though going by the filming style and the rather large amount of nudity and sex in it, it must have been made for HBO, Cinemax, or Showtime. It’s a proper neo noir (though one with a genre-atypical ending), however, the sexy bits not being the only important parts of the film, unlike in the neo noir’s sleazier little sister, the erotic cable TV thriller. There is, however, indeed a lot more sex and nudity in this one than it would strictly need for its plot. It is pretty much equal opportunity nudity, though, so there’s quite a bit of Van Dien’s qualities in addition to the female nudity on display, too.
I suspect one’s liking for On the Border will have a lot to do with one’s tolerance for films that attempt to include basically all the tropes and clichés of a given genre, for broad acting, as well as for Caspar Van Dien’s sex face, the last being not pretty. This is not what anyone would call an intelligently constructed thriller, rather it is one that just heaps complications and plot threads on its poor protagonist, half of which will acquire stupid yet also highly entertaining twist in the final ten minutes. It’s the “throw as much as possible at the audience, logic be damned” approach, something which doesn’t generally end in films that make much sense. But then I’m a bit of a sucker for simple stories made absurdly complicated, as I am for film that wallow in genre tropes as much as this one does. Sometimes, it’s simply enjoyable to watch a dance you know by heart even though its steps are obfuscated by a whole load of weird hand gestures and mumbling.
Even better, Misiorowski actually gets around to twisting some of the genre tropes of the neo noir, sometimes even in fun ways. So the horrible fake accent you roll your eyes over does indeed turn out to be fake, one of the film’s two femme fatales (why have one when you can have to in a film, right?) isn’t actually one, and the film’s solution does use the general way movies tend to side-line their Mexican characters for a little surprise. Now, before anyone thinks too much of these elements, they are still embedded in a whole lot of sleaze and violence. As I like it.
It would be terribly remiss of me if I ended this without mentioning On the Border’s fine bunch of caricature villains. I can’t imagine living a life where one wouldn’t enjoy a pretty paunchy Daniel Baldwin sweating and being sleazy towards his wife and prostitutes and babbling nonsense about simple being stupid. Or Bryan Brown’s lovely portrayal of a perfect caricature of a vile man (without the Australian accent, I’d put a Trump joke right here). Or how Bentley Mitchum’s minor villain is all twitchiness, verbal tics and drug-fuelled craziness, just one step away from becoming a circus geek.
On the Border is the neo noir interpreted as a sleazy, fun low budget movie, and even though that is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, it sure is mine.
A couple of years after an involvement in a bank heist gone wrong, Jake Barnes (Casper Van Dien) is working as a bank guard in a tiny town on the US side of the US/Mexican border. He’s not leading a boring life, though, because he spends his free time having an affair with Rosa (Rochelle Swanson), the wife of his very sweaty boss Ed (Daniel Baldwin). To make matters more interesting, the couple is planning on ripping off the bank in a couple of days, for while there’s usually little worth the risk of robbing it inside, this coming Saturday, there will be a whole load of mafia money locked up in there.
There are – of course – complications. For one, Ed’s gotten the idea Rosa is indeed cheating on him and wants Jake to find out who it is. As it will turn out, Jake and Rosa aren’t the only ones who want that sweet sweet mafia money, either. One Barry Montana (Bryan Brown), probably the guy for whom the phrase “toxic masculinity” was termed, is rather interested in the money too. Barry sics his private slave Kristen (Camilla Overbye Roos) on Jake to seduce him and convince him to partner up for the robbery.
Jake does realize that Kristen’s supposed to be a honey pot, yet he still feels drawn to her, as she seems to be to him. She does, after all, have a probably perfectly true horrible story about her being sold to Barry to tell, and seems to only want to get away from the arsehole and out of the life. Because that’s not trouble enough for one film, Jake’s former partner in the old heist that worked out very badly indeed, a completely crazy person called Sykes (Bentley Mitchum), is lurking around the plot’s edges, trying to get an angle. And here I thought robbing a bank was easy.
Going by the IMDB, Bob Misiorowski’s sleazy, pulpy little neo noir is a TV movie, though going by the filming style and the rather large amount of nudity and sex in it, it must have been made for HBO, Cinemax, or Showtime. It’s a proper neo noir (though one with a genre-atypical ending), however, the sexy bits not being the only important parts of the film, unlike in the neo noir’s sleazier little sister, the erotic cable TV thriller. There is, however, indeed a lot more sex and nudity in this one than it would strictly need for its plot. It is pretty much equal opportunity nudity, though, so there’s quite a bit of Van Dien’s qualities in addition to the female nudity on display, too.
I suspect one’s liking for On the Border will have a lot to do with one’s tolerance for films that attempt to include basically all the tropes and clichés of a given genre, for broad acting, as well as for Caspar Van Dien’s sex face, the last being not pretty. This is not what anyone would call an intelligently constructed thriller, rather it is one that just heaps complications and plot threads on its poor protagonist, half of which will acquire stupid yet also highly entertaining twist in the final ten minutes. It’s the “throw as much as possible at the audience, logic be damned” approach, something which doesn’t generally end in films that make much sense. But then I’m a bit of a sucker for simple stories made absurdly complicated, as I am for film that wallow in genre tropes as much as this one does. Sometimes, it’s simply enjoyable to watch a dance you know by heart even though its steps are obfuscated by a whole load of weird hand gestures and mumbling.
Even better, Misiorowski actually gets around to twisting some of the genre tropes of the neo noir, sometimes even in fun ways. So the horrible fake accent you roll your eyes over does indeed turn out to be fake, one of the film’s two femme fatales (why have one when you can have to in a film, right?) isn’t actually one, and the film’s solution does use the general way movies tend to side-line their Mexican characters for a little surprise. Now, before anyone thinks too much of these elements, they are still embedded in a whole lot of sleaze and violence. As I like it.
It would be terribly remiss of me if I ended this without mentioning On the Border’s fine bunch of caricature villains. I can’t imagine living a life where one wouldn’t enjoy a pretty paunchy Daniel Baldwin sweating and being sleazy towards his wife and prostitutes and babbling nonsense about simple being stupid. Or Bryan Brown’s lovely portrayal of a perfect caricature of a vile man (without the Australian accent, I’d put a Trump joke right here). Or how Bentley Mitchum’s minor villain is all twitchiness, verbal tics and drug-fuelled craziness, just one step away from becoming a circus geek.
On the Border is the neo noir interpreted as a sleazy, fun low budget movie, and even though that is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, it sure is mine.
Saturday, November 16, 2013
SyFy vs. The Mynd: Slayer (2006)
This is another one of those independently produced films that landed itself a SciFi Channel premiere, and like a much higher percentage of those films than of the ones SciFi/SyFy had an actual hand in making, it's pretty bad, and not even in a relatively entertaining manner. Yes, I just implied that SyFy Original Movies are often actually pretty good.
Anyway, this one finds Casper van Dien as the action movie hero name carrying US soldier Hawk (no relation to the protagonist of Dragon Age II, who is a girl), traipsing through the jungle of a Central American nation to help out with the local vampire problem, and rescue his ex-wife who left him because of an earlier vampire encounter he and his men had in the same area. He has to fight vampires played by Latino actors and Ray Park, all doing white boy kung fu, as well as his freshly turned former best friend Kevin Grevioux whose acting approach is best described as "has a deep voice", while being the worst fearless vampire slayer ever. Lynda Carter and Danny Trejo pop in for a few scenes, and not much else of interest happens.
Not surprisingly, the "action" of this action horror piece is rather on the lame side, with director Kevin VanHook never getting a bead on how to make his vampires look physically threatening instead of just silly when they do random acrobatics and snarl like cute little pooches. It's also all rather repetitive, too, for no single vampire attack or fight ever adds up to even a minor set piece, or even reaches the levels of mild craziness of your most minor Italian jungle action movie. For the first two or three action scenes, this visible cluelessness is rather charming but the film quickly reaches the point of monotony.
This impression is further exacerbated by a weak script that wastes its more interesting ideas (who knew vampires are caused by the Fountain of Youth Ponce de Leon was looking for?) on an aside or two and doesn't even attempt to do anything with about a dozen opportunities to at least grab itself a theme like a real movie. Of course, Slayer is a movie that seems to miss about five transitional and expository scenes that would at least have helped to make it feel less random and not quite as unnecessarily disjointed.
But hey, Danny Trejo smiles a few times.
Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,syfy vs the mynd,in short,kevin vanhook,casper van dien,kevin grevioux,danny trejo,lynda carter,horror,action
Friday, November 9, 2012
On WTF: The Pact (2012)
One of the true pleasures in horror of the last decade or so for me has been a resurgence in tales of ghosts and hauntings. Sure, not all of these films are great, but regularly, one will stumble upon a fantastic example of the sub-genre.
Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,horror,nicholas mccarthy,caity lotz,casper van dien,other places
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)