A Movie a Day 2: Movie Harder

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They Live (1988)

Aliens are here to secretly take over the planet and make us obey and consume. Rowdy Roddy Piper is here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. Keith David can't believe any of this voodoo BS. David Keith is angry about not being in this movie.

Despite my psychotic love for The Thing, I'm not really up on my John Carpenter. I've seen Halloween, Escape from New York, Escape from L.A., and parts of Memoirs of an Invisible Man, but that's it. I haven't seen Dark Star, Assault on Precinct 13, The Fog, Christine, Starman, Big Trouble in Little China, Prince of Darkness, In the Mouth of Madness, Village of the Damned, or Vampires.

I've set out to take care of that problem, and I started today with They Live. It's probably most well-known for the terrific fight scene between Piper and David (which was parodied in the South Park episode "Cripple Fight" when Timmy fought Jimmy), but the whole movie's good.

Once again I find myself with very little to write about because there's nothing to complain about. That's the problem with this stupid "movie a day" idea. If I watch a good movie, I have no idea what to write about it, because there's nothing to complain about and I suck at describing why a good movie is good. But if I watch a bad movie, I'll spend an hour and a half wishing I was watching something good and hating myself for thinking it was a good idea to spend my free time watching a movie every goddamned day.

Here, look at the bunny.

I'm at a loss here, staring at my computer screen, wondering what the hell to type. And that's a good thing, because it's much harder for me to describe why I like a movie than to describe why I dislike one. The Thing is not as good as the 1982 version, but it's kind of amazing how successful it is at capturing what made it so good: the combination of paranoia and social decay with grisly, Lovecraftian creature design. (Flamethrowers, too. They make everything better.) You rarely see horror movies like this anymore, and it's a f***ing miracle that we occasionally get something like this and The Mist. This movie is so much better than any Saw or Hostel or Paranormal Activity movie, and better than the overrated Dawn of the Dead remake that all I can do is laugh at the 33% rating it has on Rotten Tomatoes.

Hear, hear ! ! Better to aim high and miss ! ! Horror has become gore by the bucketful.

^ I started reading that and thought, "What the... that's what I wrote! Oh." You just didn't use a quote tag.

Anyway, I wouldn't say The Thing 2011 aimed high and missed, it aimed decent and hit. It wasn't even trying to be as good as the 1982 film because it knew it would never be able to match it. It just tried to be a good horror film and in my opinion, it succeeded.

Frankenstein (2004) Part 1 of 2

This doesn't sound too promising. It's a made-for-TV movie from the Hallmark Channel and it's three hours long. Surprisingly, it's actually pretty good. At least the first half is good. I'm counting the first half as a movie because sitting through three hours of any movie is borderline torture for me, no matter how good it is. The second half will come later. So far, this is the most faithful Frankenstein adaptation I've seen, even more faithful than Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Alec Newman is good as Victor Fronkenshteen, Luke Goss is good as the creature, and William Hurt's fake German accent is hilarious. The only real problem, aside from that accent, is that the creature isn't nearly as repulsive as he's supposed to be. He looks like an Abercrombie & Fitch model who spent a little too much time in a tanning bed and burned his skin a little bit. It doesn't make sense when he sees his reflection for the first time and seems disgusted by it, and the people who act horrified by him and attack him only do it because the script says they're supposed to. Still, it's holding my interest.

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

I don't know. Maybe I wasn't in the right mood. Maybe it's one of those movies you have to see twice to appreciate. But I just didn't get much out of this one. A lot of people love this movie, and I've even heard some of them call it John Carpenter's best. Of the six that I've now seen, it's by far the worst. I was told it was a comedy, but I didn't find any of it funny or even recognize what was supposed to be funny, and some of the acting is embarrassing. This is probably the worst performance I've ever seen from Kurt Russell. It's not a complete waste, since the action scenes aren't bad, the special effects are terrific, and the Chinese actors are much better than the Americans, but I was glad when it was over. I'll give it another chance in the future.

The Thing (1982)

Since I had practically nothing to say the last time I watched this, I decided to take notes this time.

00:03:40 - For a DVD from 2004, this looks fantastic on an HDTV.

00:03:45 - The beginning of this movie matches up so perfectly with the ending of the 2011 prequel that I'm wondering if they used some of this footage in that movie.

00:08:12 - I wonder if the dialogue in this scene was redubbed when the movie was released in Norway, because if you speak Norwegian, it spoils the plot for you. The man who's shooting at the dog is yelling, "Get the hell away! It's not a dog! It's a thing! It's imitating a dog! It's not real! Get away, idiots!"

00:09:11 - He gets shot in the leg, says he's alright, and he's handed a bottle of whiskey and starts drinking from it. This movie is awesome.

00:11:01 - Wilford Brimley just looks weird without a mustache.

00:13:16 - Sweden, Norway, same sh*t.

00:14:35 - In this movie, we hear Stevie Wonder's "Superstition." In the prequel, we hear Men at Work's "Who Can It Be Now?"

00:15:35 - Whoever trained this dog deserves an award. He's one of the best actors in the movie. I hope they gave him lots of good puppy chow and b*****s.

00:18:47 - It's fun to watch the Americans inspecting the remains of the Norwegian camp after seeing the prequel. The holes blown in the walls, the axe lodged in the door, the guy sitting in the chair who cut his throat, the remains of the two-faced monster lying outside, you see it all happen in that movie. Again, they match up perfectly. Amazing, considering they were made 29 years apart.

00:27:48 - Seriously, how is the dog that good? There's something perfectly strange about him, something too human. Even someone who has no idea what the movie is about would know that something is seriously wrong here.

00:29:03 - What the hell is the Thing spraying on the dogs here? It reminds me of the way that Mothra sprays silk on her enemies in the Godzilla movies.

00:34:34 - One of my favorite lines: "This, for instance. That's not dog. It's imitation." He sounds like he's casually pointing out to a friend that her handbag isn't real leather.

00:37:37 - How many people other than Kurt Russell can wear that hat without looking completely ridiculous?

00:42:37 - "Probability that one or more team members may be infected by intruder organism: 75%" Is Blair typing this, or does his computer just have an artificial intelligence that's amazing for 1982?

00:47:59 - Ambulances should use the sound that the Things make. People would get the f**k out of the way pretty fast.

00:53:57 - "Ahhhhhhhhhhllllll keel yoo!"

00:55:26 - Wilford Brimley is getting a syringe in the arm during this scene. I've seen this movie roughly a dozen times, and I can't believe it's taken me this long to think of the word "diabeetus" while watching it.

01:06:39 - "ALRIGHTCUTTHEBULLSHIT!"

01:17:18 - Nice touch here. Palmer must be a Thing at this point, but he still points out to the others that the Norris Thing is getting away, because it's something a human would do.

01:21:25 - Critics are usually full of sh*t when they claim that a movie contains a metaphor for something, but this scene makes it clear that there's something to the claim that there's an AIDS subtext. Everyone who's human must know they're human, but they still breathe a huge sigh of relief when the blood test clears them.

01:23:24 - Does the Thing have some kind of anti-gravity skills? I always wondered how Palmer gets on the ceiling in this scene.

01:23:35 - There's no music in this scene, just the screaming and chaos of everything that's happening. It reminds me of a very similar movie, The Mist. That one has no music at all, except at the very end.

01:36:34 - I'm surprised that not one, but two black guys made it this long.

01:38:24 - One thing the prequel has over this movie is monster agility. The puppets they were using in 1982 couldn't really move around all that much, but the CGI monsters in the 2011 film actually get to chase people around.

01:38:29 - "Yeah, well F**K YOU TOO."

01:42:15 - "Starring A. Wilford Brimley as Blair." Not THE Wilford Brimley, just A Wilford Brimley.

The Fog (1980)

Not to be confused with The Mist, The Fog is about a misty mist that rolls into town, and there are monsters in the mist that will kill you, mister.

Good lord, this is dull. I don't like it when critics use words like "misstep" and "misfire," but it certainly applies here. Two years earlier, John Carpenter made Halloween. One year later, he made Escape from New York. Two years later, he made The Thing. How is that even possible? You would never expect that kind of talent after seeing The Fog.

The remake from 2005 got horrible reviews, but it's hard to imagine it being much worse than this. I saw it for free and I want my money back. I've read that JC isn't too proud of this movie, and it's easy to see why. That's John Carpenter, not Jesus Christ, but Jesus told me that he hates it too. He also told me that he wants me to kill the Pope. No idea what that's all about.

Week 2 ended yesterday but I guess I forgot to post the recap. Has it only been a week since I watched The Fatal Hour? It feels like two months ago. Time flies when you're having fun. Anyway, here it is: The Thing from Another World (1951), The Third Man (1949), The Thing (1982), The Thing (2011), The Lost World (1925), They Live (1988), Frankenstein (2004, Part 1 of 2), Big Trouble in Little China (1986), The Thing (1982), The Fog (1980)

Frankenstein (2004) Part 2 of 2

A lot of people want the film adaptations of their favorite books to be as faithful as possible, but adaptations this faithful usually just make me feel like I'm wasting my time. This one is at its most interesting when it makes some changes. Still, it's so well acted, written, and directed, much better than what you would expect from a movie made for the Hallmark Channel, that it didn't even bother me that the creature sounds like Zac Efron when he speaks. The scene in which the creature confronts Victor and they bounce angry dialogue off each other is terrific, much better than the embarrassing version from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Donald Sutherland is so good that it doesn't even matter that he was probably drunk when he filmed this.

Dark Prince: The True Story of Dracula (2000)

I started this "movie a day" thing so that I would feel like I was doing something better with my time than watching YouTube videos of cats vomiting, but movies like this make me feel like that would be more productive.

It's the story of Vlad the Impaler, the real-life man who the fictional Count Dracula is very loosely based on. I knew I was in for trouble when I saw that Peter Weller was in it but the filmmakers didn't have the good sense to cast him as Dracula. It also wasn't a good sign that Roger Daltrey was in the cast. (Yes, the singer from The Who.) Vlad is played by a guy who the Internet Movie Database tells me also played Dracula in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and that's precisely where he looks like he belongs.

I gave up 20 minutes into it. Buffy Boy and Daltrey are awful and Weller is embarrassing himself. I shouldn't have bothered with a movie from the director of Halloween 6 and Hellraiser IV, but the 2004 Frankenstein gave me false hope that made-for-TV movies like this could be good. I should report this to YouTube as offensive content.

The Thing (1982)

A few weeks ago I was watching almost nothing but Sherlock Holmes movies, and now I'm here watching The Thing repeatedly. My obsessions go in phases. What will it be next month? I'll probably be into nothing but Philip K. Dick again, then another round of Sherlock Holmes, then the DVD of The Thing 2011 should be out and all this crap will start over again.

Anyway. I've had the DVD of The Thing 1982 forever but I had never listened to the commentary because most DVD commentaries are f***ing boring, but I read some reviews insisting that it's one of the best commentaries ever and had to try it. The reviews were right. John Carpenter and Kurt Russell sound like they're having a blast watching the movie, and they have the kind of behind the scenes information to share that's interesting for psychotic fans like me. Carpenter refers to "this Laserdisc," which gives you an idea of how old the commentary is.

The Thing: Terror Takes Shape (1998)

It's a shame that there aren't more versions of The Thing. At least when I'm going on a Sherlock Holmes binge, I have countless books and movies available to read and watch. On the other hand, here's how much Thing material there is:

* Who Goes There? (1938) - the original short novel
* The Thing from Another World (1951) - a movie I don't like
* The Thing (1982) and all the special features on the DVD
* The Thing (2011) - a movie that isn't on DVD yet
* a video game I don't care about
* some comic books I don't care about
* an X-Files episode I don't care about

This is an 80-minute documentary on the Thing 1982 DVD that I had watched before, but as I made clear above, I don't have much to feed my Thing obsession right now, so I'm just doing things over and over again like an Alzheimer's patient. It's a good documentary but you won't care about it unless you're a huge fan of the movie like me.

Did you know that you can buy this DVD for five bucks on Amazon right now? I figured they would jack up the price because of the new movie. Speaking of which, Amazon lists it as the #5 bestseller in Science Fiction, the #7 bestseller in Horror, and the #4 bestseller in Documentary. One of those doesn't make any sense at all. See if you can guess which.

The Giant Gila Monster (1959)

I guess I still have a place in my heart for Godzilla movies, but there's a reason I don't really watch them any more. At least half of the running time of most Godzilla movies is wasted on a bunch of BS that has nothing at all to do with the monster or monsters. That's fine if the humans have action scenes of their own like in Godzilla: Final Wars or if the monster is a continuous threat even when it's not on the screen like in the original 1954 film, but you can skip the first three quarters of most Godzilla movies without missing much. They're like the Home Alone movies, where you're really just waiting for the final quarter for the kid to rig the house with traps for the burglars to stumble into.

The Giant Gila Monster is the same kind of stupid crap. I turned it off about halfway through, and I'm amazed that I made it that long. I should have turned it off earlier when the main character was dancing with his friends, or later when he was giving a drunk driver a tow, or later when he's getting lectured by a policeman about replacing his headlights, but it wasn't until we meet his little crippled sister and her Forrest Gump leg braces and he starts singing to her that I gave up any hope of this ever being worth my time.

I should have known sooner, since the glimpses we see of the monster are so f**king pathetic. It's bad enough that they just filmed a real gila monster walking around in the desert so there's no sense of scale to let us know how giant it is, but no attempt seems to have been made at any kind of illusion of it interacting with anything. There are no composite shots of humans standing next to the monster or anything like that. We just see the monster, a car driving along, the driver screams and the car veers off the road. Maybe it got better later in the movie, but I don't give enough of a sh*t to stick around and find out.

Normally when I give up on a movie, I watch something else to make up for it, but f**k that. It's not like I'm getting paid for doing this.

Highlander II: The Quickening (1991)

Highlander has got to be the most mishandled series in film history. The first movie couldn't have a sequel because the ending was so final. The immortals fought each other over the centuries until Connor MacLeod was the last one, and he became mortal. It was over. But there could have been endless prequels, right?

Instead, we got five sequels and three TV shows that bent over backwards to work their way around the ending of the first movie. Most of them just ignored that ending, but Highlander II got creative in its stupidity. You see, the immortals are actually alien outcasts from another planet, and when some new immortals visit Earth, Connor regains his immortality, and apparently dead people can be brought back to life just by calling their names, and...

Amazing, huh? All they had to do was make a prequel that took place before 1986, but they came up with this silly BS instead. Four years after releasing Highlander II, the filmmakers realized how badly they f**ked up and released Highlander 2: Renegade Version, which is the version I watched, but all it does is change the alien explanation by instead saying that the immortals came from Earth a long time ago. Which is sort of like putting a Band Aid on that guy in Rambo 4 whose body literally exploded when Stallone shot him with that giant gun. Highlander II is not only f**ked, it's un-unf**kable. You can't unf**k it, not with any amount of editing.

That's because no matter what you do to fix the story, it'll still suck because every aspect of it is so horrible. The action scenes are poorly staged and edited, and the acting is so embarrassing that you have to see it to believe it. Seriously, this is Manos: The Hands of Fate bad acting. I think I actually heard my TV set crying and asking me why I was doing this to it. Also, scenes just pop out at random, like when two characters f**k in an alley about five minutes after meeting for the first time. And you don't even get good scenery since the whole thing takes place in the future and the city design is completely ripped off from Blade Runner. It's amazing to think that this movie was made by the same director who made the original Highlander.

Amazingly, they made more Highlander sequels after this. Four more movies and three TV shows. They all suck. I love the first movie and own the Director's Cut DVD but I can't even call myself a Highlander fan because that would imply that I like at least some of the stuff that came after, and I don't. It's like Star Wars, but instead of three good movies and a bunch of bad ones, there's only one good movie and a bunch of bad ones. Highlander II is sh*t. Highlander: The Series is sh*t. Highlander: Endgame is sh*t. Highlander: The Source is sh*t. I haven't seen Highlander III or Highlander: The Raven or Highlander: The Animated Series but they're probably sh*t. (Yes, there's an animated series for kids based on a movie about immortals who can only kill each other by decapitation.)

I've been accused more than once on these forums of ripping off the Angry Video Game Nerd, but it's not like I'm trying to be like that guy. I had never even heard of him the first time I was accused of ripping him off. He and I just seem to have a similar sense of humor and tendency to f**king curse way too f**king much. However, since I can't think of anything else to say about this dumpster fire of a movie, I'm going to deliberately rip him off for the first time by leaving you with this quote, which perfectly sums up how I feel about it: "It sucking f**ks, it f**king sucks, it f**king blows, it's a piece of sh*t, and I don't like it."

Highlander (1986)

Highlander II sucked my ass so hard that I'm still having trouble sitting down. I had to call a specialist and get one of those hemorrhoid pillows. I wanted to wash the bad taste out of my mouth by watching the original Highlander, which I hadn't seen in a long time. The sequels are so horrible, the name Highlander so irrevocably associated with crap, that it's easy to forget how good the first movie is. Sure enough, I found my Director's Cut DVD stuffed in the back of the TV cabinet, back with The Blair Witch Project and other DVDs I feel ashamed to own, as if my subconscious instantly ruled out the possibility of anything with the name Highlander being any good that I automatically shoved it back there the last time I dusted out the cabinet.

The plot is some of the greatest nonsense to ever come out of the 80s: a group of immortals who can only die via decapitation fight each other with swords over the centuries for some vaguely defined "prize," which will be awarded to the last immortal left. "There can be only one," and all that. None of it's ever explained. When Christopher Lambert asks Sean Connery what it's all about, Sean says: "Why does the sun come up? Or are the stars just pin holes in the curtain of night? Who knows?" It's the screenwriter's way of saying, "F**k you, that's why."

Everything's awesome. The actors are great. Sean Connery is awesome as always, cool and suave and probably drunk, and anyone who thinks that Christopher Lambert is a bad actor should watch this movie. (Better yet, they should compare his performance here with the one he gives in Highlander II.) The Queen soundtrack is fantastic. The action scenes kick ass. The flashbacks are great. The humor is great. I have nothing bad to say about this movie. What the hell am I supposed to type? How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Go watch Highlander if you haven't seen it. Amazon is selling the DVD for $7.45 and the Blu-ray for $10.69. What were you planning on buying next? Probably Transformers 3 or Pirates 4? Have some dignity, man.

The Sign of Four (1932)

I have a book about Sherlock Holmes movies which claims that when making the films starring Arthur Wontner, they rarely did retakes. If takes like the one pictured below made it into the movie, I'd love to see one of the takes they considered too f**ked up to use.



There are four Holmes movies starring Wontner (there were five, but one of them is lost), and they all have the same strength and weaknesses. That's strength singular, not plural, because Wontner is pretty much the only good thing about them. He's a terrific Holmes, even though he was about two decades too old to be playing the part, but he was always much better than his material. These movies are so cheap that calling them b-movies would be an insult to the Holmes b-movies that Basil Rathbone made in the 1940s, the writing always managed to turn whatever story was being adapted into an incomprehensible mess, and good luck finding an actor other than Wontner who isn't completely embarrassing.

The movie's only 75 minutes but it feels longer than The Godfather Part II. Aside from Wontner, the only good thing I can say about it is that it manages to get some creepy atmosphere out of the villain and his peg leg. There's a good scene in which someone hears a tapping sound and he thinks the villain is coming to kill him, and something completely mundane turns out to be making the noise. But everything else sucks. Wontner's co-stars are terrible, every one of them. There are action scenes but they're ruined by the baffling decision to speed up the film, making everything look like a Benny Hill sketch.

The script sucks. It's at its best when it's sticking close to the book, but when it makes changes, everything goes to hell. There's a character who isn't in the book, an escaped convict who disguises himself by getting tattoos all over his body. "Nobody will recognize me," he says. Why not? The tattoos don't cover his face, and he works in public in a circus sideshow. Also, the poison dart was in the book, but the movie explains that it was made from a tattoo needle, so all Holmes and Watson have to do is look for the tattooed man who's displaying his tattooed body in public, along with his uncovered face. I normally criticize adaptations for sticking too close to the book, but knowing what kind of stupid crap the screenwriter added to the story, sticking as close to the book as possible is exactly what he should have been doing.

And why the hell do so many of these early Holmes films arrange the events in chronological order? Those flashbacks in the books were flashbacks for a reason. Letting the audience know the who, why, and how of the crime before we're even introduced to Holmes makes the second half of the story incredibly tedious since we're waiting for him to discover what we already know. Even if you already know the story like the back of your hand like I do, it just doesn't make a satisfying narrative.

I've seen four filmed versions of this story. The only thing keeping me from calling this the worst is that awful animated version from 1983 with Peter O'Toole. The 1968 version with Peter Cushing is a little better, but the only really good one is the 1987 version with Jeremy Brett. I would recommend that one even to someone who doesn't give a crap about Holmes.

By the way, that title pisses me off. The book was first titled The Sign of the Four, not The Sign of Four, but most editions of the book and pretty much every movie based on it use the four-word title. The five-word version sounds better, doesn't it?

I think that's the end of Week 3. I think this is a new low record. Only eight movies, two of them I gave up on, and one of them was just the second half of a three-hour movie. Oh well, f**k it. Here's the recap: Frankenstein (2004, Part 2 of 2), Dark Prince: The True Story of Dracula (2000, gave up), The Thing (1982), The Thing: Terror Takes Shape (1998), The Giant Gila Monster (1959, gave up), Highlander II: The Quickening (1991), Highlander (1986), The Sign of Four (1932)

The movie Legacy is pretty awesome