A Movie a Day 2: Movie Harder

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Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962)

I once heard a comedian say, "Sometimes I wish I grew up in the 60s so I could know what the f**k was going on." Maybe if I had grown up in the 60s, I would have known why someone thought it was a good idea to make a Sherlock Holmes movie with a jazz soundtrack. Or why they hired Christopher Lee, a great actor with a wonderfully distinct voice, to play Holmes, only to dub his voice with someone who belongs in an Ed Wood movie. Or how Terence Fisher could have possibly directed such a dull movie. This is the guy responsible for Horror of Dracula, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, The Curse of Frankenstein, and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, not to mention the 1959 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is one of the best Sherlock Holmes movies ever made. Conclusion: Everyone was on drugs.

God damn, Jory. Your reviews are incredibly entertaining.

Glad someone's enjoying it, because most of these movies make me want to die.

Better than going back to alcoholism, I suppose.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

The 1978 version is better for one reason. This version takes place in a small town, and the characters will be safe as long as they can get to the city and warn people. In the remake, the aliens invade the city, so the characters are f*cked no matter where they go. My favorite horror movies are the ones with an "abandon all hope ye who enter" tone, because it's, you know, horrible. Hope is for The Shawshank Redemption. This is one of the many reasons I prefer the 1982 version of The Thing over the 1951 version. In the original, the Thing is defeated with minimal casualties. In the remake, there are two possible outcomes: either all the characters die, or the Thing gets off Antarctica and the entire population of the Earth dies. The 50s were a more optimistic time, and the villain always had to be defeated. A couple of decades later, everyone was more pessimistic, and movies adopted that attitude. This attitude may not have made the world a better place, but it made for better horror movies.

In summary:

1950s: We shall prevail!

1960s, 70s, 80s: YOU'RE ALL F*CKED. EVERYONE IS GOING TO DIE.

Which tone do you consider more effective in a horror film?

But aside from that, this is still a very good movie. As far as 1950s sci-fi and horror films go, it's a lot closer to The War of the Worlds and the original Godzilla than certain overrated "classics" like The Thing from Another World and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Those movies waste your time with a bunch of crap that has nothing to do with anything (anyone want some coffee?) when they should be busy building tension. Film critics love to preach about how "less is more," how keeping the monster off-screen builds tension, but that's only true if the characters are treating the unseen monster as a genuine threat. The Thing from Another World is a total failure in that regard (anyone want some coffee?) but Invasion of the Body Snatchers doesn't f*ck around. It's only 80 minutes long but it uses every one of them effectively. All of the actors are good and there are plenty of good scenes that aren't in the remake.

Random thoughts:

* According to Wikipedia, the studio executives forced the optimistic ending upon the director. He should have told them to go f*ck themselves. The movie would have ended perfectly five minutes earlier, when it's assumed that the aliens have already made it to the city and it's too late.

* Film critics tend to over-analyze everything and seem to think that every movie made in the 50s features some kind of metaphor for communism, and this one's no different. Every critic in the world will tell you that the body snatchers are metaphors for commies. They should watch the interview on the DVD with Kevin McCarthy, who plays the main character in this version. He says that he never thought there was any political subtext in the film. The interviewer mentions that Jack Finney, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, also said there was no subtext in the story.

* Some of the dialogue in the movie seems a bit racy for 1956. "Is this an example of your bedside manner?" "No ma'am, that comes later."

* When a young boy leaves his doctor's office, McCarthy slaps him on the ass. A more innocent time indeed.

Cloverfield (2008)

It's on days like this that the decision to watch a movie every day seems like a poor one. About two hours ago, I realized that I hadn't watched one today, and I didn't really want to. So I just grabbed a DVD off the shelf, something I knew was short. Cloverfield is about an hour and 15 minutes without the credits.

It's good. It does a good job of showing just how horrifying it would be if you were one of those little dots that we always see running around at the bottom of the screen in Godzilla movies, and I like how the characters rise to the occasion to get to one of their injured friends instead of just bickering amongst themselves and arguing about how it would be stupid to do this or that. Can't anyone be heroic in movies anymore? Everyone has to be a cowardly douche these days. Cloverfield isn't like that, so thanks, people who made Cloverfield. You did us a solid there.

The only real problem is that the first 20 minutes are a waste of time. It's all setup to introduce us to the characters, but it turns out to be unnecessary since there are lots of good little character moments sprinkled throughout the rest of the movie. That's the best thing about this movie, the little details. My personal favorite is when the characters encounter a horse pulling a driverless carriage through the streets.

I hated watching this. It's a good movie and I like it, but I didn't even want to watch something tonight. Why am I doing this? Leave me alone.

Encounters at the End of the World (2007)

I've got a problem. I have a fascination with Antarctica, but I hate penguins. Or rather, I hate the fact that seemingly every movie about Antarctica focuses on penguins. The fact that they take place in Antarctica is just a coincidence of nature. Isn't anyone interested in exploring the continent? If you're going to travel thousands of miles to film in Antarctica, don't just show me something I can see at the zoo. I want to see what life is like for the people who live and work at the research stations, and the people who go outside once in awhile to study something other than penguin sh*t. So it's good to see a movie like Encounters at the End of the World, an Antarctica movie that focuses less on animals and more on the land and the people who inhabit it.

Also, it was directed by a total psychopath.

Werner Herzog is one of the most praised and respected filmmakers of all time. He's also completely insane. He made a documentary called Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe in which he boiled and ate a shoe after losing a bet. While filming his movie Fitzcarraldo, he made a small crew haul a ship that weighed 320 tons up a muddy hill. While filming Aguirre: The Wrath of God, he sat around getting drunk while his crew members almost drowned in a river. And this is just the stuff I know about. Someone will probably read this and e-mail me to let me know that he once put on a Bugs Bunny costume and f*cked a cow or something.

Encounters at the End of the World isn't exempt from Herzog's insanity. It starts about four minutes into the film, when his narration tells us that he wants to know why humans feel the need to put on masks and chase the bad guys, and why chimps don't ride goats for transportation.



It's this crazy narration that makes the movie gold. Herzog gets bored and impatient with the people he interviews and interrupts them. He complains about "tree huggers and whale huggers." He asks a scientist about gay penguins. (The scientist says he hasn't seen any gay penguins, but he mentions a kind of "penguin prostitution" that goes on.) It's too bad that there aren't more documentaries made by dangerous whackjobs.

But this would be a good movie even without the narration. We see some history about the exploration of Antarctica, explorations of ice caverns, an active volcano, and the oceans beneath the ice, newcomers going through mandatory survival school (wearing buckets on their heads to simulate whiteout conditions), and interviews with people who work at the McMurdo research station (which is more like a city than a facility; it has a radio station, bars, a bowling alley, yoga classes, and an ATM machine). The people there are a lot more interesting than the boring scientists you would expect. Each one has a story to tell; one woman claims to have "traveled from Ecuador to Lima, Peru in a sewer pipe" on the back of a truck. It's funny to learn that the people there love ice cream and get pissed when the machine breaks down, and they like to watch apocalyptic science fiction films. (I've read that The Thing is a favorite down there, but here they're seen watching Them.)

The only problem with the movie is that it's incredibly pretentious. Here's some actual dialogue from an interview with a scientist: "I'm actually adrift in the ocean, a vagabond floating in the ocean, and below my feet I can feel the rumble of the iceberg. I can feel the change, the cry of the iceberg as it's screeching and as it's bouncing off the seabed, as it's steering the ocean currents, as it's beginning to move north. I can feel that sound coming up through the bottoms of my feet and telling me that this iceberg is coming north. That's my dream." There's a lot of religious chanting music and Herzog talks about every action that takes place in Antarctica as if it's a holy experience, at one point describing divers putting on scuba gear as being "like priests preparing for mass." It makes you wonder why these people need buckets over their heads when they've got them shoved so far up their asses.

But I guess a movie sort of has a right to be pretentious when it's this good. It's probably the best recent documentary I've seen, even better than The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, but of course I'm biased because of the subject matter. Anyway, I would recommend it. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go call a penguin prostitute.

Last edited by Jory on 15 Nov 2011, 3:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The X-Files: Ice (1993)

I knew that there was an X-Files episode that was a rip-off of The Thing, but I wasn't interested enough in seeing it to waste a Netflix rental on it. Tonight I found a website that was streaming it and had nothing better to do, so I decided to finally see what it was like. I wasn't expecting much, since I hate most TV shows, but it's not bad. It's surprising just how much of a rip-off it is, right down to individual scenes, but it manages to have some good moments that aren't in any of the official Thing movies. Since they didn't really have a special effects budget, they rely mostly on the paranoia aspects of the story with characters turning on each other, and the actors do a good job with it. Especially Xander Berkeley, who's good in pretty much everything. The only real problem is that it sometimes spoils the mystery of who is and who isn't a Thing by showing us characters doing things that they wouldn't be doing if they were infected, like pointing a gun at the others without just killing them. And since in this version people aren't killed when they're taken over and can be cured later, it kind of sucks that they didn't bother to show us Mulder or Scully becoming a Thing. Still, not a bad way to spend 45 minutes. It's better than The Thing from Another World, that's for sure.

Parasite Eve (1997) Part 1 of 2

There's a Parasite Eve video game, but I don't know anything about it. What I know about the movie is that the first half is so f*cking boring and eventless that I decided to save the second half for tomorrow. It's like watching a reality TV show that takes place in real time. Here's the plot summary from the IMDb: "Toshiaki Nagashima is a biologist who is doing major research on mitochondria. When his beautiful young wife is tragically involved in a car accident which leaves her brain dead, in desperation he steals her liver from her body in order to recieve the mitochondria from it to resurrect his wife from the dead. The killer mitochondria takes the form of his assistant who then uses the biologist for the host of a terrifying new species that is threatening to take over the world." I'm halfway through the two-hour movie, and I've only gotten to the guy stealing the liver. So far it's mostly been a bunch of boring drama about the girl being braindead and her husband doesn't want to pull the plug but she's an organ donor and someone needs her kidney and WHO GIVES A F*CKING F*CK. None of this will have anything to do with anything, so what's the point? Start the movie where the plot starts, not an hour before it. I'll finish this tomorrow, but I don't expect it to be worth my time.

Parasite Eve (1997) Part 2 of 2

Did you know that there's a movie called Deafula? It's a Dracula movie filmed entirely in sign language. I wonder if there's a Semaphorula or Smoke Signula or Morse Codula. I wonder if the DVD has subtitles for the NOT hearing impaired. That would be quite a change. Anyway, I was planning on watching it soon, but I found a brief clip of it on YouTube, and it was so bad that I knew the novelty would wear off after about five minutes. Just knowing that it exists is more amusing than actually watching it.

Back to Parasite Eve. I wasn't planning on watching the second half until tomorrow, but I changed my mind and decided to get it out of the way tonight, because I was sure that I would hate it and I wanted the suffering to end as soon as possible. Surprisingly, I didn't hate the second half like I hated the first half. I understood the plot about as well as I understand Bjork's lyrics, but I was happy to see something actually happening this time. Everything in the first half that you need to know in the second could (and should) have been edited down to about five minutes. Maybe I was spoiled by Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which got the job done in 80 very efficient minutes, but Parasite Eve felt to me like a Twilight Zone episode stretched to two hours.

And hey, this ends Week 5. A Movie a Day 2 has officially lasted longer than A Movie a Day. How much longer will I last before calling it quits again and starting A Movie a Day 3 soon after? I'm certainly just as sick of this as I've ever been, but it gives me something to do. Anyway, recap: Ripley's Game (2002), The Thing from Another World (1951), Hawking (2004), Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Cloverfield (2008), Encounters at the End of the World (2007), The X-Files: Ice (1993), Parasite Eve (1997)

Alien (1979)

"What are my chances?"

"DOES NOT COMPUTE."

If you asked me to name the best horror movie ever made, the best I could do is call it a three-way tie between Alien, The Shining, and The Thing. The last one is my personal favorite, but I can't objectively call one of them better than the others. The fact that they were made within four years of each other is amazing. Oh, and Ridley Scott did Blade Runner three years after Alien, and John Carpenter did Halloween and Escape from New York right before The Thing. How did this happen? What a beautiful accident.

I have nothing to say about this movie that isn't just a bunch of gushing praise, so let's talk about rape instead. I'm always amused by the way that critics read way too much into movies and find metaphors that aren't really there, but apparently all the rape subtext was intended by the screenwriter. He says that the alien invading Kane's body is a metaphor for the "male fear of penetration" and "payback" for all the horror movies in which women are attacked by male monsters.

Maybe the fact that I'm gay has something to do with this, but I never thought it had anything to do with a male fear of penetration. Instead, I thought the alien was scary because the very idea of pregnancy is f*cking horrifying, whether that baby was planted there with or without your approval. If I was a woman and I wanted a kid, I'd be adopting, and not just because I don't like the idea of ushering a new life into an overpopulated world. "Excuse me, miss? Would you like a creature growing inside your body?" Eat sh*t and die, but thanks anyway.

I recently discovered that my cable company has On Demand movies available for free. I was going to watch this horror movie called The Strangers, but I shut it off when I saw that it had been "edited for time and content." Who the hell offers On Demand movies and edits them like they're being shown on basic cable? Good to know that I can watch a version of a horror movie about people being terrorized and tortured that's suitable for children. Can I also get an edited version of MILFs Like It Big 4? I wouldn't want my little kids seeing anything obscene.

Aliens (1986)

Aliens may be the best sequel ever made. You could argue that The Godfather Part II is a better film, but it's just average as a sequel since it doesn't do much to build on its predecessor. It's basically just an extension of what came before. At the end, nothing has really changed since the end of The Godfather. Nothing new was really even attempted. Aliens, on the other hand, is a real progression. Instead of just pouring more concrete on the foundation of Alien, it builds a new house on top of it. As much as I love Terminator 2, watching Aliens makes me wonder how James Cameron could have made such a leap forward when making a sequel to someone else's film while just rehashing the plot of The Terminator when making a sequel to one of his own. He also rehashed Aliens when he made Avatar, but that's another story entirely. A really bad story with terrible acting and writing. Aliens is different. It's damn near a perfect movie. It's kind of depressing to hear people talk about how "bad-ass" Avatar is only to discover that they've never seen Aliens. Damn kids. Get off my lawn.

Escape from New York (1981)

Of all the John Carpenter films I've seen, this is my second favorite after The Thing. Carpenter and Kurt Russell created one of the great iconic bad-ass action movie characters with Snake Plissken. F*ck Alien vs. Predator, f*ck Freddy vs. Jason, f*ck Monsters vs. Aliens, f*ck Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, and f*ck Kramer vs. Kramer. I wanna see Plissken vs. McClane. Are you telling me that we can't make that happen? Hollywood will finance a movie like Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel but they won't get Kurt Russell and Bruce Willis together? Are they insane in the membrane?

Anyway. Obviously I like watching movies this good, but it's bad news when I have to come back and write my little review, because I have nothing bad to say. I can't say something funny like "Marlee Matlin told me to turn this movie off because the dialogue was hurting her ears" or "the screenplay feels like it was written by a chimpanzee with Tourette's." All I can say is the acting is good, the writing is good, the action is good, the music is good, there's a good balance between humor and seriousness, etc. On the other hand, if I watch a sh***y movie like The Mad Monster, I have a lot to write about, but it destroys my soul to watch crap like that all the time. I can't even claim that I'm suffering for my art, because I'm not even getting paid to do this. And I think we can all agree that art is all about money, and that people should be judged only by their looks.

I think I might be stupid.

Last edited by Jory on 14 Nov 2011, 7:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958)

It! stars Tim Curry as a demonic clown who

No, wait.

It! stars a bunch of actors I've never heard of who battle a killer alien who stows away aboard their spaceship after they visit another planet. Sound familiar? Yep, It! has a reputation for being the movie that Alien ripped off. But it was The Thing from Another World that I was thinking of while I was watching It!, not Alien.

The two movies are practically identical: a humanoid monster who can't be killed with conventional weapons preys on a group of people in a remote location they can't escape. The monsters are about the same, they're both kept off-screen or in the shadows most of the time, and the characters hunt them down in about the same way.

But here's the difference. At one point in It!, one of the characters says, "Why is it so quiet? Why doesn't it attack?" At this point in The Thing from Another World, the characters were just sitting around joking with each other while a secretary asked them every five minutes if they wanted any coffee. A killer alien monster is on the loose and they seemingly couldn't care less. It only grabs their attention when it comes nearby. It!, on the other hand, is all about the monster. It's a constant threat, the characters are always nervous about it, and everyone is trying to think of a way to kill it. This movie doesn't jerk us around and waste our time.

The monster is sort of a joke when you finally see it, but the movie is much more well-made than the typical b-movie crap that was being released around this time. It actually gets creative in the way the characters encounter the monster. My personal favorite scene is when they booby trap the end of the air duct it's hiding in so that it'll get blown up when it tries to come out, and they hear it growling and screaming from another room over the ship's intercom when the grenades go off.

The characters are also a little deeper than you would expect from a cheap horror flick. One of them seems to feel survivor's guilt for always making it through every confrontation without a scratch, and a few of them struggle with the morality of leaving an injured man behind in the air ducts. It's little details like this that really make a lot of difference with me in movies.

Scott of the Antarctic (1948)

What a pisser. Scott wanted to be the first man to reach the South Pole, but when he got there, he found a tent. One of his rivals, Amundsen, had gotten there first. So he turned back, and he died on the return journey. And you're probably still b*tching about the time you went to Best Buy to get an Xbox on the first day but they were sold out. This horrible screwing over by life reminds me of Cartman's hilarious South Park rant:

Anyway, aside from being a little too long (it's only 111 minutes, but movies made before the 1960s always feel like four hours to me if they're longer than 75 minutes or so), I don't have much to complain about. It does a good job of showing how these explorers just wanted to be the first to reach an unexplored spot on the map and get their names in the history books, but rationalized their ego trips by telling themselves and anyone who would listen that it was serious scientific work. It also does a good job of presenting the hardships of Antarctic exploration: my favorite part is when one of the characters says that he prefers dogs to motor sleds. Why? Because you can't eat a motor sled after it stops working. Good to know.

The dialogue's good, too:

"It'll be tough."

"I know."

"As Hades."

"But not so warm, eh?"

Demon Planet (1965)

You know, I don't really like doing this. Every day I have that moment of realization: "Damnit, I haven't watched a movie." So I have two options: I can pick some old piece of crap I've never heard of that usually ends up being really boring and it pisses me off, or I can watch a good movie I've already seen, which makes me feel like I'm cheating. It's not like I'm watching a movie every day because I'm a huge cinema geek; I'm just giving myself something to do so I don't lapse into insanity or relapse into alcoholism to deal with the boredom and isolation of my daily life. It usually feels more like a job than entertainment, a job I'm not getting paid to do.

But every now and then I get perked up by a pleasant surprise like this. I knew nothing about Demon Planet and basically chose it at random after glancing at a positive review which mentioned that it had some influence on Alien, and it turned out to be the best movie I've seen recently that I had never seen before. The more I watch these cheap b-movies from the 50s and 60s, the more I find that a lot of them are much better than the more popular "classics" that critics love to masturbate over.

The similarities to Alien are easy to see, with astronauts investigating a distress signal on another planet, exploring a huge ship, and finding the remains of the ship's huge alien pilot, though there's also an element of The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers here. But Demon Planet is absolutely filled with cool sh*t that I've never seen in any other movie. It's consistently interesting and never predictable, with something always going on to make me think, "Just where the hell is this going, anyway?"

It's a pretty low-budget movie, but it's a triumph of imagination over resources. Most movies like this fail at presenting alien worlds and creatures that seem genuinely alien, but Demon Planet actually manages to be creepy simply from how weird everything seems. It's visually terrific, from the sets to the costumes. (Whoever designed the uniforms in the X-Men movies must have been a big fan of Demon Planet.) Also, I'm always going on about the importance of sound in horror movies, and like The Mist, this one uses a lack of music to its advantage, and the sounds that you do hear are weird and creepy as hell. The sounds coming from the alien ship should make someone in the next room wonder if you're watching The Exorcist.

This movie is more commonly known as Planet of the Vampires, but what the hell kind of title is that? Sh*t, that's what.

Sounds fascinating ....

It's on YouTube.

I doubt that we're allowed to give out links to copyrighted movies on these forums, but look for "PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (HQ)."