Movie #979: The Public Enemy

The Public Enemy is a 1931 crime drama starring James Cagney, Edward Woods, Donald Cook, Leslie Fenton, Beryl Mercer, Robert O'Connor, Jean Harlow, Murray Kinnell, Frankie Darro, and Frank Coghlan Jr. 

We begin with the early life of Tom Powers (Coghlan Jr.) and his best buddy Matt Doyle (Darro) as Tom sneaks beer, steals things, hurts people for no reason, and gets beat with a belt by his father (hey, I think I might have spotted some of the problem!). And then he grows up into James Cagney (and Doyle into Edwards Woods), his older brother Mike (Cook) stayed in school and is a good, honorable fella who enlists in the Army just in time for the Great War, and Tom and Matt have started running with local small-time hood Putty Nose (Kinnell). 

Putty Nose cuts and runs after Tom and Matt kill a cop (there are literally no consequences for this for them, ever), but fortunately Prohibition hits, and Paddy Ryan (O'Connor) is there to pick up the slack with his charming and kinda scary boss, Nails Nathan (Fenton). Tom and Matt live high on the hog, meet girls, Matt marries, Tom kicks his girlfriend Kitty (Mae Clarke) to the curb when he meets Gwen (Harlow), Nails dies in an accident and the whole thing erupts into a gang war that leaves Matt dead. Tom goes to singlehandedly kill the entire Schemer Burns mob, and predictably gets shot. He winds up in hospital until they kidnap him, kill him, and dump his dumb ass at home for his brother to find. 

I'm being a little flip, but this is actually a really good movie. Cagney shows us a character that we would now call a psychopath, utterly without remorse, impulsive, violent, and so forth. In what is perhaps the most telling moment of the movie, after Nails dies Tom and Matt go to the stable, buy the horse that threw him, and fucking shoot it. 

The plot would later be reused multiple times, often by Martin Scorcese. You can see the influence - guy rises in a criminal enterprise, gets too big for his britches or sticks around past when the getting is good, winds up dead. Except the vibe here is very much "hey, society creates people like Tom Powers and we're going to have to deal with that shit at some point." I was expecting this movie to be a lot more moralistic than it was; aside from the end plates it just kind of presents Tom as the monster he is but doesn't waggle its finger or shy away from showing how much fun he's having. 

The Public Enemy is one of those movies that you feel like you've seen even if you haven't seen it, and I always love watching those because it's fun to see where tropes come from. 

My Grade: A-
Rewatch Value: Medium-low, I think?

Next Up: Alvin & The Chipmunks: Road Chip. At least it's the last one

Movie #978: Alvin & The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked

Alvin & The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked is the third movie in the Chipmunks quadrilogy and stars, once again, Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler, Jesse McCartney, Christina Applegate, Amy Poehler, Anna Faris, Jason Lee, and David Cross, and adds Jenny Slate and Alan Tudyk to the mix. 

The Chipmunks and the Chipettes are going on vacation! Dave (Lee) brings them on board a Carnival Cruise (yay product placement), whereupon everyone tries to have fun except Alvin (Long) insists on being a complete asshole and gets everyone in trouble. Simon (Gubler) continually tries to keep him in line so that his insistence on being a dick doesn't splash back on the others, but is of course unable to do so. And then due to a series of wacky cartoony mishaps, the little CGI abominations get sucked out to sea on a hang glider and crash onto an island. Dave grabs a people-sized hang glider to go after them, but his old nemesis Ian Hawke (Cross), now working as a pelican mascot for the cruise line and intent on ruining Dave's life, wrestles him for it and they both wind up on the island! 

Neither side aware of the other, the Chipmunks try to survive. They run across Zoe (Slate), a FedEx pilot who crash landed here multiple years ago (but still has access to hair care and makeup and soap, because she looks perfectly clean) and has been surviving as a Castaway parody ever since. A spider bites Simon and turns him into Simone (Tudyk), a French adventurer, making him fun and adventurous and pushing Alvin and his Chipette counterpart Brittany (Applegate) into the responsible ones. Theodore (McCartney), Jeanette (Faris), and Eleanor (Poehler) don't have much to do. Theodore obsesses over a horror movie he saw, I guess, and Eleanor breaks her foot. Whatever. 

So, turns out Zoe is here for treasure and tries to force Jeanette to retrieve it, Rescuers-style, because there is literally nothing original about this movie. Ian and Dave spar over Ian being a selfish, terrible person, but then he kind of has a redemption arc because there's nothing else to do with him at this point, eventually they make it back to civilization in time to do a concert!

I mean, it's more of the same. I found this one a little (a little) more watchable just because it reminded me more of the 1983 cartoon, but like, it's still a bunch of CGI creatures singing pop songs in unintelligible squeaky voices, David Cross and Jason Lee shilling for a paycheck, and now Jenny Slate acting silly. The only time in the movie I laughed was a bit where Ian and Dave are bedding down for the night and Ian, still dressed as a pelican, has built a nest. That's the best joke in the movie. 

My Grade: D
Rewatch Value: IINSIAIFWT

Next up: The Public Enemy

Movie #977: Priest

Priest is an action...horror? I guess movie starring Paul Bettany, Karl Urban, Cam Gigandet, Lily Collins, Maggie Q, and utterly wasting the talents of Christopher Plummer and Brad Dourif. 

In a world (IN A WORLD) where vampires are these gloopy, pale, eyeless monsters, the Church employs Priests - some kind of super-warriors with jumpy-flippy powers and cool weapons - to beat them back. This works too well, they win the war, and the priests are assimilated into society, which would be easier if they didn't have fucking crosses tattooed on their faces. One such Priest (Bettany) has retired to a life of brooding when vampires kill his sister-in-law (Mädchen Amick), mortally wound his brother (Stephen Moyer), and kidnap his niece Lucy (Collins). 

Priest asks the Church Council to be reinstated, but the lordy high monsignor guy (Plummer) tells him to piss off, we won the war, no more vampires, these are just raiders out in the wastelands. Obviously Priest can't let that go, so he follows Sheriff Hicks (Gigandet), the local law and also Lucy's boyfriend, out into the wastelands where he kills a bunch of familiars (pale humans with weird eyes) and vampires, until he discovers that this is all being orchestrated by a former priest-turned-vampire (Urban)! 

This is based on a graphic novel, and it very much feels like it. It's also inspired by Blood, the old first-person shooter video game, which I've never played. It's a little sad in some ways, because it's got a great cast, Bettany is doing his best and he's actually pretty good as an action hero, and the premise has some schlocky gothic potential. But it just kinda...ploops out? 

Like, these things are "vampires," which is fine, they're night-stalking creatures that drink blood. But what are they? It's a big screaming deal that Black Hat (Urban's character) is a "human vampire", but that's never discussed until close to the end. Familiars can handle sunlight, and that's apparently what happens when people get bitten, but people can be "infected" - does that mean they grow into the gross hanging blob-cocoons that Priest finds in the vampire train? The logistics are never explained, and that's only a problem because these are "vampires" and that word has a lot of baggage that I don't think we really needed. 

Also, making the movie PG-13 was a bad choice. This was in 2011, when everything had to be PG-13 (we were in the early stages of the MCU and the studios were realizing how much money there was in adapting comics and bringing in the 13-20 demographic, but they apparently missed that you have to adapt them well), so here we have a movie about brutal vampires that had to animate part of its sequence so it could show blood and dismemberment (the animated sequence is pretty cool, granted).

It's not a bad watch, it's fun to watch Bettany nibble scenery and Urban and Dourif chew it, but it's dark and dour and it could have been more interesting. 

My Grade: D+
Rewatch Value: Low

Next up: Public Enemy, technically, though I suspect I'm going to get another crappy movie from Toasty today

Movie #976: The Omega Man

The Omega Man is a sci-fi post-apocalypse flick starring Charlton Heston, Anthony Zerbe, Rosalind Cash, Paul Koslo, Lincoln Kilpatrick, and Eric Launeville. 

Neville (Heston) is the last man on Earth...sort of. He was a government scientist who was working on a vaccine for "the plague," a bio-engineered disease that causes people to choke out and die within minutes. He gets the plague but injects himself with the drug before he dies, making him immune, but he doesn't have the apparatus to make more and most of the world is dead anyway.

Not all, though. Sufferers of the plague sometimes turn into white-skinned, light-sensitive ghouls, led in a fanatical society by Mathias (Zerbe). They see Neville as the last remnant of the old world (they call him a "follower of the wheel," which I thought was a nicely poetic touch) and want to kill him to cement their hold on the new world.

But then Neville finds a small enclave of children, looked after by Lisa (Cash) and Dutch (Koslo). They all have the plague but it doesn't make you a ghoul or kill you right away, necessarily. Neville, now having a reason to bother, uses his own blood as a way to make a cure, but gets stabbed and bleeds out in a fountain in the most heavy-handed religious metaphor ever put to film. 

This is the second film adaptation of Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend (the first was 1964's The Last Man on Earth, and then in 2007 we got I Am Legend starring Will Smith). It's interesting to me, reading the synopses of the other two movies, that all of them involve Neville dying at the end, but the original novel and the 1964 version have Neville dying as a monster (the titular "legend") while the Heston and Smith versions have him heroically sacrificing himself after fashioning a cure. I knew that there was an alternate ending to the Smith version that was closer to the novel, but it still misses the biggest point of the novel: That the infected have a society and that they are afraid of the last man on Earth, because he hunts them during the day and kills them.

So taking The Omega Man as its own thing rather than an adaptation of Matheson's novel, it's a fun dystopian film. The shots of Los Angeles completely empty as Neville drives around are haunting, and Heston does a good job of portraying Neville as just a bit screwy from isolation. The monsters aren't terribly threatening - they look scary and Mathias' rhetoric is appropriately fanatical, but they're pale people wearing robes (that they seem to spontaneously generate, because I don't know where the hell else they're getting them) that won't use guns, so they're only dangerous in numbers. (In the novel, they're flat-out vampires.) Rosalind Cash's performance is good, but then she becomes infected and turns white and spends the rest of the movie waffling between joining "the Family" and trying to help Neville. It's a little muddled.

Anyway, it's a classic and a staple of the genre, but it's a pretty poor adaptation of the source material, and now I really want to see The Last Man on Earth. 

My Grade: B-
Rewatch Value: Medium

Next up: Priest

Movie #975: Observe & Report

Observe & Report is a dark comedy starring Seth Rogen, Anna Faris, Ray Liotta, Michael Peña, Collette Wolfe, Jesse Plemmons, Aziz Ansari, Celia Weston, John Yuan, and Matthew Yuan. It's...not great.

Ronnie Barnhardt (Rogen) is the head of mall security at...a mall (I'm sure the name is mentioned but it's not important). He takes himself very seriously. It would be easy to say he takes his job seriously, but that's not remotely accurately - his job is just a way for him to live out his delusions of being a protector and a warrior. And then one day, a flasher (Randy Gambill) shows up and starts...flashing, and shows his junk to Brandi (Faris), a shallow, vapid, cosmetics salesperson who Ronnie happens to fixate on. 

The actual police, in the personage of Detective Harrison (Liotta) show up and try to do actual police work, and Ronnie fucks with the investigation every step of the way. And then the next night, someone vandalizes and burgles the mall, meaning Harrison has to come back again, and Ronnie fucks it all up again. Someone in here gives Ronnie the idea that he should be a cop so he applies, but fails the psych eval (because he has bipolar disorder and has gone off his meds because everything's going so great), we get our Abyss moment, he gets fired, he comes back to the mall, chases down the flasher, and fucking shoots him (nonfatally). 

There's a lot more I'm leaving out - he goes on a date with Brandi, there's a mall employee named Nell (Wolfe) that he flirts and talks with, and of course his right hand man Dennis (Peña, speaking with a strong lisp for some reason) turns out to be the thief. The movie does not work, and I've been trying to think about why. 

I think part of it is that Ronnie is a truly despicable person. Yes, some of that is mental illness (and also his dad left when he was very small, his mom (Weston) is an alcoholic who used to fuck his friends when he was in high school). But Ronnie is a ticking time bomb - he's a gun enthusiast, he's quite capably violent (in a plot decision I don't fully understand, he's shown to be very able to handle multiple opponents in a fight), and he's a misogynst, homophobic, racist, bigot. He sexually assaults Brandi more than once, and then assumes they're dating after their one pretty awful date (which he blackmailed her into). 

But also, the people around Ronnie don't...seem to mind? Like, a lot of people hate him, but his boss (Dan Bakkedahl) puts up with his bullshit for reasons I cannot fathom. Other folks just kind of soak up his abuse, and I have to assume some of it is because they're afraid of him (and rightly so, because he 100% reads as someone who's going to go on a shooting spree at some point), but even people who have the authority to call him out don't. 

Part of the issue is that there are no good or likeable characters in the movie. Like, exactly none. Jesse Plemmons' Charles gets close; he's a mall employee moving up to security guard and serves as a very quiet voice of reason, but then jumps in a fight against a horde of cops to help Ronnie. Nell is pathetic, but other than the fact that she's got a foot cast and can't walk and that she's a "born-again virgin," we never learn anything about her. Even Harrison, who is initially positioned as a cop just trying to do his job, snaps at Ronnie (which is reasonable) but then heaps slurs on him.

So if this is a "watch this character unravel" a la Taxi Driver (which the directed cited as an inspiration), OK, but why make it a comedy? Why try to position Ronnie as this loveable goof (which is what the trailers did)? Ronnie is not lovable, he's scary, and the fact that it's the Ronnie Barnhardts of the world who are now members of ICE just kind of puts a sobering spin on all this.

Dark comedy is tricky at the best of times, and this had some potential, but it did not stick the landing. The only things I can say in its defense is a) the needle drops are good (there's a cover of "Where Is My Mind?" that I quite enjoyed) and b) the awkward moments don't linger too long, which is often a problem in Rogen movies.

My Grade: D-
Rewatch Value: IISNIAIFWT

Next up: The Omega Man

Movie #974: Barbarian

Barbarian is a horror movie directed by Zach Cregger and starring Georgina Campbell, Justin Long, Bill Skarsgård, and Matthew Patrick Davis.

Tess (Campbell) rolls up to a house she's rented online in a truly shitty part of Detroit, and discovers that that it's been double-booked. There's a young man named Keight (Skarsgård) staying there, and after a few tense moments in which Tess very clearly weighs the pros and cons of entering this house with a dude she doesn't know, they discover they actually run in some of the same circles and wind up having a very pleasant evening together, chatting and drinking wine.

And then the next day, Tess gets locked in the basement and discovers a hidden door leading into a dark, man-made sub-basement, quite reasonably says "fuck that", but winds up looking a little deeper and finding a room with a bed, a bucket, a video camera, and a bloody handprint on the wall. Keith gets back and helps her escape, and doesn't take her concerns seriously, goes into the tunnels...and vanishes. Tess follows when she hears him scream, finds him in the dark, and then a monster-woman (Davis) pops out of nowhere and beats him to death against the wall. 

(Sorry, did you think he was the lead?)

And then we cut to Hollywood, where actor A.J. Gilbride (Long) has just been accused of sexual assault by a coworker and is facing legal and financial issues. Turns out he actually owns the house, and he flies back to Detroit to sell it so he's got some money for lawyers. He, of course, stumbles into the hidden tunnels and finds Tess, and shit gets extremely fucky. 

Barbarian is really one of the most effective horror movies of the decade, in my humble opinion, and Zach Cregger does really amazing work. The camera work, the shot composition, but also how the story is structured - setting up the situation and then jumping back to see how we got here, and then going forward and seeing how whatever happened in the past has evolved (I'm thinking here of the serial killer (Richard Brake) hunting a woman (no idea, didn't catch the character's name), and then we see her dress in the basement in present day). The little details like the way the killer has the videos labeled - some by name, but some by physical details or actions - go a long way to helping us understand who this guy is and what he's done. 

The performances are all perfect. Both Skarsgård and Campbell play their initial meeting with an appropriate amount of trepidation, but then we get to see Keith just taking up space and becoming oblivious as it becomes obvious that he's not in danger, while Tess maintains her fear and guard. AJ, likewise, manages to get close to giving us some moments of humanity, but is never far from being a selfish and privileged jackass. And Matthew Patrick Davis gives us a terrifying but kind of sad performance as the Mother. 

This is probably the movie I've been most excited to get on DVD, since it's only just become available on physical media because fucking Disney didn't want to release it. Power the people! 

My Grade: A
Rewatch Value: Medium-high

Next up: Observe & Report

Movie #973: Bangkok Dangerous

Bangkok Dangerous is an action/drama flick directed by the Pang Brothers and starring Nicholas Cage (in his "must pay my back taxes" career phase), Shakrit Yamnarm, Charlie Yeung, Panward Hemmanee, and Nirattisai Kaljaruek. 

Joe (Cage) is a hitman livin' that hitman life - no connections, erase all traces of your passing, kill who you get paid to kill and don't worry about the morality of it. Deciding it's time to get out of the game, he books a gig in Bangkok - four separate hits for a crime syndicate - and when he gets there, recruits a young street hustler named Kong (Yamnarm) to be his errand boy and translator, fully intending to kill him when all is said and done.

Things don't quite go that way; Kong winds up getting into Joe's heart a little when he shows more loyalty and gumption than Joe expected, and Joe winds up falling for a deaf pharmacy...employee (I have no idea whether she's actually meant to be a pharmacist or just a clerk), Fon (Cheung). He mentors Kong in self-defense (maybe with an eye towards training him to be an assassin, but it never gets that far), and continues doing the jobs he's there for. And that's fine, because his targets are, as Kong points out, bad men. 

But then Joe is out with Fon and gets jumped by a couple of muggers, and he quickly kills them both, and Fon panics and runs away (I mean, obviously). Joe becomes despondent and goes back to doing his job, but chokes at the last minute because the fourth hit is on the goddamn Prime Minister (Keang Kunsri, I think), who Kong tells him is a good man. His employer, Surat (Kaljaruek) grabs up Kong and Aom (Hemmanee), Joe's informant and go-between whom Kong has been seeing, and Joe has to do the third act bloody rampage to free them! 

So...I actually didn't hate this movie. It's not bad. It's certainly better than the 9% on Rotten Tomatoes it's getting. Sure, it's not really treading any ground that The Mechanic, Leon the Professional, or Grosse Pointe Blank didn't already, but it's very different in tone than any of those, too. What's interesting is that it's a remake of the Pang Brothers' first film (same title), in which Kong was the POV character, was already a hitman, and he was the deaf-mute character (the conceit apparently being that gunshots didn't bother him because he can't hear them). So aspects of the characters get mixed around here, but the broad strokes seem similar. This includes the ending where Joe (Kong in the original) shoots himself in the head, simultaneously killing Surat. 

Second act drags a bit, but not painfully so. There are a couple of pretty effective scenes, most especially the one in which Joe mercilessly dispatches the two muggers and Fon stands looking out over the river, oblivious, until blood spatters her jacket. The action isn't anything to write home about, but it's fine. I actually like that while Joe is a competent marksman, he's not super accurate under pressure (he misses a lot during the river chase sequence). 

The standout performance is Yamnarm as Kong. Cage is playing Muted Cage (as opposed to Wild Cage), so we don't get much of a range from him, but I do like how he portrays Joe during the scenes where he's trying to get to know Fon and bumping up against the language barrier twice (she understands English, but of course speaks in sign). Kaljaruek's Surat is on the verge of being interesting, and I wish he'd gotten just a little more time to react when Joe threatens his wife to get him to back off. 

Overall, though, it's not high art but it's a solid enough action/drama, which is a hell of a lot more than I thought I'd say for it.

My Grade: C+
Rewatch Value: Medium-low

Next up: Barbarian

Movie #972: Nobody 2

Nobody 2 is the sequel to Nobody, and stars Bob Odenkirk, Connie Nielsen, Christopher Lloyd, RZA, John Ortiz, Sharon Stone, Colin Hanks, Gage Munroe, Paisley Cadorath, and Colin Salmon. 

We start just as the first movie did, with a beat-up looking Hutch (Odenkirk) sitting across from a couple of (probably) Feds (David Lawrence Brown and Denesha Lee-Labiuk), very conspicuously not explaining himself. Only this time, his wife Becca (Nielsen) and a dog are with him! And right here we have the theme of this movie; just like the first one, only this time Hutch's family is present the whole time.

Since the events of the first movie, Hutch has been working off the massive amount of Russian mob money he burned doing jobs for "the Barber" (Salmon). That, however, has resulted in undoing all of the character development we had in the first movie, and Hutch has again grown distant from Becca, his daughter Sammy (Cadorath), and his son Brady (Munroe). Realizing this, he takes the family to an amusement park that you would be forgiven for thinking is in Florida, but is in fact in Wisconsin, according to the wiki. Oh, and he takes his dad (Lloyd) with him.

He's barely there a day before he realizes that the cops here are hella corrupt (I mean, sure), as the local sheriff (Hanks) threatens him for staring a bit. Hutch does his best to make all this fun, but then his son gets in a fight in an arcade, the proprietor (didn't catch his name) smacks Sammy on the head, and Hutch goes back inside to whoop ass. And that results in the organized crime ring that runs this town, run by Lendina (Stone, but she doesn't show up until two-thirds of the way through), gunning for Hutch, until he, his father, and his brother (RZA) have to set up a trap-filled death-maze in the water park!

If it's not apparent, I...kinda wasn't a fan. I wanted to be. I really like Nobody, and I didn't realize until we'd started watching this that it's not from the same director. Derek Kolstad is credited as a writer, but if that's the case I'm not sure what happened. Nobody 2 is beat-for-beat the same movie, just with the set dressing changed. The problem with that is that it necessarily erases all of the character development from the first movie, because that movie ended with Hutch reestablishing himself as a badass but also realizing that he needed to be present for his family, and now we get to see him learn that lesson again. 

As long as I'm bitching: Sharon Stone was wasted in this role. She had a better character arc in Catwoman, even if the movie overall wasn't as good. Here, she just kinda shows up and acts nuts and kills people indiscriminately, and it comes off as a pale imitation of Alexei Serebryakov from the first movie. But again, he had some character traits beyond "bwa-ha-ha evil". 

The action scenes are fine, but they're nothing new and nothing special. There's a fight on a duckboat that's beat-for-beat the same as the bus fight in Nobody, and had me thinking "I should watch that instead." The best sequence in the movie is probably the fight in the arcade, not because the action is amazing, but because we're really on Hutch's side - but then the response gets completely over the top because this town is run by a nutbar with her own private army. 

The takeaway, here, is that I need to go back to not blind-buying movies, or at least sequels.

My Grade: C-
Rewatch Value: Low

Next up: Barbarian, unless I get something beginning with "A" from Toasty today

Movie #971: Near Dark

Near Dark is a vampire horror movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow and starring Adrian Pasdar, Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, Jenny Wright, Jenette Goldstein, Tim Thomerson, Joshua John Miller, and Marcie Leeds. 

Caleb (Pasdar) chats up the wrong young lady. Mae (Wright) talks about "listening to the night" and living forever, and Caleb, having never seen The Lost Boys (which in fairness opened around the same time as this movie so that's forgivable) presses her for a kiss and winds up getting a bite instead. He stumbles home, already smoking in the daylight, when an RV pulls up, someone yanks him in, and Caleb finds himself in a new family: A group of vampires.

The vampires' patriarch, Jesse (Henriksen), gives him a week to fit in or else he intends to let his eldest "child" (or should I say...childe? No, I shouldn't) Severen (Paxton) kill him. "Fitting in" here involves killing someone, since that's kinda how these vampires roll. Severen cleans himself up and seduces women to feed on them, Jesse and his vampiric bride Diamondback (Goldstein) pick up hitchhikers, and Homer (Miller), stuck as an eternal tween, lures in people by pretending to be hit by a car on his bike. 

Mae, for her part, seems to rely on her looks to get people alone. She and Caleb hitch a ride in a truck and she tries to get him to kill the trucker (Roger Aaron Brown), but he can't bring himself to do it...so she does. 

Yeah, these vampires are monsters, and that includes Mae, though she's a little more ambivalent about it than the others (and she does like Caleb a lot). The family rolls into a bar, intending this as a final test for Caleb, and slaughter the inhabitants in a truly terrifying manner (like, killing off the people one at a time, and in a such a matter-of-fact way that Jesse has cut the waitress' (Jan King) throat and drained her blood into a beer glass before the bartender (Thomas Wagner) really knows what's happening. 

Anyway, the one survivor in the bar (James Le Gros) is meant to be Caleb's first kill, but Caleb can't bring himself to do it, the guy flees, and the vampires are all set to kill him but get stuck in a hotel as the cops blow holes in it and the sun rises, and Caleb grabs their van and saves them!

Questionable decision, really. Anyway, meanwhile, Caleb's father (Thomerson) and sister (Leeds) are out searching for him, and wind up at the same hotel that the vampires go to after their escape! Caleb winds up getting his family out, and winds up cured by a...blood transfusion. 

This is a really good vampire movie that did not do well at the box office, largely because it opened right around Lost Boys (which...I don't think is better, I think they're about even as movies, but Lost Boys had a lot more money behind it). The vampire family has an obvious dynamic, and watching the behind-the-scenes they all came up with backstories and, most important, figured out the timeline for all of them getting turned. That actually made a big difference, I think, because Jesse and Severen have the clearest and strongest relationship, while Homer is perhaps closest to Diamondback and Mae, and Mae is really the odd one out generally (she's only been a vampire about four years). Caleb is actually probably the weakest character, but since he's meant to be our POV character that's probably pretty deliberate. 

I have a couple of niggles. I think the movie peaks after the bar scene, and the ending sequences where the vampires kind of all die inside of a few minutes feels a little rushed. I'm not sure how I feel about a simple blood transfusion curing vampirism, and I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that Mae has been murdering people and drinking their blood for years (and never really shows any remorse) and then gets cured at the end and we're all OK with that. But then again, I like the really tight focus - we start with Caleb hitting on Mae and he gets bitten pretty much right away, so it's a pretty lean movie. 

What makes the movie, though, is the vampire family's performance and chemistry, and how all that reacts to Caleb. I like that the vampires are strong and deadly, but not particularly smart or supernaturally powerful - they can't turn into wolves or mist or anything, they're just strong and fast. The movie isn't a million miles from something like The Devil's Rejects in some ways, except of course that we're not focused on the bad guys. 

My Grade: B+
Rewatch Value: Medium 

Next up: Nobody 2

Movie #970: John Dies at the End

John Dies at the End is a cosmic horror-comedy (not a combo you see every day) directed by Don Coscarelli and starring Chase Williamson, Rob Mayes, Clancy Brown, Paul Giamatti, Doug Jones, Glynn Turman, and Fabianne Therese. It's one of those movies that, if I were not a gamer, I don't think I'd have enjoyed as much.

We open with the familiar trope of someone giving an interview to tell their strange, supernatural or unbelievable story. Actually, not that's not true. We open with our narrator, Dave (Williamson) explaining the Ship of Theseus thought experiment as applied to the ax used to behead a corpse, which then reanimates (played by Brett Wagner) and comes after the person who beheaded them, and asks if it's the same ax. Then we start the interview thing, where David Wong is being interviewed by a reporter named Arnie (Giamatti) about his experiences. 

Said experiences go back to him meeting a drug dealer (Tai Bennett) with apparently supernatural powers, and then getting a call from his friend John (Mayes), who has, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, come unstuck from time (inasmuch as he keeps calling Dave from earlier in the evening even when he's sitting in front of him). It turns out that John has tried a living drug called "soy sauce", which has opened his mind to other realities. Dave winds up getting jabbed with a needle and getting on the sauce as well, and from there we get into the weird, Lovecraftian events in which otherwordly insect-creatures come into our world, infest people to use as puppets, eventually make them explode if they can't use them or they get bored, and continually push John and Dave toward their ultimate goal.

Said goal is to enter another universe (accessed through a "ghost door" that can only be opened using the "phantom limb" of the guys' friend Amy (Therese)), where they discover a largely naked congregation of masked weirdos who tell them that this universe is a parallel one to theirs in which the dominant form of science is "beastiology". Anyway, the place is run by a big flesh-monster/living computer called Korrok (voiced by Keven Michael Richardson), which intends to eat them to absorb their knowledge and then conquer Earth. 

There's a lot more I'm leaving out, but suffice to say that the story is very much a Lovecraft/King story as filtered through millennial/Gen X humor. It's based on a book by Jason Pargin (writing as David Wong), whom I know from his work at Cracked, and the style of humor feels very much like a visual adaptation of a Cracked article. That's not a bad thing, but it does assume a lot of...not knowledge, exactly, but frame of reference? Alternate realities, monsters that you only see out of the corner of your eye, that sort of thing? It all makes a lot more sense if you've read Lovecraft and/or played Call of Cthulhu. 

But with that context, it was pretty fun. Coscarelli also directed Bubba Ho-Tep and there are some stylistic similarities, just inasmuch as it's an insane unreal situation presented in a mostly realistic way. The main difference is in scale (Bubba Ho-Tep is about one nursing home, this is about the whole world and possibly others!) and in the attitude of the protagonists (Elivs and JFK view fighting the mummy as their responsibility and are willing to die to do it; John and Dave mostly just bumblefuck their way through it and their attitude is much more "ugh, fine, we'll save the world." And actually it's the dog that really saves the world). 

The pacing is weird and while nonlinear storytelling is fine, keeping "when" we are in the story requires a bit of concentration, though maybe that's appropriate, given the subject matter. Paul Giamatti is fantastic as usual. I wish Clancy Brown had been given more to do (actually that's true of Therese; her character is fun for the little we see of her, but I think a little more variance from the two White Dudes would have been good). 

Coscarelli's films don't tend to be the most accessible in the world, but I always find them a lot of fun to watch. Also the effects here seem largely practical, and that always goes a long way to keeping me in the movie. 

My Grade: B-
Rewatch Value: Medium

Next up: Near Dark

Movie #969: Alvin & The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel

Alvin & The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, in case the clever wordplay goes over your head, is the second (OF THREE) sequels to Alvin & the Chipmunks. Obviously. It stars Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler, Jesse McCartney, Jason Lee, David Cross, Amy Poehler, Christina Applegate, Anna Faris, Wendie Malick, and Zachary Levi. 

We pick up with the titular Chipmunks, Alvin (Long), Simon (Gubler), and Theodore (McCartney) doing their schtick where they sing pop songs in squeaky voices, when their manager/adopted father falls victim to a cartoonish injury and winds up in traction in France (if this had happened in the US, it wouldn't have worked because the US health care system would have discharged him the same day). Anyway, the Chipmunks are sent to stay with their friendly Aunt Jackie (Kathryn Joosten), but she almost immediately falls victim to a similar accident and this leaves the boys in the care of their slacker cousin Toby (a pre-Shazam Levi). 

Part of Dave's instructions was for them to have a normal childhood, so they're getting sent to school. This turns out to be high school, which was jarring because before this I realized I had no context for how old these mutant rodents were supposed to be. I mean, they're all "sassy" and talk like teenagers, or rather, they talk like how a middle-aged screenwriter thinks a teenager in 2009 might talk ("oh, it's on like Donkey Kong!" "Right back atcha!" "I can't hear you over [whatever]". Stuff like that). Anyway, they go to high school, where they are immediately beset by bullies who try to kill them (what is this, the 80s?) and the principal (Malick), who happens to be a Chipmunks superfan, tells them they have to represent the school in a music festival because if they win, the prize money will pay for the school's flagging music program!

So we've got like six different cartoon plots already, but we're not done! The evil former music exec Ian Hawke (Cross), living like a mad hobo in the basement of the record company building, gets a FedEx package with the Chipettes, the female versions of the Chipmunks. Like, literally, we've got the sassy one, Brittany (Applegate), the one with glasses, Jeanette (Faris), and the fat/loveable one, Eleanor (Poehler). And sure, let's talk about this here.

The Chipettes are literally just girl versions of their respective Chipmunks, just a little less-than. Brittany is a less-assholish Alvin, Jeanette is a less-smart Simon, and Eleanor is...well, Eleanor is about the same as Theodore. Less cowardly, maybe. They get almost no characterization. I'm not saying the Chipmunks are fleshed-out characters, but they at least all have a little personality. I was there in the 80s when the girl-versions of characters appeared, I know this song. 

Anyway, the plot is stitched together from multiple cliches. We've got Alvin joining the jocks and blowing off his family, the Chipettes vs. the Chipmunks as they're manipulated by Hawke, and Toby learning to come out of his shell and talk to his high school crush, Julie (Anjelah Johnson, utterly wasted in this role). If you've been awake for the last 20 years, you know every beat before it happens, and for those of us in Gen X who watched the cartoon, there's a palpable sense of déjà vu. Anyway, it ends up with both groups performing together (obviously) and the Chipettes moving in with the Chipmunks (obviously). 

I just...I think my biggest problem here is that I don't get the appeal. I mean, the Chipmunks have always had the same gimmick (again, pop songs in a squeaky voice) but the 80s cartoon had the benefit of cartoony adventures n' shit. This is that schtick with cliché plots, hackneyed dialog, and some truly mediocre CGI. And there's a cameo from a...sewer gopher? that the movie clearly thought I should recognize. I had to look him up; it's a thing called Digger (Dave Bauza), who was a mascot for NASCAR on Fox until the head of Fox Sports apologized for him. 

People talk about Marvel movies being soulless corporate affairs, but to me, this is the kind of thing that makes me want to make movies made in the 70s. It's real bad...

...but it's somehow better than the first one. I don't mean it's good, I hasten to add. It's like how stubbing your toe is better than getting kicked in the balls. I don't want either one, neither one is fun or good, but if I have to experience one or the other, I'll pick the one that has a timely reference to another, better movie (that'd be Alvin - remember, voiced by Justin Long - reminding us during a dodgeball game of the five Ds of dodgeball). 

Wish I could've dodged this movie! HAHAHAHAHAHAi'mgonnakillyoutoasty

My Grade: D
Rewatch Value: IINSIAIFWT

Next up: John Dies at the End (for reals this time!)

Movie #968: The Innocents

The Innocents is a psychological (or supernatural, or both) horror movie based on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James and starring Deborah Kerr, Megs Jenkins, Pamela Franklin, Martin Stephens, Michael Redgrave, Peter Wyngarde, and Clytie Jessop. 

Miss Giddens (Kerr) is hired by a happy bachelor (Redgrave) to take charge of his orphaned niece Flora (Franklin) and nephew Miles (Stephens). "Take charge" may be underselling it; he flat-out says that no matter what happens, she's in charge and he wants to bounce around the world and bang hot twinks (this last bit is not explicitly stated) and wants nothing to do with any of them. 

So Giddens goes out to his country estate, a house far too big for the few people who live there, and meets Flora and Mrs. Grose (Jenkins), the head housekeeper. Not long after, Miles gets home from school after having been expelled, but won't say why (and this is in the days when a school could just boot a kid with no good explanation). 

Giddens begins to see people haunting the house and determines that they're the ghosts of her predecessor Miss Jessel (Jessop) and the valet, Quint (Wyndgarde). She comes to believe that the children are possessed by these people (which would be plenty weird enough, but they were lovers in life), and she fixates and getting them to admit what's happening. That winds up traumatizing Flora, and when left alone in the house with Miles, Giddens forces him to confront Quint's ghost...and he dies. 

There are a couple of interpretations here. One is that there really are ghosts and Giddens is trying to save the children. The other is that she's a few toes short of a toaster and winds up killing one kid and traumatizing the other. We never know one way or the other. The original script by William Archibald played up the supernatural more overtly, Truman Capote did some rewrites that amped up the psychologist thriller aspects, but I understand that James' original story doesn't fully explain it, either.

Ambiguous ghosts aside, though, the movie is really tense and well done. Deborah Kerr gives a fantastic performance as the naive and inexperienced governess put in a truly weird situation that just keeps getting weirder - these children are odd ducks. Flora needs constant attention, Miles speaks like a much older person and seems to be actively flirting with Giddens at times. The one you really feel for is Mrs. Grose, who loves the kids and is just trying to do her job amidst all of this shit that she is truly not prepared for. 

It's a sad and Gothic movie, it's beautifully shot, and (sing it with me) the house feels familiar by the end of it, but also manages to feel consistently too big for the people in it. It's not exactly a "fun" movie, but it's definitely a good example of how to do horror without gore or jump scares.

My Grade: A-
Rewatch Value: Low

Next up: John Dies at the End, presuming I don't get something from Toasty today

Movie #967: Alvin & The Chipmunks

Alvin & The Chipmunks is kids movie based on the old cartoons and "band" of the same name, and stars Jason Lee, David Cross, Cameron Richardson, and the voices of Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler, and Jesse McCartney. It's pretty awful.

Dave Seville (Lee) is an marketing dude and struggling songwriter who pitches songs to his old college buddy Ian (Cross), now the head of Jett Records. He gets rejected after pitching a song that sounds a lot like Death Cab for Cutie's "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" with every bit of sentiment stripped out, but on the way out of the building picks up three stowaways: Alvin (Long), Simon (Gubler), and Theodore (McCartney), three CGI chipmunks that were in a tree that the company cut down for its Xmas display. 

These chipmunks can not only talk and reason like people, but can sing more-or-less contemporary songs in three-part harmony, so like, that's weird.

Anyway, they reveal themselves to Dave, he's all set to kick them out after they utterly trash his house until he realizes they can sing, so he writes a new, fresh Christmas song...oh, wait, it's the god-awful "Chipmunk Christmas Song" that came out fifty goddamn years before this movie? Oh, OK. Anyway, after a false start where the Chipmunks freeze up, they become worldwide sensations, Ian manipulates them with the rock-n-roll lifestyle to move out of Dave's house, but eventually Dave admits he wants a family and they're all back together and Ian is left trying to get real squirrels to sing. 

Well, I can't say I was expecting to enjoy this movie, but I used to watch the cartoon when I was a kid, so maybe some nostalgia? Nah. It plays just like someone - by which I mean a committee and a focus group - wrote it today in a boardroom, with two awkwardly old songs (the Xmas one and "Witch Doctor") remixed and crammed in. 

Jason Lee is completely unlikeable as Dave. I don't know if it's because he can't act when working with CGI (and I could understand that), but he really comes across as bland and boring no matter what scene he's in. David Cross is a little more watchable, but he's also more shameless and doesn't mind literally shaking his ass in this movie. 

And then there's the Chipmunks. I don't know if I'm just getting old, but man, I have no interest in watching CGI creatures hop around and fart. If the jokes were better, if the movie had any heart, maybe it wouldn't bother me, but as it is, I felt trapped between Chipmunks whose voice performances aren't great because they're sped or pitched up (and I cannot understand them when they sing) and human performances for people who were very clearly standing there thinking "big paycheck, big paycheck, lots of actors can't even find work, c'mon, you can do it." 

My kids would have been about the right age to enjoy this movie when they were smol (it came out in 2007, so not in theaters, but certainly in the home video market) and I'm glad it never made it into rotation. 

My Grade: D-
Rewatch Value: IINSIAIFWT

Next up: Near Dark

Movie #966: Murder by Decree

Murder by Decree is a murder mystery/thriller starring Christohper Plummer, James Mason, Donald Sutherland, David Hemmings, Frank Finlay, Susan Clark, Geneviève Bujold, Anthony Quayle, and John Gieguld. 

So, the basic premise here is "what Sherlock Holmes pursued Jack the Ripper?" That's a solid enough premise - this is hardly the first or last time it's been tried. We've got Christopher Plummer playing Holmes and he deliberately tried to make the character a little more human and vulnerable than Basil Rathbone's earlier performance. Likewise, Mason's Watson isn't as bumbling and, well, dumb as Nigel Bruce's Watson, but this Watson is still touchingly naive about whether a member of the aristocracy could be (gasp!) murdering prostitutes.

The setup here is largely based on Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, an unfortunately titled book by Stephen Knight. It'll look familiar if you've seen or read From Hell; the Ripper Murders are a Masonic plot to cover up the indiscretion of Prince Albert Victor (Robin Marchal) and his fathering a child with Annie Crook (Bujold), a (gasp!) Catholic girl. Knight's book was presented as a real Ripper theory and it has of course been pretty much debunked. Likewise, we've got Sutherland playing Robert Lees, who was a real person who claimed to psychically know the identity of Jack the Ripper. There's a scene in the movie where he lets his "visions" lead him to the house of Sir Thomas Spivey (Roy Lansford), a Royal Physician who (along with William Slade [Peter Jonfield]) is the Ripper. Lees claimed this really happened (that is, he got off a bus because he saw a man on the street he knew to be the Ripper through his psychic visions and the visions led him to a fancy house), but there's no evidence to suggest it really did.

Basically what I'm saying here is that this story is fan fiction within fan fiction. That doesn't necessarily make it bad, of course, and Christopher Plummer and James Mason are very fun to watch. Donald Sutherland turns in a really haunted performance as Lees. But I have to say, I wasn't a fan of this movie, and after sitting with it a couple of days, I think I can put a finger on why.

First, it's too long. Rather, it's paced badly. The second and third acts drag, and it ends like three different times. That's the easy answer.

But beyond that...a story about Jack the Ripper that tries to keep the facts of the case consistent, even if it introduces conspiracies and occultism and politics and so forth, is a very different kind of story than much of the Sherlock Holmes canon. Holmes solved mysteries, yes, but they were mysteries with adventure and intrigue, and the motives were explicable most of the time (I say "most" because it's not like I've read the whole canon). A dude running around Whitechapel dismembering sex workers because of some sadistic sexual urges is kind of incompatible with that genre, and so if you're going to include this quasi-superpowered detective in that kind of fiction, you have to change him. And indeed, our Holmes here is morally outraged by what's happened and sheds tears for Mary Kelly (Clark) and Annie Crook and the whole situation. 

Is that "in character" for Holmes? I don't know, Holmes is a character, so what's in character depends on who's writing him. But it feels off. We're not seeing Holmes' amazing deduction on display, and he utterly failed to prevent any of the Ripper's victims from being cut up, because, if we're going to keep to the facts, he has to fail. So this isn't a detective story, despite attempts to make it one. Alan Moore had a better sense of what to do with this setup (and didn't include Holmes), but it still bumps into one of the big problems with using real crimes in fiction. That is, the crimes did happen, these women were murdered, like a lot of Ripper fiction, the movie kind of uses them as props (though I have to say that Mary Kelly's depiction in the movie wasn't bad, especially if you know what really happened to her). 

Overall, I think there's an interesting story to be told combining Holmes and the Ripper, but I think that having Holmes confront the kind of violence and madness that the Ripper represents, not just in what he's doing but in how the press and society respond, would be the better way to go about it. Yes, that'd be a pretty dark story, but that's probably appropriate.

My Grade: C+
Rewatch Value: Low

Next up: Near Dark, assuming I don't come into possession of anything earlier in the alphabet before we get a chance to watch it

Movie #965: Monkey Man

Monkey Man is an action/revenge flick starring and directed by Dev Patel, and co-starring Sikander Kher, Pitobash, Makarand Deshpande, Ashwini Kaleskar, Vipin Sharma, Sharlto Copley, Sobhita Dhulipala, Adithi Kulkunte, and Jatin Malik. 

Our protagonist and hero, just credited as "Kid" (Patel, Malik as a child) works an elaborate ruse to infiltrate a rich asshole club run by Queenie (Kulkunte), so that he can get close to Police Chief Rana Singh (Kher) and blow his fucking head off. Singh was responsible for the destruction of Kid's village years before, and the rape and murder of his mother more directly, so this starts off as a revenge flick. But what's interesting is that it starts off (well, within the first 30 minutes or so) with Kid confronting Rana, nearly having his revenge, but then getting his ass kicked and chased through the city streets until he winds up getting shot, dropped into a river, and picked up by the hijra (not a term I knew before this) in a temple dedicated to Ardhanarishvara (also not something I knew about). The leader there, Alpha (Sharma) nurses him back to help and helps him clarify what exactly he's trying to do. 

(As a side note, very often a character like Alpha would advise letting the anger go and realizing that revenge doesn't help. Here, Alpha gives a different piece of wisdom: sometimes you have to destroy something to make room for something new. Actually, Kid does get told to let the anger go and renounce violence, but we'll get to that.)

Meanwhile, India is gearing up both for Diwali and for a national election, in which a dude named Adesh Joshi (Vijay Kumar) is standing as the candidate from the "Sovereign Party", so you can kinda guess his politics. The real power, though, is Baba Shakti (Deshpande), a spiritual guru who's been whipping up the crowds with nationalist and religious fervor (where have I heard this before?), and pushing for Joshi's election. And of course it was Baba who really cleared Kid's village. 

So, beat-for-beat, it's not too far off movies like John Wick or The Crow or Peppermint. But there are a few things that really make Monkey Man stand out. The transgender warriors rolling in to kick ass during one of the last fight sequences was one, that wasn't something I was expecting, but it was amazing. But also, Dev Patel manages to neatly straddle the line between Kid being broken, silent, and nearly blank and being a badass. He's lean - skinny, even - but "Bruce Lee shredded" as he says in one of the featurettes. And he doesn't come across as perpetually angry or unstoppable, he comes across as traumatized, but with flashes of the loving child he used to be (one of the recurring bits is that his hands are badly burned, and we're expecting to learn that Singh did it deliberately, but actually Singh set his mother's body on fire and Kid tried to put it out). 

The action scenes are likewise amazing. The fight choreography starts off choppier as Kid is less focused, and then we get longer and longer shots as he trains and becomes clear in what he's trying to do. There's a violence here that seems intense without being gratuitous, also a hard needle to thread. Again, didn't know I needed a car chase with a souped-up tuk-tuk, but here we are. 

About my only real criticism is that the sound mixing is such that understanding some of the dialog can be hard. Other than that, I don't have a lot negative to say about it.

I rather suspect I'd appreciate the movie on a deeper level if I knew more about the cultures it was reflecting, but I can definitely appreciate a good revenge story, and armed government goons going after minorities is also pretty damned relatable. Over all, kinda regret not watching this sooner; it was on my radar and then just kind of slipped off. 

My Grade: A- 
Rewatch Value: Medium-high

Next up: Murder by Decree

Movie #964: Beverly Hills Chihuahua

Beverly Hills Chihuahua (sigh) is a comedy starring Piper Pierbo, Jamie Lee Curtis, Manolo Cardona, José Maria Yazpik, and with the voices of Drew Barrymore, George Lopez, Andy Garcia, Cheech Marin, and Edward James Olmos. 

Chloe (Barrymore) is a tiny white chihuahua who lived a ridiculously pampered life among the other tiny dogs of Beverly Hills. Her owner, Vivian (Curtis, who doesn't seem entirely sure what movie she's in), has a full schedule of pampering and outfits every day, which is all the more remarkable as Vivian is also a cosmetics maven. She goes on a business trip and leaves Chloe in the care of her niece, Rachel (Pierbo), who isn't, like, mean or anything, but pretty irresponsible and (quite rightly) feels that this dog is being spoiled. 

So Rachel pisses off to Mexico with Chloe in tow, Chloe scampers out of the hotel and promptly gets kidnapped to be used as a bait dog in a dog-fighting ring what the fuck. But you know, in a cute way. Like, she's put out to fight Diablo (Olmos), a terrifying Doberman, but it's funny because she's tiny and scared!

Another fighting dog, Delgado (Garcia), rescues Chloe and they embark on a whirlwind tour of Mexico to try and get Chloe home, culminating in a whole herd of chihuahuas, led by Montezuma (Plácido Domingo), rescuing them from mountain lions that make noises like scared kitties. 

Anyway, in the end they are all reunited, largely thanks to Vivian's gardener (landscaper) Sam (Cardona) and his chihuahua Papi (Lopez), who's been smitten with Chloe forever. Papi and Chloe, it is implied, make puppies. Happy ending! 

So, ugh. I was kind of hopeful that this movie might surprise me because it was directed by Raja Gosnell, who also directed Scooby-Doo, but it turns out that the reasons I enjoyed that movie were the cast and James Gunn's script. This...man, one of the effects of Toasty giving me some truly awful movies is that something like this is more watchable. So, taking as read that it's silly in a dumb way, let's go back to something I said before about the dog fighting.

We never see any of the ugly parts of dog fighting (like, um, the actual fighting or bait dogs being killed or whatever). It's all very sanitized, but other than an excuse to have our aggressively evil bad guy Cortez (Yazpik) and his supernaturally tenacious dog Diablo chasing our heroes, why is it there at all? Likewise, at one point Chloe gets put on a train to head home (or somewhere, I don't know, this movie would have benefited from an Indiana Jones-style red line to show us where in Mexico we are) and Delgado arranges this with a coyote. Now, here it's a literal coyote (Ed F. Martin), but in real life, a "coyote" is someone who smuggles people across the border and, again, that's a seedy and dangerous world to be mirroring in a stupid movie about talking dogs. 

I might be inclined to chalk this up to casual racism from the screenwriters and/or directors, but it might just as easily be studio interference, who knows. It's actually the most interesting thing about the movie (not "interesting" in a good way, just "interesting" in a "everything else is pretty bland" way). Except that a large part of the cast is Mexican (except for Domingo, who's Spanish, playing a Mexican character named after...you know what, it doesn't matter). I suspect this may fall into the "you're thinking about this more than the filmmakers, Matt" area.

So: Piper Pierbo is charming and the best of the human cast. She has very little time with Cardona's Sam, which is good because their chemistry kinda isn't there. Drew Barrymore's chops are, shall we say, not as a voice actress, but George Lopez does a good job (and indeed, he's the only one that came back for the sequels). I was all set to note that the movie at least doesn't CGI the dogs, but then it did CGI a rat (Marin) and an iguana (Paul Rodriguez), and it's ugly and distracting, so fnah. 

My Grade: D+
Rewatch Value: IINSIAIFWT

Next up: Monkey Man

Movie #963: Balto

Balto is an animated movie loosely based on real events and starring Miriam Margolyes, Kevin Bacon, Bridget Fonda, Jim Cummings, Bob Hoskins, Phil Collins, and Juliette Brewer.

Back in 1925, in Nome, Alaska, Balto (Bacon) is a wolfdog living in the refuse of the town and hanging out with his adoptive father, Boris (Hoskins), a...goose. (Side note: Isn't it weird that there have been two animated mammal characters whose adoptive fathers were geese?) A little girl named Rosy (Brewer) winds up catching diptheria, and getting medicine to Nome proves difficult due to weather and the fact that it's fucking Nome, Alaska. 

So they send out a dogsled, led by the magnificent but utterly dickish Steele (Cummings) - I mean, there's a human with them, too, but that guy's useless. The team gets lost on the way back with the medicine, Balto likes Rosy but he's really infatuated with Rosy's dog Jenna (Fonda), so he and Boris and two polar bears (Collins voices one, the other doesn't talk so much as squeak) go off to find them!

Trials and tribulations occur, Balto eventually gets the medicine back, and because this movie is G-rated Steele just get shunned rather than fatally thrown of a cliff or eaten by bears or whatever. 

I dunno, it's cute. Kind of hearkens back to the older Disney cartoons that didn't have plot twists galore, just a straightforward narrative. This one fills its runtime better, the voice performances are good, and there are a few really funny lines (mostly given to Hoskins). Not sure what was happening with the polar bears' animation; they looked like melting marshmallows a lot of the time. 

Michelle loves this movie, and I'm sure if it had been a staple for my kids I would, too. As it is, it's cute, but it doesn't hit me in the feels the way some of the later animated movies (Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Mitchells vs the Machines) do. 

My Grade: B
Rewatch Value: Medium-low

Next up: Beverly Hills Chihuahua (Toasty strikes again)

Movie #962: Assault on Precinct 13

Assault on Precinct 13 is an action (maybe action/horror?) movie written and directed by John Carpenter and starring Austin Stoker, Darwin Joston, Laurie Zimmer, Nancy Loomis, Martin West, and Tony Burton.

The LAPD guns down six gang members (all armed with automatic weapons, in fairness), and the rest of the gang swears vengeance on...basically everybody. Meanwhile, the titular precinct (well, actually it's Precinct 9, District 13, and the title was a studio change, but let's not split hairs) is being shut down and moved, so tonight, only a skeleton crew remains - Lieutenant Bishop (Stoker), two secretaries, Leigh (Zimmer) and Julie (Loomis), and a sergeant (Henry Brandon). Meanwhile-meanwhile, a prison bus carrying two convicts, Caudell (Peter Frankland) and Wells (Burton), one death row inmate with the fantastic name Napoleon Wilson (Joston), and a cop called Starker (Charles Cyphers) sets out on a transfer run that takes them near said precinct. Meanwhile-meanwhile-meanwhile, a man named Lawson (Martin) and his young daughter Kathy (Kim Richards) are driving around looking for someone's house (I think Kathy's nanny but it's neither clear nor relevant) when they spot an ice cream truck. Kathy goes up to buy an ice cream just as the gang members circle around and kill the vendor (Peter Bruni), and one of the gang members (Frank Doubleday) casually shoots her dead. 

Lawson promptly goes bananas, takes the ice cream man's gun, chases down the gangsters and fatally shoots the fucker that killed his daughter, but then runs into a nearby police precinct - you guessed it! Moments later, the prison bus pulls in, as Caudell is sick and getting worse, and Starker figures he needs a doctor. 

And then the titular assault begins. After a brutal initial burst of (silenced) gunfire, only Leigh, Julie, Bishop, Wilson, Wells, and Lawson are left alive, and Lawson is so deep in shock he can't move or communicate. The rest of the movie is the survivors desperately trying to hold out until someone notices their plight, holding back the gang members with the few weapons they have while other cops drive around like idiots trying to figure out where all these reports of gunfire are coming from (it makes more sense in context). 

I'd never seen this movie before, and I have to say, I know Carpenter has made some bad movies later on in his career, but he was pretty on point as a young director. The influences from westerns (which is what he really wanted to make) and Night of the Living Dead are obvious, but the movie very much has its own identity and vibe. The moment that really makes you sit up and pay attention, of course, is poor little Kathy getting shot in the chest; it's very much a "shit, they went there", and at that point we don't know what movie we're in. Moments like that are...well, perhaps not fun, but exciting. 

One of the things I enjoy the most is how little the movie explains. We only get little bits of explanation about the gang - a news broadcast early on acknowledges that its multi-ethnic nature is odd, and Wells tells us that the gang members aren't afraid to die and will just keep coming (you know, like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead), but that's it. We don't learn anything about Wells or Wilson - we know Wilson killed "those men" but we aren't told which men or why, and we don't learn anything about his backstory. We don't learn why Leigh is so cool under pressure and why she's a good shot (like, seriously, three fatal shots right in a row with a wounded arm and with murderers running straight at her, holy shit, girl). Hell, even the characters within the movie never really learn what's going on - Lawson just stumbles in, unable to talk, and then goes basically catatonic for the rest of the movie. 

That lack of information could be detrimental to the movie, but here it works, because the characters show us who they are. Likewise, the situation is so extreme that knowing why it's occurring is less important than the fact that it is occurring. It got me thinking about how scripting for movies like this has gotten really unnecessarily elaborate over the years - I remembered there was a remake of this movie starring Ethan Hawke and looked up the wiki to see how it compared, and holy shit it looks terrible. It's just this mess of plotlines - corrupt cops! the Wilson character is a crime boss! twice as many characters in the precinct during the assault! - and I have to wonder, what is that in aid of? I'm not saying intricate plotlines aren't worth the time or that they're always bad, but like, I think too about movies like L.A. Confidential, which is much more involved, but there's still no real reliance on the dramatic chord reveal moment. 

Anyway, what this shows us is that, once again, a movie made on the cheap by people who are passionate about what they're doing trumps a multi-million dollar movie made by a corporation with a pet director on strings, every single time. 

My Grade: A
Rewatch Value: Medium-high

Next up: Balto

Movie #961: My Soul to Take

My Soul to Take is a supernatural slasher movie directed by Wes Craven and starring Max Thieriot, John Magaro, Emily Meade, Denzel Whitaker, Zena Grey, Nick Lashaway, Paula Olszynski, Jeremy Chu, Jessica Hecht, and Frank Grillo. 

Serial killer Abel Plenkov (Raul Esparza) discovers he's the Riverton Ripper (rather, one of his multiple personalities is) just before that part of him takes over and kills his heavily pregnant wife (Alexandra Wilson). Plenkov manages like three or four "supposedly dead killer comes back and stabs someone" moments in his very brief screen time, but eventually the ambulance he's in crashes and burns, so clearly he's dead (he's presumed to have rolled into the river and drowned). Meanwhile, though, seven babies are born on the same night, and sixteen years later have grown up as a big part of local lore - the Riverton 7. 

They're a pretty diverse lot, though, which is appropriate since literally all they have in common is a birthday. Our POV character is Adam (Thieriot), or "Bug", as everyone calls him - shy, timid, prone to migraines and other health issues. His best bud is Alex (Magaro), put-upon and abused by his stepfather (Lou Sumrall) and the school bully Brandon (Lashaway), who also happens to be one of the 7. We've got Penelope (Grey), a teenage Jesus-freak, Brittany (Olszynski), a second-in-command to the school's mean girl Fang (Meade, and we'll get to her), Jerome (Whitaker), the only black kid and is also blind, and Jay (Chu), the only Asian kid and is also highly creative and artistic. We meet all these kids on their sixteenth birthday enacting a ritual in which they gather by the burned-out remains of the ambulance (which I thought was a nice touch) to have one of them symbolically kill the revived Riverton Ripper.

This year it's Bug, but he chickens out and then the cops, in the personage of Detective Patterson (Grillo), who was there the night the Ripper "died" and actually shot him a few times before getting stabbed, arrive and send everyone home. And on the way home, Jay is brutally stabbed and thrown in the river. One down!

The rest of the movie is the Ripper picking off the kids, until the end when it's revealed that (spoiler for a movie from 2010 that no one cares about) Alex is possessed by the murderous soul of the Ripper, Bug is really the Ripper's son cut from his mother's womb, and he winds up stabbing Alex and becoming the hero. 

So, this movie does a few things right and a few things wrong. The premise - serial killer contains multiple souls that flee into babies just being born when he dies - is pretty cool, though I found myself wondering if those souls displaced the ones the babies were supposed to have, or do babies not have souls until [some arbitrary thing like first breath], or what? Likewise, the idea that Bug is, spiritually speaking, a condor, able to "eat death" and act as a kind of guardian for dead souls, is a cool one and a theme that gets repeated a few times. The problem is that neither of these ideas is ever really explored fully. I think what happened is that the movie was trying to keep the truth - that Alex is the killer - a big reveal and that we're supposed to think Bug might be the killer without knowing it, but honestly that's a much less interesting idea and has been done to death. The idea of Bug being able to access the memories and skills of the dead teens (a la Necroscope) is likewise fun, but never really fully explored, and he winds up repeating things they've said before they die, so the whole thing gets muddled. 

And then there's Fang. She's actually the Ripper's daughter Leah, who was about three when shit went down. She's grown up resentful of Bug and how he's viewed as this innocent miracle baby while she was ignored and forgotten after nearly getting butchered by her own father - cool, that's some solid motivation - except she's not only become a mean girl who is callously directing Brandon to punch lesser-order kids (like Alex and Bug) to varying degrees, but there's actually a numerical ranking for said punches, and she's refined it to the point of sending in Brittany to distract the security guard (Alberto Vazquez) for it, and she's apparently selling drugs and laundering money? The reveal of her really being Leah is fine, that's handled well, it's not a DUN DUN DUNNN kind of moment, we just see her at home with Bug and their aunt (Hecht) and realize who she is. But her being some kind of criminal mastermind/truly cruel person doesn't land. 

But for all that, the actually horror bits of the movie, where the killer is popping out of nowhere and stabbing people, come off pretty well. The Ripper's design is pretty cool, and although he delivers what you could call one-liners, they aren't later-movie Freddy Krueger puns, they come across as just hateful invectives, and the effect is that you get a slasher who actually seems to care about what he's doing. I thought that was a nice touch. The Riverton 7 mostly come across as memorable characters; Jerome could have used a little more fleshing out, but I was happy to see that him being blind (or black) wasn't really his defining point.

This isn't one of Craven's best, but it got really shit on when it came out (it sits at 11% on Rotten Tomatoes), and I think it's underrated. It's not that the movie is bad - it's better than a lot of other teen slashers I've seen - but it didn't live up to its potential and that's kind of sad. 

My Grade: C+
Rewatch Value: Medium

Next up: Near Dark

Movie #960: The Music Man

The Music Man is the 1962 film version of the eponymous musical, starring Robert Preston, Shirley Jones, Buddy Hackett, Hermione Gingold, Paul Ford, Pert Kelton, The Buffalo Bills (a barbershop quartet; they have names but they're credited by the group name and frankly their individual characters don't really mean much), Susan Luckey, Timmy Everett, and Ron Howard.

Harold Hill (Preston) is a con-man and traveling salesman who goes to little towns, whips up a moral panic, and then sells a "boy band" (which meant something very different in 1962, although a contemporary version of this story set in the 90s that had Hill trying to start a N'sync knockoff or whatever would be amazing), complete with uniforms and instruments and all, to fix it. Of course he doesn't know the first thing about music, but he's an amazing fast-talker and knows how to play to people's vanities. He rolls into River City, IA and starts his rap, and tries to cozy up to Marian Paroo (Jones), the local piano teacher and librarian, because he knows she'll be able to expose her.

This doesn't really work, but he manages to shuck and jive long enough to milk money out of the town, but just when he's about to be exposed by another, rather scummy but completely in the right salesman (Harry Hickcox), Marian demonstrates that she's in love with him, he falls in love back, and the boy band actually manages to squeak out a kind of recognizable version of Beethoven's Minuet in G, which is good, because the town was quite literally ready to murder him. 

Of course, all of this is intercut with songs (it's always interesting to me how little actually happens in musicals of this era, because most of the run time is taken up by song and dance. Same principle applies to action movies like John Wick or porn movies). And a lot of the songs are really staples of the era and the genre - "76 Trombones," "Til There was You", and "Gary, Indiana", off the top of my head. I worked crew for a production of The Music Man in college, so it brought back a lot of memories to see the movie. 

Now, does it hold up? Is it "good"? If you like musicals, you're off to a good start. If not, don't bother. I think it's worth noting that this was a Best Picture nominee - film adaptations of Broadway musicals was a reliable moneymaker for a while (see also Oliver!, West Side Story, My Fair Lady, Guys & Dolls, Oklahoma!, and hey, Chicago - not so much Cats, of course). As musical adaptations go, it's fairly snappy - these films can get overlong pretty easily. The music and lyrics require some pretty quick wordplay and Robert Preston (who originated the role on Broadway) is clearly very comfortable doing it. 

As is typical of musicals like this, you're not going in for deep characterization of intricate plots, you're going for the bright colors, the fun music, and the impressive dancing, and there definitely is all of that. And most of the comedy lands and has held up fairly well, so all in all it's a win.

My Grade: B+
Rewatch Value: Medium

Next up: My Soul to Take