Film Freak Central

Straw Dogs (1971) - DVD

****/**** Image B Sound B
starring Dustin Hoffman, Susan George, Peter Vaughan, T.P. McKenna
screenplay by David Zelag Goodman and Sam Peckinpah, based on the novel The Siege of Trencher's Farm by Gordon M. Williams
directed by Sam Peckinpah

by Walter Chaw Straw Dogs is about an evil man who has so divorced himself from animal logic that he's become monstrous. He's cruel to his wife, comparing her to a child when she's lonesome and an animal when she's amorous, and he blames her for his detachment from himself. She gets impatient during foreplay if he chooses to take a moment to set his alarm or remove his watch, ergo she must be a nymphomaniac of low breeding. At one point, she mischievously changes a "plus" sign on his chalkboard to a minus and he changes it back so that it looks like a crucifix: the instrument of his martyrdom, the faith of his castration--the ideology that seeks to isolate him from his bestial nature. Finally, when she wishes to run away, he loses his grip on carefully-nurtured civilization, slaps her across the face, and orders her upstairs to the bedroom in the same way that Victorian women were banished from the room upon outliving the delight provided by their servile domesticity. This monster moves to a small Cornish village, where he insists on the creature comforts of home, paid for by a grant to study mathematics, of all things. And in the village the monster ultimately finds himself amongst men of a truer nature.

Orca: The Killer Whale (1977) - DVD

Orca
***/**** Image B Sound B
starring Richard Harris, Charlotte Rampling, Will Sampson, Bo Derek
screenplay by Luciano Vincenzoni and Sergio Donati
directed by Michael Anderson

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I was scared off of Orca, widely considered to be one of the worst films of all-time. The movie had a reputation as a bad Jaws rip-off and my last viewing of a bad Jaws rip-off was Lamberto Bava's Devilfish on "Mystery Science Theater 3000", which was awful enough to make me question what I was doing spending my Saturday mornings watching "Mystery Science Theater 3000". Well, I'm pleased to report that Orca's reputation is completely unwarranted. Critics and audiences were wrong, they just didn't get it. They labelled it a "Jaws rip-off" before setting foot in the theatre and watched it on autopilot.

Maniac (1980) [30th Anniversary Edition] + Vigilante (1983) - Blu-ray Discs

MANIAC
**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A+
starring Joe Spinell, Caroline Munro
screenplay by C.A. Rosenberg and Joe Spinell
directed by William Lustig

VIGILANTE
*½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
starring Robert Forster, Fred Williamson, Richard Bright, Woody Strode
screenplay by Richard Vetere
directed by William Lustig

by Walter Chaw William Lustig reduces exploitation cinema to the filthy stepchild of Sams Peckinpah and Fuller: one part animal logic, one part tabloid paranoia. He wallows in impulse, and his sensibility is 42^nd Street grindhouse through and through, from kitchen-sink production values to disjointed vignette presentations to a generally lawless indulgence towards atrocity. If Lustig's pictures have achieved a kind of cult lustre, credit his ability to alternate action sequences with B-legends showcases. It would be a mistake to attribute more to Lustig's pictures than workmanlike efficiency as applied to formula prurience, though there's something to be said for knock-off garbage done with a lack of pretension--done, in fact, with a distinct, naïve childishness that doesn't quite get down there with Jess Franco or Herschell Gordon Lewis (nor up there with Mario Bava or Dario Argento), but manages a little interest despite itself now and again, probably by (who cares?) accident.

The Vampire Diaries: The Complete First Season (2009-2010) - Blu-ray Disc

Image C+ Sound B- Extras C-
"Pilot," "The Night of the Comet," "Friday Night Bites,""Family Ties," "You're Undead to Me," "Lost Girls," "Haunted," "162 Candles," "History Repeating," "The Turning Point," "Bloodlines," "Unpleasantville," "Children of the Damned," "Fool Me Once," "A Few Good Men," "There Goes the Neighborhood," "Let the Right One In," "Under Control," "Miss Mystic Falls," "Blood Brothers," "Isobel," "Founder's Day"

by Walter Chaw You can diagnose things like Kevin Williamson's tween opera "The Vampire Diaries" by how much of the dialogue consists of peoples' names. "Hey, Ben is with Carrie down in the tomb with Josie and Halley. Chris said he and Caroline would meet us there, but then Damon said that Stefan was going instead, but Stefan still has feelings for Elena..." OMFG, amiright? Add to that a liberal use of music by the likes of Matt Kearney, The Fray, and Bat for Lashes, mix sloppily with flavour-of-the-month genre fetish, and, voilà!, the kind of thing everyone describes as a "guilty pleasure"--which basically means they're not telling you they also enjoy "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo". The remainder of the dialogue is interested in secret parentage, secret siblings, and this and that about lore to establish credibility while simultaneously demonstrating that everyone involved in this one has read more books than Stephenie Meyer (a low bar) and is aware of Stephenie Meyer...and Heath Ledger...and Emily Brontë. Never mind, you wouldn't understand. Similarly difficult to understand are magic rings that allow vampires to walk around in daylight, ancient tombs sealed by Creole witches led by that bitch from "A Different World", and a complex series of events that need to happen before one of this show's vampires is able to turn one of this show's hot little nymphos into a vampire. It's a metaphor--not for abstinence, per se, but maybe for embarrassing tumescence. That's right, "The Vampire Diaries" is a boner joke.

Species III (2004) [Unrated Edition] + Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) [Special Edition] - DVDs

SPECIES III
*/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Robin Dunne, Robert Knepper, Amelia Cooke, J.P. Pitoc
screenplay by Ben Ripley
directed by Brad Turner

RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE
½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Oded Fehr, Thomas Kretschmann
screenplay by Paul W.S. Anderson
directed by Alexander Witt

by Walter Chaw There used to be only two avenues for women in the modern, post-Black Christmas horror genre: they could be the bimbo at the end of the machete, or the virgin wielding one at the end of the movie. After rape/revenge stuff like I Spit on Your Grave and Ms. 45 (and, ultimately, Aliens), though, it became possible for women to be men from the first frame of their ordeals instead of incurring steady masculinization throughout the course of some torturous, highly structured pursuit. What made Roger Donaldson's Species (1995) so interesting is that it transformed the woman's biological urge into the sui generis of the premise: The bad guy in Species was a bad girl named Sil, and Sil wanted to mate really bad (and really badly). But just like her brothers in slasherdom (Jason Vorhees, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger), that will-to-fuck is largely unrealized--enough so that most academic reads of this horror subgenre involve the acting out of priapic males unable to reach climax through a variety of phallic substitutes. This is acknowledged in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 as Leatherface's titular dick runs out of gas between a girl's legs--and the would-be victim knowing the score strokes it anyway, soothing his bruised male ego.

Resident Evil (2002)

*/****
starring Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, Eric Mabius, James Purefoy
written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson

by Walter Chaw A group of highly-skilled soldiers infiltrates an abandoned facility where all the civilian workers of a multi-national corporation have mysteriously died. Suffering a holocaust themselves immediately thereafter, the surviving members of the squad break down into a cowardly tech-specialist (Eric Mabius); a covert agent of the corporation in question (James Purefoy); a tough-talking Latina with a big gun and a chip on her shoulder (Michelle Rodriguez); and a woman suffering from bad dreams who seems particularly adept at fighting the bad guys (Milla Jovovich). Discovering that the folks in the "hive" died during military research gone awry (thus unleashing hordes of nearly-indestructible villains), the foursome attempts to get out before a desperate time limit expires while also containing the evil to the site of infection.

The Apparition (2012) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras HILARIOUS
starring Ashley Greene, Sebastian Stan, Tom Felton, Julianna Guill
written and directed by Todd Lincoln

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw I think you enter into a handshake agreement with The Apparition that it's never, not for a moment, going to be scary when in its prologue, we're introduced to Harry Potter alum Tom "Draco" Felton as a grad student or something in a Doc Brown helmet prattling on about "anomalistic psychology" in that affected, pained way the Harry Potter alums (see: Emma "Hermione" Watson in The Perks of Being a Wallflower) seem to have adopted post-franchise. Or maybe it's the first scene between central pretties Kelly and Ben (Ashley Greene and Sebastian Stan), which, without fail, sports extra, meaningless, unintentionally hysterical blank reaction shots, thus announcing, in addition to hyphenate Todd Lincoln's inability to cast, his inability to frame shots or hire an editor (or three, as the case may be). To The Apparition's credit, though, milquetoast hero Ben is wearing the Bauhaus T-shirt I used to wear in high school when I wasn't trying to be hip, so...yay for being old enough to have a direct connection to a hipster reference. As for the rest of it, it's kind of astonishing that this didn't land as a dtv relic submitted for the immediate disapproval of the Netflix-streaming peanut gallery.

The Brothers Grimm (2005)

*/****
starring Matt Damon, Heath Ledger, Peter Stormare, Lena Headey
screenplay by Ehren Kruger
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Walter Chaw A film with all the drama and flair of a Tuesday Morning tchotchke shop, The Brothers Grimm is the only Terry Gilliam film since Jabberwocky that I've actively disliked. It's the star-crossed director's most conventional, most compromised work, the first to betray the behind-the-scenes strife--the desperation that has defined Gilliam's career to this point. Already pre-emptively disowning the finished product (citing various impasses with the Brothers Weinstein), Gilliam doesn't, this time around, have the aegis of a subversive finished product to hide behind. There may be a lot of people responsible for what's wrong with The Brothers Grimm, but the bulk of the responsibility for its failure is parked square at Gilliam's doorstep--and the rest of it belongs to nitwit screenwriter Ehren Kruger, whose flavour-of-the-month status might finally be souring. It's perhaps unfair to expect the director to constantly pull his Waterloos out of the woods, but The Brothers Grimm is finally the film that his detractors have always accused him of making: busy, unfocused, obnoxious, and lousy.

Frankenweenie (2012) - Blu-ray 3D + Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
screenplay by John August, based on a screenplay by Lenny Ripps
directed by Tim Burton

click any image to enlarge

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Back in the early-Eighties, Tim Burton was part of the conveyor belt at the Walt Disney Company, cranking out artwork for films like The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron. But drawing cuddly animals proved as bad a fit for Burton as it did for R. Crumb, and the studio eventually allowed him to separate from the pack, giving him a chance to hone his voice that was kind of unprecedented. Under the Disney umbrella, Burton produced two black-and-white shorts: the animated Vincent, a sweet and Seussian ode to his idol, Vincent Price (who narrated); and the live-action Frankenweenie, about a boy who uses mad science to bring his departed canine back to life. The latter scandalized Disney (too "scary," plus dead dogs and black-and-white have got to be roughly equivalent anathema to kiddie fare), and plans were shelved to attach the film to prints of Pinocchio in 1984. Three decades later, Disney confidently bankrolled a feature-length remake of Frankenweenie, stop-motion animated this time but still in black-and-white, and still with an undead dog at the crux of the narrative. What changed in the interim?

Final Destination 5 (2011) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C-
starring Nicholas D'Agosto, Emma Bell, Miles Fisher, David Koechner
screenplay by Eric Heisserer
directed by Steven Quale

by Angelo Muredda "Five! Five different systems had to fail for this to happen." So shouts a slumming Courtney B. Vance as a suspicious cop on the scene of only the second or third most elaborate death in the cynically titled Final Destination 5. Who can blame him? Five, after all, is an improbably large number. Here we are, though--as many entries into a series that's sure to rival even Final Fantasy's swollen ranks once the last lighter fluid-doused fan blade hits the last neck.