Film Freak Central

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 (2011)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Billy Burke
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by Bill Condon

by Walter Chaw Appalling by pretty much every measure, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 (hereafter Twilight 4.1) is the predictable end result of a film based on a book written by an illiterate Mormon housewife mistaking her profound ignorance for profundity. It's about a really old guy who talks a really young girl into marrying him and enduring really, really painful childbirth as her portion of God's judgment on her kind; and then it's about another kind of pedophilia, wherein a 19-year-old badly in need of acting lessons gets turned on by a baby and decides he's going to marry that infant once she's old enough to breed. Still with me? So, yes, I knew it was going to be bad and, yes, I went anyway. And you know what? For as girded as I was to the raw incompetence of this franchise, Twilight 4.1 still managed to plumb a few new depths. See, Twilight 4.1 is an apologia for spousal abuse and a clumsy pro-life screed (what about this crap isn't clumsy?) before turning into cartoon Grand Guignol horseshit meant to freak out an audience of pre-teens and lonely housewives who think that this object of their devotion is selling them anything except loneliness and delusion. It's sledgehammer racist in its depiction of a native housekeeper cast as Maria Ouspenskaya, and it has a moment in which a circle of wolves "think-talk" to each other in some ineffable evocation of an Optimus Prime pep talk. It's completely inexplicable, in other words, and irritating for it.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Benjamin Walker, Dominic Cooper, Anthony Mackie, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
screenplay by Seth Grahame-Smith and Simon Kinberg, based on the novel by Seth Grahame-Smith
directed Timur Bekmambetov

by Walter Chaw That idiot Timur Bekmambetov continues his reign of terror with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, an adaptation of a Seth Grahame-Smith novel co-written by Grahame-Smith himself that tries to walk the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies line between reverence and camp but only manages to be ugly and stupid. Abe's (Benjamin Walker) superpower is honesty, natch--and a silver-coated axe. One night, as a child, after witnessing a vampire kill his mother but somehow not turn her into a vampire (vampires don't fear the sunlight in this one, either, or at least fear it only as much as Edgar Winter does), Abe embarks on a vengeance-crusade aided by vampire hunter-trainer Henry (Dominic Cooper). Henry has a secret! It doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter inspires a sense of absolute despair and hopelessness in the viewer, as it's not just bad, it's misguided in every way a film can be misguided, from conception to execution. There's a horse-stampede fight, a burning bridge and a train, grotesque misuse of slow-motion and CGI, and nary a naked Angelina Jolie anywhere to leaven the stew. I want to muster up some outrage at the portrayal of Confederate soldiers as bloodsucking legions of the damned, but that actually strikes me as the least offensive of the film's myriad offenses.

True Blood: The Complete Fourth Season (2011) - Blu-ray/DVD/Digital Copy

Image A- Sound A Extras B
"She's Not There," "You Smell Like Dinner," "If You Love Me, Why Am I Dyin'?," "I'm Alive and on Fire," "Me & the Devil," "I Wish I Was the Moon," "Cold Grey Light of Dawn," "Spellbound," "Let's Get Out of Here," "Burning Down the House," "Soul of Fire," "And When I Die"

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. To recap: "True Blood"'s third season ended with Vampire Bill (Stephen Moyer) and his queen (Evan Rachel Wood) revealing a heretofore-unseen ability to defy gravity as they prepared to duel to the death; Hoyt (Jim Parrack) and Jessica (the staggeringly beautiful Deborah Ann Woll) receiving a creepy housewarming present (unseen by them) in the form of a moldy doll; Tara (Rutina Wesley) departing Bon Temps for anywhere less likely to be a hub of supernatural activity; and a newly liberated Sookie (Anna Paquin) disinviting Bill and Eric (Alexander Skarsgård) from her home before vanishing in a ball of light with her literal fairy godmother.

Trouble Every Day (2001)

****/****
starring Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice Dalle, Alex Descas
screenplay by Claire Denis & Jean-Pol Fargeau
directed by Claire Denis

by Walter Chaw Plaintive and sad, Claire Denis's remarkable Trouble Every Day is a rare combination of honesty, beauty, and maybe even genius. It isn't enough to say that the picture captures the barbarism festering at the core of gender dynamics, nor is it sufficient to express my frank amazement at how Denis subverts genre in ways perverse and powerful. Here's a canny director who knows the vocabulary of cinema as well as the cruel poetics of sexual anthropology; perhaps it's enough to say that Trouble Every Day captures something ineffably true about the sex act with images vital, frank, and unshakable.

Vampyres (1974) - Blu-ray Disc

a.k.a. Vampyre Orgy, Daughters of Dracula
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Marianne Morris, Anulka, Murray Brown, Brian Deacon
screenplay by Diane Daubeney
directed by José Ramón Larraz

by Bryant Frazer SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. One of the hallmarks of Eurohorror is brightly-lit sex scenes. Rather than reveal nudity in chiaroscuro, or in the kind of colour-gelled Hollywood glow meant to suggest candlelight or moonlight, cinematographers working in this mode step right up and wash light over their actresses to ensure that no detail is lost in shadow. This tableau looks a little strange from a contemporary vantage--off the top of my head, I don't think anybody but Paul Verhoeven and maybe the mumblecore crew shoots sex scenes so plainly these days--but it's a stylistic disconnect and a marker of a sense of time and place that makes these films a conduit for nostalgia among cinephiles of a certain age. José Ramón Larraz, a Barcelona-born director working in England, doesn't let Vampyres out of the gate before staging a bedroom scene involving two young, completely naked women. The sleepy brunette Fran (Marianne Morris) and the pale blonde Miriam (Anulka, a former PLAYBOY centrefold) are rolling around in bed before a killer in a top hat arrives in silhouette and fills their nubile bodies with bullets. (Were the title not Vampyres, you'd be forgiven for assuming the film had just announced itself as a giallo.) With that violent flourish, the opening credits begin.

Fright Night (2011) - Blu-ray + DVD

****/**** Image B- Sound A+ Extras C-
starring Anton Yelchin, Colin Farrell, Imogen Poots, David Tennant
screenplay by Marti Noxon, based on the screenplay by Tom Holland
directed by Craig Gillespie

by Walter Chaw After 28 Weeks Later, I wondered when Imogen Poots would become a star. It only took four years. As Amy in Craig Gillespie's really frickin' great Fright Night, she's sexy without being vacuous and tough without being masculinized--her general kick-assness undoubtedly owing in part to screenwriter Marti Noxon, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"'s showrunner from Season Six to completion. I'm spending time talking about Amy because she's a wonderful character who manages to complete an arc or two in a mere supporting role. Consider a moment in which she mentions her boyfriend's skin clearing up that locates her completely, and believably, in the film's high-school environment--that's a lot of expositional impact in a little package. A remake of Tom Holland's cult classic that was itself one of my VHS favourites (worn to breaking during my formative decade with the movies), Fright Night is delightful because it's absolutely certain of what it is and what it isn't, delivers everything it promises it will (in spades), and genuinely has fun with the 3-D innovation that's the bane of most other movies lately. Smart as hell and unapologetic about it, it presents character beats that matter and sports a performance from Colin Farrell as evil vampire-next-door Jerry that should, no shit, earn him Academy Award consideration. Between him and the chimp from Rise of the Planet of the Apes, it'd be a tough call.

Tsui Hark's Vampire Hunters (2003)

a.k.a. The Era of Vampires
*/****
starring Chan Kwok Kwan, Ken Chang, Suet Lam, Michael Chow Man-Kin
screenplay by Tsui Hark
directed by Wellson Chin

by Walter Chaw An incomprehensible bit of garbage produced and written by legendary Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark, Vampire Hunters juggles at least three plots and drops each of them repeatedly and egregiously. Its lore is confused and its heroes are unremarkable but for the unusual degree to which they're inept and disinteresting. The promise inherent in a chop-socky wuxia opus concerning a quintet of fearless vampire hunters and a cadre of zombies is almost infinite, making the abject failure of the piece something almost awe-inspiring. Though it's tempting to blame director Wellson Chin's propensity to stage fight scenes in unrelieved murk, the real culprit of the piece may be a bad guy who looks and moves a lot like a mannequin on a string. William Castle, eat your heart out.

Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2001)

***½/****
screenplay by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, based on the novel by Hideyuki Kikuchi
directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri

by Walter Chaw Yoshiaki Kawajiri's name is probably not as familiar to anime's United States fanbase as Hayao Miyazaki, Katsuhiro Ôtomo, Mamoru Oshii, Isao Takahata, or Shinichirô Watanabe, but amid those in the "know," his Ninja Scroll is among the best pure action/fantasy films of the last fifty years in any medium. Tightly plotted and drawn in a style that crosses Bernie Wrightson with Kelley Jones's work in Neal Gaiman's Sandman comic series, Ninja Scroll is one of few eloquent stand-alone justifications for Japanese animation as a movement of true cinematic value and lasting merit. Perhaps accounting for his relatively anonymous standing, Kawajiri's other films veer wildly from the sloppily drawn though viscerally intriguing Wicked City to the frankly awful Demon City Shinjuku. With Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, Kawajiri's first film since Ninja Scroll six years back, the director takes on Hideyuki Kikuchi's popular manga D--yousatsukou (the sequel to Kyuuketsuki Hantaa 'D', made into 1985's Vampire Hunter D by Toyoo Ashida), and produces something that falls in quality somewhere between the dizzying heights of Ninja Scroll and the occasionally weak Wicked City, while borrowing images and elements from both.

Underworld (2003)

*½/****
starring Kate Beckinsale, Scott Speedman, Shane Brolly, Michael Sheen
screenplay by Danny McBride
directed by Len Wiseman

by Walter Chaw Appearing to be based on two White Wolf role-playing games--"Vampire: The Masquerade" and "Werewolf: The Apocalypse"--introduced a while back (and indeed, the games company is suing Sony, Screen Gems, and Lakeshore for copyright infringement, citing no fewer than sixty points of unique similarity), Len Wiseman's Underworld may prove to be less "Romeo and Juliet" than much ado about nothing. The picture looks fantastic, Kate Beckinsale and Scott Speedman look fantastic, and that's pretty much all there is recommend about the piece, which is so boring, lifeless, and humourless that White Wolf would do well to distance itself from the thing toot sweet. This is gravid filmmaking at its worst, indulging in its twin cults' puerile wish-fulfillment fantasies with a sexless lust: the life of an immortal rock star in period garb thirsting for the blood of bullies for the one, of a raging man-beast thirsting for the blood of bullies for the other. In between are tons of rip-offs of everything from The Crow to The Matrix to the leather fetish and arms of Blade to the sweaty bodice-ripping of Anne Rice to the Alien³ wall-crawling monster views of David Fincher. Wiseman, in his hyphenate debut (he co-concocted the story), has scored big with a real-life engagement to the ethereally beautiful--and undernourished and anaemic--Kate Beckinsale, enough to take the sting out of the blah of Underworld, I'd surmise. And why not? Many would fail worse for less, but as a writer and director he proves himself to be a pretty good set designer.

Queen of the Damned (2002)

**/****
starring Stuart Townsend, Marguerite Moreau, Aaliyah, Vincent Perez
screenplay by Scott Abbott and Michael Petroni
directed by Michael Rymer

by Walter Chaw The latest big-screen adaptation of an Anne Rice Vampire Chronicle, Queen of the Damned looks great but remains the sad product of Rice's juvenilia and velvet eroticism. Its sweaty mythmaking matched by its thirty-something-decade whining, the film substitutes blood for semen in its kinky puerility (a rose-petal love scene is a classic in scarlet euphemism) and becomes boring and pat when it should've been trashy and unapologetic. The greatest problem with the film isn't as obvious as its bad writing and weak structure: it's that Queen of the Damned tries to make sense where none is to be made.