Lessons of Darkness

Beach Break

Before embarking on a NJ Shore respite from watching and reviewing movies, I've got a bunch of new stuff for those interested in seeking shelter from the heat in a nice, air-conditioned cineplex. Although given the negativity oozing from the below reviews, theatergoers would be wise to avoid this weekend's junky new releases and check out The Aristocrats instead.

This weekend:
Stealth (Slant magazine)
Sky High (filmcritic.com)

In the weeks to come:
The Great Raid (Slant magazine)
Wall (Slant magazine)
Underclassman (Slant magazine)
New York Doll (Slant magazine)

And don't forget to check out my six new site-specific reviews, including Michael Bay's atrocious The Island, Lucio Fulci's gruesome Zombie, and the original Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. All can be found directly below this post.

The Island (2005): D+

Though the wretched Star Wars prequels are thankfully over, Michael Bay makes sure that the attack of the clones continues with The Island, a loud, odious sci-fi spectacular that employs the director’s trademark incomprehensible action for a paranoia-drenched story condemning stem cell research. In the foreseeable future, pretty Ewan McGregor (with a pretty awful American accent) and even prettier Scarlett Johansson (far better than this trash) live in a hermetically sealed complex, two of the remaining survivors of a global ecological apocalypse that’s contaminated the atmosphere save for an idyllic paradise called The Island that certain people are granted access to via a lottery. Curious cat that Macgregor’s Lincoln Six Echo is, he soon discovers that the whole thing is a sham: the complex’s residents, including Johansen’s gorgeously pouty Jordan Two Delta, are clones being harvested to help cure their original, identical counterparts out in the real world. As with most of his abominable output, Bay’s superficially glossy film is rotten to the core, exuding the surface sheen of a perfume ad – though, as he already proved with Bad Boys II, the director knows how to flip a car during a high-speed chase – and an ethical repugnance in which stem cell research is turned into Frankenstein-ian mad doctor science that’s a crime against both humanity and nature. The Island eventually winds up implicating villainous cloning doctor Merrick (Sean Bean) in a holocaust-style “recall” of his defective flesh-and-blood “products,” thus concluding the film’s wholly fanciful equation of stem cells with mature, conscious beings. Unlike his replica protagonists, however, it’s Bay’s repugnant film that shows no sign of intelligent life.

Zombie (1979): B+

Originally titled Zombie 2 as a craven attempt to piggyback on the success of Dawn of the Dead, Lucio Fulci’s Zombie has nothing to do with George A. Romero’s undead classic, though that doesn’t mean it’s not without its gruesome charms. The Italian goremeister’s breakthrough film features not a single believable character or plot point, no semblance of narrative cohesion or momentum, scraggly editing, horribly dubbed dialogue and a deadening lack of subtext. Yet via a few satisfyingly blood-splattered set pieces and some nice panoramic shots of voodoo-spawned zombies shuffling through a dusty Caribbean shantytown and emerging from the graves of centuries-old Spanish conquistadors, Fulci’s film nevertheless achieves a ghastly sort of brilliance. With close-ups of zombie mouths tearing flesh from victims’ throats, an eyeball being impaled on a shard of wood, and some hilariously unnecessary T&A, Zombie delivers the grisly B-movie goods even as it exhibits none of the depth or artistry found in the work of horror contemporaries Mario Bava and Dario Argento. Then again, unlike Fulci, neither of those esteemed directors was ever genius enough to stage an extended underwater fight between a zombie and a shark.

Audrey Rose (1977): C-

Vishnu sits in for Satan in Audrey Rose, a possession thriller in The Exorcist mold that replaces Christian claptrap for Hindi hokum. Elliot Hoover (Anthony Hopkins) is convinced that prepubescent Ivy (Susan Swift) – the daughter of Manhattan ad exec Bill Templeton (John Beck) and wife Janice (Marsha Mason) – is filled with the spirit of his dead daughter Audrey Rose, who died in a horrible car accident mere minutes before Ivy’s birth. Despite the fact that Hoover has been stalking her family and has a tendency to kidnap Ivy, Janice falls for Hoover’s reincarnation jive, thus turning director Robert Wise’s (West Side Story, The Sound of Music) thriller into a piece of Eastern-religion propaganda stuffed full of gibberish about the indestructibility of the human soul and culminating in an abysmal court case in which Hinduism is vindicated as an acceptable explanation for criminal behavior. A glass-shattering finale piles on the obvious symbolism, but it’s the torturously serious-minded approach to such a rote horror story – the most frightening element of which is a photograph of crazy-eyed Ivy with a loony bin smile – as well as a straight-faced closing quote from the Bhagavad Gita (!) that makes one pine for the sweet, comforting embrace of eternal darkness.

Wonderland (2003): D+

John “Johnny Wadd” Holmes was solely noteworthy because of his prodigious member, and director James Cox’s foolish decision to only perfunctorily mention the porn legend’s elephantine organ in Wonderland is indicative of this ludicrous, pointless Rashomon-meets-Boogie Nights saga. Detailing Holmes’ alleged participation in a 1981 murder case involving his scuzzy drug-pushing associates, Cox’s film proves more fascinated by junkiedom than Holmes’ sex career, fetishistically lavishing attention on filthy psychos (Dylan McDermott, Josh Lucas, Tim Blake Nelson) snorting coke, playing with guns, and generally acting like left-over degenerates from The Salton Sea or Spun. Val Kilmer brings a level of pathetic shadiness to his shifty, cocaine-manic Holmes, and his scenes with estranged wife Sharon (Lisa Kudrow) have a balls-to-the-wall desperation that almost sneak some genuine emotion into this putrid muck. His high-strung performance, however, is wasted on a film not only unwarrantedly interested in B-list celebrity-gone-to-seed, but also misguidedly convinced that its E! True Hollywood Story-ish narrative is something other than a mere footnote to its sorry subject’s limp rise-and-fall life story.

The Slumber Party Massacre (1982): B

The Slumber Party Massacre is something of a 1980s slasher film anomaly: written by lesbian erotica novelist Rita Mae Brown and directed by Amy Holden Jones, this gory story about a drill-wielding serial killer terrorizing scantily-clad high school girls during a nighttime get-together is, in fact, a gruesome, T&A-filled feminist tract about female fears of mature male sexuality. Opening with the sight of Trish (Michelle Michaels) throwing away her childhood dolls and stuffed animals, Brown’s film turns traditional horror conventions on their head, positing a world in which men are spineless wimps and women are sexy, sexually liberated alpha creatures who love to play sports and do the nasty. That these post-puberty women – constantly showering or wearing provocatively skimpy lingerie around one another – are hunted by a maniac with an enormous phallic drill (seen during one murder spinning between his legs) only heightens Brown and Jones’ subtextual portrait of female anxiety about men and their frightening organs. And though the acting is piss-poor, killer Russ Thorn (Michael Villella) is a decidedly ordinary-looking pervert, and the tension is about as thick as a piece of loose-leaf paper, the final showdown between Russ, Trish, and Trish’s next-door neighbor Valerie (Robin Stille) culminates in a fantastic bit of metaphorical rape/castration imagery in which Russ tells his would-be victims “I love you…You know you want it” right before they slice his protruding weapon.

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971): B+

Mel Stuart’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory has given pleasurable highs to many an acid dropper, but there’s nonetheless something dreary about all the song-and-dance numbers peppered throughout this adaptation of Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s tale. Listening to Jack Albertson’s Grandpa Joe sing about Wonka’s factory tour-yielding golden ticket is enough to make one pine for deafness, and there’s simply no excuse for Mrs. Bucket’s (Diane Sowle) somber ditty about her poor son Charlie (Peter Ostrum). Yet aside from its abominable musical concoctions – as well as some overly shrill acting by Julie Dawn Cole as spoiled Veruca Salt – Stuart’s classic is still an eerily entrancing head-trip headlined by Gene Wilder’s equally sweet and bitter chocolatier. With devious eyes and snide comments for his bratty guests, Wilder’s Wonka is alternately clownish and creepy, a slightly deranged madman in a purple suit who runs his factory with munchkin Oompa Loompa slave-laborers. Stuart’s psychedelic journey through the cocoa plant has its share of now-dated moments – the graphics used for text look silly, the chocolate river still looks like brown toilet water – but there’s a menacing undercurrent to the odyssey that’s immeasurably heightened by Wilder’s indifference toward the demise of Veruca, Violet Beauregarde (Denise Nickerson), Augustus Gloop (Michael Bollner) and Mike Teevee (Paris Themmen). Though its tour guide may eventually turn out to be a softie for well-behaved kids, what makes Willy Wonka so delicious is the fact that Wilder’s sweets-peddler is the kind of disturbed freak mom and dad warned you not to accept candy from.

Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990): D+

Tobe Hooper’s imprint is nowhere to be found on Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, a failed attempt by New Line to reinvent the titular chainsawer into a Freddy Krueger-style villain. Two bickering ex-lovers (Kate Hodge and William Butler) driving cross-country run into trouble when they hit a stretch of deserted highway used by Leatherface and his new family (including Viggo Mortensen) as a hunting ground for fresh meat. Forced to run for their lives in what appears to be a magical Texas rain forest, the couple team up with a heavily armed military survivalist (Dawn of the Dead’s Ken Foree) to battle Leatherface and his clan, but dreadful director Jeff Burr is thoroughly incapable of generating either the suspense of the original or the campy hysteria of its first sequel. “The Saw is Family,” reads the human skin mask-wearing killer’s new power tool (as well as the film’s tagline), but after this dreadful attempt to cash in on Hooper’s genre-defining masterpiece – now available on DVD in the infamous X-rated cut that, unsurprisingly, still sucks – someone should have permanently buried Leatherface and his bloody annoying relatives.

Cinematic Nirvana

Though I haven't yet seen the latest Michael Bay extravaganza The Island, this weekend's other major releases are, by and large, very good. Richard Linklater and Billy Bob Thornton do justice to Michael Ritchie's kiddie sports film classic Bad News Bears, Rob Zombie delivers a gory, gonzo splatter flick-via-Western with The Devil's Rejects, and Gus Van Sant's Kurt Cobain-inspired Last Days is the best film I've seen this year.

This week:
Last Days (filmcritic.com)
The Devil's Rejects (filmcritic.com)
Bad News Bears (Slant magazine)

One very good doc, and one mediocre foreign import, both out next month:
Unknown White Male (Slant magazine)
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Slant magazine)

Sleepaway Camp 3: Teenage Wasteland (1989): C-

Shot almost immediately after Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers, Michael A. Simpson’s Sleepaway Camp 3: Teenage Wasteland is the type of cheap quickie sequel that eventually ruined the slasher film genre. Angela (Pamela Springsteen) murders a poor girl with “Milk” and “Shake” tattooed on her chest, assumes her identity, and takes her place at Camp New Horizons, a summer getaway on the site of previous killing ground Camp Rolling Hills that, under new stewardship, now seeks to bring together kids from wealthy and destitute backgrounds. Socio-economic status, however, means little to Angela, who finds something deviant, or just plain annoying, about all of her stereotypical fellow campers (including the black guy who loves rap, the Hispanic guy from East L.A., and the rich, racist snob), and thus sets about dispatching all of them in a 24-hour span. Seemingly filmed without a script or a budget, the movie is both aimless (Angela slays anyone who rubs her the wrong way) and, more problematically, humorless. Springsteen is still game as the cheeky serial killer, but after this dreadful third go-round, the series – about to be revived by original creator Robert Hiltzik with 2005’s Return to Sleepaway Camp – should have been permanently closed for business.