Lessons of Darkness

Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers (1988): C+

Gender-confused Angela is back and crazier than ever in Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers, a sequel that finds the murderous androgyne taking a counselor job at Camp Rolling Hills after having undergone snip-snip sex change surgery to become a real woman. It’s the perfect summer gig for the guitar-strumming, camp song-singing psycho, whose bunk is brimming with horny teenage girls in need of a good stabbing, strangling or beheading. If Robert Hiltzik’s original was primarily concerned with identity, Michael A. Simpson’s more straightforward sequel is a conservative ode to sexual Puritanism, as Angela primarily punishes those driven by carnal desires. The film is far too pleased with its self-referential pose – nods to Freddy and Jason are wink-wink reminders that we’re watching a traditional slasher movie – but Pamela Springsteen’s jovial performance as Angela has a tongue-in-cheek cheeriness that amplifies the outlandishness of her increasingly elaborate murders. Never scary but frequently funny, it’s a follow-up that delivers more gore, more T&A, and more humor than its predecessor. And after Angela’s dispatching of always-nude hussy Ally (Valerie Hartman), you’ll never look at an outhouse the same way again.

Sleepaway Camp (1983): B

Robert Hiltzik’s Sleepaway Camp unimaginatively mimics Friday the 13th’s summer camp setting for its string of mysterious slayings, but the film’s infatuation with gender confusion is its own dubious legacy to the 1980s slasher flick genre. Years after a boating accident claimed her father and younger brother, silent, wide-eyed Angela (Felissa Rose) is sent to camp with her potty-mouthed cousin Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten) by Aunt Martha (Desiree Gould), a long-fingered freakshow whose pasty clown make-up and wacko theatrical affectations mark her as the most unreliable maternal substitute ever forced upon an orphaned child. At camp, those who pick on passive Angela – and thus infuriate protective Ricky – wind up dead. Yet the film is less entertaining as a guessing game about the killer’s identity than as an artifact of a now-antiquated early-‘80s pop culture in which young kids (played by teenagers and 20-somethings) swore like sailors, men wore package-hugging shorts, and anyone with questions about his or her sexual identity was, at heart, an unhinged psycho with a prudish interest in killing promiscuous cretins. Though it has significantly less gore and nudity than its campier, self-referential sequels, Hiltzik’s original is still the finest Sleepaway Camp, if only because of its memorable final shot, a hilarious, repulsive – and, for those with same-sex inclinations, potentially offensive – image of androgynous turmoil that remains burned in one’s mind long after the derivative plot has faded from memory.

Count Chocula Rules

Count Chocula's presence can be felt in both the ribald R-rated comedy Wedding Crashers and Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, two new releases sure to satisfy one's appetite for sweet summer confections.

And for those who don't feel like reading my jibber-jabber posts but want to find out what I had to say about each week's new movies, I've now added a "This Week's Films" category to the right sidebar which will direct you to my reviews of each weekend's latest releases.

However, if you don't want to move your eyes from the center of the screen, here are all of my latest write-ups.

This Week:
Wedding Crashers (Slant magazine)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Slant magazine)

Coming Soon:
Grizzly Man (Slant magazine)
The Baxter (Slant magazine)
The Brothers Grimm (Slant magazine)
Pretty Persuasion (Slant magazine)

Dolls (1987): D

“Now that doesn’t make a whole lotta sense,” says child-at-heart toy lover Ralph (Stephen Lee) at the end of Dolls. Ain’t that the truth. In Stuart Gordon’s (Re-Animator) flabbergasting film, an abusive father (Ian Patrick Williams), his manly second wife (Caroline Purdy-Gordon), and his precocious daughter Judy (Carrie Lorraine) find themselves stranded in the middle of nowheresville, England. Taking refuge in a giant castle along with Ralph and a duo of thieving punk rock chicks, the family becomes the target of demonically possessed china dolls sculpted by the spooky mansion’s elderly owners (Guy Rolfe and Hilary Moore). The dolls kill those who don’t have a childlike spirit, but there’s the nagging question of how grown-ups could be so easily felled by an army of tiny toys who move with stop-motion awkwardness and are vulnerable to being stepped on. More disturbing, though, is Purdy-Gordon, who seems to be channeling Joan Crawford-via-Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Picture Show as this fairy tale’s evil tranny stepmother. With its lesson about toys’ enduring loyalty to their owners, Dolls is like the separated-at-birth sibling of Toy Story 2. Though unlike that Pixar marvel, this pitiful horror film feels like it was made by a trio of monkeys with a $20 budget.

Hustle and Flow (2005) C+

A hit at this year’s Sundance, Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow is a Southern remix of 8 Mile, a rags-to-riches fairy tale in which a struggling Memphis pimp named DJay (Terrence Howard) uses his street smarts and stable of loyal whores – as well as an aspiring music producer (Anthony Anderson) and his white deejay (the aptly named DJ Qualls) – to crunk it up in the rap game. Produced by John Singleton, Brewer’s sultry directorial debut has an intoxicatingly laid-back Southern rhythm, and his film serves as a coming-out party for star Howard, who gives the barely-hanging-on DJay a soulful, frustrated desperation. The moment in which the pimp-turned-lyricist begins spitting on tape is nothing less than a cathartic cry of self-actualization. Nonetheless, there’s no getting around the dubious fancifulness of Brewer’s story, which depicts DJay and his prostitutes (including Taryn Manning and Taraji P. Henson) as a dysfunctional (but nonetheless loving and supportive) family unit that’s merely trying to scrape by. What’s troubling isn’t that Brewer refuses to outright condemn DJay’s drug-dealing and pimping but rather that he subtly glosses over the most despicable elements of his protagonist’s behavior so that his script’s happy ending will go down smoother. Furthermore, although the pimp explodes in a few anti-female tirades against his most unruly “employee” (Paula Jai Parker), Hustle & Flow doggedly avoids addressing the fact that DJay’s 50 Cent-ish music is as misogynistic and preposterously boastful as his line of work is unsavory and contemptible. “You know it’s hard out here for a pimp,” begins the chorus to DJay’s smash single, but given his profession as an unrepentant exploiter of women, it’s tough feeling euphoria over DJay’s triumph over adversity thanks to a prostitute-empowerment song entitled, “Whoop Dat Trick.”

Any Which Way You Can (1980): C

Clint Eastwood and his orangutan sidekick return for more boozing and street brawling in Any Which Way You Can, a redundant Buddy Van Horn-helmed sequel in which Philo Beddoe (Eastwood) and pet monkey Clyde find themselves embroiled in a high-stakes fight against legendary fisticuffer Jack Wilson (William Smith). A slightly sloppier rehash of Any Which Way But Loose, this second team-up between Eastwood and a primate also includes Sondra Locke and Geoffrey Lewis as Philo’s country music-singing love interest and trusty friend, respectively, as well as the slapsticky Black Widow Nazi gang. Perhaps the most disposable film Eastwood has ever made, Any Which Way You Can delivers its share of moderately humorous gags involving Clyde’s “right turn” punch and Philo’s crotchety Ma (the always funny Ruth Gordon) while never transcending – or even barely improving upon – its superior predecessor. With that said, however, such been-there, done-that monkeying around is still made moderately amusing by Eastwood’s “I can’t believe I’m in another one of these movies” eye rolls.

Backlog

Since I've been without my desktop computer for the past two weeks (thanks faulty power supply unit!), I've kept things simple here by only posting site-specific reviews. Well, things are now back to normal, and thus I've got two weeks' worth of online reviews for movie-hungry readers to devour.

This week:
Dark Water (2005) (Slant magazine)
Fantastic Four (Slant magazine)

Last Week:
Rebound (Slant magazine)
Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (Slant magazine)
November (Slant magazine)

And new reviews of theatrical films (including War of the Worlds and Mr. and Mrs. Smith) and DVDs (too many to list) can also be found below.

War of the Worlds (2005): B

Until its phony finale undoes everything exhilarating that’s come before, Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds proves to be not only a thrilling apocalyptic adventure haunted by the specter of 9/11, but also a summer spectacular in which human relationships and emotions refuse to be overwhelmed by (admittedly awesome) computer-generated mayhem. As with countless Spielberg fables, the central dramatic dynamic involves father-offspring relationships, as deadbeat dad Ray (Tom Cruise) struggles to prove his paternal aptitude to rebellious teenage son Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and younger daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) amidst an alien invasion in New Jersey. After his ex drops the kids off for the weekend, towering, laser-firing tripod machines – which are powered by aliens who have traveled to Earth via lightening, and which emit moaning sounds that slyly recall the musical tones from Close Encounters of the Third Kind – begin rising from the ground. In these breathtaking opening moments, Spielberg astutely captures both the natural human reaction to initially gawk at strange phenomenon (“Cool,” Ray says at first) and then the more reasonable instinct to run like hell.

Cruise’s intro scene as a dockworker is as unbelievable as the idea that aliens buried their death-dealing vehicles underneath the planet’s surface thousands of years earlier (if they were here that long ago, why didn’t they just set up shop then? Why wait for another civilization to appear?). But the film’s logical inconsistencies don’t interfere with the tension Spielberg generates from his unfriendly extraterrestrials’ siege and from the carnage’s affecting September 11 allusions (the wreckage of a downed airplane; missing people flyers lining a bridge). Yet for all the cacophonous, larger-than-life chaos, the director maintains his small-scale focus on Ray (embodied with efficient, one-note ferocity by Cruise), whose superheroic (and transformative) efforts to protect his kids no matter the cost culminates in a startling second-act scene between a harried Ray, terrified Rachel and the militant lunatic (Tim Robbins) with whom they’ve taken shelter in a dilapidated basement. Unfortunately, though, Spielberg sabotages his film with a disingenuously happy ending that reveals War of the Worlds as merely a cheap, consequence-free fairy tale, one in which any sense of mortal danger is merely a ruse orchestrated by a director who can’t help but leave his audiences with the comforting – and false – idea that everything works out in the end.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005): C

Tabloid darlings Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie play house in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Doug Liman’s conjugal action/comedy in which the regular US Weekly cover couple play disaffected spouses who are shocked to discover that the other is a deadly assassin. Pitt and Jolie’s rapport during the household-set first half – which is sprinkled with snippets of the duo passive-aggressively sparring in marriage counseling sessions – exhibits an amusing air of mutual discontent. Yet once screenwriter Simon Kinberg’s narrative conceit is revealed and Pitt and Jolie are assigned to kill each other, there’s nothing left but dreary paint-by-numbers action set pieces in which the couple’s amorous spark is reignited through murderous sparring. Liman’s facetious fight scenes deflate due to Pitt and Jolie’s predetermined indestructibility, but more troubling is Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s flippant depiction of violence as a consequence-free activity (except for all those faceless drones on the receiving end of Pitt and Jolie’s bullets) that’s both fun and liberating for the entire family. Achieving catharsis via punching your husband or wife in the face may begin as a tongue-in-cheek metaphor. However, as this one-note film segues into a standard-issue summer blow-'em-up, such activities eventually seem less like therapy and more like good ol’ fashioned domestic – and audience – abuse.

Maniac (1980): B+

It’s amazing to think that Michael Sembello’s 1983 hit “Maniac” from Flashdance was originally written as the title track to William Lustig’s splatterfest Maniac. Then again, the film’s serial killer protagonist Frank Zito (Joe Spinell) would no doubt have loved to get his hands on Jennifer Beals’ private dancer. A Son of Sam-ish madman with serious mommy issues and a thing for women’s pretty locks, Zito stalks and scalps his female victims so that he can use their hair for his coterie of bloody mannequins. A precursor to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Lustig’s film depicts this lunatic in a somewhat compassionate light, making sure to complement Zito’s grisly slayings with moments of schizophrenic introspection as he mumbles to himself about the childhood abuse (and maternal abandonment?) that scarred his psyche. Spinell and C.A. Rosenberg’s script, however, stops short of trying to elicit outright sympathy, a wise decision given Zito’s bloody habit of stabbing whores in seedy motel rooms – an act that, like so many of his killings, has an overt sexual component – and shooting lovers at point blank range with a shotgun (leading to horror make-up expert Tom Savini’s infamous exploding head cameo). Spinell’s committed performance as the slovenly, misogynistic fiend has a frenzied intensity that only somewhat compensates for the implausible plot, which eventually involves Zito’s relationship with a way-out-of-his-league photographer (Caroline Munroe). But as a grimy snapshot of early ‘80s Manhattan and an unapologetically twisted study in pathological murderousness, Maniac still exhibits a hideous pulse.