Blood Fest (2018) – Review

When making a meta-commentary on a genre, is there a line that shouldn’t be crossed? When Wes Craven gave us Scream, with its rule-spouting characters, the self-awareness of genre clichés was somewhat fresh, but now, post-Cabin in the Woods, the subversion of the genre has almost become a cliché in and of itself, and herein lies the danger. In the case of Blood Fest, writer/director Owen Egerton seems to be overcompensating by throwing in more and more nods and winks to classic genre tropes, what he's basically saying is that, “If you can’t be original at least be big!” The result of course is something less than desirable.

The film opens with the standard prologue, where we see a mother and son watching a classic horror film on Halloween night – cliché number one for this film – and she imparts to him the wise words, “You are stronger than anything you are afraid of.” This is a nice sentiment, but it doesn’t do her much good as she is then brutally murdered by a masked psychopath. So the sentiment should have been more accurately stated as, “You are stronger than anything you are afraid of, unless what you are afraid of is armed with a big fucking knife." The film then jumps to the present day where we are introduced to our hero Dax (Robbie Kay), who was the young boy who witnessed his mother’s murder, and as anyone whose life has been severely traumatized by violence, he has become obsessed with horror movies – cliché number two – and despite his dad forbidding him to attend Blood Fest, a horror convention taking up 700 acres that houses tributes to all the great horror genres, we know Dax is going to attend, come Hell or high water. Dax also works at a video rental store, which is, if not quite a cliché, almost anachronistic at this point.

If only Jay and Silent Bob were here to save the day.

Dax’s father (Tate Donovan) is a psychiatrist, who has turned his wife's murder into a rallying cry for his crusade to rid the world of such despicable entertainment: “Blood Fest is a gathering of freaks and degenerates celebrating mindless violence and gore,” and even his sister Jayme (Rebecca Lynne Wagner) tells him Blood Fest is going to suck. But where would we be if our heroes ever listened to such sage advice? So Dax manages to sneak into Blood Fest, along with his best friends Sam (Seychelle Gabriel) and Krill (Jacob Batalon), and they meet up with Ashely (Barbara Dunkelman) who is “starring” in an upcoming horror flick, and along with her is douchebag director Lenjamin Caine (Nicholas Rutherford); their night of true horror is about to begin.

Wanna take bets on either of these two surviving?

The evening gets off to a rough start when Dax meets the star of one of his favourite horror franchise The Arborist, Roger Hinckley (Chris Doubek), who is a jerk to Dax so that we can check off the “Never meet your heroes, it will always be a letdown” cliché box, but things take a turn for the worst when Anthony Walsh (Owen Egerton), the festival's maniacal organizer and horror film producer, claims he “wants to make movies scary again,” and unleashes blood and carnage as real chainsaw-wielding maniacs and knife-brandishing psychos tear into the crowd with relish.

One thing that can be said of this film is it does not stint on gore.

Turns out that Walsh has a secret agenda, one that somehow revolves around brutally murdering all the attendees of Blood Fest, and filming it for some arcane purpose. The premise is simply ludicrous, how exactly is this supposed to work? However he cuts this “movie” together, it will end with him either in jail or a nuthouse, but logic and reality kind of take a backseat as the proceedings follow our intrepid group of heroes as they try to fight their way to freedom. Due to Dax being an expert on “The rules to survive a horror movie,” he becomes the de facto leader, and so we are treated to hazardous trips through the various park areas; a zombie infested forest, a cabin in the woods with something nasty in the basement, a group of sexy vampires, a tortureland that is only missing its maniacal puppet, killer clowns — who are not from space — and the location of Dax's favourite film The Arborist. Some of this is a lot of fun, and the actors do their best with the material given, but much of it stretches our suspension of disbelief a tad too far, especially when we learn more and more on how the park functions, because there isn’t anything actually supernatural going on, it’s all manufactured by Walsh and his mysterious silent partner. Give any of this a moment's thought, and the whole picture starts to unravel.

Note: We get several scenes of Walsh and a bunch of his subordinates operating out of some sort of control room, as they control the monsters in the park, and the similarities between this and the office workers in Cabin in the Woods is well beyond homage and is basically outright theft.

And exactly how did Walsh create this army of monsters?

• He took local mental patients and had them watch the same horror film on repeat.
• Walsh has video gamers unknowingly controlling real corpses to kill the guests, which may not be supernatural but is batshit mad science that is beyond far-fetched.
• The vampires are hot Eastern European women who have been promised visas, have had their teeth filed, and are infected with Porphyria.
• The killer clowns he found on craigslist.

Okay, that last one seems plausible.

As Dax and his friends flee from one encounter to the next, with members being picked off along the way, fans of horror films will most likely enjoy ticking off the references to films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Evil Dead, The Ring and the Saw franchise, just to name a few, but genre aficionados might find that the film's complete lack of originality a bit wearing at times. Now there is a lot of fun to be had with this film, the gore and monster designs are quite good, and the Zachary Levi cameo was simply brilliant, but by the time the end credits rolled, I’d pretty much lost interest in who does or does not survive this killer park, and by the halfway mark, if you hadn’t guessed the identity of the knife-wielding psycho or who Walsh's “Silent Partner” is, then you probably aren’t this film’s target audience in the first place. It’s clear that Owen Egerton truly loves this genre, but Blood Fest is basically ninety minutes of him going “Remember this bit from Evil Dead?” or “Wasn’t Killer Clowns From Outer Space a lot of fun?” all while spending no time on actual motivations or logic. Thanks, by the time the big climax arrives, we just don’t care.

“Ignore the man in front of the curtain!”

As a meta-horror-comedy, Blood Fest offers some decent gore, a few laughs, and a bunch of nods to the classics of the genre, but not much else. The acting is pretty over-the-top, though I’m sure that is intentional, but this often results in the undercutting of any true elements of horror, so what we are left with is a rather shallow entry into the genre. This film is Owen Egerton’s love letter to horror films, and I’m sure many horror fans will most likely get a real kick out of this little flick as it’s really not that bad, I just wish Egerton had put a little more of himself into the project and less of everybody else's stuff.

“Hello, I will now vomit black goo for unknown biological reasons.”

The Christmas Chronicles (2018)

With the Christmas season upon us this means our television viewing will most likely consist of some Christmas classics, but between the multiple showings of It’s a Wonderful Life, or the twenty-four-hour marathons of A Christmas Story, we will also be bombarded with a boatload of “fresh” Christmas content, ones that will be vying to become new holiday mainstays. So far this year the most interesting entry in the seasonal assault would be Netflix’s The Christmas Chronicles, a movie that stars the roguishly charming Kurt Russell as Santa Claus.

 We are first introduced to the Pierce family through a montage of home video clips, where loving mom (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) and dad (Oliver Hudson) chronicle the Christmas holidays each year, but the movie proper starts after the dad has died — standard off-screen death of father figure — with this being the first Christmas without him. The dad’s death has fractured the family as Mom now has to spend more time at work while eldest son Teddy (Judah Lewis) lashes out by becoming a wannabe gangsta who boosts cars with his juvenile delinquent friends. But then there is his younger sister Kate (Darby Camp), a sweet little girl who keeps re-watching those old home movies in an attempt to keep the Christmas spirit alive. It’s while viewing one of these old Christmas videos that Kate catches a glimpse of a red sleeve in one of the shots, which she is sure must be Santa, and this leads to her blackmailing her brother — threatening to show video evidence of his car thievery to their mother — into helping her capture Santa on film.

 

 "Then she got an idea. An awful idea. Kate had a wonderful, awful idea."

Teddy comments that this idea is ridiculous, “You don’t think anyone has tried that before, catching Santa in the act?” which is a good argument and the film’s only defense is Kate’s response of “But have you ever heard of anyone pulling it off? No, they probably think it’s impossible.” This is pretty goddamn thin logic, yet she of course turns out to be right, which somehow leads to Kate and Teddy sneaking aboard Santa’s sleigh, where a startled Santa (Kurt Russell) discovers them — almost flying into a 747 — resulting in the reindeer breaking free and the sleigh crashing somewhere in the south side of Chicago. We then learn that if Santa is not able to deliver the toys to all the children of the world by morning, the “Christmas Spirit” could drop to dangerously low levels — he has a watch that measures this kind of thing — and the last time that happened it caused the Dark Ages. So the two kids team up with Santa to track down the reindeer, recover the missing toy sack which fell out during the crash, and fix the sleigh and save Christmas.

“We’re in Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, a half a pack of cigarettes, 186 minutes to save Christmas, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses. Hit it!”

The Christmas Chronicles is a fun little holiday movie, with Kurt Russell as Santa being the key selling point here, and he is delightfully wonderful in the part, but we also have to endure the holiday cliché of a character learning “The true meaning of Christmas” — in this case unbeliever Teddy. This brings us to one of the trickier elements in making a Santa movie, and that is laying out the rules and mythos that the filmmakers plan to incorporate into their version of Santa Claus, such as how exactly one man can deliver toys to every child on Earth in one night.  In this movie, we see that Santa’s sleigh can travel through some type of wormhole — this gets him from one side of the globe to the other in seconds — and his house-to-house visits are expedited by his magic Santa hat, which turns him into a sparkly streak of light that allows him to zip in and out of homes. But even with all that explained, it’s still clear that a one-night delivery would be impossible.

 

As cool as this looks, some things are best left unexplained.

Next, we have the issue of “If Santa doesn’t exist, where do the parents think those extra presents came from?” In most Christmas films of this type — those dealing with the existence of Santa — a key component is that only children believe in Santa, and any adult claiming to be Kris Kringle is crazy and most likely needs to see a good psychiatrist. This particular trope dates back as far as 1947’s A Miracle on 34th Street — which is still my favourite incarnation of Santa — but in the case of The Christmas Chronicles, it is taken to a whole new level. There are some great scenes in this film of Kurt Russell’s Santa engaging with various people for help — him knowing the name of every single person they meet, as well as every Christmas desire they've had, is particularly charming — but at one point, Santa is arrested for car theft, child endangerment and kidnapping, and while in jail he holds an impromptu rock concert that magically appears in his jail cell, which makes one wonder how anyone can disbelieve of his existence after all this. The film ends with Kate discovering that Santa had stolen the video cassette out of her camera — as she’d been chronicling their night’s adventures — but that is far from the only piece of evidence left behind that night.

 

Did he magically erase all the police footage of his exploits?

Sure, we’re not supposed to think about these kind of things when watching a movie about Santa Claus, and this film does its best to race along fast enough in the hope we don't notice the implausibilities of the situation, but it certainly brings the whole question of the “existence of Santa” to a whole new level, and it's never properly addressed. Now this doesn’t detract too much from the fun, as there are some great laugh out loud moments in this Christmas movie; we get cool CGI reindeer, a nice tricked-out sleigh, and it even manages to land a few poignant moments as well — which is pretty much required in this type of film — but the fantasy elements could have been dealt with a little better. The most negative thing I can say about The Christmas Chronicles is that this film’s depiction of elves was simply terrifying — think the cute trolls from 2016 animated film but with chainsaws — and any moment of them on screen is a little creepy.

 

These guys are pure nightmare fuel.

Stray Observations:

• While zipping from house to house, Santa leaves his sleigh hovering in the middle of the street. It’s not cloaked by any sort of invisibility shield, so how is it not spotted by random drivers?
• If the Christmas Spirit is what keeps the world from plunging into war, was the lack of it what caused the Jewish Holocaust?
• Santa’s sack isn’t just a magical bag of holding, it actually contains a wormhole that leads to the North Pole workshop. That’s pretty neat.
• Teddy is grabbed by a bunch of criminals and taken back to their evil lair because he wouldn’t hand over Santa’s toy sack, but realistically they would have just shot Teddy in the face.
• Mrs. Clause is portrayed by Goldie Hawn in a nice bit of stunt casting.
• The running gag of Santa hating advertisements that depict him as fat could have been trimmed a tad.
• The Santa “Jailhouse Rock” sequence is a nice nod to the fact that Kurt Russell has played both Elvis and an Elvis impersonator in previous films.
• After this musical number, which involved Santa conjuring up musical instruments and costumes, the police all just smile and walk off to go back to their jobs, as if this kind of thing happens all the time.

 

“Nothing to see here, move along.”

Overall, The Christmas Chronicles is a light-hearted whimsical Christmas adventure where someone will not only learn to believe in Christmas, but to also believe in himself — we’re looking at you Teddy. Kurt Russell was clearly having fun with this role, and his easy-going charm does a lot to sell this movie. This film may not be the best, nor most original Christmas movie out there, and it won’t be replacing any holiday classics anytime soon, but it's certainly worth checking out.

Deep Rising (1998) – Review

Blending horror and comedy has always been a tricky thing – too often the comedy can undercut the horror – but in 1998, writer/director Stephen Sommers released Deep Rising, which was not only a horror/comedy, but an action movie as well. Added to the mix was a monster that would be 95% CGI – at a time when computer generated characters/monsters was in its infancy – so this movie turning out as good as it did is a testament to all those involved.

Deep Rising is quite the genre mash-up, with equal doses of the action heist movie, buddy comedy flicks, and your classic B-monster movie, all centering on a cast of villains – that’s right, this movie has no straight up heroes just degrees of morally flexible crooks – who must work together if they are to survive (and not that many of them do). The basic plot of Deep Rising is that a group of mercenaries have hired PT boat captain John Finnegan (Treat Williams) to pilot them out to the middle of the South China Sea, where they are to pull off some mysterious job. Among Finnegan’s own small crew is his wise-cracking mechanic Joey Pantucci (Kevin J. O'Connor), and Leila (Una Damon), who gets stuck doing much of the grunt work as well as having the unenviable position of being Joey’s girlfriend. Neither of these two crew-members are all that happy with Finnegan’s business motto of “If the cash is there, we do not care,” especially when Joey discovers the mercs have brought black market Russian torpedoes onboard.

 

Horror Tip: Avoid being the sidekick’s girlfriend.

The group of mercenaries are led by a badass named Hanover (Wes Studi), a take-no-crap kind of guy, and their target is the Argonautica, a luxury cruise ship owned by Simon Canton (Anthony Heald), but a wrinkle in the plan quickly develops when the cruise ship is attacked by a massive sea monster prior to our plucky band of mercs arriving on the scene. Armed to the teeth, the men storm the ship only to find it completely devoid of passengers or crew, only blood and carnage, and before anyone can even utter the words “Mary Celeste,” they all find themselves fighting for their lives against a tentacle monster, one that apparently likes to swallow and “drink” its victims alive. Our “heroes” eventually do come across a few survivors; Captain Atherton (Derrick O'Connor) and the aforementioned Simon Canton, who is shortly to be revealed as the inside man on this heist, and we also encounter sexy thief Trillian St. James (Famke Janssen), who got locked up in the ship’s larder prior to the attack.

 

Can’t have a horror movie without your Final Girl.

The only reason this film works at all is because of the great chemistry among this bizarre collection of characters; Finnegan is your standard roguish hero – so much in the vein of Han Solo that they first offered the part to Harrison Ford – who has a very flexible moral compass when money is involved, and the banter between Treat Williams and Kevin J. O’Connor certainly elevated the material beyond what we are use to getting in films of this genre. Famke Jansen is great as the femme fatale, quickly realizing what kind of movie she was in and thus sticking close to Finnegan, and then we have the amazing Wes Studi, whose instant screen presence sells his character as an efficient, cold and calculating villain who doesn’t intend to let some slimy tentacled creature get in the way of his payday.

 

“I hope I’m not horribly killed as a comeuppance for my evil actions.”

What is truly delightful about Deep Rising is the fact that Stephen Sommers gave us a hard “R” rated monster movie – if made today, I’m sure the studio would have forced a PG 13 rating like they did to Jason Statham’s Meg – and this film does not hold back at all on the gore, as bloody body parts and viscera practically spray throughout the film’s entire running time. The blend of practical make-up effects with CGI enhancements lead to some truly startling results, as well. Not only do we get to see people being engulfed by the monster, but we also are treated to some great moments with them after they have been partially digested.

 

If there are worse ways to die, I don’t want to know about them.

Deep Rising is an immensely fun flick full of laughs and screams, but it does have a few problems, starting with the basic premise behind the heist itself. We learn from Canton that he hired the mercs to rob and then sink the ship for the insurance money, because after spending $487 million dollars building his dream ship, he came to the startling conclusion that this ship will never be able to operate at a profit, thus sinking it for the insurance is the only way to prevent the bankers from getting their grubby hands on it. Joey makes the comment, “You mean we're all gonna die 'cause you screwed up on the math?” and then the movie rushes forward with more monster action, not giving us time to question, "Just how did he screw up the math?" Now, this is the maiden voyage, and a bemused Captain Atherton points out that the ship is running at full capacity, so how could it be in financial trouble already? Canton informs him that, “The problem is that the cost of keeping it operating is a hell of lot more than we’re ever gonna take in.” So apparently Simon Canton constructed a floating casino that from day one was doomed to lose money, but exactly how is that possible? I thought Donald Trump was the only person on Earth cable of opening a casino and losing money. Did Canton construct the ship’s hull out of platinum? Does he pay the entire crew one hundred thousand dollars a year? It’s a little throwaway plot element that just doesn’t quite pass the smell test.

 

When greed and stupidity meet.

Deep Rising also has a couple nice nods to some classic films; when the ship is first struck by the creature we are treated to some fantastic stunts, as passengers are sent flying ass over teakettle, and it all looks like it could have been lifted directly from Irwin Allen’s classic disaster film The Poseidon Adventure, but the similarities to that film don’t end there: there is a moment in Deep Rising where our heroes have to travel through a submerged corridor that is a homage/rip-off of the Shelly Winters swimming sequence from The Poseidon Adventure. Then we have the film’s exciting climax where Finnegan sticks the Russian torpedoes through holes in the hull of his PT boat, where he then sets it to auto-pilot to ram the monster-infested cruise ship with his makeshift weapon. This is a pretty clever plan, but almost the exact same plan that Humphrey Bogart and Catherine Hepburn came up with in The African Queen to use against a German gunboat.

 

Bogie and Hepburn didn’t have to contend with monsters like this.

A modern audience looking back at Deep Rising may find the early computer generated monster to be a little quaint, with some rendered shots looking a little cartoony at times, but the creature designs by legendary effect man Rob Bottin are really quite impressive. However, the sequence where the monster chases Finnegan and Joey, popping up floorboards as it travels below the deck, seems to be a complete lift from John Carpenter’s The Thing, a film which Bottin also worked on. But wherever the film lacks in originality, it certainly makes up for in pure unadulterated fun. Deep Rising may not be the best sea monster movie ever made, but it’s got to be in the top five, and one heartily recommend.

 

"I also made the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs."

Final Thoughts:

• Canton had disabled the cruise ship’s communication systems so the crew wouldn’t be able to call for help when the mercenaries arrived, and because of this our heroes can’t call for help either, but wouldn’t Finnegan’s boat have had a radio on board?
• The triple-pulse assault rifles used by the mercenaries’ fire so many rounds that each of them would have had to be towing a wagon full of ammunition behind them for this to be even remotely possible.
• During the waverunner chase sequence, Finnegan opens and closes elevator doors by shooting the control panels. This is a trope that I really, really hate. Electronic locks do not work this way.
• The cast of mercenaries is quite impressive, along with Wes Studi we have the likes of Jason Flemyng, Clint Curtis, Trevor Goddard and Djimon Hounsou.
• Our survivors make it to a nearby island only to find it inhabited by a giant monster.

 

Apparently this nod to Skull Island was to be a lead into a reboot of King Kong by Sommers.

Tarantula (1955) – Review

When it wasn’t atomic bombs creating giant monsters in the 1950s, it was your garden variety mad scientist, tinkering away in his beaker-filled lab, spilling behemoth creatures all over the landscape, and one of the most memorable examples of this is the 1955 creature feature Tarantula. Produced and directed by the legendary filmmaker Jack Arnold, Tarantula tells the classic story of a scientist trying to make the world a better place, but instead unleashing a monster of unbridled power.  You know, shit happens.

The movie opens with a deformed man staggering through the desert – the man will later be revealed to have been biological research scientist Eric Jacobs – who shortly perishes from what looks to be a genetic ailment called acromegaly, a rare disorder that is caused by an excess in growth hormone, but the real mystery here is that apparently four days ago, Jacobs looked completely normal, and the level of deformity he has at death would have taken years to reach the point at which the film finds him. That is all kinds of messed up.

What makes Tarantula stand out from other giant monster movies is that this film is primarily a mystery, with the hero trying to put together the pieces of a bizarre puzzle — it just so happens that this mystery ends with fighter jets attacking a giant spider. So not quite Agatha Christie, but still a cracking good way to wrap up a mystery. The man to solve this particular mystery is Dr. Matt Hastings (John Agar), a local country doctor who doesn’t buy “acromegaly” as the true culprit in the death of Jacobs, and he wants to investigate further. In opposition to this is Professor Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll), who is not only a well reputed scientist, but was also Jacob’s scientific partner, and he puts the kibosh on the idea of having an autopsy performed, saying, “I don’t think that will be necessary. I was in attendance, and I signed the death certificate.” Worse is that Deemer’s entire explanation seems to hinge on the fact that, “Things happen when you get older.”  Yeah, that sounds scientific.

 

“Or are you just covering up for medical malpractice?”

Hastings gets quite a bit of resistance from Sheriff Jack Andrews (Nestor Paiva), who takes the side of Professor Deemer, stating that, “A young fellow like you can’t stack what he knows against the Professor. The trouble is, Doc, you hate to admit you’re wrong.” As this story takes place in the 50s, and located in a small Arizona town, this attitude is actually quite realistic — "age trumps youth" was the motto of the 50s — as was the attitude towards women, when Stephanie “Steve” Clayton (Mara Corday) arrives in town – hired by the late Jacobs to work in their lab as a graduate student – one of the first things out of Dr. Hastings's mouth was this little gem: “I knew it would happen. Give women the vote and what do you get? Lady scientists.” The casual sexism was pretty much standard in films of that era, especially in the science fiction genre, but at least here Hastings is just kind of “kidding” around.

 

“Doctor, you’re kind of cute, so I will let that boorish remark slide.”

What follows is your standard monster movie mystery, with a variety of horrifying moments to keep our interest peeked. Professor Deemer is attacked by another person – who seems to also be suffering from acromegaly – and who (during his trashing of the lab) injects the Professor with something, and we're betting it’s not kindness. The destruction of the lab does result in our title creature escaping into the night, though at this point the tarantula is no bigger than a large dog, but eventually it will grow big enough to feed on neighboring cattle, as well as the neighboring ranchers themselves. When Hastings discovers large pools of spider venom at the crime scenes – more venom than even hundreds of spiders could create – he becomes very suspicious, and when he learns of Deemer’s experiments in creating a super-nutrient, one that causes test animals to grow rapidly, he starts to put two and two together, that there be mad science at work.

 

Two and two equals an eight legged nightmare.

The special effects for Tarantula as a whole are quite good – exempting the odd times when one of the tarantula’s legs would step outside the matte lines – but what is the real standout is the make-up effects that Bud Westmore developed for this film’s version of acromegaly, as they are purely terrifying. Poor Professor Deemer was injected with his “super nutrient,” and we get to watch in horror as over time his face and hands morph into grotesqueness. John Agar and Mara Corday have great screen chemistry, and their scenes together helps keep our interest between monster attacks, and Agar’s country doctor doesn’t even let a giant spider cockblock him, brushing off a monster induced rockslide as if it was nothing more than an annoyance. Mara “Call me Steve” is a spunky scientist who isn’t just around to be menaced and saved – though this does happen – for even though she’s only a graduate student, the film doesn’t treat her intelligence as anything less than that of our male hero.

Question: Why do giant monsters insist on peeking through windows to check out women?

Then we have Leo G. Carroll who, though playing the standard movie scientist “Who should not meddle in God’s domain,” provides his character with a bit more pathos than what you’d expect to find in a movie about a giant arachnid tossing cars around and eating people. Overall, Tarantula is one of the best example of the 50s sci-fi monster movies, with good characters to root for and a monster that is universally feared. 'Cause seriously, who wouldn’t be afraid of a hundred-foot high spider? So if you haven’t seen this classic monster movie, I do recommend you hunting it down, before it hunts you.

Final Thoughts:

• The film of course ignores Galileo's square-cube principle, as a creature exponentially grown to giant size would be crushed under its own weight.
• How Deemer plans to save mankind from starvation, by creating a super nutrient, is never made clear. All we see is his test animals that either become fully mature in a matter of hours, or grow gigantic. Not sure how injecting that into humans is all that helpful.
• The desert is a big place, but it’s still surprising how a hundred-foot tall spider manages to keep things on the down-low for so long.
• People would not be the prey of a creature the size we see here – a hundred-foot high spider tearing apart a house, looking for the human prey inside, would be like me busting up a dollhouse to find a couple of peanuts. Way too much effort for the end result.
• Nice uncredited cameo of Clint Eastwood as the lead fighter pilot who napalms the giant tarantula.

 

I bet the town smelt like burnt spider for days.

Overlord (2018) – Review

Genre mash-ups can be a lot fun, and when it's horror with another genre, the results can be quite surprising – horror-comedy being one of the more prevalent of these – but one horror combo that doesn’t get a lot of love is the horror/war movie mash-up, which is why Overlord is such a treat. The best way to describe this movie is by picturing Easy Company from Band of Brothers encountering a Nazi version of the Umbrella Corporation from Resident Evil, and if that doesn’t sound like fun to you, then we have nothing further to discuss.

The plot of Overlord is fairly basic; a squad of paratroopers is air-dropped into France in advance of the D-Day invasion, their mission? To take out a Nazi radio installation located in the tower of an old church. But when they reach the quaint French village where the church is located, things don’t go quite as expected. Turns out an evil Nazi scientist – one who clearly went to the Josef Mengele School of Medicine – is experimenting with a strange and mysterious liquid compound that had been discovered beneath the church, and the result of these experiments could lead to the end of the Free World and the birthing of a Thousand Year Reich.

 

Can you say unstoppable undead Nazi soldiers?  I knew you could.

Directed by Julius Avery, from a story and screenplay by Billy Ray, Overlord is an incredibly solid war movie, from the thrilling perilous night drop – which results in about 90% of the squad being lost or killed – right up until our surviving heroes hook-up with a French woman named Chloe (Mathilde Ollivier), who is able to take them to her town where the German radio installation is located, and where they hunker down to figure out how four men are going to fight through a hundred German soldiers and destroy that tower. Up to this point, we'd been experiencing a taught and action filled war movie – with enemy troops and landmines threatening our heroes at every turn – but when our intrepid soldiers encounter the sadistic and part-time rapist SS Hauptsturmführer Wafner (Pilou Asbæk), things go from grim to downright terrifying.

 

You know it’s a bad day when a stroll through enemy territory is the easiest thing you’ll do.

Overlord doesn’t worry about having big stars to bring in an audience, but the ones they have on hand do fantastic work here, especially Jovan Adepo as Pvt. Ed Boyce, the green recruit who may not have the killing instinct needed to survive this mmission.The character of Boyce is beautifully counterpointed by Cpl. Ford (Wyatt Russell) as the “been there done that” seasoned soldier, and Ford is damn well going to accomplish this mission no matter the cost, a point of view that doesn’t always sit well with Boyce. It’s this kind of conflict that brings a little spice to the proceedings, and stops the film from just being a two-hour version of Wolfenstein. Now, our little band of heroes may come off as a little cliché – the required Brooklyn guy is found front and center – but this kind of works in the film’s favour, as it puts the audience at ease with the feel of war films of the past, and that allows the filmmakers to easily pull the rug out from under us when we come face to face with undead Nazis.

 

And it’s a very gory and bloody rug at that.

Simply put, this film is tons of fun – when our plucky heroes aren’t mowing down German soldiers like stalks of wheat, they're running down dark corridors with a series of nasty monsters hard on their heels – and the CGI blood and gore is kept to a minimum as practical effects are allowed free reign in this film. We get characters rushing off to complete separate missions, whether it be to rescue a small French boy, or plant demolition charges to complete their mission, and then there are taught character moments that lets us get to know our heroes between moments of humor and outright horror, and it's director Julius Avery who manages to keep all these balls perfectly juggled while constantly upping the ante. If any movie could be described as “edge of your seat entertainment,” it would be Overlord, from the opening terrifying airdrop sequence to the film’s final moments of nail biting horror, it grabs hold of you and never lets go. If you are a fan of the 2008 Ray Stevenson film Outpost, or the Nazi zombie movie Dead Snow, you would be doing yourself a big disservice if you missed Overlord.

 

There is a lot to love in this film.

Supergirl (1984) – Review

It was in the year 1984 that we saw Supergirl’s first appearance outside the pages of DC comics, which was pretty sad considering her cousin Superman had been appearing in serials, cartoons, television shows and movies dating as far back as the 1940s. Yet it wasn’t until the success of the Christopher Reeve movies that anyone thought to bring this comic book character to life. Now, female superheroes as a genre didn’t have much of a history outside of comic books, the Linda Carter Wonder Woman series being the only notable one at the time, but with Superman III only pulling in about $60 million dollars (as opposed to the first two movies both easily clearing the $100 million dollar mark), Alexander and Ilya Salkind decided to branch out their Superman franchise and give the Girl of Steel her shot.

The movie opens in the magnificent Kryptonian community of Argo City, which kind of looks like a crystal hippie commune lit by orbiting stadium lights. Inside, we are introduced to young Kara Zor-El (Helen Slater) and her mentor Zaltar (Peter O'Toole), the genius mind behind the creation of Argo City. We find Zaltar playing around with a small orb called the Omegahedron, which he “borrowed” from the city guardians so that he could create a bizarre facsimile of a tree. Kara admonishes him for doing this because the Omegahedron is the device that provides power and air to the city, which one must admit is fairly irresponsible, and leads one to ask, "How can a person just get a hold of device that is solely responsible keeping the people of Argo City alive?" Well, for starters the entire city is made up of a series of rooms with no walls, so apparently security is not an issue, and this comes from the fact that Argo City is viewed as a community of perfect harmony. That residents of Argo City all walk around looking as if they are in some kind of drug-induced state of ecstasy explains how such an important device could be borrowed without anyone noticing.

 

Argo City brought to you by the makers of Quaaludes.

While Zaltar is discussing explorations into outer space with Kara’s mother (Mia Farrow), we see Kara herself screwing around with the Omegahedron, and with it she brings to life a large dragonfly that quickly proceeds to fly around erratically until eventually puncturing a hole in the city’s saran wrap like exterior wall. This causes a vacuum breach and the Omegahedron is sucked out into space, thus dooming the inhabitants of Argo City to a slow and painful death. Zaltar states that as this is all his fault — which it really is — he will venture off into space after the missing device, in a small craft that he will pilot through something called the binary chute: "a pathway from Innerspace to outer space." But before he has a chance to explain his plan, Kara hops in the spacecraft and takes off in it herself.

Note: According to Zaltar, Argo City is located in “Innerspace” which is apparently a pocket of trans-dimensional space and not inside Martin Short.

In Superman: The Movie, baby Kal-El was placed in a spacecraft so that he would survive the destruction of Krypton, while in this movie we have Kara Zor-El stealing a spacecraft to flee the world she herself doomed. This is a very key difference in plot and character development between the films. Sure, her plan isn’t to abandon her people to a horrible death, a fate that she would be completely responsible for, but to retrieve the Omegahedron and return it to Argo City — regardless of her noble motives, though, this is a less than heroic way to introduce our main character. In the comics, Argo City was a surviving fragment of Krypton, and Kara’s parents sent her to Earth when the city was doomed by a meteor shower. One can understand the filmmakers not wanting to use that premise, as it’s pretty much the same origin story as Superman’s, but having her accidentally dooming the city seems to be a rather odd direction to go. Things get even stranger when she arrives on Earth – popping out of a lake in full Supergirl regalia – where she proceeds to fly around as if she doesn’t have a care in the world.

 

“I have a vague notion that I should be doing some important, but nevermind, time for more flying”

The Salkind Superman movies are guilty of giving kyrptonians bizarre powers – in Superman II we saw that General Zod suddenly had finger-pointing powers of levitation, and Superman himself gets that wonderful “kiss of forgetfulness” power – and in this movie the first thing Supergirl does is pick a flower and make it bloom with her heat vision. But her most startling power is her ability to morph from her Supergirl persona to her secret identity of Linda Lee as if by magic. There is no running into a phone booth to change here, not even a quick Wonder Woman costume spin change, but instead she just calmly walks through the woods as her Supergirl costume slowly shifts into Earth attire and her hair changes from blonde to brunette. This is basically magic and not any kind of super power, and it’s this change into her secret identity that brings forth my biggest issue with this film, and that would be "Why in the hell does she bother with a secret identity at all?" Does going undercover at a local high school somehow aid her in the search for the Omegahedron? The answer to that is decidedly no.

 

Your people are dying, you colossal idiot!

Before leaving Argo City she heard her mother state that within a few days, “Our lights will grow dim and the very air we breathe, so thin.” And yet we see Supergirl’s first action on Earth – aside from flying around and looking at horses – is to enroll in Midvale all-girls school, as if she has all the time in the world. And how does she spend her time there?  Well her amazing powers are used to save her new friend Lucy Lane (Maureen Teefy), younger sister to Lois Lane, from some bullies during a field hockey game, and later she thwarts those same bullies when they try to scald the other girls in the school showers — talk about "With great power comes moderate responsibility!" And does any of this bring her closer to finding the Omegahedron? If we look at the origin of Superman, he arrived on Earth and was found and raised by the Kents, but he had no outlying mission other than to eventually become one of the world’s greatest heroes, and it’s his persona of Superman that’s actually his secret identity, Clark Kent is who he really is and the guy in blue tights was created to keep his loved ones safe. This is not the case here with Supergirl in this movie, as there is no reason for her to take on a second identity – other than to maybe pad the run-time – as she should be spending every waking hour searching for the Omegahedron. The filmmakers don’t seem to have a clue as to what to do with her character, they clearly don’t want her to be a carbon copy of Superman, but then they saddle her with a mild-mannered identity that serves no purpose to the story that they’re trying to tell, and because she is a female, they bizarrely thought the best introduction of a “Supergirl” would be to have her first encounter with people of Earth to be with a couple of would-be rapists.

 

How dumb do you have to be to attempt to rape a girl in a Superman costume?

If we were to assume that these would-be rapists thought that this was just a young woman in a Halloween costume that would be one thing, but she lifts the first asshat up by his chin and throws him through a fence, and yet his partner still proceeds with the attempted rape – he doesn’t even let the fact that she melts his knife with her heat vision phase him – and thus the audience is left wondering, “Who in the hell wrote this thing?” Of course, idiot rapists aren’t this movie's number one threat to Supergirl – that’s just a threat to good taste – because the real “big baddie” is a power-hungry witch named Selena (Faye Dunaway), who while picnicking with her warlock friend Nigel (Peter Cook) has the Omegahedron literally fall into her lap, or to be more accurate, into her cheese fondue. The one positive thing I can say about the Supergirl movie is that it looks like Peter O’Toole and Faye Dunaway had a lot of fun with their roles, and especially Dunaway with the high camp aspect of her character.

 

  Don’t screw with Faye Dunaway.

Coming up with a proper villain wasn't all that easy for the Salkinds, for at this point in history the character of Supergirl didn’t have much of a rogues gallery of her own – even today the likes of Silver Banshee and Bizzaro-Girl are not known outside of the most avid comic book readers – but this movie doesn’t bother to use anything from the DC canon. Instead, we get a witch who lives in an abandoned carnival, a location that screams for the Scooby Gang to investigate, and the conflict between Supergirl and Selena seems to stem more from the fact that they have the hots for the same guy, and not because Selena is in possession of the item that is required to save Supergirl’s people.

 

Note: The love interest is played by Hart Bochner, who played the idiot Ellis in Die Hard.

I must say it’s a shame that writers insisted on pitting a female superhero against a female supervillain, as if Supergirl would be no match for the likes of Lex Luthor or Brainiac, which is why I was pleasantly surprised that the latest Wonder Woman movie had her up against Ares the God of War, and not her more notable female antagonists like Cheetah and Circe. That Selena here is a practitioner in the dark arts does make her a credible threat, as magic is one of Superman’s key weaknesses – right up there with Kryptonite – but this element of the comic book was never really addressed in the movies, and Supergirl counters most of Selena’s spells without much effort, so not much drama to be found there. The film’s key threat to our hero is when Selena manages to conjure up supernatural beings of "darkness and shadow," but this had me questioning how the Omegahedron works, and how exactly is Selena able to use it? We are told it is the power source that keeps Argo City alive so how exactly does that translate to working black magic and summoning dark forces?

Filmmaking Tip #28 – The biggest tip-off to your effect budget being on the smallish side is when you include an “invisible monster” in your movie, because if you’re not The Forbidden Planet, it’s just sad.

Aside from two confrontations with mystical monsters, we don’t get much in the way of cool Supergirl action; she beats up the aforementioned rapists, saves Lucy from a nasty hit during that field hockey game, thwarts the evil bullies' shower scheme, saves Selena’s boy toy from a magically animated bulldozer, and later rescues him from Selena-controlled bumper cars. None of this is particularly impressive, and during all of these events you can’t help but ask the question, “Why and the hell are you worrying about all this shit when everyone back in Argo City are about to die?” We count at least three different night scenes before the third act, and at least a couple of more days must go by after Selena banishes Supergirl to the Phantom Zone and takes over Midvale – don’t ask me how an amateur occultist even knows about the Phantom Zone – so if we go by Supergirl’s mother's statement as fact, that they only had few days left before “Our lights will grow dim and the very air we breathe, so thin," then this means by the time Supergirl eventually defeats Selena, all of her people back in Argo City would be long dead.

 

But hey, at least she was able to conquer sixth dimensional geometry.

This movie is supposed to take place in the same universe as the Christopher Reeve movies, and Reeve himself was originally set to appear in Supergirl but he wisely bowed out at the last minute, yet references to his character come across as rather odd, and they raise some rather interesting questions.
• At the beginning of the film Kara and Zaltar discuss her cousin living on Earth, but exactly how they know of his surviving Krypton’s destruction is never addressed.
• Kara pops out of her trans-dimensional craft suddenly wearing the Supergirl costume. Did this little space pod have some kind of costume manufacturing device inside it?
• To enroll in the Midvale all-girl school, Kara adopts the persona of Linda Lee, forging a reference letter from her cousin Clark Kent, but how would a person from Argo City even know what a school reference letter was, let alone how to forge one?
• And again how are the people in Argo City keeping tabs on Kal-El? Does Zaltar have some magical viewer that allows them all to watch the adventures of Superman?
• The Phantom Zone that Supergirl is banished to is very different from what we saw in the first two Superman movies. We do see her briefly in what I call the “Queen Album Cover” that we saw General Zod and his flunkies trapped within in the previous films, but then we see her next on some desert alien landscape. If this big barren world is the Phantom Zone, why before did we only see the three Kryptonian criminals with their faces mashed up against it like a pane of glass?

 

The limbo-like Phantom Zone from the comics.

 

The Queen album cover Phantom Zone from Superman: The Movie

 

The wasteland Phantom Zone from Supergirl.

This was actress Helen Slater’s first movie role – an after-school special being her only other credit before this film – and she does remarkably well as the naïve young Supergirl, which considering the fact that she is facing off against the legendary Faye Dunaway is pretty damn impressive. It’s just a shame that the filmmakers didn’t quite have the handle on the character that they wanted her to depict. Is she here to save the world from an evil witch or to find her city’s lost power source and save her people? The scripts waffling of motivations keeps her character from being even remotely sympathetic, which Slater is certainly trying her best to pull off, and this is the key reason for the film doing so poorly at the box office and why we never got a sequel.

 

Is she a Superhero or a bloody Disney Princess?

Director Jeannot Szwarc was mostly known for his television work and feature films like Jaws 2 and Somewhere in Time, which didn't quite prepare him for the a big superhero fantasy genre. Thus, Supergirl ended up being a muddled mess, one that just so happens to contain a couple of fun performances. Now, if Szwarc had been given a decent budget and a script that made even a lick of sense, this could have spawned another franchise, but instead we got a movie that meandered for a little over two hours and then abruptly ended. Supergirl isn't the worst superhero movie out there, but it is certainly guilty of wasting potential, and only worth checking out for nostalgic reasons.

 

“Supergirl, will you stop screwing around and just find that damn Omegahedron!”