Friday the 13th (2009) – Review

How does one remake the 1980 classic yet still include the iconic character of Jason Voorhees? It’s no secret that Hollywood is all about repackaging and rebooting products so that they can wring a few more nostalgia dollars out of the public, which was pretty much the case with the 2009 version of Friday the 13th, a film that has more in common with Friday the 13th Part 2 and Part 3 than it does the original movie.

The movie opens with a poor recreation of the ending of the original Friday the 13th, with Mrs. Voorhees trying to kill the Final Girl only to have her head cut off, but in this re-telling we see a young Jason Voorhees looking on from a hiding place in the woods. Wait, wasn’t his death the thing that got all Mrs. Voorhees so hot and bothered in the first place? Once again we must wonder if Jason had faked his death and that he’d hidden out in the woods because his home life sucked or something. The movie then jumps ahead a few decades to where we find a new group of teenagers hunting for a mysterious crop of marijuana, unfortunately for them, they find the pot but also Jason Voorhees (Derek Mears), who brutally murders all of them, except a girl named Whitney Miller (Amanda Righetti), whom he captures because she resembles his mother.

 

This Jason has even weirder mommy issues than previous incarnations.

Six weeks later we meet Clay Miller (Jared Padalecki), who is looking for Whitney, his sister, and he’s doing the whole Easy Rider thing while handing out pictures of Whitney, it's at this point that he runs into a group of rich kids who have arrived for a fun weekend at the lake. These teens are your standard one-dimensional characters found in pretty much all slasher films and would be considered rather unlikable if they also weren’t so forgettable. Clay eventually teams up with Jenna (Danielle Panabaker), the designated “good girl” of the group, but when they stumble across Jason carrying a corpse, things quickly go from bad to worse.

 

“Don’t worry, my brother Dean and I are quite used to this.”

Stray Observations:

• Are we to assume that the pot field was planted by Jason, or was he just hired by the local hillbillies to guard it? Either way, this is much more financially conscious Jason than what we've seen in the past.
• Hanging a person in a sleeping bag over a campfire is a very sadistic thing to do but torturing people was never been Jason’s style, I mean, he did love displaying corpses so one could argue he practice psychological torture, but laying bear traps and burning people alive doesn’t have a much of a Jason vibe to it.
• After a mere six weeks, the local police close the case on five missing teens. This would only make sense if the cops were paid off by the hillbillies that Jason was working for.
• Jason trades up from the bag over his head look to his iconic hockey mask for…reasons? Did it take him twenty years to figure out that burlap was so 1981?
• Jason’s seemingly magical ability to appear anywhere, as if he could teleport, is explained here by his having a network of underground tunnels. I'd gleefully give the film points for this clever idea if only everything else wasn’t so blandly generic.

 

I personally preferred the bag head version in this film.

Director Marcus Nispel is good at creating suspense and tension but he’s hampered at every turn by a cast of characters that we don’t give two shits about – with the exception of Whitney who should have been the star of this movie – and at an hour and forty-five minutes in length this is also the longest of the Friday the 13th movie to date and it really shows at times. The entire last act of the movie consists of characters running from Jason, getting caught, escaping, running some more and then getting caught again, add rinse and repeat until the end credits roll. It’s really quite tiring, but not in a good way.

 

Who of these unlucky campers will survive, more importantly, who cares?

This is a slicker and more polished entry in the franchise, and the make-up effects used to depict the skills are lightyears ahead of what Sean S. Cunningham and Tom Savini were able to pull off back in 1980, unfortunately, other than that there is very little to distinguish this film from its predecessors. This remake also lacks the dark sense of humour that many of the better chapters were able to incorporate – there is certainly nothing meta going on with this movie – and so there really isn’t much to offer fans that they haven’t seen many times before.

Tremors 2: Aftershocks (1996) – Review

In 1990 a little monster film called Tremors came and went with barely a ripple at the box office, even good reviews couldn’t spur audiences to visit the town of Perfection, but with the advent of home video this overlooked gem garnered a second shot at life, and like Frankenstein’s monster it rose from the grave to lumber across the landscape with sequel after sequel.

Taking place years after the original film we find Earl Bassett (Fred Ward) has squandered his fame and fortune on a failed ostrich farm – someone should have told him that having two male ostriches does not bode well for breeding prospects – but when he is approached by Carlos Ortega (Marcelo Tubert), an oil executive whose Mexican oil fields have become a feeding ground for Graboids, he finds himself facing a tough dilemma as the offer of $100,000 dollars for every Graboid killed is hard to turn down.

 

“Maybe I could get a spot on Dancing with the Stars.”

Needless to say, Earl takes the job and soon he and his new partner Grady Hoover (Chris Gartin) are heading south of the border to hunt monsters – this new partner is due to Kevin Bacon deciding to star in Apollo 13 rather than a sequel to a film that bombed – and we also learn that the Mexican military has offered to provide them with whatever they need to hunt down and kill the Graboids, but this begs the question, “Why exactly would the Mexican government be okay with a pair of norteamericanos running around their country blowing shit up?” We get a brief explanation for why the Mexican military isn’t handling this problem, some bullshit about the sounds of many people running around would cause the Graboids to scatter, but none of it makes even the remotest sense if two seconds of thought is given. At most, you’d have had Earl Bassett being brought in as a consultant to aid the military, much as Ripley was brought along with the Colonial Marines in James Cameron’s Aliens.

 

"Is this going to be a stand-up fight, mam, or another bug hunt?"

Our two would-be-monster-hunters meet up with Kate Reilly (Helen Shaver), the oil company’s geologist and head of their “support team” and she also reveals to them that a recent fossil uncovered proves that the Graboids are Precambrian creatures and not a recent evolutionary development, which upsets Earl as he was still betting on them being from outer space. But before they head out Ortega tells them that the company will pay them double if they are able to catch one of the creatures alive, but why, does this particular oil company have a special interest in Graboids? Do they think these creatures could be useful in looking for new oil deposits? Sadly, this plot point is never resolved or addressed again. Earl, being a sensible soul, has no interest in even trying to catch these very dangerous creatures alive and thus he and Grady proceed to systematically kill dozens of Graboids by using remote-controlled cars rigged with explosives. Unfortunately, as effective as this tactic seems to be they are still overwhelmed with the sheer number of Graboids in the vicinity and they are forced to enlist the help of Burt Gummer (Michael Gross), who is available because his wife left him to tour the country under the name Reba McEntire.

 

“I’m just waiting on a call-back for the Family Ties reunion.”

Now with two teams blowing up Graboids, it looks like easy money for our heroes, that is until Earl and Grady encounter what appears to be a sick non-aggressive Graboid, finding it moaning sickly and sticking half out of the ground, and in the morning they discover its bloody carcass looking as if it had been violently ripped open from the inside. Turns out it had given “birth” to some strange bipedal Graboid-like creatures and soon these little terrors, which are later labelled Shriekers, are chasing our heroes back to the oil refinery and supposed sanctuary. Things get even dicier when it’s revealed that the Shriekers reproduce asexually – but not hermaphrodites as Kate incorrectly identifies them as – and can replicate at an incredible rate after eating enough food.

It’s at this point it should be noted that the writers of this film have no understanding of biology or evolution, in the original film they were wise to leave the nature of the Graboids mostly a mystery but in this film not only do they falsely label them hermaphrodites but if Shriekers were part of the Graboid lifecycle where were they in the previous film? Even stranger is the fact that these bipedal offspring don’t hunt via sound like their parents but instead they rely on special infrared receptors on their heads to “see” their prey. This is tantamount to a creature giving birth to an entirely different species.

 

I guess Darwin can just go and suck an egg then.

Stray Observations:

• Why would the Mexican government seek out Earl Bassett and not Burt Gummer? You’d think a gun-toting Graboid killer would be top of the list, not a washed-up ostrich farmer.
• Kate dates a Graboid fossil to be from the Precambrian era but as there was no life on land at that time I’m not sure what they were eating.
• Grady seems overly excited about the prospect of the $100,000 dollars for the capture of a live Graboid when they’ve already killed literally dozens of them for $50,000 a pop.
• The Graboids in the original films were smart and adapted quickly to their prey's tactics, the dynamite as bait only worked once, but the Mexican Graboids fall for the RC cars/explosive bait time and time again.
• The Shriekers use their tentacle-like tongues to distinguish what is edible by licking what they find, so how were they able to tell that Burt’s foil-wrapped MREs were food?
• Why exactly does an oil refinery have a warehouse full of cartons of candy? Is that how the oil company pays their Mexican labourers?
• The Shriekers show their intelligence by forming a “human pyramid” to reach Earl and company who are hiding on the roof of a nearby shack. Bring it on, baby!

 

Next, they’ll be forming cheerleading squads and competing in championships.

As ridiculous as pretty much every element of this movie is there's a lot to enjoy from a viewing of Tremors 2: Aftershocks as once again we have the ever affable Fred Ward returning as Earl Bassett and Michael Gross completely embracing a character that will define him for decades to come. We also have the delightful Helen Shaver to give the film a little love interest and though she’s mostly around to spout utter scientific nonsense she does her best to make it sound sincere. The only real letdown in the cast is Chris Gartin as Grady, who is so annoying that it’s hard to believe that Burt Gummer wouldn’t have fed him to a Graboid at the first opportunity. As for the creatures themselves, well they're simply fantastic, Amalgamated Dynamics once again does a brilliant job with truly amazing puppets, made more challenging as the Shriekers are above ground as opposed to the Graboids in the previous film being underground 90% of the time.

 

Shriekers are a little harder to hide from.

In addition to the Shriekers designed by Amalgamated Dynamics, the film sports some nicely computer-generated beasties from Phil Tippet, who learned a lot from his tenure in Jurassic Park, and the blend of live-action puppetry and CGI effects worked amazingly well and coupled with a great cast of actors – excluding Chris Gartin, of course – this film turned out way better than it had any right to be and was so well received that though it was a direct-to-video release the studio did consider theatrical distribution, unfortunately, it was decided a theatrical release would be too expensive and thus Tremors 2: Aftershocks will have to settle with being one of the better direct-to-video sequels ever made.

Freddy vs. Jason (2003) – Review

Not since Frankenstein’s monster met the Wolfman has a monster match-up been more anticipated than the one between Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees, but the problem facing the filmmakers could be summed up by one simple question “When your dealing with two evil antagonists who is the audience supposed to root for?”

For a decade the idea of a Freddy vs. Jason movie had been stuck in development, ever since the teaser at the end of Jason Goes to Hell, but in 2003 that ultimate horror smackdown finally did happen. The basic premise of Freddy vs. Jason is that the people of Springwood somehow managed to figure a way to make everyone forget about Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) and it’s from the opening narration by Freddy himself that we learn “I can't come back if nobody remembers me. I can't come back if nobody's afraid” which leads everyone’s favourite murderous pedophile to search the bowels of Hell for someone he can let loose and who will bring fear back into their lives.

 

Question: Did Freddy post an ad on Hell’s bulletin board, “Looking for a monstrous killing machine, time wasters need not apply.”

Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirzinger) arrives in springwood, don't ask me how, and after killing a few teenage suburbanites – in a manner that feels more like Michael Myers than either Jason or Freddy – the authorities, led by Sheriff Williams (Garry Chalk), are worried that Freddy Krueger is back to his old tricks, despite the community working so hard to erase the very memory of that serial killer. Unfortunately, Lori Campbell (Monica Keena), whose house was the site of the first murders, overhears Krueger’s name and that is enough to get Freddy a bus ticket out of Hell.

 

Is the Gate to Hell that easy to circumnavigate?

Plot-wise there really isn’t much here beyond a collection of vastly contrived moments that will eventually lead up to the title fight, and any time spent with our cast of teen idiots is pretty much a waste. There is a whole subplot about the town’s conspiracy to lock up all the teens who had witnessed Freddy Krueger, keeping them drugged and imprisoned in a psychiatric ward and out of touch with the world, and though this was an interesting idea and could have worked well in its own Nightmare on Elm Street movie, here it seems like time filler.

 

This creepy moment belongs in a better film.

We also get this bizarre exposition dump from Lori’s boyfriend Will (Jason Ritter), who was one of the teens locked up in the psychiatric ward, which basically outlines the film’s exact premise to the rest of the Scooby gang, “It makes sense in a way. I mean, what if Freddy brought Jason back because he was too weak to go after us on his own so he used Jason. He knew we’d think it was him, that we’d spread the fear again.” The only way Will could have come up with that conclusion is if he’d watched the opening prologue where Freddy spelled it all out for us the viewer. That has to be one of the greatest examples of lazy screenwriting to date.

 

“Did one of you kids steal my copy of the script?”

Stray Observations:

• The character of Gibb, the girl with the ball cap, was clearly modelled after the P.J. Soles character from the original Halloween.
• The hulking figure of Jason Voorhees stealthily wandering the suburbs is fairly ridiculous. Unlike Michael Myers, he doesn’t even have the Halloween holiday as a cover for looking like a monster.
• How could Freddy get Jason to target a particular address on Elm Street? It’s one thing for Freddy to free Jason from Hell and send him on a killing spree, that’s kind of Jason’s thing, but did he send him topside with google maps and a checklist?
• How can the authorities completely wipe out knowledge of Freddy Krueger? Will and his friend find all the news articles in the archives have been redacted, blacking out all information on the previous murders, but we later see them looking up Hypnocil on the internet and there is no way a Podunk town like Springwood has the capability to censor Google.
• Jason is suddenly given hydrophobia as a weakness despite the fact that he has had no problem attacking characters from underneath the water in the past.
• Lori claims that Freddy killed her mother and that her dad covered it up, but that doesn’t explain how Will saw her dad commit the murder.
• Both of these horror icons have been defeated by teenage girls in the past, so it’s nice to see them having such a hard time killing each other here.

 

“Let’s get ready to rumble!”

What elevated the script above these collections of contrived moments was director Ronnie Yu and his wonderful visual flair, not only did we get amazing dream battles between Jason and Freddy, that look quite spectacular to watch, but we also got wonderful recreations of Crystal Lake and Freddy’s lair and they are the most cinematic looking they’ve ever been. This was Robert Englund’s last outing as Freddy Krueger and he was clearly having the time of his life with his part in this, and Ronnie Yu wisely gave him free rein with a character that he knew so well, and when Freddy’s steel claws and Jason’s massive machete finally clashed fans of either Freddy or Jason couldn’t help but smile at the end result.

 

Note: That Freddy shows actual fear at facing off against Jason was a really nice touch, as was his being pissed off that Jason kept stealing his kills.

Is Freddy vs. Jason a perfect movie? Of course not, the manufactured plot is beyond ludicrous and the actions of the teens veer between sheer stupidity and utterly moronic – at one point a girl is told to give mouth-to-mouth to Jason, who is an undead monster – but I guess that’s what’s expected from teenagers in this genre.  I just wish Ronnie Yu had been given a better script, like the one he got with Bride of Chucky. If you want to watch an incredibly fun fight, one between two amazing pop culture icons, you can’t go too wrong with Freddy vs. Jason, it’s just a shame the script didn’t quite live up to the visuals.

Live and Let Die (1973) – Review

With Bond entering the 70s he was struggling to feel relevant in what was a changing cinematic landscape, Connery’s Diamonds are Forever seemingly particularly out of touch, and with the blaxploitation era in full-swing, it wasn’t too surprising that producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli would try to capitalize on this growing genre. Of course, keeping up with the time wasn’t the only issue facing the producers of the Bond franchise as they were also facing the problme of casting a new Bond.

As with most James Bond movies the script of Live and Let Die has very little to do with the book as written by Ian Fleming, in the book the antagonist Mr. Big was an American gangster who was secretly working with the Soviet counterintelligence organization SMERSH in a plan to smuggle 17th-century gold coins out of the British territories in the Caribbean. Aside from the fortune-telling Solitaire and a couple of named villainous henchmen the book and the movie do not have much in common as the villainous plots are vastly different. The film does have a Harlem mob boss named Mr. Big (Yaphet Kotto) but the movie villain has a dual identity named Kananga, dictator to a small island in the Caribbean. We also get a Tarot card reading Solitaire (Jane Seymour), whose precognitive abilities are used by Mr. Big/Kananga to help keep his organization running smoothly, she is also the one character that remains closest to the book incarnation. There is no smuggling of gold in the movie, instead, we have Kananga planning to distribute a ton of heroin, free of charge, via his chain of Fillet of Soul restaurants.

 

“We’ll be more popular than McDonald's.”

And exactly why would a criminal organization give away that much free heroin? Kananga believes that not only would this increase the number of addicts on the streets, which would then boost sales in the future, but it would also have the added bonus of wiping out the Mafia who would find themselves without a market. Now, at a glance that may seem like a great plan but the Mafia has never relied solely on drugs as their main revenue stream and all that Kananga’s plan would have accomplished is in starting a war with the Five Families. What is interesting here is that James Bond (Roger Moore) is teamed up with the CIA agent Felix Leiter (David Hedison) to stop what is basically a drug-smuggling operation, which is a decidedly step back from space-based laser weapons and volcano lairs.

 

“All the volcanoes were rented, so I had to settle for this little grotto.”

As a Bond film Live and Let Die does have the prerequisite thrills and spills expected of the franchise – the double-decker bus stunt and the thrilling boat chase through the Louisiana bayou offer some truly spectacular stunt work – and Roger Moore is more than capable of stepping into the shoes left behind by Sean Connery. Moore isn’t quite the ruthless killer that Connery’s Bond was known for being as this Bond is more the “British Gentleman” and though he is still a rather sexist creature – when teamed up with CIA agent Rosie Carver (Gloria Hendry) he points out her incompetence to his old friend Quarrel Jr. (Roy Stewart) stating “As I was saying Quarrel, a lousy agent but the compensations speak for themselves” and by that he means she looks great in a bikini.  If she had simply shot Bond after that remark I'd have had more respect for her character.

 

"Pam Grier wouldn't put up with this shit."

But Bond isn’t just about belittling women in the workplace, that’s only a side bonus to his job, he’s more interested in getting them between the sheets and in the case of Live and Let Die there is no more odious of a moment than when he tricks Solitaire into sleeping with him via a stacked deck of Tarot cards. Now, I do understand Bonds need to find out information on Kananga, and seduction is one of the key weapons in Bond’s arsenal, but Solitaire is a naïve and sheltered woman and Bond taking her virginity for the sake of a mission seems a little crass even for him. Worse is the fact that after their coitus she can’t help but want more of his “007” and it’s here where I find Roger Moore’s smugness a little hard to take. If Solitare had been a female agent, one who was a Russian counterpart to Bond or a femme fatale, I’d have no problem with his actions but the deflowering of the innocent as depicted here is rather awful, especially when it’s clear that she is deeply in love with Bond, who is the first man she’s ever been with, and we know he’s going to dump her right after the end credits are over.

 

“I may seem like a callous bastard, but I’m actually a lot worse once you get to know me.”

Stray Observations:

• The plot kicks off with the murder of three MI6 agents, which is fine because unless your Bond being a British agent doesn’t bode well for life expectancy, but what is odd here is that one of those agents was working as a represented of the United Kingdom to the United Nations, would Britain actually have a spy as a diplomat?
• Solitaire clearly has no idea how to read a tarot deck, for instance, she has the common misinterpretation that the “Death” card is to be taken literally when it actually represents the end of the process and beginning of a new one, not actual death.
• This is the first Bond film in which 007 has a liaison with a black woman and it’s a shame that they made her out to be a fairly incompetent agent and then summarily killed her off after having sex with Bond.
• Kananga wants to know if Bond has “touched” Solitaire, thus depriving her of her fortune-telling abilities, but did he not have access to a gynecologist who could have at least told him if she was still a virgin or not?
• This is a rare Bond film for having an actual supernatural element as not only does Solitaire’s card reading come across as very accurate but the final shot of Baron Samedi sitting at the front of the train, after being killed by Bond earlier, leads one to believe that he really is a voodoo god.

 

Note: Geoffrey Holder was to return in a future Bond film, sadly, that never came to pass.

Now, it may seem like I wasn’t a fan of this particular Bond outing but, in fact, that is far from the truth as this is one of my favourite of the Roger Moore outings, despite the dubious sexual nature of Bond’s relationships I found Moore to be exceedingly charming in the part and I will go so far as to say that he pulls of the “Bond Quips” even better than Connery. Yaphet Kotto’s Kananga may not be on par with some of the better Bond villains but he gave an excellent performance with his dual villainy, which couldn’t have been easy with some of the “Jive talking” dialogue that screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz littered the script with – I’m assuming Tom Mankiewicz’s entire knowledge of African American culture came from watching films like Shaft and Foxy Brown – and I’ll always have a soft spot for the racist southern Sheriff J.W. Pepper (Clifton James), whose exasperated performance came close to stealing the movie, “Secret AGENT? On WHOSE side?”

Note: While filming in Louisiana some racist cops complained of the use of black stuntmen but when the production threatened to move its multi-million dollar production to another state they quickly shut up, with Tom Mankiewicz getting the last laugh with the creation of the racist goofball character of J.W. Pepper.

This smaller-scale Bond adventure was a nice change, and the villain’s use of voodoo culture to keep the locals in line was fairly inspired, with the legendary Baron Samedi (Geoffrey Holder) as its figurehead, but fans of Bond gadgets may be a little put out as not only is Q absent from this movie but all Bond is equipped with is a watch that sports a powerful magnet and tiny buzz saw – which he uses to escape from one of the laziest of cinematic death traps that Bond has ever faced, the slowly lowering platform into a pool of sharks – and the dispatching of the villain by way of Bond forcing Kananga to swallow a compressed-gas pellet, which causes him to inflate and explode, is easily one of the worst moments in the entire franchise.

 

This is something you’d expect to see in an Austin Powers type parody.

Overall, this entry is a mixed bag; the cast all provides decent performances despite some of the cringe-inducing dialogue and the action sequences are quite astounding making this a Bond film that any fan of the franchise can enjoy, that is if they can let slide some of the film’s more dated aspects.

Jason X (2001) – Review

When a long-running franchise reaches the point where the idea of “In Space” seems to be the only viable option it may be time to cash in the chips and call it a day, and this was the problem New Line Cinema was facing after the disappointing fan reaction to Jason Goes to Hell, yet they were ready to try anything to keep the franchise alive and when screenwriter Todd Farmer suggested that going to space was the only direction left they quickly greenlit the project. 

The 1998 film Jason Goes to Hell ended not only with the titular character being dragged down to Hell but also a tease that Freddy Krueger would be the next antagonist facing off against Jason, sadly, this was not to be the case and that particular idea was to postpone it for almost a decade, instead, we got Jason X, a science/fiction horror film that was a far from Crystal Lake as you could get. The basic plot of the film is that the government had somehow managed to capture Jason and due to everyone involved being an idiot Jason is allowed to escape, but before he can put the finishing kill on everyone a government scientist named Rowan LaFontaine (Lexa Doig) lures him into a cryogenic pod and activates it, but he ruptures the pod with his machete, stabbing her in the abdomen. The escaping cryogenic gas fills the room and our good doctor is frozen alongside Jason until they are found by a school field trip 400 hundred years in the future.

“Ranger 3 and its pilot, Captain William “Buck” Rogers, are blown out of their trajectory into an orbit which freezes his life-support systems, and returns Buck Rogers to Earth, 500 years later.”

Of course, this is far from the first time horror and science fiction has been blended but this is no Alien, hell, this thing barely qualifies to be in the same category as something like Moon Trap, and the cast of characters are about as one dimensional as to be found in any of your standard slasher films. The sci-fi setting doesn’t really add much to the franchise, you can add all the nano-tech and holograms you want but if the bulk of the film consists of idiots splitting up and being murdered one by one you’re not going to be accused of originality. There was certainly no danger of that as the premise of a female waking up from cryo-sleep in the future, where she must deal with space marines who underestimate the monster they are dealing with, is pretty much the plot of Aliens and we don't have anyone as cool as Ripley or Hicks to bail us out.  The film does have a couple of inventive kills, a head frozen in liquid nitrogen being shattered against a table was pretty badass, but even Jason becoming a full-on cyborg wasn’t enough to make this entry all that interesting.

 

“Did anyone call an Uber?"

Stray Observations:

• Wasn’t Jason in Hell? This film’s opening credit sequence gives us images of what could be considered some form of Hellscape but then it cuts to Jason being held prisoner in some government facility but there is no connective tissue or explanation as to how this came to be.
• The Government wants to study Jason because of his supposed regenerative ability, but he doesn’t really regenerate damage, does he? He’s a walking corpse with all the damage he’s taken over the years still quite evident.
• Apparently, in the year 2024 hockey will be outlawed, well, I guess that’s something to look forward to.
• Onboard this spaceship we have an android with nipple envy, yet she looks completely human so the exclusion of nipples in her design makes no real sense and exists only so we can have a lame gag involving magnetic ones.
• The Colonial Marine knock-offs in this movie are pretty damn bad at their job, they would look more at home playing laser tag.

 

"How do I get out of this chickenshit outfit?"

The film’s only saving grace is that it does manage to poke fun at itself a couple of times, I particularly liked the moment when Jason gets his original machete back and Professor Lowe (Jonathan Potts ) gasps in relief, “Guys, it's okay! He just wanted his machete back!” That scene and the wonderful meta-moment where they use a holographic Camp Crystal Lake to distract Jason with two virtual teenage girls who offer Jason drugs and premarital sex, but these are about the only real clever parts in this movie and other than those brief flashes of self-awareness there really isn’t much to offer fans of the franchise…well, when the android (Lisa Ryder) gets her Space Dominatrix upgrade that will please a certain core demographic.

 

I bet you James Cameron wishes he’d thought of this.

With a 14-million dollar budget, I will say that on the production side of things every dollar spent is up there on the screen; the interior sets for the spaceship were top-notch, the model work and optical effects were quite good – that scientists in the future wear half-top shirts may have been a stretch – but the overall look of the film was more than one could expect from a “Jason in Space” movie, and if they’d gone either full meta like Scream or embraced the darkness of Ridley Scott or James Cameron’s films this could have been really great entry, as is Jason X will always be a bit of the Red-Headed Step-Child of the series

Tremors (1990) – Review

In what was basically a throwback to the creature-features of old director Ron Underwood and writers S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock came up with an idea they first dubbed "Land Sharks" – which was basically Jaws on land – but where they would stray from that classic monster formula was in the protagonists who wouldn’t be G-Men or lab coat wearing scientist, instead, they would be a couple of hapless handymen who’d rather be doing anything else than fighting monsters.

Located in a sun-baked region of Nevada is the small town of Perfection, a community that may be weak in population but strong in grit and determination, and that determination is put to the test when terror strikes in the form of burrowing monsters that relentlessly hunt their prey. It is true that Ron Underwood’s Tremors owes its genesis to film like Them! – a 50’s film where giant radioactive ants terrorized a desert community – but in this film, you don’t get the likes of James Arness and James Whitmore to fend off the monsters, not at all, in this movie we get reluctant heroes Valentine McKee (Kevin Bacon) and Earl Basset (Fred Ward), a pair of blue-collar handy-men who upon finally deciding to abandon Perfection for a better life, one with fewer septic tanks to empty, find themselves facing an unknown threat, something that is killing their fellow residents.

 

“We decided to leave town just one damn day too late!”

Another staple of this genre is the earnest scientist, whose key job in a monster movie is to lay out all the exposition about the creature and how to defeat it, usually while wearing a lab coat and pointing at a chart, and though Tremors does have a scientist in its ranks, in the form of seismologist Rhonda LeBeck (Finn Carter), she hasn’t a clue as to what the people of Perfection are facing and is a little put out when people keeping asking her for answers. In those classic science fiction films, the term “scientist” meant you were an expert in every field, from atomic energy to zoology, but Rhonda is a seismologist and thus creatures that are unprecedented in the fossil record aren’t exactly in her purview. Now, this doesn’t mean she has nothing to offer as her knowledge of the Earth is instrumental in our group of heroes figuring out how to defeat the monsters – wonderfully named Graboids by general store owner Walter Chang (Victor Wong) – and this knowledge is greatly needed because these creatures aren’t just mindless killing machines, they learn and adapt tactics to get their meals.

 

“Feed me, Seymour Feed me all night long.”

What makes Tremors so great is that it is a masterful blending of the genres.  First, you have the mystery side of things, as to what is killing the residents of Perfection, with Earl and Val initially assuming a serial killer has set up shop nearby, and then you have the monster movie aspect with the reveal of giant worms bursting out of the ground and dragging its victims into its horrible maw with nasty tentacles, but most importantly to this film is the perfect blend of humour which is wonderfully embodied by Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward’s reluctant heroes. When they first uncover a Graboid, after it dies running headlong into a concrete culvert, Earl asks “Hey, Rhonda you ever seen anything like this before?”

 

“Oh, sure Earl. Everyone knows about them we just didn't tell you.”

Its the relationship between Earl and Val that really makes this movie sing and the chemistry between Bacon and Ward is impossible to deny and though the film does have a romantic subplot, between Val and the cute as a button Rhonda, it’s clear that the bromance between Earl and Val is the primary force here, but as good as the camaraderie between those lovable goofballs is the talents of the rest of the cast should not be ignored.  The aforementioned Victor Wong, whose money-making schemes for the Graboids was very believable and incredibly funny but most notable would be the paranoid survivalists Burt (Michael Gross) and Heather Gummer (Reba McEntire) whose underground bunker didn’t take into account an enemy that could burrow from underground. Then we have the creatures themselves, which were designed brilliantly by Amalgamated Dynamics, who not only the challenging job of creating the film’s title creature but also in making sure it didn't look like something that escaped from David Lynch’s Dune. The result was a monster that worked as a threat whether it be bursting out of the ground or travelling under the surface like a giant angry groundhog.

 

“I'm alright. Nobody worry 'bout me.”

I particularly liked that Underwood and company felt no need to explain where the Graboids came from, no nuclear testing caused these beasties, yet that almost wasn’t the case as the execs over at Universal initially wanted an origin for the monsters and they almost forced the filmmakers to give them an extraterrestrial explanation, luckily wiser heads prevailed and a backstory for the Graboids was pushed off and left as mere speculation by the film’s characters.

 

“I vote for outer space. No way these are local boys.”

Stray Observation:

• The city of Perfection has a population of 14 people which is a bit grandiose when you consider the fact that most states require a minimum between 1,500 and 5,000 residents to be considered a city.
• Earl and Val find the severed head of Old Fred peeking out of the earth, but why did the Graboids leave that part of the meal behind?
• Little Ariana Richards has a magical Pogo stick, Kevin Bacon tackles her off the toy and yet it remains standing long enough to be pulled underground by a Graboid.
• Having to pole vault from rock to rock, so as to keep out of reach of the Graboids, is basically the monster version of “The Floor is Lava” game that we all played as children.
• Casting Family Ties star Michael Gross as a right-wing survivalist is easily one of the best cases of casting against type.

 

“Broke into the wrong goddam rec room, didn't ya you bastard!”

What is surprising is the fact that back in 1990 Tremors was a box office disappointment, despite fairly good reviews across the board – the studio's inability to market the film being the biggest suspect for its financial failings – and if not for the VHS rental boom this title may have slipped beneath the sands into obscurity, instead, it slowly built some serious cult status over the years and eventually developed enough buzz to not only launch a film franchise but a short-lived television series as well, and that’s not something that film’s from the 50s can boast. No matter the troubling history this film had, or what the future holds for the franchise, whenever I set back to watch the original Tremors it’s not so much to watch a cool monster movie, which it most certainly is, as it is to kick back and revisit a group of oddball friends.

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993) – Review

After the low box-office returns of Jason Takes Manhattan Paramount Pictures decided that "Enough was enough" and sold the character rights of Jason Voorhees to New Line Cinema, and it would seem obvious to almost any sane person that the thing to do would be to reboot the franchise, but instead, New Line decided to make a Friday the 13th movie without Jason Voorhees, or at least in a rather different fashion.

The last film didn’t happen, everyone got that? Jason Goes to Hell opens with what looks to be a standard Friday the 13th scene, with a young woman alone in a cabin in the woods who finds herself being attacked by Jason (Kane Hodder), but when he chases her into a clearing where – surprise, surprise – it turns out that this was all part of an elaborate sting operation and the woman was simply "bait" for the trap, we then see Jason literally blown away by a heavily armed SWAT team. Jason’s remains are then sent to a morgue where the resident coroner (Richard Gant) becomes entranced by the still-beating heart...and he then eats it!  And with that, we are off and running with one of the more bizarre entries in the Friday the 13th franchise.

 

“Alas, poor Jason, I knew him well.”

In this movie we will not have hockey mask-wearing Jason stalking a variety of idiot teenagers, who had made the mistake of visiting Crystal Lake, instead, we have one of the more supernatural centric plots as it’s here that we learn that Jason can “body swap” – somehow by transferring his heart from victim to victim and thus possessing them until their body is too damaged and he must find a new one – but we are also introduced Creighton Duke (Steven Williams), a bounty hunter with a hard-on for Jason Voorhees. It’s through him that we learn more of the lore surrounding Jason, such as the fact that only a member of Jason's bloodline can truly kill him, but on the flip side of this, we are also told that to regain his invincible nature Jason must possess a member of his family. The bizarre nature of this mythology is quickly glossed over – don’t expect flashbacks or backstory to explain any of this – but one must admit it does lead to some of the more interesting moments in the franchise’s history.

 

Don’t even try and understand what the hell is going on here.

What this movie has in abundance, aside from a batshit crazy plot, is a collection of actual interesting characters for us to spend time with, which is not something that can be said about most of the Friday the 13th movies, and the film is also more action-driven then previous installments, with scenes that owe more to John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 and James Cameron’s The Terminator than it does your average slasher film. When “Jason” enters a police station, shrugging off bullets and tossing officers around like they are ragdolls, we get an action sequence that many fans had expected to see in the much-hyped Jason Takes Manhattan, a film that was almost devoid of action as well pretty much devoid of anything to do with Manhattan.

 

“Where is Sarah Connor?”

Stray Observations:

• The FBI trap was pretty sloppy and the fact that the undercover agent actually survives Jason’s initial attack was more about luck than anything else.
• The possessed coroner murders his assistant and two FBI guards but the authorities seem unaware as to what actually happened. Wouldn’t such a well-guarded facility have had CCTV cameras everywhere?
• Even if you assumed Jason Voorhees was actually dead what is the exact appeal of going to Camp Blood to have sex? Would it be considered an Extreme Sport?
• Killing off Erin Grey, whose character on Buck Rogers ushered many of us through puberty, was an unmitigated crime.
• The passing of the “Jason Spirit” from body to body, like some kind of parasite, was a blatant rip-off of the sci-fi classic The Hidden.
• The police lock a suspect in a cell while still wearing his blood-soaked clothing. Do the cops in Crystal Lake not understand what evidence is?
• Why exactly does the Voorhees family have the Necronomicon from the Evil Dead movies?

 

Did Bruce Campbell have a yard sale?

The one other big issue I have with Jason Goes to Hell is that we seem to be watching a sequel to a movie series we hadn’t actually seen. Not only is the possession element completely new but we now have the Voorhees extended family and a bounty hunter with some kind of history with Jason.  Just before he dies in the arms of Jason Clayton Duke asks, “Do you remember me?” but what does all this mean? Are we to assume this guy had encountered Jason in the past, and if so how did that go down?  I certainly would have loved to have seen that.  And why were there birthing stirrups in the Voorhees homestead? Was Pamela Voorhees a midwife? Sure, why not, maybe in a Rosemary’s Baby kind of way.  Is it possible that the unkillable Jason Voorhees was a demon from Hell all along, one who had possessed the body of a drowned boy?

 

Note: Writer-director Adam Marcus has since stated that Jason is a “Deadite” just a different version of the ones seen in the Evil Dead movies, and he’s even killed by what looks like a Kandarian Dagger.

I give Adam Marcus credit for trying something fresh with the franchise, as well as doing his best with the directive from producer Sean S. Cunningham to “Lose the hockey mask and forget that part eight ever happened” but the end result was a movie that simply raised more questions than it answered. Marcus can claim all he wants that this movie exists in the world of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead but nods and a wink to fans don’t quite cut it because no matter how clever you think you are leaving the bulk of your audience in the dark is never a good idea. It’s one thing to want to create a whole new mythology around an already established character, and I admire that, but it also has to be a film that can stand on its own two legs.

 

Note: The stinger ending with Freddy Krueger’s clawed hand retrieving Jason’s hockey mask was another wink to fans, something that would take a decade before finally paying off.

Jason Goes to Hell may have been too clever for its own good, with nods to Evil Dead, Halloween, Creepshow and Nightmare on Elm Street, because with all that going on it was harder for the director to come up with a comprehensible story – I’d love to see what hit the editing room floor – but one can only grade the final product and I have to say that though this entry was a fun ride it probably would have worked better as the third installment of a whole new fresh reboot of the franchise.

Them! (1954) – Review

“When Man entered the atomic age, he opened a door into a new world. What we’ll eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict.” It was these chilling words that closed out the 1954 classic science-fiction film Them! and set the tone for many such films to follow, a genre filled with nuclear-created monstrosities who would dominate the 50s. The first example of this would be the Ray Harryhausen film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, where an atom bomb test in the Arctic awakens a prehistoric beast, a very cranky dinosaur with irradiated blood, but it was a year later that we got the first true “atomic mutation” in the form of the giant ants in Them!

Of all the atomic B-Movies produced over the years, I find Gordon Douglas’s Them! to be one of the best examples of the genre as the film never once diverted into the "campy territory" that many films succumb to and the first quarter of Them! works as great police procedural and not a monster movie. The movie opens with New Mexico State policemen Sgt. Ben Peterson (James Whitmore) and Trooper Ed Blackburn (Christian Drake) discovering a little girl (Sandy Descher) wandering the desert in a catatonic state, and later they find her family’s vacation trailer destroyed by some unknown attacker but there is no sign of her parents. At a nearby general store, similar destruction and carnage are found along with the broken corpse of the owner, then things take a turn for the worse when Trooper Blackburn is left behind to secure the scene and has a personal encounter with our mysterious foe, one that is decidedly fatal.

 Safety Tip: If you hear strange pulsating sounds in the dark, it’s probably best not to investigate it on your own.

It’s the mystery aspect that makes this film stand out from many of its contemporaries and much of that comes from the demeanour and the acting of the primary cast members, not a soul can be found winking at the camera as everyone on hand to investigate these bizarre attacks takes things with deadpan seriousness. We get James Whitmore as the aforementioned no-nonsense State Trooper and he is then joined by FBI Special Agent Robert Graham (James Arness), Dr. Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn), and his daughter, Dr. Pat Medford (Joan Weldon) who all work together to unravel the horrifying mystery that is unfolding in the New Mexico desert. Edmund Gwenn is particularly good as a driven scientist who is so unsettled by the possibilities of what is happening that he is reticent to even share his theories with Graham or Peterson – that is until the title creature makes its first on-screen appearance.

 

These things would seriously ruin a picnic.

Unfortunately, being a product of the 50s even a movie about giant insects couldn’t escape the sexism of the time, so as heroic and stalwart Graham and Peterson appear when facing off against monstrous ants, their attitude towards a pretty face is less than stellar and resulted in this rather dubious exchange:

Robert Graham: “I shoulda had this suit pressed.”
Police Sgt. Ben Peterson: “She's quite a doctor, huh?”
Robert Graham: “Yeah. If she's the kind that takes care of sick people, I think I'll get a fever real quick.”

 

“Who knew women could be doctors?"

It should be noted that this film, at least, didn't bother to introduce any sort of love story to the proceedings and neither Arness nor Whitmore rides off into the sunset with Joan Weldon. In fact, the film surprised me by killing off James Whitmore at the end – while he was heroically saving two children from the giant ants – which normally would have paved the way for Arness to win the girl, but when the end credits roll there is no suggestion that the FBI agent and the scientist will be getting together. So, even though this film has less than a progressive attitude towards the fairer sex that particular failure does not permeate the film to any significant degree, and thus, the bulk of the film rightfully spends most of its time trying to solve the ant problem and not their sex lives.

 

And it is a pretty big ant problem.

The only issue I have with the ants as depicted in this film is that with only three full-scale puppets to create the army of giant ants, we never get a true sense of the scale of the threat. We do get some terrifying scenes of our protagonists entering the various nests, flamethrowers-a-blazing, where they encounter these insect menaces, but if the film had been budgeted to use Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation technique, we could have been treated to some truly amazing scenes of dozens of ants mobilized against our heroes. That all said, I must state the ant puppets created by prop man Richard Smith and special effects master Ralph Ayres were still quite impressive as their waving antennae and gnashing mandibles were very effective, and one can say that they also added a bit of cheesy charm to the otherwise grim proceedings.

 

Note: If you are familiar with this 1950s’ science-fiction monster feature, and have also seen James Cameron’s sci-fi action masterpiece Aliens, a few similarities can leave you wondering if Cameron was also a huge fan of Them!

• Both films feature a young girl found by the heroes, a little girl who has lost her family and gone mute due to her shocking encounter with the giant insects.
• In Aliens, the monsters are more insect-like in nature than as depicted in the Ridley Scott original.
• Both films deal with a queen, workers, and warrior drones, though Them! has the bonus of having two queens.
• Both the xenomorphs and the ants use secreted resin to form their nests.
• An egg chamber is featured in both films.
• The military is sent into the nest with flamethrowers to engage the insect threat.
• Both films end with the rescue of children from the center of the nest/hive.

 

Sigourney Weaver definitely had better luck than James Whitmore.

There were many giant insect films that followed Them! yet it still remains one of the best examples of the genre. Such films as 1955’s Tarantula and The Deadly Mantis from 1957 certainly continued the legacy of science causing monstrous insects to go on the rampage, but none of them had that element of realism that director Gordon Douglas was able to imbue into his film. If you somehow come across this film during a Saturday afternoon matinee, I do recommend tracking it down; you won’t be disappointed.

Science Note: The reason you won’t find giant ants in your backyard has to do with a bottleneck that occurs in insects’ air pipes as they become humongous. Simply put, ants don’t possess lungs, the air is circulated through their bodies by air pressure alone via a number of holes on each side of the thorax, which is an effective method in small bodies but not sufficient to oxygenate an animal the size we get in Them!