Category: Film Review

B Movie Glory: Asylum

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Asylum is first rate trash, a nasty, cheap exercise in shocker horror that gives sanitariums everywhere a bad name and perpetuates the ludicrous stigma that all such institutions are the scariest, most unorganized places on earth. God bless the cheap underside of Hollywood and it’s deliberately skewed perception of things. This one sees Robert ‘T-1000’ Patrick as a private investigator who goes undercover inside a mental hospital as a patient when it becomes clear that people are going missing inside and something is up. The set, design and mood of the place is schlock to the core, without the faintest hint of realism to be found. The facility’s head doctor (the late great Henry Gibson) is a benign fool who has no idea the kind of havoc being perpetrated under his watch. The place has a special kind of crazy in a character played by Malcolm McDowell called Sullivan Rane, a lucidly maniacal serial killer who has red herring written all over him and moonlights under an obvious wig and mask as a patient known simply as ‘Doc’. It’s a hammy throwaway role, but ever intense McDowell seems to have a ball playing whatever oddball garage sale B role they give him, and ends up stealing his few scenes, as usual. Patrick plays it straight and his trademark steely reserve is an odd contrast to the knowingly silly demeanour of almost everyone else involved. The film does it’s best with a twist one can sense coming a good country mile off, but it gives one aforementioned actor some last minute juicy scenes to make his involvement worthwhile. Low rent horror and then some.

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: Past Midnight

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Past Midnight describes the cable time slot that disposable psycho thrillers like this are relegated to for all time, soaked in by weary, often inebriated viewers in the haunted wee hours and oft remembered as a hazy dream or recollection. This one stars the late great Natasha Richardson and Rutger Hauer, who is one of the reigning sultans of B Movies among actors out there. He plays a man who is recently released from prison for allegedly stabbing his wife to death a decade before. Natasha is the social worker who falls in love with him and gradually begins to believe that not only is he innocent, but the real killer is still lurking out there somewhere. It’s taut psycho-suspense done pretty well, and there’s certainly enough menacing atmosphere and evocative rural locations to spare. Hauer, even when playing the most saintly heroes, just always puts off a dangerous, disquieted vibe so it’s only fitting for him to play this guy we’re kind of not sure about until the third act revelations come along, he really nails it the whole way. Richardson, who tragically passed away a few years back, was always magnetic no matter what (I’ll always fondly remember her as Lindsay Logan’s mom in The Parent Trap), and the burgeoning love, compassion and curiosity to get to the truth is nicely cultivated by the actress. The legendary Clancy Brown shows up as well as a potential suspect, filmmakers tend to throw in his presence to ratchet intensity but he’s fairly relaxed here. Watch for an early career glimpse of Paul Giamatti too. This one doesn’t break new ground or go down in history as anything new, but as far as chiller thrillers go it ain’t half bad at all, and definitely benefits a bunch from having Hauer and Richardson on the frontline.

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: Quick

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Quick doesn’t quite live up to it’s title, and probably should have been called something contrary to that like “Slow” or “Take Your Time”. It’s technically an action thriller but it ambles along at a leisurely pace, one pearl in a strand of interchangeable 90’s B Movies that you’d never dream of actually watching unless you’re a serial cinephile like myself. Actually, there is one reason this one stands out and may be worth one’s time: Teri Polo. Mrs. Gaylord Focker from Meet The Fockers to most, she’s on an early career rush here as the titular assassin, a deadly femme fatale playing the cops and the mob against each other whilst simultaneously romancing a meek accountant (Martin Donovan) who knows too much about a powerful crime boss (the legendary Robert Davi in relaxation mode). Polo is probably one of the sexiest female protagonists I’ve seen in an action flick, exuding natural sex appeal, especially in a scene with Donovan that would get anyone hot and bothered. It’s too bad the film itself can’t keep up with her and arrives pretty limp. Not even the usually magnetic Davi can seem to rile up a pulse. The only other spark of life is Jeff Fahey as a psychotic corrupt cop who’s into violent kinky sex and probably should never have been given a badge. Tia Carrere isn’t bad either as his foxy partner. Not a terrible flick when you consider the cast and what they get to do, but at the end of the day it’s still essentially just polished up time filler junk.

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: Heaven’s Fire

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

There’s an expression around the campfire of film criticism called ‘Die Hard clone’, a residual effect of how influential that movie was on the action genre. Although that term certainly applies to the terminally goofy Heaven’s Fire (that title tho), I resist the impulse to always trace films back to their inspiration as a negative connotation, and view every story as it’s own encapsulated adventure. Now that aside, this one is pretty shitty on it’s own terms, as you can probably tell by the almost deliberately shabby DVD art. It’s worth it for two reasons only, if you’re a fan of either: Eric Roberts and Jurgen Prochnow, two charismatic genre players who are always so much fun to see, even in Fisher Price knockoff crap like this. Prochnow, for like the tenth time in his career so far, plays a terrorist who seizes a high rise building, planning to hold the city ransom or blow it up. Roberts, that charming bastard, plays an off duty treasury agent who happens to be on a tour through the facility with his family and gets caught in the middle. You can guess where it goes. Gunfire, cringy one liners, standoff’s, inept hostage negotiations, all the tropes are present and accounted for. The script is so bad it almost seems like an SNL parody concocted by fifth grade guest writers, you almost can’t even hate the film because it reaches levels of absurdity that are, dare I say, *adorably* terrible. Eric and Jurgen ham it up in their own special way and if you enjoy their work (I’m something of a fanatic) it’s worth tracking down just to see the two legends side by side. Oh and like so many two bit flicks of this nature, Vancouver is the home-base for filming, which is always a plus no matter how shitty your movie is, because I get to take in the scenery and spot landmarks I pass by every day. Silly, silly stuff, and I’m pretty sure it’s rated PG13 too as there’s no swearing and all the violence is Grade school play level.

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: Seven Mummies

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Seven Mummies is so bad it plays like something that From Dusk Till Dawn shat out along the highway. There’s not even one mummy in the thing, let alone seven, instead it’s a dull, shoddily acted piece of bargain bin garbage and the plastic used to make DVD copies would have been put to better use elsewhere. It concerns a bus full of convicts who escape somewhere in the remote southwest, and head for the Mexican border. On the way they stumble across Aztec treasure that has some vague curse, and soon an even vaguer evil is after them all, but none of it makes much sense. Danny Trejo is in it as a mysterious old weirdo called Apache (never mind that he’s so obviously, visibly Mexican), who sits on a dilapidated desert porch and ominously laughs to himself while staring out at the horizon for at least a whole scene. Seriously. No actual lines at all, just laughing and staring, it’s so odd. The one saving grace is veteran villain actor Billy Drago as the evil ghost of an old west outlaw who shows up to cackle and terrorize everyone in a classically hammy bit of theatricality, it’s always great to see him. Other than that there’s really no signs of life to this one, from crappy low rent CGI monsters to lazy filmmaking all round. You’re better off pulling up a chair next to Trejo on that dusty porch and joining him as he chuckles at the tumbleweed dumpster fire of a film he agreed to d just for a few bucks. Amazingly though, it’s still better than that Tom Cruise Mummy flick from last year. Ugh.

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: Dark Asylum

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Dark Asylum is one of those dimly lit, cheesy horror efforts that plays on cable somewhere in the wee hours, a trash exercise in low budget exploitation that leaves little impression other than spotting which character actors are in the roll call to collect a paycheque. In a conveniently remote location, a young psychologist (Paulina Porizkova) arrives at a sanitarium to examine a freaky serial killer called The Trasher (Hollywood’s resident extraterrestrial, the late Larry Drake). The head doctor of the asylum (Jurgen Prochnow), seems to have a relaxed attitude towards security and before you can say Hannibal Lecter, The Trasher escapes captivity and runs about the place killing and terrorizing anything that moves, including a hapless custodian played by Judd Nelson. The whole premise is one of those ridiculously staged things where the killer seems superhuman, can survive everything from sixty pound fire extinguisher hits to the head to being run over by a vehicle, despite being human (I’m reminded of Hollow Man). It’s ok when Michael Myers survives all that shit because he’s.. you know, Michael Myers, he’s earned the esoteric badge, but any old killer in any old B flick surviving everything thrown at him grows old and lowers the stakes pretty quick. Anyways it’s not a terrible movie, just pretty middle of the road, non-special horror filler with enough atmosphere to warrant a watch.

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: American Meltdown

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

If American Meltdown had a bigger budget, better director and wasn’t cursed with the stigma of being a telefilm, it could have been something cool, because as far as script and cast go, it’s got something. In terms of terrorist flicks it also does something that hasn’t really been explored and throws a curveball twist that might make some Americans squirm uncomfortably in their seats (denial is an ugly bitch). Too bad it got the cheap treatment though, aesthetically speaking it looks like a discarded 24 season test pilot and doesn’t have the dazzle dazzle to support its big ideas. When a ruthless foreign extremist (The Mummy’s Arnold Vosloo) holds a nuclear power plant hostage and threatens to cause chaos, FBI Agents Bruce Greenwood and Leslie Hope race against the clock to prevent the kind of impending doom only TV movies can supply, while a military tactical unit led by character actor James Remar menacingly waits on standby. The whole hijack is more complicated that it seems though and Vosloo’s antagonist proves to have more up his sleeve than a simplistic radical agenda, so the film does attempt to stand out from the crowd. But overall it’s lazily edited, haphazard trash, the kind of thing that will always be dumped onto cable. Cool cast though.

-Nate Hill

“Why did you try to kill me?” A review of Hereditary – by Josh Hains

by Josh Hains, posted in Film Review

I do not hate, or dislike, Hereditary. I do not like it either, though I do avidly admire it. To clarify, it is difficult for me to say I like a movie that is so atmospherically dour, so tonally bleak, and so disturbingly grotesque, that makes me feel like I need to bathe in molten lava to burn away the residue of it. However, it’s easy for me to say I admire nearly everything about it.

The same can be said for similarly dark and bleak cinematic ventures like Sicario, You Were Never Really Here (my current vote for the best film of 2018), and Annihilation, to name a trio. Hereditary is as joyless an experience as they come, which makes it inherently difficult to for me recommend to friends of mine whose humongous appetites for horror are in desperate need of some quenching. This isn’t your archetypal, audience friendly and accessible popcorn horror flick one could take a date to and enjoy being scared from, complete with ample cheap or earned jump scares (such as The Conjuring), or heaps of deliciously over the top gory carnage (like in The Cabin in the Woods). I don’t find Hereditary scary per se, just unsettling and disturbing, much like iconic but hollow The Shining.

It is however, the kind of intricate, meticulously crafted psychological horror movie that uptight horror cinema snobs are constantly reminding the rest of us that Hollywood so rarely constructs and releases these days. Nearly every facet of the movie, from the performances (Toni Collette is truly Oscar worthy with her passionately raw performance of a fractured soul) to the cinematography to the editing to the eerie sound design, is handled with top notch laser guided precision worthy of the heaps of praise it’s received for months now since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 21st. It might not be the best horror movie of the year (which is easily A Quiet Place by miles), or the best movie of the year for that matter (that’d be a huge stretch, considering that honour should most definitely be bestowed upon You Were Never Really Here), but it’s certainly a great little horror picture in its own right.

As great as those and other elements are, the movie becomes dreadfully problematic in the script department after the initial 45 minutes or so. Initially, the movie has absolutely no problem both setting and maintaining a particular psychological horror aura, which is rather sadly, gradually pushed to the side after a major event in the first half hour of the movie, in favour of typical paranormal horror elements. This leads to an ending (that will go unspoiled here), that despite being set-up right from scene one onward, and makes sense to the overarching narrative that’s been told leading up to that point, feels ported over from The Witch (another horror release by the same studio that produced Hereditary, A24), and that doesn’t match the tone of everything that’s come beforehand, and requires one too many suspensions of disbelief in the laughably ludicrous twists. Aside from the tonality issues derived from an unnatural shift in the tone at the midway point in the movie, and a nearly unforgivably ridiculous tacked on ending that doesn’t gel with the rest of the movie, Hereditary is a masterful psychological horror movie bound for the glory of classic horror movie status, though those tonality and ending issues will likely haunt it for decades to come.

As I observed in an article I can’t recall the source of a couple of days ago regarding Hereditary, it’s the “other kind” of horror film, the meticulously crafted, bleak, and unrewarding kind, a rare find these days. The film studio A24 (whom released Hereditary, The Witch, and It Comes At Night), along with Paramount (who’ve also had divided reaction with mother, Annihilation, and the Cloverfield series) and others, seem passionately keen on continuing to churn out these more obscure and psychologically perplexing and taxing horror movies.

I don’t blame them for wanting to.

B Movie Glory: The Grave

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Dust off the cobwebs in a corner the forgotten ruins of VHS land and you’ll find charmers like The Grave, a enjoyable, forgettable little haunt that stars 90’s indie beauty queen Gabrielle Anwar, her kooky real life husband Craig Sheffer, Breakfast Club alumni Anthony Michael Hall and B movie sultan Eric Roberts, if you’re quick enough to spot his cameo. It’s one among an infinity of B movies from back in the day that starred earnest character actors involved in lurid criminal escapades and sensual deception, each plot only slightly altered from the last. This one see a troupe of escaped convicts (Sheffer, Hall, Donal Logue and others) running around out west in search of a treasure chest full of loot that’s supposedly buried next to it’s millionaire owner. This setup leads way to betrayals, double crosses, Coen-esque hayseed black comedy and all sorts of shenanigans. Anwar plays the scheming ex girlfriend of one of them who gets in the way of all involved like any self respecting femme fatale should. Curiously, Eric Roberts has absolutely nothing to do with the main plot and only shows up for like a minute long cameo as a country bumpkin who gives hitchhiking Anwar a ride when her rig breaks down, talks her ear off for a spill and then heads off never to be seen again. Huh. Must have owed the director a favour from the last B flick he headlined. Anyways it’s a fun one on low key, inconsequential terms.

-Nate Hill