Tag: movie

The VHS Files: Yesterday’s Target

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Today’s VHS File is a dusty old SciFi time travel flick called Yesterday’s Target whose plot I just couldn’t get a handle on, despite it having some cool ideas, ambient atmospherics and neat set pieces. It stars one of the Baldwin brothers, and you pretty much know what you’re in for when they headline something. Daniel Baldwin is an unassuming factory worker who is recruited by a shadow organization because of his untapped psychic talents, targeted by a mysterious rogue military scientist played by Malcolm McDowell in one of his classic mega villain roles but he’s curiously restrained and relaxed here. Baldwin basically goes on a cross country road trip to find other psychics like him including a clairvoyant (Stacey Haiduk), a short order cook who is a firestarter (T.K. Carter from The Thing in this film’s liveliest performance) and others. They’re pursued by McDowell’s top man, a cowboy hat wearing Levar Burton in a bizarrely cartoonish performance that doesn’t work and brings the film somewhat down whenever he’s onscreen. There’s an absolute deluge of expository mumbo jumbo, arbitrary subplots and just garbled SciFi clutter here including some secret society that travels through time to prevent people from having shitty lives, a child prodigy, Vegas card sharking, McDowell’s random personal life with his wife and all sorts of interludes that muck about until I really wasn’t sure what this film was even about beyond a vague idea of ‘time travelling clairvoyants.’ Still, it’s very atmospheric and some of the performances are a lot of fun. It’s also quite muted and laidback and even when there’s gunplay or a pursuit it feels just… hushed and soothing somehow. There’s a deliberately anticlimactic ending as Baldwin and McDowell standoff only to surprise each other with revelations regarding identity, time loops and serendipitous phenomena that again, I wasn’t clear on, but allows Malcolm to inject some real poignancy into an otherwise standard villain role, if even for a brief moment when all is almost said and done. It’s worth a look but nothing special. I have no memory of where I even got the VHS tape but it’s another one of those screeners that nobody is supposed to sell yet somehow find their way to good homes. I see this is also streaming on something called Tubi though, if anyone is at all curious.

-Nate Hill

The VHS Files: Yesterday’s Target

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Today’s VHS File is a dusty old SciFi time travel flick called Yesterday’s Target whose plot I just couldn’t get a handle on, despite it having some cool ideas, ambient atmospherics and neat set pieces. It stars one of the Baldwin brothers, and you pretty much know what you’re in for when they headline something. Daniel Baldwin is an unassuming factory worker who is recruited by a shadow organization because of his untapped psychic talents, targeted by a mysterious rogue military scientist played by Malcolm McDowell in one of his classic mega villain roles but he’s curiously restrained and relaxed here. Baldwin basically goes on a cross country road trip to find other psychics like him including a clairvoyant (Stacey Haiduk), a short order cook who is a firestarter (T.K. Carter from The Thing in this film’s liveliest performance) and others. They’re pursued by McDowell’s top man, a cowboy hat wearing Levar Burton in a bizarrely cartoonish performance that doesn’t work and brings the film somewhat down whenever he’s onscreen. There’s an absolute deluge of expository mumbo jumbo, arbitrary subplots and just garbled SciFi clutter here including some secret society that travels through time to prevent people from having shitty lives, a child prodigy, Vegas card sharking, McDowell’s random personal life with his wife and all sorts of interludes that muck about until I really wasn’t sure what this film was even about beyond a vague idea of ‘time travelling clairvoyants.’ Still, it’s very atmospheric and some of the performances are a lot of fun. It’s also quite muted and laidback and even when there’s gunplay or a pursuit it feels just… hushed and soothing somehow. There’s a deliberately anticlimactic ending as Baldwin and McDowell standoff only to surprise each other with revelations regarding identity, time loops and serendipitous phenomena that again, I wasn’t clear on, but allows Malcolm to inject some real poignancy into an otherwise standard villain role, if even for a brief moment when all is almost said and done. It’s worth a look but nothing special. I have no memory of where I even got the VHS tape but it’s another one of those screeners that nobody is supposed to sell yet somehow find their way to good homes. I see this is also streaming on something called Tubi though, if anyone is at all curious.

-Nate Hill

The VHS Files: Conundrum aka Frame By Frame

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

So here’s a fun idea (I hope)… I have hundreds of unwatched, obscure VHS tapes ive collected over the years and I’ve recently organized them, fired up the VCR and begun to explore the darkest corners of Z-Grade 70’s, 80’s and 90’s analog nirvana, so I’ll do a series of intermittent reviews based on these random, unheard of treasures with a snapshot of the tape itself, just for fun. First up is one called Frame By Frame, which I guess is officially called Conundrum on IMDb. It stars Michael Biehn and Marg Helgenberger as two inner city cops who begin to have a fiery affair amidst the aftermath of gangland killings stirred up by a Chinese crime syndicate. His family is murdered to set an example, this event brings them closer as she comforts him but before you know it other nasty secrets are unleashed and the classic obligatory ‘web of deceit, betrayal, twists and kinky obsession’ of the essential 80’s B movie potboiler is set into motion. Biehn and Helgenberger are perfect for each other, and on top of being two of the absolute sexiest cult icons of their day, they actually turn this run of the mill script into something fun thanks to their vivid characterizations. He’s as wild eyed and frantic as he was in Terminator and even gets one sly ‘big emotion’ scene that takes on new meaning once all the twists unfold, and she does this tough girl tomboy thing with her accent and mannerisms that’s fun too. The story kind of goes wildly all over the place and I didn’t quite follow every hairpin turn or believe in this brand of convolution but hey, it’s an ancient DTV flick and half the fun is watching these two stars rip snort their way through the hard boiled narrative anyways. I’m fairly sure I may be the only person to have ever seen this film because the tape I have is one of those promotional screeners that aren’t for resale (but they always are anyways), there are positively zero user reviews on IMDb or even critics reviews out there elsewhere on the interwebs and one can barely find traces of its existence at all beyond the tape I have. Good times though, especially if you love Biehn and Marg as much as this viewer.

-Nate Hill

Ramaa Mosley’s Tatterdemalion aka Lost Child

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

It’s always fascinating to me when a film is subtly billed as horror, unfolds thusly with the ever present promise of ambiguity and then takes the road less expected to provide a truly surprising and unexpected experience. Ramaa Mosley’s Tatterdemalion, given the far less inspired title of ‘Lost Child’ for its streaming release, is a powerful story of loss, trauma, reconciliation and finding your path, a deeply heartfelt drama that’s kind of.. not necessarily disguised as a horror, but is very down to earth despite its ‘folk horror’ stylistics and slightly spooky mythological underpinning. It tells of Iraq war veteran Fern (Leven Rambin) who returns to her hometown deep in the heart of the Missouri Ozarks to a broken family and a broken life. She tries to mend a relationship with her volatile brother (Taylor John Smith) and strikes up tentative romance with a kindly social worker who moonlights as the local bartender (Jim Parrack) and begins to get her life on track. One day deep in the heart of the woods she finds a young boy named Cecil (Landon Edwards) wandering lost, with no ID, family or recollection of where he came from. She takes him in and pretty soon odd things start to happen; she finds her energy sapped, she feels sick, she discovers strange iconography fashioned from sticks adorning her property and soon the locals with an ancestral connection to the ancient Ozark legends lost to time warn her of ‘Tatterdemalion’, a soul vanquishing demon personified as a lost child who preys upon unsuspecting folks who take them in. Is Cecil a dangerous entity, or simply one of the countless forgotten, abused and neglected children who are out there trying to find a home? I mean there’s many reviews calling this an ‘anti-horror’ film which in itself already spoils the answer to this question, but I’ll try not to say more other than to iterate how emotionally mature, down to earth and compassionate this narrative is, strikingly brought to life with warmth, depth and empathy by the assured hand of director Mosley, the first of her work I’ve had the pleasure of seeing. Leven Rambin is an actress who also brought the character of Athena Bezzerides to life brilliantly in season 2 of True Detective and she is stunning here, embodying the lost child elements in her own life as she struggles to come to terms with a tragic family history and figure out who Cecil is and care for him at the same time. Shot on location in atmospheric rural Missouri, scored to elemental and orchestral perfection by David Baron and Chris Maxwell, this is a phenomenal sleeper gem that’s streaming on Canadian Prime and I would highly recommend it.

-Nate Hill

Álex de la Iglesia’s Perdita Durango

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Even if I told you to picture a Mexican version of Natural Born Killers starring Rosie Perez and Javier Bardem with shades of voodoo mysticism, tons of pulpy brutal violence, transgressive taboo vibes and shades of From Dusk Till Dawn it wouldn’t prepare you for the visual audacity and narrative viscera that is Álex de la Iglesia’s Perdita Durango, a scrappy mid 90’s bit of cult nihilism based on a book by Barry Gifford. Gifford, you may recall, also wrote the book that David Lynch based Wild At Heart on so many of the same characters appear here for a kind of fascinating “Lynch/Gifford extended universe” vibe. Rosie Perez is Perdita Durango, a vivacious wayward outlaw girl who hooks up with Bardem’s Romeo, a psychopathic, voodoo practicing criminal who has been hired by evil crime kingpin Marcelo ‘Crazy Eyes’ Santos (Don Stroud) to facilitate the black market delivery of stolen human fetuses for cosmetic industry (I swear I’m not making the shit up). The two of them hook up along the way and get up to all sorts of lurid shenanigans including kidnapping a teenage couple (Harley Cross & Aimee Graham), raping them both and forcing them to tag along on their bloodthirsty swath of carnage and mayhem across Texas and the Mexico border. James Gandolfini shows up as a dogged DEA agent hellbent on stopping them and nailing Santos, and he hilariously gets hit by multiple speeding vehicles only to keep on truckin with a neck brace, then a leg brace and so on. There are also scattershot appearances from musician Screamin Jay Hawkins, filmmaker Alex Cox and a young Demien Bechir as a Vegas crime kingpin who meets a spectacularly gory end at the hands of Bardem. He is unbelievable as Romeo, I didn’t think I’d ever see a film where he has a more ridiculous haircut than his mop in No Country For Old Men but it happened, he looks like a an angry tumblr maven with his hyper cropped bangs here, and he tears into the role with a kind of unhinged ferocity and rambunctiousness I haven’t seen before in his mostly restrained career so far. Perez is like a Latin Harley Quinn as Perdita, all pissed off fury and sudden violent sexual energy in a total tour de force. This film won’t be for everyone: it’s incredibly subversive and deranged, there are explicitly shown instances of human sacrifice, rape, child abuse and domestic violence, not to mention the overall dose of supremely bloody gun violence and just a generaly lurid, deliberately unsavoury tone that stems from Gifford’s often shockingly tasteless yet somehow captivating work. But it’s a lot of fun too, there’s heaps of hilariously subtle dark comedy thrown in, a ballistic firestorm of a soundtrack, a host of deliriously over the top performances from the excellent cast and all manner of bizarre, arbitrary, surreal and eclectic sideshow-freak elements that make this an eccentric trip to hell with two demented individuals who you can’t decide whether to run from in horror or party with as they’re that much fun.

-Nate Hill

Rachel Talalay’s Ghost In The Machine

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

What if like, a serial killer committed suicide, but not before making sure that his soul would be uploaded into a computer server through some pseudo hacker wizardry, leaving his essence free to roam throughout entire systems of data and machine control, manipulating everyday household items into deadly weapons of murder? It sounds ridiculous and it is but it’s also a lot of fun, an old forgotten cyber horror flick called Ghost In The Machine. Now, obvious comparisons might be made to another 90’s cyberpunk SciFi/horror called Virtuosity with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe but besides having a way lower budget, scrappy feel to it, this film is about a serial killer who was already human and then died and went into cyberspace vs the other way round. The killer here (played by Ted Marcoux) is just a nondescript, nasty piece of work dubbed the “address book killer” for his arbitrary, imagination deficient mode of picking victims. One night he deliberately totals his car off a cliff and kicks the bucket, only to resurface in cyberspace to hunt a young mother (Karen Allen) and her kid using everything from toasters, home entertainment systems, crash test dummy courses and basically anything electronic he can posses using his weird supernatural hacker magic. Their only hope is a super hacker of their own, (played by Chris Mulkey aka Hank from Twin Peaks) a good natured dude who once embezzled a million bucks from the IRS and gave it back to the people. This is fairly lowbrow, schlocker type entertainment with really, really cheesy 90’s virtual reality effects in the vein of something like The Lawnmower Man, but it has a certain viciousness and violent edge that I appreciated. Several murder scenes are pretty jaw dropping including one where the killer turns the entire interior living room of a dude’s house into an irradiated microwave zone and lets him literally fry to death, or an instance of electricity induced spontaneous combustion that is genuinely jarring in its sudden gruesomeness. Rachel Talalay the director also did the criminally underrated cult classic Tank Girl so she has a flair for the bizarre punk sensibilities that come across here. If you like retro SciFi goofiness, grisly slasher aesthetics and just a cheesy, lovably VHS feel, you’ll get a kick here.

-Nate Hill

The Poison Rose

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

You would think that a film noir headlined by John Travolta and Morgan Freeman would be a surefire winner or at least something moderately stimulating, but The Poison Rose is just a lazy, watered down, lethargic, empty, nonsensical and just plain fucking boring film. The first five minutes show the faintest beam of promise as we see hard-luck ex football pro turned private investigator Carson Phillips (Travolta) running away from vicious loan sharks while carrying his cat in a carrier. It’s a fun bit, followed by a nice opening credits sequence where he hits the road and drives it from Cali to his hometown in Texas to take on the case of a missing woman and for a hot second the film feels like it could actually go somewhere… and then it just viciously, thoroughly and embarrassingly flatlines. Travolta narrates the proceedings as if he’s in his nightgown and favourite La-Z-Boy chair about to nod off and who can blame him with a narrative this thin and scattered. The search for this girl leads him to a few of his old high school pals including a shady businessman (Freeman, barely raising a pulse) who owns half the town, a slightly corrupt sheriff (Robert Patrick) an ageing hipster (Peter Stormare) and an old flame (Famke Janssen) now wedded to Freeman’s sinister magnate. Brendan Fraser shows up to give quite possibly the weirdest performance of his career as a psychiatric “doctor” who looks like he could use a stay in the institution himself, garbling out his lines in a syrupy lisp under a dying combover and really looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. Now, this is one serious lineup of actors, like if this thing were made in the 90’s with a better script, director and when all these wonderful actors had more energy it could have maybe been something good, but they’ve squandered a dream cast on toilet water material, dumpster diving level production value and a story that is so clearly, derivatively, unapologetically DULL that I can’t let this review go by without a serious verbal lashing. There’s just no excuse for this kind of mediocrity in any echelon of film or art, it just rests somewhere between being dimly engaging and outright terrible and they’ve just limply thrown in the towel, and added an wet blanket overtop of it. There’s a scene where Travolta says “everything in moderation, including moderation.” One thing I could use in moderation, or simply not at all, are these uninspired, flaccid dicked, direct to video embarrassments of once great stars/actors. Piss poor excuse for entertainment.

-Nate Hill

Robert Zemeckis’s The Witches

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Robert Zemeckis is a perfect director to tackle one of Roald Dahl’s books; he’s got an inspired mastery over cutting edge CGI, a talent for dynamic visual storytelling and a genuine sense of the macabre, this willingness to be honest about the darker aspects of real life and include them in a story geared towards children, which is an attribute that he directly shares with Dahl himself. His crack at The Witches is an admirable, mostly successful, visually stunning and opulently stylish bit of devilish fun and although obvious comparison will be made not only to Dahl’s book (which simply cannot be topped) but also to Nicolas Roeg’s brilliant 1990 take on it. Zemeckis definitely takes the more playful route and while still injecting palpable dread and menace into the proceedings, his version isn’t quite the prosthetic soaked nightmare Roeg offered. The setting here is switched up from the UK to Deep South Alabama where a young boy and his grandmother (Octavia Spencer) encounter a coven of nasty real life witches holding a convention at a swanky bayou hotel. Anyone who has read the book knows that these witches are all about murdering children in frighteningly inventive ways and are led by the preening, aristocratic and supremely evil Grand High Witch, here played by Anne Hathaway in a performance that has to be seen to be believed. In the book the character is mean enough, in the 90’s version Anjelica Huston gave her a kind of.. ‘dark empress socialite’ vibe but Hathaway just grabs the script in her jaws like a dog and runs off with it. Sporting snowy blonde hair, a jittery Norwegian accent and mandible modifications that would make the vampires in Blade 2 shudder, she devours scenery, steals every scene and annunciates every syllable with the force of a snake sinking its fangs into someone. She truly makes this character hers, it’s the most impressive work I’ve ever seen from her as an actress and is by and far the best thing about the film. Even Stanley Tucci, who is usually the life of the party in any film, stands back in restraint as the hotel’s fussy manager and gives Anne a wide berth for her typhoon of a performance to unfold. The special effects are wondrous creations and I can’t figure out why anyone would bitch about the CGI on display here (it’s always inevitable I suppose) because it looks and feels incredibly tactile and terrifying. Zemeckis takes liberties with the witch anatomy that Dahl never dreamed of but they are righteous departures in style that make sense and add to the mythology nicely. Chris Rock narrates the film vivaciously as an older version of the young boy, and I never thought I’d say it but he has an uncannily perfect way with Dahl’s passages that had me wishing for a ‘The Witches audiobook as read by Chris Rock.’ My only one complaint is that it feels too slight in the latter half and I would have appreciated more of a runtime, but what they do give us really is a treat. Solid, comprehensive storytelling from Zemeckis, audaciously beautiful costume design, a gem of a score from Alan Silvestri and one unbelievable banshee howl encore performance from Hathaway who is truly having a blast.

-Nate Hill

Adam Wingard’s Home Sick

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Adam Wingard has become something of a household name lately, blasting on scene with his vicious shocker You’re Next, thrilling audiences with his retro cult specimen The Guest and solidifying his presence as a filmmaker to be reckoned with by scoring the reins to Godzilla Vs. Kong, the dude is a top dog who is here to stay. Many aren’t aware of his debut film though, and fair enough because it’s about as low budget, under the radar and avant-garde as horror can be but it’s so, so worth watching to triangulate the evolution of a fascinating artist from the murkiest pits of lo-fi, Grindhouse schlock to the loftiest echelons of Hollywood high gloss. It’s called Home Sick, he made it on a shoestring budget back in the mid 2000’s and it’s an absolutely diabolical treat, but only if you can stomach some truly jarring moments of gore and have one demented sense of humour with the capacity for.. let’s just say… abstract thought. Low budget, practical effects driven schlockers like these are a dime a dozen, but this one is worth it’s weight in gold simply for going that extra mile to make it memorable and stand out from the cheaply drawn masses. It starts out slow, with an eerie opening credit musical jingle and animated sequence that could suggest all kinds of horrors to come. We meet a group of friends in the Deep South going through the motions of partying and quarreling. Tiffany Shepis does a wonderfully nutty little riff on her scream queen shtick who likes to rail cocaine at her graveyard janitor job and swing a mop around with gale force. Anywho, this weird little troupe is kicking back one night, when into the apartment walks a very ill adjusted stranger named Mr. Suitcase (the legendary Bill Moseley), and sits down on the couch like he owns the place. He’s chipper, charming and affable to a terrifying level, as he opens up his suitcase full of razor blades that he calls “gifts”. He asks them all to pick one person in their life they hate and want to wish dead, slicing a nasty gash on his forearm for each answer. The hilarious lot deadpan member of the group (Forrest Pitts, in a priceless performance of comedic eccentricities) foolishly blurts out that he wishes everyone in the room dead, and then the real fun begins. A giant masked killer begins stalking and killing pretty much every character around in ways so brutal your balls will shrink into your pancreas. Seriously, it’s like they sat down in a boardroom and systematically came up with every squirm inducing way to inflict violence on a human body, and gave their results to the storyboard artist and effects team. It all comes to a chaotic, deranged finale when they take refuge with Uncle Johnnie (the late great Tom Towles, always brilliant) a gun toting chili enthusiast. That’s where the film comes off the rails, but it’s seemingly deliberate and actually quite hilarious, as everyone pretty much goes certifiably bananas and loses the plot all at once like feral kindergarten class in overdrive. There’s some thought and care put into the writing, and as such the characters, however odd or over the top, seem like real people, albeit some strange and undesirable folks. The film oozes unsettling atmosphere right from the get-go, fervent in its aggressively weird sense of style and never taking the conventional route that most horrors end up with. Like I said, if your sense of humour has an affinity for the bizarre, demented and off the wall (think David Lynch meets Tim & Eric meets The Evil Dead meets John Waters), you’re gonna love this little gem. On top of being a laugh riot, it’s just freaky enough to earn it’s horror classification, something which many films in the genre just can’t claim. As to why it’s called HomeSick, though? Couldn’t tell you, and there’s no reference to it the entire time. Perhaps it’s called that for the folks that will be thoroughly repelled and repulsed, those who watch it expecting a run of the mill, cookie cutter slasher and feel uncomfortable with the oddness, getting “home sick” for their safer horror fare. As for me, I’m right at home up the weird end of the alley, and love this type of thing and it’s one hell of a fascinating debut for any director to start out with.

-Nate Hill

Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani’s Let The Corpses Tan

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Whenever contemporary filmmakers attempt a homage to cinematic styles, tones and artistic mechanics of bygone eras in cinema it’s very easy to tell whether they know their shit and have captured their intended aesthetic or missed the mark. Every culture and era of the medium has their own unique and distinct flavour woven into every aspect of the artistic process, and any pastiche is just going to be a delicate undertaking. In the case of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Let The Corpses Tan they have done an impeccable job of emulating this kind of… 60’s/70’s Italian pulp/murder/spaghetti/cop/splatter/action vibe that’s so specific to that time and region I can’t even properly describe how… unmistakable the palette is. It’s like Italian genre cinema went to sleep one night and this film is a window into into its REM cycle. On a remote, sun drenched island in the Mediterranean (shot in beautiful Corsica), a gang of murderous thieves spearheaded by a vicious femme fatale (Romanian cult icon Elina Löwensohn) hide out in the crumbling ruins of a Hellenic ghost town, harbouring a stolen trove of gold bullion. As they languidly await some vague deadline, others approach including a gaggle of unfortunate civilians and two intrepid motorbike cops, whose arrival heralds the furious, bloody, beautiful extended gun battle that becomes the film’s centrepiece. That’s all for plot really, but trust me it’s all you need, this film is all style, aesthetics and nightmarish visual poetry and contains some of the most outright striking imagery, editing and production I’ve ever seen in cinema. The weapons are all gorgeously retro and have this… ‘Spaghetti SteamPunk’ mechanical anatomy, the violence has a Giallo singed, pop art bloodiness to it, and the editing is some of the most painstakingly detailed work I’ve ever seen. Closeups on craggy faces, hyper-quick zooms, pans, jump cuts and jarring chops that are so off the wall, intense and unconventional they nearly give the viewer a heart murmur in the best way possible. Amidst the gunplay that although supremely stylish is very down to earth there is also this wonderful flourish of shocking surrealism woven into the story, as we see a mysterious, Venus-esque maiden appearing occasionally surrounded by tantalizing, erotically charged symbolism, gunshots explode into otherworldly blasts of coloured paint and all manner of dreamlike cutaways, hyper-stylized mysticism and enough bright colours and sunshine to get a rave going. Absolutely astonishing film, highly recommended.

-Nate Hill