My Week(s) in Movies — Halloween Edition! (10/3–10/31)

TRICK ’R TREAT* — A surprisingly fun and satisfying anthology film from one of Bryan Singer’s frequent collaborators. Deliberately in the vein of vintage anthology horror comics — like the Tales from the Crypt comics which inspired the series — which themselves were sometimes depictions of the more terrifying urban legends. While not based on any specific urban legends of which I’m aware, the film’s vignettes are each evocative of the kind of uncanny tales that give you the classic “thrills and chills.”

Writer-director Michael Dougherty is hardly shy about his influences: the film’s opening titles are designed as a montage of horror comic covers and panels depicting scenes from the film, and one of the vignettes is specifically about an urban legend come to life. But he managed to nail the tone of those stories wonderfully, so these elements feel appropriate rather than highlighting the disparity between what he was trying to do and what he accomplished.

The tone might be a little jarring for those without a grounding in classic urban myths, combining a sense of humor which could strike some as mean-spirited with a vicious edge to the horror.¹ But horror film enthusiasts will find this a nice return to pre-torture porn horror aesthetics of the 70s and 80s.

For reasons unknown to anyone but Warner Bros. and the filmmakers (though there are some plausible theories), the studio decided to bury this film rather than release it, and while completed in 2007 it only released to video and Netflix in late 2009. So you quite possibly haven’t heard of it (it’s pretty underground) and if you have, it may seem to have the stink of cheap direct-to-video horror on it. But don’t let it put you off. It’s sick, twisted fun done with flair, and like I said about PUMPKINHEAD back at the beginning of the year, it’s a shame the film’s ever-present Sam hasn’t become an icon of the Halloween movie season. I would love it if a new TRICK ‘R TREAT anthology came out every year, rather than a new PARANORMAL ACTIVITY or, previously, SAW film. But alas, it seems this is not to be.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY* — Ugh. This thing doomed us to the last few years of found footage horror movies?

Regular readers will know I’m not, in principle, an anti-found footage guy. When I saw BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, I was blown away, and looking forward to seeing more films take the genre and experiment with it. For some reason, it took almost 10 years for another film to come along and really do something interesting (CLOVERFIELD). And last week time I gave the thumbs-up to TROLLHUNTER, which also does something clever with the format; but in part its success is the way it’s simultaneously a satire of the more recent developments of the genre, as well as a great and original example of it.

Anyway, I’m not hating on PA because it’s a found footage movie — though as in many films of the genre, eventually I found myself thinking “why in the hell would any real person continue shooting and framing this?” And unlike many of my friends who have seen it and found it completely un-scary, I do think it has some legitimate frightening moments. But they come far, far too late in the film, by which point I, as a viewer, had basically checked out. Too little, too late. I did my best to give the film its shot at getting me — I watched it at night, alone in the house, with the lights off — and like I said, when the few heart-pounding moments came, I was able to engage with them. But there just weren’t enough of them to make it worthwhile.

Also, I hated the characters and wanted them to die. Wanted it. From the very first scene. Remember when I raged about the shitty yuppies in the Chase commercials? They made a movie about them where they’re tormented by a demon. Tell me you’re not rooting for the demon.

They’re just so smarmy and the husband is such an asshole — really he’s the problem more than she is, character-wise — and their actions and reactions are just plain inhuman. The husband vacillates back and forth whether or not he actually believes any of this stuff is going on, even after it’s pretty clear something is going on. And despite being tormented every night for three weeks straight, with the haunting becoming more aggressive and eventually even manifesting in the daylight hours, the couple 1) never leave the house (“jobs”? lol!) and 2) are somehow always sleeping peacefully by 3 A.M. when the next attack comes. I’m sorry, if I’m being attacked by a supernatural force in my bedroom every night, I wouldn’t be sound asleep under the fucking covers in bed. By night 14, we’d be sleeping in fucking shifts with round-the-clock coffee brewing and all the goddamn lights on.

The “they never leave the house” bit is at least addressed — they make the point it’s the girl who is actually haunted, not the house. Wherever she goes, the demon will go. So if they tried to take refuge at a friend’s house, or a hotel, it wouldn’t do any good. But, for one thing, it wouldn’t hurt to actually demonstrate this by having them try staying at a friend’s house for a night and have it go all to shit. Could be a cool scene. I know the film was shot in the writer-director’s house and the whole point was to constrain the film there, but after a while the excuses for doing so get pretty thin, and overall it feels contrived.

For another thing — okay, a hotel or a friend’s house won’t work. How about a church, you yuppie fucks? At one point they very seriously consider consulting an exorcist. If this really is a demon, if you’re really willing to investigate that possibility, try a night in a church to see if it provides the sanctuary it’s named for. And if a Catholic church doesn’t work, try a Lutheran one. If that doesn’t work, shit, try a mosque and a synagogue and whatever the fucking Scientologists stay in. I’m the opposite of a religious man, but get an invisible, malicious force to start tormenting me in the night and I’ll start re-evaluating my options. And trying a church couldn’t be any worse than trying nothing at all and sleeping in the same haunted goddamn house for three weeks.

Again, I know. The point was to keep the production in the house for cost purposes. But real people with brains wouldn’t act the way these characters do, and it took me out of the film. A cool, inexpensive idea I sure as hell wish I’d thought of — but not a very good movie at all.

LO* — Another off-beat, experimental horror film, in which a young man summons a demon called Lo to rescue his girlfriend from Hell. The film is essentially black box theatre, with no sets to speak of, and with the main character spending the entire running time sitting inside a small pentagram on the floor, his only protection from the demons and other horrors who come to tell him his girlfriend was not who — nor what — she seemed.

Being an experimental film, by its nature some things work and some don’t. I like the fact it’s a horror-comedy, and at times both the horrific and comedic moments really work; and a few moments of legitimate drama shine here too. But in a lot of places this feels like a pretentious off-off-Broadway show, with characters saying things I think probably looked good on the page but sound clunky and contrived spoken aloud. The longest such stretch comes toward the end, when Justin, the main character, starts discussing the nature of love with the demons. It could be worse, but it’s not great. The performances — particularly between Justin and Lo — are at their best when they’re understated and wry, at their worst when they turn into broad, community theatre mugging.

The limitations of the concept, and having to work around them, result in some clever and unique ideas in execution — “flashback” sequences are literally done as community theatre-style productions, with over-the-shoulder shots giving us a view of what’s going on backstage; and when Lo brings two damned souls up from Hell to tell Justin what it’s like, the visualization of the idea is both cheesy theatre and legitimately creepy — but also a certain repetitiveness in structure and behavior. Lo can only rear up and roar so many times before I’m over it. And some moments really feel drawn out and padded — not a good sign in a film with an 85 minute runtime. But, it also had a great “surprising yet obvious” ending, which for all the film’s quirks and foibles and occasional padding left me satisfied when it was over.

I think it’s a great concept and reasonably well-executed. Writer-director Travis Betz shows he has real talent and a highly creative mind. It just needs some refining.

THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW — A creepy and unusual film, one of the lesser known of Wes Craven’s career. It feels a lot like a Carpenter film of the same era, to me, but it could be I’m just not as familiar with Craven as I am with Carpenter. Nominally a “zombie” film, it reaches past the Romero-born popular zombie mythology, clear back to the origin of the notion and the word zombie itself — the voodoo culture of Haiti.

A pharmaceutical company — which, it’s interesting to note, is not corrupt or otherwise villainous — has become interested in Haitian zombification, through which human beings can be made to appear dead, with no pulse nor response to stimuli, then be revived with no ill effects up to 12 hours later. The pharmaceutical company believes this must be done with some form of heretofore-unknown drug, which could save millions of lives as a new form of anaesthetic. The victims of zombification in Haiti awaken as shambling slaves to the voodoo priest who drugged them, but the company considers this is to be purely psychological — the voodoo priest’s only power over his victims is their belief he has power over them. So they send in an agent who has brought other tribal remedies out of the tribe and into the pharmacy to discover the mystery drug and return with a sample to be analyzed and replicated.

Of course, being a Wes Craven horror film, the voodoo priest’s power is real, and the pharmaceutical company’s agent finds himself targeted by the wielder of this dark and primal magic.

Oddly, I find I don’t have much to say about this one. It was interesting (legitimately, not in the way where you hate it but want to sound like you’re being positive), and if the above synopsis interests you, you should check it out. But I suppose the lack of real stand-out moments or performances is probably why it’s one of Craven’s forgotten works.

SPLICE — A science-gone-wrong story of two genetic engineers who splice together a bunch of DNA willy-nilly for some reason (something about special proteins for a pharmaceutical company — also not the villains in this film) and get something part human but mostly not. They can’t seem to decide what to do or how they feel about it and shit gets weird… but not really weird enough.

With a premise like this, I think you want a strong personality and sensibility behind the camera, someone who’s really going to produce a film that sticks with you through its powerful imagery, even if the story itself goes in one ear and out the other. But the direction, while perfectly competent, is nothing to write home about, and while engaging in the moment the film is ultimately forgettable and I’m not sure what lesson I’m supposed to get out of it. Some cool effects work, though.

ONE EYED MONSTER* — Porn star Ron Jeremy (as himself) is struck by a strange light from the sky, causing an alien consciousness to possess his famously monstrous penis. The penis then detaches itself from Jeremy and proceeds to murder the cast and crew of Jeremy’s latest adult film in classic B-movie monster fashion. And it’s way more fun to watch than should be allowed.

The best part of it is that almost everyone plays it straight. They let the absurdity of the concept, and the fact that they’re taking it so seriously, get the laughs, rather than pulling faces and acting like morons and calling it humor. Charles Napier delivers a showstopping “USS Indianapolis”-esque monologue about a rogue penis massacring his platoon in ‘Nam and driving him to alcoholism and you believe every word of it.

You do see the disembodied penis, but not as much as you might expect. I’d put this on the same level as a KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE — it’s ridiculous, it knows it’s ridiculous, and it plays out its premise with total sincerity and was a great party viewing.

JESUS CHRIST, VAMPIRE HUNTER* — By contrast with the previous film, this one is not as fun as it sounds, I’m afraid. It’s got an amazing pitch — Jesus returns only to find the world overrun by vampires, and sets out to save the last remnants of humanity from the undead threat. I’m totally willing to ignore all the sense that doesn’t make within any version of Christian or vampire mythology and go along for a rip-roaring schlocky ride.

Unfortunately, this movie offers no such rip-roar. It isn’t even coherent enough to be bad, it’s just confusing. Everything ONE EYED MONSTER does right, JCVH does wrong. It’s one big wink at the camera but I don’t know what the wink signifies because I’m not in on whatever the joke really is.

I think the most interesting part, to me, is how it feels exactly like a 1970s super 8 amateur film (actually shot on 16mm, but let’s not quibble), quite like the ones the kids in SUPER 8 were making, but was made in 2001. On the one hand, I’m impressed at how perfectly they channelled the amateur aesthetic, incoherence, and bizarre narrative choices such as a narrator who only makes things more baffling and a song and dance number out of and into nowhere. But it may not be as meta as that — it may actually be an amateur, incoherent, and sincere attempt at a film. Obviously the premise is silly on its face, but it still could have been a good silly movie. According to the internets, this was shot on weekends over a two year period. I bet the people involved had a ton of fun for those two years, but the 90 minutes which resulted are kind of excruciating.

No pun intended.

BIRDEMIC* — … Holy shit, you guys.

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1. Somewhere along the line — I don’t remember where — I heard that the main difference between a comedy and a tragedy was that a comedy ends in a wedding, and a tragedy ends in a funeral. In the case of urban myths, they almost always end with a brutal, senseless murder, or the protagonists’ skin-of-their-teeth escape from one. Sometimes both.

The Translated Man (and Other Stories)

So, a couple weeks ago, I said something funny on the internet. Which, you know, I try. But this time I touched a nerve, my tweet was retweeted by Wil Wheaton — who has 1.8 million followers — and then all hell broke loose. Retweets and responses started flying, my email started buzzing with one new follower after another.

Realizing I had, for a fleeting moment, the potential attention of all those people, should they click through to my account to see who this wisecracking jackmook was, I began casting madly about for stuff I could promote. Among other things, I mentioned, almost offhandedly, that I am working on the film adaptation for a novel called The Translated Man.

Not exactly the way I wanted to announce it, but I kind of panicked (and also the author saw what was happening and yelled at me for not mentioning it). But this is a project that I’m very, very excited about, and it deserves more than the 280 characters I was able to devote to it.

I first heard about The Translated Man when it was recommended by the screenwriter John Rogers on his blog. This was just when I had gotten my Kindle and I was ravenous for good new books to read, and he even dropped the L-bomb (Lovecraftian), so I went and snatched it up immediately.

The Translated Man is an industrial horror-fantasy, set in the richly-textured city of Trowth, in a world where the line between magic and science is heavily blurred, and dangerous sciences — such as necrology (the reanimation of corpses), and translation (cross-dimensional travel) — are declared heresies by the theocratic Church Royal. The enforcement of anti-heretical measures falls under the jurisdiction of the Coroners, Trowth’s version of the FBI, authorized to use lethal force with any confirmed heretic, on sight. The story begins with the Coroners’ investigation of a brutal murder, an investigation which leads them down a path toward a secret that threatens to destroy the city.

Like Rogers, I loved it, and my manager at the time was encouraging me to seek out potential properties for adaptation that I could take on, so I contacted the author and discovered that the film rights were still available, and we made a deal.

Which brings us to the present. One of the reasons I’ve previously held off saying anything about it was because I wanted to finish writing the script first. And then I struggled for a long time with how to take such a detailed, evocative, interesting book and distill it down into 150 screenplay pages or less, without losing what made it so great and worth adapting in the first place.

So it took me a while, during which time I was chipping away at it without making major headway. But in the last few months I got my head around a cinematic way to structure the story — aided by my re-examination of the successes and failures of the HARRY POTTER adaptations, and the immensely well-executed adaptation of GAME OF THRONES — and had a breakthrough. I’ve finally completed the first draft of the adaptation (which came in at 125 pages), and gotten the go-ahead from the author to start sharing it with some of the producers and other contacts I know and see if we can’t get something moving along.

You, my friends, can help.

See, one of the reasons adaptations are so popular in Hollywood right now is because the studio gets a sense that the movie they’re making has a built-in audience. It’s not a slam-dunk for the film’s success — nothing is — but it makes it seem like a surer thing than the completely original screenplay they got great coverage on this week.

What you guys can do to help this movie get a little closer to happening is head on over to Amazon and pick up a copy of the book, either in print or on Kindle. The book also comes with four short stories, set in the same world and expanding on its mythology, and already has a sequel, with another on the way. If you like the book — and I think you probably will — spread the word about it. Recommend it to a friend, do a blog post or even just a tweet, and give it a review on Amazon so it can start to rise through the rankings and get even more attention, and make it easier for me to stand in a room with some executive and go “See? The people want this movie.”

Setting my personal interest in its success aside, it’s just a great book that deserves more exposure and that I really think, especially for the people who share my sensibilities enough to read my blog, it’s something you won’t want to miss out on. So check it out, and I look forward to updating you guys on the project’s status in the future.

Book Review: Making Movies

Approximately once a year, I watch two documentaries, usually within a few days of each other.

The first is OVERNIGHT, a documentary which was initially going to be about the making of the film BOONDOCK SAINTS, but instead became a study of the meteoric rise and fall of Troy Duffy’s career. Duffy, the writer-director, systematically burns every bridge he stumbles upon, on camera, in a glorious flameout of self-reinforcing arrogance. And yes, it can be argued that some of it was created in the edit, but certainly not all of what goes on. After a viewing of OVERNIGHT, it will be little wonder that it took Duffy a decade to get BOONDOCK SAINTS II off the ground. Frankly, it’s a wonder he ever did.

The second is LOST IN LA MANCHA, another film that starts off as a standard fly-on-the-wall making-of documentary which suddenly becomes the chronicle of a dramatic implosion, this time of the film and not its filmmaker. Poor Terry Gilliam. Saddled with a reputation for going wildly over schedule and budget, his attempts to produce his pet project THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE are met with one disaster after another — none of them within his power to anticipate or prevent — until at last the insurance company shuts the production down.

I watch both films regularly to keep my head on straight, and my expectations realistic. OVERNIGHT reminds me that no matter how successful I might get or how many people say nice things about my work, the most important thing is that I never let it go to my head. I work hard on all the projects that I do; if they’re any good, it’s that hard work — not some innate and effortless genius I channel mystically from the aether — that makes them that way.

LOST IN LA MANCHA reminds me that even if I were a genius, even if I did everything right, the universe doesn’t owe me a movie. I can dot all my T’s and cross all my I’s and the project can still go utterly to shit. I have to care about what I’m doing — if it’s going to be good, I have to care very deeply — but I also have to be ready for the unforeseeable, and prepare myself emotionally to deal with the challenges that will inevitably arise. And to keep in mind that if my project is destroyed, that doesn’t — and shouldn’t — destroy me, too.

Both films (and both BOONDOCK SAINTS films, too) are available on Netflix Watch Instantly.

I’m now adding to my “pull/keep my head out of my ass” rotation a book: MAKING MOVIES, by Sidney Lumet.

I worked on PIRANHA 3D

Remember how I said that I was “drowning” in work and that was a pun and you didn’t know why but I’d tell you?

Yeah. I worked on a movie that involves water and drowning, and a lot of mean little CG fish.

Get it?

Anyway, I’m not saying you should or shouldn’t go see PIRANHA this weekend. What I will say is that this film actually took its time with the conversion. Whereas most films get finished and then go “We can charge how much for 3D tickets?!” and turn around a shit-tastic “3D” version in six weeks (I’m looking at you, everything), they knew from the word go that PIRANHA was going to do a conversion and they gave it the time you need to do it right. Nine months, on this one. I was there for seven.

I am very proud of the quality of the conversion that was done on this film. I think it is genuinely the best, cleanest 3D conversion to date. The quality of the film we did the conversion on is…not Shakespeare. Let’s leave it at that.

Like I said, I’m not promoting the flick per se. Don’t make plans to see it just on my account. But, if you were already going to see it, I think this one might be worth the 3D tax. It’s big and silly and gimmicky — quite honestly, a movie like PIRANHA is what this 3D thing is really good for. And you might spot my name in the credits!

The Value of Ideas

Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) put up a blog post today addressing essentially the same point we’ve been talking about this week:

You’d be hard pressed to come up with an idea so bad that it couldn’t succeed with the right execution. And it would be even harder to imagine a great idea that couldn’t fail if the execution were left to morons.

Must be something in the air.

Descendants update…

If you read the blog earlier today, I posted an update on the status of the DESCENDANTS project.

The short version, as I said in that post, is that the version of the project I worked on for two years is dead. I then continued in that post with my perspective and experience of how the project fell apart. It was a bit of frustration venting, of course.

And it was up for a bit, and then I got a message from our guy over at Dark Horse. And now the post is down.

I wasn’t asked to take it down. In fact, when I spoke with him on the phone I offered to take it down and he said it wasn’t necessary. He, in fact, wanted to apologize for the way the project had panned out and that he was still hoping we could do something together. So while I don’t think I said anything libelous in the post, and made sure not to name names even with that in mind, I feel it would be ingracious of me to leave any dirty laundry out there after our conversation. I don’t like how this project turned out, but I liked working with them when it was going well, and that’s not a bridge I want to burn.

Getting a movie going is a bit like catching lightning in a bottle, really. All the right elements have to come together, and in this case they just didn’t. Some of that was within our control and judgement errors were made (on my part as much as anyone else’s, if not more), some was outside our control. But the upshot is that DESCENDANTS isn’t going to happen, at least not the version with which I was involved.

I also probably won’t post the scripts after all, at least not before discussing it with Joey. That’s also not a bridge I’m out to burn. So I’ll just have to find something else to post about.

Meanwhile, it’s full steam ahead on KUNG FU RED. In fact I think I’ll post about that one next…

The Grey Area

So I was watching G.I. JOE the other night.

This isn’t a review for G.I. JOE, because there’s not a lot to say. It’s pretty much idiocy, top to bottom. Characters are less than one-dimensional, dialogue made me flinch like I was being physically assaulted, bad guys’ motivations make no sense, VFX favor quantity over quality, and despite having a huge budget and Ray Park as Snake Eyes, the best action sequence was a flashback of two kids fighting in a small kitchen which was probably shot second unit.

I tweeted my opinion as I was watching it:

Watching GI JOE just for the hell of it. Sucks like a sumbitch, as anticipated. So, so dumb.

I got a number of responses, most of them agreeing and commiserating the loss of precious, precious life that was those two hours of it. But I got one response similar to what I’ve seen before:

I too, was surprised that no one re-enacted Shakespeare plays with their action figures as I did… Oh well. (@MattWBP)

I didn’t really follow up on what exactly he meant by that, but my interpretation of it is that it’s a more nuanced and sarcastic way of saying “What did you expect a G.I. JOE movie to be?”

IRON SKY — oh, hell yes.

If you follow me on Twitter you’ve already seen this, but I want to save it here for prosperity (and also give a go, once again, at making more regular posts…).

About two years ago, a group of independent filmmakers put out a pitch trailer for a film they were working on called IRON SKY. I could summarize it for you, but the pitch trailer tells you pretty much everything you need to know:

Now, I thought this was fucking awesome. What a brilliant piece of pulp sci-fi. Space Nazis? Sign me the fuck up.

I was a little concerned, based on the fact that they bill it as a “sci-fi comedy” and they ended the pitch with a bit of lowbrow poop humor, but I reserved judgement until I could see more.

I’m glad I did. They’ve now put together what is still essentially a pitch trailer, but this one contains actual footage that will ultimately be in the film, and…well. There are no words.

That last shot seriously takes my breath away every time, and the music gives me chills.

After they released the original trailer, I actually contacted the team and offered to help them out with the VFX work. They were willing to bring me on board, too, but the catch was I’d have to relocate to Finland for the gig.

I’ve got work going on right now and a feature to be shooting, but if they’re still working on this around the end of the year, and things have slowed down for me then, I honestly might consider it. I love what I’m seeing and whether or not I can lend a hand personally, I wish them every success. I want to see this movie!

SHUTTER ISLAND: The Twist

I haven’t seen the new Scorsese film Shutter Island. I haven’t read the script or the book it’s based on or a synopsis of the plot. I haven’t read any spoilers or seen anything besides the trailer. 

And based on the trailer, it’s so obvious how the film ends it makes me want to scream. 

I’m going to put my bet down after the jump. Spoilers, if I’m right, but I can’t be the only one who’s sorted this out. 

Book Review: SAVE THE CAT!

When I finally broke down and picked up a copy of SAVE THE CAT! I noticed a few things right away. First off, the image of the cat on the cover has some truly nasty green spill on it, to the extent that portions of the fur are overexposed. It makes me feel ill to look at.

After that, I noticed that the subtitle on the front cover is The Last Book on Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need. But on the book’s spine and back cover, it’s The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need, redacting the “that.” It’s a weird inconsistency that put me on edge before I even started reading.

But you know what they say about books and their covers. Let’s talk about the content of the book itself.