Friday, October 28, 2011

Night Visions Night 2

... not a great night. Can't talk about these movies without spoiling them to hell, so spoilers in white, highlight the text to see them. (great, what's tomorrow's post gimmick going to be?)

Another Earth

An exact duplicate of Earth (and the moon!) comes into view, and as time passes it's getting closer! Then we find out that (not only is this an exact duplicate as far as form and land masses etc, but that each and every person on Earth is also duplicated there!). But the movie's not about that, as the planet situation is merely background noise for what the movie's really about. The movie is about the tragedies and hardships of two people that I really can't give a fuck about because THERE'S A DUPLICATE EARTH THAT'S GETTING PRETTY HUMONGOUS IN THE SKY SO WHO CARES ABOUT PEOPLE AND THEIR NORMAL PROBLEMS???? And of course it ends just as it might get interesting for someone that would actually be interested in a movie that might be about a duplicate Earth closing in on us.

Rabies

This was a mess of a movie. It wasn't about anything, just bad things happening to people out in the woods. In Israel. It was like a tragic and violent episode of Seinfeld in that way. (still haven't figured out why it's called Rabies)

Basically there's this killer that has set a traps in the woods. This snares some woman and her brother (with whom she's having an incestuous affair) is freaking out about how to get her out. Luckily for him a group of teenagers/young adults gets lost on their way to a tennis match... and the police are called, but boy oh boy are they not going to be helpful. And there's a survey team in the area too.

The funny thing? (the killer only kills a dog before he's knocked out. Everyone else kills one another, horribly, through cases of mistaken identity, because there's a fucking minefield in the woods, or because some of the people here are serious assholes and out in the woods situations are just going to get out of hand, right?)

whew. I couldn't tell if this was all supposed to be really dark humor or if it was all unintentionally rather silly.

Trick or Treat

80s "classic" that features cameos by Gene Simmons and Ozzy Osbourne (so naturally they're featured on the DVD cover like they're the stars or something).

Basically, kid named Eddie Weinbauer (played by Family Ties' Skippy) is a lonely loser metalhead freak is always getting bullied and humiliated at school. He talks about killing himself but one thing keeps him going: Heavy metal, in particular his hero Sammi Curr, who had graduated from the same high school the kid goes to and went on to conquer the rock world.

Curr dies in a fire, but a local DJ takes pity on Weinbauer and gives him a studio master version of Curr's unreleased album... which turns out to be magic as Curr speaks to Eddie and helps him get his revenge...

There's a good movie in here somewhere. I thought it captured the "put upon high school loser" pretty well, the whole PMRC thing was played up in the movie, and the kid's taste in metal reflected what a hardcore metalhead would have listened to (the kid has Judas Priest and Raven posters up on his wall, and has Megadeth, Razor, and Impaler albums in his collection). The setup didn't seem like horseshit.

But it didn't quite work out for this movie. They get details like the record collection right, but there's the big red boom mic dipping into the scene so often it should have gotten a credit. The way one of the jock bullies shouts "WEINBAUER!" it sounds like he's yelling "WHITE POWER!" the whole movie. And the actual threat in the movie was lame and there really wasn't much suspense. (Rocker Sammi Curr comes back to life as an evil electric ghost that can materialize through sound equipment and shoots lightning out of his guitar all through playing his unreleased record backwards!)

Not very good.

DEEP RED

Dario Argento's 1975 classic murder thriller! On the BIG SCREEN!

IMDB sums it up best: "A musician witnesses the murder of a famous psychic, and then teams up with a fiesty reporter to find the killer while evading attempts on their lives by the unseen killer bent on keeping a dark secret buried."

The one problem with this movie? The pace of the investigation is rather slow and when our heroes discover something, they really don't tell us, the audience, anything that would help us identify the killer.

It's pretty much a twist ending, with everything explained in hindsight, which is a bit much for a movie lasting over two hours.

Argento's movies are almost all a complete mess as far as the script, plot, and pacing (although the script and plot here are perfectly fine). Let's be honest here, his "masterpiece" Suspiria is completely incoherent - I think Tenebrae is his best movie. I wonder how things would have been different for him through the decades if he teamed with a real writer with rather than writing his films' scripts himself.

What Argento can do better than almost anyone is shoot a scene and make it a goddamn work of art. (oh, and hire Goblin to do the music)

And Argento displays a set of great big brass balls here. For all the problems this movie has, none of them matter. Argento (reveals the killer's face to us very early in the movie, and in such a way that it identifies the person as the killer. But you don't see it because Argento knows what to do with the camera and sets the scene up so that he's supremely confident that he can put the killer's face right in front of you on a 20' tall screen and you won't see it.

And he's right.

The reveal/playback at the end of the movie blew my mind completely apart when I first saw this movie years ago.)

Today's lineup is looking really good.

The Whisperer in Darkness (the movie I'm most looking forward to seeing in this whole festival), Revenge- A Love Story, Kevin Smith's Red State, and Morituris.

Plus hopefully something really cool and special for LotFP.

See you tomorrow!

1 comment:

  1. I agree completely with Tenebrae being Argentos best movie and better than Deep Red... and yes, they are all a mess, sometimes in a good way, sometimes not so much. And yes, yes yes yes, the Goblin soundtracks are brilliant.

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