Okay - back to the usual nonsense, eh? There are two indie horror movies (via) coming out soon (one a comedy, the other decidedly not a comedy) that Uncle P is pumped to see.
The first is Bad Milofrom director and co-writer Jacob Vaughn. Ken Marino (about to be seen in the stoner comedy We're the Millers) plays Ken, a guy who thinks his stomach problems are caused by stress. Unfortunately, it turns out that Ken has a demon living in his intestines. A demon who is intent on killing the people causing Ken's stress. The amazing cast includes Patrick Warburton ("The Tick;" "Family Guy;" "Rules of Engagement"); Peter Stormare (Fargo; The Brothers Grimm; "Prison Break"); Gillian Jacobs ("Community"); Stephen Root ("News Radio;" O Brother Where Art Thou; "Boardwalk Empire") and Mary Kay Place ("Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman;" The Big Chill; "Big Love"). Talk about a dream cast! Bad Milo is certainly not a movie for everyone, but it is right up Uncle P's alley (you should excuse the expression) and I especially love the use of practical effects, harkening bad to the days of 80's indie horror movies like Basket Case. Here's the NSFW Red Band trailer:
Bad Milo will be available OnDemand starting August 29th and in limited release in theaters on October 4th. Bad Milo is being released by Magnet Films, the same company that gave us the sentient tire movie, Rubber.
Mark (Josh Ethier) disappears into a bright light. Two years later, a string of grisly murders convinces his friend Seth (Graham Skipper) that Mark has come back, albeit with something... not quite right inside him. Shot in New Hampshire with a cast of unknowns, the trailer for Almost Human looks like it might be the trailer for the next "X-Files" movie as made by Sean S. Cunningham:
No U.S. release date has been announced for Almost Human, but I'll be sure to let you know when it is.
More, anon. Prospero
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If you read my pity party post last weekend, then you you'll be glad to know that yes, I am over it. Part of that has to do with not only how quickly the work week seemed to go despite how slow we are, right now (Oh, don't worry - this is our regular slow season; this particular NPO isn't going away any time soon). And while I did just as much yard work (if not more) today as I did last weekend, I also got to actually see a Summer movie that was on my list, and spend some time with my friend, Mike. Again, the movie's been out for a week and a half, the big reviews are out and any spoilers I might spoil have already been leaked (though I promise to alert you to them as always).
While there have been movies about the End of the World for almost as long as there have been movies, it seems to me that comedies about the End are few and far between. Last year's Seeking a Friend for the End of the World was less than hilarious, though 2009's Zombieland was very much so. Kubrick's comedic genius is quite evident in 1964's Dr. Strangelove and Roman Polanski's 1967 horror-comedy The Fearless Vampire Killersdoes end with the vampires taking over the world. Then there's Ivan Reitman's 2001 alien invasion comedy Evolution. Basically a Sci-Fi re-hash of Ghostbusters and a massive fail, Evolution could have been so much better than it was, though I don't know of anyone who remembers seeing this movie, but me and my friend Laura. So that's five off the top of my head... if I'm missing any, please let me know.
Based on an NSFW short film/faux trailer made by stars Seth Rogan (doing his best MacCauley Caulkin in the photo above) and Jay Baruchel called Jay and Seth vs. The Apocalypse (see it here - again, NSFW), This Is the End is an End-of-the-World Stoner Comedy featuring every young(ish) comedy star working today, playing and parodying themselves. James Franco; Jonah Hill; Danny McBride; Craig Roberston; Michael Cera; Emma Watson; Mindy Kaling; Christopher Mintz-Plasse; Paul Rudd; Aziz Ansari and the Backstreet Boys make up just some of the dozens of celebrities who find themselves facing an apparently Biblical Apocalypse, complete with the Rapture. Mike and I both liked This Is the End, though he more than me. Here are my 5 For and 5 Against, this time starting with 5 Against:
5 Against:
5. Danny McBride remains as annoying as he always is in every thing I've ever seen him in. And while the movie is constructed to make us hate him, I always hate him. He's rarely, if ever, funny.
4. The movie's second act, despite including an hysterically bad home-made sequel to Pineapple Express, drags a bit. Co-directed by Rogan and Evan Goldberg (Superbad; The Green Hornet), the two just don't seem to know when a joke has run out of steam.
3. SPOILER (highlight to view) - Urine drinking! Ugh!
2. Again, why include jokes/scenes/visuals in the trailer which don't end up on screen?
1. While giving some memorable performances, Aziz Ansari and Paul Rudd are terribly under-used. Especially Paul Rudd, who is never even given the chance to be naked. Paul Rudd should be naked at least once in every movie in which he appears (though is seems like he usually is). I know that at my sweet (and quite unsane like me) Mia would agree. Admit it... you do, too. Oh, Paul...
5 For:
5. The well-executed, occasionally cringe-worthy and quite often hilarious CGI.
4. Well-used isual and dialog references from Ghostbusters; Left Behind; The Exorcist; Jurassic Park; Rosemary's Baby and probably dozens more apocalyptic movies.
2. SPOILER (highlight to view) -Heaven Has Roller Coasters!!!
1. Michael Cera, delivering the movie's funniest performance as what is essentially the 'Anti-Cera.' The scene where Baruchel walks in on Cera in Franco's bathroom is the most uncomfortable belly-laugh you can imagine. And it just gets more hysterically offensive as it progresses.
The very 'Hard R' rated comedy is probably the funniest comedy I've seen in a while. **1/2 (Two and a Half Out of Four Stars). This Is the End is rated 'R' for Apocalyptic Violence; Gore; Language; Sexual Situations; Male Genitalia; Drug Use and Gross-Out Humor.
And once again, as with the last movie I saw with Mike, there was an very inappropriately aged child brought in by (presumably) his parents. What the...?!?! Have fun explaining all the sexual references the adults found funny to your 9-year old and telling him not to use profanity, a-holes. Then call Family Services and relinquish your parental rights, because you are horrible parents.
More, anon. Prospero
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Season 2 of Ryan Murphy's and Brad Falchuck's mini-series/anthology hybrid "American Horror Story: Asylum" ended last night with an episode titled Madness Ends. Last week's episode, Continuum, started to tie up the loose ends and seemed rather sedate, given the deliberately disturbing and off-putting story of lunacy, aliens, Nazi experiments, demonic possession and crushing guilt.
Unlike Season 1, which pretty much revolved around 6 or so central characters and a modest supporting cast; "Asylum," while having many more supporting characters with their own subplots, was ultimately about three people: Sister Jude (the incomparable Jessica Lange); Kit Walker (Evan Peters, finally coming into his own) and Lana Winters (Sarah Paulson in a true Tour-de-Force performance that deserves as much recognition as Lange's). And the writing this season was even better than last. There were so many things going both in and out Briacliff, none of it should have made any sense or fit together at all, but it did and it shows that taking time to develop a story-line all the way through before writing a single episode is the way to go. And the season finale was no exception to the rest of the season, which truly surprised me by wringing more than a tear or two out of jaded old Uncle P's eyes. No matter how awful things had been or how badly they had treated one another, we came to care about these three people and we wanted to know what happened to them.
Madness Ends starts in the present as an aging and now very famous Lana gives a rather intimate interview on the eve of receiving a Kennedy Center Honor. As Lana tells the truth about everything, flashbacks filled in the details of what happened after Kit found the supposedly dead Jude at Briarcliff. And even if not every question was answered (why did the aliens want Kit and what did his children do to calm Jude's damaged sanity in the woods?), their stories ended quite appropriately, if - in at least one case - a bit predictably.
I didn't know how they were going to top Season 1 and now have no idea what to expect from the already announced Season 3. I have no doubt that Murphy and Falchuck have finally found a show that may be able to maintain it's momentum by introducing a new story each season, using a rotating ensemble of astoundingly talented actors and a team of insane writers with only their imaginations to limit them. Don't be surprised if other networks copy FX's 'long format mini-series' (have Murphy and Falchuk created "Repertory Television?") approach used on other genres. Of course, the 'Big 4' won't be able to be nearly as edgy or experimental as FX can.
Bizarre; creepy; ironic; blasphemous; outrageous; sexy; gross; shocking; horrific and so very over-the-top, but always so very effective, Asylum set a new bar which I can't wait to see raised in Season 3. American Horror Story is a must see for fans of Horror and terrific acting & writing. **** (Four Out of Four Stars).
More, anon. Prospero
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Eek! An invisible evil creature has entered my body and taken it over for malevolent purposes! What ever shall I do?
Demonic possession movies have never, ever been scary to me, simply because I don't believe in superstitious nonsense. You can go crazy or get become very ill and appear to the ignorant and gullible to be possessed, but you aren't. Maybe that's why I think the best possession movies are the funny ones (though not all the funny ones are good).
Possession movies are about the fear of losing control; be it your mind, body or life in general. They're also about laying blame for our negative actions - if I'm possessed by demons, I certainly can't be held responsible for throwing my mom's super-gay director out of my window to his death down an infamous Georgetown stone stairway, now can I? And I suppose we can owe the Possession sub-genre to that infamous stairway, don't we? The Exorcistcame out when I was 12 years-old and already a rabid horror fan. I was desperate to see it, but not allowed. People lined up for blocks; people fainted in the aisles; people ran shrieking out of theaters. People couldn't stop talking about what many people still consider to be The Scariest Movie Ever Made. Now, just so you know just how old your Uncle Prospero is, this was in the days before the VCR and movies were periodically re-released to theaters without a "Special Director's Cut Edition You Never Saw Because the Effect Never Looked Right" and when The Exorcist was re-released in 1978, my father finally deemed me old enough and took me to see it. My reaction? Meh. I think what really killed it for me was the completely fake-looking head twist. Dick Smith's makeup was brilliant in turning pretty young Linda Blair into a demonic monster, but the head twist was so obviously fake that it completely took me out of the movie, squarely back into the reality of the impossibility of such a thing. I'm not saying The Exorcist is a bad movie - far from from it - it deserves to be a classic for many reasons. It's just that for me, scary isn't one of them. A state-of-the-art remake from Del Toro or Jackson (or even Raimi) is long overdue.
Director William Friedkin would later be accused of abusing cast members of his adaptation of screenwriter William Peter Blatty's novel. And, as with many a horror movie (Poltergeist), there are stories about a curse and creepy things that happened on set during the movie's filming. Of course, no one who made or makes money off the movie denies these stories, and why should they? The faithful will still believe and the rational will still be entertained. It's a Win-Win, really.
In 1974, a cheap Italian rip-off of The Exorcist was released in the U.S. as Beyond the Door. It stars Juliet Mills ("Nanny and the Professor") as woman not only possessed, but pregnant to boot! I've never seen it, though from what I've seen of it, I don't think I ever need to:
That same year, the Blaxploitation Horror movie Abbytook on the Devil for African American believers:
I actually have seen Abby, though it's been a very long time. I don't imagine it was an actually good movie, though.
Director John Boorman returned to Blatty's characters for his gonzo sequel Exorcist II: The Heretic in 1977. Blair, Kitty Winn (Sharon) and Max Von Sydow (Father Merrin) return, while Louise Fletcher, Richard Burton and James Earl Jones join in the fun. Goofy, weird and oh-so-silly (Darth Vader wearing a locust hat?), Boorman's sequel is like spoiled clams after a delicious sorbet - funny to think about, but not so good going down for real:
Now, take the crazy factor of that trailer and multiply it by about 90 minutes, and you will know how truly awful that movie is. I saw in the long-gone Town Theater, even then a crumbling relic, and the scariest part of the movie was a ceiling tile falling down in the row in front of us.
Fast forward a few years to 1981 -- I'm living in the O.C. and my sister tells me about seeing the scariest movie she's ever seen. It's a little indie horror movie that she says scared the crap out of her. So, I take my lonesome self down to the nearest mall theater to see The Evil Dead. And while I find myself annoyed that it is hardly a movie to make me crap my pants (the budget had to have been all of a buck two-fifty), I am struck by the filmmaker's clever and inventive camera work and twisted sense of humor. Sam Rami's story about a group of friends who invade an "abandoned cabin in the woods" and accidentally awaken a bunch of ancient "Candarian Demons" deserves its cult status if only for Raimi's audaciousness as a guerrilla director who didn't know he was inventing an entirely new style of film-making.
Six years later and with quite a bit more money, Raimi's sequel Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawnhits theaters and is really more of remake, than a sequel. What it does, however, is ramp up the comedy and exploit handsome, square-jawed star Bruce Campbell's exceptional aptitude for physical comedy. Campbell deserves every accolade that comes his way and his status as a Cult Movie Icon is all thanks to the bloody, slap-stick insanity that is EDII:DbD. Eyeballs fly like a Stooge's cream pies and chainsaw prosthetics deliberately change sides like Igor's hump in Young Frankenstein.
Not too long ago, a mad group of Canadians went and turned Raimi's films (with his blessing) into one of the funniest contemporary musicals, ever. Video from the actual show is hard to come by, but this fan-made video will give you an idea of how funny the show's lyrics are:
Blatty took matters into his own hands in 1990's Exorcist 3, with his 'official' sequel (based on his own novel, "Legion"), directing George C. Scott, Nicol Williamson and Jason Miller in Exorcist III: Legion. An amnesiac (Miller) shows up in an asylum as a hard-boiled cop (Scott) investigates a series of murders in D.C. 'Patient X' bears a strange resemblance to a certain priest who died after performing the exorcism of certain actresses daughter in Georgetown and the cop begins to suspect something less than natural may be at play:
Certainly a better film than Boorman's sequel and a rather faithful adaptation of the novel, Blatty's film still fails to scare me, though I have to admit Blatty is at least a better director than King.
Also in 1990, director Bob Logan went the Zucker Brothers route with his atrocious spoof, Repossessed. Linda Blair plays a housewife who had been possessed as a child and is once agin possessed as an adult. Leslie "I'll Do Anything for a Buck" Neilson is a Catholic priest and Ned Beatty is a televangelist in this craptacular movie that elicits pity more than laughter:
Raimi visited Candaria one last time in 1992's Army of Darkness, a decidedly comedic entry in the Evil Dead series. Campbell's Ash character finally becomes the badass everyone thinks of him as, and Raimi goes nuts with the slap-shtick. Giving Ash the physical, emotional and psychological beating he wouldn't use again until Allison Lohman's Christine in Drag Me to Hell, and adding tons of stop-motion, split-screen and animatronic FX, Army of Darkness ultimately fails simply because it tries too hard. This may be "my boomstick!" but using a line from classic Sci-Fi as an ancient spell is a little too self-referential for me:
PS - Bonus points (good for nothing other than bragging rights) if you can quote the referenced line and it's source.
One of the most recent recent Possession movies I can remember isThe Exorcism of Emily Rose, starring Laura Linney, Tom Wilkinson and Campbell Scott is a movie that can't decide if it wants to be a Horror movie or a Courtroom Drama. It fails at both:
And last, and practically least, there is this fall's undeserving hit Paranormal Activity, which suffers not only from over-hype, but a boring script and a cheesy ending.
And then there are two versions of the same movie; Exorcist:The Beginning and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, by two different directors (one of the strangest moves by a studio in a long time):
So, can anyone make a movie about Demonic Possession that can actually scare me? I doubt it. I'm much more afraid of lunatics with razors, machetes, axes and/or guns than I am of invisible beings out to control my body just for shits and giggles. How about you? Do demons, devils and pookas scare you?
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This animatronic "demon woman" was on display at the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, Japan.
Watch it all the way through. It's short, fun and really kind of creepy. I love it now, just as much as I would have at 9. (via)
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