Reviews

Slow, basically plot less ghost story about a hospice nurse who works in a haunted house inhabited by an old woman who was a famous horror author in her day. The woman's most famous book was called The Woman in the Walls and might have been dictated to her by an actual ghost in the house--except that writer/director Oz Perkins (son of Anthony Perkins) seems to have no interest in narrative storytelling at all. The movie features a lot of novelistic voice-over, some from the nurse and some from the novel within the movie, and there's a suggestion of some sort of connection between the nurse and the character in the novel, and a lot of meditation on what it means to be a ghost, which is apparently something to do with trying to see yourself and not being able to. The nurse walks around the house for 90 minutes feeling vaguely spooked, reads parts of the old woman's book feeling vaguely spooked, then she drops dead and the movie ends, except that it never ends since the nurse is still narrating the story, haunting the house herself.

To say that I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is slow and repetitive is probably understating matters a bit. Perkins seems to be trying to create something closer to poetry than a horror film. The end result is stultifying but also a little mesmerizing, like a dream you can't quite wake up from.

Frustrating comedy drama was made after the creative and critical debacle of Valley of the Dolls and seems to have been intended primarily to rescue Patty Duke's career as a potential movie star and re-establish her as the adorable and sweet screen presence that she was before Dolls. Hiding Duke's natural appeal under bad hair, a putty nose and Jerry Lewis teeth clearly wasn't the path to movie stardom because she only top-lined one other theatrical movie after this one, the underrated You'll Like My Mother. The bigger problem with Duke's love-me-please performance in Me, Natalie is that she doesn't do the character or the movie any favors. The basic plot involves an ugly duckling girl looking for her place in the world as a young woman. The problem with Duke's performance is that it feels shallow and gimmicky--she never captures her character's genuine pain and longing (at one point when a favorite uncle she hasn't seen since childhood comes to visit she flees through her bedroom window because she feels so awful about her looks). Patty Duke and the movie also largely ignore Natalie's negative qualities such as her complete lack of empathy for other people, her shallowness and her judgmental nature. At one point after leaving home she finds out that her dead uncle's former fiancé has died from a drug overdose and all she feels is that it's a great opportunity for her to get her first apartment. The movie seems to think this is cute and quirky but in reality it's sad and probably a little creepy. Natalie shows a similar obliviousness to anyone's feelings other than her own when she attends a former best friend's wedding, sees that the bride to be is pregnant and not marrying her boyfriend and then leaves the church without ever saying anything to her friend to even let her know that she was there. This was an opportunity for Me, Natalie to confront the main character's shallow belief that beautiful people always have beautiful lives and the movie completely flubs it by not giving Natalie and her former best friend a scene together. Natalie eventually engages in an affair with a neighbor that doesn't ultimately go anywhere because the main character is too immature and indecisive. I'm sure that wasn't the intention the filmmakers had in mind with the ending but that's about the only thing you can really take away from it. Some people might find this movie of interest as a period curio or because Al Pacino turns up for one scene in his big screen debut. I can't watch Me, Natalie without feeling sad for the big screen career that Patty Duke should have had--she probably squandered more talent than any other actor or actress from her generation. How many other actors went from winning an Academy Award to doing guest spots on The Love Boat and Hawaii Five-O?

I'm not really sure what to think of this one. Peculiar thriller/drama starts off with scenes of a strained teenage girl and her mother who clearly don't get along driving together. When the girl is in her room it turns out there is an escaped convict dressed only in his undershorts hidden in her closet who she feeds, does provocative exercises in front of and flirts with. Given the unlikeliness of the situation you figure at first that the man is a figment of the girl's imagination, but then he turns up at one of her mother's adult education classes and talks the older woman into letting him sleep on the pull out sofa as a guest, which the daughter has extremely mixed feelings about. The only other character in more than a couple of scenes is the girl's remote, estranged father who is a doctor and who left the family for reasons that are never fully made clear. Without giving any more of the plot away by the end of the movie I really didn't know what was going on or if the escaped convict was even that, since he seems like he might actually be the most psychologically healthy person in the film. The final shot is undeniably creepy, but like the rest of the film it begs more questions than it answers. The actresses who play the mother and daughter and both excellent and go a long way towards making their characters seem credible even though none of their actions really is. If you're looking for a head-scratcher this will likely fit the bill just fine, but audiences expecting a thriller will likely be bored and disappointed.

Big budget action flick about a young man and woman in a Utopian society whose only purpose is to be as healthy and fit as possible before winning a lottery to go to a paradise called the Island, the last inhabitable place on the planet is for all practical purposes a remake of the low budget thriller Parts: The Clonus Horror, which had an identical premise and many of the same plot twists. Strangely, The Island supposedly isn't a remake of Clonus, which means a lawsuit is likely. I'm generally skeptical of plagiarism suits in Hollywood--everything has already been done and there aren't any truly original stories left to tell, but in the case of The Island the thievery of Clonus is so blatant that the people who claim this is an "original story" deserve whatever they get. How is it possible that The Island got approved and filmed and marketed and released without a single involved party noticing that their movie bore a troubling resemblance to another film that was previously released theatrically, shown on television (and ridiculed on MST3000) and even released on DVD? Didn't people who make 120 million dollar Hollywood B movies watch B movies themselves as kids? Well, somebody involved with the story and script for The Island clearly did, because the similarities between The Island and The Clonus Horror are too great to be a coincidence.

Of course, that doesn't address whether The Island is actually any good. Clonus had a clever premise but lacked the budget and talent to pull it off. The Island has all the money and talent anyone could hope for, but as a movie it really isn't any better.

The problem is that while the premise is perfect for a provocative and intelligent thriller, the director is Michael Bay of Armageddon and Bad Boys 2 fame. Bay doesn't make intelligent or provocative thrillers. He makes mindless big-budget crap where stuff gets blown up. Lots and lots of stuff.

The Island starts off great, even if the early scenes feel like they've been largely lifted from the earlier film, but as soon as the action leaves the confines of the facility where the clones live and enters the outside world the action scenes kick in and the movie gets dopier and dopier, leading to a happy ending so cringe inducingly awful you just know Steven Spielberg had to have a hand in this somewhere. Who wants to bet that if Spielberg had produced or directed Armageddon Bruce Willis would have somehow gotten off the asteroid alive? Spielberg could never resist a tearful reunion between Willis and his daughter. The botched endings to Spielberg's War of the Worlds and Minority Report provide all the proof anyone could need. The ending for The Island isn't just bad, it's Spielberg bad, it's the kind of happy ending that ignores all of darker implications of what came before for superficially uplifting images that make little narrative sense and completely insult the intelligence of the audience.

In the case of The Island we have one character who spends the entire film causing mayhem and killing innocent people changing sides (that's going to make me forget all about the civilians and police he and his men killed in pursuit of the clones) while the clones themselves escape to freedom at the top of a mountain. End credits. Hurray. Everyone leaves happy. No wait, the cold-blooded mercenary looks at the clones escaping to freedom and smiles, suppressing a tear in his eye. Now everyone leaves happy. (Unless like me you leave nauseous).

Of course, none of the clones knows anything about the real world and it would be interesting to find out how the world reacts to the news of what was going on in the lab, particularly since the clones are all of people who are rich and influential, including the president. Would there be a scandal? Would the government cover everything up? Would the government hunt down the clones or leave them be? Would the clones try to find their sponsors or take over their sponsors lives since they are identical and have many of the same memories? There are so many interesting directions that The Island could have gone in, the fact that it ultimately turns into a mindless explosion fest is more disappointing than usual. Bad Boys 2 never really had the potential to be anything other than what it was, a mindless big-budget action comedy destined to make money but be forgotten as soon as it left theaters, but The Island could have been a classic. Instead it just feels like another Michael Bay movie.

What went wrong? From a purely technical standpoint War of the Worlds is fine--the special effects are first rate and this is the type of material Steven Spielberg can direct in his sleep. His film-making is taut and he stages some of the finest action/suspense sequences that audiences are likely to see this summer. War of the Worlds could have been a classic--so why did it leave me feeling indifferent and cold and why does everyone I talk to seem to leave the movie kind of underwhelmed? I think the problem is the script. Spielberg and writer David Koepp decided to focus entirely on three characters--Tom Cruise's deadbeat dad Ray and his two children. The whole movie follows them from one calamitous event after another as they try not to get zapped by the aliens. There aren't even really any other actors that are on screen long enough to really qualify as characters.

There are a couple of problems with this. First, it makes the story unnecessarily narrow. This is a movie about the destruction of the planet and we spend all of our time following 3 characters. The other problem is that we're pretty sure Spielberg isn't going to kill Tom Cruise or his kids. That creates basically a feature length version of the raptor chasing the kids scene from Jurassic Park--how do you generate suspense when you know the characters who are being threatened with death are never going to get killed? After a while watching the same 2 or 3 characters narrowly escape from the aliens gets to be monotonous and that's pretty much all that War of the Worlds has to offer--one special effects oriented action scene after another after another. There's no plot, too few characters and no soul, just a lot of action and special effects.

There's also a really lame happy ending, which seems to be Spielberg's Achilles heel these days, that unfortunate need to please. He doesn't completely betray the material like he did with Minority Report, but only because there isn't nearly as much to betray. The ending here is ludicrous and stupid but I didn't mind because at least the movie was over.

This remake of a 1996 Japanese film works surprisingly well for much of its length, a fast-paced and funny piece of work about a middle-aged man (Richard Gere) bored with his life who decides to take dancing lessons after seeing a pretty teacher (Jennifer Lopez) staring out the window of the studio while taking the L home.

The film is shameless but effective in wringing laughs from the uptight businessman slowly discovering the joys of dancing and loosening up, keeping the lessons from his family who notice that he is happier lately and that he seems to come home late every Wednesday night with a different excuse. The man's wife (Susan Sarandon) becomes convinced that her husband is having an affair.

The movie chugs along effortlessly for its first hour, hugely entertaining. Then during a dance competition after one character stumbles badly so unfortunately does the movie. The pacing becomes jerky and trips under unnecessary and pointless narrative complications. Unfortunately pretty much every decision the filmmakers made during the final reels is completely wrong, none more so than the ending. After showing us for an hour how dancing brought pleasure back into the businessman's life there probably isn't a person in the theater who would actually want him to give up dancing at the end, but that is essentially what happens. The film creates a false choice between dancing and marriage that is never justified or believable (even his family doesn't want him to quit).

Maybe the filmmakers shot multiple endings and this was the one that test-marketed the best but it really doesn't work. It's a shame. For most of it's length Shall We Dance is graceful, funny and effortlessly charming, but the last half hour is a terrible mess. Still, the preview audience I saw this crowd-pleaser with seemed pleased enough, cheering during the end credits and smiling and chatting on their way out of the theater, so maybe the flaws aren't serious enough to keep this movie from becoming a modest hit.

Dull haunted house thriller finds an American family moving into a 200 year old house in Japan where a violent murder suicide love triangle occurred.

Novel setting is about the only element of interest in this very slow moving horror flick by the director of Motel Hell. The film generates zero suspense and is composed of somewhat choppy scenes that rarely seem to be leading anywhere overall.

One obvious example is a fairly early scene where the male lead visits a temple after realizing that his house is haunted as the monk had earlier warned. The monk recounts the history of the house (which the viewer is already familiar with from the opening sequence) and then the film simply cuts away to something else. Earlier the monk had offered to help. Well, where is the help? The family continues to stay in the haunted house as things get worse and worse and no mention of the monk is made until nearly the very end when he turns up again to do what he should have done an hour earlier--try to drive the spirits out of the house, although by this time it's difficult for the viewers to care.

There are some (probably) unintentional campy laughs in seeing the American actors at the end become possessed by the Japanese spirits and suddenly start doing bad martial arts, I say probably because the scene is more than a little reminiscent of the chainsaw duel from the same director's Motel Hell which was more obviously meant to be amusing, but on the whole this is a forgettable dud.

I personally think Renny Harlen is one of the most underrated directors working in Hollywood--he has more talent in his little finger than an an Antoine Fuqua or Gore Verbinski, both of whom have managed to direct action movies without having the slightest idea how to actually stage exciting action scenes. I mean as bad as Cutthroat Island was, it had far more impressive action sequences than anything in Pirates of the Carribbean. Unfortunately it didn't have much of anything else and that's the problem with Harlen--he's a truly gifted filmmaker who has no talent whatsoever when it comes to choosing his scripts.

This one ranks alongside Driven as being Harlen's worst to date. The premise is promising, although it bares more than a passing resemblance to the derided (but better) Stallone vehicle Detox.

People who go to movies looking for Friday the 13th style colorful kills will probably enjoy this. The problem for me was that the murders were so outlandish they not only seemed completely impossible--they actually crossed the line into goofy self-parody. This movie generates little suspense, the script (by the writer/director of The Cooler) doesn't make much sense, the biggest stars are killed off or disappear from the movie early. Pretty much everything that can be wrong with this movie is.

The studio should just dump this garbage on cable where it belongs--a theatrical release would be a waste of time and money, although the film could pick up a cult following among drunken frat boys who will no doubt enjoy the goofy murders.

Slick but pointless remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre isn't the complete disaster I expected--the movie is extremely well-shot, R Lee Ermey is hilarious and Jessica Biel certainly is attractive running around in shorts and a skin-tight T.

Unfortunately there isn't much suspense and the characters are generally so stupid and unlikable that it's hard to have any rooting interest in what's happening. I would have to say the low point in terms of character sympathy comes when the "teens" give R Lee the gun a female hitchhiker had used to blow her brains out in their van and he put the gun in his empty ankle holster. I don't know about you but that would have been a clear sign to me that something was wrong and I would have gotten out of there as quickly as humanly possible. But the characters in the movie don't make any connection between the police officer and their suicidal passenger until much later. Characters that stupid are just impossible to care about.

The demented family gathering around the dinner table trying to get the old man to off Marilyn Burns with a slaughterhouse hammer is still one of the most intensely creepy and uncomfortably funny sequences I have ever seen in a horror movie. The original Texas Chainsaw can make you squirm even though, contrary to its reputation from people who never actually watched the movie, it has no graphic violence or gore. (Remake producer Michael Bay displayed his ignorance by claiming in interviews that his new version would have none of the graphic gore of the original).

I think the most shocking thing about the remake is the fact that so many people on this site actually think it's a great film. People are entitled to their opinions but this movie is so far from great I can't help but wonder if some of these reviews are from the kinds of people who wouldn't find it strange when a police officer puts a murder weapon in his own empty holster.

New Salem's Lot adaptation is surprisingly awful, in spite of its strong cast and the fact that it's based on maybe Stephen King's best horror novel.

What went wrong?

Well, let's see. While adapting the novel as a two part 4 hour (with commercials) mini-series might make sense from a business standpoint creatively it means keeping way too many unnecessary characters and subplots. This Salem's Lot has too much build up and, unfortunately, not much in the way of pay-off.

The dialogue is consistently hackneyed and unconvincing--a supposedly playful early exchange between Rob Lowe and Samantha Mathis in a diner actually made me wince. Mathis who is usually a likable and reliable actress appears particularly lost here, without the slightest idea of how to play the material. She seems to be doing an impersonation of a very bad 1950's B movie actress, which I doubt was the intention.

Rutger Hauer and Donald Sutherland are both good but neither has nearly enough screen time to register as an effective villain.

The biggest sin probably is that this version of Salem's Lot just isn't scary. The vampires aren't creepy at all and the digital effects used to create images of them flying and turning to dust upon being staked are awful and give the monsters a too artificial feeling that makes them seem more cartoon than flesh and blood threat.

The most telling scene here is the one where Danny Glick wakes to find a dead schoolmate floating outside his second floor bedroom window. This sequence was the scare highlight both of the novel and of Tobe Hooper's far better filming of the material. Here the scene isn't scary at all--there's no atmosphere, no creepiness, not much sense even that the bedroom is on the second floor. The whole scene is completely mishandled, like everything else in the movie.

Strangely, after the head vampire is dispatched the film seems to turn more into a Dawn of the Dead rip-off than a vampire film, with the remaining townspeople shuffling through the streets like zombies. I have no idea what the filmmakers thought they were doing.

My recommendation would be to avoid this crap and either read the book or rent the much better Tobe Hooper version.