Saturday, July 27, 2013

Fetish Dolls Die Laughing (2012, David Silvio)

I don't even know what to say. The title sounded alright, but when all was said and done, "Fetish Dolls Die Laughing" sucked a colossal pile of rancid warthog balls. This flick pretty much did every conceivable thing wrong that one could do when making a meager-budgeted horror movie...

Some small, bearded, bald guy runs around kidnapping and tying up various women who provoke his rabid foot fetish. He likes to tickle them (while referring to himself as "The Tickle Monster") until they bleed out and die... Ugh. There's also a pair of detectives looking for him.

The biggest problem with this thing is that it's TOO fucking LONG without enough plot or interesting material to support or justify it's length. It's really just the same thing over and over again and I started getting annoyed watching this guy sucking on the toes of average to unattractive-looking chicks in a greatly redundant sequence of pointless scenes. There's basically no gore to speak of, aside from the usual, half-assed squirt-bottle of fake blood just off screen. Clearly, this movie was going for the 'intentionally campy', look how crazy we're being, Herschell Gordon Lewis-influenced appeal, but it all just sucks and looks like countless other digitally shot, DIY horror flicks out there. And the "silliness" of the fetish killer didn't mesh too well with the equally boring scenes of the two cops adding the 'serious' element to the "story". One thing I would like for you indie horror hack film-makers to quit doing is trying to incorporate detectives and crime-solving motifs into your already shittily structured low-budget bore-fest. You're not David Fincher, you imbeciles! Stop it!

So, yeah... There's nothing about "Fetish Dolls Die Laughing" that's worth checking out. It's total shit.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

An American Ghost Story (2013, Derek Cole)

 
I'm not a fan of haunting/supernatural-based horror films to begin with, but it gets even WORSE when pieces of unendurable shit like this come my way - that provides a distressing 90 minutes of anti-originality and non-creativity. I seriously think the guy who made "An American Ghost Story", Derek Cole, was striving for a world record for most laughably cliched haunted house movie.

The plot centers around a guy - who sorta looks like a terminally ill Ethan Hawke - who moves into some suburban house that is supposedly haunted. The whole thing with a book writing project, news paper clippings, blah blah blah... His girlfriend gets freaked out and splits. He's got a buddy who looks like Chris Cornell who pops up here and there for no reason...

The rest of the film consists primarily of those tedious, slow moving "tension building" scenes of homeboy walking around the house with a flashlight, calling out to "spirits", cabinet doors opening on their own, teddy bears and other toys moving around, including one of the oddest looking wind-up toys I have ever seen... I'll just leave it at that... Plus, they also include the hackneyed "crazy lady who has experience with ghosts and provides usual information" character in a scene that goes on WAY too long.

Oh, and the ghost in the movie actually wears a sheet. Literally... a fucking bed sheet. Like fucking Charlie Brown on Halloween. Clever!

There's really nothing more to say about this one. It's one of the most conventional supernatural horror flicks I have ever seen. Even if you LOVE this type of thing, you'll be bored to tears by this, I guarantee it. And if you're not, you're an easily impressed dullard with a broken brain. Avoid this movie!

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

The Conjuring (2013, James Wan)

Being a fan of "Insidious" and most of James Wan's other flicks, I had relatively high hopes for "The Conjuring". Based on the some of the trailers I had seen beforehand, it thought it looked kinda similar to "Insidious", as well as a plethora of other modern supernatural films, but so did "Insidious" and I was quite pleasantly surprised with that one. Despite my hopefulness, this one was kind of a let down...

A family moves into a new house out in the sticks and the five daughters begin experiencing sinister paranormal occurrences, as well as the mother who ends up taking the brunt of it all, for sure! So they call upon the help of a married couple who are known demonologists who quickly deem their house fit for an exorcism...

Really, "The Conjuring" could've been alternately titled "Insidious in the 70s". It's apparently based on an actual account of a vicious haunting documented by a married paranormal investigating team led by renowned ghost-hunters, Ed and Lorraine Warren. That's fine, though I'm personally not into true stories that are based on supernatural phenomenon. Not one ounce of me believes in it and they mostly just turn out to be bullshit hoaxes that are embellished with all kinds of 'cinematic liberties'. I mean, how else can you do it?! The set up here is pretty much the same as "Insidious" (except there's no comatose kid) such as, the mom being one of the main spectators of the ghostly/demonic activity, they call on the paranormal experts (including a pair of buffoonish technical guys) who inform them that these malevolent entities have pretty much fastened themselves to their family until they manage to cast them out, via a religious ritual. Also, Patrick Wilson - the dad from "Insidious" - is back (no real drastic change in his performance), but with groovy 70s side burns. And Wan's infatuation with evil looking dolls forces a somewhat out-of-place side-story involving the paranormal couple's daughter and a demonically possessed doll named Annabelle...

To be fair, I thought "The Conjuring" was decent, despite it not really doing anything new. Wan definately has a knack for tension, moodiness and intense creepiness, though this proficiency doesn't come across as "strong" this time around. It felt a little like a quick cash-in considering he came right off of "Insidious" and they actually ran a trailer for "Insidious Chapter 2" before the flick, which looked NO different than the original or the movie I was about to watch. I hope Wan doesn't ride this cash-cow much further cuz it's getting a bit over-played, in my opinion. Still, "The Conjuring" is fine. Little more dependent on the jump-scares than I hoped and not as inventive as I was expecting coming from James Wan. However, on the plus side, you get Lily Taylor getting all possessed and taking a bite outta some motherfucker. That was almost worth the price of admission.

Friday, July 19, 2013

Megan is Missing (2011, Michael Goi)

Here we have another addition to the exhaustingly recurrent "found footage" genre that has officially stopped progressing, but still tends to pop up here n' there and cover a few more redundant bases. So here, "Megan is Missing" incorporates online sexual predators with the whole formula that revolves around modern technology to really get WE, the viewer, "connected" with what's going on... Yeah... Eh... It's just not cool anymore, guys. All the Blair Witch and Fred Vogel shit that came out over a decade ago did what you aspiring indie horror guys are trying to do now with your digital cameras, but it's just not affective anymore... Can we please just go back to putting forth an EFFORT instead of shaky, ad-libbed, POV, trying-to-look-realistic-but-failing bullshit? It's just embarrassing now...

Sorry about that, but I had to get my plea out of the way before I officially start this. So "Megan is Missing" does the whole "based on true events" gimmick and follows two 13-14 year old girls who seem to devote a lot of time to web-chatting; eachother and other dumb sounding girls. One of the girls, Megan, is a notorious party girl slut who likes to attend high-school parties and blow her brain dead classmates for free drugs. There's numerous times where she regales her nerdy friend, Amy, of all the times she was raped as a very small child. Which... made her a whore, I guess. Psychology 101. She starts conversing with a fella by the name of SkaterDude online. She goes to meet up with him behind a diner and is never heard from again. Her friend Amy then starts chatting with SkaterDude (a.k.a. Josh) and when she starts giving the cops and news media some information on Josh, Amy goes missing too...

This all leads up to the last 22 minutes on Amy's video diary following her abduction, in which the film becomes a pretty over-the-top exploitation/torture film in the most shameless sense. What's really confusing about it is that the movie credits itself as being something meant to spread awareness of online predators... The cover features a quote from Marc Klaas - the guy whose daughter was kidnapped from a slumber party in their home and found murdered back in '93 - which reads: "A powerful, important film that deserves both attention and discussion". Did he actually fucking watch this?! Calling "Megan is Missing" a film that deserves attention and discussion is like saying that "Niku daruma" deserves public praise for addressing the reality that women HAVE, in fact, been kidnapped, dismembered, gutted and raped. If you sit your teenager down to watch "Megan is Missing" in hopes that they'll discuss it with you after, you're gonna look like the most idiotic parent in the world, plus your kid is gonna think you're fucked in the head. I really don't think that Mr. Klaas saw this movie, though I'm sure he heard it contained the topic of disappearing children and was misled into thinking it was a reputable "wake up call" film. Not the case, sadly...

First of all, the majority of this flick is dull as shit, consisting mostly of these and numerous other teenagers acting like how out-of-touch adults THINK that modern teens act and talk like. I mean, I know they do to a degree, but just listen to the dialog and watch just a few scenes outta this and you'll see what I mean. "You want us to invite HER? But she's, like, totally fucking lame and doesn't even dress like us!". Yeesh... Like After School Special dialog but with more cursing... After Megan disappears, they show some funny faux-news footage and a hilariously dramatic reenactment of the abduction, complete with lightning strikes every 4 seconds. Then, the friend is kidnapped and... of course... the antagonist records it all on her camera for the sake of "found footage" (shitty fucking genre!) At this point, it becomes "The Poughkeepsie Tapes" or "Hostel" (whatever) showing her locked in a dungeon and also including a lengthy rape scene. Not "opening peoples eyes" to the potential dangers of online interaction, but straight-up BRUTAL horror flick. Plain and simple. And I wasn't all that impressed. Yeah, they took the violence overboard and got controversial, which is something I typically tend to appreciate in cinema, though the whole "found footage" angle just ruined it for me. I'm so sick of it...

Julien Donkey-Boy (1999, Harmony Korine)

Following his avant-garde 'white trash' art-film debut, "Gummo" (1997) - a piece of work that I personally retain an immense amplitude of reverence toward, due to it's complex undertones and wildly stark representation of hellish redneck lifestyles - Harmony Korine dabbled in similarly offbeat material. "Julien Donkey-Boy" is Korine's attempt to uphold the ridiculous Danish 'Dogme 95' movement of the organically restricting "Vow of Chastity" by abiding by their usual set of rules, including constant handheld camera work, use of natural lighting, lack of formative genre customs, etc. The film was shot on a DV cassette and transferred to 16mm THEN transferred to 35mm, which gives the look of it a distorting, worn out graininess and faded lack of color.

The plot - like "Gummo" - is a very non-linear slice-of-life that is full of ugly, mentally deranged characters, such as Julien, a retarded schizophrenic religious zealot. He lives in New York with his pregnant sister (whom we're led to believe is carrying her brother's child), their domineering German father who dedicates most of his time to whipping his other son into shape to become a "winner" he can be proud of... And also attempting to pay him ten dollars to put on his dead mother's dress at one point...

For the most part, you're just getting Korine's usual brand of seemingly senseless, yet disturbing and aesthetically striking moments involving a black albino rapping about the obviously unfortunate hand he's been dealt in life, Werner Herzog dancing around in a gas mask and drinking cough syrup out of a slipper, Julien washing a little blind girl's feet in a bathtub, being told off by a Hasidic Jew child and stealing a deceased fetus from the hospital...

This series of exceptionally odd events certainly have a hypnotically provocative magnetism, though it all tends to come across as a more 'over-blown' rendering of Harmony Korine's unique visionary auteurism; illustrated well in his previous effort, "Gummo". While that film actually maintained a palpable sense of Korine's cinematic nihilism and unconventional take on story-telling, "Julien Donkey-Boy" comes across as a much more pretentious and fairly uninvolved film. The passion that Harm clearly had for his first film isn't found in nearly the same capacity with this one and, for the most part, it really just comes across as a boisterous freak-show with a much more shallow undercurrent of interpretive nuance and memorable strangeness. I almost wanna blame it one Korine's choice to earn his "Dogme 95" certificate which might have led to the outcome muddling the director's intentions somewhat. That's probably not the case, however... I dunno.

Despite all this, the film is not without it's stand-out strong points, such as Ewen Bremner's performance as Julien, which is pretty fucking incredible and actually based off of Korine's schizoid Uncle Eddy, whom he required Bremner to study in his preparation for the role. A scene is which Julien and his sister talk on the phone from separate rooms of their house as she comfortingly speaks to him as their dead mother from beyond the grave as he fondles himself is a notably harrowing scene that is solely performance driven. Chloƫ Sevigny as the prego sister is very good too. Herzog, however, steals the show in every scene he's in - whether he is yelling at his son for wrestling a plastic trash receptacle or using the term "artsy-fartsy" numerous times before breaking down a scene from "Dirty Harry" and equating it to REAL poetry.

In all, "Julien Donkey-Boy" didn't reach the same level of cinematic rebellion that Harmony Korine displayed with his 'white trash' Vaudevillian-influenced nightmare "Gummo" (and hasn't come close to since his debut film), though this is still a worthy film for Korine fans and 'arthouse' lovers. Again, it's a little highfalutin, but worth checking out.

Adventures in Plymptoons! (2011, Alexia Anastasio)

I'm a pretty huge Bill Plympton fan. Have been for years ever since I accidentally saw his second feature-length film, "I Married a Strange Person!", late one night on Showtime or some channel years ago. For those of you who aren't familiar with him, Plympton is a renowed independent animator best known for his prolific dexterity and unheard of ability to create hand-drawn features all on his own. His first feature, "The Tune" (1992), set a precedent that rocked the animation scene.

"Adventures in Plymptoons" seemed like it'd be interesting, seeing as how Plympton has come a long way from his breakthrough, Oscar nominated surrealist musical short, "Your Face", having hit the mainstream by doing MTV bumpers and music videos for Weird Al Yankovic and Kanye West, while continually working on his own indie projects and maintaining his sense of artistic pride and unwillingness to sell out. Unfortunately, this documentary struck me as being rather clumsily put together and VERY light on actual information concerning the man's varying artistic styles, influences, personal life, etc. They really just crammed in a bunch of interviews from people continually praising Plympton and contributing basically nothing else. Childhood friends, current friends, grade school classmates, sisters, cousins, former Disney execs, film critics, fellow animators... "Animation Godfather" Ralph Bakshi pops up ever-so briefly and adds NOTHING. Well... he praises Plympton. Other than that... NOTHING. Some assistant producer or whoever from The Simpsons appears a few times playing a tuba and tries to be funny, fails... and adds NOTHING. Lloyd Kaufman (who will make an appearance at your six-year old's backyard birthday party as long as you're recording it on video) is in this and guess what he adds... Even LESS that all of the previously mentioned people! Terry Gilliam has a sarcastic little interview and so does Ed Begley Jr. The guy who does the voice for Spongebob Squarepants does a goofy little comedy bit. In essence, everyone here is just trying to be silly or sucking Plympton's dick with praise. It gets pretty redundant.

Of course, Plympton himself is interviewed throughout the film and, in the end, is the only one I cared about hearing from. Still, he withholds a lot of information. I won't blame him, though. I really think the maker of this doc dropped the ball and fucked this whole thing up. It lacked focus and jumped around way too much. I was hoping for some more details on "I Married a Strange Person!", "Hair High" and "Idiots and Angels" and what inspired these films. They gloss over all of 'em. A little insight into what made him shift over from his rather 'light', almost child-friendly works such as "The Tune" and "One of Those Days" to the heavily violent and sexually themed films he eventually began animating and what triggered that whole phase.

Anyone who has never heard of Bill Plympton and his work will have one hell of a poor introduction to the guy here, if you ask me. I would hope for a follow-up to this, done by a more competent documentary film-maker, that focuses on Plympton as opposed to all of the non-contributing ass-kisser material this fucking thing is padded out with. The DVD for "The Tune" contains a documentary within the special features titled "Twisted Toons" from the early 90s that actually covers the animation genius's up-bringing, early works and creative process better than this. Check THAT out.

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Wound (2010, David Blyth)


What you get from "Wound" is some highly bleak, experimentally formulated 'arthouse' horror out of New Zealand that is pleasurably laced with some nicely taboo themes and wildly weird and macabre imagery. The film had a little bit of a "Jacob's Ladder"; potential descent into madness vibe to me... Just with more cock-chopping and vaginal blood sucking...

We start off with a seemingly proper older gentleman (who sounds EXACTLY like Malcolm McDowell) visiting his adult daughter. She clocks him over the head with a bat, ties him up and murders him as revenge for raping her as a child. She buries him in the backyard, amidst a bunch of wadded up balls of aluminum foil (never understood the significance of this detail) and resumes her normal life... A life that consists of unsuccessfully soliciting printer service over the phone and allowing a whack job to act out some kind of S&M 'kink' in which she is forced to role play as a submissive housewife in front of a webcam. Eventually, her long-lost daughter - a potentially lesbonic teenage goth - comes knocking after having gotten the necessary documents from the creepy school guidance counselor. Turns out, Mama was told by her old and haggard dominatrix mother that her incest-spawned baby had died following birth and no one is willing to believe that she's now got a new, freaky house guest hanging around claiming to be her kin...

There's some other crazy, nightmarish shit thrown and you never really fully understand how it all adds up. You're led to wonder whether or not the daughter is real, if the mom is completely insane, or if the whole movie is just a bad dream. Or all-of-the-above, perhaps. There's an image thrown in showing the daughter preparing to commit suicide on the railroad tracks with her boyfriend and there's the reoccurring sound of a train thrown in at seemingly random points throughout the film... There's also a scene involving a fat rapist with a spiked dick, tattooed legs and ass and creepy pig mask as well as a big, pulsating vagina birthing a pair of doll-faced figures... Cool shit.

I'd recommend "Wound" to anyone who is craving some deranged surrealism with their horror viewing. Something... a little DIFFERENT, if you will. Haters of less-than-linear story telling should steer clear, but if you can appreciate some 'irregularity' and calculated, nightmare-like disorientation along with depraved and bizarre imagery and nastiness than you should check this out. The performances are all really good, the cinematography is slick and the creativity element is plentiful.

http://woundmovie.com