In the Mouth of Madness (1995)

I Think, Therefore You Are.

Remember my October Horrorthons?  Of course you don’t!  Why would you?  I apparently don’t.  Around the time I was reviewing horror movies for this Horrorthon, a movie review was requested of me by friend of the reviews Kendra that I never got around to.  And then it never really felt like a good time to review a horror movie because it was no longer October.  She probably forgot that she requested it.  I know that I forgot about it for a while.  But then it popped back into my head and I realized that I should not try to wait until October to knock this one out.  Let’s do this!  The movie is In the Mouth of Madness, written by Michael De Luca, directed by John Carpenter, and starring Sam Neill, Jürgen Prochnow, Julie Carmen, David Warner, Charlton Heston, John Glover, Frances Bay, Wilhelm von Homburg, and Bernie Casey.

John Trent (Sam Neill) is a patient in a Looney bin that recounts his story to Dr. Wrenn (David Warner).  Trent worked as an insurance investigator who is hired by the director of Arcane Publishing, Jackson Harglow (Charlton Heston), to locate popular horror novelist Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow).  At first, Trent is not interested.  But he then inexplicably decides to buy all of his books and read them, giving himself nightmares.  And that is exactly the reason that any rational person would take up the case!  Also, he cut up the covers of the books and found a map that only people in this movie can read because it just looked like a collection of various book covers to me.  Anyway, it leads Trent and Linda Styles (Julie Carmen), editor of Cane’s books, to a town that doesn’t exist called Hobb’s End – the place where Calvin’s tiger died – where they find that Cane’s books are coming to life.

Uh … why did I watch this?  I don’t say that because this movie was “bad” per se, but I don’t really understand how this movie became requested.  The movie feels like it intends to be deep and psychologically scary, but was really only a slight step up from a regular “gore and makeup” horror movie.  I started thinking negatively of this movie right in the beginning as the movie opens with the most 80’s, Karate Kid-style rock music.  What have I gotten myself into?  And then it got into a lot of its nonsense.  Like the whole situation with the agent trying to kill Trent with an axe and Trent talking to Harglow and Styles about how he thought it was a publicity stunt.  A publicity stunt?  That guy is dead now!  How much did he believe in Cane’s new book that he’d take part in a publicity stunt that ended with him being dead?  Trent says a lot of stupid things in this movie though.  Near the end, he makes the claim that “every species can smell its own extinction.”  What are you basing that on?  How many now extinct animals have we interviewed about what they can smell?  And what does extinction smell like?  I like to think it smells like White Diamonds.  And then it gets into the story, which isn’t that interesting but felt like it really wanted to be.  Is the book causing all of this?  (Probably)  Does Cane have super powers?  (Sure)  Is Trent crazy?  (Seems to be)  Do I care?  (No, not really)  And then the movie ends with Trent in a movie theater, watching the movie we just watched like the horror movie version of Blazing Saddles.

I wasn’t really impressed with the performances in this movie either.  Sam Neill gave a good enough performance, but it felt like he was not good enough at hiding his accent yet.  He has one on the realsies, right?  Well, if not, he talks weird.  Also weird: his character keeps a squeaky horn in his glove compartment, specifically to wake up passengers that fall asleep while he’s driving?  That’s odd.  Especially since these vehicles actually have built-in squeaky horns of their own.  I spent the greater majority of the movie trying to decide if I wanted to bang Julie Carmen.  By the end of the movie, I decided that I wouldn’t kick her out of bed, but I also wouldn’t actively pursue it.  The only thing I really thought about her character was that she must’ve been SUPER dedicated to her job.  I know she’s Cane’s editor, but does that necessarily entail that she memorize every detail of his books?  She knows which direction the church is from the hotel in a made up novel.  Unless there’s a map or he just spends a lot of time describing the layout of the towns in his books, there’s really no reason to do that.  When I saw Frances Bay in the movie, I recognized her but didn’t know from where.  I thought she was the rapping grandma at first, but then I realized she was a grandma, but a grandma for Happy Gilmore.  That made me so happy.  She’s good too.  In Happy Gilmore, she was a sweet old lady that you wish was your grandma, and she starts out that way here, but shows some range too.

Because of my lack of expectations, In the Mouth of Madness was unable to disappoint me.  But I didn’t like it.  It’s not bad; it’s just average and insignificant.  The story wants to be special and deep but isn’t, and then it’s left to stand on its aging visuals.  The performances didn’t do anything for me, but the Grandma from Happy Gilmore is in it.  Besides her, I can’t think of any reason to recommend this movie to you.  Go ahead and skip it.  In the Mouth of Madness gets “Reality is not what it used to be!” out of “I’m sorry about the balls!  It was a lucky shot, that’s all!”

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Christine (1983)

Okay … Show Me.

I feel sad as the October Horrorthon is coming to a close.  There are so many more movies I wish I had reviewed!  Well, I did what I could.  And we still have a couple more for you, or at least as many as I can within October.  Today’s movie is both a classic movie and a request from my friend Christie Mallomarchipotle.  It’s also a movie that I’ve never gotten around to seeing even though I’ve heard so much about it.  But, unlike other movies like that, I’ve never heard so much about this movie that it would ruin the ending.  It’s exciting, I know.  All I really know about this movie is that it’s about a car that kills people, and that Christie is an egomaniac for requesting a movie that shares her name.  That movie is Christine, based on a book by Stephen King, written for the screen by Bill Phillips, directed by John Carpenter, and starring Keith Gordon, John Stockwell, Alexandra Paul, William Ostrander, Robert Prosky, Christine Belford, Harry Dean Stanton, and Roberts Blossom.

Arnold “Arnie” Cunningham (Keith Gordon) is the nerdy friend of popular jock Dennis Guilder (John Stockwell).  His parents are douche nozzles and he is also bullied by another high schooler who is way too buff and old looking to be a high school student named Buddy Repperton (William Ostrander).  On their way home one day, Arnie and Dennis come across a beat up 1958 Plymouth Fury belonging to George LeBay (Roberts Blossom).  Arnie falls in love with the car despite Dennis’ disgust in its condition and he buys the car for $250.  Arnie starts to get obsessed with the car (that he finds is called “Christine”), and spends all his time fixing it.  It even starts to affect him as a person, making him quicker to anger with his friends and family and turning him into Peter Parker from Spiderman 3.  Dennis gets concerned for his friend so he goes to talk to George and he finds out that George’s brother, Roland, died in the car from carbon monoxide poisoning after his young daughter had died in the car.  Maybe there’s more to this car than there seems to be…

Finally!  A classic horror movie that lives up to the expectations I barely had for it!  I kind of dug Christine.  It’s not the most spellbinding story ever, but it’s imaginative.  I don’t think I’ve seen very many movies about a car that tries to kill people.  Just that one episode of Futurama.  The biggest qualm I had with the story of the movie is that it never really bothered to explain what made Christine supernatural.  Are we to believe that what made it evil is that it was the only red car in its production line?  Apparently, the book blames it on the death of Roland LeBay, but the movie makes the car evil before it has even left the assembly line, crushing a dude’s hand and killing a guy that sits in it with no explanation about how that happened.  After that, the only other thing that confused me was in the fight with the bully in the beginning of the movie.  During the fight, one of Buddy’s goons participates in the fight by grabbing a heaping handful of Dennis’ dick.  Was that considered a thing back in the day?  ‘Cause if I lost a fight like that, I would be calling that kid a queer.  “I wouldn’t say I lost a fight so much as I turned down your request for a date, bro.  That’s a little aggressive for me.”

I’d say what kept me going with the movie was mostly the direction.  John Carpenter makes some cool movies, and this is another one.  A lot of the things that the car did were pretty cool ways to kill people with a car.  They actually didn’t do much for the easy technique of running someone over, or if they did, they amped it up.  When they did run someone over, it was after Christine just pushed another car into one guy, got completely doused with gasoline, and chased the guy down while completely on fire.  Otherwise, they were all pretty interesting ways to do it.  The one that I took the most issue with was the lame look of killing the shopkeeper by pressing the chair too hard against the steering wheel.  That was more goofy than anything else.  I also liked how well they did the look of making a broken down Christine put herself back together, making the dents pop out like someone was blowing into her tailpipe.  …That sounds dirty.  I meant like a balloon.  The music was a bit of a problem for me, but it usually is in 80’s movies.  The basic score of the movie was just music that sounded like the same music Carpenter used in Escape from New York, so I didn’t really have a problem with that.  The music I did take issue with was the music that Christine would play.  It felt like they could’ve put a little more effort behind picking the songs that Christine would play on the radio to indicate what Christine was trying to say.  There were a couple of occasions where it made sense to me, like when Dennis was trying to break into Christine and she started playing “Keep A-Knockin’ (but You Can’t Come in)”, but I really don’t understand playing “Little Bitty Pretty One” while Christine was trying to run down the fat kid.

None of the performances really impressed in any significant way, but none of them really did poorly either.  Keith Gordon’s character in this movie was definitely what Tobey McGuire based that abortion that he portrayed while walking down the street in Spiderman 3.  He starts off nerdy and nice, but turns into an overly cocky swaggering prick pretty quickly when Christine gets involved.  And he was putting the stupid car over his hot girlfriend that was dying to give him the pussy, but felt neglected because he paid more attention to the car.  That is crazy to me.  Maybe she’d feel less intimidated by it if you would start referring to it just as “your car” and “it” rather than “Christine” and “she”.  And why did he never find it strange that his car got jealous and he had to sweet talk the thing to get it to start?  That would put a little question mark over my head, to be sure.

I was happy to find that Christine was a good movie.  I’ve been underwhelmed by so many classic horror movies lately that it was good to have one live up to my expectations.  The story was imaginative though not mind-blowing, but it was interesting throughout because John Carpenter brings it.  He made the movie visually interesting, and actually found mostly interesting ways to have a car kill people.  The performances bordered on over the top on occasion, but mostly were fine.  I recommend Christine for a watch, especially if you haven’t already seen it.  It holds up, and it’s a movie that’s talked about enough that everyone should know it.  Christine gets “That’s just about the finest smell in the world, ‘cept maybe for pussy” out of “Good!  Now, get the hell out of here.  We’re closed.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook and Twitter.  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

Ghosts of Mars (2001)

Maybe I’ll Sleep With You if You’re the Last Man on Earth. But We’re Not on Earth.

My inspiration for watching this movie was pure randomness. I saw it in my instant queue and thus I watched it. I really should get to some of those review requests I have building up, but I decided at random to watch this movie. This will be a short introduction indeed. I have no idea how this movie got added to my queue, I don’t know why I picked it to watch today, and I know nothing about it beyond a few people that star in it. And most of those people aren’t even reasons to watch a movie! It doesn’t really matter. I watched it and now I reviews it. This movie is Ghosts of Mars, written by John Carpenter and Larry Sulkis, directed by John Carpenter, and starring Natasha Henstridge, Ice Cube, Pam Grier, Jason Statham, Clea DuVall, Liam Waite, Joanna Cassidy, Duane Davis, and Richard Cetrone.

In the 22^nd century, on a mostly terraformed Mars, a team including Melanie Ballard (Natasha Henstridge), Helena Braddock (Pam Grier), Nathan Jericho (Jason Statham), Bashira Kincaid (Clea DuVall), and Michael Descanso (Liam Waite) are sent to a small mining town to transport a murderer named “Desolation” Williams (Ice Cube) to prison. When they arrive, the town is virtually deserted. They find a few survivors and one of them named Whitlock (Joanna Cassidy) explains that they found a hidden doorway that was opened, releasing “ghosts” into the air that inhabited the miners, turning them crazed and violent. They form an uneasy alliance with Williams to hold out against the threat long enough for their train to return.

Was I mistaken, or is John Carpenter generally regarded as a good filmmaker? ‘Cause the movie I just watched was typical, poorly-conceived shoot-‘em-up bullshit. It’s mostly just a collection of better movies put together in a way that was as interesting as it was easy to follow … which is to say “not”. The bad guys looked like they were from the Mad Max movies, though they mostly acted like zombies, and the main bad guy looked like the Kurgan from Highlander, but he only spoke in gibberish. The sets in the movie looked like they were stolen straight out of either Total Recall or Judge Dredd. And the story was pulled straight out of the toilet behind a Mexican restaurant. A good bit of the dialogue was just trying very hard to sound official. I could just imagine them sitting in the office and yelling out the door, “I need a book of military terms. STAT! Okay, I definitely want to use ‘clicks’ for distance, ‘marks’ for targets, and I probably only want to refer to time in hundreds. And, by God, cock your damned guns instead of punctuating!” Of course they would do this to make their police team seem more qualified, forgetting the fact that everything else they wrote made them look like the worst team of police officers that’s ever existed. They were decent enough in a fight, but every 10 minutes or so they’d get in a position where they were being held at gunpoint and everyone had to slowly lower their weapons to the floor. Also, after everything they go through, they don’t accomplish any one of their missions, but they do lose the greater majority of their team. To try to make their team a little stronger, they add in some of the prisoners and murderers that they’ve encountered without bringing the collective IQ of the group into triple digits. Hell, one of them cuts his thumb off trying to open a can of food with a machete. They were only able to succeed because the enemies were even stupider. The closest thing they could come up with for motivation for these guys is destruction. Living creatures aren’t supposed to want to destroy the planet. They live there too! All they ever did was try to destroy things and, when they didn’t have things to destroy, they all stood around and either yelled gibberish at each other or stuck pieces of metal into their faces. If they weren’t these guys, they were a red/purple smoke that would take control of the camera and smack into people’s face, though it seems that was to indicate that they were being inhaled. All I could see was that it looked like I was wearing old school 3D glasses when I was supposed to be seeing from their point of view. What I could also see is that this movie sends the worst kind of message ever. When Melanie inhales the crazy smoke, they give her some of the drugs out of her stash, which allows her to overcome her possession. That is not a joke! Drugs saved her life! I don’t know why the movie didn’t just end with the good guys wrapping the town in cellophane and hotboxing all of the bad guys until they came out of it.

The performances didn’t impress but, in their defense, most of them didn’t seem like they were trying either. They all probably just agreed to be in this movie based on John Carpenter’s involvement, thinking they would be in one of his good ones. But they had already signed the contracts by the time they read the script, so they just had to ride it out. Natasha Henstridge did a good enough job. She played badass pretty well on occasion, I suppose. In the beginning, she does get needlessly defensive at her debriefing, but I think that was probably the piss-poor writing. She walks in to the room with a committee, they tell her to have a seat, and she starts demanding a lawyer. We haven’t even asked you anything yet! Jason Statham did a decent enough job, but he was never really likeable. The only concern he had was to try to fuck Natasha Henstridge through the entire movie, paying little mind to the weirdos trying to kill them all. Speaking of which, the crazy people never did a good job. They came off more goofy than scary.

I had no reason to watch Ghosts of Mars, and I probably should have taken that as a sign. The story was stupid and pointless, and mainly just tried to steal from so many better movies. The action is decent, but not decent enough to be a reason to watch this when you have to sit through the story to get to it. The performances seemed phoned in, but I couldn’t really blame them for it. Altogether, I see no reason why you would watch this movie. You COULD stream it, but I wouldn’t bother unless you need to write a review for the day as well. Ghosts of Mars gets “The ass end of the universe” out of “Come on, you mindless mother fuckers!”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people. Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense. Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated. You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle). Don’t forget to leave me some comments. Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

I’m a Reasonable Guy, But I’ve Just Experienced Some Very Unreasonable Things

Today’s movie is one that I guess I’ve seen before.  I’m basing that mainly on the fact that I already reviewed it on Netflix.  But, if it’s true that I’ve seen this movie before, I could tell you nothing about it.  So when Jake was trying to get a handle on my movie tastes and suggested it, I was more than happy to oblige.  It took me a little bit of time to finally receive the movie from Netflix, but now I have and I can see what I actually think of Big Trouble in Little China, written by W.D. Richter, Gary Goldman, and David Z. Weinstein, directed by John Carpenter, and starring Kurt Russell, Dennis Dun, Kim Cattrall, Suzee Pai, James Hong, Carter Wong, Peter Kwong, James Pax, Victor Wong, Donald Li, Kate Burton, Al Leong, Gerald Okamura, and Jerry Hardin.

Truck driver Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) arrives in San Francisco to gamble with his friend Wang Chi (Dennis Dun).  He then accompanies him to the airport to pick up his fiancée Miao Yin (Suzee Pai).  While at the airport, he also meets Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall) who is there to pick up her friend.  Even though she shuts down his advances, he still jumps in to help when Gracie’s friend is attacked by a Chinese street gang called the Lords of Death.  Unable to take Gracie’s friend, they take Miao Yin instead, with the intention of selling her as a sex slave.  Jack and Wang go to find her and get caught in the middle of a turf war that is then interrupted by 4 Mortal Kombat characters: three Raiden lookalikes named Thunder (Carter Wong), Rain (Peter Kwong), and Lightning (James Pax), and a Shang Tsung lookalike named Lo Pan (James Hong).  They take Miao Yin because her green eyes mean that she can be sacrificed to break Lo Pan’s curse and give him physical form again.

I’m charmed by this movie.  It’s aged, to be sure, but it’s aged fairly well.  The story of the movie is equal parts goofy and fun, but at least it’s intentional on both counts.  It includes many familiar parts, but it’s really hard to call this movie very typical.  We’ve seen the damsel in distress movies before, we’ve seen the hapless hero triumphing over the ancient evil, and we’ve seen martial arts movies.  Put them all together and they can become extremely silly and campy, but make themselves an entertaining little cult hit.  Most of the moments that were intended to be funny were kind of slapsticky in action scenes, but they never felt like they were trying too hard.  I thought a couple of the lines in the movie were pretty clever too.  There was one part in the movie when Gracie said that she couldn’t go into a location because her face was too recognizable to the bad people and later, when she was saying she couldn’t come into another location, Jack said, “I know.  There’s something wrong with your face.”  Some of the dialogue didn’t work for me, just because a lot of them seemed to throw exposition in rather bluntly.  Some of the characters actually decided it would save time to throw their personality profile from eHarmony in with their introduction, like when Gracie said, “You know I’m always sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong,” just to get it out of the way.  It’s nice to be able to figure out the characters quickly, but it makes the dialogue clunky.  It didn’t happen that often though, and the rest of the dialogue was fine.  And the look of the movie actually holds up pretty well.  The visual effects would be lackluster by today’s standards, but this movie was made in 1986, and they’re pretty interesting by those standards.  There was a lot of magic going on in the movie from lightning that characters would ride into a scene to light coming out of people’s eyes to two wizards battling by shooting light at each other that clashes and then turns into a scene of avatars doing battle for them.  All of it worked pretty well.  The supernatural creatures they created were pretty interesting as well.  There was a floating ball of eyes that seemed right out of Dungeons and Dragons, and some troll creature that looked like Rahzar from the Ninja Turtles movie.  I don’t know how they allowed the close ups on Gracie’s eyes through.  She was supposed to have green eyes for the role and Kim Cattrall has brown eyes.  Being no particular Kim Cattrall fan, there’s only one way that I would have that information: the really obvious contacts.  Computer graphics probably weren’t good enough or cheap enough at the time to fix that in post, but there’s another option: not showing a close up on her eyes!  I wasn’t paying that close of attention until you forced me to.  The action was kind of hit and miss with me.  There were plenty of action scenes in the movie, but the actual fist fight parts weren’t that convincing or interesting.

None of the performances in the movie really seemed to require too much out of the actors, but they were performed well.  Kurt Russell did an acceptable job as the cocky but none too bright hero.  Dennis Dun did a fine enough job delivering some humor and a good deal of the martial arts for the movie.  James Hong did a good job as the bad guy in the movie, but I just can’t hear his voice anymore and not think of Po’s father from Kung Fu Panda.  And it’s hard to be scary when you’re saying, “Noodle, don’t noodle.”

Big Trouble in Little China isn’t what I’d call a good movie.  Its story is a combination of basic ideas, it features aging graphics, and some of the dialogue is a little blunt.  But the movie still manages to be fun with a good amount of action, some clever dialogue, and overall silly fun mood.  I’m comfortable saying this movie is worth a watch.  It’s a classic cult movie and it holds up fairly well.  Big Trouble in Little China gets “May the wings of liberty never lose a feather” out of “Ol’ Jack always says … what the hell?”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.