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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Jurassic Park III (2001)

No Force on Earth or Heaven Could Get Me on That Island

Oh no! It’s getting worse! At least so far as Rotten Tomatoes is concerned, the third part to this trilogy is even worse than the second, dropping down to a lowly 50%. After watching the second one, I’m not sure if this movie also suffers from the comparison to the first movie that hurt the second one or if it benefited from comparison to the second one. That sentence just confused me. So, instead of trying to figure that out, let’s jump into my review of Jurassic Park 3, written by Peter Buchman, Alexander Payne, and Jim Taylor, directed by Joe Johnston, and starring Sam Neill, William H. Macy, Tea Leoni, Trevor Morgan, Alessandro Nivola, Michael Jeter, John Diehl, Bruce A. Young, and Laura Dern.

Eric (Trevor Morgan) and his mother’s boyfriend Ben (Mark Harelik) are parasailing off the coast of the infamous Isla Sorna when something goes wrong and the people driving their boat disappear in the mist below them. They look up to see that the boat is about to collide with some rocks, so they detach the cable and sail off towards the shoreline. Meanwhile, Alan Grant (Sam Neill) is visiting Ellie Satler (Laura Dern) and her family. He then goes and does some presentation in order to try to get more funding for his digs, but people only want to ask him about Jurassic Park. He returns to the dig site where his assistant, Billy Brennan (Alessandro Nivola), shows Grant a device they have that makes replica’s of Velociraptor resonating chambers, something they think shows that Velociraptor’s can communicate. Grant is then approached by a wealthy couple, Paul (William H. Macy) and Amanda Kirby (Tea Leoni), who ask Grant to escort them on an aerial tour of Isla Sorna. Grant is not down, but reluctantly agrees once Paul’s checkbook comes out. Much to Grant’s dismay, they land on Isla Sorna instead of just flying over it. It turns out that Paul and Amanda are Eric’s parents and, frustrated with the government’s decision to not look for Eric, hired Grant, Billy, and three mercenaries (Bruce A. Young, Michael Jeter, and John Diehl) to help them find him. And even more to Grant’s dismay, the mercenaries, and their airplane, are quickly dispatched by a giant Spinosaurus and they are now trapped on Isla Sorna.

Oh how the mighty have fallen. I actually thought about saying that in my review of The Lost World too, but I figured it’d be best to hold it until here. Another lackluster installment in the Jurassic Park series, but this one they decided they needed to finish off by putting the rest of the cast of the first, great movie that they had not yet put into a shitty Jurassic Park movie. They knocked out Goldblum, Attenborough, and the kids in the second one, leaving them only with Neill and Dern. Mission accomplished. The story was passable here, but they did a couple of things that I thought were so ill-conceived that it topped the previous movie in bad ideas. The graphics, however, were probably better than they were in the previous two movies. If that was all it took, this would be a great movie. It’s not all it takes for me, though. It uses a much flimsier approach to getting the traumatized person back to the island, and one they already used. Neill was already hesitant to go to the island in the first movie, and Attenborough’s cash got him to go back. I understand Macy and Leoni’s reason for going to the island, but Neill should know better. I know he was heading towards hard times, but money shouldn’t have worked as it did in the first movie, even if he was so sure that he’d just be flying overhead. Has going to these islands ever worked out, Grant? On the plane, they used one of the worst ideas they ever had by making Grant have a dream that Billy was a Velociraptor, that then started speaking his name as the non-dream Billy did. This was SO corny and stupid. If you were so worried that you had gone too long into the movie without showing dinosaurs you could’ve just waited a few more seconds until they saw them. Otherwise there was really no reason to try to do something so dumb. This movie also does something I hate: they bring an expert, but then choose to ignore him. When they’re staring at a Tyrannosaurus, Grant says “Don’t move” and everyone runs. Why bother bringing an expert if you’re going to ignore him at the risk of your lives? It gets worse that they then mention almost exactly what I just said right after I wrote it down. They do a lot in this movie to show how intelligent the Velociraptor’s are, but I think they went way too far. The worst example of this is when they’re looking around the deserted lab, looking at the broken eggs and dead dinosaurs in jars. I can believe that Leoni would look at a Raptor that appeared to be in a jar and think it was just another one, but I won’t believe a Raptor would be three feet away from a person that was looking right at it and be intelligent enough to know it should just hold still and they would think it was a mannequin. As a good thing, I was happy to see that (even though it took them three movies to do it) they finally made Pterodactyl’s a good part of the movie (which I say because I believe they were shown flying in one of the other movies). The look and mood of the Pterodactyl cage area was pretty nice. The thing that bothered me about them is that Leoni forgets to close the cage, allowing the Pterodactyl’s to fly free in the world, and the people leaving the island really don’t seem all that concerned that they let them loose on the world. They could have at least thrown a “Don’t worry, they can’t fly far enough to reach the mainland” to make me feel better about it.

The very worst part of this movie, to me, was the Spinosaurus. Not the Spinosaurus itself, but what they did with him. I understand that you wanted to amp things up for this movie by throwing in a dinosaur that was bigger and scarier than the Tyrannosaurus, but having him lay a massive beatdown on the T-Rex we had grown to love over the last two movies was bad form. You can have the Spinosaurus beat the T-Rex, but you can’t allow him to make the T-Rex his bitch. T-Rex did right by you for two movies already, and this is how you treat him? Especially when you replace him with a dinosaur that can’t possibly make it through a tiny, metal door, but can bust through a giant, barbed, metal fence like it was tissue paper. For another good note, I can’t think of any dinosaurs in the movie that didn’t look good throughout.

The performances were still pretty solid in this movie, probably because they didn’t know how bad it was going to be while filming it. Sam Neill still brings it, and Laura Dern still does nothing for me, but this time it was because she was barely in it. William H. Macy is just a great actor, even in this movie. Tea Leoni was a bit of a miss for me. Her performance was fine, but her hairdo was not. She’s gorgeous with long, brown hair, and even really good with long, blond hair, but short, blond, dike-y hair? Not so much. I kind of liked the Eric character in the movie, but not really because of Trevor Morgan. I mainly liked it because it was a total swagger jack of Newt from Aliens. It was almost the same character! A little kid that has to survive for a prolonged period of time in a place full of dangerous creatures and is also all alone because those dangerous creatures killed everyone else. But, instead of dying as you would expect, they become an expert on them and are able to get around somehow. Same damned character! But I did love Newt, so some of that comes off on this character. I got pissed when the little shit was cocky enough to ask Alan Grant if he knew what a Raptor claw was. Are you shitting me? This guy was studying Raptors when you were still semen in William H. Macy’s balls AND he survived the first movie. You’ve been at this shit for eight weeks. Cocky little fucker. Thankfully, he gets punished for this a few times in this movie. I got to thinking that, after being stranded on the island, having your adult accompaniment killed, and then getting singularly selected by the Pterodactyls as food for their kids, you ever think that God might just want you dead? I will say, in favor of Neill, Macy, and Leoni, there was at least one point in the movie when I totally related to them. Sadly, while watching this movie, it was the scene where they were digging through giant mounds of shit.

The third part to the series further tries to drag down the great things Jurassic Park did. The tools it uses are a decent story bogged down with stupid ideas, the defeat of a much beloved dinosaur in order to replace it with a dinosaur I don’t give a shit about, and hit or miss performances, some of which were stolen right out of Aliens. I feel like this movie did to Jurassic Park what the Spinosaurus did to the T-Rex. The worst thing in the movie was that damned ringtone they used constantly for the satellite phone. Every time I hear that ringtone on someone’s cell phone it reminds me of this movie … and to kill the person whose phone was ringing. You can skip this movie, but I can’t ’cause I’m a reviewer and the thing came in my three pack. Jurassic Park gets “Reverse Darwinism – survival of the most idiotic” out of “This is T-Rex pee.”

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Jurassic Park (1993)

You’re Implying That a Group Composed Entirely of Female Animals … Will Breed? … Sexy!

The decision to watch today’s movie (and the ensuing remainder of the trilogy) happened because of my recent reviews of the Back to the Future trilogy. It wasn’t me thinking about great trilogies that got me interested, but every one of the Back to the Future movies began with a trailer about the recent BluRay releases of this movie’s trilogy. Then I says to myself that it’s been far too long since the last time I watched this, and their time had come. We get started with the original, Jurassic Park, written by Michael Crichton and David Koepp, directed by Steven Spielberg, and starring Sam Neill, Richard Attenborough, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Joseph Mazzello, Ariana Richards, Wayne Knight, Martin Ferrero, Samuel L. Jackson, and Bob Peck.

When a park worker is attacked and injured by something at his new park, lawyer Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero) tells eccentric billionaire John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) that the investors will pull out unless he gets some experts to sign off on it. Gennaro brings Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and Hammond brings paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and paleobotanist Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern). They take a helicopter to the park and that’s when they find out the magic Hammond has created: he’s reanimated the dinosaurs! I just spoiled the whole movie for you! And for another spoiler, it turns out that dinosaurs don’t get along with humans. That’s why Jesus killed them all 3000 years ago. Sarah Palin told me so. Anyways, Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) makes a move to steal a bunch of dinosaur embryo’s by shutting down the security around the park. Problem is, the above mentioned people are all out on a tour with Hammond’s grandchildren, Tim (Joseph Mazzello) and Lex (Ariana Richards), and the security gates and tour vehicles just simultaneously shut down in front of a Tyrannosaurus cage. I think we may have an idea where this is going. Spoiler alert: Jesus saves them all with his sweet, Jesus-y bisceps.

Have you guys heard of this movie? It’s pretty damned good! The story is fairly simple, but the premise is pretty well thought out and, more importantly, there’s lots of good action. The story of the movie is basically just that people are put into a predicament and need to escape it, but the premise of the movie is much better. Your typical action movie probably wouldn’t put very much thought into how the dinosaurs got there, but this one did. Being cloned from blood stored in the belly (or thorax or whatever they wanna call it) of ancient mosquitoes that are preserved in solidified amber. Then, in order to keep the dinosaurs from breeding and running amok on the island, they are genetically engineered to all be female. Then, to add another wrinkle (that doesn’t actually make any kind of a difference to this movie) they begin to breed because they’ve used some reptile DNA and there are apparently some frogs that can turn tranny when they live in a sausage party. I don’t know if any of these things are true and/or viable, but they worked for me. The action was great. The movie starts off pretty strong when we watch the guy get attacked by the Velociraptor, getting dragged up the side of the cage reminiscent of the girl in Jaws. It slows down for a little while as we meet our characters, but then ramps up the action increasingly once the dinosaurs get involved. The scene when we first meet the T-Rex still holds up as a fantastic scene, and it includes my favorite moment in the movie. It’s when the T-Rex has flipped over the car and is attacking the undercarriage of the car. It bites a tire, which releases air into it’s mouth, making it kind of step back and stare at it like a dog that’s confused when his toy squeaks. And that T-Rex still holds up. Even living in a world of Avatar, that T-Rex still looks great. And when the T-Rex throws down on a couple Velociraptors at the end of the movie, wins, and then roars triumphantly as a banner falls, it’s still pretty awesome. But a couple of things for this movie: why is the entirety of Jurassic Park only able to be accessed through DOS prompts? No one uses that anymore! Also, how are we to get behind Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum as our heroes when it takes them like 10 minutes of a T-Rex attacking the car with two kids in it to decide they should help? I understand that a T-Rex is intimidating and that little boy was pretty damned annoying, but you gotta do something, man! But the men aren’t the only assholes in this movie. Laura Dern was present for Sam Neill’s whole speech at the beginning of the movie about how Velociraptor’s will look you in the eye as two more attack you from the side, but she chose not to warn Bob Peck that he might be in that exact situation in a few moments. His blood is on your hands now, Dern!

The performances were pretty great in this movie. I always like Sam Neill. That guy’s pretty underrated and never really got the bump in his career that you’d expect this movie to give, even though he was great. The best scene of him was from right in the beginning of the movie when some chubby kid that had somehow gotten onto a dig site starts talking shit about Velociraptors and Sam Neill tells him that great story about how they would kill the shit out of his chubby ass. It gives you pretty much everything you need to know about the character right away. Very knowledgeable and passionate about dinosaurs, but could perhaps use a little bit of work on his ability to deal with kids. Laura Dern didn’t do much for me in this movie. She seemed just a hair above damsel in distress the whole time. She did fine, but not much more. Jeff Goldblum was … well, he was Jeff Goldblum. They just kind of let him talk and take what they wanted to use. He could get a little tedious, but was otherwise fine. Richard Attenborough was good in this movie. He was so happy all the time that he made me think he would probably play a great Santa Clause. The kids were alright too. Joseph Mazzello was a little annoying, but that’s what he was going for. Ariana Richards mainly just screamed a lot.

It’s so nice when you can look back on a movie you watched when you were 10 and enjoy it almost as much, and Jurassic Park does that. This movie holds up like a champ. Good story involving a well thought out and explained premise, and mostly great performances. The directing is Spielberg. That’s equivalent to great. It amazed me most of all that this movie’s graphics were still able to hold up so well, but they definitely do. As does the entire movie, for that matter. I only have them on DVD right now, but it’s just a matter of time before I re-purchase them on BluRay. This movie belongs in any collection, regardless of size. We’ll see if that goes for the rest of the series over the next two days. Jurassic Park gets “I spared no expenses” out of “If the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.”

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The Hunt for Red October (1990)

My Morse is so Rusty, I Could Be Sending Him Dimension on Playmate of the Month

Leave it to my friend Forty to actually request my review of a good movie.  One of the first, to my recollection.  In all honesty, I don’t really mind watching bad movies most of the time because I tend to find them amusing.  But, every once and a while, I should probably be asked to watch a good one so I don’t kill myself or simply die from From Justin to Kelly-related aneurisms.  Forty’s movie request was for a classic movie that – as with many classically awesome movies – had eluded me thus far, but it is a movie I wanted to see at some point.  And now I have.  I’m talking about The Hunt for Red October, based on a Tom Clancy novel, directed by John McTiernan, and starring Alec Baldwin, Sean Connery, Sam Neill, Scott Glenn, James Earl Jones, Stellan Skarsgard, Tim Curry, Joss Ackland, Courtney B. Vance, Jeffrey Jones, and Fred Dalton Thompson.

Admiral James Greer (James Earl Jones) brings some pictures of a new fancy submarine to CIA operative Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin).  With the help of submarine expert Skip Tyler (Jeffrey Jones), they figure out that this picture is of a spankin’ new Typhoon-class submarine with a propulsion system called a “Caterpillar Drive” that makes sonar detection extremely difficult, allowing it the potential to get all up in America’s Kool-Aid without even knowing the flavor, and even boil that Kool-Aid with nuclear warheads.  This submarine is called the Red October.  At first, the Joint Chiefs of Staff wet themselves, but then Jack Ryan poses the possibility that the prestigious commander of the Red October, Marko Alexandrovich Ramius (Sean Connery), may want to defect.  The Joint Chiefs give Ryan 3 days to confirm Ramius’ intentions.  The Russians are after him to destroy him before the American’s get their new sub, the Americans are after him to stop him from possibly launching nukes at them, and Ryan’s after him to find out what he’s up to.  Thus begins the hunt for the Red October.

I feel like I’m one of the last people around to reach this conclusion but, here it goes: fuck this movie.  Just kidding, Forty!  This movie rules!  I haven’t always seen eye to eye with this Tom Clancy feller.  Some of his games got way more popular than I felt they warranted, and I’ve heard mixed reviews about some of his other movies, though I don’t know that I’ve seen any of them.  I had worried that, as is the case in some of his video games, I would think they were overrated.  But nay!  This is a good movie.  His story works really well, especially with how well-executed it is.  Most of the story of this movie is just about Ramius’ intentions, stretched into a little over 2 hours.  It’s not until around the last 20 minutes of the movie when you are actually sure of what his actual intentions are.  There are times when you’re sure he’s going to defect, other times when you know he wants to hijack the Red October and blow up America to start a war, and other parts where you have no idea.  And, seeing as the movie takes one idea and stretches it over 2 hours, you’d think it’d get really boring.  I don’t recall being bored at all in this movie.  From the start of the movie the tension builds as different groups get closer and closer to the Red October until the end where it just climaxes all over the audiences faces.  …EWWWWWWW!

There is quite the cast to this movie, as you may have gathered from the long list in the opening paragraph.  Alec Baldwin, still young and handsome, tore it up in this movie.  I never really believed Sean Connery’s accent was Russian, but he was a badass.  One of our first scenes with the guy shows him killing a fellow officer with extreme prejudice and the corner of a table.  He also had one of the best lines in the movie, involving how things react to bullets.  He had a smaller part in this, but I found myself watching Sam Neill more than anyone else in the movie for some reason.  He was a strong character that opened up to Ramius with some kind of sweet and innocent intentions about his new life in America if their defection works out.  I sure hope that works out for him.  I liked Courtney B. Vance as the really good sonar guy; like the action movie version of Harland Williams from Down Periscope.  Joss Ackland was pretty good as well, but I could not see him as anything but DeNomolos from Bill & Ted.  Though I’m usually excited to see him, I was extra excited to see Stellan Skarsgard in a good movie that came out long before I knew he existed, and he was also excellent, if under-used.  The entire cast was great, so I won’t waste more time just saying that.  Take actors name and add “was really good” to the end.

So there you go, Fortissimo.  Good story, great thrills, excellent tension, top notch performances.  This here is the recipe for a good movie.  You’ve probably already seen this movie, so I’m telling you that you should watch it again.  If you haven’t seen it yet, I can’t yell at you because I just saw it myself, but now I’ve seen it so it’s only a matter of time before I’m allowed to yell at you for not watching a really good action-thriller.  The Hunt for Red October gets “Some things in here don’t react well to bullets” out of “And I will have a pickup truck”.

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