Mayhem, Chaos and Setting: Horror Film Essentials

Mother, that lasagna was AWESOME.

 O  nce a staple of American filmmaking, the horror movies of the last decade have grossly been one gigantic letdown. Movie goers craving films like The Exorcist and Halloween are now being subjected to poorly-made demon possession movies like The Conjuring and Ouija made by folks who don't seem to understand the basics about human nature and what it is that makes regular people genuinely scared.

After honing his craft in 1978 with Halloween, John Carpenter decided to brave the cold and remake The Thing From Another World, a 1951 movie with James (Gunsmoke) Arness about a team of scientists who find a crashed flying saucer and a "body" frozen nearby buried in the Arctic ice.

John Carpenter's The Thing starts off by introducing us to the Antarctic's frigid weather and a couple of crazy Norweigans trying to kill an Alaskan Malamute as it runs across the frozen tundra towards the safety of an American Research Station and into the arms of mild mannered "Clark", Richard (One Day at A Time) Masur. One of the blabbering dog haters is not too smooth with his hands and ends up blowing up his helicopter and himself with a thermite grenade while his comrade gets shot in the head by the station's commander "Garry" who thinks he's defending the camp from a nut with an automatic rifle. The dog survives and smoothly integrates himself into the camp while Kurt Russell "Macready"—a booze loving helicopter pilot who does not take kindly to losing a chess match with a computer—and "Cooper," the camp's doctor, go to the Norweigans’ camp to look for survivors and instead find a frozen corpse and some kind of humanoid they decide deserves a closer look.

Because the dog is not a dog and the humanoid is far from dead, the entire camp's members start getting picked off one by one in a movie that starts off in the day and moves into a frigid -40° night (which is scary in itself). It turns out that the Thing is some kind of alien that tries to devour and replicate its prey, turning itself into an indiscernable copy of whatever it engulfs; dog or man. Paranoia and bedlam take over the camp as the Thing periodically reveals itself as a walking head, a deformed spider with tentacles or a half-man, half-alien creature capable of creating sounds that will make anyone's blood curl. The film's special effects are nothing short of breathtaking—and this is when the closest thing people had to a computer was a calculator—making even the most seasoned horror fan say to himself "You gotta be fucking kidding!"

When one of the camp's members real identity is discovered as he is strapped to a couch with his buddies and one by one, they are exposed to a half-assed blood test, The Thing shows why it's one of the best horror movies ever made. There is screaming, yelling and swearing as tentacles fly and flame throwers douse alien guts and a survivor finally says "I know you gentlemen have been through a lot, but if it's not too much trouble I'd rather not spend the rest of this winter TIED TO THIS FUCKING COUCH!”

Carpenter understands how people react to stress and the bombastic pressures of dealing with aliens from another world in the freezing cold without having to rely on his characters using snappy one-liners as they wave the American flag. Instead he uses raw, believable reactions that are downright terrifying and entertaining, especially when Macready confronts a screaming "thing" in the film's climax and says "Fuck you too!"

The editing is perfect; the music from Spaghetti Western scorer Ennio Morricone is incredibly surreal, and in choosing to use setting, chaos and mayhem as his primary weapons of horror, John Carpenter sets himself apart from the likes of James Wan and the other horror filmmakers of today as a true master of the genre.

De Palma and Pacino Prove: We Can't Change Who We Are

Gee, Al, your shirt looks . . . funny. Your hair looks . . . plastic. What's up with that?

 W  hen I was dating my wife to be, I knew she was ten years older than me, had some health issues—at the ripe old age of 42 she said she could never get pregnant due to something that happened in her past —had hypertension, diabetes, an addiction to cigarettes, and a personality so labile that it felt like if I somehow hooked her up to the terminals of the dead battery in my car she'd get it to start.

Still, I loved her and easily envisioned a life with her. We got married, had a child but did not live happily ever after. 

Before our daughter got cancer, my wife's heart failed and she nearly died but somehow, both made full recoveries. My partner swore she would quit smoking but never did and ended up back in the hospital several times with chest pain and still, we stayed together. I swore I would not be there for her the next time she ended up in the hospital but always was and always will be for one simple reason. When we were dating, even though we never said it to each other, we both needed saving and made a life together and that was all it took.

In 1983, Brian De Palma and Al Pacino teamed up to make what is now considered one of the better gangster movies of all time: Scarface. Ten years later, they were back at it with Carlito's Way where this time Pacino is an ex-gangster released from prison who is trying to be straight. 

As the cinematography in this film shows, just as De Palma cannot escape his obsession with Alfred Hitchcock, Carlito (Pacino) soon gets drawn back towards his old streets where he meets his old contact Rolando (played by Al Israel - the chainsaw wielding drug dealer from Scarface) and begins to run a bar where he hopes to make enough money to escape New York and go to the Bahamas to rent cars. 

His frizzy haired, sleazy, coke-head lawyer and best friend Kleinfeld (Sean Penn) who got him out of prison by exploiting the system, soon manipulates Carlito into doing dastardly deeds relying on his loyalty and his street smart code of conduct. Carlito's love interest Gail  (Penelope Ann Miller), also has dreams of improving her life from that of a sexy stripper to a respected dancer on Broadway.

As fate would have it, no one really changes in this movie, they are who they are. Gail swears she will never wipe up Carlito's blood ever again and she ends up doing just that. Carlito performs criminal acts for his friend because that's who he is and as he puts it "I don't invite this shit, it just comes to me, I run and it runs after me." 

De Palma is back to his old tricks again, trying to emulate Hitchcock and Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and manages to create some harrowing chase scenes forcing Pacino to run like a cockroach through crawlspaces and dive on escalators in shootouts. All the while, we root for Carlito and Gail as they make love to "You are so Beautiful" and the soulful singing of the great Joe Cocker, hoping they will find their dreams but deep down, we know how the story ends.

Ironically enough, I played "You are So Beautiful" at my half-assed wedding 12 years ago. I am still with my wife and always will be because like the characters in Carlito's Way, I can't change who I am.

Small in Stature, Big on Formula

Where's the fuckin' Ortho man when ya need him?

 E  ven if you're not a Michael Douglas fan, the first five minutes of Ant-Man will have you scratching your head in awe. In it a "young" Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) explains how he will never let his formula out (presumably one which can shrink a human into the size of an ant and give him super-human strength) right after he cold-cocks a business associate for talking about his wife in not so kindly a fashion. 

The year is 1989 and either through CGI or some other aspect of special effects/makeup wizardry that is taste fully abundant in this film, Douglas somehow looks better than he did from An American President, a film from 1995.

 As the simple story would have it, there is indeed a way to transform humans into ant-sized "Hulks", but only Pym knows the way to do it until his now disgruntled former protege turned CEO/villain finally figures out how to perfect the method and stops turning colleagues who disagree with him into snot-sized mucous he is able to wipe up off the floor and literally flush down the toilet. Pym then calls on our hero Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) to break into the Cross building now run by villain Darren Cross (Cory Stoll) and steal the formula before it gets sold and turns into a weapon that literally could destroy the world.

Part caper flick, Ant-man has the perfect blend of action, drama, humor and special effects that make it the best block-buster 2015 summer movie so far. The audience cares about the characters— especially Scott Lang, an ex-con convicted for being a modern day Robin Hood, who is trying to gain rights to see his incredibly sweet 4-year-old daughter. 

We laugh at the comedic relief provided by Lang's "criminal" buddies, headed by his friend Luis (Michael Pena) and our hearts break for Pym's daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly), also Lang's love interest, who is seeking to know the truth about her mother's death. We tap our feet at the hip Christophe Beck super-hero score which also smoothly incorporates the short 1973 Roy Ayers piece Escape, last used in Jackie Brown, and we learn all about ants, the bravest of which is aptly named "Antonio".

Ant-man is slick, smart and yet thoroughly inoffensive, and it is a joy to watch a film that does not take itself too seriously but still has the sense to know how to please an audience. 

In a time of when movies about desolate wastelands and villains who enslave women are hailed as masterpieces (Mad Max: Fury Road), a good and wholesome story about redemption and the potential goodness of the human heart that people of all ages can enjoy is hard to come by and should not be missed.

Mad Max Resurrects Travis Bickle in "The Drop"

"I'm dying to do the sequel." "VEEERRRY funny."

 I  n 1976, Martin Scorsese gave movie-goers the ultimate anti-hero—a psychopathic, sympathetic, socially incompatible Vietnam veteran taxi driver named Travis Bickle who was determined to rid the streets of New York City of the filth that had contaminated it, turning 13-year-old girls into hookers complete with pimps and other lowlifes that seemed to infest the streets of Brooklyn, Harlem and the Bronx. 

Over the last forty years, filmmakers have tried in vain to replicate Scorsese's ability to create a character audiences could both fear and root for, a character who did bad things which were justifiable; someone imperfect, lonely, who could not fit in. It would seem that the creativity and sympathy that was omnipresent in films of the 70s have been replaced by special effects and sequels and directors with more money than brains. Not so with a sleeper of a film called The Drop from 2014, in which an actor (Tom Hardy) proves he can indeed act without having to wear a mask and disguise his voice (Bane from The Dark Night Rises), or be strapped to the hood of a car with another mask on in another ludicrous sequel: Mad Max Fury Road. 

The Drop tells the story of a small bar in Brooklyn where Bob (Hardy) Saginowski (funny, his name was Max Rockatansky in Fury Road) serves the drinks under the watchful eye of his cousin Marv (played by the great James Gandolfini in his last role before he died), who lost ownership of the bar to a bunch of Chechen mobsters 10 years ago. 

"Cousin Marv's" serves as a frequent "drop" where thousands of illegal dollars are dumped off on special occasions like Superbowl Sunday—the kind of money that is not declared to the IRS—so that it can be collected by a bunch of well-dressed criminals who will surely bolt your leg to the floor of a van, let you bleed out, chop off your arm, and throw you in a river somewhere if you even dare rob from them. 

After two morons decide to do just that and end up stealing $5,000 from the bar, Bob, a stalky and quiet figure who seems unfazed after the thieves had a gun pointed at his head, finds a small pit-bull puppy in a garbage can on his way home. The garbage can's owner Nadia (Noomi Rapace from Prometheus) and Bob decide to take care of the dog, build a friendship, and Bob takes the dog home and raises it. Lo and behold, Nadia has quite a few problems including a suicide attempt and an old nutjob boyfriend, "Eric," who claims he was the dog's rightful owner but decided to beat it and leave it to die in the garbage. Eric is abusive, volatile and seems to want to harm Nadia and the dog but gets a little more than he bargained for after he meets Bob. 

Bob goes to church every day but never gets communion. He is able to cover up appendages which would otherwise be evidence for the police by wrapping them up and throwing them in the river without so much as working up a sweat; he plays with his dog, works nights at the bar and serves as protector to Nadia. Throughout the film he claims he just "tends bar" when being questioned by a detective searching for those who robbed "Cousin Marv's" but he does quite a bit more than that. He is explosive and capable of great violence when Nadia and the dog are threatened, yet, he is likeable. 

Many of The Drop's scenes are filmed at night in a middle-lower class Brooklyn neighborhood and the music accompanying them is very reminiscent of Bernard Hermann's darker parts of Taxi Driver. 

Originally a short story called "Animal Rescue," The Drop tells a simple story of an "ordinary" man who is a bartender, much like the ordinary job Travis Bickle had as a taxi driver, who is imperfect and alone but when pushed, will push back. He is vulnerable yet violent, a criminal with ethics and morals that audiences love to watch. 

A pity it has taken 40 years for us to see such a magnetic persona come to life in a movie that nobody saw. 

Check it out on Netflix!

Pizza and a .mov

In which I make pizza and watch documentaries about Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood.

Don't forget to play back at 1080p!

Historical Terminator is Surprisingly Charming

Shooting me will void your warranty

 B   efore driving to the closest IMAX theater to see Terminator Genysis with my eleven year-old daughter, I gave her a brief history lesson. Together we watched the first five minutes of 1984's The Terminator—which I had first seen on video in 1985—on Netflix, she understood the premise easily, and we headed off to the theater in, you guessed it, a car from 1984.

We stopped off at a local Tim Horton's where our discussion continued to revolve around my "weird car" that's so old it does not even have power steering and after a quick bite to eat, off we went to stand in line with the rest of the products of the Baby Boomer generation who were now taking their own kids to see Mr. "I'll be Back."

The latest version of the now classic story essentially about preventing a retroactive abortion in order to save the world starts off, ironically enough, as a history lesson of the last 31 years of one of the more successful franchises in movie history. The first few minutes pay homage to the original movie and give die hard fans something to drool over until poof, a ludicrous change in the timeline of The Terminator alters things and changes everything we thought we already knew.

Sarah Connor, Kyle Reese and Arnold are all back together again but this time, they are all on the same team. A grizzled Schwarzenegger (the good guy) is still a robot, only his organic outer layer has cleverly aged with time. His hair is grey, his once massive pecs have sagged and his famous biceps are hidden by his black jacket. Now, he's a father figure to Sarah and has already been protecting her since 1973. Kyle thinks he's been sent to once again save Sarah but this time he's under scrutiny from Sarah's surrogate father even though he's probably expected to mate with her in order to create John Connor, the savior of the human race.

To make matters worse, somehow or another, John Connor becomes a villain altered by Cyberdyne systems and is head of Genysis—an "app" that everyone wants as much as the latest iPhone—that has already pre-sold one billion units but when released will ultimately mean the end of the world. Sound ridiculous? It is. 

Surprisingly enough though, this movie is not without its charm, and despite its crazy bus-flipping stunts, dazzling special effects and clever jokes (at one point Arnold is being questioned by two cops Law-and-Order style and they ask each other "Can this guy even speak English?"), most of the charm is generated by, you guessed it: Arnold. There is genuine chemistry between his character who Sarah calls "Pops", Sarah and Kyle.

Sarah (Emilia Clarke) looks like Linda Hamilton (the original Sarah Connor) and even though she might not want to "mate" with Kyle at first and create John, they too have a connection that is somehow palpable and fun to watch.

My daughter, who is definitely not a science fiction fan and had to be lured to the theater with the promise of popcorn liked the film immensely and her favorite character was, you guessed it: Arnold's. 

The Terminator has become "Pops," history has been re-written, the franchise has been tastefully rebooted for a new generation of viewers to enjoy, and like my car, Mr. Schwarzenegger is "old but not obsolete."