The Black Campbell

I remember the original 1973 version scared the living piss out of me when I was a kid (I was eight or nine when I caught it on a Saturday horror fest on TV.) Del Toro’s producing, and it looks like it could be pretty taut.

I’ve been catching up on movies the past month or so, thanks to Netflix, so I’m just going to give a few thumbnails of a couple of the movies I’ve watched. We’ll use the traditional 4 stars nonsense, as well.

Splice: I rather enjoyed this. It’s not quite what I expected…in many ways, the monsters are the scientist protagonists that create this chimera that is part human (Dren) in an effort to make a new drug product. The woman they make grows at a remarkable rate (’cause all test-tube monsters grow at the speed of plot), is intelligent, vicious, but surprisingly sympathetic due to the actress’ performance. The female scientist has an abused background and she finds herself applying some of the same controlling methods to Dren. The ending is a bit of the usual creature-goes-rogue stuff you’d expect but the performances are good, and the weird child abuse vibe really takes this a cut above. 2.5-3 stars

Iron Man 2: A bit less focused than the original, but it cracks along, Robert Downey Jr. does Robert Downey Jr., and there’s a nice libertarian vibe to the movie I really liked. 4 stars.

Public Enemies: How you can take the story of John DIllinger and make it boring is a challenge, but Michael Mann rose to it. Uninspired performances, slow pacing, but good art, set ,and costume direction and it’s pretty solidly historically. Did I mention boring? 2 stars.

The Road: A movie so dark, slow, and uninteresting I turned it off after 30 minutes. If I want a reason to snuff myself, I’ll listen to The Wall in the dark with a gun after drinking heavily. Can’t rate it, because I didn’t finish it.

Funny People: Judd Apatow takes on the world of stand-up comedians and fame. Adam Sandler turns in a superb performance as a comedian who is dying and tries to atone for being a tremendous dick. While there’s a lot of funny moments — it’s a serious downer. Fame sucks, you have no real friends, and your competition/friends will stab you in the back. It’s also a good hour too long. It’s good, don’t get me wrong…just waaaaay too long. 2.5 stars.

eXistenz: Cronenberg takes on virtual reality with his usual biological creepiness. It’s slow, a bit muddled, and while it would have been a bit more interesting ten years ago, it doesn’t do the “life is a simulation” idea as well as The Matrix or Inception, and nowhere near as well as Ghost in the Shell 2. 2 stars.

Shopgirl: The novella was poignant and charming…so’s the movie. Love story between a lonely older man and a young shop girl who is lonely. She thinks it’s a real love affair, he’s using her to salve his loneliness. Interesting performance by Steve Martin. 3 stars.

Extraordinary Measures: Based on a true story (allegedly), Brendan Fraser’s kids have a rare disease and are going to snuff it any day. Harrison Ford is an annoying academic working on the most promising cure. Fraser puts together a foundation to fund the scientist, gets a pharmaceutical company to sign onto their work which is then coopted. Good performance by Fraser, Ford is Ford (so good), and the story is a gutwrencher if you have kids. No big surprises, plot-wise. 2.5-3 stars.

The American: I went on a lone assassin gets a conscience kick and brings his employers down on his head. (Le Samourai, Eastern Promises, Ghost Dog) so this is pretty much the same story, but set in gorgeous southern Italy. I’m not a huge Clooney fan, but he’s bloody good in this. 4 stars.

Run, Fat Boy, Run: Simon Pegg plays his usual likable loser who leaves his pregnant girlfriend at the altar. Five years later, he’s still stuckin a rut, but her new American boyfriend inspires him (out of spite) to run a marathon in London, competing with the new beau. Hank Azara does a good slow burn as we discover the kinda cool guy is actually a dick. We don’t get the full happy ending, but we get close. Fun fluff. 3 stars ’cause I like Pegg.

The Expendables: Put a whole bunch of action stars from the last 30 years together in a movie, pull a script from 1987 and update it by shooting it with modern action camera techniques, and give a few of the guys a touching scene to show they can act. Shake vigorously. There you go. Dumb fun that, if you grew up on this sort of action pic, will get you all wistful for Contras and Soviet existential evil. 2.5 stars if you’ve never seen Commando or Red Heat and said “I need this on VHS”, 3 stars if you did and bought them.

Scott Pilgrin vs. the World: I’m not read the comic, and now I want to. Yeah, Cera plays his usual affable geek, but it works here. The same director from Shawn of the Dead brings a great mash-up of video game and comic book tropes and gags that really work here. Boy has girl, dumps girl for mysterious hot girl that has a bunch of evil boyfriends he must fight, boy loses cool girl, fights to get her back, realizes the geek girl was cool, too…aw, just see it. Really! Chris Evans and Brandon Routh are great in their evil exes roles. 3.5 stars.

30 Days of Night: No friggin’ emo pussy vampires talking about their feelings and getting angsty about their vampirism. No sexy vampires. These bastards are fast, vicious pack animals and that portrayal, mixed with the dark, isolated setting of Barrow, Alaska real works. I wasn’t expecting the hero’s tactic for “winning”. Ben Foster doesn’t come off gay. 3 stars

Faster: The Rock Dwayne Johnson (met him before he was the Rock; nice guy) plays an ex-con that was the victim of a rip-off by another crew. He gets out and over 5 days hunts them down. Standard fare save for the secondary characters that are all very intersting in a way the lead is not. Johnson shows a bit of acting ability here and there, Billy Bob Thornton is good, Carla Guigino isn’t doing sexy. There’s a seedy doper cop (BBT), a perfectionist assassin out to stop the Rock Johnson who is fun (and I suspect trained by the same acting coach as Clive Owen.) It’s not as fast-paced as the title would suggest, tries to be a bit deeper than the usual action pic, doesn’t quite pull it off. But I really kinda liked it. 2.5 stars.

Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story: Set against his Sexie stand up tour, we find out he was born in Aden, raised in Ireland until he was eightish, his mom dies, he’s in boarding school, and then spends 12 years or so busting his ass to be an overnight success. He’s a touch, stubborn bugger from the look of him, crossdressing or no. 3 stars.

The Crazies: Remake of a George Romero zombie movie where the people aren’t really zombies. A government plane goes down and infects a small Midwestern town with a biotoxin that drives them nutty. Timothy Oliphant is not creepy or a bad guy in this; he’s the town sheriff trying to figure out what’s going on, then rescue his friends when the Army inevitably comes in and experiments/kill off the town’s people to contain the event. You’ve seen this movie before…it’s still done pretty well. 2 stars if you think everything Romero does can’t be topped, 3 for the rest of us.

Ondine: An Irish fisherman (Colin Farrell) discovers a girl in his nets. His handicapped daughter thinks she’s a selkie…is she a sea creature? Is she not? It’s a charming movie and very well acted. See it. 4 stars

I was a bit iffy on this one, but after seeing the trailer…count me in:

First off:  I was bored.  Second…I have Netflix, so it’s not like pay specifically for the movie.  Third:  aw, who am I kidding?  I was dumb enough to drop this into my queue and watch it, even having an inkling of what it was about…

Human Centipede is a movie only a German could make. (Actually, I think the director’s Dutch, but I can’t be bothered to learn anything more after the experience)  Two idiotic American girls are wandering the German countryside on a road trip and are off to find a swanky nightclub.  They wind up in the middle of a German forest (which I thought were pretty much destroyed, so let’s assume that these characters walked in circles in a copse of trees in a suburban neighborhood…) in the rain, after their Volkswagen’s tire pops.

Do they change the tire?  Nope.  Do they even attempt it?  Nope.  Mostly they spit vapid “I’m scared but we can’t just sit in our car” lines. They have another driver stop to “help” them, which is mostly some old, fat guy leering and making suggestions as to what they can do together.  So, yeah, I guess they “have” to go look for help.  Do they stay on the road?  Nope.

So they find the massive house of retired surgeon Dr. Haiter — who for years was the preeminent surgeon for detaching Siamese twins.  Now he wants to rectify that by sewing people together into a Siamese triplet.  The girls come looking for a phone and despite the immediate “hey, this guy is halfway to the moon crazy” vibes they get, they go into his house, accept water (roofied) then wind up strapped to gurneys in his torture chamber cum laboratory under the house.

There is a botched escape attempt by one of the characters, a girl of such mind-deading stupidity I actually was shouting insults at the screen.  She gets out of the lab and winds up locked in a bedroom the madman can’t get into.  What does she do? Hide behind the bed and cry.  Does she knock out the window and run screaming her head off into the neighborhood?  Nope.  does she grab the nearest blunt object and whack said rampaging retiree?  Nope.  She waits until he’s gone away to open the window blinds.  Surprise!  Dr. Nutbag’s here!

This leads to her running away, falling into his pool, only to be rescued when the power goes out from the coming rainstorm.  Does he just wait in the dark for her?  Nope.  He actually goes to turn the power on.  So does she run through the window he broke open and get help?  Nope.  She goes back for her friend, drags her through the house (LOUDLY!  ’cause stealth when being hunted..?  Not needed.) and out into the yard, where she gets shot with a tranq dart.

At this point, I’m starting to get into the very misogynistic vibe of the movie, if only because this broad is so implausible stupid that women everywhere, when meeting director Tom Six, should haul off and kick him in the jimmies on general principle.

Long and short of it:  they get their knee ligamants cut soe they have to be on all fours, and sewn — as only the Teutonic crazy would think to do — ass to mouth making a human centipede.  The crazed doctor tried to train them, there’s some contest of wills between the Japanese guy that is the head of this gruesome creation and Haiter; the girls mostly whimper and look sad over the buttocks of the person in front of them. This leads to the inevitable scene where the Japanese guy has to defecate.  You get the picture.

Finally the police arrive, responding at least a week or so after the girls have gone missing and a report of an American girl screaming on the property have been reported.  They send to longhaired, not-overly-bright detectives to the property.  After a bit of “what have you got in the basement, you crazy bastard” “I don’t have to tell you without a warrant” nonsense, Haiter tried to roofie the cops.  Do they pick up on this?  Nope.  Do they buy his line about the syringe of sedative he was planning on using on the cops?  Mostly.  Does one drink the water for the obviously deranged surgeon living in the woods and on whom a report of a screaming girl was filed.  Yup!

They leave for a warrant, in which time the centipede makes its move to escape and in the ensuing fight with Haiter the Japanese “head” stabs Haiter in the leg, bites him, yaddayadda.  The centipede stages its escape attempt with the idiot girl from the last escape attempt miming direction to get out.  This can’t possibly go wrong.  There’s a showdown between Haiter, who can’t stand, and Japanese dude — who until now has showed spunk and incredible presence of mind.  So what does he do?  After a moving soliloquy in Japanese, he slits his own throat to regain his humanity.  (Hey…how ’bout killing the doctor and finding a phone?  Then surgeons could cut you lose from the other two and you would only have a horrible scar on your ass and mental trauma for a lifetime.  That would work, too.)

The cops show up with a warrant a Walther P5s held like the actors haven’t seen an action movie since the 1970s.  (Hey, Rambo, that slide’s going to cut your off-hand thumb to shreds.)  Roofied cop goes down just as he finds the doctor.  Now he has a machinegun, ho ho ho…wrong movie.  Final firefight sequence — dumbass longhair cop one finds dead dumbass cop two.  Does he attentively look for the threat?  Nope.  Does he get gut shot?  Yup.  But not before he blows a tunnel in the doctor’s head.

Annoying can’t escape for toffee chick is thus left stuck sewn in the middle ofthe bodies of the Japanese dude and her dead friend.  The end.  (Possibly the only redeeming feature of this cow-pat of a movie — no happy ending.)

Style: none.  Substance: none.  Don’t bother.  Even for free.

I’ve heard of this movie a few times int eh past, but finally happened to read about it as i was thinking about ordering up Eastern Promises, which I’ve yet to see.  It’s a 1967 film by French directorJean-Pierre Melville, and it’s arguably the inspiration for most of the assassin-on-the run movies of the past 40 years.  You can see elements of teh storyline in movies such as the Bourne series and The American, as well as Ronin and Collateral.

It follows a 48 hour period in which Jef Costello, a dapper, laconic, and very capable hit man commits a murder of a club owner (and we can assume crime figure), only to be spotted by the lounge piano player and a few other patrons.  He is arrested in a sweep of the usual suspects and the police superintendent homes in on his right away, despite a well-planned alibi and the pianist refusing to identify him.

Released, his employers — worried about his arrest and the police interest — try to kill him.  Costello spends the rest of the movie trying to lose the police tails he has, and stay alive long enough to find his double-crossing employer.

There’s tropes from this movie that get tapped for crime movies that followed it:  the beautifully-dressed, handsome assassin that is a hollowed out shell until he meets that one girl (the pianist, in this case); there’s the double-cross by his employers, the cat and mouse games with police and other assassins.  In the Paris of this movie rains almost as much as Ridley Scott’s future Los Angeles.  (Costello and Deckard have a very similar feel to their characters.)  And there’s the last hit gone bad due to his change of heart about the job.

The movie is a bit slow moving and modern action fans might find it drags, but it’s worth a look.