A Quick Review of "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire"

Starring: Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright

Director: David Silverman

Created by: Matt Groening, James L. Brooks, Sam Simon

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0348034/

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_Roasting_on_an_Open_Fire

"But he's a loser. He's pathetic. He's...a Simpson." - Homer on Santa's Little Helper

I wanted to do a quick something for the holidays, so I figured the best way to do it would be to briefly review a Christmas special, which also happens to be the series premiere of my favorite TV show of all time.

Saying that "The Simpsons" is my favorite TV show is kind of like saying my favorite ice cream flavor is chocolate (it is, by the way): not everyone would say the same, but it is almost a boring choice. But there is good reason for that: the show has influenced nearly every aspect of our culture and is permanently etched in the minds of all who grew up with it. Some people go to church on Sundays religiously; I would watch "The Simpsons" on Sunday religiously. Heck, I still watch new episodes of it when I have the time. No, it is not nearly as good as it used to be and is done more out of habit and loyalty than anything at this point. But I am not here to talk about that. In the spirit of the season, and to commemorate the 25th anniversary of its original airing (which was before I was born, by the way), I am here to give you my (short) take of "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire."

(Warning: I am assuming most of you reading this are fans who have seen this episode a million and one times, but just in case you are not, there will be spoilers).

The episode features the Simpsons running into trouble during the holidays when their sources of income fall through: Homer does not get his Christmas bonus because Mr. Burns is a greed bastard and Marge has to use their Christmas savings to remove a tattoo that Bart got without telling anyone. Homer keeps the former a secret and tries to find ways to make sure his family's Christmas is not a disappointment. This includes getting part-time work as a mall-Santa and attempting to get rich at a dog racing track by betting on a canine with a very familiar name.

By this description alone, it sounds like a fairly typical Simpsons episode, and indeed there are many aspects within it that have carried on throughout the years. However, you will probably notice that this is very much a series under construction. The animation is rather primitive, the voice actors seem very cautious in the way they deliver their lines, and the jokes are generally safe in terms of their content. And while most of the characters are more or less constructed the way most people view them today (especially Bart), others have undergone some noticeable changes since 1989. Ralph Wiggum makes only a brief appearance, but it is hard to overlook the fact that he sounds...uh...not "special." Lisa sounds like, dare I say, a normal 8-year old girl who wants a pony for Christmas. The character who seems most out of place is Homer: aside from the Walter Mattau-style voice (seriously, that is who Dan Castellaneta originally based it on), he seems a lot more straight-laced than he does in later seasons. His intelligence nothing to brag about but not abysmal, his anger seems more abrupt and threatening, and he appears to have a relatively strong moral conscience. When he and Bart go to the race track at the insistence of Barney Gumble (who has blonde hair, strangely enough), he seems genuinely ashamed about it. That's not the Homer Simpson I know! The Homer Simpson I know would have brought the whole family with him and blow their entire life savings on that damn dog!

By the way, does anyone else who has watched this see a lot of similarities between it and "Christmas Vacation"? Both feature the family patriarch failing to turn on the Christmas lights on his house while his family watches on, getting a tree from out in the middle of the woods instead of a lot,  and, yes, not getting his Christmas bonus. They both came out around the same time so unless there was some connection between the two productions, I cannot cry plagiarism for either. My guess is that the Simpsons and Griswold families are only a small faction of people who struggle during the holidays for similar reasons.

But I digress...

In a way, all this makes sense: the show was in the process of evolving from animated shorts that would appear between sketches on the Fox program "The Tracy Ullman Show" to a full-length series. This is not exactly an easy task even today; the creators of "The Simpsons" on the other hand were doing this at a time when Fox itself was just getting started and probably had barely any budget to give them, on top of the fact that there had not been a successful prime-time animated series since "The Flintstones" ended its run twenty years prior. So you can understand if the show seems like it is trying to figure itself out. Still, it is odd to think that this would become the longest-running primetime scripted show in television history; it looks like something that would barely last a half a season today.

As the episode goes on, however, you start to see an inkling of what made the series great. Lisa leaves the pony stuff aside to give a passionate defense of her father as her male role model. Homer meanwhile gets some laughs trying to make the Santa and dog track things work (and failing), with Bart contributing to the mix.

*Spoilers start here*

And then there is the end. Once it seems like rock bottom has been hit, they encounter the dog that Homer lost money on. His name, of course, is Santa's Little Helper, who is adopted by the family as everyone learns WHAT CHRISTMAS IS ALL ABOUT!!! Okay, it is very cheesy and cliche, but it works.

*Spoilers end here*

The Simpsons was always good at mixing humor with heart. I have the quote on top because it is a good synopsis of the episode and to a certain extend the series as a whole: while people (and animals) are flawed, they do their best to rise above it all. Even if they do not succeed, they still manage to find what is really important in life. And hopefully, have a laugh while doing it.

So that is "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire." How does it hold up a quarter of a century later? Fairly well. It is not the greatest Christmas special ever, and certainly not the best "Simpsons" episode ever (at least it is not the Worst. Episode. Ev...sorry I could not help it...). Still, it has the Christmas spirit and is, in its own little way, a very appropriate start to a beloved series.

I definitely recommend it if you have not seen it already. And if you have...see it again!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

The pictures and links on this page do not belong to me and are being used for entertainment purposes only. Please do not sue me,

Ghostbusters 2 (1989)

Ghostbusters was a great film and a classic of cinema. But it wasn’t just a classic. It was the film that defined a generation. It was a movie about a bunch of working class schmucks starting up a business at their lowest point and succeeding. Never mind the fact that it was a goofy, hilarious ghost-romp - it also had heart to it and a lot of wit, and the people of the 80s were probably attracted as much to the working class, blue-collar American entrepreneurial spark as they were to the supernaturally charged antics.

And then the sequel came out.

Director: Ivan Reitman

Starring: Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Dan Aykroyd

IMDb

A lot of people really didn’t like this movie for whatever reason. I dunno - I didn’t see this as a kid; in fact I only saw it as a young adult for the first time, but I always thought it was good. While the original had more classic lines and iconoclastic scenes, this one I always thought was a good movie anyway and plenty funny and enjoyable on its own. As this year marks the 25th anniversary of this film, I thought I’d take a look and see what it was, from a more critical eye, that people didn’t like about this flick. Let’s turn on the proton packs, don our grey janitor suits and try not to cross the streams.

This one starts off immediately with a text card saying Five Years Later - and as the film was made five years in real life after the first one, I think the movie deserves an accolade for truth in advertising. Take that Guardians of the Galaxy - you should’ve waited that 26 years after the opening scene to make the rest of your movie!

We then see that this was at the very edge of that time in movies where things like this could happen and not cause an infuriated outrage immediately:

I'm never having kids.

Sheesh. If that happened in a movie these days, you’d get five Facebook pages the night after it was released crying for the beheading of the director in the middle of a crowded city street. Also, shouldn’t Sigourney Weaver be a bit better at looking after a baby when she’s fought off aliens in the past? Just saying, movie.

We then see where a ghostbusting pedigree gets you - birthday parties where little kids scream about wanting He Man instead. Most parents didn’t want a 75% naked guy with hair like Fabio at their 10 year old boy’s birthday party, so I guess the Ghostbusters were option #2. I guess getting Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (i.e. real turtles with voice boxes Krazy Glued to their shells) was option #3.

That's Jason Reitman as the little boy, who would later grow up to make movies like Thank You for Smoking and Up in the Air. Call this scene a "passing of the torch" between father and son, if you will.

We also see them dancing to their own theme song at the party. Wait a second; who the FUCK recorded that song in-universe? I thought it was just a theme song! So they’ve actually gotten a real song IN THE MOVIE’S UNIVERSE to dance along to? Huh. Go figure.

This is like watching your childhood heroes get drunk and fall on their asses while trying to reclaim their former glory. Painful - going down in flames, guys...

This scene is just proof of one of the movie’s flaws … it’s a debilitating condition I like to call sequel-itis, where a follow-up to a well-acclaimed film doesn’t further the story of the original so much as deconstruct it, leaving its characters in a run-down place in life and having the first film’s accomplishments serve as a yellow brick road to the unemployment line.

Characters will do silly and demeaning things that mostly just make them look, well, silly. Instead of a continued story, sequel-itis knocks the franchise over with the proverbial flu, forcing it to lose ground and have to pick itself back up again. It takes a lot more guts and talent to write a sequel where the characters don’t fall down and regress to where they were before the first movie started again - it takes talent to write characters that continually progress. Unfortunately Ghostbusters 2 does tend to fall into this trap.

We also get Bill Murray as a TV show host on a show about weird psychic phenomena - his guests include a guy who wrote a book about the end of the world, claiming it will end on New Year’s Eve, and a lady who says an alien took her to his hotel room and told her the world will end on Valentine’s Day in 2016. Well, all I have to say about THAT is, at least we won’t have to sit through another presidential election that’s actually just a big media circus.

Also I thought aliens would have better taste in hotels than the Hilton. I mean at least go to the Marriott instead, guys. That’s the real hub for supernatural vacationing.

The guys all meet up again to help out Dana Barrett with a problem involving her infant son, who she fears is in danger from some kind of supernatural force. But we see the only danger the baby is in comes from Peter Venkman, who likes to pick up the baby and insult it for not being his child. I sure hope he doesn’t remember any of these diatribes when he gets older. Those are the sorts of things that mess a kid up.

Don't shake his hand, kid. That'll open up doors you never expected - like bursting randomly into comedic jokes...

We also get this line from Egon: "I had part of a slinky as a kid. But I straightened it."

Wow. That's got to be the saddest fucking thing I've ever heard. Good job - up there with Million Dollar Baby and pictures of starving children for sure.

They end up discovering there’s actually a giant river of pink slime under the streets of New York City - wait, this is news to people? I always knew that.

I don’t fucking know. I’m just wondering where the hell they got that construction equipment. Was it just in the trunk of the Ghostbusters car the whole time?

I guess they all somehow became masters of using that construction equipment too. Guess ghostbusting involves a lot of different skills.

They get arrested and are in court the next day with a judge that is perhaps the most extreme I’ve ever seen in my life - he screams like a Looney Tunes character and says he wants to burn them at the stake for being frauds. Geez. Either this guy was having a really bad day and just needed some Quaaludes to calm down, or he’s never judged anything more serious than a parking violation before this.

"Bahahahahahaha....my life is an unending ruinous smoldering pile of rubble. Why do they let me be a judge again?"

Then again, these days you can shoot an unarmed black kid and get off because “you were defending yourself”...maybe judges in the 80s were just more innocuous.

Dana’s troubles aren’t over either, as she is attacked by Ditto from Pokemon:

"I WILL HAVE MY MOTHERFUCKING REVENGE!"

That isn’t the only thing she’s attacked by though - she’s also under constant siege from Venkman, who she shares possibly one of the weirdest relationships ever with. He didn’t want a baby when they were together years ago and constantly avoided the subject, yet now acts jealous that she has a kid.

She constantly warns him not to try anything funny and acts like she doesn’t want to be together, but then walks around in his house wearing nothing but a towel.

"We can have sex, but it doesn't mean you can try any funny business."

Not to say either one of them is at fault - THEY’RE BOTH WEIRD AS FUCK. Being a relationship counselor for these two must be fucking fun, huh? Probably requires a person with a will strong enough not to bang your head against a wall with your eyes bleeding and your brain aneurysm screaming after twenty minutes.

Not to mention the crowning achievement of complete insanity these two characters have - after learning that a bloodthirsty centuries-old immortal tyrant is the cause behind the slime in the sewers (just go with it), what is Venkman and Dana’s plan of action? Well, the logical one of course: go on a date while the other Ghostbusters go down in the sewers and mess around with the slime.

Actually, on second thought this is some brilliant entrepreneurial work. Smooth-talk the other guys into doing the dirty work while you go eat at a high class establishment with a beautiful woman. That’s the kind of thinking that allows you to do nothing else after this movie but Wes Anderson films and become a fodder for Internet memes.

They also discover that the pink Ditto slime can light on fire when you get too close to figuring out why it exists. But luckily Ernie Hudson with a fire extinguisher is right there to save their asses, like the boss he is:

They just keep him locked in a closet with a fire extinguisher until they need him.

Down in the sewers, Winston discovers the genesis of one of the great Halloween haunted house scares - the good ole “train coming at you then disappearing” thing:

So after that stunt, the Mayor gets them into his office and they try and explain exactly what the fuck was going on. The Mayor’s aide, who hates them for no reason, ends up getting them locked up in an insane asylum, unbeknownst to the Mayor:

That's Bill Murray's brother Brian Doyle-Murray playing the doctor here. Guess that was fun at family reunions. "You didn't really want to lock me up in an insane asylum, did you, Brian? Brian? Uh...why are you so quiet right now?!"

This is another of the film’s worst moments - why are they in an insane asylum? Did nobody remember the giant fucking Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from the first one? Was everyone in this movie just passed out drunk on cough syrup when the Ghostbusters were fighting Gozer in the first movie? How does nobody believe them? In terms of half-crazy TV paranormal investigators with a slightly worrisome obsession with marketing, THESE GUYS are probably some of the more believable!

Fortunately there’s a Statue of Liberty cameo to save us all:

Man that's a lot of people waaaay too happy about seeing the Statue of Liberty marching toward them. How do they know it isn't the bad guy here? They can't see the Ghostbusters from way down on the ground!

That's several thousand dollars in property damage, good job!

I wonder if they’ll use this as a promotional campaign for the city - hey, if you want to experience NYC the right way, take a ride in the Statue of Liberty! It may destroy the city’s streets and sidewalks, but it’ll drive our tourism industry through the roof faster than shiiiiiit. Then go gorge yourself on hotdogs.

So they all save the day, even Louis Tully, who dons a Ghostbusters outfit in a clear case of "nobody needed to see this ever":

I'd say this is jumping the shark, but frankly I'm still traumatized by the word 'shark' after seeing Creature.

So that’s Ghostbusters 2. I still like it. While I won’t say it’s as good as the original by a long shot, I also wouldn’t say it’s bad either. I don’t really know how any sequel they made to Ghostbusters would have been satisfying to fans - after all, most of the cast and even director Ivan Reitman didn’t want to do this at first and only changed their minds later. The genius behind the first Ghostbusters was, in part, because the guys were nobodies; they had no reputation and they just sort of came out of nowhere and captured the worlds’ hearts.

In the second one, not only do people know about them in the movie’s universe, the WORLD knows the Ghostbusters exists in real life. They had huge reputations. For a movie about a bunch of down on their luck schmoes, it doesn’t really work so well when your losers are actually the biggest stars in the world in real life. The cartoon had already aired at this point too, and so a lot of the quiet and somewhat mature wit of the first movie is replaced with goofy slapstick and over the top emoting. And that’s a bit of a letdown.

However, the movie as a whole is still very enjoyable overall. The electric energy and bounce of the first movie is still there, the supernatural goofy plot is still there (albeit maybe not as dark and occult as the first movie’s Gozer plot) and the characters are still really good. There are a few dumb moments, but for the most part the characters - especially Bill Murray and Harold Ramis - carry the film higher than it would have been otherwise, and the chemistry and energy between them is still very ripe and present throughout the runtime. So despite a few goofy 80s-movie moments, a couple dumb cliches, I still really enjoy Ghostbusters 2. I can see why some people dislike it, but it’s good in my books.

Images copyright of their original owners, I own none of them.

REVIEW: Society (1989)

With Black Friday just past us now, and the Christmas season coming up, there’s a lot to be said about the commercialism, superficiality and fakeness of society. So being that I need a cheap segueway to review Society, I might as well go ahead with that. Society is a criticism of society, and being that society has become even more obsessed with commercialism and marketing in the 25 years between the movie and this review, I might as well review Society, as Society is a critique of society!

Director: Brian Yuzna

Starring: Billy Warlock, Devin DeVasquez

IMDb

We start this masterpiece off with a scene of the main character, King 80s Mullet. I’m sure he has another name in this movie, but really that’s what he’s supposed to be. Take characters from any number of 80s flicks from Big Trouble in Little China, Gremlins, The Hitcher, Pumpkinhead, Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare and every slasher movie ever made after the first Friday the 13^th and throw them in a blender, and you’d get this guy. It’s practically alchemical. I mean, Dr. Frankenstein couldn’t have done so well.

So anyway, he goes out in the middle of the night with a knife, and then we switch to a scene with him talking to his psychiatrist. He says he’s afraid of the psychiatrist. I’d say this is a reason to keep talking to his psychiatrist, but the psychiatrist reacts in such a creepy way that I’m inclined to believe the psychiatrist is actually a serial killer.

Because the movie is about as emotionally consistent as a bipolar person off their meds, the next scene is about King 80s Mullet and his best friend, Cameron from Ferris Bueller knock off, playing basketball. The best friend character says King 80s Mullet will grow up to assassinate the president someday…I don’t really know what THAT’S supposed to mean. Maybe this is his future:

We also get a creepy guy in a closet assaulting King 80s Mullet’s sister, putting a hand over her mouth and shoving her down on the bed and everything. He says he wants to “talk” to her…sure, that’s why he hid in the closet and shoved her down on the bed like a rapist…I totally believe that. I also believe that the news isn’t biased at all, politicians are honest and M. Night Shyamalan had a point in his career where he made good movies. I’m not gullible at all.

He just wants to talk!!!

So they chase that guy out and King Mullet talks to his sister about her “coming out party.” Uh, excuse me? Is she a lesbian or something? And if so, is a party needed? Am I just uneducated on Beverly Hills upper-echelon culture? This comes up several times and is never really explained, even before we get the big “twist” of the movie later, so it’s just strange. Most movies go from normal to strange; this one goes from strange to stranger.

If you’re just so enticed by this world that you can’t bear to stop watching this film after scenes like the above, well, you’re in luck. Next we get some fun scenes like snails on fancy dinner plates out in the garden…

Truly escargot has made a comeback in Beverly Hills! It’s all the rage! We also get endless talk of this judge guy coming to the sister’s party. Do they just have nothing else to fill the void of their empty, meaningless, shitty lives? Why don’t they watch crappy 80s movies and spend time putting together elaborate reviews on a blog? That usually works for me. But I guess they didn’t have the Internet in ’89, so that must be why.

Then later that night, King 80s Mullet comes into his sister’s room and sees…

Yep. You just saw that. A girl with her boobs on her back. Or is it her ass where her vagina should be? I don’t know; thinking about it for too long gives me nightmares, and frankly I had enough of that with Pet Sematary’s cross dressing dead baby last week. I guess this scene served its point if the point was to make that girl un-dateable for the rest of her life until this movie faded into obscurity, though.

Then at the beach, King 80s Mullet and his girlfriend, Shallow Blonde Bimbo, are making out and talking about two things: a) how much they love each other and b) how much the girlfriend wants to go to this rich guy’s party. But kids using sunscreen as water guns put a stop to that riveting conversation!

Sunscreen is now a viable Call of Duty weapon.

Then we get a double whammy when a hot chick does the same thing to King 80s Mullet as he chases the kids…because, you know, that’s an acceptable way of flirting.

It could be her way of telling him she's a transvestite.

Then the creepy attempted-rape guy from the bedroom finds King 80s Mullet and shows him a tape recording of the family at the “coming out” party, apparently doing some kind of weird orgy. As King Mullet was already feeling alienated and like his family had adopted him, this only furthers his suspicions. At school the next day, King Mullet tries to tell his girlfriend about the orgy tape, but all she cares about is the party, and then she breaks up with him for being too selfish…yeah, high school fucking sucks. Wait till college, man; then you can have conversations like this fueled by too much weed and booze and a lack of sleep. That will be paradise.

He takes the tape to his psychiatrist, then comes back later to find that somehow, the orgy has been changed to non-suspicious talk of dancing and parties, nothing weird at all. So then King Mullet calls the attempted-rape guy again and tells him to bring another copy of the tape, BUUUUUTTTTTT….

Yep, a car crash! King Mullet tries to go dig around and find the tape, only to get told by the cops that he can’t be rummaging around at an accident scene – gasp! What oppressive pigs! Somebody call V for Vendetta! But really, what did he expect? The movie treats this like some kind of telling sign that there’s a conspiracy going on, but what the hell would happen otherwise? “Oh, well, he was your FRIEND…well, okay, come and poke around the accident scene all you want! Here, you can hold our guns as well!” Movie, I get it; you’re trying to be all high-minded anti-establishment here, but c’mon. It’s a fucking accident scene! Nobody would be allowed on no matter what, except law enforcement!

So, yeah, I guess King 80s Mullet goes to the funeral for the attempted rapist guy, and finds out that House of Wax and this movie are in the exact same universe:

We then get a strange scene that again tries to prove there’s something WRONG in big, bold, capital letters with the family, as King 80s Mullet goes home and tries to tell them about the death, but they don’t care, instead just talking about the party going on later. Which King 80s Mullet has been invited to.

Being that HE was the one so broken up about how all everyone else cared about was the party instead of the horrible death of one of their friends, he’s going to take the high road and not go, right? Nope! Next scene he’s at the party, dancing with that chick who squirted sunscreen on him earlier.

You can see the grief in his face.

Truly this guy is the picture of anti-establishment, going against the grain and proving that we can still have humanity and decency in these times of…oh, screw it; he’s just as bad as the rest of them. Part of me tried to rationalize this and say ‘hey, maybe that’s the point of the whole thing.’ But it’s not – the filmmakers were just clumsy clods. You want proof? How about the next scene?

Yeah, so King 80s Mullet and his new sunscreen-fetish girlfriend go back and have hot steamy sex in her room. Then they go out and she makes him tea, and says the following line: “Do you want it with sugar, cream, or do you want me to pee in it?” Then they’re making out. Her mother comes in, some big, hulking, mute abomination of nature (real good signs for her genes in the future…), and the movie expects us to think that yes, the mother is the weird one in this scenario! SHE must be the one we should be wary of! Certainly NOT the girl who just made a joke (?) about peeing in her new fuck-buddy’s tea!

"Mmm, yeah, talk some more about pissing in my tea!"

"MOM! You interrupted our tea-pissing session! YOU'RE SO GROSS AND WEIRD!"

How about another scene, where the ex-girlfriend comes out to him and berates him for sleeping with the sunscreen-fetish chick? Bitch, YOU BROKE UP WITH HIM. What’s the logic here??? I mean, yeah, I get it; high school girls can act crazy at times. But again, the movie is treating it like this is some kind of tell-tale sign as to the creepy, unnatural stuff going on in the movie’s world! It’s not! It’s just a crazy, stupid, random, illogical segment shoved awkwardly into the film!

This movie is about as subtle as a giant ape wielding a broad sword killing the entire staff of a nuclear bomb research factory. Eh, still better than Parents any day though.

We get some other part where King Mullet goes out to meet another kid in the woods, who promises to tell him some of the secrets going on. However, that gets cut short when the kid’s life gets, well, cut short:

*canned laughter*

However, when they bring the cops back, the body is gone and the car has been replaced. King Mullet goes to school later and tries to raise awareness to the whole thing WHEN….

Yup, the guy comes back to life without a scratch on him. Guess he took a trip to the Lazarus pit in between the previous night and now…snore…I’ve seen this kind of scene in a million other films.

Then King Mullet goes home, thinking he’s going to get the jump on his parents, but really there was a whole room full of people waiting to ambush HIM that he didn’t even see! How stupid do you have to be to not notice all those people while you were waiting in the dark? I guess about as stupid to take a role in a movie with imagery like this in it:

Yep, the next 20 minutes is pretty much just this: bizarre scenes of some kind of alien orgy. Kurt Vonnegut would be proud. They’re actually very well done scenes, and the makeup and hands-on effects are incredibly done for a movie of this kind of budget in 1989. Pretty entertaining shit. I mean, provided you’re into Rush Limbaugh’s interpretation of gay marriage laws.

So after fighting a knockoff of Jack Nicholson’s Joker…

How is that not Jack Nicholson as the Joker? It's identical!

…he comes across what I am fairly sure is the strangest thing I have ever seen in my life.

Well, okay, maybe not; I’ve reviewed things just as strange as that in the last few months. And even the last few weeks. So I’ll just rectify that to “the strangest thing I’ve seen in the last five minutes.” I mean, look at this. His family had some kind of incest orgy that somehow transformed them all into one horrific abomination, all with the class and subtlety of Gene Simmons on a particularly bad night:

And the sense of manners regarding the correct and polite use of the tongue.

This is the longest set-up for a joke using the childish term "butthead" ever to exist in the history of the world.

I’m pretty sure even Peter Jackson circa 1992 would call this a bit excessive!

So, anyway, I guess they get away, even managing to get one last insult in at King Mullet’s dad (“Butthead”…what a crowning moment of intellectual BURN!). Then I guess the movie is over. What did we learn from all this? Absolutely nothing.

Yeah, so this was…something, I guess. Apparently having alien sex orgies translates to social commentary; whodathunkit? This whole thing should be insufferable, but somehow it still kind of comes off as likable. It’s just such a strange, psychedelic experience, almost dreamlike, and I have to admit it has some pretty interesting moments. Compared to similar movies like The Stuff and Parents, this is actually a lot more intriguing, having just as much schlock as it does actual, real storytelling.

But even then, I do think it could’ve been better. I mean, what the fuck WAS this about, anyway? What were those alien things? How were King 80s Mullet and Mr. Attempted Rape the only ones in the whole town who weren’t in on it? I think it actually would’ve been more interesting if, by some kind of twist, King 80s Mullet was the alien, and the weird orgy participants were human – or at least, human in their own world. Maybe King 80s Mullet is some kind of amnesiac space traveler who crash-landed on a whole planet of these weirdoes, who masquerade as human beings.

Sure, that’s pretty outlandish. But it’s also cool. Hmm, I think I’ll get started on writing a script for a remake! Oh yeah, shooting for the stars! Look out for the remake in 2014, starring Seth Rogen as King Mullet and Ellen Page as the hot chick with the sunscreen.

Watch Society here!

Images copyright of their original owners. The film Society (1989) copyright of its original owners. I own none of these things.

REVIEW: Pet Sematary (1989)

That isn’t how you spell cemetery! Instant zero stars, review over!

Director: Mary Lambert

Starring: Dale Midkiff, Fred Gwynne

IMDb

Oh okay, I’ve read the Stephen King book; calm down. It was one of my favorite books as a teenager just for how absolutely, uncompromisingly dark and morbid it was. It’s said that it was the only one of King’s classics that he didn’t want to publish at first – he thought it was too scary. So in response to that, we got a movie version a few years later that mostly failed at recreating that scary and morbid atmosphere…let’s review Pet Sematary.

We start off with a graveyard for pets, with voice overs from the kids who buried them there. Well gee. Isn’t that a happy way to start off your movie? Fortunately after that, we get something much more grounded in every day life…a family arrives at their new home and is too busy re-enacting a Norman Rockwell painting to notice their two-year-old son Gage wander around the yard and almost get run over by a truck in the middle of the road.

All that's missing is a white picket fence, which would ironically have helped these morons quite a bit...

You could have just not let him wander near the road. You know, like decent parents. But I guess that would have prevented the introduction of the most sane and well-balanced old man ever, Jud Crandall.

They didn't have an old peoples' home in this town, I guess...

Am I being sarcastic with that last bit? Well, you decide: the first thing he decides to show them as a neighborly kindness is an old graveyard for buried pets, the same one as in the opening. “Hey, welcome to the neighborhood, let me show you a creepy old pet graveyard!” Isn’t that kind of weird? You could have shown them the nice areas to have a picnic in, or the general store downtown, or even the spot on the hill where you looked up at the full moon as a young man and realized you were stuck with that goofy accent for your whole life. But instead you show them a graveyard for dead pets killed in the road.

Oh, yeah, that’s where most of ‘em come from…seriously, here’s a piece of advice for you: PUT UP A FUCKING STOP SIGN ON THAT DAMN ROAD. How has that never been brought up at any community meetings or anything?

“Hey, we got this road where it seems like nothing but giant trucks come through, and there are tons of animals and little kids that might be in danger! Is it worth putting up a stop sign or at least some “drive with caution” markers?”

“Nah. We’re going to wait until an evil clown appears on the road before we do anything.”

“But there’s an Indian burial ground that brings dead things back to life just up the hill from the road! What if…”

“SHUT UP!”

Yeah, I guess that’s how it went. Anyway, we get some decent enough scenes of main character Louis Creed, his wife Rachel and his daughter, Mediocre Child Actress, interacting with one another and their cat, who they call Church. But I call him Cheap Scary Plot Foil. These scenes aren’t anything too bad or whatever, but the acting is about as credible as, well, any Stephen King adaptation this side of the Kubrick Shining version. King’s dialogue never translated well to the silver screen, like at all, but I don’t think the goofy acting really helps matters.

But anyway, we have more important things to show…like a grouchy old housekeeper who constantly tells Rachel how jealous she is of her marriage. Gee, I sure hope this character has a point in the end! Otherwise it would just be strange and non-sequitur.

"I'm just looking for my decency and likability...oh, wait, I left it at home..." 

We also see Louis at his job as a doctor. Some guy is wheeled in after a horrible accident, and like any good hospital, the whole place goes nuts and turns into complete chaos, even the nurses and orderlies, because of this. The guy’s name is Victor Pascow, and I only bring that up because for some reason, he’s an integral part of the plot. He knows Louis’s name somehow and reappears throughout the film as a sort of ghostly spirit guide…why? I have no fucking idea. Stephen King stories always have this sort of unexplained supernatural element to them, but this one is pushing it.

Anyway, let’s not get ahead of ourselves…so Pascow dies and later appears to Louis in a dream, guiding him outside into the woods and explicitly telling him never to go beyond the Pet Sematary and into the Micmac Burial Ground. Since Louis had no idea it existed at this point and likely wouldn’t have known about it at all if Pascow hadn’t told him about it, this scene kind of shoots itself in the foot. Bonus points because Pascow comes off more like a character from a Return of the Living Dead movie than anything actually scary. How are we supposed to take this seriously?

It's like a Muppet version of Dawn of the Dead. Shaun of the Dead looked less silly.

The next day is apparently Thanksgiving, so Rachel and the daughter, Ellie, go to Rachel’s parents’ house by themselves. Why doesn’t Louis go with them? Because apparently he doesn’t get along with her parents…sounds like a shitty Thanksgiving, then. Instead he just gets a dead cat:

Jud, being a stand-up guy, decides to take him out to the old burial ground where, apparently, dead things buried there can come back to life. They bury the cat. Louis talks to Jud about it and it’s only NOW that Jud decides to let Louis in on a little secret. Apparently as a kid, Jud buried his dead dog at the burial ground, and it came back as a horrific blood-stained monster:

He got ketchup all over him!

So let me get this straight. He knew this whole time what horrible things that burial ground could do, didn’t tell Louis any of it, and still took him up there anyway? What kind of sick sadist is this guy? I guess his explanation is that he didn’t want the daughter, Ellie, to be without her cat, but what kind of reasoning is that? He would rather her have a horrific abomination of nature that would scare the living bejeesus out of her? I mean, holy shit, how much less sense can you make?

Well, I guess if you count the fact that the daughter comes home and doesn’t notice that the cat is now a horrific abomination of nature, Jud’s lies and deceptions aren’t so bad. How can she not tell there’s something wrong? She even says the cat smells bad! How does the mother not notice? It’s one thing for the cat to stink a little after running around outside. But this is supposed to be like, corpse rot of death. Wouldn’t that be, I dunno, A LITTLE BIT NOTICEABLE after a while?

I guess it’s understandable though, since that random grumpy caretaker lady kills herself shortly after. Why? Well, to incite Rachel to tell Louis about her sick, demented sister who died when she was a kid. That’s right. The caretaker’s only point in life was to serve as the catalyst for a horrible flashback scene. I guess I can’t blame her for killing herself then. I mean, wouldn’t you? Take a look at this shit:

What is that? It looks like Beetlejuice if he was run through a concentration camp. I remember this storyline from the book – it was integrated into the story a lot better there. Here it’s shoehorned in very awkwardly in the wake of a random death scene. Basically it goes like this: Rachel had a sister when she was a kid who got some kind of debilitating disease, confining her to the back room of the house because the parents were ashamed of her or something.

Who are the two random fat people in the corner? Never explained...*Twilight Zone music*

One time her parents left her alone with the sister, and the sister died. Rachel ran out the door and cried but also thought she could have been laughing…this incident, apparently, gave her an odd relationship with death for the rest of her life. I remember this plot thread being relatively well done in the book, but here it’s just done awkwardly – maybe they should have left it out, because it really fucking sucks actually. It tries for unsettling and disturbing, and mostly hits “kind of weird and a little comical with how over the top it is.” How am I supposed to take anorexic Bride of the Lizard People sister seriously?

Yeah, real fucking ominous and scary there. Hacks.

And I get it – it’s the 80s, the special effects aren’t going to be that great. But they didn’t even really try at any kind of atmosphere. If The Thing, released several years before this, could make one of the scariest movies of all time with just practical effects, and Re-Animator, released around the same time, had much better looking zombies, what is the excuse for the lack of effort in making any of the effects here look remotely scary? They’re just goofy.

Anyway, so Louis hears that whole creepy dead sister story, and says it gives him “one more reason to hate Rachel’s parents” for leaving Rachel alone with the sister. Which is fine and well, except later we see that the parents are fine and really not portrayed as neglectful or abusive or anything. So what’s the point of putting any of this in the movie? Nothing really, except to waste time – which is one of the movie’s favorite things to do.

Tragedy strikes later on when their young son Gage is killed by a truck when he wanders out into the road. Again, stop signs, they’re not a foreign concept! It’s all very tragic and sad and what not. But honestly, I can’t get over the hypocrisy here…so Louis is so quick to condemn Rachel’s parents for leaving her alone with her sick sister, but he can’t even watch his own fucking son when he’s walking into the very dangerous road full of speeding 18-wheeler trucks? Nice double standard there, asshole. Also, nice over-dramatic “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!” shout right after it happens – doesn’t diminish the weight of the scene at all…

I'd make a Darth Vader joke if this came out 15 years later!

So I guess some of these scenes are decent enough. Overall the movie at least tries to give a shit with these scenes, even if they’re not doing a terribly amazing job of it…though I can’t speak much for the goofy funeral scene where Rachel’s dad socks Louis in the face – deservedly so. Everyone starts screaming and shouting, and the whole thing comes off as more comical than it should. Pet Sematary, making child death way funnier than it ever had a right to be!

Rachel and Ellie leave to go live with Rachel’s parents for a while, and Louis ponders bringing Gage back to life with the burial ground. If you didn’t think it was stupid enough that Jud knew the effects of the burial ground and let Louis bury the cat anyway, well, the movie is about to top that. Jud then tells Louis the story of some guy who got buried in the burial ground after being shipped home from war in a coffin. In the book, this was an effective and morbid section. The movie treats it, unsurprisingly, like a big joke, having him bumble around slurring his words like a drunk. A middle finger to fans of the book if there ever was one.

So, yeah, that’s the size of it – Jud knew ALL THIS HORRIBLE SHIT happened at that burial ground, and showed Louis anyway. The stupidity is just reaching dizzying heights here, looking down on unsuspecting movie viewers and laughing at them. But hey! At least we have like twenty minutes of the ghost of Pascow “helping” Rachel to get back home after this!

Yes, if you weren’t convinced that this was just a schlocky horror comedy, well these scenes are like bright glowing neon lights pointing directly at that realization. We get all these ridiculous scenes of the ghost of Pascow, looking more and more like the ghost of Bill and Ted every scene, giving little hints to help her rent a car and hitch a ride after the car breaks down.

This has to be simultaneously the best and worst moment in the whole movie

She can’t do that shit on her own? She really needed help RENTING A CAR from the airport? Yeah, I guess that’s really one of those things that’s just too complicated to figure out without a ghost helping you. And to think these scenes were actually green-lighted by some poor sap of a studio executive…

Meanwhile, the now undead Gage preys on Jud by giggling childishly and asking to play hide and seek…yeah, real bone-tingling scary there. How come Jud doesn’t just leave his house and make a run for it? We see clearly he had many opportunities to do so. Oh well. Gage makes pretty sure he won’t be running anywhere any time soon:

How lovely…

When Rachel gets back, she for some reason goes to Jud’s place first instead of her own house. She sees the hallucination of her creepy dead sock puppet sister, which is as lame as ever, and then…

No. No, no, no, no no no. That can’t be real. You can’t be serious with that. When at any point in human existence did we need a cross-dressing undead baby? What the fuck was going through the director’s head when she allowed that in the movie? In fact, I think I know exactly what happened here. Gage came back to life the reincarnation of a certain fictional character…

If you were actually dumb enough to continue watching after that, we see Gage killing Rachel too. Louis the next morning gets a phone call from Gage – because that makes sense, even though he was too young to know how to use a phone when he was alive…and Gage tells him, quite creepily, that he wants to “play” with Louis. Louis stands there and shouts “WHAT DID YOU DO?!?” kind of like an over the top sitcom parent after the kid smeared finger paint all over Grandma’s expensive China plates. Just add in a goofy musical cue, cut to commercials, and the effect would be complete.

We get some more shitty ass acting when Louis yells at Church the cat to die after poisoning him – standing in the street and yelling at a dying zombie cat…not exactly a place you look forward to finding yourself, but there we are anyway. He goes inside and proves how hard it is to fight a two-year-old. Real fuckin’ gripping.

There is one good scene, where he has to kill Gage a second time with a lethal injection of some kind of poison. It’s a touching scene and is done well. I think it’s too little, too late.

The movie ends with Louis carrying zombie Rachel off to bury her in the burial ground. Pascow appears again and over-dramatically tells him not to do it, whilst simultaneously also sounding about as bored as anyone would with this mediocre script.

Contrast the seriousness of what happened with Pascow's girl shorts...

This could have been a powerful scene – if they cut out the silly ghost and didn’t have Louis muttering to himself about how it would work this time. In the book, everything he said was internal monologuing – NOT dialogue said out loud. Like most terrible book to movie adaptations, the movie feels the need to cram in all of that internal stuff and not just SHOW it through the visual power of filmmaking. Pretty fucking weak.

So, yeah, Rachel comes back and kills him for being a terrible actor and a terrible character, and then the movie ends.

Pet Sematary, promoting necrophilia since 1989.

So Pet Sematary kind of sucks. It’s silly, the characters are bland and the acting is pretty much awful. When I was a teenager and read the book, I didn’t see this movie because I feared it would be like this – just robbing all the power and macabre magic out of the story. And this movie was exactly what I thought it’d be back then. It’s got a few decent parts, but really it’s nothing like the book aside from the superficialities like the ideas in the plot – it’s got none of the darkness and mystery of the book.

And I don’t know. The book probably had some holes, too; plenty of the flaws I pointed out here were in the book, too. But King’s style of writing convinced you that the world you were in was real. That was a big asset to the story, as it is to any good book. The movie doesn’t immerse you like that. It can be entertaining at times, in a schlocky, silly sort of way, but it’s not the deep and immersive work that the book was. King’s writing style just doesn’t translate well to the screen. You can’t just take his long-winded dialogue and often abstract plot ideas and put them to film with no alterations. You have to make some changes to make it seem more natural, which Pet Sematary and most other King films do not do.

Oh well. There is a remake coming out, supposedly – maybe THAT will be closer to what I actually wanted from this story. It’s a far cry. But it won’t make this movie any better.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.