Frailty (2001)

Alright, last week's review was not very Christmassy. It was, in fact, not at all related to Christmas. But this week I have truly found the meaning of the holiday in a religious horror film that shows the roots of this festive time of year – a belief and devotion to Christ, whose birthday we should all revere and celebrate instead of that fat jolly red bastard who really just represents the evils of American capitalism. 

With that said, this is a movie about a guy who gets visions from “God” that tell him to go murder people who are apparently demons. Now that's festive!

Director: Bill Paxton

Starring: Bill Paxton, Matthew McConaghuey

IMDb

This movie and I have a long history together. See, I used to rent a lot of horror movies at now-defunct video rental giant Blockbuster. I became fascinated early on with horror movies, and often would try and rent random ones that nobody ever heard of in an attempt to find a really, really good one. Most of the time, these movies turned out to be complete shit. Other times they were mildly okay with flaws. Sometimes, though, I'd get a really good one. They were rare, but it was worth the effort. This was one of those few choices.

We start this one off with an FBI agent, Wesley Doyle, receiving a visit from Matthew McConaghuey's character, Fenton Meiks. It's painfully obvious this was before McConaghuey was a household name, because rather than be starstruck, Doyle is just confused as to why this weird guy is coming to his office in the middle of the night with stories about serial killers.

You shoulda seen the time George Clooney came to his office and started talking about sports statistics!

Fenton says he thinks the killer may be his brother, Adam. When asked why, Fenton says he used his incredible reasoning and deductive powers – while he was sitting on the couch getting wasted off his ass, Adam called him, made some damning comments about how the world was full of demons, and then shot himself in the head. I know, that really took a lot of deduction, right? He must be a super sleuth.

This is when I have all my best revelations too.

Do all serial killers HAVE to keep a board with newspaper clippings of their crimes? Seems a bit counterproductive...

As this was apparently a huge murder case in this city, Doyle asks Fenton to take him out to this garden where Fenton claims to have buried Adam. I guess they have to do it now rather than just asking Fenton for the address and going out with a proper forensics crew in the sunlight like sane people. That would just be too much of a hassle. No, of course they have to do it now! For dramatic effect!

In the car, Fenton reveals one of his many magic powers – when he speaks, the movie goes into Super Flashback Mode, to when he and Adam were happy little children in an idyllic small town. Their father is played by Bill Paxton, who comes home one night and tells his children that God has spoken to him and wants them to start “destroying demons” as part of a holy mission about the end of the world or something else silly like that. Rather than just start planting fliers on cars or screaming about it in front of college libraries during finals week, I guess Paxton is just a special kind of crazy who starts plotting to do it immediately.

The best time to manipulate your own children is when they're clearly half asleep!

Yeah. I guess there was no qualms about killing people from this apparently normal guy, huh? Not even a sliver of doubt? You could say he's just that into doing whatever God says, and as we don't know this character, you could be right about that. His brain, like many fervently insane zealots, is really just a black void with an Etch-a-Sketch in it waiting for God to use His hands to form ideas upon it.

What follows this is several scenes of two children watching Bill Paxton kill people. While I'm sure that's exciting for Paxton, for those looking for that good old Christian spirit, it is a bit of a buzzkill. I must say, this is not doing its Christian duty at all.

I guess Adam, the younger brother, actually buys into all the bullshit Paxton is spewing about it being a calling from God. Usually you have to buy a kid a few video games to make him believe your holy murdering crusade, but Paxton doesn't look to have much money at all. Huh. Must just be a persuasive guy then.

For all the strangeness of these murdering scenes, I do have to give the movie one thing – it is quite creepy and unsettling to watch these scenes. With Paxton's dead-eyed stare and creepy 'enlightened religious zealot' cadence to his voice, followed with the grisly implications of the bodies being chopped up in that basement, it's pretty gruesome and chilling.

However, I do have to call the movie out for one of the strangest scenes in it – when young Fenton runs across town to the sheriff and tells him his dad is killing people, the sheriff just flat out doesn't believe him and mocks him as a liar. Why? Doesn't it at least merit checking out? He's accusing somebody of MURDER. I get that you're a small-town sheriff and you'd rather be doing the crosswords or humping your secretary than solving crimes. I get that your most devious cases usually just involve some kid drinking too much at the local bar. BUT COME ON. IT'S A MURDER CASE. You gotta at least look into it!

"I'm halfway into a bottle of Wild Turkey and was in the middle of watching the hockey match. How dare you disturb me for your petty causes like 'murder' and 'upholding the law of the land'?"

Even though the sheriff believes Paxton when Paxton says he isn't killing people, the sheriff goes and checks in the shed outside anyway. There's nothing there now and the sheriff still thinks Fenton is a liar, but Paxton comes in anyway and kills the sheriff with an ax. Why? He was on your side! With law enforcement like this, hell, I'd just start dropping decapitated bodies on his fucking lawn. Not like he'd care! Why kill him? He's your greatest ally in this killing spree and you just got rid of him.

Then Paxton locks Fenton up in this hole in the ground for a week until Fenton 'fesses up to believing in God and their murder-mission. Hell, stick me in a place like that for a week and I'd cop to seeing JFK murdered by aliens in flying saucers. I don't think this is quite a confirmation that Fenton is exactly on your side, Paxton – but I guess a guy who thinks God is instructing him how to kill people isn't really the sharpest pencil in the drawer.

I'm sure nothing bad will happen after this. Nope. Nothing!

The murders continue on their merry paths, until Fenton finally has enough and gives ole Paxton the ax:

"On second thought, maybe I shouldn't have believed you were on board with my religiously inspired killing spree! I guess I'm a real idiot!" 

Unfortunately, Adam takes over and kills the guy they were originally trying to kill. Boy, this sure isn't putting the Christ back in Christmas at all!

Not your grandfather's Christmas Story! Actually this movie doesn't take place around Christmas. Why am I trying to hammer this joke in?! WHY AM I SO UNFUNNY?!?

Then we go back to the present times, where Fenton reveals to Agent Doyle that he was really Adam Meiks all along, and Fenton was another serial killer altogether. It's here that the movie shows us there really were supernatural religious elements in play all along – they weren't just Paxton hallucinating. To demonstrate this, we see Adam now magically knowing that Doyle murdered his mother years and years ago:

The funniest thing about this scene is the fact that an old lady died. No, I'm kidding – it's that the movie never fucking explains why Doyle, who is apparently a regular FBI agent now, would kill his mother! Was it a bout of temporary insanity? Was she evil too? Is he just a sick fuck who needs to be locked up? I dunno. The movie never tells us. It's pretty much just a shockingly poorly written excuse for Adam to lure Doyle out there and tell him this whole story.

In addition, we also learn that while the guy we thought was Fenton was really Adam, the real Fenton was a serial killer, too! Yup. I guess that crazy gene runs in the family. Why did he become a killer? Because he was traumatized because his daddy was one? I dunno, it isn't very well fleshed out or established. I guess everyone in this universe is a serial killer! Call the world the Killerverse for all I care. Say that the old lady down the street kills orphans in the middle of the night for shits and giggles. Say the receptionist at the FBI building murdered her whole family last week and nobody found out. Go crazy!

After that we see Adam is actually the sheriff of this town now.

His opponent in the last election was the town's local pedophile. Because the only choices in this world are bad and worse!

I love this movie's stance on law enforcement. The only cops we see are a) a non-caring dipshit who doesn't even see accusations of murder as a big deal, b) a guy who killed his mother and c) a God-powered religious serial killer who makes Dexter Season 6 look like child's play. That's lovely. I'm sure the cops watching are just overjoyed at that!

This movie is still pretty frigging good. It's a solid thriller with good performances from the kids, especially given that they have to carry so much of the film. Paxton and McConaghuey do serviceably and the story is very solid overall. The fear comes from watching Paxton believing he's exactly right in murdering these people, and especially goading his young sons into it. That kind of thing could probably happen in real life, and things involving terror to children are scary as shit.

There were a few points I can see now aren't all that good, sure. Like the numerous holes in the plot whenever law enforcement is involved – come on, that sheriff should have known SOMETHING was up. And I guess the film is really weakened by the reveal at the end where you see McConaghuey and Paxton really did have some kind of supernatural powers to see people were evil. That kinda makes it too much like a Christ propaganda film of sorts...I mean, it still works overall, but the effect is a bit less, is all.

I would have preferred it remain more ambiguous as to whether or not there was anything supernatural. For that matter, keep it all in the past. Don't even show us the present at all, or if you have to, make it very minor parts at the beginning and ending. The scariest part of the film is the middle bit where you see Fenton and Adam as kids – just make a whole movie about that, from their eyes, and don't make it too obvious whether God really is telling them to kill demons or not. That would just be a better flick, and I'd find it even scarier than I found this.

Overall though? Still a good horror movie. Go check it out!

Though, now that I think about it, this wasn't very related to Christmas either. Huh. I guess the idea of God telling people to murder in his name isn't the part that those Christians really wanted Christmas to be about. My bad!

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

Predator 2 (1990)

You'd think it would be really easy to make a Predator sequel. I mean, the first one wasn't exactly the stuff of geniuses – you take a bunch of musclebound meatheads, stick 'em in the jungle and watch them get killed off by a sometimes-invisible alien. I had never seen this one, so I was like, oh, it'll probably be more or less the same, right? Right?

RIGHT?!

Nooooooo.

Director: Stephen Hopkins

Starring: Danny Glover, Gary Busey

IMDb

We start this one off with some news reports detailing the dystopian future we all have to look forward to: in 1997, apparently voodoo gang members rule Los Angeles and the police are helpless to stop the constant gunfire and gang warring going on. You read that right, yes – voodoo gang members.

I...just can't even comprehend what kind of bungled thought process went into THAT one – hey, let's make a predator sequel! Cool, what ideas do you have? Well, I thought I'd add in some voodoo gang members in a dystopian future landscape to really exemplify what the Predator is all about and...hey, why are you running for the door? Come back!

Well that's what should've happened. Also, yes, 1997. I do remember the violent gang wars that ruined LA at that time – what a fiasco. And to think all we have to worry about these days are lesser issues like ISIS and the economy and shit. We have it easy!

So apparently our main character is Danny Glover, playing a horrible actor. Or is that not a role at all? There isn't a lot to say about the first twenty minutes or so, as much of it is just a haphazard dive into gratuitous shooting and violence. This isn't necessarily bad, but it's tough to get invested in a film that doesn't seem to give two shits about actually introducing you to any of its characters in the least – instead it's just “Hey! Look at how much violent shit we can put in!”

The gunfire and the cars getting blown up have more character development than the actual characters.

Although there is one guy who we'll rememeber, though mostly for cocaine induced reasons:

Well that's how everyone on set got through making this thing, anyway.

This whole thing goes to shit when the Predator shows up and slaughters most of the gang members. The last guy, Mr. Cocaine over there, is left to jump off a building when he sees the Predator coming for him. This surprises exactly nobody until they notice the little detail of the one other guy in the building who was randomly chosen to be strung up like cattle with his heart cut out.

One of Glover's guys, Danny, goes off by himself and ends up getting killed. Glover gets shit for messing up the operation back at the base, because they weren't supposed to go in the building at all, and apparently he has a history of not obeying orders.

Astonishing; a movie cop that doesn't obey orders? What's next, a hot chick that needs to be saved from a villain twirling a mustache? Whatever will you do next to buck the system and fight against cliché, movie? I'm just on the edge of my seat.

We also get introduced to some other characters, like Gary Busey playing some hard ass special ops guy trying to take over this whole thing as his own. But really his job just seems to be showing off that gap between his front teeth.

Then there's Bill Paxton, who loves to tell wacky stories at crime scenes, because that's how a good cop acts, you know. This character is a constant annoyance on screen and there's really nothing about him that I enjoy.

While that's going on, the Predator is busy killing off a bunch of the Voodoo gang members in some condominium. The cops come and investigate, finding a little spearhead thingy, which Glover and his sidekicks take to some white-haired scientist lady who I think has been locked in a room for seven years with no way out:

Hi, character invented for no purpose but to dole out exposition like a Blackjack dealer!

The lady looks at the spearhead, proclaims she's completely baffled by it because it has no metals known to the periodic table, then just shrugs and lets the cops take it out with them again. You know, no point in actually researching that shit; just let them take it out with them and never bring it up again, like any good scientist is wont to do. Brilliant work, lady.

Then we get more action when a bunch of guys on some train are harassing some women when the entire train whips out guns, because this whole thing is really just the NRA's wet dream fantasy:

The Predator was apparently just waiting for this opportunity, as he comes down and slaughters most of the people on the train. The cops get there, and we see the movie's fetish for scenes where people wander around in the dark for a while before something jumps out and scares them, which is NEVER something overdone in these kinds of movies!

Run! The Invisible Man has gone INSANE!

Fortunately Paxton gets killed off in this scene, which raises the movie up a notch for me personally, as I was about to claw out my own ear drums if I had to listen to another scene of him telling jokes in the middle of a crime scene.

DIE!!!

Like clockwork, Glover gets chewed out back at the station and it's revealed he has a history of being psychologically unstable and violent, yet has been on the force for a jawdropping 18 YEARS. Are you shitting me? In the real world he would have been fired and then gone through rehab twice in that time! 18 years? Were they really that short on people? What did their other options look like?

Oh. Oh, I see. Well THAT I understand - carry on, then.

Anyway, Glover then immediately goes out and violently confronts Busey, which I'm sure will really change the higher-ups' outlook that you're some violent, crazy madman...oh wait, no, it really won't.

Oh, the guy with a history of psychotic angry breakdowns in public just did the same thing again after an 18-year career of the same shit over and over? OK, you can stay on the force.

While Glover is visiting his buddy's grave, the Predator stalks him because he has that arrowhead thing, or something like that – this scene is just an excuse for the Predator to have a scene where he runs into a little boy with a gun. C'mon; are we really that bereft for ideas that we're putting a “monster runs into little kid” scene in this shit? Is that the level we've stooped to?

Be careful, kid; you could get expelled from school for having a toy gun these days. Gotta appease the overreaction culture!

Then we get an interminable number of fight scenes which pretty much go like this: people wander around in the dark, then the Predator reveals itself, and we get a decent splurt of actual action. These scenes aren't bad, but they certainly aren't good enough to rival the intensity of the first film. I guess the most pressing thing going on is that Busey and his Special Ops idiots have figured out how to detect the Predator with some kind of thermonuclear detector or something.

Great! How will that wo---oh, I forgot, having any characters be competent would just be silly. Instead the losers and fuckups are the only ones who can survive in a movie like this!

He died as he lived, with his mouth open.

Glover and the Predator have a showdown where Glover takes off his mask and the Predator does his whole "repeat a line from earlier in the movie" thing like in the first one. Only unlike that movie, this time it's a really dumb, lame line that mostly embarrasses me for the makers of this movie. Are you ready for this? The Predator, this ultra badass alien super-warrior, utters this line: "Shit happens!"

Fuckin' seriously? THAT was the best you could come up with, writers? "Shit happens" was the summation of your creative wit? On the one hand, it doesn't even make sense; how does that have anything to do with the situation at hand? On the other, at least it kinda sums up the making of this movie. Shit does happen. As is quite evident here.

You'd think THIS would be the end of the movie, but no, there's still 30 minutes left. 30 minutes? How? What more do you really have to do with this story? Are we going to have the all-important scene where the Predator talks to his therapist about how his mother never loved him and that's why he turns invisible and kills people on other planets?

What about the scene where the Predator helps his best buddy set up a wedding reception? Is that one included?

I'm just asking out of curiosity, as really, this thing is dragging on like a party thrown by your great aunt where she tries to get you to play Parcheesi with your redneck hick cousins who you haven't seen since you were in diapers because oh, it'll be like the old days, except she ignores the crushing reality that the reason you haven't come over in a decade and a half is exactly because of this, and because she also sneaks in snide racist comments she doesn't realize are outdated and kind of offensive and you just don't want to get mixed up in that kind of thing anymore, so you just stick to calling her twice a year on Christmas and birthdays from now on.

What? Oh, where was I? Oh yeah. 30 minutes left after all this? Nobody was around in the editing room nodding off to sleep going “hey, maybe we need to cut this thing down by at least 20 minutes”? I mean that's really all you're doing at this point – creating a cure for insomnia.

But hey, it's not all a loss...we do get the scene where he scares an old lady in the bathroom.

The Predator tries heroin...his experimental days...

In the alternate ending, the Predator is killed by an old lady with a broom. This ending was eventually rejected after test audiences thought it was too realistic.

Because yes, this movie was so desperate it needed to include both the 'little kid' cliché AND the 'old lady' cliché just to show how lighthearted and goofy it really is with its monster movie concept. That's fuckin' astonishing, the level of pandering here.

Then somehow Glover slides down an elevator cable and finds a spaceship with an inside that I think was decorated by the crew from Big Trouble in Little China.

Except Kurt Russell could have made this movie awesome. Seriously; who thought replacing Arnold Schwarzennegger with Danny Glover and Gary Busey was a good idea anyway?

Glover fights the Predator and somehow beats it down, but then a bunch of its buddies pop out of thin air and carry him away. But not before tossing Glover a gun from the 1700s for no reason whatsoever!

What the hell was that about? I have no clue. I guess they intended to have a sequel to this thing, but obviously after 24 years that isn't happening.

And why should it? This thing is just a mess. There are some goofy fun moments, and not all of it is bad, but for the most part it's too long, the characters are annoying, there are a bunch of cliches and the story is just kind of a mess – the Predator mostly just seems like he's stumbling around aimlessly, and what is he even doing in this setting? I get wanting to change things up from the first film, but this just seems like some entirely different movie, some sort of dystopian gang-war thing like a discount The Warriors, with the Predator thrown haphazardly into the middle. Half the time he just seems like he's confused, as he doesn't have much purpose or direction in this movie and just pops up wherever.

There's no consistency to this thing and with a near two-hour runtime, it gets tiresome by the end, real fast. I guess I can see why some people like it, but really to me it is just an overly long, ridiculous bore for the most part. I guess you could do worse though. You know, the best thing you can say about any movie!

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

The Month of Terror: Near Dark (1987)

Director: Kathryn Bigelow

Starring: Adrian Pasdar, Jenny Wright, Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093605/

"You see those stars up there? They'll burn out in about a billion years. And you know what the sad thing is? I'll still be here when they do. In a billion years."

-Mae

Artful and atmospheric, this is a great flick that I am sad I hadn't seen already. Near Dark is one of those old 80s classics that just gets everything right, with a hearty blend of horror, romance and vampire mysticism coming together for something sorrowful and bleak, but also quite beautiful.

Most vampire movies just go for gore and cheap smut, but this one actually takes the time to have some awesome directing that unfolds into an incredibly captivating story. I love how it just jumps right into the action from the start, without really any build up at all, and just keeps you hooked with every turn. Finally we have a movie that doesn’t feel the need to oversaturate us with pointless drawn-out crap introducing everything. Sometimes just jumping in is the best way to go – same as swimming. He’s on the road, he picks up the girl, and the movie gets going. Nothing else is necessary here.

At first it's a rather sad romance that turns twisted when the girl impulsive Caleb picks up bites him, but as the film goes on it cycles through several other emotions and movements from scary to action packed, all while flowing so well that it feels like half its actual runtime. The trials Caleb has to take to prove himself to the vampire cult can be taken as some kind of coming-of-age message, but it's not forced and is actually relatively in the background, so you can enjoy this just as a great vampire story or as a meaningful, implicating tale.

Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton kick up a storm as the two main antagonists, and by contrast, Jenny Wright is captivatingly beautiful and heartachingly tragic. The characters are all really well done in general. You don’t ever learn about any of their backstories, but you really get a sense of them through their expressions, actions, etc., and it’s all very powerful. You can see a ton of pain and longing in Jenny Wright’s eyes – you get the sense she’s a character who’s had a lot of terrible things happen to her, lost a lot of people, doesn’t want it to happen again, despite her natural urges. Very human, very intricate.

I don't know how this will hold up on future viewings, but as it stands, Near Dark is a great film, running the gamut of emotions and crafting a unique and thought provoking movie out of a subject that was already rather trite even back then. The characters are interesting even though you know almost nothing about them, the directing is incredible, the setting is awesome with the whole dirty, run-down Western feel (wish more movies would do this in modern settings), the action is cool…it’s just an all around winner of a movie. This is up there with Let the Right One In as one of the best vampire movies ever. Go see it if you haven't. This is probably the most poignant and meaningful movie I’m going to review this month. A horror movie for the ages.

REVIEW: A Simple Plan (1998)

Director: Sam Raimi

Starring: Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120324/

Sam Raimi is an odd character, isn’t he? You can’t fault him for not branching out. I think his best work will always be The Evil Dead (the first one), but most of the other stuff he’s done is admirable as well.

Well, OK; MOST of what he’s done is creative and has merit to it. But in between the creeping horror/comedy of his early works and the mainstream-friendly work he did with Spider-Man, there lay another movie – a dark and tense drama about two brothers who find a crashed plane with a dead guy and a bag with millions of dollars in it, in the middle of the snowy woods.

Starring Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton, this is one of those movies that is certainly dramatic and gripping, but at times takes the dramatism a bit far, and sometimes lapses into a comic book-like melodrama. Mainly the focus is on the two brothers and the decay of their worlds around them as the money destroys them. Yeah. Money is evil! In this case, it’s pretty easily understandable – it drives several characters to murder, for Pete’s sake. The acting is well done. Thornton gives the most emotionally vulnerable performance, and his status as a poor, downtrodden and weak-looking guy gives him a lot of potential for empathy from the viewers. But Bill Paxton does a good job playing a snooty, opportunistic schemer too, as he double-crosses and backstabs his way to keeping the money for his wife and kid.

The story unfolds pretty smoothly, rolling through each conflict and gradually escalating to the chilling and tragic climax. Lou (Brent Briscoe) is a rude, crude lout who also discovered the money with them, and through the film he gets progressively more irate about Paxton’s suggestion that he (Paxton) keep all the money at his house until they’re sure they can get away with spending it, finally ending in a shoot-out where Lou ends up dead. There’s another scene where a farmer is killed, too. These are not murderers; just average people in possession of a lot of money. That kind of power makes people susceptible to things they might not do otherwise. This is pretty much the movie’s main theme.

But a lot of the time even that gets stretched beyond the limits of credibility. When Paxton’s wife (Bridget Fonda) sees the money for the first time, she automatically – like literally, in a second – starts plotting and scheming ways to keep the money for themselves. At first I thought this was just a little silly, being that she had changed her tone so fast, but when she started advocating murder and telling Paxton to turn his brother against Lou, I couldn’t believe it anymore. It’s just too comic book­­-esque. How would this seemingly normal looking woman be able to come up with all of this shit so fast, and with so much certainty? Is she some kind of secret agent, or terrorist? It’s just too over the top.

And then at the end, when Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton and the sheriff (Chelcie Ross) are out in the woods and the ‘FBI agent’ they’re with turns out to actually be the brother of the guy in the plane who was trying to steal the money to begin with when it crashed. He kills the sheriff and holds Paxton at gunpoint, and I don’t know, this also just seems way too comic-book-like, way too fantastical for such a gritty story like the film was going for. I can’t help but think that moments like these take away from the very realistic and poignant drama that some of this film has. I don’t mind comic-book-like, over the top and melodramatic scenes in movies – sometimes they can be entertaining; these are still movies, mind you, and I don’t pretend everything has to be scaled down to a realistic level. But when a movie like this one has some really good, touching drama and tension, over the top moments like the ones I’ve talked about here really ruin the flow.

I think the best parts of this movie are the scenes with Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton together just…talking about stuff. These are the moments when the movie quiets down and really delivers some raw, emotional goodness in the form of solid and relatable drama. Like the part where Paxton finds out that their father committed suicide – that’s good! I wish they had really done more with this idea. There was a lot of potential there. And in general their conversations are always interesting. The two actors work well together and the writing remains strong and down to Earth.

So this movie is good. It’s not perfect and there are moments when the drama is stunted by the over the top nature of some scenes, but it’s worth watching, and never gets dull. Sam Raimi’s works after this weren’t nearly as impressive, but this one’s worth seeing. Go check it out.