The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2003 remake is a movie I picked to review around the holiday season because it is all about a family and the dysfunctional ways they have to live with one another. This was the worst movie I had ever seen when I was 14 and didn't know any other movies. I figured maybe I had been overexaggerating, and in the years since, I sort of had it built up in my head that this wasn't too bad in the grand scheme of things.

Well, I was right back at age 14. This is a huge pile of cinematic manure.

Director: Marcus Nispel

Starring: Jessica Biel, R. Lee Ermey

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

This was back in the days when horror remakes were made by people who had no clue how to make a horror movie. Like, their idea of a good cast of horror actors was, cast a bunch of people who look like they belong on fashion magazine covers or underwear/swimsuit model ads. And Jessica Biel – can't forget her!

And their idea of dialogue was to just have every character be a total ass to one another for no reason! They just bitch and whine and argue so much that Leatherface is basically the new good guy of the movie. Congratulations if that was what you were going for. This is basically Tucker and Dale vs Evil from the perspective of the teenagers.

Unfortunately, Leatherface doesn't show up for like the first forty minutes of this movie, so until then it's a lot of arguing about nothing from these characters who have the personalities and looks of background extras in a shitty music video. Hell, they even pick up a hitchhiking girl who is depressed so much by their horridness, she kills herself right in their van:

Is that not what happened? I dunno. It is to me.

Anyway, they keep on arguing from then on what to do about the body, with some of them insisting it would be wrong to just dump the body on the ground. They try to pawn it off at a local gas station, but the lady won't have it or help them at all, except to say the cops could be there several hours from now. But they're going to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert, so they don't have time for that shit. So I guess driving around with a bloody corpse in the back seat is the new plan!

"Look, can we just leave the bloody corpse inside your store and go to our concert? We could leave it in the Produce aisle."

I guess they're trying to find a police station to pawn it off on, but they don't try that hard – instead of just finding out where the next police station is, they seem content with driving around randomly with no direction. Okay then! They do find a house with an old, legless man in it, and he lets them call the cops. The only problem is, the old man gets stuck upstairs and makes Jessica Biel help him up, as an excuse to grope her ass... because THAT'S what Texas Chainsaw Massacre needed, an ass-groping scene randomly.

The OTHER only problem is, Douchebag Boyfriend guy decides to come in and randomly poke around the house. Which is a terrible idea, because that's where Leatherface is lurking around! He kills Douchebag Boyfriend guy with a hammer while his back is turned. How did he stay so quiet and unnoticed before this? A big guy like Leatherface, you'd think Jessica Biel would have heard him and he would have killed her. But I guess he has very tiny, quiet feet and can move like a mouse. And because Biel is the main character, she gets immunity for now for no reason.

So she comes back out and finds the rest of her friends, all of whom are mildly concerned that Douchebag Boyfriend is missing but not that worried. They search for him by doing the Old Cliche Dumb Horror Movie thing: just walking around shouting his name. Maybe if they stand three feet over that way, the acoustics will carry and he'll FINALLY hear you shouting his name and come out from wherever he is!

I also love the stupid bullshit in all these movies where characters assume their missing friends are playing pranks on them. Who does that? Are they just such shitty people that they'd make you believe they were missing in a strange, unfriendly place? I guess I can see why they'd think this, though – one of their own guys decides to stick his arm inside a hole in a car and then pretend to get pulled inside, only to reveal it was a joke. What a douchebag. If I was the rest of them, I'd just leave his ass behind.

"Ha ha ha, I'm a worthless waste of human air and you should be ashamed for knowing me."

They do eventually get split up, and Biel and this other moron get stuck inside the Leatherface house again. The moron ends up in the kitchen, where he checks under every pot and pan on the stove and even looks in the fridge, finding all kinds of weird, wacky stuff. What is he expecting to find in there? Does he think his friend shrank down to a miniature size and is now hiding in the fridge behind the rotten meat this family no doubt keeps there?

"Bro, are you in there?"

Meanwhile, this crazy “sheriff” guy shows up, immediately spitting a disgusting brown loogie out of his mouth. That is so gross that I would've just been like 'nope, bring me another sheriff! This won't do at all!'

So he basically tortures the other three assholes for a super long time, and in a not-very-scary way – he has the nerdy glasses-wearing guy mime how the girl from the opening scene killed herself. I guess this is supposed to be threatening, but honestly it drags on waaaay too long and was never scary in the first place. Mostly it is just annoying to watch the sheriff guy mug for the camera and chew scenery like a starving man on a desert island given a rump roast. Jesus Christ is he bad.

Jesus, will somebody get the suicide help line on set for these maniacs? On second thought, eh, maybe don't.

I guess after that we get the reveal that the sheriff guy is working for the Leatherface family! Wow! I couldn't have seen that coming unless I had even the smallest morsel of a brain cell! Also, this barely feels like Texas Chainsaw at all. I don't care if you don't keep every little detail of the original, but this just feels like Shitty Midwest Horror Movie #933357.

Even the crazy family trope that was so integral to the original is toned down. The original family was totally unhinged, just mad and raving and constant screaming and noise. This one? Eh. Just kinda irritating and gross! Not that big of a deal. Pretty sure you could find some similar families in any rural outback state if you turned down a creepy enough road. Remember, the overall theme of Texas Chainsaw Massacre is “Mediocre boring stuff, because the crazed excess of the original was just not that important to bring back!”

Guess which one of these pictures is from a movie that's actually scary?

So Biel gets kidnapped and thrown in a basement, where she finds the one guy whose leg got cut off in another scene hung up on a hook. He doesn't really seem to be bleeding or in any great pain, and earlier we saw him trying to unhook himself from the hook and acting like he just got a hangnail rather than a meathook in his back – why would THAT hurt, after all? Biel ends up killing him to put him out of his misery. Got to love how there's no blood at first when the camera is on him, but then it's just all over Biel in the next shot.

Blood: who knows how it works? It's just magic!

Speaking of Biel being all wet, this movie sure does love to make up excuses for her to get her white T shirt wet and show off her boobs. That seems to be what they wanted to get across: Jessica Biel has breasts. How informative of them!

Honestly, though, as the movie drags on and on through the endless, boring, poorly done chase scene, Biel just keeps getting that tight white shirt wet! The movie seems to have an endless amount of excuses – the sprinklers are on in the random meat factory she runs into and that gets her soaking wet! Then outside, even though it was perfectly dry all movie, suddenly it's a monsoon of pouring rain that soaks her to the skin!

To offset this, the director and producers just thought about feminism and Susan B. Anthony a lot while filming, so this is actually OK in my books now.

Christ. Just call this 'Jessica Biel: Wet T-Shirt Contest Winner,' put it in the Special Interest section of the video store and it would've been more honest. I mean, I wouldn't be complaining if you did that – it'd be honest. But as is, it's not like she ever gets naked or anything, so what really is the point?

And this isn't some kind of porno. It's a fucking horror movie. Do the directors of this kind of trash think we have nowhere else we can look to see tits? If your only source of seeing boobs is to watch a serial killer slasher movie... you probably have a freezer full of dead animals that I think the cops should know about.

I know that was a lot of talk about boobs, but honestly, there was nothing else of interest happening. Fucking boring, shitty chase scene that has nothing on the terrifying 1974 version, and Leatherface is basically just Jason Voorhees with a chainsaw here. Total snoozefest.

I guess there is some subplot about a stolen baby, possibly from the woman who killed herself at the beginning of the film, though it's never elaborated on. Biel figures out the baby doesn't belong to them. I only bring this up because, in a totally unrelated scene, the baby goes missing from the Leatherface family's home! Now, come on. Don't jump to conclusions. Maybe baby's just taken his first steps!

But no, of course Biel took him. They drive away in a stolen car. I'm sure that infamous 'dinner scene' is coming up soon, right? I mean, any second now...

Wow. They just left it out, huh? Ah well. What was ever important about THAT scene in the original movie? You can totally just do TCM without it! Doesn't neuter it like a sad cat at all. Remember, the motto of this movie is 'Mediocre boring stuff that doesn't have the craziness or extremity of the original, because that wasn't important.'

This is horrible. I can't believe this ever was some kind of cutting-edge horror – but it kinda was, for 2003. This was sadly the norm for that time period, with awful disposable characters acting like jackasses so you would root for them to die in terrible ways, a lot of blatant and pointless sex symbolism that was never needed and, especially in the case of remakes, they missed the point of the original work. You don't have to keep everything identical – I like it when things change, I want to see your original interpretations of it. But to just miss the point this hard, and take out everything that was good...

Fuck Texas Chainsaw Massacre '03. Thank god this kind of slop isn't the norm anymore for the genre.

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

REVIEW: Next (2007)

SPOILERS afoot here! Beware!

Nicolas Cage is a lot of things. He’s a bad actor, a so-bad-he’s-good actor, a producer of films and an all around odd character in real life. Whatever you can say about him, he is certainly noticeable. And what way to make him MORE noticeable than to put him in a movie where he plays a psychic stage magician on the run from Julianne Moore? This is Next.

Director: Lee Tamahori

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Jessica Biel

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0435705/

I really do like the flashy aesthetic this movie has. Pretty much anything involving Las Vegas is automatically cool. This is no exception. It’s just all about the visual eye candy. The flashy lights, the gaudy buildings, the slick streets, the fast cars…it’s all here in spades, people, with a healthy American scent all over it. This really is a very American movie in the end, with a lot of shots later on of perhaps the most American thing ever, the Arizona desert – truly a majestic sight. Any movie that has people driving through the desert gets at least one brownie point for aesthetic worth. There is a lot to be said for the atmosphere of a film and how the locations chosen affect the viewer’s enjoyment of the whole.

Cage himself is his usual stoic, too-serious self of his latter days – this is the melodramatic try-hard overly serious Cage of Drive Angry, not the silly Vampire’s Kiss-styled Cage of the 80s and 90s. He’s not a good actor and never will be, but where he succeeds is pure passion and energy into what he’s doing. Cage is always an intense guy and even when he can’t emote for shit, you can always tell he is into what he’s doing. He will never purposefully half-ass a performance and he will definitely never sell out. He just loves acting – even if the rest of us have to suffer sometimes. And I think that’s what makes him a respectable actor. In his own weird little way.

Julianne Moore is…well, Julianne Moore, playing the usual overly confident, smug lady cop she has played in other movies. Jessica Biel is probably the weakest link in this thing as she just doesn’t have much of a character other than being eye candy – and she does work as that, but as an actual character she leaves a lot to be desired, mostly just acting as your generic Mary Sue female protagonist with no flaws or personality. Pretty boring.

The story is a Die Hard sort of tale, about terrorists and bombs and what not, except the twist is that Cage’s character can see two minutes into his own future to find out what’s going to happen next. Moore and her people want to capture Cage so they can channel his power to help find the terrorists, only he doesn’t want them to because he doesn’t want to be locked up like a lab rat. He does eventually team up with them when Biel is kidnapped. The whole third act is just a thrill ride, maybe not as good as any Die Hard movie, but close enough, and nail-bitingly exciting in its own right.

The only problem with this movie is actually the reason why I can’t recommend this as a bona-fide good film – it’s not exactly a small issue. One of the recurring plot points in this movie is that Cage’s psychic visions are sometimes presented to us as actual happenings in the film. Like something will happen, but then a few minutes later the screen will flash and Cage will just be sitting there THINKING about whether or not to actually let it happen – the benefits of his psychic foresight, but not exactly a strong filmmaking technique. The first few times it’s OK, as it adds to the humor – like the numerous visions he has about different ways to ask Biel out. That was pretty funny.

But it turns out Biel’s character is some kind of psychic enhancer for him, somehow, so with her he can see even further into the future. This plot point is never properly explained – how is she able to do that to him? And it’s made even worse by the fact that the entire climax, yes, the entire action-fueled, tense climax, all turns out to be part of Cage’s vision. None of it actually happens! This serves, I guess, to show us that Cage has to make the tough choice and leave Biel behind while he goes and saves the city on his own, but still, it’s a pretty damn big cop out. At the end of the day, there simply isn’t much that actually HAPPENS in Next, and that’s where the film fails in the end. It’s just the principle of the whole thing. While this film is entertaining, and quite original, the fact is, not a lot of stuff really transpires in the film – a lot of it is just in Cage’s head.

Next is a fundamentally flawed film that still remains enjoyable in spite of those flaws. Not every movie has to be absolutely spotless, and sometimes a few flaws can make a movie more interesting, as they do here – there wouldn’t be as much to talk about if this was just your average Nicolas Cage action movie. And your mileage will vary on just how much the ending disappoints you – it really just depends how much you like the idea of a lot of it only being in Cage’s mind the whole time. If you can get past that, great; you’ll probably dig it. Otherwise, it’s worth a watch and has a curious enough plot to warrant one. Go see it.

Nicolas Cage told me to tell you that the images here aren't mine. They are copyright of their original owners.

Blue Powder (2009)

Starring: Jessica Biel, Ray Liotta, Eddie Redmayne, and Forest Whitaker

Directed by Timothy Linh Bui

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1032819/

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powder_Blue_(film)

Uh...I...I...yeah...I do not really know how to describe this movie and the extent of what is wrong with it. I mean, I can but I do not want to spend a lot of time doing it. But I will give it a shot... 

There are two essential problems that this film has. The big one is that it is very blotted: it tries to stuff too much into its 1 hour and 48 minute time frame (which feels a lot longer) and it does not really make sense. It starts off showing the audience all of the different characters and the problems they face. If you have seen movies like this before, you would naturally expect all of them to intervene into one another’s lives at the end. However, this does not really happen; instead, it evolves into two, almost completely different story-lines, one featuring Ray Liotta, Jessica Biel, and Eddie Redmayne (with cameos by Kris Kristofferson and Patrick Swayze) and the other one featuring Forest Whitaker (with small roles played by Lisa Kudrow and a random transvestite prostitute). The only time when any sort of intermingling takes place between these groups is when Whitaker and Redmayne briefly meet in a mortuary (woo hoo, happy places!), in a part that could easily have been left on the cutting room floor. Writer/director Timothy Linh Bui should have decided to use one story-line and stuck with it. 

The other problem with this movie is its moral. It is supposedly about how miracles can happen even in the darkest of times. It tries to reinforce that message by setting the plot during the Christmas season (though this is about as much of a Christmas movie as "Die Hard") That is all well and good, except there are no miracles that actually occur; some good things happen and some bad things happen, but it would be a stretch to call any of them miraculous. The only exception is when...it starts snowing in Los Angles on Christmas morning...Really? That is the big miracle? That is something you see on a holiday special for a TV series, not for...whatever this movie is trying to be. Does this have anything to do with the plot you ask? I will give you a hint: no. 

The only thing that saves this movie from being a complete disaster is that the characters and the acting are fairly decent...well, sort of. I liked Redmayne's character for always trying to do the right thing even if it hurts him in the long run. Kudrow's character was also nice enough. Whitaker's character is a little difficult to sympathize with because how he became so miserable. He lost his wife on their wedding day by filming her in the car WHILE HE IS DRIVING; I am not saying that is not tragic, but in a film like this you kind of want your protagonist to be a little smarter than that. He also tries to pass on his problems to other people by asking them to kill him so he does not go to hell for committing suicide; this guy need to...let’s just say grow up a bit. I think the only reason why he comes off as well as he does is because Whitaker himself, which shows once again how great of an actor he is. I did not like Biel's character that much either; the audience is supposed to have empathy with her, but she has so many issues that she comes across as being too pathetic to have people root for her. The worst character was Swayze's; he is too over-the-top and outlandish as opposed to the people around him, who are relatively low key. It is almost like he is from a different movie and he sticks out like a sore thumb every time he shows up on screen. Swayze was not the best actor in the world, but he brought a sense of charm to (most of) the roles he played, and I feel kind of bad that, in one of the last films he made before he died, his abilities were wasted on this unnecessary bit part in a film that is itself a waste of time. 

Well, that pretty much sums it up. A weird, useless movie with a nonexistent theme. I do not recommend it and...yeah, that is it, I just do not recommend it.