Frankenstein (2015)

Am I still doing these? Let’s see what happens. I'm posting this with very little editing. I don't know if anyone reads blogs anymore. But this is still here, still heaving onwards like a strange misshapen behemoth forgotten by time. Here we go.

Director: Bernard Rose

Starring: Xavier Samuel, Carrie-Ann Moss

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Frankenstein is a new adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel from so long ago, because I guess somebody really wanted more stories like this after all this time? This version starts off with very little backstory, just a couple of scientists making a 20-something white dude in a lab. There’s no real info on why they did this, no real details on who they are. Just a fun science experiment. The creature can barely walk and shows no discernible skills, but they take a lot of shots and inject him with sedatives a lot! Then he gets some boils on his face randomly so they decide to kill him.

Sorry, so what was the point then? Doesn’t seem like a very good experiment to me. Luckily the creature, who calls himself ‘Monster’ in this, just breaks free and kills everyone. He gets out and sees sunlight for the first time, and the cops just appear from nowhere like vampires and start firing guns without even asking questions. I give the movie points for a realistic portrayal of cops.

He goes out into the world and makes friends with a dog like it’s a fucking Disney movie from the late 90s. Then he finds some little girl to race sticks in the water with – truly this will be one of cinema’s all-time greatest scenes. He throws the little girl in the water for no reason, which is actually kinda hilarious. She gets out, but there are more cops there almost immediately ready to shoot him without asking questions – these guys are real desperados, man! Living on the edge!

He traipses through some fairly nice looking scenes of the city, until he finds Tony Todd, the Candyman himself, hanging out as a bedraggled blind homeless man playing a guitar under a bridge. This is actually a portrayal of how he's been doing since Candyman!

Anyway, he’s also cool, accepting and can do a lot of shit despite being blind, but doesn’t really have a character aside from that. It’s about as cliché as a movie can get. This stuff is like they were playing Mad Libs in the studio. It’s like they were trying to angle for an Oscar but didn’t know how to make the whole movie, instead of just individual scenes. It’s actually charming in a doofy kind of way.

Tony Todd introduces him to your usual cool, down to Earth hooker who wants to have sex with him. They go to a hotel and the hooker continues to treat ‘Monster’ like he’s a regular dude who just doesn’t talk much, even though he’s actually a catatonic freak show. It’s one of those dumb movie things where it doesn’t make sense why anyone doesn’t just see he’s an abnormality and treat him as such – the movie’s writing isn’t clever enough to sustain it. The bridge is giving out. You can feel the free-falling air meeting you like an old friend…

Anyway, he comes out of the shower naked, completely fucking scarred and with no dick. She freaks out and says she doesn’t want to do anything anymore, and he accidentally kills her. Then Tony Todd’s character comes up and ‘Monster’ kills him, too. The issue with the movie is just that he’s so strong he can do fucking anything. How is this an interesting plot if nothing hurts him and he can just swat anyone around like a fucking King Kong impression? Not very, I think.

He ends the movie by going back to the scientists as they’re about to have sex. They interrupt their good times to go down to the basement and care for him yet again. The dude tries to kill him yet again, also showing him a newer model of the same thing – still no reason why they’re doing this by the way; it might as well be gibberish. The woman scientist then tries to stop the dude from killing ‘Monster,’ but the dude ends up slashing her gut and killing her. They were having sex before this – that’s just funny to me now. What a tumultuous volcanic relationship. What a weird dynamic.

Anyway, that’s the movie I guess. It’s at least not a straight re-telling. I liked a few of the scenes’ camerawork. But overall it was kind of a joke. Why would you make this and title it Frankenstein and then just do it so unpretentious? Why was there no backstory to anything? I don’t need a huge amount – but this literally had nothing explaining any aspect of why these things were happening. That would be fine if the movie was gripping, but really, because he can just beat the shit out of or kill anyone he wants, there’s no drama. It’s like half of a premise became a movie with no vetting.

But maybe the pointlessness is just reflective of how life is now. Of how looking for meaning is really just naive and not constructive at all, and we might as well just go along with whatever weird tides life throws at us. Yeah. Maybe that’s it.

Holmes & Watson (2018)

Holmes & Watson is the kind of movie you make when you don't give a shit anymore, really. This is a woefully insane movie that had Tony and I just wondering what kind of gambling debts Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly had to settle that led them to do this shit. It's getting press as one of the worst movies of the year and had a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes at first – now it's gotten to the clandestined, unparalleled highs of 8%. Hallelujah!

But what exactly is it that makes it so godawful? Well, strap in, kids!

Director: Etan Cohen

Starring: Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Ralph Fiennes

IMDb

Co-written with Tony.

This thing starts off with a young Sherlock Holmes as a child going to a British boarding school, where all the kids are mean to him and force him to kiss the backside of a donkey by blindfolding him – hey, you little jackasses, what do you think this is, Bird Box? And they made fun of him because he did the thing THEY TRICKED HIM to do. What imagination! What candor! You really showed him by executing a planned trick and him falling for it! The height of comedy!

In response, young Holmes immediately, like as he’s standing there humiliated, becomes super smart, cold and detached – he even makes his tears recede back into his body, which is something I imagine alt-right assholes wish they could do to mask their own insecurities. Then he gets every other kid expelled from school for various things he immediately deduces they've done – I wonder what their parents think about this. BUT AT LEAST SHERLOCK GOT HIS EDUCATION, THE LITTLE NARC.

No, seriously; every teacher just teaches him alone for the rest of his time there, I guess. No other students were admitted? Nobody found this weird? OK then, movie.

Then we fast forward to years later as Sherlock Holmes and Watson are world-class detectives, ready to solve any case. Well, actually they’re complete idiots and weirdos, only Holmes occasionally has a burst of deduction to solve whatever hamfisted case they come across. I guess all that specialized education for Holmes didn’t bother to teach him even the most basic things about how to interact in the real world. They get drawn into some kind of mystery involving someone threatening to kill the queen, I guess, although personally I’d trust any random homeless man on the street a thousand times before I hired these obvious deviant maniacs. I’d be afraid of these guys murdering me in my sleep. They’re fucking bonkers.

I mean, a lot of the rest of the movie doesn’t even make enough sense to critique in my usual way - the plot is a lot of nonsense that’s silly on purpose, and the main issue is that it’s weird instead of funny like 99% of the time. These gags are so strange that you’d swear they were working off some ancient parchment full of things an alien civilization found funny hundreds of millennia ago - they’re certainly not funny now. There’s a lot of shots of characters eating raw onions for some reason? A lot of random vomiting? A scene where two characters exchange a romantic glance while performing an autopsy?

It’s just head-scratching. It’s gibberish. Even when the comedy isn’t outwardly terrible like in the first scene of him as a kid, it’s so confusing and bizarre that you don’t laugh anyway.

Then there are the scenes that take up the majority of the film where they just extend lame gags for long enough that they could call this a full length movie rather than a serial killer’s demo reel for SNL. There’s one segment where they break a bee hive conspicuously in Holmes’ apartment and spend several minutes messing around with that - there’s no reason why they have it there except for this gag and the plot doesn’t advance at all, so it’s pretty much a hollow thing and wastes all of our time. If you could fast forward past an entire comedy segment and your movie doesn’t lose much, maybe it sucks… well, maybe it’d be fine if it were legitimately funny, but we know that ship sailed when we saw the first scene.

The second one they do involves the queen coming over, you know, like she does. They end up knocking her unconscious, and then there’s a long sequence of them trying to hide her body, using an obviously fake voice that nobody catches onto, and finally almost chopping her body to pieces with a hacksaw! Wow! I wonder what repercussions there will be for that and what comedic reactions we’ll get! Oh, nothing at all and this was a non-sequitur? OK then.

Seriously - without some of these scenes this would probably be basically a short film. The padding is so much that you could heal a guy with horrific back pain by just lying them down on this movie’s rolls of fat. It’s like a cloud. No substance at all.

There’s really zero point in going into all the other random shit that happens… just to gloss over it, they meet two women from America who fall in love with them, because this is that kind of movie. Also there’s some really dumb dialogue about how America is so noble and has a democracy and a fair justice system. So, you know, if you were thinking this movie was gonna be the second coming of Sartre, you’re wrong about that.

I guess at the end of the movie, Holmes figures out the killer must be someone close to him who can predict what he’s going to do, and so with no real reason he suspects Watson, having him arrested and almost hanged. It turns out, through an overly-long, dragging sequence, that we figure out he’s really just upset because Watson was going to leave him and be with the American woman - so, great reason to do all this! What a stand-up guy! This movie doesn’t have the complexity to tackle stuff like this, and it’s somehow glossed over and done lazily even though they spend time on it.

Anyway, that’s Holmes and Watson. It’s a baffling piece of cinema. Some parts are so weird they border on avant garde, and then you just get other things that are fairly normal, dumb-ass comedy without much in the way of any humor. By the end of the movie it seriously slows down and becomes a more generic picture and this is where it pretty much lost me. Most of the things that happen are inconsequential, and so the movie as a whole tends to feel like a waste of time.

It’s not good, but for those curious like we were due to the awful reviews… well, don’t bother. It sucks. That’s pretty much all there is to it.

Image copyright of its original owners; we don't own it.

The Year Movies Got Stephen King Right

This has been a great year for Stephen King movies - three in a row based on his stories have been killer: It blew through like a storm in theaters and became the highest-grossing horror film ever made, then on Netflix we got Mike Flanagan’s Gerald’s Game, dripping with dark and enticing imagery, and finally 1922 - a sad, horrific period piece.

I loved all these as King’s written macabre tales, and I like them as movies almost as much.

And it really is kind of a breath of fresh air for me, as I never thought movies based on King’s stuff were always very good - I went on record as hating the original It movie back in 2016, and others like Pet Sematary, The Stand and more were underwhelming at best. I suppose there were some good ones too, but the disappointments as compared to the books were too great for me to get past.

And I think the tone was just never quite right - King has always been such a big name for the unique imagination and style he had, which wasn’t really ever translated right before this year. It’s not something that can be described in a word or two, but just the feel his stories have - the dialogue style, the focus on emotional heartstring-tugging character development, the strange and surreal supernatural world-building that doesn’t draw from any one established school of myth… it all just comes together into a uniquely King-like piece that he has forged over the years into a signature style.

Finally, with these films, I think they got it right. In the new It movie, the way the kid main characters interact and talk and jive with one another is just magical. It’s great to watch because they’re actually funny and have memorable interactions - not like the old one where I honestly can’t remember one conversation between them. These kids are seriously charming and the writing combined with their acting skills produces a wonderfully enjoyable energy. And when things get dark and the visions they see draw them together to fight the evil, you really give a shit. That’s how you make a good story. King understood that, and now a movie based on his work captures his unique writing style well.

In Gerald’s Game, a husband ties his wife to the bed for some sex games, but then the husband dies of a heart attack, leaving main character Jessie to fend for herself. One thing King did with the book was create such a rich story even despite the fact that the character is tied to a bed the entire time. He did it through flashbacks and inner dialogue and a whole story about what led to Jessie’s current predicament. Flanagan masterfully weaves this stuff together by putting in ‘ghost’ versions of Jessie and her dead husband that converse with the real ones, as well as flashbacks with wonderfully macabre, ominous imagery. The level of introspection and character layering is in-line with King’s specialty.

1922 is a newer story, a tale of murder and greed set in a farmhouse in the early 20th century as a farmer plots to kill his wife for the land she’s inherited. It was one of my favorite stories King has done recently, and an especially brutal and punishing read. The movie pretty much sticks to exactly how the story went, not missing a beat. Thomas Jane is excellent as main character Wilfred James, and the creeping, slow-burning horror and guilt of this story rolls over into a crushing wave by its end. Like a lot of good King stories, the horror comes from the human evil and the perils of greed upon his own actions. The pacing and atmosphere are just perfect - chilling stuff.

As I’ve been writing this, I noticed all the reasons I’ve given for appreciating these movies - good characters, layered writing, chilling atmosphere and the human evil - aren’t necessarily groundbreaking or original things that make King’s work good. They’re things that make any fiction good and lots of good fiction does these things well. But as I said, King just has his own unique touch and I am glad these movies are doing him justice finally. King has been a cultural icon and institution for decades and I’ve enjoyed his work for well over 10 years now myself. Do yourself a favor. Check out these movies this Halloween season.

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

Cinema Freaks Live: It (2017)

Here's the review Will, Nathan and I did for the new Stephen King's It movie. We did this about two weeks ago, but a hurricane in our home state of Florida forced us to reschedule it and then other things got in the way. I know, I know - what could be more important than this?

The answer is that nothing can be. Nothing.

Enjoy the review!

Watchmen (2009)

I am almost sure director Zack Snyder's favorite part of making Watchmen was when he got to show four blue dicks on screen at the same time.

When he heard Dr. Manhattan constantly walked around either naked or in a speedo, Zack Snyder, the man responsible for the other ultra-masculine man-movie 300 and so many others like it since, said 'finally! A story that I can really relate to and appreciate! I will adapt this into the greatest slideshow of hypermasculine beefcakes ever made!'

With all the shots of musclebound men with clearly defined asses and bulging biceps and six-packs being so prominent in this and every other fucking movie he's ever done, it really does show that he is the manliest man ever in the history of the world. His movies are all unquestioning love-letters to manliness. The ultimate expressions of testosterone's glory. No shadow of doubt, nor any shadow of any other kind, will be cast on Zack Snyder's undeniable heterosexuality.

Director: Zack Snyder

Starring: Patrick Wilson, Jackie Earle Haley, Billy Crudup, Malin Akerman

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

If you took all the slow-mo scenes out of this, it really would be about 40 minutes shorter. The fight scene at the beginning where the Comedian dies and is thrown out a window is so long and dragged out. It's really not a good sign if your fight scene is like a long, pointless guitar solo in a bad 80s song – if it's just distracting from the story, then it's a shitty fight scene. If I wanted to watch a pointless fight scene, I'd go the gym and bump into a 'roided-up frat guy and then blame that on the guy next to him, and watch the fireworks.

The slow-mo is so silly in all of this. In the scene where the Comedian falls out the window, he falls so slowly that I think he could've survived the fall. It isn't like he would've hit the ground at a lethal speed with that slow mo going on!

"I sure am glad gravity bends to my will!"

Then we get a bunch of scenes you know from the book. It's hard to make fun of this, because all Snyder did was copy-paste scenes from the book and vomit them up on his movie, like he just stumbled back in the door after a night of binge drinking.

The real problem with all these scenes – of Rorschach investigating shit, Dan and Laurie hanging out, Dr. Manhattan being weird as fuck – is that it just feels like they're cut-and-pasted to check off a list of scenes, rather than further a story. I don't know why, but even though I love the Watchmen book, these scenes all fall terribly flat for me, and I can't get into the movie's arc or emotional scenes at all. The lighting and coloring look perfect for the book, but everything just has this digitized, overly slick, sexy kind of sheen on it that makes it impossible to feel like anything is really happening. I just don't like the "look" of the whole movie. I'm constantly aware that this is a movie when I'm watching it – rather than be immersed in its world, I'm pulled out of the story by the over the top visuals and reminded that it's all fake and rehearsed, which shouldn't happen.

The actors all sound bored as fuck and deliver their lines in a monotone – they sound like kids reading off cue cards. The philosophical and insightful dialogue from the comics comes off as just meaningless prattle here. It's like, yup, you sure got those words from the comics in your movie! Thumbs up! I know some of these actors could do very well, but the whole attitude of 'we HAVE to stick EXACTLY to how the book looked' just limits what they can really do with the characters in terms of making the performances their own.

He looks like the book! Even if he is soulless and boring as a character in this. But he looks like the guy from the book, and that's all that matters.

Michelle and I just didn't care about these characters. When Laurie finds out The Comedian is her biological father, that should be the big scene - it was in the book, in terms of her character anyway. But in the movie it just gets lost at sea in the middle of all the other crap. There's just too much going on.

The real problem is that the numerous flashbacks and side-stories that worked so well in the book just come off as overly cluttered and confusing in the movie, jumping around more than Super Mario on cocaine. In the book, you could read at your own pace, and in books that kind of time jumping and complicated narrative is expected. I don't think Snyder translated it well to film at all. The lack of direction in this movie is kind of like a broken GPS – it just takes you all over the place and you never get where you want to go. It's hard to tell what's a flashback and what isn't in this movie, with all the endless rolls of fat.

There's one scene of Laurie and her mother talking in the apartment about the Comedian – it comes off like some kind of weird, awkward one-room stage play. It feels very stiff and awkward.

"I definitely have breast cancer. So when are you and Dr. Manhattan going to get back together?"
"Mom, I told you, I don't love Dr. Manhattan anymore. I love Nite Owl now."

In fact, it kind of reminds me of something...

Nah, must just be coincidence.

Or this other scene of Ozymandias talking to reporters or something, with the over the top ominous music behind it and him constantly with that cold smirk on his face. I'm sure he's not the bad guy! Really, he isn't! But I dunno, maybe this is a faithful adaptation – maybe Alan Moore, when he wrote that scene in the book, also had that same ominous music in mind playing constantly behind Ozymandias, and Zack Snyder wasn't just a hack-ass director with no understanding of storytelling.

Don't bother turning on the light. All interviews should be done in dark rooms on very cloudy days to make sure things look as obviously sinister as possible!

The movie would also be way shorter if we didn't have scenes of Rorschach monologuing over a montage of him walking around in a graveyard or opening cabinets! I know it was in the fucking comic book, but that doesn't mean you have to include it in the movie! I think Zack Snyder hears the word self restraint and thinks it's some kind of mumbo jumbo foreign type of yoga.

This is like the Stephen King's IT movie in a way – it's just so bloated and they focused too much on putting in the material from the book, rather than delivering a good movie. But I'll give IT this – it was never even half as pretentious or up its own ass as Watchmen. This movie is like a college student's 2 a.m. drunken philosophical Facebook notes mutated after exposure to radiation into a horrible monster. Holy shit. I mean, this whole thing just radiates the flannel shirts and the PBR-stench of someone who just read Nietzsche for the first time. The book had a lot of this, too, but Alan Moore's clear talent and knowledge of storytelling made it work. The movie's slow pace and bloated runtime just makes the philsophical stuff unbearable and annoying.

"Life is meaningless. Life is only pain." = him in this movie, condensed version.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the excruciating slog of the last 25 minutes, in which the film goes through the climax. If you don't know, it's where Ozymandias, revealed SO SURPRISINGLY IN THIS MOVIE as the bad guy, says he's blown up half of New York and that's his crazy plan to bring about world peace. The characters all react with shock and horror in very rote, boring, scripted ways, and none of it is exciting. Rorschach then dies in a way that almost evokes a pulse of excitement, but then remembers it's this shitty ass movie and quits doing that.

Amazing how the biology of his blood when he explodes is so in tune with irony. I guess nature is funny sometimes.

I've had my car broken down in the dead of winter before and still gotten somewhere faster than Watchmen's climax does. A snail could get to the other side of town in the time this takes to get anywhere. If I had to listen to any more of Ozymandias's dead-eyed speechifying in this movie, I think I'd be praying to be in New York when that bomb went off, too. Just to save myself the pain.

A fitting metaphor, finally!

I remember being a bit younger, back when I first saw this movie seven years ago. I remember seeing all the people complaining about book-to-movie adaptations never being faithful to the source material. These days, we have good adaptations like the Hunger Games series or Gone Girl that tell a good story independent of what they were based on. But with Watchmen, it stuck too close to the book and was somehow worse off for it. I remember seeing this when it came out and thought "yeah, this is exactly like the book," but I just wasn't crazy about it, because “looking exactly like the book” isn't synonymous with good movie.

Overall, the movie is just proof that film and books are fundamentally different mediums. You can't just assume everything done in one of those mediums will fit the other. You have to adapt them – that's why it's called adaptations. If you just take everything in a book and throw it on screen with zero context or changes minding the fact that movies and books are different, it looks clumsy and awkward. If Snyder had any ingenuity or cleverness, he could have taken the massive pages and pages of dialogue that worked in the comic, and the complex flashbacks and differing storylines that also worked in the comic, and worked all that into a compelling film by moving things around and changing things and, y'know, adapting them. But nope – he just threw it all directly from the comic to the page, no changes at all! This movie is the fat kid eating too much cake at a birthday party and passing out before the party's even over. There's just zero restraint or filter here.

Maybe under a better director this could've been good. I thought while watching it that this could've been a good Netflix TV show – all the flashbacks and different storylines might lend themselves better to that, with the long-winded, oft-complex nature of it all being more easily digestible as hour-long increments. Maybe it'd have more room to breathe as a story. As a movie though, Watchmen too much; it's bloated and over-stuffed to the point that it's barely watchable.

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

Stephen King's IT (1990) - Part 2

Welcome back to the review of Stephen King's IT, the 1990 TV movie adaptation that made every fan of the original King novel want to throw their TV into an active volcano. I covered the first part of this a few days ago, and now I'm back for the second part. Make sure to read the first part first!

Director: Tommy Lee Wallace

Starring: John Ritter, Tim Curry, Richard Thomas

IMDb

Co-written with Tony.

It does have to be said that the child actors in this movie are pretty damn good, especially considering it was a 1990s TV movie made from a horror novel. That doesn't usually lend itself to good child actors, but we did get some very decent scenes with those kids in the first part of this whole thing, especially when they had to interact with Tim Curry. Curry is also fantastic and looks like he was having a lot of fun. Or at least like he was on some good drugs before shooting this, which is how I would have gotten through it all, too.

Why am I going so easy on the movie now? Well, because this is the last of anything good I'll have to say about this piece of shit. After the first part, the director probably said, yeah, I've done enough of anything resembling quality from 20 yards away by a half blind guy. It's easy for me to believe that's what happens – that movie directors consciously decide to make bad movies. That sure does make reviewing easier than actually considering peoples' motivations and what they were trying to do with a piece of art!

So, basically, all the main “heroes” gather under one roof in their old hot spot Derry, Maine. Bill meets up with Mike Hanlon, and the two embark on what I can only describe as a rejected Full House opening credits scene when they find Bill's old bike. For some reason, Mike has kept that bike all these years – for 30 fucking years he kept a 12-year-old boy's bike.

Nothing weird about that!

But you have to admit. These scenes of them fixing Bill's bike and riding around on it set to puke-worthy pop rock garbage – they're pretty unbearable to watch. I feel like this is the kind of scene that a guy writes at the very end of his rope, after his bosses have shoved him down to the bottom of the barrel in terms of projects to work on. I can't imagine how many people you'd have had to piss off.

I'm trying to think of a nice way to say 'I want to stab this scene with a pair of rusty scissors and then bury it in the Mojave desert' but...nah, that works.

Meanwhile, Richie here hangs out at a library, fretting all the time about how he should just run for the hills and go home. This character in the book was quite well rounded and could be strong when he needed to be. So I guess that's why he's a total pussy bitch coward in this movie who can't go a scene without whining about everything.

Stop whining, your ancestors had WAY more blood on their faces than this and they were fine!

He's accosted for a looooong stretch of time by Tim Curry, who makes a bunch of balloons explode blood all over him and then Curry sits on a banister and screams nonsense for a while. It's extremely entertaining, at least until Richie starts screaming over HIM in a more annoying voice at the library attendant. It's less a scary scene and more of one that makes me feel bad for the poor girl playing the librarian. I hope someone gave her a shot of Jack Daniels after that idiot screamed in her face all day.

Just another day at the library...

Then they all meet up at a dinky looking Chinese restaurant and they all have the happiest reunion a shitty ass script like this one can produce. I love when one of them, Eddie I think, sees Mike and goes “is that you, Mike?” Yeah, Mike, at this reunion of all our childhood friends that I knew everyone who would be there, is that you, my one black friend? How many other black friends did I used to have, anyway? I just can't keep track.

The ensuing dinner table conversation that happens after this is frankly psychedelic in how bizarrely awful it is. First you get a long one-shot camera take where the camera just spins around them in circles as they talk. It's absolutely baffling as to how anyone thought that was a good idea. What, did you lose a bet? Did you make a dare that you could definitely work your patented “drunk on a merry go round” camerawork style into a movie somehow, and us, the viewers of Stephen King's IT, lost out big time on that?

Then if you can get past THAT and listen to what they're saying in this scene, it's even more batshit crazy. First they're all friendly and happy, just chatting about old times. Okay, fine. Then everyone starts panicking and shouting for no reason about how they're going to die, with seemingly no transition. Then, a beat later, they're all just hanging around drunk, talking about old times again. What the hell is wrong with you people? I can see why no one else wants to hang around these idiots – no one can keep up with their conversations. It's like a roller coaster when you're high.

Oh, but they do get some fortune cookies with bugs and a human eye in them! Man, I love Chinese restaurants.

I do love different cultures!

Oh, and Bev also kisses like, half of the group on the mouths, just as a friendly introduction. But don't worry, they all really hang out with her for her personality and brains. Yeah. That's it...

Most of the rest of this is a seemingly endless slog, much of it taken up by the characters all competing for the dubious honor of most annoying in the entire film. Who do YOU think is more annoying? Richie, who constantly has a look on his face like he wants to take a shit, and who is always blathering on about how scared he is?

Or Eddie, whose voice gets higher and higher pitched as the film goes on, as if he is trying to turn into a human dog whistle?

There is a scene where the bully Henry Bowers breaks out from the mental asylum he was in all these years. He's helped out by IT, which takes the form of the security guard's worst fear...a bull dog in a clown outfit eating him alive. Hey now, don't make fun of him. That's an extremely common fear to have.

Seven of my friends are deathly afraid of this.

Then he goes and stabs Mike in the library. In the book this was a pretty suspenseful scene, but in the movie it's over in a few seconds and barely has any weight to it. I dunno, maybe the director was just running out of time and money by this point, but I've had more impactful moments in my life at the bank depositing a check.

So Mike's out, which leaves the others like retarded babes in the woods, all of them completely unsure of what to do. This leaves us much more time to develop the remaining characters, like Ben and Bev, who have an extremely contrived and cliche romance scene together. Their dialogue is so bad that even people who eat up airport romance novels would roll their eyes. This is just the worst kind of dated cheesy garbage. It's as painful a scene as any I've ever sat through on this blog. Just so fucking lame and trite.

Lifetime movies are like David Lynch compared to this.

After approximately seven more hours of bitching and whining about how they want to go home – and no, I'm definitely not exaggerating there about that length of time! – they finally decide to go back in the sewers and face IT once and for all! As they get to the place they need to go, Eddie stops them all to confess that he's been a virgin his whole life because he never loved anyone but them!

Awesome. So...he's three-fourths gay, then? Since, you know, three of the others he's in love with here are guys. Not that there's anything wrong with that, though.

But seriously, why the hell is he talking about this now? My guess is, probably because his therapist refused to see him anymore because he was that annoying. I guess IT agreed with me, because it kills him in the very next scene!

Actually, the acting is better than I gave it credit for, because no one would be able to easily pretend to be scared of that.

Oh yeah, and it's also a giant awful-looking spider thing now, which is apparently its final form in the movie. After a three hour movie, I too enjoy seeing that the big payoff is something I can kill in my kitchen by stepping on it. So this is satisfying to me.

Something really pisses everyone off, either Eddie dying or the fact that the spider looks so shitty. Either way, it was enough for them to now go gallivanting into the sewer, tip it over like a dumb old cow, and beat it to death with their bare hands, ripping its heart out. You know, they do say to handle things in the most mature way possible, so I'm cool with this.

Cool, they're like kids bored in a small town and wanting to go tip cows. Awesome.

Then we find out that Bill's wife, who had been kidnapped by IT, is now catatonic with fear. Then there's a scene where he puts her on a bike with him and rides her down a crowded street with no regard for traffic. It could have gotten them both killed and could have injured God knows how many other people, but somehow in the magically idiotic world of IT, this just wakes her up.

I know a lot of people talk about how scary this movie was when they were kids. I've had multiple friends tell me how scared they are of clowns because they watched this at age 7 or some other ridiculous age. But honestly, just try and watch this shit now, when you're older. It really is just so toothless, idiotic and silly, on every single front. While the kids are good actors and Tim Curry is a lot of fun as the clown, mostly everything else is just total shit. It's really, really not scary at all, with all the scares coming off as funny when they're not just sad.

The drama is so bad it makes me want to turn the movie off. The characters, who in the book were so great, have all been turned into awful, shitty whiners and cowards. Like they didn't just not capture the spirits of the novel's characters - they actively ruined them all. The story from the book isn't done justice here, mostly because it was so large and expansive in the book that condensing it down for a movie is very hard to do.

Maybe a remake would do it more justice. Maybe if made by someone who was genuinely interested in changing up the story to adapt it better to screen, rather than just trying to stick so faithfully to the book, IT would be a better film. Maybe this is just a sad relic from a time gone by, and we can ignore it now and focus on the great source material.

But frankly, it's more fun to just straight up bash a movie and not put any thought into a review. Fuck Stephen King's IT!

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Stephen King's IT (1990) - Part 1

Hey, you! Stop right there! Don't click away from this page! Because this...this will be a review you want to read. A review fit for the kings and other important people. If you don't believe me, just keep reading. You won't be disappointed.

Stephen King's It was a 1990 TV movie that aired in two parts, mostly because the original novel it was based on was thick enough to break a person's leg if you dropped it on them. Which, I'm told, was the main reason so many known mafia associates were flocking to bookstores in the 80s – to get that fucking book and kill people with it. You might not find any sources for that, but I did say it, and I'm on the Internet. So it must be true.

Director: Tommy Lee Wallace

Starring: John Ritter, Tim Curry, Richard Thomas

IMDb

Co-written with Tony.

But now I'm just rambling – which is, strangely enough, exactly what the movie does. So really, it's okay if I just keep going on and on without ever actually telling a coherent story. I'm also going to split the review into two parts, just like the TV movie was split into two parts when it originally aired. Isn't that how these movie reviews have always worked? I write them solely based on what lazy jokes I can throw in just to parody the films in a weak manner. It's just my style, man.

Stephen King's IT was a movie I had not seen in full since I was 14. I'm in my 20s now, but this movie, I saw in middle school immediately after I had finished the book. In a way, I think this was the first major disappointment of my life in terms of movies. This was the threshold I crossed, guys. It was my coming of age.

We start this crap fest off with Bill Denbrough, a writer who has a very hot wife who keeps pressuring him to go places with her, but Bill is too busy writing in his bedroom. This scene is great because all it's missing is for Bill to muse to himself, “Man, I wish I was as good a writer as Stephen King.”

Then they have dinner and he says he doesn't want to go to London with her. This is immediately followed by him getting a call from his old friend Mike, who tells him in an ominous way that “it's happening again,” which prompts him to immediately start packing his bags to leave for his hometown, Derry.

"What do you mean you want donations because I went to college there?!"

OK, that was a lot of information. Let's recap exactly what just happened: Man tells his wife he doesn't want to spend time with her, sort of blowing her off in general. Then the next second, he gets a phone call from a man he admits he hasn't seen in 30 years, and he's rushing out the door.

I'm sorry, what's that sound? Yes, I do believe it's divorce papers shuffling about!

Then we get a long rambling flashback that shows Bill and his brother Georgie as little kids. Bill is sick in bed while Georgie is suiting up to go play outside with a paper boat. Oh the good old days when kids could go outside and do this. Nowadays, you get shot by the police if you do something like this.

Tsk tsk, what a young hoodlum.

Anyway, Georgie meets Pennywise the Clown, who hangs out in the sewer. If this is all sounding a little too much like Sesame Street on really bad acid, I'd forgive you. As Georgie is apparently a complete idiot, he stays there and talks to the clown for several minutes. Well, I'm sold: he deserves whatever happens to him now.

It's just one of those sewer clowns. You know, the ones that were popular in the 50s...

What follows are some truly strange scenes showing Bill going into his little brother's room and finding a bleeding book on the ground – I dunno, something about this scene just doesn't work when you set it in broad daylight with bright pastel colors. It just doesn't come off as scary.

Get that fucking ketchup off the book, you slobs.

His parents also scold him for coming in there and tell him angrily never to enter his brother's room again. Because, apparently, this is how people act in the bizarre, lopsided world of Stephen King's IT! Yes, how dare you mourn your brother? Only WE, the PARENTS, can have THAT privilege, silly knave boy!

Then we flash back to present day Bill, who looks dazed, like someone just spiked his orange juice. What's that? You forgot we were even in a fucking flashback? Me too, don't worry. The way this first part of the movie is told is just so bad, pacing-wise. You get a few minutes of the characters in their adult lives, then a 15-minute flashback of them as kids. I get what they were going for here, for clarity and conciseness sake, but it's sloppy as fuck and doesn't end up very engaging when that formula is repeated five times in a row.

One of the others is Ben Hanscom, played here by the late John Ritter. Well, he wasn't the late John Ritter when he was making this movie. I mean, it's not like they took his corpse and just painted open eyes over his closed ones and used a shitty voice-over or something. That's crazy that you would think that's what I meant.

I just had to clarify that.

Anyway, Ben is an insane man who tells his dates how fat he used to be as a kid, which I guess is a real aphrodisiac for some of these women. I wonder if he seeks them out based on the "I used to be a fat kid" fetish? It's also especially weird because it isn't like he's that skinny now. He just has money, and used that as a way to not feel fat anymore.

In his flashback, we find out that he was immediately targeted as a kid by the 17-year-old bullies who have been held back apparently most of their whole lives in the same sixth-grade class. They're super realistic bullies who like to do normal bully things, like holding knives to kids' stomachs and literally threatening to cut them wide open.

Oh, kids will be kids.

In the book, this was a legit plot thread and came off as scary. Here it comes off as hacky and goofy, without any kind of sense to it. But don't worry, there's all kinds of other terrible things going on, too!

Like, really, do we need a subplot about the woman in the group, Bev, dealing with an abusive husband? It's as contrived and shitty as any abusive spouse plot from this time period. I know it's a realistic thing that happens to people, but the way it's done here is so bad. Most old movies like this never really had nuance or subtlety to these plots, and didn't present them as a way to get to know a character. Instead, most of them are just really hacky ways to give women something to do. “Yeah, being abused is a problem women can have.” Go fuck yourself, movie.

But don't worry, this movie doesn't let you forget that above all else, it's a cartoon made for children who ride the short bus. Like look at how she “escapes” him finally: she throws a makeup container at his head, he falls on his ass and she runs out the door. He just screams at her to come back, because yeah, I'm sure she's gonna do that now.

"I'm really commanding a lot of respect right now!"

Then we get a flashback sequence, where her father smacks her around a bit, too. She runs away from him as well, and he shouts at her to come back, too, and doesn't ever actually chase her. Are all the men in this chick's life just vampires who can't venture outside or else they'll burst into flames? Jesus Christ. I don't know why she even puts up with the abuse. If she steps outside the door for a second, they won't be able to follow – it's foolproof. These guys aren't anything to be afraid of, they're total wimps.

So I know everyone who saw this movie when they were younger than 10 is officially Afraid of Clowns (TM) for life. But honestly, there's nothing to be afraid of, and I'll prove that to you. I guess we'll start at the beginning, in which the movie decided it really had to show us the essential “little boy in the showers alone” scene. Yes, I can see why this had to be in the fucking movie...

It's for artistic integrity, we swear! Then again, it's not the worst child sex-related thing related to Stephen King's IT...

Then the shower heads start moving around following him, but that frankly isn't that weird. This will be in our Jetsons-style future in a few years, anyway. But then the clown shows up, and while Tim Curry IS having a lot of fun here as the clown, it just isn't that scary. He pops up out of a Bugs Bunny-style hole in the ground and just kind of hams it up. It's literally like a cartoon. There's no way an adult could find this nonsense scary.

Those are actually Tim Curry's real teeth, by the way.

BUT... I guess it could be scary if you want to imagine that it's actually Jared Fogle dressed up in clown makeup. There you go. I made IT scary again for you. I am a fucking genius.

Just in case you forgot what he looked like.

But the characters never thought it was passe or old hat. Take a look at Stan, the one guy in the group they haven't bothered to show as an adult until now. Why IS that, you might be wondering? Well, it's because when Mike Hanlon decides to give him a call, his immediate response is to go upstairs and kill himself in the tub. His wife comes up and finds him in the most drawn out and ridiculous way ever, dropping the beer she's holding and letting out a scream more befitting of a terrible and cliché horror movie than anything else.

Oh, wait.

Come back here for the second part of this in a few days! It gets so much worse!

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

Cinema Freaks LIVE: Goosebumps (2015)

Nostalgia is a powerful force these days. Everyone wants to remember what they sort of forgot. The Internet gave them that, like a golden goose's egg, and now movie studios are milking it for all it's worth. If you want the biggest example of that, well...there are probably a lot. But one of them is the new Goosebumps movie. Which Michelle and I did a podcast about!

(SPOILERS are in the podcast and review, for those who want to avoid those!)



Wasn't that great? On second thought, don't answer that. Instead, you can read the review if you're not convinced.

Director: Rob Letterman

Starring: Jack Black, Dylan Minnette, Odeya Rush

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Basically about a kid who moves to a new town, befriends a girl and finds out her father is RL Stine, and also that he has a bunch of books which, if opened, unleash all the monsters from the classic Goosebumps books on the unsuspecting real world. You know how it goes. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy has to fight off obvious marketing tools in a kids' horror movie.

The movie is rife with all sorts of witty puns and dialogue from every character. They spew them like gumball machines. It's like all of them sat down in a room and wrote out their dialogue before actually going out to speak to one another. Main character Zach at this point might as well get a job writing for Buzzfeed, he's so quick with a light jab or quip.

"Hang on, mom, I need to consult my joke writer to see what funny stuff he's got for me to say!"

The movie really shows its true colors with a scene of this girl, Hannah, calling to him and making friends. They exchange some dialogue that will be repeated over the course of the film in a predictable way, but is still rather likable anyway, so I'm torn on what degree I should make fun of it – a full on inferno-burn, or a mere sizzling like bacon on a griddle? Eh, it's not terrible.

But I love the part where Jack Black as RL Stine pops out of the window and tells Zach not to talk to his daughter, like a threat against him – come on, SHE talked to HIM first! What is he supposed to do? Ignore the cute girl in front of him flirting with him in the middle of the night? At like 16 or whatever age he's supposed to be, I think a Catholic priest would have an easier time resisting his urges!

"Hey, let's exchange some light hearted, scripted-sounding banter!"
"Sounds good! Can we flirt more?"
"No, this is a PG movie and that would get us thrown in jail."
"Well sheeeeeeeeeeeeaaaatttt."
"Sssshhhh!"

"I'll make sure you turn GAY before you talk to MY DAUGHTER!!!"

The next day at school, we get all kinds of wacky scenarios, like Zach's mom starting her new job as the vice principal at the school and saying “Twerking” in her opening speech rather than “Tweeting.” Oh the hi-larity! And also, Zach meets this weird kid named Champ, who asks him to go to the dance together...to pick up girls. Yeah. That's why he wants to. Uh, yeah...cough...then Champ hands him a business card, which really makes sense for a high school kid to have and also points out how fucking weird this kid is.

At night, Hannah takes Zach out into the woods, where she shows him an abandoned carnival that somehow still has the power on. I guess they just forgot to turn that off and just chalk up the thousands of dollars in extra electricity towards residents' taxes to a fluke. If it seems weird that I am spending time thinking about that shit during a kids' movie, well, don't pay attention to me. There's another scene  right after where they climb up the old Ferris wheel with nobody around and hang out there, because apparently death excites them.

There's really nothing that can save them here from death – Zach even asks how they get down at one point, which I'm sure Hannah's real answer to was “you can't get down, I own you now!” But they had to cut that out and continue the movie, because otherwise nobody would have gotten paid. Oh well. All I'm saying is, it's insane that this fairground thing is a plot point in the film.

They eventually make their ways back to RL Stine's house, where Zach thinks Stine is abusing Hannah. I remember thinking the trailer showing this plot point was really fucking dark, and not even knowing what movie it was at first. But then of course, they break in and discover Stine's secret – he has every book he ever wrote locked up, and if they're unlocked, the monsters come to life and terrorize reality.

"Why is there one copy of a Bearenstein Bears book in here?"

There's never really much of an explanation for why or how this happens, except that Stine has a magic typewriter that can do it. I guess he never considered STOPPING writing the books even after he had to have known it was possible after a FEW of the fucking things. What a psycho! And why does he have them just displayed like that on a shelf? Shouldn't they be locked away in a safe at the bottom of the ocean or something?! Something tells me this RL Stine in the movie is less a horror writer and more a demented and hell bent sadist bent on humanity's violent destruction.

Stine: "I could have stopped this, but I secretly wanted this to happen!"

But oh well – so the plot doesn't make sense. What do you want? All we're really here for are the action scenes. They're generally well done. We get a few pretty enjoyable scenes of the characters fighting a snowman and a werewolf in various places. And Jack Black (again) as Slappy the dummy is hilariously good – he's almost worth the price of admission by himself.

I guess there are a couple of forced 'serious' moments as the film tries to give us a plot about how Stine was bullied as a kid and that's why he grew up to write the Goosebumps series. It's really rather silly and doesn't come off well. Mostly because we needed another bullied-kid story like I needed a bag full of fire ants at the foot of my bed. Oh boo hoo, you got bullied as a kid? Let me play you the world's smallest guitar, doing the intro to Stairway to Heaven.

...wait, I don't think THAT'S right...

But the real reveal is when they find out that, shock and awe, Hannah is actually a creation from one of his books! She isn't even real and doesn't know it. Goddamn. That means he can create functional human beings out of thin air. I mean, yeah, THIS time he created a sweet teenage girl. But what about when he gets the urge to replace a politician in power with his own pawns? Can he just create a proxy who will do whatever he wants? Will we all end up under the thumb of the totalitarian RL Stine reign without even knowing it? Jesus. This just became the most terrifying movie of the year, easy.

I'll put this image here to balance it out.

So the only way to defeat the monsters is, apparently, by writing one final book about all of them, which will end with them getting sucked back into the book. Stine tries, and even almost finishes a book in an extremely short amount of time while Zach is doing something else – maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it seems like this movie has mixed messages. On one side, Stine is a terrifying potential dictator who can do anything with a keyboard. On the other, “hey, he writes his books in under an hour!” Maybe both are true.

This goes fairly well until Slappy breaks Stine's fingers, rendering Stine unable to write. So it's up to Zach to go finish the last page of the book without getting his head torn off by monsters. Meanwhile, though, Champ saves this really hot girl in a skimpy dress from a werewolf, and she rewards him by kissing him. Because, you know, if you can save a girl from a werewolf, you deserve her as a prize, I guess.

I went to acting school and all I got was a shit role where I had to give myself to a dorky character!

Zach manages to finish the book, but only after a terrifying near-death experience in which a Ferris wheel almost kills them when it comes off its hinges and rolls down a giant hill. Seriously, how did they survive that? I think a career in stunts would seem as harmless as a knitting job after that. Jesus.

"WE REGRET DOING OUR OWN STUNTS!!"

So yeah, they stop all the monsters at the end, but Hannah gets sucked back into the book as well. The next day at school, I guess everyone just got over that whole 'most of our town was annihilated' thing pretty easily, as no one seems to care anymore. Stine is even a teacher there now, because I guess almost destroying an entire town with monsters you created makes you qualified to teach whatever kids didn't get massacred the previous night by said monsters. Life is fun when it makes no sense, huh?

To add an extra dose of pandering, apparently Stine wrote Hannah back to life just so she could be with Zach. A literal fictional girl created just to be someone's girlfriend. What do I even have to say? It's pretty lame. Should our movies really be teaching young boys that if they do absolutely nothing, a children's author will write a girlfriend into existence for them? Ugh. I've just seen that bad lesson in movies way too often.

This film is just silly, mostly. Nothing in the plot makes sense. But then again, when did the original Goosebumps plots ever make that much sense? The film is pretty true to its source material! The whole thing really is just intended to be like an extended, over the top version of what the classic Goosebumps stories were - it has the same structure and format; a kid meets a girl and gets into supernaturally-laced trouble.

It's nonsense, but it's fun nonsense. The characters are enjoyable in a dumb way and the story is fast and exciting enough, especially for younger kids and teenagers. Jack Black is electrifyingly fun as RL Stine and the effects are enjoyably cheesy. While I can't say this is that good or anything, it is entertaining in its own silly way. So go see it, especially if you used to like Goosebumps.

But seriously, guys. Be careful of who you piss off. You don't want to run afoul of RL Stine, as he is a master of the arcane old arts and possesses unspeakable powers with which he can ruin your life. He rules us to this day from his horrific mountain lair, creating monsters wherever people irk him. On second thought, if you don't see me any time soon, just assume he did something to me because of this review.

Images copyright of their original owners. We own none of them.