11/1
Night of the Creeps (Rewatch, 1986, Fred Dekker, Blu-ray) - 10.0
A boy has a crush on a girl, and so his best friend tries to help him connect with her, and they end up trying to join a fraternity, which requires them to procure a corpse, and the corpse they find is cryogenically frozen, and when it thaws out, alien slugs explode out of its head and slither around campus infecting other people’s brains and turning them into zombies, and it’s up to the boy and the girl and a hard boiled detective to defeat the alien slug zombies using blowtorches. It pays a lot of tribute to the science fiction and horror genres, and is an original, inventive enough story to become a classic in it’s own right. The cast is amazing, particularly Tom Atkins, the humor is well-played, the effects are fucking awesome, and amidst all the horror, there’s a touching story of friendship and first love. One of the greatest fucking horror movies ever made.
Pig Hunt (Rewatch, 2009, James Isaac, 35mm, Red Vic) - 3.0
My review here sums it up, for the most part. But even though I didn’t like it, I wanted to see it again because I couldn’t quite place what it was that didn’t work about it. I was also working at the Red Vic one of the nights it was playing and I didn’t have any film work or anything else better to do, so it’s not like I went out of my way to see it when I could’ve been watching something more promising I hadn’t seen yet. Anyway, the problem with it is that it kind of borders between wanting to be fun and campy and wanting to be fuckin’ badass, and ends up failing on both counts. My impression is that it wants to be a badass movie, and there are a few one-liners where it’s obviously trying for this, but I guess it’s just poorly written because it always comes out lame. I think if they had tried to be a little campier and funnier, the story had the potential to be good, but instead it constantly lingers on the edge of this, without ever embracing it. In particular, there’s a hillbilly who really stands out as an interesting character, and it seems like any minute he’s about to say or do something amazing and/or hilarious, but it simply never comes. The characters are bland and boring, and since nothing actually happens for over an hour, there’s nothing about it to make it worth watching.
One thing that did kind of make me appreciate the movie, however, were the people who came to see it, who I’m pretty sure had all come down from the backwoods locale where it was shot. A man named Troll who doesn’t believe in “male feminists” and two haggard-looking women in their 60’s showing off their tits in skimpy outfits totally made my night.
11/2
Where the Wild Things Are (2009, Spike Jonze, 35mm, Vogue) - 2.0
Max is an imaginative, but high maintenance kid who is prone to tantrums, and he gets in a fight with his mom, bites her, and takes off running, and ends up sailing to an island of whiny monsters, all of whom represent a different negative aspect of his inner depression, and when he sees how fucking irritating they all are, he learns to fucking get over himself already. I really, really wanted to like this movie, but all that happens in it is the Wild Things bitching and complaining about everything. I can see how this would be considered a dark or a sad movie, but I don’t agree, because nothing sad or tragic ever actually happens. They all just act as if it had, or they invent problems where there actually aren’t any, and after awhile, it’s intolerable to watch. Hating this movie makes me feel like the mother in Happiness when she says her son is “depressed” all annoyed and disbelieving, but I really didn’t feel like this shit was “emotionally honest.” It was simply whiny and obnoxious.
The movie does have one highlight, though, in the form of two owls. Everything about their scene is weird and confusing, and reminded me a lot of the best humor from the Muppet movies (specifically, Muppets Take Manhattan). Why does KW knock them out of the sky and then hold their sad faces in headlocks? Are they actually friends with her, or just enslaved? I don’t know what the fuck was going on in that scene, but I know that I loved it, and their knock-knock joke was hilarious.
11/3
Antichrist (2009, Lars von Trier, 35mm, Embarcadero) - 4.0
After an infant commits suicide to get away from his fucking parents, the mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) gets depressed, so the therapist father (Willem Dafoe) decides to help her work through her grief by taking her to some woods because she’s afraid of them. She doesn’t really get any better, and it turns out maybe she had been kind of crazy all along, and then she eventually gets a lot worse. The build-up is incredibly fucking slow, and starts to get real fucking boring, and though the payoff is fairly amazing (movies, in general, could use more shots of real penises ejaculating blood), it doesn’t make up for the tedium that precedes it, or the completely retarded, symbolism-drenched ending that follows it. Aside from the inclusion of genitals, the gore is pretty much the same as any of Lucio Fulci’s better works, or most of the Saw movies, so I’d rather just watch those since at least they’re entertaining.
11/5
The War Zone (1999, Tim Roth, DVD) - 10.0
A teenage boy finds out his sister is having a sexual relationship with their father, and doesn’t know what to do about it. Really fucking bleak story that goes to very graphic and disgusting places. Incest is one of those themes that completely fascinates me and it’s always a treat seeing it in the movies, but this one actually made me feel gross. And for that, I fell in love with it, as I have literally waited my entire life for a movie to make me as uncomfortable as this one did, at least while also being a great fucking movie. The performances are all low-key, realistic, and amazing, particularly Ray Winstone and Lara Belmont. It reminded me a lot of a Mike Leigh movie, but a thousand times more depressing.
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