One A Week Reviews #44: Suck

A gem of a horror-comedy reviewed for dvdsnapshot.com. Highly Recommended!

Suck

Official Synopsis:

The Winners are a down and out band who find their road to stardom by riding rock-n-roll's highway to hell. It all begins when their bass player, Jennifer (Jessica Paré), disappears with a mysterious vampire and reemerges with a sexual charisma that drives the audiences wild. Now, The Winners are topping the charts and blazing a bloody trail across North America with legendary vampire hunter Eddie Van Helsig (Malcom McDowell) hunting them along the way. Who knew fame and immortality could "suck" like this?

Our Take:

Rob Stefaniuk is rather smartly shortcircuting reviewers from taking easy shots at this rock-n-roll vampire movie by bluntly naming it Suck. So... does it? To get it out of the way, no. If anything, he can stand boldly behind the name as this is a surprisingly near-perfect horror comedy.

The Winners are a mediocre bar band barely making ends meet while on tour, so when the bassist shows pale, ruby-lipped, and making everyone fall in love with her it's a god send... even if she's noshing on the occasional person while on tour. Next thing you know they're climbing the ladder of success thanks to some good old-fashioned blood-sucking. It's a humorous way to ask the old question: "What price success?"

The cast of Suck is uniformly good. Stefaniuk cast himself as band-leader Joey and Jessica Paré is first charming, then show-stopping once a vampire. Paul Anthony, Mike Lobel and especially Chris Ratz as the Renfield-like Hugo each shine as the rest of The Winners. Dave Foley pops up as the band's manager and Malcolm McDowell gleefully chews scenery as vampire hunter Eddie Van Helsing (nice touch, that). McDowell brings his usual intensity while also seeming unusually playful. Frankly, he looks like he's having an excellent time. (The incorporation of footage of him earlier in his career in a flashback spices up some rote back story, as well.) Musicians Alice Cooper, Henry Rollins, Moby, Iggy Pop, and Alex Lifeson show up to lend "stage cred" to the proceedings. For stunt casting, they're all charming performers and each shines in their cameos.

The construction here is "music video." The music is incorporated through montage and performance to the point where you could call this a musical. The editing, cinematography, and effects nicely straddle the horror-comedy divide. Everything looks lavish, while still feeling small-scale. Color changes in the lighting and stop-motion animation are effectively used to transition scenes. Keep an eye out for the running gag of shots that reproduce famous album covers. While the vampire aesthetic is all pasty skin, red eyes, and good lighting, things stay humorous even when the blood starts flowing.

Superficially, one could say the metaphor here is "vampirism as a metaphor for success," but mostly Suck is simply high-concept comedy done right and worth seeking out.

Special Features:

Suck is presented in widescreen with 2.0 and 5.1 Surround Sound Audio options in English with English SDH subtitles. Extras include trailers, a 45 minute making-of documentary "Down To The Crossroads," an audio commentary track with the writer and director, along with a music video by Burning Brides.

Conclusion:

A tongue-in-cheek musical lark of a vampire story, Suck is campy and fast-paced fun. A nice surprise and highly recommended. Be sure to "try some groupie" and give it a watch.

Overall Picture:

Movie: A-

Extras: B

One A Week reviews #3: Halloween II

I can understand why people were so resistant to both the Halloween Rob Zombie reboot and the sequel that touched on the original "H2" then went off on it's own way. I think the resistance was mostly to the "revisionism" more than anything else. However, as someone who read comic books as a kid and fiction all his life, I have no problem with the idea of revisionist history and divergent story-lines.

Halloween II - which has probably been blogged more than enough and I can keep this short and sweet - starts with a first-quarter faithful to the original hospital-and-bad-wig-bound Halloween II. After that, it quickly diverges off into the study of a very post-traumatic-stressed girl who instead of being a paragon of "final girl virtue" instead lives in squalor on anti-depressant medications. I think it's a great choice, personally. That story is a more realistic look at a damaged life spiraling out of control... this is the fate you figure the original Laurie would suffer if you thought about it too deeply. For this more realistic Laurie, it's inevitable. I'm not even sure I can be empathetic to her path since it is so right that she'd end up down the path to lunacy.

By opening up the timeline and creating a new story as opposed to part two of the same night makes this an entirely different H2. Having the Laurie character generally losing her marbles. Her finding out she's actually "Angel Meyers" in Loomis' super-insensitive true-crime exploitation book is an inspired touch.

However, when you add the White Horse, the Guy Maddin-inspired dream sequences, and Sheri Moon Zombie doing her best to be the new Millennium's version of Tim Burton's lovely ex-muse Lisa Marie... I've personally never found Moon to be anything less than a charming presence and thinks she gets short-shrift in most reviews. In the original Zombie Halloween she's great in the role of Michael's mother.

I'd also like to see the painting in Danielle Harris' attic - she's playing more than 10 years under her age and looks impeccably right doing it. You've seen decades of people in their late 20s playing teens, but for a girl born in 1977, she looks absolutely 19 in this movie. Harris is realistic and easy to relate to. Her character's demise (intercut with her discovery after) winds up grisly and more affecting than it should be. She's representative of what I think is one of the other main objections to Zombie's Halloweens - the stunt casting.

Since she played Jamie in Halloween 4 and 5, she's iconic shoehorned in here as Annie Brackett. But it's the bit players that get people. Margot Kidder, an unrecognizable Howard Hessman, Betsy Rue (so boldly naked and jiggly in My Bloody Valentine 3-D), Weird Al Yankovic. There aren't as many "hey, it's that guy" moments as the first Zombie Halloween, what with Danny Trejo, Richard Lynch, Leslie Easterbrook, Dee Wallace, Sybil Danning, Mickey Dolenz, and more. Brad Dourif's Sheriff Brackett again proves he's an actor with great skill and presence. He remains my favorite character in both movies.

I think stunt casting generally ruins a mood in movies, though the genre vets who appear in these two Halloweens make mostly comforting appearances. Makes up for some glaring omissions - the near total absence of the iconic Halloween score and gratingly stupid "Rockabilly & Topless Dancers" Halloween party scene. It just screams "something that only happens in movies." The Rocky Horror Halloween costumes and "shaggin' wagon" right outta Prom Night are two touches I happened to like a lot, though.

Malcolm McDowell is good, channelling a kind of evil pomposity as always, and Scout Taylor-Compton (who I inadvertently met and was completely charmed by at HorrorHound Weekend in November without immediately realizing who she was) does a good job in the Laurie role, though seems more misguided waif than the living-in-squalor trappings of her room, wardrobe, and friends suggest. The visions of Mother Meyers and little Michael had by both Laurie and Michael do grate. They're a touch you have to either embrace or reject and I don't think they add to the proceedings.

They do, however, make for an inspired way to explain Laurie's growing detachment from reality and way to incorporate Moon back into the storyline. The super-bright and white Moon clashes with the gritty visuals. Movie's too damn dark in most places. I don't need Mama Moon and baby Michael showing up constantly to haunt the final half-hour of the movie, either.

The gritty, "realistic" visuals clash with the dreamy Moon hallucinations and I think are off-putting in the end. The choice to switch drop the audio of the environment for silence (Michael surprising and attacking Annie) or music (Sheriff Brackett breaking down upon seeing Annie's body and the cut-in of some totally manipulative "Annie as a child" video footage) is a stronger stylistic choice that worked on me. (We've seen this before - the first time I can remember encountering it is the end of Godfather III. Still works.) I like Moon, but could have done with a lot less of her "Galadriel and the horse" and a whole lot more of Dourif and McDowell going head to head as they do FAR too briefly towards the end.

On the whole, I'm calling Halloween II flawed, but worth giving a chance to. It's a very different animal than what was expected. A ghost-haunted mashup into a franchise with baggage I'm not sure it all works. I'll give it to Rob Zombie that it's an individual vision and I'm inclined to favor it on the whole. My response is just about the same one I always have to the flawed-yet-individual movies of another writer-director... John Carpenter.