Jay's One A Week Reviews #28: Fan of the Dead

The fine folks at MVD sent me a DVD of Fan of the Dead a while back, and I'm a shamefully tardy reviewer with a too-busy schedule that I'm just now getting a review up about it.

Fan of the Dead is a short documentary by an Italian fan of the films of George Romero. French fan Nicolas Garreau, dubbed over in English, shoots himself with a hand-held home-video camera as he goes on a tour of the locations of his movies. The feel is somewhat similar to the feature in HorrorHound Magazine named "Horror's Hallowed Grounds" where a film's locations are visited and photographed. It's traditionally a surprisingly comprehensive and fascinating feature, the most recent issue visiting the locations of Salem's Lot. I have never personally understood the allure, personally, of commemorating a location for no other reason than something once happened there, but in the magazine it's an interesting, educational monthly feature. On video, it's just travelogue. (An exhausting one at that. Should I be rewarded to know that the office where Ken Foree finds the keys in Dawn of the Dead still exists? It's now... used as an office!)

Along with interviews filmed at the Pittsburgh Comic Con of many of the actors from Dawn of the Dead, he visits the locations of that film along with Creepshow, Day of the Dead, and the 1968 Night of the Living Dead. What looks most fun is a tour of the Monroeville mall from Dawn lead by Ken Foree. It quickly dawns on you, though, that this is literally a home movie of a weekend vacation made good.

It's clear Garreau knows Romero's films quite thoroughly. He navigates his way through the graveyard from the 1990 Night by the names on the headstones. I think the obsessive attention to some details, like where a medicine cabinet was hung and where a particular shot was photographed from is a level of minutia that's really a bit beyond the pale, but I can't find fault. A little slip of a documentary, and not even an hour in length, it's a home movie with credits, distribution, and some guest stars. This is also good-natured and surprisingly not cheesy. It is was it is, but I found in an enjoyable watch almost in spite of myself. The DVD has a photo gallery, but it all reproduces shots you've already seen in the documentary, and a cute trailer collection straight from the Drive-In. It's about the only place you'll ever find Julie Andrews around Zombies.

I appreciate Garreau's fascinating way to document a vacation to the US to meet some movie stars -and that he got it a distribution deal. I wish I'd taken a camera when I went to HorrorHound weekend in Indianapolis... because then the trip would have been a tax write-off.

One A Week Reviews #27: Stolen

A thrilling, sobering thriller reviewed for dvdsnapshot.com, this one is definitely worth checking out!

 

OFFICIAL SYNOPSIS
Golden Globe Award winner Jon Hamm of Mad Men stars as Detective Tom Adkins, a devoted cop haunted by the unsolved disappearance of his young son eight years earlier. But when Adkins discovers the buried remains of a boy who was brutally murdered more than half a century ago, he becomes obsessed with investigating the long-forgotten crime. Is the 1958 mystery surrounding down-on-his-luck family man Matthew Wakefield (Josh Lucas of Glory Road) and his own abducted son linked in any way to Adkins' tragedy? And even if Adkins can prove a connection, can he face the shocking truth about the killer? Rhona Mitra (Boston Legal, Doomsday), Morena Baccarin (Serenity) and James Van Der Beek co-star in this harrowing thriller about the parallel lives of two men for whom secrets will not stay hidden when hope has been Stolen.
OUR TAKE
There's a kind of pornography to the exploitation of parental fears that comes with any film about desperate searches for kidnapped children. Even when well done, I feel there's a cheapness to it, and I don't even have kids. It's such a raw, crazy, vast fear to even try and conceptualize that it does, at least, make it easy for a movie to gain the sympathies of an audience. Stolen (aka Stolen Lives) illustrates idea that a stranger can enter the world of a family and rip it's very center apart twice over.
When Tommy Adkins vanishes on the 4th of July, his parents are at a loss until the discovery eight years later of a similar body that's been buried for fifty but with some of the same clues opens up parallel storylines of loss. His father is a Police Detective who, never able to find his own son, grasps onto solving this long-past mystery as a way to perhaps find a key to getting answers.
Fifty years prior, Matthew Wakefield finds himself in dire financial straits with a suicidal wife and three young sons. As he makes sacrifices for his family, he crosses paths with a married woman and a mystery man who's stalking his son. Solving the mystery of what happened to the Wakefields may just help Detective Adkins find answers in his own son's disappearance.
Non-linear storytelling skips us across 2000 to present day to 1958 to the parole hearing of one Bert Rogianni, who may or may not have taken Tommy. For a first film, director Anders Anderson keeps the story moving, the audience engaged and has an excellent eye. The pace is a slow build, but smooth. enough that you won't mind the pacing. Be warned that things get dark and chilling as the film unfolds with the structure of a well-written mystery novel.
Jon Hamm and Josh Lucas both turn in good work here as stalwart, all-American fathers under unimaginable pressures. Rhona Mitra, however, has been presented as an exotic European Sex Vixen for so long that it's hard to buy her as a tortured small-town mother, and sadly that typecasting overshadows a decent performance. Even worse, an American accent does not suit when you have a voice and accent like hers. It's also hard to get past Morena Baccaran's looks to see her as a frowsy 50's housewife with an oppressive husband. Joanna Cassidy, a very naturalistic James Van Der Beek, and the underrated character actresses Beth Grant and Kali Rocha put in welcome appearances. Don't let the don't let the heavy handed names get to you (Matthew's sons are mark Luke and John. A trio of women named Pearl, Coral, and Rose) and in you're in for a treat of a potboiler.
Also: don't read the imdb page for this film before you watch it. The cast list alludes to major spoilers.

SPECIAL FEATURES
Stolen is presented in widescreen format with English Dolby 5.1 Audio and subtitles in both English and Spanish. The DVD also includes a 12 minute "Behind the Scenes" featurette and trailers for Life in Flight, Uncertainty, Five Minutes of Heaven, Swedish Auto and The Good, The Bad, The Weird.

CONCLUSION
Stolen tells a pair of parallel kidnapping stories that strike at a parent's worst fears and illustrate how the repercussions of crimes change lives forever. Just don't look at the imdb page, since it includes a spoiler and pay attention as the non-linear storytelling leads you through the film's novelistic structure. A well-crafted quality entertainment, but also a very dark film.

OVERALL PICTURE

MOVIE: A-

EXTRAS: C

One A Week Reviews #26: These Are The Damned

An "odd duck" that's part of the Hammer Icons of Suspense collection, These Are The Damned kicks off fast. With a jangly theme song called "Black Leather" that WILL unfortunately lodge itself into your brain, there's rapid-fire introductions to boring American tourist/Man of Mystery Macdonald Carey;dapper biker-thug Oliver Reed and his sassy, hip-swinging sister-moll, Shirley Ann Field with her inexplicable attraction to Carey; and exotic beatnik sculptress Viveca Lindfors.

With gorgeous black and white cinematography and an intriguing English Seaside town setting, Damned is engaging from the get-go, where you're expecting a character story. Something about the wild youth of "today" rebelling against staid society, even if here it's represented by the stately, stuffy Carey. Oliver Reed, in an early role, is already expressing the magnetic lunacy that will make him a compelling and repelling screen presence for his whole career. You have the "dapper biker gang" trying to roll the American, but this little "social drama" soon turns when a military conspiracy is revealed. One involving a classroom of very sheltered, black-clad children (These "damned" are the aesthetic flip-side of the Village of the Damned kids).

It's all very intriguing and by 25 minutes in you're hooked, committed to find out just where the hell this is all going. The story goes from "social drama" (I keep turning to that phrase but I don't know how else to describe it's dynamic. Maybe "kitchen-sink drama"?) to chase thriller to Sci-Fi-W-T-F? while keeping a fair pace. It does drag in a few places, but that's acceptable in a nearly 50 year old film. You're not sure why Carey and Field get together beyond the perfunctory needs of the script, yet they have an oddly calm chemistry. Lindfors and Reed share a very interesting scene, something out of a social drama. They seem to be two very damaged kids who could just somehow make it work.

Joseph Losey was an accomplished director and here created a real below-the-radar gem. I can't recall encountering this film before, but I'm definitely glad to find it now. I'm not going to spoil too many of it's secrets because it's worth a watch. An artifact of the "Atomic Age" and a curious glimpse at early sixties youth counterculture, this is a unique film. Seek it out!

Jay's One A Week Reviews #25: Vamp Vixens (with a surprising twist at the end)

Read to the bottom, as that's where I "Buried the Lead," as it were...

Vamp Vixens 

 The kind and lovely people over at MVD Entertainment Group saw my review of their recent release I Am Virgin and most generously proceeded to send me a big ol' box of fab DVDs for my perusal and review. Typically, I took that opportunity to flake out for a month and am only now turning my weary, bleary little eyes back to their box of delights.

What can I say about the oddity Vamp Vixens? As it launched from a menu featuring a gal with plastic fangs and silicone implants and into credits that state it's "Hosted by Mistress Luna Moon" (her given name, I'm sure), I wondered what was in store.

What I didn't expect is a woman in a leather getup and Betty Page bangs lisping around her mouthful of fake vampire teeth introducing a series of vignettes... which turn out to be all the sex scenes that felt shoe-horned in to I Am Virgin. It's no wonder they felt so awkwardly injected into that film's storyline, as they're a kind of multi-purpose semi-porn. She has a "pet" man on a chain and aims for the witty aside, a la Elvira, but doesn't add much spark to the dire, simulated, and very unconvincing scenes of (ahem) "erotica."

Ok, seriously, it does take marketing balls to sell this as a separate item. Kinda smart to repackage these soft-core sex scenes featuring tattooed, kinda "Suicide Girls"-style strippers simulating sex with each other or a couple of nondescript hunks who don't have much more presence than the gals do. Even in terms of appealing to those with the fetish for vampire-play or the near-"Rollergirl" look, I find it hard to imagine Vamp Vixens delivering for them.

Slowly paced and, yes, almost depicting intimacy on occasion, on the whole the aesthetic is just off. Dime-store Halloween fangs added to shot on video soft-core do not make it somehow hotter. Also, even though they have discretely labeled this DVD as being "Rated X," this is definitely soft-core. If you're going to watch adult programming designed with fetishes in mind, and something this completely lacking in storyline, you may as well go "balls out," as it were, and watch the real hard-core thing.

Awful, awful, awful. Sorry, folks, there's just no point to this flick.

And now, the "surprising twist"...
In the end, I suppose you could play this in the background at parties and bars, but the only thing really recommending this DVD is the "special feature." Surprising and timely, the "Also from Brookland Brothers" link leads you first to the trailer for Palin: Erection 2008, a satire-porn featuring Stephen Hill, AKA Steve Driver, the porn actor who murdered a coworker and attacked two others with a prop samurai sword and then fell to his death off a cliff June 5th, 2010 after a 9-hour standoff with police that ended in a tasing that may or may not have contributed to his fall. A surprising coincidence to see the same day on a DVD in my home I'd received a month before. Ah, coincidence...

One A Week Reviews #24: Neowolf

This stinker may very well be one of the worst movies I've ever had to review. Enjoy...?

NEOWOLF

OFFICIAL SYNOPSIS:
"A rock band of werewolves will tear your heart apart!" Torn between the girl he loves and the dark side of fame, a young musician is seduced by a touring rock band called "Neowolf" with a mysterious past and a hungry habit that comes with the full moon!

OUR TAKE:
Ever see Near Dark, where a guy gets hooked up with a roaming band of vampires thanks to his "Star-crossed love" for a bad girl? Well, here we have a band that's a Band and they're Werewolves. They're also style victims. Neowolf is a barely-coherent mess directed by the estimable "Alan Smithee." (A pseudonym for Yvan Gauthier in this case).

Essentially, college boy Tony returns to try and patch things up with his girlfriend Rosemary and her sidekick Kevin when he's seduced away by Paula, the distaff member of Neowolf, a touring rock band made up of Werewolves. When she decides he needs to be a Lycanthrope as well, it's up to Rosemary and Kevin to trudge their way to a plan of rescue.

From the very beginning this film is a derivative, badly-constructed mess. Most shots are framed awkwardly. One of the opening scenes reminds one of some weird super-slow-mo fashion commercial set at a gas station. Weird, cross-fade montages are the structure of every scene, along with jittery action camerawork for when the badly-costumed werewolves attack. This editing can barely camouflage the wooden acting or completely random leaps of logic the characters take.

Veronica Cartwright and Tiffany Shepis show up here in bit parts. They both have just enough audience goodwill to forgive them these trespasses. I just hope they didn't lower their quotes for the job.

There's also some uniquely bad lip-syncing in this movie. The special effects and kill-scenes (rather important in a horror film) are pretty atrocious, too. CGI morphs that would have looked amateur in 1995 are show-piece effects here and a website-insert  that looks like it came from '95 as well. Everything about this is amateur and disjointed, but I think the filmmakers went in with good intentions. (Gauthier has made other films) That said, this is aspiring to compete with The Room more than it is The Howling.

SPECIAL FEATURES:
Neowolf is presented in widescreen with audio in English 5.1 and 2.0 Dolby Digital along with Spanish subtitles. Some trailers are included.

CONCLUSION:
"Alan Smithee" is a pseudonym a director uses when, due to either quality or control issues, he wants to remove his name from a movie. Neowolf may ruin his career.

This isn't just bad. This is The Room of Horror films.

OVERALL PICTURE:
MOVIE: D-
EXTRAS: C-