
Sunday, February 24, 2013
The Disco Exorcist: Jay's Movie of the Week #8

Monday, February 18, 2013
Valentine (2001): Jay's Movie of the Week #7
The slights of childhood tend to stick with a person. However, holding a grudge from a middle school dance and turning it into a murder spree is a tad much. Valentine was part of the post-Scream slasher revival and something of a flop. Most importantly, it's a hoot to recount for you now, complete with snark, especially on so timely an occasion (says the boy who meant to post this one day after Valentine's, not four).
___
Back in the sixth grade, Shelley, Lily, Paige, and Kate all shoot down super-dork Jeremy's invitation to dance, while barely tolerated social pariah (just guessing based on her later behavior) Dorothy finally accepts. When a gaggle of boys start mocking them, she smartly errs on the side of surviving the social jungle and turns on Jeremy, who winds up stripped and beaten in front of the whole school. Thirteen (and shouldn't it always be that many?) years later...
Shelly (the always-alienating Katherine Heigl) is going on the sort of ridiculously overdressed "Fancy" dates that the teen audience aimed for here would imagine for such sophisticated Med School ladies. Along with shooting down douchy guys, she also likes to expose herself to blood-borne pathogens when doing late night, darkly lit autopsy homework (which doesn't even make sense in the movie, much less in the explanation). After getting a threatening Valentine (a charming custom made card that would probably have a nice life outside of this film) from a red-herring jump-scare dude, she finds herself being stalked. After a little of the old cat and mouse, she's quickly dispatched by our cherub-masked hero, who's post-kill signature is, of all things, a nosebleed. Keep it in mind, it'll come up later.
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Bong of the Dead: Jay's Movie of the Week #6
BONG OF THE DEAD
Zombie movies are pervasive enough to
factor audience assumptions into their storytelling. Shots to the
head, brain-eating, slow shuffling; we hold these truths to be
self-evident. Similarly, we accept that the foolish might not only
survive, but be rewarded with truly bad-ass chicks for their efforts.
(That some of the zombies are downright chatty might not, however, be
as palatable to genre purists.)
In Bong of the Dead,Tommy
(Jy Harris) and Edwin (Mark Wynn) have ridden out the zombie
apocalypse baked, perhaps a perfectly sensible response to the
circumstances. (The line between empathizing and mockery is thin for
the sober viewer.) So inebriated, they make a logic leap which leads
to a Monsanto-worthy moment of marijuana magic. As suspension of
disbelief rules in the land of the dead, why can't reanimated brains
be the secret ingredient for fertilizing some truly fine bud? There's
also a lot of horsing around during the end of the world; this movie
could be twenty minutes tighter, but it's a drug comedy. Hijinks had
during their meandering road trip to obtain more zombie gray matter
for whipping up their green goo are perfectly permissible. Along the
way, they acquire Leah (Simone Bailly). She's an aggressive,
shotgun-toting, Sarah Connor-inspired beauty straight out of a
teenage boy's Sci-Fi dreams.
Monday, February 4, 2013
Headspace (Director's Cut): Jay's Movie of the Week #5
A little belated, coming after the weekend and all, but that's the way the Editorial Calendar crumbles sometimes...
Andrew van den Houten has certainly
earned horror fandom's indulgence as a producer on The Woman,
Home Movie, and Jack
Ketcham's The Girl Next Door and
the director of Offspring.
As president of Moderncine, he gets to indulge himself with
this director's cut of his 2005 film, Headspace (with
about an hour of extras packed on the disc) which itself
must withstand big expectations
from that same fan base he's earned with his later work (providing
you haven't seen the prior DVD release).
The
story here involves aimless young house sitter Alex Borden
(Christopher Denham), whose childhood was ruined when doting parents
played by Larry Fessenden and Sean Young (briefly seen but hugely
memorable) have a “shotgun divorce” on his 11th
birthday. Nearly 15 years later, he starts exhibiting what most would
assume to be the symptoms of incipient schizophrenia and recalling
childhood visions of demons. His intellect explodes, seemingly
sparked by a simple game of chess in the park, and heightened senses
and psychic gifts also seem part and parcel of his brainy new gifts.
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