31 Flavors of Horror #18: The Haunting of Amelia

Well, they can't all be winners - this film, reviewed for Exploitation Retrospect wants to surprise with it's few chills and twist ending, but it gives up it's secrets early. If not for some ooey-gooey make up effects, this would play more like an "After-school Special" with a twist than the attractive TV actor's Twilight Zone story it'd like to be taken as.

However, the gentle chills it holds are still worth sharing with you. Anyhow, it's a Tuesday. No one expects big thrills and chills on a Tuesday!

31 Flavors of Horror #18
The Haunting of Amelia

After the last ten years or so of the Asian Horror Invasion, it's understandable that you'd look at the box cover, featuring some ghostly girl staring out ominously through a thick fall of hair, and think “Score, horror movie!” You've just been horribly mislead. Once you see the PG-13 emblazoned on it, you'll know for sure. There's a dearth of horror here, and romance, though these seem to be the genres aimed for. This is really more a coming of age drama with a supernatural bent.

If the maudlin adult contemporary songs don't send you running, there's a story here. Rusty (Chad Lindberg) returns for a high school reunion after a decade away. Meanwhile, his friend Josh (Brendan Fehr) stayed, unmotivated, traumatized and shuffling through life like a semi-catatonic. While Rusty tires to spark a little life into him, Josh is paralyzed by memories of his high school girlfriend who died in a train accident.

(gentle horror gets gentle spoilers ahead)

One A Week Reviews #24: The Voyeur

I like to write about movies filled with buckets o' guts, cheesy acting, and high-camp plotlines. I wouldn't normally scribble down my opinions on a film from European soft-core king Tinto Brass unless Dan at Exploitation Retrospect asked me to. Previously, I wrote about the beautiful Art of Love for site, and a refreshing bit of sexploitation is always welcome. The Voyeur is a movie for  "grown ups" and it's topic matter is  "bouncy-bouncy." If my logo shows all the different cuts of meat, you have to expect, on occasion, different muscles.

THE VOYEUR

Tinto Brass seems to have two basic obsessions, buttocks and labia.

The Voyeur is a film all about “The Male Gaze” in film, by a master of it. Every nook and camel-toe get explored by the camera in this set-bound, softly-lit, weirdly perfume-ad-like film. It's of 1994 vintage but, has an Eighties haze and the aesthetic of a Seventies centerfold spread, lacking only a long string of pearls and a wicker chair. The compositions, though, are sometimes as painterly and composed as those of Peter Greenaway, and in the service of a nearly hard-core fantasia.

(Thar be (naughty, naughty) Spoilers Here:)

One A Week Reviews #23: Sculpture

My history with Sculpture goes back a while. It was a pleasure to meet members of the cast and crew back at Horrorhound weekend in 2009, so when Dan at Exploitation Retrospect asked if I wanted to review the movie, it was a given I would.  

Sculpture is an unusual curiosity of a movie: A study of a woman going mad as the sexual abuses of her past catch up with her, dressed up with gory murders, then stuffed into a pair of posing trunks. Your normal, pulchritudinous Scream Queens are here replaced by a series of muscular hunks who's every curve and swell are explored by the camera before they're chopped to little bits by a crazed killer. It's nice to see how the other half lives.

Opening with a framing sequence at the art gallery of Alan Rowe Kelly (you really must see The Blood Shed), who's proud to present the newest show of Ashley Steele (Raine Brown). We then flash back to see how Ashley builds her show-stopping sculpture, "The Perfect Man." After the death of her abusive father, she returns home to brother Adam, his gang of muscle-bound friends, and old "frienemy" Emily. Things quickly take a toxic turn as she finds inspiration for her art in the bodies of Adam's friends

Erin Brown returns under the "Misty Mundae" moniker as Emily. It's a fascinating, fresh twist (though perhaps a one-note one) to see her and Brown's soft, "natural" bodies and breasts countered with the over-defined, pumped up chests of the men in the film. They're packing more cleavage than the actresses and the camera lingers over them longer, both when they pose and as Ashley methodically goes about harvesting their parts. Blake has beautiful legs and Greg has a nice rump, and she's not about to let any piece get away from her and her art. The sawing away she does to get such parts, though, is almost comical, but the dip into gore satisfies.

Aimed at an audience of women and gay men (more closeted than not, I'd guess), and produced by Screamkings, a company with a roster of films where pretty boys wind up in the grave, Sculpture actually has a subtle, surprisingly well-handled story of childhood abuse at it's heart. For low budget horror -with all the constraints that implies – this is a well-written and directed film. The DVD extras include a deleted scene of fantasized incest that's a textbook example of knowing what to cut to strengthen a film. There's also an excised gay subplot and fleshed-out version of a double murder scene.

Raine Brown is one of those B-movie actresses who shows up in fare that emphasizes her figure then surprises you with nuanced acting. She plays a modulated, methodical decent into crazy and in the end sells wide-eyed madness without going (too) over the top. We understand why she sees The Perfect Man as marble when the world just sees fly-blown meat. Both Browns and Kelly have the chops. None of the other actors embarrass themselves, though all are obviously featured primarily here for their bodies. Best are Dustin Kerns as Adam and co-producer Marv Blauvelt who appears as the father in flashbacks. Blauvelt is still producing horror films where the bread and butter is hot guys getting killed by scream queens, and more power to him and this odd sub-genre.

There's (and this is such a groaner I almost hate to type it) "meat" to the story in Sculpture behind the beefcake.

One A Week Reviews #50: Fireball (2009)

Not great, not horrible - reviewed for Exploitation Retrospect. You really should check that fabulous site out!

FIREBALL

Ever watch a movie and get annoyed by some character trait that seems to be nothing more than some piece of business shoe-horned in by an actor in a fit of "inspiration?" You've seen it before. A limp, an accent, some truly bad hair, a facial tic. Something where the actor can say "I'm acting" while the crew stands aside, awkward and embarrassed because it's not worth anyone's job to stop them.

In Fireball, Ian Somerhalder's character has a repetitive shtick involving flicking a purposely-unfilled Zippo lighter to not light a cigarette, since his character is trying to quit smoking. While I'm sure he's a lovely and talented man; this, along with a performance that seems to be made of solely of poses and winces, makes for so rough going. It's hard to empathize with a movie when all you want to do is douse the pretty lead actor in gasoline and break out a proper Bic.

Fireball stars Somerhalder as a standard-B-movie-issue FBI agent ("Agent Cooper," no less) along with Lexa Doig (looking the same as she did in Jason X a decade ago, ageless and lovely) as a "book-smart" Fire Investigator in a little town that seems to have it's fair share of arson. You'll thrill to their perfectly pedestrian and chemistry-free character arc as they investigate crimes, have a cute date, and leap out of the way of a few fireballs!

Also starring is Alexis Paunovic as disgraced Football star Tyler Draven (no, I'm sure the screenwriter wasn't aping "Tyler Durden" of Fight Club here. Of course not...), who through a mix of "steroids keyed to his particular DNA sequence" and a chance encounter with a burning building winds up becoming a human match. He's capable of starting fires he uses to fulfill an agenda of petty vendettas, offing those he thinks have done him wrong. Clearly a man with some roid-rage issues, he's already a rampaging mess in a bad wig prior to becoming a state-of-the-low-budget-CGI-art Supervillain. At this point, while he should be heading off to do in the people he sees as ruining his career he instead decides to hunt witnesses, Judges, and a sleazy reporter who really does deserve it. Blowing up cars and propane tanks, he escalates to leaving smoldering footsteps in his wake and slagging bullets. Paunovic grimaces and growls out a series of profoundly stupid, quasi-religious one liners while mediocre special effects create hurling fireballs as he escalates from microwaving a hotel room to deciding to nuke a nuclear power plant.

The movie loses some points for a truly stupid "I know how to stop him" plan that involves getting Durden to stand completely still while they dump sand on him, and another plan which relies on sucking the oxygen out of a totally non-airtight room with a giant pit in the middle (one with a wobbling ring of "concrete" around it). The scene where they slice a fireball in half with an axe is more likable than you'd wish it to be. As a "show-stopper" effect, it charms a smidge more than it should. Shot on video and obviously low-budget, there's still some good photography here. The actors aren't bad. Things are just... not inspired. This is a "SyFy Premier" movie, and I'm always willing to give them a pass for their hokey and good-natured fun. I love these "Saturday Night Specials" and Fireball is no different... even if it lacks a giant sea beast, sand serpent, or half-man half-mantis creature.

Now, usually, it's not good to give away quite as many details about a film as we do here. I feel like I'm entitled to, however, because this is one of those flicks where the trailer gives away the entire movie. Seriously, it's a linear collection of every low highlight in the flick. If the filmmakers don't want to save anything to be enjoyed by the audience, I don't see any reason to. Don't get me wrong, Fireball is enjoyable, and a good "stay in with a few brews" flick, but if you're going to catch it, skip the previews.

One A Week Reviews #34: Creature of Darkness

A title reviewed for Exploitation Retrospect. The bastards made me suffer this so you don't have to!

CREATURE OF DARKNESS

It's one thing to be a paint-by-numbers Creature-Feature for the Syfy Network, but what does it say about you to make those films look like they should be in the AFI top 100?

Well, CREATURE OF DARKNESS is just such a movie. From the beginning's bad CGI, like something out of an early 2000s flight simulator, to a later background composite less convincing than the kind of primitive 1970's Chromakey Sid and Marty Kroft would have used, right out of the gate this has the feeling of “why bother?”

A multi-culti group of twentysomethings go on a retreat to land right by a USAF bombing range to ride their ATVs and help now-puffy and thirtysomething “star” Devon Sawa deal with his nightmares. Of course, these bad dreams relate to that location at that particular time of year and bad juju that happened to his Uncle there, who warned him NEVER to go to THAT location at THAT particular time of year.

No, you're right. That doesn't make a lick of sense. Sawa here is joined by Sanoe (who the hell) Lake and Matthew Lawrence (If Lawrence brothers were Baldwins, he skips Stephen and Billy and goes right to Daniel levels of fame) and together the star-wattage is, sadly, neutral. I'm not sure of the point of a C-grade, no, make that Z-grade Sci-Fi film that presents you with special effects and breasts you can't see because the film is timed too dark.

When the girls aren't sunbathing in the shade, characters are driving their ATVs into magical sinkholes that appear when convenient to the plot. The stupidest character not only shoots his gun and hits one of the vehicle's gas tanks, but he then throws a flaming log that winds up setting off the flowing gas and blowing the bike to kingdom come. Seriously? Stupid.

About the only thing the the film has going for it is the alien when he's presented as a practical effec. With the bad CGI animation he comes off like a intentional homage to Ray Harryhausen. Mostly shown in closeup of his grimacing mouth, the critter is a cross between a mantis, a grey, and Alice Krige's Borg Queen, then dressed up like the JEEPERS CREEPERS monster. Thanks to plot exposition by Sawa's story of his uncle's convenient brush with this monster, we find out it's a spine-flinging “Catcher” collecting for what we can only assume is his outer-space zoo. His desire for unique and unblemished specimens makes this young knock-off United Colors of Bennetton crowd especially attractive to him in the one flash of intelligence the script shows.

Needless to say there's a predictable body-count and some action broken up by long periods of chat without any sense of urgency. There are choices made that make absolutely NO logical sense and plot holes created with no rhyme or reason in the story. There was at least an opportunity to showcase the “unique specimens” concept and explore just WHY the government didn't interfere with something that left gored bodies on their land. If these points do ever get explored, may they at least be by a movie with more going for it than this one.

To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, “this is NOT a movie to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” 

One A Week Review #33: Murder on Flight 502

I'm proud to announce that, along with dvdsnapshot.com, I'll be writing some reviews for Exploitation Retrospect as well (my first for them was Art of Love). This is the first of my regular pieces for them, a compendium of everything right about the works of the one and only Mr. Aaron Spelling. Enjoy!

MURDER OF FLIGHT 502

Made-for-TV movies often straddle the fine line between the ridiculous and the sublime. Be they “ripped from the headlines” or a“disease of the week,” when at their best you get B and C-list has-beens, currentlies, and never-weres trooping through plot-heavy, punchy, just-darn-entertaining throwaway movies. They're potboilers, TV's “beach novels.” My favorites are often the most sensational and trashy ones. MURDER ON FLIGHT 502 is great because it seems to want to be a “disaster movie,” but is instead an exemplary disaster.

This is a 1975 Aaron Spelling production and it is truly the low-rent “prestige” presentation one would hope for out of the most-beloved scholck-meister in TV history. It wears its inspirations proudly. Namely: AIRPORT, SKYJACKED, THE VIPS, and AIRPORT 75.

The sublime here is the cast, and it's worth taking the time to share who's who. The actors and their characters, such as they are, remain the main reason to check this out. Robert Stack is playing his AIRPLANE character at an earlier stage in his career. Polly Bergen chews through scenery like there really is scotch in all those cocktails her character knocks back as she verbally spars with Fernando Lamas. Hugh O'Brien is a police detective, which is not exactly an acting stretch from his time as TV's Wyatt Earp. Walter Pidgeon and Molly Picon (a star of Yiddish theater playing the most stunning stereotype I've possibly ever seen of a lonely European Jewish Grandmother) have a subplot straight from the Love Boat. Farrah Fawcett-Majors (before the hairstyle that made her famous) is the Stewardess on her last flight because she's “tired of being liberated” and ready to marry and settle down. Sonny Bono essentially plays himself in a storyline where he's resented by Dane Clark and Laraine Day, a couple of B-grade movie actors long past they're prime that I'll defy you to recognize.

You also have the second rung of subplots: Ralph Bellamy getting stalked by Theordore Bikel for real and imagined slights. Danny Bonaduce, traveling unsupervised, leaves behind a smoke bomb (ah, the golden age of travel) and gets barely a slap on the wrist for it. Brooke Adams, all teeth and sparkle, walks-on as what seems to be the only stewardess for the rest of the plane and George Maharis wanders around lost as the man back at Mission Control. This is the greatest Fantasy Island cast never assembled.

There's a murder on board, though no one dies until the hour mark. With subplots about two different maybe-murders from the past and some good old fashioned money laundering, there's enough chat to pad out the story while obscuring the fact that hardly anything happens. Two different people are being blamed for deaths from the past. Someone may be a thief and someone else an imposter identified in the most mind-boggling way possible. The clumsiest “set-up-in-the-first-five-minutes plot point” ever slides right by as you're numbed into submission by this assemblage of storylines that don't seem to go anywhere. It's all too, too much as it piles on, but this is a fondue of some top-shelf cheese.

I personally tend to fly commuter cattle-car airlines, so the vast first-class cabin that's the main set is the furthest thing imaginable from today's reality. Since the action cuts between various areas of the plane and airport security on the ground, you never get any sense of the claustrophobia such a locked-room whodunnit requires. We never see any other passengers or sections of the plane, only our Murder She Wrote cum Hotel selection of “characters.” Airlines must not have been very concerned about maximizing every square inch of space like they do today. Nowadays the stuff that happens in this movie would get that plane grounded so fast the oxygen masks would drop.

The production values are low, the fabrics are eye-searing, and the dialogue is atrocious. Bono's character at one point actually says “the beat goes on.” His agent is briefly introduced at the beginning so he can deliver possibly the greatest line in TV movie history: “When you're on top you can rape whistler's mother in Macy's window at high noon and get away with it.” Seriously.

All that aside, this is a heckuva lot more entertaining than FLIGHTPLAN. It's good fun in that classic trash-TV-movie sense. A very low-rent, multi-storyline homage to the style of Arthur Hailey, MURDER ON FLIGHT 502 is also a reminder of what made Aaron Spelling such a beloved TV presence. This collects all of his hallmark touches... except for sex and Heather Locklear.