Anvil and Sprocket Movie Review

I have seen some terrible monster movies. I have seen the Killer Shrews. I have seen Troll. God help me, I have even seen Hobgoblins. But nothing could have prepared me for Cloverfield.

I haven’t taken any screen shots here because there’s nothing in the movie worth looking at. So there.

Can your armpits and I just be friends?

Good lord, that was a slog.

It’s amazing how high the production values can appear now, even on a “budget” film of $1.5 million. And the acting is reasonably decent. But Cabin Fever suffers from too much hip, too much stupid, and a premise that would have been better forgotton. That’s the problem, I suppose, with keeping a notebook on hand when you toke up: “Dude, like, we’ll make a slasher movie but the killer will be a disease.”

Oh my god, I think I just bought everything in the minibar.

The advantage of intentionally seeking out bad movies is you are rarely disappointed. I had such high hopes for the Stephen King movie 1408. There seems to have been opportunity somewhere in the raw footage or in an earlier draft of the screenplay for a good movie. After all, 1408 starts out strong as a classic ghost story, but in the end (or perhaps forty minutes before the end), director Mikael Håfström just couldn’t deliver. I think it’s a result of trying to do too little of the ghost story and do too much psychology.

What about this scene says “sit here and stay a spell?”

I had to go back and reread my review of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie because most of that film had slipped my mind. I remember it being a real downer. Well, the 2003 version is even worse. Sure, it’s as depressing as the original. But it’s also been through the big-money Hollywood meatgrinder and now looks like just about every other Hollywood torture-porn flick made this decade. Dark and humorless, the remake features a cast that looks like buffed and polished versions of the original crew — minus the annoying guy in the wheelchair. The sets are visceral and suitably disgusting, but there are only so many movies they can make where the bad guy makes occult art out of human body parts before the trope gets old.

The best thing I can say about the film is that the pacing is still brisk up to the ludicrous chase scene in a slaughterhouse. I’m not so desensitized yet to fake violence, and the pacing managed to keep my animal-brain engaged and scared even as the rest of me was bored. That’s a very odd sensation, kind of like trying to watch 2001 after five cups of coffee. I can’t recommend it.

Look at me when I’m trying to kill you!

I watched Cube shortly after it came out, and I remembered being confused and disappointed by the ending. But it’s become something of a cult success, so I thought I’d watch it again and see if I missed anything. Apparently not. In fact, knowing writer/director Vincenzo Natali wasn’t going to shed any light made watching this talky horror film a more torturous experience than strictly necessary.

Six people from different walks of life are trapped in a cube-shaped room with doors on each face of the cube — all four walls, the ceiling, and the floor. They all quickly learn that some of the doors lead to other cube-shaped rooms, while the others lead to cube-shaped room full of gruesome, fatal traps.

A number of questions immediately present themselves, none of which will be sufficiently answered in the roughly ninety minutes of the film. Instead we’re treated to Sartre-like character analysis and conspiracy theory. And if you hope to resign yourself to watching the team of six mcgyver their way past ingenious traps, you’ll be disappointed again. Using information not really available to the viewers, our Cube subjects learn to decipher which rooms have traps and which don’t. That means most of the film involves the cast moving from one identical room to the other (each has different lighting, but they’re all identical), needling and sniping at each other until they finally snap.

Long time readers will know I have no patience for movies that discard story in favor of some theoretically higher ideal. Such films are usually poorly-written self-indulgent cheats, and Cube is no different. If that’s your thing you’re welcome to it.

It julianes fries!

“Doctor! No!”

There are a handful of phrases that one doesn’t expect to hear all that often in the modern day. “Fire in a buggy whip factory” is one of them. “An all-new silent film” is another. Given that the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s The Call of Cthulhu comes on a DVD and not on a city block, it’s an easy guess which phrase applies in this case.

O, look at all the baby sequels.

Occasionally when watching a movie I am gripped by deep dread and disappointment. This tends to happen just after the film announces it has been executively produced by Roger Corman.

A mad scientist Doctor Hyde (Corbin Bernsen, and yes: Hyde) re-animates dinosaurs near a small desert town. Unfortunately, some of them escape leading Sheriff Tanner (Eric Roberts) and an animal control officer Melissa Brasselle (Barbara Phillips and her two close friends) to Hyde’s compound. The compound is, of course, ultimately stormed by the U.S. Military. But the military is rapidly outmatched by the raptors leaving Tanner to battle a T. Rex with a Bobcat track loader while Brasselle jiggles. Meanwhile, Corbin Bernsen does his best Alton Brown impersonation.

Corman is also credited as part of the writing staff on this film, and I think I can recognize his work: he wrote the scene where the woman with the huge breast implants takes her top off. He also probably wrote the scene where the other woman with the gazongas trots to the truck.

The dinosaurs are rubber, which suits me just fine.

Maybe we should add “how not to disturb spooky houses” to the Standards of Learning.

This movie is as old as I am and still far more effective than most horror films its age. I suspect that’s because the last thirty minutes or so feature a woman screaming in mortal terror — a sound that would probably evoke your basic animal fight-or-flight response even if you were looking at pictures of fluffy bunnies. It also makes the movie something of a downer. (You can get the same effect from the Blair Witch Project, which seems to have stolen from The Texas Saw Massacre mercilessly).