Wednesday, May 2, 2012

The Problem with Horror Films and Gangster Comedies: Five More Bad Old Movies

Still going back and posting movie reviews I wrote a bit over a decade ago, I find I'm not the biggest fan of romances even back then, but at the same time, I was beginning to see the horror films I cherished in a more mature light, and that goes for gangster comedies as well.  While I had no love for a romance like Forces of Nature, saying of it, "The script sucked completely, making the movie awful despite having two charismatic leads in Sandra Bullock and Ben Affleck," and complaining that "the lighting and cinematography were horrible, making the splashy promotional material look like it was advertising for a different movie," I had much more to say about Analyze This and three old horror films, one of which was new at the time I reviewed it in my journal (The Blair Witch Project) and two strange old gory films which I may have once liked, but outgrew:

Analyze This

Okay, I get it.  DeNiro is a gangster.  He’s going to use the F word.  So are all his made men.  But can you at least tone it down, especially since this is supposedly a comedy?  I hate these movies that have to overuse profanity.  Can’t these screenwriters and actors get their point across without every other word being a swear word?  I get the point!  They’re gangsters.  I have no problem if they pepper the dialogue with some rough language.  But there is no need to completely saturate it!  Ten uses of the F-word in a half-hour’s time gets the point across, but more than a hundred times is probably a bit much.
     But Ana-Fu… – e’em, I mean, Analyze This, is not even that good when you remove all the excessive swearing.  The movie is standard Billy Crystal fare and is a low point for De Niro.  
     In the 40’s, Universal took their once scary horror movie icons Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Wolf Man, and put them smack dab in the middle of an Abbott and Costello comedy, finding that these once frightening creatures could be played for laughs.  Now the same thing seems to be happening with gangsters, with Marlon Brando parodying Don Corleone from The Godfather in the late 80’s Matthew Broderick vehicle The Freshman, and De Niro doing his gangster schtick for laughs in Analyze This.  The main difference is that when those classic Universal Monsters appeared in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, it was actually funny!  Maybe once it becomes schtick, you should schtop!

The Blair Witch Project


There was so much hype and word-of-mouth about this film, I went in expecting to see classic horror movie cinema that superbly skates the thin line between what makes a landmark, scary fright film and exploitative trash.  This film was actually neither.
     This film opened against Hollywood’s big special effects horror film remake of The Haunting.  Critics applauded Blair Witch for being able to create a creepier, more involving mood than The Haunting.  They and word of mouth began comparing Blair Witch to The Exorcist as one of the scariest movies ever made, stating that what makes it so gosh darn scary is its restraint, keeping the audience guessing and on the edge of their seats.  Don’t make me laugh!
     The critics were right on target when they pegged The Haunting remake as an overproduced and overstylized movie, thereby losing its desired mood and scariness, but they were way off the mark when they claimed The Blair Witch Project to be a classic due to its restraint.  When I compare Blair Witch to some landmark horror films that were made famous due to their restraint, such as the original Cat People and the first version of The Haunting, as well as other truly scary independent, cheap films like the first Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween, I see a film that does not measure up.  It’s not enough that Blair Witch doesn’t show anything in a supposed attempt to heighten the suspense.  I can deal with that, but cinema, like a painting or a musical composition, has its own set of tools to turn a film into art, and I see none of those tools being used on Blair Witch.  It would be akin to comparing a child’s picture to a painting by one of the Masters, or classical music played on a toy piano versus by a full orchestra.  It may still be art, but it can’t compare to the others because it’s just too sparse.
     As for whether or not the film is scary, in my opinion, Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween were able to supply much more frights and scares on a shoestring budget.  In fact, aside from its restraint, which was not necessarily intended anyway, every single thing you could possibly find to praise Blair Witch for was done much better and with more skill more than 25 years ago when Tobe Hooper made The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with barely any money.  And as for its cherished restraint, films like the original Cat People and The Haunting from 1963 were better movies.  Those movies also used many of the cinematic tools that Blair Witch shuns out of necessity, and the suspense created in them using music, cinematography, set design, lighting, and editing is lost on a film like The Blair Witch Project.  Perhaps my rating of what makes a good horror movie is whether or not I could do better, or at least just as good.  Give me a video camera and I could make something comparable.  Perhaps I should!  It sure made millionaires out of these guys!

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Part II


Of course horror movies, like anything else, have their fair share of crap (more than their fair share, actually).  When I first saw this, I actually liked it.  It had an appealing main character in Stretch, played by Caroline Williams, along with some black humor, and I can remember both my sister and I liking this.  I even used the main character’s paranoid, terrified ranting, “They live on fear!  They live on fear!” in an old poem of mine titled “Fear” because I thought it captured the same flavor I feel when dealing with the evil of this world.  But there are a lot of other movies out there, a lot of better movies, which have humor and make some sort of social statement, movies in which the main characters don’t have to act without their face attached, or wearing another person’s face (ick!).  Whatever else this movie may be, it takes pride in taking the low road, arriving at the lowest common denominator in “entertainment,” and it’s disgusting for no good reason!  I understand that this is a movie that centers on a family of cannibals, and I understand there is going to be some gore, but these filmmakers (including the director Tobe Hooper) seem to just relish showing all the gore they possibly can!  I can handle disgusting gore – I absolutely loved the David Cronenberg remake of The Fly, but The Fly was disgusting and gory for a good reason, and that reason was ingeniously integrated into the tightly scripted, ultimately tragic, and emotional story.  But for Texas Chainsaw II, it was simply an excuse to add gore galore, and then more!  I can just picture the film set with Tobe Hooper screaming over a bullhorn, “Okay, now slice her up some more, and stick that chainsaw right through Leatherface’s gut!  Yeah, that’s it!”  My tastes seem to be changing.  Besides, Dennis Hopper overacts shamelessly!

Phantasm


It just amazes me that this silly film has made it onto some lists of the best or scariest horror films ever made!  I wouldn’t use the words “best” or “scary” to describe this incoherent mess!  Rather, the words that seem to fit the best are “odd” and “strange.”
     Story-wise, the movie makes no sense at all, even if you have a basic grasp of the plot, the acting is just atrocious, and the movie’s two biggest promotional tools, the Tall Man and the floating balls, aren’t nearly as scary as I remembered.  There were some scary moments, to be sure, mostly involving those vicious little midget things, but I defy anyone to explain to me what was really going on here, and have it make any kind of sense!  Sure, I get it; it’s about aliens at the mortuary who want to take the corpses, bring them back from the dead, and compact them to midget size to use as slaves on their planet, which has a denser gravity (hence, the need to compact these zombies), and they have floating ball weapons.  Even knowing all this, it still doesn't make any sense!  It certainly sounds inventive and original, but not intelligent in any way, shape, or form, and the production values are just awful.  If movies with these kinds of plots are your bag, then go for it – as for me, it was a waste of time, and I think I’m finally getting wise to the ways of these gore-mongers!

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