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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