October 8th: THE MOON OF THE WOLF - a 1972 tv movie billed as a "mystery" but it's nothing of the sort: a young woman is murdered in a Louisiana town in the early 1970s, the Sherriff uncovers secrets and lies as he tries to track down the killer, an old guy on his death bed keeps screaming "loup garou!" and then someone is revealed to have a mysterious condition that makes him black out when murders happen and then when his hands start getting really hairy I'm starting to think they won't need to draft in Columbo to solve this one. Maybe the novel made more a whodunnit of the material so at least the treatment was interesting if not the story, but this is pretty straightforward, real meat and potatoes werewolf fodder and not noteworthy for much except a perpetually-underused David Jannsen, and that guy who's always in Clint Eastwood movies whose name escapes me and who I never had much of an opinion about except that maybe he was a better actor than this outing would suggest. Although there are some effective first-person shots of the werewolf stalking its prey, they're wasted the moment it actually appears onscreen and it feels like you fell asleep and Youtube cued up a Supergrass music video from the 1990s, the 4:3 ratio and fuzzy resolution really helping with that impression because holy geez they really just put big sideburns on a guy and called it werewolf makeup huh? Okay.
My hopes weren't high, but it had "wolf" in the title and I rolled the dice. This time: snake eyes.
October 9th: THE MEG 2: THE TRENCH - is less a movie and more two money laundering schemes inside a trenchcoat, bankrolled as it is by a combination of the usual "Hollywood accounting" and "Chinese new money", a class of entrepeneur that likes to invest big in Western media projects because they love Western culture... and for no other reasons.
Jason Statham's roles all boil down to one thing: a character who is there for a paycheck, and I've always felt that this blatant metacommentary on the reason he's onscreen is his revenge on the world for that time Kelly Brook dumped him for Billy Zane. Obviously, Kelly Brook remains a smokeshow to this day, but this is mid-20s Kelly Brook we're talking about here and it's not like Statham is ugly or anything, it's just that he's Jason Statham and she was always going to dump him and he knew it, and I believe he had accepted it and was just along for the metaphorical ride because like I said, mid-20s Kelly Brook yes please, and then she dumps him for Billy Zane and like the rest of us, Jason Statham has to unpack this turn of events now. He can't just go on with his life, he's been dumped for Billy fucking Zane. Seriously, what the Hell? So he takes on the roles of mercenary, gangster, getaway driver - any and all roles in which the audience knows as they watch him onscreen that he is just there to get paid. Bruce Willis can show up in a zero-budget thriller that is only technically a film and people who know full well that they're watching complete dogshit will still say "why is he acting so badly in this? He can do better than this.", but that will never be said of Jason Statham. Jason Statham drifts from one gig to the next, never changing, a constant in an unstable world because Jason Statham is not an actor, Jason Statham is the role. His troubled mind may be occupying another, more important plane of being dedicated to unpacking The Great Mystery, but his toned, muscular frame is back on Earth, fighting sharks, communist juntas, or fellow inmates on a... a post-apocalyptic Earth or whatever he does in other movies - I dunno, I haven't seen them and this metaphor has gotten away from me, but he's not very good in this is what I'm saying, and that's okay, because the material demands nothing more than he brings to it, and you know, leave the little guy alone, he's got stuff to figure out. The Meg 2 was a silly monster movie matinee and I enjoyed it just fine, but it often felt like it might have been quicker if they just burned the money in a furnace.
October 10th: THE CURSED - a fun gothic werewolf romp from writer/director Sean Ellis, maker of that weird sex perv drama about the bloke who develops the power to stop time and uses it to disrobe female customers in the shop where he works so he can take pictures, which, like most sex crimes, is a very French premise for a film. Ellis goes the French route yet again in plundering 2001's Brotherhood Of The Wolf for ideas, which was a period film about an 18th century detective investigating deaths in a remote village but who is also a secret agent because the crimes were done by a werewolf controlled by a tribe of anarchist cavemen death cultists who can only be defeated by the secret agent and his Native American sidekick's superior kung fu skills - it's all very French, and Sean Ellis clearly looked at it and decided "more films should be like this", and whatever else I might think of The Cursed, I certainly can't fault the director's reasons for making it.
The Cursed chooses to make its story more overtly supernatural, instead of the perfectly logical explanations for the strange goings-on offered up in Brotherhood Of The Wolf - like the "werewolf" eventually revealed not to be some ludicrous supernatural killing machine at all, instead turning out to be a regular old armored cyborg lion programmed to assassinate the king of France - while the "monster" behind the series of gory deaths in The Cursed is unambiguously supernatural long before appearing onscreen as a CGI goblin werewolf thing created through a combination of gypsy curse and a slightly underpowered graphics card. I assume it's not technically a 'proper' werewolf because hairy creatures are more difficult - by which I mean expensive - to animate than something smooth-skinned and perpetually sweating, but this hair-splitting doesn't get in the way of this being a werewolf movie and I will not be entertaining arguments to the contrary because we have so few good werewolf movies I am not prepared to let this one slip away. Although I really must ask if every modern horror movie is shot inside a coalshed, as I had to turn the contrast and brightness way up on this one.
It was neat. I liked.
October 11th: TRANSFORMATIONS - is a 1988 werewolf-in-space movie, so you just know it has recycled SFX footage from Battle Beyond The Stars in it. I remember seeing some making-of video about Battle Beyond The Stars, and apparently the SFX guy they hired was fresh out of college and loaded with debt and really, really needed the gig if he wanted to eat that month, so he designed and built a bunch of stuff specifically to appeal to (Battle Beyond The Stars producer) Roger Corman's sensibilities, which is why - Corman at this time being a prolific producer of sexploitation movies - the design for the hero's starship in Battle Beyond The Stars has a massive pair of tits. Sadly, despite pulling extensively from Roger Corman's library of stock SFX footage, we do not get to see the slug-tidday starship in this one, but it is a movie about a werewolf in space, so on balance things work out okay.
Transformations tells the story of intrepid space smuggler Captain Wolf, who has a dream in which he does a sex with a hot lady who turns into a space monster just as he's finishing up, and now lawks o lordy he's got a space STD that's turning him into a killing machine! It's daft as a hat stuff, featuring Patrick McNee as a space monk and some surprisingly large physical sets - not good sets, I have to stress, but really big, even the corridors and rooms. Such productions were not meant to be viewed in such high resolution as is available to us here in the space year of 2023, however, so you can really see the joins where they just sellotaped stuff like consoles and airlocks together, these films really only finding a natural home in a combination of 4:3 cathode ray televisions and fuzzy VHS, rather than the crisp blu-ray transfer and HDTV combo most will experience.
Having said that, it's a space werewolf movie made by schlockmeister Charles Band in the late 1980s, if you have expectations of high culture going in, that's your baggage. I knew what to expect of a movie about a sexually transmitted infection that turns you into a space lizard (but we know it's still a werewolf movie, the main character's name is literally WOLF), and I had a hoot watching it.
October 12th: ALIEN: THE NOVELISATION, BY ALAN DEAN FOSTER - more like ALIEN DEAN FOSTER am I right? That's the cleanest joke that will ever appear on this blog.
I tried to read this last Halloween as part of the Aliens multimedia blow-out which comprised of the movies and the dreadful, dreadful Colonial Marines videogame, but sadly couldn't find the time, however, Long Covid and a bout of the flu have cnspired to give me a lot more free time to spend in bed and sooner or later the charge on my phone and tablet runs out and I'm reduced to reading things with my eyes, things on paper, like some medieval peasant from the 1970s or something.
This was, for some reason, a triple-threat along with the Aliens VS Predator videogame (some rough edges, but a solid shooter with a decent story) and Foster's adaptation of OUTLAND, one of my favorite sci-fi movies despite - or possibly because of - its incredibly dated FX and persistent fanboy speculations about it being set in the Aliens cinematic universe through a mix of a similar design aesthetic and a line in anti-corporate critique that increasingly seems odd to see in 1980s productions given that half the world was aligned against socialism at the time. I wonder if it's merely my looking back at them from 2023 and feeling such things are just incomplete without a legion of wailing man-babies complaining about wokeness and communism. Truly a simpler time.
Anyway, one thing that strikes me about Foster's prose across both novels is that he's great at setting the scene - by which I mean setting the scene from the movies he's adapting. Passages describing characters and settings feel like he's describing stills from the film, but with an economy that allows him to toss in the odd distraction or aside, like the now-legendary "coccoon scene", and I was half-expecting Ripley being a mother to come up at some point before realising I was getting my missing scenes mixed up. In retrospect, those Alien movies were always a fucking mess, huh? At least half the book seems to be dedicated to the Nostromo and crew getting to the planet and finding the Alien, which I liked as it helps lean into the stuff I find interesting about the setting, and if I was a better writer I could probably take this and run with the Outland comparisons further, but all I can do is point out that the stuff with the xenomorph (which doesn't read like it physically resembles its movie counterpart very much) happens relatively quickly, and there's a bit that I'm not sure if I'm reading right, but it basically seems to suggest that Ripley first seems to think there's something off about Ash when she realises that he hasn't fucked any of the women on board, which is uhhhhh... yeah, not sure about that tbh.
All in all, though, an enjoyable read.
October 13th: BLOOD MOON - as I said futher up the page, we have so few good werewolf movies, and despite its cheapness this is damn near one of them before some terrible acting and writing choices derail things - but it has a bloke in a suit playing the werewolf (just don't ask me if it's a convincing suit) and a bunch of British actors pretending to be cowboys on a Western set that is clearly located somewhere in England, and you know, I am not made of stone over here. It is a very enjoyable romp and that is all I want in a werewolf movie so I shall keep my gripes to myself on this one.
What was the point of the B-plot about the Native American witch? Who knows. Enjoyable film. Filled time.
October 14th: M3GAN - "what if Chucky, but girl?" is one of those horror concepts that must have really kept the writers up all night dreaming it up yes I know staying awake to dream something is a bad metaphor but it's that or my usual tiresome cynicism about how "stuff like this is why writers are suddenly worried about being replaced by AI" and you know, I'm almost as tired of hating everything as people are of hearing me do it. I actually enjoyed this, it's a lot of fun, and clearly aimed at taking advantage of the growth in teenage girls attending horror movie showings, as the amount of gore is lower than one would expect and no-one asks if they can have sex with the doll - which seems like the first thing that would come up at a shareholders' meeting if my understanding of capitalism is correct.
October 15th - POLLEN - A young woman is sexually assaulted by a co-worker and begins coddling the potted plant he gives her like it was a child, meanwhile the woman is stalked by a tree man thing that no-one else can see except her young niece. The tree is a metaphor for rape, the plant is a metaphor for a baby, okay, I get it, and I choose not to dwell on how the child character can also see the rape tree man, but in another time this would be seen as a sexploitation movie and come with lots of shots of bare asses, whereas now we get tasteful tree metaphors and some toxic work environment drama - yet it still feels a bit exploitative to me. I don't think it really comes off like the makers hoped it would, but maybe someone else would get something out of it that I can't.
No comments:
Post a Comment