Archive for September, 2003
145 – House of 1,000 Corpses
Posted by frothy in House of 1000 Corpses on September 25, 2003
This movie tries awfully hard to be a new version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (which is silly, because the original 1974 movie is being remade this year, anyway). As such, it’s a popcorn movie – throw that ol’ Pop Secret in the microwave and get prepared to have that knowing smirk wiped off your face. This isn’t a tame, placid movie in which the killers aren’t seen; it’s an all-out gore fest that delights in shocking, or at least in attempting to shock.
Much of the plot has been lifted from countless drive-in movies. Four teens are driving across the country, collecting information for a book one of them is writing about odd roadside attractions. They stop for gas at a place called Spaulding’s, run by a half-mad misfit (Sid Haig) who sometimes dresses as an evil clown. The young quartet, after gassing up, takes a “tour of evil” behind the store, and here they learn about a half-mythical being known as Dr. Satan. Thinking this might be good fodder for their book, the kids ask Captain Spaulding (you oldtime movie buffs should catch that reference) if he can direct them to where Dr. Satan now resides. The wacko is glad to oblige.
But of course, it’s dark, and then it’s rainy, and then they pick up a sexy hitchhiker, and then the tire blows. And wouldn’t you know it, the kids forgot the spare. So the hitchhiker (Sheri Moon) who says she lives down the street, says she’ll get her brother to bring his tow truck around. Which means it’s not too long before our four “normal” kids are stranded in a spooky house in the middle of the night during a harsh rainstorm.
The Firefly family is a tad on the peculiar side, from young harlot Baby (Moon) to old harlot Mother Adrienne (Karen Black) to Otis (Bill Moseley), who looks a lot like Riff-Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, to Granpa (Dennis Fimple). Naturally, it’s not long before these meddling kids want to get out of there. FAST.
House of 1,000 Corpses is not a movie built strongly on a foundation of irrefutable plot development. It’s signature is style, and director/screenwriter Rob Zombie bathes the movie in an absolute orgy of it, complete with dismemberments and scalpings and many other horrific elements. There’s plenty of blood and gore, and as long as you can convince yourself it’s not actual gore, you might find this a fun movie.
Let me pause right there. Some of you are probably scratching your heads. “A fun movie?” you ask. Death and dismemberment is fun? Sure, in a creepily exotic way. The idea of the movie isn’t to see how the kids can escape the horror, it’s to see how many unique and interesting ways they can be tortured. All right, so that’s a little
sick. I admit it. I have a bloodthirst when it comes to some movies. If I’m in the right mood, a gory film (see Dead Alive, by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson to learn about fun with a lawnmower) is perfect.
This is all a roundabout way of explaining that this movie is not for all audiences, but then again the title alone should alert you to that. It’s probably a bad idea to let young, impressionable kids watch this. I say “probably,” only because perhaps you don’t mind your Timmy growing up thinking slaughtering young people is okey dokey.
It’s not a movie for the weak of heart. Please don’t watch this if you’re pregnant; it may induce laughter. You see, when this came out to poor reviews, I figured the big problem was that it was laughable. It’s not laughable – you just have to be in a precise frame of mind for it. I hope Zombie makes more of these.
Oh, and here’s an interesting bit of trivia. One of the four teens is played by Chris Hardwick, who once upon a time cohosted the MTV game show Singled Out!
House of 1,000 Corpses: *** (but only for gore fans; for everyone else, it’s more like *1/2)
144 – The Core
Hollywood’s gone to the outer reaches of our galaxy (not to mention others), it’s plumbed the depths of the ocean, mapped dank swamps and arid deserts, but one place it hasn’t gone to with any sort of regularity is the inner core itself.
The Core is certainly one of those movies for which one must suspend disbelief. It’s a science-fiction movie that emphasizes fiction over all; that is, the physics of the film don’t hold up to snuff. If you’re an engineer or physicist, you should be smart enough not to watch it – you’ll just spend most of your time second-guessing the inane psuedoscience.
It seems the inner core of the Earth has stopped spinning, for some reason, and this has caused the electromagnetic field that surrounds and protects the planet to begin to decompose. This is evidenced by, among other things, pigeons in Tralfagar Square in London suddenly veering at plate-glass windows and sundry people who wish they were extras in a less-violent movie, like Daddy Day Care or maybe Finding Nemo. At any rate, the world’s leading scientists, commissioned by the military (it wouldn’t be a Save the Planet from Imminent Destruction without our pals in the movie military), figure out that the core’s stopped rotating, and that Something Must Be Done to get it going again.
Ah, but what? We’ve only drilled down about 8 miles, and according to my calculations the distance from the surface to the core is …. a bit further. We must drill down, sayeth the sage scientists, and lo and behold, through the magic of movies, there’s this guy in the desert who’s been working on a laser rocket thingy that’ll help them blast all the way down. This handy little thing is just the cure, so a crew is hastily assembled: Commander Iverson (Bruce Greenwood), Major Beck Childs (Hilary Swank), Dr. Josh Keyes (Aaron Eckhart), Dr. Serge Leveque (Tcheky Karyo), Dr. Conrad Zimsky (Stanley Tucci), and Dr. Ed Brazzelton.
Like such doomsday movies as Armageddon, what The Core has going for it are likeable characters and a lot of nifty FX. It also has the unknown working for it; we don’t know what lies beneath the thin crust of the Earth, because we haven’t drilled beyond it. That allows filmmakers a lot of free reign to depict whatever the heck they want in terms of What’s Down There.
What The Core has going against it, however, is a predictable plot and some howlingly awful dialog. Now, it’s not giving anything away to mention that at least one person doesn’t make it back from this mission. It’s also not giving anything away to note that there’s at least one knockdown, drag-out hissy fit of a scene in which Keyes admonishes Childs for something she didn’t do. It’s hysterical to watch, although I suspect the emotion the director was attempting to convey was more like empathy, not euphoria. Or ennui, which is unfortunately how some of the movie felt.
The Core is cheesy. No, not the actual inner core – although, come to think of it, maybe it is, since we don’t know for sure what it’s made of. And wouldn’t that be fitting? A cheesy core for a cheesy film made by cheesy people in a cheesy society? Who’s up for some Muenster?
The Core: **1/2
143 – Chicago
By this time, you’ve undoubtedly heard of this Broadway play-cum-Hollywood musical; otherwise, that rock you’ve been under must be nice and cozy. Chicago won six Oscars (including Best Picture) at this year’s ceremony, and it was nominated for seven more. It’s rare that a movie could be so widely praised and still not be be very good, and happily for the home viewer, that doesn’t happen here, either.
Chicago is the story of Roxie Hart (Rene Zellweger), a married woman on trial for killing her boyfriend. Her husband Amos (John C. Reilly) stands by her, but Roxie aspires to be more than a housewife – she wants to be a big Star like her idol, Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who’s also currently in stir for murder. Roxie is defended by the magnificently egotistical megalomaniac Billy Flynn, who had been Velma’s lawyer, too.
It’s not always easy to transform a musical to the big screen. Movie audiences tend to tune out big production numbers, because our attention spans just aren’t what they used to be. Also, it’s harder to capture the pomp and circumstance of a big musical production in a movie than it is on a stage. On stage, your audience is rapt, captive to the sounds and smells of the entertainment afore them. On the screen, it’s all visual. In addition, the grand old era of big musicals is long gone – MGM Studios had an entire division devoted to it back in the forties and fifties. But times have changed, and the audience with them.
Director Rob Marshall, whose first big film this was, brought a career in choreography to the project, and he succeeded tremendously. The dramatic apexes of the movie are told in song and dance, and never for a moment does the viewer imagine he is anywhere but in the jail, the courtroom, Roxie’s apartment, or wherever the scene is set. That’s a testament to the wonderful camerawork, the lively and photogenic choreography, and the bravura performances turned in by the cast. Each scene is more mesmerizing than the last, and the set pieces alone are really jaw-dropping.
But aside from all that supplemental stuff, there’s the cast itself. Each cast member performed his or her own singing and dancing. Zeta-Jones is a trained singer and dancer; the rest of the cast needed lessons, but it doesn’t show. In particular, I was duly impressed with Zellweger’s vocal range and showmanship; even Richard Gere – long on my list of Poor Actors – shone. And none in this triumphant trimverate turned in the plum performance of the show – that would be Queen Latifah, who was herself nominated for an Oscar as Mama Morton. Of course, Latifah is an accomplished singer and has been for some time, but her work her was absolutely powerful.
Recommending musicals can be treacherous work. Guys will turn up their noses or grunt (or both) and dismiss any musical as a chick flick. Don’t do it, guys, don’t do it. You get to see three sexy women (four, if you count the exotic Lucy Liu, one of my personal all-time favorites) oozing scandal, intrigue, and sensuality; it’s not as if they’re sitting around discussing the latest woman-in-peril movie on Lifetime. There’s violence AND sex. Okay, the sex is way, way, way offscreen. But it’s still naughty, trust me.
Chicago: ***1/2
142 – Identity
On the surface, Identity seems like a cheap knockoff of an Agatha Christie paperback. You know the type. Several disparate types are stranded on an island or in an old mansion or a broken-down hotel, and it’s raining cats and dogs outside, and wouldn’t you know it, but they’re being picked off, one by one. But beyond the obvious setup, this isn’t anything like And Then There Were None or its myriad imitations. This has a few twists, including an outstanding one right near the end.
Several people wind up at a ramshackle motel in the middle of nowhere. It’s pouring rain. The road’s been flooded both ways, so no one can get out. Among the stranded are a limo driver (John Cusack) and his employer-actress (Rebecca DeMornay), an irascible cop (Ray Liotta) and the convict he’s chaperoning (Jake Busey), a prostitute (Amanda Peet), a newlywed couple, and a man (John C. McGinley) and his family, complete with a mute son.
Pretty disparate, all right. But trouble’s afoot from the get-go, as Cusack, blinded by the torrential rain, runs over McGinley’s wife, causing severe injuries. As the woman slips in and out of consciousness, Cusack must rush to the hospital to get an ambulance (phone’s out, of course, and she can’t be moved). But then it’s flooded, see, and… well, everyone winds up back at the motel.
Sometimes thrillers explain themselves a bit too well – and too often – and the viewer has too much of an idea what’s coming. Telegraphing what’s to happen to a character is one of the biggest flaws of most thrillers, and if the viewer stops and thinks about the movie, the movie’s sunk. Once thought enters the viewers mind, the holes in the plot are as familiar as Swiss cheese.
But the plot in Identity holds up very well, thanks in no small part to a great cast. Normally, in emsemble pieces like this the cast is comprised of once-great or once-pretty-good actors, people you’ve heard of but not lately. But Identity‘s cast is peppered with names familiar for their recent talents, and not their tabloid prowess. For instance, what’s Cusack doing here? Isn’t he slumming? Yes….. and no. It’s a murder thriller, but he elevates the movie far beyond its rudimentary whodunit origins.
Cusack’s great – I’ve yet to see him be awful – but he’s not the only one with a bravura performance. Liotta’s turn as the cop is gritty (he’s no stranger to the role, playing a similar one in Unlawful Entry) and ultimately believable, and McGinley’s a lot better than the underwritten role he was handed. Also shining is Peet as the hooker – I’ve never really liked her, but she did a good job with a good role.
And the atmosphere is wonderful! It felt like it was raining in my apartment. I jumped when they jumped, and I cringed when they cringed. That’s good camerawork.
The good aspects are the ending, the ending, the acting, the ending, and the atmosphere; the bad aspect is the middle stuff, as a lot of the movie is slasherific.
But the ending is excellent, in case I forgot to mention it. The only thing I will tell you is that the standard “everyone dies” mantra begun by some guy named Shakespeare or something doesn’t hold true here.
Identity: ***
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