halloweenfest evening three: ghosts of mars

(2001. dir: John Carpenter) OK. We've settled Mars. Mining camps, mostly. We've jerryrigged a certain amount of earth-like atmosphere and set up makeshift villages for the workers, established a running train. We also woke up something long dormant, a cloud of entities which travels like a thick red dust-storm and enters in through the ear, possessing the humans and turning them into Reavers. (If you're unclear as to what a Reaver is, watch Firefly episode three, "Bushwhacked".) The movie's Token Scientist, played by Joanna Cassidy (all the power-holders in this civilization of the future are women), along with the ranking officer (Natasha Henstridge, who has her own encounter with possession but beats it by taking drugs), together suss out that these are the ghosts of a long-dead, fish-faced, warrior race who are bent on genocidal destruction of any invading entity: in this case, the human race.

It's an unabashed Western, complete with posse, band of outlaws, an ambushed train, and a wrathful indigenous people being slaughtered for their land ("This is about one thing," says Henstridge's Lieutenant in her St. Crispin's Day speech. "Dominion. This is not their planet anymore.") Carpenter gets to play in some of his favorite sandboxes here: he takes the post-apocalyptic punk-chic of Escape from New York and ramps it up to full volume (a bra made out of severed human hands, anyone?) and restages Assault at Precinct 13 on the red planet, with cops and crooks teaming up to fight... well, ghosts. And, because these beings are incorporeal, and because once you kill the host they're going to find the next available ear to jump into, the killing doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Particularly once our band of heroes is safe on the train out of there and Henstridge's Lieutenant decides they need to STOP AND GO BACK to try and destroy the menace by MacGyvering a nuclear bomb ("a small one," granted) out of the nuclear power plant. Why Cassidy's Token Scientist doesn't explain that ghosts probably aren't going to be affected by a nuclear blast, but they, as humans, sure as hell are, is one of many, many weak points in the script.

In the end, it's not what matters. This is a buddy-action flick, with Henstridge and Ice Cube as the unlikely buddies, and it's some fun in that respect, although Ice Cube is so babyfaced it's hard to be truly impressed by his tough-guy attitude, and it would have been a whole lot more fun if the two of them had some kind of chemistry. Or, indeed, if Henstridge shared a chemistry with Jason Statham, who has an interesting turn in what would normally be the cute-girl role, fetching and carrying, opening locks, making google-eyes at his Lieutenant. The best part about the whole movie is the gender-reversal aspect, in fact, and it would have been doubly great if the Ice Cube role (James "Desolation" Williams) had been given to a woman as well.

For all the interesting casting (Clea Duvall, Pam Grier, Rodney A. Grant), it never sparks entirely into life. The world itself (apparently the whole thing was filmed in a rock quarry in Mexico) never feels true, and the actors never seem to truly inhabit it. Coupled with the howling miscalculations at the heart of the story, it makes for some rough going. Where it succeeds, it succeeds by the fun we have in spite of all that.

halloweenfest triple feature: circus of fear, chocolate, and bonnie and clyde vs dracula

Circus of Fear:(1966. dir: John Llewellyn Moxey) Ah, Carnaby Street! Peglegs and moppy hair and anglophilia. This isn't, it turns out, a horror film so much as a murder mystery concentrated around a travelling circus. The production is a German/English cooperative effort, with a mixed cast of tommies and huns. Christopher Lee is here, playing a badly scarred lion-tamer and wearing a bag over his head for most of the film (but what eyes! and, when the bag comes off, that marvellous face!), and Klaus Kinski, cold and still and positively glittering with danger. It begins with a cracking good, and largely silent, heist of an armoured car on Tower Bridge (or, as they pronounce it, "Tahr-bridge"). From the first shot, a close-up of Kinski projecting a quiet enjoyment of his own inimitable menace, until the first murder-by-circus-knife, it's great fun. It slows up as it moves, giving us circus-folk in-fighting, probably too many tangled back-stories, and a smirking detective who is constantly being offered cups of tea, but it's still a good time.

Chocolate: (2005. dir: Mick Garris) The Masters of Horror series is more miss than hit. The trouble seems to be that the entries are short enough that the "masters" assume they can get away with the shadow of an idea, rather than a fully thought-out script. Chocolate is one of Mick Garris' entries, and it's a particularly wretched offender.

The dialogue is pretty awful, especially once the "love story" starts. The initial idea is not earth-shaking: a lonely man begins, suddenly, continually, and for no reason that is ever made clear to us, having spells during which he experiences the world through the senses of a beautiful stranger. Soon, he knows how to love like a woman, be fucked like a woman, and, since it's a horror film, commit murder like a woman. He tracks the stranger down, convinced he's in love, and it's no spoiler to tell you he winds up with her blood on his hands (and neck, and down his shirt-front), because the framing device is his police interrogation and he confesses as much in his first words.

The only thing it's got going are a few effective visual and aural effects, when he's fading from one "reality" into another. Believe me, it's not enough to make it worthwhile.

And that's too bad, because Henry Thomas deserves better. Watch Dead Birds instead.

Bonnie and Clyde vs Dracula: (2008. dir: Timothy Friend) This was a family project. Practically everyone who worked on it has the last name "Friend", and that doesn't bode well, right? But this one has some mojo to it. Despite a tiny budget, it's got really good lighting, good photography and music, and the two lead actors are engaging. I think this guy spent his whole budget getting an honest-to-god scream-queen to play his Bonnie (Tiffany Shepis). She's good. The only downside of her casting is that when she gets out of the bath you get pulled up out of the movie thinking, "Did women really shave off their pubic hair in the 1920s?" (I googled it. They didn't.) In a production this tiny, there are going to be weak spots, bad performances, etc, and there are. The sound is not great, and one of the characters in particular (the "innocent" sister) is just awful, just a terrible idea with a terrible realization.

On the other hand, there was one plot twist in particular that I didn't see coming, and it's just so brazen, the whole thing, I couldn't help but dig it.

halloweenfest evening one: dark was the night

(2015. dir: Jack Heller) It's a familiar and well-loved tale: unnerving and inexplicable tracks in the snow, an ancient beast from Native American legend displaced from its secret home by a logging operation, a small-town sheriff called reluctantly from the hypnotic trance of his own personal demons to an act of heroism which will save his town. In fact, the external and the hero's internal, mirrored "demon" seem to be linked, as if the sheriff's guilt over the death of his young son is somehow catalyzing the outer battle. Stuck in a swamplike ennui made of his own heavy shadow, he rejects the monster as a clever prank, indeed, rejects every plea for help, as from a horse-owner who's lost an animal to the phenomenon, prefering instead to fade into the background and watch as events play themselves out.

One of the movie's roots lies in an old Fortean story known as "the Devil's Footprints". In 1855 in Devon, England, folks woke to a trail of some 100 miles of inexplicable hoofprints in the snow for three nights running. The prints not only defied expectation by being "single file", but by travelling right over haystacks, even rooftops. The maker was playful: sometimes the prints seemed to duck into a small drainpipe and emerge from the other end. Explanations put forward included an unmoored balloon dragging a weight behind it, wood mice, badgers, a very lost kangaroo, hoaxsters, or the devil himself. In this case, it's something more mysterious.

The film's palette is relentlessly blue, mirroring the approaching winter storm. The story is told sparingly and well, the town itself brought to life in easily moving pieces, put forward at a small-town pace. Lukas Haas shines in his down-playing as the big-city deputy, and the townsfolk, the wonderful Nick Damici among them, are believable and low-key. The initial hoofprints are chilling, and the slow reveal of the beast (we do not see it clearly until the end) is remarkably effective as the thing travels like a gargantuan squirrel through treetops. It's an old-fashioned, slow-building suspense, an art-form near-lost, and Heller is to be applauded for championing it.

The downside is that, although well-crafted, the formula is so strictly followed as to become claustrophobic by the end.

Recently I read an interview with Emma Thompson in which she complains that throughout her thirties and forties she turned down hundreds of scripts in which her role could be summed up as begging the hero not to do a very brave thing. Since I read that, I'm astounded to find this "don't-do-the-brave-thing" role absolutely everywhere, and I'm even more agog that I never noticed it before. From Andromache begging Hector not to fight Hercules to Calpurnia begging Caesar to stay away from the forum, it's an ancient and hackneyed trope and you will find it in every third movie you watch, maybe every second one. Bianca Kajlich is lovely here as the sheriff's estranged wife, but she is filling this same role, and by the time he goes off to face his end-battle, taking leave of his son with that moth-chewed, "take-care-of-your-mother-until-I-come-back" chestnut, the dialogue has left any vivacity far behind.

The sheriff gathers the townsfolk together in the church to weather the night of storm and monster, and, within this traditional fortress, the climactic showdown will play out. At this point, it's as if the writer stopped setting the story's course and put it on autopilot for the end, giving us the moments (including the last-minute twist) that we've come to expect. It's too bad. It was almost something extraordinary.

a sorry chris evans triple feature

the Perfect Score: (2004. dir: Brian Robbins) Evans is miscast. It ought to have been someone a shade geekier, maybe a Chris Marquette. He ought to have played instead the love-wounded Matty, opposite Scarlett Johansson, with whom he's proved in six films to have an easy but palpable chemistry. This is an MTV revamp of the Breakfast Club, brainless, witless, and without merit, excepting the few moments of truth the young actors can coax from the piece. Erika Christensen, for example, is the smart girl who learns to tap into her inner slut. She gets the awkward, stuck-inside-her-head part right, but does nothing else particularly well, and the bit on the rooftop where she's finding her passion is forced and uncomfortable.

It doesn't matter. Nothing would have saved it. It's narrated by the Asian stoner dude who's a secret maths genius, and you can imagine how badly that plays: shamelessly for laughs, laughs which never come manifest. The token black guy is a basketball star whom the script treats as ridiculously asexual. It's embarrassing: in the end, the white kids pair off, while the Asian and the black guy don't even enter into the game, although it's obvious that Desmond (Darius Miles) is the character who has the chemistry with Christensen's smart girl. There's something grotesquely 1950s about it.

The other revelation is that Chris Evans doesn't play the straight man well. In his defense, his "comic" foil this time is Matthew Lillard as his older brother, again embarked upon his tired (you can tell even he's tired of it) "hyperactive party 'tard" routine, and that can't be easy to be around. And, to be fair, Cellular came out this same year, in which Evans does very well as straight man in his scenes opposite his scuz-buddy (Eric Christian Olsen), so it may well be a matter of script quality. And, come to think of it, direction, as well: in Cellular, Evans is allowed to be quicker on the draw, which he seems to enjoy, whereas Perfect Score is edited with long reaction shots before and after lines, which does nothing but protract the stupid thing.

If there's a reason to watch it, I can't think of what it is.

London: (2005. dir: Hunter Richards) This guy Richards raided the set of Cellular (Evans, Biel, Statham) and wound up with a much better cast than he deserved for what seems to be a very personal indie projet-du-coeur about the agony of being rich and gorgeous and just wanting to be loved on your own terms, goddamnit, and I'm going to stand in this bathroom doing cocaine until she loves me for the reasons I want her to.

The fact that Richards got Statham, with his super-virile presence, to play the impotent guy was an enormous coup, and Evans and Biel do everything they can, he playing an asshole who just can't quite stop himself being an asshole, she playing a homely gal, -- just kidding!-- the embodiment of All Which Men Desire, and they BOTH JUST WANT TO BE LOVED ON THEIR OWN TERMS, IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK? Like I say, both actors do what they can.

We spend most of the movie in a luxury bathroom about the size of a Tokyo apartment, half mirrors and half balustrade overlooking the city, doing coke off a Van Gogh casually pulled down off the wall. Mostly the Evans character is avoiding having to confront the woman he obsesses over and wants to dominate (calling his yearning by the name of "love"), the woman who is leaving him for a guy with a 10-1/2 inch cock (seriously, it seems that if the guy had a smaller dick, the loss wouldn't be so traumatic. But this is True Love, mind you).

Sometimes the conversating is more interesting than others. Sometimes we're stuck in an infernal round of flashbacks in which fucking, fighting, and whining are an endless ring in some Sartrean hell.

*SPOILER ALERT*

Puncture: (2011. dir: Adam and Mark Kassen) This is the bleakest lawyer movie you will ever see. It's like the Verdict only without those brilliant, icy spaces, and, significantly, without that miracle pitch in the ninth, the one that sends James Mason's unflappably smooth and malevolent lawyer into a much-cheered moment of stammering. This is Erin Brockovich with six-pack abs instead of cleavage, but instead of a plucky, foul-mouthed gal who won't give up, this guy is a drug-addicted sleazebag who lives his life on the edge of surrender, snorting coke in public johns and getting handjobs from his students. He obsesses over this one unwinnable case for the wrong reasons, possibly because he knows his body is about to give out and this is his last chance for salvation, and in the end, it is suggested, gets himself Silkwooded instead: suicide by waving a red flag in front of Big Business. The trouble is that his last, noble speech is one we don't really buy, because by this time we're familiar with this guy's brand of bullshit, and it seems ridiculous that anyone in power would go to the trouble to take him out because he's such a powerless, sadsack freakshow. After his death, almost as an afterthought, his ex-partner and the client, remotivated by his untimely demise, find their moment of victory, but the way it's presented seems hollow and a little glib.

Evans is good. He has that Paul Newman thing going, that rare, extreme level of likability that allows him to play an utter douchebag and get away with it. After watching this and London side by side, though, I never want to have to watch Chris Evans snort cocaine, ever again. Maybe a nice pot-smoking surfer next time, just to mix it up a little, OK?