^ Heathers:
Teen rebellion produces a growing body count as the popular
kids at Westerburg High are all suddenly committing "suicide."
Everything’s going just fine until Winona Ryder’s character
has to spoil it all by developing a conscience. Bad her.
An old favorite, one of the movies that made me what I am today: one sick, twisted individual. Christian Slater’s character here fueled a youthful obsession with him that lasted years. The movie features dark humor, the deaths of the kind of people I personally wanted to kill myself, and Winona Ryder when she was still cool. JD and Veronica’s relationship fascinated me, because, yeah, he manipulates her, but he’s always there for her when she needs him. Hey, it’s not his fault he’s nuts.
And of course there’s the classic line, among many others, of "I love my dead, gay son!"
* Fight Club:
A ticking-time-bomb insomniac finds a new, dangerous kind
of therapy while under the wing of a mysterious soap
salesman. Of course things soon start to go very, very wrong.
Don’t they always? This is what you get for trusting Brad Pitt.
This is what you get for trusting yourself....
I don’t envy the people who tried to market this film for Fox.
I can’t describe it either. Forget anything you saw in the commercials, because this isn’t a movie about extreme fighting clubs. It’s a movie about desperation, about wanting to change your life so badly that you pretty much destroy it in the process. It’s a movie about insomnia, an altered state of mind that this movie captures better than any depiction of it I’ve seen before. Visually, it’s very cleverly put together, and you have no idea what the director may throw at you next. I also didn’t anticipate how
funny the film would be. Plus you have the very slashy couple of Edward Norton and Brad Pitt. I wanted to talk about the ideas in and execution of this film for days afterward. But I thought the ending was all wrong, I have to tell you that now.
^ The Court Jester:
There’s a kind of Robin Hood theme here, but the main plot
involves Danny Kaye’s Hawkins getting thrown into a
cauldron of other people’s plots when he impersonates a
court jester in his band’s effort to get the real king on the
throne. And it seems like everyone wants to kill him,
when they’re not hypnotizing him into submission or
knighting him in a day.
You know you’re in for a wild ride when the first musical number, presented as soon as the credits finish, features a large troop of little people. I don’t generally like musicals where everybody starts singing and dancing out of nowhere, but it actually seems to fit in this insane film’s world. Danny Kaye "makes a fool" of himself with an intensity I don’t see in many comedians today. When most of them play fools, they seem to be winking at the audience to show that they’re not really idiots. The charming Kaye plays dumb with a feeling of total honesty, fully invested in the role. With Basil Rathbone involved, you know there’s fencing. The character of Jean is a surprisingly modern woman for a movie made in the ‘50s, and she’s as skilled and devious as a freedom fighter would have to be, with the movie having no trouble giving her the credit she deserves for it. The wordplay at work here is inspired, and the "body with the coffin" bit from the "Dead Guys Don’t Throw Rice" episode of
due South is a direct takeoff of
Jester’s "vessel with the pestle" bit.
* Nature of the Beast:
A traveling salesman and a junkie drifter meet on a desolate
desert road. One’s a thief and the other is a serial killer.
Which is which?
A low budget, direct-to-video thriller, but it grabs you. Watch Lance Henriksen and Eric Roberts play mind and power games. The video’s box says that "one is a madman." Ha! Oh yeah,
one is a madman. The skanky yet surprisingly attractive Adrian, "Dusty" to his friends, is played with a great restraint by Roberts; this character would have most actors gnawing the scenery. And he has this beautiful, dark honey drawl. Henriksen’s whole body language makes Jack an obviously repressed man with something way off about him, even aside from the fact that he calls his wife "Mommy." Though you do have to ignore the way that the spare tire his character has is so bad looking that it should really be put into a pillowcase. Everybody they meet assume the characters are couple, and you will too. I was so happy to see that Amazon.com had this film for sale. (Note: I wrote a
Nature of the Beast slash story called "
Angels and Devils." Yes, this is a shameless plug.... )
* Hard Core Logo:
This mock documentary on a punk band’s hellish reunion tour
is actually an object lesson on how the people who know you
best can hurt you best. Dysfunctional love permeates it all.
Of course this is on the list. I see something new every time I watch it, and my perceptions shift a little every time too. Hugh Dillon has incredible charisma as the aptly self-named Joe Dick, while Callum Keith Rennie as Billy Tallent does what he does so well. When these two share a scene, it’s like everybody else disappears. And it’s just about canon. When Joe and Billy reunite, the old, doomed way of relating to one another clicks back into place immediately. Everything feels so real too. It’s rare to find a film partly about music and the music business that actually present them as true instead of as a means to a storytelling end. Here you have the characters’ love for what they do, but you also have the skanky waiting areas, the physical discomfort of traveling, the way you usually end up spending far more money than you ever make (unless you get hugely popular, another topic the film tackles), and the love/hate that evolves when you do what you love for a living. The film’s inexorable plot course toward what the audience knows is an inevitably bad end pulls you in. As for the ending... well, I’m glad nobody spoiled it for me. "In the end, it’s love."
^ Cemetery Man:
Dellamorte is groundskeeper at a cemetery where the dead
won’t stay dead. Knowing that he’ll face a mountain of
paperwork if he reports this, he just kills them again and
hopes the second time works. Then things
really get strange....
This is one of those foreign films where I have to wonder if it comes off as insane to Europeans as it does to me. Rupert Everett (in a het role, so stop that) plays the sane-maybe-in-his-world Dellamorte, who sees hunting and dispatching the dead as just another part of the job. Sick humor abounds (as soon as you see the bus full of scouts, you know what’s coming), as well as inexplicable things tossed in seemingly for the hell of it (what are those flying, flaming marshmallows all about, anyway?). Then you have the end. I’m still trying to figure out the end. Also available for sale at Amazon.com.
^ Grosse Pointe Blank:
An existentialist hitman comedy with lots of alternative ‘80s
tunes. And John Cusack. A hitman returns to his hometown
for his ten-year high school reunion and one last job. What
he finds isn’t anything like what he expected.
The movie’s really funny, but that’s not why it makes my list. I love how it explains him and delineates his character without hitting you over the head with it. For example, watching Martin being unable to sit with his back to a window with the blinds up and a door rates high. The movie doesn’t make a point of telling you why he has to move chairs so he’s facing the door, figuring you get it on your own. How cool and smooth he is with most people and what a clumsy mess he is in front of the people he loves let you see the growing rift in his personality and the reasons why he has to quit his line of work. The dialogue zings, the music rocks, and the hallway fight scene is beautifully choreographed. And I have mentioned that it has John Cusack.
^ The Crow:
One year after his murder, Eric returns from the dead to
exact revenge on the people who killed him and his fiancée.
And he’s going to do it in whiteface while tightly packaged
in black cloth, leather, and duct tape as the Crow.
They’d come to take my union card away if I didn’t mention this film. Brandon Lee famously died while making this film, which gives an elegiac quality to a character he’d already invested with so much deep emotion that he raises the film above the level of most revenge-from-beyond-the-grave flicks. The necessity of shooting footage without him also forced the film to spend more time on the other characters and how they deal with Eric and Shelly’s murders, another positive. The scene with the mirror gives further weight to a theory I’d held regarding the comic’s Crow’s need to make his face up: that Eric puts on the makeup to make him someone else, someone who doesn’t have to deal with his destroyed life and his pain. Lee’s Eric does angst-ridden and insane equally well. That scene where he strokes his head back and forth against that bare light bulb with this
look on his face.... And he kicks ass so gracefully. Lots of great fight scenes. Michael Wincott does his usual great job being a sick bad guy, while his character’s lover/half-sister has to be seen to be believed.
* The Lost Boys:
Santa Carla’s in-crowd consists of vampires, and they want to bring
new boy Michael into the pack. Not if Mike’s little brother Sam and
his weird new friends have anything to say about it.
Okay, how many films make incest slash not only possible but almost inevitable? I’ve never seen two brothers be as draped all over one another as Michael and Sam are. When you factor in the way Sam dresses and all the male pin-ups he has on the walls of his bedroom.... You also find yourself wondering if the Frog brothers do one another. This film is slash personified. 97% of the vampires are lithe, attractive young men dressed in the best colorful, form-fitting ‘80s style. Hell, one wears chaps and spurs. I can’t help imagining vampire orgies, and I doubt I’m alone. Almost every boy in this movie has moist, luscious pink lips, gleaming in invitation. Face it, Star was thrown in as a beard.
^ Fright Night Part II:
After years of therapy Charlie Brewster has been convinced
that it was a serial killer, not a vampire, he killed in the last
film. Now he has a girlfriend and a very mundane life at
college. But he’s starting to see vampires again....
One of those rare sequels that are better than the original, though the original is good too. I loved the therapy angle, the idea that someone who lived through a horror movie plot would seek professional help afterward and one day be convinced that he’d turned a regular killer into a vampire in his mind to deal with the situation. Roddy McDowall is great as actor Peter Vincent, who played vampire killers in his films and had to be convinced that vampires were real in the first
Fright Night. In
Part II he still believes in vampires after helping Charlie slay one last time and now has to convince Charlie. Regine’s plans for Charlie are fairly unusual too. I like the idea that the blood exchange makes you thirst for blood, but there’s also a necessary component that involves
choosing to be a vampire. Brain Thompson, best known to fandom as
X-Files’ alien bounty hunter, is here as the vampires’ ghoul, while the guy who played Broots on
The Pretender portrays a rather clutzy vampire. And you have to see Belle, the cross-dressing, roller-skating vampire.
* Interview with the Vampire:
We all know the story. Vampire Louis tells us his life
through undeath story, how he went from depressed
plantation owner to vampire slave for two stronger, less
principled vampires, one of them the famed Lestat.
I already mentioned my union card. When I heard that Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise would be playing the roles, I was horrified, but I first saw the film with an open mind. Pitt is mostly disappointing, looking more constipated than mournful to me (and the teeth prostheses make his face look ape-like, as if he were retaining water), but Cruise gives a great performance as Lestat. Even without the blood-drinking = sex equation, there’s slash a’plenty. The plantation-burning scene isn’t in the book, but I felt like it should have been; the book glosses over the event, while here we get it in all its over-the-top melodrama, perfect for the person Louis is. I also loved him feeding on chickens and poodles. The vampire makeup makes them alluring and repellent at once, with their extreme pallor, occasionally visible veins, and slight skin sparkle. Antonio Banderas’ thick accent makes him a disaster as the vampire who’s supposed to explain it all, but I can live with it. I also miss Louis’ inconsolable grief being over his brother (I have a grand theory about the book on how important the brother is to Louis, and how he chooses to go into vampirism with Lestat due to the brother). My main quibble is about something that would be impossible to do live-action anyway, which is that it would have been far creepier if Claudia could have been the five-year-old of the book. The book had this great scene with Madeleine creating a Claudia-sized environment in their hotel room, with Louis sometimes lying on the floor amidst the tiny furniture and feeling himself growing ever more insane.
^ Strange Days:
Ex-cop turned pusher Lenny Nero deals in the best new
drug out there: chips featuring other people’s memories.
His life changes completely when someone passes him a
snuff chip that makes you experience a woman’s murder
from the rapist/murderer’s point of view. With his own life
now on the line, he has to find out who the killer is before
he’s the next victim. And nothing is what it seems (duh).
Okay, it’s flawed, but the cast makes this a favorite. Angela Basset kicks ass as Mace, and Ralph Fiennes is strangely appealing to me as Lenny, especially when he’s hustling his wares. He should get an award just for successfully conveying the idea that his character loves Juliette Lewis and her singing. Michael Wincott is Drano-voiced evil, and Tom Sizemore plays a seedy character who’s even seedier than you think. You can see Lenny’s moral evolution, and Lenny and Mace take beatings like real people, not action heroes. Sure, Lenny doesn’t deserve Mace’s love, but even Mace can’t be perfect in all things. Besides, one flashback suggests shows how her devotion started pretty well. (Note: I read a bit of James Cameron’s original screenplay, so Lenny’s ouster from the police force makes more sense to me than the film shows you. The backstory: Lenny was undercover vice and gradually became more like the characters he portrayed, losing the ability to draw the line anymore. Also, the memory technology was originally a new kind of wire for police to wear in to tape a scene, thus the screenplay suggests that Lenny became addicted to it while on the force.)
* Kalifornia:
Brian and Carrie are taking a road trip to California that will
give him material for a book he’s writing on serial killers
and them a new start in a new state. Too bad they don’t know
that one of the people in the couple they’re ride-sharing with
to save money is a spree killer.
How did
another Brad Pitt movie end up in here? Must be something in the water. You have to get past some contrivances, but there’s some good stuff in here. The first meeting between the all-black-wearing hipster couple and the white trash couple is entertaining, with both sides seeing the other as freakish, though later they start to bond. Brian and Early’s growing fascination with one another sure has its moments. Brian likes Early’s directness, lack of refinement, and violence; his reaction to Early beating the crap out of someone who’d started trouble with him is shock, horror... and something else. Early likes the book idea and wants Brian to learn what being a killer is about and feels like... from the inside. Brad Pitt doesn’t chew as much scenery as he could have while portraying Early, and Michelle Forbes kicks ass in what could have been the thankless role of girlfriend. She also gets to show off an assortment of black bras. A lithe David Duchovny gets a kind of warm-up for the role of Mulder.
* The Island of Dr. Moreau:
When Edward Douglas is rescued from a drifting life raft by
Dr. Moreau’s assistant, he gets what’s meant to be a
one-way trip to the island where Moreau is doing his
gene-splicing experiments. Once Moreau’s creations figure
out a way around his methods of discipline, they explode into
bloody rebellion.
This is where Mike Myers got the idea for Mini-Me from. That’s a claim to fame at least.
Hugely flawed, with me watching a good parts version through fast forwarding when I pop it into the VCR. But, oh, those good parts. Watch Val Kilmer’s crazed junkie Montgomery flirt with, torment, and manipulate David Thewlis’ Edward Douglas. You’ll never look at bunnies the same way again, let me tell you. Also, you can’t help feeling that Montgomery took advantage during all those lost days when he had a heatstruck, delirious Douglas under his "care" (Te conjectures on this to great, creepy effect in her "
Today, Today" story). Te also has an interesting house slave/field slave take on Moreau’s creations. Watch the film for the rampant slash and the luscious, full-figured Fairuza Balk.