2024/12/27
This is where it gets good fun. Sure, these movies are pretty awful -- pretty awfully enjoyable, that is! Dig in, you toilet-guzzling, dumpster-diving trash hounds! This meal's on me.
Following their outing for candy on Halloween, the babysitter (Katie Maguire) of two suburban kids (Cole Mathewson, Sydney Freihofer) is reluctant to view a videocassette containing three gruesome vignettes: at a train station, a young lady (Kayla Lian) is drugged, abducted, and chained by a deranged clown (Mike Giannelli) in preparation for a Mephistophelean fate that's befallen many before her; a housewife (Catherine Callahan) who's recently relocated to the countryside is stalked by a skulking extraterrestrial (Brandon deSpain); that pranking, violent clown terrorizes a costume designer (Marie Maser) after a pit stop on her way home. Damien Leone's anthology showcases two of his preexisting shorts (The 9th Circle, Terrifier) along with a third (Something in the Dark) and a dull, overlong frame story that were shot exclusively for its presentation. Terrifier is enduringly engaging, but the rest here is amateurishly substandard, and Leone's gaffes -- such as interspersed reaction shots of his frame tale's characters in an overlit interior -- are frankly remarkable. All save Leone's devotees are best advised to watch Terrifier and skip the rest.
Who would guess that Duane (Kevin Van Hentenryck) and his outrageously deformed, once-conjoined twin Belial would survive their fall, only to be adopted and rescued by an obsessively empathic, backstair philanthropist (jazz singer Annie Ross) and her granddaughter (Heather Rattray), who cloister the brothers with several other rescued freaks at their home in Staten Island? Scummy journalists (Kathryn Meisle, Matt Mitler) would, and with a private detective (Ted Sorel) track the pair to their peril. Exchanging the first feature's barely-budgeted grit for nice photography and professionally lit sets, Frank Henenlotter sacrificed some of its appeal, but its hammy performances, outlandishly grotesque prosthetics, gory surprises, and silly humor are enough to assure his fans that it was crafted with the same character. Hentenryck still can't really act, but Meisle, Ross, and Mitler all but sprain every muscle in their faces with amusing overperformance in compensation. Both brothers pursue romantic interests, yet the scarcely-human stump is the one who comprehends and consummates his amor, albeit revoltingly....prompting the question of whether freakishness is more inborn or behavioral.
Had Don DeLillo and David Cronenberg purposed to proclaim their ignorance and superannuation, the former's preposterous novel and latter's sillier adaptation thereof would've been a screaming success. Alas, the aching (if well-intentioned) cluelessness of these Silents is perfectly manifest in their stiltedly enacted character study of a young pecuniary speculator and billionaire (Robert Pattinson), whose paranoia spirals into self-destruction when his fortune evanesces for ill investment during a trip in his deluxe stretch limousine across NYC, as he's menaced by activists and a former employee (Paul Giamatti). On one hand, it's terrible: Cronenberg frames nearly everything amateurishly, and his script (and in turn, DeLillo's story) betrays a risible nescience of finance, computerization, globalization and populist countercurrents thereto, Millennial mores, American culture, and the pathologies and bloodless, featherweight ethos of the 1%. On the other hand, it's often hilariously terrible, as when Pattinson's nabob encounters the bedizened cortege and open casket thereupon of his favorite rapper (Keinan Warsame), discusses security with his chief technologist (Jay Baruchel) with language scarcely more sophisticated than that jabbered in Hackers, or fucks his sinewy old art consultant (Juliette Binoche) before confiding to her his intent to purchase the Rothko Chapel in the breathless implication that it's priceless (as though any of Rothko's output has worth beyond its utility as a medium for laundering money). Every conversation is stagy in the worst way and somehow jejune, and DeLillo's conception of the billionaire is that of a navel-gazing hipster. Most actual billionaires are very much alike: congenitally corrupt, conniving, craven, vacant, tasteless, drearily pretentious, culturally agnostic, adaptively optimistic, and very boring. DeLillo and Cronenberg needed only to observe them.
=]=:< <"What the fuck was this all about?"
Police could just track the cell phone number misused by a serial killer (Shinya Tsukamoto) who murders his interlocutors by killing them in their dreams in a manner that psychosomatically prompts their suicides while asleep, but then an impersonal, fledgling detective (pop singer Hitomi Furuya) wouldn't have a reason to solicit the succor of a robed, mopey, suicidal psychic (perenially pouty Ryuhei Matsuda) who can enter dreams to identify the culprit. As usual, much of co-star/co-screenwriter/director/cinematographer/editor Tsukamoto's ambiguous story and visuals are arrestingly imaginative, well-shot and cut....when he isn't lapsing into schlockily successive dissolves, manually shaken shots in the style of music videos from the '90s, and verbose exchanges that only detract from his atmosphere and audience's patience. Tsukamoto's so edgy at this point that he can't stop stabbing himself, and good performances from Matsuda and Furuya can't accord the leggy leading lady any particular appeal despite her glamorous beauty. Ren Osugi's perfectly typecast and likably prickish as a senior detective, but hasn't much to do. For fans of Tsukamoto and those who want to see everything that the gifted yet often achingly pretentious cineaste does wrong and right, best and worst, this is required viewing.
=]=:< <"Never mind tracking Shinya's cell phone number; why didn't anybody think to handcuff that guy and keep him away from weapons so that he couldn't stab himself to death? They were even in a police station! Cops probably have like a hundred pairs of handcuffs in a police station, and they couldn't spare one for the guy who's gonna kill himself because Tetsuo told him it would be cool in Dreamland? I mean, come on!"
Ellay's as garish, gay, and overwrought as usual in this ambitious but goofy story of a former child soldier and retired gangster (Reza Sixo Safai) who fights, dodges, and bargains with Russian and Iranian mobsters to rescue his slutty girlfriend (Helena Mattsson) and her son (Greg Kasyan). Too cutesy for its own good, Safai's and director Daniel Grove's script imputes ridiculously flamboyant homosexuality to its characters whenever possible, and was clearly tailored for effect, not sense. Julian Sands and Laura Harring are enjoyably hammy severally playing a Russian mob boss and seductress, but all of this movie's fun is limited to its worst ostentation. Moreover, Grove would probably produce more realistic movies if he learned how firearms function.
=]=:< <"This was stupid."
Sultry, addled, conspiratorial podcaster and attention addict Dasha Nekrasova aspires to be a filmmaker, a sex symbol, an iconoclast, some kind of switch-hitter -- and what Dasha! wants, Dasha! gets! In her unbelievably (possibly deliberately) hysterical cinematic debut, Dasha! irrupts into the lives and Upper East Side apartment of two friends (Betsey Brown, Madeline Quinn) to conduct research where Jeffrey Epstein was presumably trafficking minors and performing blood sacrifices. Possessed by the spirit of Prince Andew's underage sex toy, Brown's tenant masturbates publicly and hams her ageplay shamelessly with an affected British accent while Quinn and Dasha! babble dully and obsessively about Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell when they aren't making out. She probably wanted to replicate the best aspects of Polanski's apartment trilogy and Eyes Wide Shut; instead, Nekrasova approximated Mickey Keating's Darling if Tommy Wiseau had co-written its script. This movie is so wildly erratic, ill-conceived and idiosyncratically bonkers that it must be seen. It's destined to become a kitchy cult classic.
=]=:< <"Dasha looks like she's a terrible meal -- too lean and stringy. Yuck! How RoBu finds this Slavic sack of antlers sexy is beyond me. This is a fun movie, though. I like when the other ugly chick's fingering herself or whatever outside Epstein's apartment like some kinda Jewish trust fund kid who's doing performance art while high as hell on fent. Amazing, surreal comedy."
Boys who cavort with an unpleasantly pretty teenager (Aleisa Shirley) are serially murdered, and her little desert town's sheriff (Bo Hopkins) has plenty of impetuous suspects to investigate when he's not struggling to keep peace between local rednecks and Native Americans who loathe each other. Dopey yet interesting murder mystery/crime drama/slasher is as fun as dumb to watch, with able character actors (Patrick Macnee, Don Stroud, Michael Pataki, etc.) playing caricatures with admirably straight faces. For schlockhounds, Susan Strasberg's hysterical freakout during an exceptionally lame slo-mo climax is not to be missed.
Blood's seldom shed so superfluously as in this third feature by filmmaker and practical FX specialist Damien Leone, whose killer clown Art (David Howard Thornton) spends his Halloween stalking a pretty partygoer (Jenna Kanell) and messily murdering nearly everyone who he encounters. It's obnoxious, tasteless, shallow, and stupid, but there's no denying the prepossessingness of Leone's story, direction, and gory special effects, nor his knack for inevidently cutting corners to co-produce a professional effort on a minuscule budget ($55K) that was partially raised on Indiegogo. A simple, outrageous, competently crafted genre movie bereft of politics, depth, or compromise -- isn't that what everyone wants? The progressively lucrative success of this one and its two sequels verify that much.
All of Yugo Sakamoto's crime thrillers are exciting, generally well-crafted on small budgets, and intensely stupid, as this dispensable, barbarous bagatelle whereby a group of vicenarians wander into a rural town populated by a cannibalistic cult; both parties have surprises for one another. For those who can tolerate and even enjoy Sakamoto's idiocies for his action, this is fun; otherwise, stay away.
=]=:< <"Oh, wow, it's so edgy and funny how they're cannibals and the dumb cute girl accidentally shot herself, ha, ha! Shut up. Sakamoto sucks."
© 2024 Robert Buchanan