Category: Movies (Page 404 of 498)

I gotta tell you, I haven’t a clue how long this has been sitting around my office, waiting to be reviewed; worse, my wife watched it when it first got here, and she can’t remember how long ago that was. The best I can offer you is that it was originally released on October 3, 2006, so we’re almost certainly looking at an entire year…and while I realize that I should feel embarrassed about the fact that it’s been loitering around here for so long, the best defense I have is that it’s a Sci-Fi Channel original film, and, statistically, those things are generally best left unwatched.

In the case of “Voodoo Moon,” I’ll at least say this: it’s a far cry from being the worst Sci-Fi Channel original film that I’ve ever seen. In fact, at times, it feels like a cross between “Fallen” (the Denzel Washington flick which probably blew most of its budget just to license The Rolling Stones’ “Time Is On My Side”) and “The Crow,” though the latter comparison probably only comes into play because the film’s lead, Eric Mabius (“Resident Evil”), walks around wearing a long black trenchcoat for the majority of the movie.

Mabius plays Cole, who basically spends his life practicing voodoo and hunting demons, one of which – a dark fellow named Daniel (Rik Young) – keeps popping back into our realm when he’s not wanted. Daniel’s been a thorn in Cole’s side for years, growing stronger each time he returns, and, now, he’s back for a final battle. To draw as much strength as possible, Cole draws together a group of folks he’s helped over the years, and they’re more than willing to step up and help him defeat Daniel. Also in the mix is Cole’s sister, Heather, played by Charisma Carpenter; it’s pretty clear that Carpenter didn’t have to stretch much to play this role, which has her reacting to things in much the same way she did when she played Cordelia Chase on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel.” John Amos (“Good Times”) plays a biker buddy of Cole’s, and there are also appearances from horror flick stalwarts like Dee Wallace Stone and Jeffrey Combs. Amos is great, but that’s also probably the least surprising revelation about the film, given that he’s usually entertaining in any role; Combs, however, is part of the most entertaining subplot of the film, playing one of Cole’s cronies who gets killed on his way to assist him but refuses to let little things like death or rigor mortis get in the way of doing his part. Young is pretty entertaining with his portrayal of the evil Daniel, too:

As with any Sci-Fi Channel flick, there are plenty of moments which will inspire you to yell at the screen because of their stupidity, but Jenn – my wife and my regular “Scare of the Day” viewing companion – became very vocal about her issues with a small moment in the movie. It occurred when Heather stepped into the hallway of the hotel where she and Cole were staying, only to get immediately stabbed in the leg with a fork by an old woman who’d been possessed by Daniel. Heather’s reaction was basically, “Ow, that hurt,” taking it pretty much in stride when Cole yanked out the fork. “Oh, my God!” yelled Jenn. “You would so NOT act like you’ve just gotten a slap on the leg if you’d been stabbed by a fork!” This really, really bothered my wife. Later in the film, Heather accidentally cuts herself on a broken glass and barely holds it together, at which point Jenn yelled, “Suck it up! You took a fork in the leg…and I know that hurt worse than that!” I won’t waste your time or mine by regaling you with the other fork-related references made throughout the course of these 89 minutes, but suffice it to say that the issue was still going strong even as I was typing this paragraph.

The special effects range from the not-bad to the outrageously-crappy, with the battle royale between Cole and Daniel falling somewhere in-between the two poles, but probably the most annoying thing about “Voodoo Moon” is that it’s one of those movies where you’re always aware that there’s a good idea getting the shit kicked out of it by poor execution. The character of Cole is actually a rather interesting one, particularly the idea of a demon hunter who has a team of people he’s saved working with him (it reminds me of “The Shadow”), but the concept is wasted here.

Oh, well. It’s not like I had high expectations, anyway.

Damn you, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez! Damn you all to Hell!

I love those guys, don’t get me wrong, but it’s because of their “Grindhouse” flick that I received a couple of DVDs from BCI / Eclipse, each of which features two of the sort of exploitation films from the ‘70s and ‘80s that served as stylistic inspiration for “Planet Terror” and “Death Proof.” When I got them, I mistakenly thought that I might actually enjoy watching these old-school flicks and at least appreciate their kitsch value…and when I saw these descriptions, I thought, “This is Scare of the Day material if I’ve ever seen it.”

Black Candles: Carol and her boyfriend, Paul, travel to England after the unexpected death of her brother. Once there, she finds out her sister-in-law is involved in a satanic cult, and she finds out that Paul is being drawn into the cult.

Evil Eye: Peter Crane is having nightmares about murdering someone. His psychiatrist, Doctor Stone, has him hospitalized for being unable to differentiate between dream and reality. Soon, people start turning up dead at the hospital. Is Peter really a killer, or is there something more sinister afoot?

I…I don’t even know what to say about “Black Candles,” except that, despite the suggestion that this story is predominantly about a satanic cult, that aspect is quickly forgotten in the midst of more softcore sex scenes than you’d find on your average Saturday night on Skinemax. There’s oral sex, mutual masturbation, man on top, woman on top, orgies with not-terribly-attractive participants, guy on girl, girl on girl, girl on goat…and, yes, you read that right. A woman has sex with a freaking goat. I mean, you don’t really see anything, thank God, but let me assure you that it’s still no less disconcerting when she shifts from “ow, that hurts” into the unbridled throes of pleasure. In fact, I was reaching for the remote when the camera suddenly focused on the goat’s eyes, and the look made me laugh out loud. It was, like, “Dude, what the fuck?” (Yes, it’s confirmed: the idea of bestiality is just as weird for the beasts as it is for us.)

In between all of this sex, you’re left with a movie that’d be perfect if The Playboy Channel ever decided to do its own version of “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” with bad foreign dialogue dubbed into bad English dialogue. Once you take the goat out of the equation, the only remotely scary moment during the first hour of the film occurs when a face unexpectedly appears in a window, which is pretty pitiful for a movie about a satanic cult. Mind you, ten minutes before the movie ends, we do get a thoroughly revolting sequence where a greasy fat man gets a sword shoved right up the ol’ poop chute, but it’s hardly a moment that you’d describe as a saving grace. When the movie ends with the revelation that all of its events were just a dream, your only wish will be that you could say the same. Then again, I should’ve known this thing was going to suck just based on the fact that its original Spanish title literally translated into “The Sex Rites of the Devil”; anyone who wastes a perfect good title like that by changing it to “Black Candles” clearly doesn’t know the first thing about quality motion pictures.

On the flip side of the coin, “Evil Eye” is extremely entertaining…though, okay, it’s as much for the wrong reasons as for the right ones. There are some highly disconcerting moments here…and not the having-sex-with-a-goat-kind, but some legitimately creepy stuff. Unfortunately, there are also moments which are so awful that I’m still tempted to declare it to be one of the best bad movies I’ve seen in years. Frankly, it earned that honor with one line, then permanently secured it with another…but I’ll get to those in a moment.

As noted above, the film’s premise revolves around a rich playboy named Peter Crane (Jorge Rivero) who keeps having nightmares about having murdered people. Director Mario Siciliano, who was also responsible for “Happy Sex,” “Erotic Family,” and “Orgasmo Non-Stop,” somehow manages to resist his baser instincts and avoid incorporating too many sex scenes into the proceedings, even scoring several legitimately creepy moments over the course of the film’s 90+ minutes, but it’s the dialogue that dooms “Evil Eye.” Blame the melodramatic dubbing into English if you wish, but the lines themselves are the real killer here, such as when Peter complaints to his psychiatrist (played by Robert Conte, a.k.a. Don Brizio in “The Godfather”) that he’s having awful dreams. When he’s asked if he takes drugs, he snaps back, “No way, I don’t like that crap…unless you count whiskey and tobacco as drugs.”

My personal favorite amongst the film’s many completely surreal lines comes via this conversation, where Peter’s longtime paramour meets his psychiatrist’s lovely partner.

Tanya: Who’s the lady?
Peter: Dr. Sarah Turner, this is Tanya.
Tanya: Well, I don’t her very much.
Sarah: Yes, you’re probably just tuning in on my reaction to you.
Tanya: I do tune in on grand pianos.

Um, what?

“Evil Eye” is definitely a must-see film…as in, “You must see just how bad the dialogue is.” But unlike “Black Candles,” at least you won’t feel like you need a shower after watching it. I should mention, though, that the DVD offers the full “grindhouse” experience by providing the original trailers for other films in the series, and while I can’t say they necessarily look any better, they were enough of a hoot that I almost wanted to check them out.

Almost.

Good evening, and welcome to the sixth and final entry in an ongoing series within “Scare of the Day.”

Wait, let me guess: you didn’t even know I was doing an ongoing series, did you?

Well, there’s no reason you should, really, unless you’re really observant and noticed a recurring logo within the artwork of the last several films I’ve tackled, but Warner Brothers recently released a six-disc box set of horror films entitled The Twisted Terror Collection, and today’s the last of the bunch. It’s a strange mish-mosh of selections, with no seeming rhyme or reason aside from the fact that they’re all horror flicks, but if you like horror flicks, it’s a pretty good deal: individually, they hover in the $13 range, but you can get all six for under $38.

So, anyway, tonight’s the night when we finally get to the sixth and final film with the set. We’re worked our way through “Deadly Friend,” “From Beyond The Grave,” “Eyes of a Stranger,” “Dr. Giggles,” and “Someone’s Watching Me” (see what I mean about how disparate they are), and, now, it’s time to get to the flick that I intentionally kept ‘til last, just so I’d have something to look forward to: “The Hand,” starring Michael Caine and written and directed by Oliver Stone.

If you’re anything like my fellow contributor David Medsker, this is the point where you say, with legitimate shock, “Oliver Stone did ‘The Hand’?” Yes, he did. And in case you think I’m trying to pull a surprise ending on you, yes, it’s the Oliver Stone, the same one who directed “J.F.K.,” “The Doors,” “Talk Radio,” “Platoon,” blah blah blah. But at this point, he had a decidedly shorter resume, having only directed one previous film (1974’s “Seizure”), but he had written an Academy Award-winning screenplay (“Midnight Express”), which was apparently enough to get him the gig on “The Hand.”

Based on The Lizard’s Tail, the novel by Marc Brandell, “The Hand” stars Caine as comic strip writer and artist Jon Lansdale. He’s doing pretty well on the business end of things, but his personal life is another story; he’s got a cute little daughter (Mara Hobel, who soon scored cult film immortality by playing Christina Crawford in “Mommie Dearest”), but his relationship with his wife is strained at best, and…well, hell, you don’t give a good God-damn about his marital woes, do you? Of course not. You just want to know about the disembodied hand that goes around strangling people, which is just as it should be. I mean, I saw this movie when I was 12 years old, the reason I remember it so vividly ain’t because of the back-and-forth dialogue between husband and wife; it’s because you don’t forget the sight of a hand scuttling across the ground like a freaking spider!

On the whole, “The Hand” isn’t nearly as scary as my memories would’ve had me believe, mostly because I’ve seen a lot of movies in the interim. Back then, I was so focused on the hand that I couldn’t fully appreciate back the fun of Michael Caine’s bug-eyed performance in the film, which he gradually takes so delightfully over the top that, by the end, you’re more likely to be cackling than shivering.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some scares here, though. In fact, we’re only about six minutes into the proceedings when we get our first jump-out-of-your-seat moment, courtesy of a cat leaping and yowling into a shot…but it’s more than just a cheap scare. Stone’s already set the scene and shown us that the cat’s there; the big reason it proves so shocking is less to do with the feline and more to do with the fact that, only moments earlier, Lansdale has been cutting wood with an axe…which means that the audience, who already knows that he’s destined to lose a hand at some point, find itself wondering, “Is this how it happens? With an axe…?” Well, no, actually, it isn’t. But since we’re already distracted by the mere possibility, we forget about the cat in the scene, and, voila, a simple scare becomes more profound than it otherwise might have been. (The cat ends up shocking us again later, resulting in my wife jumping, then grumbling, “Stupid goddamned cat.” I immediately seconded her emotion.)

When Lansdale finally does lose his hand…well, I can’t speak as to how medically accurate it is, with the ungodly amounts of blood spurting everywhere, but it certainly feels like there’s more blood than is actually necessary. Then again, his hand has just been completely ripped from his arm at the wrist, so maybe that’s just me wanting to believe that it should’ve been less bloody. However you feel about the gore, though, one thing that’s undeniable is that the choreography of that scene is the definitive moment within “The Hand” that’ll make you go, “Yep, even back then, Oliver Stone was already a hell of a director.”

With the loss of a hand, specifically his drawing hand, Lansdale’s life as a cartoonist is effectively ended, and his marriage is already hanging by a thread, so it’s no wonder that he begins a descent into depression…but is it a descent into madness as well? He begins to dream that his hand, which was MIA after the car accident which severed it, is still out there somewhere…and crawling towards him. (There’s a very fun scene when Lansdale goes to search the field where the hand should’ve landed and we’re treated to camera work which effectively provides us with a “hand’s-eye view.”) As the film progresses, we’re left uncertain as to whether he’s been dreaming or not…and if you haven’t actually seen it, this is definitely one that I won’t spoil for you.

The score by James Horner is suitably creepy, but there’s something very amusing about the scene where a slightly-crazed Caine is cruising down the road whilst cranking Blondie’s “Union City Blue” on the car stereo. (Don’t tell me Stone wasn’t aware of the lyric, “Power, passion plays a double hand.”) It’s also worth noting that “The Hand” is the only selection within the Twisted Terror Collection to feature audio commentary; Stone himself sits down and discusses the experience of making the movie and, as with most of his commentary tracks, it’s almost as entertaining as the film itself, in particular because he admits outright that he hasn’t seen it in years…not unlike myself.

“The Hand” is an enjoyable blend of drama and horror, with the occasional bit of humor to lighten the mood; it might not be as scary as I’d remembered it, but thanks to the team of Caine and Stone, it proves entertaining nonetheless.