One of the great masterpieces of Cinema played on the Paramount screen last Wednesday, and once again I was there to appreciate it. What I was really flabbergasted by though, was the fact that so many people in the audience were seeing “Psycho” for the first time. Our host, the programmer of the Paramount Classic Summer Film Series, asked for a show of hands for people who had never seen “Psycho”. It was hard to believe that almost a third of the audience in attendance that night raised their hands.
The rest of us, who are seeing “Psycho” for the umpteenth time, waited in glee for the many twists and turns that take place during the story. In the long prologue to the violence, Marion Cranes transaction with the used car dealer got a lot of laughs, but you could also sense a great deal of tension in the audience. In fact the laughter that came from the audience almost certainly was generated by people who had seen the movie before and knew the irony of a particular statement, we’re waiting for the turn that comes very quickly.
Once again I think the best scene in the movie takes place in the parlor as Norman Bates tries to relate to Marion, but marks himself as a strange fellow with every sentence he utters. We can still empathize with Norman at that moment, because of the brilliance of Anthony Perkins performance. We can also see the moment of redemption when Marion decides to face her mistakes and return to Phoenix and try and clear up the horrible decision she had made. This is the moment where the movie turns from being a mere thriller to a tragedy, and the two actors in the scene are both brilliant in the way they play their parts.
It must be nearly impossible in modern culture to be on the outside of the big twist in Psycho. 25 years ago I tried to keep my kids from knowing about Norman Bates and his mother, until they had a chance to see the film for themselves. Social media, YouTube, endless memes, all results in fewer surprises for film audiences. That’s too bad. One of my friends on the Lambcast refuses to watch trailers for films, and I completely understand her perspective. I just wish trailers didn’t give so much away. But I still need to have some sense of what a film is about if I’m going to decide to watch it. I think we could use more trailers like the one above, famous for Alfred Hitchcock walking us through the set of his movie.
Anytime you can watch “Psycho” from beginning to end, you should take advantage of it. Anytime you can see it with an audience in a real theater, the real crime would be skipping it.
A lot of people when asked what it is the best shark movie after Jaws, might choose Deep Blue Sea. I saw DBS a week or two ago and was once again impressed with how much fun the movie is. Genetically altered sharks, hunting humans, in the middle of a natural disaster, is obviously a lot of fun. The story is filled with mayhem related to the cumulative destruction of the Marine Research Center where the sharks are housed. As entertaining as this film is however, I must say that it pales in comparison in regard to tension, anxiety, and reality, to the shallows.
This is practically a one-woman show, as Blake Lively plays a surfer, confronting a shark in a shallow bay, somewhere on the Mexican Coast. The setup for the film is very strong, there’s a reason that nobody will miss her for a night, and there’s a reason that the shark lingers in the area, which doesn’t require it to have any particular emotional Arc that it is following. Unlike Jaws the Revenge, it’s not really personal it’s instinct.
Our protagonist is Nancy, a medical student who is uncertain that she wants to continue and become a doctor. She’s retracing the steps of her deceased mother, to locate an isolated beach in a bay that was her mother’s favorite place. She caught a ride with a local, while her traveling companion has been rendered incapable of going with her by inebriation and infatuation with man that she met near their hotel. So Nancy is on her own except for a couple of other surfers with whom she shares the secret of the perfect waves in this idyllic location.
The shark who becomes her nemesis, is there feasting on a whale that it has killed and which is floating into the bay. Perhaps even more harrowing than the shark, which is a consistent threat, is the shallow reef and rock formations, which have rendered Nancy injured, bleeding, and trapped on. After an initial attack, Nancy looks for refuge as she tries to figure out how to reach the shore while the shark doggedly pursues her and lingers in the area attracted by both the whale and her blood in the water.
The film builds a lot of tension, as others enter into this scenario, unaware of the danger that faces them as they interact with Nancy from her perch on a rock outcropping. Actually, Nancy has had three locations from which she tries to stay away from the shark. The first is on the floating dead whale, but as that is like seeking sanctuary on a a dinner plate, that location is not secure for long. The high and low tides exposed part of the reef and shallow rock bottom, at least enough to give Nancy a safe spot to contemplate her woes. Her injuries are significant, including a bite wound that threatens to leach the life away from her. It is convenient that as a budding physician, Nancy understands how to apply a tourniquet and create a pressure bandage out of part of her wetsuit. The Third location that she seeks protection on is it nearby buoy, which becomes her final refuge in the extended confrontation with the shark.
They are desperate attempts to acquire materials that will help her in her fight, some of which work and some of which fail. Her hopes are raised by the arrival of others on the beach, but those hopes are often dashed by the motives of the beachcombers, or by the actions of the shark. As horrifying as a shark bite would be, the moments that caused me physical pain watching the film came from seeing her tumble on the rocks or crawl across the poisonous coral. There’s also a painful interlude with jellyfish, all of which will give you plenty of reason to cringe in your seat.
Most shark movies have some goofy element to them , or a human conflict in the background. “The Shallows” takes an experience that is very serious, and treats it in a way that makes you share the pain and frustration of our protagonist. The only thing that might make this movie feel a little artificial, is the climax and the resolution with the shark. It is dramatically solid, although a little improbable. In the end though none of it matters because we’ve spent two hours living an incident completely through our senses, and hope never to have to share.
I could have sworn I’d written about this film before, but as I looked for any version of a review on the site I came up empty. It must simply be that I’ve talked about it with other people on a regular basis and so I thought I had actually written something about the movie. There are a couple reasons why this feels somewhat personal, but it has nothing to do with my drug use or participation in the adult film industry. Many of the reasons that I identify with this film have to do with the time and setting of the movie, which in some ways do parallel my own life.
The house that Eddie, our main character, lives in with his parents, before he becomes Dirk Diggler, is in Torrance California and it looks exactly like the home of my college debate partner who lived in Torrance. The interior layout and the exterior Frontage might very well have been filmed in his neighborhood. In 1981, which would be in the middle of the time that this film is set, I had a summer job making deliveries of photographic supplies to a variety of businesses, and one of my routes consisted of the San Fernando Valley. Famously, this was the home of the pornography industry at the time, much like it’s depicted in the film. Some of the locations that I made deliveries to were in fact producing magazines that were largely pornographic. So I have a tangential connection to what was going on. The one element of the film however that most closely connects me to the story, is maybe the most compelling scene in the film, the drug deal that goes wrong. One of my closest friends in college took a wrong turn and ended up working as a low-level drug dealer, in the valley. By the time he was doing this I only saw him occasionally for lunch or to talk to on the phone just to check in. I was not immersed in his lifestyle, except that there was one experience when we met for lunch and I drove him to a location where he was making drop off of his supplies. It was one of the most uncomfortable experiences I ever had with him. A year later he was murdered by his partners in the drug business. So although the experience is not exactly the same I can certainly share the perspective of how crazy and dangerous the times were.
My personal connections with the story aside, this is an incredibly watchable movie that is propulsive and uses needle drops and inserts to create a sense of verisimilitude. There are some truly great performances in the film, Mark Wahlberg gives us a desperate, insecure character in the last act, for whom you can feel surprising sympathy. Philip Seymour Hoffman is a minor character in the film, but he develops a sense of pity from us that feels quite realistic. Burt Reynolds notoriously disowned the film, but his performance in it, as the father figure / pornographic film director, is one of his career best. Julianne Moore, William H. Macy, Robert Ridgely, John C Reilly, and a dozen other players all create characters with big faults that we still find ourselves empathizing with, to our surprise.
I was flying solo at this performance at the Paramount, and I got there a little bit later than I usually do. I had to sit near the back on the orchestra level because the theater was packed for this Thursday night screening. The audience was incredibly receptive, and Paul Thomas Anderson, who is not making his debut with this film but for whom this was my first exposure, impressed me and everybody else with how this movie was put together.
It only happens occasionally but this is one of those times, a film will enter my regular blog posts, but also be included in the Strathmore film project. Strother has a minor part in his great 1968 Western directed by Sam Peckinpaugh, a man that Strother had worked with before and would work with again. Any film fan is familiar with the Wild Bunch and it’s significance as part of the new Hollywood.
An elegantin Western sit near the end of the frontier days, the Wild Bunch is about the passing of old ways, and the violence that ensues. The film stars William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson, and Warren Oats as a band of Outlaws whose competence is in question, and who is being pursued by a posse of prairie scum led by their former compatriot played by Robert Ryan. As surprising as it might seem there are themes of loyalty in the film, and when considering the nature of these men, loyalty is not one of the characteristics you would expect. In fact there is a clear example of such hypocrisy at the very beginning of the film. In escaping from the town and the trap that had been set for them, they abandoned their youngest member, to be set upon by the citizens after the others have escaped.
There is virtually no one in the film that could be described as an honorable person. Everyone is guilty of some form of murder or theft. However, there are moments when the bandits act with dignity, and a sense of a moral code, that seems so foreign to the way they act to the rest of the time. In addition to the issue of loyalty, the biggest theme seems to be autonomy. No one in the film, from the bandits to the Posse to the Mexican soldiers, wants to be told what to do or how to act. The desire to have command over your own decisions seems to be a strong motivator, especially for Holden and Borgnine.
Robert Ryan as an aging Bandit himself, now trapped into leading a posse against his former partners, is the poster child for the theme of autonomy. His inability to act in the manner that he wants, and the fact that he is forced to work with characters for whom he has disdain, is another driving force in the film. Two of the scum that ride with the Posse are TC and Coffer, played by Buddies lq Jones and Strother Martin. If there is anything close to comic relief in the film by these two losers, who bicker with each other like an old married couple over issues like whose bullet killed a victim in the streets, or which one of them gets to keep the boots of the latest dead man they have found. While Pike Bishop and Dutch Engstrom are hardly models of social nicety, they certainly Tower over the likes of Deke Thornton’s mob of Misfits.
Sam Peckinpaugh became famous for the stylized violence in his films, often featuring slow motion deaths. This is the film that probably initiated that reputation. The movie is bookended by two over the top shootouts, which feature Mass deaths in slow motion bullet holes and falls. If there is a third theme running through the film, it may be that violence is inevitable and inevitably futile. There is a coda to the film which also includes violence, but after the massacre of the Mexican troops and the Wild Bunch itself, Peck and Paul wisely allows the massacre of the Posse to occur off screen. So anyone who says that Peck and paw shows no restraint must have missed this last scene.
There’s a lot more to the movie than the two big shootouts, but I’ll leave that for another time. I have no doubt that I will return to the Wild Bunch for a separate entry on the Strother Martin film project. For now it’s just a pleasure to have seen the film once again on the big screen, and bathe in the Macho themes and images that dominate this movie.
It seems like there were dozens of “Jaws” rip-offs in the late seventies. Killer Orcas, Grizzlies, and in this film, genetically modified piranha that can strip a man to the bone in minutes. This was an exploitation picture that launched the career of director Joe Dante. It has only a little of the sideways humor that characterizes his best films, but it does try to keep the audience engaged with frequent piranha victims every few minutes.
The formula is a clear set of beats stolen from “Jaws”. We start with a titillating experience that results in death, followed up by a slow discovery of what is happening, and then a series of denials of reality by officials. One of the main differences is that the obnoxious character who is trying to dismiss the whole thing, gets a comeuppance, unlike the mayor in the shark movie.
Bradford Dillman was a seventies staple as a suspicious official or businessman, and he was in a ton of TV shows of the era. Here he plays a drunk hermit like loser, who hets turned into an action hero for no particular reason. Heather Menzies, who played one of the Von Trapp children in “The Sound of Music” and Strother Martin’s daughter in Sssssss, is a bounty hunter who gets caught up in the action, and veteran horror icon Kevin McCarthy starts a long association with director Dante, playing a crazed scientist. Don’t ask why there is a small lizard man walking around the laboratory in the early part of the film. It never becomes important and it is simply a loose thread.
“Piranha” is an efficient, low budget fright film. The film makers do the best they can with their resources and imaginations. Although many consider it a cult classic, it simply feels standard for the times. But of course those were my times so I loved it.
Most of the entries coming up will be brief, I am still trying to catch up on posts for all the theatrical screenings in the last couple of weeks. I cannot however, skimp on my opinions about this particular film. “Zodiac” has been one of our family favorites since we saw it in it’s original theatrical release. Over the years, it has become a default movie for us. Whenever we have trouble deciding what we should watch , someone inevitably suggests “Zodiac” as an alternative and nine times out of ten, we are watching it again. This screening at the Paramount Theater was the first time I have seen it in a theater since 2007, and it is the first time since I started blogging, that it gets included on this project.
I was eleven years old when the Zodiac killings started drawing press attention across the state of California. So I was old enough to be aware of the story, but still young enough that it did not obsess me the way that it did the characters portrayed in the story. Robert Graysmith , as portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal, is a cartoonist for a San Francisco newspaper, one that received messages from the killer. His tangential connection lead to an intense desire to know who the killer was, and he wrote the book this movie is based on. Director David Fincher, portrays the writer as an innocent bystander, watching the horror play out around him. Gyllenhaal looks like a baby-faced kid among the police and newspaper professionals that surround the case. His sincerity is achingly displayed on his face as he asks questions of his colleague Paul Avery, who is covering the Zodiac for the paper. Avery is played by a pre-Iron Man Robert Downey Jr. Avery is also presented as an obsessive, but his pursuit is more professional and it consumes him in a different way than Graysmith.
The third leg of the tripod that the story of the investigation rests on is Dave Toschi, a police inspector in charge of the S.F. part of the investigation. Mark Ruffalo plays Toschi as an overwhelmed professional, frustrated by jurisdictional impediments and inconsistent evidence. The two newspaper guys supplement and interfere with his task, but ultimately, it is Toschi who gets to chillingly interrogate a suspect that seems to fit the information that they have. All three of these men get moments of horror as they confront individuals or places that may be a key to solving the crimes. Downey Jr. is playing a character who descends into alcohol and drug use as his paranoia and professional life collide. There is an honesty about those destructive forces that may be a reflection of his real life struggles in the years that preceded this film. Ruffalo seems to be calmly frustrated reacting to both the killer and his amateur pair of Zodiac hunters.
Everyone in the movie is top notch in their performances, but I will single out two of the supporting players to show how well the movie is put together. Toschi has a partner, Bill Armstrong, played by Antony Edwards. Armstrong is a dedicated professional but he remains more impartial than Toschi. He is analytical but not obsessive. Edwards exudes competence with an aura of detachment. He wants to solve the case as much as his partner, but he doesn’t let the frustrations of the case overwhelm him. Edwards is the cool straight man to Ruffalo’s, only slightly warmer counterpart. They make a great team.
The second outstanding secondary performance is by John Carrol Lynch, who plays the eventual main suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen. We only see Allen in the context of the investigations. There are no scenes where he is depicted as the killer engaged in the crimes. We learn about his character in interviews with his former friends and family. When Toschi, Armstrong and two other law enforcement personnel question him at work in the break room of the facility he works at, all sorts of alarms are going off in our heads as the cops listen with gapped mouths to the explanations and information that Allen shares. Lynch is calmly aloof as he spills suspicious conduct and details to the investigators. His face never reveals a fear that he is trapped, or that he is on alert in the face of the questions he is getting. His quiet comment “I am not the Zodiac. And if I was, I certainly wouldn’t tell you.” is as chilling as some of the murders that we see depicted in the film.
The verisimilitude of the film is found in a thousand places in the movie. The location shots are all consistent with the era. There is a sequence with Melvin Belli, a famous attorney who was a celebrity because of the lawsuits and clients he was involved with His depiction reflects the commercial television practices of the time. Toschi is shown attending a special screening of “Dirty Harry” which is a film that has a character inspired by the real life criminal he is pursuing. One of the most haunting and realistic uses of music of the time occurs in the attack on the couple in a car at the start of the film. Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy” man plays out over the scene, and you can almost smell the aura of the 1960 descending on the moment.
I would not classify this as a horror film, just as I would not say “The Silence of the Lambs” is a horror film. There are certainly frightening moments but the key is realistic suspense. These are thrillers with horror elements. The creepiest scene takes place in a basement, and there is no blood, weapon or violence shown, but the hair on the back of your neck will certainly stand up at the moment. Charles Fleisher, who is best known as the voice of “Roger Rabbit”, provides an additional supporting character to make this movie the masterpiece that it is.
“Zodiac” was not a huge success when it was first released, but there has been a lot of reassessment in the last two decades and I think you will find that this movie will hold your attention, frighten you and haunt you for a long time. I am happy to have had a chance to see it again in it’s natural habitat and I encourage everyone to spend some time with this excellent film.
I was a big fan of the original “28 Days Later” from 2002, and I also appreciated the sequel “28 Weeks Later” as well. I expected a “28 Months” movie fifteen years ago but it never materialized. So instead, almost 28 years after the original (really only 23) we get a legacy sequel which tries to restore the franchise to life, which is an odd thing considering that many people consider it a zombie film. Regardless of how it is classified, the new film stays relatively true to the preceding movies, with a couple of variations that are bootstrapped in to make the story feel more substantial and original.
An idyllic community has been established on a coastal island, which is only accessible on a bridge that is only accessible during low tide. While there is a threat of infection from the mainland, that possibility is remote. The bigger issues facing the community are limited resources, lost knowledge and in one case, the absence of medical facilities that might be life saving. The community has become a cult of rituals, meant to perpetuate the group and prepare youngsters who were born into this cloistered society, how to deal with the world they live in. The first act of the film is a father-son bonding ritual which involves confronting the outside world, killing some of it, and surviving the terrors that exist on the mainland. Spike, a twelve year old who trusts his father and adores his mother, gets confronted with a confounding situation when his expedition reveals things about his Dad and the world that his mend is not ready to handle.
If there is a weakness in the story, it is not in the action or characters but rather in the short sighted thinking of a kid. His motives are pure but his method is nuts and he should know that. The story becomes a quest for help that lays past the sections of the map that in the old days would be labeled “Here there be dragons”. Spike is resourceful, but there are a couple of convenient moments that solve problems that he would have been unable to manage on his own. There is a good deal of tension in this middle section, as the threat of rage-infected humans looms around every corner. he action is intense, and the escapes are narrow, and the complications are interesting.
The third act is mystical and disturbing, and it is almost a polemic on euthanasia. Ralph Fiennes appears as the most interesting character in the story, and his narrative, while a little preachy, does give us some issues to think about. The conclusion of the movie will throw you off, but I understand that if you live in Great Britain, it will make a lot more sense. There are apparently two sequels coming so Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who plays the dad, will probably be back after disappearing from act two and most of act three. Jodie Comer will be missing for an obvious reason, but that should not surprise anyone who makes it into the movie for twenty minutes. By the way, the opening, which is a revisit to the onset of the zombie apocalypse, is smashing. Those sequences in these kinds of films usually are.
It was fifty years ago, this month, that “Jaws” the greatest film of the last eighty years, first dropped into our collective culture. Ever since that day, film makers have been striving to recapture the essence of the film. Some have stuck to the basic horror narrative, using the sharks as a monster to hook us into watching. A few films (especially TV movies) have tried to parody shark films into action comedies with varying degrees of success. Only occasionally, has a shark film created a aura that was reminiscent of the classic, “The Shallows” being the most recent example I can think of. This new film, “Dangerous Animals” tries a different approach and succeeds in getting the tension right, and the horror appropriate. It is not anything close to the quality of film that “Jaws” is, but it has some things going for it that make it my favorite film of the year so far.
If you watch the trailer, you will understand the premise very quickly. We have a serial killer whose method of murder is feeding his live victims to ravenous sharks while the victim is still alive. This is potentially a gruesome horror film that could be classified as exploitation, except for the fact that director, Sean Byrne, has learned his Spielberg lessons well. Instead of extended scenes of sharks dismembering the poor subjects of the killers plans, we see just enough to be terrified, but not enough to be revolted. There is blood in the violence, but it is not the over the top fountains of a horror film like “The Monkey”. If ever a horror movie could claim to be in gory good taste, this one is probably it.
The big advantage that this movie has over other exploitation films is that it has two dynamic characters that are really interesting. The main character is Hassie Harrison, as Zephyr, an itinerant American, surfing the coast of Australia. She is emotionally damaged, we can see that, but she is not unreachable as her one night stand with a friendly local explores. She is also not a mere damsel in distress. She is smart, resilient, and relentless in trying to fight back against the antagonist. Zephyr is not simply going to resign herself to a fate that she becomes an eyewitness to, she is going to struggle in any way possible to keep living. She may not be the easiest character to love, but she is clearly one that we are happy to root for, time and time again.
One of the faults of some thrillers is the good luck that the victims sometimes run into, which allow them to escape and give us unearned hope. This movie turns that trope on it’s head. It is the killer who ends up with all the good luck on his side as he repeatedly thwarts Zephyr in her escape plans. Jai Courtney is Tucker, the deranged serial killer who can mask his evil with an avuncular round of “Baby Shark” one moment, and then a knife in the throat the next. I have seen in in half a dozen other movies over the last few years and he always seemed to me to be a guy who was just missing it. An actor who would have occasional moments but never enough to be memorable. He was bland as you could get. This film however, gives him a part that is screaming for some charisma, and he delivers. Courtney has the glint in his eye of a maniac, and the physical form of a damaged brute. It is impossible to take your eyes off him when he is on screen and that says something because his counterpart is attractive as heck and in a bathing suit for most of the film.
The script allows us to believe a few things that are unbelievable. The brief fling that Zephyr has with local Moses, becomes for him an obsession, only in a good way. The fact that Moses and Zephyr are surfers and they are connected by a particular beachfront spot, becomes a key point in building up a chance that Tucker could somehow be derailed. Zephyr knows what is coming because she also meets Heather, a fellow pawn in Tucker’s twisted game. If there is any heart in the film outside of the truncated love story, it is in the few minutes that Heather and Zephyr share as they await their fate.
Sharks are in the film, but first time screenwriter Nick Lepard and director Byrne, seem to know that the fish are the least dangerous animals in the food chain of this thriller. Their role is kept to a supporting part, which makes them all the more effective when they do come into play. For some reason, this film is not getting many screens or much publicity, which is really unfortunate because, like the mother of all shark films, it is really not a horror film as much as it is a thriller. I know it is produced in partnership with Shudder, which is a horror outlet, but you are selling the movie short if you keep it in that box. This is a great twist on the great white, and in spite of the fact that it is being promoted as from the producers of the excretable “Longlegs” you should seek it out.
I’ve said it before, including a mention on the LAMBcastt, there must be something about us that is just wrong for enjoying these movies. The main reason that somebody goes to see a “Final Destination” film is to watch people die in elaborate convoluted accidents. The fascination with this sort of thing is easy to understand, since everybody does some rubbernecking when they pass that accident on the highway, or watches videos online where people get hurt doing stupid things. I suppose we can excuse this behavior in regard to the movie because we know it’s an elaborate fiction, and that there is some malevolent force behind it. Still, when you hear people cheering for some gruesome moment in one of these Rube Goldberg execution methods, it does make you question Humanity.
A month ago on the podcast, we covered the entire “Final Destination” franchise. The people on that show all enjoyed it so much that they volunteered to come back and talk about the new installment, which arrives here 14 years after the last Edition. “Bloodline”s has a couple of twists on the formula which helps make it feel fresh and worth investigating. The biggest innovation is that the original disaster is in fact completely avoided, which leaves a whole lot of deaths unaccounted for in the Grim Reaper’s Ledger book. The storytelling gets a little convoluted and the explanation of how death is just catching up with everybody at this point is awkward. Almost 30 years after he was denied all those earlier deaths he is finally getting around to the main family involved. Those of you who have seen the previous Final Destination films know that there is an order in which the deaths are supposed to occur, and we get a trick here that shows how that has been pushed back for several decades. As you know however, the bill is going to come due.
One of the things that makes “Bloodlines” work is that we get some characters that we do in fact care about. The hero of the original disaster turns out to be the linchpin for this story, and once that plug is pulled we return to the inevitable line of disasters. Interestingly enough though, there are a couple more turns which create some humor in the story and a lot more suspense. Many of these come at the expense of audience expectations from previous entries in the series. Sudden bus deaths are narrowly avoided, and a complex series of events that is reminiscent of two elaborate scenes in the earlier films, turns out to be a red herring.
If you take the time to listen to the podcast that I’m going to post here, you’ll hear everybody ranking their favorite deaths. Once again, our entertainment values are pretty morbid, but they are also satisfied with a well plotted story, some pretty effective character work, and a lot of fan service that turns out to work pretty well.
As horror films, these movies undermine the suspense and thrills a little bit, because we know eventually everyone is in fact going to die. The only questions we have concern how they’re going to die and whether or not it will be entertaining enough to wait around for. This film is just about 2 hours and that’s 30 minutes longer than most of the other entries. I never found my attention lagging, but I did wonder sometimes if in an attempting to create some dread, the filmmakers stepped on their own jokes. For example a character that’s been holding off death for decades is holed up in a cabin that is surrounded by a yard full of things that would be happy to kill her. It feels like the exact opposite of what the character would probably choose. If you want an example of this you can go back to Final Destination 2 and see how Clear Rivers tried to do the same thing.
Minor quibbles aside, this film was a blast and it was exactly what I was looking for. What it says about me that I enjoyed it so much is not clear, but I suspect that most of you who love horror films will find plenty to justify spending your money and your time on “Final Destination Bloodlines”.
Well I’m happy this film is doing so well with the box office, and encouraged by the willingness of people to invest in a story that is not based on some other IP, I don’t want to be blind to the flaws of the movie simply because it succeeds so well and in most aspects. Let me start with the positive things and then move on to a couple of the main criticisms that I have of Ryan Cooglers’s “Sinners”.
The film takes great effort to set a time and place where there is automatically discomfort in the normal settings that the principles find themselves in. A pair of twin black brothers have returned home to their southern roots after having ripped off the mobs in Chicago, well into the Great Depression. The hometown they have returned to, seems calm on the surface, and supposedly the Klan is no longer in operation, but that doesn’t mean that it’s roots are not still near to the surface. The brothers are attempting to create a social club that caters to the local black population, in particular to their taste in music dancing and other frivolities. Most of the social tension that you get at this point is set up for atmosphere, but later on director/writer Coogler, tries to use it as a plot point to finish off the film and that doesn’t quite work.
Anybody who chooses to see this will know that it’s a horror film, but it does take a while for the horror elements to develop. There is some early mumbo jumbo about hoodoos brought from the African Homeland, and maybe some of the Caribbean influence as well. All of that is really in aid of developing a secondary character who will provide some exposition later in the film. The ability to recognize vampires doesn’t really require all of that, but the film goes through the motions anyway.
The characters in the film do the most to create an atmosphere of dread without any particular source. Michael B, Jordan plays the brothers as a pair of menacing hoodlums who recognize their own depravity, but proceed to live life as if they are the ones who are in the right. Their younger cousin, a musician with dreams of blues mastery, gets mixed up in their plan to create a juke joint that will bring in big dollars and hopefully provide him some fame. The brothers are not interested in him becoming a regular part of the entertainment. They seem to sense that this is a one-off opportunity, it’s going to have some negative consequences, and they appear to be trying to avoid trapping him into their own lifestyle. That’s about as close as being noble that the two hoodlum Brothers get.
It takes an hour or so for the supernatural element to enter the story, and when it does it’s pretty creepy. The rapidly multiplying population of monsters sets the stage for a siege segment that is the main action sequence of the film. Viewers steeped in Vampire lore will understand some of the rules that are being followed, but there are also some things that don’t make a lot of sense.
This is where some of the flaws of the film come in. The rules of the world that they have created seem a little ambiguous. Why becoming a vampire turns you into a virtuoso musician, singer, or dancer is not clear. Characters who are turned seem to maintain the personas of their earlier selves, but never for long and it’s not clear what’s driving them. Also for a group of characters who are so intelligent as to give a philosophical justification for their actions, they don’t seem to have planned for the arrival of dawn. Which for vampires is a pretty short-sighted fault.
The best things about the film are the musical sequences which integrate Blues roots into the plot line. In fact it might even be acceptable to call this film a musical based on the number of scenes where the primary emphasis is on a performance. The scenes of the cousin playing guitar in the car, or performing in the Juke Joint, are excellent. The scenes of the vampires trying to use music is a way of enticing themselves into the Juke Joint are also quite good. Apparently being dead can turn you into quite the Irish dancer, I’ll have to keep that in mind for future reference.
Well the film is superior in a number of ways, it does suffer from some of the typical faults of horror movies. The main characters have to make stupid mistakes, someone has to violate the rules, and there will be choices that will make you scratch your head. As usual I try not to give away any spoilers in these posts, but a little of what I’m about to share with you might hint in that direction so proceed in reading with a little caution.
Ryan Coogler cannot find an exit for the movie. He creates a scenario which allows for a satisfying murder of dozens of violent racists, but it has nothing to do with the main plot of the film and it feels tacked on. Even when it’s finished, he is still not done. There’s a final twist in the film which is designed to give us one more musical interlude, and a take which seems to suggest that giving in to being a vampire isn’t necessarily all that bad. The movie should have ended 20 minutes before it did. And regardless of how good the song is or how satisfying an extended sequence of cathartic violence might be, it’s got nothing to do with the main story and it feels like padding. Coogler needed his editor to twist his arm a little bit and say “let’s stop here”.
So the production quality on the film is great, the actors do a terrific job, and the horror story works pretty well even with some of the flaws. It all gets diluted by Coogler’s attempt to turn the film into a social commentary. Something that was not needed in order for the film to be worthwhile.
Kirkham A Movie A Day 