Friday, September 6, 2019

Worth Mentioning - You Don't Want to Die There

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.


It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt.


BLOOD BEACH (1980)

The most famous tagline for Jaws 2 was "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...", and two years later another Jaws knock-off came along with a tagline that adds on to that one. The most famous tagline for Blood Beach was, "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water - you can't get to it." It fits, because this movie is rare among the Jaws cash-ins in that it doesn't feature any sort of aquatic man-eater. The creature here is something that lurks beneath the sand of Venice Beach in California, pulling people and animals alike through the ground so it can munch on them.

These thing doesn't always finish its meals, leaving body parts behind on the sand, so at first the local police think there might be a serial killer or a rampaging Nazi stalking the beach. But it isn't long before they realize the threat is something they didn't even know existed. With the help of harbor patrol officer Harry Caulder (David Huffman), who spends a good amount of the movie romancing the daughter (a character played by Marianna Hill) of one of the victims, police officers played by the likes of John Saxon, Burt Young, and Otis Young work to bring an end to these beach attacks.

Blood Beach is a precursor to Tremors in some ways, but of course its underground monster isn't nearly as cool or interesting as the Graboids. Few things are. For the most part, this thing is kept off screen while sand shifts or people sink into the sand. When we do get glimpses of it they confirm that director Jeffrey Bloom (who also crafted the story with Steven Nalevansky) was right to keep it obscured for most of the running time. The design is fine, but it doesn't look all that convincing.


Most of the moments with the monster on screen are saved for the ending, but halfway through there's a strange scene that plays to the exploitation crowd, with a woman getting dragged under the sand and landing in an underground tunnel naked, her pants, shirt, and jacket having been removed during her slide through the ground... There's a quick flash of the monster as it moves in on this nude woman.

I'm not sure how this thing we see manages to hang up dead bodies around its lair like a slasher, but in the end the heroine does get surprised when a dead body comes swinging down from above, just like in a slasher movie.

Blood Beach isn't a thrill a minute, but its cast, concept, and tagline helped it achieve cult status and it's an interesting oddity to watch almost forty years down the line.



PERFECT (2018)

Filmmaker Eddie Alcazar's feature directorial debut is called Perfect, and while that title does make sense for the story, there's another P-word that's an even better match for the movie: pretentious. And most viewers will need yet another P-word to be able to sit through it: patience. A whole lot of patience. Perfect may only have an 87 minute running time, but the experience of watching it was so mind-numbing that it felt more like 187 minutes to me.

Scripted by Alcazar and Ted Kupper, the film stars Garrett Wareing as an unnamed young man whose wealthy mother (Abbie Cornish) sends him away to a remote treatment center after he loses control and murders his girlfriend. There doesn't seem to be a threat of any legal ramifications for this murder, the young man just needs to get right and his mother knows there's a chance that spending some time at this treatment center could be beneficial for him, as she was once a patient there herself. We'll soon find that the treatments in this place involve the patients being given self-surgery kits in toy packages. The directions say to slice open their faces and insert bionic implants into the hole - implants that will mutate their perception and "free them from their base programming".

If that story were told in a more straightforward manner, it might have been interesting. It's all in the execution, though, and I found the way Alcazar brought this story to the screen to be maddening. The film put me off with the opening scene, which pairs a nonsensical voice-over with abstract visuals and strobing light that could trigger seizures for some viewers. This goes on for three minutes. Perfect never drew me back in after that opening.

Those first three minutes are indicative of how Perfect is going to conduct itself through its entire running time, so you can confidently use that opening scene to decide whether or not you want to continue any deeper into the film. If you like what you see and hear there, Perfect will probably work for you. If, like me, it already has you cringing at how pretentious it is, abandon ship. More abstract visuals lie ahead, including black & white footage in which the young man has visions of himself as a monstrous creature that torments and murders people. There are many more voice-overs to come, contributed by various characters and often going on about random information (one of the earliest voice-overs is from a character we haven't even met yet, talking about creating automatons) or existential issues. Perfection is deemed horrible, the multiverse is pondered, someone who's not Thanos talks about balance in the universe, we're given a lesson on caterpillars and butterflies. While this is going on, scenes are padded out with excessive slow motion; we even get to watch the lead character eat fruit in slo-mo close-up.

Alcazar makes it very tough for the viewer to decipher what's going on in his story or make any connection at all with the characters, but on the positive side Perfect is truly visually impressive. Cinematographer Matthias Koenigswieser did a great job capturing the images, most of which were shot at an incredible location that has a CGI-manipulated view. Koenigswieser has promise that Hollywood is taking note of, he shot Disney's recent release Christopher Robin, and Alcazar also proves with this film that he could be a hell of a visual storyteller. The storytelling part of the equation is just lacking here.

Another positive is the score provided by musician Flying Lotus, who served as an executive producer alongside Steven Soderbergh, whose name is being heavily leaned on to help market the film. "Steven Soderbergh Presents" even appears above the title. It's effective, as Soderbergh's name is how the movie caught my attention.

Basically an 87 minute music video, Perfect is a cold, experimental arthouse film that will only appeal to a very small audience. It's strictly for viewers who want to get lost in strange, dazzling visuals while listening to Flying Lotus music. Anyone who puts this on hoping to see a movie where they can fully understand what's happening to likeable characters won't find anything they're looking for here. Perfect wasn't for me at all, but I'm sure it will find an appreciative audience who will be able to get wrapped up in it.

The review of Perfect originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com



INTO THE DARK: I'M JUST F*CKING WITH YOU (2019)

If a movie deals with April Fool's Day it should be a lot of fun, full of laughs and pranks - much like the 1986 slasher movie April Fool's Day. Thankfully, director Adam Mason's April Fool's Day themed addition to the Hulu and Blumhouse horror anthology series Into the Dark is packed with laughs and pranks.

Written by Gregg Zehentner and Scott Barkan, I'm Just F*cking with You stars Keir O'Donnell as Larry Adams, a bitter little troll who I found easy to hate from the beginning, when he's introduced leaving childish, vulgar insults on social media pages under the screen name Programming Flaw. Larry is the sort of guy who needs an ass-kicking visit from Jay and Silent Bob. But they're not around in this movie, so he has to be taught a lesson in another way.

Larry is on his way to the wedding of his ex-girlfriend, who is getting married to his cousin. That's why he's so bitter and has to turn to trolling to get enjoyment out of life. He's known for staying in the most "flamboyantly vile" motels he can find, and that's exactly what he does here, checking into a place called Pink Motel, which is coated in garish, colorful neon lighting - meaning it looks really cool in a movie. This habit of staying in vile places makes sense for his online persona, but makes zero sense for Larry, who is such a germophobe that he has to clean every inch of his room before he can settle in.


The guy working the front desk is Chester Conklin, played by Hayes MacArthur, and it's MacArthur who really makes I'm Just F*cking with You worth watching with his performance as this obnoxious "good time guy". Everything out of Chester's mouth is a joke, but not necessarily one meant to amuse anyone other than himself. He likes to wind people up, then drop his catchphrase, which also serves as the title of the movie. Chester would be a nightmare to be around, but MacArthur is a delight to watch.

Chester makes Larry's night at the Pink Motel a living hell, tormenting him with his sense of humor much like Larry torments people with his idea of humor online. But as the night goes on, the situation collapses into something much darker, and Larry begins to suspect Chester might be dangerous. He might have even done something to his sister Rachel (Jessica McNamee), who was supposed to meet him at this place...

Like the previous Into the Dark movie, Treehouse, I'm Just F*cking with You is about a crappy person being forced to face who they really are. Watching Larry be antagonized is much more enjoyable than the scenario in Treehouse, and I like this movie overall better than the Treehouse entry, and yet I don't like the ending of I'm Just F*cking with You, while I found the ending of Treehouse to be quite satisfying. The styles are very different, but for back-to-back installments in an anthology series they're surprisingly similar at the core.



SAW IV (2007)

Saw III was an ending of sorts for the Saw series. It was the last time franchise creators Leigh Whannell and James Wan had creative input; although they remained attached as executive producers, they were done crafting the story of the trap-making serial killer who doesn't consider himself a serial killer, John "Jigsaw" Kramer (Tobin Bell). A character who died at the end of the film - and unlike other franchise stars like Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger, Jigsaw wasn't the kind of guy who was likely to rise from the grave. Saw IV goes so far as to confirm that Jigsaw is dead by opening with a lengthy autopsy sequence, showing all the gory details. (And Jigsaw's penis.) These movies are truly disgusting, it's kind of shocking that they were so popular at the time. At the end of the autopsy, an audio tape is discovered in Jigsaw's stomach. On the tape, he asks, "You think it's over just because I'm dead?" This series isn't even close to being over.

So how does Saw continue without its lead villain? Well, it doesn't really continue without him. He may be dead, but John Kramer is all over this movie. With Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan, and Thomas Fenton taking over writing duties, the story continues by becoming convoluted, piling on so many twists, adding in so many characters, and expanding the back story until only viewers who have paid close attention and committed a lot of things to memory can keep track of who's who, what's going on, and why. Writer Leigh Whannell and director Darren Lynn Bousman put a little flash of something that the makers of future Saw movies could latch on to when they had Kramer hallucinate the image of a woman he loved in Saw III. Here we find out that woman was his ex-wife Jill Tuck (Betsy Russell), and she's an important part of the Jigsaw origin story.

Having decided that his diagnosis of terminal cancer and his near death in a car crash weren't enough to drive Jigsaw to want to teach people to cherish life by putting them into horrific, disfiguring, often fatal traps, the writers now craft a history for him in which the civil engineer was married to a woman who ran a health clinic that many of his victims passed by or through. Jill became pregnant, a planned pregnancy to coincide with a preferred sign in the Chinese zodiac. Apparently Kramer was clueless about what would make a nice gift for a kid, because that unnerving Billy the puppet he was always playing with was something he made for his unborn child. Sadly, Jill suffered a miscarriage as the result of an injury sustained during a robbery at the clinic. The Kramer/Tuck marriage crumbled after that... So the terminal diagnosis, the car crash, the miscarriage, and the divorce were all contributing factors to Kramer becoming Jigsaw. And the guy who caused the miscarriage became the first person to be put in one of his traps.


This is revealed to us in the middle of a story that involves SWAT commander Daniel Rigg (Lyriq Bent), a character introduced in Saw II, setting out on a quest to save Saw II / Saw III character Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) from the clutches of Jigsaw. You might have though Matthews died in Saw III. Hell, I thought he was as good as dead at the end of Saw II. But for some reason Jigsaw kept him alive for six months before getting around to putting him in another trap. Well, Jigsaw didn't do it alone, and his assistant Amanda Young - also killed in Saw III - wasn't the only help he had. There was more money to be made by releasing more Saw movies, so there has to be another assistant we didn't know about before.

FBI agents Strahm (Scott Patterson) and Perez (Athena Karkanis) suspect that Rigg is the other assistant, but since he's being bounced around the city following tapes and notes left for him by Jigsaw, we know that's not the case. The identity of this other assistant is revealed by the end of the movie, around the same time there's a twist that convinced Bousman to come back and direct Saw IV after saying he was done with the series after directing II and III. That twist doesn't mean much and comes late in the 95 minute movie, but it was impressive enough to Bousman that he had to be the one to bring it to the screen.

Rigg is being put to the test because he's dedicated to bringing this Jigsaw business to an end, so obsessed with busting criminals that his marriage is suffering. He is never put into a trap himself, he is led to places where other people have been put into traps. At times he's told that all he has to do is not do anything and things will be fine, but of course he can't just stand by and not try to help. In another situation, the Jigsaw tape allows him to choose whether or not a repugnant criminal should be put into a trap. Rigg puts that criminal in the trap in the name of justice, thus becoming a criminal himself, an accomplice in the Jigsaw crimes he's trying to stop. That is a clever idea, but the execution of the idea within the film doesn't do much for me.

I enjoyed the first two movies, but Saw III lost me along the way and Saw IV doesn't win me back. I don't care enough about what's going on to get wrapped up in the story that's gradually becoming more and more complicated. I never liked John Kramer and don't feel the need to know his entire history. One thing I do like about Saw IV is the addition of Strahm and Perez. They seem like characters who can get things done, despite looking in the wrong direction by being suspicious of Rigg, and throughout I'm rooting for them to solve this case and end it.

There are four sequels and counting after this, so obviously Strahm and Perez aren't as successful as I would like them to be.

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