Friday, September 25, 2020

Worth Mentioning - Be Excellent to Each Other

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.

Laughs from decades ago and modern scares.

BILL & TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (1989)

I had no idea what to expect from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure when my mom came home from the video store with a VHS copy in, I assume, late 1989 - at which time I would have been five years old. I hadn't requested to watch it, I don't think I had seen a trailer for it, mom just thought it would be an entertaining movie for a five year old to watch. And she was right. I had so much fun watching the movie that I still have memories of that first viewing more than thirty years later... although some of those memories are of how certain things confused me or went right over my head.

Directed by Critters' Stephen Herek from a screenplay by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, the film stars, as pretty much everyone knows, Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves as dimwitted but good natured California teenagers Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted "Theodore" Logan, who have formed a two man band called Wyld Stallyns, even though they don't know how to play their instruments. "Surfer dude" types who are never shown surfing, "stoner" types who we never see taking any substances, these guys are such goofballs that it's tough to believe they would accomplish much in their lives, but a glimpse forward to the year 2688 shows us that Bill and Ted somehow become known as the "Great Ones", and their positive, music-loving world view has shaped an utopian future society. But that future isn't set in stone. It's in danger of being wiped out because Bill and Ted can't wrap their heads around history.

Bill and Ted are about to fail history class. If they do that, they'll flunk out of San Dimas High School and Ted's strict police Captain father (Hal Landon Jr.) will be sending him off to Oates Military Academy. If Bill and Ted are separated, that utopian 2688 won't happen. So a trio of authority figures called The Three Most Important People in the World send a guy named Rufus (George Carlin) back in time to 1988 to help Bill and Ted out. And Rufus helps them by sending them back in time.

The history report that the future depends on requires Bill and Ted to pick an important historical figure from a variety of different time periods and imagine how they would view their hometown of San Dimas in 1988. So instead of reading up on historical figures and using their imagination to come up with what they would think of San Dimas, Bill and Ted travel to different time periods and gather together a group of important historical figures to bring them back to modern day San Dimas so they can find out what they actually think of the place.

Much like on Doctor Who, Bill and Ted travel through time and space in a machine that resembles a phone booth, using the keypad on the phone to punch in their destinations. Unlike the vehicle on Doctor Who, this phone booth is not bigger on the inside than it appears to be on the outside. It is only phone booth size, so it gets really crowded in there as Bill and Ted collect those historical figures - those people being Napoleon Bonaparte, Billy the Kid, Socrates, Sigmund Freud, Genghis Khan, Abraham Lincoln, Beethoven, and Joan of Arc.

One of the things that went over my head when I was a kid was the Joan of Arc character, since I didn't know who Joan of Arc was at the time (despite being a fan of The Legend of Billie Jean). So when our heroes express confusion over the fact that Joan of Arc was not Noah's wife, I didn't get the joke. Another thing that rattled my brain is the fact that Bill's stepmom Missy (Amy Stock-Poynton) is much younger than his dad (J. Patrick McNamara); so much younger that she was a senior in high school when Bill and Ted were freshmen. They both asked her to the prom, and Bill still clearly has the hots for her. That whole scenario kind of disturbed me when I was five.

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is simple and fun, and it moves through its 90 minute running time at a very quick pace. The title characters are blasting through time for the majority, spending very few minutes in each location before they move on to the next one. The ride isn't completely smooth, they run into some trouble in the Old West and in 15th century England - where they meet love interests Princess Joanna (Diane Franklin) and Princess Elizabeth (Kimberley LaBelle). They also have some trouble in '88 San Dimas. But their problems are resolved rather easily and it's not hard to get most of these historical figures to agree to go on a trip with them. Even notorious people like Napoleon and Genghis Khan prove to be rather compliant, and their antics are played for laughs.

Others may have debates over whether or not historical figures should be portrayed in the way they are in this film, but the only real issue I have with this movie comes right before the midway point, when Bill and Ted hug each other to celebrate a happy moment, then recoil and call each other a derogatory term that's used against gay people. It's not a word that good-hearted "Great Ones" who will be leading the world into a utopian existence should be shown using... But it was the '80s, that word was being thrown around all over the place, and usually viewers were expected to laugh at it for some reason.

That of-its-time misstep aside, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure still holds up as an amusing, charming comedy that provides entertainment for viewers of all ages, even if the viewer is too young to know who Joan of Arc was or to understand the Missy situation.


THE UNFAMILIAR (2020)

Director Henk Pretorius's horror film The Unfamiliar is presented as if it was intended to have viewers wondering, "Is the problem here supernatural or psychological?" It doesn't quite work that way, though. I don't think many viewers will be convinced that the strange events in the movie are only in the lead character's mind, especially since the movie starts with one of those spoilery, flash forward types of openings that gives a glimpse at a sort of exorcism that's going to be performed seven days from the proper beginning of the story.

The lead character is British Army doctor Izzy Cormack (played by Jemima West), who returns home from war with scars that are both physical and mental - the front of her body is covered with scars left by wounds she received, and she's also suffering from PTSD. It's a happy occasion when she's reunited with her husband Ethan (Christopher Dane), teenage stepdaughter Emma (Rebecca Hanssen), young son Tommy (Harry McMillan-Hunt), and infant daughter Lilly (Beatrice Woolrych), but it isn't long before she begins to realize that things have gotten very strange around the Cormack household in her absence. Ethan has gained knowledge about magic rituals while researching a book on Hawaii, he has a tiki totem set up in Lilly's room, there's chanting going on, Tommy is talking about demons possessing people and has a two-way radio that he says allows him to talk to his father while he's asleep. Izzy is plagued by nightmares, finds that items around the house have been disturbed, has frightening experiences that seem to be hallucinations. Ethan pushes the idea that her PTSD is to blame, while Izzy calls in a pair of paranormal investigators.

Even though Pretorius and co-writer Jennifer Nicole Stang added the veteran/PTSD aspect into the mix as a way to make the movie seem unique, a lot of The Unfamiliar is actually very familiar. The paranormal activity, the scenes of Izzy wandering around a dark house during the build-up to a jump scare, the séance, the exorcism, we've seen versions of all of this before. Things get weirder about halfway through the movie, but even then it's something familiar, as the demon-inhabited dimension someone enters is very reminiscent of The Further, as seen in the Insidious movies.

The Unfamiliar dilutes its interesting ideas by mixing them with a lot of supernatural horror movie clichés, but that wasn't my main issue with it. I like Insidious and The Conjuring, I can like movies that feel similar to them. The problem here was, it was never effective at making me wonder if Izzy was imagining these things or not, and I found the execution of the concept to be quite dull and unengaging. The movie is only 89 minutes long, but for me it was a slog to sit through, as scenes felt like they dragged on and on. Viewers might expect things to get more exciting in the second half, but that's when the movie became less interesting to me, despite the presence of Rachel Lin as kahuna Auntie Mae, who sets out to fix the mess Izzy finds herself in.

The movie does manage to subvert expectations at least once along the way, and there are some cool things in it. The acting is good, with McMillan-Hunt being particularly impressive with the way he handled some of the moments and lines he was given. That includes the unexpected way in which we're told about the event at the center of Izzy's PTSD. But The Unfamiliar was underwhelming overall, and a lot of the positivity I felt toward it really took a hit when I saw how silly the final shot was.

Ending up far short of its potential, this movie is only recommended to supernatural horror fans who are desperate for some new interdimensional demon action.

The review of The Unfamiliar originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com


MEN AT WORK (1990)

For me, Emilio Estevez's 1990 directorial effort Men at Work is a film that's worth mentioning because of the cast, not really because of the quality or content the film. I actually don't think the movie is very good, but how can you pass up a comedy that stars Emilio Estevez, his brother Charlie Sheen, the great character actor Keith David, and Summer School's Dean Cameron? A movie with that cast has to be watched at least once, and even though I'm not a fan of it I have seen it multiple times - originally as a VHS rental, then through airings on cable, and now I've gone back to it again all these years later.

The story, which Estevez also wrote, starts with a hammy John Getz as unscrupulous paint thinner factory owner Maxwell Potterdam III, who has made a deal with local politician Jack Berger (Darrell Larson), city councilman in a seaside California community, that allows him to dump barrels of the factory's waste products into the water just off shore. Those barrels weren't supposed to start leaking for 150 years, but when they start springing leaks Berger has second thoughts and Potterdam has him killed.

Estevez and Sheen play James St. James and Carl Taylor, a pair of irreverent garbage men who find Berger's body while doing their job under the supervision of off-kilter Vietnam War veteran Louis Fedders (David). Rather than alert the authorities, the trio decide to stow the body in Carl's apartment and solve the murder case themselves. There's some explanation given for this decision; the night before, Carl observed Berger having an intense interaction with his associate Susan Wilkins (Leslie Hope) in the apartment building across the street from his and decided to shoot the politician in the butt with a pellet gun. Given that Berger was strangled, it's not likely that the police would connect a bruise on his butt to Carl's pellet gun and accuse him of the murder, but the garbage men just aren't interested in talking to the cops, who aren't fans of them to begin with.

While the guys try to figure out why Berger was killed -  their investigation starting with Carl talking his way into both Susan's apartment and a complicated romantic situation - Potterdam's henchmen Biff (Hawk Wolinski) and Mario (John Lavachielli) come looking for the body and for a tape that has incriminating evidence on it, which happens to be in Susan's possession. In the midst of all this, Louis takes a pizza delivery man (Dean Cameron as a character credited as Pizza Man) hostage because he spots the body in Carl's place.

Men at Work tries to be hilarious but only manages to be occasionally amusing. The way the story plays out just isn't very good. Apparently Estevez wrote fifteen different drafts over the course of about five years, and given the fact that John Hughes was so impressed by a draft written in 1985 that he was interested in directing the movie himself, I have to think that those rewrites didn't do the story any favors. The finished film isn't on the level of Hughes, it's just a way to kill 99 minutes by watching a good cast bounce off of each other while bringing to life some mediocre subject matter.

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