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.
SHALLOW GRAVE (1987)
Subverting expectations can be a tricky thing for a film to do. Sometimes it works and the viewer can appreciate that things didn't play out in the exact way they expected them to. Other times, it can be irritating when a film doesn't follow through on something you felt it should have. For me, director Richard Styles' horror thriller Shallow Grave is an interesting example of a film that subverts expectations. Early on, Styles and screenwriter George Fernandez introduce two characters who would probably turn out to be the heroes in any other movie. But they're not the heroes here, and that makes the movie feel more realistic to me. In movie land, these characters would happen to show up at the right place at the right time to swoop in and save the day, but in the real world it's not very likely that they would manage to accomplish anything. And in this movie, they don't accomplish anything.
While that may be a touch of realism, Shallow Grave is still a rather goofy movie. It starts off with a ridiculous take on the Psycho shower scene, then follows four Catholic schoolgirls - Carol Cadby as Patty, Lisa Stahl as Sue Ellen, Just Kelly as Cindy, and Donna Baltron as Rose - as they set off on a spring break road trip from Virginia to Florida. They'll never make it to Florida. They only make it to the small town of Medley, Georgia before a flat tire puts them on the side of a country road, forcing Sue Ellen to wander out into the woods for a pit stop. While in the woods, she witnesses an extramarital tryst between local sheriff Dean (Tony March) and barmaid Angie (Merry Rozelle). Their meet-up doesn't go well, it ends with Dean murdering Angie - and Sue Ellen is there to see it all.
From that point on, the movie is all about Dean's relentless quest to make sure the schoolgirls can't tell anyone about Angie's murder. There are some frustrating moments, there's some bad dialogue, some bad acting, and there's a mind-blowing stretch in the middle of the film where a song called "Waitress" plays over two scenes back-to-back, then is brought back to play over a third scene after a brief break. But whenever there's something baffling in Shallow Grave, or something that causes you to roll your eyes, that just adds to its low budget, backwoods charm.
This is a rather strange movie, and not a great one, but I was glad I watched it. And I appreciated the way Styles and Fernandez handled those would-be heroes.
BAD PRESIDENT (2020)
I was asked to review director Param Gill's satire Bad President several months ago, but I've been hesitant to get around to it because I try not to be overtly political here on Life Between Frames, and it's tough to avoid being overtly political when you're talking about a movie called Bad President where the lead character is Donald Trump, played in the film by Jeff Rector. The joke behind Gill's film is that it answers the question of "How did Trump become president?" by revealing that he was backed by the devil, played by Eddie Griffin. What's interesting is that, despite this very negative-sounding set-up, I have seen several positive reviews for this film that were apparently written by Trump supporters.
That does make sense to a degree. Even though the devil is shown to be hanging around, when that character isn't on the screen Gill presents the events leading up to Trump's election in a way that's not extremely far off from reality. If you were following the 2016 election, you've seen the real Trump do and say a lot of the same things the movie Trump does, although Gill and co-writer John Buchanan push things further for humorous effect. So if you liked what Trump was doing back then, you'll probably like reliving those moments through this movie. And if you found the Trump phenomenon baffling, maybe the devil's involvement will make sense to you.
Personally, Bad President's humor didn't really work for me. I didn't find the stuff with the devil to be funny, and I didn't get much enjoyment out of revisiting some of the most infamous moments from the 2016 election. But while Gill took me back there, it was kind of mind-blowing to be reminded of the things that actually happened and were actually said. Stormy Daniels even shows up as herself. It made me think that Gill could have just cut the real video and audio clips together for a documentary about the election instead of having Rector re-enact the moments and mixing them with the awkward devil scenes, but this was more entertaining than that would be.
This wasn't a movie I would have watched if I hadn't been asked to, but if 2016 election satire sounds like a good time to you, give Bad President a chance.
DOORS (2021)
The sci-fi thriller Doors is an anthology film of the rarest sort, consisting of segments written and directed by different filmmakers, but each one telling a chapter of the same story. In this case, creator/producer Chris White and creative director Saman Kesh teamed up with directors Jeff Desom and Dugan O'Neal to imagine how it would go if mysterious portals started appearing all over the world. These things are called "doors", but they're not like any door anyone on Earth has seen before. These things are obviously alien in origin, and can really mess with a person's mind when they're in close proximity to them.
Like any anthology, Doors has its ups and downs, as one filmmaker's segment may not work for you as well as another filmmaker's does. For me, the film reached its peak with the very first segment, Jeff Desom's Lockdown, which also happens to be set on the first day of the door phenomenon. Desom and Kesh, who wrote the segment, show us the start of the doors event from the perspective of a group of high school students who are taking a test when the world starts to fall apart around them. Desom succeeds at making the scenario intriguing and unnerving, and I connected with this batch of characters - Kathy Khanh Nguyen as Ash, Aric Floyd as Jake, Julianne Collins as Lizzie, and Rory Anne Dahl as Rory - more than any we see later in the film.
After Lockdown effectively gets us interested in the mystery of the doors, the segment called Knockers provides some information on what happens when people enter these strange portals. Kesh directed this segment, and also wrote it with Ed Hobbs - but while the answers it gives about the doors were appreciated, Knockers didn't work quite as well for me as Lockdown did. "Knockers" is what the world calls the volunteer researchers who enter the doors and then return with reports on what they saw on the other side. By the time this segment takes place, a couple weeks into the phenomenon, it has already been determined that a person can only be on the other side of a door for a limited amount of time before they begin suffering psychosis - which is why a knocker played by Josh Peck eventually delivers the awesome line, "I'm gettin' psychosis, peeps!"
We see exactly how the doors cause psychosis in this trippy segment, which shows the mind games knockers like Peck's Vince and his significant other Becky the Trekkie (Lina Esco) have to deal with when they're on the other side.
More information is delivered in the third segment, Lamaj. Directed by O'Neal, who wrote the script with Kesh, this segment centers on a scientist named Jamal (Kyp Malone), who lives in seclusion and happens to have found a way to communicate with the alien intelligence behind the doors. It's an interesting idea, but not executed in the most interesting way... and then the film continues on beyond what seems to be the perfect moment to end on.
Audio from an internet talk show hosted by a fellow who calls himself Martin Midnight (David Hemphill) helps the film segue from one segment to another, and in an epilogue that takes the film out on a lesser note than it would have if we didn't have this scene at all, we are shown part of Martin Midnight's show.
If I were to rank the segments of Doors, it would show that I felt the film was on a slight decline over the course of its brief running time. I liked Lockdown better than Knockers, I liked Knockers better than Lamaj, and I liked everything that came before better than that final segment with Martin Midnight. I never disliked Doors, I was always on board with what was going on and wanted to find out what was going to happen next, the whole movie is worth watching, but for me the other segments just never reached the same level that Lockdown was on.
The review of Doors originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
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