Worth Mentioning - Can't Stop, Won't Stop Moving

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. 

Horror, comedy, zombies, killer lions, and Chuck Norris.

LITTLE MONSTERS (2019)

Written and directed by Abe Forsythe, Little Monsters stars Alexander England as Dave, the sort of idiot man-child you often see in comedies. Newly dumped by his girlfriend, Dave has to crash on his sister's couch - a situation that brings with it the responsibility of having to watch his five-year-old nephew Felix (Diesel La Torraca). Dave continues acting like an idiot and saying inappropriate things around his nephew, but soon sees a reason to turn himself around: when he lays eyes on Felix's kindergarten teacher Miss Caroline (Lupita Nyong'o), it's lust at first sight. So much so that he goes right back to his sister's place and masturbates to a picture of Miss Caroline after their first interaction.

In an effort to get closer to Miss Caroline, Dave accompanies Felix on a field trip to a place called Pleasant Valley Farm, a petting zoo that also has a mini golf course. Even though the film is set in Australia, Pleasant Valley Farm also happens to be right down the road from a U.S. Army Testing Facility... and 20 minutes into this 93 minute movie, it shifts from being a straightforward comedy to becoming a horror comedy, as zombies created at that facility bust loose and make their way through the countryside. And the zombies overrun Pleasant Valley Farm while Dave, Miss Caroline, and the kindergarten class is there.

Also present at Pleasant Valley Farm is Josh Gad as Felix's favorite children's television entertainer, Teddy McGiggle. Teddy is a goofball, but on his show he seems to be a good example for the kids. That's not the case in real life. When faced with the zombie threat, Teddy shows his true colors, and turns out to be a total scumbag.

When I first heard about Little Monsters, I wasn't sure how it was going to work, a mixture of kindergarten kids and flesh-munching zombies. How could kids being threatened by zombies for a whole movie be entertaining? I wasn't interested in seeing a bunch of little kids being bitten and becoming zombies. Thankfully, the film manages to be entertaining without relying on "monster kids" for humor; Miss Caroline is such a good teacher and so protective of the children in her care that she's able to keep the kids from realizing what's really going on around them, even when they're trapped in the Pleasant Valley Farm gift shop with a horde of hungry zombies outside. She thinks they're playing a game. Of course, there is some child endangerment for the sake of drama, and there are some zombie kids here and there, but for the most part we can just sit back and relax to enjoy the sight of zombies eating adults, and to enjoy the amusing interactions between Dave, Miss Caroline, and Teddy.

Although the likeability of their characters varies - Miss Caroline is on one end of spectrum as a great person, while Teddy McGiggle is trash, and Dave falls somewhere in the middle - England, Nyong'o, and Gad all do great work in their roles. Little Monsters is a lot of fun to watch, a much better movie than I expected it to be. It delivers some good zombie action and a lot of laughs, features a miniature Darth Vader, and you get to watch Nyong'o "slay Tay-Tay on the ukulay-lay". Which is to say, she does a ukulele rendition of Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off" for the kids on a couple occasions.

THE GHOST AND THE DARKNESS (1996)

A voiceover at the start of director Stephen Hopkins' "nature run amok" thriller The Ghost and the Darkness informs us that the film is based on a true story, and that "even the most impossible parts of this story really happened". That is, of course, not the case. This is based on a true story, but Hopkins and screenwriter William Goldman took dramatic license, as filmmakers do. If they didn't, Val Kilmer would not be sharing the screen with Michael Douglas in this movie.

Kilmer plays John Henry Patterson, a bridge engineer from Ireland (and therefore Kilmer made the regrettable decision to try to play the character with an Irish accent) who was hired to build a railway bridge in Africa in 1898. Once Patterson gets to Africa, he finds that the workers constructing the railway and his bridge are being terrorized by two man-eating lions, who go on to eat dozens of the men, maybe over a hundred of them, over the next several months. Patterson desperately tries to stop the attacks, but the lions are quick and elusive... So Hopkins and Goldman give him assistance from a renowned hunter named Charles Remington, played by Douglas. The real Patterson did not have this assistance.

But I'm not complaining that Douglas is in this movie as Remington, because he does a great job playing the character, who is quite enjoyable to watch. Goldman compared The Ghost and the Darkness to Jaws in his initial pitch, so Remington is sort of the Quint equivalent here. He shows up 45 minutes in, introduces himself as "the Devil", then spends the remaining hour of the film trying to steal it away from Kilmer. He doesn't, and Douglas shouldn't have gotten top billing, but he's a good character nonetheless.

The Jaws influence is also evident in the fact that the story builds up to Patterson and Remington trekking off into the wilderness for an extended hunting sequence, joined by local foreman Samuel (John Kani), much like the three heroes in Jaws went on an extended fishing trip. These guys even take the time to get drunk one night, which seems like a really bad idea when you're being stalked by lions. But they did it in Jaws, so they do it here too.

The Ghost and the Darkness isn't quite on the level of Jaws, only Jaws is on that level, but it is a really good movie that's worth checking out.

INVASION U.S.A. (1985)

There's so much debate over whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie (clearly it is, being set at Christmastime and having all sorts of references to the holiday), people seem to overlook how much of a viable alternative Lethal Weapon is when they're looking for a yuletide '80s action fix. Referenced even less often is director Joseph Zito's Invasion U.S.A., which is the darkest of the three movies I've just mentioned.

James Bruner crafted the story for this film with one Norris brother, Aaron Norris, then wrote the screenplay with another, Chuck Norris, who also happens to star in the film as retired CIA agent Matt Hunter. Hunter reluctantly returns to action when Mikhail Rostov (Richard Lynch), a Soviet operative who has history with him, starts leading an invasion of Communist guerrillas into the United States via the Florida coast. Rostov is so obsessed with making sure Hunter won't get in his way, it kind of distracts him from the invasion he's trying to pull off, and he's only successful in getting Hunter pissed off at him and extra determined to stop him.

The darkness of the film comes through the fact that we see, on multiple occasions, Rostov and/or the men he's leading murder innocent people in cold blood, including gunning down many Cuban refugees and expats, killing a couple on a beach, and destroying a suburban neighborhood. The sequence of suburban destruction gave me one of those cinematic "How did they do that?" moments, because we see the villains roll into this nice area that's all done up for Christmas, and proceed to blow up actual homes. This was shocking to me, because this was a Cannon Films release made on a budget of $12 million. How could they afford to blow up homes like that? As it turns out, this suburban area was slated for demolition anyway, because a nearby airport was expanding. I've seen something like this myself; I was on the set of The Strangers: Prey at Night, which was filmed in what had once been a residential area, but was bought out by a nearby airport. The houses were long gone by the time The Strangers and I got in there, though.

Another major sequence that cements this as a Christmas viewing option is set in a mall that's thoroughly decorated for the holiday. Hunter battles some villains inside this place, which was the Avondale Mall near Avondale Estates, Georgia and sadly no longer exists, and they make a mess of it.

I'm not the biggest fan of Invasion U.S.A., it's a bit too mean-spirited for my taste, but there is some cool action in there, and some violent moments where Zito brought in special effects legend Tom Savini, whom he had worked with on Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, to provide the bloodshed.

PSYCHOPATHS (2017)

Psychopaths feels like it was mainly just an excuse for director Mickey Keating and cinematographer Mac Fisken to do some visual experimentation. Visually, the film is terrific, Keating and Fisken captured some great imagery. But as a feature film that's attempting to tell some sort of story, the experience of sitting through its 82 minutes and trying to concentrate on it is not very satisfying.

The set-up is that the film shows us the wave of violence that sweeps across a city when a serial killer named Starkweather (Larry Fessenden) - but not the serial killer named Starkweather who existed in the real world and was executed in 1959 - is executed on the night of a full moon. The psychopaths of the title are played by the likes of Ashley Bell, James Landry Hebert, Angela Trimbur, and others... and the film is really just a bunch of violent vignettes that jump around in time and from place to place as we watch people do terrible things to each other. There aren't any characters to latch on to or care about, we're just drifting along. And that's why Psychopaths is tough to focus on, because there's no reason to care about what's happening. It's just violence and pretty pictures.

I'm always hearing about movies being shown on a loop in nightclubs, and Psychopaths seems like it would be perfect for a situation like that. Something that's there in the background to give you some nice art to look at whenever your eyes happen to wander toward the screen.