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.
VACATION (2015)
Warner Bros., through their subsidiary New Line Cinema, wanted to reboot the Vacation film franchise - and given the fact that Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo are still around, the reboot we got in 2015 took the best possible approach, storywise. Rather than just remaking the 1983 original, this Vacation is a sequel about a grown-up Rusty Griswold (Ed Helms) wanting to give his family - wife Debbie (Christine Applegate), sons James (Skyler Gisondo) and Kevin (Steele Stebbins) - a good time by taking them to the Walley World amusement park, like his parents took him and his sister to Walley World thirty years earlier. That's a reboot idea I can support, and when you add in the fact that the Griswolds visit Rusty's sister Audrey (now played by Leslie Mann) and his parents Clark (Chase) and Ellen (D'Angelo) along the way, that's perfect. I didn't find the execution of all this to be perfect, though.
The problem I have with this Vacation, which was written and directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, is that it has a different sense of humor than its predecessors. The breakdown of the critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes says reviewers felt that the movie lacked "the charm, wit, and heart" of the original, and I would agree with that. It's packed with people that have strong comedic talent, but it too often wants to rely on gross-outs to get the laughs. Dicks, vomit, raw sewage, and vulgarity are its primary idea of humor. I was especially put off by the Kevin character, who is a nasty, foul-mouthed little bastard who constantly bullies his older brother.
Helms' portrayal of Rusty is fitting for a descendant of Chase's Clark, and Gisondo is terrific as his awkward son. There are some great cameos throughout the movie, including Chris Hemsworth, Ron Livingston, Keegan-Michael Key, Regina Hall, and a creepy Norman Reedus. My favorite of them all is Charlie Day as a cheery rafting guide with a death wish. I've never watched the long-running show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which Day stars in, but his performances in this movie and Fist Fight have convinced me that I need to watch it someday. Chase and D'Angelo are only around for a few minutes, but those are a fun few minutes.
The 2015 Vacation isn't a bad movie, I just don't like its sense of humor for large patches of its 99 minutes. But occasionally something quite funny does happen.
Bonus points for featuring the clock tower from Covington, Georgia in one of the driving montages. (The movie tries to tell you it's in Memphis, Tennessee.) That clock tower is featured in Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI, so it always brings a smile to my face whenever I see it in another movie or on a TV show.
ANKLE BITERS (2021)
I don't know the story behind the making of director Bennet De Brabandere's feature debut Ankle Biters (which was formerly known as Cherrypicker), but I'd like to think the film was inspired by Robert Rodriguez's advice that beginning filmmakers write something based on the people and things they know they have access to. For El Mariachi, Rodriguez knew he had access to "a bus, a guitar case, and a turtle", and he built the movie around that. If De Brabandere wrote his movie specifically because he knew he could get the four Reid sisters to star in it, that was a genius move. If they just happened to come in to audition for the movie, it was very fortuitous.
The sisters are Rosalee, Lily, Violet, and Dahlia Reid, and in Ankle Biters they play Rosalee, Lily, Violet, and Dahlia Haywood (the shared names are what made me think the roles were written with them in mind), the daughters of young widow Laura (Marianthi Evans). Laura is dating former hockey player Sean Chase (Zion Forrest Lee, who also crafted the story with De Brabandere), and the girls are highly suspicious of this new dude in their mom's life. They're certain Sean is planning to hurt Laura in some way, and even think he has scared her into staying with him. This couldn't be further from the truth - Laura is very happy with Sean, and he's never shown to be anything other than a good guy with her and around the kids. The kids really only mistrust him because they don't like the idea of their mom being with someone new... but they feel their suspicions are confirmed when they find a cell phone video of Laura and Sean having sex. This couple has a kink for the rough stuff, and all the girls see when they watch the video is violence. So they set out to save their mom from Sean, no matter what it takes.
The story of this movie is rather straightforward. The girls don't trust Sean from the start and we just watch them take things further and further as they try to get the guy out of their lives. Some very twisted stuff happens by the end of this movie (including variations of a couple popular urban legends), but the kids rarely come off as full-on little devils. There is an innocence to the horrible things they do, as they're not old enough to fully understand the consequences and seriousness of their actions. There are elements in the film that De Brabandere could have explored to make it a bit deeper. We are shown that Sean has had a violent temper in the past, and he keeps having flashbacks to a hockey game where he gouged an opponent's eye out, but in the present there's no sign of that old violence. De Brabandere could have made the viewer uncertain about Sean as well, but instead we're meant to be on his side the whole time. And even though we know he's capable of removing someone's eyeball in the middle of a game, the film is effective at making us feel sympathy for Sean.
Lee and Evans both do well in their roles, and there are notable supporting characters played by Matia Jackett (another cast member who shares a name with her character), Evert Houston, Jani Lauzon, Michael Copeman, and Colin Mochrie - yep, the Whose Line Is It Anyway? guy shows up in this movie as a detective who tries to figure out what's going on in the Chase/Haywood household. He plays the role in a down-to-earth way and still gets some laughs. But the MVPs here are the Reid sisters, who are simultaneously adorable and disturbing, and handle the crazy things their characters do perfectly. The standout among these standouts is Rosalee, the most twisted one of the bunch. She did a great job playing a little maniac.
Ankle Biters is a weird, amusing, unsettling movie that had the potential to be something more than it is, but as it is it's quirky and entertaining enough to be a decent watch.
Truly my biggest issue with Ankle Biters is the fact that it starts off with a Gary Glitter song playing on the soundtrack, a stunningly awkward choice for a movie that stars a bunch of little kids. Surely the filmmakers must have been aware of the uproar that occurred when "Rock and Roll Part 2" was used in the Joker movie, so why would they use it here? Of all possible musical choices, they went with this cringe-inducing one. I'd cut out the Gary Glitter, but the score composed by Maurizio Guarini is pretty cool.
SPIDERS (2000)
Apparently director Gary Jones' Spiders was released as Arachnophobia II in Argentina, and I can't imagine how disappointed the movie-goers who went to see this must have been, thinking it was a ten-years-later sequel to that 1990 killer spider classic. Instead of being on the level of Arachnophobia, this is just the sort of low budget "nature run amok" movie that you see on Syfy all the time. In fact, one of the characters comments that what they're witnessing is "like a bad sci-fi movie", and that's a fitting description.
Scripted by Stephen David Brooks, Jace Anderson, and Adam Gierasch from a story by Boaz Davidson, the film concerns a government experiment to combine spider DNA with alien DNA, an experiment that has to be performed in zero G on a space shuttle because it's closer to the atmosphere the alien came from. The experiment is a disaster that sends the shuttle crashing to the ground, and the first people on the scene are journalist Marci Eyre (Lana Parrilla) and her cohorts Slick (Oliver Macready) and Jake (Nick Swarts), who were reluctantly helping her on an investigation into aliens and shady government activities. The military arrives to clean up the wreckage, collect the bodies, and take the evidence back to a nearby base - and Marci and her pals are unknowingly taken to the base as well.
While our three heroes sneak around the base, the situation there completely falls apart, as the alien-spider hybrid known as Mother-in-Law is now loose in this place. And she is growing rapidly.
Spiders feels like it takes forever before anything interesting happens, but eventually there is some giant killer spider action - and Mother-in-Law even manages to escape from the base and terrorize a city. One of the film's positive points is that it does feature some cool special effects courtesy of KNB. Those effects are the main reason to watch the movie (but rest assured, there is also some bad CGI), along with the fact that Lana Parrilla is the lead. She has a large following these days thanks to her role on the show Once Upon a Time, her fans are called the "Evil Regals". Back in 2000, she was just getting started, and she did a good job playing the heroine in this mediocre movie. Plus you get to see Josh Green, Tank from Curse of the Puppet Master, fly a helicopter and fire a rocket launcher! Parrilla is better with the rocket launcher than he is.
I can give Spiders a pass, since I saw it with the title Spiders. If I had watched it as Arachnophobia II, I would be very upset.
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