Worth Mentioning - Don't Stop Me Now

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. 

Zombies, laughs, erotic thrills, and romantic adventure.

SHAUN OF THE DEAD (2004)

Shaun of the Dead wasn't director Edgar Wright's first feature, that was a little-seen comedy Western he made eight years earlier, but it was his breakthrough movie... and it was a film that appealed directly to me, as a super-fan of George A. Romero and his zombie movies. Although Shaun is a comedy, it's also a very reverent, respectful tribute to Romero's films, and could almost be considered part of his Dead universe. Romero himself was so impressed by the movie, he even gave Wright and star Simon Pegg zombified cameos in his film Land of the Dead the following year.

Pegg plays the titular Shaun, who is hitting a rough patch with his girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) because he refuses to grow up, even though he's nearly thirty. All he seems to want to do is hang out with his roommate Ed (Nick Frost), who doesn't do much other than smoke cigarettes, smoke weed, drink alcohol, and play video games. When they go out, he just wants to go to a pub called the Winchester. So Shaun quickly gets dumped. Then the zombie apocalypse hits.

Faced with a world full of the flesh-hungry walking dead, Shaun and Ed come up with a plan of survival: they'll pick up Shaun's mum Barbara (Penelope Wilton), his stepdad Philip (Bill Nighy), Liz, and - sure, if necessary - Liz's pals Dianne (Lucy Davis) and David (Dylan Moran), then seek shelter in the Winchester and wait for this all to blow over.

Written by Wright and Pegg, Shaun of the Dead is clearly a zombie comedy made by people who are huge fans of the horror movies I love. This movie warms my heart from the moment it begins, as the first thing you hear is some music lifted right out of Dawn of the Dead. You'll hear more Dawn of the Dead music later, as well as references to the likes of Night of the Living Dead, The Evil Dead, and other works of Sam Raimi. Plus Reservoir Dogs. The film largely sticks to the rules of zombies as established by Romero, while keeping the laughs coming at a steady pace. It's basically a blend of Romero zombie movies with a British version of slacker man-child comedies like Kevin Smith's Clerks and Mallrats. So of course I enjoy it a great deal.

Wright is one of the most interesting directors working today, and he already had a great style when he made Shaun of the Dead.

TICK-TOCK (2000)

A thriller from Witchboard writer/director Kevin S. Tenney, Tick-Tock had its film festival premiere two and a half years after the release of John McNaughton's Wild Things - and while this sort of thriller had been around for decades before, I couldn't shake the feeling that the close proximity of the two movies wasn't a coincidence. Even if it's just because, for example, an investor might have decided to put money into Tick-Tock because of all the attention Wild Things got. It's along the same lines: a steady flow of twists and turns, devious characters, money-making schemes, and bisexual sex.

Megan Ward stars as Rachel Avery, whose wealthy husband Holden (David Dukes, who sadly passed away from a heart attack soon after this film's premiere) is a good twenty years older than her. Holden isn't a particularly nice guy and we can see that Rachel doesn't get much out of having sex with him, so it's not too surprising that she lets a cowboy named Travis (Linden Ashby) pick her up when she goes out to a bar with her friend Carla (Kristin Minter) while Holden is out of town. That turns out to be a big mistake, because Travis has pictures of their tryst that he uses to blackmail Rachel for $100,000... and that's just the start of the trouble. The story takes plenty of swerves from that point, working in more character pairings, a private investigator played by John Ratzenberger of Cheers, and a murder committed while the killer is completely nude.

I thoroughly enjoyed Tick-Tock because I never really knew where it was going. There were twists I didn't see coming at all, which is always fun. Tenney is a really solid filmmaker who has made some really cool movies over the years (in addition to Witchboard there was Night of the Demons, Peacemaker, and Witchboard 2, among others). He did a such a good job writing and directing this one, it bums me out to think that in the twenty-plus years since he has only directed three more movies and written just one. There needs to be more Kevin S. Tenney movies in the world.

ROMANCING THE STONE (1984)

Directed by Robert Zemeckis from a screenplay by first-time writer Diane Thomas (who sadly passed away in a car accident before she could get any more scripts produced), Romancing the Stone was considered an Indiana Jones rip-off when it was first released in 1984. This despite the fact that Thomas had written the initial script a couple years before Raiders of the Lost Ark was even released. But as a child of the '80s and '90s, this movie didn't work for me nearly as well as the Indiana Jones films did. I gave Romancing the Stone a couple chances, wasn't really into it. I mostly remembered it as the movie that a friends' mom was a fan of. That makes sense to me; there is something about Romancing the Stone that makes it feel like "Indiana Jones for moms". I wrote it off as such for years, but then I was asked to write a script about the movie for the Revisited video series on the JoBlo Originals YouTube channel. Rewatching the movie for that writing project and digging into the behind-the-scenes story, I finally gained some appreciation for Romancing the Stone.

Kathleen Turner stars as Joan Wilder, a romance novelist who dreams up thrilling adventures for her stories while living a stereotypical "cat lady" life. She's forced to go on an adventure herself when her brother-in-law is killed in Colombia and her sister Elaine (Mary Ellen Trainor) is captured by criminals (Zack Norman and Danny DeVito) seeking the map to a treasure. A map Joan's brother-in-law mailed to her before he died. To free her sister, Joan has to travel to Colombia and deliver the map to the criminals... but she's thrown off track by Colonel Zolo (Manuel Ojeda), who leads the secret police and wants the treasure for himself. As Zolo's men pursue Joan through the Colombian countryside, she crosses paths with world traveler Jack T. Colton (producer Michael Douglas), and proceeds to live the sort of romantic adventure she would have written about. So maybe you can see why I considered this to be a mom movie when I was a kid.

Of course, it's not just for the mom demographic. It has a much wider appeal than that. Revisiting the movie, I found that it's a fun comedic adventure - and while researching the behind-the-scenes stuff, I came to realize that this was a very important movie in the careers of both Zemeckis and Douglas. This is how Zemeckis rebounded from the box office disappointment of Used Cars and got Back to the Future made. This is how Douglas established himself as a movie star; before this, his best success had come as a producer. The movie was made on a relatively low budget (which is why Zemeckis got the chance to direct it in the first place), but still contains plenty of exciting sequences. It has a good sense of humor, and several fun characters. I can see why my friends' mom liked it, and now I like it too.

And as a Friday the 13th fan, I really liked that the movie begins with a sequence (lifted from Joan's latest novel) that features Ted White, who plays Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, as a menacing cowboy.