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.
WYRMWOOD: ROAD OF THE DEAD (2014)
Australian brothers Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner drew inspiration from great sources when setting out to make their low budget feature debut. Their idea was to make a movie that would be like "Mad Max meets Dawn of the Dead". And they didn't just make a movie about people racing around in the Australian Outback in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. They got weird with it. Since the Mad Max movies deal with the scarcity of gasoline, the Roache-Turners mixed that idea into their movie as well. When the zombie apocalypse hits, gasoline and other fuels also stop working. But then it's discovered that the zombies of this world have flammable blood and exhale methane. If someone can strap down a zombie and hook it up to their car, they can run the vehicle on zombie breath.
The characters we follow as the world falls apart and the dead rise are family man Barry (Jay Gallagher), who is forced to kill his wife and daughter with a nailgun when they turn into zombies; Benny (Leon Burchill), who was on a hunting trip when a meteor shower kickstarted the end of the world; and Barry's sister Brooke (Bianca Bradey), who is introduced in a scene that proves she's quite capable of handling herself against the undead. Unfortunately, she also has human villains to contend with – a hazmat-suited mad scientist who instantly starts conducting experiments on both zombies and humans, and his heavily-armed soldier lackeys. Brooke is captured, experimented on… and this leads to her undergoing some strange changes.
Accompanied by Benny and another survivor named Frank (Keith Aguis), Barry hits the road in search of his sister, the survivors travelling across Australia in a customized, armored vehicle that runs on zombie fumes. Fun, blood-soaked action ensues, with a standout sequence coming when our heroes have to face off with a soldier – The Captain, to be exact - played by Luke McKenzie. The Captain causes a lot of trouble for the good guys and beats the hell out of Barry, but McKenzie gives a show-stopping performance in the process.
It's easy to see why Wyrmwood quickly developed a cult following, as this is an entertaining movie that goes in directions you wouldn't expect a zombie movie to go. It twists the story and around and does different things with the familiar concept, while still delivering the moments you want from a zombie movie.
PAM & TOMMY (2022)
Back in the '90s, a sex tape made by newlyweds Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee was stolen from their home and leaked out into the world, both through VHS copies and this new thing called the Internet. Nearly thirty years later, we now have an eight episode mini-series that shows how that leak occurred, and how it affected Pam & Tommy to know that so many people were watching their intimate moments. The fact that this show was made without the permission of the couple has led some to question whether it should exist at all. While Lee has expressed support for it, Anderson has had no comment and couldn't be contacted by those who tried to reach out to her. It is odd, given how much sympathy the show actually has for Anderson, that she wasn't asked to sign off on it. But knowing how she felt about the sex tape and the legal issues that arose at the time, it's also not surprising that she has distanced herself from all of this.
Pam & Tommy takes a rather humorous look at how the sex tape was made public, but also takes moments to deal with the characters on a human level. Anderson and Lee seem like walking cartoons at first – there are even scenes where we see Lee having imagined conversations with his penis - but as the episodes go by we come to learn more and more about them as people. Lee never comes off particularly well, while Anderson is given so much dignity and respect by the end of the show's run that it even succeeded in making me more respectful of the real Pamela Anderson. We also come to know the inner workings of the man responsible for the leak. A carpenter named Rand Gauthier, who stole the tape – and the huge safe it was stored in – after he was fired and ripped off by Lee.
Lily James and Sebastian Stan do great work in the roles of Pam and Tommy, with James – sporting prosthetics to make her look more like the real Pam – being given some really impressive moments to play. Seth Rogen also has both funny and dramatic scenes to play as another major character in the story, Rand. The three leads are surrounded by a strong supporting cast, including the likes of Nick Offerman as a porn producer; Taylor Schilling as Rand's estranged wife, porn star Erica Boyer; Andrew Dice Clay as mobster Butchie Peraino, who funded Deep Throat and also ran the distribution company Bryanston Pictures, which released the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; Fred Hechinger as an internet porn entrepreneur; and Paul Ben-Victor as a lawyer, among others. The prosthetics on James are quite convincing, but I can't say the same for the ones that were used to try to make actor Adam Ray look like Jay Leno for a few appearances. He doesn't even look human.
Aside from the mutant Jay Leno, Pam & Tommy is a very well-made series that's interesting, amusing, and occasionally touching. What happened with that sex tape is truly mind-boggling. Some liberties were taken, I'm sure, but this story is a prime example of truth being stranger than fiction.
The following review originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
HATCHING (2022)
Many of us probably know someone who uses social media to present their lives as being much more idyllic than we have seen it to be in reality. That’s certainly what Sophia Heikkilä’s character does in the Finnish horror film Hatching. She runs a blog called Lovely Everyday Life, where posts, videos, and live-streams offer glimpses into the picture perfect life she has with her husband and two young children. But it’s all a facade – and the family member who has to struggle the most to live up to this fiction “Mother” is sending out into the world is her twelve-year-old daughter Tinja (Siiri Solalinna).
Mother has it in her mind that Tinja needs to be an impressive gymnast, and Tinja tries desperately to reach the skill level her mom wants her to be at. She just can’t. It doesn’t help that mother puts more psychological burden on her by openly having an affair with handyman Tero (Reino Nordin), an affair her milquetoast, cuckold husband is aware of. He doesn’t even object when Mother decides to take Tinja to Tero’s with her for a while, where Tinja finds that Mother helps take care of Tero’s infant daughter. Tinja is so tormented by all of this, it’s no surprise she’s able to somehow bring a monstrous creature into existence. A creature that is willing to kill anything that causes trouble for Tinja.
Directed by Hanna Bergholm from a screenplay by Ilja Rautsi, Hatching is a fascinating blend of social media satire, engaging psychological drama, and bizarre horror elements. The film gets its title from the fact that Tinja hatches an egg she retrieves from the nest of a bird – a bird that was wounded by her mother – after she kills the bird to put it out of its misery. She takes that egg and places it on her bed, under her teddy bear. And later inside her teddy bear. But this is no ordinary egg. It grows to a massive size before hatching… and the giant bird-creature that emerges was designed by Gustav Hoegen, who previously did animatronic work on Star Wars and Jurassic World movies. Hatching would have been doing just fine if it had kept the creature in that form for the entire movie, but it isn’t finished being weird. The creature, which Tinja names Alli, gradually evolves to take on a human form. And it kills for the person that hatched it.
Hatching may be too weird for some viewers at first, I thought it would be too weird for me for a while, but if you stick with it you’ll be rewarded with a good, well-made film that really makes you care about the Tinja character. The viewer’s heart breaks for this kid again and again throughout the movie. Child actress Solalinna turns in such a strong performance as Tinja, it’s surprising to see that this is her first – and so far, only – screen acting role. She could build quite an interesting career if she decides to stick with acting. Heikkilä is also great as Mother, but she is not a character we come to like or care about. She is detestable from beginning to end.
It’s also impressive that Hatching happens to be the feature debut of Bergholm, who proves to be a filmmaker worth keeping an eye on. She handled the dramatic, satirical, and horrific moments of the story all equally well. With the help of production designer Päivi Kettunen, Bergholm also managed to capture a unique look for the film, dropping Tinja into a world put together to match Mother’s sickening view of floral-print-covered perfection.
I’m a big fan of coming-of-age horror films like Let the Right One In, Ginger Snaps, and Teeth, and Hatching fits in right alongside those 21st century genre classics. If you have enjoyed any of the movies on that list, I highly recommend seeking this one out.
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