Justin Robinson's Blog, page 2

Lifetime Theater: Below the Surface

I don’t even know with this one. I can’t even think of a nicely vague statement about writing, or the Lifetime Network, or even maritime disasters that can come close to my opinions on this movie. Because I don’t even know what this movie thinks about this movie. I suppose that was inevitable, considering it was apparently written by hurling magnetic poetry across the room and filming the results. That’s seriously the only way I can hope to justify this madness. Or this could have been a Lifetime writer begging for help in the most roundabout way possible.

Only that’s not it, because this is somehow the product of an auteur. Well, as close as you’re going to get on the Lifetime Network anyway. Damián Romay, an Argentine filmmaker, is responsible for this thing, so I have to assume that he meant it. It’s hard to direct a movie when you’re being held against your will. Unless it’s a North Korea situation, and I really don’t think Lifetime has that kind of juice.

Tracy was played really well for this.

Besides, if they really were holding Romay, it would be in that Vancouver suburb where most of Lifetime’s movies are shot. You know, Lifetimesburg. This one, in defiance of budget, is shot in Miami. This is a shame, mostly because I would have loved them trying to pass off Canada as Florida. To be fair, the only reason I recognize it so readily is that I watched seven seasons of Burn Notice. And before you ask, yes, this would have been a thousand times better, and made a thousand times more sense, if Michael Westen and crew got involved.

You’re probably wondering what the hell is going on here. I watched this thing and I am too. Romay, I think, wanted to craft a deeper experience than most Lifetime movies end up with. He wanted characters to move in and out of the narrative organically, and for people to have backstories that didn’t directly impact the plot. This is realistic. It’s also narrative death for an 84 minute movie, and really not part of the Lifetime brand. I’m going to do the best I can at summarizing this thing.

Cameron (Jenny Wade) is a… diving instructor I guess? She explores shipwrecks with students and teaches them how to fight sharks. None of that is made up. You’re probably thinking that her diving or skill in the water or knowledge of how to fight sharks is going to come back in the third act and save her. You’d be wrong. Oh, she executes a short swim away from a sniper, but it’s a tossed off little scene and I would lay even money that it was added at the insistence of the network.

She’s getting married to Shane, the manager at a freight company. Shane “gets called away for work” which is Lifetime code for “going to Pound Town.” Only this time, the pound part gets taken too literally, and he runs down the head accountant at his company. And this is just after she discovered an irregularity that he’s responsible for.

Oh yeah, and she is an ex-fiancee of his. They only broke up because he caught her sleeping with her assistant(?) Maria, who goes to work in black cocktail dresses because I don’t even know what’s happening anymore. Also, Maria ends up dead a little while later, but it takes at least one commercial break before anyone identifies the body. Shane promptly goes on the run, because even an alcoholic living in his car could connect those dots.

Cameron goes to the cops, and they put Detective Ortega on the case. Ortega, who for some reason has a marriage on the rocks, a possible gambling addiction or maybe alcoholism, and he lives in his car. There’s a lot of backstory on Ortega. Don’t worry, literally none of it comes to anything.

There’s also a news reporter that Shane has some kind of weird connection to? Look, I don’t know. I’m going to skip to the end because I’ve already got a headache. It turns out that the reporter is the daughter (I think) of a high-ranking cop. He’s working through the cargo company to smuggle in drugs, maybe. And Shane can make containers disappear, which he’s only doing because a friend of his at work needed money to help a sick child. Yeah, it’s a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top! And the only one who can unravel it is a woman with steely determination to save her hapless man!

Only not really. Sure, Cameron does help out. There’s that sniper scene, but it helped that the guy is the worst shot in the history of gunmen. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was the only working sniper with cataracts. After he kills the man Cameron was going to meet, she sort of wobbles uncertainly (they have poor Jenny Wade in a variety of skintight outfits and ridiculous heels) toward the water while the sniper fires ineffectually at her.

Eventually, with the aid of a thumb drive — because that’s the modern MacGuffin — Cameron is able to bring the conspiracy down. Shane has to go to jail, but hey. at least he’s not a murderer. I’m wondering if he didn’t get a deal because that thumb drive basically made the entire case against the evil conspiracy.

I had no idea what to make of this movie as it was unfolding. None of it seemed quite right, and certainly not like the Lifetime brand I’ve come to know better than nearly anything else in my life. After all this, I think I’ve figured it out. This is a Lifetime movie written and directed by a man. Of course he got weird stuff wrong. From the casting of very attractive women, to their body-hugging costumes, to the shoehorned in depth of the minor male characters, this is a man trying to work in the confines of a female-led aesthetic. I can’t help but think this is the same thing women butt up against in mainstream productions.

So what did we learn? Shit, I don’t know. How to fight a shark, I guess.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Below the Surface, fighting sharks, Jenny Wade, lifetime movies, Lifetime network, Lifetime Theater

Now Fear This: All Cheerleaders Die

Pictured: Truth in advertising.

Satire is a tightrope. Go too far in one direction, and all subtlety, and more importantly the teeth, is gone. Go too far in the other, and you’re just parroting the point of view of whatever it is you’re poking fun at. Hell, even good satire gets mistaken for what it’s parodying. See how many conservatives honestly believed Stephen Colbert was one of them, or the number of people who think Starship Troopers is a stone-faced action film. Yeah, that’s how hard satire his: Paul Verhoeven was once too subtle.

It gets even more difficult when you’re lampooning a piece of the culture to which you belong. While men can and should poke holes in male privilege and the like, it’s definitely fraught. Men are never going to understand it the way women do. We’re going to miss at least some of the details. Hell, we could set out to make an empowering action flick that ruthlessly deconstructs the male gaze, and end up with Sucker Punch . It’s happened before, and it’ll happen again.

This week’s selection, All Cheerleaders Die, is pretty far from perfect, but that doesn’t mean it’s entirely without merit. On the contrary; it’s a damn good time and it does have a few things to say. Sure, a pair of heterosexual men are going to leer a bit when they’re making fun of the objectification of women in horror films, but on the whole, the movie stays on point and most importantly, never wears out its welcome.

The two men behind this flick are Lucky McKee, a presence on the indie horror scene who specializes in creepy weirdos on the periphery of polite society. He made past Now Fear This feature May (a better film which I heartily recommend), as well as the witch-themed The Woods, and the Masters of Horror episode “Sick Girl.” McKee’s co-writer and co-director is Chris Sivertson who made… yeesh… I Know Who Killed Me. As terrible as that movie is, that feels like a no-win situation for a young director, so try not to judge him too harshly. After all, Paul Schrader couldn’t corral Lindsay Lohan, and that was during her alleged recovery.

The movie introduces us to Lexi, who basically seems like Regina George (not to make another reference to a Lohan movie) minus the few isolated moments of tact and taste. She’s being profiled by her friend Maddy, a Hollywood bookworm whose idea of being dowdy is not wearing all that much makeup. The scene Maddy catches on her camera is so heightened that it’s impossible to take seriously: cheerleaders in midriff-baring costumes with leather (or possibly pleather) skirts, proudly calling themselves “bitches,” and ruling the school in the way only seen in teen movies and military juntas. On the other side are the football players, a bunch of dead-eyed alpha males who look like they should be running Oz, not the school itself.

The star quarterback.

Lexi’s profile looks like the set-up for the villain of the piece, the person Maddy is going to have to humble in order to win. Or murder, considering the title. The video ends with Lexi accidentally getting killed in a freak cheerleading accident. Don’t laugh: cheerleading is dangerous as fuck. It’s basically gymnastics minus the safety equipment and the respect. Flash forward a few months, and Maddy is, for reasons held until a third-act reveal, itching for revenge against Lexi’s ex-boyfriend, Terry, the leader of the jocks.

While the title would lead one to believe that Maddy’s revenge would be centered around murdering cheerleaders, that’s not the case. Instead, she joins the squad in one of those identity makeovers we were all so fond of in our formative years. Only Maddy’s ex-girlfriend (it’s a McKee joint, which means lesbians), the gothy Leena thinks anything is wrong with what’s going on.

Maddy’s plan pretty much instantly goes awry when she pushes Terry too far (in her defense, he’s a monster), and he runs her car off the road, killing her, the other two major cheerleaders, and the little sister who serves as the school’s mascot. Leena, who’s also a witch, manages to bring all four girls back to life. And that’s when things get a little weird. Now the ladies are mentally-linked cannibal succubi, and oh yeah, the two sisters have switched bodies. It’s enough conceits to hang three or four movies on, and McKee and Sivertson just breeze past them with barely a look back.

While the girls have become murderers, and in fact kill at least one innocent person, the film never wavers in its sympathy for them. It is firmly in Maddy’s corner throughout, even before the reveal that justifies what she’s going to do to Terry. Terry is an awful person from the beginning, first framed as a serial cheater who hooked up with his ex-girlfriend’s closest friend just after her death, then into an outright monster whose attacks on the girls are shot and treated like rape scenes. The one troubling part is that Terry is the only black guy in the movie, although in the movie’s defense, he’s not treated as any different from the others. Sill, you know, bad optics. The villain, though, is the culture that spawned someone like Terry, who’s given carte blanche to do whatever he likes with zero consequences, so long as he can throw and catch a leather ball. Terry is a symptom, and the entire poisonous culture is the disease.

It’s appropriate then, that the most wholesome character is the biggest outsider. Leena’s romance with Maddy initially has a few obsessive overtones, but she’s never a threatening figure. While the film waffles slightly over who the One True Pairing is, lingering a bit on Maddy and Terry’s new girlfriend Tracy, it ultimately sides with Maddy and Leena. Leena raised Maddy from the dead after the shattering grief of losing her, and only brings the others back as a side effect. She was most insulated from the “dogs and bitches” culture of the school, and thus had a purity of spirit none of the others have. She also gets the best line in the movie.

All Cheerleaders Die is an example of reach exceeding grasp. There’s something noble in the reach, though, and that helps make this a worthy little film. Besides, it’s a good time and, at only ninety minutes, zips right by.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: All Cheerleaders Die, Chris Sivertson, horror comedy, Lucky McKee, Now Fear This

COLDHEART for 99 cents and with a brand new sequel!

Okay, tons of news from the universe of the League of Magi.

For starters, COLDHEART is on sale for 99 cents! Grab it now.

There's also a giveaway upcoming for COLDHEART! Keep an eye out for that.

And lastly, pick up the brand new sequel!

Yakmala: Warrior of the Lost World

Based on the poster, it doesn’t look half bad.

Thanks to the runaway success of George Miller’s The Road Warrior (or Mad Max 2, if you’re Australian), for a brief, shining moment back in the early ‘80s, every hack with a camera was heading out to some dusty backwater to shoot a post-apocalyptic murder-chase and call it a film. Italy never saw a movie they couldn’t make a terrible version of, and turned in 1983’s Warrior of the Lost World.

Tagline: Only one rider can destroy the Omega Force

More Accurate Tagline: Only one rider can destroy the Omega Force… and this isn’t him.

Guilty Party: While it would be tempting to blame hack director David Worth for this (after all, his biggest movie is Van Damme vehicle Kickboxer), he really is blameless. Supposedly, he was expected to start filming without a script, and only a poster to go by. The producers were like, “Here, make this.” And he shrugged and went out and made cinematic infamy. Instead, I’m blaming the entire country of Italy. Your obsession with schlock went too far, Italy! You made this! You own this!

Synopsis: The movie starts with an opening crawl that jams a book’s worth of worldbuilding into your eyes with all the grace and gentleness of a nearsighted proctologist with crippling vertigo. I’ve seen this movie three times (yes, I’ve wasted my life), and I still don’t know all the ins and outs of the Dark Age of Tyranny, the Radiation Wars, the Outsiders, and the Butt Warriors. I only made one of those up.

The Rider (Robert Ginty, the jowliest hero you’ll ever see onscreen) zooms through a post-apocalyptic California that looks like a lush section of a Mediterranean peninsula, because it’s Italy. Also, these roads are really well maintained, considering the entire world was engulfed in nuclear fire and mutants roam willy-nilly. But anyway. He blasts his way through the Omega Force Highway Patrol (yep, the evil empire’s best use of time is spent on speed traps), and a gang of New Wavers, because this was the early ‘80s and we all hoped that civilization would collapse, but somehow leave a bunch of hairspray, Manic Panic, and checkered clothing.

Wounded, the Rider crashes into the wall of a canyon, where he’s nursed back to health by a bunch of creeps in togas with magic flashlights. Fred “the Hammer” Williamson is also there, in a paramilitary uniform, but he’s never named so I’m assuming he’s playing himself. Frankly, the idea that Fred “the Hammer” Williamson could survive a nuclear holocaust qualifies as the film’s most realistic flourish.

This group wants the Rider to rescue their leader McWayne from Prossor (Donald Pleasance), the leader of Omega Force. The Rider whines a little about getting drafted, but eventually infiltrates the Omega Force compound with McWayne’s daughter, Nastasia (Persis Khambatta). Incidentally, thus far the Rider’s only superpowers appear to be annoyed muttering and crashing his motorcycle into walls. They rescue McWayne, but because the Rider is a useless asshole, he leaves Nastasia behind. Seriously, if he had waited one second longer, she could have gone with them. Anyway.

McWayne has the Rider stop by an impromptu brawl in the middle of a quarry where an eclectic array of gangs have decided to hang out and punch each other. There’s the Amazons, the Hillbillies, the New Wavers, the Kung Fu Fighters, and the Asians. Yeah, that’s as much character as the Asians get. The Rider joins the brawl and after defeating them, he’s their leader. That’s the law of the wasteland.

Then they all join up and attack the Omega Force. After blasting through the road defenses, the Rider and McWayne encounter Prossor, who has brainwashed Nastasia. He orders her to shoot the Rider, which she does, because fuck that guy, but when she’s ordered to kill McWayne, she turns the gun on Prossor. She blows his brains out, and the world is saved.

Except not. Turns out he was a robot clone, and Fred “the Hammer” Williamson was on his side the whole time somehow. The movie is setting up a sequel and hoping we’ve been hit in the head recently so we forget what just happened. Which, since we sat through Warrior of the Lost World, it’s not a bad guess.

Life-Changing Subtext: Need a hero? Find the whiniest guy you can.

Defining Quote: “Be quiet and watch for mutants!” The Rider hisses this at Nastasia when they’re sneaking through the underground entrance into Omega Force and wouldn’t you know it? Mutants instantly attack. It’s like they were waiting for the warning just to make it extra ironic. No idea why Omega Force lets mutants live in its crawlspaces. You’d think they’d clear that out.

Standout Performance: The closest thing the movie has to an iconic character is Einstein, the Rider’s “intelligent” motorcycle. And this thing is iconic the way anything you’d want to burn in effigy is technically an icon. Designed to appeal to a nonexistent kid fanbase, Einstein has a habit of chirping its lines three times, because once doesn’t yet make you want to jam a screwdriver into your eyesocket. Its warnings to the Rider about bad mothers, geeks, dorks, dickheads, veg outs, and of course, very bad mothers, sound like a Speak N’ Spell built for people who habitually eat cleaning products.

What’s Wrong: It’s a ripoff of The Road Warrior, minus all the stuff that made that movie great. Did Max’s interceptor talk to him? No. No, it did not.

Flash of Competence: Donald Pleasance is entirely too good to be in this movie. I’m grateful to whatever gambling addiction that compelled him to be in schlock, but he’s consistently the best thing in any terrible movie he finds himself.

Best Scenes: When the Rider and Nastasia sneak into Omega Force (this is just after the mutants), they happen on what can only be described as a performance art piece by an offbrand version of leather-enthusiasts Kiss. For what’s supposed to be a fascist state with constant propaganda blaring over a PA system, it’s a weird detail. Weirdest part? There’s no audience. These people are just sort of posing in the middle of an otherwise empty warehouse. Maybe this is some kind of bizarre work detail? Like, instead of splitting rocks, you have to cram your ass into a leather Borat bathing suit and strut around for a couple days.

During the final chase sequence, the good guy van rams the bad guy van off the road. The film then switches to a far shot, showing the bad guy van leisurely rolling into a stack of barrels. And they’re not stacked for storage. They’re stacked like a a bunch of cans at a carnival, just hanging out by the side of the road, waiting for something to roll into them. And when the van does, everything explodes. It’s like a scene from Naked Gun, but funnier.

Transcendent Moment: Einstein might be second-most memorable character in this thing. The most is Omega Force’s version of the Death Star. That’s right, it’s the imaginatively named Megaweapon. That’s the kind of name that you have as a placeholder, but when you get the device back from the evil superweapon manufacturer, you’re like, well, shit. Guess we’re stuck with it. What is Megaweapon? It’s a giant dumptruck with a black paint job. That’s… that’s pretty much it. Its only weapon is a flamethrower that shoots about fifteen feet. You could outrun this thing on a segway.

It’s the final countdown… for Omega Force.

Warrior of the Lost World is terrible, but it’s also short. If you have any affection for Italian ripoffs, give it a shot.

 

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion, Yakmala! Tagged: Donald Pleasance, Megaweapon, Robert Ginty, talking motorcycle

FIFTY FEET OF TROUBLE for free!

This holiday season you can enjoy the sequel to CITY OF DEVILS for the price of an Amazon review! For the next 20-odd days, FIFTY FEET OF TROUBLE is entirely free! You can't beat that.

The sequel to CITY OF DEVILS is available!

FIFTY FEET OF TROUBLE, the sequel to CITY OF DEVILS is available for purchase!

If you only buy one book by me, this is the one to get.

Lifetime Theater: Honeymoon From Hell

The point I keep returning to in this series is that the Lifetime network produces horror movies. While some of this is that those are the ones that sound most interesting to me, and are thus the ones I watch for review, it’s undeniable that horror is at least a plurality of what’s available on the network. The thing is, most of the horror offerings are reality-based. Some of them are direct adaptations of true crime, while others are fictionalized versions of real cases, and still others are just stuff that could conceivably happen in an upscale suburb of Vancouver.

The most dangerous city in the world.

What is notably absent, is the supernatural. The horror on the Lifetime network is solidly rooted in the real, or at least the could-maybe-possibly be real. The only movie with a supernatural element was a Henson-produced Thanksgiving movie, which featured a group of syphilitic weasels that formed a Voltron. For their horror offerings, the villains were decidedly grounded: murderous husbands, unhinged stalkers, and entitled gender-warriors.

The reasoning here, I think, comes down to who these horror movies are made for. Horror is intended to scare its audience, and most horror is made for young, predominantly white men. This demographic doesn’t really have anything real to be scared of, so you have to throw demons, ghosts, aliens, and killer dolls at them. Lifetime, is made for middle-aged women, a demographic that knows exactly what’s really dangerous in this world. So the supernatural never has much place. In the few offerings with ostensible paranormal elements, these inevitably get revealed, Scooby-Doo style, to be the cheating husband all along. Until now. Maybe.

Honeymoon From Hell is a profoundly weird entry in the Lifetime Extended Universe (which I will continue to believe is a thing), because it introduces supernatural elements, explains them away, then, at the end shrugs and goes, “Hey, maybe there was a ghost all along?” I have my own hypothesis about what they were going for, but really, I’m as clueless as I suspect the writers were.

Newlyweds Julia and Rivers (ugh) are honeymooning in Virginia. Their first stop, for some reason, is the grave of local legend Alice Flagg. Side note, that is an incredible name. Alice Flagg sounds like a pulp heroine who rides a dinosaur in George Washington’s army. Anyway, she was a rich girl who fell in love with a poor kid and was disowned and eventually killed herself. This story speaks to Julia, because she’s also from a rich family and was kind of disowned when she married poor kid Rivers. They say if you run around Alice’s grave thirteen times, you wake her up. Rivers, of course, teases Julia and runs around the grave twelve times before relenting.

They’re spending the bulk of their honeymoon at a bed and breakfast run by Mary Ellen Trainor. Okay, it’s actually a character named Hazel and played by Catherine Hicks. If you want to get that joke, listen to one of the 7th Heaven episodes on the podcast. There’s quite a cast of characters at this B&B. Hazel is charming and folksy, but there’s something not right about her from the beginning. Hicks really tears into the role with her eyeteeth, so she’s telegraphing the inevitable third act twist. There’s also her special needs foster son Bear, the handyman Walter, and the only other guest, a perpetually bikini-clad shit-stirrer named Janelle. There’s another couple there initially, but they leave pretty quickly after an inexplicable scene where Walter semi-accidentally peeps on the topless wife.

Meanwhile, Julia and occasionally others see an apparition of Alice Flagg lurking around. Julia also has a couple of possibly prophetic dreams pointing to sinister happenings around the B&B. While all this is happening, a ticking clock in the form of an incoming hurricane, promising to trap everyone indoors with a ghost and possibly a whole cadre of murderers.

In case you haven’t figured it out already, Rivers is Hazel’s son, and them, plus Bear (who isn’t special needs at all), have decided they’re going to get their hands on Julia’s trust fund. If they can provoke her to suicide, Rivers gets it all. To that end, they’ve been relentlessly gaslighting her since she showed up, spiking her drinks with low-grade hallucinogens, and generally pushing her subtly in the direction they want. Most damning though, is the “apparition” turns out to be Rivers’s girlfriend, and she’s not too happy about how he’s kind of falling for the mark.

Long story short, they all have it out. Janelle (who has a halfhearted turn to good, or at least self-preservation and is on Julia’s side) is hilariously killed with a tiny dart in the temple — you know, the ones whose points aren’t long enough to get through a skull. Julia burns the whole place down, and Rivers sacrifices himself to save her. He’s been having second thoughts since he knocked Julia up, and this sort of makes up for the abuse, I guess? Who knows.

The thing is, when Julia wakes up in a hospital bed in the end, there’s a white rose there with her. This was established as Alice Flagg’s favorite flower. Additionally, one of the dreams Julia gets specifically shows her her daughter, and in the movie’s coda, that exact girl is with Julia. So the implication seems to be that the supernatural is real, but while it’s weird and frightening, it’s ultimately benevolent. Alice Flagg saw herself in Julia, and decided to get off her undead ass and lend a hand. Or else Rivers accidentally half-woke her up. In any case, while this wasn’t what I’d call a good movie, this depiction of the supernatural is one of my favorites and can be found in at least two movies I’ve reviewed for Now Fear This.

While not particularly good, Honeymoon From Hell is weirdly relevant. Gaslighting has become a vital part in the national conversation about sexism, and we can see it rearing its ugly head whenever a bigot is dismissed as a “firebrand” or “outsider.” How does Julia solve her problem? By burning the whole house down. Gas is, after all, quite flammable.

So what did we learn? Ghosts aren’t necessarily evil. Make sure your murder or suicide doesn’t benefit anyone else financially. And if the lady from 7th Heaven is too friendly, she’s trying to kill you.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: catherine hicks, gaslighting, ghosts, Honeymoon From Hell, lifetime movies, Lifetime Theater, mary ellen trainor

Now Fear This: Dawn of the Dead

This looks like a shot from the Most Extreme Elimination Challenge.

The internet as a whole has not been kind to Zack Snyder. Small wonder, when the man’s job appears to be nothing more than screwing up beloved comic book characters and misunderstanding feminism so hard he accidentally created a singularity that also somehow wears a fedora. I’ve been mean to him a couple times, and even took a shot at him in one of my books. Writers are petty like that. Now, ignoring for a second that he’s a multimillionaire, I’m pretty much nobody, and goofing on Snyder is the very definition of punching up, I haven’t been entirely fair. Because I do like one Snyder movie, and I’m going to talk about it. That movie is the 2004 remake of the zombie classic, Dawn of the Dead.

It probably says more than he would like that his best movie is also his first. Everything afterwards gets progressively worse, and yes, I’m including the interminable 300 among the bad. No movie that’s at once that homoerotic and homophobic can ever be anything more than a warning to others. With Dawn of the Dead, the studio was taking a chance on a mid-budget remake of a cult property, precisely the kind of film that doesn’t exist anymore. This was an attempt to cultivate an up-and-coming talent, not release the final seal of the apocalypse. Man, I can’t get through an ostensibly positive review without taking shots at the guy. Sorry about that, Zack. Dawn of the Dead really is an enjoyable flick.

It’s also the least Zack Snyder thing he’s ever done. Some of this is due to the oversight the studio had on it. While this wasn’t a huge property, there was a chance for dollar signs. They didn’t want to do anything too experimental with it. And, to be fair, Snyder’s relentlessly nihilistic outlook is a much better fit for zombie stories than it is for the four color world of DC Comics. Additionally, the writing credit on the film goes to James Gunn, who you might know as the man who accidentally made the third-best Star Wars movie with Guardians of the Galaxy. With a legitimately good writer at the helm, the slick veneer of a Snyder film can be used in the service of something greater rather than merely masking empty artistic pretension. Gunn is never under the illusion that he’s making great art. He’s a pulp craftsman, far more concerned with telling a good story than explaining why the world is terrible. Hence, Dawn of the Dead is something that none of Snyder’s other dour efforts are: it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

The film’s greatest achievement is in its first ten minutes, when we see an emerging zombie apocalypse in the edges. It’s so subtle the main characters don’t even pay attention to it until it’s too late. These kinds of scenes are so rare precisely because they’re so hard to depict. To make an apocalypse both real for the audience and ignored by the protagonists is a nearly impossible tightrope. Most zombie fiction cheats, either with putting the hero in a coma for the first month of the apocalypse (28 Days Later, The Walking Dead), depicting the very first small-scale outbreak (Dead Alive, Return of the Living Dead), or set many years after the end of the world (Day of the Dead, Zombieland, Undead on Arrival). Actually showing what the end of the world looks like to those living through it is delicate work.

Because in a lot of cases, it doesn’t look like much of anything at all. We meet our heroine, Ana (Sarah Polley), working as a nurse in a hospital. A patient, bitten in a bar fight, who came in at the beginning of her shift at six in the morning, is suddenly in the ICU. People are beginning to come in with hideous injuries, but it’s a hospital in the big city. As Ana leaves, an ambulance driver laments that, “It’s starting early tonight.” Ana ignores the few concerned news broadcasts in favor of music, and at home, completely misses a special bulletin. So the next morning, when her home is invaded by a zombie child, it’s a total surprise.

Okay, that’d probably be a surprise regardless.

Ana emerges into a scene of utter chaos. Snyder’s tendency to frame everything as comic splash pages serves him well here as he choreographs Ana’s suburb in the grips of a zombie apocalypse. The film never recaptures the electricity of these early scenes, but that’s hardly a knock against it. Most movies never even achieve these heights. There’s a solid case to be made that these are the best ten minutes in any zombie movie ever.

While the rest of the movie doesn’t really measure up, it’s still a good romp. The zombies are fast — because it’s Snyder, so of course they are — and the action sequences are peppered with gratuitous use of slo-mo. In particular, Snyder is obsessed with the way shotguns expel their shells between shots. All the characters are expert marksman after this, and as dangerous as the zombies are, running headshots are never a problem.

The characters have a bit more depth than the standard corpse-food that stocks these things. The standouts are doomed gun shop owner Andy and CJ (Michael Kelly, most familiar as Underwood henchman Doug Stamper on House of Cards). Andy’s parlor game of sniping zombie lookalikes and his friendship, via long communication with white boards, with stoic cop Kenneth is a highlight. CJ starts out as the kind of guy built to be zombie food, a Randian survivalist who wants to keep the mall safe from looters and the dead. He executes the perfect face turn about halfway through, becoming one of the biggest badasses among the good guys and a reliable source of gallows humor. Snyder’s ugly sexism only really surfaces in the character of too-dumb-to-live Nicole, a character that manages to waste the normally winning Lindy Booth in a thankless role.

When I first saw this one, my review was simple: not as smart as the original, but more fun. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead is a legitimate classic, and usually the film people hold up as the greatest zombie movie of all time. It has warts, but it’s also anarchic in a way that only indie films in the ‘70s could be. Snyder’s remake is all studio polish, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the time. Zombie movies should find fun in the midst of the apocalypse, and it’s a pleasant surprise that Snyder managed to do just that.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Dawn of the Dead, gratuituous slo-mo, Now Fear This, zack snyder, zombies

Yakmala: Fateful Findings

Breen is just so mad at laptops.

Neil Breen looks like if jaded scientists decided to turn the phrase “fuck it” into a human being. A man with the charisma and appearance of a damp pile of peach-colored towels, Breen has become a reliable presence in outsider art, producing a baffling work of overweening hubris every four years. Fateful Findings is what he did in 2013.

Tagline: Breen doesn’t play by your prosaic rules of marketing, society.

More Accurate Tagline: I’ve been hacking into the most secret government and corporate secrets.

Guilty Party: In my review of Breen’s earlier (and superior… yeesh, didn’t think I’d ever say that) effort Double Down , I pointed out that he doesn’t quite fit into my Insane Foreign Businessman Auteur Theory. Thanks to some mescaline and a bad fall, I think I’ve figured out why: he’s not one. In fact, he belongs to a different, but related and often overlapping group: The Bare Ass Auteurs. Insane Foreign Businessmen Auteurs usually do not appear in their own films. Bare Ass Auteurs, however, fancy themselves stars, and what’s out when the stars are? That’s right, a full moon. (Okay, that was a long trip for a terrible joke. I’m really sorry.) Point is, Bare Ass Auteurs, like Breen and Tommy Wiseau, are convinced that the road to success is through their asses. By showing them onscreen.

Synopsis: All right. We can do this.

Two kids wandering in the woods find a mushroom. Then, using some kind of alien black magic and a cheap cross-fade, the mushroom turns into a box. The kids take a black cube out of the box, and replace it with some cheap plastic beads that are on the ground next to it, because fuck you, aliens. The girl, Leah, decides she’s making a bracelet out of the beads. The boy, Dylan, gets the cube.

Leah moves away, and like forty years later, Dylan (Breen) is living a Vegas suburb with his wife Emily. Then, one day, he gets totally creamed by a Rolls Royce. Bummer for him. But during the accident, the black cube appears in his hand, and a puff of smoke wafts over his face like the world farted at him.

So he goes to the hospital, where they cram a giant bandage on his head, but due to alien black magic or something, he recovers and goes home. Only now he no longer wants to be a novelist. He turns his back on his lucrative world of the written world (my eyes are bleeding as I write this), and starts hacking into government and corporate computers after the secrets and corruption he knows is there. He pretty much tells everyone who will listen that he’s doing this. Incidentally, his idea of “hacking” is sitting in front of four open laptops, all off, occasionally throwing books at them and periodically typing with a care and precision that makes Keyboard Cat look like Chopin.

Meanwhile, he has two therapists, one who wants him taking drugs, and one who wants him to talk. Drug Therapist is basically just supplying Emily’s pill habit. Talk Therapist apparently meets her clients in a shipping container.

Anyway, Dylan meets up with Leah at a barbecue, and meets her fiance Tim. Dylan looks like he’s in his fifties, while Leah’s about twenty years younger, so I’m pretty sure they met in that wainscoted black hole from Interstellar. Either that, or Dylan’s had some seriously hard living. They pretty much instantly hook up, and Emily kills herself. Dylan cradles her body for all of about five minutes, and then he’s like, cool, now I can live with this chick I knew when we were nine. Or she was nine and I was twenty-six.

One of the governments or corporations or someone that Dylan’s been hacking into sends one guy in a hoodie to sort shit out. He kidnaps Leah and takes her out to a storage container. Because he dropped the note with the address of the storage facility on it (seriously), Dylan solves that mystery pretty quick. He knocks hoodie guy out with a convenient beer bottle (totally realistic, they’re all over Vegas), but can’t get in as the trailer is locked and no one has the key. So through this whole movie, he’s been yammering on about powers he’s gotten, and to this point, those seem to consist entirely of working on laptops that are off. Here, he phases through the trailer like Kitty Pryde, rescues Leah, and gets out.

Somebody get Neil Breen a space dragon. Now.

Then he delivers a press conference, where he tells the world that he has all those government and corporate secrets. Not what they are, mind you. Just that he has them. Presumably, this ushers in a new age of… something. Who the hell knows.

Life-Changing Subtext: If you want to be with your long-lost love, just provoke your wife into overdosing on booze and pills.

Defining Quote: “I’ve hacked into the most secret government and corporate secrets.” This line is said by Dylan at every conceivable opportunity as a shibboleth for people with a deep spirituality, but with a distrust in both government and private institutions. Basically, people who’ve been out in the desert too long, and could probably use a cold drink and an umbrella. That’s not to say that governments and corporations aren’t corrupt — they are, to a cartoonish degree — but that Breen’s understanding just kind of stops there. It’s like figuring out Count Chocula is a vampire, and then wondering who stole all your blood and chocolate donuts.

Standout Performance: Klara Landrat as Emily is this incredible combination of terrible actor and recent immigrant. I’m ninety percent sure she learned her dialogue phonetically. It’s not like she could look for clues from context.

What’s Wrong: The thing that I love about the auteur brand of terrible movie is what it reveals about the mind behind it. Breen’s got some feelings, man! He’s clearly pining over lost love, and wishing he could pursue it. He sees rampant hypocrisy and corruption in the public and private sectors and wishes he could do something about it. He also wants to be a superhero, because at this point, fuck it, why not? The only surprising part is there’s no narration where he talks about the healing light that emanates from his dong.

Flash of Competence: Breen loves the Nevada desert, and in a couple shots, he manages to capture its stark majesty. Sure, he’s kind of lurching through it at the time, but at least he isn’t skipping around on rocks like a mountain goat with crippling vertigo.

Best Scenes: I completely omitted a huge subplot from the synopsis. Why? Because it had nothing to do with anything, least of all the movie. Dylan and Emily are best friends with this trainwreck of a couple, Amy and Jim. They’re both alcoholics, and they have a high school-aged stepdaughter who comes onto Dylan a few times because Breen’s ego is like a balloon with a slow leak. Occasionally it needs someone to blow in it. Wait, that came out wrong.

So anyway, Amy shoots Jim (she was trying to shoot the car. Don’t ask.) and then makes it look like a suicide by dropping the gun next to him. There have been pants-shittings with more planning. Dylan rushes in and cradles the dead Jim — he cradles everyone who dies, like a saggy-fleshed Mary — repeatedly asking why he killed himself. Later, Ally, the stepdaughter, comes clean about what happened. Dylan tells her to go to the cops, and that’s it. Out of the movie. Never mentioned again.

Periodically, Dylan is nude in a room lined in black plastic. I think this is supposed to be the inside of the cube. The only person ever in there with him is Leah. This looks like the kill room in the haunted basement of Leatherface’s homestead. Incidentally, it’s never explained, so fuck it, that’s what it is.

Transcendent Moment: I glossed over this in the description of the climax of the movie because it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. After Dylan totally assures the world that, uh-huh, he’s got these really damaging secrets, but they’re like in Canada or something and you haven’t met them, he surrenders the mics. To who? A parade of government officials and corporate officers. They all admit wrongdoing. Two of them then shoot themselves in the head. The others go home later and kill themselves.

So… the fuck happened there? Did the second guy who brought a gun to kill himself see the first guy and get a pissy look on his face like they wore the same gown to a ball? How did the press conference keep going after the first suicide? Were the others who killed themselves later originally planning to shoot themselves but figured it’d be passé? I don’t want to jump the gun here, no pun intended, but it’s the funniest mass suicide ever put on film.

There’s literally nothing I could say in good taste here.

At this point, I am comfortable saying that any Breen movie is going to be an automatic recommend from me. While Fateful Findings isn’t as good as Double Down, there’s plenty of insanity and inanity to please fans of WTF cinema. And if you figure it out, let me know.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion, Yakmala! Tagged: Bare Ass Auteurs, Fateful Findings, Neil Breen, WTF?, Yakmala!

Lifetime Theater: Kept Woman

Weird stuff enters the zeitgeist. The way a single year might feature two killer asteroid movies, or everyone becomes obsessed with furry owl poop that talks. You can’t predict it. Not too long ago, I got around to seeing Room, a movie I initially confused with one of my favorites. I loved it, and emerged (you don’t so much see Room as survive it) with a deep respect for Brie Larson and a strong desire to see her play Captain Marvel. I started that day feeling out-of-sorts, and that movie didn’t really help (although it is far more optimistic and life-affirming than its subject matter suggests). I wanted a pick-me-up. Partly as a joke and partly because it’s one of my favorite sitcoms, I decided to turn to Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

You see what I did there, right? Two works, both exceedingly brilliant in their own rights, with the same premise. That premise, in case you’re unaware, is a creepy older white guy kidnapping women and keeping them imprisoned. These two properties couldn’t be farther apart either. Room is a spare yet lyrical look at the psychologies of a woman and child in an impossible situation, while Kimmy Schmidt is one of the funniest things to ever happen to television.

Both are the product of women. Room was written by Emma Donoghue, from her novel.  I know nothing about Donoghue, and learning would violate the strict code we white men live by: never look at information before formulating an ironclad opinion. The point is, Donoghue is brilliant, so it’s safe to assume she’s a feminist. Kimmy Schmidt is the partial brainchild of Tina Fey. I’m a big fan of Fey’s and she is an outspoken feminist, who (though she takes some probably deserved guff for the lack of intersectionality in her feminism) is sincere, passionate, and eloquent in her beliefs. She’s also a fucking comic genius, which is more important when you’re making a sitcom. The point is that this scenario is percolating in the heads of extremely intelligent women, enough so that two wildly different takes can produce transcendent art.

Today’s Lifetime Theater is not transcendent, but it is the same premise. It’s interesting to watch a premise that created legitimate genius be Lifetime-ized. Spoiler right up front: this is one of the better Lifetime movies I’ve seen, too. Maybe some of the claim this premise has is that it’s essentially idiot-proof.

In some ways, I think this premise is so popular because it speaks in lurid ways about the conversations that are only just being had in the public sphere. We can thank social media for some of that, and though there’s a lot of negative to go with it (seriously, can we please stop harassing women for having opinions?), there’s at least some positive. This is the apotheosis of toxic male entitlement: deciding to keep a woman, or women, in a cage, like a parakeet you can have sex with. Kimmy Schmidt makes the link to white male privilege explicit in how the Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne (one of the best comedy names ever) is able to effortlessly gaslight an entire court of law, but this week’s movie, Kept Woman, goes full Lifetime on us.

Simon, the creep in question, is introduced wearing a plaid suit with a bowtie, Malcolm X glasses, and a fedora (because of course there’s a fedora). He speaks in stilted tones, using old-fashioned slang. He’s unfailingly polite and is never seen outside his home in less than one of his upholstered suits. He’s a professor at the local college, and he teaches Men’s Studies. Look, if you roll your eyes that hard, they’ll come right out of your skull. Believe me, I had the same reaction. This guy is the poster child for the Men’s Rights Movement. And no, we don’t need “Men’s Studies.” That’s just studies. Men have been considered a default (despite being less than half the population) for the entirety of recorded history. Incidentally, that’s what the word “history” means. His Story. Seriously.

Can you even look at him without wanting to punch him in his stupid face?

Simon instantly creeps out Jess, who moved to the suburbs with her fiancee, irony of irony, to get away from the crime in the cities. She smells a rat, and she’s not wrong. Lifetime makes its female characters more perceptive than its guys. In some cases, it comes off as pandering, although it’s pandering I’ve defended. Here, it feels entirely realistic. Of course a man couldn’t sniff creep on an old-fashioned nerd, while a woman is ready to shank him at the first sign of trouble. Unfortunately, it’s not enough. Jess gets bushwhacked when Simon preys on her politeness and fear of being labeled hysterical. Yes, the Lifetime network made a subtle point about pervasive sexism in a lurid potboiler. Crazy, right?

So, after Simon makes Jess check to see if his hanky smells like chloroform (it does), she wakes up in an underground bunker that he has done up as a ‘50s kitsch house. There’s another woman down there as well, and she’s been totally brainwashed by her years of captivity. Simon has constructed a perfect jail. It’s entirely sound-proofed, it has two doors, both with digital combo locks and rotating combinations. He tells Jess she’s free to try to kill him. If she succeeds, she’ll starve to death in the bunker. If she fails, well, that’s even worse. Simon makes it abundantly clear that he’s a killer, and in the course of the eighty-odd minutes, will kill two people, cutting one up like a Thomas Harris character.

To throw Jess’s man off the scent, Simon fakes a break-up email to him. And the dunce totally buys it. The one guy who doesn’t, is Oscar, a friend of Jess’s. They have the same hobby: they’re in an online group who looks into missing persons cases in their free time. Sounds fake, but these groups are totally real, and they have done good work in the past. I love this partly because Oscar is obese and is consistently the most intelligent, sensitive, and useful man in the movie. He’s the one who figures out that Jess is gone (rather than just ran off) and who believes her hunch about Simon enough to research him and find some disturbing leads. In most fiction, a character being overweight is usually shorthand for them being dirty, lazy, gluttonous, and so on. It’s nice to see that trend being bucked, especially when the two handsome hardbody characters are the ones almost eager to take Simon’s word over Jess’s suspicions. The real irony is that Oscar is an actual nice guy, who does things for his friend without any expectation of reward, while Simon is the archetypical Nice Guy, who does things for his own ends.

Jess does eventually get out by using a daring plan involving a rhubarb pie. It’s even a Chekov’s Rhubarb Pie, which might be the first time that’s done. She escapes just in time to save her man and take Simon down. Go Jess.

So what did we learn? Always have a baked good that you and your significant other can identify with smell. Fuck politeness. If you think he’s a creep, he’s probably a creep. And maybe most importantly, there’s some frightening stuff going on in the creative minds of women, and maybe, just maybe, we should address the underlying causes of what’s scaring them.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Kept Woman, Lifetime Theater, Room, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt