Movie Reviews 170 – Children of the Corn (1984)

I’ve always been curious about the Children of the Corn (CotC) movie.  Yet another movie adapted from a Stephen King novel, what intrigued me more was learning that there are no less than seven movie sequels (and a TV series ‘remake’) that were made in the years since. I figured that there must be something particularly intriguing going on here with so many movies and the popularity could not be due to King fans alone.

So I got the DVD with the first movie (actually it was on one of those quad pack with four movies for five bucks) and in anticipation also found another multipack DVD that had the first five sequels (see below) and even three Halloween sequels. CotC DVDs in hand, I got down to viewing …

After an odd short opening sequence in which we find some Amish/Mennonite country bumpkin kids slaughtering the customers at a small town dinner, the ‘Corn’ aspect of the movie (the actual vegetation not the ‘hackneyed’ meaning of the word) makes the first of many appearances. The next scene features young couple Vicky (Linda Hamilton) and her doctor husband Burt (Peter Horton) driving through Nebraska’s never ending corn fields where they literally crash into a kid emerging from the roadside fields. Upon closer inspection they discover to their horror that the kid was mortally wounded even before running out onto the road. The couple then try to report the incident to the local authorities only to find out that they seem to be driving around in circles, all of which eerily force them to enter the town of Gatlin despite being warned by a roadside garage mechanic that they won’t find any help there.

What they do find in Gatlin is a town where all the adults were killed in one big massacre (reference to the opening scene) a few years ago and which is now ruled by the kids. The leader is a conniving, bible thumping Isaac (John Franklin) backed up by the ‘muscle’ of the group, the slightly older Malachai (Courtney Gains). The couple also run into young brother and sister, Job and Sarah, ‘good’ kids fearing and sometimes skirting the rules of the elder leaders. Even more interesting is Sarah’s precognitive abilities in which she foresees horrific events in her crayon drawings.

We find Issac sermoning the kids on the vileness and villainy of all adults during his occasional sermons out in the cornfields (natch!) and revering their deity who is simply referred to as “He Who Walks Behind the Rows”. As you can expect it isn’t long before we find all the kids chasing the couple around town until the movie comes to the big final showdown which will pit some of the kids against one another as much as the adults.

Not a bad movie but not very powerful either as you have to suspend belief for a lot of the events and situations to be realistic. The acting abilities of the young cast can be irritating at times but I’m not sure what the poor acting excuse was for the few adults in the movie. The movie ends on a whimper with one last ‘surprise’ shock that was laughable.

Fair warning. I’ll be watching and reviewing that DVD set with the first five sequels (CotC II: The Final Sacrifice, CotC III: Urban Harvest, CotC IV: The Gathering, CotC V: Fields of Terror, and CotC 666) so you’ll be getting quite a few more Corny reviews in the near future. I’ll also make an effort to find that seventh sequel, CotC: Genesis, completist that I am, but we’ll just have to see about that one.

Movie Reviews 169 – The Others (2001)

Fighting off the pain of her lost husband who never returned after the end of WWII despite it ending more than a year earlier, Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman) is already strained by the burden and fear with keeping her two young children shielded from all sources of light in order to appease their allergy to it. Living in a remote old English mansion, her despair and isolation are suddenly magnified when she awakens one day to find that all the hired help have suddenly left. When an elder couple arrives at her doorstep with a younger deaf mute girl in tow, she hires them on the spot and sets out all the ground rules on how to handle the children and their rare ailment.

As you can imagine, depicting a family living in near perpetual darkness with candlelight as the only source of illumination, the sinister mood for the movie is conveniently cemented in The Others. Grace remains strict, but loving and devoted to her children, but when the family’s isolation is further tested with eerie screams, and sounds and visions of another child in the house, it brings her to the verge of a breakdown. Something ominous is afoot but it’s really hard to tell who’s hearing or seeing things. The audience commiserates with both the children’s plight and Grace’s woes and while all the facts seem clear we can’t quite figure out what exactly is going on. One thing is clear, the new hired hands know exactly what is going on but they aren’t telling.

Great acting all around but especially from Kidman who is in top form. Just watch her riveting eyes and you’ll see what I mean (In fact, she was at nominated for a Golden Globe as best actress in a drama for this movie. She lost, but I suspect that part of the reason for losing was that she was also up for best actress in a comedy or musical and won for that category for Moulin Rouge).

The only issue I have with the movie is that at one point the surprise ending becomes all too obvious based on one particular event and from there on all intrigue and suspense was lost as I just watched the plot plod to it’s inevitable conclusion. But even so it was nice to see all the pieces suddenly coming together and making perfect sense.

This was director Alejandro Amenábar’s first English language movie and sadly he has not done much since. He did write and direct the original Spanish version of Vanilla Sky that was later remade by Hollywood so I may have to track down that original to see some of his other works.

Across Time – David Grinnell (1957)

As an avid Planet of the Apes fan I usually hear about other science fiction novels that feature sentient apes or as in this case, ape-like creatures. Some apes fans long ago pointed me to David Grinnell’s Across Time as such a novel, so this was on my ‘to read’ pile for quite some time. As has happened before, the assertion that the novel featured an advanced ape culture turned out to be somewhat misleading, but that was not really the problem I had with this novel.

Zack, a young air force test pilot is re-assigned to be a liaison for a science project when he has a troubled flight with an alleged UFO encounter. But the real problem he has with the assignment is the fact that he will have to work with his older brother, Carl, in whose shadow he has had to live in his entire life. Worse, his brother has since married Sylvia, the woman he loved, when Zack went missing during the war for a spell and was presumed dead.

As his brother Carl’s science experiment is put into operation in a remote desert, aliens in globular bodies of light interfere, and as a result of Zack’s inaction his brother and Sylvia are whisked off to god knows where. Now feeling guilty, Zack recreates the conditions of the experiment so that he too could be whisked away in the hopes that he can save his brother and Sylvia. It turns out that there are more than one set of aliens, and that they are all far future Earth life forms that have evolved from humans. But these aliens that all have their roots on the Earth are all now in distant galaxies and have undergone thousands of years of wars. While Zack was taken by what he believes are benevolent beings, Carl and Sylvia were taken from an offshoot of an evolutionary line that were not as successful and now want to change history with the help of Carl.

After the well crafted, if somewhat staid opening sequence, the novel bounces all over the place (literally and figuratively) starting off with Zack being co-opted by the Seroomi, and more specifically, a young female Seroomi and her politician father. This weird interlude includes a brief interracial love triangle the spittles off to nowhere which is almost as awkward as it reads in the story. The entire Seroomi sequence in the novel turns out to be as inconsequential as the blip on the radar Zack saw that during his initial UFO encounter. It was only once I finished the novel that I even realized that the Seroomi where the closest aliens in the novel that could be remotely called ape-like, but that was only because they had longer then usual arms. So much for this being a sentient apes story. (Sigh)

Like many novels of the time, this one comes up a bit short on the character development side, a victim of the then normal short length coming in at a mere 150 pages. The relationship between the brothers is expressed more as stated facts than fleshed out personal reflections. Even less consideration is given to the supposed relationship between Zack and Sylvia. You just have to believe him when he says he loves her and gives absolutely no history to reinforce that notion.

But the novel is not a complete failure either. Those who enjoy pure, fast paced (but not well thought out) adventure will enjoy a few thrills. The author also provides a unique take on sentient spaceships that I’m surprised has not been adopted by more movies and TV shows. I suspect it’s been used since, although I can’t think of a specific instance. You’ll have to read the latter half of the book to see what I mean.

I was kind of surprised to learn that David Grinnell was a pseudonym for reputed writer, editor and publisher Donald Wollheim who went on to create the publishing imprint DAW.

If nothing else, the novel does sport a nice cover by Jeff Jones.

Movie Reviews 168 – Re-cycle (2006)

Originally from Hong Kong, the Pang Brothers Oxide and Danny Pang were at the forefront of the new wave of Asian horror when they created The Eye, a neo-classic that has spawned both remakes and sequels. I guess they were looking to rekindle some of that magic by casting the star of The Eye, Angelica Lee in Re-Cycle (original title Gwai-Wik). But this outing is nothing like The Eye, and quite frankly was a huge disappointment.

Somewhat successful writer Tsui Ting-Yin (Lee) is writing a sequel to a well received book series. Under the pressure of having to write the novel she also has to deal with an old lover of hers that has returned after 8 years and a failed marriage. While writing the novel strange ghostly events start happening around her apartment, and we are led to believe that either the events are mimicking the horror elements she has just written for her novel or the other way around where she experience them and then writes them down.

But come the second act, and Tsui finds herself in a world from another dimension where castoffs and rejects of our world end up. There she meets an old man and young girl and led by the girl Tsui tries to find her way back home.

Although the visuals of the reject world are stunning and imaginative, the contrast to the opening act, with the more traditional ghost clichés is jarring. The rest of the movie is a fantasyland quest that, at first, doesn’t quite gel to what we were expecting. But the biggest disappointment for me was that once challenged to understand what Tsui was really seeing, it became all too obvious and I could practically write the rest of the movie myself. You may figure it out yourself as you see Tsui and the little girl navigate the chamber of living embryos.

I don’t mind a movie with a message but it has to have more than just a veneer story for delivery. Sadly, this movie goes into the recycle bin.

Movie Reviews 167 – Dementia 13 (1963)

Roger Corman is not only the king of the B movies, his stable of young actors and directors working their earliest projects reads like a Who’s Who of some of Hollywood’s biggest names including David Carradine, Jack Nicholson, Ron Howard, Joe Dante, and Martin Scorsese. Another fella that busted his film making chops under the helm of Corman was Francis Ford Coppola and one of his earlier directorial standouts was Dementia 13. I should point out that Coppola also co-wrote the script with Jack Hill (Spider Baby, Foxy Brown) yet another great who learned his craft under Corman.

As was usually the case with Corman projects, Dementia 13 was the result of squeezing out a second movie from an already available shoot location and set of actors making another movie for Corman. If they are still available for a little while longer, why not make another movie? In this case the locale was Ireland and the primary movie was The Young Racers. I would not call Dementia 13 a standout movie (which is why Coppola would have wait a bit longer for fame and fortune), but as a quickie effort the results are impressive.

It starts off with a squabbling young couple in a rowboat basically spilling out their loathing for one another. Husband John throws out the fact that he knows his wife Louise (Luana Anders) is only sticking around since the John’s family is wealthy and he should be up for a huge inheritance soon when his mother dies. As the arguing continues John himself suddenly dies of a heart attack. Knowing that with him dead Louise will not be getting any inheritance she dumps his body on the lake and cooks up a scheme to fake a business trip for her husband and then sets off to visit his family for their annual sojourn as if nothing has happened.

Once there we learn of the many eccentricities of all the family members and vague references regarding the sudden death of the John’s sister who drowned mysteriously as a child in the pond on the mansion grounds when John was just a child himself. The pilgrimage includes an annual mourning ritual for the young girl which has the mother fainting every year like clockwork.

It’s all very bizarre but there are great performances from Luana, Patrick Magee (who will forever be remembered as the wheelchair bound victim in A Clockwork Orange) as the family physician and William Campbell (Trelane in the original Star Trek) as one of the man’s brothers. The basic mystery is about what really happened to that young girl all those years ago and quite frankly every member of the family and the doctor are all suspect as they all seem to have secrets. I did not count how many characters there were in the movie but they were all demented to some degree so I would not be surprised that there were 13 in total, hence the title. And don’t worry about that

Not all Corman productions were successful but I would count Dementia 13 as one of them. You should find this movie easily enough as it has fallen into the public domain and can be found on a myriad of cheap DVDs.

Movie Reviews 166 – The Shining (1980)

It’s tough writing a review of The Shining. On the one hand it is undoubtedly a classic horror movie, the result of a collaboration of three of titans of artistry in their respective fields of directing, acting and writing. While many of the scenes are well known, the movie as a whole is confusing at times, does not deliver a concise message, and has an ending that is open to interpretation on many levels. But the movie does not suffer from it’s ambiguous ending and is arguably one of Stanley Kubrick‘s best movies (you can thank me for not citing the obvious “Shining Moment” adjective) adapting Stephen King’s novel of the same name. I would posit that this also constitutes Jack Nicholson’s most memorable oeuvre, notwithstanding many fine moments in other movies.

What cannot be argued is that the movie does not disappoint when it comes to building suspense and thrills. You literally don’t know what’s around the corner as the characters walk, run or drive their bicycles around the corridors of the Overlook Hotel.

Jack Torrance (Nicholson) is a writer looking for some peace and quiet so that he can take a stab at writing his  ‘great American novel’. He drags his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and son Danny (Danny Lloyd) to a remote Colorado mountain top luxury hotel about to shut down for the winter where meager duties in his new job as winter caretaker will allow for plenty of peaceful writing time. As the family is introduced to the departing staff we learn that one of the rooms had a sordid history, and one of the past winter caretakers had Cabin Fever and butchered his family.  Despite that fact that the family will be almost totally isolated once the snow sets in, Jack assures the management not to worry about him and his family.

Along the introductory tour of the hotel Danny also meets up with Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) the hotel cook who immediately senses Danny gift of “Shining” and he telepathically informs Danny of his gift. Danny knows little of his special abilities but he also harbors another dark secret, that of his imaginary friend “Tony” who sometimes communicates with Danny and even takes over his body on occasion.

Jack’s solid grounding quickly starts to show some cracks as he struggles with his writing and forced alcohol abstinence in the hotel. Their only communication to the outside world is a shortwave radio to an emergency operation center to which they can occasionally get outside news and reports. As Jack slowly becomes unhinged and takes out his frustration on his family, he begins having hallucinatory encounters with a bartender in the main ballroom, and his later visit to the room boast a full house of 1920’s garbed ballroom revelers.

Wendy is not the most stable of parents to begin with herself and harbors doubts about Jack, but as his descent into insanity progresses she does her best to protect Danny. Danny himself has strange encounters throughout the hotel with a set of identical twin girls, the lure of room 237 and visions of elevator doors releasing a deluge of blood.

It all culminates with Jack going totally insane and tracking down his family both within the cavernous hotel and in the labyrinthine hedge maze outside. The famous tracking shots of his chase in the nighttime snowy maze were ‘steady cam’ movie firsts, the developer of the cam perfecting the technology on those scenes and the memorable ones of the camera following Danny on his Super Cycle trike as he races along the corridors.

A fine horror thriller on all accounts and the movie that introduced the word “Redrum!” to the modern lexicon.

As fascinating as the movie itself is the history of it’s filming. Aside from the pioneering use of the new steady cam technology I mentioned, it featured Shelley Duvall famously locking horns with Kubrick to the point of losing her hair by the anxiety and the fact that little Danny Lloyd was kept from the fact that they were filming a horror movie at all as examples of the memorable aspects. And there is of course the fascinating conspiracy theory that Kubrick used the movie to try to tell the world that the Apollo moon landings were fake and thereby alluding that he really directed the fake footage himself. Look it up.

Movie Reviews 165 – House II: The Second Story (1987)

I know I kinda promised I would watch this in my review of House and I am a man of my word no matter how foolish my promises may be.  As expected, the unwritten law of diminishing returns meant that a movie sequel to a movie that barely tips the acceptable scale itself would fail to attain any modicum of acceptability. So, yeah it was worse. Much worse.

Shades of the first movie, once again a guy (Arye Gross) inherits a house only this time he doesn’t have any deep-seated baggage that will rear it’s ugly head. This time around it’s his ancestral roots that will come a haunting. His great great grandfather in fact.

Gramps (Royal Dano) was an old time archeologist-prospector that, along with a partner, dug up some ancient Mayan crystal skull that can give the owner longevity. When he moves into the mansion with his girlfriend, Jesse makes note of the shining skull above a mantle. Curious, he starts digging into the history of the skull and some family history. After deciphering some old manuscripts they find in the attic, Jesse and his best friend Charles are lead to dig out Gramps from the estate cemetery at the back of the house, and find him surprisingly alive and well after all those years. Despite the fact that Gramps is decrepit and wearing his tattered original clothes (after all, he was promised longevity, not a rejuvenation) he’s begins enjoying his great great grandson’s partying ways. That is until his old evil partner shows up and steals the crystal skull. Knowing that in the wrong hands it will unleash an onslaught of evil, Jesse, Charles and Gramps have to get the skull back. But the skull has other powers that include inter-dimensional transportation, the entry point to which is accidentally uncovered by the hapless electrician (John Ratzenberger, postman Cliff Clavin from Cheers) working on some wiring issues.

The scares are almost nonexistent and the movie plays out more like a light hearted comedy without that many laughs either. There are a few nice looking and cute creature effects featuring aliens they encounter during their inter-dimensional chase and battles, but that’s about it.

Dano in his “Miner 49’er” getup looks great while the other actors just stay a cut above annoying. The worst part is actually a minor role played by Bill Maher prior to his current commentator and interviewer career. Ratzenberger only appears about two thirds through the movie and really only has a minor role as well, but he is still one of the better characters which gives you a sense of how bad the rest of the movie must be.

Yeah, this movie is a pass. As in “Pass me a stiff drink so that I can get through this thing.”