Something About a Teaspoon Hootenanny...

I don't get out to see new movies on opening night, anymore.  Something about my husband hating the filthy primates that attend.  Well, he really just hates everybody because he, like myself, is a cranky old man, but don't let him know we know.  It'll be our little secret.

But tonight was special.  Tonight, the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise got a new sequel and I had to be there.

And that is because I, apparently, am a Jello™-shot away from being an adult survivor of fetal alcohol syndrome.

I heard about this MONTHS ago and I said to myself, "It will probably be really lame and you will hate it because it is lame with lame sauce and a frosty mug of lame on the side."  And, then, I saw the trailers and I said, "This will not be lame, it will be the awesome and you will SIT there with your icy-cold bladder buster and your gallon of popcorn and LIKE it, Mister Man!"

So, there I sat in the small theater at the early showing with my icy-cold bladder buster and my gallon of popcorn.   Waiting.  The girls next to me announced that they were screamers.  This made me happy.

And then it started and my inner child went "SQUEE" and I settled myself in for 90 minutes of 3D mayhem.

See that baby?  She's all important and stuff.

I never heard a peep out of those screamers.  Not.  One.  Peep.

So, you all know that Jed Sawyer is Leatherface and his family, the Sawyers, are cannibals and they covered up Jed's crimes.  Well, this movie is kind of replacing Texas Chainsaw 2 in that the town goes all craziness and torches the place to the ground so none of the Sawyers survive.

Well, two Sawyers survive.  3, really, but one doesn't know she's a Sawyer.

Enter Heather.  She's the adopted one.

So, she inherits a house in Texas.  Her friends wanted to go to New Orleans, anyway, so they say "Let's take a road trip, y'all!" and pack into the antique VW van.  They pick up a hitchhiker.  Does this sound familiar at all to you?

She gets a huge set of rings from her grandmother's lawyer who didn't actually explain anything but, here's your house, OOP!  Gotta run.  TA!

This?  It's supposed to be all poignant but it just looked fucked up.

I really can't give away any more so let's just get on with the trashing, shall we?

OH.  MY.  GAWD.  Was this a fucking SNOOZEFEST!  John Leussenhop and 8 FUCKING WRITERS not only made about the most boring installment of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre ever to hit celluloid (and that INCLUDES that Matthew McConaughey/Renee Zellwegger/Trannie-Leatherface barker) but they made Leatherface an anti-hero?  

Ooooooh, "He's family.  He's slow but he WILL protect you."

Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?

First off, if you're going to make a sequel, make it follow all of the successful iterations of the franchise.  Don't overwrite one THAT STARRED AN ACTOR YOU BROUGHT IN AS A SHOUT-OUT, with... this...

Second.  If you're going to give us the "Ooh, you did the nocturnal nasty with your best friend's man", make sure that the jilted character actually finds out, huh?  Otherwise the deaths are wasted.

Three guesses.  First two don't count.

Finally, DON'T PUT ALL THE GOOD KILLS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING MOVIE and then try and run along with your not-mysterious-at-all fucking Scooby-Doo shit.  This is the Scrappy-Doo of horror.  I'm pretty sure its middle name is Cornelius and it should be kicked out of the Mystery Machine for peeing on Daphne.

This is seriously a time-waster.  Not even bad enough to be good.  There is ONE instance in the movie that is laugh-out-loud funny.  That's it.

Wait for video if you absolutely must see this.  Don't waste your money in the theater.

BULLETS!  I take BULLETS for you people.

*mumblegrumblerazafrakkinkidsnorespectforfilmmumblymoo*

What? You Don't Like Stamps?

In 2009, we were given a gift.

Director Marcus Dunstan gave us a beautifully shot update on "The Most Dangerous Game" in The Collector.  It was taut, claustrophobic, chilling and utterly underrated.

But I'm not here to talk about a GOOD movie.

Seriously?  They couldn't even change the POSTER from the first film?

Now, before we get going, I WILL say that there are parts of this movie that are done really well.  Unfortunately, none of them are character development, script or plot.

So, if you saw the first movie, you know that this guy:

Henceforth to be known as Whiney McAngst-Face.

Defeated the Collector only to wind up being collected himself.  This just proves that he did not do his due diligence as a movie anti-hero and missed the most important part of dealing with Trappy O'Psychopath and that is TO KILL HIM!  Granted, I get Hollywood's almost obsessive need to create "franchises" instead of "good movies" but this needs to be said.

IT IS ENTIRELY POSSIBLE TO ACTUALLY END A MOVIE AT THE END OF THE MOVIE!

Anyway, now that that's out of the way, we'll introduce this person:

Hottie Von Deaf Chick

She's apparently the daughter of someone important who survived an auto accident in her childhood.  How important?  Not sure.  Her dad does something that entitles him to bodyguards.  Or, it could be that the movie does say something about it but I just didn't care because all we REALLY know is that the accident left her with a need to wear a hearing aid which, seriously, is more trouble than it's worth.

She goes to a rave at a warehouse that requires a password (because the best raves always do) and her douchebag friends (along with the other ravers) get killed in a douchebag way after she stomps out, which is what she gets for watching the douchebag guy that was kind of set up to be her douchebag boyfriend hit on another douchebag girl, but she comes back and gets to watch the douchebag friends that missed getting diced in the first wave get pressed into a fine vintage which is probably the most useful they will ever be.

Enter this guy:

Kickass bin Pedophile

THIS guy is the body guard who puts together an elite team of black ops commandos to rescue Hottie Von Deaf Chick.  He seems to have an inappropriate level of affection for HVDC.  It's almost creepier than Trappy.

There are traps.  People die in fun and interesting ways.  Trappy has a pet whom we will call "Bait".  EXPLOSIONS!

This is an OK popcorn flick.  Turn off your brain and watch the body parts fly.

Other than that, it's forgettable.

Leave the Light ON, Dammit!

I'm not really sure WHY I have to go here for today's visit to Trope-Town, but it's so obvious that we often forget that it's a trope.

Darkness.  The dark.  The creeping black.  

There's a REASON we hate it and that reason is simple. 

WE CAN'T FUCKING SEE!

And when we can't see, there are two possibilities.  Either there's nothing there or there's something there.

And in horror movies, guess which one we're gonna experience first?

Oh, hey there.  Have you accepted Christ as your lord and savior?

 

Now, nyctophobia is a relatively common fear in real life and it can be tracked down to the fact that we're animals with no naturally protective qualities.  No armor.  No built in weaponry.  Nothing but our big, beautiful brains and we'd like to keep them where they are, thank you very much.  In the dark, our brains play tricks on us.  They tell us that we're being stalked by a predator or that we're gonna fall down a hole or that we're gonna step on a long-thought-lost toy.

Speaking of which:  

 

Ode to a Lego in the Dark: A haiku.

 

Motherfucking Ow

Son of a Bitch, God Dammit

Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Ow

If the Danish ever decided to go for global domination, Legos is how they'd do it.

In horror movies, it's pretty much a given that if you cross your pinkie toe over into the dark, spooky area, something is going to snatch that toe right off your foot.  Because horror movies have had over 100 years to perfect that whole "YOUR VAUNTED OPPOSABLE THUMBS CANNOT HELP YOU NOW, BEYOTCH!" thing.

So, now that we understand that this actually is a trope, let's look at one of my favorite examples of its inversion.

 

 

In 1967, Audrey Hepburn gave us one of the most chilling performances of her career in Wait Until Dark.  She plays a blind woman who ends up in possession of a doll filled with heroin and must defend herself against a trio of thugs that are trying to get the doll back.  There are a couple of instances where, despite the insecurities of Susy Hendrix, her blindness turns into a superpower.  First, Roat (Alan Arkin) likes to use disguises and the fact that she can't see allows her to completely bypass them since she can hear that he's the same person and isn't distracted by the visual.  She can even tell that one of the "cops" she's talking to is removing evidence.

The second, though, is the best part of the whole movie.  She doesn't need light.  The trio does.  She wins the day by breaking all of the lamps in her apartment.  She forgets one in the fridge but that's understandable.  Eventually she gets the bulb removed, anyway, but the entire sequence is one of the most thrilling, nail-biting cinematic experiences EVER.  Also?  Score one for Henry Mancini.  His soundtrack was AMAZEBALLS!

I try and watch this one once a year at LEAST.

Scream 2 also has a wonderful inversion with Randy getting killed in the middle of the day, on the brightly lit college campus.

THE DAY STAR WON'T SAVE YOU!  

Just sayin'.

Where's The Fuckin' Clowns?

Today's post will either be very late or non-existant due to the holiday.

Apologies.

Purple Bob Needs Sleep Badly.

Tweezers Will Not Help

You ever watch one of those films where you're not sure exactly WHY it didn't get a full release because it's damn good and more people should see it but you know that the reason WHY it didn't get seen is because nobody had the cash to get it out there?

That's what I thought when I saw 2008's Splinter.

It was shown in 4 theaters and, dammit, it should have gone further.  MUCH further.  We're talking Trick'r'Treat levels of unjust non-distribution.

This film is a PERFECT example of claustrophobic horror and it kind of combines The Mist (in that we don't know WHY the "monster" exists or where it comes from) with The Thing (in that we don't know which of the cast is going to be the next infected).

Anyway, the film starts where all good horror films should start.  In the woods.  Because the woods hate you and you should never go there.  Our unlikely hero, Seth (a biologist), and his kinda tomboy-ish girlfriend, Polly, fail at "Shelter 101" even though they want to do the Anniversay Mambo under the stars (this is not really that important) and decide to get a motel room like any sane person. 

And then they get carjacked.  Enter Dennis and Lacey.

And then they hit something nasty.  I would call it roadkill but it was basically already dead when they hit it.  It turns out to be infected with this black stuff that looks like ferrofluid.  (Ferrofluid being the most awesome looking thing EVER!!!  Magnets are rad.)

It looked like this, only spoooooooky.

So, this stuff, as it turns out, is definitely some kind of parasite but it kind of doesn't stop when its host is dead.  It continues to animate the parts and such.

And THAT looks like this:

Because a WHOLE hand would have just been silly.

Now, this doesn't sound like a lot but the cool thing about this movie is that it packs SO much tension into it what with the alien force AND the criminal AND being trapped in a gas station and it's just an awesome ride.  Beyond that, the script sets up character archetypes and then breaks them down to allow characters some breathing room and to let them be more human.  You feel for these people and you watch them evolve as the story goes on.

Well, maybe not for her...

Add to that some AMAZING practical effects and a minimum of noticeable CGI and you've got yourself an unsung masterpiece that needs to be shared with the masses.

Because sharing is caring.

Now, people often complain that there isn't enough explanation as to the splinter-thing in this movie but I ask those people, in my best Shanaynay voice, "Whyyyy do you need to know?"  Seriously.  Why do you need to know what it is and where it comes from?  Isn't that one of the points of horror is that we're afraid of the unexplained or unexplainable?  Is this not the reason religions were founded and science was born?  Let it be unexplained so we can actually fear it. 

Descriptions are for pussies.