MOVIE REVIEWS
IT WAITS
The good folks at Anchor Bay recently satiated my movie lust by sending me a copy of their latest direct to video horror film “It Waits.” I watched it the other night and figured I’d toss a review up here. Someone on IMDB reviewed the film as “It Waits..we wait” which is sort of true as you only see the central creature for maybe a combined total of two minutes the entire movie. The rest of the movie involves watching heroine, Cabin Fever's own Cerina Vincent, hang out in a forest ranger tower, drink vodka and talk to a parrot. That’s not really bad because Cerina has one, erm…two, things going for her: gigantically large breasts. No lie. The things are huge. They don’t necessarily look weird or fake or anything it’s just that her breasts take up a great majority of her body. The director obviously knew this when casting her as she wears nothing but a sheer tank top throughout the whole film. Thanks guy. I’m not even a breast man but they are just so out there you find yourself transfixed. The sequel to this film should be called “They Bounce”(JOKES!) Anyhow, plot story short, Cerina and her friend were drunk driving, they crash, friend dies, Cerina devotes herself to a life of servitude as a park ranger, meets hunky fellow park ranger, does it, gets stalked by this half wolf / half bat creature that’s from Native American folklore, everyone around her dies, her parrot cracks wise, she kills the beast - movie over.
“It Waits” isn’t a bad movie per se. It’s a fun movie from a director who appears to have mainly done direct to tv stuff for USA. The problem with it is 1.) it’s not scary 2.) it’s not gory and 3.) it’s not funny. If you’re going to direct a horror film it really has to be one of those things. “It Waits” looks more like a polished student film rather than the efforts of someone who’s had some real time behind the camera. There’s really only two locations in the film, “the park ranger tower” and “ the forest.” There’s also very few characters so when you’re working that minimally you have to really make the characters people you care about. It seems the director was mainly interested in introducing new characters so he could kill them off quickly. You could really give a shit what happens to most of these people because, from the short time you know them, they’re either assholes or morons. And Cerina acts so unfazed by anything during the film the only people you end up wanting to survive are the parrot and Cerina’s breasts. The dialogue is also very unnatural swaying from action movie one liners to soap opera like pledges of troth often in the same sentence. It’s like watching 24 on one tv and Felicity on another at the same time after taking high grade LSD.
Staging the entire movie in a watchtower could have led to some great and scary claustrophobic stalking moments but I guess due to budget restrictions, those moments were limited to Cerina cowering in the corner while strange sounds happened outside. And the times they are out in the forest, which should be scary, everything is either too dark to make out what’s happening or its broad daylight which is terribly not frightening. I guess most of the budget went to the Stan Winston designed ‘creature’ which looks nice if the one, sort-of total shot of it in the film is any indication but the damn thing is never on the screen long enough that we get an idea of what it is or what it can do. The deaths are either cut aways or shot from the pov of the creature. It would have been nice if there was at least ONE long scene of the full bodied creature stalking toward Cerina or one grizzly decapitation because, after all, the creature is why people will check the film out. But sadly- no. The only lingering shot is one of the head of the creature as it inches it’s face closer to Cerina’s but that’s nothing we haven’t already seen a dozen times over in the Alien movies. And don’t even get me started on the cheapo CGI shots of the creature flying. If you can’t do it right, don’t do it at all movie! I will give the director credit for some creative staging of the corpses. Having the creature constantly dig up the bodies of people it’s killed and taunt Cerina with them was a nice touch. Unfortunately, budget restrictions make the corpses look very, what’s a diplomatic way of putting this,… “totally shitty.”
In conclusion, the film tries to do too much. It shoots for the moon and misses by a mile. I hoped this would be a great counterpart to that awful art-house mess Wendigo a few years back but sadly, it looks like any movie involving Native American folklore that’s not Ernest Goes to Camp is doomed to suck. The director really should have taken stock of what he had and tailored the film to it instead of attempting to shoot an auspicious script on a limited budget. In any event, I’m all for more horror films than less horror films so I’d like to see what this guy does with his next movie. 2 stars. Maybe check it out. Wanna borrow my copy?
THE GRUDGE
The Grudge is a re-make of the Japanese movie Ju-On (translation: Cat Boy and his Crazy Dead Mother Fun-time Explosion). In this re-make Sarah Michelle Gellar plays a girl who goes to Japan with her boyfriend. While there she makes the mistake of volunteering to help assist an elderly woman to get credit for school after her normal caregiver fails to show up. Horror Movie Rule #38 - never help anybody! BTW, her boss is Ted Raimi. Horror Movie Rule #42 - Ted Raimi always dies. So Sarah goes to help the old lady who she finds in a wigged out state which doesn't prevent Sarah from giving her a sponge bath anyway (ewwww). Suddenly black plants or grass start growing in the old woman's room, she wigs out and Sarah blacks out. Then we go to a flashback of the old woman when she first moved into the house with her son and daughter in law. Old woman flips out upon setting foot in the house followed by the daughter and then finally her son who discovers his dead wife at the hands of CAT BOY!! The movie then follows Sarah Michelle Gellar as she wakes up in a hospital and becomes obsessed with the evil house and the curse that follows anyone who goes near it. The curse (i.e. The Grudge) first takes the form of a sound that's like someone vomiting on cracking ice. Then some Hendrix like feedback takes over. Then Cat Boy (a little naked Asian boy who meows) runs around you and harasses you, sort of like the hype-man for... his creepy dead mother who either flies or crawls at you and then I guess, eats you. It's never really shown. The Grudge, much like The Ring, is actually a fairly refreshing horror movie because unlike American horror movies they rely on legitimate scary images and situations not just shocks for their scares and good never wins at the end. In fact, the movie has a fairly very open ending which I suppose is wildly disorienting for American audiences as we expect our shit to be wrapped up neatly in two hours with very concise explanations as to why things happened. The Grudge is not like that and nor is The Ring. While not as disturbing or scary as The Ring it's a pretty good flick if you're into horror movies. I hope more American directors take this cue and we start getting more top notch horror not dreck like Alone in the Dark (aka: the Relic) or The Boogeyman (aka: Robert DeNiro in the Amityville Horror.)
RAY & 8 MILE
That's right kids! It's movie review time! Today we have Ray and 8 Mile. One features a singer trying to be an actor, the other features an actor trying to be a singer. Both are pointlessly long and both are pretty much...well...pointless.
First up is Ray starring Booty Call's own Jaime Fox. While Sr.Fox (Foxx?) does an uncanny impression of the late Ray Charles it's not enough to save the film. What could easily be an enjoyable ninety minute look at an R&B singer best known for his Diet Pepsi commercials in the early 90's becomes a two hour plus, pseudo art-house crawl hemmed by a sadistic director who refuses to let the audience leave the theater until they realize the genius of Ray Charles. The truth is, after all is said and done, Ray Charles didn't do much. In fact, if you watch closely his big "sonic revelation" was that he fused gospel with r&b. Big whoop. Look, in the 50's and 60's the big stories in R&B were happening in Detroit with Motown and Memphis with Stax. Ray was on Atlantic. To jazz up Ray's story we have endless flashbacks to his childhood, endless scenes of Ray being freaked out by visions of his dead brother, and endless scenes of women yelling at him to stop doing heroin. What's supposed to be a story about the power of the human spirit and man's ability to triumph over adversity is really the story of a singer who can't stop falling off the wagon until Johnny Law cracks down hard on him and who shortly after deciding to straighten up and fly right once and for all, quietly fades into obscurity. Until Pepsi comes calling. Look, I like Ray Charles- he has a great voice and his country albums are some of the best things ever (they are even given a decent nod in the film). But aside from being the other blind singer who's not Stevie Wonder, I can't see what's so interesting about his life that he deserves a two hour film? I would much rather watch an Otis Redding movie. But that's just me.
Speaking of Detroit… white rap sensation (now white-rap falling star) Eminem stars in 8 Mile. An amalgamation of Rocky and Coal Miners Daughter, 8 Mile is the story of an aspiring rapper named Rabbit who must deal with not only being white trash but being white trash stuck in the ghetto! We watch Rabbit work a soul crushing job at a car pressing plant, break up with his crazy girlfriend and come home to find his mom in an abusive relationship with a guy who was in the same high school class as him! Poor guy. And all he wants to do is write violent homophobic raps for a living! Can't he just catch a break!?! Fortunately for him he is aided on his quest to stardom by a multi-ethnic coalition of supporters who are convinced the bumbling, sub-literate Rabbit (who appears to possess NO rhyme skills whatsoever) is really a hip-hop genius that will be snapped up by a big label and take them all far, far away from Detroit. Along the way he meets Brittany Murphy who falls so in love with Rabbit after watching him rap for forty-five seconds on his lunch break that she sneaks off with him to do the nasty somewhere in the auto pressing plant. STD's and grease stained clothes be dammned! This is true love! Later on she bangs one of Rabbit's friends because he can "do something for her career." Rabbit goes into a rage obviously thinking she was cheating on him when she was blatantly "networking" and gets into a scuffle with his friend and some rival rappers. Rabbit gets beaten up. Bruised, broke and humiliated he slumps into battle rap contest and proceeds to tear everyone a new one, win back his girlfriend and save the day through rapping. The end of the movie finds him walking away from the cheering throng because...he has to go back to work. So nothing has changed but he now has PRIDE!!! Thank you goodnight. Elvis has left the building.
Again, this movie is needlessly long. We see too much of Kim Bassinger as Rabbit's mom who invented her own "Detroit" style of talking for this feature which sounds like Southern drawl by way of Canada. It's sort-of suggested that the reason his mother is in such dire financial straits is because she potentially has brain damage. We also have wayyy too many shots of Eminem pouting or looking intense. These scenes ,I assume, were substituted in lieu of scenes where he was probably supposed to be acting. It's a clever directors trick to stall for time until we can get the camera back on Michai Pfiefer or Brittany Murphy's legs. Can Eminem act? No. Well..actually..I don't know. His character strikes only one emotion throughout the entire film: intense, seething rage. Even during the sex scene! They try to soften his character in one scene by showing him singing to his baby sister but you actually feel she'd be safer with her mother's drunk boyfriend than Eminem who's character is prone to flying off the handle at a moment's notice. In the scenes where he's not pouting he's being hit in the face so the film never really gives Eminem a chance to flex his acting chops (if he actually has any) and judging by the gross on the film, I doubt he'll ever get another one. 8 Mile will take its place in the pantheon of movies like Cool as Ice, Crossroads and A Walk to Remember. People love musicians at the top of their game but when they cross the line into celluloid THEY HATE THEM! As much as the media conglomerates think they can sell anyone anything, the people seem to know a vanity project when they see one. 8 Mile is no different. To be fair to Eminem, the life span for a hot property is very brief so who can blame him for wanting to stick his finger in as many pots as he can before he's kicked out of the kitchen. When all is said and done, Eminem may encompass a few paragraphs in the history of music but 8 Mile is doomed to spend its life floating around the bargain bin of video stores and the late night hours of basic cable movie networks. Maybe it'll meet Ray somewhere along the way.
