What I Liked: Wow
the cinematography is absolutely stunning.
It’s like watching an oil painting come to life but with some nice grit
thrown in. You have all steady beautiful
shots without the annoyance of shaking the camera to hell in an attempt to get
you to feel something.
The storytelling is very deliberate and carefully
crafted. If it went on for any longer it
would get too tedious and if they cut it shorter it would probably feel
rushed. This is a delicate piece.
The acting is very good all around. They all sell their fear, frustration and
paranoia hard.
What I Didn’t Like:
This is a minor gripe but they went for period dialogue and accents (1600’s New
England) and sometimes it was a little hard to understand what people were
saying. Not too long into the picture I relented
and turned on the subtitles. In this
sense it’s almost like a foreign film but they’re actually speaking English.
Overall Impressions:
Robert Eggers has a background in production and costume design so it’s no
wonder why this film is so damn pretty to look at. He tried his hand at writing and directing
this feature and I really dig his style.
He’s not afraid to take his time and build plenty of atmosphere for you
to sink your teeth into.
This will probably only appeal to a small group of people
because of how much of a slow burn it is.
And even then it doesn’t eventually explode into a fiery inferno but
rather it keeps on methodically unleashing its own brand of evil. It may not seem like much happened at the
time but when you look back on the events it’s kinda fuckin’ crazy.
I like this one a lot and it only gets better the more I
think about it. If you’re up for
something that’s all about mood and jam packed with tension check this sucker
out.
What I Liked: There’s
so much more to this movie than the famous pottery sex scene. It’s actually about vengeance, conspiracy and
a wacky psychic with a brassy dame attitude.
Some parts had me laughing out loud.
Tony Goldwyn (Kiss the
Girls, The Mechanic (2011)) is great at playing a sniveling, conniving
asshole. His face is very punchable and
I wanted to take a good healthy swing at it.
Great performance!
And of course, true love never dies. Right on.
What I Didn’t Like: Patrick
Swayze’s (Dirty Dancing) acting is
kinda bad a lot of the time. In so many
scenes he’s supposed to have this utterly shocked/apoplectic expression but
instead he looks like he’s about to cry and/or take a shit.
Demi Moore (Nothing
But Trouble) does a fine acting job with being so distraught all the time
but her character is pretty one note.
She’s broken up over Swayze’s death and there’s nothing more to
her. She’s really uninteresting. But I don’t think it’s Demi’s fault, I think
it’s just the way the character was written.
Overall Impressions:
Ok, this was sort of a joke movie I put on here for Halloween but it was way
darker than I had anticipated. I was
expecting a romance picture between a human and a ghost and not a thriller
about who killed Swayze and why. The
film is definitely cooler than what I was led to believe all these years. There are even these creepy shrieking evil
spirits that come up from the ground to take bad souls to hell. And one death in particular is gruesome with
a guy getting impaled by a broken glass window.
What a surprise from Jerry Zucker who did Airplane! and produced the Naked Gun movies. This is a decent thriller and certainly a
choice for those that feel like they should do something for the Halloween
season but don’t really like horror movies.
Just get some tissues ready and a big ol’ block of clay. You’ll need both.
What I Liked: The
story is mostly no bullshit. There’s a
creature on the loose and it’s eating a specific part of people’s brains,
that’s pretty much it.
It’s interesting to have the finale be the entire second
half of the movie. It goes from police investigation
to holy shit we’re trapped inside the museum with this thing and it’s killing
everyone in sight. The flow is different
than most and I liked that.
No forced romance between Tom Sizemore (Blue Steel, Passenger 57) and Penelope Ann Miller (The Shadow, Carlito’s Way). Sizemore even says at one point “I’m not here
to ask you out”.
The creature is gnarly looking. It’s a combination of lizard, lion, beetle
and who knows what the fuck else. When
they used a real puppet or animatronic it looked badass. Maybe a bit bulky but definitely menacing.
What I Didn’t Like:
When a character mentions something earlier in the film it’s a little too
obvious that it’ll come into play later.
Like the storage room filled to the brim with flammable chemicals or the
gala event that needs to go off without a hitch so the museum’s programs can
stay funded.
The dialogue and acting are both kinda wooden. It sounds awkward when folks talk about
science-y stuff and shit gets too jokey at times with the police investigation
side.
Unfortunately they went with a fair amount of mid-90’s CGI
for the action creature shots. Maybe two
or three shots actually look good but most of them don’t come off so great.
The picture is a little too lopsided. The first half doesn’t have quite enough
going on and the second half has a lot happening. They could’ve evened things out more and
still had a somewhat unique structure.
Overall Impressions:
This is kind of a fun movie from my man Peter Hyams (Sudden Death, The Musketeer).
He went for something darker than he normally does and it works well
enough for what it’s supposed to be: a creature horror film.
And when I say he went dark I mean that literally. This is one dimly lit movie. It’s hard to make shit out sometimes but at
the same time I never felt like I didn’t know what was happening. Maybe Hyams used shadowy lighting to convey
atmosphere or maybe he did it to hide the CGI monster. I’ll let you be the judge.
Anyway if you’re into these creature type horror films this
isn’t a bad one to check out. They
deliver on the thing cutting people’s heads off ‘n’ shit. The body count is actually really high. It just takes a little while to get going.
What I Liked: R.
Lee Ermey (On Deadly Ground, The
Frighteners) does a great job as the sadistic sheriff. He doesn’t play it subtle at all, which
would’ve served the movie better in my opinion, but he puts on a nice show for
ya with the callous, crude and straight up assholic attitude.
Jessica Biel (Next)
tries hard. She’s screaming her head off
and crying all over the place but always keeps herself moving forward. Good work.
The set design is well done with tons of random crap strewn
about the murder mansion. All the body
parts everywhere, things in jars and general gross wetness of the place is
great atmosphere.
What I Didn’t Like:
The cinematography is not very well done which is interesting because it’s the
same guy that shot the original ’74 joint, Daniel Pearl. He started out making features but found his
real niche in music videos during the mid 80’s.
What got him back into doing films again was this Chainsaw remake. Both versions
use almost exclusively low angle or eye level shots but it bothered me more when
Pearl employed the same method again here.
I’m just not sure why. I felt
like I wanted to lift my head up all the time.
And I’m not into the washed out nearly black and white color palate that
was used.
This item may seem trivial but it kinda pissed me off that
the filmmakers cheated rather badly with one particular kill. When Leatherface is chasing one of the teens
through white sheets that are hung up to dry outside he magically teleports to
get in front of the victim and saws one of his legs off. I don’t know if it was the editor’s fault
(Glen Scantlebury (Dracula (1992)))
or if they simply fucked up when they shot the scene and they couldn’t really
fix it in post. I know this teleportation
shit happens all the fucking time in horror movies (especially slashers) but
this specific instance really annoyed me.
I dunno.
Overall Impressions: First, there is no reason for this film to
exist. The original is a masterpiece and
will most likely never be topped. I’m
all for sequels and rip offs but to roll this sonuvabitch out as a remake is
pure marketing for a quick cash grab.
But if we leave that aside and judge the picture on its own
it still stinks. It’s slasher movie 101
to a tremendous fault. Everything you
expect to happen in a guy-with-a-chainsaw-running-through-the-woods film
happens. There’s zero unpredictability
and that makes for a dull experience. Like
if R. Lee Ermey scaled back his performance to the point where you were unsure
if he was a good guy or a bad guy then we’re starting to be a little more
thoughtful. But you know where all
characters stand the moment you meet them, and all events play out like you’ve
seen a million times before in the most by-the-numbers way possible.
The movie almost feels like it was made by someone that had
never seen the original before but was told everything that happens. It’s not visionary in any way. There’s nothing about it that’s superior to
the first Chainsaw and there aren’t any
new idea that are kinda neat which makes this a bit of a wasted effort.
I wanna be clear that this isn’t even close to the worst
movie I’ve ever seen. It’s totally
watchable but it’s just so uninteresting.
Here’s the story, Morgan Creek brought on Paul Schrader (who
wrote Taxi Driver, Rolling Thunder
and Raging Bull) to direct the next Exorcist movie. When he handed in the finished product the
studio hated it and decided to hire Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Cutthroat Island) to reshoot the entire thing. After Harlin’s version was released and
completely bombed Morgan Creek threw Schrader a couple of bucks to finish up
his original picture which got released the next year. So what we have here is extremely rare and
maybe unheard of: two movies made a year apart from almost the same script with
some of the same actors (including the lead (Stellan Skarsgard (Deep Blue Sea))) using the same sets and
a lot of the same crew. It’s the
director that’s the major change. I know
this wasn’t intentional but what a fascinating experiment.
Dominion
Here are some general differences. Schrader handles the characters better by fleshing
them out more and making them seem like real-ish people. So I had a better connection with them than
Harlin’s version. They seemed more
natural. Schrader also went for slightly
more abstract storytelling by having a few extra dream sequences and making the
possessed individual act like a god as opposed to a crazy sick person. And there’s a lot less ghastly imagery and
blood overall. It’s definitely the tamer
of the two. Oddly enough I think the
most well done sequence is the opening where Father Merrin has to deal with another
form of evil, Nazis. They force him to
choose who lives and dies with a small crowd of people. It was the most heart wrenching thing between
the two versions and gives Father Merrin some key backstory.
Harlin’s take is a total middle of the road Hollywood type
release. There are unnecessary plot
twists, a lot more bad early 2000’s CGI, the characters aren’t as focused, the
dialogue is bland and the ending is bigger and stupider than Schrader’s (more
on that in a minute). Harlin’s has the
better cinematography though. Vittorio
Storaro (The Last Emperor, Apocalypse Now)
worked on both and it looked like he took advantage of the second go around by
improving his chosen style. Colors are
more vibrant (especially the yellows and tans for the daylight scenes and
almost grayscale for the evil church parts), lighting is improved by better use
of shadows and the angles are more dramatic.
The story is also a little easier to follow because it’s been simplified
somewhat and modified to have a gory part every so often.
The Beginning
The ending to Harlin’s is laughably terrible though. It basically turns into an Evil Dead movie with cheap rubber makeup
effects and the demon running around saying taunting shit and acting a little
lusty. The climax is a big battle where Merrin
and the demon toss each other around in a cave while Merrin keeps trying to
exorcise the sonuvabitch. It doesn’t fit
at all with the rest of the film but I get that Hollywood wanted to make
something more visually appealing to a 2004 audience. It’s like “if we give them something similar
to the ending of the first movie they’re gonna be bored, these two gotta punch
each other ‘n’ shit”.
Dominion
Neither version is good.
Schrader’s is more of a character study and I should like that better
but I have to admit Harlin’s was more entertaining, even though it’s a good
deal dumber. Schrader’s feels kinda like
a B movie while Harlin’s comes across bigger.
I looked up to see what Skarsgard thought of all this
because I wanted an inside opinion from someone who worked on both. In the couple interviews I found he said it
was a great experience and that he liked working with both directors. He even says he likes Harlin better than some
of his movies which is a funny comment.
But he thinks Schrader’s version is better because the focus is more on
Merrin and not the threat.
Dominion
The Beginning
Anyway, these pictures are the closest thing to a typical
sequel the Exorcist series has had so
far. II
was some weird bullshit and III had
an interesting idea but wasn’t executed the greatest. Plus III
is technically a spin off and not a direct follow-up to either I or II. It’s a strange series that never got its shit
together because they kept producing these bizarre ideas or botched scripts.
I would only recommend checking out The Beginning or Dominion
if you’re curious how two different directors would shoot the same movie. It’s a good study on every aspect of
filmmaking and something we may not see again for a very long time.
