Review: Brain Dead

What a cast in this movie. Bud Cort! George Kennedy! The guy who wanted to take Data apart in TNG: "Measure of a Man"! The fast food cashier from Falling Down! One of the pirate buddies from Pirates of the Caribbean! And according to IMDb, Kyle Gass played one of the anaesthetists, though I didn't spot him.

And our leads? The oft-confused Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton. This movie's actually a helpful mnemonic for those of you who have trouble remembering which is which: who'd make a better head-in-the-clouds neurologist vs. who'd make a better corporate shark?

Pullman is the neurologist, Rex, whose livelihood is threatened by shady goings-on involving his old college buddy turned plutocrat, Jim (Paxton). Soon, Rex's very sanity is on the line; he begins to experience hallucinations after agreeing to perform experimental brain surgery on a company drone (Cort) who knows too much.

Review: Castle Freak

Director Stuart Gordon wants frequent collaborator Jeffrey Combs to play Edgar Allan Poe in a biopic for which they are currently raising funds. Castle Freak, a film they did together in the '90s, would actually feel very Poe-esque were it not for the typical gore-flick misogyny.

It's still an engaging, sorta creepy haunted-castle kind of movie. It features a solid story, overall avoidance of the most tired horror cliches, and a memorable antagonist. I just wish it had dispensed with the bad taste.

Review: Warlock III: The End of Innocence

The third Warlock film damn nearly could not be more different from the first two. Warlock and Warlock: The Armageddon were both rollicking rides through a wacky world of time travel, coin-eating, visits to Amish country, purposeless murders, lamewad druids, mystic tomes, magic stones, and salt assault. The direct-to-video Warlock III: The End of Innocence is by contrast as conventional a horror film as you could hope for, a youths-in-a-creepy-house story we've seen countless times. Yet it's also mildly scary on several occasions, unlike its predecessors.

Review: Pontypool

(Note: this review is as spoiler-free as I could make it. Which is to say, it hints at spoilers.)

Many indie horror films end up being more horror and less indie; they aspire, not to artistic profundity or hipster cred, but to scares, gore, and frequently, reliable genre tropes. Indie zombie movie Pontypool is largely the inverse of that.

I have mixed feelings about indie movies; even those I've liked, I've often found slightly irritating. And initially, I wasn't even going to do a full review for Pontypool because its ending bugged me so much. Upon further reflection, however, much of the first hour-plus was engaging and effective enough that I changed my mind. Its indie-ness is less overwhelming than it could have been, resulting in a watchable and quite different movie, which is a rare enough combination to merit attention by itself. It helps that, despite its miniscule budget, Pontypool is occasionally scary, and in a distinctive way.

Spend enough time in a nursing home or a psych ward, and there's a good chance you'll encounter some individuals exhibiting the same behavioral oddity that distinguishes Pontypool's zombies from others. Thus, despite its concept being even less plausible than that of more typical zombie narratives, its brand of scare works—and is likely to feel even more unsettling than most zombie movies to those of us who've seen people do this.

Review: Leviathan (1989)

1989's Leviathan borrows so much from Alien, The Thing, and similar futurey-horror blockbusters of its age that if you've seen a couple of them, you can safely skip Leviathan, because it adds pretty much nothing to your personal catalogue of filmwatching experiences—except possibly the ability to link Daniel Stern directly with Richard Crenna for Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon purposes. But then, I just told you that, so you don't have to see it after all…unless your rules variant requires you to have actually seen the movies you reference, which, wow man, let me into THAT game.

Review: Warlock: The Armageddon

Challenge: Make a Warlock sequel that's simultaneously more boring and more batshit than its predecessor.

It may seem impossible, but that's the impressive feat achieved by Warlock: The Armageddon. A predictable and unoriginal story accompanies ludicrous setpieces and greatly amped-up gore, but those aren't the only ways in which this sequel differs from Warlock. In fact, if they'd cast someone else as their warlock, you'd barely be able to tell that these two movies take place in the same universe at all—no direct reference whatsoever is made to the events of Warlock, and the only slight hint about those events is the fact that the Warlock seems to know a little bit about late-20th-century materialism and motor vehicle operation.

Review: The Cabin in the Woods

(Warning: major spoilers ahead. If you were interested enough to get this far, and you haven't seen it, go see it now. It's on Netflix Instant.)

What do we mean when we talk about "sacrifice"? And what do I mean when I say "we"? "We" could be modern Western media-savvy types—Joss Whedon's usual audience. "We" could be modern Americans.

"We" could also be all of humanity, but in rewatching The Cabin in the Woods, I began to think in terms of premodern versus modern peoples (to use very broad categories). For premodern peoples, sacrifice means abject terror before dark forces you can't control, and feebly offering blood in the hope of placating those forces, under the assumption that they want blood, since they're obviously dark and all—what with their plagues and floods and pyroclastic flows.

For modern Americans, perhaps modern peoples generally, sacrifice means soldiers, firemen, and cops. What if both meanings of sacrifice are the same? What if the dark forces to whom we now sacrifice our young (mostly) men are war, random fiery destruction, and man's inhumanity to man, respectively? And was there an early version of this script where one of the cabin visitors was a veteran of a recent war?

Review: Warlock

Warlock is a cheesy-ass 1989 fantasy/horror flick with a story so dopey that it makes the movie more fun than it has any right to be, largely because you're never sure what's coming next.

To encapsulate the experience: a warlock is about to be executed in Boston in 1691, but while confronting a vengeful witch-hunter, the warlock summons evil powers and (apparently inadvertently) teleports both of them to 1988 Los Angeles. It seems the forces of darkness can be budget-conscious too.

So upon arrival, the warlock is thrown into a house that just happens to contain one of the three pieces of the Grand Grimoire, an evil book with earth-shattering powers. The warlock proceeds to kill the homeowner just for the sake of accessorizing, then acquires the pages and ventures off to complete the book. But the witch-hunter is hot on his trail, thanks to a vaguely Hellraiser-esque warlock-compass contraption.

Review: Gravity

Alfonso Cuarón (director of Children of Men and the best Harry Potter film, Prisoner of Azkaban) proves his chops once again with Gravity, a space thriller that I'm choosing to categorize as sci-fi even though it's not futuristic in any detectable way.

Indeed, it's a movie of its moment, particularly so if you're an astronomer or an astronaut, I'd imagine. The narrative's antagonist is the Kessler effect—the phenomenon of space debris crashing into other space debris and causing a cascade reaction as tiny, superfast pieces effectively multiply themselves. Part of me was hoping that, following the harrowing climax, the survivor(s) would address a session of Congress about the urgency of cleaning up our way-too-polluted orbital space. But that would have been preachy and lame, which is why I wasn't disappointed when it didn't happen.

Review: Room 237

Evidently the product of one too many dormitory pot parties, Room 237 purports to expose hidden meanings in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining by intercutting audio from interviews with "experts" alongside a few diagrams and (mainly) footage from assorted films by Kubrick and others. (MST fans should be on the lookout for Urbano Barberini, a.k.a. Tarl Cabot, in one occasionally re-used shot.) While I can honestly say I've never seen a movie quite like this, that's far from a compliment.

What I have seen are a few of the wall-of-text, black-background Shining analysis websites that Room 237 mentions, and even these virtual watering holes for crackpots are more persuasive than just about anything presented in this film. Room 237 runs the gamut from the Native American motif (intentional, and therefore not hidden) to Danny imagining literally everything (if so, kid's got some serious psychosexual baggage for his age) to supposed subliminal minotaurs (I guess if you have astigmatism, maybe) to the Holocaust (which everything can be about if you try hard enough) to the Kubrick-faked-the-moon-landing theory (can we PLEASE be done with that now). Moreover, every interview subject seems to think that an observed (or imagined) connection inherently counts as proof. I haven't seen this much reaching since my last trip to Sam's Club.