My goal in this review is, as much as possible, to make you understand so you don't have to see it. Because whatever else can be said of this movie, it has a certain uniqueness, and unfortunately that can be attractive sometimes.
Be assured that Road House is in fact repellent from start to finish.
That last one's the real stake through the heart. I'm pretty sure I've never been as bored by any Bond movie, and I saw Quantum of Solace—and the '60s Casino Royale. And that boredom's not just due to this movie being a remake of Thunderball. Yes, much of the story is the same, but most scenes have no direct analog in the original, and some entire plot developments are new. It's all just…so dull. The main reason I didn't give up on this movie at the hour-thirty mark was just in case I'd miss another scene as batshit as the video game. (Also, it was directed by Irvin Kershner—director of The Empire Strikes Back, the best Star Wars film. Didn't help.)
I will answer your franchise-apostasy questions below, so that idle curiosity does not compel you to waste two-plus hours on this.
Now that Western popular cinema has entered the post-Marvel, post-LOTR age—where serialization is not just accepted, but expected, in our blockbusters—it's interesting to look back on an era when such things were still pretty new. The original Star Wars trilogy began the modern version of the trend, and, alongside the Indy trilogy, the Star Trek film franchise reinforced the trend, proving it to be a viable strategy and not a series-specific aberration.
Contrast this with the comparatively abrupt opening of Star Trek IV. The opening council scene with John Shuck's Klingon ambassador provides some indirect summary of the previous two movies, then Kirk's first captain's log says "We're in the third month of our Vulcan exile," never fully explaining why they're exiled, let alone why the planet Vulcan would be harboring them. Ironic that the most financially successful Trek film (up until 2009) opens in a fashion so impenetrable, almost hostile, to the uninitiated viewer. It's not as though they could have assumed that every audience member saw The Search for Spock. (Indeed, it seems they even tacked on a weird prologue for the foreign markets under the assumption that too few people overseas had seen III.)
Eighties movies run the gamut between "charmingly '80s" and "painfully '80s." Innerspace is kind of all over that gamut, which makes it a densely representative example of '80s cinema.
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.
I have a standard operating procedure when confronted with a film so astoundingly, unforgettably inept that it is destined for a special place in my heart. I refer to the likes of Birdemic, The Room, Teen-Age Strangler, or The Beast of Yucca Flats—a film I adore so much I've created a second Twitter account in its honor. That procedure is to ask myself, not in sarcastic bafflement (though there's that, too), "How/why did this get made?" I often feel that I can't fully evaluate a cinematic turd until I've been able to come up with at least a plausible answer to this question.
In the case of the preceding examples, the answers are (in order) "somebody thought he was both Hitchcock and Al Gore"; "somebody wanted to get aspiring naked actress flesh all over him"; "a small town thought they could come together and make a swell picture just as well as Hollywood"; and, well, "I'm Coleman Francis; I don't need a reason."
Imagine a Miami where rival synth-pop bands, vying for the choice gig at a particular club, enlist cocaine-funded motorcycle ninjas and gangs full of Mad Max extras to assault one another seemingly at random.
(Did I have you at "motorcycle ninjas"? Maybe skip to the end, then. Otherwise, stay with me.)
After re-watching both Timothy Dalton Bond movies—this one and its predecessor, The Living Daylights—I have to say I think Dalton gets over-maligned as Bond. He's not completely right for the role, at least as the role came to be defined by earlier films, but the Dalton installments themselves are a welcome respite from the increasingly ludicrous Moore installments that preceded them.
License to Kill has a stronger story and a more interesting cast than Living Daylights. In a pretty atypical pre-credits sequence, Bond is attending the wedding of his old friend, CIA agent Felix Leiter, when they learn a notorious and untouchable drug lord, Sanchez (Robert Davi), is in the vicinity. They work together to nab Sanchez and make it to the wedding at the last possible moment, naturally via parachute—and then the Binder titles begin, so we know something's amiss.
This is a fun one for all the sci-fi nerds out there. Just let me emphasize that, by "fun," I don't mean "good."
Timestalkers is a cheesy 1987 made-for-TV movie about a history professor and Old West hobbyist (William Devane, almost completely miscast) who, after the death of his wife and son (the boy from Who's the Boss), finds himself recruited by a time-travelling fashion model (Lauren Hutton, sadly wearing a cap over her tooth-gap) to help her stop the assassination of some 19th century person to further the vague career goals of her deranged, homicidal ex-colleague (Klaus Kinski, looking like Doc Brown's psycho brother).
Kinski and Hutton alternately employ unnecessarily gaudy time-travel technology to make the plot appear to develop. Even before this, however, we are treated to "flashbacks" from Devane's antiquing road trips that depict what Kinski is (simultaneously?) doing in the Old West. The part that's by turns endearing and irritating is that each flashback is accompanied by an explosive screen effect and the stolen sound of a TIE fighter cannon firing.
Like many horror sequels, Hellbound: Hellraiser II attempts to up the stakes and the scope of its predecessor. In the attempt, it manages to walk the fine line between "expanding the setting" and "explaining too much." All the same, now that we understand a bit more of what to expect from Cenobites and skinless undead, the scariness is diminished—its vacancy filled with extra gore and weirdness.
Hellbound picks up soon after the events of, and includes several flashbacks to, the first Hellraiser (my review is here). I assume the intent was to make the film comprehensible to those who missed the first one, and indeed, so thorough is the recap that this is one case where I doubt you'd miss much if you went straight to the sequel. It might feel more WTF than it already does, though, and plus you'd miss Andrew Robinson (the dad in the first movie), who doesn't reprise his role here. The only other principal who doesn't return is the boyfriend, but maybe he died in the last movie…I didn't care enough to commit that detail to memory.
You know how sometimes a movie sort of comes out of nowhere and blows you away with its originality, wit, and unique perspective—e.g. Evil Dead II? When that happens, have you ever wondered (as I often have) what such a film might have looked like if it emerged around the same time, had a similarly unique perspective, but was somehow just…not successful at all?
Phantasm II is an example of the latter.
Horror aficionados of the Fangoria-subscriber variety seem to have a fondness for the Phantasm franchise (of which I have now seen only the first two films). I attribute this fondness mainly to the following:
Though it's a solid translation from text to screen, the 1984 film version of Orwell's 1984 is really only worth seeing for two reasons: John Hurt and Richard Burton.
I say this because nothing in the film is more effective than (or even an impressively-accurate realization of) anything in the book—and much of the best stuff from the book is missing or only hinted at in the film.
In short, if you have interest in the film but you've never read the book, then what the hell is up with that. Seriously, read the book first. I know people say that all the time about movies based on books, but this is Nineteen Frickin' Eighty-Four. I feel so strongly about this that the rest of this review is going to be spoiler-free, which I don't usually bother to worry about.
I saw Hellraiser for the first time this week. It had long been on my third-tier, "maybe-get-to-it-eventually" movie list, due to its apparent weirdness. But when I learned Andrew Robinson (Garak from DS9, and the killer in the first Dirty Harry) was in it: well, more urgency, naturally. Having seen it, I'm not going to prioritize its sequels much higher than that third tier, but maybe a little—another DS9 alum, Terry Farrell, is in one of them.
I don't think Hellraiser could have come into being without A Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th. Certainly, it outclasses its forebears in every respect: better acting, stronger mood, freakier freakiness, and one-liners that are both more memorable and more seamlessly integrated into the story. I am already saying "We have such things to show you" in everyday conversation, and "Don't look at me!" has such obvious utility that I've already been using it for years.
So last night I theorized that the best way to dull the inevitably depressing impact of another election night would be to watch a movie sure to be more depressing than any exercise of democratic rights, no matter how empty. I watched The Killing Fields :D
In retrospect I think this may have been a kind of brilliant ploy to combat election fatigue, and to put all the breathless coverage into perspective. This is one of those movies that's full of unrelenting, historically-accurate brutality arising from the rapid breakdown of a society. So completely did it inoculate me against overreacting to every little announcement last night that I'm now thinking, in four years, I'll want to make sure I have Hotel Rwanda handy.
