THIS MODERN NIGHTMARE

NEW TV SEASON

The new fall television series is upon us, and I will be doing a wrap-up of new genre shows for Fear Zone in a few weeks (I want to see a few episodes of each show to judge them fairly). Of the shows I've seen so far, my favorites include:

LIFE

This show stars Damian Lewis as Charlie Crews, a cop who spent 12 years in prison for a crime he did not commit and who has now returned to the job after receiving a huge settlement from the state. Lewis plays Crews as an enigmatic oddball spouting zen platitudes, but he's also riveting to watch. You want to know more about his character and you want to get inside his head. Of course, he's so odd that it might turn some viewers off and may lead to the show's failure. I hope not - I found it offbeat and interesting enough to want to see more. The show also features the sexy Sarah Shahi (Carmen from Showtime's THE L-WORD, and she was also the girl in the famous SOPRANOS episode where Tony takes magic mushrooms) as Charlie's partner Dani Reese, and Robin Weigert (Calamity Jane from DEADWOOD, now looking like an actual woman!) as an Internal Affairs officer trying to get information to kick Charlie off the force, for reasons of her own. The main mystery here is who framed Charlie and got him put away - and why. I'm looking forward to finding out the answers. (Airs Wednesdays at 10pm in NBC).

DIRTY SEXY MONEY

Peter Krause (from HBO's SIX FEET UNDER) stars as lawyer Nick George, whose father was the lawyer for the Darling family - a bunch of decadent and borderline insane characters who have more money than they know what to do with. The Darlings took Nick's mother away from him when he was a child (she refused to play second fiddle to the Darlings and left Nick's father to raise the boy alone) and his father (who spent so much time away from home putting out legal fires for the Darlings that Nick grew up feeling like an orphan). Nick mainly takes charity cases for causes he believes in, and has sworn never to work for the filthy rich family who ruined his formative years. But once his father dies, the Darlings' patriarch (the always-terrific Donald Sutherland) is convinced that Nick is the only one who can take his place.The show then gives us a tug of war between Nick and his ethics and the family of loopy billionaires who get in trouble so often that working for them is a full-time job. At first, Nick takes the job when he is offered ten million dollars to give to the charities of his choice (above and beyond an astronomical salary), seeing it as a way to do good. But once he finds himself in the exact trap he's always sworn he'd avoid, the question becomes whether he will stick with the job or leave - and he quits several times in the course of the first episode alone.

The Darling family consists of such nut jobs as Jeremy (Seth Gabel) the spoiled rich boy who thinks he can do anything he wants with impunity; Juliet (Samaire Armstrong) who wants to be an actress but is awful at it and her daddy has to buy all her roles; Brian (Glenn Fitzgerald) an abrasive priest who happens to have a son he has to keep secret; Patrick (Adam Baldwin) a politican who is being groomed for the Senate but who has a lot of skeletons in his closet (including a predilection for transsexual hookers); and Karen (Natalie Zea) who was "deflowered" by Nick in their youth and who clearly wants another shot at him.

Sutherland is oily and sinister as patriach Tripp Darling (you just know this guy has some shocking skeletons of his own) and Jill Clayburghn plays his wife Letitia.
The entire cast is pretty good, and this is exactly the kind of show that can become a hit as a guilty pleasure. I'm looking forward to more. (Airs Mondays at 10pm on ABC).

REAPER

Sam (Bret Harrison) is a slacker who works in a Home Depot type store with his layabout buddy Sock (Tyler Labine from INVASION), and who has a crush on co-worker Andi (the very hot Missy Peregrym, who previously had a stint on the first season of HEROES). On his 21st birthday, his parents inform him that they sold his soul to the devil (the old "cure my wife of cancer and I'll give you our first born child" story) and that, upon turning 21, the devil is going to come to collect.

Satan is suddenly a part of Sam's life, in the form of Ray Wise (Leland Palmer from TWIN PEAKS). Sam thinks this means he's going to hell, but the devil has a proposition for him instead. He wants Sam to become his bounty hunter and round up souls that have escaped from Hell. Why someone with the power of Satan needs lackies to gather up escapees eludes me (then again, this is the same plot as the GHOST RIDER movie), but it's a fun concept despite the lack of logic.

In the first episode, Sam comes across a man who was a pyromaniac when he was alive, but who now is a fire demon. And the only weapon Sam has to fight with is a Dirt Devil mini-vacuum (a product placement that's almost funny). But Sam also has some other powers, including telekinesis. So all is not lost.

Reaper is a silly show, but it's also a lot of fun. It's got a good cast, especially Wise who is perfect as a smooth-as-silk Satan, and it's nice to see Labine (who was so good in INVASION) in another show. And I definitely want to see more of Peregrym). The first episode was directed by Kevin Smith and has a strong CLERKS 2 vibe to it (yeah, the watered down but fun CLERKS sequel, not the first one - we are talking about network television here!). Whether or not the show will retain its charm without Smith's direction waits to be seen. (Airs Tuesdays at 9pm on the CW).

(For more on genre shows, including The Bionic Woman, Moonlight and Pushing Daisies, check out my column on the new TV season on Fear Zone when it comes out. It'll be announced here when it's online in a few weeks).

RETURNING SHOWS

PRISON BREAK - some fans have been grumbling about the new season, which takes place in a Panamanian prison where anarchy reigns, but I kind of like the new setting. In a place where violence rules and anything can happen (since there are no guards, although there is an authority figure named Lechero (Robert Wisdom) who acts like a modern-day Nero among the chaos). The third season of PRISON BREAK reminds me a bit of the HBO prison drama OZ, which is always a good thing. They need more T-Bag, though. Robert Knepper is just too good to stay in the background.

HEROES - the second season is off to a good start, even if they did kill of George Takei. I'm looking forward to Kristen Bell's joining the show this season (she was VERONICA MARS, for those who don't know), and I can't wait to see what her super power is.

BOSTON LEGAL - I've been a fan of this show, mostly because of William Shatner and James Spader, who play two oddball lawyers who have great chemistry together. It's especially good to see Shatner is another strong role. But this is a David E. Kelly production, which means - I'm sorry to say - it's doomed.

Kelly has a propensity to making his shows sillier and sillier until they completely fall apart under the weight of absurdity. And BOSTON LEGAL is going in this direction. It reminds me a lot of ALLY MCBEAL, which started out kind of promising, but as it went along every character had so many strange quirks that it just became tedious to watch. The same with BOSTON LEGAL. We now have a lawyer on the show with Aspberger's (the character's name is Jerry Esperson, and he keeps his hands tightly at his sides at all times and is known to woop and squeak a lot). A little Jerry (Christian Clemenson) goes a long way, and when he was a minor character he was tolerable. But now that he's become a main character, he's downright grating! Another character in the spotlight is Clarence (Gary Anthony Williams), a law clerk and transvestite who has an alter ego of a big, booming woman named Clarice. Add these two weirdos to the just as weird Shatner and Spader characters, and you have oddball overkill. A show that had just the right mix of the absurd and the serious is now heavily weighted on the absurd side, to the point where it's about to topple over.

If only David E. Kelly could restrain himself a bit. And hey - if you want a good oddball as a lead character, why not bring the "Peeper", Lincoln Myer (David Dean Bottrell) back? He was easily the best character the show ever had.

This season some familiar faces have been axed and new ones have taken their places. This includes sitcom veteran John Larroquette as one of the firm's senior partners. But the new cast members, including Larroquette, bring nothing all that great to the show (although, to be fair, I have only seen the first show of the season so far), and I find myself missing gung-ho Marine character Brad Chase (Mark Valley) who at least brought a different viewpoint to the show.

If BOSTON LEGAL continues in this vein, I'll probably stop watching. But then again, I have more than enough on my plate television-wise these days anyway, and would appreciate dropping a few shows.

***

MUSIC

I hate metal from the 1980's. I'm mainly talking about the "hair bands" here. The problem is their lead singers all sounded like women, and/or aspiring opera singers, and it just didn't work for me. I like my male metal vocalists to sound like actual men, which is why I dug bands like Motorhead and Metallica right away.

But in shunning the majority of 80's metal, I actually missed out on a decent band. QUEENSRYCHE probably do not consider themselves a hair band - for one thing they are way too ambitious. But my friend Brian Keene has sung their praises for awhile now, so I figured, what the hell, I'd check them out. I picked up a copy of OPERATION: MINDCRIME, their most famous album, and put it on my Ipod.

On first listen, vocalist Geoff Tate sounded like all the other guys-who-sound-like-chicks who fronted most metal bands back then, but the more I listened the more I noticed the subtle differences between Tate and the rest of the pack. And the band themselves had chops that most of those pop metal bands couldn't even come close to.
What can I say? Queensryche has won me over. They're really growing on me. Something I thought would never happen. Which just goes to show you you're never too old to try something new.

EASTERN PROMISES & TIDELAND

(I saw EASTERN PROMISES last weekend, but haven't had a chance to post about it. So here's my belated review of director David Cronenberg's latest film.)

David Cronenberg's new movie EASTERN PROMISES continues his ascension into the mainstream that began with his last one, the well-received A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE. Both films also share the acting of Viggo Mortensen, who has been given a chance to really shine in these last two Cronenberg films (in fact, I think he was robbed of an Oscar nomination for HISTORY). Plot-wise, Cronenberg's last couple of films don't seem as meaty and satisfying as earlier films like DEAD RINGERS and CRASH, they're just too conventional and straightforward, and Cronenberg made his reputation as the master of the strange and offbeat for too many decades to simply jettison that now. In fact, his earlier films were so imaginative and intense that his more recent movies seem kind of thin in comparison. But Cronenberg's most conventional movies are still in a different class than most of Hollywood's output.

In EASTERN PROMISES, Noami Watts stars as Anna, a London nurse with Russian heritage who treats a young pregnant 14-year old girl. The girl dies, but her baby survives, and Watts goes about trying to find their family. A diary found on the girl leads Anna to Seymon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), the owner of a fancy Russian restaurant. He seems fatherly and helpful, but the truth is he's a sadistic Russian mob boss who wants to keep the details of the dead girl and her baby quiet.

Also involved in the plot is Kirill, Seymon's unpredictable and irresponsible son. Kirill is next in line to take over the mob, yet he is a disappointment to his father. Aside from the fact that he's a total loose cannon, he is also quite obviously homosexual, although he can never admit this in the context of the Russian mob. As played by Vincent Cassel (a French actor who also turned in great performances in LA HAINE (i.e. HATE), as well as Gaspar Noe's terrific and disturbing masterpiece IRREVERSIBLE), Kirill fluctuates from being annoying to being quite sympathetic. Cassel fleshes the character out well.

Kirill's chaueffer and right hand man is Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), who, when he isn't acting as Kirill's babysitter, is also an accomplished killer and clean-up guy. Nikolai has ambitions of his own. He knows Kirill is a fuck-up and is eager to show Seymon that he is more than capable of becoming his protege. Of course, Nickolai also has some secrets of his own.

The cast is stellar, but this is really Mortensen's show. While the Naomi Watts character gets the story started by searching for the family of the dead girl, and acts as a kind of love interest for Nickolai (he acts more as her protector, as she gets more deeply involved in mob business, than a lover, though), the movie clearly could have been just as good without Anna. While I like Watts a lot, she isn't the stand-out here.

Mortensen is amazing. Whether he is cutting up a frozen gangster's body for disposal (first thawing it with a hair dryer) or engaged in a long and bloody knife fight with two thugs in a bathhouse, his time on screen is mesmerizing. Cronenberg couldn't have found a better actor to be the core of his most recent films, and Mortensen is the main reason why these movies, despite being a bit too conventional for hardcore Cronenberg fans, pulse with vibrant life.

If only Cronenberg would give us a movie as dark and weird as CRASH or VIDEODROME starring Mortensen, I think I would be completely satisfied.

My only complaint about EASTERN PROMISES concerns the occasional voice-over narration of Tatiana (Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse), the teenage girl who dies early in the film. During the course of the movie, she tells us the story of her upbringing and how she came to her fate - the voice-over sections are clearly entries in her diary - but I found this distracting and borderline irritating. Whenever Tatiana's voice came on to speak to us, it took me completely out of the film and I had to find my way back in.

But her narration does not happen often enough to ruin the film, and overall this one complaint is rather minor. EASTERN PROMISES is definitely worth seeking out. Cronenberg and Mortensen have given us another powerful film to chew on.

***

I also recently watched the DVD of Terry Gilliam's TIDELAND. I remember that when it had a brief run in theaters, it got savaged by critics. But friends of mine who have seen it couldn't praise it highly enough. So I figured it was time for me to check it out for myself.

I'm a big fan of Gilliam's, from way back when he did those insane animated bits for MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS. But his work as a filmmaker has been pretty impressive. BRAZIL has become a classic, and my favorite of his films, FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS does a great job of capturing the feel and insanity of Hunter S. Thompson's book, in a way I doubt few other directors could have accomplished.

TIDELAND begins with a brief appearance by Gilliam, to tell us that this film should be viewed from the point of view of a child. That this is perhaps the closest to true innocence he has gotten to on film. I don't know if this introduction was in the theatrical version - or if it was inserted here due to the harsh reviews he got from critics who didn't get what he was going for, but I really didn't think it was necessary.

This is the story of Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), a lonely little girl whose parents are junkie rock stars. When her mother (Jennifer Tilly, doing her best Courtney Love impression) dies of an overdose, her heroin-addicted dad Noah (Jeff Bridges) flees the house with Jeliza-Rose, taking her on a bus trip to the old house where he grew up in, now abandoned and in disrepair, in the middle of tall weeds. Not long after they get there, Noah dies as well, and Jeliza-Rose is suddenly all alone in the world, and in the middle of nowhere.

Well, she does have her friends - disembodied dolls' heads named Mytsique, Satin Lips, Baby Blonde and Glitter Gal. She wears them on her fingers and gives them their own voices, and they almost seem like characters themselves.

While out playing in the vast yard (the landscape seems like all weedy yard with tall yellow grass that resembles a wheat field), Jeliza-Rose comes upon Dell (Janet McTeer), an insane woman dressed in black and a veil to protect her from bees (earlier in her life she was stung and almost died). Dell is harsh and bitter, but Jeliza-Rose is desperate for human contact, and wants to be her friend. The girl follows the woman back to her house, where Dell lives with her mentally-challenged brother Dickens (Brendan Fletcher).

Jeliza-Rose becomes friends with the child-like Dickens and entertains fantasies of being his girlfriend and wife. Dell, a taxidermist who knew Jeliza-Rose's father when they were younger - finds Noah's body and uses her skills to preserve him. In a weird way, these misfits become a sort of strange family until everything falls apart.

Jodelle Ferland is astounding as Jeliza-Rose. I haven't seen this strong a performance from a child actor in a long time, and she easily carries the film. Her performance is engaging, fascinating and often heart-breaking. I also thought that Brendan Fletcher, as Dickens, was a revelation. I know that mentally-challenged characters are often showy cliches in the movies, but he does a fine job of making his damaged man-child seem real and sad.

I really do not understand why some critics were so hard on TIDELAND when it first came out. I think it's one of Gilliam's strongest films. It was unfairly dismissed and deserves a second life on DVD.

MOON KNIGHT - THE BOTTOM

I don't often write about comics here. The truth is, I used to be a big comics fan and a collector, but then I stopped a few years ago. I just don't have the room (besides, I also collect books, cd's and dvds. LOL), and I'd buy a bunch of comics and never read them. So I figured, why bother?

But I went back to the comics store recently, to pick up the latest HULK crossover - WORLD WAR HULK - where the Hulk takes on the rest of the Marvel superheroes. It's been okay so far, but it's a temporary series. While I was there, I also picked up some issues of Moon Knight. I'd always been a fan of the character, and the artwork looked great.

Which leads me to the new MOON KNIGHT series. I guess it's a bonafied hit, and came as kind of surprise to Marvel. MK has always been considered kind of a B-List superhero (sometimes even a C or a D-Lister) and suddenly there's lots of interest in him. Of course, that's what happens when you have a terrific artist/writer team. They can breathe life into almost any character.

The team this time around is writer Charlie Huston and artist David Finch (although Finch, sadly, recently left the series), and the first six issues of the new series have been collected in a trade paperback called THE BOTTOM.

For those who don't know, Moon Knight was created back in the 1970s and first appeared in the Marvel comic WEREWOLF BY NIGHT. Since Moon Knight had the moon connection, and had weapons made of silver (there's even silver integrated into the fabric of his costume), he was hired by some secret organization to kill the Werewolf. Somehow that hairy guy survived the confrontation.

Even though he just made a two-part appearance in a Marvel monster comic, Moon Knight proved to have real staying power. He made some appearances in brief runs in comics like MARVEL SPOTLIGHT, before getting a back-up story in HULK MAGAZINE (seriously, these are worth checking out if you can find them and are usually pretty cheap). By this point, MK was being drawn by my favorite comic book artist, Bill Sienkiewicz, back when Bill was just starting out and his style was heavily influenced by Neal Adams (this is before Sienkiewicz had established his very experimental style which fully bloomed in ELEKTRA: ASSASIN).

The storyline in the HULK MAGAZINE back-up stories involved a masked psycho who killed nurses. He wore this really horrrific mask. Moon Knight tracks him down using his girlfriend Marlene as bait. It turns out the killer is MK's brother. Really great story arc (Collected in THE ESSENTIAL MOON-KNIGHT, in comic stores everywhere).

After that, MK got his own series, which was drawn by Sienkiewicz for much of its run. I always thought he was an interesting character. Moon Knight is actually Marc Spector, a former mercenary who was left for dead in a pyramid in Egypt and was revived by the god Koshnu. Koshnu is the god of the moon and vengeance and Moon Knight has superhuman strength and skills (these powers are amplified depending on the phase of the moon). He's also rich, and has a crew which includes his pilot Frenchy (a friend from his mercenary days) and his butler. The rich part is a little reminiscent of Batman (so is the moon jet, which looks like a giant crescent, and of course the two characters share a cape and cowl). But Spector has many personalities. The question is whether he uses these to suss out criminals, or if he's mentally ill. One of these personalities is a cabbie, Jake Lockley, and another is the rich guy Steven Grant.

After about a 30-issue run in his own series, the Moon Knight comic ended, and he kind of disappeared for awhile, only popping up occasionally (like a brief stint in the West Coast Avengers at his lowest point).

He was kind of forgotten before the new series started, written by Huston and drawn by Finch (whose artwork is amazing and atmospheric and really captures the feel of Moon Knight). In THE BOTTOM collection, Marc Spector was badly injured in a fight with his nemesis Bushman (another character from his mercenary days) and is wheelchair-bound. He's also addicted to pain killers and never leaves his house. Moon Knight is a thing of the past, and all of his former crew have abandoned him (or rather, he's pushed them away).

Spector has reached the bottom of the barrel. And it's then that The Committee (which hired him way back in the Werewolf By Night days to finish off Wolfy) decides that they want to kill him off for turning against them in the old days.

It should be easy. Marc Spector has hit rock bottom and his friends are gone. He's even stuck in a wheelchair. But once people try to kill him, he finds renewed purpose and his old god Koshnu, who also seems to have abandoned him, suddenly takes an interest in him again and "rejuvenates" him.

After a few kill attempts go wrong, the Committee hires the Taskmaster (a villain from THE AVENGERS who's a trained killer who also ran a school that trained supervillains for awhile) to do the job.

But Spector's friends have been taking an interest in him. Crawley the drug dealer (a character from the old days who was one of MK's informants and who now provides Spector with his pain pills) reintroduces Spector to his old pilot Frenchy (who turns out to be gay and has harbored a crush on Spector since the early days) and even his old girlfriend Marlene gets back into the picture.

By the time the Taskmaster shows up to pick Spector off, he's not such an easy kill anymore.

Basically THE BOTTOM is interesting because it revives a character who was pretty much dropped to the D-List and makes him an A-lister again. The comic has been doing very well (hence the high prices for back issues and the trade paperback) and is worth checking out if you're into cool comics characters.

I've been a big fan since the Sienkiewicz days, and it's really cool to see MK back where he belongs. I really dig it when talented people take up these forgotten characters and give them new life. Now if only someone would do that with Brother Voodoo.

***

Speaking of comics, I also recently read the trade paperback of 30 DAYS OF NIGHT, since the movie version is coming out in October. Written by the talented Steve Niles, with great artwork by Ben Templeton, 30 DAYS is about the town of Barrow, Alaska, at the northernmost tip of the state, where there is a period of time when it's night for 30 days straight. So a bunch of vampires decide to vacation there and enjoy the all-you-can-eat buffet.

The heroes of the book are a husband and wife team, Eben and Stella, who are also the police presence in Barrow. Their interplay reminded me of the Coen Brothers movie FARGO at times. I really enjoyed the comic and hope the movie does it justice. But, in the meantime, definitely check out the graphic novel.

***

A few more odds and ends.

Michael Jackson died earlier this month. No, not the "Beat It" guy. This Michael Jackson was the world's leading beer critic, and he was 65. Jackson knew he'd never become a household name, but he was a real champion of beer (his favorites were from Belgium) and sought to bring the same kind of respect wine gets to its barley cousin. Jackson was a fine writer and a great critic, and he'll be missed.

I've also been reading some of the classics lately, and I've been surprised how different they are from how we know them. For example, I read THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE again, by Robert Louis Stephenson. I barely remember reading it as a kid, and I was shocked to find how different it was than the movie versions. In the book, Hyde is a much smaller man than Jekyll, almost dwarfish, and has a look about him that people can't put their finger on, but which they find repugnant. That "look" is the essence of pure evil looking you in the face.

Currently, I'm reading Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, and it is vastly different from the movie versions. It begins at the North Pole for one thing, where a ship picks up a very distraught Victor Frankenstein, who then tells his horrible story. I'm about 50 pages in, and most of it is Frankenstein talking about his college education and his thirst for knowledge. The monster's animation takes about a paragraph (and we never learn the secret of his reanimation, since Victor wants no one to ever duplicate it -so there's no lightning involved, and there's no Igor). And once he comes to life, Victor flees his house for two weeks. When he comes back, accompanied by a visiting friends, the monster is nowhere to be seen, but we know he's waiting to make his presence known to his creator.

Some parts have been tough to slog through - nothing much happens in the first 50 pages, but it's fascinating to compare the book to the versions we're so familiar with.

A HATCHET for HALLOWEEN!

First off, people have been asking me where the new Cinema Knife Fight is, since I went and announced it was coming last week. Well, it's still coming, but it's been delayed a bit. As several of you guessed, it's a review of Rob Zombie's HALLOWEEN, and we got it done in time for Labor Day. But it's part of the launch of a new horror-themed website, and the launch saw some unforseen delays. Now it looks like the new column will see the light of day early next week. And, as usual, all updates will be posted here, including a link to the article.

As soon as it's online, you'll know it.

In the meantime, I saw the new movie HATCHET tonight, and I thought I'd post a review right away, since it wasn't screened for critics, and a lot of people are wondering if it's any good.

Well, I have two reactions to HATCHET. The first reaction is that it's the equivalent of a fun (but dumb) amusement park ride. My second reaction is that I feel like I've been cheated.

You see, I was really looking forward to HATCHET because it's been advertising itself as "Old School American Horror." To some of us, that phrase actually means something. It hearkens back to the golden decade of the 1970s, when we got treated to intense horror classics like the "original" TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, the "original" HALLOWEEN, the "original" DAWN OF THE DEAD (don't you just hate that I have to put the word "original" in front of each of those movies, so you know what I'm talking about?), and the "soon to be original" LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (since we all know it's inevitable that will get the official remake treatment at some point too).

HATCHET was building up a lot of buzz on the premise that it was a throwback to the horror films fo the '70s, and me being the silly person I am, I thought this meant suspenseful, brutal, edge-of-your seat filmmaking. But they got it wrong, HATCHET isn't like '70s horror films at all. It's more like the horror films of the '80s, especially stuff like FRIDAY THE 13th PART 2 – you know, when slasher films were just starting to get a bad name and were becoming jokes because of all the damn sequels and cliches?

Which is kind of funny, because the monster in HATCHET is played by Kane Hodder who played Jason in FRIDAY THE 13th Numbers 7 – 10. See how everything comes full circle?

HATCHET revels in the whole "jokey horror" genre, where we get as many jokes and one-liners as we get thrills. And frankly, I'm getting a little tired of that, since it's seldom done well.

The story is simple enough – hell, it seems a bit too simple. A bunch of friends are at Mardi Gras. One of them, Ben (Joel David Moore) refuses to have a good time because he's a whiner who's devestated over his recent breakup with his girlfriend. So his buddy Marcus (Deon Richmond) agrees to go with him on a late night "swamp tour" through the spooky bayou to lift his spirits.There are other people on the tour, including an older couple, a sleazy filmmaker and his two "actresses" (who constantly pull their tops down "Girls Gone Wild"-style), and a weird girl who won't say much. The guide for the tour is a Chinese guy who talks in a cajun accent and pretends to be a local – but he has no idea what he's doing. While out on the swamp, their boat gets damaged and they have to run to shore before the alligators get them. But, in the woods, there is a worse danger. His name is Victor Crowley.

Victor (Kane Hodder) is a deformed freak who looks an awful lot like the monster in Tobe Hooper's THE FUNHOUSE (1981) with some "Elephant Man" thrown in for good measure. As a child, Victor was taunted by other children because of his tragic appearance. One Halloween, some kids threw firecrackers at his house to torment him and ended up burning the place down by accident. Trapped inside, poor Victor panicked and struggled to get out. His father, trying to get inside, used a hatchet on the door. Unfortunately, Victor's face is pressed close to the other side….and you get the picture from there.

For some untold reason, Victor's still around. And he's boiling mad!

What happens next is just what you think. The group of morons who got stranded in the woods get picked off one by one by the deranged freak.

I'll admit, once Victor appears, the movie does take a leap forward. The character is fun - and deserves a better movie built around him. Until he makes his appearance, it's just a lot of lame jokes and annoying characters. And it is kind of fun how he constantly pops up when people least expect it, to kill and mutilate. There were rumors that this movie was going to get an NC-17 rating originally, and you can see why. There's tons of decapitations, bodies getting cut in two, and arms being ripped off. But it's more cartoony than scary.

A little Victor Crowley goes a long way, but unfortunately, he's not enough to save the movie. And it certainly wasn't good enough to justify the ten dollar ticket price I paid.

And, of course there are the now-mandatory cameos by genre icons. We've got Robert "Freddy" Englund as a crusty old alligator hunter in the beginning, and Tony "Candyman" Todd as the proprieter of a voodoo emporium. Too bad neither has a big enough role to add some muscle to the proceedings.

Sure, I laughed a few times, and I dug the carnage, but HATCHET was ultimately a dissapoinment. If they'd actually played it straight and truly emulated the films of the 1970s that they claimed to be inspired by, then maybe HATCHET would have been a film worth recommending. I know I was expecting something much more intense. If this sounds like the kind of goofy fun film you'd enjoy, then by all means, check it out. Everyone else, you can wait for the DVD.

If only it truly had been in the spirit of "Old School American Horror."

Another lesson in "don't believe the hype."
(originally posted 9/7/07)

IT’S COMING....

Okay, so some of you know that I used to co-write a column called CINEMA KNIFE FIGHT for a little horror newsletter called Hellnotes. Me and Michael Arruda used to do this humorous movie review thing that was part Ebert & Roeper and part E.C. horror comics. Some people actually seemed to enjoy it. Well, after the Hellnotes newsletter stopped, CKF didn't have a home for awhile.

That's going to change. Soon.

In a couple of days I'll have news about CKF's new home, and there will be a brand new column online, reviewing a certain Rob Zombie movie that's in theaters now.

I've got my Kiss t-shirt on and I'm ready to rock n' roll, baby!

More news to come....

~LLS

PS: if you wanna check out the entire previous run of CKF, it's all archived on my website, www.llsoares.com
Just in case you wanna get a preview of what's to come.

(originally posted 9/5/07)

SUPERMAN RETURNS AND SNAKES ON A PLANE

I recently saw a few movies on cable and DVD that I thought deserved some quick review.

SUPERMAN RETURNS: I really didn't expect to like this, which is why I didn't see it at the theater. I'm not much of a Superman fan - he always seemed like too much of a boy scout for my tastes. But the movie was actually quite good. My only qualm was the casting - if Superman went into space for 5 years and came back (and I'm assuming this is supposed to take place after the Christopher Reeve movies), then why would he and Lois Lane be more than 10 years younger than they were when he left? This constant casting of kids in adult roles is just annoying. I mean, Lois Lane looks like a college kid and she won a Pulitzer Prize??!!

Aside from that though, the acting was pretty decent - even Supes and Lois (Brandon Routh and Kate Bosworth)- enough so that I forgave the silliness of them being so young. Kevin Spacey was a decent enough Lex Luthor (but why does he have to be the villain in EVERY Superman movie? Doesn't Superman have other bad guys to fight?), it was good to see Parker Posey who I always dig (even if her role was silly) and even James Marsden (Cyclops from the X-MEN movies) was good in it.

Superman movies are one of those things where special effects are important, and everything looked good in SUPERMAN RETURNS. Hell, even the plot about Lex stealing crystals from Superman's Fortress of Solitude that bloom into mountains - which made no sense and who would want to live on these things? - was kind of cool-looking.

And I did like the scene where Superman was powerless and Luthor kicked the shit out of him and stabbed him with that Kryptonite blade. At least Kevin Spacey was kind of vicious compared to the campier Gene Hackman Luther, which was nice.
Even the kid (Tristan Lake Leaubu)- and I usually hate subplots about kids - was decent in it. I loved when he crushed the guy with the piano.

All in all, a pretty good flick.

But it still baffles me that a guy who's biggest power is incredible strength constantly fights a guy who's only power is he's incredibly smart. Who cares? Even when the Hulk went up against the Leader (who has a super brain) in the comics, the Leader always had these crazy plastoid monsters to fight it out with the Hulk. If a guy has super strength, you want to see the muthafucker FIGHT, don't you?

I'm not as well-versed in Superman comics, but the guy has been around for almost 70 years. He hasn't accumulated a decent rogues' gallery by now? There's got to be a bunch of bad guys who have super strength and can play "Rock Em Sock Em Robots" with him.

SUPERMAN RETURNS has a somber tone, and Routh does a good job channeling Christopher Reeve. It's no SUPERMAN 2 (from 1980, and still my favorite Superman movie because of General Zod!), but I enjoyed the heck out of it, and I'll definitely see the next one in the theater when it comes out (I think it's due out in 2009).

SNAKES ON A PLANE: When this came out, I boycotted it because I was sick of all the damn hype. The marketing of this movie became bigger than the movie itself - and when they started taking stuff from internet message boards to spice up the script and please fans - it just seemed way too much like pandering to me.

But it was on cable, and I figured, "what the hell" I'd give it a chance.
I am sooooo glad I didn't see this at the movies. Some movies are so bad they're good. SNAKES ON A PLANE is just plain bad. The script sucks, the acting is horrible (except for Sam Jackson, who seeme to take any script that gets offered to him these days, and Juliana Marguiles, who I actually felt sorry for) and the snakes look fake as all hell. It was like a bad Sci-Fi Channel movie without the laughs.

Avoid this muthafuckin movie. I saw it for free and I still felt cheated - of the 90 minutes it robbed from my life!

THEY CALL HER ONE EYE (1974): The DVD box has the title of this movie as THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE, but I hate that title (maybe it just reminds me too much of Michael Jackson). I much prefer its original title THEY CALL HER ONE-EYE. This is one of the movies that supposedly inspired Tarantino's KILL BILL movies, so I really wanted to check it out.

A mute farm girl (Christina Lindberg) is walking to town and this guy drives up and gives her a ride. The guy turns out to be Tony (Heinz Hopf) a sadistic pimp who drugs her, injects her with heroin to get her hooked, and then makes her turn tricks. Poor girl! The pimp writes a letter to her parents saying how she hates them and ran away from home.

When she is first forced to be a prostitute, she claws up her first client's face. So Tony cuts out one of her eyes to teach her a lesson (that's why "they call her one-eye").

Later on, she gets a little freedom to come and go. The pimp knows she'll be back because he's made her an addict and she's dependent on him. She goes home to visit her folks and finds out they had broken hearts and committed suicide! She's horrified by this and uses a bunch of cash she accumulated from tips, and she goes to a karate school to learn hand-to-hand combat, goes to a teacher to show her how to shoot various guns, and hires a guy to show her how to be a stunt driver. She then buys a car and steals a bunch of guns.

She starts killing off all of the "clients" who abused her sexually. The last one she goes after is the pimp, who seems to be able to avoid her for awhile until she finally challenges him to a duel. She even kills some cops at one point with her martial arts and steals their police car! Somehow she never gets arrested.

There are some hardcore (penetration) shots mixed in with the prostitution/sex scenes, but I'm not sure why. And for some really strange reason, all of the violence is in extreme slo-motion. Every time someone is shot, kicked or stabbed, it's incredibly slow. At one point I hit the FF button on my remote just to see a scene at what should have been normal speed. The violence looked good, but for some reason the director insisted on doing every one of those scenes in slow motion! Maybe to pad out the running time?? There are also some nice touches, like when Christina wears red, she wears a red eyepatch to go along with her outfit.
An interesting movie and Lindberg is great in it. But the weird slow-motion violence can get on your nerves after awhile. Abel Ferrara's MS. 45 was better. So was I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, if you're interested in "Woman Gets Revenge" movies.

***

TV SHOWS

Well, FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS wrapped up its first season, and I'm really starting to love this show! I think it's already been renewed. It's on HBO and is about a couple of nerds from New Zealand who have a two-man band called Flight of the Conchords. They're kind of like the New Zealand version of Tenacious D.

They have a manager named Murray who works for the New Zealand consulate's office, and who does band business in his office when he's not supposed to. The band also has one fan, a goofy chick named Mel, who is the only member of their fan club.

The guys have some oddball friends in the city and are always trying to get gigs (Murray hardly ever gets them any) and date women. They're bad at both.

About twice every episode, they break into song. Their songs are pretty funny and some are out on an EP from SubPop.

The last episode was terrific. Murray forces the guys to add a third member to their band - Todd - who plays the bongos. They really don't want him, but Murray insists. Todd has his own ideas and immediately breaks up the band and forces Jemaine to perform his songs including a goofy little number called THE DOGGIE BOUNCE, where Jemaine is forced to say "Arf! Arf!" over and over. By the end, Bret and Jemaine are back together, of course, and Todd has moved on to become a huge star on his own because The Doggie Bounce has become a huge hit. Murray is Todd's agent too and suddenly shows up driving a fancy car, and even Mel sports a Crazy Dogggz (three g's and one z) t-shirt (Todd's band). This was the funniest episode yet, and a great way to end the season.

It's a really low-key kind of show. Not uproariously funny, but the kind of show that really grows on you over time. I think it's definitely become at cult show at this point. If you don't have HBO and can't catch it in reruns, then check it out when it's released on DVD soon.

JEKYLL on BBC America came to a close, and while I liked some aspects of it, I didn't really like it. If they come back with a second miniseries, I doubt I'd watch it, even though I'm a huge Mr. Hyde fan. And ABC's MASTERS OF SCIENCE FICTION also came to an end - after just FOUR episodes!! It got better with each episode, and the final installment was an adaptation of Harlan Ellison's early story THE DISCARDED, and featured good performances by Brian Dennehy, John Hurt and James Denton. Of course, no matter how good it was, it was doomed. ABC had it on in the middle of summer on Saturdays at 10pm - who would be watching this?? (well me) - and they only intended to air four episodes (the show is supposed to come out on DVD with two more unaired episodes at some point).

Brought to us by the same people who produce Showtime's MASTERS OF HORROR, I thought MASTERS OF SCIENCE FICTION had real potential and deserved a shot as a regular series on ABC. I even sent them an email asking them to reconsider the show - but I know it was useless. Unless tons of people do the same, they couldn't care less. How is it that MASTERS OF SCIENCE FICTION gets totally fucked over, yet the incredibly mediocre JERICHO was brought back due to fan response? I don't get it.

TORCHWOOD: starting tonight, BBC America will be showing the new show TORCHWOOD on Saturday nights at 9pm. It's a spin-off from the new DR. WHO series, with John Barrowman starring as Captain Jack Harkness - a character he originated on Dr. Who. The show revolves around former cop Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles) who joins Torchwood and learns about its weird inner workings (but what's up with that big gap in her teeth? More proof that England has bad dentists?) Torchwood is basically in the same mold as MEN IN BLACK and THE X-FILES (although it's better than the former and as interesting as the latter so far). Harkness heads a covert agency that protects the world from aliens, and takes their high-tech technology along the way. I've seen a few preview episodes and this show looks really good. So if you're a Who-vian, you might want to check this out, although it has a bit more adult feel to it than DR. WHO (in one episode, and alien feeds off orgasms, for example - something you'd never see the Doctor involved in).