Schlockbuster Video

Somebody Sure Doesn't Like Cats

2006-05-21T18:25:00.000-04:00

Nothing gets the Schlockbuster juices flowing like good, old-fashioned procrastination. Rather than putting more time into the sinking ship known as MCAT preparation, I bunkered down on this Sunday afternoon to take in an On-Demand Blue Plate Special: Steven King's Sleepwalkers. Admittedly, it was kind of awesome, and right from the get go. The film starts with an excerpt from the Chillicoathe Encyclopedia of Arcane Knowledge (1st ed, 1884): "Sleepwalkers; n. Nomadic shapeshifting creatures with human and feline origins. Vulnerable to the deadly scratch of the cat, the sleepwalker feeds upon the life-force of virginal human females. Probable source of the vampire legend." Hmmm. A more ancient evil than vampires, phylogenetically (so to speak)? And a considerably more fun evil at that! I haven't read the source material, and from what I gather, die-hard fans were troubled by the adaptation, but I have spent many a lonely teenage afternoon with my nose buried in King's prose, and many a wasted afternoon in college watching Steven King movies, so I feel justified in acting the expert here.
While straining under its implausibility, the plot is relatively straightforward, and generally light fare. We're spared the navel-gazing of King's more sensitive characters (Desperation, It), the vaguely existential crises represented by other short works (most notably "The Langoliers"), and are instead treated to an entirely brain-dead but delightful good time. The story never gets very dark-- no Dolores Claiborne, Gerald's Game or Needful Things overtures here-- and the viewer almost gets a sense that the director is celebrating the purity of his product in the context of the genre. Quite simply, Sleepwalkers is an unselfconscious (barring the trademark King cameo) romp through a comically nightmarish situation that makes you just kind of sit back and say "what the fuck, I might as well go along with it."
The basic idea here is that the mother/son Sleepwalker team of Mary and Chad Baker move from town to town in the midwest, looking for virgins to suck the life-force out of, and leaving more dead cats (strung from trees, no less) than you can possibly imagine in their collective wake. Mom relies on her good-looking-by-early-90s-standards son to get the goods and feed her (we're never really spoon-fed why she can't just inhale a virgin herself, although my guess would be that the silver screen just wasn't ready for all that hot lesbian action, and, let me tell you, the chemistry between Mom (Alice Krige) and the virgin (a luminous Mädchen Amick) is intense enough already). So Mom's REALLY hungry, and seems to only be able to goad Chad into making a kill by balling him like there's no tomorrow. While there's only one obvious mother-son sex scene, a few others are implied, and the periodic making-out serves to drive this point home, rather uncomfortably.
When Chad's inquisitive and (homo)sexually-threatening Creative Writing teacher (gleefully over-played by Glenn Shadix [formerly Xander Berkeley's neighbor?!]) catches on to the boy's lies, things start to go to shit, but not without a few exquisite puns. Without giving too much away, a police chase soon develops, through which we learn two VERY important facts: a) sleepwalkers can "dim" themselves [turn invisible] and their cars and b) only cats can see a dim sleepwalker, and by extension, their pimped-out rides. This gives rise to the third-best line of the movie: "Stop looking at me, you fucking cat!"
While far from "amazing," the special effects here are pretty damn good for what I figure was probably an anemic budget, and actually serve to authenticate the internal logic of the sleepwalker myth. Throw in some Ron Perlman, double-entendre surrounding gravestone rubbings, and a cop getting stabbed to death with corn on the cob (followed by the best line of the film "No vegetables, no dessert."), and you've got a Schlockbuster Classic. It's zany Steven King at his best, and makes for a reasonable low-budget companion piece to The Lost Boys, or any decent late-80s/early-90s sci-fi/horror flick.
A few trifles. Pay close attention during the chase scene so that you don't miss the world's luckiest squirrel narrowly avoiding an entirely coincidental death. Also, the end-credit music is the most bizarrely beautiful composition I've heard in a while-- almost as touching as Silence of the Lamb's "Goodbye Horses" (I'd fuck me), but somewhat less emotionally charged. Lastly, while searching for pictures of angry cats, I came across this website. Holy mother of god, or more appropriately, Great Holy Cats!

Daddy, You Live In A Cave

2006-03-12T18:54:00.000-05:00

This "ingenious thriller" was found in the discount bin at MovieWorks (Brookline), where I'd probably go tonight for some more of the good stuff if they didn't have a bounty on Annie and I for late fees. A movie like this represents some difficulty for the thoughtful critic, in that the protagonist is only half batshit crazy, and is also charged with explicating most of the narrative development. In this case, such explanations are peppered with rants against "Stuyvesant," the watchful white demon who watches all from atop the Chrysler Building while bombarding both NYC and large swaths of land upstate with both Y and Z rays. Where does one begin? Well, for starters, The Caveman's Valentine offers up three shots of Samuel L. Jackson's ass (pliant after all these years) and one SLJ junk shot (in profile, thank god). The cast: SLJ plays a homeless Julliard almost-graduate named Romulus Ledbetter, which might be the least believable fictitious name ever to be uttered on film. Colm Feore, eternally monotonously creepy with his patented menacingly ambiguous sexuality, plays the suffering-obsessed photographer David Leppenraub (another awesomely wacky name). Most bizarrely, we have one Anthony Michael Hall playing Bob the Bankruptcy Lawyer (the irony is not lost on me).
Synopsis: When a dead homeless boy is found outside his dwelling, The Caveman sets off on a schizophrenic investigation of the crime, helped by his cop daughter, the aforementioned bankruptcy lawyer, another homeless dude and several acquaintances of the photographer Romulus believes is behind the murder. We are granted a fresh perspective on what it's like to be manageably insane, and passably believable while at it. This 'whodunit' takes us from the streets and parks of NYC to some hinterlands upstate, culminating in a truly non-sensical and thoroughly contrived ambush on what might have been the Q train.
The Best Line: Is also an ersatz haiku, which makes it even MORE fantastic. "I have brain typhoons//Storms of moth-seraphs live in // My head. Lies vex them." Naturally, this poem tumbles forth from Romulus' chapped, cave-dwelling lips.
Other Random Awesome Things: The first line of the film, also delivered by SLJ, is "Don't you watch me! You think you gonna get inside my brain and see a show?" My better judgement, at that point, was to follow Romulus' instructions and just watch reruns of Best Week Ever! on VH1. Yet, I was captivated to see how the whole damn thing would play out. Notably, David Cronenberg's sister Denise designed the costumes. Who would have thunk it? There's also some gay homeless romance hinted at here (Brokeback Shelter?), and the credit sequence (drawing on several scenes from Romulus' musical hallucinations) is revelatory. Think interpretative Africana crossed with Matthew Barney's hypothetical fusion of Candyman and Mimic.
My Take: At one point in the film, Leppenraub states that "all great art is born of suffering. " This is one of the few thought-provoking statements we're given here, if only because I'm certain that it's wildly fallacious, but I'm not equipped with the background to really tear it a new one. Annie, you want to take this one? Still, there are moments of greatness to Caveman. Visually it is "stunning", and the music is surprisingly beautiful, and almost entirely diagetic (mad props). Director Kasi Lemmons has taken a very sympathetic stance towards psychosis, at once furthered and hindered by Jackson's half-baked performance. I find Jackson to be most believable when he's not trying that hard. For instance, I thought he was magnificent in Jurassic Park, and equally so in his short appearance in Deep Blue Sea. The Red Violin, however, falls flat on its ass, because we're not seriously going to believe that Jackson is a presumably Canadian violin collector. Jackson relishes being able to walk crazy and talk crazy and wear dreds and rub said dreds up and down the pale body of Leppenraub's sister in one of the creepiest non-Cronenberg sex scenes ever witnessed here. He rails against the smell of mendacity and evil, while entertaining guests at Leppenraud's soiree, set at the farmhouse he owns with his slutty sister Moira (the farmhouse, btw, strikes me as more of a retreat for lesbian macrame artists from Portsmouth NH rather than the setting for some S&M-y photographic experiments orchestrated by a wealthy New York artist).
Verdict: Eh, rent it. There are some eminently quotable lines, Jackson is pretty easy to watch, and like I said, the credit sequence is un-fucking-believable. I give it three schlockbu-stars (out of five).

Dude, Your Piton Is Showing

2006-03-11T14:33:00.000-05:00

If there's one thing humanity ought to have learned from non-fiction adventure paperbacks, documentaries and Vertical Limit, it is that K2 kills you dead. Admittedly I only saw the last 3/4 of this high-flying, adventurous drama. You might say I watched it because "It was there."

The context: Hung-over afternoon, sun filtering in through the shades, watching FX, the basic cable equivalent of a yardsale.

Synopsis: This must have been one of those movies that you can't really miss the first 20 minutes of, like Memento, or Vera Drake, because I basically spent an hour and a half trying to figure out exactly why Chris O'Donnell was trying to scale K2 with a spectacularly grizzled Scott Glenn, and why the other two teams of climbers kept exploding. That's right, exploding. Apparently nitrogen-based explosives are essential tools when trying to reach trapped, injured climbers. What these poor saps didn't realize was that the explosives react to sunlight, so once the storm ended and the weather cleared up, the viewer is treated to all kinds of exploding athletes (the next best thing to blowing up an REI). As one can imagine, intense explosions on K2 also lead to some pretty ripshit avalanches (Look out, Cyril!) [author's note: I still don't know why Cyril was on the mountain]. It's eventually revealed that O'Donnell and Tunney are brother and sister, the children of an avid climber, who himself once conquered K2. Tunney for some reason is holed up near the summit with billionaire Bill Paxton, and some seriously wounded dude. Paxton is a bad-ass with a history of murdering other climbers when the going gets tough. The real enemy is not Paxton, nor is it really the mountain, so much as it is pulmonary edema, which apparently results from a combination of internal injury and long-term exposure to very high altitudes (hence, the vertical limit). All in all, not a very compelling bit of anything.

Why you should see it: While the plot was completely ordinary and the character development somewhat retarded, there are a number of great sequences of attractive climbers just being totally the fuck FLUNG off of cliffs, down crevasses, and slammed into rocks. There are a few moments of really well-managed vertigo, reminiscent of Cliffhanger. Also, don't miss the Muslim and the Aussie getting balls-to-the-wall vaporized-- it's one of those "oh SHIT!" moments that movies like Final Destination have distilled to pure impact.

And the Oscar goes to: Robin Tunney. I honestly believed that she was dying of edema, and I fucking LOVED The Craft.

Meet the Press, Part I

2006-02-28T20:07:00.000-05:00

If Schlockbuster Video were only accessible from, say, my blog, then I'd just skip the introduction and move straight on to the meat and potatoes-- the criticism. However, as we're likely to be getting traffic through my co-creators blogs, I figure some introductions are in order. Howdy! That's a rendering of me, to the right, there. I KNOW, I look pretty damn tired and tense at the same time. I was born seven weeks early in the hamlet of Stoneham MA, where I spent the first many waking hours of my life in a machine in what appears to be a dramatically-poorly lit hospital (it might just be the photo quality... remember those squarish photos with the rounded edges that were like two inches thick?). Subsequently I started smoking, got gay, and severed almost every tie I have to my home state of New Hampshire, with the glaring (at times) exception of my family. I currently share an apartment with my muse Annie, and an unnamed m(o)use (I suggest Roderigo, or Carlita, in homage to the lesser-known cast member of ABCs Invasion). "Wait-- two ironic assholes writing under the same roof?" "And we share a toilet!" I reply. Not unlike Janet Maslin and J. Hoberman, we can smell each others' shit a mile away, and promise to call one another out on it. Unfortunately our tastes have a tendency to overlap somewhat, so passionate disagreement is not really in the cards. I don't know Elizabeth from a hole in the wall, so some film-theory fisticuffs might just take place after all. (Considering that one of the few things I DO know about Elizabeth is that she is staggeringly more intelligent than me, these are likely to be masochistic affairs).
Moving on. Schlockbuster Video. What does it mean? As has already been mentioned, a schlockbuster selection doesn't always follow a set of criteria, and we apply few if any formulae in choosing a quality film for our viewing pleasure and subsequent digestion. A Schlockbuster night can take many forms, indeed. There are some characteristics that I myself would typically ascribe to a true schlockbuster, and I'll let you in on my process:
a) Limited Star Power. This one can be interpreted pretty loosely. Celebrity itself is a fickle thing (what if the actor in question wasn't famous at the time (Phoebe Cates, Paradise), or more likely, was famous then and is now obscure (Jaime Gertz, The Lost Boys), or never was famous (Bill Paxton, Frailty)?). The dim star can never be Tom Hanks, and in this case he probably doesn't have a cameo, either. Animation fucks things up-- Polar Express could very well be on a Schlockbuster Top Ten list (prepare yourselves, these'll be dropping like bombs). And what of the ensemble piece (Mars Attacks)? Or the unlikely coupling (Philip Seymour Hoffman and DeNiro, Flawless)? I know-- totally difficult to establish a solid rubric here, isn't it? With the schlockbuster, you might not be able to explain the gravitational pull of the star, but you're powerless to resist it (Pick a Baldwin. For real.).
b) Director. More than likely, the director of the Schlockbuster is fairly well-known, either for his or her (Nora Ephron) earlier work, or other unrelated antics. Brian DePalma would have to be the obvious example here, for having the most mind-boggling ouvre one could possible accrete over the years. The Schlockbuster resides in the space between the incredulity of (in DePalma's case) "He made this?" and the satisfaction of "He made this!" A director like DePalma gives us lots of material--- each selection from his body of work *dare I?* (re)presents an insane 4D puzzle piece that when the puzzle is complete (if ever), adds up to at once much more than and staggeringly less than the sum of its parts. Ron Howard, on the other hand, while prolific, sucks full-time. My wildcard? Roger Avery. We'll see more of him, and not just when Glamorama is FINALLY unfurled from post-post-production.
c) Circumstance. This one's the doozy. Most days I would probably walk past a discounted copy of B.A.P.S. sitting in a box outside of the local video store. But what if this was a yardsale? What if this was Mitt Romney's yardsale (not that I'd have an invite, or even enough dough to buy his copy of Hoosiers). You see what I mean, though, don't you. An otherwise unremarkable film may become a schlockbuster merely by virtue of its circumstantially contextual embeddedness at the moment of first contact (I Accidentally Domed Your Son).
d) Intoxification. The sine non qua of a schlockbuster night. This has very little to do with the specific film, unless otherwise vaguely mentioned.

So there you have it. Brian's take on the phenomenology of the schlockbuster. You'll be getting spoonful after lovin spoonful of it later on, so start slow. As a general note, I skimp on hyperlinks, especially when most of what I could link is easily obtained from an IMDB search.

Coming Soon

2006-02-21T23:27:00.000-05:00

It's not entirely easy to make it a Schlockbuster night.

As many of you know, it is deceptively difficult to select the right kind of bad movie. We've all been burned by a Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot or two - movies that promised legendary depths of "badness" but failed to achieve that nearly indescribable, uproariously flamboyant variety of terrible that turns a late eighties vanity project into a beloved treasure. Let's be honest with ourselves - Battlefield Earth was more bewildering than funny, and late Seagal can veer dangerously close to depressing.

The Schlockbuster team's goal is to carefully mine the Salvation Army shelves, yard sale tables, and "pre-owned clearance" bins of the world to bring you only the best, most stupendously awful films to share with friends and loved ones. These will be the movies that you can't wait to show off to your friends, play drinking games to, and laugh both at and with. With $3, a cold six, and our help you'll never be bored again.

We're certainly not going to be the first site to celebrate "bargain" films, but we hope to be the best.